Hellboy

The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20070825093836/http://app1.chinadaily.com.cn:80/star/2004/0617/wh… DVD review Shanghai Star. 2004-06-17 Cold mountain Director: Anthony Minghella Starring: Jude Law, Nicole Kidman, Renee Zellweger, Eileen Atkins, Natalie Portman, Donald Sutherland The first thing to be said about Minghella's excellent film of Charles Frazier's award-winning Civil War novel is that Renee Zellweger really earned her Oscar this year as Best Supporting Actress. With carefully judged restraint she resists any temptation to overplay her earthy role as Ruby Thewes, the saviour and best friend of Ada Monroe (Nicole Kidman). Ada, refined and over-protected, is lost and alone in the rural North Carolina hamlet of Cold Mountain and is grieving over the death of her clergyman father (Donald Sutherland. Ada is also pining for a lost love. He is Inman (Jude Law), a laconic, even taciturn, young man who had marched off with the rest of the joyously confident youth of the village to fight for the South at the outbreak of the Civil War more than three years earlier. It is now mid-1864 and Inman is with the survivors of the Cold Mountain volunteers in the battlements protecting the Virginia town of Petersburg. The "Battle of the Crater" which follows is as graphic in its depiction of the violence of war as the opening scenes of Spielberg's "Saving Private Ryan". The botched attempted Union breakthrough - made possible by the detonation of an enormous mine under the Confederate defences - is shown

in bloody detail. The Union troops are without scaling ladders to climb out of the crater caused by the massive explosion and the Confederates blow them to pieces ("It's a turkey shoot!") as they mill about helplessly in their manmade mass grave. Inman is wounded in the neck and after a cursory triage is taken to a dreadful field hospital and left to die in his own good time. However, he recovers and decides to head home to Cold Mountain and his sweetheart, Ada. Charles Frazier said he intended his novel (based on the Civil War experiences of his great-great grandfather) to have something of the shape of Homer's "Odyssey" if not its detail. Minghella ("The English Patient") is faithful to this intention and the warrior Inman (Odysseus) has to survive deadly peril and carnal temptation if he is to make it home across the Blue Ridge mountains to his Ada (Penelope). Jude Law as Inman looks the very image of a Confederate soldier of the Army of Northern Virginia - his lean face, often bearded, looks like a daguerrotype of one of Lee's veterans. The bizarre characters he encounters on his long "voyage" home could also have stepped out of the pages of a history of 19th-century Appalachia. In fact, the richness and number of roles for the supporting cast are occasionally a distraction - at times they threaten to walk away with the movie altogether, leaving the stars high and dry. The major minor roles include the Reverend Veasey (Phillip Seymour Hoffman), an adulterous clergyman terrified of being found out for getting one of his women slaves pregnant; Sara (Natalie Portman), the widow of a Confederate soldier living alone with her baby son; Maddy (Eileen Atkins), an elderly philosopher goatwoman; and, Sally (Kathy Baker), a neighbour of Ada and Ruby whose husband and two sons are slaughtered by murderous Confederate Home Guards on the look-out for stragglers or deserters from Lee's army. Inman's tender interlude with Sara in her shack in the woods is one event which is obviously going nowhere. It looks like a case of "boy finds girl" until we remember that the boy has already found THE girl. Minghella here manages to bring off a shocking contrast in mood in a bloody shift to violence as Inman and Sara are forced to fight and kill a band of marauding Union pillagers and rapists. Just as bad are the North Carolina Home Guards led by Teague (Ray Winstone) who has designs on both Ada and her farm. He represents in one evil form all of Penelope's dreadful suitors as she waits for Odysseus to return from the Trojan War. One of Teague's side-kicks, the near-albino Bosie (Charlie Hunnam), is another character who could have stepped out of an Appalachian murder ballad. One complaint critics had about the movie last year was that there were almost no African-Americans in it. After all the movie is set in the war that ended slavery. Well, they're there - they're just keeping their heads down. In one scene Inman is walking down a rural road when a crowd of ex-slaves emerges from a cornfield. They stare at Inman and vanish again. But it is the scenes between Ada and Ruby that are the spiritual heart of the movie. The friendship and respect that gradually grows between the roughand-ready Ruby and the genteel Ada is beautifully drawn out by Minghella. Their dialogue is always mildly comic as when Ada, the pianist and embroidery expert, helps the ever-practical Ruby mend a fence: "This is the first thing I've done that might actually produce a result." The movie's gory texture may seem to be a little over the top for some viewers. There are protracted scenes of the carnage of battle, the torture or execution of innocents by Teague and his cut-throats and even the slaughter of a goat. To criticise this is to forget that the movie is also about myth, honour, courage and vengeance, not only love and fidelity.

Barry Porter Hellboy Director: Guillermo del Toro Starring: Ladislav Beran, Selma Blair, Rupert Evans, Biddy Hodson, John Hurt, Doug Jones, Ron Perlman, Karel Roden Comic book stories have swept Hollywood in recent years, as the advance in computer-supported special effects have made impossibilities possible and the absolutely implausible increasingly convincing. Del Toro's "Hellboy" (2004) - based on a Mike Mignola character and revelling in its pulp-formula identity - is among the most vibrantly entertaining so far. After a group of Nazi occultists, led by a re-animated Rasputin (Roden), open a cosmic portal during a hell-raising ritual on a remote Scottish island, the "Hellboy" (Perlman) comes through into the mundane sphere. He is raised at a top secret government facility, belonging to a paranormally-oriented US intelligence agency, where his human mentor (Hurt) trains him to put his considerable talents in the service of civilization, decency and the American way. As a mark of his devotion to the side of the "good guys" he files off his devil horns (leaving only the stumps). There is not much chance of Hellboy integrating into society, since he is a bright infernal red in colour and clearly not quite normal (his prehensile tail and hypertrophic right-arm are distinct give-aways). Instead he is concealed in a special room, where he smokes cigars and eats candy bars, escaping occasionally to visit his fire-starting "girlfriend" (the relationship is emotionally highly ambiguous) lodged at a high security insane asylum nearby.

When Rasputin returns with his Teutonic ice-maiden lover Ilsa (Hodson) and faceless Nazi robot-ninja accomplice (Beran), awakening a plague of tendrilheaded demonic dog-monsters to lay waste to the earth, rookie FBI agent John Myers (Evans) is sent to team up with Hellboy and Abe Sapien - a psychically gifted amphibian (Jones) - to put an end to the menace. With a plot like this there is no point faking solemnity, but del Toro masterfully combines dry humour and genre satire with stupendous atmospherics, striking exactly the right note of soul-scouring playfulness and ironic cosmic dread. He thus demonstrates his fidelity to the tradition of extravagant metaphysical horror initiated by H.P.Lovecraft, splicing the Book of Revelations with gruesome mechanical contrivances and tentacled abominations from higher dimensions, greeted by awe-struck humans as gods. While more self-consciously humorous than most of the comic book flicks proceeding it, "Hellboy" never descends into cheap parody. Instead it delivers a delicious slice of light-hearted darkness which even the most hardened horror fans should enjoy. Nick Land Visions of Oz THE Australian delegation to the 7th Shanghai International Film Festival was one of several overseas teams who were on a mission to "secure a foothold" in the growing Chinese movie and television market. International interest in China and the vast potential offered by the immense size of its movie-going public has intensified since the country joined the World Trade Organization three years ago. The leader of the Australian contingent to the Shanghai film festival, Laurie Patton, said overseas film producers were anxious to have talks with Chinese authorities about getting their films released in China. Patton said he and other members of the Australian delegation were taking advantage of their invitation to China and the Shanghai film festival to begin another round of talks with senior Chinese film makers. The talks, in both

Beijing and Shanghai, originally began in 2002 and are aimed at securing the commercial release of Australian films in China and facilitating future coproductions between the two countries. The crime flick, "Gettin' Square" headed up a slate of seven Australian films at the Shanghai film festival that ended last weekend. Also screening were "The Honourable Wally Norman", "Dirty Deeds", "Ned Kelly", "The Tracker", "Swimming Upstream" and "The Goddess of '67". Patton is a vice-president of the newly formed Australian Asia-Pacific Coproduction Association. He was in Shanghai with fellow vice-president Paul De Carvalho and the film producers Trish Lake ("Gettin Square") and Emile Sherman ("The Honourable Wally Norman"). Their participation in the film festival was part of the on-going campaign to secure local release of Australian films in Chinese cinemas and on Chinese television channels that screen foreign movies. An official reception at the residence of Australia's Consul-General to Shanghai, Sam Gerovich, last week was attended by 70 guests including the President of the Shanghai Film and Television Group, Zhu Yongde, and the Executive Vice-Secretary-General of the Festival, Chen Xiaomeng. "Hollywood is already making major overtures to China so it is very important that Australia moves quickly to secure its place in this expanding cinema and television market while it is still early days," Patton said of his talks with Chinese officials. Barry Porter Copyright by Shanghai Star.