Neil Sonnekus

<b>Movie of the week:</b> Karel Schoeman’s novel <i>Na die Geliefde Land,</i> has been made into a movie, <i>Promised Land</i>, writes Neil Sonnekus.

Neil Sonnekus joins a voyeuristic audience to view <i>Two to Tango</i>.

<b>Movies of the week:</b> Neil Sonnekus reviews a satirical English movie, <i>Once Upon a Time in the Midlands</i>, and a small independent film called <i>Tadpole</i>.

Can South African movies located in a specific time and place tackle universal themes? Neil Sonnekus speaks to filmmaker Jason Xenopoulos.

One of the strokes of genius of <i>The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys</i> is to jump right into that animated universe, writes Neil Sonnekus.

<b>Q&A</b>: Ronnie Apteker with Neil Sonnekus.

The Apollo Film Festival in Victoria West can only get better, writes Neil Sonnekus.

<b>Thriller of the week:</b> <i>Insomnia</i> is a work of true genius, writes Neil Sonnekus.

<b>Not the movies of the week:</b>
Two very different films, <i>Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood</i> and <i>Frailty</i>, ignore the basics – and make us wish for a remote control, writes Neil Sonnekus.

<b>Not the movie of the week:</b> <i>Bad Company</i> is just propaganda by wishful thinking, writes Neil Sonnekus.

<b>Not quite the movie of the week:</b> <i>In the Bedroom</i> is an impressive debut, even if it doesn’t quite achieve what Wyeth is quoted as saying in his Helga series: "You look at my pictures … there’s witchcraft and hidden meaning there", writes Neil Sonnekus.

<b>BIG-BUDGET MOVIE OF THE WEEK:</b> Not a scene, action or word is wasted in this fine evocation of the endless joys and lurking terrors of youth – <i>Hearts in Atlantis</i>, writes Neil Sonnekus.

<b>COMMERCIAL MOVIE OF THE WEEK</b>

<b>Not quite comedy of the week:</b>It falters because it tries to be everything for everyone, but where it really falls apart is when it looks back to another era and turns to stone, writes Neil Sonnekus.

<b>Movie of the week:</b> The scientist sees the human as a machine that procreates and dies or is copied, whereas a flawed artist like Spielberg sees the human, real or copied, as the carrier of a soul that lives forever as a child – a human being, writes Neil Sonnekus.

<b>Love story of the week:</b> Occasionally an American film comes along that, as untimely as it might sound in these crashing days, restores one’s faith in the human race. <i>Two Family House</i> might have one of the worst titles around, but there is absolutely nothing wrong with the sentiment behind it, writes Neil Sonnekus.

The Encounters film festival elevates the filming of actuality to a fine art, writes Neil Sonnekus.

Bertold Bohmer (Armin Mueller-Stahl) is a widowed, sixtysomething German émigré and athletics trainer. He lives like a pig in a cottage on an Afrikaans couple’s farm, has no interest in women – black or otherwise – and never shaves. This is possible, but highly implausible.

The notion of people’s lives overlapping each other’s has almost become a genre on its own. Examples such as <i>Short Cuts</i> by Robert Altman and <i>Love’s a Bitch</i> by Alejandro Gonz‡lez I-‡rritu come to mind. Though not always high on drama, as the latter was, they do create some tension about how and when individuals will cross paths.

Making a cast of thousands seem like an understatement, <b>The Emperor and the Assassin</b> is about Ying Zheng (Li Xuejian), heir to the throne of the kingdom of Qin. He and his concubine Zhao (Gong Li) come up with a clever plot that will ultimately unify a then fragmented China. She will set up an assassin from the neighbouring Han kingdom whom he will then expose.

There comes a time for all actors of integrity to shine and that time has come for Ian Holm. What makes his performance in <b>Joe Gould’s Secret</b> all the more poignant is that the character he portrays is a very rare kind of actor himself.
Joe Gould was cursed by a time, place and perception that no longer applies, but it left the man so devastated that he became an artist in spite of what he said he was: a writer.

At the centre of <i>Finding Forrester</i> is a rather touching story with excellent dialogue dying to burst out of the boundaries imposed upon it by its pretentious director, Gus Van Sant. It is, essentially, a remake of his <i>Good Will Hunting</i> in that it’s once again about the friendship between an old man and a young boy.

Directed by Alejandro Gonzalez I-arritu, <i>Love’s a Bitch</i> (Amores Perros in Spanish) tells the story of three very different types of people, runs for two-and-a-half hours and, if that sounds a bit clinical, it’s a passionate but lucid masterpiece.

Depending on your point of view, the problem with a film like <i>Red Planet</i> is that there is just too much damn space. All you can do with that intangible real estate is show plastic models floating through it from interesting perspectives to a hopefully exciting soundtrack. Or, as the kugel said when she went to the first Mi Vami on the moon: "But there’s no atmosphere."

The issue of female beauty and its attendant competitions was dealt with to an extent in Sally Field’s affecting directorial debut <i>Beautiful</i>. Its main thesis was that its lead character’s drive to succeed had to do with her desperate need for attention and, by extension, her deep dislike of herself.

The fact that it is independent hardly redeems Lyk Lollery, a not-so-new local comedy, writes Neil Sonnekus.

M Night Shyamalan, the 30-year-old writer-director of the commercially (10th-highest grossing film of all time) and artistically successful <i>The Sixth Sense</i>, has a knack of drawing us into a world that is so unique and mysterious, yet grounded, that we can only marvel as we are swept along a road with very few signposts.

One of the reasons for the success of American slasher movies is that they confirm the predominantly middle-class teenagers’ worst suspicions about their parents’ world. It’s as nasty and violent as the news implies, and the new bogey-man or archetype of that world is the serial killer.

The transatlantic love affair between England and America is perfectly understandable. England has the weight of history behind it, while America is its most successful former colony. The language, with all its economic and cultural implications, has travelled from a green island to a wealthy mainland to the ever-expanding boundaries of outer space.