Raised in Hong Kong, Dominic Nahr started his career at the South China Morning Post, but left the staff position after a year to become a freelance photographer.Since then, he has covered conflict zones that include East Timor, Gaza, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. His work has been published in Newsweek, Time, Vanity Fair, Spiegel, La Monde, and the New York Times among others.

Virgile Simon Bertrand is a French photographer who has been based in Asia since the late 1990s. His new exhibition in Hong Kong is called “Proxemics” and considers the unspoken rules of human relationships, and the relationship between people and the world around them.

Ken Loach’s new movie “Looking for Eric”, is about a forty-something Manchester postman whose life is falling apart. He left his first wife and child years before. His second wife left him, and he’s now looking after two shiftless adolescent stepsons who don’t have much respect for him and are involved in petty crime. He’s a man on the edge of a breakdown, and things are not made any easier when he has the opportunity to reconnect with his first wife, with whom he is still in love. But he does get a little help from his football idol Eric Cantona. Gary Pollard tells us more.

Georgia’s first professional state dance company, Sukhishvili was founded just after the Second World War, in 1945, by Iliko Sukhishvili and Nino Ramishvili. Trained at the Tibilisi Opera and Ballet Theatre, the duo blended traditional Georgian art with contemporary choreography.

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Reviewed by Gary Pollard (first aired on RTHK Radio 4’s “Morning Call”)

One thing I’ve always liked about Ken Loach’s movies is that he never forgets that most of us have to work for a living. In Hollywood films, at least if you’re not a policeman or a spy, jobs are pretty much hobbies.

In Loach’s world, real people have to do real jobs.

In “Looking for Eric”, the main character Eric Bishop (Steve Evets) is a forty-something Manchester postman who worries about getting up for work the next day even when he’s in hospital after having crashed his car during a panic attack. His life and his emotions are in a mess. Years before, he left his young wife, the love of his life. Later he got into a relationship with another woman. She, in turn left him seven years ago, and now he’s living in a house with two layabout stepsons Ryan (Gerard Kearns) and Jess (Stefan Gumbs). He has zero parental control.

He does have good working class friends though, fellow Manchester United fans he knows at work, led by Meatballs (John Henshaw). They make it their mission to cheer him up. They try telling him jokes or sharing self-help books and meditation exercises, in one of which they all choose idols they’d like to channel. He chooses Manchester United football legend Eric Cantona.

One night, while getting high on marijuana to console himself after a run-in with his stepsons, he finds Cantona in the room with him. It’s obviously a figment of his imagination, but they begin talking about what a mess his life is in.

Eric had crashed his car because he had been upset over the idea of facing the wife, Lily (Stephanie Bishop), that he had left many years before. He feels the years have not been as kind to him as they have to her. He doesn’t want to be pitied or, even worse, considered irrelevant.

The reason for his renewed contact with Lily is that their grown daughter, Sam (Lucy-Jo Hudson). needs the two of them to help look after her child as she is studying at college. Cantona begins giving him advice on how to get his life back in order.

Gradually Cantona persuades Eric that he can face the problems in his life, take control of his home, and even – perhaps – restart things with Lily.

This is director Ken Loach’s ninth movie with writer Paul Laverty. Some of their scripts err on the side of the didactic. A committed socialist, Ken Loach has never been afraid to wear his heart on his sleeve. “Looking for Eric” is different. It still has its strong commitment to the working class and the virtues of solidarity and friendship, but – through Cantona – it introduces a magical realist element, and it’s very much a comedy even though it has its dark moments.

The relationship between Eric and his idol is witty as well as meaningful, and even ventures into visual comedy when Cantona starts taking him out to the countryside to get in shape. For all that, the gradual reawakening of Eric’s new relationship with Lily is perhaps the film’s strongest point. Eric tells us about their past: their meeting on the dance floor, where he was an avid rocker, blue suede shoes and all, their first night together, their hasty marriage as a result of her pregnancy, and then how he caved into the pressures that made him leave.

In the present, he’s still racked by guilt over letting her down. What threatens him most is the idea that she may not care at all any more. He’d rather she hate him, and he regards it as a step in the right direction when she does get upset and angry.

Stephanie Bishop is a strong complement to Steve Evets, capturing her character’s assurance and the changes she has gone through to become the somewhat different woman she is today. She, we can sense, would like to give things a second chance but she does have reason to remain suspicious.

All this might seem to going a little too easily, but there’s an added problem in that Eric’s stepsons, particularly Ryan, are involved with a psychopathic thug who thinks nothing of shooting someone for insulting him in a nightclub. He forces the boys to keep the gun in their home under the floorboards. Their initial dismissal of Eric begins to change when they realize how much he cares about the state their lives are in, and when he begins to put his foot down about their behaviour, but he still needs to find a way to deal with the gangster, and he’s neither a particularly brave man nor an action hero. In the end, Cantona’s advice about teammates comes in useful, and the threat is confronted in an essentially humorous way.

For many, this section is the one that’s the least satisfying in the film. Laverty and Loach are shifting moods between Loach’s characteristic social realism, through romantic comedy, into fantasy, and on to a crime thriller. It moves from romance, to darkness, and humour, and back. It’s not Loach at his most socially serious.

On the other hand, that has its value too. “Looking for Eric” is a feel-good movie, and one that has audiences in cinemas, as it did in the Cannes Film Festival, laughing out loud and applauding certain plot developments. For me, it’s always good to see Loach taking a lighter approach to his material.

Football fans will enjoy the clips showing some of Cantona’s classic goals and passes, although if you are expecting a football movie you will be disappointed. He has a good sense of comic timing, and manages to be both icon and rather more self effacing individual

As I said at the beginning of this review, one of the differences between Loach and Hollywood is that his characters do have to work for a living. Another is that he invariably looks for the authentic in his actors. Steve Everts is an effective Everyman. Eric Cantona may be playing himself, but does so very much as a human being, not as a celebrity. Loach has said that he intended all along to show that celebrities are really just ordinary people after all.

For me, “Looking for Eric” was a strong contrast to Stephen Soderbergh’s “The Informant!” which I saw and reviewed last week. In story “The Informant!” is based on a true story, but even though Matt Damon paunches up and has thinning hair, Soderbergh still can’t get away from the star system. In contrast, Loach is presenting us with a fantasy story, but using actors who are very from stars, who aren’t having to dress down for the role, and are conveying a much more convincing sense of reality. Critics, including me, generally preferred the Ken Loach film, but it’s done less than half as well at the box office, at least so far. As always, I’d have preferred Loach to reach an even bigger audience. This one deserves it. But he’s always resisted the urge to really go Hollywood and lose his touch with ordinary people, and he – I know – is well aware that there is a price to be paid for that.

Create a picture of a prosperous city in the modern world and it’s likely to be a mess of traffic, crowded streets, and pollution. Once upon a time in China, prosperity looked considerably more picturesque, as “The Prosperous Cities” an exhibition of paintings from China at the Museum of Art until the 22nd November, reveals.

In our regular film review, Gary Pollard talks to us about Stephen Soderbergh’s “The Informant!” in which Matt Damon plays Mark Whitacre, who works at an agribusiness firm. When he receives reports that someone is  sabotaging their work he’s asked to work with the FBI , but it turns out you can’t quite believe everything Mark Whitacre tells you.

Once, Iranian music was so highly regulated that you could not carry a musical instrument on the streets. In different periods, control over music has relaxed and intensified, but it continues to be a subject of political and religious debate. It is much easier for the musicians of percussion group Zarbang to perform outside Iran than it is in their home country, as they told us during a recent trip to Hong Kong .

In stark contrast to the distrust of sensuality in music exhibited in Iran, South American countries like Argentina and Uruguay do everything they can to celebrate passion and romance in the form of the tango. Both countries have been having a bit of a tiff about where the dance originated, but they did get together recently to propose to the United Nations that the dance be considered one of mankind’s great cultural treasures.

Reviewed by Gary Pollard (first aired on RTHK Radio 4’s “Morning Call”)

Perhaps you should ignore many of the reviews you’ve seen or heard for Stephen Soderbergh’s ”The Informant!”. Except this one of course. Many are a long list of superlatives, many of which – like the movie’s title itself – end with an exclamation mark! Well, in the movie’s title, the exclamation mark means “Buyer Beware”.  For some watching the film, it may well mean the same thing in the reviews.

Despite all the glowing reviews, I watched it in a more than half-empty cinema where three couples walked out in  the first half hour, and the person I was with fell asleep. I could understand that. It was sometimes, even for me, hard going. Something had got people  into the cinema, and yet they clearly weren’t getting what they expected or wanted from the film.  This may have been their own fault. Perhaps they were hoping Matt Damon would be in Jason Bourne mode. Or perhaps the critical enthusiasm surrounding the film had led them to expect more than it could deliver.

One critic described the movie as showing “an excellent performance by a chubbed-out Matt Damon as a Midwestern executive who’s so smart he’s dumb.” Ironically, while “The Informant!” is proud of its own cleverness, the same phrase could in some ways also apply to the movie. It too is perhaps not as clever as it thinks it is.

Based on a true story and a non-fiction book by journalist Kurt Eichenwald, “The Informant!” is mostly set in the 1990s, when the computer screens in the office are still running DOS programs instead of Windows. Matt Damon plays Mark Whitacre, a  Vice-President at Archer Daniels Midland, or ADM, an agribusiness firm that deals in corn products. As he says: “corn goes in one end and profit comes out the other.” The company is having a problem with a virus that’s damaging the lysine manufacturing Mark has pioneered. Things begin to change in his life when he tells others in the management that there’s a mole in the company who is allowing a Japanese competitor to sabotage their output. He also says he has received calls from a Japanese man who has offered to tell him the identity of the mole for $10 million.

Instead of giving in to the demand, the company calls in the FBI, which decides to tap the home phone on which Mark says he received the calls. But there’s more going on than might appear. Mark has two phones at home, one a company line. The company only wants the FBI to tap one of them. They worry about what might be overheard on the other.

Mark goes along with this at first, but his wife Ginger (Melanie Lynskey) has reservations. Both worry that if the FBI discovers certain things about the company he will be made the fall guy. It’s only when Ginger threatens to speak out to agent Brian Shepard (Scott Bakula) that Mark gives in. He tells the FBI the company is part of a massive international price-fixing scheme involving lysine.

The agency asks him to work undercover. He agrees to wear a wire at work, and carry a portable tape recorder to provide the evidence the government needs. As he travels the world, talking to international company reps, he tries to get them to say outright what they are doing.

Throughout the movie we hear some of what’s going on in Mark’s head through voiceover narration. Screenwriter Scott Z. Burns, who also wrote “The Bourne Ultimatum”, shows us he has a strong capacity for self-dramatisation, confuses television and the mass media with reality, and has a strong fantasy life. He’s also a fan of Michael Crichton novels, including “Rising Sun”, which gives us a clue about where the idea of company sabotage came from.

For all that, Mark is no Jason Bourne. Although he labels himself Agent 0014 because he thinks he’s twice as smart as James Bond, he is dangerously inept even with the simple tape recorders he needs to gather evidence.

Alarm bells soon start ringing, earlier for the movie-savvy viewer than for the characters. Soon we start asking ourselves why we don’t see on screen any of the things that Mark says happened. Why are they always reported to us only through him? Gradually Mark’s story begins to fall apart, much to the confusion of his FBI handlers.

He begins to change his story. He tells them that while the company used to fix prices, it no longer does so. He admits there never was a mole in the first place. And other parts of his life story also begin to fall apart. He tells us, and the FBI, that he hopes that once the bad guys at ADM are cleared out, he’ll be the only executive left and he’ll end up running the company. But just in case none of this pans out, it turns out he has been embezzling millions of dollars from the company over the years. And then he is revealed to be suffering from bipolar disorder. The FBI agents become increasingly desperate as they see the credibility of their case unravel before their eyes.

Although “The Informant!” is marketed as a comedy it is rarely laugh out loud funny. Perhaps that’s one reason people were walking out when I saw it. Soderbergh has cast many American comedians in supporting roles, even the Smothers brothers, but they are mostly playing it straight.

Also, even though Soderbergh films in actual locations, including Whitacre’s home of the time,  something doesn’t ring true about the period setting. Why does this movie, set in the 1990s, have such a seventies or even earlier vibe? You keep feeling you are watching a somehow less crisp episode of the TV series “Mad Men”.

The strongest element of the movie is Matt Damon’s performance. He is enjoying playing an inept spy. He’s also enjoying doing a Russell Crowe and putting on the 30 lbs extra weight. Mark Whitacre is convinced all along that he is one o the good guys, and that’s what helps to fool some of those around, in the movie, and in the audience.

But despite Damon’s performance, and although everything I’ve said might convince you that there’s a lot here to make an interesting movie, I think it falls short. Sometimes it looks like it could have been a Coen brothers’ movie, but it lacks both their snap and their darkness. Even David Lynch might have taken a worthwhile crack at it.

There’s a mass of potential in Eichenwald’s more than 600-page book, and in the real-life story of Mark Whitacre. There have even been comaplints that Eichenwald himself is not all he appears to be, which adds another layer of complexity to the story, and whether we can believe what we are seeing. I’m not convinced that Soderbergh and screenwriter Burns bring all the ironies and the ambiguities out. Perhaps that exclamation mark in the title is the key. They are standing back from the material, viewing it ironically, and in the end that irony stops us from getting as close to the depth of these characters, including Whitacre, as we might like. I think you will like “The Informant!” more if you already know more about the true story, so that this is seen as another fragmented reflection of it.

Soderbergh has taken a fascinating true story and tried to turn it into another episode of his Oceans series of movies – “The Big Con – Agribusiness”. It would have benefited from a quite different, and more involved, treatment.

In this week’s show: a new look at an old art form: Chinese ink painting.

Two exhibitions in Hong Kong, one at the Hong Kong University art gallery, the other at Artist Commune, are currently revealing how Hong Kong artists are trying to bring new life to a traditionally conservative art.  Some are combining Eastern and Western elements; others are bringing in new media.

In our movie review, Woody Allen’s new movie “Whatever Works” is the story of a very intelligent but miserable retired physics professor, and the not terribly bright twenty-something woman who falls in love with him. It’s also a return to his old stamping ground of Manhattan, and based on a script first written in the 1970s. So is it a return to the Woody Allen of old? Gary Pollard tells us more.

And we feature the 22-year old pianist Wang Yujia, who performed in Hong Kong last month. She talks to us about her debut album, and why she wants to be known for more than having fast fingers.

Click link below for a streaming video of the show

The Works Video

Reviewed by Gary Pollard (first aired on RTHK Radio 4’s “Morning Call”)

Most artists have a peak period of creativity. In some the gap between the quality of that period and the rest of their work is large. For some the peak period is longer than for others; for artists like Picasso, it seems to last most of their lives.

For me, Woody Allen had a peak period in terms of achieving the perfect synthesis between his desire to be a serious film-maker and his humour at around the time of “Annie Hall”, “Manhattan”, “Stardust Memories”, and “Zelig”. In recent years his work has gradually declined, although it’s not a steady drop. There have been independently interesting and good films. In the meantime he has sometimes flailed around with subject matter and approach.

The decline became most noticeable when he left the United States for a while to make films elsewhere. “Match Point”, “Scoop” had their moments, but were a far cry from his earlier work, and revealed – for British viewers – a horrifically tin ear for the niceties of England and English life. In recent years, the one major return to form has been “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” but that itself seemed a little outside the Woody Allen oeuvre, an Eric Rohmer film that happened to be made by Woody Allen, although it does have a couple of typical Allen notes.

With “Whatever Works”, Woody Allen has returned to his old stomping ground of Manhattan, which raises hopes that he’s going to be back in full form. Audiences might also expect the old flair from the fact that the script for this one was originally written in the 1970s. The subject matter, an older man who has a young woman fall in love with, and marry him, might make it look like the wish fulfillment of a man himself older, but the role of its protagonist Boris Yellnikoff was originally written for Zero Mostel. Allen set the screenplay aside after Mostel’s death in 1977.

Now Boris Yellnikoff is played by Larry David, as a basket of mannerisms somewhere between those of Woody Allen himself and Larry David’s own “Curb Your Enthusiasm” character. He’s basically an old misanthrope. Doesn’t like people at all. He’s a former physics professor, an expert in string theory and quantum mechanics, who –as he likes to tell everyone – was almost nominated for the Nobel Prize. Now he’s retired and spends the days sitting in cafes kvetching with his old friends that the universe is going to end, and teaching chess to children, whom he can’t stand either because they can’t play as well as he can.

Boris was once married to a woman who was brilliant and attractive, but decided they got married for all the wrong reasons and jumped out a window in a suicide attempt. They divorced. Now he limps, and lives in a rundown apartment near Chinatown. He is used to living alone. He has to be. It’s likely no one else could put up with him.

All that changes when the young Melody St. Ann Celestine (Evan Rachel Wood) turns up outside his apartment. Formerly a beauty queen in New Orleans she has run away from home. She initially asks him for something to eat, and then asks if she can stay. She is wonderfully dumb. When he tells her sarcastically that he if something she says is true he was a major league baseball player, she can’t get the idea of him being a baseball player out of her mind for quite some time. He considers most human beings beneath him in intelligence, and she is considerably lagging even behind them.

Still, she is sweet, and open, and he doesn’t want her to go out wandering the streets and eventually working them. She cooks him crayfish, and watches Fred Astaire movies with him in the middle of the night when he has anxiety attacks. He often criticizes her dumbness but his ego can’t help but being happy to be her teacher: he talks to her about everything from the Heisenberg uncertainty principle to all the crimes, some of them very minor, that he thinks should result in a death penalty.

After a while she develops an attraction to him, and yes, they get married. To the audience’s discomfort perhaps, Melody begins to absorb some of Boris’s misanthropy, and starts to regurgitate it from time to time, even though she probably doesn’t really agree with most of it.

They have a comfortable enough existence until, one year later, fate comes knocking on the door just as melody is listening to the opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth. It’s her Bible-spouting mother Marietta (Patricia Clarkson). She has left her husband, who was having an affair with her best friend. Looking around the dilapidated apartment, she thinks her daughter is now living like a sharecropper. Her first glimpse of Melody’s husband sends her into a dead faint. To our surprise though, New York changes her a lot. As too frequently happens in Woody Allen’s films, she is an undiscovered natural artist – a photographer – who gets a gallery exhibition almost immediately, and drifts into a ménage-a-trois with one of Boris’s friends and a gallery owner. From a born-again Christian she becomes a born-again Bohemian.

One thing that doesn’t change is her conviction that her daughter has mismarried, and she tries to fix her up with a young and vapid English actor (played by Henry Cavill) who has a penchant for lines such as “I live on a boat and I read and I think and I play my flute.”

Soon, Melody’s gun-nut father (Ed Begley Jr.) also arrives in New York. He’s remorseful about his affair and wants his wife back, although she has moved on. The city works its magic on him too, and pretty soon he has also undergone a life changing transformation. It all results in a more or less happy ending, even though Boris makes another suicide attempt before he gets there.

As Boris says, prefacing the movie’s title, “My story is, whatever works as long as you don’t hurt anybody. Any way you can filtch a little joy in this cruel and pointless life, that’s my story.” He’s intellectually arrogant, but he is morally unjudging, which may be one of his few good qualities.

Clearly at one time, Boris could have been played by Woody Allen himself. If it had, he’d probably have been somewhat more endearing. It’s a lot easier to dislike Larry David’s rendition of the character than it might have been Allen’s. That’s not necessarily a bad thing.

What’s more unfortunate is that there’s a lack of precision about the whole movie. The camera work by Harris Savides is a far cry from the superlative lensing that Gordon Willis brought to “Manhattan”. The character transformations seem too pat, and contrived to give us that happy ending. That’s a pity, as with a little more though, they could have been sold to us much more convincingly. The one unmitigated delight for me in this movie is Evan Rachel Wood who captures both the sweetness and the dumbness of her character beautifully. Often in Woody Allen’s films his characters give line-readings as if Allen himself were saying them. Disturbingly, even Scarlett Johannson was channeling Allen in “Vicky Christina Barcelona”. Evan Rachel Wood makes the words her own, and the optimism she brings to the film is a welcome antidote to Boris’s sourness.

As a whole though, “Whatever Works” is very minor Woody Allen, and probably mostly one for the hard core fans satisfied with little more than some great one-liners and the very occasional glimpse of the glory days.

We are back!!

We kick-off the new season with an open-air concert, The Works by the Harbour which took place on Sunday (4/10) at the Hong Kong Cultural Centre.

For those who missed the concert there was a chance to catch some of the highlights on Tuesday (13/10) at 7pm on TVB (Pearl).

We have classics from piano prodigy KJ (Wong Ka-jeng) , as well as flautist Ada Poon and pianist Yvonne Lai, classic rock from Eugene Pao and the POWz, blues from Henry Chung and the Spontaneous Combustion, world music from Africa with the Griot Mannequin Live Band, and jazz from Skip Moy & Friends.

To see the streaming video of the show, click here

Reviewed by Gary Pollard (first aired on RTHK Radio 4’s “Morning Call”)

“(500) Days of Summer” is, on a first glance, and for the first half, a breath of fresh air. Yes, it says it’s not a love story, but it is most certainly a romantic comedy. And I am hapy that it tries to shake off the shackles of romantic comedy formula. You can be happy for what’s not here. No “meet cute”. No instant contempt for one another to modify. No current jerky boyfriend or girlfriend to be dumped with no conscience. No last minute race to the airport. No heartfelt protestation of love in a crowd of warmhearted strangers.

In fact, Tom Hansen (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and Summer Finn (Zooey Deschanel) meet in the most prosaic of ways, in the greeting card office at which they both work. Neither has a previous encumbrance to shed. They don’t instantly take an active dislike to one another, and there is no last minute race to the airport, simply because the woman has decided she wants nothing more to do with the man, at least romantically. In fact, she tells him she wants to break up and then says nonchalantly how good the pancakes they have been served look. And in case you are shocked that I have revealed the ending, well the movie preview itself does the same, and the movie itself tells you what’s going to happen in the first five minutes.

Director Marc Webb and screenwriters, Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, jump backwards and forwards in time throughout the film and show us both the main characters’ meeting and their break up almost back to back. On the other hand, why is this a surprise? Some of the best romantic comedies, including “Annie Hall”, which brought its own fresh take to the genre, do not end with the couple getting together.

What happens here is that Tom and Summer work for a Los Angeles greeting card company. He seems interested in her, but is too shy to do anything about it, convinces himself initially that she has a lover and later that she may be gay. They eventually do get together but then she tells him she doesn’t believe in love – her mother and father are divorced. Tom has always believed in love and the one right person, largely – so the film’s narration tells us – to an early exposure to sad British pop music and an early misreading of the movie “The Graduate”.

Like most who have fallen in love with an initially doubtful partner, Tom decides Summer’s skepticism is primarily a result of uncertainty, and that if they do get together she will slowly change her mind. Hope springs eternal.

One of the nicer things about this film is that it’s not afraid to tell us that men have romantic aspirations too. Lately there’s been a new sub-genre of romantic comedy which is about the fat raunchy slob getting the beautiful girl. They are trying rather hard to provide something to persuade males into the cinema. This one has no such solace for those who like to consider themselves more testosterone driven.

(500) Days of Summer, as I said, is best in its opening moments, including the film’s “dedication” to one Jenny Beckman. Its dialogue is funny without being too contrived, the jumping around in time is initially interesting, the characters are both more or less likeable, due almost solely to the on-screen personas of the actors. The couple appear a well-suited yuppie couple, walking around Ikea and make-believing it’s their home, sharing a fondness for the music of The Smiths, disagreeing about which Beatle is the most talented – she thinks it was Ringo Starr. But, after a while I began to feel that while the movie was on the surface ringing the changes from the romantic comedy, it didn’t go much beyond that surface. The jumps in chronology make it increasingly hard for you to realize where you are in the relationship, and in the film. The movie could end in two minutes or two hours. It’s less than an hour and a half, but it feels longer.

This can work. It did so with superb effect in “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”, which is one of my all time favourite love stories, but there you always knew exactly where the movie was heading.

At times, Marc Webb goes for the obvious. Having them both work in a greetings card company, where Tom is employed to write schmaltzy messages, is rather too obvious for a movie talking about real versus ersatz romance. And the characters are rather superficial. He is apparently a trained architect, who is working here because that “didn’t work out”. Once they have broken up he finds himself not wanting to do greetings cards any more and wanting to get back into his original profession. But why? And although it doesn’t seem exactly easy, his path back to architecture (like his departure from it) begs far too many questions. Even if his character is a little formulaic though, hers is worse.

Summer is the formulaic romance object. She’s kind of cute, kind of quirky, but she isn’t about anything. At least he has his old career. She has nothing. She likes this or that pop music. She doesn’t believe in love, at least initially. But she has no ambition, no dreams, no direction, nothing she even feels particularly strongly about. You wouldn’t even know whether she’d vote Republican or Democrat. “Annie Hall” in comparison was not only a bundle of neuroses, she also had determined ideas about where she wanted to go, what she wanted to do. And those inevitably impinged on the relationship. Did Webb and his scriptwriters decide to make Summer a thin character so more people like her, or did they simply not think a more definite character would suit their drama? You sometimes get the idea that the filmmakers are more interested in playing with the form than creating apparently a living and breathing young couple.

There’s formula too in the rather irritating wise-beyond-her-years younger sister (Chloë Grace Moretz), and in his two buddies (played by Matthew Gray Gubler and Geoffrey Arend), there really to be a foil to his romantic illusions. And yet, there are moments of real insight here you won’t find in many romantic comedies. There are some great lines. And it is a movie that gives you the freedom to see the characters in more than one way. There are moment where you just feel Summer is an entirely self-centred and dislikeable character, and the eventual romantic outcome of her life might have more to do with status and wealth than much else. A cynic would say it’s just unfortunate for Tom he’s not a successful architect when they meet. And the movie gives you room for that interpretation.

The film’s single best scene though for me involved the movie Tom misreads: “The Graduate”. So many people have watched that film, seen Dustin Hoffman as Ben run to the church, seen Katherine Ross as Elaine decide to leave her family and fiancé and run off with him, and then seen them sitting on the bus, her still in her wedding dress. Superficially it’s a happy ending, but then Mike Nichols keeps the camera on their faces as both of them begin to wonder what they have done, and what they are going to do next. It is in fact potentially the opposite of a happy ending.

Here, Tom and Summer go to see the movie. He loves it. She bursts into tears at the sadness. It’s a beautifully done scene and one of many moments when “(500) Days of Summer” references other good movies about love. It’s just unfortunate that occasionally, despite its insight and humour, it also reminds you that those movies were actually also more profound than this one.

Reviewed by Gary Pollard (first aired on RTHK Radio 4’s “Morning Call”)

In “District 9”, man’s first encounter with extraterrestrial life is neither as spectacular nor as threatening as it’s been shown in most movies. Twenty-eight years ago, a huge alien spacecraft appeared in the sky over Johannesburg. And stayed there. It emitted no sound. No creature made an effort to contact the human race. It just hovered there for months.

Eventually humans decide to fly up to the ship and cut their way in. What they find is a dark, dank, and  filthy ship filled with millions of starving, sick aliens. The aliens are insect-like beings that walk on two legs, and have crustacean-like skins and tentacled mouths. Human beings give them the derogatory name “prawns”.

It appears the alien ship has come to Earth, and then broken down. According to one scientist who s being interviewed, after the ship’s arrival something detached from it and fell to Earth. Despite a search, it has not been found.

Mankind treats them as it does many refugee populations, settling them into a temporary housing area, the so-called “District 9”, where they are restored to health. Over time though, as world governments cannot decide what to do with them, the temporary housing becomes permanent. District 9 becomes a slum, its inhabitants taking on the characteristics of the disenfranchised everywhere, falling into alcoholism, addiction, and gang culture. South Africans of all races think of them with suspicion, occasional empathy, and, mostly, xenophobic hostility.

We’re told all this in the first fifteen minutes or so of Neill Blomkamp’s “District 9”. It’s shot in the manner of a television documentary, using clips from a corporate video about a private company called MNU, or Multi-National United, archive footage from assorted news organizations, and interviews with scientists, human rights activists, and people on the street. MNU is the company that’s been given the job of looking after the alien refugee population. It also has ulterior motives. The aliens brought weapons with them. However, they are coded to work only with the DNA of the extraterrestrials. Human beings can’t fire them. MNU is conducting experiments to work out how to make those weapons usable by man.

Meanwhile, some human groups move into the camp to profiteer off the aliens, and to collect their weapons, including a gang of Nigerians that is also determined to make those weapons work. They’re Nigerians are led by a warlord-like figure Obesandjo (Eugene Khumbanyiwa) who buys the weapons with cans of cat food, which the aliens consider a delicacy. They also kill the occasional extraterrestrial. The gang also believes that by eating the creatures they will gain their power and be able to use the weaponry.

In the opening interviews, we are introduced to Wikus van der Merwe (Sharlto Copley) whose father-in-law (Louis Minnaar) is the head of the company. Nepotistically, Wikus has been put in charge of the transfer of aliens to the even more remote District 10. Blomkamp has based this on the forced removal of over 60,000 non-white inhabitants from District Six to the Cape Flats township during the 1970s by South Africa’s apartheid regime.

In a segment that looks like an episode of the US television series “Cops” Wikus and a team go from door-to-door in District 9 serving eviction notices. None of them cares whether the aliens understand the notices. They just have to get their scrawl on them so the eviction process has at least a semblance of legality.

Wikus is a little friendlier with the aliens than most of the other operatives, even if patronising. He still uses the terms “prawns” though, and clearly regards them as subhuman. In one hovel he finds a cache of weapons. In another, a cluster of alien eggs. The creatures are not allowed to breed without a permit, so Wikus calls in a team to destroy the shack with a flame-thrower.  As it burns, he cheerfully compares the popping sound the eggs make with the sound of baking popcorn.

As he continues to serve the notices and search the homes, Wikus accidentally ingests a black liquid the aliens have collected. Within hours, it begins altering his DNA so he is starts to take on alien characteristics. His fingernails drop off. His teeth fall out.

Soon he is wanted by MNU, as well as by the Nigerians. It seems he can fire the weapons that human beings have wanted to get their hands on for so long.

Increasingly an outcast from the human world, Wikus has to become part of the alien one. He teams up with a “prawn” that humans have named Christopher Johnson (voiced by Jason Cope), and his child, “Little CJ”. He wants a way to reverse his alien metamorphosis; they want to get their spaceship working and return to their planet.

It may seem from this outline that the allegory in “District 9” is a little too obvious. Clearly it’s about apartheid. But the script by Blomkamp and co-writer Terri Tatchell goes far beyond that. “District 9” is an expansion of a six-minute short “Alive in Joburg” that Blomkamp made in 2005, and like that earlier film it’s not interested in exploiting the aliens for cheap scares. It’s much more about reflecting our own xenophobia.

Horror and sci-fi fans will see many elements from other movies and TV programmes here, including the BBC’s 1950s “Quatermass” stories, “The X-files”, and even “ET”. Its pseudo-documentary style mixes humour, grisly news reportage, horrific scientific experiment, and even – eventually – a Transformers-like fight sequence. If one has a criticism of it, it may be that towards the end it becomes a more formulaic action movie, but by this point you do not care. Blomkamp has set up the situation with such intelligence and integrity, and got you so hooked on the characters, including the aliens, that you are highly invested in the outcome of that action.

The film’s special effects are among the best I’ve seen. The way the spaceship hovers above Johannesburg, partly obscured by heat haze and pollution, often seen shakily through hand-held cameras, makes it entirely real. The aliens are mostly computer-generated, and yet you come to believe in them fully as characters. One of the most impressive things is that, as superb as they are, you stop wondering at the special effects as the story progresses because they are secondary to it, not driving it.

Sharito Copley isn’t an actor most of us will know, but he makes Wikus a flawed and initially sometimes despicable human being whom we nevertheless end up supporting. By the end, as he has externally become less human, he has begun to represent what is best about humanity rather than what’s worst.

Made on a smallish budget “District 9”, produced by Peter Jackson after his “Halo” project fell through,  is the blockbuster movie of the summer, and proof – above all – that the blockbuster can be sharp, intelligent, and even have much of value to say about the human condition. It’s one of the best science fiction films for a long time. It’s one of the best movies of any kind for a long time.

Reviewed by Gary Pollard (first aired on RTHK Radio 4’s “Morning Call”)

”Surrogates” was released worldwide on pretty much the same day. No reviewer had been allowed to see it, or write about it at least, before that release. That’s a pattern of distribution that almost invariably shows a studio has no confidence in its movie. If you expect good reviews, you get them out there before the film hits the screens.

There were a couple of other warning signs. The movie is under 90 minutes long, often a sign of serious re-editing, and one of the heads of the studio that produced it was fired from his job a week before it opened. I did not have high expectations.

Well “Surrogates” may not be quite as big a stinker as most films released in this way, but it is mediocre. And that’s a pity, because there are some good ideas here that director Jonathan Mostow and his John Brancato and Michael Ferris don’t make the best of. The movie is based on Robert Venditti and Brett Weldele’s graphic novel of the same name. I do not know whether that source material made more sense or was more gripping.

It’s set in the not-so-distant future. People have become obsessed by the use of “surrogates”, essentially robots that they control by lying in their apartments on a special “stim-chair” with wires attached to their heads. Not only can your surrogate be younger, handsomer, more athletic than you, it also does not feel any pain. And if it should happen to get involved in an accident or killed, well you’ll be fine. Many people choose not to leave their apartments at all, having become virtual shut-ins, while – in their robot bodies – they go to work and party.

For some, it’s not such a bad existence. But there is also a group of dropouts that rejects surrogacy, led by a mysterious figure called the Prophet (Ving Rhames). They live in special areas of the major cities where robots are not allowed.

As “Surrogates” opens, two young and attractive robots are attacked by a leather suited individual wielding some kind of electrical gun. Not only does it cause the circuitry in the robots’ heads to fry, it feeds back to their operators and liquefies their brains. FBI agents Thomas Greer (Willis) and Jennifer Peters (Radha Mitchell) investigate the case. They find that one of the murdered victims is the son of Dr. Lionel Canter (James Cromwell), who invented the surrogates. Even more creepily, the other one, whose robot form was an attractive and shapely blonde in her early twenties turns out to have been an obese middle-aged man.

It doesn’t take Greer long to track down the murderer, and the movie’s first formula action sequence soon follows. During that chase, Greer’s robot, that looks like a much younger smooth-skinned Bruce Willis is destroyed. Partly because of this, ands partly because much of the investigation will have to be done in the no robot zone, he gets out of his apartment and continues his work in the flesh.

Greer’s wife Maggie (Rosamund Pike) who – like him is mourning the death of their son in an accident – does not like the fact that he is trying to head back out into the world. For her, real life is too painful. The glamorous existence of the surrogates is much more appealing, and allows her to live vicariously while remaining in isolation. Most of the time she only allows even her husband to see the younger, prettier, robot version of herself. There’s a nice emotional and psychological element here that the movie should have concentrated on instead of the half-baked action scenes.

One of the problems with the surrogates themselves is that they are rather bland. That means that much of the interaction in the movie is pretty bland, as Greer is not talking to real people but to robots. And you never know who is operating the surrogate with whom you are interacting anyway. A character who seems to be one race or gender or age may turn out to be quite different. Sometimes three different people you meet may all be operated by the same person. At others, a surrogate may be operated by different people at different times, so it’s almost as if they are possessed. This could lead to a world of shifting certainties that would have been fascinating to explore. Mostow and his writers do not decide to explore it, but to simply use these ideas as plot devices in what becomes a very formula script.

In execution, “Surrogates” is lackluster, and there is a problem that once you realize most of the characters you see are not flesh and blood there is no reason to care about what happens to them. It’s mostly boring. Beyond the fact that it’s boring though, there is a problem that the film somehow looks recycled. There are ideas here from such movies as “Westworld”, “A.I.”, even “Blade Runner”.

All of these ideas were better explored in their original films. And there’s a lack of logic about the whole thing anyway. If a surrogate can’t be hurt, or convey pain to its operator, how can it feel pleasure? The movie tells us that once surrogates became popular, crime disappeared. But why would it, when you could rob banks, rape or get into fights with no consequences to your body? And if most people never leave their apartment or get out of bed, why don’t they all get obese and out of shape?

If the movie kept you involved throughout its length, maybe you wouldn’t stop to ask yourself questions like these, but as it can’t make up its mind whether it’s a whodunit, a thriller, an action movie, a sci-fi movie, a social critique, or a psychological melodrama, you begin to wish that you could have stayed at home in bed and sent a surrogate out to the cinema instead.

The overall impression I get is that “Surrogates” was seen to have problems quite early in the process, but that no one bothered to iron them out, hoping that throwing action scenes at the audience would distract them. Unfortunately Mostow is not a particularly good action director.

“Surrogates” may not be as screamingly awful as “Haeundae”, the movie I reviewed last week, but there really isn’t anything about it to make you glad you decided to go to the cinema either. Maybe catch it on DVD later.