Eddie Izzard Page 2

Scottish filmmaker Gillies MacKinnon (Hideous Kinky) remakes the 1949 Ealing comedy classic, although it's difficult to understand why. Loosely based on a true story, it's a lively romp set on the edge of Europe during World War II. But after nearly 70 years the material called for a much fresher approach than this rather dull farce. At least the cast is likeable, even if they can't inject much spark into the story.

It's set on the island of Todday, off the west coast of Scotland, where the locals are horrified that their rationed quantity of whisky has run dry. Annoyed that they now have only tea to drink, they get on with their lives. Postmaster Macroon (Gregor Fisher) is preoccupied with the romances his two daughters are carrying on: Catriona (Elle Kendrick) is in love with skittish schoolteacher George (Kevin Guthrie), while Peggy (Naomi Battrick) has just reunited with her returned soldier boyfriend Odd (Sean Biggerstaff). Then a ship runs aground off the shore, and word has it that its cargo hold contains a massive whisky shipment. So the villagers devise a plan to sneak around local military officer Wagget (Eddie Izzard) to salvage the hooch.

All of this plays out as a rather tepid adventure, never cranking up any suspense at all as Wagget is easily outwitted by everyone else on the island. The dual romances play out without even a whiff of lusty zing or dramatic tension. And there's also a political thriller thread involving a stash of important documents, which the script sidelines completely. Instead we get more of the whisky-chugging local minister (James Cosmo) who participates in the hijinks but forbids heist activities on the sabbath. Director MacKinnon stages everything in slapstick style, accompanied by a ludicrously insistent comedy score by Patrick Doyle. But it's never very funny.

Continue reading: Whisky Galore! Review

Using animation, home movies and archive footage, we follow Izzard through his birth in 1962 to British parents who were working in Yemen, his early childhood in Northern Ireland and his youth in Wales and England. After being kicked out of university, he started performing comedy on the street, finally getting his big break in the 1990s, touring the world as a comic and becoming more famous in America as an actor. Along the way he discovers that past tragedies have inspired him to believe that he can be a stand-up, an actor or anything he wants to be.

Continue reading: Believe: The Eddie Izzard Story Review

Jan Kounen, the Dutch cause celebre responsible for the hyperactive cult film Dobermann, tackles the epic story of Blueberry with a careful, almost blissed out style - much to the dismay of fans of his earlier work. Blueberry is a meditative work, a somnambulist's ramble through western history and psychedelica. The film is slowly paced but crescendos in a special effects blowout, a literal celluloid peyote trip, which would make Alejandro Jodorowsky jump with joy. (That isn't a random aside, Blueberry is as close an homage to Jodorowsky's El Topo as a big budget western can get.)

Continue reading: Blueberry Review

It is certainly not a film without some merit. With its surprisingly apt cast, including notables John Hannah (Four Weddings and a Funeral), Famke Janssen (Rounders), Peter Stormare (Fargo), and Eddie Izzard, it's hard not to like this bunch of clowns (no pun intended) as they stumble through a double-, triple-, even quadruple-cross plot ultimately involving a great deal of money that one lucky crook will end up with. But who?

Continue reading: Circus Review

Part homage to one of cinema's best-known silent films, part winkingly nebulous black comedy, and part old-school horror flick, "Shadow of the Vampire" is a crafty "what if" fictionalization of the making of "Nosferatu," the world's first vampire movie.

The film stars John Malkovich as F.W. Murnau, the classic picture's legendarily obsessive director who is willing to go to any lengths to capture genuine terror from his cast -- even if it means hiring a real vampire to play the lead, promising the undead "actor" the neck of his leading lady when the picture wraps.

Enter Willem Dafoe in a performance of a lifetime as Max Schreck -- the method actor who never appeared to the cast and crew out of character (or out of make-up, or during daylight) the whole time "Nosferatu" was being made on location at a foreboding castle in Bavaria, circa 1922.

Continue reading: Shadow Of The Vampire Review

Most film directors dream about making their "Citizen Kane," and while few would have the audacity to try to equal Orson Welles' cinematic masterpiece, Peter Bogdanovich has found a way to do the next best thing.

Where Welles borrowed famously from the life of William Randolph Hearst -- his ego, his powerful publishing empire and his scandals -- in creating the fictional Charles Foster Kane, Bogdanovich has commandeered an incessant rumor about an infamous and mysterious death aboard Hearst's yacht in 1924 and turned it into a foxy and spirited historical showbiz anecdote that lingers in your mind for weeks after seeing it.

"The Cat's Meow" is an ensemble piece packed with the best work of some under-appreciated actors including Edward Herrmann ("The Lost Boys," "Gilmore Girls") as an amusingly gruff Hearst whose paranoia has gotten the better of his nerves; Joanna Lumley ("Absolutely Fabulous") as sardonic novelist and socialite Elinor Glyn; Jennifer Tilly ("Bound") as sycophantic but opportunistic gossip columnist Louella Parsons; Cary Elwes ("The Princess Bride") as once legendary, now down on his luck movie producer Thomas Ince; and a delightfully devilish yet wisely understated Eddie Izzard ("Shadow of the Vampire") as Charlie Chaplin. All these famous names were among the billionaire's onboard guests that fateful weekend.

Continue reading: The Cat's Meow Review

Husky men in drag may be good for a sketch-comedy guffaw, but as the basis for an entire movie the idea always gets stretched way too thin.

It's the difference between "The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert," a good movie with authentic transvestites who happen to be fun and funny, and "To Wong Fu, Thanks For Everything, Julie Newmar," an inane movie built on nothing more than the incongruity of seeing Patrick Swayze, Wesley Snipes and John Leguizamo in flamboyant frocks. (OK, Leguizamo looked pretty damn good.)

But far worse than even "To Wong Fu" is "All the Queen's Men," in which decking out burly boys as "broads" is little more than a fatuous gimmick -- the kind of 25-words-or-less concept that is the basis of most bad movies: Wouldn't it be funny if a bunch of Allied soldiers went undercover as assembly-line women in a German factory during World War II?

Continue reading: All The Queen's Men Review