UFO Info Week-End

It snaps and pows all right but does not speak to us

It snaps and pows all right, but does not speak to us.Some Voices was originally a stage play (a vehicle for Ray Winstone, it has been adapted for the screen by Joe Penhall) and its sorrowful narrative seems lost in the huge celluloid world, flimsy on the streets of West London, shaken-up by the tide in its scenes on the coast Barely there.It’s pretty frustrating But the film’s stars are not Morrissey and Macdonald are familiarly likeable. In one scene, Macdonald wakes in a Brighton hotel room, Holbein white under the white sheets. She has the skin every British actress dreams of – that of Juliette Binoche, Isabelle Adjani and Irÿne Jacob, French actresses who always stimulate directors into long facial studies, pressing the camera up against their pale perfection, their invisible pores.But Craig is really something. He is easily the best, if not the only, young actor of his type in the country. Craig has always reminded me, very specifically, of two people: Jack Kerouac for his face (even down to his reassuringly busted konk) and Robert Shaw for his Hemingway-masculinity.

Like Shaw, Craig’s masculinity is comprehensive not defensive – he’s no spiv bully, he’s never monotonously hard. This is a rarity in a national cinema heavy with either false male heroics or men with full heads of curls and delicate fingers.There’s nothing decorative about Craig. He runs the gamut from amiable to pinch-mean with old-fashioned precision Consequently, his flourishes are never false. He sneaks in vacillations and ambiguities as though they were genuinely rebellious impulses. Amongst British actors, at least, this is as common as a unicorn.There’s Only One Jimmy Grimble is another British film, equally low-key. It’s all about a sweet, lonely, bullied (blah, blah) teenage Mancunian who comes across a pair of magic football boots and triumphs as striker in the school team. It’s an exceptionally naive affair, and no less loveable for this.Robert Carlyle turns up as an ex-Manchester City star (Carlyle has taken some pretty strange roles in his time but he’s never played an oxymoron before) turned PE teacher who now spends lonely nights in his terraced house sitting in front of the biggest telly in the world (presumably watching home videos of himself in the days when, Gary Lineker-like, you could land a helicopter on his thighs) I can’t think who might go and see this film.

Real-life 15-year-olds will scoff at its innocence (“If the magic’s not in me boots, it must be in me feet!”) and adults might long for more Kes moments (thin legs in out-sized shorts, the rain falling hard on the hum-drum town) to go home and feel awful about. And it’s a little unfair that just about every Manchester band other than The Smiths gets a go on the sound-track.Location-wise the film is Hatful Of Hollow in motion (“O Manchester, so much to answer for!”). But I suppose the sight of Ray Winstone with a brushed-mahogany rinse playing a nice man (Jimmy’s Mum’s bloke) gets your attention more than Jimmy dribbling to “Kinky Afro”. (If you’ve no idea what I’m talking about, then you’re past it and always were.)Cherry Falls has a gloriously B-movie plot A killer is targeting virgins in a small American town. The local high school is agog with excitement – they have to do it to live! A sex party is staged, but by this point the film has run out of steam, having reached a zenith of sorts with its young star (Brittany Murphy) closing her eyes and quoting TS Eliot whilst wearing a skirt smaller than a yoghurt pot. What gloomy Tom in his bank clerk’s overcoat would have made of that we’ll never know…Gossip features the British actress Lena Headey (who does not work as often as she deserves) playing one of a group of American undergraduates who live and party together.

She and her mates start a vicious rumour concerning a chaste, rich class-mate and her supposedly libidinous boy-friend. Things turn sour, and the film dissolves into horrible hysteria.The 1979 Jamaican flick Rockers gets a re-release in time for the Notting Hill Carnival. The plot is unimportant (vague, my God!), the subtitles a must (impenetrable Rasta patois), the music (Burning Spear, Junior Murvin, Bunny Wailer) full of sexual braggadocio, and this weekend’s screening a guaranteed event.. The years are being kinder to Jackie Chan than to the rest of us. The 46-year-old is, of course, phenomenally fit; he’s alsoline-free and ageless in that particular Chinese way.

Still, it will come as a relief to fans of this sublimely gifted but ageing martial artist and comedian that in Shanghai Noon he doesn’t throw himself off high buildings, over cliffs or from fast-moving vehicles Well, not much. The years are being kinder to Jackie Chan than to the rest of us. The 46-year-old is, of course, phenomenally fit; he’s alsoline-free and ageless in that particular Chinese way. Still, it will come as a relief to fans of this sublimely gifted but ageing martial artist and comedian that in Shanghai Noon he doesn’t throw himself off high buildings, over cliffs or from fast-moving vehicles. Well, not much.
Fighting there is aplenty, though, and with it the visceral thrill that comes from knowing that it’s done “for real”. Shanghai Noon boasts a stunt co-ordinator, but Chan has clearly been given free reign.