Hey folks, Harry here... We've heard this film loved on the site and one person nicknamed it Beyond Boring at one screening. Ultimately, I believe one's passion for this film is going to rely on whether or not you believe the relationship between Clive and Angelina. From the reviews I've seen, that's the key sticking point. Some like em together, some don't. Clive is cool and Angelina is yummy, so at the very least this should be ice cream... I just hope it ain't pistacchio..
Harry,
Don't know if you're going to end up using this or not, but I don't recall having seen a review of this film up yet.
Last night at my university they had an advance screening of Beyond Borders with Angelina Jolie and Clive Owen for the journalism students. It was free, and though I am not a journalism student, I found plenty of empty seats and sat down to catch the free screening. Director Martin Campbell was on hand, as was writer Caspian Tredwell-Owen and one of the producers, as well as one of the executives from Mandaly pictures, where the whole thing was put together. We were told that this was only the third screening of the movie, after one in New York and one in Washington.
So there's the background.
Angelina Jolie stars as Sarah Jordan, an american socialite living in London (I believe that's exactly what the release they gave us said, too) who decides to go to the Sudan to help foreign aid workers there after being in a posh london ball crashed by rebellious doctor Nick Callahan (Clive Owen). She heads down, saves some people, Nick is a dick to her, and then she leaves.
The movie shifts to a few years later, the economy is down, Sarah is having home trouble, and suddenly she gets a call from Noah Emmerich's character (whose name escapes me and isn't on the IMDB) who was the manager, so to speak, of Nick's foreign aid group. Since she works for the UN they need her to get a stamp of approval on some food they're having shipped in so it will be able to get through the war-torn Cambodia. She accepts, but ups the ante by saying she'll go down with it to see it through. She goes down, we find out Nick's been doing shady CIA deals for money for medicine and food, they almost die, and there's a super-sweet scene involving a baby-and-a-grenade. They get out of Cambodia, do the mattress mambo, and then off Nick goes to settle some affairs in NYC.
Cut to a few MORE years later, Sarah's got another little kid now, she's head of the UNHCR (I'm pretty sure that's what it is) a human relief organization, when she discovers Nick's gone missing in Chechnya. She gets some help from her recurring-character sister, heads to Chechnya, finds out Nick's been kidnapped (reason being he pissed off the wrong people) and she goes to rescue him.
I think that is the best spoiler free summary I could ever come up with, though if my english professor saw those run-on sentences he'd probably castrate me. College is fairly hard-core these days.
Now how is it? I mean, that's essentially the important part of any review, right? Well, I guess I liked it. I mean, I had very very low expectations for it - the posters and trailers are awful and totally send the wrong vibe about the flick.
Jolie is fine as the main character. I bought her drive, bought her change, though I thought it was a littlew strange she was never "hmmm... this is some crazy shit, man". Plus she and Clive Owen make babies like five seconds after a semi-major character dies, but that's probably the scripts fault and not hers.
Clive Owen roxor my soxor. HE was the man in this film and owned every second he was on screen. He's just an unforgiving asshole and there's no way you can or should like him but you do. I didn't see Croupier, but after seeing Owen in this I'm a staunch supporter. Though the film is lite on action he does his fair share of body-mangling - both giving and taking.
Which segues (or segways?) nicely into comments about director Martin Campbell. He's a smallish bald dude who I thought was a well-spoken brit (Which is sort of redundant) but it said on IMDB he's from New Zealand. The horrors of death by starvation are well displayed without being a two hour exercise in audience sympathy. One scene that's particularly memorable is when Sarah first arrives in the Sudan and sees a starving child being eyed by a patient and waiting vulture. It's really a horrifying image and situation, and even more horrific when I discovered, during the Q and A afterwards, that that particular situation had indeed occurred in real life. Evidently a photographer took a picture of the same situation, but did nothing to stop the boy from dying. He later killed himself.
The horror isn't over-done, however. Campbell seemed very aware that too much horror would turn the audience off from the main story at hand - the romance between Nick and Sarah. However, as a film about foreign relief and such, it was necessary to display the suffering that goes on beyond the American borders, and really that image of the boy about to be eaten by the buzzard summarizes all of the death and horror just beyond the frame of the camera.
Plus the set of the Sudanese camp is amazing and huge in scope. One of the audience members made the comment that they actually felt like they were there, and it really is true. He does some nifty color work, too, much like Soderbergh did in Traffic; the desert is bleached, the jungle is dripping with texture, and Chechnya is blue and cold. It's an almost overused technique these days, but it works well in the episodic nature of the film...
Which is really the film's main problem. I had no interest in relief workers until this film, and the movie does a great job of putting a face and a personality to what I, at least, considered a strange sub-culture of Quakers and born-again christians. Evidently not all foreign relief groups are faith-based, but their goal is all the same - to help people. And this film really makes that seem, well, cool and heroic and posh and all those things. However, by spreading the film over more than a decade really undermines the emotional attachment we have to the characters, and REALLY undermines their romance. I mean, I bought that maybe Sarah could fall for Nick in Sudan, despite his standoffishness, and that maybe they'd hook up in Cambodia, esp. because of her failing marriage, and that, given that love-fest, she'd go hunting for him in Chechnya but... each one of these events is at least 5 years apart. I think the Sudan-Cambodia leap is six or seven years, alone. An episodic n arrative... is rarely the form you want a story to take. And in this case, that is true.
Last thing I'd like to touch on is the action in the flick. There isn't alot of it, given it's a romantic-drama set amongst dying people, but when there is action, it's pretty sweet. Campbell knows how to direct action (As is evident by Goldeneye, which is an alright Bond film, and Mask of Zorro, which I think is one of the best summer movies in the last decade or so... though I'm a little young to make that judgement whole-heartedly) and it shows.
For example: There's a sequence in Cambodia where the Kmher Rouge (I totally butchered that spelling), who run the village the workers are helping, demand the weapons Nick has been smuggling to them in return for their protection. Unfortunately, the weapons were confiscated, and as retribution the rebels demand the head of one of the Americans. There's all these dudes with guns pointed at our relief workers - not the most Stallone-in-Rambo type heroes - and they take a baby from its mother, put it in the center of the hut where they are, and put a grenade in it's hands. IT's a mexican standoff with a baby and grenade. And machetes. And the way they get out of it is pretty sweet and I bought it, despite it being, you know, relief workers.
There's another sequence with Chechnyan rebels getting the shit pounded out of them (not prison style) by what I only assume are Russians that plays in parallel to another scene that's super cool too. You see a wounded soldier being dragged away hit square on with a rocket and it's super sweet.
Wow. I apologize for the long and rambling review. I have a trippy head cold that's totally messing me up, as well as the drugs I'm taking for it, so I'm sorta out of it. After the film everyone had a chance to discuss the message and the most important thing I think I can say about the film is that it's by a bunch of people who really cared about what they were doing. I remember when the film was announced around the time of Any Given Sunday as an Oliver Stone project (and was briefly referred to by someone on the panel), but it's nice to see that care was taken to accurately portray the sacrifices these people make to help others. I mean, Tredwell-Owen spent about five years researching the film and actually visited Kosovo. They said that if ten million people see the movie, it'll be a hit. If five million see it, they'll have trouble making back their money, but if just one million people go to see this film, that's still one million more people who will know about the gr eat war going on in the world - the battle for human survival, and the people that fight death everday in the losing battle.
If you end up using this - then call me
-King Dong
