Father Geek here along with Edgard and company to file our Euro-AICN column to start off your week here at Aint It Cool. Lots of info below soooo we'll leap right into it all... Here's Edgard...

EURO AICN

Hi folks... Edgard here with the latest news from Europe... as I wrote last week, summer is on its way and things are a bit quite right now... still you will find news from the Netherlands, France, Germany, Italy and Ireland, while Ethan will comment on Ocean's Eleven and Christophe Gans work, and last but not least our first European review on a little film called PEARL HARBOR (don't know if you heard about it)... let's not waste more time... and here it is

THE NETHERLANDS

* The Wicked Witch is back with some news on...

"7 days to live" - I couldn't find anything about this film on the AICN site, except for its announcement for the Brussels SF and Fantasy film festival. 7 days to live is a horror movie produced in Germany with Amanda Plummer and Sean Pertwee in the main roles. I had the distinct displeasure of seeing it last night as a sneak preview. And I did wonder "WHY WHY WHY does this kind of drivel get financed?? If people want to throw away a few million, hey, I have a bank account they can contact!" It is a very bad horror movie. Why? Because there isn't a shred of originality in the plot. Actually, the script writer took over the plot of the PC game "Phantasmagoria" added in a bit of "Poltergeist" and "The Shining", but left out everything that made these films and games fun to watch. The acting is not too bad, but that's about the only thing that can be said. The sounds and cinematography are way over the top, but sadly it is not meant to be a comedy. Even a postmodern twist in the Scream variety would have lifted it far above the current status, which is "Don't watch it. Ever. Don't even waste your money hiring it on video. It's really that bad."

"Ocean Warrior" - On an unrelated note, I used to report in the past about the antics around the film "Ocean Warrior", the most expensive Dutch production ever, about the life of Greenpeace founder Watson? Well, the only news the film nowadays makes is about the lawsuits attached to it. Seems the production is in big financial trouble, and though the producers seem to have found some extra money, the cast has already stopped working and is filing for bankruptcy.

The Wicked Witch

FRANCE

* As you will read here below in Ethan's column, Vincent Cassel will be Bob Morane, famous hero of French novels and comics, in L'AVENTURIER, the next film directed by Christophe Gans. Bob Morane being a cultural icon in France, Cassel being very popular now and Gans having proved he can handle big budget with "Brotherhood of the Wolves", this will certainly be a movie to keep an eye on !

ITALY

* Hi Edgard, Harry and FG. Our colleague Paolo Paparella was in Los Angeles at E3, the videogames event reserved to press. He was able to see (and to take some picture at) many sketches which will be used as a model for the LOTR videogame. There are great images (exactly twelve, divided in two pages), as the one I'm sending you. To see the others, go here: And Click Now!

Robert

IRELAND

* The Scottish actor Gerard Butler who has been hanging around Dublin's top night spots over the past few months has landed the starring role in the big-budget film Timeline, which is based on the Michael Crichton novel. Butler, who has been seen hanging out in Lillies Bordello nightclub in Dublin every weekend for the past two months will play Andre Marek, the site manager of an archaeological dig in France who is recruited to travel back in time to the 14th century to rescue a school teacher. The role is a major Hollywood breakthrough for Butler, who made his feature film debut in Mrs Brown and starred in the title role in the unsuccessful Dracula 2000. The actor is currently in Ireland filming Reign of Fire with Matthew McConaughy and Christian Bale.

More on : http://www.ShowBizIreland.com

GERMANY

* From Screendaily : French actress Isabelle Huppert, who was named best actress at the Cannes Film Festival for her performance in Michael Haneke's The Piano Teacher (La Pianiste), is to be honoured at this year's Filmfest Stuttgart/Ludwigsburg (June 6-12). The festival will award her its $11,000 (DM25,000) prize for an outstanding achievement by a European actor and stage a retrospective of four of her films which she personally selected: Raoul Ruiz's La Comedie De L'Innocence, Laurence Ferreira Barbosa's La Vie Moderne, Maurice Pialat's Loulou and Claude Chabrol's La Ceremonie. Among the 15 films competing in the Cinema Europa competition for over $66,000 (DM150,000) in prize-money are Roy Andersson's Songs From The Second Floor, Luciano Emmer's Una Lunga, Lunga, Lunga Notte D'Amore, Stefan Jaeger's Birthday, Andrei Nekrasov's Lubov And Other Nightmares, and Robert Guediguian's La Ville Est Tranquille. Sidebars this year include a focus on Spain - with a cross-section of filmmaking output from 1992 to 2000 ranging from Alejandro Amenabar's Abre Los Ojos to Alfonso Alcabete and David Menkes' Sobrevivires - and a spotlight on the film scene in Baden-Wuerttemberg with world premieres of Julian Benedikt's William Caxton portrait Jazz Seen and Klaus Gietinger's Heinrich Der Saeger.

ETHAN`S CORNER

Everyone is getting jazzed up for Soderbergh`s OCEAN`S ELEVEN remake. This is the movie that deserves a remake because the first version had its` flaws. The only problem is that OCEAN`S ELEVEN was a typical industrial feature which shared the spirit of many then-popular flicks. Still, even those commercial and not very inspired features from the past appear to have more soul than contemporary fare. Billy Wilder worked on the original OCEAN`S ELEVEN script. The remake certainly can`t match his name on the credits but it has a screenwriting of its` own. It`s Ted Griffin. Griffin is the brilliant young author whose grandfather used to act in Keystone Kops features. Thus filmmaking flows through his veins. His first script BEST LAID PLANS was turned into a rock-solid little noir by British TV director Mike Barker, an unsung classic of the season. His second script RACVENOUS was also brilliant but Antonia Bird`s direction made it look average. I hope Soderbergh won`t spoil his writing. Soderbergh has a history of working with great writers like Lem Dobbs, Scott Frank and Ted Griffin. Good writing deserves top-notch direction not Soderbergh`s fake `caught not staged` concept. I hope OCEAN`s ELEVEN will be a directed movie. Still, I have some doubts about since it was shot very quickly which brings us back to the awful TRAFFIC experience. Audience doesn`t deserve this. Griffin doesn`t deserve this.

Christophe Gans is setting up to make THE ADVENTURER comic book adaptation. I can`t wait to see this. To be honest with you I liked CRYING FREEMAN as a perfect B-actioner while I think that LE PACTE DES LOUPS wasn`t as great as we wanted it to be. The script had major flaws and the ambition surpassed budget. Yet the greatest problem of all is Gans` direction. He tried to simulate the Hong Kong style and combine it with McTiernan`s PREDATOR aesthetics. He failed because all the scenes were staged sideways instead of being set into the depth of the frame. Depth of the frame constitutes the magic of cinema and Gans betrayed this. Also his slow-motion shots were used more for showing-off than for some rhytmic purpose. It felt like Gans wanted to show us that he had seen lots of Tsui Hark flicks. Anyway Gans` exploitation of Hong Kong movie heritage is better than Tarantino`s since he uses HK visual achievements while QT only verbalizes it. LE PACTE DES LOUPS deserves to be seen because on the conceptual level it really is a masterpiece. This feature is something new for European cinema and you have to cut some slack to Gans and Co. since they are pioneers in the new revival of the Euro-Asian cinema.

In the end I`d like to recommend you a vintage masterpiece. Don Siegel`s CHARLEY VARRICK. See it. Enjoy it.

God bless, Ethan

REVIEW

PEARL HARBOR by Santa

Dropped into a Dublin press screening of PEARL HARBOR yesterday and - with the US release imminent - thought I’d share with you these gems of Irish wisdom. This is a long review. But it was a long film, so go figure. Beware of some SPOILERS !

When I first heard about the concept for PEARL HARBOR I was gob-smacked by the sheer goddamn audacity of the idea: a historical romance set against the backdrop of a major maritime disaster. But whereas TITANIC had to kill off one of the leads to tug at the heartstrings, PEARL HARBOR can go one better - a love triangle. Sure, we know one of them’s gonna die, and very tragic it will be too… but then there’ll a SUPER-HAPPY REFLECTIVE ENDING in which the remaining couple pair off and gaze soulfully into each other’s eyes through the haze of Michael Bay’s garish camera filters.

However, I have to admire the man’s restraint in this regard. There are less filters, jump-cuts, sweeping crane-shots and slo-mo heroic-gay-subtext shots than BAD BOYS (ugh) THE ROCK (Mmm) of ARMAGEDDON (Bah!)… but it doesn’t change the fact that HE IS AN ADVERTISING DIRECTOR. Michael Bay sells you an IDEA, not necessarily a story. He acts as co-producer along with Jerry Bruckheimer, but I don’t reckon they’ll ever recapture the hey-day (if you can call it that) of the Simpson/Bruckheimer alliance. As god-awful as many of their films were, you couldn’t deny that Simpson had a passion for STORY… even if that passion lacked a certain degree of taste.

Bay and Bruckheimer just sell an IDEA of the story than anything else. Dashing illiterate pilot Ben Affleck and beautiful nurse Kate Beckinsdale meet and fall in love in the first hour amongst a series of disjointed flashbacks. There isn’t much in the way of saying WHY they fall in love. PEARL HARBOR gives you the conventions of a Bruckheimer romance and expects y’all to fall in line. And probably, a lot of people will. The romance is sketchy, but by-and-large, it works. Just. The opening scene, which I felt sure I would DESPISE WITH ALL MY FIBRE, worked surprisingly well, though I wanted to see more of William Fitchner (sic). It sets up Affleck and Hartnett as long long-term buddies, even if their adult counterparts are only on screen for a few TOP GUN-related moments before Affleck dashes off to England to fight for the plucky Brits.

A couple of months later, he gets shot down. Back at Pearl Harbor, Beckinsdale and Hartnett try to move on with their lives and -surprise, surprise - fall in love. But (and this isn’t much of a spoiler if you’ve ever watched a film… ever) Affleck ISN’T DEAD (Da-da-DAAA!) and returns like the shadowy twin brother in a bad soap opera. He and Hartnett go through the obligatory bar-room brawl and collapse on the beach.

The night before the Attack.

Notice the capital ‘A’? THIS is what is going to draw the crowds in. This is what you wait over an hour for. This is what all the fuss is about. So is it worth it?

Pretty much so, yeah… I hate making another fatuous TITANIC reference, but the destruction of Pearl Harbor reminds my of the vertical White Star liner. It is damn spectacular, no doubts about that; enormous explosions, bullets singing underwater and strafing through drowning soldiers, (a la PRIVATE RYAN) gravity-defying plane crashes and a battleship doing a 180 degree barrel roll. But it is the build-u, that few moments of calm before the storm, that is truly extraordinary.

The image of the Japanese planes sweeping low through the Hawaiian mountains is the most beautiful things I’ve seen this year, certainly the most beautiful image to ever find its way into a Bruckheimer production. There’s this one bit where children stop playing and look up to see this plane slipping by, almost like a passing bus… The Japanese tail-gunner is waving frantically to them - maybe telling them to get the hell out of there, I don’t know. I hope so.

The trouble is, the film has to shift some major gears after the attack, and - to put it bluntly - it can’t. The people came to see Pearl Harbor get blown to beautifully-choreographed pieces and two hours later, that’s what they get. So what then?

Bruckheimer, Bay and Randal Wallace obviously felt the need to show America striking back, so they give us the Doolittle raid. There is a moment when Doolitle (Alec Baldwin) is explaining the relevance of this mission: if Pearl Harbor was a sledgehammer then this will be but a pinprick, but a "pinprick through the Japanese heart". I don’t know much about the American/Japanese war in the Pacific (though I had relatives fighting there) but I thought this was going to be an almighty fire-bombing of Tokyo. That they were going to slaughter all these civilians as retribution…. Which, while horrible in itself, would have fitted in nicely with the America-losing-its-innocence that seemed to be one of the films many themes.

But I digress. The Doolittle raid is - apart from being cringe-worthingly similar to TOP GUN - is a major anti-climax. All you can do is twiddle your thumbs and wonder whether it will be Affleck or Hartnett dies in some dumb-heroic way.

PEARL HARBOR is a big dumb blockbuster with slivers of historical accuracy running through it. It was never meant to be the other way around. Hans Zimmer’s score is MAJORLY overused and Affleck looks insufferably smug for the whole thing. The terrible beauty of the Pearl Harbor attack just about balances the flaws which dominate the last hour (but I suppose you don’t have to hang around for that) There is less of the jingoistic, flag-waving bullshit that you’d expect, but not an awful lot.

A good deal of the people at that screening yesterday seemed to HATE this film… they smiled to the PR people and started cursing when they stepped outside the door. I’m kinda’ ambivalent about it. I was entertained for about two hours (shame it’s over three hours long) and it was certainly something that could only have been seen on the biggest of big screens… but then, I didn’t pay money for it. The rest of you cinema-going schlubs might not be so easily placated…

… Told you it was long. In other, not particularly related news, a friend of mine met Johnny-Lee Miller in a bar last week…. Apparently he’s in Dublin with Gillies MacKinnon (REGENERATION) to shoot THE ESCAPIST. Which I hadn’t heard about.

Anyhow, stay frosty

Santa

That's it for this week... remember to share your reviews and news with us by sending your messages to the Euro AICN offices at euroaicn@yahoo.com

Have a fun week !