Radio Reviews: Bel Ami & The Decoy Bride

A disappointing week for film begins today with the poorly received John Carter 3D (he is ugly, but he is beautiful...), along with R-Patz in bodice-ripper Bel Ami and rom-com The Decoy Bride starring David Tennant and Kelly MacDonald.

Listen in to the Movie Café online or by downloading the podcast to hear me review them (and do my Kelly MacDonald impression) alongside Janice Forsyth and Alistair Harkness.

Apologies for the dearth of content around here - but I'm almost done editing my book! Regular programming shall resume shortly.

Bel Ami and The Decoy Bride arrive in UK cinemas today, Friday 9 March. The Decoy Bride is available on DVD from Monday 12 March, and you can buy it here.

Glasgow Film Festival Review: Beats, Rhymes & Life

Beats Rhymes and Life: The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest brings the story behind the titular hip-hop band - Q-Tip, Phife Dawg, Ali Shaheed Muhammad, and Jarobi White to the big screen this year's Glasgow Music and Film Festival. Taking its title from the band's first album, the film traces the band's meteoric rise to fame within the hip-hop community. The band takes us back to their former hang-outs, illustrating the music scene of the late 80s and early 90s as they go. In its best moments, the film is a Behind the Music style mash-up of interviews and music video footage, but digs deeper into the psyches of its subjects. Quest's chilled out sounds soon clash with strains of disagreement as Phife's diabetes and artistic differences caused a rift between band members. Beats, Rhymes and Life gets caught up in its own life-based dramas but redeems itself with consistently engaging characters and cool jams.

Beats, Rhymes & Life screens at Glasgow Film Festival this Saturday 25 February at 10.45pm. Book tickets here.

Glasgow Film Festival Review: Bonsái

Chilean directing talent Cristián Jiménez brings his second feature to Glasgow Film Festival this week. One for the bookish, Bonsái's protagonist is more of a leader-on than a leading man. Julio, using his cultural smarts (namely, the dubious claim of having read Marcel Proust) to woo his student girlfriend Emilia. Years later, under the guise of transcribing his local hero's novel, he uses their relationship as inspiration to write, be it under an elaborate rouse.

Despite channeling a mumblecore vibe, charm-free, statuesque young actors may speak of unmeasured still waters. Not knowing how deep they run will only get you so far, and Julio's mumbling and bumbling is curious but not much more, and quickly wears as the film's non-linear narrative shuffles through time like the worn pages of a well-thumbed paperback. But if you're looking for a touch of solipsism without picking up Proust, Bonsái is a good start.

Bonsái screens again at Glasgow Film Festival today, 23 February at 8.45pm. Book tickets here.

A Few Words In Praise of RPatz

Cedric Diggory, Edward Cullen, and now Georges Duroy, 25 year-old heart-throb Robert Pattinson - affectionately known as R-Patz - steps into another role for the ladies in the screen adaptation of Guy de Maupassant's Bel Ami. Stepping out of the sparkling vampiric skin of the chaste Edward Cullen and into the dapper facade of a man a little more attuned to the ladies' needs, Pattinson's already setting hearts alight in Glasgow as frenzied fans of the actor have been demanding news of his arrival since the GFF programme was revealed.

Fans of Pattinson are known for their own particular brand of fervour - one that sees them snooping outside his parents' estate, riled all the more by news he isn't home. Critics have censured Twilight for its celebration of self versus other -- for dedicated fans, no is all the more likely to mean yes. One thing is certain, the audience will sparkle at the film's Glasgow FIlm Festival release tonight.

If the (albeit 2D) presence of Mr Pattinson isn't enough to make you want to lock up your daughters, Bel Ami is set to encourage further arduous swoons at this week's screenings - and not only from the teenagers - as his character Georges Duroy beds Paris' finest, played by the likes of Christina Ricci, Uma Thurman, and Kristin Scott Thomas. Ooo la la!

As Pattinson casts off the burden of sullen Cullen, forging ahead as Twilight fans breathlessly await the final chapter later this year, Bel Ami becomes an interesting next move. Although Water For Elephants put him in a new leading man position, its focus on forbidden love and dark debarring forces failed to preclude a good long mope. Instead, Bel Ami and an upcoming project with David Cronenberg - who has already pronounced Pattinson as the best actor he's ever worked with - seem certain to turn our vampire into a warm-blooded movie star of great repute.

Bel Ami screens at Glasgow Festival tonight, 22 February at 6.15pm and tomorrow 23 February at 5pm. Buy tickets here.



Bel Ami is released in UK cinemas on Friday 9 March.

Glasgow Film Festival Review: Finisterrae

Crossing the Line, the new strand at this year's Glasgow Film Festival, brings experimental and avant-garde films to the Glasgow, exploring the crossover between cinema and visual art. Finnisterrae is, in many ways, an excellent introduction to experimental filmmaking, blending stunning vistas with an unusual, almost farcical storyline of two ghosts in limbo. Tired of being spirits, they ask oracles and whimsical beings how to become living creatures, resolving to take a journey to Finistarrae - the end of the world. At once weird and wonderful, gently creepy, but remarkably structured, it's a slow and philosophical pilgrimage that invokes odd recollections of Silent Running and Monty Python. Some segues into visual art – a dream of naked dancing ghosts and a self-conscious insert of 80s Catalan visual art – feel forced, but these are balanced with beautifully wacky run-ins with creatures of the netherworld. Above all, the striking image of white-cloaked beings staring into the camera with their jet-black eyes makes Finisterrae an innately compulsive watch.

Glasgow Film Festival runs until Sunday 26 February.