BATTLE OF THE BRITISH ALL-STARS
Gosford Park
dir. Robert Altman starring: Michael Gambon, Emily Watson, Helen Mirren, Maggie Smith, Kelly Macdonald, Kirstin Scott Thomas, Alan Bates, Derek Jacobi, Richard E. Grant, Clive Owen, Ryan Philippe, Bob Balaban, Steven Fry
Official site | IMDB
An enjoyable anthropological study and comedy for the first two-thirds that quickly winds up in an unneeded whodunit in the final third.

Simpering grace in a cocktail glass.

Ryan Phillipe taking acting lessons from one of the greats: Helen Mirren

Count on Robert Altman for the ability to marshall together such a production as this: a 1930s manor whodunit featuring an all-star cast of British film actors, a film that feels good whether it stays on course or not.

If you're not familiar with the notables of British acting you may want to take notes during this because it's not often that anyone is able to gather three generations of such calibre together in one film much less in one room. Although at times it may be hard to separate the men in their dress-best apart or the servants in their drab grey, each character gets their licks in, in a typical Altman milieu now transplanted to the manor set.

You must indulge me while I gush over the cast.

The great Dame Maggie Smith (whom most will recognize now as the headmistress in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone) plays a crusty Countess who seems to takes the spotlight each scene by virtue of some very funny snobbish lines. With equal prominence, Michael Gambon, who was the deliciously monstrous gangster in The Cook The Thief His Wife and Her Lover, is another snarly upper crust noble who has invited the elite of Britain to his Gosford estate seemingly for no other reason that to watch them bicker and scheme. Kirstin Scott Thomas is the beautiful but snippy younger wife of the host, favouring each scene she's in with a languid, calculating cat grace. If you hated her in the English Patient you may want to mentally delete her from this film.

Those are just the handful of notable actors playing the elites who have come to Gosford for cocktails, shooting and sniping at each other. Another set of British acting royalty play the army of maids, footmen, valets and other servants who scurry underneath the manor. The always excellent Helen Mirren whom most will know as the tough as nails detective in the BBC crime series Prime Suspect is the head of an immense housekeeping staff who have been mobilized to meet the needs of a dozen idle rich. The glowing Emily Watson (Breaking the Waves, The Boxer) is a sometimes outspoken head housemaid while Clive Owen (The Croupier) is the manly valet of a guest. Even American actor Ryan Phillipe takes a turn as a curious, irreverent valet for a visiting Hollywood film producer who is scouting Gosford for a Charlie Chan murder mystery.

If you've skimmed the last two paragraphs you can be forgiven for not acknowledging the main feature of this film, which is to see so many actors working so well off each other under the direction of Robert Altman, who is almost solitary among American directors for his power to bring together an enormous cast. Like his legendary films: Nashville, M*A*S*H and The Player, Gosford Park is a collection of parts weaved together in a meandering story unified more by location than by theme. I liked Gosford Park but more for the flavour than the point.

Gosford Park has tremendous flavour, like a four course meal. Like all good movies, Gosford Park transports you to a place out of the experience of most viewers into a world you may want to visit but probably wouldn't want to embrace. For a good two-thirds of the film Gosford Park is a funny satirical study of the manor set of the 1930s when doubt at the veritability of the British Empire hadn't quite reached the upper class. Arriving for a weekend of bridge, pheasant hunting and dining, the guests of the estate have equally arrived to resolve various demands and longstanding arguments by appealing to the host, Sir William McCordle (Gambon). With no intention at all of satisfying the appeals of any of his supplicants, McCordle sets himself up as an object more usefully removed. In the last third of the film, an Agatha Christie-like structure descends on the film which could have been done without. It's almost as though Altman had enjoyed the anthropological element of the film so thoroughly (as did I) that he had to hurry to bring in the elements of the whodunit when there was no time left.

The price of good clothes: unceasing cattiness

Like another great study of servants and their masters, The Remains of the Day, Gosford Park is at its best when it reveals the callow, snobbish nature of the manor set. Unlike that Merchant Ivory production, Gosford Park is lively and funny throughout. With a snide nudge and wink we quickly are taken downstairs below the veneer to hear the gossip, the intrigues and the indiscretions that seem to provide the servants and us (because we share more in common with the servants) with our entertainment. Like us, the servants are both fascinated and repelled by the strictures of the upper class, taking pleasure in their small roles in the lives of the rich while sniggering at the rich set's lack of common sense when it comes to relationships and decency. The symbol of innocence in the film, the young maid of the elderly countess, played by Kelly Macdonald, is the cipher for our own questions, travelling between both worlds as her mistress' spy. As a new maid she gets to have both the upstairs and downstairs worlds explained to her: the various roles of the household, the stated and unstated rules governing the behaviour between the servants and the served. Rules that can be broken but only if kept out of sight.

One of many threads knitted through the film is a hinted at relationship between the head housemaid (Watson) and the lord of the manor. An older generation of servant played by Mirren may hold other secrets that until this weekend have remained successfully buried under layers of discipline. In a dryer film such elements might have been brought out overtly. Thankfully, they are not here.

Out of the hands of Altman Gosford Park could have been developed as a more serious film, more deftly incorporating the murder mystery earlier and more securely with the other elements. Another director might bring forward the more tragic elements or highlight the villainy of certain characters. (Indeed, if you were looking at a driving conclusion to the mystery, you will be disappointed.) But it is Altman's manner and confidence with his enormous cast that is the warmth of this film, a character that makes this one of the better films this year.

In theatres now.

Seemingly running at less than an hour, the newest version of the H.G. Wells time travel adventure "The Time Machine" is too short to get annoying. It's a fair adventure with some all-right effects and at least the beginnings of a compelling story that it abandons half-way through.

Improving very little on George Pal's 1960 version, Simon Well's "Time Machine" has not much to recommend it, even by changing the protagonist and creating more motivation for the hero. In the 1960 version (I've never read the story), the time travelling explorer is motivated by nothing more than the spirit of scientific enquiry to use his own invention to travel into the future. In the new production, the scientist (not Wells, but an American professor played by Guy Pearce) creates a time machine at first to go back in time in order to undo the events that lead to the death of his beloved girlfriend.

Without explaining the whys or hows, the professor discovers that he cannot prevent her death, even by changing the chain of events that originally lead up to it. Daunted, he decides to fast forward to the future where he believes future science will uncover the reasons why he can't change the past.

Instead, he finds Orlando Jones.

That was cheap. There's nothing wrong with the 7-UP guy appearing in the movie. In fact his role in the movie as a holographic librarian is one of the more honest attempts to keep the movie on theme. Still, the problem with "The Time Machine" is that the farther it goes into the future, the more the script seems to abandon any attempt to answer the questions raised in the first part in favour of giant jumping sub-humans, naked people and special effects.

I'm in favour of all three but the makers of "The Time Machine" needed to make a decision early on to dispense with cornball drama and embrace the silliness of the sci-fi concepts thrown at the audience in the latter half of the film. Some of these concepts are in the original versions but a lot are not. The exploding moon colony that disrupts the Earth's orbit is right out of Thundarr the Barbarian. The 'localized time explosion' that wipes out the bad guys seems to follow the cliche that sophisticated machines will blow up good by jamming them in the middle of a process. Other cliches include the hero directing a jet of steam at the villain in a crucial moment and the-girl-with-the-shovel who-saves-the-day™.

Nothing is really bad-bad in "The Time Machine", nor is it good. One couldn't call Jeremy Iron's scenery-chewing performance as the "Uber-Morlock" (that's what he's really called) really bad when compared to Guy Pearce's really mannered, absent-minded professor performance in the beginning. And then you have Samantha Mumba as a nice nearly-naked body to stare at in a future Ewok-esque paradise. None of this is really unexpected. They all just fit the type of candy-floss movie "The Time Machine" is. By the time you might be checking your watch, the movie finishes with a chase, explosion and the guy gets the girl. No harm done.

In theatres now.

Although formalistic and at times austere, the new ambient album by Boards of Canada is a crystalline pleasure, a melodic tapestry of experimental tones, samples, grounded with crunchy beats. Unlike nearly all the other Warp records lineup, the Scottish duo bind melodies to their aural textures, noise compositions. In this, their second album, they've selected both long, building atmospheric landscapes and also snippets of extremely pleasurable warmth. I didn't think it was possible to describe any Warp artists as warm but Geogaddi is. Excellent listening and working music.

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