New at the Movies: The Company You Keep, Rebelle (War Witch), Haute Cuisine, Antiviral and Jurassic Park 3D

It’s easy to laugh at age­ing movie stars. Crumbs, when they make films like The Expend­ables they active­ly encour­age us to make jokes about creak­ing joints and dicky hips. But let us pause for a moment and salute the longevi­ty of one of the great­est movie stars there ever was, some­one who was head­lin­ing box office smash hits when Arnold was still just pump­ing iron and Bruce was still at High School.

Robert Red­ford — the “Sun­dance Kid” — is 76 years old and in his new film, The Com­pa­ny You Keep, he does quite a bit of run­ning around even though you can see he has the slight­ly uncer­tain gait of some­one whose bal­ance isn’t what it was. He rations out that mil­lion dol­lar smile pret­ty care­ful­ly too, as this is anoth­er of his seri­ous polit­i­cal­ly-aware dra­mas — couched in the form of a thriller.

Red­ford — who also directs — plays pro­gres­sive small town lawyer Jim Grant, a wid­ow­er with a sparkling twelve-year-old daugh­ter (Jacque­line Evan­cho). When he turns down the chance to rep­re­sent Susan Saran­don’s for­mer domes­tic ter­ror­ist, who is cap­tured near­by, local reporter Shia LaBeouf starts dig­ging into his back­ground and finds some dan­ger­ous sur­pris­es. Grant is forced to go on the run with LaBeouf (and the FBI) chas­ing him and oth­er pen­sion­ers like Julie Christie and Nick Nolte all around the Mid­west.

So far, so engag­ing. The sce­nario is inspired by the real life Weath­er Under­ground, a left-wing mili­tia that either blew up or set fire to, var­i­ous Gov­ern­ment tar­gets to protest the Viet­nam War. Anoth­er fan­ci­ful ver­sion of their sup­posed lives on the run, Run­ning on Emp­ty, starred Riv­er Phoenix in 1988.

I wish I had enjoyed The Com­pa­ny You Keep more as it is the kind of mate­r­i­al that is usu­al­ly right up my alley. The prob­lem here is of the fish/fowl vari­ety — not enough pol­i­tics for the pol­i­tics junkies and the thriller nev­er ris­es above tepid. This is an imper­fect anal­o­gy, so for­give me, but it’s as if (late peri­od) Woody Allen tried to direct a Bourne movie.

Return­ing from the very strong French Film Fes­ti­val, we have two dra­mas that are a study in con­trasts — Cana­di­an co-pro­duc­tion Rebelle (akaWar Witch) by Kim Nguyen and Chris­t­ian Vin­cen­t’s Haute Cui­sine (aka Les saveurs du Palais, the lit­er­al trans­la­tion of which is The Flavours of the Palace which is much bet­ter than the hor­ri­ble cliché that actu­al­ly got attached to it).

War Witch is a remark­able mag­i­cal real­ist por­tray­al of the tragedy of child sol­dier­ing in one of Africa’s many civ­il wars. The phe­nom­e­nal Rachel Mwan­za plays Komona, kid­napped from her vil­lage by the rebel army and forced to mur­der her own par­ents. She is the only one to sur­vive the new com­pa­ny’s first action and super­sti­tious com­man­ders start to believe that she is a lucky charm, hence “War Witch”.

Hyp­not­ic, beau­ti­ful, upset­ting — War Witch is an extra­or­di­nary achieve­ment, total­ly deserv­ing of an Acad­e­my Award nom­i­na­tion against Amour and No ear­li­er this year. By any def­i­n­i­tion, this isn’t going to be every­one’s cup of tea but I’m going to high­ly rec­om­mend it any­way.

In the slen­der Haute Cui­sine, Cather­ine Frot plays Hort­ense Laborie, plucked from rur­al obscu­ri­ty to run the pri­vate kitchen for Pres­i­dent François Mit­terand while he was Pres­i­dent of the French Repub­lic. He wants to eat nos­tal­gi­cal­ly and her authen­tic recipes and fine fresh ingre­di­ents fit the bill. As food movies go, this gets the pre­sen­ta­tion of the actu­al cui­sine very right. Every dish looks like it has been plucked straight from the oven, and even though this review­er may not have been won over by cab­bage stuffed with salmon, you can see the care and atten­tion that has gone into every dish.

I just wish I could say the same for the sto­ry, which lacks dra­ma — a fun­da­men­tal flaw you might think — and uses a rather redun­dant fram­ing device of Mme Laborie cook­ing in Antarc­ti­ca to empha­sise the sub­text of a ded­i­cat­ed, mid­dle aged, career woman pro­fes­sion­al­ly going about her craft while mis­un­der­stood but not unap­pre­ci­at­ed.

With Antivi­ral, Bran­don (son-of-the more-famous-David) Cro­nen­berg has made an object les­son in intel­li­gent low bud­get hor­ror. In the near future, our obses­sion with celebri­ty will have become so grotesque that fans will be inject­ing them­selves with virus­es har­vest­ed from their favourite screen stars, in order to get even clos­er to them. A licensed mar­ket for these wee bugs is being under­mined by pira­cy and coun­ter­feit­ing and thus Antivi­ral man­ages to bring the entire zeit­geist rather nice­ly to the boil. Although the film drifts a lit­tle in the final third, the premise — and the clever con­struc­tion of a future world out of today’s every­day items — makes the film a worth­while watch and Cro­nen­berg a name to keep an eye on.

Last year the Embassy played a one-off screen­ing of Juras­sic Park on DCP and they are now play­ing the 3D ver­sion. For rea­sons of sci­ence, then, I sat myself in the very same seat as last year so I could com­pare the two for­mats and help guide you on whether the extra D is worth it. The answer, I can report, is a firm “maybe”. After all, the orig­i­nal made $350m in 1993 so I think it’s fair to say that no one was hold­ing out, hop­ing for a 3D ver­sion at the time.

The con­ver­sion is per­fect­ly fine — though not to the lev­el of Cameron’s Titan­ic last year — and 3D gives Spiel­berg’s ele­gant direc­tion a help­ing hand with some of the more thrilling dinosaur moments. If you haven’t seen this film on the big screen since it was first released, I can rec­om­mend you check it out this time, though I can’t imag­ine the 3D ver­sion will end up as the defin­i­tive way to see it.