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  Film: Nell Schofield previews Before the Devil Knows You're Dead and Be Kind, Rewind March 23, 2008 Reporter :Nell Schofield  Watch the videoFilm: Nell Schofield previews Before the Devil Knows You're Dead and Be Kind, Rewind Director Sidney Lumet (pron: loo-MET) is renowned for such seminal New York based films such as 'Dog Day Afternoon' and 'Serpico', both of which featured that intrinsically New York actor Al Pacino. Now a new generation of New York actors has rallied around the 84 year old veteran to breathe life into his 45th film, including Ethan Hawke and Philip Seymour Hoffman. It’s all about the money…at least for Andy Hanson it is. He’s a successful payroll officer at a New York real estate agency who’s living large with his sexy wife Gina but never quite large enough to quench his insatiable greed. So he dreams up a scheme to pull off a heist that he reckons will be a cinch – rob his parents jewellery store. All he has to do is to rope in his rather pathetic brother Hank who needs a bit of cash as he can’t even afford to buy his daughter a ticket to see ‘The Lion King’. But from the moment the brothers commit to their crime things start to go horribly wrong. Ethan Hawke is a bundle of frazzled nerves and crippling guilt as Hank and Philip Seymour Hoffman is brilliant as Andy, the older conniving brother who’s often too drugged up on heroin to know how to handle the fallout. Marisa Tomei takes to her part as Andy's two timing trophy wife like a gold-digger to a millionaire. And Albert Finney, who worked with Lumet over thirty years ago on Murder On the Orient Express, is emotional putty in the director’s hands as the grieving father Charles. Octogenarian director Sidney Lumet who won an Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement just three years ago. There's an old Irish toast that says: "May you be in heaven half an hour before the devil knows you’re dead" and screenwriter Kelly Masterson has appropriated the last part of it for the title of his first film. Before the Devil Knows You're Dead is an incredibly accomplished debut told from several different angles and shifting cleverly back and forth over the ten fateful days in which the action takes place. It's a seriously tense modern melodrama, focusing a clinical gaze on the idea of instant karma; if you rip off your parents, you're going down big time. Same story if you throw an anchor into a power plant; you're going to get zapped. Be Kind, Rewind features the comic talents of Jack Black as the clueless Jerry, a paranoid conspiracy theorist who believes that his mind is being manipulated by an electricity sub station. In order to undermine its evil plan, he mounts a risky sabotage and needless to say the consequences are disastrous, especially for his friend Mike, played by hip hop artist Mos Deaf, who's been left in charge of the local video store. With all the tapes suddenly wiped of their content, Mike and Jerry decide to make their own video versions of the films as their customers require them. But the limitations of this mad method quickly become apparent so the pair seek out the services of a female named Alma played by the adorable Melonie Diaz. Strangely enough, the trio's inventive brand of so-called 'sweded' films becomes a sensation and when the store is threatened with demolition, the whole town rallies together to defend it. This utterly kooky concept springs from the imagination of French writer/director Michel Gondry who last year brought us The Science of Sleep and who previously won an Oscar for his original screenplay Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. In one memorable scene Gondrey excels himself by shooting a montage of the gang filming their own 'Sweded' versions of everything from King Kong to Carrie to The Lion King in just one take! This is a hoot of a film and a real tribute to the power of the amateur. Apart from the three gormless leads, there's Danny Glover as the video shop owner, Mia Farrow as it's biggest customer and Sigourney Weaver as a studio lawyer who comes down on the whole hokey operation like a ton of bricks. Be Kind, Rewind reveals how even the most ridiculous idea, when motivated by pure intentions, can galvanise an entire community into action. And may even spawn some true originality in the process. |
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