Review: Hollywoodland

UK release date: 24th November

Though it has all the hallmarks of a film noir — a gumshoe, a mysterious death and not one but two femmes fatales — Hollywoodland doesn’t quite fit the genre bill. Instead, it’s more a poignant love letter to the glory days of Tinseltown, personified by George Reeves (Ben Affleck), a struggling bit-part player who found fame in the 1950s as TV’s Superman.

The film takes liberties with the facts of Reeves’s life, starting with his apparent suicide in 1959 and telling his story in flashback through the eyes of private eye Louis Simo (Adrien Brody), who is hired by Reeves’s mother to look into her son’s death. Simo uncovers three possible alternatives, all hinged on Reeves’s involvement with a rich, powerful and married woman (Diane Lane).

Despite the convincingly dark, smoky atmosphere to Simo’s investigation, Hollywoodland works better when it’s evoking Reeves’s heyday — a cosmetically genteel world of zoot suits and jazz bands, in which the studio system protected its investments at any price.

Radio Times rating:

***

UK cinema certificate 15
Running time 125mins

Review by Damon Wise

News: Ben Affleck

Having got a fair amount of Oscar buzz for his turn as former TV Superman George Reeves in this week’s Hollywoodland, Affleck’s next step for his career revival masterplan is a turn as a mustachioed hitman in Smokin’ Aces, a comedy crime caper that could, at a push, pass as a parody of the kind of Tarantino-lite flicks (like Get Shorty) of the mid-1990s. Or it could be a genuine attempt to make that kind of film a decade after they went out of fashion… Due out in the UK in March 2007, whether it’s going to be any good or not is anyone’s guess, but the trailer can be found <a href=”http://www.smokinacesmovie.net/teaser/&#8221; target=”_blank”>here</a>.

Likely to be more promising for Affleck’s future is his planned team-up with best buddy Matt Damon – with whom he won the Oscar for Best Screenplay for Good Will Hunting all those years ago. As yet untitiled, the pair will star as a couple of lawyers who toil for fifteen years to save the life of an innocent man on death row, and is apparently based on a true story. Quite when (or if) it will see the light of day is unclear, considerin Damon’s hectic schedule these days.

Also showing potential is Gone, Baby, Gone – written, produced and directed by Affleck, and starring his younger brother, Casey, alongside Morgan Freeman and Ed Harris. Based on the <a href=”http://www.dennislehanebooks.com/books/gone/&#8221; target=”_blank”>book</a> by Dennis Lehane, the author of the book Sean Penn got his Oscar-winner Mystic River out of. Set around the kidnapping of a four-year-old girl in Boston, it looks set to be rather more serious than most of Affleck’s recent outings – and could, if he’s as good a director as he used to be a writer, prove rather good.

News: Adrien Brody

Oscar-winner Brody puts in a good turn as a noirish detective in this week’s Hollywoodland, though most of the Academy Awards buzz for this film seems to be centred around the “comeback” performance of his co-star Ben Affleck.

It could instead be the upcoming biopic of Spanish bullfighter Manuel Rodríguez Sánchez, Manolete, for which he trained in southern Spain to get the full bullfighting experience, which garners Brody his next batch of nominations. Likely to be a controversial movie for its potential to laud such a cruel sport, and coming from Menno Meyjes, the same writer/director responsible for the John Cusack-starring Hitler biopic Max, word is that the chemistry with co-star Penélope Cruz could make this one to remember on its release in Autumn 2007.

Brody will also be appearing in the experimental director Todd Haynes’ equally experimental exploration of Bob Dylan I’m Not There, alongside a ridiculously impressive cast of the likes of Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett,Charlotte Gainsbourg, Richard Gere, Heath Ledger and Julianne Moore. Due out next year, Dylan’s life and work is explored through seven characters representing different aspects of the man and music.

News: Bob Hoskins

Playing to type as the seemingly psychotic studio boss in this week’s Hollywoodland, Brit hero Hoskins will be cropping up on the telly in this Christmas’ all-star feature-length BBC One adaptation of The Wind in the Willows as Badger, alongside Little Britain‘s Matt Lucas as Toad, The League of Gentlemen‘s Mark Gatiss as Rat, Lee Ingleby as Mole and Imelda Staunton. He’ll also be returning to TV and period Hollywood for the 1920s-set mini-series The Englishman’s Boy, based on the book by Guy Vanderhaeghe, for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, where he’ll play a movie producer desperate to hunt down a former Western star. Fingers crossed for a UK screening at some point…

In terms of the movies, Hoskins will take on a more challenging role than usual inthe low-budget Ruby Blue, as an elderly man whose friendship with an eight-year-old girl arouses all kinds of unsavoury local suspicioons when she goes missing. He will then appear alongside Sean Bean in British movie Outlaw, following a modern-day vigilante group out to right the wrongs of an unjust society, with another Brit flick, Sparkle, also due out next year, with Hoskins starring alongside The West Wing‘s Stockard Channing and Buffy the Vampire Slayer‘s Anthony Head in a tale of a young Scouser who heads to London to become a rich woman’s toyboy. Perhaps most interesting, however, is Citizen Brando, about a young Tunisian boy’s search for the American Dream through the films of Marlon Brando, which Hoskins is co-producing.