DVD reviews: Growing up with alco pop

Harry (Gabriel Byrne, left) watches son Ralph (Nicholas Hoult) in coming-of-age drama Wah-Wah
Metro10 April 2012

Richard E Grant makes his directorial debut wiht Wah-Wah, Paul Greengrass explores the horror of 9/11 in United 93 and coming out drama Imagine Me & You is just plain silly...

Wah-Wah
****

Given his Rupert Everett-like delight at poking fun at Hollywood with his name-dropping autobiographies, you'd expect Richard E Grant's directorial debut to be a full-on, shrieking, tantrumsandtiaras satire. Not a bit. Though spiky, funny and outrageous, Wah-Wah is an almost uncomfortably personal reminiscence of the actor's pre-luvvie life as an adolescent in the last days of the British Empire in Swaziland.

When his parents divorce, shy 11-year-old only child Ralph (Nicholas Hoult from About A Boy) is sent to boarding school in England. Upon his return three years later, he finds his father Harry (Gabriel Byrne) remarried to a free-wheeling, fun-loving American (Emily Watson) who thinks the stuffy old Brit ex-pats all talk a load of old 'wah-wah' (rubbish). Yet the couple's exuberant, booze-fuelled anarchy takes a darker turn with pop's increasingly violent alcoholism - creating close-tothe-bone moments so real, raw and scarring that they transcend this good but otherwise unremarkable movie.

Extras: Making-of doc, cast and crew interviews. Larushka Ivan-Zadeh

United 93
****

Paul Greengrass has never lacked guts - as his recreation of Bloody Sunday, and, in an entirely different sense, his direction of The Bourne Supremacy, demonstrated - but taking on 9/11 takes some doing, as Oliver Stone has since found to his cost. In United 93 Greengrass opts for a careful, unflashy reconstruction of the fated flight of the fourth hijacked plane. The terrorists were deflected from their intended target - probably Capitol Hill - and the plane crashed on uninhabited land, thereby foiling the killers' plot and avoiding any deaths outside the aircraft. All within, of course, perished, but Greengrass uses the viewer's knowledge of this to draw us in: instead of suspense, we get real-time horror and then ongoing heartache - and all without a whiff of exploitation or conspiracy speculation. Truly, an exceptional achievement.

Extras: Director commentary, doc about the real-life victims. Nina Caplan

Imagine Me & You
**

Writer/director Ol Parker tries to pull out of wife Thandie Newton's shadow with Imagine Me & You, a coming out drama that tries to be affecting but is just plain silly. Rachel (Piper Perabo) marries her sweetheart and ought to live happily ever after - except that, just before the vows, she catches the eye of her florist, Luce (Lena Headey) and falls in love. The least plausible element is a bride who hasn't met her florist before the big day, but it gets worse as Rachel dithers on-screen, Parker dithers offscreen and London is made to resemble a cute village. The only brownie points go to Headey, doing her best with a weak role, and Parker's decision to make the cuckolded husband a nice bloke, which at least lends tension.

Extras: None.

Colonel Redl
****

Istvan Szabo's 1985 pseudo-historical drama Colonel Redl reimagines a notorious story of treason, blackmail and sexual scandal as a decent bloke having an identity crisis - but such is his directing skill that it works as film, if not as history. Klaus Maria Brandauer is superb as the Austrian colonel working his way up to become head of military intelligence, then dying in peculiar circumstances just before World War I. The boredom of military life during peacetime and the shenanigans of a crumbling regime in the last days of the Hapsburg Empire are believable, even if it remains an odd decision to have turned a traitor still remembered for the secrets he sold and the deaths that ensued into a hero.

Extras: None.

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