Don’t think, just goggle

Future improbable: an alien tribe is imperilled by human colonists 150 years hence in James Cameron’s ‘Avatar’

Fantasy adventure directors have no time for time. Avatar (

), James Cameron’s delirious depiction of life in another solar system, blasts through future-historical probability with high explosives. Humans will have established a mining colony on a moon in the Alpha Centauri system by AD 2154, says Cameron. That’s less than 150 years’ preparation on a penniless Planet Earth more obsessed, at present, in surviving for 150 months.

But what has reality to do with Hollywood, let alone with Cameron? This man made two Terminators, an Aliens and a Titanic: films that pushed the envelope of technological possibility while bursting the balloon of human plausibility. Cameron creates his own universes, then populates them. For us, if the universes are giddy enough, that’s good enough.

Never mind your initial horror at a space-conquering future in which humans will apparently still be windbagging about the environment. The plot has a crippled marine (Sam Worthington) donning high-tech guise as a native alien – the “avatar” is the remote-controlled host body he assumes – to infiltrate and destabilise a forest tribe’s occupation of a potential mining zone. (The precious mineral, to help the slowcoaches in the cheap seats, is called Unobtainium.) But guess what? The hero rebels, sides with the “tree huggers” and becomes Tarzan, Lord Jim or whichever antecedent in this ancient story genre you favour.

Just don the 3D specs and feel the width and depth of Cameron’s visual brainstorming. This is a Cameron now souped up by his hallooed high-tech innovations. A jungle world with mountain crags strung vertically like necklaces; rainbow-coloured dragons that fizz around the sky like living fireworks; a sacred tree so enormous it makes Wagner’s World-Ash-Tree seem a discount sapling at B&Q; and an army of earth-made death machines trundling through the sky like mad behemoths invented by a giantising Heath Robinson.

Whenever your senses can bear no more, Cameron says: “Have some more.” So we get hammerhead elephants and horses that can be hotwired (your pigtail to their mane). Around the riot of this colossal fantasy oasis, the lone and level banalities stretch far away. The villains are mostly out of pantomime; much of the dialogue needs a stretcher; and the save-the-rainforest plot is a pain. (What, another rainforest, in another world, for another generation of Bonos?) Just take your eyes to the film. Leave all other faculties
at home.

Nine (

) moves to the beat of a different orchestra, securely tethered to Planet Earth. Even so, Rob Chicago Marshall, directing, does his best to make this ex-stage Fellini makeover fly. Daniel Day-Lewis, speakin-a wid an accent to try to catch Marcello Mastroianni’s tousled Italiano in 8½, is the inspiration-blocked filmmaker embarking on an untitled, unscripted and (though only he knows it) yet-unconceived new movie. Meanwhile his love life swirls around him like Richard III’s haunting crew at Bosworth, though Richard’s ghosts didn’t break into song.

Nicole Kidman, Sophia Loren (mum), Penélope Cruz (who should surely play Loren in a biopic), Marion Cotillard, Kate Hudson ... If you stretched the film’s divae end to end, you still couldn’t stop them standing up in turn to try and steal each other’s limelight. Hudson, singing “Cinema Italiano”, delivers the showstopper. Kidman is gone if you blink. Cruz and Cotillard are there to prove that no one in America knows the difference between France, Spain and Italy. Day-Lewis sings as well as anyone, even when required to belt his opener while climbing 20 feet of scaffolding. Bitty and frequently batty, Nine doesn’t have the sultry cogency or louche mellifluousness
of Chicago. But it will do for Christmas ’09.

Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes (

) won’t do for anyone, anywhere. The Baker Street sleuth is played by a Robert Downey so preoccupied with his English accent – which he bases on the principle that you clip or eliminate every other vowel – that it is like watching a man try to act with his talent tied behind his back. Jude Law’s Dr Watson is slightly better. But the overblown plot (world domination conspiracy, villains returning from the dead) reminds us that all the best Conan Doyle stories had an atmospheric, even seedy particularity of place and event. The script here is a pretext for fatuous action pyrotechnics, misfiring comedy, the inevitable star from Central Crumpet Casting (Rachel McAdams) and CG jiggery-pokery evoking Ye Olde London. In short: Doc, Sh’lock and Every Scraped Barrel.

Aaron Johnson as John Lennon in ‘Nowhere Boy’

A later British icon fares little better in Nowhere Boy (

). The late teenage years of John Lennon, put through the biopic wringer by screenwriter Matt Greenhalgh, come out as flat and lifeless as yesterday’s “We Love the Beatles” T-shirt. Artist Sam Taylor-Wood, in her first feature, tries to coax three-dimensionality from the cast: Aaron Johnson (Lennon), Anne-Marie Duff (fun-loving mum) and Kristin Scott Thomas (frowning Aunt Mimi, who brought John up). But no one can entice life and contour from the pedestrian story structuring, the here-it-comes dialogue (Paul to John: “If we’re gonna do this, we should write our own stuff”) or from scenes of suburban sturm und drang suggestive of a humourless Hancock’s Half Hour.

From America, Lynn Shelton’s funny, creepy Humpday (

) needs a category all its own. Mumbleporn? No one has sex, at least in front of us; they just talk or waffle about it. But sex on the brain, as the wag said, may be the best place to have it. One night Ben (Mark Duplass) is hauled out of his marital comfort zone by an old buddy’s doorstep appearance. His rational self long since vanished into his hippyish beard, Andrew (Joshua Leonard) is into senseless art projects. So one tipsy stag night the two men discuss having sex together on camera – for art. When this unholy notion is laid before Ben’s wife she understandably implodes. Will the two men go through with it? Are they crypto-gay? Can sex happen at all (at least with men) if inclination isn’t there? The questions are piquant, the answers droll and surprising.

The week’s sweetest surprise, though, is from Israel. My Father, My Lord (

) is David Volach’s first film. Like many debutants he is unspoiled by other people’s wisdom. He knows intuitively what cinema is: you put the camera in the right place, you coax truthful performances, you tell a clear story that means something to you.

Here it is a household’s story: a strict Haredic Jewish father (Assi Dayan), a kind but conflicted mother (Sharon Hacochen) and a young son (marvellously played by the wide-eyed Ilan Grif) for whom the delights of nature and the everyday world are more important than Jewish belief and observance. The light through a tea glass; the pictures in a book; the doves’ nest on a school windowsill. But the call to prayer or study keeps drilling the boy from his daydreams. And one day his father, obeying an obscure Torah teaching, chases the mother dove from her nest. By the time the family go on their Dead Sea holiday, the runes are cast for cataclysm.

You would almost swear every scene is acted without dialogue. As in any good film, what people say is less important than what they express with their eyes, faces, looks. And what a director says is not in any uttered message but in the epiphanic speaking of the story through its images. The ending is heartbreaking. Like the first crack in glass, or ice, that spreads to become a maze, the hint of discord here grows to a cry, a howl, an uncomprehending, all-encompassing chant of pain. Yet in the last scene even the character Volach condemns is still seen whole and human, lit by the same luminosity, the same compassionate intentness of vision.