Vampire romance that goes for the jugular

Twilight (Catherine Hardwicke)
Love and Honour (Yoji Yamada)
Gonzo: the Life and Work of Dr Hunter S Thompson (Alex Gibney)
The Tale of Desperaux (Sam Fell, Robert Stevenhagen)
Inkheart (Iain Softley)

It is clear that Catherine Hardwicke, who directed the teen screen sensation Twilight, is cyclically fascinated by the same storyline. A young person arrives in a small community, is regarded for a while with awe and wonder, and is later credited with starting a fashion for drinking blood and eating flesh. Hardwicke’s last film with this plot was The Nativity Story. Now it is a vampire romance.

Messiahs and monsters: aren’t they the same thing, seen from different angles? Life-changing, epiphanic, a little scary. In the US, Twilight has shot up the charts. Easy to see why. Source novelist Stephanie Meyers, like Anne Interview with a Vampire Rice, has a woman’s memory of that hormonal heyday called adolescence, when teenage female sexuality was a world involving dangerous, thrilling interaction with those testosterone units known as boys. A girl knew that to bare a neck to these creatures, if only at the back of a movie theatre, was to put at eternal hazard her resistance and virginity.

No wonder a woman gets to direct the first of Meyers’s books destined for a Hollywood payday. Twilight may be the ultimate date movie. If there were any more close-ups of the palely Heathcliffean hero (played with white cheeks, staring eyes and a blood-red pout by Britain’s Robert Pattinson) leering into the face of heroine and fellow student Bella (demurely beautiful Kristen Swanson), after they meet in a school biology class, the entire audience, whether or not possessed of two X chromosomes, would cry “Take me! Take me!”

The twist, vampirologically, is that Edward, the boy, tries to hold back from the passion he and Bella share, knowing that one dental incision will condemn her to his own eternal, sleepless life of appetite, sensuality and desire. So they sublimate their inner delirium in outer frolics such as shinning up 200ft fir trees, flying over mountains, or ignoring her over-protective dad when he tells her, “I’ve put a new can of pepper spray in your bag.” All the while, a simmering romantic eroticism powers their byplay.

Hardwicke directs as if hot flushes are controlling her camerawork. The close-ups are too close, the cuts too cutty, the zooms too zoomy. The dialogue is mostly mad north-by-northwest, as befits a film set in Washington State. (“I had an adrenalin rush – it’s very common, you can Google it,” says the superpowered Edward after hand-stopping a skidding van from hitting Bella.) Somehow it all works. This is sexual-Gothic tripe of a high order. I am looking forward to the second instalment.

Love and Honour is the third instalment of Yoji Yamada’s Samurai trilogy, after Twilight Samurai and Hidden Blade. As in those films, the warrior spirit is washed in homeliness before the protagonist’s heroism is hung out to dry in a climax testing his honour and courage. You could call Yamada’s style prosaic – no flashing blades or flying limbs. But the stories are superfine (all taken from the author Shuhei Fujisawa) and the domestic tableaux poignantly exact. Here a feudal lord’s food-taster, played by the young actor/pop star Takuya Kimura, loses his sight after a poisoning incident and is then tormented by suspicion of his wife’s infidelity.

Can a blind man fight a duel of honour? The drama, until its action finale, is confined virtually to a single room, like a long labour finally birthing a catharsis conceived in Japanese warrior lore and honour codes. More touchingly than in Blindness, the film conveys the pain and paradoxes of being sightless. “Dreaming is my only sight, it’s when I wake up the world goes dark,” laments the hero. The tale is given a soft landing, even a sentimental one, but we still feel we have been on a long, authentic human journey.

Crazy writers who get non-crazy, pedestrian documentaries made about them – shouldn’t there be a law against that? In Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr Hunter S Thompson – the very title sounds like an insomnia-curing academic thesis – Alex Gibney, who scarified us with sanguinary truths in his torture-and-rendition documentary Taxi to the Dark Side, takes the schmoozer’s shilling. He does a commissioned documentary for Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter and others about the greatest bad-boy writer-reporter in recent US history.

Thompson wrote Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which reshaped, in a few dozen pages of sandblasting prose, a country’s culture and zeitgeist. A single scene of Terry Gilliam’s hallucinatory film of F and L in LV, or a single one of Ralph Steadman’s rapturously creepy drawings (glimpsed here), is worth all the rest of Gibney’s documentary. He fails to make vivid either Thompson’s writing or his spirit. He fails even to get a debate going, which might have brought some life, by subpoenaing Thompson’s adversaries. Instead the friends and fawners queue up (you thought Tom Wolfe could never be dull?) and Thompson must be looking down, or up, from his afterworld thinking: “The worst success is a failure to keep alive the spirit of offendedness and outrage.”

We are asked to admire the title mouse in The Tale of Despereaux, Universal’s Christmas digimation feature, for his skill in whisking a piece of cheese from a trap without springing it. Oh come now. This ability is shared by the entire mouse population of my attic. Do any readers have mice who cannot outwit these fumbling instruments of death?

Never mind: the film is full of charm, wit and pictorial panache. (I loved the sequences of illuminated-manuscript-style mock medievalism.) Desperaux himself will be a sure sell in the soft-toy shops. I am not sure I could follow the complex comic plot: the distributors fed us with croissants beforehand, which have a sedative effect on my synapses. But I salute a sophistication that regales us, inter alia, with an Arcimboldo-style sous-chef composed entirely of vegetables and a chief rat with a chilling resemblance to the vampire in FW Murnau’s famous silent classic. Nosfe-Rat-U?

Children who cannot get a ticket to Desperaux could console themselves with Inkheart. The story is whimsical, all about people called Silvertongues who bring books to literal life by reading aloud. But director Iain Softley, a certified Italophile (The Wings of the Dove), perches the climactic scenes in gorgeously fantasised hilltop villages in an Italy of one’s dreams. Brendan Fraser, Helen Mirren, Paul Bettany and other actors ham about, hoping to be of some interest. But they are of little, really. You come out humming the scenery.

The Puccini schmaltzathon La Bohème ( PG, Robert Dornhelm, star rating withheld due to incomplete viewing), reaches the screen with Rolando Villazón, Anna Nebtrenko and a nearly continuous sequence of close-ups of quaking teeth and tonsils. It is pretty ghastly. I left after Act Two, at which point the opera descends into the terminally maudlin.