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Perennial Oscar(r) nominee Judi Dench shakes off the dust of period pieces to play a sassy widow looking to recapture a little of the excitement of her youth: she was the star saxophone player of a World War II-era all-girl dance band. Yanking her instrument from mothballs, she starts blowing the old standards as a street musician, much to the horror of her cultured children (they prefer symphonies to swing classics), and then hatches a plan to track down her band mates for a gala reunion at her granddaughter's school dance. The script carries little suspense and few surprises, but the cast is a delight. Ian Holm costars as the band's womanizing drummer (in a dress and a platinum blonde wig), a rascally old rogue who seduced almost every member during their brief wartime run and married half of them in the intervening years. Olympia Dukakis (Moonstruck) is their trombonist, a hard-drinking American widow living it up in a Scottish castle; jazz great Cleo Laine is a trumpeter turned torch singer; and Leslie Caron cameos as their brassy bass player. Joan Sims (a fixture of the Carry On movies), Billie Whitelaw (Quills), and June Whitfield (the mother on Absolutely Fabulous) are among the great British character actors who join the fun. The old broads bring sass to the sentimentality in this fluffy, feel-good, made-for-cable comedy, insisting there is not only life after 60, but that it swings sweetly if only you let it. --Sean Axmaker ... Read more

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Hideous Kinky journeys back to the early 1970s to Marrakesh, that hippy mecca for everyone from Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix to Gillies MacKinnon, the director of this movie. Here you'll find one nice but confused middle-class young woman escaping the daily grind of a drab London with her two young daughters in tow. Whereas Esther Freud's book was told from the younger girl's perspective, the film-script places Julia centre-stage as she searches for what she describes wistfully as "the annihilation of the ego."

Though fresh from her Titanic experience, Kate Winslet is no drippy hippy, bringing a refreshing feistiness to her role and looking fetching swathed in diaphanous layers. As her two daughters, Bella Riza (Bea, the wide-eyed younger one) and Carrie Mullan (Lucy, the sensible one) are brilliant discoveries--unselfconscious, charmingly quirky, and enjoying a camaraderie that belies their difference in characters. Completing the family unit is Julia's lover, the endearingly unreliable Bilal (a fiery performance from Saïd Taghmaoui). When the money runs out, their adventures begin and the resilience and practicality of the girls is contrasted throughout with the dreaminess of their mother, her sense of duty vying with her quest for self-discovery. Visually, it's a veritable feast as we're pitched from the color and cacophony of the marketplace to the dusty harshness of the mountains. And that elusive title--which is never explained in the film--is in fact a phrase coined by the girls as a term of approbation. --Harriet Smith ... Read more

Reviews (51)

Beautiful and mystical
Titanic was the first movie I saw Kate Winslet in, and while the movie really impressed me, the press surrounding it turned me off both of the lead actors.

The great cover design caused me to pick up "Hideous Kinky" in the video store on 5 seperate occasions before I finally rented it. It turned out to be one of the most beautiful adventure movies I've seen. The next day I bought the DVD.

Hideous Kinky (I still haven't figured out exactly what that means) has the patient cinematography of a foreign film, great supporting actors (including the kids), and Kate plays her naive character in such a beautiful and natural way that I now have full respect for her as an actor (a respect which was reinforced after seeing "Holy Smoke").

As for the actual DVD features, well there aren't any. The production quality is nice and crisp though... and on a movie like this, that's really the best feature.

Beautiful locations, gorgeous lighting, lovely sets, but....
Where's the story? That's the question I kept asking myself watching this visually stunning, but flawed movie.

To be fair, I guess, there IS a story. A young British mother drags her two young daughters to Morroco in search of spiritual enlightenment. That's pretty much the movie. She meets a local, rugged, Morrocan male... He likes her kids. They have no money. They travel around. Her eldest daughter wants to be normal and disagrees with the Mom's bohemian ways.

There is good acting and I liked the relationships between Kate Winslet, ... and her eldest daughter. Also there are a lot of little, sweet, scenes with the characters and their surroundings. But in the end I didn't really care for Kate's character or the choices she made. I didn't "take the journey" with her for her quest for enlightenment.

But the movie is VERY visual stunning. It was a treat just to watch it. The colors, the production design, the shots. Visual fantastic. I just wish they'd taken a little more time creating an engaging story around all this beauty.

B-

A 70s hippy movie, set in Marrakesh
Marrakesh was a famous hippy destination during those amazing hippy hears. Gillies MacKinnon, the director of Hideous Kinky, spent time here and documented the probably-at-least-partially-true story of an innocent middle-class young London woman with two daughters who goes off the deep end. Kate Winslet plays the lead role in a story narrated from the point of view of one of the girls. While their mummy goes about her business of drifting around looking for love and enlightenment, the girls shift mostly for themselves. One of the girls seems entirely willing to go along for the bumpy ride, but Lucy, the sensible one, craves tea-time, regular meals, school uniforms, and a reliable mother. Mostly set in the colorful and exotic local of central Marrakesh, Hideous Kinky is a feast of images, sound, and color - and a good depiction of the ethos of those oh so confusing years.

Beautiful and Intriguing
Julia (Kate Winslet) is a mother in search of enlightenment and religious discovery (Sufism) -- with her two lovely daugthers, she journeys to exotic Morocco to find what she is searching for. This movie is very well directed, and the performances of Winslet, Said Taghmaoui (Bilal), Bella Rizza (Bea), and Carrie Mullan (Lucy), are extraordinary. For some, Julia will seem to be the worst of the self-absorbed, selfish, deluded, irresponsible mothers of all time. But, as a single mother myself, I truly felt a kinship with her in wanting to give her children a sense of adventure. For all of the characters, adventure is a great teacher bestowing extravagant gifts memorable enough to last a lifetime.

SWHippyF w/ 2 daughters Seeks Spiritual Center
Hideous Kinky is a nice film not trying to be a great British epic. It is a smaller work about a young mother who insists on dragging her daughters around North Africa, mostly Morocco, to find her spiritual center. She is not fully blessed with the maturity to understand how she is throwing her family off center. The cinematography captures the terrain of land and people beautifully. Kate Winslet and the kids create the wonderful illusion of a clueless hippy family that graces and jinxes Bilal's life. I felt like the invisible 3rd daughter whining that I want to go back to England and go to school, but then crying when it is time to repatriate. Waaaaaaaaaaahhhh! I want to stay! Bilal has to be relieved to send me back, too. I would just like to know how I can send him a postcard.

I would pair it with the BBC series ÒFlame Trees of Thika;Ó the episode of Absolutely Fabulous where Edina, Patsy & Saffy go to Morroco; ÒLaurel Canyon;Ó ÒAlmost Famous;Ó and ÒThe Sheltering Sky.Ó ... Read more

Reviews (10)

Well-acted drama presumes too much to itself ...
BEHIND THE LINES, in my estimate, fails to be the powerful commentary on war it aspires to be. Jonathan Price is excellent as the Military Psychiatrist whose duty is to return men to battle. James Wilby is fine as accomplished war hero-poet who comes to self-illumination: war may not be so "dulcet" (sweet/fitting) a path to manhood nor glorious in yielding a "sacramental" death. It's not that the film is hackneyed in exploring these themes. Rather it is too careful and overly "refined". Opening scenes move viewers through Heironymous Bosch-like images of front line horror and chaos. These are effective in IMPLYING the brutally scarred, mental landscapes dominating soldiers' minds. Yet this powerful beginning is squandered. Radical questions of duty, honor and sheer survival are treated like geometry problems rather than spiritual and emotional wounds in REALITY. The fact that the most powerful sequence in the film presents men being tortured (by a stimulus-response fanatic employing SHOCK THERAPY)into "moral" acquiescence as prerequisite for return to war is unnecessary coercion on the part of Director Mackinnon. He seems to finally realize that an abstract "poem-film" won't work.

At least it didn't for me. Existential "crisis" films frequently employ irony, understatement and even boredom to comment on the human conditon. But WWI was one of the most useless wars fought in recorded history (in any Tradition). The one-in-four LOST GENERATION DEATH toll is not a story that does well in drawing-rooms of psychiatric hospitals or tea time T-groups. BEHIND THE LINES Director Mackinnon hedges his bets and makes a clever art film...forgetting(since he has chosen NOT to be entertaining)that war is humanity's frontal assault on itself. Being dulcet( the way the film often affects its own emotional terrain)is deceptive if not false. Therefore,in its own terms, mediocre as art...

a beautiful adaptation of the great novel...
...but why does the american film industry feel the need to change the titles of films. this film is called "regeneration". that it has mutated into "behind the lines" in the united states is ridiculous. that film companies will do anything to the "product" in order to secure an audience means that they will sacrifice anything about the film. the title "regeneration" is an important feature of the story of this book. it is NOT a film about being "behind the lines" (we are rarely behind the lines in this film) but about, as wilfred own put it so well, the pity of war. to make it sound like some gung-ho action movie is to do it an injustice. the director takes barker's orginal narrative - suffering, torment, passificism, objection to war, homoeroticism, class conflict - and turns it into a good depiction. it cannot repressent the book but it repressents something of its own. it is well worth watching for that reason.

Good film, deals efficiently with WW1's secondary effects
First of all (in response to many previous reviews), "Behind the Lines" is a perfectly suitable title for this movie. It directly and accurately conveys the film's focus - literally, on what went on in one particular institution "Behind the lines" during WW1. Being in a military mental hospital certainly qualifies as being behind the lines. Maybe some are reading "behind enemy lines"? Otherwise there is NO reason for confusion here. To think "behind the lines" implies an action movie is silly. If anything it implies detachment from the action.

As for the film, this is a responsible analysis of the effects of trench warfare. Some mute soldiers are treated brutally with electro-shock therapy, but Dr. Rivers takes a more humane approach, all the while questioning his work - is he simply sending soldiers back to die, and is that really noble?

Overall, not terribly exciting, but certianly effective and historical (Owens and Sassoon are principles). A good film.

A great film adaptation
BEHIND THE LINES is a film adaptation of the first volume of Pat Barker's excellent Regeneration trilogy. I was anxious to watch this DVD since I finished reading this book last week, but I had some reservations since film adaptations are often less than par. However, shortly after pressing the play button I was reassured that this DVD did the book a great justice. The directors did a phenomenal job in re-creating the atmosphere of the suffering of the soldiers and the horrific psychological consequences of trench fighting. BEHIND THE LINES follows a group of officers suffering from shell shock who are treated at Craiglockhart War Hospital outside Edinburgh. There is no doubt that what these soldiers experience can disturb even the most strong-minded individual today. The principle psychiatrist is Dr. Rivers, who suffered from his own personal demons and war symptoms. He created strong friendships with many of his patients and cared dearly for their well being. Rivers is a complex, nuanced character. While he portrays an exterior of believing in the War, he holds an internal debate of the War's philosophical warrants.

As stated by a previous reviewer, the original title of this film is Regeneration *not* Behind the Lines. I have no idea why the title was changed when it was released in the United States because the current title doesn't make any sense. Another complaint is that there is a lack of any special features on this DVD. It would have been marvelous to watch a director commentary or behind the scenes footage. It's unfortunate that this is a bare bones DVD. Regardless of these two negative aspects, BEHIND THE LINES is a wonderful and deeply moving film of British soldiers suffering from shell shock during the Great War.

Read Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy and watch this film. Both are highly recommended.

Far, Far Away the Thudding Guns [Regeneration]
Good grief, I finally found a US edition of this film so I can buy it. Can't the original title be put in brackets or something beside the 'nouveau' so you at least find it?! The philistine who came up with the new title didn't even bother to look at a Sassoon or Owens poem, obviously. My suggested title above (which admittedly may be no better as a film title) is from a Sassoon poem and I picked it more or less at random on the first page I opened in my anthology.

The film did manage to get across the awful (British) Imperial jingoism without ramming it down our throats more or less exclusively. The experiences that caused such acute suffering as displayed by the inmates of Craiglockhard were presented well, as was the personal humiliation of succumbing to mental illness or "shell-shock". Less successful however, was the treatment of the worst thing a soldier can do: failing to act with stoicism and diffidence. (Sassoon for example, developed an intense hatred for civilians as a result of this fairytale "let's all pretend we're having a lovely time in Flanders because that's what they want to hear at home, and we can't go upsetting the ladies, now can we, lads?", that at least outlasted the war.)

This was a well-scripted, well-acted,thoughtful and thought-provoking film. This is not a standard "tear-jerker" but if it does not make you shed a tear of sorrow and rage then you must have been multi-tasking.

This film actually rekindled a schoolgirl interest in the history of the First World War and in the extraordinary change in and range of poetry resulting from the experience of those in the foul trenches of France and Flanders. ... Read more

Reviews (21)

Modern version of George Eliot's story 'Silas Marner'
I really enjoyed viewing this movie when I rented it a few years ago. 'A Simple Twist of Fate' is based on Mary Ann Evans' (1819-80; Pen-name George Eliot) story 'Silas Marner'(if anyone is interested in reading Silas Marner on-line, go to this web address, inside the {} brackets: {http://www.mastertexts.com/Eliot_George/Silas_Marner/Index.htm}

Steve Martin is a sad & lonely bachelor school teacher who's life feels empty and irrelevant; Then a sweet little baby girl walks into his life. The short of it is that she has recently become an orphan; So Steve Martin adopts her. Raising this precious little girl brings much love, joy, and happiness into their lives. It is a story about the transformative and healing power of love.

I was dismayed to find that this movie is not currently available to purchase

This is an adorable film all should see.
I rented this movie and liked it so much that I bought my own copy. Steve Martin did a good job of taking this movie and making it modern from George Elliot's book Silas Marner. All the characters played their role well and it has great music and scenery. Everyone should at least see this movie once in their life if not more!

Silas Marner gets an update.
A SIMPLE TWIST OF FATE is a good middleweight movie which doesn't quite go into the top-drawer class because of a few predictable moments and a truly cheapjack ending that doesn't just stretch plausibility but mangles it completely. Steve Martin wrote the script and produced it as well as starred and it's apparent that this was a special project for him. He, Catherine O'Hara, Laura Linney and Gabriel Byrne are all in fine form and Alana Austin just melts your heart away as the Martin character's adopted daughter.If it's not a classic film it's still a good way to spend an hour and forty-five minutes and makes me forgive Steve Martin for SGT. BILKO two years later.

A Must Have
This movie warms your heart, feeds your mind and leaves you feeling like there is hope for humanity. I cannot recommend it highly enough. Steve Martin is awesome in this film.

Excellent Movie!
This movie is excellent. Most of the movie was filmed at my next-door neighbors farm across town. I remember watching the movie being filmed when i was younger. It is a great movie and I highly recommend it for people of all ages. ... Read more

Description

In Trojan Eddie, acclaimed director Gillies MacKinnon and award winning writer Billy Roche create a strange compelling world on the edge of society – where everyone wants something they can’t possibly have.The New York Post calls Stephen Rea’s portrayal of the title character "spellbinding," and heralds Richard Harris’ performance " as frightening as it is hypnotic." ... Read more

Reviews (5)

"We really don't see much of the law down here."
The Scottish coming-of-age film "Small Faces" is the story of the three teenage Maclean brothers growing up in the slums of Glasgow in the late 60s. Quiet, gentle Alan attends Art College. Wayward brother Bobby is a member of the Glen Gang and right hand man to the gang leader--Charlie Sloan. The film's protagonist is the youngest brother, 13-year-old Lex. While Alan is the 'good' brother, and Bobby is the 'bad' brother, Lex has yet to define himself. Lex shares Alan's artistic talent, but he also suffers from being the youngest brother of the three and longs to be viewed as a man. There is a certain amount of subtle pressure from the Glen Gang for Lex to join their ranks--a certain cloak of safety apparently comes from the idea that you have powerful--or in this case--violent friends. Bobby has declared himself by joining the Glen, and Alan steers clear of gang involvement while trying to protect and shield Lex at the same time.

When Lex commits a foolish, thoughtless act, the Glens and their serious territorial rival--the Tongs--both begin paying attention to the Maclean Brothers. Interest is heightened when it becomes common knowledge that Alan has a relationship with Joanne--a 17-year-old girl who manages to be friends with both Charlie Sloan and Malky Johnson (the leader of the Tongs).

Most of the film deals with the idea that a child--Lex--is forced to make serious, irreversible decisions--which will impact the rest of his life. Some of the best, and most touching scenes in the film occur when Lex is placed in typical childhood situations. For example, in one scene, Lex, who is hiding out in a local cinema--terrified that he will be murdered--wakes up to find himself in the middle of a children's matinee. He is surrounded by happy, joyful children, and Lex responds and echoes their behaviour with ecstatic relief. It is poignant scenes like this that remind us that Lex is still--at heart--a child who has been robbed of his childhood innocence by poverty and violence. One of the most interesting relationships in the films occurs between Lex and Gorbals--a fellow 13-year-old who is affiliated (rather against his will) to the Tongs. Neither Lex nor Gorbals want to get involved with the gangs, but they are forced into contact by their situations. When they meet, the boys stare at each other for a few moments as they recognize that they are both hostages to proximity.

Unfortunately, this lesser-known Scottish film is out-of-print. The film did not receive the acclaim or notoriety of "Trainspotting." "Small Faces" isn't as stylish as "Trainspotting", but I think it's a better film. If you enjoy "Small Faces", I also recommend "Fresh" (director Boaz Yakin)--displaced human

dynamite
The film small faces is great, i live where the film
is set and gang culture is very popular in the gorbals.
The gangs in the film (tongs,glen)were very feared around glasgow in the 1990s but now they are not very popular.
the film is a very sad when lex has his brother killed.
THE FILM HAS SOME QUIT VIOLENT SCENES THE FILOM HAS EVERY THING FROM SEX VIOLENCE AND TEARS IT IS GREAT

An amazing film... Trainspotting but far better!
Small Faces tells an amazing story of two brothers growing up in 1950's Glasgow, Scotland. Bringing together director Gilles Mackinnon and brother Billy Mackinnon, the story is told straight from the heart. While comparable to Trainspotting in some ways, the film far surpasses that in its drama and intensity; its reality. And while the cinematography in Trainspotting was impressive, Small Faces blows it away in that department also.

Enjoy...

m

Brilliant!
I've seen this movie a few times now on video and still think it's great. It's a story of three Scottish brothers, particularly the youngest who becomes involved in a gang. It's a great story about a family growing up together. It shows how many families lives are like, particulary in the UK. It's greatly acted and scripted. I've even got everyone I know to see this movie. A must-see movie.

Great movie!
If you can get past the painfully thick scottish accents, the movie is wonderful. Saw it at the Seattle International Film Festival a few years ago, and got to meet the director. It is well done, with great dialogue, only a few jokes or references inexplicable to non-scottish viewers. The acting is great, particularly on the part of the young man who plays the older brother, Charley, I believe. ... Read more