MEIFF is the place to be

Some of Hollywood's biggest flicks will premiere their UAE releases at the Middle East International Film Festival (MEIFF).

Those films include future star-studded classics like Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona, featuring Scarlett Johansson and Body of Lies with Leonardo DiCaprio.

African-American director Spike Lee presents his answer to Clint Eastwood's "whitewashed" war movie, Flags of Our Fathers, with Miracle at St Anna.

Lee flew to Abu Dhabi early in the week and was hotly tipped to appear at the opening ceremony but had to return to the US for personal reasons. Earlier, the director took part in a series of workshops for lucky film buffs.

Other special presentations at MEIFF include Neil Burger's The Lucky Ones, Stephan Elliott's Easy Virtue and Anthony Leondis's Igor.

MEIFF vice chairman, Mohammad Khalaf Al Mazrouei, said, "I am pleased to say that MEIFF 2008 has attracted some of the top films, filmmakers and distinguished guests from all corners of the world, and we are honoured to host them in Abu Dhabi.

The official competition is the place to be at MEIFF, to see up and coming films and premieres from across the globe. These films should be the first stop for cinema lovers in Abu Dhabi," Mazrouei told reporters.

More than 60 films from 32 countries have been signed for the festival's official competition.


Woody Allen's verbal feast in Barcelona

It's the same old opening credits, the elegant white font on the black background, but the music is new. The pulse of a Spanish guitar replaces the big-band brass that usually heralds Woody Allen's films. Barcelona subs for Manhattan. The eroticism of Javier Bardem and Scarlett Johansson replaces the neuroticism of an ageing New Yorker wringing his hands.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona goes down like sweet Riesling instead of a chalky dumpling, and it's all thanks to Allen's extended holiday in Europe.

Now, from Spain, Allen brings a movie that plays like a greatest-hits album. Vicky Cristina Barcelona is nothing we haven't heard before, but the packaging is gorgeous.

And that's not just because the cast includes two of Spain's best (and best-looking) actors, Bardem and Penelope Cruz, as Juan Antonio and Maria Elena, two divorced painters who have driven each other to - among other things - attempted homicide, or because their explosive relationship is reignited by the luscious Johansson.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona is beautiful because Allen blends an expatriate hipness with the sharpness of his older dramas and the effervescence of his older comedies.

So Cristina. In Barcelona. With Vicky, her best friend, played by the disarming British actress Rebecca Hall. Cristina is blonde and carefree and unsure of what she wants from life and love.

Vicky is brunette and staid and engaged to a thoroughly satisfactory man who wears khakis. When the two friends join Juan Antonio for a weekend in the country, both are charmed, and they fall for him in different ways.

Love triangle

Cruz, as Maria Elena, blows into the movie almost an hour later and fractures the narrative hypotenuse of the love triangle. Cristina, the superego, only knows what she doesn't want out of life.

Vicky, the ego, can't escape from what she does want from life. And Juan Antonio and Maria Elena are the lustful, vulgar ids who tear through the women's uncertainty and decorum.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona is really about Vicky and Cristina, and Juan Antonio and Maria Elena. This time Allen's philosophical musings emerge subtly from the interaction of these characters and their choices instead of through trademark dialogue.

"Life is short," Juan Antonio says as a come-on to Vicky and Cristina, "life is dull, life is full of pain. The trick is to enjoy life, accepting it has no meaning whatsoever," and we think immediately of Allen's opening monologue from Annie Hall more than 30 years ago: Life is "full of loneliness, and misery, and suffering, and unhappiness, and it's all over much too quickly."

He's not lazily re-chewing this theme in 2008. It's merely a familiar melodic riff deftly woven into a mellower, deeper progression of chords.


Conspiring to make a hit movie

Suffice it to say that Leonardo DiCaprio and Ridley Scott agree to disagree about certain principles of the Geneva Conventions.

"If I'm going to get down to brass tacks, there's no rules," Scott exclaimed, sitting on the sun-drenched deck of his West Hollywood production company.

He was speaking hypothetically about his willingness to use torture to extract information from a suspected terrorist - a pivotal plot point in the knighted British director's political thriller Body of Lies.

The film stars DiCaprio and Russell Crowe as CIA operatives out to smash terror cells in the Middle East.

"If I want to get the information out of somebody, I have to do it," Scott continued. "And it makes it a lot easier if that person put a bomb in a square or blew up a bunch of kids. I'd definitely take a cricket bat to him." He glanced over at DiCaprio for confirmation. "Right?"

DiCaprio clamped his lips together, averted eye contact and almost imperceptibly shook his head no. Awkward moment, anyone? The hard-charging director suddenly reversed course. "Never let me be the head of any counter-terrorist organisation," Scott said, chuckling.

Adapted by William Monahan, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of The Departed, from Washington Post columnist David Ignatius's intricately plotted espionage novel of the same name, Body of Lies presents the most stinging screen portrayal of American foreign policy by any Hollywood studio movie in recent memory.

DiCaprio portrays Roger Ferris, an idealistic field agent operating out of Iraq and Jordan who resorts to elaborate subterfuge - concocting a fictitious sleeper cell and staging a mock bombing - to flush a terrorist mastermind out into the open.

It's a deliberate throwback to Nixon-era conspiracy thrillers, films that spotlighted American political skulduggery and corruption. "To make a highly intelligent film with today's politics: That was the objective," DiCaprio said.

"This movie could - not necessarily say something about the state of the world, but - take grasp of where we are in history right now."

Big ideas

"It is a failed subject matter in the sense that none of those films have been successful," DiCaprio said. "But whether (Body of Lies) was going to be commercial or not was never a factor. It's the opportunity that we get to make this movie. You feel lucky to get to do it. The audience can get involved while simultaneously getting insight into what the US is doing in the Middle East."

Scott was more blunt. "Do I think it's a commercial movie? My gut tells me it's a commercial movie," he said. "I think a lot of those Iraq war movies were jingoistic. This one isn't jingoistic. The audiences smell that."

The film offers plenty of big ideas.

Known for his crusading efforts as an environmentalist with a growing affinity for appearing in issue-oriented films (2006's Blood Diamond is plotted around how so-called conflict diamonds fuel civil war in sub-Saharan Africa), DiCaprio says he checked his political agenda at the door when he signed onto the project.

"You don't want anyone to leave with a moral judgment when they see a movie like this," DiCaprio said. "But the more we did the movie, the more we got involved with the day-to-day operations of the CIA - you realise what they're undertaking. The thought of stopping this in one or two wars? In 10, 20 years? If there's any moral message to the movie, it's that we've bitten off so much more than we can chew."