Chaos, Hostility and Murder

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

2012-02-01T04:34:00.000-08:00

David Fincher, 2011

BBFC rating: 18

I tend to think of actors as being like football managers: they need a reasonable level of competence, but those who've attained that level are more or less interchangeable. There are a couple of exceptions - I'll probably give a film a second glance based solely on its cast's including Willem Dafoe or Chloë Sevigny. But it's rare that a character seems so important that the actor chosen for the role is critical - after all, Daniel Radcliffe's Harry Potter is mediocre at its peak, but that doesn't spoil the movies for me.

However, having seen the original Swedish adaptations of The Girl... series - in which Noomi Rapace plays Lisbeth Salander, the eponymous female lead, to a tee - it seemed likely that this new version was going to stand or fall on the basis of Rooney Mara's take on the role. Fortunately, she does it very well indeed. She sulks, hacks, seduces, and zips about on an extremely cool motorbike, with style and attitude. Everyone else pays their part convincingly well enough, and the script, cinematography and pace are all about right - the latter, notably, despite this film's length of almost 150 minutes. It also retains the darkness and brutality of the source material, hence its 18 certificate.

Still, this was true of the original Swedish version of the film. I definitely enjoyed the American version more, but that's probably because it's now been over two years since I read the book, so the story seemed fresher - whereas I saw the Swedish version at the cinema in the afternoon after finishing the book that morning. The American version is better in its choice of graphic design and props, but the original wins for being in Swedish where the characters in the remake speak English in a variety of Scandinavian accents - bar Daniel Craig's Blomkvist who, oddly enough, has the actor's regular English accent. It would have been better for all the characters to do the same. I think the film just about gets away with this defect, and it's an otherwise very good adaptation of an excellent, exciting story. But I don't think I could recommend it over the original.

Drive

2011-10-21T04:24:00.000-07:00

Nicolas Winding Refn, 2011

BBFC rating: 18

Like Taxi Driver, which is clearly a source of inspiration for this movie, Drive follows a man of quiet violence motoring around the streets, resolutely following his own unusual moral code, unaccountably putting all his eggs into the basket of a woman he barely knows but with whom he has a relationship of semirequited love. Gosling's unnamed character is like a cross between Travis Bickle and Ryan from The O.C., handsomely prowling Los Angeles in his heavy boots and gold bubble jacket. His journey is filmed in strikingly framed shots with artificial lighting (apparently) from mundane sources - strip lights, indoor lamps - that somehow manages to look mystical, transcendental at times. There are scenes of brutal, up-close violence which Mark Kermode likened to scenes from Gaspar Noé movies: certainly they bear some resemblance to the early death-by-fire-extinguisher section of Irreversible or the repeated car crash and aftermath segments of Enter the Void. But where Noé keeps the camera directly on the action, Refn's shots are briefer and more oblique. In other words, Drive is nowhere near as difficult to watch as the Noé comparison would suggest.

Having recently spent time driving in and around LA, I found the landscape gave me the excitement of vague familiarity and, frankly, I would have been happy just watching the scenes shot from our hero's bucket seat for minutes at a time. Fortunately for everyone else, none of these sections last long except in the less prosaic sequences where Gosling races and hides from the pursuing police like a naughty kitten intent on staying out after dark. The action builds, swells and breaks with a natural rhythm over the course of its 100 minutes, as its characters cross and backstab each other while the stakes rise along with the body count.

The only minor problem with Drive is that it's shot digitally, which means it suffers from the same distracting pixellation artefacts as other digital films. Of course that won't matter for the home video market (unless you've got a 15-foot tellly). But this was the only negative thing I could think of about Drive. It's The Fast and the Furious with guts, balls and acting; Taxi Driver plus Death Proof plus tension. Unmissable.

Picture credit: Pierrot Neron. Picture appropriated from the facebook fan page, which includes other such posters designed by the general public.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

2011-10-02T10:42:00.000-07:00

Tomas Alfredson, 2011

BBFC rating: 15

I would never have looked any further than the title of this film had I not heard the hype, and found out it was directed by Tomas Alfredson (who turned a mediocre pulp novel into a masterpiece with Let the Right One In). It just sounds too silly. But I was bowled over by Alfredson's involvement and the rave reviews it's been receiving, and went for it. I found myself rather disappointed. It has the singular, atmospheric feel and look that Let the Right One In had, albeit here it's miserable, smoky, 1970s London rather than white, harsh Swedish suburbia. Unfortunately - and I realise this is more likely to be my fault than the film's - the plot was very difficult to follow, largely because there were so many characters and so little time in which to learn their names. Which military intelligence bod has sold them out to the Russians? It's very hard to tell when you can't put the hints about characters together because you can't remember which one is which. So while it's not boring, it is confusing, and seems longer than necessary. Or maybe it's just that I just would have preferred to see Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Vampire.

Kill List

2011-09-21T13:58:00.000-07:00

Ben Wheatley, 2011

BBFC rating: 18

What makes the difference between a horror movie and a thriller? I think in many cases it's all in the ending. Films about the main players being trapped - like Buried and Frozen - would be thrillers if they culminated in escape and horror films if they didn't. This could depend on as little screen time as the final 15 or so seconds. Thrillers and horror movies often rely largely on tension ratcheted up over the course of the film, giving the audience time to acclimatise to the baseline and get to know and invest in the characters - to magnify either the horror when it arrives, or the sense of vicarious relief when it doesn't. Kill List straddles the thriller/horror boundary, moving across toward the latter as the film progresses. I can understand why it has been described variously as one or the other (and as the ambiguous 'chiller' in the quote on the promo poster above).

Much like Skeletons and The Disappearance of Alice Creed (a similarly brutal and enthralling movie), Kill List centres around the relationship between two male characters. The three also have in common low budgets, stark British landscapes and a melancholic tone as well as convincing acting, intriguing plots and fairly limited cinematic releases. My guess is if you like them, you'll like this too - as long as you don't mind a splash of horror with your thrills and drama.When the horror finally arrives, it's nicely done: jeopardy, chases, and blood and guts are all present, correct and stylish and the horror has overtones of A Serbian Film, The Wicker Man and The Last Exorcism. It's not quite got the conceptual strength to linger for ages in my mind like Martyrs did, for example, but it certainly has the balls and the guts to induce the queasiness and dread the poster promises.

Senna

2011-06-02T13:00:00.000-07:00

Asif Kapadia, 2010

BBFC rating: 12A

Documentaries examining motorsports, including their attendant tragedies, are popular this year, with Closer to the Edge still in cinemas as Senna is released. Sadly, this year's Isle of Man TT has already seem fatal accidents with a sidecar partnership both killed in practice earlier this week. Motorcycle racing is not the only dangerous sometime-road-based sport around, however. Last weekend's Monte Carlo grand prix gave us viewers a timely reminder that driving open-wheel sports cars round tight circuits at 200mph can be dangerous too. Sergio Perez's crash in the third qualifying session saw the first time since Felipe Massa's Hungaroring incident in 2009 that a driver remained in the car for minutes after coming to a stop with injuries of unknown severity - a tense scenario which fortunately had a happy ending on Saturday, as did Vitaly Petrov's less spectacular but still potentially nasty crash in the following day's race.

In fact anyone who pays any attention to Formula 1 will already know that Ayrton Senna, the Brazilian three-time champion, was the last driver to be killed in an F1 crash. Fewer people are likely to be aware of the internal politics and the macabre aura over that race weekend, and no-one had seen until this film the footage of Senna's backroom srguments with FIA bosses during pre-race driver's meetings, in which he pleaded for changes to be made to tracks to improve safety. In the post-screening Q&A at the preview I attended, the director said he saw footage of Senna criticising the specific corner on which his fatal accident later took place. However, he decided not to include that in the film - given the number of track features Senna remarked upon during his time in racing, he thought cherry-picking that footage would have added drama at the expense of authenticity.

I thought that was very admirable. And Senna is definitely authentic. The visuals are stitched together entirely from footage of Senna and, although there's the occasional snippet of interview voiceover to set context or explain what we're seeing, the story largely tells itself. The combination of previously unseen backstage footage and clips of classic F1 races on the big screen was for me entirely compelling. I thought the fact I found it hard to imagine anyone having a different reaction might just be down to my lack of imagination but surely not every reviewer who contributed to its 100% Rotten Tomatoes rating can also be a motorsport geek. In fact, even sport-hater Mark Kermode commended it on his 5Live show. Recommendations don't come much better than that.

Closer to the Edge

2011-05-22T11:10:00.000-07:00

a.k.a. TT3D

Richard de Aragues, 2011

A couple of months ago the BBC broadcast a documentary about 'the killer years' of Formula 1 (here's a link to the first part on youtube). It documents how, in the 1960s and 70s, drivers were frequently killed in racing incidents. Their cars were fast but flimsy, easily breaking into pieces - which could then fly into the cockpit - or bursting into flames. The tracks were lined with trees and walls - rather than gravel run-off for a more gentle stop - and haybales, leading to spectacular inflagrations. The drivers lacked the fireproof suits and head-and-neck-support systems which nowadays prevent them from burning alive and snapping their spines respectively. F1 now has far fewer sickening moments and even fewer serious injuries. No-one's died in a crash since 1994, the year Ayrton Senna - the subject of a documentary opening on 3 June - was killed in San Marino.

The same cannot be said for motorcycle racing. Its competitors are prone to being flung from their vehicles - occasionally into the path of their competitors - and lack a surrounding chassis to absorb impact energy. Most track motorcycle races are, however, held on circuits with similar safety features to those used in F1: Armco crash barriers, tyre walls, long run-off areas at corners. No such luxuries for those who race for the Isle of Man tourist trophies every June, though. This circuit round the roads of the island is lined with the features of everyday driving - houses, walls, lampposts - but the top racers average 130mph round the circuit, hitting 200 plus on the straights.

Shot in the lead up to the 2010 Isle of Man racing festival, the movie culminates with tense footage from the five main races of the weekend. The hero of sorts is Guy Martin, a straight-talking northern mechanic who loves fixing lorries, masturbating and, most of all, racing motorbikes. He's like a two-wheeled Karl Pilkington (a thought I was dismayed to discover wasn't an original one), with probably more self-awareness than he lets on but plenty of charisma and casual confidence in his singular worldview. Before 2010, he's had podium (top three) finishes in several TTs but hasn't won one - he's determined to put that right this year.

Since I had no idea what happened at the 2010 TT before I went to see this film, I found it as exciting and suspenseful as watching the action live would be. I'd strongly recommend anyone thinking of seeing it to do so without researching the results beforehand. Guy Martin is not the only rider the film-makers interviewed; there are many others, and the tension comes not only from wondering whether the riders you've met will win, but whether they'll survive - intact or otherwise. It's not giving much away to say that one or two of the later interviews' subjects are filmed talking from their hospital beds.

Closer to the Edge has a perfectly-balanced combination of race footage, backstage events and personal stories. Run by enthusiasts, populated by amateur riders and providing nail-biting thrills for spectators, the TT was so well showcased by this film that I'm now wondering how best to make it over to watch next year's in person.

Noruwei no mori

2011-03-31T12:28:00.000-07:00

a.k.a. Norwegian Wood

Tran Anh Hung, 2010. BBFC rating: 15.

Being a teenager is rubbish. This film gets that right - though really these kids should, by the age they've reached (which seems to be about 19), have at least begun to grow out of the stage of sulking and sobbing. On the contrary, however, the kids in Norwegian Wood spend their time moping, crying, walking melancholically around fields, killing themselves, and having awkward, miserable sex. Sometimes they combine these activities.

And they're the lucky ones. At least adolescent angst is interesting to the angstee: what's in it for the audience? Well, we get some pretty cinematography. But that's about it. There's the occasional laugh, no doubt unintended by the director, as when our hero stands on a cliff screaming at the sky to the backing of a screeching orchestra. (Yes, really.) The score is awful - grating, hammy, and distracting. Apparently it was put together by Jonny Greenwood off of Radiohead, which makes it rather a fall from grace for him.

Mind you, the film is actually rather reminiscent in tone of early Radiohead. Take "Street Spirit" with its adolescent, portentous and surely in retrospect embarrassing lyrics ("cracked eggs, dead birds, scream as they fight for life": 'cause if you're 14, you know that life's really all about death), which is tonally similar to this. There are two major differences, however. First, "Street Spirit" is shimmering and evocative, unlike either the music or the narrative of Norwegian Wood. And, more importantly, it lasts just over four minutes. Norwegian Wood lasts over thirty times that long. Avoid.

Never Let Me Go / Splice / Legion

2011-02-28T14:05:00.000-08:00

This was originally a post announcing my intention to expand my blogging subjects to include science, but the projected expansion hasn't materialised so I have edited it down to just the movie reviews originally included in the post.

I have seen a couple of newish films recently so I'll quickly share my views on them.

First up is Never Let Me Go, the adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro's 2005 novel of the same name. The novel is pretty much perfect - allowing the reader a glimpse of an other (but not very other) world through the eyes of a character immersed in a small part of it. She gets only small clues, the significance of which she rarely understand, and it's left to the reader to infer the science behind the fiction. Unfortunately the film is a little more explicit about that than the novel - some things that should be left to the viewer to infer are presented directly instead - though not to the extent that it spoils what is an excellent adaptation. Like the book, the movie is all about its three main characters and their love triangle. And I was relieved to find that the song after which the book is named is up to the job it has in the film.

Splice, which I missed at the cinema and caught recently on bluray, is altogether different. Science in this is a case of throwing lots of exciting data and cells and swirling nucleotides around, mixing them all up, and seeing what happens. It's as close to the reality of genetic engineering as Hackers was to the reality of bypassing network security. It's really nicely shot - lots of great low angle shots of labs and shacks - and it has a good monster (secretly created by the rockstar science bods in an act of rebellion when their boss asks them instead to make boring proteins all day). Fun, but very silly.

Not as silly as Legion, mind you, which I just watched on bluray. This is The Terminator meets From Dusk til Dawn meets the nativity story. Except even more portentous and absurd than that sounds. Still, again, it's pretty good fun.

Black Swan

2011-02-06T12:25:00.000-08:00

Darren Aronofsky, 2010.

BBFC rating: 15.

There's a book by called The Black Swan about 'the impact of the highly improbable'. It may be full of interesting facts and astute analysis, but I will never know because the first few pages, which are all I managed, are such an absurdly over-written, insufferably smug, self-congratulatory wankfest that I threw the book into the bin lest some other unfortunate soul should find it and suffer the same blood-boiling rage that I did. This has nothing to do with Black Swan, a far superior piece of work; I am simply providing a public service by warning you off its awful titular twin.

Black Swan tells the story of Natalie Portman's obsessive, uptight ballet dancer and her struggle to embody the dark side of her Swan Lake character. It has a fairly straightforward horror movie narrative: we are introduced to the characters and follow them around for half an hour or so before the occasional strange happenings multiply and intensify, accelerating us towards the inevitable conclusion. Though clearly belonging in the psychological horror category, Black Swan was featured on the cover of high-end coffee table film mag Little White Lies as well as grindhouse periodical Fangoria: it has transcended the genre, such that several unsuspecting souls have found themselves traumatised at the end of a film they anticipated would be a nice family ballet movie. It's not. But, while its sticking to horror convention makes its plot predictable - as with many such movies (including Heartless, of which it rather reminded me) - that is no bad thing. It is, of course, all about the journey - which is well worth making.

127 Hours

2011-01-29T03:05:00.000-08:00

Danny Boyle, 2010

BBFC rating: 15

Self-surgery is quite an ordeal for someone with the training, skills and equipment to carry it out - as recorded in this case report of a surgeon who, stuck in the Antarctic and faced with death as the alternative, removed his own appendix. Included are extracts from the surgeon's diary:

An oppressive feeling of foreboding hangs over me ... This is it ... I have to think through the only possible way out: to operate on myself ... It’s almost impossible ... but I can’t just fold my arms and give up...

I didn’t permit myself to think about anything other than the task at hand. It was necessary to steel myself, steel myself firmly and grit my teeth...

I grow weaker and weaker, my head starts to spin. Every 4-5 minutes I rest for 20-25 seconds. Finally, here it is, the cursed appendage! With horror I notice the dark stain at its base. That means just a day longer and it would have burst...

But even this looks controlled and safe compared to the 'operation' Aron Ralston carried out on himself five days after his arm became trapped under a huge boulder down a crevice in the middle of a desert. He had to deliberately break both bones in his forearm before cutting through the muscle, blood vessels, tendons, nerves and probably various other tissues that would be very painful to snip using a blunt penknife. 127 Hours, as its title implies, tells the story of what happened over that period. Now the story above might make you wince in sympathetic agony, imagining the horror of being faced with the choice between that and death yourself. Or you might agree with Michael Legge (I usually do; his blog is brilliant, the best written by a comedian that I know of) who has a less sympathetic take on the scenario:

The whole way through the film your head can't help shouting "YOU STUPID FUCKING PRICK" constantly. Who the fuck does these things? Who invented extreme sports? Why is smashing yourself to bits thought of as a rush? Isn't Batman on the Wii enough? 127 Hours is a true story about a man who likes going into the middle of the desert, WHERE NO ONE CAN FIND HIM, and climbing deep down into tiny crevaces hundreds of feet into the rock. WHAT A CUNT. I hate him. When he falls, traps his arm and spends six days going insane until he cuts his own arm off, it was all I could do to stop myself standing up and shouting "THERE YOU GO, YOUNG MAN. YOU DESERVED THAT..."

I can see his point.

As Ralston waits to die - slim chances of rescue slipping away - he remenisces about an ex-girlfriend, played by Clémence Poésy (seen recently in Harry Potter and Heartless), whose presence would brighten any film. Like The King's Speech, this is a true story so its narrative and conclusion are unlikely to surprise anyone. The only mystery is how Boyle is going to make it interesting. Which he does, with brass knobs on. It's certainly more interesting than reading interviews with Ralston himself, who seems to largely blather on about fate and Gaia and spirituality and other such drivel. 127 Hours is totally gripping, in part because of the memory sequences and the hallucinatory sections (which play out much like the cold turkey scenes in Boyle's Trainspotting). But it's also remarkable just how enthralling the footage of a man stuck under a rock manages to be.

The King's Speech

2011-01-28T10:19:00.000-08:00

Tom Hooper, 2010.

BBFC rating: 12A (on appeal)

For anyone who doesn't already know, The King's Speech depicts the relationship between King George VI and his speech therapist over the period in which he ascends to the throne and the start of the second world war is declared. The reason Bertie (as he is known to his familiars and, to his chagrin, the therapist) needs the therapist is his stammer, which has destroyed any previous attempts he's made at public speaking (whether in person or on the radio).

It's interesting for being one of few films to have its initial rating overturned on appeal. Given a 15 certificate at first for language, its rating was dropped to 12A after the producers challenged the BBFC. The key line from the second decision, I think, is "The strong language is not aggressive and not directed at any person". This is the difference between The King's Speech and Made in Dagenham; the producer of that film complained about its 15 certificate, too, but the BBFC's decision on that film notes that "Generally the uses [of 'fuck'] occur as part of heated exchanges between characters, occasionally they are angrily directed." It's the intent and the subject of the speech that matters. And Bertie is expressing only his own frustration, about his inability to express himself, at himself.

Colin Firth is expected to win the Oscar for this performance, and he indeed wholly convincing - as he was in last year's A Single Man. And, like that film, The King's Speech is a self-contained piece, as narrowly focused as the poster picture above, which perfectly achieves its aims. However, it's weirdly insubstantial, especially given the gravitas of its subjects. Possibly this is because, as Andrew Collins points out, there is not a surprise in its entire length. And it's not a film I would ever bother seeing again; nor is it one that needs to be seen at the cinema. But it's good while it lasts.

Love and Other Drugs

2011-01-19T10:01:00.000-08:00

Edward Zwick, 2010.

BBFC rating: 15.

In Love and Other Drugs Jake Gyllenhaal plays Jamie, a university drop-out from a family of doctors who is hired as a trainee drug rep by Pfizer. His job largely consists of trying to persuade medics to drop Prozac in favour of Zoloft, while his principle leisure activity is seducing countless women. Sometimes the two parts of his life overlap. He gets involved in an unlikely love triangle with Maggie (a client's patient, played by Anne Hathaway) and an ex-military rep from a rival pharma firm. Meanwhile, there are rumours about a forthcoming drug for erectile dysfunction. Suiting perfectly his work-life balance, Viagra is the drug he was born to push. But might Jamie also be coming round to the idea of being a one-woman man? And, if so, is Maggie - who has a degenerative neurological condition as well as a feisty attitude - willing to be that woman?

So there's an interesting story underlying Love and Other Drugs. Unfortunately the film doesn't seem to quite be sure of what it's trying to do. On the one hand it's a romantic comedy, according to which Jamie must both grow up and overcome a series of obstacles to win Maggie's affection and fidelity. On the other, it's a sort of expose of the nepotism and corruption in the relationships between the medical and pharmaceutical industries in the United States. It's also trying to sensitively portray Maggie's dealing with and learning about Parkinson's disease. And it manages all of these with some limited success, but as a result it seems uneven. I found it difficult to settle into a mode of watching it, often not knowing quite the point of each scene until it was over (if at all). It's a shame this project wasn't handed to Jason Reitman (director of Thank You for Smoking and Up in the Air), who is a master of this sort of material, managing to court the emotive, the comedic and the profound without fully committing to any, but without selling any of them short either. That's something that Love and Other Drugs fails to achieve.

Top ten of 2010

2010-12-31T08:55:00.000-08:00

Obviously I haven't seen every film released this year, nor even a representative sample. I've missed several critics' favourites that might well have made it onto my list had I seen them (Winter's Bone and Of Gods and Men in particular I look forward to catching on DVD next year). But, for what it's worth, here is my top ten of 2010.

1. Enter the Void.

I was surprised by how muted was the critical reception of this masterpiece. I found watching it a quasi-spiritual experience and am eagerly anticipating the bluray release so I can share it with others (albeit even in HD the home viewing won't match the overpowering cinematic experience).

2. Kick-Ass.

Of all the films on this list, this is the one I've watched the most and I suspect is the one which will stand up to the most repeat viewings. I predicted it would become a favourite lazy afternoon watch when I first saw it, and so it has proved. It's still hilarious, shocking and exhilarating after four or five viewings in the space of a few months.

3. Four Lions.

I think Mark Kermode's completely right in saying this film is not a comedy - it has funny scenes but for the most part they're simultaneously heavy with tragedy. It is, however, brilliant.

4. Gainsbourg.

Charming, witty, surreal, original, inventive, and very French. There's no need to like or even know Serge Gainsbourg's work in order to love this movie.

5. Heartless.

The best of the 2010 horror movies I saw. Bloody, melancholy, charming and never dull, the film cleverly makes monsters both of ancient demons and modern hoodies. Genuinely scary in several parts and a story that stays with you for days afterwards.

6. A Prophet.

I saw this before starting these reviews, so no title link, but on twitter at the time I said that it was totally engaging despite being 155 mins long, which was high praise from someone with my attention span. I think this was underselling it a bit. Un Prophete is one of the best crime films I've ever seen, up there with Casino and Heat. In fact, probably better than both of them.

7. Shutter Island.

Another underrated film, and better than the highly enjoyable but flimsy Inception. I loved it on first viewing, being gripped by the story, moved by the DiCaprio character's loss, and (apparently somewhat naively) surprised by the ending. My opinion of it went down a little after seeing it for a second time, but I think this was because Vue, ridiculously, left some of the lights on. This is a film that needs to be seen in the dark.

8. A Single Man.

A lovely, polished film, played piano throughout and with wholly believable characters and relationships. One of those films that is, within its own narrow confines, pretty much perfect.

9. Skeletons.

I watched this again on DVD over Christmas. It's a really fantastic film: strange without being wacky, moving but not remotely sentimental. It's a shame it'll probably never get the audience it deserves: it's probably only thanks to Jason Isaacs' supporting role (hello to Jason Isaacs) that it got any publicity to speak of. Incidentally, it is also the film of 2010 with the best-named actresses: Tuppence Middleton and Paprika Steen.

10. The Girl who Played with Fire.

I put this in tenth place as it's my favourite of the three Swedish Millennium adaptations, but obviously it needs to be seen between The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl who Kicked the Hornet's Nest. A superb series of crime thrillers with Noomi Rapace playing Lisbeth Salander so perfectly that it's difficult to see why David Fincher is bothering to remake them, other than that people can't be bothered watching subtitled films.

And I also just wanted to note the best movie review of the year: without a doubt, and by a country mile, Lindy West's evisceration of Sex and the City 2. Reading this is as fun as watching Kick-Ass, possibly more so.

And finally, a happy new year to all four of my readers! I much appreciate every page view and comment.

Luftslottet som sprängdes

2010-12-19T07:22:00.000-08:00

a.k.a.

The Girl who Kicked the Hornet's Nest

Daniel Alfredson, 2009.

BBFC rating: 15.

Like Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, this is an adaptation of final part of a much-loved series of novels. It starts immediately where its predecessor finished, Lisbeth being airlifted from the scene of her attempted murder of her father, defected Soviet spy Alexander Zalachenko. Shortly afterwards, while she is still recovering in hospital from her cranial gunshot wound, the police attempt to interview and then charge her for this crime. Meanwhile, a secretive sub-section of the security police is at work trying to prevent the exposure of their conspiracy to protect the abusive, conscience-free Zalachenko - by whatever means necessary. Mikael and Millenium (the magazine he edits) also become targets when it transpires they intend to publish an expose of this conspiracy in the run-up to Lisbeth's trial. Things are further complicated by the fact that Lisbeth's brother - enormous, sociopathic and congenitally immune to pain - is on the loose. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest is not the best of the Millenium trilogy, in my opinion - the narrative requires a lot of setup before the action can begin properly, and it doesn't feel as self-contained as the first two in the series. But, like its source novel, it's a satisfying conclusion to the series.

Srpski Film

2010-12-11T05:28:00.000-08:00

a.k.a.

A Serbian Film

Srdan Spasojevic, 2010.

BBFC rating: 18 (with compulsory cuts)

One of the few films in recent years to have been refused an 18 certificate in its uncut form, Sprski Film would be interesting for that fact alone - just as last year's Gurotesuku (Grotesque) was for being rejected in its entirety. But unlike Grotesque - which was nasty, unrelenting torture with no narrative or message - A Serbian Film is a transfixing, astonishing piece of work.

The story follows Milos, a semi-retired porn actor now married with a young son. The opening scene involves this son watching one of his father's movies. (This is not by any means the film's most disturbing scene involving sex and children.) Milos is offered a final job by Vukmir, a filmmaker who wants to make a new type of porn film. The catch is that the artistic process means he's not allowed to see the script in advance; rather, he must explore the possibilities of each setup in real time, ostensibly to heighten the film's realism. However, the real reason Milos isn't shown the script is that Vukmir wants him to perform acts so illegal, immoral and reprehensible that he would never have signed up had he known. But is it too late for Milos to get out of the strictly-enforced contract?

The BBFC report makes interesting reading, but be warned that many of the more shocking scenes are described in such detail that reading it may diminish the power of the film. Having said that, the BBFC have insisted that A Serbian Film be cut by 4 minutes and 12 seconds for its theatrical and home video release so they've done a pretty good job of that themselves. Though, as I've said before, I find the BBFC's decisions thoughtful and reasonable, these decisions are restricted by the guidelines against which they judge films. The current guidelines are such that they

required forty-nine individual cuts, across eleven scenes. A number of cuts were required to remove elements of sexual violence that tend to eroticise or endorse sexual violence. Further cuts were required to scenes in which images of children are intercut with images of adult sexual activity and sexual violence.

It seems impossible that these cuts haven't softened the film's horror. In its uncut form, this is one of the most affecting, disturbing movies I've ever seen. Having little interest in supernatural 'scares', I find most horrific the films that plausibly show people battling with the worst of which humanity is capable. That's one of the reasons I tend to defend so-called torture porn. But in A Serbian Film this theme is really ramped up, because it explores the real horror of what we, through our protagonist, are capable of doing - under the right circumstances, with the right kind of nudging. Vukmir is a sociopathic Milgram, twisting and stretching Milos' free will while observing the results with an excited detachment. The results are stylishly grim, and the conclusion both appalling and inevitable.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows part 1

2010-12-08T12:11:00.000-08:00

David Yates, 2010.

BBFC rating: 12A.

I finished reading the seventh Harry Potter book for the second time a couple of days ago. The first time I read it, I hated the ending, which I thought was a cop-out, a deus ex machina with a sickening and obvious postscript. Either my cynicism has mellowed or I had previously missed something - I think the latter - because I found it much less egregious this time round. Something I appreciated much more was the structure of the story. The first time I read it, it bothered me that so little was achieved within the first two thirds of the story by the trio around which the it revolves - Harry, Ron and Hermione, who are trying to locate and destroy the six horcruxes in which Voldemort has secreted parts of his soul. And the first half of this story is what this latest film adapts, so the action is sporadic, the outlook generally bleak and the achievements few and far between. But that's how projects go in the real world: it's the slog and the thinking, the exasperation and hand-wringing, that subtly creates the conditions required for its completion. And that's what we see in this film. The payoff comes in part 2, which opens next July. No doubt it, like this and all the other movies in the series, will suffer from unconvincing acting. But, like the more recent Potter adaptations, it will have some spectacular scenes of magic, death and bittersweet victory.

Video Nasties: The Definitive Guide

2010-11-19T19:16:00.000-08:00

Jake West, 2010. BBFC rating: 18.

The BBFC, which certifies TV and film into age appropriate categories, doesn't have much of an impact on the watching habits of most adults in this country these days. Although it refused Grotesque an 18 certificate last year, anyone with an interest was able to acquire a digital copy with little effort. It also refused certificates to two other films: NF713 and My Daughter's a Cocksucker were rejected for, respectively, eroticising sexual torture and 'being likely to encourage an interest in sexually abusive activity'. Regardless of your views on censorship in general, these reasons are at least thoughtful and serious.

This seems to be the case for most, if not all, the BBFC's recent decisions. Often they exhibit a wry sense of humour, as in this excerpt from their most recent annual report:

Despite the widespread media coverage of our decision to classify Lars von Trier’s Antichrist ‘18’ with no cuts, we only received 10 complaints. The film was described by correspondents as an “abomination”, “pornographic” and “common trash”. All the comments were made in response to the media coverage; none of the complainants had actually seen the film. Indeed, there was some confusion about the actual nature of the film, with some people believing it to be a film about religion or Jesus Christ.

Anyone who speaks fluent bureaucratese will see the grin and sneer suppressed beneath this polite choice of words. I highly recommend reading the report in full (pdf) - it's full of this sort of thing, particularly delightful when describing the complaints received from teenagers about decisions to certify games and films at 18, and is in any case a fascinating insight into film classification and censorship.

The fact that the complaints about Antichrist were made by people who had not even bothered to research the film's content, much less see it, should not come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the moral panic about video nasties in the early 1980s. As Video Nasties explains, the moral panic may have been spurious, ill-informed and hysterical, but the distributors of the films in question didn't help themselves. By rebranding Day of the Woman as I Spit on Your Grave (admittedly evocative, though not of the film's contents), they were appealing to paternalistic politicians along with excitable teens. Mary Whitehouse and The Daily Mail went through the roof and survey statistics were deliberately misinterpreted and put to good use in lies fed to the public and Parliament.

Moralisers and politicians working together behind closed doors soon led to the introduction of the Video Recordings Act, which required the BBFC to certify any video recording before it could be legally distributed, and the director of public prosecutions compiled a list of films thought to breach obscenity laws - the soon-to-be-infamous list of video nasties.

Video Nasties is rare as a documentary that allows those with opposing views to defend themselves. Alongside the talking heads of academics and producers of modern horror movies sit interviews with and clips of contemporaneous footage of those who opposed the video nasties. The director of public prosecutions and the MP who introduced the Act remenisce about and are clearly proud of the roles they played. The forces of good don't need to lie to make the other side look bad; they're perfectly capable of doing that for themselves, and the story speaks for itself.

It's not often I complain about a film being too short, but this documentary is only 70-odd minutes long and it seems a shame they didn't say more about ongoing controversies, a brief mention of the controversy surrounding A Serbian Film aside. (Of which more should be expected soon, as the movie is slated for a theatrical release in December. Expect Christopher Tookey to hit the roof.) Regardless, anyone interested in video nasties should buy this DVD boxset quickly, before the limited run of 5000 sells out. They should also check out the Video Nasty Project.

The documentary ends with the grim prediction that the current lack of online censorship - of youtube and the like - will likely one day seem distant and utopic, and a reminder that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. All it takes is The Daily Mail to write a couple of stories spuriously linking a horrible crime or manufactured teenage trend to a subset of films for our politicians to blindly grasp for the parchment. Recent reactions to drug policy critics demonstrate that they cannot be trusted to seek evidence or balance before speaking or legislating. Is it too optimistic to predict they'd have a tougher time stamping on creative and expressive freedom in the age of web 2.0? I hope not.

Packaged with another two DVDs featuring trailers for each of the 72 video nasties, along with introductions by academics and filmmakers as well as a series of postcards featuring lurid promotional artwork, Video Nasties is a great coffee table item as well as an essential reference for these era-defining films.

Cross-posted to D-Notice.

The Social Network

2010-11-15T15:03:00.000-08:00

David Fincher, 2010. BBFC rating: 12A.

I'm sure there are few people who don't know that this film is about the origins and subsequent legal disputes over the ownership of facebook. Mark Zuckerberg created the website at Harvard in 2004, with the financial help of a friend and some creative help (or so this film assumes) unwittingly provided by a trio of upper class jocks. Zuckerberg is played by Jesse Eisenberg, the likeable lead from Zombieland. As such, although he's frequently gauche and occasionally a bit of a tit, 'Zuckerberg' seems largely likeable. It's unclear how similar 'Zuckerberg' is to Zuckerberg. And that's the only downside to a fast-paced, dialogue-heavy movie: I would much have preferred to know that what I was watching was a close approximation to the truth - though, for reasons the postscript explains, that truth is valuable and closely guarded. Facebook is so much a part of most of our lives that its origins are bound to be a subject of curiosity. But, even taken largely as a work of fiction, The Social Network is well worth seeing. It's not a cinematic movie, though, so one to add to the rental list rather than struggling to see it before it leaves the big screen.

Heartless

2010-11-15T12:42:00.000-08:00

Philip Ridley, 2010. BBFC rating: 18.

I hadn't realised when watching it on bluray recently that Heartless only came out this year - a British horror film that, like Salvage, had a home video release date only days after its theatrical release. It's set, from what I could tell, around London's Commercial Street and the backroads of Bethnal Green (quiet streets meandering around and under railway arches) and lit in a tungsten orange that works so much better than the same colour scheme does in Let Me In.

Jamie is a 25 year old photographer who seems to work in a family firm. He lives with his mother and reveres his late father, also a photographer, who's played by Timothy Spall. In looks and in some respects in character, he's like an older, less confident Donnie Darko. That lack of confidence he attributes to the large heart-shaped birthmark on his face. His home streets of east London are plagued with violent gangs of hooded and masked young men - a not dissimilar world from that portrayed in last year's utterly depressing Harry Brown - according to the media. But Jamie knows better - these are not humans, but demons. And extremely effective, chilling demon faces they have too - these are not the friendly or stupid monsters of Buffy and the like.

I'd suggest watching it without knowing too much of what comes next, but suffice it to say Jamie is led into extreme darkness, seduced by its opportunities and attempting to dodge complicity. He also sees a chance to obtain love and happiness with Tia, an aspiring model played by Clémence Poésy (who was Fleur Delacour in the fourth Harry Potter film). But this is a horror movie, not a romance. It explores good and evil, free will and its absence, the visual nature of beauty, and the despair of being powerless. And if that makes it sound like a load of pretentious old tosh, don't worry - it isn't.

Heartless has not, however, been universally revered. The reviews on Rotten Tomatoes demonstrate the fairly extreme divide between those who loved it and those who didn't. Even Ben Austwick, with whom I normally agree entirely, slates it. I can't say I understand the negative coverage it received, but I can tell you that it reminded me of films and books I love, and maybe that'll go some way to suggesting its appeal. As well as Harry Brown and Donnie Darko, Heartless strongly put me in mind of Irvine Welsh's experimental novel Marabou Stork Nightmares and this year's British indie movie Skeletons. It evokes some of the visceral dread conjured by the likes of Antichrist and A Serbian Film. And it has the sad beauty of the tender moments in a Gaspar Noé movie - the siblings playing together in Enter the Void, or Monica Belluci reading in the sunshine at the end of Irréversible.

And the thing that really sold me on Heartless: it's a film that has devils and demons alongside guns and gangsters, and pulls it off without selling either aspect short. Daniel Stamm and Eli Roth, take note - here's how to make a realist film with supernatural elements that doesn't alienate its audience. I really can't say enough good things about Heartless. It must be one of the five or six best films of the year. If you live in the UK, rent it. If you live in the States, you're in luck - it premieres there tomorrow.

Let Me In

2010-11-13T01:51:00.000-08:00

Matt Reeves, 2010. BBFC rating: 15.

I've been both excited about and dreading Let Me In, the English-language remake of Swedish vampire movie Let the Right One In, that modern classic which I loved and which real critics - as well as I - thought was the best film of 2009.

The story is the same. A bullied and lonely 12-year-old boy - called Owen rather than Oskar in this version - befriends an odd local child, apparently a girl of the same age, though as a vampire neither her sex nor her age are quite what they seem. They slowly grow fond of each other, though Abby's time in Owen's neighbourhood is limited: her necessity for blood means she and her cohabitee, an older man with whom she has a complex relationship, leave a trail.

The first thing that really struck me about Let Me In was the colour. Where Let the Right One In is shot in brilliant white light, Let Me In glows faintly orange. It's the same as the difference between the tungsten and flourescent settings on a camera's white balance. And one of the things that made Let the Right One In so special for me was its visuals, the contrast between the pure white snow and the occasional flashes of colour when ruby red blood drips onto it, or a rubix cube is foregrounded against it. This contrast is lost in the remake.

There are other problems, for me, with this new version. Abby - though well played by Chloë Moretz, who was Hit Girl in Kick-Ass - seems slightly too old, when compared to Eli, and she also lacks Eli's other-wordly qualities. Many of the key scenes are very similar to, but never better than, the original. The audience is spoon-fed the story and the nature of the vampire's life is revealed in ways that were only hinted at in the stark, fill-in-the-blanks narrative of the original. Similarly, the soundtrack gives the audience a bit too much, and is a little irritating at times - though it works well in the tense and dramatic scenes, it feels intrusive in the slower, quiter scenes.

Although I'm comparing it entirely negatively with the original, Let Me in isn't a bad film - considered on its own it's a very good film indeed, though it's hard to know how the experience would differ for someone who had not seen the original - but it's simply superfluous. There'd be no point owning this inferior remake because when it came to rewatching, you'd pick Let the Right One In every time.

Mr Nice

2010-10-23T04:44:00.000-07:00

Bernard Rose, 2010. BBFC rating: 18.

Quite the reverse of Made in Dagenham, Mr Nice inspired in me nostalgia for the 60s and 70s. Apparently, back then, drug dealers were cheeky chappies gallavanting about the world making everyone stoned and happy. It's a biopic about Howard Marks, the notorious cannabis smuggler, based on his 1996 book of the same name. And the portrayal of trafficking in Mr Nice is about as far from that in The Wire as you can get. This is closer to the jolly larks of Just William.

The film follows Marks from his sixth form in rural Wales, through undergraduate study at Oxford, to his business travels from Pakistan to California via Northern Irish farmhouses - and, inevitably, to jail. It's odd in the early part of the movie seeing Rhys Ifans, a man clearly in his forties, being patronised by his parents and his 20-years-younger peers. But as Marks leaves Oxford, starts teaching and accidentally falls into being a smuggler (and a part-time spy), the disparity melts away and Ifans is so convincing that I soon forgot Marks wasn't playing himself.

Marks' wife Judy is played by Chloë Sevigny - last seen in Werner Herzog's surreal soap opera My son, My son, what have ye done? only a few weeks back - who is as alluring and subtle as ever in this, moving from coquettish hippie to homely mother without becoming another character entirely. Partly this is because she is always, clearly, in love with Howard: something demonstrated on screen by gooey eyes as well as various restrained sex scenes.

Given this lack of anything sexually explicit, or much violence, I was curious about why the film had been given an 18 rating. Visiting the BBFC classification decision, I was surprised to find that reason was simply the fact that everyone is constantly smoking and talking about weed - the film thus requiring "an adult understanding of the complex moral and social issues surrounding soft drug use". In other words, it makes being a stoner look like a lot of fun. The rating most likely demonstrates the BBFC's knowledge that parents, believing their teenagers to be naive but suggestible, don't want them being encouraged to skin up. Of course, any teen stoner can pick up the book on which Mr Nice is based. I read it at 15 or 16 and I'm pretty sure it made me want to be an international drug smuggler, an ambition I fortunately failed to pursue.

Oh, the BBFC decision does note that we are also treated to the "brief sight of the head of a man’s penis after he has drawn a face on it". That'll be Jim McCann, then: the crazy, drunken, stoned, gun-toting, whoring but kind of lovable pal of Marks' who helps him channel drugs via Ireland (his IRA pals letting tons of hash through customs in the belief they're "importing guns for the cause"). Fotunately the movie manages to portray McCann and other quirky characters without turning them into Guy Ritchie caricatures.

I quite enjoyed Mr Nice. It comprises a series of well-acted, amusing set pieces but because I've read the source material, I was able to fill in the gaps - such as most of his time in prison, and the ingenuity of many of the smuggling schemes that was only hinted at in the film - and so for me it felt as though it had a depth which may well not be apparent to someone coming to it afresh. I think a TV series lasting four or six hours would have allowed for more drama by giving the audience a greater investment in the characters, as well as building up more tension by having the time to show the schemes' successes in detail as well as their failures. And there's little in the film that requires the cinema experience, good though Philip Glass' soundtrack (clearly inspired by Catch Me if You Can) sounds. But within the limitations of the two hour format, the filmmakers have probably done Marks' life to date as much justice as was possible. And that's a good enough reason to make it worth seeing.

Made in Dagenham

2010-10-22T10:41:00.000-07:00

Nigel Cole, 2010. BBFC rating: 15.

1968 was over a decade before I was born. But even so I found it hard to swallow the fact that trade unions and other supposedly progressive voices were opposed to equal pay for women, a notion that wouldn't now be seriously raised by anyone outside the confines of 'Have your say'. That the Equal Pay Act of 1970 was introduced two years later owed much to the walkouts by female workers at Ford's Dagenham plant which are the subject of Made in Dagenham.

Rita, the accidental head of this campaign, is played by Sally Hawkins, who played the slightly irritating lead in Mike Leigh's recent Happy-Go-Lucky. She's much more likeable and rounded in this role, growing in confidence and conviction as she takes on increasingly difficult authorities in the fight for equality. Her relationships with her children and husband, strained by the amount of time she dedicates to her cause, is moving and believable. The sub-plots intertwine naturally with the main narrative while exploring interesting and related issues. And there's a nice, unobtrusive soundtrack to boot including the lovely, underappreciated Small Faces' chart-topper All or Nothing. All this adds up to an historically interesting and extremely well-crafted film. In that sense, though not in visual or dramatic style, it reminded me of earlier this year's A Single Man - another film about a time where the intolerance of things now unremarkable (in that case, being gay) was widespread.

Although it's easy to look back forty years with amazement at now unimaginable sytematic discrimination, as I write this senior clerics are, apparently seriously, debating whether female bishops should be allowed. So perhaps we shouldn't be so quick to sneer at the sexist sixties - and perhaps Made in Dagenham has some messages we can learn from today. Not least of these messages is a counterpoint to the tiresome stereotype of Essex girls - to whose pride and determination, this film makes clear, we are indebted.

The Human Centipede (First Sequence)

2010-10-14T10:22:00.000-07:00

Tom Six, 2009. BBFC rating: 18.

I'd been looking forward to seeing The Human Centipede since I heard Boyd Hilton describe it as the most disgusting film he's ever seen on the 5 live review show on 20 August. Only six weeks later, it was released on DVD and blu-ray. The publicity it received seems disproportionate to its very limited cinema run and subsequent quick home video release. Presumably most of this was to do with the disgust factor from the concept of the titular monstrosity, a "centipede" made by surgically stitching three humans together by their gastric passages, cakehole to arsehole.

The film is described in the promotional gumph as being "100% medically accurate!", a claim disputed by an Australian expert in this highly entertaining interview (video, 3m 30s) - although his objections are based on the trailer and are in fact, for the most part, addressed in the film. (One suggestion the jocular doctor makes is that an additional couple of people be stitched in to make a constantly refeeding circular creature!) Regardless of its anatomical credibility, the BBFC wryly notes in its classification decision that "the scenario is so far fetched and bizarre that there is no plausible risk of emulation".

Creating this siamese cut'n'shut is the pet project - quite literally - of insane German surgeon Dr Heiter, played by Dieter Laser with a ferocious intensity that occasionally crosses into pantomime. (Tom Six, the director, describes Laser accurately on the blu-ray commentary as looking like "a dehydrated Christopher Walken" and explains how much the actor put into the character, on more than one occasion leading to his hurting and fighting with his co-stars.)

When Lindsay and Jenny, two young female tourists, get a flat tyre and stumble across Dr Heiter's lair, they're in for a shock as he calmly explains his project to them (having made sure first to drug and lock them up). It's not giving anything away to say that despite their brave escape attempts Dr Heiter's plan, which also includes a Japanese chap with a comparatively enviable position in the chain, is initially successful. The mad medic revels in the delight of his new pet before the centipede's own ambitions and the suspicions of the local police divert his attention to more pressing matters.

Despite Boyd Hilton's promising description of the film, in reality it's the concept that's the most disgusting aspect. The gore is infrequent (but brutal) and much is left to the viewer's imagination. These directorial tactics, along with the cold lighting and the smooth camerawork, reminded me a little of Let the Right One In. And, although The Human Centipede is not quite in the same league as that modern classic, it is a tense, bonkers ride of a movie, well worth checking out if you can get over the gastrointestinally gruesome notion at its core. Roll on the "100% medically INaccurate" sequel, which Tom Six says will feature a dodecapede and make the first sequence look like 'My little Pony'. The Human Centipede (Full Sequence) arrives in cinemas (and, probably more significantly, on the horror shelves of HMV) next year.

Frozen

2010-10-11T08:47:00.000-07:00

The premise of Frozen - the latest film from Adam Green, who made the stupid but fun swamp-based monster movie Hatchet - will be familiar to anyone who's seen the opening episode of the third series of Bottom, in which Richie and Eddie are trapped on a ferris wheel slated for imminent demolition. In Frozen, however, we have three students trapped on a ski lift. With no hope of rescue until the following weekend, by which time they will surely have perished from exposure, one of them needs to find a way to escape the predicament and alert the authorities. But how?

As so often with such a simple set-up, more fun is to be had from finding out how they get into this situation than their subsequent adventures. Probably this is simply because the single location becomes monotonous while both the avenues open to the characters and the potential pitfalls are limited, leading to repetition and a loss of tension. I would have liked to see what was going on back home as they failed to return to their homes and colleges, if only for a change of scenery and characters. After all, they aren't so dislikable that you'd expect their friends and relatives to be simply relieved by their dissapearance (unlike those of the leads in Hostel, say).

Frozen has some nice watch-through-fingers parts arising largely from the effects of the cold on human skin, though it lacks any detailed gore (hence receiving a 15 certificate). It's well-made, convincing and probably as good as a film set mostly on a ski lift could hope to be. But I don't think any such film could expect to become a classic. Currently available free online for lovefilm members despite its recent cinema release, it's certainly worth a watch at that price, but otherwise is probably not worth prioritising unless you find the prospect of being stuck on a ski lift inherently fascinating.

Enter the Void

2010-10-02T02:23:00.000-07:00

Watching Gaspar Noé's Irréversible at the cinema in February 2003 set a new benchmark in my mind for the capabilities of cinema to viscerally affect its audience with scenes of graphic intensity and, in retrospect, probably kickstarted my love of ultraviolent extremist cinema. But it's taken over seven years for Enter the Void - the latest film from the same director - to come along and hit me with the same level of affect.

The film opens, like Irréversible, with too-fast-to-be-readable credits projected over intense flashing lights and banging noises. The narrative begins. Oscar, psychonaut and small time dealer, says goodbye to his sister Linda, who is leaving to go to work as a pole-dancer. Already high on ecstasy and The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Oscar smokes DMT, meets one of his fellow western ex-pat friends and goes to sell a parcel of pills to another whose trust he has recently betrayed. The friend returns the favour, setting him up to be arrested, but Oscar's panic and bluster results in his being shot dead by the cops. His spirit leaves his body and we follow it for the next two hours as it spirals over, through and inside the film's surviving characters, the sleazy neon Tokyo nightlife and his own memories.

Noé makes most directors look like children playing with toys they don't really understand. The visuals in this are extraordinary: trippy, beautiful, erotic, gut-wrenching. A lot has been made (in reviews I've caught up with since seeing the film) of the hallucinatory visuals - it's said to mimic being on drugs. I think some of that may come from the fact that at times it's bathed in too-bright light which pours from pores, cracks and orifices. We see everything through Oscar's drug-widened pupils, the aperture too wide for the conditions. Swooping shots over the neon-drenched Tokyo streets are noticeably motion-blurred. Accompanying this is a soundtrack as encompassing and affecting as that in Irréversible: the same repeated sirens and banging techno drums with occasional diegetic noises joining in (heartbeats, screaming). Every so often a few bars from Air on a G String float into the mix, Noé teasing the audience with some light relief - like a club DJ tantalising the crowd by repeatedly playing a few bars from a dancefloor favourite every few minutes before it's finally played in its entirety.

To my mind, the story of Enter the Void is pretty much beside the point. There's no dramatic tension and little resolution (in the conventional sense). Some reviewers note that it has something to say about death, dualism, spirituality, or reincarnation. Ben Austwick at Quiet Earth says it "it explores an unscientific, druggy spirituality that goes against present day intellectual atheist consensus", whereas Rick McGrath on the same site interprets the entire film as taking place in the mind of the protagonist in the few moments before his death. That's how I read it, too, though perhaps because I unconsciously discounted the former interpretation which sits uncomfortably with my worldview. Anyway, Rick and Ben (both chums of mine, in the interests of full disclosure) both give the movie very high scores: a 9 and a perfect 10, conclusions with which I wholeheartedly concur.

Enter the Void demands a cinema viewing. It's such an immmersive, quasi-spiritual experience. Entirely sucked into the film as I was, I couldn't believe it when someone in an adjacent row started playing with their mobile phone half an hour from the end. Fortunately I was able to move position so I could see the screen but not the light from their phone. But I felt like dragging them out of the cinema and having them excommunicated for blasphemy. And if the cinema is a church, Gaspar Noé is its visionary godhead and Enter the Void is the second coming. It's absolutely phenomenal.

My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?

2010-10-01T11:25:00.000-07:00

Werner Herzog's new movie My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done? is based on a true story about Brad, a rather unbalanced man in his early 30s who kills his mother with an enormous sword and then holes up in a house while the police try to meet his demands and protect his hostages (whose identities are initially unclear) from harm. Between scenes set in the present, there are various flashbacks explaining Brad's recent past and demonstrating his bizarre relationship with his also rather unusual mother and his extremely tolerant fiancée, played by the wonderful Chloë Sevigny (of Larry Clark's Kids fame). The other principal characters involved in all this are the director of a play for whom Brad recently acted and the police chief, played by the even more wonderful Willem Dafoe.

After a very limited cinema showing (two screens, so I was lucky to even manage to catch it), My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done? is already available on DVD. This is the second Herzog project released in 2010, after Bad Lieutenant arriving - coincidentally? - on the shelves at about the same time. (The title of this blog, for the time being, is a Herzog quote about the nature of the universe from Grizzly Man.)

Anyway, moving back to My Son, My Son, etc. It's a hyper-real suburban melodrama. Not too far from what I imagine a feature-length Neighbours season finale - albeit one directed by Herzog and produced by Lynch - would be. This might derive partly from the fact that it's shot digitally, something that I at least haven't yet got used to and still find a little alienating on the big screen. It's also contributed to by the fact that none of its characters acknowledge at any point just how crazy Brad is. They might look a little worried from time to time but, inexplicably, no-one sics the men in white coats on him. Obviously, in retrospect, this is a big mistake.

Tone and feel aside, the story is not hugely entertaining but it keeps your attention. And Herzog seems to have a knack of picking actors, like Nic Cage in Bad Lieutenant and Willem Dafoe in this, who I think can probably rescue just about any movie. (Not Captain Corelli's Mandolin, obviously. But think the otherwise- rather poor Daybreakers, dragged into the worth-watching category by Dafoe's presence.) I tend to agree with Mark Kermode's assessment of My Son - in a sense, it's only OK, but then it's a Herzog film so there are enough wild and wonderful parts to make watching it more than worthwhile. The bottom line is - having mainly watched predictable Hollywood fare recently (Salt, The Expendables, The Other Guys), I was just really pleased to see a film in which the main character keeps pet flamingoes.

The Other Guys

2010-09-24T09:28:00.000-07:00

In The Other Guys two cops, played by Will Ferrel and Mark Wahlberg, make a bid for justice and glory when they stumble upon a huge financial conspiracy while investigating a permit breach. The British conspirator, played by Steve Coogan, owes money to various foreign gangsters and plots to steal billions of dollars from hard working public servants to pay them back. Gamble (Ferrel) and Hoitz (Wahlberg), the eponymous other guys, try to stop them despite their bosses' lack of interest.

The film uses this story to make some hard-hitting political points about the state of the financial industry and its impact on the man on the street. At least, it does over the end credits - as everyone switches their mobiles back on, gathers their belongings and leaves the cinema. In the meantime, The Other Guys uses its story to deliver a sequence of scenes often either mildly amusing or jarring and confusing. There are, however, one or two scenes of genuine comedy - particularly those involving the cops played by Samuel Jackson and 'The Rock' whose place as Manhattan superstars the other guys aim to take when the prior top guns are rendered unfit for action. This goal is pursued enthusiastically by Hoitz, reluctantly by Gamble, and much of the dramatic tension and comedy is based on this disparity.

Although it's not a particularly memorable film, I've spent a lot of time thinking about The Other Guys over the few days since I saw it, trying to work out what I thought of it. And I'm still not sure. Though completely aware that I was watching a film throughout the screening, never losing myself in the drama - often a bad sign - I wasn't bored, and in fact found almost every scene more or less entertaining. I can't say it's a good film, because the story is too jagged and the character development so back-and-forth that it lacks much coherence. But watching The Other Guys is a pleasant enough way to pass a couple of hours.

The Last Exorcism

2010-09-18T00:09:00.000-07:00

I am usually careful not to spoil films when I review them, but in this review I am going to spoil The Last Exorcism (and, to some extent, Rec and The Prestige) in order to explain what spoiled The Last Exorcism for me.

It's a film I've been looking forward to for months, largely because of its association with Eli Roth, whose Hostel movies I love (and am planning to explain why in a forthcoming post on here). Discovering that Roth only produced The Last Exorcism rather than directing it dampened my enthusiasm slightly, but he's been promoting it relentlessly on twitter and elsewhere, and the trailers and reviews I'd come across looked very promising.

One of the things I really like about all of Eli Roth's films so far (that is, Cabin Fever and the two parts of Hostel) is the lack of any supernatural element to the horror. I don't mind good supernatural horror - I quite enjoyed Paranormal Activity, for instance - but it doesn't give me the delicious squirmy fear that a good naturalist or realist horror does. So obviously, with The Last Exorcism, I was anxious that it treat its subject matter with the appropriate skepticism and that the horror derive from the very real insanity, fear and violence of pseudo-possession and exorcisms.

And, for the vast majority of the film, that's exactly what it does. It's shot in the handheld mock-doc style of Rec and The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity. Of those films it's closest conceptually to Rec, an excellent Spanish horror based around 'found footage' from the cameras of a TV documentary crew following firefighters who get inadvertantly quarantined in an old building with a secret. In The Last Exorcism, a two-person camera crew is following Cotton Marcus out to his last exorcism. Marcus is a charismatic evangelical preacher who retains a fondness for his flock despite having gradually lost his faith. He has performed many 'exorcisms' in the past, ridding people of their demons with the help of gadgets and legerdemain. Now he's going to demonstrate how this trickery is achieved by taking on one last case: Nell, a teenage girl from a strict religious background whose family are all dealing with various issues following the loss of their matriarch two years earlier.

As is necessary in order for the movie to work, the characters are all well-played and believable. More could have been made of Nell's brother - it's unclear why he is initially very resistant to the exorcism but mollified when he discovers it's all a fake, and exploring this further would have been interesting. But that observation demonstrates the depth of the characters in this film, especially when compared to a horror film as laughably characterless as The Collector. For the majority of its running time, The Last Exorcism's only weak point is that it regularly betrays its mock-doc premise by adding non-diegetic scare music and offering shots of some scenes from more than one angle. But, though noticeable, these errors of judgement do not spoil the film.

What spoils the film is the ending. It really is a shame because the action is well-paced, the scares are properly creepy and the story is engaging. Marcus investigates the family's extranuclear relationships and discovers there are mysteries other than those of the girl's "possession". And by 80 or so minutes into the film, the mystery appears to have been solved, the girl "exorcised" and the documentary finished.

And then, on their way out of town, a new clue which overturns Marcus' previous explanations surfaces and the crew turns back. And they find that in fact she really was possessed and the locals are forcing her to undergo a medieval ritual involving fire, flesh and chanting. And it's rubbish, and it turns what could have been a really good horror movie into a flop. I hated the ending for the same reason I hated the ending of The Prestige: both films lead you to believe that these characters inhabit the real world, and then suddenly pull the rug from under you and yell Ah! It was magic, after all! Well, that's not an explanation. And these are terrible ways to end otherwise fine films. The Last Exorcism ought to have taken a leaf from the book of Rec: supernatural scares can work if introduced late into a film. But they need to be sufficiently ambiguous to be consistent with what came before. Otherwise you just end up wishing, as I did after watching The Last Exorcism, that they'd deleted the the last 10 minutes or so. Had it finished as the crew left town the first time, the film would have been whole, consistent, tight, and much much better than it actually was.

It's this lost potential that makes The Last Exorcism such a waste of a strong story and some great footage. But I know many reviewers have lamented the ending despite otherwise enjoying it, and hopefully the filmmakers will learn from this and go on to create something that fulfils the potential that The Last Exorcism had.

Salt

2010-09-13T12:47:00.000-07:00

"Who is Salt?" the adverts ask. Is she a KGB operative who has infiltrated the CIA? Or a loyal special agent double crossing the Russians? Either way it's not very 2010, but this 80s throwback action movie is far better than the creaking yawnfest that was The Expendables. Between jumping from one truck to another to escape her former intelligence buddies, trying to save her innocent scientist husband and assassinating key political figures, Angelina Jolie spends most her time simply kicking the crap out of people. The tech stuff is a bit naff in this film, as so often: an fMRI scanner that appears to be invisible, work from a distance of several metres and instantly tell whether a new subject is lying is the most egregious example. (Also worth a mention, the fingerprint scanner that insists on tracking across the subject's fingers slowly like a knackered Canon photocopier.) But on the whole, while never entirely engaging, this film does what's asked of it. In that respect it's better than the aforementioned Sly Stallone offering by a country mile. But Salt is only really worth watching if you've already seen Inception - perhaps twice - and have an urgent need to see some goreless, harmless ass-kicking.

The Expendables

2010-09-04T03:36:00.000-07:00

Tattoos! Knives! Guns! Beards! Just four of the things you'll catch regular glimpses of as The Expendables meanders lumpenly across your field of vision. They're all attached to erstwhile action movie stars including Sly, Dolph, and Arnie - apart from those adorning the odd current star (Jet Li, Jason Statham). Make no mistake, these are men. They don't cry, they don't get scared and they don't have any desire that can't be satisfied in a vehicle workshop.

In her seminal 1985 book Between Men, Eve Kosofsky-Sedgwick described homosociality, the desire for platonic friendship with the same sex. Although these relationships are - like that between a politician and his special adviser - non-sexual, Sedgwick describes how, for example:

What goes on at football games [and] in fraternities.... can look, with only a slight shift of optic, quite startlingly “homosexual”... For a man to be a man’s man is separated only by an invisible, carefully blurred, already-always-crossed line from being “interested” in men.

You can tell this book is from the 80s because of its trendy deconstructive langauge. Similarly, you can tell The Expendables is from the 80s, culturally if not literally, because of its stars, its south American dictator baddie, and its action-man dialogue. The dialogue in particular is so terrible, and so poorly delivered, that if this film had any hint of a sense of humour you might mistake it for an 80s action movie pastiche.

Anyway, the reason I mention Between Men is because the characters in The Expendables are profoundly homosocial. Their views of women are obtained solely from fairy tales. They're incapable of conversing on any level other than grunts and punches. Visibly more relaxed in the company of their bicep-flexing colleagues, they bemoan their bad luck with the ladies between knives thrown at a dartboard, deep down relieved that they don't have to make forced conversation with members of the fairer sex. When Bruce Willis makes a jibe to Arnie and Sly about their sucking each others' dicks, I almost expected them to get down and do just that. Not even a slight shift in optic required here. (What a scene that would have been!)

With all the narrative complexity, subtle thematics and polished segueways of a Dan Brown novel clunking from one hackneyed scene to the next, the film fails to be saved even by the fight and chase scenes (which are of course the whole point of the movie). The Green Zone style shaky handheld camera means you never get the opportunity to admire the grand scale of these set pieces. So I'm afraid there really is nothing to recommend this film. Do yourself a favour and watch Commando instead - or, better, dig out Total Recall and enjoy an 80s action movie with a story, some three-dimensional characters and a sense of humour.

Madeo

2010-09-03T11:16:00.000-07:00

Madeo (Mother) tells the story of an amiable but misguided simpleton, Do-joon, who finds himself arrested for the murder of a schoolgirl after being seen in the wrong place at the wrong time early one morning. The police, having found circumstantial evidence of his involvement, close the investigation. Do-joon's quiet but determined mother sets about investigating the background of the murder victim in order to identify the real culprit. She teams up with Do-joon's best (and only) friend and together they beg, connive and torture information out of the girl's associates and other witnesses, along the way discovering the truth about her lifestyle, her death, and the reason for Do-joon's identification as the killer.

Mother takes you on a journey, but not an exhilarating one. To call it an emotional rollercoaster would imply a greater range of peaks and troughs, and a faster pace, than it has. The experience is closer to driving the length of an emotional A13: sweeping gently up and down, occasionally passing through more or less grim territory, but an oddly interesting and satisfying journey nonetheless - one which includes wince-inducing moments along with laughter, mystery and intrigue.

I was surprised to learn that Won Bin, who plays Do-joon, is a popular actor and model in Korea. It's hard to imagine Kate Moss or Danny Dyer portraying characters with a mental age in single figures (deliberately, at least). Kudos to him for taking on this role, and pulling it off so well.

It's filmed on a good-quality digital format (compared to, say, Salvage), but I still found the pixellation a little distracting. Although this minor issue will be resolved if you're watching the DVD or Blu-ray transfer (unless your telly's enormous), I'd still recommend that anyone wanting to see it do so at the cinema. Perhaps I'm guilty of assuming that everyone shares my fickle attention span, but I need to be forced (by virtue of having no distractions) to concentrate on a movie this subtle and languid. It's worth being forced, though, since the story is ultimately gripping, surprising and satisfying.

Flickan som lekte med elden

2010-08-29T11:14:00.000-07:00

The Girl who Played with Fire is, as everyone already knows, the second book in Steig Larsson's Millenium series - and the second of the Swedish film adaptations. The story picks up a year after the first one, Män som hatar kvinnor ('Men who hate women' in English, though the film was translated as 'The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo'). Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander haven't seen each other for a year. Lisbeth's fingerprints are found on a gun used to kill three of their acquaintances. Rather than attempt to prove her innocence through the usual channels, Lisbeth disappears and begins investigating the murders. There are two other investigations going on in parralell: Blomkvist's, motivated by the death of his friends and his desire to prove Lisbeth's innocence (of this particular crime, at least) - and the fairly hapless enquiries carried out by the police.

Noomi Rapace is Lisbeth Salander. Her looks, attitude, moodiness and intelligence are perfectly poised in this assured, understated portrayal. This was true of her performance in Män som hatar kvinnor as well, but she is even more impressive in the sequel. Michael Nyqvist's solid, convincing Blomkvist sits well alongside, but this really is Rapace's film. She is complemented by the unflashy cinematography and the locations: largely the harsh, grey but beautiful Swedish countryside and Stockholm's classic city backdrop. These are major contributors to the success of this as an adaptation of the sombre, gritty novel.

This is not just an excellent adaptation of the novel. In many ways it's an improvement: the distractions of original, such as the intricate police procedural and political aspects (and the silliness of Lisbeth's proving Fermat's last theorem in her spare time), have been removed - making the story tighter and the action faster-paced. As such, I preferred it to the film of the first book, despite feeling the opposite about the novels. There exists a three-hour cut of the film, presumably featuring many of these removed plot points. I'd be surprised if it was an improvement over this cinematic release.

The Millenium series is also currently being adapted by David Fincher, who directed Fight Club and Seven. Much as I admire his work, I cannot imagine these new versions coming close to the perfection with which these Swedish films capture the spirit of Larsson's books.

Piranha 3D

2010-08-28T01:59:00.000-07:00

In general, the bullet-pointed list is more suited to PowerPoint presentations then movie reviews. That's because films are usually better considered as a coherent work of art than as a series of loosely connected scenes. And in fact, Piranha does achieve this aesthetic wholeness, despite its rice-paper-thin plot. But that's not why you should see it. Piranha includes:

two piranha fighting over who gets to eat a disembodied human penis
Kelly Brook and another naked playmate performing a Sapphic underwater synchronised swim
Christopher Lloyd reprising his role as Doc from Back to the Future
two superb deaths-by-being-torn-in-two
Ving Rhames getting post-industrial on the asses of a shoal of piranha with a boat propeller
the shredding of countless objectionable frat boys, and
someone being eaten from the bottom up.

If you want to see these play out in glorious, colour-saturated 3D, then this is the film to watch. And if you don't, then what's wrong with you?

Gainsbourg (Vie héroïque)

2010-08-11T14:42:00.000-07:00

If I met someone for the first time at a party and they told me they enjoyed listening to French spoken word jazz, I'd swallow my entire drink in one gulp and make my excuses. But that's the music of Serge Gainsbourg described in four words. If on the other hand I had met Gainsbourg himself at a party I think I would have followed him round for the rest of the evening. If this new biopic is anything to go by, the weedy, Gallic chain-smoking piss artist had charisma.

I knew almost nothing about him when I went to see this film. I'm not sure I know too much more now, but that doesn't matter. Based largely on the movie poster, I was expecting this to be something like Control, the film about Ian Curtis' life that came out a few years back: very well made, dark, tragic, but not exactly fun. But Gainsbourg is hilarious, surreal fun. It's probably this that makes Christopher Tookey hate it. Tookey is the Daily Mail clown who thought Kick-Ass was for paedophiles and wanted to get Cronenberg's Crash banned. To paraphrase C S Lewis, Tookey is either a lunatic, a liar or - an unlikely one, this, admittedly - the son of God. He seems to have a real hatred for joyous, charming, playful movies. He calls Gainsbourg 'woefully pretentious', 'tiresome', 'twaddle'.

Pretentious twaddle it may be in part, though I think there's more to it than that. But it's far from tiresome and woeful. There are a handful of scenes which are stunning, for various reasons. One joyful section involves Brigitte Bardot dressed in a bedsheet, dancing around Serge's piano while he plays and smokes, and is so entirely convincing that watching it feels close to voyeuristic. The brilliance of several other scenes derives from the presence of Gainsbourg's 'mug', a Tim Burtonesque character with an enormous nose, long thin fingers and a mischievous grin. Mug is born, almost literally, out of the exploded remains of an oversized, comic-book spherical Jew the young Gainsbourg creates and with whom he enjoys various adventures. I wasn't overstating the case when I said it was surreal. Elements are clearly influenced by Dali (whose home makes a brief appearance).

Although there isn't much of a plot in the traditional sense - a problem shared by many biopics, whose subjects have a bad habit of failing to structure their lives like films - Gainsbourg's life had enough marriages and tribulations to make the film a highly enjoyable series of set pieces. And watching the journey his character takes, from cheeky charming child through awkward young man to self-assured, arrogant old soak, makes up for the lack of conventional story arc. One small criticism of the 122 minute movie: it could stand to lose a few minutes to the edit room floor, especially during the last third. But this is a minor issue and even the scenes that slightly outstay their welcome have more to recommend them than those of many movies. Gainsbourg is one of the most original, inventive films of the year, and also one of the best.

Toy Story 3

2010-08-11T12:47:00.000-07:00

I don't have very much to say about Toy Story 3. It's been generally lauded, with a 99% score on Rotten Tomatoes to date, and rave reviews from both Kermode and Mayo and their current standins Boyd and Floyd. Supposedly it's the first 'part 3' film to live up to the quality of its preceding chapters, and Pixar's finest moment to date. It's also been widely touted as making grown men cry at the unbearably emotional ending in which Andy comes to a decision about what to do with his toys now he's leaving for college.

Toy Story 3 is slick, no question. And the story, involving the toys coming to terms with their possible futures now Andy has grown out of them, is well-crafted. Even the 3D seems somehow natural in a way that it hasn't managed even in the best of the 3D films we've seen so far such as Avatar and Streetdance 3D. But for some reason Toy Story 3 just left me a little cold. While tears streamed from under the polarised lenses of hardened criminals around me (or so I surmise), my own ducts didn't even flinch. I much preferred the charming How to Train your Dragon. I was explaining this to someone, telling them I wasn't hugely impressed with the film, and they replied that on the contrary: "It's a good story, well told". Well, it is that - but to me, it wasn't much more.

Skeletons

2010-07-31T05:53:00.000-07:00

Skeletons, a low-budget British film (made on "a shoestring", according to this Guardian article), follows two scruffy professional men whose occupation involves visiting customers, often couples, at their request to uncover their secrets - the skeletons in their wardrobes - using the sort of equipment favoured by new-agers and amateur ghostbusters. Only, in the movie, this equipment works - and they are able to physically explore and investigate their customers' secrets before reporting back to them. The premise is internally consistent, thankfully, so the quasi-supernatural elements are not intrusive (unlike in The Prestige, for instance, which annoyed me earlier this week).

The two are apparently experienced but junior officers who are then given the opportunity by their gruff northern boss, the Colonel - played by Jason Isaacs and his moustache - to undertake a more difficult role which, if completed well, may lead to promotion. However, the job is even more difficult than they had anticipated. They are further beset by a troublesome member of the family they investigate, the 21-year-old daughter - played by the brilliantly-named Tuppence Middleton (who played the lead in last year's silly Brit horror Tormented). To make things even more difficult, one of the duo is battling his addiction to 'glowchasing' - illicitly reliving happy memories using work equipment. In order to complete the job more quickly, they decide to stay with the family, leading to some beautifully balanced and very funny dinner scenes, as well as some strange and moving friendships.

Skeletons is being shown a handful of times at various independent cinemas - a list of screenings appears on the official website - but will hopefully receive longer runs in future. It should: the screening I saw at Manchester's Cornerhouse was moved to a larger screen to accommodate the relatively large audience, presumably many of whom had - like me - been alerted to Skeletons' existence by Jason Isaacs' plugging it on Mayo and Kermode's review show. The Cornerhouse is planning a week-long run in August as a result of its popularity.

Conceptually it shares some aspects with Inception although, featuring few special effects and taking place largely in the English countryside, is dramatically different visually. It has been compared to Withnail & I, and it it has some similarities: the setting, the very British humour, the close platonic relationship between two men of a certain age and, happily, the quality of the script and performances. Skeletons has some interesting things to say about the nature of secrets, memories and the dangers of living in the past. But despite the bizarre premise and story - and although it works well in that respect - it was the unconventional but touching relationships between the six principal characters that really made it for me. I hope Skeletons gains the audience, and the recognition, it deserves.

Inception

2010-07-27T13:12:00.000-07:00

Like Shutter Island, Inception stars Leonardo DiCaprio as a man on a singular mission, obsessed with the absence of his wife and children and constantly haunted by their apparitions. Also like Shutter Island, it turns into a dizzying commentary on the fragile nature of reality. They're also both ambitious, portentous concept movies from respected directors - this one from Christopher Nolan, who made Memento and The Dark Knight.

But even more than it recalled Shutter Island, Inception brought to mind David Cronenberg's 1999 movie eXistenZ. (Coincidentally, it's not the only thing to do so recently.) It has similar multi-layered levels of reality and fantasy and similar young, strong, intellectual female characters who expertly design these reality-levels. In some ways the concept is better than that of eXistenZ: in Inception's dreamworld, dreams-within-dreams last longer than their host dreams and so several parallel "events" can synchronise - which they do, in a technically superb and exciting finale. In the to my mind important sense of plausibility, the concept of eXistenZ is superior and thus more satisfying. But the world of Inception is largely self-consistent, despite some minor gaps.

I deliberately haven't explained much of the concept here, because finding that out is an important part of the enjoyment of the film. But it's worth saying that although Inception has been slapped with warnings of complexity and of being hard to follow (notably by Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo), I wouldn't take these warnings too seriously. Yes, it doesn't spoonfeed us, but it does give us ample explanation of what's going on. I was slightly apprehensive about it myself, ensuring I was wide awake before seeing it. But that wasn't too necessary. For one thing, it's got enough explosions and gunfire to keep the doziest viewer awake. I wouldn't want people to miss out on seeing the best film of the summer just because they don't fancy having to make too much effort. Inception is thoughtful - but it's also rip-roaring, dizzying fun. Whether it would survive a second viewing with as much praise is hard to say, but everyone should give it a first.

The Collector

2010-07-14T05:48:00.000-07:00

John Fowles' first novel, The Collector, describes with insight and tension the relationship between a bizarre, socially awkward man and the young student he kidnaps and keeps locked up in his basement. It's a page-turner with a unique voice, similar in that sense to The Wasp Factory and The Catcher in the Rye. As when White Noise came out a few years ago, my initial delight at seeing one of my favourite novels adapted for cinema was displaced by disappointment when I discovered they shared only a title. But I heard The Collector was the latest so-called 'torture porn' horror from Marcus Dunstan who made Saw and so, as I am quite fond both of the sub-genre and the franchise, I gave it a go regardless.

The premise: Arkin, a softly-spoken former jailbird, is renovating a rich family's home. They like him, and reward him with cash and praise. Unfortunately, not enough cash - he owes his ex-wife money she needs before midnight in order to pay loan sharks: or else...

He decides the only way to obtain this money at such short notice is to break into his employers' home and steal from their safe. There's gratitude for you. But he has a stroke of bad luck - wouldn't you just know it, the local hooded psychopath has done a Home Alone and turned the place into a massive booby-trapped deathpit.

And that's about it. Arkin tries to rescue the family from the collector - for it is he - with fairly predictable results. There's plenty of gore (much of it not too easy to make out because of the darkness of the setting), several deaths, no plot beyond that described above, and very little character development. In fact, about the collector himself - whose motivations and background are surely the most intriguing - we learn nothing. Oh, apart from the fact that if he likes you, he might 'collect' you (a fate little better than what awaits if he doesn't like you). For all we know, this is Macauley Culkin's Kevin McAllister grown up, traumatised by the horrific injuries he was led to inflict in his formative years and reliving those events in an increasingly violent destructive spiral. (I'd be happy to come on board, if anyone at Lionsgate is reading this and wants my help writing Home Alone 5.)

As Mark Kermode pointed out on his 5Live show, in a section that might have made me think twice before seeing the film if I'd heard it in time, it might as well be called "the Trainspotter - because if you look like a train, he lets you live".

I concede that the film isn't entirely without merit. The high-tension chases around the house were fairly well done, especially considering the dark set (something I normally despise). And the gory stuff was quite well-shot without being hugely inventive. But why not wrap this up in a bit of plot and character stuff, I wonder? It seemed to be aimed squarely at the audience with whom I found myself sharing the cinema when I saw it: teenage boys determined to show their mates how insensitive to nasty violence they are by laughing through the goriest scenes.

So, congratulations, Dunstan and Co, for letting torture porn sink to its ground state: providing cheap, unexciting thrills for idiots. I hope you're proud of yourselves.

Les Herbes Folles

2010-07-02T10:35:00.000-07:00

I like my French cinema like I like my French women - horrific, sexual and extremely violent. Films like Irreversible, A ma souer, and Martyrs. While sometimes hard to watch and at other times simply dull to watch, these movies make their points and stay submerged in my consciousness for a long time after I watch them. Which is, if nothing else, good value for money.

Les Herbes Folles exemplifies a less appealing side of French cinema. Called Wild Grass in English translation, its respected director Alain Resnais seems to think that whimsy is a substitute for storytelling. But it isn't. Amelie was whimsical, but it had charm, a heart, a story. This, on the other hand, has none of these things.

Well, I suppose I ought to concede that it does have a story of sorts. This sorry tale is of a quirky middle-aged dentist and flying enthusiast whose purse is stolen and discarded, before being found by a middle-aged, miserable layabout with his own equally quirky but rather unsavoury personality. The latter, who is married to an implausibly young, attractive lady, begins stalking the former. The dentist is initially wary - as she should be - but soon comes round to finding it charming. Things vaguely build to a lacklustre crescendo.

The film is 104 minutes long, but it feels like 104 hours. The characters are so unpredictable and their actions so implausible that any dramatic tension soon dissipates. The director seems to be aware of the drab piece he has created, for he teases the viewer with two false endings before finally putting us out of our misery.

Is Les Herbes Folles, then, just a joke at the audience's expense? If so, the joke is well-calculated - but it's also rather insulting.

The Killer Inside Me

2010-06-16T11:26:00.000-07:00

Having missed the opportunity to see Michael Winterbottom’s new film when I saw Streetdance 3D instead, I was pleased to find time to see it later in the week. Well, I was pleased in advance of seeing it. But I now know that I wouldn’t have been missing much.

I was expecting quite a lot from this film. For one, given Winterbottom directed A Cock and Bull Story, an inventive postmodern masterpiece on a par with Adaptation, I was hoping for an entertaining narrative. For another, I had heard that it had some of the most brutal violence of any recent film, which I wanted to confirm for myself.

And the violence is nasty - although in terms of raw blood and close-ups it's nothing remarkable. The power of the violence comes from the women to whom it is meted out most enthusiastically: one pleads to her attacker with bewildered love during the ordeal while the other is completely humiliated by him.

However, the story is dull. The acting is impeccable but the characters are empty spaces. To paraphrase Harvey Keitel to Julia Sweeney in Pulp Fiction: just because they are characters, it doesn't mean they have character. And they really don't. This film left me as cold and uninspired as the bodies of Casey Affleck's character's victims.

*Apologies for this review. I'm trying to finish it using the free wifi in a pub while my battery slowly shuffles off this mortal coil, a band soundchecks above me, music plays over the pub speakers and I intermittently sneeze through hayfever and take pulls on a pint of Westons.

Streetdance 3D

2010-06-07T10:28:00.000-07:00

Which of the two following movies would be worse to watch with a hangover? (Not a nauseous or anxiety-stricken hangover, but a wearing-a-too-small-hat-made-of-lead hangover.) My options were reduced to Michael Winterbottom's crime thriller The Killer Inside Me, reportedly including scenes of prolonged and brutal violence to rival Irreversible, and the new British teenage bubblegum extravaganza Streetdance 3D.

I feared the latter would be worse, expecting loud insipid music with colourful, swirling visuals flying toward me from the screen. Not to mention the huge rubbery 3D glasses, fitting snugly over my prescription spectacles (and my leaden headwear) and further squeezing my poor aching head. But my companion had the deciding vote, so Streetdance it was.

And in many ways Streetdance was as bad as I anticipated. The dialogue is bland at best and regularly cringe-inducing. For what it's worth, the paint-by-numbers story is: boy leaves girl, girl has to take over streetdance crew with only weeks until the streetdancing finals, girl has to teach ballet dancers (for reasons too tedious to recount) to streetdance in order to succeed. Various obstacles are placed in front of this goal, only to be skipped over, shimmied around or completely ignored. You don't need me to tell you how it ends.

Streetdancing, incidentally, seems to my untutored eyes to be a cross between club dancing, breakdancing and sychronised swimming. Only without the swimming. And this dancing is of course the main point of the film. As rubbish as all the normally-essential elements of a movie are here, it's a little churlish of me to criticise it for that, since they're hardly the point. The point is - dancing! On the street! In 3D! And if that's what you want to see, this is the place to see it.

And the effect all this had on my poor hungover brain? I was surprised to find it was all rather soothing and hypnotic. Much like watching a fruit machine that no-one's playing. It's a shame the music they are dancing to is so bland - I doubt I'd even recognise one of the tracks if I heard it again, which I hope not to - but even so, I found it all strangely charming. And I have little doubt that I left the cinema happier than I would have had I spent the previous two hours watching a man smashing ladies' heads in.

Bad Lieutenant - Port of Call: New Orleans

2010-05-29T09:11:00.000-07:00

The only Werner Herzog films I'd seen before this one were the extraordinary documentaries Grizzly Man and Encounters at the end of the World. So this is the first feature film of his I've seen and I am unable to compare it with his previous output. Nor have I seen the original Abel Ferrara version of Bad Lieutenant. So my impression of this film may be offered either positively, as being baggage-free or, negatively, as being ill-informed. I leave that to my reader to judge.

The story is of Nic Cage's eponymous corrupt cop, newly-promoted and charged with investigating the murder of a drug dealer and his young family soon after the Katrina disaster. His girlfriend is a prostitute and, like him, a cocaine addict. Cage's character becomes increasingly demented, the various strands of his life tightening around him, like the tentacles of a cruel but efficient predator, as he tries to escape them.

The resolution of all this is both surprising and surprisingly satisfying. Along the way, there are some bizarre and superb individual scenes, mostly involving Cage's character in one or another drug-induced, highly emotional state, fraternising with his police colleagues, the criminals with whom he becomes increasingly complicit, and his alcoholic ex-cop father.

Nic Cage's cop is a great film character, a mass of contradictions who makes the film what it is. The bad lieutenant and The Bad Lieutenant are amoral but sweet, violent but fun, occasionally frightening but - most importantly - highly entertaining.

Four Lions

2010-05-24T01:45:00.000-07:00

Four Lions is Chris Morris' return to form, a film worthy of association with the genius both of his 90s output and the record (and movie) label Warp. It tells the story of a group of would-be Islamist terrorists in Sheffield, haphazardly organising a suicide bombing alongside their everyday lives as father, husband, neighbour, brother.

The performance of Riz Ahmed as Omar, the lead character, was brilliant, totally convincing. The supporting cast was solid too. The humour was classic Chris Morris, and it managed to stay (just) on the side of plausible rather than falling into farce, most of the time. There were some parts which were shocking, in one or two cases too shocking to be funny despite their comedy potential.

This is a film that treats the audience as adults and doesn't tell you what to think of what is happening onscreen. I felt a bit confused after seeing it - but not in a bad way. It takes a few days to let the content sink in: always the sign of an interesting film, but something that often happens following a movie which is not particularly enjoyable to watch (such as extreme French horror Martyrs). Four Lions, however, is both a quotable knockabout comedy-drama and a unique, thoughtful, even seminal film of ideas. A must-see.

Metastaze

2010-05-08T05:57:00.000-07:00

Translated in some places as Metastasis and others as Metastases (I prefer the latter), this movie has been called "the Croatian Trainspotting" with good reason. Three of the four principal characters could hardly be closer to Renton, Begbie and Spud (although there is no direct counterpart to Sick Boy). Krpa, the Begbie equivalent, is an extraordinarily nasty piece of work, a sociopathic, misogynistic veteran with a hair-trigger temper and a deep sense of nationalism. The most sympathetic character - the Renton equivalent - is just out of rehab and trying to stay straight(ish) while his father encourages him to look for work and his overindulgent mother steals crafty drags on his cigarettes. Mean while, our two friendly losers - the Spud types - are drunkenly, goallessly stumbling through life toward an early grave.

Knowing next-to-nothing about the social and political context of the film, which is clearly making a point about post-war Croatia, I could only engage with it as a story about its characters. And in some ways it's well done. The relationships are believable even while they're in some cases utterly depressing, involving intense scenes of domestic violence and general misery. However, the occasional interest this film had for me was too infrequent to lift it above its limitations.

One of these limitations comes from the fact that Metastaze seems to be very cheaply made - a scene in which our heroes sit around in a graveyard seems to have been filmed by a sole camera which hangs above them, swaying gently in the wind. The lighting is poor, although I don't know whether this is a deliberate, aesthetic choice by a Dogme-influenced director or simply an artefact of a low budget. As I've said before, I often find films to be underlit, and this feature may bother other viewers less than it did me.

The cheapness of the film is not limited to its filming. The quality of the script may be very high, for all I know, but the subtitling was not. "Your" appearing as "You're" was the worst example of the errors strewn through the subtitles, making the watching experience far from that of some films with such excellent titles that you barely notice the conversation is entering through your eyes rather than your ears. The subtitling is constantly there in Metastaze.

This is not the sort of film which would be ruined by knowledge of the ending, so I hope I will be forgiven for describing it. (It's also not a film many people are likely to see, I would think: it was premièred to about 60 people at the East End film festival a couple of weeks ago but I doubt it will get a wide general release.) The film ends with Krpa, having bungled a bank robbery because his lookout pal nodded off on duty, being chased on foot through the streets of Zagreb by a couple of policemen. So far, so Trainspotting. However, this scene is set not to Iggy Pop but to music straight from Benny Hill. It's a strange tone and it illustrates what for me was the main problem with Metastaze - I was unable to decipher the point the film was trying to make. It might be that this was because it wasn't trying to make one, but that seems unlikely given the political overtones and the subject matter. Equally, it's unclear why metastases - cancerous growths which migrate from a primary tumour and settle in other parts of the body - was chosen as a title: presumably it was meant to be evocative or metaphorically appropriate, but it fails in practice.

So was this film just poorly-thought-out, or was something lost in translation? I can't tell - but, either way, I cannot really say that Metastaze deserves 80 minutes of your time.

The Ghost

2010-04-25T04:49:00.000-07:00

Roman Polanski's The Ghost Writer, as it's more accurately titled outside the UK, tells the story of Adam and Ruth Lang - a lightly-fictionalised Tony and Cherie Blair, played by Pierce Brosnan and Olivia Williams - soon after the PM's departure from number 10. Adam's previous ghostwriter, who had almost completed the PM's memoirs, has drowned in the sea surrounding the North American island on which the Langs are living. McGregor's character (who is never named) reluctantly takes on the job of finishing the book. Shortly after he arrives on the island, controversy erupts when a former colleague publicly accuses the PM of war crimes. As the Langs and their entourage - in particular, Adam's personal secretary and mistress, played by Kim Cattrall - are distracted by the intensifying media circus, the ghostwriter discovers clues left by his predecessor which point to a conspiracy in which the PM appears to have been a player.

Although the story has enough intrigue to keep your attention, it is heavily driven by dialogue and would probably work just as well as a theatre production or radio play. And because McGregor's investigation relies so heavily on written evidence, we end up having to read along with him - including watching him search the web for a few minutes as he tries to work out the connection between the PM and a supposed CIA agent. Also, for a so-called thriller, there is really little in the way of tension or indeed thrills. Apparently the movie cost $45m to produce. Most of this must have gone on actors' fees, for there is no evidence of extravagance in the set and special effects are almost non-existent.

The acting is largely decent but both Cattrall and McGregor struggle at times with their respective English accents, Cattrall resorting to speaking constantly like a Sloane in the dentist's chair - "you do raahlise haaw saahrious this is getting, don't you?", she asks him at one point - and McGregor adopting a bizarrely fey mockney twang. This is particularly noticeable in scenes involving just the two of them and left me wondering why McGregor, at least, wasn't allowed to talk with his own voice.

In short, The Ghost is a film that keeps your attention and is, on the whole, worth watching - but I'm sure it will be just as worth watching when it arrives on TV in a couple of years, and there is no pressing reason to seek it out sooner than that.

Cemetery Junction

2010-04-18T13:45:00.000-07:00

I've followed and loved everything Ricky Gervais has done since the 11 O'Clock Show, so was prepared - despite the mildly disappointing The Invention of Lying - to be bowled over by Cemetery Junction, the film he co-wrote and directed with Stephen Merchant which went on general release on Friday.

The film's story is derivative but enjoyable, involving a group of three lads in their early 20s growing up in a small town near Reading in the early 70s, struggling with boredom, the police, girls, the drudgery of work and the possibility of escape. Ricky Gervais plays the factory-worker father of the protagonist, Freddie, a clean-cut young man who is struggling to find his way, torn between his working-class background and his old childhood friends (with their self-destructive tendencies); his potentially lucrative but morally dubious and empty new job as an insurance salesman; and his desire to see the world. Meanwhile, he's developing a crush on a childhood sweetheart who is unfortunately engaged to his inattentive, sexist supervisor.

What path will Freddie take? Finding out is a diverting experience which is bolstered by two sub-plots involving his geeky friend finding his first love while his other, cockier, mate learns a few harsh lessons about his past and his probable future. The jokes come largely at the expense of the former friend and are often, as you'd expect, laugh-out-loud funny (although the humour is both slightly too absurd for the context of an ostensibly realist film and not entirely new, being based on jokes that will be familiar at least to listeners to Gervais and Merchant's erstwhile Xfm radio show in the early 2000s).

Cemetery Junction is the sort of thing you'd be happy to take three generations of your family to see, as long as they weren't mortally offended by a couple of appearances of the word which the BBFC designates "very strong". One of those rare films where I was actually disappointed when the credits rolled because I would have liked to see more (it's only 95 minutes long, which is about right: the editing is tight yet the story is given room to breathe), it's not a masterpiece, and it dissipated from my mind almost as soon as I'd seen it - but if you're looking for an entertaining hour-and-a-half, you won't be disappointed.

How to Train Your Dragon

2010-04-10T02:54:00.000-07:00

This endearing 3D kids' movie tells the story of Hiccup, a nerdy and scrawny teenager living on an island otherwise populated by characters the size of Obelix the Gaul. The island is regularly raided by dragons, and the principal occupation of the islanders is dragon-slaying, in which Hiccup frequently attempts to take part - in good faith but with disastrous consequences. One day he finally manages to shoot down a dragon and goes off to recover the body to prove himself, but ends up instead making friends with it. The story moves on in an entirely predictable but thoroughly entertaining way. The flight sequences work superbly in 3D, and the rest of the film is not too distractingly rendered. (Like Avatar but unlike Alice in Wonderland, How to Train Your Dragon was designed in 3D, and the difference shows.) The plot is engaging, the dragons are cute, and happily - as Steve Novella explains on Neurologica - the geek wins the day. I found it charming and walked out of the cinema feeling that all was well with the world.

Kick-Ass

2010-03-28T09:20:00.000-07:00

Dave Lizewski is a typical high-school geek character. He wears glasses, reads comics and spends his time at school doodling and staring, glassy-eyed, down his breasty teacher's top. Frustrated with being repeatedly mugged, he buys a green one-piece suit and sets out to protect the innocent and find missing pets. He's almost immediately smashed up but, after recuperating, find his damaged nerves allow him to take an ass-kicking with little pain, so sets off to do it all over again - quickly becoming an internet sensation despite being beaten to a pulp again. After biting off more than he can chew while attempting to impress a pretty classmate, he meets Hit Girl, a foul-mouthed and ultraviolent but lovable 11-year-old, and her father, Big Daddy (Nicholas Cage). These two have a long-standing vendetta against a local mobster, whose attention they soon catch when they destroy his lair. Then the trio's evil counterpart - a GTR-driving, cape-wearing, iPhone-toting kid - lures them into the mobster's trap. Much violence ensues.

Kick-Ass has been hailed as an instant classic, and it's not difficult to agree. It has the potential to join the likes of South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut and Back to the Future as a film to stick on once or twice a year on a lazy weekend afternoon. It's funny, shocking (in a gasp-inducing, not disturbing way), and consistently entertaining. It's visually stunning, particularly when providing the backstory in still cartoons, the point-of-view sweeping around beautifully inside some of the frames. The soundtrack, too, is punchy, upbeat, and at times joyous: a scene in which Sparks' 'This town ain't big enough for the both of us' plays out stands out in particular. I find it difficult to imagine how anyone could dislike Kick-Ass.

And yet this proves only my lack of imagination. Josh Tyler on Cinemablend, for example, is disturbed by the violence both wreaked and received by Hit Girl - particularly the latter - saying that Kick-Ass:

presents it as light entertainment and then seems to sneer at anyone who might think otherwise. Kick-Ass revels in it. Kick-Ass fucking enjoys it. Kick-Ass seems to want you to enjoy it and call me old fashioned, but I find that kind of depraved and sick.

I can see his point, but I don't agree. For one thing, we identify with Hit Girl, not the character carrying out the beating. The effect of that scene is to remove any sympathy the audience might have had for the mobster, not to glamourise child abuse. Indeed, this is the point the BBFC make in their explanation for granting Kick-Ass a 15 certificate:

...those doing the beatings have been clearly established as evil characters and the audience is encouraged to feel sympathy for the victims rather than revel in the violence being inflicted. At the same time, the audience knows that the highly skilled good guys are likely to regain the upper hand very swiftly.

Kick-Ass features both more-or-less realistic violence - the sort that is quick, brutal and instantly renders the victim incapable of anything more than collapsing or dying - and comic-book sequences in which our heroes run up walls, take out numerous individuals at once whilst dodging a hail of bullets, and utilise frankly unlikely technology. Some might see that as an incongruous mix, but I thought it worked perfectly in the film. It's not as though the audience is unable to suspend disbelief just because it has an initially realist tone. Likewise, the critics who frown upon the film for being lightweight are missing the point. Kick-Ass is a lightweight and exhilarating comic extravaganza.

Shutter Island

2010-03-27T11:48:00.000-07:00

It's difficult to describe Shutter Island's story without giving too much away, and the less one knows about it before watching the better. The movie begins with Teddy, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, and his sidekick Chuck meeting for the first time on a boat en route to the eponymous island some time in the 1950s. They're U.S. marshals, a fact which every review I've read states as though everyone knows what that means. Even after watching Shutter Island, I wasn't entirely clear, so I looked it up. They carry out enforcement on behalf of the courts, apparently, although that doesn't make it much clearer. Anyway, these marshals are visiting the island to investigate the disappearance on one of its inhabitants, a woman who drowned her children and has thus been locked up in the island's asylum, which houses dangerous criminals with refractory mental illness. The woman appears to have evaporated through the walls, as the psychiatrist (and head of the asylum) played by Ben Kingsley puts it. Teddy and Chuck soon find themselves trapped on the island as a wild storm develops, their investigation frustrated at every turn by the island's reticent inhabitants. They uncover inconsistent morsels of information, and it's clear that something strange is happening. The truth, it transpires, is not what Teddy was expecting...

The spooky noir setting and various vivid Lynchian dream/hallucinatory sequences, along with solid acting and faultless direction by Scorcese, add up to a superb-looking and feeling film. But Shutter Island is much more than the sum of its superficial parts. It has an exciting and engaging story, but the really thrilling aspect is its exploration of profound themes - madness, violence, guilt, grief, reality, memory - which comes to a head in a three or four stunning dialogue-driven sequences between Teddy and various other characters. For Teddy is investigating what it means to be human as much as he's investigating the disappearance of the madwoman - and what he finds is fascinating.

Shutter Island is the best film I've seen this year, and certainly the only one I'd be tempted to go and see a second time. I think it's been underrated by many reviewers, and I don't quite understand why. I thought it was a masterpiece.

Salvage

2010-03-20T09:57:00.000-07:00

It's 24 December. 14 year old Jodie normally lives with her Dad (Ray from Life on Mars) but is being dropped off at her mum's house on a middle-class Wirral estate, against her will, for Christmas. Her mum, Beth, is a lawyer who sacrificed her relationship with Jodie for her career - a relationship which doesn't improve when Jodie immediately catches her in flagrante with Keiron, a stranger (well, a bloke from various British soap operas). Jodie storms off to her friend's house across the road. Almost immediately, a bunch of soldiers descend on the cul-de-sac, forcing everyone into their homes and shooting a local Asian doctor (prompting Kieron's tabloid-knee-jerk assumption that Al-Qaida have descended on suburban Merseyside). The bloody deaths keep coming at some pace, and it turns out the trigger-happy army isn't the only deadly force Beth will have to overcome to find and protect Jodie.

For the look and feel of the film, think Brookside with blood, filmed in natural - that is, not very much - light using a presumably fairly cheap digital set-up. (You can see the pixellation on the cinema screen.) Terror and quasi-zombie elements aside, the relationships between the major characters - not to mention whole sections of the script - could have been lifted straight from the erstwhile C4 soap.* That's no bad thing, as it helps establish the everyday normalcy of the setting, enhancing the identification and fear factors when the cadavers start piling up and chaos reigns. And it won't disappoint those who like their horror violent and blood-soaked, receiving an 18 certificate from the BBFC for that reason. As their classification decision accurately puts it:

The strong bloody violence and gore occurs throughout the film and includes two throat slitting scenes where blood pumps from victims’ necks, several bloody shootings and some close up detail of gory injuries, including spurting blood pooling in open wounds and pumping from arteries. There is further gory imagery, including blood spatters all over domestic environments, sight of very bloody dead bodies and characters covered in blood.

Salvage opened in cinemas yesterday and is released on DVD on Monday (though it's already available to rent and buy on iTunes) - more information, and trailer, on the official site. In London, it's only showing at Empire Leicester Square and Mile End's Genesis - and the latter only once, a screening that attracted a grand total of five cinemagoers. Including me. All men, all on our own - of course. But at least I had a row of seats to myself and no-one was eating popcorn or giggling.

It's a shame, however, because Salvage does deserve a wider audience than that. The occasionally limping build-up gives way to a fast-paced gorefest of an ending, and clocking in at only 80 minutes long viewing it hardly takes a huge chunk out of the day. The lack of lighting was my main problem with it, though I may be out on a limb here given that I thought that Alien and The Descent both suffered from the same problem. So, while it may be too late to catch it on the big screen, it's worth bunkering down with the DVD - lights off and volume high!

* Having written that, I found one reason for the eerie similarity: it was filmed on Brookside's set, according to iMDB!

Green Zone

2010-03-19T17:21:00.000-07:00

In this military thriller Matt Damon plays Roy Miller, a Chief Warrant Officer with the US Army tasked with raiding Baghdad bases intelligence sources have named as WMD sites. Disillusioned after several false leads, Miller begins to investigate the source of this intelligence. He makes an important discovery and finds himself involved in an internecine battle between Pentagon and CIA officials with different ideas about how best to deal with the aftermath of the fall of Saddam. Eventually he manages to catch up with the supposed source of the WMD intelligence and all hell breaks loose.

Comparisons with The Hurt Locker are inevitable, and Green Zone comes out of that with honours but without victory. Although the handheld, frantic action-chasing-fighting sequences are engaging it never reaches the white-knuckle level that The Hurt Locker manages throughout. And in some ways the fact that Green Zone does have a point to make detracts from its worth as a movie in its own right. The Hurt Locker had an easier job, its narrative free from any obligation to engage with the worth or otherwise of the war itself and therefore able to keep the tension constantly ratcheted up. It's hard to imagine a better way of making the political points that Green Zone manages in under two hours of film - and the story ticks along, never becoming too clunky or trite. Given the subject matter, that's quite an achievement. Just don't expect to be blown away.

Alice in Wonderland

2010-03-19T12:22:00.000-07:00

I went to see Alice last Saturday at the IMAX in 3D. The 3D was good for the chasing sections - although it made this viewer feel a bit queasy, given the overwhelming and inescapable size of the screen - but seemed rather pointless for most of it (unlike in Avatar, which really did suit the 3D throughout). I suspect that - again, unlike Avatar - it would be just as good, and possibly better, in the standard two dimensions.

Technology aside, the plot is far too much standard Hollywood goodie/baddie fare and the general tone not nearly whimsical enough. I may not be familiar enough with Through the Looking-Glass to pick up all the references to the original - the film is based on aspects of both books - but the Wonderland sections were disappointingly straight, failing to convey the lovely absurdity of the books.

Some of the various star turns were better than others. Alan Rickman's caterpillar worked well, although Matt Lucas' delivery of the Tweedles' lines was a bit poor. However, Mia Wasikowska was charming as Alice. Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham-Carter were exactly what you'd expect from a Tim Burton film. I admit I'm not much of a Burton fan at the best of times, and those who are may have more positive views on Alice.

My verdict: it's OK at best, and just about worth seeing if you've already seen everything interesting that's currently showing.

A Single Man

2010-03-08T05:10:00.000-08:00

The only Christopher Isherwood work I've ever read was Down There on a Visit. And I can remember only a couple of things about that book, the standout being men copulating with chickens.

Sadly, there is no such interspecies mating in A Single Man, Tom Ford's adaptation of Isherwood's novel of the same name. However, it does feature a superb performance from Colin Firth as the bachelor in question. The film is set over a single day in his character George's life, a few months after the death of his longtime male lover in a car accident but including flashbacks to key moments in their relationship. The scene in which George hears of his loss stands out as a superb portrayal of a man overcome by shock, grief and the knowledge that nothing will ever be the same again, yet forced to converse politely and pragmatically with the tragic news' messenger.

However, to pick out specific scenes from the film is, in a way, to do it an injustice. It is a brilliantly tight, coherently structured film that yet allows for an unhurried and revealing look at the character and state of mind of its hero. Within minutes of the film starting, I was confident that everything to follow would be worthwhile. The experience is like reading some of the later David Lodge novels: it inspires complete trust in the storyteller. This is an incredible accomplishment for a directorial debut.

With this in mind, I recommend going to see A Single Man knowing as little as possible about it (beyond the premise outlined above, which you learn in the first few minutes anyway), sitting back, and appreciating the ride through the day, the character and the story.

The Lovely Bones

2010-03-07T10:17:00.000-08:00

The Lovely Bones is a grating and unlikeable film. One reason for this is illustrated by a sequence near its start when, as it attempts to establish the context of the tale, we are shown an episode in which Susie borrows the red family convertible to rush her choking brother, in stunt-driver speed and style, toward hospital. The point of this is to emphasise the dull normality of her suburban life. In movie-world, of course, this sort of happening is par for the course. But if this really were normal life and this really happened to a normal teenager, it would be the most exciting thing that had ever happened to them or anyone they knew. Susie would still be reliving it as she walked through the cornfield months later where is met by the man who entices her into a den before murdering her a short way into the movie.

In other words, the choking episode fails completely to achieve its supposed purpose. And the rest of the film equally fails to convince. Mark Wahlberg and Rachel Weisz as Susie’s parents – the former bent on uncovering his daughter’s killer, the latter on the run from her grief – perform well. The generally high standard of acting and superb production values, as well as one particularly tense scene in which Susie’s sister breaks into the killer’s home, give us a glimpse into what could be a decent thriller - were it not for the awful nonsense that constantly invades the drama on earth in the form of Susie’s semi-departed spirit.

For Susie spends the few years over which the action takes place flitting between exploring an afterlife elsewhere – consisting largely of a computer-generated cornfield and a bandstand – and watching the aftermath of her death unfold back on earth. We are given very little insight into the structure of this afterlife or its relationship to the real world, and so it seems flimsy and unsatisfying – an impression strengthened by the lurid cartoony visuals of Susie’s heaven. The afterlife sequences are therefore an unwelcome intrusion into the rest of the action rather than, as is presumably intended, the basis from which we identify with Susie, helping us view events back on earth through her eyes.

The story, for what it’s worth, follows Susie’s discoveries about her afterlife and its other inhabitants in parallel with her family members’ various efforts to identify her killer, cope with their grief, and grow up around Susie’s absence: these paths forming the figurative ‘lovely bones’ which grow around the hole Susie's death left behind. That metaphor is a good guide to the movie itself: it seems to aim at something profound and meaningful but misses, coming over as clumsy and confused.

To be fair to Peter Jackson, the source material is no better. Many critics have noted that the novel is almost unfilmable, but few if any seem to share my opinion: that the project was doomed not just because the novel had elements difficult to translate between literature and the screen, but because the novel itself is irritating, unconvincing, and would have been better left alone.

Official site, Rotten Tomatoes, Roger Ebert review, Andrew Collins review (scroll down).