Metastaze

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!