Skeletons

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

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

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

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.

Streetdance 3D

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

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

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.