A Serious Man

This is a marvellous black comedy. The whole point of the
movie is that there is no point, and that your life can turn to shit, and you
will never know why, no matter how many authorities you appeal to for an
explanation. It's the atheist Book of Job. So if you think you could watch a
film that tells you that a blind, uncaring universe could easily randomly
select you for sufficient misfortune to ruin your life, I highly recommend it.
The Coen Brothers are on fire right now.

Law Abiding Citizen

So Gerard Butler is having a nice evening in when all of a sudden, he's
interrupted by a couple of psychos who break in, tie him up, kill his wife and
kid, and start nicking his stuff.

Because they are not bright criminal geniuses, they leave him alive, and they
are brought to trial. In order to secure some kind of conviction, they get the
guy who did kill the wife and kid to inform on the other one. It's not
abundantly clear why it couldn't have been the other way round. So the big bad
guy gets 3rd degree murder and a light sentence, the sidekick gets death row.
The justice of the situation escapes Gerard Butler.

So, ten years later, when the sidekick is finally executed, (and nobody
involved in the film appears to have aged a day) Gerard Butler decides to get
his revenge on the justice system. He rigs the execution to be tortuously
painful, kidnaps the main bad guy, tortures him to death while filming it, and
posts a DVD of it to the DA who did the deal freeing the guy. Some would call
that an overreaction, but that's just for openers. Butler, it seems, is some
kind of CIA tactical genius assassin bloke who seemingly has prepared for this
moment by boobytrapping the entire world, so that he can go on killing the
people he deems responsible for this miscarriage of justice until he is
satisfied that his not entirely clear lesson has been learned.

There's two major flaws here though.

1) If you're going to play "here is a genius who has planned your demise with
meticulous detail" you kind of want some inventive methods of ironic execution.
Whereas in fact, his tactically feendeesh revenge pretty much runs to a few car
bombs. Imagine if the film Seven had all seven murders being "Kevin Spacey
Shoots Some Dude" and you're beginning to see the problem.

2) It has no idea where it's going. Butler has no great masterplan, just a
ticky list of people who he sort of wants to kill. He starts off quite well,
but quickly loses momentum, and the film kind of rolls to a gentle halt at the
end.

Ultimately the question is not whether this is a childish and gruesome revenge
fantasy thriller - it is - but whether it's a good one. It really isn't.

The Informant!

Matt Damon plays a Vice President of a company that manufactures lysine, an
amino acid that gets fed to chickens to make them grow fast, and stuff. His
company is involved in price fixing, and he decides to inform on them to the
FBI, apparently out of a mix of conscience and enlightened self interest - i.e.
he fears it'll come out, and he'll be implicated. He proceeds to wear a wire
and gather evidence. The FBI builds a case, it all starts to go to court, and a
big price fixing scandal ensues.

However, unfortunately, as time goes on, it becomes clear that he's a bit
unreliable. And then a lot unreliable. And then actually completely nuts, and
the whole thing looks like it's going to blow up, fall apart, etc.

Now, this is all based on a true story, that of the Archer Daniels Midland
Company scandal. It's somewhat fictionalised, in order to play it for laughs.
Or, to be honest, smiles, smirks, and chuckles. It's not laugh out loud funny,
or edge of the seat dramatic. It gently meanders along, picking up momentum
slowly, losing momentum at times, but in generally, telling a satisfyingly odd
little tale.

Overall, I've seen two kinds of reviews of this film. Some of them tell you
it's a gently amusing little film that you should see, others who've said that
it's too slight, with the rewards not being worth the time invested in watching
it. I think that either viewpoint could be true, depending on taste. I was
certainly in the former camp, though.

Taking Woodstock

On the face of it, from the trailer, this looks like it might be a movie about
how the Woodstock Festival came to happen. That isn't entirely correct.

It's a filming of Elliot Tiber's memoir *about* Woodstock. Tiber's involvement
in Woodstock appears to be that his parents owned the motel that the Woodstock
people used to organise the festival, that it was his initial invitation that
got the Woodstock people to come to White Falls, and that he was somewhat
involved on the periphery of the event, largely on the basis that he was
hanging around, and the Woodstock people were too polite to say "Oh do fuck off
Eliott, we're trying to organise a music festival here."

As such, this is more a coming of age film set against the background of
Woodstock. The overall effect is that there are any number of people in the
movie as peripheral characters whose stories would be much more interesting.
Tiber's sole value, in my view, is as a witness and recorder of what happened,
and to be honest, I don't think he saw an awful lot of the interesting stuff.
Overall, this is a film following the wrong man.

Also, the film is pretty guilty of foreshadowing stuff that doesn't happen. A
good example is, early in the film, a couple of mobsters turn up to attempt to
put a protection racket on the motel. Tiber is then approached by a
transvestite ex-marine (played by Liev Schrieber, who is a hoot) who says that
these mobsters are bad dudes, and that there's going to be trouble. And we
hear nothing at all about them. OK, so this is a movie based on fact, so
sometimes things don't have neat resolutions and callbacks. But it does kind of
make you feel like Tiber's memoir was wrung out for significant events, and
came up short.

It's not a bad film, it's competently made, well acted, but ultimately I felt
like I was watching an uninteresting story set against the backdrop of a much
more interesting one.

Harry Brown

It's like Mike Leigh remade Death Wish.

Michael Caine lives on an abhorrent London council estate, which is dominated
by criminal chav scum. His family are all dead, and he only has one friend.
Who the chav scum then hound to death. Being an ex marine, and having basically
no reason to live any more, he decides to do the world a favour and kill them
all.

This is not a happy film. In any way. This is not about the catharsis of
revenge, there is no redemption. This is a man driven to compromise himself
utterly, out of pure despair. Nor is Caine playing and apparently
indestructible badass old man. He's slow, he's stumbling, and his only real
advantage over his opponents is that he's learned how to shoot straight, at his
target, rather than panic fire all over the place. The ultimate message of the
film appears to be that violence isn't the answer, but it's as close as you're
going to get, because there is no answer.

This is the least glamourous violent film I have ever seen, I think. It's
massively bleak, very well shot, and leaves you with ambiguous feelings about
practically everything that happens in it. I thoroughly recommend it with the
following reservation: if you are not in the mood for it, this film could be
very depressing indeed. It is, however, very worthwhile.

Bright Star

John Keats fell in love with a woman called Fanny Brawn, wrote her a book of
poetry, singly failed to get into a proper relationship with her, fell ill,
emigrated to Italy for his health, and died soon after. If you're just after
facts, I hope I've saved you the bother of watching this film. If you're
intent on watching it, well, treasure that name Fanny Brawn, it's the only
laugh you're going to get.

I would not like you to think that I disliked this movie because of its
subject, however. Oh no. There is so much more to hate. The dialogue is stilted
in the extreme. The costumes are bizarre. The scenes intercut so haphazardly
that you sometimes feel you're watching it on shuffle. It's stuffed full of
tired tropes you see in every damned costume drama.

And it's long. Boy is it long. A third of the way through Star Wars, they blow
up Alderaan and billions die. Minutes into Saving Private Ryan, the carnage is
unbelievable. Bearing that in mind, you will be amazed at how long a scrawny
consumptive poet can cling on to life. Moreover, you will be amazed that it's
only an hour and fifty, feels like weeks.

Maybe, just maybe, you are interested in Keats, costume drama, tragic self-
obstructing love affairs, and uncomfortable pauses. In which case, you might
see some value in all this. Otherwise, no.

The Men Who Stare At Goats

It seems to be the case that back in the day, the US military had a psychic
warrior program. The Russians had one, because they believed the US had one,
and because the Russians had one, the US had to start one, just in case there
was anything in it. They did some pretty weird stuff. The journalist Jon Ronson
wrote a book on it, which was interesting.


What seems to have happened is that someone read the book, and thought that it
was pretty funny. And that you could write a story about these people. Hence
this.

What this is, is effectively a comedy parody of Apocalypse Now, set in the
Iraq war, kind of crossed with The Big Lebowski. George Clooney is a former
psychic soldier, summoned into Iraq to seek out his former commander, played by
Jeff Bridges (being The Dude) who is in the clutches of Kevin Spacey, a
renegade psychic soldier. Following him is Ewan Macgregor, a journalist who has
basically nothing better to do than tag along.

It's hard to pin it down. It's not spectacularly deep, and not exactly
a joke a minute. The humour comes from the weird things that people can make
themselves believe. The weakness comes from the fact that the situations are
somewhat based on fact, but the events aren't. I've a feeling the original book
would be funnier. Because real idiocy is better than fictional idiocy.


Overall, though, it's an amusing hour and a half of self-delusion and
misadventure, that doesn't quite scale the cliffs of insanity that you hope it
will, but is very entertaining for all that.

Up...

...is quite a peculiar film. In that on one hand, it's a barnstorming Pixar
chase romp around a South American jungle plateau, involving an old man, a boy
scout, a house held up with balloons, another old guy, some dogs, and a big
comedy ostrich. And a zeppelin. But on the other hand, it's a rather touching
portrayal of an old man mourning the loss of his wife who was the love of his
life. Much in the same way as WALL-E was just as much about a lonely robot
care-taking the grave of the Earth, as it was about bleeping knockabout fun.

If this one has a problem, it's that there's no middle ground. There's the very
adult theme of bereavement, and there's an updated version of the Roadrunner
cartoons. Seemed quite an incongruity to me.

For all that, it's a great little film, and well worth seeing.

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnasus.

Ok, nonsense time. Doctor Parnasus is an immortal travelling showman, with a
travelling theatre which allows punters (one at a time) to enter incredible
dreamscapes, and (little do they realise) make a choice between the
high road of goodness and enlightenment, and the low road of self-
gratification. It seems that this whole setup stems between a wager between
Parnassus (Christopher Plummer) and The Devil (Tom Waits. Yes, that Tom Waits.)

However, it's getting near time to pay the piper, and the devil wants his due.
And Parnassus is an old man, and the public aren't interested in his tatty
looking theatre. Into this situation wanders Tony, a highly ambiguous charmer,
who might well be Parnassus's salvation.

And then some stuff happens that's very Terry Gilliam in a Time Bandits/ Baron
Munchausen kind of way.

Is it any good? Well, it's Gilliam, so obviously, *bits* of it are genius. But
in terms of making a film, it's a bit like throwing the pieces of a jigsaw into
a box, shaking it, and hoping. Sure, the pieces are there... Ultimately,
though, you've got to ask yourself which you'd rather have, a jigsaw you've got
to work on assembling yourself, of something great, or a perfectly formed
picture of something piss-poor. I saw a trailer for the new Twilight movie while
waiting for Parnassus to start, and I can tell you, that film will be linear
and expositiony from start to finish, and you'd have to tie me down to make me
watch it. And I'd still be like Jonathan Pryce at the end of Brazil rather than
actually look at it. So, Parnassus is flawed, but better than a coherent but
crap film.

As for the question of Heath Ledger's death... Apparently, Heath Ledger had
done all his location scenes. What needed to be done was do the CGI dreamworld
sequences, and we get round that by saying that Tony is two-faced (or many more)
and thus in a world of imagination presents a different face for each
situation. For instance, when he's interloping in a woman's romantic fantasy,
he looks like Johnny Depp. Makes sense, or so every woman I've ever met tells
me.

Two problems rear their heads. First, Colin Farrell. Farrell has turned in some
good performances, but this isn't one of them. And unfortunately, he's playing
Tony at the climax of the film. I would personally have switched in either
Johnny Depp or Jude Law for him. Second, I just don't get the feeling that this
was how the film was supposed to turn out. I feel there were hasty rewrites to
accomodate the lack of Heath Ledger. And the thing is, that might not be true,
they may have filmed the script with very few changes, but the overall film is
so disjointed that you can't feel confident in it. Definitely worth seeing if
you're a fan of Gilliam, though.

Zombieland

In a nutshell, it's an American take on the Shaun of the Dead concept - take
a zombie movie, and make a comedy out of it. In Shaun of the Dead, the zombie
movie was Dawn of the Dead, and the comedy was Spaced. In this, the zombie
movie is 28 Days Later, and the comedy is, probably, Scrubs (or the like).

In that your main character, Jesse Eisenberg, narrates much in the way JD does
in Scrubs, there's frequent illustrative sequences like JD's fantasies, and he
is, like JD, an awkward boy-man trying to make his way in the world. Along the
way, he teams up with Woody Harrelson who is a pretty awesome zombie-asskicking
redneck. And the pair of them encounter a pair of sisters also trying to make
their way in the world, and an awkward group relationship slowly blossoms.

It's actually quite a sweet little comedy about how the people around you are
your family, just like Scrubs is, only with the medicine taken out, and
sick-as-you-like zombie violence substituted.

Rating wise, it's difficult to score, in that while objectively, it's not that
brilliant, and you should probably score it something like 7.5, I hugely,
hugely enjoyed it. So my personal rating is something like a 9/10. I don't
think it's one of those films that transcends its genre - like say, Reservoir
Dogs is a great film even if you don't like gangster movies. But I would say
that if you think that you might enjoy this film, given the description, then
you probably really will.

The Hurt Locker

Gritty wartime realism. Set in Iraq, present day, the film follows a bomb
disposal squad going about their daily business of dealing with unimaginable
peril, and trying to deal with their new squad leader, who appears to be a
chronic risk-taking adrenaline junkie.

It's essentially a film about American soldiers being put in harm's way, in
constant risk of death from all sides, and how that unimaginable stress is
dealt with, when even a local with a mobile phone is a potential threat, and
every bag of rubbish in the street is a potential landmine. The answer seems to
be that you either crack up, or you go crazy.

There isn't so much a story as a series of events. Each day, the team's called
out to deal with a situation, and they go and they deal with it. And we get to
see a fresh horror of war each time. There are some unbelievably tense scenes,
made more tense by the film's apparent willingness to kill off the characters.
God alone knows what it must be like to actually defuse an improvised
explosive, if watching an actor defuse a fake one is that tense.

I don't think that the film has more to say about war than earlier efforts like
Full Metal Jacket or Apocalypse Now, but it's a worthy successor to that sort
of film. If I have a criticism, it's that it does seem, a bit, to be pro-US
propoganda. Iraqi insurgents are seen in a very bad light, where they are seen
at all, and very little is made of the politics of the situation. We don't
really get to question whether or not the US has any business being there. As
far as the soldiers are concerned, they're there because those are the orders,
and that appears to be sufficient justification. But then, the film isn't
about that.

Still, and interesting film, with a very interesting ending. If you can even
call it an ending.

Adventureland

And while we're on the subject of sweet romantic comedies that don't really
have a lot to say...

This is actually a really incredibly standard movie plot. A protagonist is
forced into a situation they don't like, but finds there love and happiness in
an unexpected place. And if this were a film with Jennifer Anniston or Sandra
Bullock in it, you'd avoid it like ebola.

So, it's not really a question of whether it's an original movie (because it
really isn't), but whether it's a good example of a fairly well represented
genre. And it is!

Set in the eighties, you have Jesse Eisenberg as a guy who's just finished
college, and has to cancel his holidays and work through the summer in order to
afford to go to graduate school the following year. And due to being a English
Lit graduate, he is qualified for basically fucking nothing, and the best he
can do is get a job working the amusements at the local low-rent funfair.
There, he meets a nice girl who's kind of screwed up, and some guys in a
similar position to him.

And so, romance sort of ensues.

It's well written, well acted, and will ring bells of recognition for anyone
who left Uni and thought "now what?" It reminds me in many ways of Juno, and is
made with that kind of indie sensibility, if with a little less originality.

Away We Go

A Sam Mendes movie, which can best be described as slight, but charming.

A young couple, played by John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph are expecting their
first child, and find simultaneously that his parents, who they were relying on
for some support, are moving overseas. They therefore embark upon a nationwide
search, visiting places where they have people they know, looking for somewhere
to settle down. Meanwhile, the subtext is that they're quite unsure how they're
going to cope as parents, and are taking a look at all their friends with kids,
to see how they deal.

There follows a series of episodes where they meet with the various odd people
they know, and we kind of learn something about families. Though I have to
confess, I couldn't really tell you what.

And that's the real sticking point for me with this film. It's highly amusing,
it's heartwarming, the performances are great, but it's behaving like that it's
revealing some great truth about family and home, and it really isn't. Where
they end up... well, without spoilering it, I will say that I really couldn't
say why they decided to end up there, rather than where they looked like they
might about two thirds of the way through the movie, which seemed like a much
better option, and *still* looks to me like a better option.

Anyway, a solid eight out of ten, I'd have said, I really enjoyed it, and
highly recommend it. I just thought it'd have rather more to say than it did.

District 9

I think it's a slightly shameful state of affairs that this is in the top rank
of scifi movies these days, but it is.

It's a wicked enough premise, having aliens as refugees, the somewhat dumb
worker bees of a civilisation whose more intelligent leadership are missing for
some reason, and who have limped their way to Earth, only to be placed in the
hands of a private security firm by the authorities who can't be bothered to
render aid to them themselves. The whole thing is a rather grim and nasty view
of humanity, which suggests our compassion is limited to the profit we gain
from rendering that compassion, and that's not a view any student of world
affairs could confidently challenge.

My problem with it is that I don't believe it. I do not believe, for one
instant, that any government is going to let an arms firm have sole
responsibility for managing a resource like an alien race with unknown
technology. The South African government would be fighting to keep control of
it in the face of the UN demanding access to the tech, rather than the whole
thing just being handed to a private concern through apathy. I think that
there's probably a rather more well thought out story to be told on this theme,
which would cast humanity in no better light, but this one is just a bit
simplistic.

I'd recommend it, but it's more like the kind of semi-intellectual low budget
scifi that you used to get in the seventies.

Mesrine: Public Enemy Number One.

See above.


No, really. As I believe I mentioned in the previous review for Mesrine: Killer
Instinct, it would appear that Jacques Mesrine was a charming, amoral, violent
twat. He robbed banks and casinos, kidnapped people for money, and treated the
women in his life pretty shabbily. Well, plus ca change. It would appear that
Mesrine pretty much behaved the same way for the rest of his life. Eventually
the French police got pissed off with him, and shot him. (No spoiler there,
happens in the first few minutes of the first film.)

Which is not to say that this film has nothing to say. Mesrine did his best to
become a celebrity, manipulating the press to cultivate a romantic outlaw
image, which they appeared only too happy to cooperate with because it sold
magazines. I also couldn't help noticing that he'd never get away with his
casual, unplanned style of crime these days, what with modern security, and
that it was people like Mesrine who made modern bank security a necessity.

I suppose it would be fairest to consider the two films as a single film. In
which case, what you'd probably think is that it was a really good film, but a
bit samey and overlong by about an hour.

Mesrine: Killer Instinct.

Essentially, it's a biopic of notorious French gangster of the 60s and 70s,
Jacques Mesrine, based on his own autobiography. Apparently, this is a two
parter, and this first film details his return from the Algerian War, his
introduction to crime, his move to Canada, arrest, incarceration, escape, and
so forth.

On a purely cinematic level, it's great. A really stylish, gritty, period
piece. If there's a criticism of it as a film, it's that it's quite
stereotypical. Quite a lot of the time it comes across as Goodfellas smoking a
Gauloise and shrugging nonchalantly. But if being quite similar to Goodfellas
is the worst you can say about a film, it's not got that many things wrong with
it.

On a story level, I'm far less comfortable with it. This is a stylish,
glamourous gangster movie for the most part, written in no small part by the
protagonist, who, in addition to being a gangster, was a real self-publicist.
Hence, we've got the life story of someone who was, quite frankly, a murderous
little shit, with very little attempt to take the shine off him.

Having said that, if this were fiction, I'd have no hesitation in recommending
it, and for all my reservations, I will certainly be going to see the second
film when it comes out at the end of the month. A good film, but one to watch
with a critical eye.

Inglourious Basterds

Oh. My. God.

What. The Fuck.

Well, Quentin's certainly been at the crystal meth again.

Once Upon A Time In Nazi Occupied France says the title card to the film's
first chapter, and yep, much as this is a WWII flick, it feels a hell of a lot
like a spaghetti western. Including the soundtrack.

So...

Joseph Goebbels has a new film coming out, his latest propaganda epic. There's
going to be a film premiere. The high ranking bigwigs of the Third Reich will
be there.

The star of the film is sweet on a girl who owns a Parisian cinema, and so
arranges that the premiere be there.

The allies get wind of this thing, and so send in the Basterds, a collection of
US secret service dudes who are basically The Jewish Dirty Dozen, who prior to
this have been committing atrocities on Nazis for a while. There is scalping.
Onscreen scalping. Be warned.

And just to make it interesting, the Parisian cinema owner is Jewish herself,
and is bent on revenge for the death of her family.

And then All Fucking Hell Breaks Loose in what has to be the least historically
accurate American made war film of all time. Think on the implications of this.

Of late, there have been a lot of films in which we have been encouraged to
consider the human angle behind the Nazi regime, and been encouraged to think,
in films like Good, The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas and The Reader, about how
real, normal people became complicit. This is not that kind of film. This is
straight out of the old school of 70s and 80s war movies where basically, the
Nazis are there purely as fair game. In fact, the ending is cathartic wish
fulfillment of epic proportions, discarding all sense and reason in the name of a
spectacular bloodbath.

There's any number of great performances, and great dialogue. A lot of the best
dialogue goes to Christoph Waltz as Col. Landa, who is an SS Officer and
shitbag of epic proportions. I'd consider this Tarantino certainly back to the
form above that he displayed in Kill Bill, if not up to Pulp Fiction genius
levels.

Ultimately, this is a hugely enjoyable, completely irresponsible mayhem fest.
Something tells me that I should find it distasteful, but what the hell.

The Time Traveller's Wife.

Adaptations of popular novels. Tricky, isn't it, hmmm? It's a difficult
business, because, as the old chestnut goes, it's never the same as what you
had in your head.

The Time Traveller's Wife was always going to be a hard sell on these lines
because it's well written, and got some chin-strokey scifi elements with the
time travel, but is essentially a sentimental love story. In the book, Henry
and Claire are deeply likable people; Claire is well defined as the kind of
woman clever men fall in love with, and I'm sure the same holds true of Henry
for women. Hence, at the core of any film adaptation needs to be a performance
of this kind.

Well, sorry. Didn't happen. Rachel McAdams and Eric Bana are *alright*. I
wouldn't like to give the impression that they were awful, that wouldn't be
fair. But you'd kind of hope for the kind of screen chemistry that you got from
old school screen pairings like Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn. Or, if you
want to be slightly less old school, the way Kate Winslet and Jim Carrey pulled
it off in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. These two, well, they were a
nice enough middle class couple. But you know. Eh.

The other thing I found difficult to swallow is that they nerfed the ending.
I'm not going to spoiler the film, and I'm certainly not going to spoiler the book,
but the end of the book was very powerful indeed, whereas the film kind of
chickened out, and presented an ending which was kind of sort of similar, but
had massively less impact. Maybe they didn't want people crying their eyes out
in the cinema, but if that's become a something to avoid in cinema, rather than
something to strive for, something's fucked up somewhere.

So, in essence, it's a nice enough film about the trials and tribulations of a
couple cursed to live their relationship in a different order from each other,
but it's a shadow of the book.

The Taking of Pelham 123

Here's another odd beast.

The Taking of Pelham 123, the original 1976 version, is a tense psychological
drama. You've got Walter Matthau as a veteran traffic cop, and Robert Shaw as a
measured, calculating hijacker.

Tony Scott, however, likes shouting loonies and car chases. So when he remade
it, he decided to throw in a shouting loony in the form of John Travolta's
hijacker, and a bunch of car chases in a film about a stationary train. There's
a bit where some police have to drive two bags of money across town, with a
motorcycle escort. Despite nobody actually trying to stop them in any way,
somehow two cars get flipped and a couple of bike cops ride straight into
stationary objects. There is spectacle for the sake of it all over the shop.

Despite that, however, the original tense psychological thriller is still there,
and while Travola chews quite a lot of carpet, it's quite a fun performance
which doesn't harm the film. The overall effect is sort of like someone took a
roast dinner and put icing and sprinkles on it, to make it *even better*.

Ultimately, this is a pretty decent DVD rental, or "OK, so we're at the
pictures, what shall we see?" movie, but don't go out of your way. A good film,
but not a great one, which actually, the original version is.

The Reader

The basic premise: A boy of 15, in 1950s Germany, has an affair with an
older woman. He's besotted with her as only a lad having lots of sex for the
first time can be, she's quite odd, and finds some sort of comfort that she
needs with him. All seems to be going reasonably well for them until one day
she disappears without warning. Years later, the boy's in college studying Law,
and goes to observe a war crimes trial, in which the older woman is a
defendant. Well, we all know how awkward it can be running into an ex.

Really don't know what to think about this film, to be honest. It's very well
made, the performances are excellent, it's very emotionally involving and
affecting. There is, however, in my mind, a problem. And that is that the plot
is so incredibly contrived. Or rather, Kate Winslet's character is incredibly
contrived. Because what this plot requires is a sympathetic concentration camp
guard. Especially as the plot requires one who is not shown as particularly
repentant. So the effect is of an incredibly weird and screwed up person.

So, essentially, we have a boy (and later a man) suffering the aftermath of all
this, and never really getting over it. But unfortunately, to me at least, the
situation seems so implausible to me, such an edge case of the human condition,
that you kind of wonder why we're being asked to consider it at all. It seemed
that the objective of the film was just to create the most complex knot of
guilt possible. There seemed to be no other purpose or conclusion to it.

So, 8/10. In that it's an excellent bit of cinema, but perhaps not so much of a
story.

Moon

Mmmm. Nice.

Hark back to the seventies, with films like 2001, and Silent Running, when
sci-fi mean a lone astronaut, isolated from humanity, with only computers and
androds for company, then encountering something that makes them question their
sanity an the meaning of life. You know, before Star Wars fucked it up for
everyone. Because much as we love Star Wars, it did to Sci Fi Films what
Tolkein did to Fantasy Fiction - made everything that came after follow its
template.

This is a film like that. Sam Rockwell plays an astronaut/maintenance guy,
whose job is to be the single living component in an automated mining concern
on the dark side of the moon, which extracts He3 from the lunar surface and
sends it back to earth to power fusion energy reactors.

The place is tatty and down at heel, the comms is bust, and the guy's been
stuck up there for three years, and coming to the end of his contract, going a
bit crazy and peculiar. Then there's a bit of an accident, and things start to
get a tiny bit bizarre.

The aesthetic of the thing is very seventies moonbase, with everything chunky
and white and labeled in all-caps bold san serif font, robots that don't look
like anything in particular, moon buggys with big balloon tyres, suspiciously
high gravity... the thing looks nostaligically wonderful.

I highly recommend this film to anyone with a sufficiently long attention span.
If I have a criticism, it's that as the mystery slowly unfolds, there aren't
too many surprises if you have a bit of experience with the genre. But shocks
and surprises aren't part of the deal, more a slow reveal and realisation of
the inevitable.

My Name Is Bruce

Cinema's all crap at the moment, so it's DVD B-Movie Time.

Most arch and self-referential of all possible movies, Bruce Campbell directs
himself as himself.

It seems that there's this ancient burial ground where all these Chinese miners
were buried in the 1800s, and a Chinese warrior demon spirit type thing was set
to protect the graves. Idiot kids defile the graves, and this blade wielding
demon spirit thing appears and sets about killing everyone in the town. The kid
who did it is a huge Bruce Campbell fan, and thus believes that he is the man
for the job. And so kidnaps him. Campbell thinks he's being wound up by his
agent and goes along with the whole thing. Until people start getting their
heads lopped off anyway.

Bruce Campbell is playing himself as a collossally egotistical, womanising,
alcoholic, cowardly loser asshole, which is where pretty much all the gold in
this movie lies. Everything else is a pretty pale retread of Three Amigos.
When you heard about this movie, *if* you heard about this movie, you either
thought "Cool! Bruce Campbell is awesome!" or you didn't. If you did, then
you'll probably not regret renting or downloading this. If you didn't, then
there's probably nothing in this for you.

6/10 - other than the fact it's BRUCE CAMPBELL, this is a barely competent
movie :)

Harry Potter And The Half Blood Prince.

Meh.

No surprises here. It's a Harry Potter Film. It's like other Harry Potter Films
you may have seen. Only there's less in it. It's not that it's bad, it's just
got the slenderest of plots. New teacher has a secret that we need to know, and
the Bad Guys have a plot to get into Hogwarts. That's basically it. Everything
else is snogging and shagging in the lower sixth.

Jim Broadbent turns up, being the latest member of the British acting
establishment to be caught in the inevitable gravitational pull of the HP
machine, and he does a great job, being the slightly creepy and slimy, but
ultimately quite likeable Professor Slughorn.

Everyone other than him, Harry, Ron, Hermione and Dumbledore is seriously
downgraded to bit part status, and much is left unexplained. Particularly what
"Half-Blood Prince" is supposed to mean. I faintly remember we were told in the
book, but the film doesn't bother. It seemed a weak enough thing to hang the
title of the book on, and even weaker with the film.

Recommendation: Well, if you watched the first five, and intend to see the
seventh, then you may as well. Far from essential to see it in the cinema
though.

Public Enemies

The film chronicles (inaccurately) the life and crimes of John Dillinger, big
time 30's bank robber, and the attempts of the embryonic FBI to arrest him.

Now, on paper, this ought to be a cracker. You've got a notoriously cheeky and
raffish bank robber played by Johnny Depp, a stoic and by the book FBI guy
played by Christian Bale, and the whole thing directed by Michael Mann, who
directed Heat, arguably the best bank heist movie ever made. How could this
fail to be the best movie of the year? Beats me, but it did.

I *think* it's the script. That's my best guess. I realised about 40 minutes in
that I no longer gave a fuck what happened. I didn't like the robbers at all,
so I didn't much want them to get away with anything. But on the other hand,
the FBI were a bunch of stuffed shirts and I didn't really care if they caught
anyone. It was as if every effort had been made to present shades of grey, and
not glamourise bank robbery or law enforcement, with the ultimate result that
the entire exercise was grey and lacking in glamour.

Visually, it's pretty good; a bit sepia and low lit, but pretty stylish, and
when the bank heists are on, you really feel Michael Mann getting into his
stride. But as far as the story goes, I was left thinking "So?"

Sunshine Cleaning

Time for a standard Hollywood plot. You've got a dysfunctional family with a
big immediate problem, and a lot of underlying problems. In order to solve the
big immediate problem, they get together and do an unusual activity, and in
coming together, solve a lot of the underlying problems too.

In this case, the immediate problem is getting enough money together to send
the kid to a decent school, the underlying problem is a pair of sisters who've
yet to come to terms with their mother's suicide, and the unusual activity is
forming a business which cleans crime scenes and apartments after murders,
suicides and people who've died alone and gradually decomposed into their
mattresses.

And there is your first clue that this isn't your usual Hollywood tat. Any
comedy attached to that is likely to be somewhat restrained and rather dark,
and this is certainly true of this film. And that level of elegant restraint is
evident throughout the film. It feels real, it has a realistic perspective. The
characters are charming, the problems believable, and the resolutions within
the scope of what's possible and believable.

Looking For Eric

Finally.

Lovely little piece, this. Eric Bishop is a downtrodden man. A 50 year old
postman, who lives with two stepsons who don't respect him, and is borderline
suicidal. Seeing him in an appalling state, his mates at work rally round, and
get him to try some self-help book by Paul McKenna. As part of this, he's
encouraged to visualise someone he admires, and try to emulate their
confidence. Obviously, he chooses Eric Cantona. Soon enough, he begins to see
Eric Cantona whenever he's alone, and begins to take advice from him.

As a result, he begins to try make changes to his life, and those of his
family.

It's witty and amusing, and has that Ken Loach Ring Of Authenticity(tm), which
really makes the film. You could probably point to a hundred Hollywood comedies
with the same sort of "Loser turns his life around" plot, but this film has the
kind of writing and performance which lifts it way above that. If anything, the
film is let down by the Imaginary Cantona schtick; Cantona is, after all, just
his inner voice, this film is more about a man taking control of his own life,
than being encouraged by some magical, mystical life coach.

It all comes to a slightly over the top conclusion, which doesn't quite chime
with the gritty goings on of the rest of the film, but when the dust settles,
the message is not so much that you can solve all your problems by being like
Cantona, so much as that it's possible to get yourself out of a rut and
pointing in the right direction, with a little confidence.

Transformers: Whatever The Hell The Rest Of The Title Is.

A number of errors led me to see this film today. The cinema's website claimed
that Looking For Eric was on at 2pm. This was the first error. When I got to
the cinema, I quickly bought a ticket from the machine, not noticing it was a
ticket for a Monday showing. That was the second error. The girl in the cinema
tore the ticket and sent me to the screen indicated without realising it was
the wrong day. That was the next error. When I got into the cinema, I was
presented with Hanna Montana: The Movie, so I left, and traded the ticket in
for a later showing of Transformers. This may also have been an error.

There's nothing to like about this movie. The humans in the movie are uniformly
badly written, badly acted and completely without redeeming interest. Whenever
something with pulse is on the screen, that moment is a waste of your time.

But so what, right? It's giant robot explodo movie. But I've got so many
issues with that aspect too. First, design. When we were kids, Transformers
were cooler if the robot in question looked like cool robots built out of cars
when they were robots. The robots in transformers have this appalling busy
design, they just don't look good, they look messy. Second, action. Michael Bay
seems to think that all he needs to do to make robot fights cool is to just
slap tons of motion blur on everything so you can't actually see what's going
on.

So, the whole thing is just a huge, inelegant mess from start to finish. A real
steaming turd of a movie.

3/10 - There's a few effects shots that are quite nice, but really, don't waste
your time.

The Hangover

So... four guys go on a stag night in Las Vegas and get utterly hammered.
Mayhem ensues. They wake the following morning, none of them can remember what
happened, and the groom's missing. His friends must therefore track him down
before the wedding.

So far, so "Dude, Where's My Car." It's a staggeringly unoriginal plot. If you
were to show me a 1920s silent movie with this plot, I wouldn't be at all
surprised.

The quality, then, has to be in the execution, and it's actually pretty darned
funny, really. It's pretty much an even split between black comedy and
slapstick. If you're likely to be amused by seeing a baby belted in the face
with a car door, this is certainly the movie for you. I'd say the whole film
sits on the comedy spectrum somewhere between Old School and a Kevin Smith
movie. Which I intend as a recommendation.

Terminator Salvation

Or, "If the machines want to take out humanity, they'd better be sure they kill
Batman first."

It would be an insult to everyone on Mono to suggest that they need a synopsis
of the plot. John Connor, in the future, fighting Skynet. Seriously, you do the
math.

The battle details one of Connor's earlier battles with Skynet, no more, no
less. Lots of hardware made of pigiron goes boom. We see a few cool new breeds
of terminator, and - hey look! Michael Ironside is a hardass! Nice to see you
again Michael! Top bloke.

The real question is, is it any good? The problem with judging that is that no
film will ever be as good as Terminator or Terminator 2, including Terminator
and Terminator 2. Seriously, I watched Terminator 2 last night, and it's just
about pretty good, but 20 years haven't been kind to it. The effects stand up,
but the plot's pretty dumb, and I will never know how we tolerated Edward
Furlong at the time. So, given that, I guess this is an acceptable, but less
good sequel. It's a bit of a mess, and the ending is pretty dumb, but it
rattles along entertainingly enough, and it looks pretty cool.

One thing that this film does *not* really do is take the franchise in any
interesting new directions. The brief is to film a bit of what we know
happened, and make it exciting. No real risks are taken, and so I suppose it
succeeds in not failing, it fails in not succeeding too.


7/10. Capable enough Explodo.

Synecdoche, New York

Caden Cotard is a relatively successful theatre director, married to a
successful artist, with a young daughter. His health's not all that it might
be, and his marriage is a bit dead in the water. His life begins to spiral way
out of control, as he attempts to create a massively complex autobiographical
theatre piece, with a cast of thousands, recreating his entire life and
everyone that connects with him in a warehouse set.

Now, this is a film written and directed by Charlie Kaufman, writer of Being
John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, so it should be no
surprise that things take a rapid turn for the incredibly bizarre, dreamlike
and hallucinatory very quickly. Uncompromisingly so, in fact; not much that
happens in the second half makes a lick of sense, even though, ultimately, it's
quite justified. It's a deliberately confusing and occasionally disturbing bit
of cinema, but I would say completely worthwhile. Like some sort of odd cross
between Michel Gondry and David Lynch.

Obviously, when a film is largely dream sequence, it's all to easy for it to
disappear up its own arse. Synecdoche avoids this by being frequently highly
amusing, as things take absurd and whimsical turns all over the place, as
dreams are wont to do. So it's surreally amusing, surreally disturbing,
surreally melancholy... basically, all flavours of surreal in one big
surreality selection box. Very nice.

Still don't know how to pronounce it. Apparently it's not done that well at the
box office, and I wonder if, in part, that's because people have gone "I'll
have a ticket for sneck... sink.. sind... Wolverine please."

The Curious Origins Of Mr James "Wolverine" Logan Esq.

It seems that once in the mid nineteenth century there was a wee boy named
James Logan, and his half brother Victor Creed. One fateful night, they
discover they have Special Animal Powers, and then the credits happen. When the
credits end, it's the Vietnam War Or Something, and they get recruited into a
black-ops super-team.

And then things go pretty much by the numbers for a film in which there's a
black-ops team that does Very Bad Things, people grow consciences, fail to
grow consciences, betray each other, swear vengeance on each other, and stuff.

So, what it is, is a pretty slick and cool action revenge type flick, with
added shiny superpowers. Rather than, I would say, a dark gritty superhero
movie. Which means it's good stuff. Obviously, it's more of a thrill ride than
a story with depth, but judged as a thrill ride, it's absolutely worth the
price of admission.


8/10 - Doesn't do anything surprising, but what it does, it does well. Doesn't
really push for anything above or beyond what was expected of it.

Star Trek

Ooh. Eh. Hmmm.

The first thing we have to do is decide what this is. Then we have to work out
how good a one it is.

Is it a sci-fi movie? Is this a story about a starship in an interstellar
peacekeeping federation? No. No it's not. It's an unashamed 124 minute fangasm.
This is a film made for people who like the original series. The intent seems
clear, to roll back the years, and remake the ludicrosity of the Shatner era.
We are having no truck with the TNG and subsequent series, where the
inhabitants of an interstellar cruise liner go places and be diplomatic at
people. This is phasers and fistfights.

As it goes, it's pretty successful. In that without the Star Trek marque on it,
this would all be pretty lame-ass stuff, but somehow, since it *is* Star Trek,
cheesy stupidity is part of the franchise, and they do a reasonable job of
capturing the formula - in a way that, for instance, 'Enterprise' really
didn't.

The plot is pretty standard Trek stuff; a bunch of Romulans from the future
have come back in time in order to trash the Vulcans and the Federation in
general, using their Way Superior Technology to cream the opposition. The only
notable thing about this is that in doing so they change Trek history, their
actions altering the characters at pretty formative points of their history,
thus ensuring that they can take a fresh take, rather than feel like they have
to copy.

It's also a superhero origins movie, in that it details how Kirk comes to
command the Enterprise, and assemble the classic crew. I don't think it'll come
as any great surprise to anyone that it doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

I have one real issue with the film, and that's that they don't give Kirk a
whole lot of manly heroics. He gets beat up a lot. His primary ability seems to
be to soak up a beating until someone else arrives to save his ass. He's Kirk.
He ought to be able to beat up any five guys in a fistfight, with a trademark
overhead double hand blow. Everyone else, I like. I actually *like* Chris Pine
as Kirk. I just wish they'd managed to write him succeeding by more than basic
blind luck.

Encounters At The End Of The World

Filmmaker Werner Herzog went to Antarctica, and he filmed the people there.

That much, was a really good idea. In that Antarctica is a really weird and
amazing place, and the people who live there are really weird and amazing
people. There's a lot of cool science going on down there, hippy dropout
travellers seem to wash up there, it's a whole other world.

Unfortunately, Herzog also felt that he needed to narrate and score this film.
So a lot of the time, all you hear is Herzog's frankly droning and insight-free
reflections on the place and the people. There are times when there are
actually really interesting people talking, and Herzog dubs over them, drowning
them out, telling us what they are saying. The ego required for that is
*astounding*. And irritating.

The rest of the time, there is a really, *really* loud music soundtrack, which
comes in two flavours - tuneless ethereal choral music, and tuneless spiritual
string ensemble that sounds like a building creaking in the wind. I'd like to
emphasise how *really* loud it was. Loud and *constant*. So (while Herzog isn't
talking over them) you have all these residents of Antarctica telling us how
really silent Antarctica is, and then when we're actually trying to look at
antarctica, and experience that, there's this intrusive and inappropriate
racket going on. I genuinely nearly walked out near the end because I was sick
of it.

I'd love to see a documentary on this subject. I'd love to see Attenborough do
it. I'd love to see Louis Theroux do it. I'd like to see *this* one with the
music and director's commentary stripped off. This, however, was rendered and
irritating and frustrating mess.

State Of Play

I was listening to the Radio 4 film programme the other day. On it, Kevin
McDonald, the director of State of Play was being interviewed. One of the
questions he was asked was why Brad Pitt had quit the film, and been replaced
by Russell Crowe. McDonald claimed that his intention of the film was to make a
film that seemed to be quite complicated but was actually quite simple. Brad
Pitt wanted it to actually be complicated, so he walked.

Put it another way. This is a film that is too simplistic for Brad Pitt, and
Brad Pitt was in Mr and Mrs Smith.

It's not that bad, really, I just can't see the point of it. There's a
Washington sex scandal tangled up with a congressional investigation into
something or other, and the murder of some people. And so Russell Crowe pokes
it with a stick for a while until it makes some kind of sense. But not much.
The whole thing turns out to be rather less interesting or shocking than you
might initially think.

I'd give it 7/10. In that it's a competent enough thriller, but it doesn't hang
together, and you don't end up giving a fuck what happened anyway.

Good

My, films about Nazi Germany are in fashion now, aren't they?

This one features Viggo Mortensen as John Halder, a German university professor
who inadvertently attracts the attention of the Nazis, who like his novel
concerning euthanasia. They co-opt him to write a paper on the subject, and
soon enough, bit by bit, small degree by small degree, they own him.

This is a somewhat bleaker film than the like of The Pianist or Schindler's
List (if that can be believed), in that while there isn't the appalling
depiction of the treatment of the Jews that those films had, neither is there
that one all important brave, compassionate soul who makes a difference, or
even *tries* to make a difference. Rather, this is the story of a man who may
mean no harm, but becomes complicit by his inaction, principally his inability
to save his Jewish friend, played by Jason Isaacs.

Ultimately, that's what's really unsettling about the film. We'd all like to
think we'd be an Oscar Schindler, even in some small way, in the same
situation. But in truth, it'd be all too easy to be like John Halder. Not
actively complicit in what was going on, but neither willing to take risks to
do what is right.

As a film, it's maybe not that great. There's only two real performances in it,
Mortensen and Isaacs, and Mortensen's a bit flat, sadly. Having said that, it's
well shot, the script's good, and Mortensen's nowhere near as rubbish as Tom
Cruise was in Valkyrie.

Let The Right One In

It's an interesting film, a vampire movie from a country with almost no
tradition of vampire movies (Sweden), and so presents the topic with an
originality, a far cry from the sexualised nature of the concept present in
many films, notably Twilight.

The film centres about Oskar, a weird kid who gets bullied at school, and Eli,
a young girl who moves in next door. Who turns out to be not so much an young
girl as a 200 year old vampire. Initially Eli is helped by an older man who
initially appears to be her father, who hunts people for her, but soon, she's
left on her own, and turns to Oskar for help.

The whole thing is shot in that stilted, almost amateurish style that European
films use to convey realism, sort of the style of no style. Not exactly
Dogme 95, bit certainly observes some of those rules, I think. It's quite slow
moving and quiet, and not a little creepy, even when there's not a vampire near
the scene.

In many ways, the film's greatest strength is that it presents the events as a document for you to consider; there's little directorial sleight of hand to tell you how to feel about what you've seen. And as such, the film stays with you for a long time, and gives you a lot to think about.

Duplicity

The basic premise. Julia Roberts and Clive Owen are espionage agents with a bit
of a past (she CIA, he MI6) who have retired and are now working in corporate
espionage. At the beginning of the film, it would seem that she's a corporate
mole, and he's a guy hired to handle her. Sexual tension. Sparks fly. Only not
that much, as Owen and Roberts have about as much chemistry as Argon.

It's a teeny bit more convoluted than that, as there are wheels within wheels
aplenty, and the whole thing is just a little bit like The Sting, only not
anywhere near as good.

The saving grace, really, is that it's actually quite funny. Paul Giamatti is
swiftly becoming one of those guys who you can count on to bring a bit of class
to an otherwise pretty average movie. Clive Owen also seems to be having a lot
of fun. Julia Roberts, on the other hand just looks bored.

The Damned United

We all know Brian Clough, right? This film is a fictionalised account of the 44
days he spent as manager of Leeds United in 1974, and the history that lead
Clough to take the job. The film is based on David Peace's novel, which has
been criticised as being inaccurate, not least by the Leeds United player
Johnny Giles who took some court action on the matter. It also implies that
Brian Clough passed over a job at Brighton in favour of Leeds United, when in
fact he managed Brighton for a year before then.

So, watching with that in mind, that a lot of what you see probably never
happened, it's still an entertaining story. Michael Sheen does a very difficult
job, in that he makes Brian Clough a likeable character, whilst still
portraying him as the egotisical prick that he certainly always seemed to be in
public. I worry for Michael Sheen; Tony Blair, David Frost, now Brian Clough.
Are these really the kinds of people you'd want to be typecast as?

The plot itself concentrates on the reasons for Clough's rivalry with the Leeds
United manager he was taking over from, Don Revie, and his pretty hubristic
intentions to eclipse Revie.

It's a well made film, keeps you interested right to the end, which for a
football film, for me, is some achievement.

A Bunch Of Amateurs

Was first out last year, but the local Odeon brought it back for the day, for
their films for pensioners thing they do on Tuesday mornings. So I got me flat
cap on and went.

Burt Reynolds plays a washed up action hero who's now way too old. He orders
his agent to get him a job within 24 hours, or he's fired. His agent sets him
up with an am-dram theatre company in Straford in Suffolk, who had written a
begging letter asking him to do an appearence to help save their theatre. His
agent lets him believe that it's the RSC in the proper Stratford, and by the
time he twigs, the papers have got hold of it and he can't back out.

It could have been Yet Another Richard Curtisesque comedy, but it's actually
quite a bit cleverer than that. The play they have him in is King Lear, and his
story neatly parallels Lear - he too is the washed up old king, deserted by
those who claimed to love him, and as things go from bad to worse for him, he
comes to understand the play he's in better and better.

Burt Reynolds is really quite good, and gives the impression that he could
actually do a pretty good Lear if he tried. Derek Jacobi's great in support,
playing the resentful old ham who feels he should be Lear.

In many ways, it's quite the Brassed Off/Full Monty/Calendar Girls type of
film, with an ensemble cast of British character talent doing the heartwarming
eccentricity thing, but what pushes it into the higher class of the film is the
respectful and intelligent way it treats both Shakespeare and the Amateur
Dramatics tradition; this isn't a "look at the silly awful actors" thing, it's
much more affectionate than that.

I'll give it 8.5/10, and I'd have given it more if they'd given Derek Jacobi a
bit more to do.

Bronson

Has this ever happened to you? You're on a bus or a train, maybe long distance,
and someone sits down across from you, and decides to tell you his life story.
And you nod, and smile, and make encouraging noises in the right places,
because the guy is a *loon*.

Well, this is the movie version of that experience.

Tom Hardy plays Michael Peterson, AKA Charles Bronson, who is apparently
Britain's most violent criminal. He's spent a total of about four months *out*
of prison since 1974, and has a history of violence and hostage taking. This
much we know for sure.

The film is a sort of illustrated monologue; Bronson appears on stage,
narrating his life, and it's clear that the recollections are his version of
events and that the stage is in his own head, complete with adoring audience.
So it's not clear throughout whether anything is true, true-as-Bronson-tells-it
or fictions made up for the film. The whole thing is a confusing stream of
consciousness, a disjointed series of tales from Bronson's life. It's hard to
discern what point, if any, there is to his life, or whether he even knows. Or
cares.

So, this isn't so much a story so much as a character portrait, and a
performance, and a hell of a performance it is. You'll often find yourself
thinking "where on earth is this going?" but not in a bad sense. It's like a
rollercoaster ride that constantly smacks you in the face and calls you a c#nt.
I heard the other day that the difference between truth and fiction is that
fiction has to make sense. That's certainly apt here.

Gran Torino

Clint Eastwood is a scary, scary old man. His wife's just died, he hates the
rest of his family, with good cause, because they're assholes to a man, he's a
grumpy old racist, and his neighbourhood has been largely overtaken by
Vietnamese immigrants. He is, himself, a veteran of the Korean war, the things
he did there have never sat right with him, and his neighbours seem to remind
him of that.

As the film progresses, he finds that he's got more in common with the decent
hard-working folk living next door than his soft, spoiled family, and gets
involved in their lives, mentoring the young lad, and eventually coming into
conflict with the gang who want the lad to join, and won't take no for an
answer.

It's quite a broad, simplified tale. The good people are good, the bad are bad,
and straight talk and guts are what counts in the end. In many ways, it's a
Western. It's the old grizzled gunman saving the decent hardworking farmers
from the bandits. It's either a classic plot or a cliched one, depending on
your outlook.

What sets the film apart is Clint's performance. For a guy pushing eighty, he
is still the scariest bastard alive. If anything, he's just getting scarier the
more time goes on. At one point he growls "Ever notice how you come across
somebody once in a while you shouldn't have fucked with? That's me." And he
sells that line to the hilt. Also he is quite staggeringly rude and offensive
to everyone; I said he was racist earlier, I almost don't think that's fair. He
hates *everyone*, pretty much. It's a towering performance, that takes this
film a few rungs above the manly man's fable that it would otherwise have been.

Watchmen

Let's approach this as a film, not as an adaptation. This is, I believe, the
best superhero movie yet. This is, however, sadly, no major claim. There's
never been a superhero film that's been better than "excellent, but flawed" and
this is no exception.

I'd start by saying that the flaws are not to be found in the acting. I am, I
believe, completely happy with every performance throughout. With a cast of
essentially unknowns (Billy Crudup is the most well known as That Guy in That
Thing I Saw One Time), they merge into their roles in a way that you can't
imagine a Big Movie Star doing. Full marks on that score - Jackie Earl Haley
gets top marks as Rorschach. In that his task is to make a character who is
essentially a right wing sociopath who never washes, and make you admire him
and feel for him. His big scene comes right at the end, and for me, it would
make or break the movie; it makes it.

Effects, again, marvellous. With exception of the makeup they stuck on the guy
playing Nixon, that is. But ignoring that, it's woo yay explosions, fight
scenes, and whizzy effects from start to finish.

The problems are two. First, direction. I feel like a heel for bringing it up,
but just maybe Zack Snyder wasn't up to this. Mistake me not, he deserves a
medal for what he *did* do, which was to fight the studios in a running battle
to make the film as faithful to the source as possible, but when push comes to
shove, the direction is somehow flat and literal.

Second, the script. In places, it's like Watchmen - Slow Learner's Edition. I
don't expect to have the plot explained to me so much. This is an intelligent
film, there's no need to spell so much out. Second, this is a two and a half
hour braindump. If I may compare to the original just this once, that was
twelve issues of 22 pages each, plus back material. Each designed by Alan Moore
to be digested over the course of a month, ready for the next issue. Compress
that into two and a half hours and inject it into the forebrain, and it kind of
hurts. So we're kind of left with this uncomfortable paradox of there a) being
too much cut out and b) being too much left in. I don't know that this could
have been avoided. So, rollercoaster ride from start to finish, when maybe you
want to sit and think about what you saw.

The International

Whoever had this one in their release schedule must have just about died of
ecstacy when the credit crunch hit. "Everyone hates bankers now? I've got a
movie here where the bad guys are bankers! Squee!" And to be honest, that's the
only reason I can imagine why this didn't go straight to video.

There's this bank, and they do bad things. They fund evil regimes, they launder
money for the mafia. It's a testament to the pre-credit-crunch origins of this
film that they felt the need to give us this kind of an excuse to call the
banks baddies. Nowadays, we're all "they're bankers, they're bastards, no need
to sugar coat it for us, we're in already. Shoot the fuckers."

But yes, Clive Owen is an Interpol agent who's obsessed with bringing the bank
down, since they've been wriggling off the hook for years. Naomi Watts is...
well, she's with the Manhattan DA's office, like that makes any difference.

And the whole thing just collapses into a big wet messy heap of a thriller,
with no discernable direction, purpose or conclusion. We spend most of the film
trying to track down some hitman, which goes nowhere, and leaves us wondering
why quite so much of the time and budget of the movie was spent establishing
his character, tracking him down, and messily exploding the Guggenheim museum
if he plays no useful part in the plot.

The film does have one saving grace, and that's that it looks good. In that we
get to see a lot of nice European cities, and the location shooting is good
enough that it feels like a much classier Euro-thriller than it actually is.

6/10, but really, why bother?

Anvil - The Story Of Anvil

I can't shake this suspicion. I can't help thinking that it's not true. It's
too good, and it's too weird. We're told that this is a documentary about a
heavy metal band called Anvil, who nearly made it in the eighties, and then
didn't. And apparently, despite an abject lack of success, they've been
slogging away in the music industry for the past thirty years, releasing twelve
albums on minor labels, and this is the point where we catch up with them.

We follow them on this tour, on which they play a series of gigs, each more
embarrassing and poorly attended than the last. The tour's managed by the inept
girlfriend of one of the band. At one point in the movie, they end up at
Stonehenge. The drummer's name is Robb Reiner. At one point we see an amp
turned up to 11. They record an album called "This Is Thirteen." The events of
this film aren't just "more Spinal Tap than Spinal Tap", they're a close
parallel to Spinal Tap, and you can't help thinking that it's been deliberately
contrived to some degree. I feared for the drummer's life.

That said, all signs do indeed point to there actually being a Canadian Speed
Metal band called Anvil who played Japan on a bill with the likes of The
Scorpions and Bon Jovi back in the eighties, and unquestionably failed to
become anywhere near as big as virtually everyone else on the bill.

What we see in this film is a portrait of a couple of guys who are in their
early fifties, have been best mates since the age of 15, and still believe,
despite all evidence to the contrary, that one day, they're gonna be rock stars
again. And they're not sad, deluded idiots. They're mad, wonderful, deluded
idiots. They have a disappointing European tour. They gamble everything they've
got on producing an album. They live their lives and they make their choices
based on the idea that it's better to try and fail than accept a lesser destiny
than Rock Star. Because frankly, whether they're playing to a packed stadium or
ten drunks in a club in Prague, that's what they are, and I salute them for it.


All in all, this is a thoroughly excellent film, that restores your faith in
humanity. For all that it resembles This Is Spinal Tap in structure, the film
it really reminds me of is The Wrestler - these too are a couple of faded
heroes who refuse to give up on their dreams, beyond all reason.

I am pretty certain that the documentary maker deliberately cut the thing to
look like Spinal Tap, and indeed may have manipulated things in that direction
("Hey guys, let's go down to Stonehenge while we're here, it'll make great
footage!") Having said that, I don't think either of our hapless heroes have
the acting chops for this to have been anything other than their genuine
responses to the situation. Go see it, and I'll bet you'll want to buy their
album by the end, even if you have no earthly intention of listening to it.

City Of Ember

Bizarre hybrid of a movie. There's little bits of all kinds of films here. A
bit of The Goonies, with its kids-in-subterranean-amusement-park, a bit of
Brazil with its corrupt-and-byzantine-dystopia, a bit of Logan's Run with its
sheltered-society-with-a-secret. In fact, it reminds me of a sort of
kid-friendly version of Bioshock - i.e. with fewer mutant psychopaths intent on
cutting off your face and wearing it.

So, apparently, 200 years ago, for no reason that was explained, a subterranean
city called Ember was established, a refuge for humanity from , where they'd live for a few generations, free from the bullshit that
was going on on the surface. I know how they feel, I have weekends like that.

Inevitably, things go awry, they fail to get their wakeup call, so the city
starts wearing out and falling apart, and anyone who tries to leave gets
arrested. Inevitably, it falls to a collection of plucky bloody kids to work it
all out and save the city from itself.

Ultimately, it's *alright*. The ideas are interesting, the sets are nice, but
the execution is a bit flat. It's stitched together from all kinds of different
movies, and you can't help feeling that it's a shallow version of all kinds of
other things. Underwhelming but mildly diverting kids stuff.

Next

Nicholas Cage is a guy who can see two minutes into the future, and see what's
going to happen to him next. And apparently has been living with this kind of
perception for his whole life, so by now can do some pretty funky things with
it. Effectively, he's a save weasel, to use the video game term, able to replay
a situation in his head until he works out the exact sequence of moves he needs
to make to win the fight, get the girl, evade the cops, and generally not die
in seemingly impossible situations.

The plot is quite slight; there's a nuclear threat, and the FBI are sure he can
help them. It's very 24 in that regard. The slenderness of the plot, however is
fine; the film's not about that, it's only there to showcase what the
seemingly limited superpower of 2 minute precognition could really do, and what
kind of person you'd be if you could do that.

Nicholas Cage has, alas, lost quite a lot of whatever matinee idol presence he
once had; he's not aged well, and his hair just looks odd. His love interest is
18 years younger than him, and boy, does it make him look like a perv.

Despite all that, there's some really nice scifi chinstrokey moments, coming as
it does from a Philip K Dick story, and for once, the sci-fi ideas aren't
overlaboured.

7.5/10 - Groundhog Day with guns and explosions.

The Day The Keanu Stood Silently Staring At People

And that's really all I have to say about him. Alien arrives, gets shot at by
idiots, is helped by beautiful scientist chick, learns the value of humanity,
and something. Oh and - Swirly Thing Alert!

Slow, ponderous, epic B Movie gets remade as slow, ponderous blockbuster. Sexy
new environmental message is tacked on, and we are forced, yet again, to endure
the message that the true meaning of humanity can be gleaned from the behaviour
of a whiny, irritating child.

The US military fails, on numerous occasions, to learn a lesson that should be
obvious - if a spacecraft is travelling at 0.1 of the speed of light and
decelerates to a pretty soft landing in the middle of a city, shooting at it
with your puny lead bullets that travel at substantially lower velocity than
that is just going to piss the aliens off. The point is made early on that it's
like when the aztecs met the conquistadors, but somehow that doesn't stop them
coming up with the strategy "wave our puny wooden spears at the men with
muskets."

It's not entirely awful, but I couldn't particularly tell you which bit wasn't.

Push

So. There's all these people who are born with special abilities. And there's
this shadowy agency who is out to control them all. Is it Heroes? X-Men? No,
it's Push.

Kicking off with an expositional voice over of mind numbing tedium, that will
be hauntingly familiar to anyone who has a fanboy mate who doesn't wash, who's
desperate to get you to start reading X-Men so he won't be SO VERY ALONE, we
are introduced to the basic rules of the various kinds of psychics who inhabit
this world. I'm pretty certain it was recorded at the behest of some studio
suit who hadn't understood the film. Anyone who's read or seen anything more
out-there than Eastenders will not need this introduction.

As it turns out, yeah, it's Heroes alright, but it's Heroes where you don't
spend weeks on end grinding your teeth hoping someone will BLOODY DO SOMETHING.
Instead, this is a jolly, superpower filled action chase around Hong Kong, with
the Good Guys, Bad guys and Third Party Gangsters are all after the Plot
Device. There's quite a clever "how to win if your opponent has a clairvoyant
telling him your moves" that doesn't quite come off, but at least shows that
someone out there was thinking about it.

With the minor plot concluded, the major plot is still to be resolved, and
we're open for a sequel. I hope that works out for them.

7/10 - It's very slight, and the plot will probably fall apart if you poke it
too hard, but it's quite enjoyable.

Frost/Nixon

In 1977, Nixon gave an interview to David Frost, during which he made some
startling admissions of guilt which he never fully lived down, and effectively
put the last nail in the coffin of his reputation, and cemented the suffix
-gate as a byword for crooked political shenanigans. At the time, however,
Frost was very much a star on the wane, with precious little journalistic
reputation. The film examines how this all came about.

What makes the story interesting is what it *isn't*. It is not the story of a
noble, crusading journalist taking down a crooked politician. It's the tale of
two egotistical, shallow men, both of whom *need* to win the confrontation in
order to salvage their careers; obscurity beckons for Frost if he loses, the
political wilderness for Nixon.

Frank Lagella paints a very human picture of Nixon, as a man whose ego and
temper brought him low, and continue to bring him low. Michael Sheen paints
Frost as a shallow mask of a man, a grin with very little substance behind it -
plenty of brains but practically no motives beyond his own comfort. If you
didn't know he was a good actor, you might easily think that it was his
performance that was at fault, rather than it being a pretty brutal assessment
of David Frost's shallowness.

Ultimately, I don't know that there's actually that much of a story to be told
here. The detail is interesting enough, but there's just a couple of really key
scenes here, and quite a bit of padding.

Underworld: Rise Of The Lycans.

Somewhere in the middle of the original1 Underworld movie, there was a five
minute flashback which told us why the Vampires and Lycans2 were locked in an
endless conflict. Someone evidently thought that it might be fun to expand that
five minute segment to the full ninety minutes. Oddly, they may have been
right.

There are few guilty pleasures as fun as watching quality actors slumming it in
some godawful bit of nonsense. And here we have Bill Nighy and Michael Sheen
taking it in turns to one-up each other in terms of pure unadulterated ham, in
one of the most nonsensical and unnecessary films ever made.

Set in Ye Olde Days Ofe Yore, the vampires create and enslave a new breed of
Lycan, one that retains its reason, and which can remain human. This is
allegedly for the purpose of having daytime protectors while they sleep, but
there's precious little evidence of this, or indeed, that the sun ever comes
up. It seems more likely that their motive is to have someone to sneer at and
hit with whips. Which is fine, I'm not going to judge them for that.

A seksi laydee vampire and a Lycan fall in love, the Lycan longs to be free,
the seksi laydee vampire's father would disapprove if he found out, and it all
gets very Romeo and Juliet, only with more blood, teeth and swords. Eventually
all the Lycans realise that you don't actually have to accept slavery and
oppression if you're an eight foot mass of claws and teeth, and it all kicks
off.

The entire plot of the movie really does fit into the five minute segment in
the original movie, so all that's new here is extra hamming it up and violence.
It should be a complete disaster, but this simplicity somehow works in its
favour, and it's just rollicking aimless fun. And that's worth a good 7/10 in
my book.
______
1 I'm being charitable here, obviously.
2 That is, werewolves, for those who have inexplicably allowed the Underworld
franchise to pass them by.

Doubt

Set in 1964, in a Catholic school, Philip Seymour Hoffman is a priest who's
abusing the boys in his care, and Meryl Streep is a nun, and the principal of
the school, who can't prove it, but is desperate to stop him. Or, Philip
Seymour Hoffman is a caring priest who's trying to help the boys, and Meryl
Streep is a nun who's irrationally convinced herself that he's abusing the kids
and sets out to frame and destroy him. And therein lies the doubt.

What follows is essentially a face off between the two. What's really good
about the film is that both performances are very well balanced. Hoffman's not
so creepy that you feel he must have done it, nor is he so obviously good and
innocent that feel he's definitely being wronged. Likewise, Streep's an
intolerant old battleaxe, and you feel she's quite possibly stringing the guy
up on what amounts to a hunch backed with personal dislike. On the other hand,
she clearly cares under the hard exterior, and seems to have good instincts for
people. You might come out of the film favoring one viewpoint over the other,
but you *will* have a doubt.

Cracking film, cracking perfomances.

JCVD

Odd little film. Jean-Claude Van Damme is a washed up action movie star, his
career is on the skids, he's out of cash after apparently having spent the last
of it fighting a custody battle for his daughter, who apparently doesn't
actually want to live with him, because he's an embarassment to her. He returns
to his native Belgium, and soon becomes embroiled in a post office siege, which
the police believe he's orchestrating. Just to make that clear - Jean Claude
Van Damme is playing Jean Claude Van Damme in this film.

So, the film runs along two lines, flashbacks to JCVD's pretty sad life which
led him to this place, and the present day, as he tries to navigate his way
safely out of the mess he finds himself in.

The film *appears* to be semi-autobiographical, what with Jean-Claude Van Damme
really having custody issues regarding his youngest son, and certainly seeming
prior to this film to be in career freefall and a complete laughing stock. I'm
not aware that he got involved in a Belgian post office siege, so it's not all
that autobiographical either.

It's a pretty good film. I don't know that he's a good enough actor to pull off
this kind of introspection and self-analysis, but on the other hand, its very
brave of him to do so, and the whole thing stands up as, if not a great film,
at the very least an interesting curiosity.

The most poignant thing about the whole thing, of course, is that despite being
an absolutely credible bit of European cinema, the presence of Jean Claude Van
Damme appears to have forced it into straight-to-DVD territory, and while I've
been keeping an eye on the listings of the local arthouse cinema for it, I
actually find it for ten quid on DVD in ASDA. The cover gives no suggestion
that it's anything other than a standard Van Damme movie, with lines like "WITH
A KILLER MIX OF ACTION, MURDER AND MAYHEM JCVD DELIVERS WITH THE IMPACT OF A
ROUNDHOUSE KICK TO THE FACE! VAN DAMME IS BACK AND THIS TIME HE'S TAKING NO
PRISONERS!" I don't know whether it's deliberate or not, but either way, it's a
supreme irony.

8/10. And the best thing Van Damme's ever done, bar none.

Slumdog Millionaire

First things first. Feelgood Film Of The Decade, the poster and advance
publicity claims. Yeah, no. Mamma Mia is the feelgood film of the decade.
Slumdog Millionaire, by contrast, does not have any weddings on Greek islands,
constant bursting into song, etc. It has a young man being tortured and
interrogated by the police, after being accused of cheating in Who Wants To Be
A Millionaire, with the sole evidence of this being that he's a slumdog, a kid
from the shanty towns, and what could he possibly know? The movie then tells
the story of his unremittingly unpleasant life, showing us how some awful
moments in his life told him the answer to the various questions, as he
attempts to explain himself.

Ultimately, the message of this film is that many of the children of India live
in filth and squalor, experiencing violence and deprivation every day of their
lives, have to resort to various forms of criminality to survive, and even if
they were to have the amazing fortune to be given an opportunity to get out
(like Millionaire) the majority will lack the education to make use of those
opportunities. The feelgood factor of the lad's unlikely success in the quiz is
tempered by the very implausibility that the few things he knows came up. And
that even as he does well, he faces the scepticism and brutality of the police
as his reward. That and, even if he won a million, if he split it between all
the people in India who also desperately need it, they'd have less than a
quid each.

This is a blisteringly good film, in that it doesn't shy away from showing the
appalling conditions they live in, while never letting that become a sermon
that takes away from the story. Feelgood film? No, it's much, much better than
that.

Valkyrie

In 1944, a conspiracy of high ranking German Army officers plotted to kill
Hitler. To this end, they recruit Col. von Stauffenberg, a brave, charismatic
and principled German officer, played in this film by a LEKSVIK chest of
drawers from IKEA.

At least, it bloody might as well have been. Seriously, all Cruise bloody does
is stand their looking stoic, trying not to show his emotions. The addition of
a sock drawer would at least have made him somewhat functional. It's very easy
these days, what with him having gone Tom Cruise Crazy, to criticise Tom Cruise
for his bizarre behaviour. That's not what I'm doing here, I promise you. I
believe that Tom Cruise is still well capable of turning in a charismatic
performance, and there's ample evidence that he can act. However, in this film,
he's just standing there being a big lump of stoic. And by all accounts, the
real von Stauffenberg wasn't even like that.

The rest of the film is actually very good. You've got the likes of Kenneth
Branagh, Bill Nighy, Tom Wilkinson, Terrence Stamp, Eddie Izzard, all taking it
in turns to act Tom Cruise off the screen. The plot is gripping, as only a plot
to assassinate Hitler and overthrow the Third Reich can be, and you're on the
edge of your seat waiting for the inevitable moment where it must, sadly, all
fall apart. And in the middle of this, is Tom "LEKSVIK" Cruise, draining some
but by no means all of the dramatic tension.

Anyway, 8/10, good film, let down by an oddly flat lead performance, but saved
by the supporting cast.

The Wrestler

Oooh, look at the poigniancy!

So, Mickey Rourke is this wrestler. He's a has-been, used to be a top ranking
wrestler, and now he's older is reduced to wrestling in local rec centres for
the odd few hundred bucks here and there, which he pretty much spends on hair
bleach, sunbeds, steroids and painkillers. Essentially, it's a portrait of a
hasbeen who can't move on from what he used to be, and is instead slowly
killing himself putting himself through ever more serious punishment in the
ring, for ever more diminishing returns.

It's well written, it's well shot, in a low-budget kind of way, by veteren
chucklemeister Darren Aronofsky. Mickey Rourke's performance is very powerful,
all the more so because he is, himself, famously a guy who had the arse torn
out of his career, and ended up in professional boxing and got his face badly
messed up. In a way, you end up wondering how much he's acting at all.

I'm not sure what I was supposed to feel in this film. If the objective was to
make you pity the guy, then mission accomplished. However, the tagline for the
film is "Love. Pain. Glory." and I didn't see much other than the pain.

I'd certainly give it 8/10 and a recommendation, but it didn't entirely chime
with me.

The Spirit

I loved it, but the odds are, you won't.

The What: The Spirit is a seriously old school crimefighting dude, created the
same year as Batman. He wears a little domino mask, wears a suit and fedora,
and his main superpower was that everyone thinks he's dead, so he can get away
with being a vigilante. I had a go at reading some of the original Spirit
comics, but I gave up on them, because The Spirit has a black sidekick who's
depicted in a mindbogglingly racist way (even for 1939), and I couldn't get
into it.

Fortunately, in his crusade to reinvent The Spirit, Frank Miller (for it is he
who amazingly has been allowed to make a film) has glossed over that. And from
what I can tell, he's pretty much changed a lot of other aspects of The Spirit,
and done it in the style of Sin City instead. For starters, in twelve years of
writing The Spirit, Eisner never showed The Octopus's face. In the film, you
get a good look at him no more than five minutes in, and Samuel L. Jackson
steals the camera every chance he gets. That, if nothing else, shows you that
this isn't so much an adaptation as Frank Miller taking inspiration then going
nuts.

It's a complete mess of a film. It's done in that black/white/red style that
Sin City was shot in. Half the time it's crass and leaden and makes you faintly
embarassed that you're watching it. The other half it's mad, cheesy, glorious
and brillant. I don't think I've seen a film in the last six months with a
moment as bad, or as good as one you'll find in The Spirit. You might, like me,
really love this film. On the other hand, if you walked out after ten minutes,
I'd have to concede that you had a point.