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.