The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas

Brief Synopsis: A young boy's father is appointed commandant of a work camp in
Nazi Germany. The boy befriends another boy, an internee in the camp, and
slowly comes to realise the gulf between what he believes to be true, and the
harsh reality, with tragic results.

We often hear that the story of the Holocaust must be retold, that we shouldn't
be allowed to forget. I completely agree with that, and for that reason alone,
this is a worthy film, which I would encourage people to see. The reality of
that stance, however, is that not every film on the subject is going to be a
masterpiece; The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas is no Schindler's List.

It does have an interesting angle; the Germans in the film have very English
accents, and are portrayed, by and large, as classic period English people. We
are being encouraged to think of the Germans as just like us, to not see it as
something *they* did, but as something we might all have been swept up in.

Likewise, everyone in the film is a victim of the Third Reich to some extent.
Clearly, the plight of the Jews is paramount, and certainly not downplayed, but
too, there is the suffering of a mother unable to interfere as her children are
indoctrinated; a young girl swept up in Nazi propaganda because she has a crush
on a young officer; the commandant himself is clearly a good man who has sold
his soul to ensure a future for his family.

The ending, which I shan't go into detail about seems like hyperbole, making a
bad thing worse to make a point, and adding a false note to a point in the film
where truth is most important.

As a film, it's a bit slow to get going, with the ending arriving in a big
rush. The performances are universally good, I think, but there's really not
enough meat there. The majority of the power of the film, I think, comes from
what you already know going in to the film.

I'd give the film 8/10, but also say that I think films on this subject need to
be judged to a higher standard, where 8/10 maybe isn't good enough.

Pineapple Express

Vague plot: Stoner witnesses murder, runs and hides at his dealer's place,
causing them both to go on the run. They attempt to evade their pursuers, the
pursuers attempt to catch them, both sides amusingly hampered by their own
ineptitude.

It's actually pretty funny. In a way, I'd say it was a cross between your
classic Cheech and Chong movie and a Coen brothers film like Fargo. In that
it's rather funnier and classier. Some great oddball performances, and a
realisation that merely getting stoned and fucking things up isn't funny in and
of itself, and a good script helps too. If you're making a film for stoners,
it's easy to be lazy, because they'll laugh at anything. This is a rather
cleverer thing.

It gets progressively wild and woolly towards the end, with a really violent
slapstick finale which is possibly over the top, but pretty hilarious for all
that.

Rocknrolla

So, Guy Ritchie's made his film again. We're back in the seedy, and clearly
non-existent world of East-End villains, enmeshed in capers at cross-purposes,
with every thread coincidentally tying up at the end. Is that a bad thing? I
don't think so. How many Hitchcock films are basically the same plot? I'm not
saying that Ritchie's as good as Hitchcock, but I am saying that it's no basis
to criticise him. Likewise, while Ritchie's East End may have no more basis in
fact that Middle Earth, it's similarly irrelevant to the question of whether
the film's any good. I say this because I am sick to the hind teeth of film
critics who appear to be putting the boot into Ritchie for no better reason
than he married Madonna, which annoys them for some reason.

As it goes, it's a bit messy and chaotic, but it's very amusing, exciting in
all the right places, sort of a dumbed down version of The Long Good Friday
with jokes in it. Everything's a bit contrived and coincidental, but not so
much that it bothers you.

Babylon AD

Imagine you've seen Children of Men. And you liked the post apocalyptic
setting, and you liked the idea of this washed up, morally ambiguous man
protecting this pregnant girl, and getting her from point A to point B. But you
couldn't help thinking it was all a bit wussy. It needs more guns, you think.
It needs explosions. It needs extreme sports. It needs martial arts. It needs
car chases. What do you do?

You call Vin Diesel, of course!

So, what this is, is your standard schlocky post-Cyberpunk thriller. Dodgy
geezer is hired to do dodgy job, by dodgy people, and unexpectedly grows a
conscience somewhere along the line, and rebels at the end at the standard
"give me the baby to eat and I will let you live and give you a million
dollars" moment.

It's not a bad one, it's grim, gritty, nicely actiony, heartlessly cruel in the
right places. It's not very intelligent, and pulls the "if we don't explain the
end, it makes us look cleverer, and saves us having to think up an ending"
trick. Beyond that problem, not so bad.

Hellboy II: The Golden Army

Whizz-bangy fun, really. Apparently, ages ago, the massed races of fantasy folk
fought a war against humanity. They won, having employed an unstoppable
ultimate weapon, but so appalled was their king at the carnage he had wrought,
a peace was made, and the two groups took to ignoring each other, such that the
whole business faded into legend. Only now the Prince of the Elves has finally
lost his patience and is attempting to gain control of said ultimate weapon, in
order to wipe out humanity again, and set everything to rights. He's got
himself a legitimate beef in my view.

In the other corner is the BRPD and their gang of freaks and weirdos, led by
Hellboy, who aims to punch him until he stops. Fair enough. Game on.

It's very much a SFX/Creatures movie, and the action sequences are king.
There's some bits and bobs of character floating about, but really, what we
want is rampaging elementals flattening New York, and being shot to death with
absurdly large guns. And that's what we get. And it's very nice.

The thing I find somewhat surprising is that a) Mike Mignola, Hellboy's creator
is heavily involved in it and b) that the film is way less talky and thinky
than the comic. Sure, in the comic, Hellboy does fall down a lot, and his
indestructability is used for the same kind of comic effect, but he's also
quite the occult investigator, whereas in the film, he's more like The Thing
out of the Fantastic Four - short on smarts, but long on "It's Clobberin'
Time!"

Anyroad, it's a good little grotesque action movie, lots of fun, but not a
whole lot to take home and think about later.

Man On Wire

There's two ways you can view this film. In part, it is certainly a very
interesting documentary about the occasion when a maverick French wirewalker,
and his mates, broke into the World Trade Center, slung a cable between the two
towers, and had him walk across it.

On another level, it's a documentary about some fantastically smug and
self-satified people who did the above in 1974, and have been dining out on the
story every since. I'd hate to actually know Philippe Petit, he's probably a
dreadful person to be stuck next to at a dinner party, Mastermind specialist
subject: Myself and How Clever I Am.

Essentially, it's not an uninteresting tale by any means, but there's two
problems. One, it's overlong. A bit of judicious editing would make this a
bloody good 45 minute BBC documentary. At double that, it begins to pall. Two,
there's not enough source material. Part of the reason for this is obvious;
there is, tragically, no way of revisiting the scene, and saying "yes, this is
where we attached the cables" or similar. Fortunately, taste prevails and we
don't travel to NY to mawkishly paw over ground zero, but that leaves us
essentially with archive footage and talking heads, and the archive material
really isn't that good. It would seem that their exploits were filmed at the
time with a few cine cameras and still cameras, but not with anything like the
professionalism you'd like. There's a lot of distant blurs of what might be a
man, on what is possibly a wire. Likewise, there's just too much of Petit and
his team banging on about their recollections of the event, and that's what
makes them look smug; if they'd said how clever they were just the once, you'd
have accepted it.

With more material to work from, this might have been worth 90 minutes of our
time. Cutting their coat according to their cloth, they'd have ended up with a
45 minute documentary. What we end up with, to quote Bilbo Baggins, is butter
scraped across too much bread.

A Complete History Of My Sexual Failures.

Independent Filmmaker Chris Waitt, in light of the fact he's just been dumped
yet again, decides to make a documentary, going back over his life,
interviewing his exes, in an attempt to work out what is wrong with him, and
why they all dumped him. And this isn't the premise for a fictional film, this
is a documentary. Albeit one where some of the scenes are of dubious veracity.

I don't think I'm giving anything away by saying that you'll know what's wrong
with him and why they dumped him in the first five or so minutes. The next 85
minutes or so, however, chronicle his own gradual discovery of his own
shortcomings, in frank, embarrassing detail.

Essentially, it's 100% pure bottled schadenfreude. The guy's hopeless, and
frankly, I think he's edited the film to make himself appear more so for comic
effect. The real mystery is not why 10-15 perfectly lovely seeming girls dumped
him, it's why 10-15 perfectly lovely seeming girls went out with him in the
first place.

Anyway, it's a whistle-stop tour of the guy's misery, lingering uncomfortably
long on the issue of his erectile dysfunction, including a visit to a
dominatrix who seems to feel that whipping his gonads will help in some way,
though whether it's intended to help him, or get vengeance on behalf of the
women of the world is not clear. I mention this episode in particular, as it
contains actual footage of his privates being whipped, and I think anyone
seeing it should be thus far forewarned.

I'll give it 8/10. Riveting, in the sense of "I want to look away, but can't."
People with a low tolerance for embarrassment and humiliation may wish to look
elsewhere.