A Prophet

Serious face now.

Back in the world of morose French cinema, we have A Prophet. The tale of a
young lad sent to prison for an unspecified violent crime, who is inexorably
drawn into a life of organised crime. We see him progress from victim to stooge
to lackey to player to kingpin over the course of a six year sentence.

The intent of the film is to show us, I think, the potentially criminalising
effect of incarceration, as we see someone progress from being a redeemable
thug to a genuine criminal.

It's not a pretty film to watch, being painted in a palette of concrete greys
punctuated only by blood and the pretty appalling state of French leisurewear.
It's well written in that every character is ambiguous to a greater or lesser
extent, and the performances are pretty excellent.

It's had a lot of praise and even a little oscar buzz, but I don't know about
that. It's confused and obscure at times, as French cinema often can be, and
sometimes I think it crosses the line between not doing all your thinking for
you, and being deliberately obtuse. I also feel that the second half of the
film doesn't really live up to the first.

Still, overall, I'd highly recommend it if you're willing to be patient.

Sherlock Holmes

Here's how you write this film. Get someone who's read the books really really
drunk. Then get a writer who has somehow lived his life without ever even
hearing of Sherlock Holmes really really drunk. Then get the reader to explain
the books to the writer. Then sober the writer up, and get him to write a
screenplay out of what he remembers.

The result? A knockabout action comedy, featuring characters that are almost,
but not entirely, unlike those created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

And I'm fine with that. The whole thing's a lot more fun than Sherlock Holmes
usually is, at least. Where it does fall down, I'm afraid, is in being
basically not that interesting plot-wise. Robert Downey Jr and Jude Law arsing
about the place beating people up like a pair of drunk Victorian ninjas are
great. However, Mark Strong as the sinister Lord Blackwood, the villain of the
piece is a bit too understated. And so he's lurking about in the shadows doing
something or other, and you really can't be bothered to pay attention to it.
You really needed someone to steal the show, the way Tim Curry would. Mark
Strong, much as I like him, is far too restrained for this film.

Anyway, the whole thing rattles on to a suitably sinister and silly conclusion,
and has entertained you sufficiently by the end. A sequel is heavily suggested,
and I for one would be happy to see it happen.

The Book of Eli

It is the post-apocalypse, and everybody is killing each other for shoes.
Again.

So, Denzel Washington has what appears to be the last Bible on Earth, and is
travelling west to take it somewhere or other.

Gary Oldman is a evil psycho (surprise!) who runs a little town, and is
obsessed with getting himself a Bible, because he believes that he'll be able
to use it to inspire and thus control people. Denzel Washington doesn't want
that to happen. Conflict ensues.

It's a pretty cliched film, all told, basically a "single good man against band
of evil men" western, transferred to a postnuclear apocalypse where the sun's
so bright everyone's wearing goggles and sunglasses, and looking quite
cyberpunk. (The future, it seems, really is so bright that they've got to wear
shades.)

Having said that, Denzel Washington's cool and scary, Gary Oldman's crazy
scary, and the supporting cast do a good job. It's well shot, looks really
good, and the script's not bad.

Certainly passes the time, and it's way more entertaining than The Road was.

Up In The Air

Ah, that's better.

George Clooney is a Human Resources consultant whose job is to fire people. He
turns up to companies, to break the bad news to employees in as humane a way as
possible. He also has a sideline in public speaking and self-help in which he
advises people that property and people weigh them down and that they should
cut all ties, just like he does. He spends much of his time flying around the
country living out of carry-on luggage in a series of hotel rooms, spends about
a month at home per year, and that's the way he prefers it.

Into his life come a woman he meets in a hotel with a similar lifestyle who he
develops a relationship with, and a young girl "apprentice" who is working on
taking their company into firing people via videoconference, who he has to
introduce to the harsh realities of what he does. These two relationships
ultimately lead him to question his philosophy of life.

What this means is that this is a dark, bittersweet comedy drama, or perhaps
drama-which-is-frequently-witty-and-amusing, which has a lot of truth in it, I
would say. I know that I have, myself, been through a recession or two in my
time, and the picked-clean open plan offices and boardrooms stuffed with
unwanted cobalt bue office chairs struck a strong note of recognition with me.

In all, it's a great film, great script, charming performances, which doesn't
entirely go in the direction you might expect. Highly recommended.

The Road

I really, really don't think this a good film. On a lot of levels. I'll detail
a few.

Plot. This goes back to my dislike of the original book. This is a novel set
post apocalypse. One day, the world burned in some mysterious way that left all
plant and animal life dead, save for some small percentage of humans who were
protected in, apparently, flimsily built American housing made of wood. For
many, misery takes over, and they turn to suicide and cannibalism. Because
that's what humanity does when we're pushed to the limit, allegedly.

So, living in the north, a man decides that he and his son won't last another
winter, and thus decide to walk south to somewhere unspecified, where it will
be warmer. Apparently, the first thing to be destroyed in the apocalypse was
the world's supply of mountain bikes, so the best that he can scavenge is a
shopping trolley to push their stuff in.

And so, they trek south in this grey and brown wilderness, like the world's
longest and most boring Quake level until the film ends to no particular
conclusion.

The plot is one of those "we're not going to tell you so don't ask" affairs
that refuses to discuss what happened, or why. We're supposed to be looking at
the characters. Which brings me to how much I hate the characters.

Not hate in the sense of "these people really irritate me." Hate in the sense
that they maddeningly make very little sense at all.

Take for example, the kid. Now, I had a reasonably middle class upbringing, and
I think the kid is soft as butter. In the film he's about ten, and was born at
the beginning of nuclear(maybe) armageddon, and is all wide eyed, and snivelly,
and fundamentally incapable of living in the world he was brought up in. He is
not, for instance, capable of listening to his father, and either a) keeping
silent or b) staying put when there are potentially cannibalistic rapists
about. If the armageddon took place *last week*, then yeah, sure, that's how a
ten year old would be. This kid... he couldn't possibly have grown up like
this. He'd be hard. He'd have instincts. But the author doesn't want to write
about that. He wants a perfect ickle angel to wax lyrical about. Despite his
insistence that everything else in the world has turned to complete shit,
apparently this kid turned out 20th Century Western Normal. He's a Nature over
Nurture man, evidently.

And there are lots of things I do not understand about the minor characters.
Like how is it that good, normal people don't trust one another, but somehow
rampaging cannibals can travel in helpful supportive packs of ten or so? The
vision of humanity's breakdown is as arbitrary and inconsistent as the nature of
the apocalypse itself.

I suppose I ought to make an effort to appreciate what the film is trying to
say, which is something or other about how parents will do anything for their
kids, which is as trite a generalisation as you'll find. But there wasn't a
single thing about the film from plot to setting to characters that made me
want to immerse myself in it at all.

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.