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.