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.

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.