Rio Rancho Film Reviews

Super 8

2011-11-30T13:41:00.001Z

Super 8 poses as an homage to the Spielberg films of the 70s and 80s. It’s based in a small town, focuses on a group of precocious children and the military are bogeymen not to be trusted. But in the end, the film goes its own way.

There was always a clarity about those early Spielberg films. We knew who the heroes and villains were. But Super 8 is a little bit muddier. And not in a complex, thought-provoking way. Sometimes it’s just needlessly violent and cruel.

The main problem is the alien life form at the center of the film. Tortured and abused by the military, it turns homicidal in its attempt to return home. Very rarely do we actually see any bloodletting but innocent people get thrown around like rag dolls and at one point someone gets eaten. Despite this, we’re still meant to sympathise with this being.

Yes it must be horrible to be incarcerated and to be tortured and to be prevented from returning home, like so much Guantanamo Bay, but that doesn’t mean you should go around collecting people to eat. This shows that you’re an intergalatic dick.

Because of this, the ending to the film falls completely flat. Our hero, Joe, is about to be munched on by this massive alien but the child establishes a telepathic connection with the creature and talks it out of killing him or harming any other people. The boy says that you can still live on after painful events. Wise words, but horribly executed by J.J. Abrams. The alien in this film is seen so seldom and has so little personality or complexity that I didn’t give a damn about his fate. Seriously, after having it lurk in the shadows for the entire running time and have it behave like a psychopath, you’re going to try and invest it with some feeling in the last few minutes? Too little, too late.

It doesn’t help that the creature looks like warmed up leftovers from Cloverfield. How am I meant to feel for a gigantic space spider? Oh, I know how. Right at the last second Abrams’ will suddenly give the creature big, round human-like eyes. Sorry J.J., your creature is still a poorly conceived, barely-adequately-rendered jerk.

With the alien being such a bust, it’s a shame that the rest of Super 8 is pretty good. The relationships between the child characters have a lot of warmth and colour, and the movie is impressively shot.

Super 8 deliberately steals a lot of its visuals from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The lens flares, the colours and the compositions are very reminiscent of Spielberg’s film.

Some of the action is also lifted from Spielberg. The scene where an electrician gets snatched by the alien feels like something out of Jurassic Park. But even though it feels like an homage, it’s still well executed.

A much more fanciful sequence is the train crash near the beginning of the film. The accident seems to last for several minutes and the CGI isn’t always convincing. Plus there’s some supreme silliness at the end when a man in a truck - a man who drove headfirst into the massive train - survives the crash. Only the back of the truck is destroyed and the man is still well enough to wave a gun around. In a film that has a massive spider alien, this is the element that stretches credibility the furthest.

The only reason that the film recovers from this nonsense is that it has genuine affection for its human characters. The kids have great chemistry and there’s that feeling of innocence and playfulness that you got from those old Spielberg movies. It seems like something special might happen. But then the alien story kicks in and everything unravels. It seemed to me that Abrams didn’t know how to tie everything together. He has the skill to create a wonderful looking film and he has the skill to create likeable characters, but he can’t knit it into one piece.

Later in the film, the violence seems incredibly brutal for what is essentially a family film. Our young heroes get to witness an alien violently ripping military men to shreds. Is the fact that the military men are murderers enough to justify the verocity of the scene? Supposedly it is, but if this were real life, I’m sure these kids would be scarred for decades.

But it’s just strange that such violence co-exists in a film which is essentially about children slowly shedding their innocence. One could argue that the violence is real life creeping in and turning these young people into adults, but some of it is pretty extreme for a PG-13.

I also hated the way that the lead character lets go of his necklace at the end. The necklace contains a locket with a picture of himself as a baby with his dead mother (she dies in an industrial accident when the film begins). It’s meant to symbolise the boy letting go of the past but it didn’t work for me. We shouldn’t let the past rule our lives but at the same time we should honour the memory of those we love. The boy letting the bracelet go made it seem like he’d gotten over his mother’s death too easily. It almost felt uncaring. This is certainly not how the scene was intended, but there was no arc to the boy’s grief. He was sad and then he got over it - there was no progression. If it were me in the same situation, the picture would have to be ripped from my hands, even if I’d had it for decades.

And this is why the movie failed. It didn’t earn the sentiment. Spielberg earned it, but Abrams most certainly didn’t.

Hanna

2011-11-22T17:45:00.001Z

Ever wondered what a British arthouse action film would feel like? Wait no more, for we have Hanna, possibly one of the most peculiar action films ever made.

There’s nothing particularly original in this movie. Thrown in some Bourne Identity, add some La Femme Nikita and sprinkle with everything from Leon to A Clockwork Orange to Mission: Impossible to Batman Begins to the James Bond movies to Grimms’ fairytales. This is a film with lots of influences.

Sadly, Hanna doesn’t rise beyond its ambitions. It desperately wants to be an arthouse actioner. It wants to shake the genre up and defy its tired conventions by making a quasi fairytale thriller. But although its beautiful to look at and although its reasonably well acted, it’s also a messy, shallow, cold, sterile, mean-spirited film. I’ve seen a great many movies that are more hard-edged than this but few have felt so grubby.

Violence in films rarely bothers me but here it’s particularly manipulative and pointless. It doesn’t advance the story and it doesn’t really tell us anything about the characters. People are tortured and stabbed and shot just to keep us on our toes and to show that the characters committing the acts are badasses that aren’t to be messed with. Cate Blanchett shoots a defenceless old lady, Tom Hollander stabs an Arab in the neck, Eric Bana kills a couple of cops etc. etc.

The scene with the old lady is particularly baffling. You see, Hanna was part of a CIA plan to create genetically altered super soldiers. The plan was a failure and everyone involved was killed. The only people to escape were Hanna and her surrogate father, Erik, played by Eric Bana. Turns out that the old lady is Hanna’s grandmother and she knows all about the secret plan. Quite why she wasn’t rubbed out beforehand, I’m not sure. But killing her now seems particularly stupid. Keep her under surveillance and she might unwittingly lead you to the girl. But no, she’s shot in the head to give the audience a jolt.

Part of the reason that everything is so broad and over the top is that it obviously wants to be a modern day fairytale. Marissa (Cate Blanchett) is the wicked witch/big bad wolf while Hanna is a demented Snow White/Red Riding Hood, living relatively peacefully in her ridiculously idyllic cabin in the woods. But there are no layers to this film. I never really felt that Hanna grew as a character. She started off as a functional psychopath and ended the film slightly less psycho. Indeed, it’s actually annoying that when she eventually says that she no longer wants to kill people - it’s when Cate Blanchett is pointing a gun at her. Now is not the time to find the peace and love in you.

The mid-section of Hanna certainly doesn’t help the film. Hanna gets taken in by a hippie family that seem more dysfunctional than Hanna and her surrogate father (note: Hanna and her father randomly fight in the middle of night to test Hanna’s combat readiness). These hippies argue and twitter on about a load of nonsense. Joe Wright is trying to make them seem like a believably complex family unit, but they come over as cliches. These are the type of people that you would cross the street to avoid if you were holidaying in Europe. And the family’s daughter is repellent. She’s a spoilt little princess who loves to discuss fake boobs and designer bags. Of course there’s meant to be more to her than this - she’s meant to have hidden depths - but I didn’t want Hanna to learn anything from her; I think she’s better off remaining as the Fuhrer’s wet dream (a blonde, Germanic, genetically-enhanced assassin).

And this kills the heart of the film. Through experience and exposure to the beauties of the outside world, Hanna is meant to find her humanity. But what’s out there? Squabbling hippies and posh chavs? Get back to that cabin, Hanna!

I was also disappointed at the failure to flesh out Eric Bana’s character. Effectively, he’s training Hanna to exert revenge on Marissa - Marissa attempted to kill Erik and successfully killed Hanna’s mother. But the character is two dimensional. Plus he’s a key part in two of the film’s hokiest moments.

Hokey Moment Number One: As Hanna’s psycho-Yoda trainer/protector, he decides that the girl is ‘ready’. He then brings out a great big transmitter that will alert the world to their presence. This is really the best way of doing things? Rather than just track down Marissa and quietly rub her out, you’re going to send your ‘daughter’ into the lion’s den? And is it really wise to keep a big transmitter like that lying around? Say you accidentally sat on it in the middle of the night, or Hanna found it and pressed it, or one of your wolf cubs set it off?

Hokey Moment Number Two: Erik is being tracked by government agents. They confront him in a subway station. It’s only Erik against four people. Rather than shoot him in the kneecaps with a silenced pistol or just outright shoot him in the head, they decide to take him on in hand-to-hand combat. Of course, even though these guys are well trained, he manages to kill all of them. Idiots.

On the flipside of this, I really enjoyed the flashback where we see Marissa try and assassinate Erik and Hanna’s mother. It has a weird, dreamlike quality to it. It also shows how inept Blanchett’s character is. She tries to stop a car with a Walther PPK! By some miracle she manages to do this and she shoots Hanna’s mum in the head. But even though it’s slightly ridiculous, it works. You get the feeling that this a woman out of her depth but ruthlessly committed to what she’s doing. There’s purpose behind it, which is the polar opposite of the scene with the grandmother.

But although Blanchett is excellent in this scene, she’s pretty lacklustre in the movie as a whole. She chews the scenery like crazy, obviously enjoying the opportunity to play the part of the wicked witch. But there’s nothing subtle about it. There’s even one bit, towards the end, where we see her scowling through the window like she’s literally the Big Bad Wolf. And her American accent is terrible.

However, one detail about Blanchett’s character that I liked: at one point we see a row of dental equipment and then we see Marissa manically cleaning her teeth. She’s cleaning them so hard that her teeth are bleeding. She’s fighting hard to keep her exterior perfect and clean while the inside of her is diseased and rotten. She must remain the fairest of them all, no matter what.

All the Snow White, Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel with guns nonsense concludes with Hanna, an expert assassin, being chased through through a fairytale land by an inept Scary Witch. Really, Hanna should be able to kill her in two seconds, but this would be an anti-climax, so we have a ridiculous face-off where Hanna and Marissa shoot each other (although, to try and make things more creative, Hanna somehow shoots an arrow out of her elbow like she’s MacGuyver). The film ends with a massive whimper.

The one bright spot in this massive folly is Tom Hollander. He’s wonderfully creepy as Isaac, a German killer who has the hair and clothes (although not stature) of a deranged Ken doll. Yes the script doesn’t give his character any depth or complexity, but at least it affords Hollander the chance to show another side of himself. He’s the one positive note in a movie that rings completely hollow.

Drive

2011-10-07T03:26:00.000+01:00

A cheesy, synth-heavy song plays over the credits at the end of Drive. With dreamy, hushed sincerity, it proclaims that the central character of the film has proved himself to be a ‘real human being’ and a ‘real hero’. This after we’ve seen him smash heads to smithereens, slap women across the face and blow people away with firearms. He’s neither of these things.

I’m not sure whether the director is taking the piss with this song or whether he’s sincere. Either way it doesn’t really affect my opinion of the film. Whether its a sincere revenge thriller or a snarky, tongue in cheek shoot-’em-up, Drive is gloriously entertaining.

Who’d have thought that a hipster could make such a ruthless killing machine? Because, yes, that’s what Ryan Gosling’s character is. With his vacant eyes, a smile that barely registers on his lips and a toothpick in his mouth, he seems too cool for school. It’s hard to believe that he could muster up enthusiasm for anything. But eventually a few cracks appear.

Robot-hipster Gosling’s world of detached brooding is infiltrated by a pretty neighbour in his apartment building. She has a young son and Gosling immediately takes to them. Pretty soon he’s hanging out in their flat and fixing their car (Gosling plays a mechanic who moonlights as a stunt driver who moonlights as a getaway driver for criminals). He even manages to produce a smile that shows a couple of teeth.

What I found pleasing about the beginning of the film is that it takes its time. While the atmosphere of the movie is very 80s, the pace in the opening half is very 70s. For a film about driving, no one is in a rush - this movie is going to take the scenic route and try and develop the characters a little bit. Not that there’s really any amazing dialogue in this movie. This is a film more about looks, gestures and atmosphere. Quite often it’s the music that does the talking. And this suits me fine.

What works for me, though, doesn’t work for everyone. In the row ahead of me, I could sense impatience. Indeed, there was even outright mockery. By the time Gosling had coyly grinned for the thirty second time, I could hear sniggers. But then when the second half of the film hit and all hell broke loose, those people quickly shut the fuck up.

But let’s wind back to the beginning of the film. The opening is amazing. Gosling’s character is hired as the getaway driver for an armed robbery. He sets out his terms and then we see him in action. You kind of expect a regular car chase, full of frenzied action. Instead you have a wonderfully tense game of cat and mouse. Gosling doesn’t just hit the accelerator and try and outrun the cops, he uses other cars and underpasses to hide out and he uses his smarts to avoid getting caught. One of the best moments is when he’s face to face with some cops at a traffic light. He has a radio receiver and he knows that he’s been identified. But the cops don’t know that he knows. So Gosling doesn’t crack and only speeds away once the light turns green. It’s really amazing how tense and how thrilling such a minimalist sequence can be.

The only other car chase is more traditional. It’s flat out with screeching tires and twisted metal. But before it can really develop, it’s violently over. It’s a good sequence but it pales beside the opener.

Let’s get back to what it was that shocked people so much. First of all, there was the fact that Christina Hendricks gets shot at point blank range by a shotgun. But the scene that produced audible gasps was the one where Gosling smashes a crook’s hand with a hammer and then threatens to hammer a bullet into his head. At this point all the muttering and snickering was gone. ‘But I thought he was a harmless, borderline retarded hipster!’ you could almost hear them think.

It’s quite an amazing U-turn that the film makes. The film transforms from a sappy indie flick into extreme grindhouse. I mean, in the opening half you’re watching Ryan Gosling seducing Carey Mulligan by driving through storm drains as retro music plays and the sun flares on the camera lens. We’re in 80s romantic movie territory. And then thirty or forty minutes later you’re watching Ryan Gosling literally smashing someone’s head to pieces.

This scene is the most extreme in the movie. But it’s preceded by a long, drippy kiss. You see, some mob guys are after Gosling and one of them gets into the same elevator as Gosling and Mulligan. As a distraction, Gosling kisses Mulligan. The kiss, in slow-motion naturally, goes on for ages. But then when its over, Gosling beats the heavy to death and smashes his face in. By the time he’s stamped on the guy’s head for the tenth time, you think he’s being more than a bit excessive. But then he continues doing it...while his girl backs into the corner. It’s like Dirty Dancing turns into Irreversible. And it’s probably the one scene that doesn’t really work. I kept on thinking that this was a stupid distraction. The mob guy should have just shot him in the back of the head as he was playing tonsil hockey with his wee delicate flower. And what about poor Mulligan? The most romantic moment of her life turns into a horror scene. It’s one thing for a man to protect his woman, but something else to turn a man’s head into pate. You’re going to think twice before you go out on twinkly afternoon drives with autistic hipsters, aren’t you?

But again, it’s hard to know how to take the scene. Is it being played straight or does it have another intent? Is Gosling being portrayed as a real human being and a real hero, or is he being portrayed as a stone cold psycho? I like the fact that you don’t really know for sure.

A more successful sequence is the hit that Gosling makes on Ron Perlman’s small time crime boss. Perlman has been trying to take Gosling out, so Gosling exacts revenge. Bizarrely scored to an operatic ballad, Perlman parties in his crappy pizzeria with some fellow crooks. Through the glass in the door you see Gosling approach...wearing a rubber mask - the type of mask that stunt drivers wear to look more like the actor they’re doubling for and which also (I think) protect them from fire. It’s a weird, eerie image (he looks like part Octavio the clown in Scarface and part Michael Myers) and I immediately thought that Gosling was going to torch the building with all the crooks in it. Colour me slightly disappointed then when he doesn’t do this.

But then, still wearing the mask, Gosling follows Perlman’s car. He rams into it and then disappears from the scene. Perlman is angry and confused but before he can do anything, Gosling comes back and rams the car off the side of an embankment. Somehow Perlman survives the crash and staggers towards a beach. We then have the eerie image of the masked driver stalking his prey and silently drowning him. It’s like something out of a horror film and it works magnificently.

Have I mentioned yet that the main villain is played by Albert Brooks? This piece of casting works tremendously as you’re certainly not expecting him to stab people to death with forks or bleed people dry with cutthroat razors. But Brooks causes carnage and creates a villain you’re eager to see become the victim of hipstercide. Gosling accommodates him on this point but not before he takes a knife to the gut.

One of the final images of the film is the shadow of the two men stabbing one another. Gosling is perhaps the righteous reflection of this psychopath? This may or may not be true, as both men are almost equally nuts, but the final song certainly wants to point out Gosling’s heroism. ‘You’ve proved yourself to be a real human being and a real hero.’

The end is almost like something out of the TV series of The Incredible Hulk. Carey Mulligan’s world has been turned upside down by a man with no name and then he leaves town to continue his nomadic existence. However, Gosling is too cool to thumb a lift as tearful piano music plays. Instead he roams the lonely highways as some obscure band does a Giorgio Moroder impression. Whose town and whose life will he turn upside down next?

PS - The film deserves extra points for the coolest aerial shots of LA’s skyline and highways since The Rock’s entrance video at No Way Out. (Fuck me, I’m a nerd.)

Mysteries of Lisbon

2011-08-08T16:05:00.001+01:00

Last year my wife and I were supposed to see a film called Mysteries of Lisbon at the New York Film Festival. At just over four hours, it’s not surprising that we didn’t make it. A film of this length is a heavy commitment to say the least, especially when you’re surrounded by jumped-up festival goers.

[Cut to a couple of weeks ago]

My wife and I are in Fnac in Portugal. For a while I peruse the CDs and then I decide to look at the movies. Being the stunning intellectual that I am, I decide to try and see what strange titles English-language films have acquired in Portuguese. At the same time, my wife and her cousin are looking at some native films. They stumble upon Mysteries of Lisbon.

The Gorgeous Spouse
Oh, this is the film we were going to see? You remember, at the festival?

Your Fabulous Author
The five hour one?

The Gorgeous Spouse
Yeah. Shall we get it?

Your Fabulous Author
Sure.

[Cut to our living room, a week or so later]

Your Fabulous Author respires gently on the living room sofa. It’s only 10pm, and only twenty minutes of the film have elapsed, but already his lifeforce is seeping from him.

Your Fabulous Author
(Waking from his brief slumber)
Can we watch the rest of this tomorrow?

The Gorgeous Spouse
(Half-asleep herself)
Okay.

Let me put a question to you first. How would you feel if you spent over four hours watching a film and it turned out to be dream or a confused, delirious, untrustworthy remembrance that someone has on the brink of death? Ordinarily, you might have the right to be pissed off, as this is usually one of the least satisfying ways to wrap up a story, but here it actually works. The film is so confused, so incoherent and so self-indulgent that it only makes sense as a dream. If it had ended any other way, I might have hunted down Raul Ruiz so that I could slap him in the face with some bacalhau.

Your Fabulous Author here is talking complete bullshit. He wouldn’t hunt down a 70-year-old cancer survivor so that he could slap him in the face with some bacalhau. He’s not heartless. Besides, he doesn’t have the money for the air fare...

I can think of another four hour plus film, though, that possibly ends with a dream - Once Upon a Time in America. But the difference between the two films is night and day. One of them is a multi-layered, breathtaking meditation on love and time and the other is, well...Mysteries of Lisbon tries hard to be that but it doesn’t succeed.

Ruiz here weaves a tale that goes off in many strange tangents and directions. Stories open within stories and soon this initially simplistic tale leads us into a murky labyrinth. But while it’s an excellent idea (the concept of unravelling the web that leads to a person’s existence), none of the intrigues are especially interesting. A lot of the time the film feels like an expensive soap opera, what with the overwrought emotions, the laughable twists and turns, and the penchant for characters to slap on horribly fake facial hair. Mysteries of Lisbon might have the veneer of an important film, but scratch beneath the surface and there’s not much there.

Your Fabulous Author is watching Mysteries of Lisbon. The second half of the film has just begun. He’s hoping that it’ll be an improvement on the first half - that the film will establish a confident rhythm. Father Dinis is talking to a monk. They chat a little about food and alcohol and...the Monk interrupts the scene to tell his story, marking the umpteenth time that this has happened; that a character has shifted the course of the movie to tell his or her tale.

Your Fabulous Author tugs on his beard and puffs his cheeks, realising that he still has two and a half hours of this nonsense left to go.

One of the most disappointing things about Mysteries of Lisbon is how overwhelmingly bland it is. For a film that is full of so many elegant costumes and sumptuous palaces you never get a real feel for the time or place. This is perhaps partly because all the exteriors feel like they were filmed in one or two places. There’s one piece of forest that I swear is used every time there’s a horse drawn carriage. It becomes almost like Hanna-Barbera - you’re seeing the same tree over and over again. This ends up making such an epic film feel much smaller than it should - it ends up betraying the movie’s TV-mini-series roots.

Again, this wouldn’t really matter if the human drama were up to scratch, but it most certainly isn’t. Whether it’s Father Dinis fighting for Napoleon, or the orphan at the centre of the film finally meeting his mother, or the reemergence of Knife Eater as a wealthy nobleman, it feels contrived and artificial. It’s a movie that’s meant to engage on an intellectual level rather than an emotional one, but it fails in this respect because it just ends up feeling like an art-house version of EastEnders. I mean, a gypsy with really unconvincing facial shrubbery reinvents himself as a priest? Oh, and another geezer with really bad facial hair reinvents himself as a nobleman? There are all kinds of shifting identities in the film but it doesn’t add to the movie in any way - at best it feels like a soap opera; at worst it’s just confusing.

Your Fabulous Author, tired and weary, stretches as the end titles crawl along the screen.

Your Fabulous Author
Well, at least that’s the last that we’ll hear of that piece of crap.

[One week later]

Your Fabulous Author opens ‘Entertainment Weekly’ and sees that Mysteries of Lisbon receives a ‘A’ grade.

Your Fabulous Author
Fuck off!

Your Fabulous Author takes a look at ‘Slant’ and sees a rave.

Your Fabulous Author
Fuck off!!

Your Fabulous Author takes a look at ‘The New York Times’ and sees a glowing review.

Your Fabulous Author
FUCK OFF!!!

Fearing that this is going to be another Russian Ark, a film that everyone seems to jizz themselves over except him, Your Fabulous Author crawls into bed.

Your Fabulous Author
(Voiceover)
Maybe when I wake up, I’ll have turned into my cat Oscar. Then I’ll be incapable of reading any of these deluded reviews. Yeah, that’ll be nice...

Hobo With a Shotgun

2011-08-03T23:19:00.000+01:00

Welcome to Hope Town! Or to give it its more appropriate name...Scum Town. This is a city that makes the Old Detroit of RoboCop look like Princeton. A city that makes Mogadishu look like an attractive place to spend your retirement. Hope Town is probably as bad as it gets.

Despite this, an elderly hobo, played by Rutger Hauer, takes up residence in this cesspool. He’s on the streets for no longer than a few minutes when he encounters The Drake (the city’s mob boss) and his two sons, Slick and Ivan, pursuing The Drake’s brother. By using a specially rigged sewer grate, they decapitate The Drake’s brother by pulling his head clean off with a car. Oh, and then an Asian woman in very little clothing dances rhythmically in the fountain of blood that gushes from the freshly made man-geyser. If this doesn’t get your attention, nothing will.

Even though he witnesses this atrocity, the Hobo still harbours dreams of a better life. In a pawn shop window he looks misty eyed at some black and white footage of a 1950s man mowing his lawn. This seems to represent a lost innocence that the Hobo wants to regain and he dreams of purchasing the lawnmower that sits near the TV in the shop window. He only needs $50.

In order to accumulate this money, the Hobo takes to begging on the streets. There’s an amusing scene where he’s trying to write a sign. On the first couple, he lies. He then gives up on this and we see him sitting on the street with a sign that simply says he needs the money so that he can buy a lawnmower. Such sentimentality is completely at odds with this hellish backdrop.

As nasty as the violence is in Hobo With a Shotgun, it’s also incredibly cartoonish. Hammers make feet shatter into bloody pieces and bumper cars make heads explode like they’re watermelons. It isn’t in the least bit realistic. But despite this, the film does have a pervasive grime and grubbiness to it. As ludicrously far-fetched as this world is, it still gets to you. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed the film greatly, rocking back and forth in my seat with pleasure as I guzzled the Colt 45 that my friend and I had smuggled into the screening. But the characters are so despicable and the backdrop so depressing that I felt like I needed a bath afterwards.

The ruthlessness of the villains on display here, though, does make the Hobo’s revenge extra enjoyable. I mean, take The Drake. Here’s a guy that decapitates his own brother. He’s also a man who holds torture parties - there’s a scene where some scantily clad women are using a man as a pinata; The Drake, however, brings this to an end with the immortal line ‘When life gives you razor blades...you make a bat, covered in razor blades’ and disembowels the man as the women jump up and down with glee.

Probably worse then The Drake, though, is Slick, The Drake’s son. With a narcissistic smile, slicked back hair and Wayfarers, he’s kind of like a psychotic Tom Cruise. In one hilarious scene, when the Hobo has become a shotgun wielding vigilante, he boards a school bus with his Cristiano Ronaldo lookalie brother Ivan. ‘Disco Inferno’ pumps from a boombox and Slick begins asking the kids questions like he’s Scorpio from Dirty Harry. He asks them if they like ice cream, he asks them if they like school, he asks them if they like bicycles and he asks them if they like hobos. They give each question a resounding yes. We then have a close-up of Slick’s Wayfarers and he says that he hates hobos. He then torches the entire school bus with his flamethrower as ‘Burn, baby, burn’ pounds from the soundtrack, his brother nodding with approval.

Now yes, you might be thinking that I’m a sick bastard for finding amusement in a scene where lots of children are incinerated, but it just flies in the face of what usually happens in films. Children never get hurt. So to see such cartoonish carnage and to see it so gleefully rendered, I couldn’t help but guffaw.

I also have to give Slick credit for referencing the Who song, ‘See Me, Feel Me’ while intimidating a woman. And also for defaming Mother Teresa: ‘Tell it to Mother Teresa while she’s fingerbanging you in hell!’

So what can the Hobo possibly hope to do in the face of such evil? Well, the Hobo holds out for as long as he can. He even debases himself to a Bum Fights-style filmmaker. The guy in question gleefully makes the Hobo eat glass for a few bucks and makes him take the money with his mouth. And Hauer’s acting in this scene is great. Everything is in the eyes - the confusion, the anger and the resignation; he manages to look just like a dog.

Once the Hobo gets to the pawn shop to pick up his lawnmower, it’s overrun by a gang of robbers. They threaten to shoot a baby and the quivering shopkeeper hands over his cash. But its not enough and the criminals become even more desperate. It’s here, with the lawnmower in his hands, that the Hobo sees a shotgun on the wall. Luckily it also costs $50 (and seems to be miraculously full of ammo) and the Hobo blows the thieves away. The choice has been made: the sentimental dreams have been exchanged in favour of grim reality. The Hobo is going to make these criminals pay.

The Hobo works his way through town, killing pimps and scumbags with reckless abandon. Perhaps my favourite slaying is his killing of a paedophile Santa Claus. Santa’s head almost completely explodes. But the Hobo saves the best for Slick. The Hobo kills him by blowing his penis off. A very apt death for a sex-obsessed psychopath who at one point literally saws into the heroine’s neck. This is maybe the Slick’s idea of penetration - to be hacking away at a woman’s flesh.

But it’s both a joyous and a disappointing moment to see Slick get killed. It’s joyous because he’s a fucking punk, but it’s disappointing because he’s such a great antagonist. Every time he’s on the screen, the film is even more despicably entertaining. But in a surreal moment, we get to see Slick carted off to hell in the back of the school bus where he incinerated lots of children.

This moment, however, seems positively normal to what comes later. Enraged by his son’s death, The Drake calls for ‘The Plague’. I can remember at the time asking myself what The Plague was. Well, turns out it’s a pair of armour-clad demons. These guys, dressed like steam-punk assassins on steroids, slaughter an entire hospital-full of people to get to the Hobo. Once they have him, they stick him in a metal coffin and drag him to The Drake on the back of their motorcycles. Oh, and in one scene, we see The Plague fighting a massive pet octopus?!?? Yes, for me, this only adds to the enjoyment of this crazy film.

But just when you think that The Plague is some sort of unbeatable, undead Legion of Doom duo from hell, one of them gets slaughtered by The Hobo’s partner, an armour-clad prostitute called Abby who has a weaponised lawn-mower motor. She uses the motor to kill one half of the duo and then the other half, who kind of resembles a low-rent Doctor Doom, asks her to join him. The Hobo gets involved and says no and the second half of The Plague just walks off. Yep, it’s a weird sequence.

In the same scene, Abby also gets her arm cut off by The Drake and she then begins stabbing him with the exposed bone. How the hell can this film possibly end, you think? Well, the Hobo kills The Drake and then the cops kill the Hobo. But then the cops end up getting slaughtered by the general populace. The final shot is of the shotgun on the floor.

What to take from this film? I’m not sure how much political or social commentary there is here. It’s certainly not on par with RoboCop. But maybe its a criticism of a society that has become so desensitised that it is literally amusing itself to death.

Maybe it’s also playing on our fear of the poor. Part of the story involves The Drake forcing the general populace to kill every hobo in town, otherwise he’ll make everyone suffer. The people are easily intimidated and do The Drake’s biding. Unfortunately, this is pretty close to reality. Politicians and media outlets are always playing on the people’s fears and the poor are an especially easy target. People certainly hate the poor more they should and hate the rich less - the rich deserve far more contempt than they receive.

But the greater, albeit more shallow, joy to take from Hobo is in how well filmed it is. For such a cheap film, it’s looks wonderful. There are some great shots and the use of colour in some scenes kind of reminded me of Dick Tracy. And in a couple of moments the film succeeds in actually being a little creepy. There’s a scene where the Hobo is in a police station talking to the Chief of Police and you cut to a shot of Ivan’s grinning mug as he slowly slinks into the room. The colour, the composition and Ivan’s smug smile make it a weirdly memorable visual.

In such a brutal film the two protagonists are also pleasingly sympathetic and likeable. Yes the Hobo is clearly bonkers, going on as he does about bears and talking to his brain, and yes Abby is a cliched hooker with a heart of gold, but they’re two bright sparks in a sea of shit. And with their silly dream of opening a lawnmower business (‘You grow it, we cut it!’) they remind you that mankind isn’t totally fucked. While we still have the power to have sentimental dreams, while we still have the ability to empathise with other people and while we can still summon an appropriate level of outrage at the degradation of those weaker than us, we’re still human...even if we need a huge shotgun to express it.

Directed by Jason Eisener
Written by John Davies
Produced by Rob Cotterill, Niv Fichman, Paul Gross and Frank Siracusa
Original Music by Adam Burke, Darius Holbert and Russ Howard III
Cinematography by Karim Hussain
Starring Rutger Hauer, Brian Downey, Gregory Smith and Molly Dunsworth

Running Time: 86 mins

Frozen

2011-06-05T20:40:00.000+01:00

What a great concept for a movie. We’ll take three obnoxious bozos, stick them on a ski lift and then have them get stuck on there with no one to help. We’ll even have a storm...and maybe some wolves. Yeah, that’ll be great!

It’s part of my peculiar nature to find a premise like this intriguing. How the hell do you generate drama with three people stuck on a ski lift?. I have no idea, but if it involves pain, degradation and broken limbs, I’m up for it.

I’m not sure if we’re supposed to sympathize with the grabass-tic amphibian shit on display here, but I despised them from the get-go. We have an airhead girl, her annoying, sleazebag boyfriend and their equally sleazy friend. They’re the kind of over-privileged, cheap-ass people that won’t pay full price for a ski ticket but at the same time are so out of touch with reality that they think that minimum wage is called minimal wage. These dickheads have led lives that are far too comfortable.

You know that these people have never done a real day’s work in their lives or ever struggled for anything. How do I know this? Because one of the guys, Dan, spends all of his time wearing a ridiculous white woolly hat. He even wears it indoors when he’s eating. Yeah, anyone who brazenly wears a tea cosy on their head all day long, a tea cosy that makes their head look four times the size it really is, has never experienced any true pain. The only conflict they experience is deciding what porno video they should masturbate to or what shitty-ass band they should cram into their fucking iphone 4 (hmm, Drowning Pool or Rev Theory?). These people need a harsh dose of reality.

Reality rears its ugly head when they decide to do some night skiing. It’s pitch black but they somehow manage to talk their way onto the ski lift. No one else is being taken to the top but this doesn’t dissuade them. They continue to talk inane, asinine bullshit. Little do they know, though, that down below there are staffing issues. The lift operator is called away to talk to his boss and his replacement doesn’t realize that there are three people heading for the top. So the lift’s turned off.

The three hateful turds are stuck on the lift for no longer than, ooh, ten seconds before they start discussing the worst way to die. Tea cosy twat-face Dan thinks that it would be especially bad to be eaten by a shark. His idiotic friend, meanwhile, thinks that the girl on the Jaws poster is hot. ‘Naked chicks are hot.’ Why didn’t they just have a scene where the tosser pulled his shrivelled little member out and talked with it? ‘Naked chicks are hot. Blah, blah, blah! Tits, tits, tits! I never get any. I’m so sad! What did I do to deserve being stuck with this douchebag for eternity?’

But although the film references Jaws, it more closely resembles Open Water. However, Open Water was a pretty decent film. This, though, is atrocious. Sure there’s joy to be found in it. Mainly the joy of watching smug twenty-somethings getting eaten by wolves. But it’s a pretty feeble piece of writing and filmmaking.

To illustrate the level of writing on display here, there’s a scene where the girl starts telling everyone how much she needs to pee. Okay, this is a real concern if you’re trapped somewhere for a length of time. But the girl sounds so pathetic - so babyish and whinny. Plus she also actually says the following line: ‘I need to pee...wicked bad.’ That line probably got the biggest laugh out of me in the entire film. More even than the bit where tea cosy guy gets eaten by wolves.

Yeah, you heard me right, tea cosy guy gets eaten. He decides to be a hero and jumps off the ski lift. Only problem is that he’s a long way from the ground and breaks both of his legs. We see the bone sticking through his twisted limbs and he screams his head off. But the fucking tea cosy on his head remains stubbornly in place.

The effects for this horrible injury are pretty terrible. There’s a bit where he’s lying there in the snow and it looks like his head is poking through a trapdoor and that the body and legs are cheap prosthetics. The crunching of broken bones and squelching noises are also incredibly phony. Plus this injury does a very strange thing and actually makes Dan sound retarded. I know that pain can do lots of things to people, but there’s a moment where it actually sounds like his brain has been stabbed. ‘Mmmsdfsdf sdffsdfs legggssss huuurrrrtttt!’

The reward of all this is getting to watch Dan get eaten. Eventually he attracts the attention of a pack of wolves. At first the wolves are easily scared away but after a while they’re not so easily deterred. And there’s a brilliant moment, right before he gets devoured, where Dan draws his tea cosy over his face. Yeah, cover your bulbous bonce with that fucking thing. Make sure that the wolves don’t have to look at your annoying face when they’re tearing into your flesh. Although, having said this, I do wish that one of the wolves would have removed the hat with its paw and slapped him in the face with it...

Of course, Dan’s girlfriend and their toolish friend Lynch get to hear Dan’s screams. And Dan even manages to order his girlfriend not to look at the wolves when they’re having their elevenses. ‘Don’t let her look!’ he screams to Lynch. Oh, what a great guy! What a hero!

The range of emotions that follow this are both cringe-worthy and hilarious. Lynch and the girlfriend argue at first and then they console each other with hugs. Aww, bless. But Lynch is such a sleazebag that I was half-expecting him to ask her for a hand-job or something. ‘Go on, just a little one.’ Thankfully, this doesn’t happen, but then in an arse-puckering attempt to generate sympathy or emotion, the girl says how she has a puppy at home. But if she’s not home to take care of the puppy, the puppy is going to starve to death. But worse than this, the puppy is going to think it was abandoned. Really, you go to a ski slope to spend all day snowboarding and you don’t tell a neighbour or a friend to look after your dog for the day? It’s not a fucking cat - isn’t it going to just piss and shit everywhere and eat your sofa? Maybe if you told someone where you were going, you wouldn’t have to worry about your puppy eating its paws while crying its eyes out and whimpering, ‘I thought she loved me.’

Other humiliations follow. The girl falls asleep and gets her hand stuck to the ski lift rail and then later she pisses herself. This latter moment is especially mirthful because the flow of urine is immediately followed by a swelling orchestra. Is this meant to be a grand, emotional moment? Is this her nadir? This is worse than her boyfriend getting eaten by wolves?

More poorly conceived character development takes place and Lynch tells the girl how he once thought he’d met ‘the one’. Like him, she was also into Aerosmith! Please, wolves eat this bastard!

Thankfully, the wolves comply. You see, Lynch manages to pull some James Bond shit and climbs the ski lift wire hand over hand until he gets to a support pole - a pole that has a ladder on it. But no sooner has Lynch reached terra firma than some wolves have jumped on him and are having another snack.

This leaves just the girl. By some quirk of fate, the ski lift come crashing to the ground and she makes a bid for freedom. However, before she reaches the bottom of the slope, she stumbles upon the wolves feasting on Lynch. She backs away and eventually manages to reach the road. Brilliant! Her puppy now is not going to eat its own head! And everyone lives happily ever after...

...Except the girl then hears the voice of her boyfriend echo in her head. ‘You’re going to be okay, baby.’ And then hilariously, even though it appeared at the beginning of the film, the title ‘Frozen’ snaps onto the screen in huge letters. It’s meant to be a final punch in the face. ‘Take that - take my heavy-hitting film and try and digest it and then shit yourself because it was so traumatizing.’ But Frozen isn’t traumatizing. It’s a walk in the park.

Directed and Written by Adam Green
Produced by Peter Block and Cory Neal
Original Music by Andy Garfield
Cinematography by Will Barratt
Starring Emma Bell, Shawn Ashmore and Kevin Zegers

Running Time: 93 mins

Rated R for some disturbing images, including men beating eaten by wolves and a fucktard wearing a tea cosy

Cliffhanger

2011-06-02T04:22:00.000+01:00

The opening to Cliffhanger is meant to be a harrowing experience. We're meant to feel enormous sorrow and pity as an innocent woman plunges to her horrible death. But how can we experience any kind of horror when Frank, a helicopter pilot played by Ralph Waite out of The Waltons, is in the background cackling with laughter? Just watch him. His eyes sparkle when Stallone tells the distressed woman that she's not doing to die. And he collapses in near hysterics when she falls but a few seconds later, obviously finding some kind of sick humour at the thought of the girl being smashed to pieces on the rocks, thousands of feet below. Contrast this with Michael Rooker's overacting – he almost faints as if he’s in a Jane Austen novel when he sees the girl plummet – and you have a scene that is tailor-made for chortles rather than gasps.

But to be fair to Stallone and the girl, they carry themselves pretty well in the scene. The girl pleads and pleads, and Stallone gamely hangs on. And the situation itself is excellent – huge drop, cracked harness, burly, lazy-mouthed actor trying to hang on to a hysterical woman who won’t shut the fuck up. But whenever I watch it, I can only see Frank's huge grin, his glowing eyes and him hooting in the background as Michael Rooker’s world falls apart. What exactly does Frank find so funny? Is he an evil old buzzard or has senility stalked its way into his spongy old brain? In his advanced years, does he think that the woman will be caught by kittens and rocketed to Valhalla in a chariot driven by mohawked-squirrels wearing diamond-encrusted strap-ons that spurt single-malt whisky? Or does he just not give a shit? Who the fuck knows...

However, as inappropriate as it is, Frank’s laughter isn’t entirely out of place. Nope, laughter is a common reaction when watching Cliffhanger. This isn’t to say that I dislike the film. It's a very enjoyable B-grade action movie. But it can't transcend the clichés of the genre.

One of the clichés the film adheres to is that the villain must be English. Well, at least I think he is. John Lithgow plays the main baddie and puts on an accent of some sort. But it's an amusing performance. His best bit has to be when he gets Stallone to climb up a rockface to get his money. "You, stay,” he says to the dribbling Rooker. And then to Stallone: “You, fetch." The joy is in his exaggerated enunciation. ‘Fetch’ somehow seems to have acquired an additional five syllables. Another funny bit is when Stallone throws Lithgow's money into the helicopter's rotors. "Damn you, Walker!" he screams like he's split a fingernail.

But there are other English villains. The first is Caroline Goodall who comes across as a low-rent Emma Thompson. But much more amusing is Craig Fairbrass (Dan out of EastEnders). His performance is atrocious. All he does is shout and swear. And he does it in a thick Cockney accent. “Fack this! Fack that!”

Fairbrass is immortalised in the scene where the drooling Michael Rooker goads him into beating him up. The Cockney is about as bright as a puddle of oil and forgoes a quick kill in favour of a prolonged pummeling. It turns out that Fairbrass' character is an ex-footballer. I guess this shouldn't be too surprising when his dialogue consists of lines like: "Yeah? And you're a loudmouth punk slag who's about to die." The only people I know who talk like that are West Ham fans.

But Fairbrass proceeds to give Rooker a surreal football-themed kicking, complete with running commentary – he even runs up to take a penalty. Is this how Hollywood sees the English? We're either effete brigands or beer-swilling hooligans. Actually, thinking about it, it's quite an accurate observation. Well done Renny Harlin. In your world of back-swimming sharks and flying Indy cars, you managed to find a single truth.

However, my favourite villain of all is played by Leon (he's so cool he doesn't even have a surname). He’s a tough Lennox Lewis-looking-like-motherfucker who eschews Fairbrass' shouty brand of villainy and instead tries to be quietly intimidating. This would be great but his line delivery is atrocious. He has no timing and seems incapable of emphasizing the right words. Where Lithgow can stretch and bend and slather layers of wonderful ham on his dialogue, Leon can only make his words sound like leaden mouth farts.

But to give the guy his dues, it is noticeable that, unlike Fairbrass, he does excel once he gives in to his urge to shout. He has a great scene in a cave where he actually seems like a genuine threat - he stalks Stallone and his girl with menace, taunting impotent old whitey with his ultimate fear; his girl having a black dick thrust upon her (and her liking it!). But before Stallone’s girlfriend Jessie has to suffer this outrage, Stallone grabs Leon by the balls and gorilla presses him through a spike. It's a WWE sort of death…which unsurprisingly I dig a great deal. (Although the filmmakers did miss a trick by not having Stallone yell, ‘You get the point!’ before shish-kebabing the scary black man.)

Speaking of Stallone, how does he fair in this film? Well, I've never really had much of a problem with Sly as an actor. Yeah, technically he’s not too great and yes he sounds like a man who was born with his brain upside down, but he is capable of a good performance here and there - just watch Copland or Rocky Balboa. Sadly, Cliffhanger is not one of those films. He’s okay at the beginning, showing humour and charm, but after the accident it all goes downhill. His idea of being haunted is to mope about like a thirteen-year-old that's been told to stop using his father's credit card to download porn. It's so amateurish.

Thank Christ then for Stallone’s bulging biceps! It’s these puppies that are given the opportunity to shine. I mean, just take the scene where the villains order Stallone to climb the mountain to retrieve their money. They make him remove his jacket. I can't help but feel that this wasn't done to prove how evil the villains are, but to allow Sly to climb while flaunting his thick, muscular arms. We don't want those babies covered up, no sirree!

However, Stallone and his biceps look like Marlon Brando compared to the "Whoa, dude!" extreme sports enthusiasts that pop up. They're sort of like Bill and Ted but without the charm. In fact, I wasn't distraught that one of them died; I was distraught that one survived. But at least the death of the Kurt Cobain lookalike gives us a hilarious silent "No!" moment from the gurning Michael Rooker, who once again amazes me with his sincere cheese. But then later on we get to relive the hilarity, because Frank's death elicits another rib-tickling "No!" moment.

Hey, what can I say, the old buzzard had it coming. You ain't laughing now, are you?

Directed by Renny Harlin
Written by Michael France and Sylvester Stallone
Produced by Renny Harlin and Alan Marshall
Original Music by Trevor Jones
Cinematography by Alex Thomson
Starring Sylvester Stallone, John Lithgow and Michael Rooker

Running Time: 112 mins

Rated R for language, violence against both humans and animals, and horrible Cock-er-nee stereotypes

127 Hours

2011-05-11T18:36:00.000+01:00

This is no word of a lie - after watching 127 Hours, my arm ached for hours. And not just a minor ache. The bone inside hummed. I was having difficulty lifting my arm. I ended up going to sleep in some minor discomfort.

All of this is small fry shit compared to what Aron Ralston (James Franco) has to go through. On a hiking trip in Moab, Utah, he gets his arm trapped under a boulder. Alone in a small canyon passage, and with only a small amount of water, some food and his hiking equipment, his chances of survival are grim.

I shouldn’t really have any reason to doubt Danny Boyle. By now in his career, he’s made so many great films. You’re almost always guaranteed something special. But although I was interested in the story, I still couldn’t quite get it out of my head that the star of the film was James Franco. You know, he of the smarmy leer - the omnipresent limelight drain; the aloof pie-eating leech that sucked the life out of the Oscars. But colour me pleasantly surprised. He’s excellent here.

Maybe Franco excels in 127 Hours because he gets so little time to interact with other human beings. In other films, he seems so detached that you can’t help but wonder whether he breathes the same air that we do. But 127 Hours has proved that that’s a little mean of me. Even though this is the James Franco show, he’s not the least bit cold. He’s finally proved that he’s a human being after all; that he’s not some dastardly smarm-bot created by the smarm-god Roger Moore in a laboratory with the aim of destroying pop culture.

The beginning of the movie shows what Ralston does with his freedom. He ignores his mother and sister, he treks off into the wilderness on his own and he’s a relentless show off - he even lies to a couple of hikers he meets in the canyon and tells them that he’s an engineer when in reality he works in a store. He’s not a bad guy, but he’s far too sure of his self. He thinks he’s in total control. The canyon is something for him to conquer, rather than to enjoy for its own reasons.

The hard, cold dose of reality is the boulder that pins him to a canyon passage. This is was not in his plan.

However, for all of his self-confidence, Ralston is one of the few people that is equipped to survive an ordeal like this. He may tell the odd fib here and there to impress the girls, but he knows his stuff. He knows that he has to keep calm and that he has to ration his food and his water.

At first Ralston tries to free his arm by cutting into the rock. Then, when he realises that this is achieving nothing, he tries to use his climbing gear to lift the rock from his arm. He manages to rig an elaborate winch. But Ralston isn’t strong enough - he reckons that it would take eight guys to be able to lift the boulder. Eventually Ralston realises that he’s going to have to cut his arm off.

Now this could be a simple blood and guts tale. Man gets stuck in a canyon, man cuts his arm off with a dull pen knife. But although the amputation is horrifyingly gruesome, Boyle’s skill lies in expanding the space of this tiny hole. You really get into Ralston’s head. Here’s a guy who thought he had it sussed - he thought he had everything worked out. But then came this boulder. Pinned to the wall, he gets to see ants and insects continue their existence, possessing a freedom he no longer shares.

For me, the film began to turn into something special when Ralston began to hallucinate. He begins to see his family sitting on a sofa in front of him in the canyon. No words are exchanged; no maudlin platitudes are shared. Instead they’re bathed in a golden light. Here are the people that care about him. Here are the people that are going to suffer if he can’t get out of this hole. And these are also the people that he has shut out. He finally begins to realize their importance; they’re finally coming out of the darkness.

Later Ralston even sees a child sitting on the sofa. This is a vision of the future he could have. He could be a father. He could have a family of his own. And there are also some wonderful flashbacks to Ralston’s past. We see him mucking about with his mum and dad and his sister. We get the impression that he’s forgotten about this - about how much these moments mean to him.

It’s only when Ralston has made this inner journey that he has the resolve to extricate himself from the hole. Using the dull pen knife, he begins to hack into his arm. Here you get to see another side of Danny Boyle’s character. He’s also a blood and guts man. The scene is truly horrific. Ralston breaks his arm a couple of times and then desperately amputates his dead limb. It’s a savage sequence and one that is aided greatly by Boyle’s command of the language of cinema. He knows that blood and guts on their own don’t really convey much. The true horror is in the sound effects. First its the breaking of his arm and then it’s the wailing guitars that come shredding from the speakers whenever Ralston touches a nerve. It immediately brings to mind the agony of going to the dentist when a nerve is hit. Except this is a horror on a much larger scale.

After Ralston frees himself from the boulder and the canyon passage, he has the good fortune to stumble upon the path of a hiking family. He looks like a shell of the man he used to be and for the first time since we meet him he has to accept help from other people. Finally he knows that he can’t do everything on his own - that other people are there to help shoulder the burden.

Ralston’s character has an interesting view on his ordeal. He thinks that the boulder has been waiting for him his whole life - the two were always destined to meet. This sounds terrifying but you can also take comfort from it. It doesn’t mean that there’s a god up there pulling strings. It means that what’s going to happen is going to happen. It’s up to us to make the most of it and to learn from it. Hopefully most of us won’t require a boulder to tells us that we need to treat our families and loved ones with compassion and respect.

Directed by Danny Boyle
Written by Danny Boyle and Simon Beaufoy
Produced by Danny Boyle, Christian Colson and John Smithson
Original Music by A.R. Rahman
Cinematography by Enrique Chediak and Anthony Dod Mantle
Starring James Franco

Running Time: 94 mins

Rated R for language and amputation by blunt pen knife

The King's Speech

2011-03-16T05:58:00.001Z

Has there been a more idiotic decision in recent cinema than Harvey Weinstein’s choice to re-release The King’s Speech as a PG-13 movie? I mean, surely The King’s Speech has been successful enough, winning Oscars galore and raking in hundreds of millions of dollars. Apparently not - now it must appeal to the kids.

And how is Harvey Scissorhands going to achieve this new rating? He’s going to achieve it by cutting out some of the swearing. Now I guess quite a few people could formulate an argument about foul language not being essential to any movie. Never mind that it provides authenticity and mirrors the way that people actually speak (have you ever tried to watch the cleaned-up version of Goodfellas on AMC - it’s fucking weird; especially when the swearing is censored but the bone-shattering violence is left intact). But here the language is also essential to the plot.

One key scene has Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush), the King’s speech therapist, proving that the King doesn’t stammer when he swears. The King then goes on to prove the point by swearing beautifully and fluently. It’s the first time in the film that Logue manages to make a dent in the King’s armour - it’s the first time that he begins to get to the core of him. So what justification can there be for altering this? Are they going to have the King say ‘Frick’ and ‘Poop’? That would be fucking ridiculous. And really, is making the film a PG-13 really going to make it any more money? It’s already made a bucketload of dosh on a very meagre budget; I don’t think that castrating it is going to attract floods of kids and teenagers. I think it’s done as well as it’s going to do.

So how do I feel about The King’s Speech winning Best Picture at the Academy Awards? Well, I feel far better now than when I hadn’t seen it. I was highly aggrieved that The Social Network didn’t win and was disappointed to see yet another film about someone overcoming adversity clearing up at the awards. But now that I’ve seen the film, I no longer have any animosity towards it. Yeah I still think that The Social Network got shafted, but The King’s Speech is a fine film.

One of my main fears at school and university was getting up in front of my class and speaking. I would literally worry about it for weeks beforehand and build the event up to colossal proportions in my mind. But I only had to speak to a few kids and a teacher. I didn’t have to get up in front of thousands. Plus I didn’t have a speech impediment. Sure my voice might have wavered as I spoke, but I didn’t have a stammer to contend with.

Another memory from school is having to listen to children with stammers perform presentations. It was always a painful experience. I’d try and be supportive but I have to admit that frustration would always creep into my mind - I’d often be thinking ‘just spit it out’ or ‘how much longer is this going to go on for?’. These aren’t particularly empathetic emotions, but they’re natural ones. So to have a King with a stammer, you’re taking this and blowing it up to a grand scale.

There’s a scene near the beginning where Prince Albert (Colin Firth), the future King, has to give a speech at the British Empire Exhibition. As you see him preparing, you can’t help but feel anxious on his behalf. You know that this is going to be a tortuous experience. And then there are all the people who offer their stupid advice - ‘make the microphone do the work’. Yeah, that’ll cure my stammer, numbnuts. But it’s the little details that help sell the terror. We’re told that the speech is going to be transmitted across the world and that when a little red light next to the microphone stops flashing, the Prince will be speaking live to the world. My sphincter tightened a little bit on his behalf when the blinking light finally turned into a solid red.

The disaster of this experience has the future King seeking help from the best doctors in England. None of them are worth a damn and they make the Prince do humiliating things like stuff marbles in his mouth. Plus they say that smoking is good for a stammer - apparently it relaxes the throat.

When the Prince and his wife end up at the door of Lionel Logue, it’s a completely different experience. His offices are almost falling apart and he doesn’t have any staff. He seems to run a ramshackle operation. But unlike the other therapists, Logue doesn’t offer crazy solutions. He tries to go deeper into the problem - he doesn’t want to just solve the mechanics.

A lot of the enjoyment of the film is watching the battle between Logue and the Prince. Angry and obstinate, the future King doesn’t want to get to the root of his problem; he just wants his affliction gone. But Logue knows that the best way to help the Prince’s problem is to treat more than the surface issue. Of course, this doesn’t always go down well. The Prince doubtlessly sees Logue as an inferior. He shouldn’t have to open himself up to him - it’s silly and undignified.

The efforts to ease the stammer sometimes resemble a battle. However, it’s a battle that’s difficult to win as the Prince’s insecurity often gets in the way. For a long time he refuses to put himself entirely in Logue’s hands. The difference in their social standing is perhaps an easy get-out clause for the King. When things get too painful or too personal he can bring the walls smashing down without lifting a finger.

The Prince illustrates this in a scene where Logue and Albert go for a walk. Logue insists that one day Albert could be King. Logue then makes the mistake of touching the Prince’s arm. Angered by this treasonous talk and this over-familiarity, not to mention the horrifying prospect of him being King, the Prince lashes out by mocking Logue’s acting aspirations and taking the piss out of his poor, working class, colonial origins. The way that the scene is filmed is quite marvelous. As the future King storms off you see Logue in the background, rooted to the spot. As the Prince walks, Logue gets smaller and smaller. His spirits are crushed and with just a few words he’s been reduced to a speck. Just when he thought he was getting close to the Prince, he’s put back in his place.

There are some things about the film that don’t work as well as they could have. King Edward (Guy Pearce) and Wallis Simpson are pretty one-dimensional. They’re shallow party fiends that don’t really seem to have a brain cell between them. It also feels that Winston Churchill (Timothy Spall) has been shoe-horned into the story because he’s a figure that everyone will recognise. Indeed, watching the film, it would be easy to miss the fact that he wasn’t the Prime Minister during the outbreak of World War Two. There has definitely been some simplification.

But simplification is often necessary in a biopic - there’s often too much detail to cram into a two hour film. The important thing is how good the core of the film is. And the core of The King’s Speech is definitely the friendship between the Prince and Logue.

There’s another great scene that occurs during the preparations for the coronation. The soon to be King confronts Logue with the fact that Logue is not a qualified doctor. Logue then points out that he never pretended to be - that the sign on his office lists him as Mister. He then points out all the soldiers that he treated for shell shock after the First World War. He speaks calmly and knowledgeably and with a complete lack of bullshit. He’s a man of experience and integrity - he’s the complete opposite of the Harvey Street quacks the King had dealt with previously. Logue will never lie or humiliate the King. He wants to meet the King on equal terms and help him solve his problem. It’s only near the end that that plea for equality is returned; that the men truly operate at the same level.

Watching this movie, you’d think the King’s first wartime speech was one of the most important events in World War Two. I say bullshit to that. If the King had stammered, little old England would have been fine. But such is the strength of the film, that the speech does indeed feel like a make or break situation. It feels like the fate of a nation is hanging on the King’s ability not to stammer. Again, like the beginning of the film, the tension is enormous.

I’d be lying if I said that the final speech wasn’t incredibly rousing. With anxious close-ups of the King and cutaways to civilians and troops, it feels like you’re walking a tightrope. If the King doesn’t stammer, we’ll have the strength to fight these Nazi bastards. If he does we’re probably going to capitulate. It’s a nonsense feeling but it’s still grimly effective. And when the King gets through the speech unscathed, it doesn’t matter that this event has been blown up into crazy proportions or that in reality the King had been speaking well since 1927 (with the help of Logue of course). You get swept up in the emotion of the piece. And of course, being an Englishman living abroad, I’m even more susceptible to the brand of patriotism contained in the film. I don’t believe in the monarchy but during this film I believed in the King.

Directed by Tom Hooper
Written by David Seidler
Produced by Iain Canning, Emile Sherman and Gareth Unwin
Original Music by Alexandre Desplat
Cinematography by Danny Cohen
Starring Colin Firth, Helena Bonham Carter, Geoffrey Rush and Guy Pearce

Running Time: 118 mins

Rated R for bloody posh swearing

The Damned United

2011-03-10T04:56:00.000Z

Brian Clough was one of the most amazing managers that the footballing world has ever seen. Brash, loud and outspoken, he took not one but two provincial, second division teams and turned them into English champions (with Nottingham Forest, he even turned them into European champions!). It’s a feat that is unlikely to be repeated.

But then there’s Clough’s tenure as manager of Leeds United. Lasting just 44 days in the job, it was an unmitigated disaster. He alienated the fans, the players and turned a championship winning team into relegation candidates. It’s this blip in Clough’s illustrious career that is the focus for The Damned United.

Some context: in the late 60s, Leeds United were one of the top teams in England. Under Don Revie, they won English championships and European titles. They played a particularly brutal kind of football, but they were effective. Derby County on the other hand weren’t even in the top division; they were bringing up the rear of the second division. But in Brian Clough they had one of the best young managers in the game. Given time, he’d win them promotion and turn them into English champions.

Given that Brian Clough achieved such great things in his career, it’s interesting that the film chooses to focus on his lowest ebb. How many times have we seen films where a coach takes a bunch of nobodies and turns them into winners? It’s the story of every other sports film. But here we have a film where a manager takes a group of superstars and turns them into losers - it’s the sports movie turned inside out.

The film begins with Clough’s tenure at Derby. Don Revie’s Leeds United are visiting for a cup game and Clough is starstruck. He holds Leeds and Revie in high esteem and orders his staff to fix up the football ground so that it’s in a more appropriate condition to be visited by such illustrious guests. He orders that a sign be repainted, that the walls be cleaned and that the pitch look like a carpet (an impossible feat when it looks like a mud bath). In short, he’s like a child who is being visited by his idol.

When Leeds arrive, Don doesn’t even acknowledge Clough. And to make matters worse, Leeds are less than sporting in the game. They kick lumps out of the Derby players and then one of them dives in order to gain a penalty. And then when the game’s over, again Revie doesn’t acknowledge Clough – he shakes everyone else’s hand. A bigger fuck you, you couldn’t ask for.

Clough’s subsequent success at Derby, which includes edging out Leeds for the championship, is painted almost entirely as revenge against Revie. Aggrieved that his idol didn’t even know or care who he was, he makes sure that everyone now knows who he is.

One of the great things about The Damned United is that it realises that there’s more drama off the pitch than on. And it’s even more appealing because the off pitch drama features none of the usual football cliches - sex and booze. This is just a tale of revenge, of obsession, of friendship and of ego. It’s the story of men in dirty, smelly dressing rooms, plotting revenge against one another. It’s the story of muddy boots and rain-soaked pitches. It’s class warfare, the north/south divide and the tedious encroachment of commerce exploding in the melting pot of a football match. It’s all the little things that make England so great and so frustrating (civic pride, provincialism, passion, anger) brought to you in concentrated form. Where else but in England would the greatest English manager never be given the job of managing the national side? But where else but in England would such a big-headed loud mouth be so loved and adored (he has statues in Derby, Nottingham and Middlesbrough)?

To give you a taste of Clough’s arrogance, there’s his first training session at Leeds United. Don Revie has left to become England manager and Clough has been hired to fill in the gap. Now how does Clough try and win the players over? Does he pamper their egos? Does he say how pleased he is to be their coach? No. He tells the players that they never won a championship fairly and that they can throw all their medals in the bin because they’re meaningless. Suffice it to say, the players aren’t impressed. However, it’s for this reason and for many others that Clough is so beloved in England. He refuses to pander. He’ll only speak his mind. There’s no compromise. But even though he’s abrasive, Clough is genuine. He’s sincere. He’s the complete opposite of Revie, who always came across like a second-hand car dealer.

Revie is openly mocked by Clough’s assistant Peter Taylor, who laughs at the Leeds manager’s various superstitions. But a lot of the drama in the film actually comes from the relationship between Clough and his number two. They’re great friends, but as Clough becomes increasingly successful, so he becomes harder to deal with. He begins to attribute Derby’s success wholly to himself, lessening Taylor’s vital contribution. Clough might be an excellent motivator and tactician, but it’s Taylor who can spot potential and help bring players to the club. Both men essentially fill-in each others’ weaknesses.

Of course it doesn’t help that Clough has to deal with a tedious chairman. As his gloomy employer, Clough’s chairman is constantly worrying about money. It’s a grim reminder that in modern football money is always the bottom line. Those who have it can buy success. Those who don’t have it are forced to struggle. But back in this era, buying power had yet to determine the best teams. Yes, money was creeping in, but you could still have a team that’s in the second division one year and is then challenging for the championship the next. That’s unthinkable nowadays, but in the 70s the manager was still the boss. The club was run by him, not by foreign billionaires.

So with all of this power and all of this success, Clough does that very English thing of fucking it all up. He pisses off the Derby chairman and then writes a resignation letter on behalf of him and his assistant in a bid to strengthen his position in the club. After all, the board would never accept his resignation, would they? Not after winning them the championship.

Clough does all of this without telling Taylor. Taylor is miffed. He’s happy at Derby. It’s a home to him. And when the board accepts their resignation, they’re cast into the wilderness.

One of the strongest scenes in the film comes during a trip to Spain. Clough and Taylor have been hired by Brighton (a team in the third division!) and are relaxing on the beach. Out of nowhere comes a man in a suit. He’s Leeds United’s club secretary and he’s offering Clough the job as manager. Clough accepts and wants Taylor to join him. But Taylor is outraged. They’ve only just accepted the job at Brighton. Plus they hate Leeds. Clough says he wants to win the championship with Leeds but he wants to do it better than they did with Revie. An argument ensues and Clough calls Taylor a parasite. It’s a horrible, heartbreaking moment and you know that Clough doesn’t mean a word of what he says, but pride, passion and ambition have clouded his mind.

Without Taylor, Clough performs dismally at Leeds. The players kick him around on the training ground, they under-perform on the pitch and they even slam the dressing room door in his face. Quite what Clough expected from them, I don’t know. He openly criticised Leeds before becoming their manager and then criticised them as their manager. The whole enterprise was doomed to failure from the beginning. But it ends up being a worthy exercise as after he’s fired, Clough comes crawling back to Taylor. He literally gets on his hands and knees and begs for forgiveness, finally learning some humility. And it’s here as Clough and Taylor are reunited that the film suddenly becomes a bro-mance. It’s perhaps the only false step in an otherwise masterful film. I have nothing wrong with the way that the scene is written or acted but the musical choice is poor - some schmaltzy song plays in the background.

But this one misstep doesn’t affect the power of the film. Michael Sheen is magnificent as Brian Clough and Timothy Spall is excellent as Peter Taylor. Indeed, this makes the third British icon that Sheen has successfully played. First he played Tony Blair, then he played David Frost and here he plays Brian Clough. But his performance never feels like an imitation. He inhabits the role of ol’ big head perfectly.

Another thing that especially pleased me about the film was the use of archive footage. For some reason, it’s very difficult to accurately film a football game. It always ends up looking phoney. The Damned United gets around that by showing actual football very sparingly. And then when it does show it, most of it’s archive footage. I don’t know why, but seeing this old footage is incredibly soothing to me - a warm reminder of the country I love and the country I left behind. Sure I wasn’t even born when these games were played, but I consumed them as a teenager and as such they’re a part of who I am.

I also loved seeing the real footage of Brian Clough at the end. And to think that after the Leeds debacle Clough and Taylor took Nottingham Forest from the second division to the first division, and then not only won the championship in their first season in the top flight but then subsequently won two European Championships! These men were giants.

However, while the film ends on a high with the footage of Clough bringing the European Cup to Forest, he and Taylor later had another final falling out, one that they didn’t recover from. After this falling out they never spoke to each other again. Apparently, when Taylor died, Clough was inconsolable and turned to drink. He even dedicated his autobiography to him with the following dedication: “To Peter. Still miss you badly. You once said, ‘When you get shot of me there won’t be as much laughter in your life’. You were right.” There are victories and defeats in every life. The best we can do is to learn from them. Sadly Brian Clough didn’t learn as much as he should have. He was a glorious, tragic figure.

Side note: I didn’t realise that this was made by Tom Hooper, the same director as The King’s Speech. So that means that I’ve watched Hooper films back to back. However, as much as I enjoyed The King’s Speech, I think The Damned United was even better.

Directed by Tom Hooper
Written by Peter Morgan
Produced by Andy Harries and Grainne Marmion
Original Music by Robert Lane
Cinematography by Ben Smithard
Starring Michael Sheen, Timothy Spall, Jim Broadbent and Colm Meaney

Running Time: 98 mins

Rated R for language and appalling hair

Black Swan

2011-03-03T05:23:00.000Z

One film immediately sprang to mind while I was watching Black Swan: The Piano Teacher. Both films are about performers trapped in claustrophobic relationships with their mother. Both films are about self-destruction. And both films are about the sacrifices people make for their art, often to the detriment of their well-being.

Another film that sprang to mind was Darren Aronofsky’s previous movie The Wrestler. One of the themes of that film was the way the way the main character destroyed his body for the enjoyment of others. The more he performed, the more he gave to the audience, the less he had for himself. And so it is with Black Swan. Here’s a woman who, like Mickey Rourke’s wrestler, is slowly destroying her body and her soul for other people’s entertainment and amusement.

One of the main bones of contention when I discussed Black Swan with my wife was our differing responses to the mother/daughter relationship portrayed in the film. I sensed a very subtle sexual element. My wife didn’t see it at all.

It’s by no means overt, but there are a couple of hints that there’s some sexual abuse going on in this claustrophobic, co-dependant relationship. There’s one scene where the mother, happy that her daughter Nina (Portman) got the main part in ‘Swan Lake’, gives her a cake. She then puts some of the cream on her finger and insists that her daughter lick it. The aggression is such that you know that she’s not going to take no for an answer. And then there’s another moment when the mother just invites herself into her daughter’s bedroom, and like there’s nothing wrong with this at all, like it’s the most natural thing in the world, says that she’s going to spend the night with her. It’s under the pretext of getting her daughter up early the next morning but this just seems like an excuse – the mother just wants any excuse to invade her daughter’s personal space.

Yes these aren’t overt signs of sexual abuse, but even if nothing physical has ever taken place, there’s at least psycho-sexual abuse going on here. The mother is needy, clingy and demanding, and as such she has ensured that her daughter lives in a state of arrested development. The daughter’s room looks like it belongs to a twelve-year-old. There’s pink everywhere and there are lots of childish knick-knacks. The mother has wrapped her baby up in cotton wool and as such the daughter is ill-prepared to deal with the harsh realities of real life.

But going back to the sexual undertones in the mother/daughter relationship, there’s a scene where Nina masturbates in her room. Before this, the sleazy ballet director that cast the daughter in the lead role in ‘Swan Lake’ encourages her to masturbate so that she can loosen up. He also asks her if she’s a virgin. She says that she isn’t but the true nature of her previous sexual encounters is never explained. They certainly didn’t seem like happy liaisons. Could they possibly have been with her mother? Is this why she’s so uptight? And then when the daughter finally gives in to desire, her wanking session is interrupted when she sees that her mother is sleeping in the corner of her room. The daughter’s sexual identity seems to be strongly tied to her mother – she can’t free herself from her mum’s suffocating grasp.

And it’s this search for liberation that is the main thrust of the film. Portman’s character is told time and time again that her dancing is technically perfect. However, in order to play the lead in ‘Swan Lake’, she must play both the White Swan and the Black Swan. And in order to play the Black Swan she must embrace her dark side: she must lose some of her inhibitions and give in to her emotions.

Needless to say, this is more difficult for Nina than you might imagine. All her life she’s been building a wall. She’s been resisting her emotions – keeping them at bay. And her desire to become a ballerina is a desire to achieve the perfection she can’t obtain in her real life. Therefore it’s always going to be difficult for her to perform with reckless abandon.

However, Portman’s character definitely has demons. The opening sequence superbly illustrates this as we see her dancing with the demon from Swan Lake. Nina is a troubled soul, desperately tying to keep a grip.

As Nina gets closer to the opening night, so she becomes more and more unhinged. There are some excellent visual touches that display her paranoia. One of my favourites was the shot where her reflection turns to look at her as she looks away. The direction is very casual and doesn’t draw attention to itself, but it’s rather beautiful and unsettling.

There are also some nice visual flourishes when Nina goes to a nightclub. As she dances under some strobe lights we briefly get flashes of the Black Swan. She’s finally embracing the darkness inside her.

Nina even goes so far as to take Lily, a rival dancer, home and have sex with her. But as we later find out, this is pure fantasy. Nina is beginning to unravel – her perceptions are becoming skewed.

The shit hits the fan when Nina finds Lily in her dressing room, dressed as the Black Swan and apparently ready to take her part. A struggle ensues and Lily turns into Nina. Nina then ends up stabbing and killing her duplicate. The passion, the energy and the emotion that she previously lacked comes out like a volcano – she’s ready to be the Black Swan.

The final performance is quite breathtaking and the sequence where she actually performs as the Black Swan is a fantastic piece of cinema. It’s wild and it’s loose, and there’s a magnificent visual flourish as Portman grows black feathers and wings burst out of her back. All of the time she’s been seeking perfection in her dancing and now she finally has it. She has everyone at her feet – the audience, her fellow performers and even the ballet director; they’re all in her thrall.

However, when Nina gets back to the dressing room she discovers that she didn’t stab her competitor at all – she stabbed herself and is bleeding to death. Somehow Nina manages to continue and gives it her all in the final act. As the White Swan lays there dying (and as she herself lays there dying), she says that she was perfect. Some performers say that they have to kill themselves for their audience. Well, Nina literally does that. And she also ends up being an echo of the character she portrays. She starts off innocent, looking for the freedom that a perfect performance will bring. But then she’s tricked by her demons and ends up destroying herself. But through this destruction she finally finds liberation – finally achieving perfection and finally receiving recognition from her peers and her audience, she can give up the ghost, knowing that nothing will ever supplant this moment.

The Talented Mr Ripley

2011-01-14T06:30:00.004Z

I first saw The Talented Mr Ripley during its original theatrical run. It got decent reviews and looked like an intriguing film. However, I didn’t quite expect it to be as good as it was. For my money, it was one of the best films of the year.

Since then, The Talented Mr Ripley has kind of fallen off the radar a little. It’s still a respected film, but I think it’s perceived as only a modest success - a film that is perhaps too controlled, too mannered and generally lacking in the thrills and spills associated with the thriller genre. And this is a huge shame, as the film works on many levels and deserves to be recognised as one of the best films of the 90s.

What’s so remarkable about the film, looking at it from 2011, is Matt Damon. I associate him so acutely with the Bourne films that it’s surprising to remember that he played Tom Ripley, and that he played him so well. Completely dispensing with the macho meathead persona he cultivated in the risible Good Will Hunting, he plays a gay sociopath who gets irrevocably tangled in his own web of lies.

It’s this laxity with the truth that is fundamental to Ripley. Tom is a young man who is ashamed of himself. He’s ashamed that he lives in a basement and that he works as a toilet attendant. He knows that he’s capable of much more. And it’s this shame that leads him to tell his first lie of the movie - while chatting to some people at a party, he tells them that he went to Princeton (he never went; he’s only borrowing a jacket from a friend). It’s a small untruth, but the consequences of this one lie are severe.

Lies often have a way of taking a life of their own. They grow, they develop and soon they have you trapped, which, perversely enough, is the complete opposite intention of the lie. Usually small lies are told to protect - to protect people from pain, humiliation or ridicule. In effect, they’re supposed to liberate you from your humdrum existence - to keep brutal reality at bay.

And at the beginning of the film, this is what happens to Tom. He lies about being from Princeton and all of a sudden he’s being sent to Italy by the rich shipping merchant Herbet Greenleaf to bring his wayward son Dickie Greenleaf (Jude Law) back to America. The wonder of this mission is beautifully visualised by the way that Ripley ascends from his wretched basement apartment to a waiting limousine on the street. This is what Ripley has been waiting for - the good life.

Now this one little lie need not damn Ripley forever more. But the trouble with lies is that they grow like weeds. Everything that is good gets obliterated by this hostile force.

Ripley’s second lie is the one that comes back to haunt him. Upon arrival in Italy, he bumps into Meredith Logue (Cate Blanchett), a wealthy textiles heiress. She tells him how impressed she is at how light he’s travelling - he has a couple of bags while she seems to have an entire boatload. Immediately Ripley’s inferiority complex rises to the surface and he tells her that he’s Dickie Greenleaf (even though his bags are in the ‘R’ section), keeping the humiliation of his poverty and poor social standing at bay. But what makes Tom a truly talented individual is the way that he can roll with his lies. Meredith saw him retrieving his luggage from the ‘R’ stand and she also knows who the Greenleafs are. So Tom spins her a charming story about travelling under a false name in a bid to try and remain anonymous - he’s a sensitive rich type, not a braggart. This wins over Meredith, who’s also travelling under a false name - he’s already made his first friend in Italy.

Despite his penchant for lies, Ripley is also capable of making some incredibly honest insights. When Ripley sets up an ‘accidental’ meeting on a beach, Dickie is aghast at how white he is - he actually calls him grey. Ripley replies by saying it’s only an undercoat - he wants to paint over his real self; he wants to be reborn.

Ripley manages to ingratiate himself with Dickie and proceeds to add layers to his dull undercoat. Lacking any real identity of his own, or ashamed of the one he actually has, he pretends to be a lover of jazz (Dickie is a big fan) and becomes a confidant for Marge (Gwyneth Paltrow), Dickie’s long suffering girlfriend. In short, he eventually becomes one of the family. They go to bars (Ripley is beside himself with joy when Dickie asks him to help perform a jazz song at a Naples club), they go sailing and they plan holidays together. Ripley even helps to hide Dickie’s affairs from Marge. They’re like brothers.

The only thing complicating matters is Ripley’s sexual attraction to Dickie. Ripley grows obsessed with him and their relationship begins to corrode. One excellent scene has the two playing chess together in the bathroom. Dickie’s bathing and Ripley is sitting by his side. Ripley then decides to make a risky move and says that he’s cold and asks if he can get in the bath. Dickie says no and Tom sheepishly replies that he didn’t mean that he wanted to get in the bath with Dickie still in there, even though this is totally what he wanted. And then Ripley ogles Dickie’s naked form in the mirror. From here their relationship sours - Dickie isn’t going to give Ripley the warmth he needs.

To make matters worse, Dickie’s friend Freddie (Philip Seymour Hoffman) turns up. He’s one of those annoying friends of a friend that can immediately see right through you - they can see your foibles, your weakness and your bullshit. All of the magic that you used on your mutual friend doesn’t work and you’re naked.

Ripley’s most humiliating exposure comes during a trip to a record store. Ripley acts like Dickie’s nagging wife and keeps telling him not to miss their train. Freddie and Dickie can only laugh at him and Ripley’s security is gone - he no longer feels like part of a family; he feels like a fool. And there’s one hilarious moment when Freddie literally dances at Ripley - with the look he gives Tom, you know that there’s only going to be one winner in this duel.

Things come to a head between Dickie and Ripley during a ride on a small boat. Ripley is mortified that Dickie is finally going to marry Marge, saying that Dickie loves him. The writing in this scene is excellent. Ripley lays himself bare but reveals himself to be jealous and clingy. He also reads far too much into certain things. Dickie is a sax player but later in the film expresses a desire to learn the drums. Of course this takes on a sexual connotation and Ripley asks Dickie to make his mind up - does he want to play sax or drums. A scuffle then ensues and Ripley ends up killing Dickie with an oar. The first strike is an attack but everything else is out of protection - Dickie is literally going to throttle him. So the murder has a strange disorientating feeling. And there’s an excellent touch at the end when, from above, you see Ripley lying with Dickie’s arm draped over him. For a brief few moments he can pretend that he has what he wants.

Jude Law is such a force in the film that it’s hard not to miss him once his character is killed off. Immediately following Dickie’s death, the film begins to drag ever so slightly. It’s still highly entertaining, but as Ripley’s web becomes more and more tangled, so the plot begins to stretch plausibility. You see, after Greenleaf’s death, Ripley pretends to be Dickie and lots of the scenes revolve around him either imitating Greenleaf or trying to convince people that he’s still alive. In a weird way Ripley becomes almost like a Bruce Wayne/Clark Kent type. Tom is the real him while Dickie is his superhero alter-ego.

As Dickie, Ripley gets to indulge in all of his deepest fantasies. These mainly revolve around him playing the piano and furnishing his overly fussy apartment. Freddie Miles actually gets things right when he turns up out of nowhere on Tom’s doorstep. He says the flat is horrible. Sure Tom might like the finer things in life but his taste borders on the Liberace. Which is kind of amusing when you consider how stylish Dickie is - it’s like Tom learned nothing from him. But then again, Dickie and Ripley are like chalk and cheese. Dickie’s style and taste is very forward thinking, while Tom harks back to the past - he’s old before his time.

Going back to Ripley’s split personality, though, there’s an excellent piece of imagery that perfectly illustrates what Minghella is trying to get across. In the reflection of a piano lid we see Ripley split in two. The further he indulges in his fantasies of being Dickie, the more he loses himself.

And strangely enough, the film actually picks up once Tom decides to permanently return to being Ripley. In the form of a man called Peter-Smith Kingsley, Ripley sees the chance of happiness. With Peter, Tom can almost be himself. The only thing that gets in the way is Tom’s secret. Ripley even says himself that he wants to give Tom the key to the basement and let him know everything, but because he knows the truth would kill the relationship, he’s damned - he’ll never be truly free.

The end to the film is darkly ironic. On a boat trip with his lover, Ripley bumps into Meredith again. Suddenly the impulsive lie he told at the beginning of the film - the one about being Dickie Greenleaf - comes back to bite him. He has two options: he can either kill Meredith or he can kill his lover - he can’t leave them both on board; the truth would eventually come out. Killing Meredith is the most obvious solution but she’s travelling with her family. Therefore, he has to kill Peter. You can see the light being snuffed out of Tom. At one point Meredith even asks him if he’s alone. He wasn’t before but he is now.

The final scene has Tom returning to his cabin, knowing he has to kill his lover. Even though Ripley is a rather wretched individual, he does always have my sympathies. He does monstrous things but he doesn’t kill because he enjoys it. He’s a slave to emotion and impulse. He’s always trying to protect himself - he’s always fighting for survival. Yes he’s to blame for digging a hole but he’s always trying to reach for the light. And then just when he sees it, it’s gone.

Before he kills him, Ripley asks Peter to tell some good things about Tom Ripley. Peter rattles off a long list and then the dialogue merges into the sounds of murder. Ripley is killing his happiness just so that he can survive; a miserable future awaits.

The final shots are a couple of masterstrokes. After the murder the camera turns around Ripley’s face. At first it’s light, but then it gradually darkens and is cast in shadow. And then from a long shot somewhere in the cabin we see a door closing on Ripley and Tom disappears. He’s going to be locked in the basement forever. His last way out has been slammed shut.

Directed and Written by Anthony Minghella
Produced by William Horberg and Tom Sternberg
Original Music by Gabriel Yared
Cinematography by John Seale
Film Editing by Walter Murch
Starring Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jude Law, Cate Blanchett and Philip Seymour Hoffman

Running Time: 139 mins

Rated R for violence, language and man love

Robin Hood

2010-12-27T02:32:00.001Z

Good old reliable Robin Hood. You can always count on him for a rollicking adventure. Whether it’s Errol Flynn or that Yank from Prince of Thieves or that fat bastard from the recent BBC series, he always tries his best to entertain. Sure he may not always succeed but at least he has a go.

Oh wait, who’s this coming round the corner? Why it’s Russell Crowe and Ridley Scott, riding a pair of steeds like constipated badgers. Ah look at them; so serious, so earnest, so dull. They’re like a married couple that’s sucked the life out of one another. Sure it was fun at the start but now they’re far too comfortable in each other’s company. Gladiator seems like another life ago.

This is the fifth collaboration between Scott and Crowe, and with the exception of Gladiator, none of their films have set the world on fire. Yet they still insist on making movies together. Maybe it’s the irresistible urge of two curmudgeons getting to eat bagels, smoke cigars and admire one another’s beards for a few months, or maybe it’s the allure of churning out another mediocre flick. This pair really doesn’t bring the best out of each other.

The concept for this iteration of Robin Hood originally focused on the Sheriff of Nottingham. Apparently it painted him in a more sympathetic light and Robin Hood was something of a wanker. Had the filmmakers had the balls to stick with that concept, they might have produced an interesting film. Instead they decided to produce this mish-mash of crap. It’s not faithful to the story we know, but it’s not different enough to shake things up. As a result it straddles an uncomfortable middle ground, making certain choices seem more than a little puzzling.

For instance, Maid Marian. In this film she’s Lady Marian. She was married for a few days and then her husband went off to the Crusades where he promptly died (well, on the way back). Is the idea of a forty-year old maid too horrible to consider (although I think the character is actually supposed to be younger)? Would it make everyone queasy to see Robin Hood de-flowering a spinster? Are people really that delicate?

In reality, the decision to have Maid Marian become Lady Marian is to support the ill-thought out plot. Robin witnesses the murder of Marian’s husband Robert Loxley at the hands of the evil traitor Sir Godfrey and then assumes the identity of Marian’s husband so that he can sneak back into England. He then enters into an arrangement with Loxley’s father Sir Walter to continue impersonating Loxley so that Sir Walter doesn’t lose his land. Okay, I can understand the thinking behind this plan, but this ends up being queasier than having Marian be a virgin. Sure the old man isn’t literally pimping his daughter-in-law out, but he is making her pretend to be in love with a complete stranger - this guy could be capable of anything. Dirty old man.

There’s also a really stupid decision to have Marian take part in the final battle. Really, is this the only way to show that the character has strength - to have her literally battle the French with sword in hand? Of course, Scott also tries to show Marian’s strength in other ways. There’s a scene where some French soldiers are going to burn some English villagers (fucking Frogs!). Marian leads the effort to free them. But these big moments do nothing to hide the fact that the character is painted in broad, spazzy strokes.

Speaking of the final battle, there’s another moment that makes it even more risible. Not only do we have Marian taking part in the fight, but we also see Friar Tuck kicking arse. Nothing else in the film suggests that he would excel in battle. After all, he’s a fat inebriate who cares more about honey than people. But no, there he is, running through Frenchies with his sword. Love a duck.

Even more criminal than all of this, though, is how colourless the villains are. Mark Strong as Sir Godfrey is a shocking non-entity. He doesn’t exude any menace or danger. And King John is just a petulant retch. He’s like a child who’s never heard the word ‘no’ and therefore feels free to double cross his loyal subjects and lounge all day in bed with his French slut.

Then you have the Sheriff of Nottingham, surely one of the most memorable characters in the Robin Hood legend. Here, though, he’s only in a few scenes and comes across as nothing more than a buffoon. It was also a shockingly poor decision to have him played by Matthew Macfadyen, who must possibly be one of the blandest actors working today. He doesn’t have an objectionable screen presence but that’s only because you rarely notice that he’s there. He’s kind of like the lettuce in a burger. He looks okay but he adds absolutely nothing to the experience - he’s screen garnish.

Doubtless Ridley Scott envisaged an amazing character arc from the Sheriff but it’s unlikely that a sequel will get made for this festering piece of poo. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with telling a story that will span more than one film, but at least make each film entertaining. Robin Hood fails miserably on that score and ends up feeling rather cynical - yeah, let’s stretch this story out and milk the public for all their worth; oh fuck, we forgot to make the film watchable.

Something else that depressed me was the visuals. Usually you can count on Ridley for some nice photography. But no, everything was dark and dingy - it was like a layer of sludge had been smeared across the lens. Despite this, I’ve heard people praise the photography, which leads me to wonder if I received a bum copy. Or maybe studios now are being complete wankers and are purposely making ordinary DVDs look like shit so that they can hawk more Blu-Rays. Anyone have any ideas? But certainly the unrelenting dinginess of the print has made me wonder.

But really, don’t waste your time on this film. Watch the one with the mullets instead. Somehow I find the soppy American more endearing than the Aussie who tries to talk and act like Michael Parkinson. I mean, Robin Hood isn’t supposed to be a gruff dullard. If you wanted that you should have just got Ridley Scott to play the part.

Directed by Ridley Scott
Screenplay by Brian Helgeland
Produced by Russell Crowe, Brian Grazer and Ridley Scott
Original Music by Marc Streitenfeld
Cinematography by John Mathieson
Starring Russell Crowe, Cate Blanchett, Max von Sydow, William Hurt and Mark Strong

Running Time: 140 mins

Rated PG-13 for violence and grim-faced humourlessness

Never Let Me Go

2010-11-17T06:10:00.000Z

It seems like a hell of a long time since Mark Romanek directed his last feature film, One Hour Photo. One of my favourite films of the last ten years, the bar was set high for his follow-up, Never Let Me Go. Based on the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, the movie has a fine pedigree but it falls short of expectations.

The main issue for me is that a lot of it feels lifeless. It’s a story that doesn’t have any action but it has lots of emotions to contend with. It should be bubbling with energy. Instead it feels cold and detached. It’s far too clinical. It’s only at the end that it sparks into life.

The opening section of the film revolves around Halisham public school. The children in this school are told how special there are. They’re also told that if they venture beyond the perimeter of the property that they’re going to get murderised by ne’er-do-wells. Hmm. This is a bit weird - aggressive fear-mongering from teachers. And why do the kids have electronic tags? Prisoners should be wearing those kinds of things, not children.

If you’ve read the book and already know the premise of the film there’s a lot of fun to be had noting the small details. For instance, there’s a scene where the teachers make a big deal about finding some cigarettes and they lecture the children on the health issues - their precious lungs could be damaged if they smoke the nasty fags. Then you have the fastidious way that bottles of milk are lined up for all the kids to drink. Sure enough this isn’t too odd - I used to have milk at school. But the kids also have a batch of pills to take. Yep, got to keep the little ones healthy. Got to keep those lungs clear and got to make sure that they have proper nutrition. Wouldn’t want them to develop any nasty diseases. After all, what would they do with those lovely organs?

One of the most disappointing things for me in the opening sequence was the way that one of the major scenes was fluffed. There’s a budding romance between a couple of the Halisham children - Tommy and Kathy - and in one scene Tommy buys Kathy a cassette tape. The song that Kathy listens to is called ‘Never Let Me Go’. It should be a huge moment in the film but instead it passes by with barely a whimper.

I was also disappointed with Sally Hawkins’ performance as the kids teacher. I don’t know why but she seems to be getting worse and worse as an actor. She’s developed a jarring range of tics that she’s begun repeating in each role. Her performances don’t feel natural - they feel artificial and mannered. She was even less believable here than she was in Happy Go Lucky and I was mentally shooing her off the screen every time she turned up.

Thankfully Hawkins disappears from the film early on. She makes the mistake of having a conscience and tells the children that they’re clones and that they’re going to have their organs harvested later in life. Again this is another scene that doesn’t really work. The children sit there quietly alarmed and Hawkins overacts like crazy, trying too hard to convey her horror. In order for a scene like this to work you need to believe that there is some inner life to the characters - that under the surface, things are happening. Instead the scene is icily detached.

The second part of the film is dedicated to the characters’ life in The Cottages. Here the characters finally have some sort of interaction with society. However, it’s very limited. There’s one amusing scene where they all go to a cafe and none of them know how to order food. So they all end up ordering the same thing - sausage and chips (yummy!).

A relationship also begins between Tommy and Ruth (played by Keira Knightley). Ruth had stolen Tommy away from Kathy while they were still at Halisham and the springs of their bed get a good pounding - Ruth is fucking Tommy pretty much just to spite Kathy; that and the fact she can’t tolerate the idea that a boy would like anyone more than her. The relationship is very immature but this is entirely appropriate considering the character’s sheltered existence. It’s almost like they’re playing at being adults - they don’t quite understand what it’s all about.

One of the most crushing things about the film is the passivity of the characters. They put up no resistance and like children they put their faith in whispers and gossip - there are rumours that any clones that prove that they’re in love will have their donations deferred for a while. Instead of actually doing anything - running away, attacking those that kill them - they go along with everything like lambs to the slaughter.

The strongest scenes are the ones at the end. Tommy leaves Ruth and finally begins a relationship with Kathy, his one true love. Buoyed by the rumour that couples in love will have their donations deferred, they try and prove their feelings for one another - Tommy takes some of his artwork to the mysterious Madame (a woman who used to visit Halisham to judge the children’s artwork to see if it was good enough to be displayed at ‘The Gallery’). Upon visiting the woman they also encounter their former headmistress. They’re very coldly informed that there are no deferrals and that The Gallery was a failed attempt to prove that clones have souls. One of the women then calls them poor creatures.

The lack of feeling is quite brutal. And considering that it’s heavily implied that the Madam and the headmistress are in a same sex relationship, it’s even more amazing that they’re quick to dismiss people as less than human. As people who are part of a group that’s faced a lot of prejudice, you’d like to assume that their thinking would be a little more enlightened. Surely it’s more than clear that these kids have souls - they think, they feel, they love; they’re human. What does it matter how they came to be on this planet? Is a ‘test tube’ child less human than one that was ‘naturally’ conceived? Instead they’re coldly dismissed as trash. It’s a horrible echo of modern society - in the not too distant wake of civil rights abuses, it’s chilling that so many ethnic minorities can march against gay marriage and gay rights.

The most powerful scene in the film is the one where Tommy finally realises he has no hope and collapses on the ground, screaming. Could anyone doubt that anyone who reacts in such a way doesn’t have a soul? Tommy realises how precious life is and all that he’ll lose - this isn’t the reaction of an animal or a piece of meat.

In the end we get to see Tommy give his last donation and ‘complete’. Speaking to a friend of mine about the scene, we both agreed that the most disturbing thing was the way that Tommy is mistreated once the anaesthesia kicks in. While he’s conscious, he’s treated with respect but once he’s asleep he’s treated like cattle - his head is roughly grabbed and his body is pulled about. Even in a situation as shitty as this, you’d hope the medical staff would have the humanity to treat their subject with respect - they’re professionals after all. Instead Tommy has to suffer one final indignity.

I think the film missed a trick in not ending the film with the song ‘Never Let Me Go’. In its place the film ends with a piece from the rather unremarkable score. I think the song would have given the ending another layer of emotion - it’s our destiny that we’ll lose our loved ones, but we shouldn’t have to let them go prematurely.

The Social Network

2010-10-13T05:21:00.003+01:00

Facebook: a presence so pervasive that even I’ve jumped on the bandwagon, dropped my kecks and presented myself to all and sundry. Yeah, look to the right of this page. Look at the purity of my site obliterated by my massive Facebook widget (and my Amazon links and my Twitter feed and my sad, desperate plea for money - give me some money you ungrateful fuckers!). Like me. Please like me. Only thirteen people like me at the moment. How pathetic is that? Add to my numbers. Add to my glory! I’m a whore.

I guess lots of great ideas have been driven by ego or revenge or the need to impress girls. The creation of Facebook seems to follow all of these lines. As told in The Social Network, Mark Zuckerberg is a talented but friendless loser. Yes he’s a smart bastard and yes he’s studying at Harvard, but if success if judged by the amount of people you know and the number of friends you have, and in lots of circles it is, then Zuckerberg is at the bottom of the heap. He has one friend and he loses his girlfriend in the opening scene.

To show how clueless Zuckerberg is when it comes to inter-personal relationships you just have to watch the film’s opening exchange. Boastful and dismissive of his girlfriend, he pisses her off to the extent that she leaves him. He’s not too concerned until he realises that she’s serious. Only then does he apologise and he does it with a complete lack of sincerity. He knows that these are the words that he’s supposed to say and the script he’s supposed to follow but there’s no feeling at all - even the biggest idiot would know that he’s not really sorry; he just desperately wants to cling onto this ornament, this decoration that shows that he’s not as big a loser as he seems. But it doesn’t work. His girlfriend still leaves him.

Subsequent to this, Zuckerberg, in a fit of drunken pique, creates a website called Facemash. It features every girl at Harvard and has them lined up in a ‘Hot or Not’-style women-as-meat contest. It successfully degrades every woman on campus and briefly entertains the male half of the university - it gets so many hits that it brings the school network to its knees. Revenge successfully achieved, Mark then has to face the music. But at his hearing Zuckerberg doesn’t display any remorse. He feels that he’s provided the university with a useful lesson - he’s highlighted the flaws in their security.

With Facemash as his first success, Zuckerberg then uses his petulant streak to achieve even greater notoriety. Hired by the Winklevoss twins (who are seamlessly portrayed by one actor) to create a kind of Harvard dating site, Mark decides to plunder their idea and create The Facebook (as it’s known then). As he’s working on it, he manages to avoid meeting his bosses by sending them texts and emails with various excuses. He gives them the runaround for six weeks before finally revealing The Facebook. The Winklevoss’ are understandably pissed off.

One of the many things I like about The Social Network is the ambiguity. It’s never made entirely clear why Zuckerberg decides to screw over the Winklevoss twins. They’re a few of the only people on campus that will actually speak to him and they give him a decent opportunity. But for many reasons Zuckerberg decides to take the offer the wrong way.

The first reason is the fact that the Winklevoss’s only allow him into the bike room of the Porcellian Club (the final club they’re a member of). The Winklevoss’s think they’re being incredibly generous by allowing Zuckerberg on such hallowed ground, but Zuckerberg takes it as a slight. He’s well aware that Jews are still treated like second class citizens in such places and his limited admittance only confirms his suspicions. Secondly, the Winklevoss’s are exactly the kind of people he wishes he could be - rich, good-looking, physically fit; they’re almost Aryan. Mark, on the other hand, is a misfit - a social reject, which makes it beautifully ironic that he goes on to create the most successful social networking site in the world. Thirdly, Mark does it because he thinks that he’s better than everyone else (an arrogance that is interestingly at odds with his inferiority complex). He doesn’t want to be an employee. He wants to be a boss. He won’t tolerate being bottom of the food chain. So Mark’s creation of The Facebook is also an inspired act of petulance. He wants to prove that he can make something on his own - he doesn’t need to be part of special clubs or have powerful friends. While most people of his age would resort to writing bad poetry or indulge in chronic masturbation, he uses his anger to begin the process of making himself a billionaire.

The process has its casualties, though. Zuckerberg hires his best friend (his only friend really) Eduardo Saverin as his business manager. Saverin gives his heart and soul to the business as well as quite a bit of money, but Zuckerberg’s head is turned by Sean Parker (played by Justin Timberlake), founder of Napster. Again, Parker is the kind of person that Zuckerberg wishes he could be - good looking, confident, good with women. But unlike the Winklevoss’s, Parker will take Mark all the way.

Timberlake is excellent as Parker, even though he’s basically just playing an extension of himself. He’s a cocky superstar - the kind of guy that men want to be and women want to be with. So the part isn’t exactly a stretch for Timberlake, but he still brings lots of charm and charisma to the role.

Parker’s seduction of Zuckerberg is the saddest thing about the film. Because of Parker, Zuckerberg ruins the one real friendship he has. This element of the film actually nicely encapsulates the problem with Facebook. Facebook allows us to have the illusion of friendship without having to deal with all the complications. We can friend someone but not really have to see them or talk to them on the phone or write them long emails or letters. We can stay in touch by occasionally looking at their wall or commenting on their status. Everything is a lot more shallow - it’s all less real. And that’s what Zuckerberg chooses. He chooses a shallow friendship over one with any real meaning.

One of the best scenes in the film is when Saverin visits Facebook in its swanky new offices (they’re about to celebrate the one millionth user). He thinks he’s there to celebrate but he’s there to sign papers because his 30% share of the business has been reduced to 0.03% due to restructuring. To make matters worse, all the other main players in Facebook still have a decent share of the business - Parker even has 7%. It’s the equivalent of being defriended and Saverin is understandably pissed off. He smashes Zuckerberg’s computer and says that he’s going to sue him. The coward that he is, Zuckerberg can only tremble. Parker, though, is over the moon - he verbally attacks Saverin. Well, until Saverin pretends that he’s going to punch him - at this point, Parker almost shits himself. But after Saverin’s left, Zuckerberg tells Parker that he was too rough on him. So Zuckerberg obviously still has feelings for his ex-friend, but he’s too much of a coward to stand up for him.

Again this accurately reflects current life, where conflict is avoided at all costs. We’d rather quietly defriend someone or ease them out of our lives than actually speak our minds. We don’t even have the option of a dislike button. Facebook and other social networking sites were supposed to bring us together but if anything they’ve driven us further apart.

But while the film is very timely, is it the all-conquering masterpiece that some people think it is? I wouldn’t go that far. It’s certainly one of the best films of the year, but that isn’t really saying that much, as it’s been a very lean year for cinema so far. However, it’s nice to see David Fincher returning to form after the disappointment that was The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. That was a film that I sorely wanted to like but it fell way short of expectations. Thankfully, though, The Social Network is a film of subtle pleasures. As great as Fincher is, he sometimes gets carried away with the technique of making a film - the worst case being the unnecessarily flashy shots in Panic Room (flying through locks and such). Here he allows the film to speak for itself while still retaining his magnificent eye for visuals. The opening shots as Zuckerberg runs through Harvard are wonderful, as is the boat race at Henley (a scene that initially seems self-indulgent until you realise that it’s cleverly showing you that the Winklevoss’s are second best at everything). And the film also has an excellent score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross (going back to the boat race, the score and the slow motion makes it feel like something out of A Clockwork Orange).

The final scene has Zuckerberg using Facebook to try and friend his ex-girlfriend. After sending the friend request, he refreshes the page every few seconds to see if his request has been accepted. Maybe he’s finally trying to make up for his mistakes or maybe he’s still a slave to his impulses. We don’t know. You can only hope that he’s learnt his lesson and that he understands that all the success and all the money in the world are meaningless if you don’t have any deep, lasting attachments.

Having said all that, go back to the top of the page and click on ‘like’ in my Facebook widget. And after that, donate me some money. It’ll do my self-esteem wonders and I promise that I’ll only use the money to bring you more reviews. I won’t use it on booze or whores. You have my word. I’ll be refreshing Facebook until you like me. Thanks in advance. :)

Pierrepoint

2010-10-10T04:32:00.001+01:00

Albert Pierrepoint was one of the Britain’s last hangmen and was responsible for the executions of hundreds of convicted felons. The end titles of the film say that he killed 608 individuals but other sources say that he killed around 400. Either way it’s a hell of a lot of people to take to the gallows.

Pierrepoint begins with its protagonist attending training for his new profession. He’s shown the procedures and he’s quizzed on some of the finer points of the job (in order to break the neck cleanly, one has to adjust the length of the noose according to the person’s height, weight and build - otherwise the executioner runs the risk of decapitating the felon). The film doesn’t go into great detail about why he chooses this job. He just says that he has something in him.

Part of the reason that he has something in him is because his father was a hangman. An uncle also did the same job. Therefore you could say that it’s the family business. However, the film isn’t particularly interested in Pierrepoint’s past - it’s more interested in showing how this profession changes and twists him. The only meaningful reference to the past is when Pierrepoint speaks to his mother - she says that she wants to hear nothing about his new profession; she wouldn’t talk to Albert’s father about his job and she’s going to do the same with her son.

During his first execution, Pierrepoint is just an assistant, but the hangman he’s assisting loses his nerve and Albert has to take charge. He’s calm under pressure and the pleading of the prisoner doesn’t seem to affect him. He’s able to make the disconnect that the other guy can’t. There’s no emotional engagement in the killing.

A lack of emotion might suggest a lack of feeling, but that certainly isn’t the case with Pierrepoint. When he carries out an execution, he’s merely following orders. He doesn’t do it because he gets any pleasure out of killing a fellow human being. His pride comes from doing things professionally; from making things easy for everyone. And this professionalism means that he has respect for the condemned. As he says himself, they’ve paid the price - in death they become innocent once more. Indeed, he even cleans the bodies himself after he’s hung them, thinking that the morticians wouldn’t treat the executed properly.

There’s almost an erotic element in one of the scenes as he cleans the body of a woman. Given his rather passionless marriage, you can’t help but feel that this is the closest he gets to another human being. Getting to hold them, to clean them and to make sure that they’re treated with dignity, he achieves the intimacy he lacks with his wife - he only has an illusion of closeness with his spouse.

At first everything seems fine between Pierrepoint and his wife, but the marriage quickly turns into a sham. There’s one horrible point where she can’t even bear to be touched by him. She knows that these hands have touched the dead and she doesn’t want the stain on her.

Yet she does want his money. She’s the one who makes the plans and she’s the one who convinces him to buy a pub. It’s also her idea to capitalise on his celebrity and to use it to sell more booze. It’s a cold, distant marriage.

However, what’s so great about the film is how subtly this is done. On the outside they seem like the perfect team. He has the charm, she has the brains. And on first glimpses they seem to get along fine. But then you begin to see the contempt that his wife has for Albert. He repulses her. She looks in his book, the book where he lists all of his executions, and she can only think of the hundreds he’s killed. The only way she can get past it is to focus on the money - at more than one point she nags him about some money he’s owed for an execution he wasn’t allowed to carry out.

Things only come to a head because Albert is called to execute a friend of his. This particular development would be too ridiculous to accept if the film were fictitious, but it actually happened. A regular at Albert’s pub, a man who was a friendly acquittance of Pierrepoint, killed his lover and was then condemned to death. Not knowing his real name (Pierrepoint only knows his nickname), Albert has no idea he’s been called to execute a friend. This sequence is one of the most powerful in the film. Albert’s friend is scared that Pierrepoint won’t acknowledge him during the execution, but knowing that this would be an act of cruelty, Albert does acknowledge him and does everything to make his friend’s experience as painless as possible. The only problem is that the whole ordeal causes Albert a huge amount of anguish. Prior to this, the executions had a professional separation - here his private life and his professional life have become horribly blurred.

What makes the experience even more unbearable is that Albert’s wife doesn’t want to hear anything about it. Even when he’s sitting on the floor, bawling his eyes out, she can’t tell him that he’s not a bad man. She has exactly the same attitude as his mother and she refuses to give him any emotional support. This burden is his and his alone.

But although the execution of his friend is when Pierrepoint reaches his professional nadir, the rot begins long before this. At the end of the Second World War, Pierrepoint is called to Germany to execute Nazi POWs. In one day alone he’s called to kill fourteen people. Even for a professional like Pierrepoint, this is too much. The experience is too long and too intense. It also brings him unwanted celebrity. He can no longer leave Albert at the door as the condemned now know who Albert is - they even plead to him by name.

The film leaves you with an overwhelming amount of sadness for Pierrepoint. Here’s a man who brings dignity and professionalism to his job and who is then punished because of his competency for it. He never wants to be solely recognised as an executioner but even his wife can’t look past it. He takes the burden and then is rewarded for it with contempt and loneliness. It’s an emotional execution that is the polar opposite of the ones he carried out - it’s long, painful and cruel.

Directed by Adrian Shergold
Written by Bob Mills and Jeff Pope
Produced by Christine Langan
Original Music by Martin Phipps
Cinematography by Danny Cohen
Starring Timothy Spall, Juliet Stevenson and Eddie Marsan

Running Time: 90 mins

Rated R for disturbing images, nudity and synchronised hanging

Wall Street

2010-09-26T22:49:00.000+01:00

Isn’t going to work every day wonderful? Getting up early in the morning, squashing yourself into a train full of flatulent commuters and then spending most of the day answering badly written, poorly thought-out emails. But things were even worse in the 80s. Back then you had to write letters and back then you didn’t have the consolation of an ipod on your trip home - your shuffles were only 60 minutes long, you had to switch sides halfway through and Westlife had yet to record an album. Those were dark days.

Despite this, Wall Street begins in a very jaunty fashion. Frank Sinatra plays on the soundtrack and the trials and tribulations of the morning routine are filmed with gentle exasperation - the opening seems to exude the American belief that if you work hard enough you’ll attain a comfortable level of prickdom and will no longer have to tolerate this daily abasement.

A believer in this extremely deluded conviction is Bud Fox, played by Charlie Sheen. He begins the film as a low-grade stockbroker, but he thinks that if he works hard enough, if he makes enough connections and kisses enough arse, he too will have a part of the American Dream. And even though most people would receive only a handful a scraps for humiliating themselves in this fashion (a minuscule pay rise, perhaps 10 days annual paid vacation instead of 5, or if they’re really good, their own cupboard-sized office), Fox actually gets some sizeable rewards for his toadying.

Fox goes from cold-calling old fogies in a loud, sweaty office to hobnobbing with the rich and powerful. And how does he do this? He does it by selling out his father.

Bud’s dad, played by Martin Sheen, works for an airline. He’s a blue-collar guy who likes to unwind after an honest, hard day’s work with a smoke and some beer. He’s the complete opposite of his white-collar son who likes nothing more than making his own pasta in his pretentious apartment with his vacuous girlfriend.

The temptation in this film is Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas). He’s the Lucifer-type figure that tempts the innocent Fox to stray from the path of decency. He teaches Fox to love nothing but money and to indulge in the mindless pursuit of it. He also throws a woman his way and very quickly Fox becomes Gekko’s loyal lapdog.

Some of the funniest scenes in the film revolve around Fox’s attempts to modernise his apartment. He and his girlfriend staple some fake brickwork to a wall and then paint it to make it look rough and ready - like the plaster is peeling off the walls and exposing the brickwork underneath. It’s some of the most pretentious design I’ve ever seen but it’s presented here as desirable and cutting edge. There’s also a hilarious exchange where Daryl Hannah, who produces a performance so stunningly flat that it seems like consciousness is a foreign concept to her, says that she wants to do for furniture what Laura Ashley did for fabrics. You mean, produce horribly bland, middlebrow vomit? Yeah, fuck you.

And so it’s for these very meagre pleasures that Fox decides to sell out his father’s company and turn them over to the shark Gekko - a pretentious apartment and some vacant poontang.

It’s at this point that you realise that the film is nothing more than a blindingly obvious morality tale. What’s more important, family or money? Anyone with half a brain should know that family comes first. I mean, sure you can sell everyone out and become Donald Trump with a bowlful of Shredded Wheat on your head hawking crappy mattresses, but what kind of comfort does money provide? Well, aside from innumerable blow jobs and an endless supply of cocaine, not much.

Daddy Fox immediately sees through Gekko’s bullshit and knows that he only gives a fuck about money. Bud is a white collar prick who doesn’t know his arse from his elbow, while daddy is a pure, unclouded, blue collar saint who can see the world for what it really is.

Seeing as Bud’s father is played by Martin Sheen, Charlie’s real life father, you’d think that their scenes would have some authenticity about them. You’d be thinking wrong. There’s a particularly risible scene after his father has a heart attack where Charlie can only express his emotional distress by blinking. Clearly talent skips a generation.

Still, it’s fun watching Sheen’s performance and realising that Christian Bale stole lots of Bud’s inflections for his role as Patrick Bateman in American Psycho.

The most fun thing about Wall Street is Gekko. Some of the crap he spews is priceless. My favourite line is, ‘If you want a friend, get a dog.’ Basically he wants people with no feelings. He’s a horrible, preposterous man, but he’s easily the most interesting thing in the film. His stupid, mindless pursuit of money represents everything that is wrong about America - the lack of feeling, the lack of compassion, the knuckleheaded belief that consumption is more important than understanding. It’s no wonder that he’s been the subject of endless parodies (Del Boy’s yuppie phase in Only Fools and Horses being the best by far).

A particularly hilarious Gekko moment is when he calls Bud early one morning to tell him how beautiful the sunrise looks from his beach. He says that no painting has ever been able to capture its beauty. His pomposity is off the chart. But what takes the scene to whole new level is that Bud seems to be having an orgasm on the other line - just look at his face; he’s lapping this crap up and spunking in his boxers.

More crap comes during Gekko’s ‘greed is good’ speech. He claims that he’s a liberator of companies. He claims that he’s rescuing them from bad management. He certainly has a point that managers are the bane of corporate life. Too many of them do too little for too much money. But Gekko is not a liberator. He’s an executioner. He’s there to cut everything up and take the spoils. He’s part of the destructive force of capitalism - he’s a leach that sucks the blood out of the economy; he doesn’t actually produce anything, he’s just a carpetbagger in a suit.

So the fact that Bud sees all of this but still looks up to Gekko for so long just shows what a stupid character he is. And when he finally does realise what’s going on, the film illustrates his mental anguish in the lamest way possible - Bud wakes surrounded by empty pizza boxes and wonky venetian blinds. Yeah, he’s seriously gone off the rails there.

Perhaps realising that it’s straining to come to a satisfying conclusion, the film ends with a silly fight in Central Park and then shows that Bud has set-up Gekko for prosecution (he’s been wearing a wire while Gekko makes incriminating statements). Yes, occasionally a Gekko or a Madoff gets prosecuted, but some things never change. Money never sleeps and shit always smells. (To my eternal disappointment, the title Wall Street: Shit Always Smells was rejected for the upcoming sequel.)

Directed by Oliver Stone
Written by Stanley Weiser and Oliver Stone
Produced by Edward R. Pressman
Original Music by Stewart Copeland
Cinematography by Robert Richardson
Starring Charlie Sheen, Michael Douglas, Daryl Hannah, Martin Sheen and Terence Stamp

Running Time: 126 mins

Rated R for language, brief nudity and fucking yuppies

How to Get Ahead in Advertising

2010-09-09T03:04:00.002+01:00

In Withnail and I, Bruce Robinson made one of the funniest films there is. Therefore it was always going to be hard for him to make anything that would equal his debut. However, in How to Get Ahead in Advertising he comes mighty close.

The reason why Robinson's second film fails to match Withnail and I is because it’s far too preachy. There are some great speeches in the film; some wonderful digs at consumerism, but occasionally it descends into uninteresting ranting. Yeah consumerism can turn us into unthinking automatons, and yeah big business is greedy, but you don't really need to point it out so blatantly. We already know this. The film works much better when it illustrates the BS or when it jabs at it. It doesn't need to get on its high horse.

One of my favourite bits is when Bagley (Richard E. Grant) – a cocky advertising executive who suddenly loses his magic touch of selling absolute crap when he has to hawk some boil cream – is listening to a bunch of idiots talking about a newspaper article. As a person who makes a living out of lying, he's appalled that they believe what the press tells them. They then begin to argue (there's a great bit when an Irish priest insists that a woman in a vice den had peanut butter smeared across her tits; it was in the paper so it must be true) and the conversation quickly turns to the boil cream that Bagley has become obsessed with. "They're incurable, all of them. I know that and so does everybody else. Until they get one. Then the rules suddenly change." And then he has a dig at the priest. "They want to believe something works. He knows that, which is why he gets a good look-in with the dying." It's a great scene; it's funny as hell and it also has a good point to make. People consume less out of desire and more out of a desperate sort of hope, or even fear; they hope this product or that product will fill the hole in their lives. They hope it will be the answer to all their problems. And thankfully this scene refrains from the preaching that affects the latter stages.

It’s also a devilish idea to have Bagley become obsessed with boils and boil cream. He himself is a boil – as an advertising executive he’s an ugly pimple and highly resistant to any attempts at removal.

But my favourite scene is the one with the psychiatrist – Bagley has quit his job and developed a hideous boil of his own, one that talks to him and one that has grown a face. He's talking to the quack with a big bandage on his shoulder. He rants for a while about the way advertisers have ruined television, and then all of a sudden, after a silence, the boil speaks. The way it's presented in the film, the boil (at first) has a separate voice to Bagley's. He's not portrayed as Gollum with a satanic pimple; he's not talking to himself – the boil is a separate entity. But at the same time you're never really sure whether you're seeing things from Bagley's perspective. He's gone totally crazy, so he may very well be the one saying all this crap. Plus the boil only speaks when Bagley's not looking the other person in the face. But what I love about the scene is the filth the boil speaks and Grant's reactions. His hysteria is hilarious (there's another magnificent bit of hysteria in the film – when the boil first 'speaks', Bagley is so shocked that he runs to the kitchen, shaking and spazzing like he's got St Vitus' dance. Grant is amazing at working himself up into a lather). And then the boil asks Bagley to tell the shrink about his grandfather. "My grandfather was caught molesting a wallaby in a private zoo in 1919." "A wallaby?" "It may have been a kangaroo. I'm not sure." "You mean sexually?" "I suppose so. He had his hand in its pouch." I haven't heard dialogue that funny in a long time.

I also love the scene when Bagley is admitted to hospital to have the boil lanced. By now he's completely raving. He's going on and on about the evils of consumerism. So then the boil says, "You commies don't half talk a lot of shit." Magnificent! It's the sort of argument a Daily Mail reader would give. Criticise capitalism and you must be a Red. However, I can see where the boil is coming from. There are certainly times when Robinson is too militant. Like I said before, he really doesn't need to stand so high on his soapbox. But at the same time the film makes some excellent points. It's just that the film works better when it does it through comedy rather than rhetoric.

Another great scene, one that takes a poke at society's hypocrisy, is when Bagley argues with a feminist who thinks men should bleed. "And I think you're a vegan who eats meat in secret. You see, she doesn't deny it. She's a vegan who eats meat in secret!" "I do not eat meat!" "But you'll eat fish, you'll eat fish until the cows come home." "Fish is allowed!" Of course, this enrages Bagley.

But although hypocritical lefties get a kicking too, the film, early on, raises an interesting point. If you're anti-consumerism, how do you spread your message without advertising? It's a bit of a kick in the teeth, that.

However, Robinson is smart enough to know that consumerism is here to stay. The film doesn't end with any hope. All we can look forward to is more advertising, more spending and more products. The world is one magnificent shop indeed.

Directed by Bruce Robinson
Written by Bruce Robinson
Produced by David Wimbury
Original Music by David Dundas and Rick Wentworth
Cinematography by Peter Hannan
Starring Richard E.Grant, Rachel Ward and Richard Wilson

Running Time: 94 mins

Rated 15 for fast eruptors, peanut butter smeared across tits and pork pies in bags

The Cove

2010-08-28T15:19:00.000+01:00

Here’s a weird piece of information. My uncle thought that dolphins were aliens from another planet. He thought that they were smarter than humans. Now bear in mind, this is a man that every Christmas would pass out in our armchair, drooling Carlsberg Special Brew from the corner of his mouth as he respired loudly while wearing a silly paper hat. I’m not saying that alcohol may have prejudiced his thinking, but...

Regardless of whether you think dolphins are Flippers from Mars or not, you have to admit that they’re pretty cool. They swim in the ocean, they protect sailors from sharks and Krakens, they make sick children and fat Floridians smile, they jump through hoops, they help the Navy. Is there anything dolphins can’t do?

Well, aside from writing literature and running the 100m, it seems like dolphins’ greatest failure is not escaping the clutches of the Japanese.

Ah, the Japanese. They’ve given us so many great things over the years – quality electronics, cars and videogames, and of course Kurosawa, Mishima, Ozu and Maru. But on the opposite end of the spectrum they’ve given us humiliation TV and lots of depraved porn; sickening stuff that’s so ashamed of itself that the cocks have spontaneously self-pixelated. Honestly, if I were a cute young girl on a Japanese train wearing an innocent little blouse and plaid skirt, I’d be worried that the very second that the doors closed a hundred blurry penises would be thrust in my face.

Japan’s also a nation that seems determined to eat and kill everything in sight. They harpoon whales and slaughter horses with reckless abandon. And then for a real good laugh, they spear some dolphins.

It takes a while to get to it, but the final part of The Cove packs a fair wallop. After lots of bullshit from various people (there’s talk about being able to scientifically kill the dolphins – apparently they can be killed with a single blow), we see how it really happens. Men in boats with spears methodically stab the dolphins. There’s no science to it. There’s no method. Men just hack and stab at the water until everything stops moving. But it takes a long time to achieve this. The water turns red and dolphins thrash in the water. It seems like the stupidest, most barbaric, most inefficient way to kill something.

The only reason that this footage is captured is because of the work of a group of individuals who decide to expose the killing that is taking place – the slaughter occurs out of sight and anyone who tries to take a look is either intimidated or encounters physical violence. It takes an undercover operation to bring it to light.

The surveillance operation feels like part spy thriller, part heist movie. There’s lots of night-vision and there’s more than one close call. In one scene, as the guys and girls bug the cove, some guards come along to intercept them. The way it’s filmed, you’re never quite sure how close the guards get, but the scene certainly gets the pulse racing. After all, this is a country that legally allows its police officers to torture suspects, so you can more than understand their rush to get out of Dodge.

One reason why the movie feels so much like a spy thriller is because the movie industry actually gets involved with the operation – a number of the team are special effects guys. So they deploy all kinds of cool ways of bugging the cove. My favourite are the cameras that are hidden in fake rocks that are planted in the cliffs.

But the real hero of the picture is Ric O’Barry. Formerly a dolphin capturer and trainer, and largely responsible for the success of the TV show Flipper, he’s turned his life around and now works to free captive dolphins. Largely responsible for this transformation is his belief that one of the real life Flippers committed suicide in his arms – unlike humans, dolphins have to consciously choose to breathe and the one in question just decided to stop. Understandably, this devastated him and he’s been a changed man since.

When we first see Ric O’Barry, he seems crazy. He wears masks over his face, he’s paranoid about cars following him and he’s constantly shifting back and forth. But it quickly becomes clear that this paranoia is justified. Harassed at every turn by policemen and angry fishermen, he survives through a sheer act of will. It’s truly impressive to see a man that is this dedicated to his cause. O’Barry won’t be intimidated and he won’t be swayed. Time after time men try and provoke him into reacting against them so that they can get him locked up, but he stays strong. And in some parts it even becomes amusing. For the hundredth time some cops decide to have a chat with him. They want to know whether he’s working with anyone to expose the activity in the cove but instead he starts talking about mercury levels. It’s obvious that they’ve heard this hundreds of times before and rather than listen to him again they quickly make their excuses and leave. It’s a brilliant piece of chess from O’Barry – he plays up to his image as a crackpot in order to protect everyone else.

But the mercury point is a big issue. Dolphin meat contains large levels of mercury and is poisonous to humans. And yet a Japanese school feeds its children dolphin meat and packets and packets of the stuff finds its way onto supermarket shelves. Anyone who eats it is slowly being killed.

The majority of the populace seems to be unaware of the dolphin killing practice but the politicians jealously protect it. They claim that it’s a form of pest control. In reality, it’s because the activity makes money – any dolphin that can be trained can fetch up to $150,000 and the rest can be slaughtered and sold for meat. And Japan gets away with it because they buy votes at the International Whaling Commission and because they don’t listen to what anyone else says.

The bubble is burst, though, when O’Barry bursts into a meeting with a video screen strapped to his chest. The video shows footage of the slaughter and O’Barry makes sure that everyone sees it. It brilliantly cuts through the bullshit and it rams the point of the movie home. There’s no ambiguity or objectivity here. This practice is fucking wrong.

Directed by Louie Psihoyos
Written by Mark Monroe
Produced by Paula DuPré Pesman and Fisher Stevens
Original Music by J. Ralph
Cinematography by Brook Aitken
Film Editing by Geoffrey Richman

Running Time: 92 mins

Rated PG-13 for disturbing content, including ritualised dolphin slaughter

Predators

2010-08-09T21:51:00.000+01:00

Here’s a question for you. How does a man get transported to an alien planet where he’s hunted for sport and still manage to put on weight? It seems to me that being a human fox in a place that has a total absence of Popeyes and Wendy’s would be a recipe for weight loss, not weight gain. But then I guess I hadn’t figured on the gluttony of Laurence Fishburne. Apparently nothing will get in the way of him and his stomach.

Fishburne plays an Air Cavalry veteran who was kidnapped by the Predators and now hides in an abandoned spacecraft. He’s been stuck there for years and has lost his mind. Well, as you would if you were being hunted daily by giant aliens with dreadlocks and you faced the dire future of never visiting Tops Diner again for their wonderful Top of the World Burger. But Fishburne’s madness isn’t exactly subtle. He has crazy eyes and talks to himself. Presumably he spends all day trying to order a Double Down with no success.

Considering the fame of the actor and his prominence in the marketing campaign, I thought that Fishburne was going to be a main character, but no sooner does he turn up than he gets killed. However, there is an amusing scene where he tries to kill the humans that he’s harbouring in his spacecraft. He says to himself that he can’t feed all these mouths (yes, there is nothing a fat bloater fears more than the prospect of precious food entering a skinny fuck’s undeserving gut) and then tries to smoke them to death. Yeah, you heard me right. He tries to smoke them to death. No burning. No bashing. No blasting. I guess he’s trying to cook them. After all, if you’re in space with no Baconaise or Donut Burgers, what better treat than some human flesh? It must make a welcome change after eating nothing but bits of spacecraft and your own poo.

On the other hand, there are Predator Dogs that he could eat. But these creatures don’t look especially tasty. They’re full of giant tusks that would gouge your eyes out and rip your nose off if you decided to be overly zealous and ate one without having a hacksaw handy. Hell, now that I think about it, how the fuck do the Predator Dogs eat their prey? How are you supposed to get something’s flesh in your mouth when you have a giant tusk blocking your gob? Complete design nonsense.

Not that the action scene featuring the Predator Dogs is anything to write home about. A bunch of these poorly rendered beasts chase the antagonists (a motley assortment of the world’s best killers) and then get killed by machine gun fire. But what makes the scene laughable is in the way that the dogs get killed. There’s a bit where a Russian with a mini-gun shoots at one of the animals for like five seconds and doesn’t even hit a dog running straight at him. These guys are worse shots than the A-Team.

To be honest, none of the action is particularly spectacular. It ranges from ho-hum gun battles to ponderous Predator fisticuffs to silly sword fights. Yep, there’s one scene where a Yakuza fights a Predator with a katana. It’s as ridiculous as it sounds and it even takes place in a field of barley. Or should that be, Predator barley? Regardless, the scene is preposterous and not at all exciting. And it also seems to me that the Predators have become significantly easier to kill, as the Yakuza guy manages to slay his bigger, stronger foe in one-on-one combat. Fair enough, the Yakuza guy also dies, but the Predators no longer seem to be so fearsome.

Hell, even Adrien Brody manages to decapitate one of the dreadlocked aliens. Although having said this, Brody is no longer the skinny bastard he once was. He has now become uber diesel. It’s quite a sight to behold once we see him without his shirt on. He stands there caked in mud, doing his best Arnie impression, and then proceeds to beat the living shit out of a Predator before eventually decapitating it. It actually ends up being quite awesome, especially as this is an Oscar winning character actor. What next, Paul Giamatti in the next Alien film, slaying xenomorphs with a GShG-7.62 machine gun?

But I don’t know why the film is so coy to show us Brody’s muscles. He obviously worked pretty hard to get them. So why deny us the modern equivalent of the awesome, muscle-bulging Dillon/Dutch handshake? Or the totally over the top but necessary gratuitous jungle-trap-building-scene where the cast ripped their shirts off so that we could have close-ups of bulging muscles as they sweated under the sun? That shit was dope! – as my friend King D would say.

But no, this is a modern film and avoids homoeroticism like the plague (bastards!). So we have a film that is pretty much played straight down the middle. There are no glorious puns, no over the top violence and not a hint of gayness. As such the film is pretty charmless. True, I wasn’t trying to gouge my eyes out like I did when I tried to watch the Aliens vs. Predator films, but it’s nowhere near as fun as the original movie. And it’s probably not even as fun as the second one. Fuck, that film had Gary Busey in it! What does this film have? Topher Grace? And Topher Grace as a serial killer. The less said about that, the better...

Jaws

2010-08-05T00:13:00.000+01:00

Some people argue that Jaws ruined cinema. It was the first massive summer blockbuster and it paved the way for the nonsense that followed - high concept, big budget, fast food movies for people with short attention spans and less than discerning taste. It completely changed the landscape of the movie industry.

Whether you think this change is a good thing or bad thing depends on if you’re a drooling fanboy or someone with a modicum of intelligence. I know there are people who jizz in their pants at every big movie release. They watch the trailers, they read the news on excitable blogs and they go to the opening weekends, crying inside as they realise that the latest future movie classic starring Ryan Reynolds and Scarlett Johansson isn’t The Godfather. Hell, it isn’t even The Poseidon Adventure. But despite this they’ll still try and convince themselves and others that it is. They’ll artificially inflate the score on IMDb and they’ll nod in agreement with that fuckwit Harry Knowles. Yes The Dark Time Traveling Matrix of Wonderland was really a life changing experience.

For other folk, summer movie season is a time for despair. A time when nothing decent seems to be showing. But even though Jaws helped usher this in, we shouldn’t think less of the film. Jaws is fantastic entertainment and proof that it’s hard to make a big mainstream flick. Producers these days seem to think that there’s a magic formula, but there isn’t. The vast majority of them aren’t going to make anything that comes anywhere near close to the genius of Jaws.

One of the things that helped Jaws was that the special effects were rubbish. This meant that the filmmakers had to be a little more imaginative about the way that they filmed the shark sequences. They couldn’t just show the rubber Great White right from the beginning; the suspense would have been ruined. Instead we see lots of point of view shots and we get to see the results of the carnage.

Had Jaws been filmed today, we probably would have seen the shark in the very first reel, even if Spielberg had been director. Drunk with the possibilities of CGI, the focus would have been on pointless money shots instead of suspense.

But is CGI even better than the effects we have here? Sure, towards the end, as the shark performs increasingly outrageous acts, the effects look dodgy. Just take the mechanical gnashing as he eats Quint or the shark torpedo as he crashes into the sinking boat in order to eat Brody. The effects don’t look remotely real. But did the effects in Deep Blue Sea look real either? Not at all. And at least here there are one or two amazing shots of the shark. Easily the most effective is the first reveal. The attacks at the beginning are unseen, but during the 4th July celebrations we get our first glimpse of the monster. We see it from above as it goes to attack a man in a small rowing boat. The water is dirty and the shark doesn’t perform any acrobatics, but in this one shot it looks completely real. And it makes the scene quite chilling. The thought that there’s this monster in the water, waiting to eat you, has certainly made me more reluctant to dip my feet in the ocean. That there is a sign of an effective film.

As mentioned before, later scenes with the shark aren’t quite as powerful. For instance, the moment when the shark reveals itself to Brody. Yes it’s a big surprise, but the shark, chomping thin air, kind of looks like it has Bell’s Palsy. Far scarier are the scenes where we don’t actually see the shark but feel its presence. For instance, the scene where Quint talks about the Indianapolis. Now the scene is amazing for many reasons. One of the many reasons I love it is because of the scar contest that the characters have - you can feel the characters bonding and this of course makes you care more about them. But it’s also a great scene because of the sense of dread it fills you with. Quint talks about his ship being sunk after delivering the H-Bomb - trapped in the Pacific waters with rescue a long way away, sharks feed on the men. It conveys far more terror than any of the action scenes and gives all of the characters an added layer of depth. Before this they’re all kind of one note (stuck up policeman, crazy seadog and cynical oceanographer) but after this they all kind of change - they finally realise what they’re up against and you’re more invested in them as people.

Other scenes are a bit more mechanical in the scares they create. A prime example is the scene where Brody and Hooper search for the shark at night. As they travel through the waters they stumble upon the boat of a fisherman. Of course, Hooper decides he has to investigate and dives into the water to check the hull of the boat. As he’s checking it, the dead body of the fisherman leers out. It’s a blatant, shameless attempt to make you jump (Spielberg actually tinkered with it, knowing that he still had one big scare left in the film) but it works like gangbusters.

Something that’s easy to forget when talking about Jaws is how funny it is. The dialogue is incredibly pithy and it helps give the film lots of life and energy. I also like the politics of the film - Brody is helpless in the face of a stupid Mayor who will put money before people. But even though he could be a simple villain, even the stupid Mayor has a little depth to him. He just wants his town and its people to prosper and as such ends up putting lives on the line. In one particularly amusing scene, during the 4th July as the fearful beachgoers remain safely on the sand, he encourages a family to enter the water - it kind of reminded me of when a British politician made his child eat a burger to prove that British beef was safe and that we wouldn’t all get Mad Cow’s Disease. He’s just trying to make sure that the celebrations proceed as normal and that the town has a good holiday season, but his recklessness ends up costing lives.

Another scene that gives me a laugh is the introduction of Quint. In the middle of a typically silly and short-sighted town meeting, he runs his fingers down a blackboard and says that for a sizeable sum of money, he’ll catch the shark –he’s the guy who knows exactly what the problem is and how to solve it. Of course, seeing as the town is run by a shyster who likes to cut corners, his offer isn’t taken up. Once again the Mayor puts money before people.

But Quint is by far the most interesting character in the film. And watching the film for the first time in years, it’s kind of remarkable that he’s only really in the final half of the film. It just goes to show how strong his presence is that he’s the first thing I remember when I think of Jaws.

What makes Quint such a likeable character is how much fun Robert Shaw seems to be having. But this doesn’t mean that Shaw is overacting or playing the buffoon. Quint feels legitimately coarse and dangerous. But at the same time, he also has a nurturing side to him. He helps Brody and even comes to like Hooper (thanks largely to the Indianapolis scene).

Speaking of Hooper and Quint, there’s an excellent class war between the two. Quint represents the working class, learn things through experience ethos, and Hooper represents technology and book learning. Neither of them are wrong, but initially they clash. There’s even an amusing bit where Quint downs a beer in one go and then crushes his can. In response, Hooper downs a paper cup and also crushes it. In some ways, the relationship is even like father and son. Hooper constantly feels the need to prove himself and only after much effort does he gain the respect of the old man.

But like I said earlier, neither of their approaches are wrong. Both experience and technology should be embraced. And Quint eventually learns this. Too bad, though, that he only learns it minutes before disappearing down the gullet of a Great White.

The ending of the film, with Brody literally blowing the shark up, should be completely laughable and preposterous, but somehow the young Spielberg has a way of making even the silliest things both plausible and enjoyable. We shouldn’t root for the destruction of sharks, but you can’t help but clutch the air as this fish explodes into a bloody mess. Somehow man manages to triumph against nature. But man shouldn’t let this success go to his head. The key to our survival is education and intelligence. Although a big gun and a gas tank also come in handy sometimes...

Directed by Steven Spielberg
Written by Peter Benchley and Carl Gottlieb
Produced by David Brown and Richard D. Zanuck
Original Music by John Williams
Cinematography by Bill Butler
Starring Roy Shcneider, Robert Shaw and Richard Dreyfuss

Running Time: 124 mins

Rated PG for little boys and little dogs being eaten by a rubber shark turd

Inception

2010-07-29T05:12:00.003+01:00

Christopher Nolan is riding the crest of a wave. Revered in indie circles for Memento and adored by the masses for The Dark Knight, he’s quickly becoming a superstar director. Needless to say, people were literally wetting themselves at the prospect of his latest film, Inception. Complete with flying actors, trains rolling down streets and a booming soundtrack, the trailer was a sight to behold. Had I been a little less jaded and wankerish, I might have wet myself too.

Sadly these stunning visuals are the best thing about the film. The story is bogged down with mind-numbing exposition and the emotional arc is melodramatic to say the least.

Loosely resembling both a James Bond film and The Matrix, Inception concerns a group of thieves who travel into people’s dreams in order to extract valuable information. But an important Japanese businessman called Saito (Ken Watanabe) asks them to do much more than this. He doesn’t just want Leonardo DiCaprio’s merry gang to steal information; he wants them to go into someone’s mind and plant an idea – an operation called inception.

The target is Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy). He’s the heir to a lucrative energy monopoly and Saito wants DiCaprio’s gang to plant the idea that Fischer, upon his father’s death, should break it up. The rationale is that the energy monopoly is bad for everyone but the reality is that Saito doesn’t want to go out of business and would like the opportunity to take over.

Reading the basic premise, the film sounds interesting, but the reality doesn’t necessarily synch with the concept. Most of the problem with the film is that Nolan is incapable of setting up the world in an interesting way. It’s kind of the antithesis of The Matrix where everything was done with ease (too bad they fucked up royally with the sequels). All the talk of dreams within dreams and kicks and totems and projections feel remarkably laboured and clunky. The film can honestly be split into two halves – it’s awesome when people aren’t speaking but it’s a drag when they are.

One of the main offending scenes is when DiCaprio is showing Ellen Page’s character the dream world. Again I feel compelled to draw comparisons with the Wachowskis’ film. When Morpheus is showing Neo around the matrix, everything is presented simply and clearly – you get the idea instantly. With Inception, though, it feels awkward and ill-conceived. A good film doesn’t have to waste lots of time on endless exposition. Everything should unfold simply and clearly. This never happens with Nolan’s film.

I get particularly annoyed when films seem to be making things up as they go along. It’s a cheap way of getting around problems with the narrative and it’s a way of papering over cracks. This feeling of things being made up as they go along is particularly apparent in Inception. First of all you have the idea that individuals can go into other people’s dreams – fair enough, this is a cool idea. Then you find out that you can have dreams within dreams and then equally out of nowhere we find out that if you go really deep into someone’s dreams you can go to limbo. All of these concepts are fine but the construction of the story is lacklustre; you never feel that the filmmakers have a firm grasp of the rules of this world. You feel like they’ll bend and change them to serve themselves rather than the story.

Another lacklustre aspect of Inception is the emotional arc. DiCaprio and his wife fool around with this dream world and end up in limbo. DiCaprio eventually ends up discovering that he’s living a dream but his wife Mal (Marion Cotillard) won’t accept it. In order to get them to return to reality, DiCaprio performs inception and plants the idea in Mal’s head that she’s not living in the real world: by killing themselves while in limbo, they’ll return to reality. The only problem is that DiCaprio’s idea has stuck and the awoken Mal refuses to believe the reality of her existence. Again, writing this down, it sounds like an interesting idea, but once again the execution is lacking.

One key problem is the lack of chemistry between Leonardo DiCaprio and Marion Cotillard. They never feel like a convincing couple. But more damning than this is the ludicrous melodrama that forms the basis of many of their scenes. I was particularly amused by Mal’s idea for her and her husband to commit suicide together. She goes to all the effort of booking hotel rooms that face one another. This way she and her hubby can jump out of the window at the same time in glorious synchronised suicide. But it just seems like such a convoluted way of doing it. You have to find a hotel that has facing rooms and which both look down into a vertiginous drop. Why not just buy a gun or sit in a bathtub and drop a toaster into the water? I guess those options just aren’t romantic enough…

I also had to laugh when DiCaprio visited his dream world and we got to see what he has locked in the basement. Again it’s the hotel room where his wife killed herself and sure enough Mal is down there. But while the beginning of the scene is very well done (it has a creepy Shining vibe), it’s spoiled by melodrama. Mal goes crazy and then DiCaprio escapes into an elevator and keeps his wife locked down below. Yes I understand the symbolism but the execution of the scene is lacking and had me giggling like a girl. Yeah, keep your wo-man locked in the basement where she belongs!

Another laugh came when Leonardo DiCaprio gets stuck in the gap between buildings while trying to escape some bad guys. Yes this is the kind of thing that often happens in dreams (although the sequence is meant to take place in reality) but I couldn’t help but feel it was a jab at DiCaprio’s puffy physique. Got wedged between some buildings, you fat bastard!

Okay, so I’ve spent quite a bit of time bitching about the film but it certainly does have lots of things going for it. The action is often amazing and the visuals are stunning too. One of my favourite visuals is that of a train rampaging through some city streets. It’s an unusual juxtaposition but it’s filmed in such a matter of fact way that it’s only after a few seconds that you realise that a huge train should not be in this environment.

I also love some of the imagery in the opening sequence – especially the water bursting through the walls. And it’s also quite amazing how much the opening few minutes feel like a James Bond movie. For some reason I couldn’t help but think it felt like a modern You Only Live Twice. And speaking of James Bond, the snow sequence near the end of the movie has a huge Bond vibe. However, this sequence is less effective – by this point I was getting serious action fatigue.

The best scene, though, is the zero gravity fight. It wipes the floor with anything that The Matrix could come up with and I was constantly asking myself how they filmed it. It’s an amazing sequence.

Something else that I liked was how immoral the story is. Cillian Murphy’s character is being conned into breaking up his company, so therefore the heroes are behaving like massive pricks. Saito might pretend that this mission is to help everyone and break up a monopoly but its aim is to really set up another one.

But in the end, these pluses aren’t anywhere near enough to convince me that the film is some kind of modern masterpiece. The film is flawed as fuck. Hell, I think I might even prefer Insomnia…

The Running Man

2010-07-12T02:01:00.000+01:00

If you were a child of the 80s, there's a good chance that at school you were lent a copy of The Running Man. And there's also a pretty good chance that you thought it was the dog's bollocks. But now that the decade of excess homoeroticism has been left behind, and now that easily pleased children have grown up, it's clear that The Running Man is pretty, well, crap.

The Running Man's most obvious shortcoming is its production values. Runners run around in quilted suits that resemble mattresses, glass lollipops serve as the ominous warning beacons that mark the point of no return for prisoners who don't want to have their heads blown off, Dynamo drives about in a car that appears to be made of Lego, fascist soldiers capture criminals with the terror that is a small red net, the wasteland that is the game quadrant appears to repeat itself Hanna-Barbera style and the opening crawl looks like it was typed on a BBC Micro. It's a cheap, cheap film.

However, despite the fact that it's cheap, despite the fact that it looks like sludge was smeared over the lenses, despite the fact that it was filmed by Detective Dave Starsky and despite the fact that the film repeats the words 'uplink', 'relay', 'network', 'interface', 'satellite' and 'resistance' so many times that I want to remove them from the dictionary Newspeak-style, there's still plenty to enjoy. The film's the epitome of a guilty pleasure.

What you most expect from an 80s Arnie film is homoeroticism, and in that regard the film certainly delivers. The first shot of Arnie (post Bakersfield massacre) is of him carrying a massive steel girder on his shoulder (it's a repeat of the shot in Commando where you're introduced to Schwarzenegger with the visual of him carrying a huge log). Sure he's probably got a micropenis, but let us buy into the fantasy - this man is hung like a shire horse and you viewer are nothing but a pathetic girly man who would wither and die when faced with the awesomeness of the Austrian Oak. And just to prove how virile Arnie is, no sooner has the film started than he's grabbing men by their privates and smoking unfeasibly large cigars.

All of this is certainly very stimulating for Killian, the Bobby Heenan-style game show presenter who hosts The Running Man. When he first sees Arnie, running in dreamy slow-motion with muscles-a-bulging, he says, "Hello gorgeous." And in the course of this scene he also says, "Isn't he beautiful?" and shouts, "I want him!" I bet he's got a steel girder in his pants. But when he first meets Arnie face to face he coos, "Hi, cutie pie." I think I'm getting a steel girder too.

But as log-friendly as this banter is, it's amateur league punk stuff when you compare it to the Captain Freedom workout. Jesse Ventura appears on the screen, shouting, "Are you ready for pain? Are you ready for suffering? If the answer is yes, then you're ready for Captain Freedom's workout." Sure there are some women in the background that you're supposed to be gently ogling, but they're clearly just window dressing. Jesse is the main course and his is the body that the camera lingers on. Hell, the scene might as well have have flashing lights and sirens, 'Butt sex is a painful but glorious workout!'

Another great detail is Arnie's disguise when he's on the run from the law. He walks around with a thick beard, a gym t-shirt (which is ripped to show as much of his neck and biceps as possible) and a yellow builder's hat. Maybe he ransacked the local YMCA.

But the film also delivers in terms of amusing deaths. Of course, the most obvious are the stalker deaths. You've got Fireball exploding, Sub-Zero wearing a barbed wire necktie, Dynamo being electrocuted (mid-rape) in his saggy kecks, and, best of all, Buzzsaw getting castrated – I love his falsetto scream. But you've also got a prisoner having his head blown off (while his body keeps running), and, my personal favourite, Killian going through a sign in that toboggan thing. But what makes the Killian death my favourite is the way the sign explodes when Killian goes through it. It's totally unnecessary but that's what makes it great.

Just as unnecessary are Arnie's atrocious puns. But their awfulness is what makes them so brilliant. "He had to split." "What a hot head." "Yeah, he was a pain in the neck." Even Roger Moore would be proud. But Arnie's best piece of dialogue is considerably more subtle. After Yaphet Kotto dies, and after he's made an offer by Killian to become a stalker, Arnie grabs a camera and yells, "I live to see you eat that contract, but I hope you leave enough room for my fist because I'm going to ram it into your stomach and break your goddamn spine!" Poetry.

Not quite as poetic, though, is the final shoot-out. Basically Arnie and a bunch of soldiers who look like members of Culture Club invade the studio and reveal the truth regarding this fascistic society. It's a dull action scene (although I like the way that Arnie, like Charles Bronson, can avoid bullets simply by ducking). Plus Arnie, for some reason, spares the bloodthirsty mob. Surely I can't be the only one that was hoping he'd open fire on the crowd – especially on that old granny – and establish a Ben Richards dictatorship? But no, in a typically un-Republican way, Arnie wants freedom. And he also gets the girl and walks off with her to the sound of some abysmal 80s power ballad. Personally, I think it would have been more convincing if he'd walked off arm-in-arm with Killian's bodyguard, Sven.

Directed by Paul Michael Glaser
Screenplay by Steven E. de Souza
Produced by George Linder and Tim Zinnemann
Original Music by Harold Faltermeyer
Cinematography by Thomas Del Ruth
Starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Maria Conchita Alonso, Yaphet Kotto, Jim Brown and Jesse Ventura

Running Time: 101 mins

Rated R for quilted tracksuits, comedy deaths and repressed homosexuality

The Road

2010-07-07T23:00:00.000+01:00

The Road didn’t seem to make any impact when it was released in theatres. It was given a very small release and then a few weeks later it was gone. I suppose the studio was hoping that it would generate some Oscar buzz and that it would slowly gain wider distribution. Unfortunately, though, it was never really a contender for the Academy Awards and it quickly disappeared off the radar.

I can understand why this happened, but it’s still a shame. The Road lacks the poetry and emotional power of the novel and it’s certainly not a crowd pleaser, but it’s still a worthy film. And as far as the Academy Awards go, it’s leagues ahead of stuff like Avatar and Up in the Air.

Although my problems with the film are few, I do think that the movie is too keen to give away key elements of the story. In the novel there’s a slow build up to the horrors. McCarthy is very methodical and takes his time. The film, though, perhaps sensing that film audiences are impatient Neanderthals, almost immediately informs you that there are cannibals in this post apocalyptic world. And then to make it explicit, within the first fifteen minutes there’s a scene where a father and son encounter one of the ‘bad guys’. The man is like something out of Deliverance and tries to tell the father that he can help him and his son out. The father’s not having any of it and points a gun at him. The father then asks what the man is eating. ‘Anything we can find,’ answers the man, who then looks at the boy and almost licks his lips. The scene is well done but it’s too early in the film. We’re only just getting to know the characters and so the peril isn’t as keenly felt. Had they placed it later on, the stakes would have been higher and it would have had more of an impact. But the filmmakers are overly eager to explain what is exactly going on in this world and as a consequence they ruin the surprise element.

One of the most shocking things in the book is not the cannibalism itself but the form that the cannibalism has taken. There’s a sequence where the father and son break into a house and then discover people in the basement – people who are being harvested for food. When I read the scene, it took me aback. In the film, though, because the cannibalism is addressed so quickly and clearly, it doesn’t have the same power.

But again the scene is well filmed. The basement dwellers look almost zombie-like but they still have the humanity to ask for help. And this captures one of the story’s moral dilemmas. The characters say that they’re ‘carrying the fire’ and they’re adamant that they’re good guys in a world gone crazy, but how can you truly be a good guy when you condemn others to death? This is what happens in The Road. The father and son, knowing that there’s nothing they can do, lock the basement and run off before they too are killed. Sometimes, in order to save yourself, you have to pass judgement on others. It’s not something that’s easy to live with, but what would be the point of killing yourself in a futile attempt to save others?

Another example of the difficult decisions that have to be made in a world this tough comes in the scene where the father and son have all of their possessions stolen by another survivor. They eventually catch up to the man and the father makes the man give all the stuff back. But on top of this, he makes the man strip naked, almost certainly condemning him to death. It’s a harsh, almost Old Testament style punishment, but you can see why the father does it. In this world, your supplies are the difference between life and death. So when someone steals your possessions you have to take appropriate measures. However, the father probably goes too far – the other man is also fighting and clawing to survive in this world. So while the father is judge, jury and executioner, his son is his conscience – the boy convinces his father to go back and return the man’s clothes. It’s this compassion, this concern for others that lets you know that he’s the one truly carrying the fire – the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes is what makes you human and it’s what makes us unique amongst the species.

The fire that the characters are carrying is also illustrated in a scene where the father and son find a bunker full of supplies. They gorge themselves on food, they groom themselves for the first time in god knows how long and they have fun. This is what life is supposed to be like. We should have evolved past the life and death dilemmas we used to face – we should be able to sit back and enjoy ourselves, free from the fear of impending oblivion. But instead the threat is still there. We still have to scavenge to survive. Life at the moment might not be like it is in The Road, but with the economic crisis that has hit us we’re still struggling to keep our heads above water.

Indeed, if you so wished, you could look at the story of The Road as a metaphor for life in America today. So many people walk a tightrope between survival and disaster that it’s hardly surprising that people will trample over each other in order to get what they need – in The Road it’s literally a dog eat dog world. With help so sorely lacking from external sources such as the government, people have to rely on charity, family and random generosity. The boy here is one of those people that will do anything to help others – when he and his father encounter an old man, he wants to hold his hand and feed him. Maybe America can learn from this boy. People shouldn’t be cut adrift and left to fend for themselves. We should all look out for each other.

The main fear for the boy in this film is that his father will die. His father is the one person who is looking out for him and who he can rely on. And indeed, at the end, his nightmare comes true – the father passes away. Thus he is cast into a harsh, uncaring world. It’s only by chance that some ‘good guys’ come along to help the boy out.

The main disappointment of the film is that the father’s death lacks the emotional punch of the novel. In the book, the death scene is shattering. Here it falls slightly flat. It’s like the actors and the director couldn’t quite get in the groove the day they were filming it.

On the flip side, the main success of the movie is its magnificent score. Composed by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, it’s further proof that they’re making some of the best film scores today. It doesn’t quite reach the dizzying heights of their work on The Assassination of Jesse James, but it comes mighty close. If only the movie’s final scene could capture the same emotion.

Directed by John Hillcoat
Screenplay by Joe Penhall
Produced by Paula Mae Schwartz, Steve Schwartz and Nick Wechsler
Original Music by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis
Cinematography by Javier Aguirresarobe
Starring Viggo Mortensen, Kodi Smit-McPhee and Robert Duvall

Running Time: 111 mins

Rated R for violence, despair and lack of food

Moon

2010-06-28T03:10:00.001+01:00

It’s quite amazing that Moon was shot on such a small budget (about $5 million). It has a scale and a scope that would suggest it’s an incredibly expensive production. It just shows what you can do when you have a bit of imagination and when you don’t have massive stars demanding outrageous salaries.

One of the interesting things about Moon’s effects work is that they actually used models for lots of it. This flies in the face of modern filmmaking when even the most mundane things are produced entirely from a computer. So in this day and age it’s unusual to see effects that actually have a weight and tangibility about them. It harks back to films like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Silent Running and Alien where you actually felt like you could reach in and touch the world that was flashing across the screen.

Something else that is pleasing about Moon is how low-key it is. This isn’t a monster production with a huge cast and loads of explosions. It revolves around one guy doing some tedious work on the surface of the moon.

Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) is an employee for Lunar Industries who lives alone on the surface of the moon. His job is to oversee a bunch of robotic lunar harvesters that are gathering Helium 3, a source of fuel that has solved the energy crisis on Earth. It’s mind numbing work and work that he does on his own. He only has a robot called GERTY for company and his contract is three years long. Therefore it’s not surprising that his mental well being has deteriorated considerably.

As Sam’s contract gets closer and closer to expiring, he begins to see things. At one point he sees a girl sitting in his favourite chair. And then later he imagines he’s making love to his wife. At this point the film kind of feels like Solaris.

Adding to the weirdness is the fact that Sam crashes his lunar rover into one of the harvesters and is then rescued by…himself. At this point the film could really feel like Solaris but a solid explanation is quickly given. The Sam who crashed and the Sam who woke up in the base and then rescued the first Sam, are both clones.

And so what you have is a kind of spin on the mysterious company that featured in the Alien films. You have a company that lies and kills to increase profits. And what better place to cheat and steal than on the Moon? Who’s ever going to know?

The conspiracy to keep the truth from Sam, that he’s a clone of a real person, extends to keeping a satellite link permanently broken. This means that Sam never has any live interaction with anyone on Earth. It also means that he never gets to talk to his wife – he only gets video messages from her. And so therefore, as you can imagine, it’s a bit of a pisser when he eventually finds out that his wife is dead and that the real Sam Bell is alive and well on Earth.

One of the strengths and weaknesses of Moon is Sam Rockwell. As the first Sam, a clone that is slowly falling apart both mentally and physically, he occasionally falls into Rockwell’s familiar tics – wild-eyed mania. But as the second clone, he exudes strength and arrogance. There aren’t any of the usual Rockwell theatrics.

But even though Rockwell does occasionally tread familiar ground with some of his rants, it’s impressive that he manages to hold the film together on his own, because aside from GERTY (who’s voiced by Kevin Spacey), he’s the only performer in this film. Everything rests on his shoulders. If only he could express anger and mental instability without resorting to his Chuck Barris shtick, it would show considerable growth as an actor.

The film’s only other weakness is the ending. You see, both of the Sams find out that they’re clones with a three year lifespan and that they’ll never get a chance to go home. They have no home. It’s all a lie. They also find out that a ‘rescue’ team is arriving soon to supposedly repair a broken harvester. But in reality it’s an execution squad. Despite this, the second Sam puts himself into a pod that is used to send Helium 3 back to Earth and fires himself back to the blue planet. We then find out that because this clone has suddenly landed, LUNAR’s dodgy business practises have been revealed and their share price has fallen. Somehow this is just a little too neat for me. I mean, I know most companies are comprised of colossal fuck ups that couldn’t keep a secret if they tried, but I don’t have faith that the little man will eventually triumph over the corporations. And so I think the ending is an unrealistic ray of light in a believably bleak movie.

But despite this, Moon is a marvellous film. It’s an old fashioned science fiction film that shows that man’s biggest conflict will always be with himself. And there’s also man’s relationship with technology. In the recent past we worried that robots or computers would make us obsolete. These days the concern is that we’ll be used for spare parts or engineered to someone’s specifications.

A small detail that I loved was that Sam’s alarm clock woke him up with Chesney Hawke’s ‘The One and Only’. Despite the obvious amusement factor of this man using a bemoled teenage heartthrob with helmet hair as his wake up call, it’s also pleasantly subversive. This man isn’t the one and only. He’s company product. And that’s what we’ll need to avoid if we’re hold on to our humanity.

Directed by Duncan Jones
Written by Nathan Parker
Produced by Stuart Fenegan and Trudie Styler
Original Music by Clint Mansell
Cinematography by Gary Shaw
Starring Sam Rockwell and Kevin Spacey

Running Time: 97 mins

Rated R for some naughty words and corporate bastardness

Inglorious Basterds

2010-06-19T05:51:00.006+01:00

Quentin Tarantino is trying his hardest to be Sergio Leone. However, he's not always succeeding.

Case in point: the scene where the beautiful heroine gets killed by a Nazi war hero/movie star/stud muffin. It has Ennio Morricone on the soundtrack, it has two senseless deaths and it’s exquisitely filmed. But it doesn't pull the heart strings - it doesn't have the power to illicit emotion like Leone's films did. Instead it reeks of someone trying hard to pay homage to a master and coming close to equalling them but just falling short.

The problem is that the relationship between the two characters isn't deserving of such an operatic sequence. Here we have a Nazi soldier who develops a fondness for a French Jew (he doesn't know that she's a Jew). What results are a few scenes of him pestering the poor girl. We never really get the impression that she has any fondness for the man. In fact, she seems to hate him. After all, her family was slaughtered by Nazis. So everything comes to a head during the final sequence at a Nazi film premiere. The war hero wants to see the girl and literally won’t take no for an answer - he breaks into the projection booth. The girl then makes out that she's interested in fucking him and shoots him in the back. Okay, one less Nazi in the world - excellent. But then the girl watches the film that is playing in the cinema - a film that both stars and is about the war hero's exploits in Italy (alone in a sniper's nest, he killed more than three hundred men). For some reason she seems moved by his ordeal and goes to comfort him. He then shoots her and kills her as Morricone blasts on the soundtrack. Had there been more complexity in relationship or had there been any chemistry between the two or even if the Nazi hadn't been a prick and tried to break into the projection booth so that he could fuck the girl, I would have enjoyed the scene more. But instead, emotionally, it falls completely flat. Yes it’s well filmed and choreographed, but that's not enough. Tarantino still doesn't quite have the skill to engage the emotions.

Tarantino is far better suited to suspense sequences and action scenes. The opening is an excellent example of what Tarantino does best. Yes it has its nods to Leone and spaghetti westerns with the slow arrival of the main villain and the Morricone that pounds on the soundtrack, but once the characters begin talking it’s distinctly QT. A Nazi Colonel called Hans Landa, a man nicknamed ‘The Jew Hunter’, talks with a French farmer. He very politely inquires after some local Jews – he’s been charged with hunting them down. The farmer says he doesn’t know where they are. What makes the scene so engrossing is how overly cordial it is. The Nazi Colonel doesn’t scream and shout. He doesn’t threaten the man. He’s actually charming. And using this charm he manages to get the farmer to confess that he’s hiding the Jews under the floorboards. We then have a brief burst of violence as some Stormtroopers enter the property so that they can shoot through the floorboards and kill the cowering Jews.

It’s this duality that makes Landa such an entertaining character – he’s charming but horrible; he’s funny but disgusting. Summing this up is a scene where he talks to Shosanna, the lone survivor of the massacre that opens the film. Landa isn’t aware of who she is, so he’s very friendly, very charming; his French is impeccable. But at the same time there’s something off about him. For one he’s very insistent that she must eat some strudel. Secondly, once he’s sated, he sticks his cigarette into his food. It’s the smallest hint of his true nature – that he isn’t the charming sophisticate he purports to be.

A favourite Landa moment of mine is when he confronts a German actress at a Nazi film premiere. He’s just discovered that she’s defected to the Allies and that she was involved in a gun battle – she got shot in her leg. Therefore he’s highly amused when she tries to convince him that she got her injury in a mountain climbing accident. His laughter is so over the top and hysterical that even she knows that he knows that she’s lying. It’s a very amusing moment but it’s promptly followed by his grisly murder of her. He takes her to his office and strangles her to death. Again humour and violence queasily co-exist with one another.

The end of the film sees the height of the film’s comedy. However, it also illustrates one of the film’s problems. You see, Landa decides to defect to the Allies. It’s never fully explained why he does this. Maybe he sees the writing on the wall for the Nazi party and decides to get out while he can. Who knows? But as he’s negotiating he suddenly exclaims, in a very camp, childlike way, ‘That’s a bingo!’ It’s a moment that had me howling with laughter but I’m not sure whether it really helps the movie. Yeah the film is amusing but sometimes the humour works against the film as a whole – it makes the characters more cartoonish and reduces the amount of tension.

Another example of this is when the ‘Basterds’ sneak into the Nazi premiere. Their German speaking members have been killed and so Brad Pitt’s Aldo Raine says that he and another couple of soldiers will attend the premiere as Italian filmmakers, and seeing as Raine can speak the best Italian, he’ll do most of the talking. Cue Brad Pitt saying ‘grazie’ in a redneck accent. Yes it’s very, very funny, but it kind of makes Raine look buffoonish. Suddenly he doesn’t seem like a dangerous platoon leader – he’s a clown.

The same goes for the other Basterds who attend the premiere. One of them is a fearsome soldier who kills Nazis with a baseball bat. But at the end he also becomes a buffoonish figure speaking stereotypical ‘I-talian’.

That being said, he does redeem himself at the very end by pretending to be a waiter and glassing a Nazi soldier. He then breaks into an opera box and kills Hitler. The wish-fulfilment here is fantastic and he even shoots Hitler repeatedly in the face as his dead body lies on the floor – Tarantino is rewriting history for us and making it considerably more satisfying.

The final action scene, though, brought another film to mind. As the Basterds dispatched Nazis in a suicidal attack I couldn’t help but think of the machine gun scene in The Wild Bunch. The scene here isn’t anywhere close to that piece of genius but it does the job – you get to see the most important people in the Nazi party get shot, burnt and blown to bits. You’d have to be a fascist or the most insane bleeding heart liberal not to get a kick out of it.

The end of the film has Aldo Raine proclaiming that this might be his masterpiece. I wonder whether Tarantino thinks the same way. If he does, he’s mistaken. As hugely enjoyable as the film is, there are too many things working against it for it to be considered truly great. The buffoonish humour, the sometimes strange character motivations and the unsuccessful attempts to produce emotion all work against it. As does the incredibly strange casting of Mike Myers as a British officer. His scene is one of the worst in the film, as he’s basically playing a toffee-nosed Austin Powers. Thankfully though, he’s on and off the screen in no time.

Directed by Quentin Tarantino
Written by Quentin Tarantino
Produced by Lawrence Bender
Cinematography by Robert Richardson
Film Editing by Sally Menke
Starring Brad Pitt, Mélanie Laurent, Christoph Waltz, Eli Roth, Diane Kruger and Mike Myers

Running Time: 153 mins

Rated R for strong graphic violence, language and outrageous I-talian accents

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans

2010-06-06T04:00:00.006+01:00

One of the strangest pieces of news I heard in recent years was that Werner Herzog was remaking Bad Lieutenant with Nicolas Cage in the lead. It was as unexpected as Andrei Tarkovsky coming back to life and remaking Commando with Michael Cera as Matrix and Jena Malone as Bennett. I just couldn’t quite get my head round it.

Now that I’ve seen the film I have much the same feeling. How the hell did this happen?

Anyone who seriously wants to defend Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans as a legitimately good film is talking out of their arse. The acting is hysterical, the writing is pedestrian and the tone is all over the place. But because of this and because of the many eccentric Herzog touches that litter the film, it ends up being perversely enjoyable. It’s not a return to form for either Cage or Werner; instead it’s a glorious trainwreck – a locomotive smashing through taste and decency.

I thought it would be difficult to top the original Bad Lieutenant for dark, twisted humour. Remember this is a film that has Harvey Keitel doing a naked, drug-filled penguin walk. It’s also a film that features a scene where he shoots his own car radio because he lost a bet. For me, funny, funny stuff. But Herzog’s film manages to top all of that.

My favourite scene by a country mile is when Cage tortures an old lady. He’s trying to locate a witness who’s gone missing and decides to interrogate the witness’s grandmother. The grandmother works in a nursing home and is looking after an old lady who can’t breathe properly – she has a breathing tube in her nose. Now you know the scene is going to be something special when Cage appears behind a door shaving with an electric razor. Yes, this is an entirely sensible and logical thing to do while hiding behind a door. But Cage’s information gathering technique really has to be seen to be believed. He decides to remove the old biddy’s breathing tube and then begins berating the witness’s grandmother. And on top of this, he gets his gun out and points it at her head. It’s maniacal and over the top, but it’s also bloody funny. And Cage’s parting words are a joy to behold. He calls one of the old ladies a cunt and then lectures her for draining her children’s and grandchildren’s money with ‘that fucked up tube’. He then says that the two old ladies are the reason that America is going down the drain and says that he should shoot them. He even starts crying and says how much he hates them. So a wonderful old lady torture scene becomes a critique of the American health system? Fucking inconsiderate old farts living longer lives and costing their kids more money and raising health insurance premiums. If only they had the decency to die at a respectable age. Forty-eight would be good.

The second best scene is when Cage begins seeing iguanas at a stake-out. Off his tits on drugs he begins to hallucinate lizards as a puffy Val Kilmer watches on. But what makes the scene so special is the combination of iguana POV shots and an almost yodelling version of ‘Release Me’. Nothing Herzog does should surprise me, considering that he once plotted to kill Klaus Kinski and that he took an air rifle shot to the gut without flinching, but iguanas…and a yodelling ‘Release Me’ cover? Did this man really make Aguirre: Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo? And am I mentally ill for considering that the iguana scene is one of the most inspired things in cinema in recent years?

Winning the bronze medal for third best scene is when a drug dealer kills a debt collector. The debt collector, played by an unthreatening douche who wouldn’t look out of place in Nash Bridges, tries to collect money from Cage but gets cut down in a gunfight. The action itself is amusing enough, with C-grade heavies getting blow apart to some curiously chirpy harmonica music, but Cage, high on crack, asks his pals to shoot the man again. ‘His soul’s still dancing’, he says. And then we see a guy with a Mohawk and Converse breakdancing before our bad lieutenant. The idea of this breakdancing fool being the soul of a fat I-talian gangster is fucking hilarious. The dancer looks like he’s the soul of one of those spotty Apple Genius dickheads, not some greaseball heavy.

Now what kind of story ties all of these loony scenes together? Nothing much. The family of a small time drug dealer is murdered and Cage has to find out who did it. Storywise, there’s nothing here that you haven’t seen before in other movies and on bad television. The only thing that distinguishes the movie is Cage’s frenzied acting (he’s like the progeny of James Cagney and Richard Nixon) and Herzog’s perverse sense of humour.

Another favourite scene is when Cage stops a young couple outside a nightclub and begins searching them for drugs (so that he can use them himself). It’s kind an echo of the ‘Show me how you suck a cock’ scene in the original film. Except in this film, Cage does drugs with a girl and then fucks her, making the boyfriend watch. But as hilarious as it is when Cage fires his gun and orders the guy to watch him fucking her girl, the earlier dialogue is even better. He starts talking about the girl’s parents. ‘Did they beat you? Mo-lest you?’ And he says that he bets they think about her as she was when she was a little girl. But what makes this so priceless is the exaggerated facial tic Cage makes after he says it. Subtlety is a foreign concept to Nicolas Cage and the world is a better place for it. And I also love the way that Cage gropes the girl’s buttocks – in an interview, Cage said that he would only eat animals that had dignified sex; well fuck me if this isn’t the most depraved, undignified sex I’ve seen in a long time.

One of the most bizarre things about the film is the way that Cage’s voice changes randomly. Every now and again he’ll begin talking like a Quasimodo James Cagney. But it’s not like you’ve just seen him take a drug hit. And even when he does take some drugs, he doesn’t sound like this. What the fuck?

But just to illustrate how confused the film is, consider the ending. Through some Machiavellian manoeuvring, Cage solves the crime and pays of his debts. And then his girlfriend cleans up and Cage gets promoted to Captain. For a second you’re left wondering if the unthinkable has occurred – Herzog’s made a Hollywood ending. But then just when we think Cage has cleaned up his act, we see him on his own taking drugs. Oh, okay, as nonsensical as the film is, at least the Bad Lieutenant remains a drug-addled prick. But then out of nowhere a character from the beginning of the film turns up and resolves to clean Cage up. And then the individual takes Cage to an aquarium where they’re surrounded by sharks. They sit in silence and then Cage asks if fish have dreams (?!?). Has Cage seen the error of his ways or has nothing changed inside? It doesn’t really matter. Bad Lieutenant is a preposterous film and is as shallow as a puddle. But for that reason it’s the comedy of the year. ‘To the break of dawn. To the break of dawn, baby.’

Directed by Werner Herzog
Screenplay by William M. Finkelstein
Produced by Stephen Belafonte, Nicolas Cage, Randall Emmett, Alan Polsky, Gabe Polsky, Edward R. Pressman and John Thompson
Original Music by Mark Isham
Cinematography by Peter Zeitlinger
Film Editing by Joe Bini
Starring Nicolas Cage, Eva Mendes, Val Kilmer and Brad Dourif

Running Time: 122 mins

Rated R for drug use, iguanas and dancing souls

Wendy and Lucy

2010-05-28T04:51:00.005+01:00

Remember the TV programme The Littlest Hobo? The show that had a friendly hobo mutt that would roam from town to town and befriend pitiful social outcasts before leaving them bereft and lonely? Well, Wendy and Lucy takes the hobo dog theme to the extreme. Here we don’t have a friendly itinerant canine providing solace to the young and elderly. Here we have an ordinary doggy providing nothing but misery and heartache to its poor owner.

I’ve never been one to romanticise hobos and bums. What’s so great about roaming from place to place, scrounging pennies here and there and possibly getting burnt or bum-raped by local psychopaths (or both at the same time if you’re particularly unlucky)? It doesn’t seem like a particularly pleasant way of living to me. You end up being even less free than the sad sacks who have to clock in every day.

The reason why drifters are even less free than the rest of the population is because they’re even more of a slave to money and the brutal realities of capitalism. You want something to eat? You want your car repaired? You want to bail yourself out of jail? It all costs money and when you don’t have it you’re well and truly fucked.

All of this happens to Wendy. She’s a wanderer hoping to go to Alaska. It’s never made clear what she’s running from, but it’s hinted that she might be escaping her shitty family. But anyway, she has a car, a dog and a few hundred bucks, but she doesn’t have a home and she doesn’t have a fixed address. Basically, if her car breaks down or her money gets stolen she’s up shit creek without a paddle.

The first disaster happens pretty quickly – her car conks out. Suddenly she’s trapped in a small town with nowhere to go. And then as she roots about in her car, she realises that she’s running out of dog food. Now for most people, this wouldn’t be too much of a problem. They’d just go to the supermarket and buy some more. But even though the girl has money, it all seems to be budgeted elsewhere – maybe for gas and other things. And so she decides to shoplift some dog food. This turns out to be a colossal mistake as she gets arrested, and then when she finally manages to get released, her dog is gone.

Wendy and Lucy isn’t a particularly subtle film, but it is effective. It paints a depressing portrait of a nation with no social safety net. In a country of unparalleled wealth, the poor and the downtrodden are still thrown to the wolves. After all, America may claim to be a Christian nation but there’s still great resistance towards state funded charity. The individual is encouraged to give generously, and Americans generally do, but the state is told to keep out of it.

An example of the American attitude towards charity occurs in a scene where a security guard at Walgreens gives Wendy some money. He makes a big deal out of the fact that he’s giving her some cash. In light of this, you think that maybe he’s going to give her a few hundred – she needs quite a lot of money to pay for her car to be repaired. But instead it’s just a couple of bucks. But the point is is that this is how charity works in America. People have to depend on random hand-outs. They can’t depend on the state. And for some reason this is the way that Americans like it. They like a system where people can easily fall through the cracks; where people continually teeter on the edge of the precipice. Oblivion is only a few steps away. First you lose your job and then you can’t pay the rent because you can’t get unemployment (or unemployment pays too little) and then, if you don’t have family to count on, you’re on the street. It’s a harsh system. And while no one likes spongers, a bit of benefits abuse is surely better than just throwing people to the wolves? Isn’t it?

Most of Wendy and Lucy revolves around Wendy looking for her dog. She walks around town and she goes to the local animal shelter. But as it turns out, the dog was taken home by a good Samaritan. The end of the film sees Wendy finding Lucy in the back of an old man’s yard. She’s ready to take the dog back, the one ray of light in her dismal world, but then she realises that this person can offer the dog the one thing she can’t – security. And so Wendy leaves the dog behind. It seems that in modern American you can’t afford emotional connections if you’re poor. They’ll only cost you more money and more heartache. Detachment and grim determination are key to survival.

The final shot kind of reminds me of Five Easy Pieces. In that film Jack Nicholson leaves his girlfriend behind and hitches a ride in a truck that’s heading for Alaska. He has nothing on him and no chance of a decent future. There’s an intangible fear he’s continually running from. And Wendy and Lucy also sees the protagonist left on her own as they journey towards the wilderness. Wendy may have hopes that she’ll finally find something worth settling down for, and that she’ll eventually have the means to forge a future, but she’s dancing on the edge of oblivion – the system is just waiting to crush her.

Directed by Kelly Reichardt
Written by Jonathan Raymond and Kelly Reichardt
Produced by Larry Fessenden, Neil Kopp and Anish Savjani
Cinematography by Sam Levy
Film Editing by Kelly Reichardt
Starring Michelle Williams and Wally Dalton

Running Time: 80 mins

Rated R for language and crippling poverty

A Talking Picture

2010-05-18T22:51:00.005+01:00

If you listened to my wife, she’d have you believe that the Portuguese invented everything in the world – dried salt cod, lobotomies, time travel and fresh air to name just a few. But with A Talking Picture they sure as fuck didn’t invent good cinema.

Manoel de Oliveira is the oldest filmmaker working in the world today. Living off of nothing but bacalhau and Sumol, he’s managed to live to the ripe old age of 101. Impressive, yes, but how good are his mental faculties? Come on, anyone who’s lived more than a century must have a touch of dementia. The weight of all those years on your brain must surely turn it to the jelly.

The beginning of the film feels like sitting next to a learned relative. A mother and a daughter go on a Mediterranean cruise and we get to hear the mother tell her child all about the culture and history of the places they visit. On and on she talks, spouting dialogue that Oliveira must have culled from encyclopaedias and tourist guides. The explanation for the dryness is that the woman is a history teacher, but it doesn’t exactly make for riveting cinema. Indeed, the only reason that it’s really watchable is because they go to some great places. Only a philistine wouldn’t enjoy seeing the Pyramids and the Acropolis.

But so relentless is the history lesson that it began to feel like a flashback to a trip to Portugal I took with my wife. One evening, while trying to do some reading by the fireside, we were accosted by her uncle who proceeded to give us a history lesson. He spoke to us like a god, sitting on a chair as we infants sat on the floor. Even though what he said was occasionally inaccurate it was clear that we should just shut the fuck up and listen to what he had to say. My wife rolled her eyes as she translated for me and the uncle was oblivious to the resentment we were feeling. This is what the beginning of the film feels like. Just shut up and listen and you’ll learn some important shit.

One of the incredibly unnatural things about the first half of the film is the way that people randomly pop up to talk to the mother and child. The mother will be standing there talking to her kid and then an orthodox priest or an actor or Jose Mourinho will just enter the frame and go ‘I hope I’m not interrupting…’ It’s kind of ridiculous. Every time they go somewhere new you’re wondering who will turn up to have a discourse about history with the mother. ‘Hi, I’m the vacationing corpse of Bertrand Russell. I just noticed that you’re alone with your daughter and thought that you might want to discuss the finer points of metaphysics as we stand in the shadow of the Great Sphinx…’

Dryness and boredom eventually gives way to hilarity. It turns out that the captain of the cruise ship is played by John Malkovich. Somehow he makes the least convincing ship captain I’ve ever seen. I think Cristiano Ronaldo or Kermit the Frog would fit the role better. But we then get to witness the delight of Malkovich talking unconvincing political bullshit with a bunch of female passengers. What makes the scene even more bizarre is that everyone at the table speaks a different language (English, French, Italian and Greek) and yet everyone understands what the other says! For a while me and my wife pondered whether any of them would make a reference to this bizarreness and then after about ten minutes of chitchat Malkovich finally confronted the issue. Turns out it’s some sort of anti-EU sentiment – ‘Oh, we used to understand each other fine, no matter our differences, but now Brussels wants to make us the same’. Okay, fair enough. But the point still remains. They can all understand each other? They can all comprehend Greek! Piss off.

But one of the most hilarious bits is when Malkovich first encounters the Portuguese woman and her child. Once again the mother is imparting some useful piece of information and again someone pops up out of nowhere to stick their oar in. Only this time it’s John Captainvich. He then proceeds to queasily flirt with the mother and tries to invite her to the Captain’s table. She politely declines but Malkovich continues to talk to her, not quite getting the hint that he should fuck off. He even tries to speak some Portuguese to the daughter, which had me crying bitter tears of laughter. I mean, all I can say in Portuguese is ‘Where is the bank?’ but not even I sound this retarded. Honestly, it sounds like he’s speaking Elvish or Na’vi or something. Coming from his mouth it sounds like an alien language. Try speaking like that at Seabra’s or Tucha, Malkovich. The Portuguese like it when a foreigner tries to speak their language but I think he’d even try their patience. He’d end up with a couple of copies of Visao rammed up your backside. You speak Portuguese even worse than the Brazilians.

Then to show what a dick Malkovich’s captain is, he disregards the woman’s declined invitation and calls her to his table at dinnertime. Apparently he has a gift for the woman’s daughter. For a horrible, queasy moment I thought he was going to produce a dress or a Quim Barreiros CD, but instead he produces a doll. Oh, how cute. And then he proceeds to hold the pair of them hostage at the table as he continues to talk to his female friends.

The scene continues for an interminable length of time and then Malkovich is suddenly called away from the table. For a moment I thought that the ship might have hit an iceberg (completely forgetting that it was a Mediterranean cruise!) or that Malkovich had found another lonely woman to sexually pester, but being a total douchebag, he asks the Greek woman to sing for the passengers. So this woman gets up and sings awkwardly at the Portuguese woman and then to the rest of the diners. It’s probably meant to highlight the beauty of her culture, a culture that is being eroded by the European Union and its desire to homogenise everything. But instead it just makes for an awkward, stilted scene.

When Malkovich comes back, he doesn’t tell everyone that the ship is sinking or that he had a great poo. No, with three minutes of running time left, he tells everyone that there is a timebomb on the ship. Yeah, you heard right. There’s a fucking timebomb on the ship! Holy fucking fuck!

It was at this point that I started laughing like an idiot. How could such a dull, static film suddenly become such a laugh riot? Terrorists? Timebombs? It’s like another film came along, clonked the old Portuguese auteur over the head and turned it into a dumb Hollywood blockbuster.

However, the revelation of the timebomb is nothing. You see, as everyone is being evacuated from the ship, the little girl decides to go back to her cabin and get her dolly. Quite why she does this, I don’t know. But she does and as a consequence mother and daughter miss the last lifeboat. They stand there on the deck and Malkovich shouts to them and tells them that they should jump. They dither and Malkovich then begins to disrobe – he’s going to swim to them. No, this can’t be happening, I think. It’s not going to happen. If it happens I’m going to wet myself with laughter. But then it does. Before Malkovich can get in the water, the mother and daughter blow up with the boat. Cue then a freeze frame of a shocked Malkovich looking like a puzzled chimp.

This freeze frame is obviously meant to communicate the profundity of the final scene. But what the fuck does it mean? Don’t go back for your dolly? Never travel by boat? Innocence will always be destroyed? Who knows? And I doubt that Oliveira does, too.

Directed by Manoel de Oliveira
Written by Manoel de Oliveira
Produced by Paulo Branco
Cinematography by Emmanuel Machuel
Film Editing by Valérie Loiseleux
Starring Leonor Silveira, Filipa de Almeida, John Malkovich and Catherine Deneuve

Running Time: 96 mins

Not Rated because of excruciating tedium and John Malkovich massacring the Portuguese language

The Lovely Bones

2010-05-17T23:42:00.006+01:00

The Lovely Bones sees Peter Jackson returning to Heavenly Creatures territory. His latest film deals with adolescence and murder, and once again it allows his imagination to cut loose. But while Heavenly Creatures featured a fantasy world that was the creation of the characters, The Lovely Bones spends a lot of time in purgatory and heaven.

I wish I could say that the sequences with the dead Susie Salmon are engaging and well realized, but they get submerged in an avalanche of CGI. Landscapes continually change and Susie waltzes through her new world but at no time does the environment feel tangible. It never feels like you could reach out and touch it. But at the same time it doesn’t feel otherworldly. It’s a bunch of poorly rendered, idyllic locations on earth that are supposed to resemble heaven because of their perfection. But rather than go to the real places and film, Jackson instead uses lots and lots of greenscreen – and bad greenscreen at that.

Some of the imagery is also trite. There’s a bit where Susie and her friend come to grips with their new reality and begin enjoying themselves. They prance through fields, pretend they’re famous and even play on a floating planet that is about as big as a wrecking ball. The last image in particular looked ridiculous. All of a sudden it was like I was playing Super Mario Galaxy – the visuals are exactly the same.

The purgatory/heaven scenes also aren’t helped by Susie’s friend – a comedic Asian girl. Her performance resembles a titmouse that’s inhaled helium – she jitters back and forth while squeaking in a baby voice. It’s cringe-worthy.

Another risible character is that of Susie’s grandmother. Again she’s meant to provide some light relief, but she just made me roll my eyes. She’s a shallow drunkard with a heart of gold – the kind of woman who makes her grandchildren do chores for her while she naps with a glass of bourbon in her hand. People like this aren’t secretly wise and they’re not endearing. They’re losers and they’re windbags. They don’t have golden nuggets of information to share with you in your darkest hours – they just want to raid the liquor cabinet. And there’s even a scene where the grandmother does just that – while giving advice she searches the cabinets for booze. It’s meant to be endearing but the character is far too shallow and glib to generate any warmth.

Going back to Susie, though, the film is more successful when the dead girl interacts with the real world. There’s a nice scene where her father sees a candle and the reflection in the window differs from the reality he sees before his eyes. He senses that it’s Susie’s spirit trying to communicate with him. And there’s another scene where a dead rose blooms in his hand and he suddenly knows who the killer is. It’s in these scenes where the fantastic feels like an organic part of the story, rather than an excuse to indulge in dodgy CGI.

Another moment I enjoyed was when a local girl sees the spirit of Susie running through the street at the point that she’s murdered. It’s one of the few really good visuals in the film. Compare this with the moment where the dead Susie sees the reflection of her lost love in the lake. Hackneyed and schmaltzy, it kind of reminded me of a moment in Bitter Moon – however, in that film, I think the moment was played for laughs.

But while Susie’s interactions with the real world mostly work, there’s a truly execrable scene near the end. You see, Susie was in love with a guy called Ray and this Ray bloke is now friends with the girl who saw Susie’s ghost as she was being murdered. So they’re hanging out and then Susie’s spirit possesses the other girl and Ray and Susie kiss. It’s incredibly silly – Ray suddenly sees Susie in the other girl’s clothes and then she lays on the bed and asks him to kiss her. Even though she’s meant to be about fourteen she looks about twelve (he looks much older). Thankfully it’s not as icky as the equivalent scene in the novel but it still doesn’t work. I mean, how fucked up is it that a girl gets possessed by another girl and then gets boned? Couldn’t that be considered rape? It’s certainly not romantic.

Speaking of the adaptation, the murder here pales in comparison to the scene in the novel. What makes the murder so jarring in the book is how brutal it is. I mean, most of the book is pretty awful but the murder scene is superbly written. It doesn’t hold back and the murderer even rapes the poor girl. But the worst detail of all is the fact that the killer, to shut her up, shoves the girl’s hat in her mouth – a hat that has a jangle bell in it. The equivalent scene here, though, is sanitized – in order to get a PG-13 rating they’ve taken away the rape and taken away the jangle bell. They’ve made it far less shocking and thusly reduced its impact – the sense of outrage and injustice isn’t as intense as it was.

The filmmakers have also reduced the complexity of the relationship between mother and father. In the novel the mother has an affair with the police detective who leads the investigation. Here she just goes off because she can’t cope with her daughter’s death. To be fair, the affair didn’t really work and was terribly written but at least it was an attempt at adding some complexity to the story. Here, though, the filmmakers keep everything as simple as possible. I guess they thought it was a better idea to focus on Susie prancing about in a crappy CGI environment than to show how complicated grief is.

But it’s amazing how the film can be so long and yet the story can be so incredibly thin. Once Susie is killed, very little happens. There’s only one real suspense sequence – Susie’s sister suspects Mr Harvey of being the murderer and breaks into his place in order to find some incriminating evidence. Would you believe it, he comes back while she’s in the house and chases her. In order to escape, she jumps out of a window and seemingly badly injures herself. Oh no, he’s going to catch her as she writhes about on the floor! But when he closes to about a foot away from her, she jumps up and manages to outrun him. It’s incredibly badly choreographed.

I also think that the ending is incredibly anti-climatic. Just like in the novel, Mr Harvey is trying to pick up a girl so that he can kill her and an icicle falls and kills him. It’s divine justice and it’s supposed to show that what goes around comes around, but it’s an unsatisfying way of dispatching the main villain. Firstly it seems far too offhand and secondly, it’s dishonest – there’s no karmic justice in the world; shitty people get away with things and if they’re brought to justice it’s because they either fucked up or people worked hard to apprehend them. You can’t count on icicles falling from the sky.

Directed by Peter Jackson
Written by Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens and Peter Jackson
Produced by Carolynne Cunningham, Peter Jackson, Aimée Peyronnet and Fran Walsh
Original Music by Leo Abrahams and Brian Eno
Cinematography by Andrew Lesnie
Film Editing by Jabez Olssen
Starring Mark Whalberg, Rachel Weisz, Stanley Tucci and Jabez Olssen

Running Time: 136 mins

Rated PG-13 for gratuitous CGI

Antichrist

2010-05-04T02:20:00.007+01:00

I admire anyone who attempts to do something different with the horror genre. Say what you will about The Blair Witch Project, I think it’s an excellent film. With a very limited budget, they made a creepy campfire yarn. Then you have The Shining, which is almost an arthouse flick. Anything that gets away from the cheap shocks and familiar beats that hobble the majority of horror films is incredibly welcome.

Which brings me to Antichrist; Lars von Trier’s latest film. Coming from the crazy genius who made Breaking the Waves, The Idiots and Dogville, you’d expect something a little off the beaten track. And he doesn’t disappoint.

The opening sequence is the complete opposite of his Dogma work. Filmed in black and white and in slow motion and with Handel on the soundtrack, it resembles a commercial for a fragrance. It’s achingly beautiful. But then to snap you back to reality and to remind you that you’re watching a von Trier film, you see a couple making love. And then to further ram this point home (literally) you see an erect penis thrusting in and out of a vagina. Filmed in extreme close-up, it’s a rather jarring image, but of course this is what von Trier wants to do – he wants to shock you and to piss you off a little. But this explicit image also helps the scene to get away from clean, sanitised Hollywood sex where there are no cocks, no oral sex and couples have simultaneous orgasms after 90 seconds of intercourse. It reminds you that this is an animalistic act.

The scene also shows that sex is a selfish, self-absorbed act – caught up in its fire, everything else gets relegated to the background. And so as the couple make love, their young child manages to climb to a window and falls out. The mother even climaxes as the child is dying. The way it’s juxtaposed, it kind of suggests that sex equals death – that something dies when you make love. I’m sure this is true for some poor bastards but it certainly doesn’t apply to the majority of the population.

Apparently von Trier was heavily depressed when making this film and when the child accidentally (or maybe not accidentally – the way its filmed it looks like a suicide, even though the child here is a toddler) kills himself, he inadvertently knocks three figures to the floor. One has ‘Pain’ written on it, the other one has ‘Grief’ and the final one says ‘Despair’. This is what the child is freeing himself from at such an early age. It’s also what he’s inflicting upon his parents. Maybe the depressed von Trier also wishes he could be liberated from these feelings.

What follows is a war between the sexes. The man, played by Willem Dafoe, is a therapist and wants to understand his wife’s feelings (the wife is played by Charlotte Gainsbourg). They almost immediately begin clashing, the wife saying that only now does she interest him. Before this horrible tragedy occurred he’d been a distant figure in her life – he paid little to no attention to her or their son. But whether this is the case or not, both of them express their grief in different ways. Dafoe throws himself into understanding his wife and the woman, quite understandably, becomes a nervous wreck. But although the ranting and raving would suggest that Gainsbourg’s character is more deeply affected by the child’s death, this isn’t true. Dafoe does the typically male thing of throwing himself into his work in order to suppress his feelings.

This ‘work’ involves Dafoe taking his wife to Eden, their log cabin in the woods – he discovers that she’s terrified of the forest and decides to treat her with exposure therapy. The scenes where we see how the wife feels about Eden are magnificently filmed. They’re hyper real and almost painterly – the woods look terrifying, but beautifully so. Contrast this with the scene where the characters actually travel to Eden. Here the woods look dull and uninteresting. It’s a very imaginative and successful way of showing how we build things up in our mind.

Once the film gets to the cabin itself it enters Strindberg territory, with the couple continually jousting. Unfortunately, though, von Trier is no Strindberg and some of the exchanges are clumsy or just plain bad. A line that had me wincing was when Gainsbourg says the following: ‘You shouldn’t have come here. You’re just so damn arrogant.’ With Gainsbourg’s weedy, lifeless voice (I haven’t heard her sing, so I hope her singing voice has more conviction) the line lands with a conspicuous thud. And things like ‘Nature is Satan’s church’ sound sub-Herzog.

The film is more successful when it expresses itself visually. There’s a graphic shot of a deer giving birth and a jarring image of a bird being consumed. And then later there’s a bit where a fox talks to Dafoe. On paper it sounds ridiculous, but the CGI is easily some of the best I’ve seen for a long time.

Whether Antichrist has anything meaningful to say about male/female relationships is hard to say. There’s so much symbolism and the characters behave so irrationally that you have to wonder whether this is just von Trier screaming wildly into the abyss or he’s simply having a laugh. Either way, the film, for me, is a success because of the insanity of the piece, not because it spoke personally to me.

One of Antichrist’s themes is the nature of women. In the film, Gainsbourg’s character writes a thesis to denounce the treatment of women across the ages but eventually proves that women are evil. And Gainsbourg’s character, in the final act, degenerates into psychopathic hysteria. At one point she decides that Dafoe is leaving her and so she then gets him excited, begins fucking him and dismounts so that she can smash him in the groin with a huge piece of wood. He passes out but he’s still aroused, and so in graphic detail we get to see her wank him off and make him come while he’s unconscious – the cherry on the cake is that he ejaculates blood.

Following this, the wife attaches a grindstone to Dafoe’s leg by bolting it to his ankle. You see what these sneaky women do; they hobble us and weigh us down! And then in a hilarious scene Dafoe crawls into a foxhole as his wife tries to dig her way into it with a spade while screaming, ‘How dare you leave me!’ Damn possessive women. If they can’t have us, they’ll destroy us. Oh, and she storms about bottomless. Fear the cunt.

Worse follows. We find out that Gainsbourg’s character was fully aware that their child was roaming about while they were making love. And we even find out that she made the child wear his shoes back to front, thus beginning to deform him. As a result of all of this, we get a close-up of Gainsbourg cutting her clitoris off with some scissors. Enjoyment of sex has apparently brought her nothing but misery and she no longer wants any part of it.

Dafoe manages to remove the grindstone from his leg and strangles her to death before burning her body like the witch she is. Again, I have no idea if von Trier is having a laugh or if he’s seriously suggesting that men would be better off burning their women.

The final image of the film is of loads of faceless women streaming past Dafoe and entering the woods. Oh no, there are more of them! And they’re all the same! This faceless evil is neverending! Mothers and wives just keep on coming!

Despite this, it would be a mistake to interpret Antichrist as a misogynistic film. Defoe’s character initiates the scenario that creates this meltdown. Rather than let his wife manage her grief and provide quiet understanding, he bullies her into accepting his therapy. He dominates her at every turn until she finally snaps. Consequently the film is more misanthropic than misogynistic.

But if you want to cling onto the interpretation that Antichrist is anti-women, there’s a Charlotte Gainsbourg quote you should remember: ‘A crying woman is a scheming woman.’

Directed by Lars von Trier
Written by Lars von Trier
Produced by Meta Louise Foldager
Cinematography by Anthony Dod Mantle
Film Editing by Åsa Mossberg and Anders Refn
Starring Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg

Running Time: 108 mins

Not Rated because of extreme cock and clit torture

District 9

2010-05-03T03:03:00.004+01:00

With apartheid over, whitey in South Africa must be awfully pissed off. What to do now that the black population supposedly has equality? Thankfully, in District 9, a bunch of aliens arrive for the general populace to focus their hate and fear on. Who needs blacks when you have prawns?

The use of the term prawn for the aliens is a deliberately dehumanising epithet (if the word dehumanising can be applied to visitors from outer space). It’s much the same as calling a black person a nigger. It’s a way of building a wall between yourself and the other person – the name gives you the permission to discriminate because it makes them seem less than human. And of course, when you’re dealing with aliens who happen to look like bugs, it’s a whole lot easier to disassociate yourself from them.

One of the things that surprised me about the beginning of District 9 was how much it reminded me of The Office. The pseudo-documentary style of the film and the acing style all reminded me of Ricky Gervais. I was expecting something a lot more straight-faced.

Consequently the film reminded me of RoboCop. A lot of the social commentary comes through humour. For instance, there’s a scene where MNU (the company that’s in charge of policing and relocating the aliens) moves into District 9. Everyone that rolls into the camp is fitted with body armour. Everyone except a black bureaucrat. He’s not important enough to have protection. I mean, sure apartheid is over, but he’s still ‘blek’.

And then you have the way that the aliens are evicted from their shacks. They’re handed a clipboard with a piece of paper attached to it, and then if they so much as touch it, this is counted as a signature – they’ve agreed to give up their property. These aliens don’t have a choice about moving, but the MNU pretend they do. It’s kind of like the Nazis evicting Jews. But instead of breaking down doors with guns and jackboots, the South Africans evict the aliens with guns and forms. There’s only the pretence of due process.

What’s so pleasing about these early scenes is what a complete shitbag the central character is. Wikus is like a malicious David Brent. He doesn’t care about the aliens. He only cares about forwarding his own career, so there’s a lot of dark humour to be enjoyed in the early scenes. One of my favourite examples is when he meets a child prawn and tries to win the child over by calling himself the sweetie man. He’s so creepy and disingenuous that he’s reminiscent of the Child Catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. He has all the charm of a bucket of slime.

Of course, the alien arrival comes down to one important thing: money. The humans only care about the superior technology that the aliens possess and they want to harness it for their own greedy purposes: they want to dominate and they want to get rich. They certainly don’t care about learning from a different civilisation. They don’t care about expanding their knowledge. They just want to line their pockets.

Wikus has to learn the evil of this the hard way. He gets infected by some alien liquid and slowly begins turning into a prawn himself. There follows some Fly-like scenes where we see Wikus falling apart as his DNA mutates into that of an alien life form. But it gets even worse when his superiors realise that Wikus can now use alien weaponry. You see, the alien weapons that everyone has been so keen to harness work on a molecular level. Therefore humans can’t use them. Well, that’s until Wikus begins turning into a prawn.

One of the most nightmarish scenes is when a terrified Wikus is forced to shoot prawns using the aliens’ own guns. Strapped to a chair and made to pull the trigger, he’s the shadowy organisation’s perfect guinea pig. If they can vivisect him before he fully transforms, they can maybe harness this technology.

Fortunately for Wikus, he manages to escape. But now he’s a fugitive and the media widely reports that he became infected because he fucked a prawn. This is maybe a dig at South Africa and its dysfunctional relationship to the HIV virus. Rather than embrace scientific fact, the country still wallows in nonsense and lies.

There’s no doubt that after its imaginative beginning, District 9 becomes a bit formulaic towards the end. The final act is a wall of action. And while it’s highly enjoyable action, it’s a slight disappointment. Much like Danny Boyle’s Sunshine, you feel like the filmmakers chickened out at the very end and decided to go for the box receipts that some big action sequences would generate.

But at least the filmmakers make the action exciting. Wikus manages to harness an alien robot thing (it’s kind of like a fancy ED-209 that you can get into) and begins kicking MNU arse. And in one excellent (and inexplicable) moment, Wikus fires a live pig at an MNU soldier. It’s a baffling little moment, but one I approve highly of. Can anyone really have enough pig?

The end sees a prawn rooting through some garbage to create a flower out of a scrap of metal. It’s obvious that the alien is Wikus. And it’s only now that he can see the beauty of life and its possibilities. Only when he’s in someone else’s skin is he capable of empathy and understanding. Hopefully the rest of us don’t have to go through such a dramatic transformation to reach the same level of understanding.

Directed by Neill Blomkamp
Written by Neill Blomkamp and Terri Tatchell
Produced by Tracey Brown, Carolynne Cunningham and Peter Jackson
Music by Clinton Shorter
Cinematography by Trent Opaloch
Film Editing by Julian Clarke
Starring Sharlto Copley, Vanessa Haywood and Robert Hobbs

Running Time: 112 mins

Rated R for bloody violence and pervasive prawn destruction

(500) Days of Summer

2010-04-30T07:45:00.005+01:00

Summer, played by Zooey Deschanel, is a beautiful free spirit with an endearingly cute retro hairdo and impeccable taste in music. Well, if you’re mentally retarded. If you have any brain power she’s a cold, manipulative cock tease who has a stupid bowl haircut and who listens to lameass indie rock. She proves herself to be a wretched human being.

Her beau is equally deranged. He’s the sort of incredibly unique American who loves British indie rock. He’s really an individual. Some even say that he was the first person in the States to discover The Smiths. I mean, what the fucking fuck? Why is it that wherever I go in America I have to be tortured by Morrissey and Marr? And why is it that every film or every American who references them seems to think that this is some underground pleasure – that they’re an obscure band. They’re not. Everywhere I go they’re polluting the airwaves. I go to a comedy gig and I hear ‘Panic’. I go to a party and I hear ‘Girlfriend in a Coma’. I go into a store and I hear ‘How Soon is Now’. Tom and Summer are not unique, quirky, enlightened individuals because they listen to the fucking Smiths.

Even worse, Tom later ponces about in a Joy Division t-shirt. So you go from wanky to just plain dull? The only redeeming thing is that Tom also has a Jesus and Mary Chain poster on his wall. But do you hear ‘Reverence’ or ‘Sidewalking’ on the soundtrack? No that would kick far too much ass.

Early in the film Summer plainly states that she doesn’t believe in true love and doesn’t want to have a relationship. Fair enough, you want to die alone in your apartment and have your face eaten by your cats. I understand that. But then after fucking Tom they go to Ikea. I’m sorry, but nothing more plainly states that you’re in a relationship than going to Ikea together. You might as well be walking down the aisle or surgically sewing your foreheads together. If you’re going to Ikea and buying furnishings and arsing about and thinking about how you’d arrange a group of Billys and looking at each other in a lovey-dovey way, you’re in a fucking relationship motherfuckers!

Quite why Tom gets so besotted with this woman is hard to understand. Everything about her is cold and flighty. But bless him, Tom falls head over heels. And it’s easy to share his confusion when Summer insists that despite the fact that they fuck and hang out and have a good time, they’re not in a relationship. What the fuck bitch, we just went to Ikea and bought a Poang!

Summer would be far less hateful a figure if she wasn’t so damn manipulative. In one scene she has an argument with Tom and says that they’re not in a relationship and then later she turns up at his door, apologises and begins kissing him. She mind-fucks him all over the place.

And then to turn her into a Stalin-esque figure of evil she dances with Tom at a wedding, while, unbeknownst to him, she pursues a relationship with another man (a man whom we later find she’s engaged to). Everything she does just makes me want to kick her into the infinite abyss and shout, ‘This is SPARTA!’ She’s worse than Hitler. Hitler wouldn’t say that he doesn’t believe in true love or relationships, fuck a guy, break up, dance with the guy at a wedding and then announce his engagement to a different guy a few days later. This kind of evil is Summer’s alone. ‘Oh, I don’t believe in attachments. People shouldn’t belong to one another. We should all just encounter one another; have beautiful encounters and then move onto the next. Wouldn’t that be nice? Oh wait, I’ve changed my mind and I’m getting married. You just weren’t enough to keep me interested and satisfied. So sorry.’

There’s actually a scene where the heartbroken Tom sits on a bench and Summer turns up out of the blue to talk to him. Sadly Tom doesn’t piledrive her through the bench. Nor does he Stone Cold Stun her. Instead they talk rationally and calmly. The only thing that wasn’t calm was me when I was watching the film. ‘Why are you letting her humiliate you like this? I understand you’re not going to fulfil my secret desire and kick her into the infinite abyss, but at least give her a tongue lashing. Or even just walk away. That would at least show a bit of class.’ But no he lets her have her say. [insert Bennett out of Commando type scream]

One of the few laughs that the film contains is when a depressed Tom writes a greeting card (this being a ‘quirky’ indie film, he of course has to have a silly job – writing the text in cards). A Valentine’s Day card contains the following: ‘Roses are red, violets are blue. Fuck you, whore!’ Pretty awesome. I also liked the skipping along the street scene when Tom realises he’s in love with Summer. It brilliantly captures the feeling of walking on air, and taken on it’s own it’s a marvellous scene, but then you remember he feels like this because of Summer and everything’s suddenly tainted.

It’s kind of hard to understand what you’re supposed to get out of a film like this. The film isn’t realistic enough to capture the true despair of a broken relationship and the characters are far too stupid and hateful for it to serve as an interesting diversion. The film might aim for sadness and melancholy but there’s no depth of feeling here. It’s hipster central. And in the end Tom doesn’t learn his lesson – of course, this being standard quirky indie fare, Tom has to better himself and find his true calling. And while being interviewed for a new job, he falls for a girl called Autumn. Oh how clever. But in reality his experience with Summer would either lead to a lasting depression or a severing of human emotion – he’d either become a monk or senselessly fuck everything in sight. But then that would be far too real for this piece of crap.

Directed by Marc Webb
Written by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber
Produced by Mason Novick, Jessica Tuchinsky, Mark Waters and Steven J. Wolfe
Cinematography by Eric Steelberg
Film Editing by Alan Edwards Bell
Starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel

Running Time: 95 mins

Rated PG-13 for ridiculous hipsters

Films of the Decade: Top 20

2010-04-27T03:13:00.008+01:00

So, several months after the project started we come to the highly anti-climatic conclusion of my Films of the Decade project. Here's my overall Top 20:

20. American Psycho

Favourite scene: Patrick Bateman gives a speech about Whitney Houston as he encourages a couple of women to make out on a sofa. With tears in his eyes he speaks about the greater meaning of Whitney’s music and how important it is to empathise with other people and one’s self. We then have a jump cut to him vigorously fucking the women and then killing them. It’s very funny and shows the complete disconnect that exists in Bateman’s character. He can regurgitate all this nonsense about Phil Collins and Whitney Houston but the reality is that he has nothing but contempt for the people around him – he may speak with emotion and he might talk about how important it is to empathise with other people, but this is just stuff that he’s read; in reality he wants to destroy everything.

19. The Lives of Others

Favourite scene: Having become seduced by an artist couple while performing surveillance on them, a Stasi officer encounters the actress half of the couple and chats with her in a bar. She has no idea who he is, thinking he’s just a fan, but he manages to give her the resolve to stop an affair she’s having with a high ranking minister. The scene that follows shows the officer relieving his subordinate from duty and reading the report of what happened during the night. The actress returns to her writer lover and they make passionate love. It’s very romantically filmed and you can see the joy that the report gives the officer – for once, rather than have a destructive effect on someone’s life, he’s doing something positive. He even manages to overlook his subordinate sleeping and praises him for a good report.

18. Audition

Favourite scene: When you give your heart to someone, there’s always the fear that the other person will hurt you. But what happens in Audition takes this fear to the extreme. A widower ends up being tortured by a prospective bride. Her reason for doing this? To prove what is feels like to need someone. It’s a very tough scene to watch but with Miike very slowly winding the tension tighter and tighter, it’s almost a release. The need to possess her ‘love’ is far too much for this woman – she doesn’t just want love, she wants full ownership and devotion; she’s willing to disable the object of her affection to make him totally dependant and subservient.

17. Memento

Favourite scene: Lenny finally hears the truth of his quest to find his wife’s killer and learns that, thanks to his memory disorder, he’s been manipulated by his friend Teddy. Apparently he found his wife’s killer a long time ago but because of his condition he doesn’t remember it. Since then Teddy has been giving him puzzle after puzzle to solve in order to give meaning to Lenny’s life. In a moment of quiet rage, Lenny sabotages his quest and sets Teddy up as his next target. The film ends with Lenny forgetting the fact that he’s set up his friend, ready to begin the investigation that will inevitably end with Teddy’s death. The scene brilliantly explains everything that has been going on, but more than that it shows human fallibility. We may think that we can overcome anything and build perfect systems that will help us achieve our goal, but we’re still slaves to our emotions. Rationality will rarely win over anger. And it’s also true that people often lie to themselves in order to be happy. This scene just elevates it to a grand scale.

16. Grizzly Man

Favourite scene: Timothy Treadwell is filming a grizzly bear when a couple of foxes run into the shot. One of the foxes then goes up to him and smells his finger. It’s a little moment but it shows why Treadwell became so obsessed with living in the wilderness. These animals give him the companionship he didn’t get in the city. They also give him (in his mind) unconditional love and they definitely protect him from his demons. They prove to be his saviours and the cause of his destruction.

15. No Country For Old Men

Favourite scene: The Coens manage to produce a shoot-out that is several times more exciting than anything that the best action directors managed to film. Shot at night and not accompanied by a score, the two lead characters face off against each other in a Texas street. For all intents and purposes, this is like something out of a Western. The evil man in black stalks the hero and the good guy turns the tables to bring on the pain. But with an innocent driver getting shot in his throat and with the sight of two men having a gun battle in the middle of a deserted street in a populated town, the action scene ends up having an abstract quality. Both men are both hunter and hunted, and in the end they fight to a stalemate. In the mindless pursuit of money, no one wins.

14. Downfall

Favourite scene: With the Soviet troops rapidly approaching Berlin, Frau Goebbels poisons all of her children. She and a doctor pretend that it’s ‘medicine’ and all but one of the children happily gulps the stuff down, but one child knows what’s going on and resists. Frau Goebbels and the Doctor then force her to drink it. The most disturbing thing about the scene is the normality of it – you really would think that the woman was giving them medicine; she’s like a rock. It’s only when the final child resists that she seems a little rattled. And there’s also a moment when we see her put a book of fairytales to the side; these kids have read their final bedtime story – they don’t need the book any more. But again to the disturbing normality of the scene – another thing that makes the scene difficult to watch is the kindness present in it. Millions of other people weren’t shown this same kindness in their final moments – they were treated like vermin. So in a way you should rejoice at this extermination of Nazism and the seeds of its evil, but there’s no joy to be taken from this act.

13. Auto Focus

Favourite scene: Bob Crane and his best pal ‘Carpy’ have a discussion about how unreasonable women are while they both masturbate to their homemade porn. Funny, melancholic and pathetic, the scene encapsulates everything about these guys – their desire to orgasm at the drop of a hat eclipses any need for a deep, fulfilling relationship. They’re clueless teenage boys trapped in the bodies of men.

12. Munich

Favourite scene: The first assassination. Proving just how hard it is to kill someone, the Mossad agents fumble and hesitate and then almost close their eyes when they finally pull the trigger. Their target then falls in a heap and lands on some bottles of milk which spills across the floor with his blood. It’s a quick, brutal scene, but it beautifully sets up the film – that revenge isn’t clear cut; it’s brutal and messy.

11. Zodiac

Favourite scene: A relatively innocent July 4th drive turns into a bloodbath when a couple of kids stumble upon the Zodiac killer. At the tail end of the sixties it signals the end of the era of peace and love. A new darker era is being ushered in and America is very quickly losing what innocence it had. The killing is filmed in minute detail and the choice of ‘Hurdy Gurdy Man’ on the soundtrack is perfect.

10. Gomorrah

Favourite scene: A couple of wannabe gangsters play about with stolen weapons as they piss about in some marshland. Wearing nothing but speedos, they fire machine guns and rocket launchers. Drunk on violent movies and the violence that surrounds them in the slums, this is their idea of masculinity. Nothing is tougher or more fearsome than a man firing an AK-47 in his underoos. Needless to say that despite the heavy crimes these teenagers commit, they have the minds of young children.

9. In the Loop

Favourite scene: There are certainly more intelligent scenes in this amazing film, but nothing gave me as much pleasure as Malcolm Tucker bullying a minister and his staff. Best line: ‘Allow me to pop a jaunty little bonnet on your purview and ram it up your shitter with a lubricated horse cock!’

8. Touching the Void

Favourite scene: With a broken leg, Joe Simpson falls into a crevasse. Stuck in a hole and filled with impotent rage, he screams every swear word he knows. Simpson then explains that despite his dire situation he never prayed to god. The fact that the man never asked a higher power for help and that he didn’t just crawl up and die is a huge inspiration.

7. Dogville

Favourite scene: With blossom falling, Grace and Tom confess their love for one another. It seems that their blooming romance has come to fruition. And yet Tom, being the colossal coward that he is, can’t bring himself to kiss Grace. We then have a dinner where one of the townsfolk of Dogville thanks Grace for showing the town who she is. You’d think that nothing but bright skies would follow, but under the surface everything isn’t quite so rosy. Grace might have shown the town who she is, but she’s also shown the town who they are. She’s seen right through them, and although they thank her for this, they grow to hate the mirror she’s shone upon them. The scene wonderfully captures the polite façade and the hatred and hypocrisy that can lie beneath it.

6. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

Favourite scene: The best scene in the Lord of the Rings trilogy actually comes at the very beginning. The film opens with a dizzying prologue that beautifully and economically tells us the history of Middle Earth and explains what’s at stake in the story that follows. In particular I love the image of Gollum in the cave, allowing the ring to consume him for years and years.

5. Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World

Favourite scene: When Doctor Maturin accidentally gets shot, Captain Jack Aubery temporarily ends his pursuit of the French ship Acheron. Yes he has the ship in his sights but he ends up putting his friend before duty. He ends up taking him to land so that surgery can be performed. Of course with both of them being British males, they can’t verbalise the depth of feeling they have for each other. Jack says that this detour hasn’t been taken on the Doctor’s account. He says that he needs to stretch his legs. But both know that this is an act of friendship. This scene helps give a wonderful adventure film an added dimension – the characters aren’t just meat to be blown up and sliced to bits; they’re people that we come to care about.

4. Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

Favourite scene: Grenouille’s first encounter with Laura - with his superior olfactory senses, he smells her long before he sees her. Immediately enraptured, he hides from the road as she passes in a horse and carriage. But then like a dog he follows her to her father’s mansion and hides in the garden, drinking her in. The scene is wonderfully scored and hopelessly romantic but it’s also filled with dread – you know that nothing good is going to come of this and that death is waiting around the corner.

3. There Will Be Blood

Favourite scene: Daniel Plainview finally strikes oil but his ‘son’ gets injured as a result. However, his injured boy concerns him little. As it is, his family is just an artifice – it’s just a way of masking his greed and making it more palatable to the masses. The most telling moment is when he’s looking at the burning oil. A colleague asks him if his son is okay and he casually replies that he isn’t. You can almost see the dollar signs in Plainview’s eyes – he doesn’t give a shit about the boy; the money is everything.

2. United 93

Favourite scene: Cutting through the simplistic jingoistic ‘Let’s roll’ bullshit like a knife, the final scene shows the passenger revolt for what it was: a desperate, violent last ditch fight for survival. These are people placed in a horrible situation desperately clawing at their tormentors as they try and regain control of the plane and their lives. But both sides are spinning out of control and mutual destruction is the only possible result. Knowing exactly what’s going to happen to these people only makes everything that more powerful; the desperate way that they try and push the pilot into the cockpit, in particular, never fails to get to me.

1. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

Favourite scene: The final moments are amazing. Finally realising the hollowness of his celebrity, Robert Ford is left to live a disappointing existence. No one really likes him and he misses his old friend. All that’s left is for him is to read hate mail and hang out in his saloon. The melancholy of this is magnificently captured and fate eventually catches up with Robert Ford. Considering what Ford did prior to this, this killing, in lesser hands, might have resembled someone getting their just desserts. But there’s no feeling of victory with this murder. It’s empty and it’s sad, and just as Ford is finally coming to terms with his act and just as he’s understanding how rotten it was, his life is taken away from him. But what makes the scene even more powerful is how resigned he is to his killing, like he knows it’s just around the corner. He almost embraces it.

Films of the Decade: Drama

2010-04-22T04:45:00.016+01:00

I found it almost impossible to restrict my best drama list to five movies. Therefore, for this final category, I’ve decided to expand it to a list of ten flicks.

Top Ten Dramas

10. The Piano Teacher

Still waters run deep. In other words, quiet people are probably tortured perverts. Well, at least that’s the case in The Piano Teacher. Dark, twisted and with no hint of redemption for any of the characters involved, it’s a brilliantly bleak film that shows that the most loathsome people aren’t those who have sexual desires that deviate from the norm (the protagonist here is someone who secretly enjoys S&M), but those that punish people because of their proclivities.

9. Hunger

Hunger surprised me a great deal. With Steve McQueen directing, I was expecting a visual feast, but I wasn’t expecting it to be quite so heartfelt. Focusing on how the conflict between the IRA and the British government dehumanised those involved, it manages to be both brutal and tender. No judgements or sides are taken; we just see that this conflict is a cancer that eats away at everyone involved.

8. American Psycho

Far superior to the novel that it’s based on, this adaptation dispenses with most of the more ridiculous violence and instead focuses on the black humour. Patrick Bateman is a man stuck in a nightmare of conformity and no matter how desperately he tries to break out, no one is listening and no one cares. He’s trapped. Christian Bale’s performance is amazing and the writing and the direction are impeccable, showing that even the most ‘unfilmable’ books can be transported to the big screen if the filmmakers are talented enough.

7. The Lives of Others

At the beginning of The Lives of Others one of the characters states that people don’t change. However, we get to see that exact thing occur – we get to see a Stasi officer have his blind faith eroded and in the process regain his humanity. It’s a very tight film with great performances and Hitchcockian direction. It also has a terrifically moving and understated ending.

6. Downfall

It’s ridiculous that people criticised this film for ‘humanising’ Hitler. Newsflash motherfuckers, Hitler was a human being! Yes he may have been among the shittiest human beings of all time but to reduce him to a cardboard cut-out monster is extremely dangerous – it makes it harder for people to learn from the mistakes that Germany made when they allowed this madman to seize control. But Downfall goes some way to reversing that – it’s a film that allows you to get a small idea of what this lunatic was really like. It never makes you sympathise with Hitler but it does flesh him out to some extent, making the horror of his regime even more palpable.

5. Auto Focus

No other film depicts the desperation of male sexuality as accurately as Auto Focus. Portraying the exploits of Bob Crane and John Carpenter, it shows that there’s nothing as disturbing, pathetic and blackly comic as grown men who are stuck in adolescence. Unable to focus on anything but themselves they’re constantly looking for their next orgasm. In fact, their need is so desperate that they even masturbate in each other’s company while watching their own homemade sex tapes. But as lurid as the film is, it manages, in the end, to achieve a note of melancholy. Still, for women I imagine this must resemble a horror movie – these men (duplicitous horny bastards who have no moral fibre) must be their worst nightmare.

4. Dogville

At first it seems like Lars von Trier’s film might amount to nothing more than a gimmick – there are no real sets and the actors mimic the actions of opening doors and performing other actions. But I found it very easy to forget this artifice and it actually ends up helping the film – there are scenes where horrific events occur and you can still see people in their buildings getting on with their lives; you can visually see the way people turn a blind eye to abuse. And although the brutality in the film is exaggerated, it does have a serious point – if you treat people like animals, you shouldn’t be surprised when they treat you like one.

3. There Will Be Blood

It’s easy to just remember There Will Be Blood as a film about milkshakes, but there’s a whole lot more going on in this film. Deep down it’s a horror film about how we’re all beholden to capitalism and the insatiable greed of big business. Daniel Plainview is a man who uses his wealth to build schools and roads and irrigate the land, but while this would suggest he’s a decent human being, he’s actually a murderous monster. And instead of ushering in an era of freedom, he helps usher in a monetary-based class system – no longer will society be controlled by nobility; it’ll be controlled by big business. But the film also illustrates the uneasy relationship between religion and capitalism (America’s two biggest obsessions). And if There Will Be Blood is anything to go by, should the two sides of America fight to the death, capitalism will win.

2. United 93

Few things are as scary as religious mania. Otherwise decent people can be driven to perform atrocious acts. This is what United 93 manages to capture so superbly. These people aren’t evil – they weren’t destined to do this from birth. They’ve just become warped. And like loyal soldiers, they execute their orders faithfully. The last few moments are among the few times that I’ve become anxious while watching a film – the passengers frenzied attempt to cling onto life is gut-wrenching.

1. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

One of the most remarkable films ever made, The Assassination of Jesse James is a beautiful film about the hollowness of celebrity. Robert Ford is a man who thinks that some of Jesse James’ stardust will rub off on him if he kills him and thus follows the soul-destroying realisation that fame for the sake of fame doesn’t bring happiness. It’s a very modern film in the body of a historical drama – it might as well be about Mark Chapman or any of the losers that appear on programmes like Pop Idol. The final twenty minutes are especially good and are amongst the best cinema I’ve ever seen.

Ten Worst Dramas

10. Into the Wild

The story of a tiresome twit who gives all of his savings to Oxfam and lives a pure, spiritual existence in the wilderness. And when I say he lives a pure life, I mean he meets annoying hippies, discards his evil parents (who aren't evil at all and who, while not great people, just want the best for him) and dies alone in Alaska. Sean Penn obviously thinks that this guy is a hero, but his selfishness and stupidity are unbelievable. I mean, the conceit that his disappearance and his retreat into the wilderness makes his parents better people is offensive. Fuck this kid and fuck this film.

9. Incendiary

What’s the worst thing you can imagine happening while you make love? Accidentally spearing your penis on your lover’s perineum and breaking your cock? Or if you’re a woman, having one of your nipples chomped off by an over enthusiastic man slut? Well, those are bad, but far worse is cheating on your husband and then seeing your child and your hubby blow up on the TV at a football match as Ewan McGregor takes you from behind. That would give you psycho-sexual problems up the wazoo. As you can probably gather from this, Incendiary is a ridiculous soap opera – a screaming, wailing, hysterical woman of a film; you just want to reach into the film and slap it so that you can shut it up.

8. The Time Traveller’s Wife

A crap book ends up making for a crap movie. Manipulative and flatly written and directed, it’s a lonely housewife picture. An impossible romance full of impossible suffering that is somehow supposed to make us feel better in the end. But instead it just made me feel used and abused – the film tries to pull every string in order to elicit some emotion; dead men coming through time, husbands losing the power of their limbs, cursed children. It’s shamelessly ridiculous.

7. A Talking Picture

Manoel de Oliveira, Portugal’s most famous director, takes a dull travelogue (the film follows a mother and daughter travelling around the Mediterranean) and turns it into something supremely ridiculous by introducing a time-bomb with three minutes of the film left to run. It’s one of those twists that, rather than shock, has the audience howling in the aisles. Adding to the hilarity is John Malkovich speaking incredibly bad Portuguese.

6. Crash

Somehow Crash beat Brokeback Mountain to the Best Picture Oscar. But while Ang Lee’s film was understated and complex, this is offensively simplistic. You see, we’re all a little prejudiced and racism is bad. But the worst thing about the film is the way that sudden events colour every person’s outlook. Prejudices are either removed or created by people ‘crashing’. This is bollocks. Prejudices aren’t removed or created in a flash. They take time. You certainly don’t start off being a racist and then find your humanity in an instant. But the ending is hilariously awful. An ex-racist finds some Thai slaves, gives them $40 and then ‘frees’ them. In other words, he sets them lose on the Los Angeles streets. This is not the uplifting ending it purports to be. Without any money and without the ability to speak English properly, these people are going to be royally fucked. It’s ridiculous.

5. Marie Antoinette

The story of Marie Antoinette is turned into a drab, lifeless American teen film. We even have a quick shot of a pair of Converse. You see, Marie Antoinette is really just the story of Paris Hilton and her ilk – only Sofia Coppola is sympathetic rather than scathingly critical like she should be.

4. Garden State

An incredibly lame ‘dramedy’ from Zach Braff, star of the awesomely bad Scrubs. This is a film that is straining so hard for meaning and pathos that all of Braff’s organs spill out of his butthole and leave a disgusting mess on the floor. Hamster funerals, men prancing about in knight costumes, a bottomless pit; Garden State has all of this. Oh, and it also has a woman who wants to capture Braff’s tears in a cup. Run away, Braff, she’s insane! But Braff isn’t much better. He’s a young man who’s in so much pain that he has to medicate himself into oblivion. But the film doesn’t have any idea what real pain is. And the idea that a little cry will make everything better is ridiculous.

3. Elizabethtown

Another risible ‘dramedy’. This time it features the charisma vacuum that is Orlando Bloom and Kirsten Dunst and her weird baby teeth. What makes the film so objectionable is the psychotic narcissism of Dunst’s character. She latches onto Bloom like a leech and then oversees a road trip that will allow him to do some important healing. Of course, this being a Crowe film, she makes the ultimate mix tape and of course this mix tape allows Bloom to see life in a new light. Pissing hell.

2. O Fantasma

O Fantasma details the exploits of a gay sanitation worker who becomes obsessed with a young man. What starts off as rather dull and silly movie becomes truly risible when the lead character goes on a gimp rampage. He handcuffs men, grabs rabbits, eats garbage and drinks toxic water. The film is supposed to be making some sort of comment on this guy’s all consuming desire and the way that it makes him an animal, but it doesn’t feel at all realistic or believable. Hell, in one scene the guy gets arrested by a cop and then the cop lets the man lick his nightstick. And this is not a euphemism for ‘sucks his cock’. But the film does feature that, in all its explicit glory. Yippee.

1. Morven Callar

One of the most soul destroying film experiences of my life, Morven Callar is a preposterous, pretentious piece of piss. It begins with Samantha Morton’s writer boyfriend topping himself and leaving her his novel. Rather than phone the police or anything like that, Morton claims the novel for her own and gets a publishing deal. She then spends the rest of her time arsing about in Ibiza. The End. Honestly, Morton’s character is wretched and the film has the depth of a puddle. But oh how it strives for meaning. There’s even a scene where Morton stands by a river and lifts her skirt in slow-motion. Yes, she has a cunt…and is one. Genius.

Update: I originally had The Convent in the number two spot. Yeah, one problem - the film came out in 1995. Oops. I guess I must have overlooked that one important detail. But thanks to the commenter who pointed this out. However, if you're thinking about watching The Convent, don't. It's fucking awful.

Films of the Decade: Science-Fiction

2010-03-25T02:52:00.005Z

It hasn’t been a particularly great decade for science fiction. The Star Wars series limped along, the Matrix trilogy imploded and both Star Trek and Avatar were colossal disappointments. Despite this, a few films came along to brighten the gloomy skies.

Top Five Sci-Fi Films

5. District 9

The first half of District 9 is an interesting take on racism and intolerance and the second half is a no holds barred action movie. The two sides of the movie could have perhaps been blended together better (a la RoboCop), but it’s still a wonderfully realised movie.

4. Moon

A fantastic old-fashioned science fiction film that brings back memories of films like 2001, Silent Running and Alien. The film has a very real, physical feel. It’s a world that you can reach out and touch – it’s a great move to use lots of physical effects. It’s also a film that plugs into corporate and technological paranoia. Will technology set us free or will it enslave us? The ending is perhaps too glib but it’s an amazingly powerful and thoughtful film.

3. A.I.: Artificial Intelligence

Up until the final sequence, A.I. is an excellent movie – dark and strange, it has the heart that is sometimes lacking in science fiction films. But the final few minutes descend into sludge. However, this is easily forgotten when you can enjoy the exploits of sex bots and suicidal boy robots. The scene where the mother abandons her android child in favour of her toolish son is wonderfully done.

2. Sunshine

If it weren’t for the highly formulaic final act, Sunshine would actually be one of the best sci-fi films of all time, instead of just one of the best of the decade. What precedes it is so imaginative and so gripping that you can’t help but be disappointed to see it turn into some horror nonsense. But the scene where the astronauts have to fix the heat shield is easily one of the best of the decade.

1. Children of Men

A gritty apocalyptic science fiction fable about the collapse of civilisation after the female population becomes infertile. Filmed in long takes and with lots of sudden violence, it’s a scary look at a slow rot of an apocalypse. Humanity here will not destroy itself over night. It’ll just violently limp on for a few decades before going out with a whimper. Of course the right place to set this film is Britain. Only us British could try and establish some sort of normality and order in the face of humanity’s extinction. Right to the end we shall be moaning and queuing. But Theo’s heroic, selfless effort to preserve a single piece of hope and innocence in this apocalyptic wasteland gives the film its power and beauty.

Five Worst Sci-Fi Films

5. Signs

The creepy atmosphere that’s generated is immediately ruined by the fact that a bunch of aliens who are allergic to water decide to invade a planet rich with the stuff and not wear suits. Never mind a glass of water, what would have happened if it had rained? ‘We’re baddasses! We’re badasses! Wait a minute, what’s that? Oh, bugger, I knew I’d forgotten something…’ Plus would the existence of psycho aliens really help you rediscover your faith in god? It’s doubtful.

4. Planet of the Apes

A bland hero. An ending that defies logic. Burton’s film is a colossal failure. The only bright spot in an otherwise dismal film is the make-up, but that’s hardly a reason to watch it.

3. Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith

Attack of the Clones was a piece of shit, but Revenge of the Sith was even worse. Basically we find out that Vader didn’t become evil because of some sort of complicated inner conflict. No, he became bad because he was a weak-minded emo. ‘How could this happen to me? I’ve made my mistakes. Got nowhere to run, the night goes on.’ Noooooooooo!

2. AVP: Aliens vs. Predator

As a teenager I thought there would be nothing cooler than an Aliens vs. Predator film. How wrong I was. Paul W.S. Anderson manages to both piss and shit in the mouth of two science fiction franchises. Well done, sir!

1. Mission to Mars

An incompetent attempt at making a modern 2001. It removes the mystery and complexity of Kubrick’s film and adds boring action sequences and awful CGI – the Martians look ridiculous. Plus Gary Sinise goes through the whole film seemingly wearing eyeliner, making him look like a square-jawed, pointy-eared Robert Smith.

Films of the Decade: Animation

2010-02-19T22:03:00.003Z

Top Five Animated Films

5. Fantastic Mr Fox

After the disastrous Darjeeling Limited, Wes Anderson redeemed himself with Fantastic Mr Fox. Sure it features his usual themes of familial strife, but it’s also very funny and visually inventive. The scene at the beginning where the foxes creep through a farm by limboing under window frames is a good example of the film’s light, airy tone.

4. Wall-E

The first half of Wall-E is amazing. We get to see a little robot dutifully clean the planet Earth. There’s no other life around except for Wall-E’s pet roach. That’s until Eve turns up. While we get to see the robots fall in love, the film is out of this world – there’s hardly any dialogue and the film feels incredibly fresh and new. However, when the humans turn up and the ecological subtext kicks in, the film loses some of its spell. The quality of the film never deteriorates seriously, but it’s a little disappointing in light of the amazing beginning. Wall-E could have been a masterpiece.

3. Monsters Inc.

Pixar produced loads of great films this last decade but Monsters Inc. is a personal favourite. It’s sweet, it’s funny and it’s clever. It also has a beautiful final image that always leaves a silly smile on my face. It isn’t as action packed as The Incredibles and the animation isn’t as good as Finding Nemo, but it has a lot more heart. Plus Boo is one of the few child characters that makes me grin rather than wretch.

2. Beowulf

Ray Winstone gets a Sean Bean makeover and a tailed Angelina Jolie gets to lure horny men to their doom. Beowulf is a surprisingly good film. And I say surprisingly because of Robert Zemeckis’ first foray into animation: The Polar Express. That film, while having some great visuals, was kind of a creepy experience. The dead eyes took a lot of getting used to. But this type of material much better suits this type of animation. Blood flows, limbs get ripped off and the hero decides to disrobe so that he can fight a monster while strutting around butt naked. Beowulf is loads and loads of fun. Plus it shows that pussy will lead every straight man to his doom.

1. Up

The opening sequence is more of a choker than anything else in animation (much more so than the beginning of Bambi). We get to see a married couple and we’re a witness to their dreams and hope for the future. None of them come true but they nevertheless stay true to one another. And then the wife dies, leaving our hero bereft and lonely. It’s a beautifully sad sequence and immediately has you rooting for the hero, who decides to escape his dreary existence and chase the dreams that he and his wife had. What follows is a wonderfully funny and entertaining film. Squirrel-obsessed dogs and dogs with malfunctioning voice collars. This film has it all.

Films of the Decade: Crime

2010-02-17T23:38:00.005Z

Top Five Crime Films

5. Sexy Beast

Ben Kingsley may get most of the plaudits for playing the shouty psychopath Don Logan, but Ian McShane plays the most chilling villain here. Fucked in the arse by a banker during an orgy, he decides to fuck the guy in return by robbing his bank. Basically the film isn’t about Ray Winstone and Ben Kingsley, it’s about a homoerotic power struggle between a banker and a hood. Everything else is just garnish, even though it’s wonderful garnish. The dialogue in particular is a joy to behold.

4. Narc

A fairly straight forward cop movie that is elevated by some incredible performances and by the gritty filmmaking, it takes the good cop/bad cop cliché to the extreme. Both Jason Patric and Ray Liotta raise their game and give career best performances. It was such a great film that I had very high hopes for Joe Carnahan…but then he made Smokin’ Aces…and has The A-Team in the can. But at least this film kicks ass.

3. No Country For Old Men

An excellent adaptation of the wonderful Cormac McCarthy novel, No Country For Old Men is a modern western dressed up as a crime film. It’s all about the conflict between good and evil. But what makes the film so special is how resigned it is. No matter what we do, there’s always going to be evil in the world; evil that doesn’t make sense. And even though we usually start our lives with the belief that understanding will come with age, the opposite usually occurs. The more we live, the less the world makes sense. In addition to this, No Country For Old Men also features some amazing set-pieces. The whole film is wracked with an incredible amount of tension.

2. Zodiac

David Fincher’s most mature film, Zodiac is a bleak serial killer film that leads the characters and audience through several blind alleys. There’s no clean resolution and it’s never 100% clear who the murderer is. But even though most of the ‘action’ happens at the frontend of the film, it always remains fascinating viewing. This isn’t a film about a killer and the killer being brought to justice. It’s a film about obsession and the human need for answers. A man practically ruins his life just to try and find out who a serial killer is. One scene beautifully illustrates his plight – a San Francisco skyscraper gets built and the landscape of the city changes as the man remains locked in the past. Without answers, he can’t move forward and without moving forward he can’t hope to live a meaningful life. He’s as much a victim of this killer as anyone.

1. Gomorrah

The complete opposite of most gangster films, Gomorrah doesn’t have a single shred of glamour. The people here are horrible, rotten individuals and the film has none of the sheen of a Scorsese or Coppolla epic. Instead it makes for grim, depressing viewing – the people here are caught in the web of organised crime and there’s no way out. Split into different stories, the most captivating is that of two young bozos who steal some mafia guns. Filled with dreams of Scarface and the glory of a violent death, they exemplify everything that is wrong with the movie-filled conception of what it is to be a gangster. Gangsters aren’t glamorous and they’re not people to emulate. They’re rotten lowlifes who don’t value human life and who worship greed. Their lives are cheap and disposable. Another excellent thread is the one that deals with a corrupt businessman who dumps toxic waste onto a future building site. Now Naples is literally a toxic waste dump instead of just being a metaphorical one.

Five Worst Crime Films

5. Gone Baby Gone

A promising beginning soon gives way to utter nonsense as a conspiracy concerning the kidnapping of a young girl unfolds. The twists and turns are completely ridiculous and don’t feel organic at all. I mean, an apparently benevolent police chief who turns out to be a bastard who kidnaps children. This is schlocky film bullshit of the highest order.

4. Cassandra’s Dream

With the brilliant Crimes and Misdemeanours, Woody Allen has proved that he can make an excellent crime movie. Sadly, though, with Match Point and Cassandra’s Dream, his touch deserted him. Both are fairly awful experiences, with Cassandra’s Dream being the worst of the two. Starring Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell as two fuckwit brothers, they’re lured into killing a poor sap by their malevolent uncle. It’s painful to watch McGregor and Farrell struggling to pull off a convincing London accent and both characters are Forrest Gump stupid. Therefore the supposed tragic ending ends up being unintentionally hilarious.

3. The Boondock Saints

An inept film in every regard, The Boondock Saints features some of the most abysmal writing and directing known to man. The structure of the film basically revolves around Willem Defoe twatting about at a crime scene and firing his fingers like guns as we get to see the crime replayed to us. If it were done once, it would be tolerable, but its not. And then you have the central characters. All of them are reprehensible wankers but we’re somehow supposed to look up to them. Plus they slaughter loads of people in the name of god. Fuck these arseholes, fuck this film and fuck the cult that has sprung up around it.

2. Base-moi

Kind of like Natural Born Killers with French lesbians. And like that film, it’s utter shit. Grannies give blow-jobs and a man gets a gun rammed up his arse. It’s another one of those murderous lovers on the run films that had me wishing that I could walk into the film with a gun and kill the characters just so that I could end the pain.

1. Get Carter

I can understand the desire to remake Get Carter. Mike Hodge’s seminal gangster film, while quintessentially British, is easily translatable. It really shouldn’t be that hard to update it and transport it to America. But sadly, the filmmakers here change everything about the film that makes it unique. They take an incredibly tough film and try and make it audience friendly. It’s a watered down version of Get Carter. And the casting of Stallone is a stupid decision. Carter isn’t meant to be a beefcake. He’s supposed to survive with his intelligence and ruthlessness. Basically you’ve taken a cobra and turned him into a pitbull. And even worse, this pitbull has had all its teeth removed and they’ve put a muzzle on it. It’s a textbook example of how not to do a remake.

Films of the Decade: Adventure

2010-02-05T00:43:00.005Z

Top Five Adventure Films

5. Gladiator

Sword and sandals epics have always been a guilty pleasure of mine. I love Spartacus and Ben Hur, and I even managed to derive a very meagre amount of enjoyment out of Cleopatra. Therefore I was delighted when Gladiator came around. I was hoping that it would kick ass and thankfully it did. With a big burly lump of man meat called Russell Crowe killing people in a very bloody fashion while wearing a skirt, it was kind of hard to go wrong.

4. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King

While a fine film in its own right, The Return of the King, for my money, is the weakest of the trilogy. The film’s major weakness is the size of the final battle sequence. It becomes unrelenting and tiring. Battle fatigue quickly sets in. The rest, though, is excellent. In particular, I love the sequence with Shelob and the scaling of Mount Doom. The latter gives the movie the epic quality that millions of trolls fighting a huge CGI battle can’t. And people might criticise the final act for going on too long and for being too teary-eyed (look at those bouncing hobbits!), but I think Jackson gets it spot on. You’ve spent so long with these characters that you can’t just quickly say goodbye to them. You need a proper resolution. And thankfully Jackson provides that.

3. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers

The Two Towers has one major flaw. Those goddamn trees. If it wasn’t for that, it would be able to challenge The Fellowship of the Ring as the best film in the trilogy. As it stands, though, it’s a wonderful piece of work. Gollum is magnificently realised and the final battle sequence is far better than the one in The Return of the King.

2. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

Easily the best film in the trilogy, The Fellowship of the Ring raised the bar for the rest of the series – a standard that Peter Jackson wasn’t quite able to maintain. One of the reasons it’s my favourite is that it’s the only film where the Fellowship are together. Consequently there’s a lot of room for internal conflict within the group. Also the story isn’t as fragmented as the rest. In the subsequent films, there are always story threads that I preferred over the rest. For instance, I would always lose a little interest whenever those goddamn trees would turn up. But here you just have concentrated awesomeness. And the film is also a lot more atmospheric and scary than the rest. The Ring Wraiths are incredibly spooky here – a quality they lose the second they start flying on weird lizard things. And the prologue is the best thing in the entire series.

1. Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World

What could have been a very routine adventure movie is elevated by Peter Weir. Yes there are plentiful thrills and spills (all of which are expertly directed), but it’s the friendship between Russell Crowe and Paul Bettany’s characters that allows the film to develop into something more meaningful. Both representing opposite points of view, they’re somehow able to find a common ground. It’s a film of subtle pleasures, with the highlight being a trip to the Galapagos Islands. I also have to point out the excellent effects work. You hardly even notice the CGI, which is surely the highest compliment you can give the visual effects department – rather than look fake and phoney, they manage to make everything look like a Turner painting.

Five Worst Adventure Films

5. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

I was tentatively excited about the new Indiana Jones film. I mean, I love Indy, but Harrison Ford is ancient and George Lucas is a fat-necked fuck up. But with Spielberg at the helm, how bad could it be? Fucking awful was the answer. With gophers, aliens, refrigerators and idiots swinging with monkeys, Lucas and Spielberg managed to take a giant dump in Indy’s fedora and then smash it on his head. Painful to watch.

4. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone

I haven’t read any of the books and so therefore I went into the movie with an open mind. But what an irredeemably dull film this was. It was all set-up and no pay off. I get that there’s a bigger story that they’re trying to build, but if a film doesn’t work in a self-contained way, then the bigger story is pointless. Honestly, I think that every line in this film is exposition. There was absolutely no depth to the piece – there are no layers. And the acting from the children is atrocious. Shove those wands up your arses.

3. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest

Pirates of the Caribbean fell into the same trap as The Matrix. They took an enjoyable first film and then decided to get all po-faced about everything. Suddenly the filmmakers take the material seriously and want to build a ‘mythology’. But rather than laughs and enjoyable hijinks, we get tedious squid-faced characters and a scene concerning an incomprehensible board game that seems to go on forever. On the plus side, Keira Knightley looks good as a boy sailor. For a brief time I felt like a drooling, paedophilic old seadog that wanted to make a shipmate walk the plank…which is the only compliment I can give this film.

2. The Golden Compass

The book was pretty poor, but the film is far worse. It tinkers idiotically with the chronology of events and cuts the ending short of where the novel ended. Both my wife and I looked at one another once the credits begun, not believing that they’d decided to end the movie on such an anti-climatic note. There really aren’t any redeeming features to the film and it’s not surprising that they haven’t adapted the other two novels. They really fucked up the chance to create a franchise here.

1. Lara Croft: Tomb Raider

A lame attempt to make a female Indiana Jones, Tomb Raider is a charmless, feckless piece of shit. The story is meaningless, the action is completely over the top and Angelina Jolie is uncomfortable as the heroine. She pouts and she preens but she doesn’t exude an ounce of believability. Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones exuded toughness and world weariness. For all the fantastical elements of the films, you always believed in him. Angelina Jolie, though, is just pretending to be an action hero. It’s all an act. And for the teenage boy audience that the film is aiming at, it’s a relentless tease. It’s all side boob and no nipple. If you’re not going to give us anything else (like a good script or stunning action sequences) at least give us some nipple. Fuckers.

Films of the Decade: Action

2010-01-15T04:24:00.005Z

Top Five Action Films

5. Rambo

A joyous splatter fest where bad guys get eviscerated by an old man on growth hormone. I don’t know what bit I enjoyed the most. The bit where the man got his throat ripped out, the bit where a group of soldiers got splattered at point blank range by a truck-mounted .50 calibre machine gun, or the bit where a devout Christian started smashing bad guys with rocks. It’s action porn and I have a stonking hard-on.

4. Crank: High Voltage

You either appreciate the crazy genius of Crank or you don’t. Me, personally, I think the Crank films are great. And somehow Crank: High Voltage manages to improve upon the first. It’s stranger, it’s funnier and it’s more surreal. One of my favourite scenes is when a fight between Chev and a bad guy, for no reason, turns into a fake monster battle with actors fighting on an undersized set like they’re Godzilla and Mothra. It’s brilliant. I also love the final battle where we’re confronted with a bad guy who is just a head in a tank that can only say, ‘Fuck you, Chelios!’ The film literally had me hugging myself, so in tune is it with my own warped sense of humour.

3. The Bourne Supremacy

Some people think that the Bourne series has ruined action films. They can’t handle the jagged camerawork and editing in the fight scenes. And maybe they have a point. Lots of subsequent films have tried to ape the Bourne films and have failed. Hell, even Christopher Nolan copied them in Batman Begins with occasionally less than spectacular results. But the reason that the Bourne films have been so influential is because the action works spectacularly well. It’s not Paul Greengrass’ fault that other directors haven’t adopted his style as successfully. And I think that Supremacy is the series’ highpoint. The car chase, in particular, is magnificent.

2. Kill Bill: Volume One

Admittedly, I’d always take Charles Bronson over Bruce Lee (squinty-eyed, monosyllabic death machine versus charismatic, good-looking, lethal martial artist? Pur-lease: watching ‘punks’ getting blown away will always be more entertaining than athletes getting kicked in the head). Therefore I’m not really the target audience for Quentin Tarantino’s film. But still, Kill Bill is so crazy and so much fun, that I ended up loving every bloody second of it. Watching people have limbs severed and eyes gouged out has never been so entertaining. And the film ends on a great cliffhanger. Too bad that Volume Two wasn’t quite as good as Volume One. But still, even that film has its moments – Thurman fighting her way out of a casket and Michael Madsen getting poisoned by a snake being the highlights.

1. Casino Royale

After the last few dreadful Brosnan films, Bond was in desperate need of reinvention. Cue then lots of bitching and moaning when the Bond producers had the audacity to hire a blonde geezer. The franchise is doomed! Thankfully these idiots were proved wrong. Casino Royale is a colossal return to form for 007 and Daniel Craig is one of the best Bonds. Tough, smart and with a body that would have even the straightest man questioning his sexuality, he lends an air of believability to a series that was last seen not just flirting with the ridiculous, but fucking it hard and deep with invisible cars and CGI parasailing. And sure the film owes a slight debt to the Bourne series for the grit of the fight scenes, but who would win in a fight? Come on, Bond would be sipping a Martini while Jason Bourne nursed his broken ribs while crying about his broken brain (who am I? What’s Treadstone?). Plus the torture scene is awesome, and not just because Daniel Craig has buttocks that could crack a Brazil nut.

Five Worst Action Films

5. 300

Now I usually get a lot of guilty pleasure out of ridiculously macho action films, but 300 isn’t one of them. 300 is so relentlessly macho that it feels like a teenage cock is being thrust in your face – no matter how hard you swat it away, it keeps twanging back in your mush. The scene that positively had my eyes bugging out of my head is when the Spartans celebrate enemy ships crashing on the rocks. The Spartans celebrate in slow motion as throbbing music plays and as rain hammers down on them. But the celebrations are so homoerotic and the droplets look so thick and white that they almost resemble ejaculate – it’s like they’re at some Bukkake party and they’re having the time of their lives.

4. Troy

From one homoerotic sword and sandals epic to another. Troy could have been a great film but they decided to cast Brad Pitt as Achilles and Orlando Bloom as Paris. The latter casting decision is the most offensive, as at least Pitt is capable of turning in a good performance if he’s cast in the right sort of film. But to see the Trojan War started by this wet blanket is painful to watch. And then you have to endure Brian Cox hamming his brains out with the weirdest wig ever seen in cinema. The only highlight is the fight between Hector and Achilles. It’s an excellent sequence. The rest is dire nonsense.

3. Die Another Day

Possibly the worst Bond film since Diamonds Are Forever. Or at least since Moonraker. Die Another Day not only features the smarmiest, most annoying villain in Bond history, but it also has an invisible car, wretched CGI, and perhaps most heinously, a cameo from Madonna. Thank fuck for Daniel Craig.

2. Pearl Harbor

Part romance, part giant dump on history, at heart Pearl Harbor is a knuckleheaded action film. Sneaky Japs attack loudmouth Yanks and a man with a horseface manages to extract some small measure of revenge. And then we have the pointless addition of the Doolittle Raid, just to remind the rednecks that the Americans didn't just crawl into a hole after getting sneak attacked. Never before have I wished that the Japanese won the Pacific War, but here I was rooting for them all the way. Every American in this film is a wretched arsehole. And the scenes where Kate Beckinsale lolls about on a beach as she vomits some treacly bullshit about sunsets and kittens had me trying to eat myself feet first.

1. Driven

An attempt at Rocky on four wheels that backfires badly. The action is a CGI mess (the crashes are moronic flights of fancy that could never happen in real life) and the story is juvenile love triangle bullshit. But the most heinous thing is that there’s a scene where Stallone races his CART car through the streets without a crash helmet on. And yes, there’s a bit where he drives the car under a juggernaut’s trailer and doesn’t behead himself because the car is so close to the ground. Seriously, the creepy Stallone film with the arm wrestling was better than this. Sure that movie had a Lolita-esque paedo vibe about it, but at least it didn’t feature a racing car being propelled into the air before hurtling into a lake whilst in flames.

Films of the Decade: Comedies

2010-01-07T06:02:00.003Z

Top Five Comedies

5. Burn After Reading

Similar in tone to The Big Lebowski, Burn After Reading isn’t the equal of that comic masterpiece but it’s still fucking hilarious. Again it’s a Coen Brothers film that focuses on a group of imbeciles. Nearly all the people here are colossal idiots. For instance, the protagonist wants money for cosmetic surgery and then goes along with a blackmail scam so that she can pay for the work. It’s a scheme that only a moron could come up with and of course little good comes of it. Sure the woman eventually gets the money for her surgery but lots of people have to die for it to happen. It just shows that if you go after your dream with enough zeal, you can accomplish anything. It doesn’t matter if you’re a fuckwit. (Btw – Clooney’s fuck seat seems poorly engineered. Would it really hit the right spots?)

4. 24 Hour Party People

I was always going to be partial to this, seeing as late 80s/early 90s Manchester is one of my favourite music scenes. After all, it gave birth to the best band that ever walked the planet – The Stone Roses. Alas, they only briefly get a mention in this film, but the movie is still comic gold. It manages to capture all the madness and stupidity of the era, and also some of the genius. A lot of the people the film portrays are clowns (the Happy Mondays and Tony Wilson in particular), but they still managed to make some great music. And there’s also a wonderfully naive/idiotic ethos to Factory Records (Tony Wilson’s label) – he gives his artists all the power and half of the money. As you’d expect, this is a recipe for disaster. But what a magnificent disaster it is.

3. The Royal Tenenbaums

Wes Anderson didn’t cover himself with glory when he made The Darjeeling Limited, but The Royal Tenebaums is a great example of his talent. Kind of like a Salinger book brought to life, it’s a bittersweet tale of broken dreams and failed expectations. All of the prodigies here are colossal fuck ups and there’s a lot of humour to be mined in their exploits. But the reason that I like the film so much is because it has a huge heart. As opposed to The Darjeeling Limited, these are people that you come to care about. The film has an emotional weight that is missing from most of Anderson’s oeuvre.

2. Adaptation

At the beginning of Adaptation, a Nicolas Cage-shaped Charlie Kaufman says that he doesn’t want to ruin the adaptation of a novel by giving into Hollywood convention. He doesn’t want there to be car chases or lessons learned. This would be untrue to the source material. By the end though, because of his crippling writer’s block, this all happens. There’s action and there are hokey life lessons. It’s a wonderfully inventive and amusing way of portraying a writer’s despair – almost every writer wants to be original but so few have the ability. In light of this it’s easy to fall for tired clichés, something that this film does to marvellous effect.

1. In the Loop

One of the smartest films of the decade, In the Loop is also hilarious. It deals with an obscure British minister who makes a small slip in a radio interview (he says that a war in the Middle East is ‘unforeseeable’). The result of this is that he gets bollocked by the Prime Minister’s enforcer Malcolm Tucker but he also gets invited to Washington where he stars as a pawn in an international game of political shenanigans. The use of language and the twisted motivations all feel unnervingly realistic and Malcolm Tucker, the Prime Minister’s Scottish Rottweiler, is one of comedy’s most fantastic creations. Full-mouthed and bad tempered, he has a piece of everyone’s arse, even James Gandolfini’s American general. But my favourite line comes right at the beginning when Tucker is laying into a female civil servant. ‘Does that not fit within your purview, Marie Antoinette? Why don’t you just scuttle back off to Cranford and play around with your tea and your cakes and your fucking horse cocks. Let them eat cock!’ Brilliant!

Five Worst Comedies

5. Jersey Girl

J-Lo dies (yay!) and Ben Affleck becomes a single father to a sickeningly cute child. Oh, what’s that? I hear some life lessons skipping round the corner… Would you believe it, Affleck becomes a selfish father. He’s much more focused on his job as a publicist than he is on his job as a dad. However, Affleck’s daughter isn’t going to accept this. She bullies her father into continuing his aimless existence. Apparently there’s nobility in poverty. Careers are something to be suspicious of. And so Affleck ends up caving in. It’s supposed to be heart-warming, but you might as well be watching a movie about a little girl cutting her daddy’s testicles off. Choppy-choppy your pee-pee (and balls)!

4. Bridget Jones’s Diary

Oh look, Renee Zelwegger does fat! Isn’t she brave? Fuck off! She’s only fat if you’re regularly puking your lettuce leaf and rice crackers up because you’re ashamed of the caloric intake you’re ingesting. God, isn’t Bridget Jones the exact type of woman that every man avoids? Self-loathing and narcissistic, she’s only good company if you can deeply identify with her insane need to judge the worth of her life entirely on the size of her bum and whether she’s in a relationship or not. Please, send her to the dole office. Maybe if she’s unemployed she’ll eat less pies, lose some weight and stop writing her fucking diary.

3. Maybe Baby

A depressing tale of marital sex. Here we have a couple who are desperate to have a baby and as a consequence every session revolves around their desire to have a wee ankle biter. In one hideous moment the wife even phones the husband to tell him that her ‘eggs’ are done and that he should come round and screw her. Could you think of a bigger turn off than to have schedules and charts and ovulation dictating your sex life? It also doesn’t help that the couple here are smug middle-aged cunts. Yes it must be horrible not to be able to have a child if you really, really desire it, but must the people here be so obnoxious? There’s one bit where the wife keeps a journal: ‘Keeping a journal certainly has helped me. Whenever I want to cry I just write down my thoughts. The only problem is that when I write down my thoughts I just want to cry.’ What a horrible catch 22. But the worst thing is that the couple splits up and the woman gets impregnated by some actor. The husband then forgives the woman and says that he’ll bring the child up as his own. Pussy-whipped fool.

2. You Got Served

Is this even technically a comedy? I think it’s supposed to be one. But then again, maybe it’s supposed to be a drama. It’s hard to tell, so shit is this abortion of a film. You Got Served concerns a couple of numbskulls who want to open a recording studio. They decide to fund it by winning dancing competitions. Holy shit, the dance scenes are atrocious. How many times can you watch someone spinning on their head or doing the robot before you decide it’s a good idea to impale yourself on the nearest shish kebab skewer? Even worse than this, though, is the middle class obsession with ‘street’. The kids here live in a very comfortable home and yet they’re obsessed with the streets. Yeah, dance offs are how they settle things in the hood. Word life!

1. Gigli

Believe it or not, this is actually the second time in cinema that horseface Ben Affleck has converted a lesbian into a straight woman. The first time occurred in the execrable Chasing Amy. Here though things are a lot worse. Affleck shacks up with a lesbian Mafia problem solver (yeah, I’m not kidding) and then proceeds to be emasculated by her. Marvellous! Oh, and did I mention that the film features a half-wit that allows the characters to gain important life lessons? Fuck me running.

Films of the Decade: Documentaries

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I almost made this list a top ten. Jesus Camp, Capturing the Friedmans, Lost in La Mancha, Sicko, Of Time in the City, Overnight and In the Shadow of the Moon are all amazing documentaries worthy of praise. But these are the ones that I liked best.

Top Five Documentaries

5. Metallica: Some Kind of Monster

Who would have thought that the members of Metallica would be such giant pussies? But as this documentary shows, they act and behave like a bunch of emos, squabbling and bitching around a table as they talk to their therapist. It’s a fascinating insight into band dynamics and quite shocking, too. It’s like This is Spinal Tap come to life. By the way, the funniest moment is when the band is trying to get rid of their therapist. They try and bring him down gently but he tells them that he’s moving closer to them so that they can have more therapy. The deluded son of a bitch almost sees himself as a member of the band – you can almost see the dollar signs in his eyes as he pictures an easy gig that will go on forever.

4. Man on Wire

Part documentary, part heist movie, the tale of Philippe Petit and his walk between the Twin Towers is superbly realised. It has tension, it has laughs and it has lots of emotion – the walk itself is amazingly filmed; in the absence of any film or video, the walk is told through pictures, narration and music. And somehow the lack of video allows the act to take on an added dimension. It makes it bigger, grander and more unearthly. You have to pinch yourself that this actually happened. But it just shows how marvellous human obsession can be – how amazing people can perform the most wondrous acts. Petit wasn’t saying anything with his walk. He just did it because the buildings were there and because he wanted to do it. It’s as simple as that. But it’s also a whole lot more complicated, and Man on Wire captures that contradiction perfectly.

3. The Bridge

A film that forces us to confront the taboo subject of suicide. In The Bridge we get to see people jump from the Golden Gate Bridge to their death. The camera doesn’t pan away and the film doesn’t cut at the last second. We see everything. Therefore we get to see how quick and how violent these acts are. They’re over in a few seconds. But the film isn’t about titillation. Through interviews it forces us to get in the heads of the jumpers. These are people. These are people who think that this is the solution to their problems. And to hear what they’ve been through, you’re compelled to look and listen rather than to turn away.

2. Grizzly Man

Most people would avoid being in close proximity to bears. Not Timothy Treadwell. He decided to make friends with them and to record his encounters and thoughts. What follows makes for fascinating viewing. On the one hand you admire Treadwell for surviving so long in the wilderness but on the other you have to admit that he’s batshit crazy. He gives all the bears cuddly names and he gives them human emotions. Treadwell is obviously a damaged individual who is seeking refuge with wild animals. And for a time it works. They save him from himself (he’s an alcoholic). But eventually his luck runs out and his salvation destroys him. It’s a sad, funny, pathetic, inspiring story.

1. Touching the Void

The last place you want to break a leg is on a mountain. But this is what happens to Joe Simpson. During the descent on an Andean mountain he breaks a limb and then faces an unforgiving struggle to survive. At first his climbing partner helps him down bit by bit by belaying him (he’s basically slid down the side of the mountain on a length of rope as his partner holds on). But when Joe falls over an edge of a precipice, his friend faces a stark decision. Hold on and be pulled off the side of the mountain, or cut the rope and save himself. Rather than take two lives, he decides to cut the rope and subject Joe to almost certain death. But Joe doesn’t die. With a broken leg he falls into a crevasse. Here most people would wither and die. But Joe isn’t any ordinary person. He finds a way out and slowly begins his descent down the mountain. Touching the Void is as good as any documentary as I’ve seen. Honest, powerful and full of emotion, it’s a wrenching journey. The last few moments, as Joe describes his descent into delirium, never fail to get to me. His simple desire not to die alone and his unwavering belief that there’s no god to rescue him are what drive him to keep going. The power of the human spirit shown here is amazing.

Films of the Decade: Horror

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Torture movies, zombies and vampires came to dominate the horror genre this decade, taking over from the teen slasher films that were in vogue at the end of the 90s. While the zombie trend was pleasing, producing a handful of decent films, the torture movies produced the Saw franchise and a couple of Hostel flicks. These films tried so hard but achieved so little. When it’s all there on the screen and no time has been taken to develop characters with more than one dimension, it’s hard to feel anything but contempt.

Top Five Horror

5. From Hell

The accents are terrible and Heather Graham is woefully miscast as an Irish prostitute, but From Hell is still an excellent film. The photography, the set design and the atmosphere are incredible, and Ian Holm is superb as the Ripper. His performance (along with Robbie Coltrane’s) manages to erase the syrupy ending and some of the less successful performances.

4. The Mist

A great idea magnificently executed – a mysterious mist descends upon a town and a group of people hole up in a supermarket; bugs then emerge from the fog and attack. What follows is a test of nerves and spirit – some of the group descend into aggressive religiosity while others try to rationally find a solution to their predicament. It’s yet another horror film that shows that people are the biggest monsters of all. Oh, and the bleak ending is a killer.

3. 28 Days Later

There are many reasons why 28 Days Later shouldn’t be as successful as it is – some clunky writing and shaky performances being the main examples – but somehow the whole film comes together as a marvellous whole. It’s gritty, it’s frightening and it has characters you care about. It’s the work of one of Britain’s most versatile directors firing on all cylinders.

2. Let the Right One In

Fuck Edward and Bella in their nubile, little arses. Let the Right One In is the vampire film of the decade. About a young boy who unknowingly befriends a bloodsucker, it manages to juggle sweetness, humour and horror with expert skill.

1. Audition

Audition is a slow burner. It begins as the rather sedate story of a widower looking for a new bride. With the help of a filmmaker friend, the man sets up a series of ‘auditions’. Through this he finds a beautiful young woman. However, she’s very quiet. She seems like she’s holding something back. Not giving a damn about this, the widower falls in love with her, not realising that she’s the sort of woman who likes to keep men in sacks. There then follows an excruciating torture sequence. Pitch black with lots of twisted psychology, it works on all sorts of levels that films like Saw and Hostel could only dream of.

Five Worst Horror

5. The Cell

I guess to enjoy this film you need to like the visuals, so integral are they to the fabric of the film. Personally, I thought they were awful. It was like watching a Madonna video that went on for a couple of hours. All the attempts to be kinky and edgy are more amusing than chilling. And then the clichéd ways that try to add depth to the killer. Oh no, he was abused. Oh yes, there is a little bit of good in him but he’s too damaged. Maybe if it didn’t feel like you were watching MTV and if the lead was a better actress than J-Lo and if you didn’t have the silly virtual reality concept and if you genuinely explored the fractured mind of a psychopath without silly gimmicks and music video visuals, then you could have a decent film on your hands. As it stands it’s a pretty shitty entry in the serial killer canon.

4. Saw

A cheap knock off of Seven that spawned a monster of a franchise. The film, quite simply, is awful. Camp and hysterical, it’s so overripe that even the most horrific scenarios are rich with humour. Just take the scene where Cary Elwes has to hack his own leg off. It’s a laugh riot (‘You have to die. I’m sowwy. My family’). And then you have Danny Glover running about and shouting like a lunatic, and a villain who seems remarkably indestructible for a cancer patient. None of it is believable and none of it is scary.

3. The Happening

Another so-called horror film that plays as a comedy. People suddenly start killing themselves for no reason. My favourite is when a man lies down so that a lawnmower can run over him. Hil-arious. But again it’s another M Night film with a moronic twist. So what caused this? Twas the trees. Quick, run away! Catch a rocketship to Mars! The leaves! The branches! The horrible, fucking branches! Oh how we’ve raped Mother Nature. We’re paying for it now with hair pins in the neck and lawnmowers on the back. We’re sorry for the polar ice caps!

2. Hostel

Horny American teenagers with no brains turn up at a hostel expecting to get snatch aplenty and then get tortured to death by sadistic businessmen. The film has no suspense and no terror, and that’s because the characters are all so irredeemably stupid. So when they eventually get abused, it’s hard to care or to feel frightened for them. It’s just graphic violence for the sake of graphic violence, and as a consequence the film is deathly dull.

1. Dreamcatcher

An anal obsessed horror film that features yet more aliens that want to explore our buttholes. But even though it must be terrible to sit on a toilet and have a gen-u-ine alien burst from your colon, must it really look like a teeth-filled vagina worm? Is the film trying to say something as the alien worm munches on the cock of a urinating man? Is it an anti-gay polemic (most of the men in the film seem obsessed with their privates, keep away from women and like to write the names of boys in the snow as they piss – are the alien vagina worms annoyed that these men will never procreate)? Or is it just a dumb, nonsensical, trashy, splatter fest? It’s probably the latter. Oh and did I mention that one of the lead characters gets possessed by an alien and then suddenly begins talking with a posh English accent? Yes, because that’s what you fucking do when you get possessed by a motherfucking alien. You start talking like Prince Charles! Aaaargghh! [head explodes]