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 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 Malkovich. 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 his 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.

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.

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.'

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.

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.

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.

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