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...

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.

>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.

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.

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.

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.'

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.