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.

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.