The End

OK, so the urge to tell the world what I think of every film I see has passed, to be more accurate it probably passed about 8 months ago, but I can be stubborn about these things. At some point in the near future these posts will be integrated into my main weblog and then this page and its associated feeds will disappear.

bye.

PS you should definately go and see Eastern Promises, best film this year I'd say.

Hellboy

Entertaining enough (I managed to stay awake through it this time) but nothing outstanding. Some nice visual touches (the pastiches of classic Fantastic Four covers pressed all the right geek buttons) but I think this is my least favourite of Del Torro's films. Blade 2 is a better comic book film. And the other are just plain better.

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Million Dolar Baby

Really really didn't deserve to win Oscars. A really mediocre film, the first half is competent sports movie then tat ends and there's a whole other film that thinks it's dealing with difficult moral questions but is about as black and white as it gets. In fact throughout the film eschews any subtleties or shades of grey. That's not to say it's terrible, Clint Eastwood is clearly a solid director, solid and unadventurous a kind of meat and two veg safe pair of hands that the studios love c.f. Ron Howard. And Hilary Swank earns her money, but the whole affair is so tiresomely worthy in a very Hollywood way.

I've noticed recently I've been saying Hollywood as if that's a bad thing, Hollywood is obviously where the vast majority of my favourite films get made, or at least get funded and it annoys me when people look down on American films as somehow inherently inferior to e.g. French cinema (esp. as French cinema is so often so bad). So youknow, just saying when I say Hollywood it's not a total diss in fact it's normally that Hollywood films can be more average than other films. Probably because there's so many of them so they kind of define the average. Anyway, enough.

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Goodbye Lenin

Better late than never... I really liked this. The nostalgia for east Berlin is kind of odd but it's mostly a kind of nostalgia for a kind of consumer innocence and a simpler life rather than any kind of political thing. Anyway, it was too long ago for me to remember much more than that vague impression.As I say I really enjoyed it.

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Re-Animator

Based on HP Lovecraft's 'Herbert West Reanimator' the director sensibly plays fast and loose with the rather dull source material. Jeffrey Comb's Herbert West is the highlight undoubted highlight a foretaste of his show stealing roll in The Frighteners.

Stuart Gordon has a new Re-Animator film coming out next year and I'm quite looking forward to it. I has West reprising the central roll and also has William H Macy as the US president, well sounds good to me anyway.

A few things struck me. 1. The film is by many measures terrible 2. the special effects are really good 3. They were much more sparing with music in the 80s 4. The title sequence is cool 4. For a film which attempts to breach the accepted standards of good taste on a regular basis (severed head cunnilingus?) it's remarkably coy about using the F word.

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Knocked Up

Not as good as some reviews have suggested, but far better than the title suggest. A superior romcom that perfectly walks the line between the rom and com.

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American Splendor

Not sure the quirks really work 100%, but well done for trying.

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The Bourne Ultimatum

Paul Greengrass and his shaky camerawork return for the final (yeah right) installment of the Bourne series. Better than the second film, maybe equally as good as the first. More wintery Northern European settings, more fighing, more running etc.

There's a cool bit set in Waterloo station which involves Paddy Constantine.

The Bourne films are easily the best action franchise of the last 5-10 years.

One of the things I really like about the Bourne films is how spare they are, you never see Jason on a plane or really any other type of transport unless he's running away or doing some other action stuff. It's like early William Gibson books, jumping from one scene to the next London, Madrid, Tangiers, the connective tissue stripped right back.

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Ocean's Eleven

Just really average, thoughtless, bland hollywood fare.

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Tales form Earthsea

On one level this is a perfectly passable piece of anime. Unfortunately it's got the Earthsea license and so I'm watching it and comparing it to some of my favourite books. On the one hand this engenders a hell of a lot of goodwill, on the other there's a lot to live up to. The films main problem is, as Le Guin herself has said

Much of it was ... incoherent. This may be because I kept trying to find and follow the story of my books while watching an entirely different story, confusingly enacted by people with the same names as in my story, but with entirely different temperaments, histories, and destinies.

The film just doesn't fit anywhere in the Earthsea chronology or the world that I know. The 'Big Bad' is deeply unimaginative, I mean it's basically Mumm-ra, and where the books have a coherent and deeply thought out reality the film is largely composed of fantasy cliches. There is also a dreadful scene where Tehanu sings a really bad song.

There are some good points: The scenes of the archipelago extending into the distance are beautiful and the film's deliberate and even pace is true to the books particularly when the soundtrack isn't overwhelmed by the vaguely celtic LOTR-esq score. I find myself really wanting to like this film but it's just disappointing. I think this is how big Star Wars fans must have felt after watching the prequels.

Ursula Le Guin's response to the film

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Abigail's Party

It's good but it's very much a play rather than a film.

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Children Of Men

Still great. The main criticism of the film I've heard seems to be that the situation isn't adequately explained. i.e. the idea that everyone's infertile is just too far-fetched. There's not much you can say about that other than to point out that 1. All films esp. science fiction films require you to accept some set of circumstances that aren't fully explained. 2. What do you want some Star Trek style nonsense about DNA degrading or something> and 3.point out that one in seven couples are infertile and the number is increasing, and no one knows why. A doctor who I was talking about it suggested that the situation was analogous to growth rate in bacterial populations.

Anyway, everything about this film is superb from the cinematography and special effects and the subtly rendered background of a world in decline.

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Die Hard 4.0

Die Harderer: A solid, if uninspired addition to the series. The plot deviates somewhat from the standard Die Hard framework i.e. John Maclane isn't trapped, he can walk away at any point wheras int he previous films he had no option. There are no really memorable action set pieces beside the car flying into a helicopter which appears in the trailer, but some funny one liners push the whole thing above the action movie mean ("did you see that?" "I did that" etc.).

It's a bit of a barren summer for blockbusters, unimaginative sequels, tired franchises etc. the only point of light on the hollywood mega-budget horizon is the third and (supposedly) final Jason Bourne film.

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Red Road

One of those relentlessly bleak British films that Charlie Brooker so memorably caricatured as "Concrete and Piss". Jackie a CCTV operator starts stalking an ex-con around the tower blocks of Glasgow. Without much dialogue the film gradually reveals her motives, slowly building a complex picture of a very real character. All the while she finds out more about her target, he changes from a picture on a fuzzy surveilance screen into a real person leading Jackie to question her actions. All this is handled with skill and assurance and the camera work is breath takingly bleak, but the film didn't quite work for me, it felt more like a TV drama than a cinematic experience. Worth a watch if your in the mood for something depressing though.

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Harry Potter: and the Order of the Phoenix

Solidly entertaining, though it didn't seem to have an ending, it just kind of stopped.

Why don't the bad guys just attack during the summer hollidays?

Not as dark as either 3 or 4 in the series in spite of the story. 3 remains my favourite.


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13 Tzameti

It's very slick and sharply focussed and the tension/ suspense is ratcheted up effectively. It's strange to see the characters who all look like they're straight out of a Godard film getting into modern cars and using mobile phones and stuff. Unlike Good Night and Good Luck where the monochrome situates the viewer firmly in the time period and imparts a sense of crystal clear realism, here it serves to distance you from the events and adds a feeling of dislocation, which heightens your association with the out of his depth immigrant protagonist.

Stylistically speaking, the closest point of comparison is probably John Wagners Button Man comic book. A spartan plot, loose class politics allegory and a kind of retro-contemporary setting. That said, Tzameti bizzarely seems to fit more into the sports film template than anything else. True there's no training montage, but the structure of the competition that is the films center piece is pure Rocky.

Also worth noting that if you know nothing about this film when you start watching it you'll probably enjoy it a hell of a lot more than if you've seen the trailer/ box cover both of which are a bit spoilerific.

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Sicko

I find Michael Moore pretty irritating. Whilst I agree that American gun laws are insane and the Bush administration is corrupt and incompetent Moore's documentaries have always seemed to me resort to misrepresentation and exaggeration to make their point. There are bits in Fahrenheit 9/11 where he shows footage of members of the Bush administration shaking hands with people in Arab dress and it's clear that the images are out of context and that the intent is to play to base xenophobic instincts in the audience. The use of emotive music is another problem for me. But I guess I'm just old fashioned expecting documentary film making to aspire to the same standard of impartiality as the news media is (quite rightly) expected to. Moore is a skilled film maker and polemicist, his documentaries have a cinematic quality which his followers, even the excellent Smartest Guys in the Room, have failed to match.

Sicko displays many of its predecessors problems; the smug voice over, the irritating sarcasm, over emotional music and de-contextualised footage are all present. Thing is, whereas with Farenheit 9/11 you get the impression that he's taking a complex set of issues and reducing them to a cartoon, in Sicko the issue at stake is cartoonishly simple: How can the richest country in the world have no social security system? And: Can such a rich country that fails to provide even basic medical provision for all its citizens be considered civilized?

Much of the film is taken up with touring the health care systems of other nations, Canada, the UK, France and Cuba. This was where I was expecting the film to fall apart, but to be honest the portrait of the NHS may be somewhat cursory and rose tinted but I certainly wouldn't describe it as inaccurate. Moore cherry picks the best bits from each country's systems to make his point: "Socialised" medicine is one of the most important achievements of the 20th century. In this case his methods seem to me to be justified. Whilst the NHS isn't perfect, you know that the country would take to the streets if any government tried to dismantle it. And frankly the American people should take to the streets and demand that their government provide them all with health care too. If enough of them see this film then I really think that they might.



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Good Night, and Good Luck

An unusual film. In fact, it feels more like a very well made BBC4 tele-play. There's a sharp economy to the way George Clooney tells the story of CBS journalist Ed Murrow's very public confrontation with Senator Joe McCarthy. It seems like a very real portrayal of the period, everyone smokes all the time and there arene't many people who arent't middle aged white men in the TV industry. The effect of the use of black and white is interesting to consider, does it help to situate the film in it's period or does it act to distance the viewer making what is an incredibly relevant film seem less so? Either way it looks really great.

If you're interested in journalistic ethics or the McCarthy witch-hunts then you're in for a treat, otherwise I suspect the film could come accross as quite cold and functional, it tells the story and then it's over. It's kind of like the anti Lord Of The Rings, which in case you're wondering is a good thing in a film that's based on real events.


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Tell No One

A man's wife is murdered. 8 years later she sends him an email.
That's the hook of Tell No One. It's a pretty effective hook and the process of uncovering the chain of events leading up to this improbable event is an enjoyable ride. That said I couldn't help but feel it's one of those films that operates by making you feel clever for watching it whilst actually being in the business of complicatring what could be quite a straight forward story. The way the convoluted plot revelations are structured seems to be entirely in service of the exhilarating central chase sequence, which is no bad thing because it's a great sequence but it all leads to a bit of a Scooby Doo ending i.e. the guy/girl behind it all reveals everything in the last scene and we find out there was really no way we could have known. Worth a watch even if you end up feeling a bit cheated.

Notes: Continues the proud French cinematic tradition of ordinary chainsmoking late middle aged frenchmen having supermodel wives, see 36 Quai des Orfèvres for a particularly stunning example of this tradition.

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OK, up to date again.

Little Miss Sunshine

If you like kooky Americana then you'll probably like this. Disfunctional family goes ona road trip together and guess what, they all learn something about themselves blah blah blah. Not very funny for a film that's billed by its box as a hilarious comedy. but you know, it's alright.

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Warrior King

Tony Jaa lacks the charisma for the small town boy role. Someone needs to give him a something like Fist of Fury that doesn't require a nice guy. But generally the plot is adequate scaffolding for some strong fight scenes. One in particular, choreographed in a single 10 minute tracking shot, is one of the finest pieces of cinema I've ever seen. For this section alone you should watch this film.

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The Prestige

Nice twisty how dunnit. The audience is deliberately kept confused about the order of events as a kind of patter to distract from the directors main trick. Whilst this kind of behaviour would normally irritate the hell out of me it seems totally apt for a film about the process of magic tricks. The final revelation re. Hugh Jackman's methodology is perhaps one twist too many though.

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Best In Show

Yes, the humour is gentle and yes the plot meanders but this is still top notch observational character comedy, anyone who's seen the taxisdermy documentary Stuff The World will be struck by the similarity in the depictions of strange obsessive worlds.

In my book it's the equal of Spinal Tap and A Mighty Wind.

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A Touch Of Evil

The version I watched was "restored to Orson Welles' vision".

Man I feel like a total philistine but this film was just dull. There was some impressive technical work but the plot swithced between overly predicatble and totally loopy.

Also: Charlton Heston as a Mexican? No!

Valuable sentiment: police work is supposed got be hard, the only place where it's not is in a police state.

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28 Weeks Later

As good as the first one. More a horror film, the plot is flaky in the extreme and I found myself supporting the actinos of the military pretty consistently. Not usual for a zombie film. Maybe it was because the civilians weren't behaving in an even remotely convincing way for survivors of highly contagious plague which had wiped out nearly the entire population of Great Britain, really you just wouldn't try to sneak out of the safe area, they needed to be fire bombed.

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Brick

A nearly successful experiment in genre isomorphism: The tropes of a noirish detective thiller are transposed onto the social structures of a US highschool movie.

The results are good, though appreciation depends to some extent on your understanding of the conventions of the genres.

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O Brother, Where Art Thou?

Really enjoyable. Not the Cohen Brothers at their best (that would be Fargo or Millers crossing for me) but a nice addition to their CV along the quirky lines of The Hudsucker Proxy but with a more serious edge.

Watching it on a TV it didn't hang together quite as well as I remembered from the cinema but only in a small way. The music, produced by the great T Bone Burnett is brilliant and I've been humming it all week.

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Marie Antoinette

There's not much story to speak of here; Marie Anoinette gets married, doesn't enjoy the strictures of the French court but gets used to it and lives a decadent and unreflected life, lots of cake and nice dresses, she does all this to a poorly integrated soundtrack of post-punk pop hits.

So Sofia Coppola has made another film about how terribly difficult it is to be an over-privileged young woman (biographical much?). We never see anything outside a very small world. The script, such as it is, could be lifted straight from a film set in 2006 so what's the point in setting this in France on the cusp of revolution? Well mainly so that Vivienne Westwood can really go to town on the costume designs, undoubtedly the films saviour.

The whole film is infected with the dullness and emptiness of it's characters who the cast largely fail to bring to life. There were points at which I though, "this is supposed to be some comment on celebrity or something" but most of the time such comments are banal and really this is a poorly made film which luckily has some nice costumes in it. Also confirmed my suspicions that Kirsten Dunst really isn't a very good actress.

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This Is England

For me, this is the first must see film of the year. It's one of those films in which the characterisation is so rich, the performances so convincing, and the texture of the society shown so solid and believable that other films just seem flimsy and flat by comparison. It's going to be really hard to view the supposedly dark and gritty Spiderman 3 as anything but candy floss after this.

Basically the story is about 12 year old Shaun who falls in with a bunch of skinheads who offer him a sense of identity and support after the death of his father in the Falklands war. Things turn sour when older skinhead Combo turns up, released from prison, and moves the group towards neo-nazism. Meadow's sympathetic treatment of Combo, who is by any standard a complete bastard, is one of the highlights of the film. In fact I think this is the key to the films greatness; by refusing to treat even the most abhorrent characters as anything but human beings Meadows offers the strongest argument possible against extremism.

This Is England is tremendously socially and politically relevant but that makes it sound a bit dull, it's not, the film is as gripping and emotionally involving as anything I've seen. The obvious points of comparison are Meadows' own earlier films with which This Is England shares a natural feel and a fundamentally optimistic view of human nature, but I was also thinking of Lukas Moodysson's early films, (Show Me Love and particularly Together) showing the inconsistent nature of personal beliefs and the collision between ideology and real life.

Really, you should see this.


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(John Carpenter's) Ghosts of Mars

The easiest way to review this film is probably just to list all the films/books that it rehashes and lifts from, so:
John Carpenter's own older films

• Alien taking on form of human, no one can be trusted - The Thing


• Cops enlist help of dangerous criminal during a siege - Assault on Precinct 13


• Someone who looks like Alice Cooper wandering 'round being chief bad guy in a kind of unspecified way - Prince of Darkness


• Dangerous misty thing - The Fog


• Ice cube's character - Snake Pliskin


• Western tropes set in a different context - Vampires


• Bad Metal Soundtrack - Vampires


• Poor acting - They Live

Others

• People being dismembered by sharp thing - Screamers


• Squad of Tough guy marines - Aliens (etc.)


• Gross out piercing scenes - Return Of The Living Dead 3


• Homosexuality is implied to be the norm - Forever War


• Lots and lots of stuff - Martian Chronicles


• Dangerous criminal can be trusted but then can't be trusted, plus their on an alien planet where something has woken up - Pitch Black


• Structure bookended and interspersed by scenes of a trial where the witness has an impossibly privileged view point - That Startrek episode with captain Pike, (The Menagerie?)


• Gratuitous scenes of Natasha Henstridge in her underwear - All the films she's in.

In spite of all the bad points and the fact that it's chronically derivative it's a pretty engaging film, the battle scenes are dragged out for too long but the rest of it is very tight, hardly any let up in the action. Most surprisingly there are some pretty good ideas in there, though they always take second place to the action.


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CAPalert (severed forearm, many hanging decapitated bodies - repeatedly, ripping the face off of others and wearing as masks,
insane desperation - multiple, adult in underwear)

Election

It's easy to mistake this for a teen high school film but really it's more of a mid-life crisis film as a respected high school teacher Mr Mcallister (Matthew Broderick) painfully and hilariously sets about destroying his life, ably assisted by impossibly ambitious student Tracy Flick (Reese Witherspoon).

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The Lives Of Others

A solitary Stasi officer monitors, through wire taps and hidden microphones a potentially subversive playwright at the behest of his superior who is having an affair with the playwrights girlfriend.

The only character who knows everything that goes on is the observing officer, who comes to sympathise with his subjects, and he has very little direct communication with the other characters lending most of the film a detached air which makes the final act all the more dramatic.

A compelling story and technically adept film making, but I don't think it deserved to win the best foreign film Oscar at the expense of Pan's Labyrinth.

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Dirty Ho

Produced towards the end of the golden age of 70's kung-fu films Dirty Ho, along with 5 Deadly Venoms and Last Hurah For Chivalry, represents the apogee of the Shaw Brothers tradition. Whilst it can't match Last Hurrah's visual style (surely an inspiration for Yimou Zhangs recent epics) or the taught plotting of 5 Deadly Venom, it does offer some of the tightest and most imaginatively choreographed fight scenes this side of Jackie Chan's hey day, all of which take place on sumptuously dressed sets (seeing it on the big screen was great). One thing that really impressed me that's often overlooked is the sound design for the film, the impact noises and incidental synth drones are brilliant giving the final fight in particular a really musical feel, a great sense of rhythm and crescendo.

The plot is nonsense and finishes abruptly after the last fight scene (though it's not as apparently arbitrary as some Shaw Brothers films), not helped by the fact that the print I saw had subtitles which could most charitably be described as functional, but really that's not what these films are for.

[the two guys with moustaches, are having a fight but trying not to let the guy in white know what's going on]

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Toy Story 2

The original is one of my favorite films and I think this might be even better but I'm not sure. The action sequences are more accomplished and the story is probably stronger but I think by including humans (i.e. the collector) in a more central role it loses something.

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George Of The Jungle

Entertaining for children and people who have stinking hangovers, perfectly undemanding viewing.

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The Edukators

An interesting film about a group of friends who protest about the evils of society by breaking into peoples houses and rearranging the furniture. As is often the case with these things though things quickly get out of control and relationships and idealism are tested.

Excellent performances (esp. Julia Jensch who played Eva Braun in Downfall and replaces Franke Potente as Smash Hit's most fanciable German) and a strong script are only vaguely undermined by a bit of a messy finish.

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Crank

Like Speed but with Jason Statham as Keanu Reeves and the bus all rolled into one. Whilst the premise promises to at least be action packed for the majority of the running time the film spectacularly fails to deliver. It starts out monolithically stupid, gets boring about 20 minutes in an never recovers. Very poor.

Interestingly whenever satellite or aerial photography are used we see copyright notices at the bottom of the screen which kind of typifies the general shoddiness of the whole production.

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300

Within the first ten minutes it's established that the Spartans are child abusing thugs but are really tough so that's cool. Soon it turns out that the Persians (in spite of the slavery and stuff) have a much more inclusive attitude towards sexuality (Spartans, pot, kettles, black) and disability. But hey it's based on Frank Miller, you're gonna get some amount of right wing bull shit.

My main problem with the film is that it wasn't crazed enough, Apocalypto had a vaguely right wing subtext but the film is such an extreme trip that it was really worthwhile seeing it in the cinema, a film with a singular (insane) vision. 300 is just an empty headed blockbuster, the blood and gore seem to be reigned in to get a 15 certificate, the sex scene is pure perfunctory channel 5, to invest any greater meaning in the whole thing is to give it too much credit, it's just kind of vacant. How much you like the film is largely down to how much you like oiled up muscle men fighting each other and saying portentous lines, it's alright.

[Seeing it at the I-Max: We had front left seats and everyone on screen was kind of distorted and the film was really obviously projected onto a plane, not sure if it was this or if it was the way the film was shot but the whole thing seemed to have no depth, everything was happening in a kind of 2d vacuum or something]


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Shampoo

Interesting mainly as a kind of historical document, a survey of late 60s values (within very particular sections of society) seen from the mid 70s. It's interesting how little music was used on the sound track, if this were made today Warren Beatty wouldn't be able to move without some pounding 60's rock'n'roll anthem offering some kind of commentary on the action (and beefing up the sales of the accompanying sound track CD). Also, did everybody really just leave their houses unlocked the whole time in 60's Los Angeles?

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Tape

Based on a play and it shows. Thankfully it's an interesting play, exploring subtleties of memory and friendships. The directors (occasionally over active) editing and natural performances from the three cast members elevate the whole thing significantly above the level of one of those televised BBC2 plays they used to show in the 80s. I was quite pleased it never really got as dark as it could have done.

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Bridget Jones's Diary

Easily the best Richard Curtis romantic comedy. Jane Austen's plot does the heavy lifting and watching the film reminded me that Curtis did Black Adder which is really easy to forget during the thoroughly mirthless Notting Hill.

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The Machinist

It's one of those films where you see something happen at the beginning and you're not sure what you're watching. Is it a flash back? A flash forward or what? Then for the next couple of hours you're led around the captivatingly bleak life of Trevor (played by a shockingly emaciated Christian Bale) and you try to put the pieces together to figure what's going on: Why isn't he eating or sleeping? Who's this guy in the red car? Why does the director keep showing us clocks with the time 1:30 on them? I guess Lost fans must spend much of their life in this state of mild bemusement and I think it's designed to make the viewer feel a bit clever without actually requiring much of them. Anyway, every solution you come up with is wrong and the truth, when you learn it, is probably significantly less shocking than some of the scenarios you've managed to cook up in the mean time.

A good point of comparison is Memento but The Machinist isn't that good.

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Transamerica

A pre-op transsexual finds out she has a son and in order to get the letter from her psychiatrist required for her to undergo surgery and , to cut a long story short, she has to go on a road trip across America with him. Everybody learns something and comes out of the experience better.

I spent much of this film wondering about the logic of getting Felicity Huffman to play the role of a man dressed as a woman when they probably could have got a man to do it, but I guess that it helps the viewer to think of her as female as most of the characters do through the film and Huffman's performance is very good.

Anyway, Transamerica suffers from the same thing that a lot of US vaguely indie films do in that it's a bit too mannered. But hey, whilst studiously avoiding being either laugh out loud funny or particularly emotionally engaging it's generally entertaining for the duration and it's hard to dislike the film.

Worth checking out when it inevitably crops up in Film 4's next 'American Misfits' season or whatever.


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Hot Fuzz

Hot shot London cop Simon Pegg is stationed to a sleepy west country village where no crime ever happens and partnered with a moon faced simpleton (Nick Frost). But wait! Perhaps all is not as it seems, and maybe, just maybe the aforementioned moon faced simpleton can teach the city hot shot a thing or two after all...

Of course it's not and of course he can and of course this all leads to a gunfight of heroic proportions that had me humming the Bad Boys II theme tune all the way home.

Sean of the Dead, the team behind Hot Fuzz's previous film, was great, genuinely a horror film and at the same time genuinely a comedy, a difficult balance to get right. While Hot Fuzz doesn't quite get it's own peculiar balancing act spot on, mixing US macho cop drama (Point Break, Bad Boys 2, Die Hard etc) and British small town gothic (Wicker Man and Straw Dogs) is a stroke of genius. The direction and the acting are spot on and there's a genuine affection for and understanding of the films which are parodied, a million miles away from the crass and cynical junk like the Scary Movie series. If I had a problem with the film it's that just about every character will be recognizable to anyone who's watched any British TV over the last 5 years or so, but that's a small thing. If you like guns and/or laughing you should see this film.

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Metallica: Somekind of Monster

I was lead to believe that this was going to be some kind of hilarious and damning documentary exposing Metallica's general buffonery. No such luck. Given that it's paid for and presumably given the green light by the band it was never going to be that (for that kind of thing you should really see Dig).

The film follows Metallica for two years as they spend vast sums of money making quite an ordinary album (albeit a massively successful very ordinary album). The first half hour is positively boring (essentially a Metallica hagiography) but it picks up when the band hire an analyst to help them work through their issues, he hangs around in the background in a slightly sinister manner for the remainder of the film occasionally making himself appear necessary but generally just milking the band for $40,000 a month. So basically interesting but not great and certainly not what the press and publicity led me to believe it was going to be.


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The Adventures Of Prince Achmed

Hailed as the first full length animated feature this film clearly has an important place in cinema history. The technique used is that of traditional shadow theatre mixed with some crude stop frame stuff. The detail of the cut outs and the composition of the scenes are both impressive for the time but were effortlessly superseded by Disney's Snow White a mere 11 years later.

Based on episodes from the Arabian Nights the story is pretty straightforward stuff; sorcerer invents flying horse, contrives to steal princess, prince with aid of Chinese witch and Aladdin rescues princess. The story itself didn't hold my interest (whenever things get tough for our hero the witch comes a long and magically solves any problems) over an hour and a half it's stretched pretty thin and I probably would have switched off had I not been in the middle of a three hour train journey. The problem is, that in spite of the obvious technical accomplishments, this is essentially a special effects film and like any special effects film once that aspect is worn out things quickly get boring. Snow White still gets watched in cinemas today not because of its animation which, whilst it stands the test of time, isn't up to today's standards but because of the story and the design work both of which are brilliantly realised.

Having said that Achmed's soundtrack is good and there's probably some interesting stuff for people interested in the idea of orientalism. But in the end this is an interesting foot note in the history animation.


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Black Book

The stories simple, a Jewish girl falls in love with an SS officer in occupied Holland. Performances are strong and the whole thing looks gorgeous, more film noir or 50s melodrama than the standard post Private Ryan blanched pallet and shaky camera. The film's thoughtful and thought provoking without ever being anything less than superb entertainment(for a whole two and a half hours!). But then this is a Paul Verhoeven film and other people aren't going to see it that way, despite the more traditional setting this is typically divisive stuff.

Even with my predilection for horror/cartoons/sci-fi and other lowbrow/genre films I often place Verhoeven's work firmly in the guilty pleasures category. The lurid mix of sex and violence portrayed in glossy Hollywood style is just so un-reconstructed it's hard not to feel slightly bad about enjoying it. But to me it always seems Verhoeven best stuff is all about this dissonance, making you laugh at something inappropriate or unexpected, taking a scene slightly further than he should in polite company; Black Book pulls of this kind of stuff time after time. As Picasso said; Good taste is the enemy of creativity (or something like that anyway, that's how lazy I've become, I can't even be bothered to Google these things any more) and I think this films is further evidence for truth in that statement.


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The Constant Gardner

Do all films set in Africa have to have, in their closing minutes, a scene of African children jumping and laughing around the camera? On the evidence of this and The Last King of Scotland the answer is yes. The shot in question is obviously taken from a Land Rover or some other motor vehicle moving slowly along an unsurfaced road and should be accompanied by some stirring yet melancholy music, probably slightly ethnic in a kind of generic way. Towards the end the film should slow down poignantly and maybe fade out. The message is that despite all the horror the children are our future, won't you please just think about he children?

Anyway, in spite of this, and a couple of other, shameless plays for our emotions this is a taught thriller with an interesting story behind it. It's reminiscent, in terms of pacing and complexity, of The Spanish Prisoner. My only criticism is that the technical precision of the film leaves the whole thing feels slightly dispassionate, just a bit too clinical, especially when placed next to the directors earlier effort, City of God. This style works brilliantly in the European settings but some how doesn't capture the heat and dust of Kenya.

Aside: Why is it that Latin American directors (I'm thinking of Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men) seem to be able to capture the essence of this country so well whilst our native directors (excepting Shane Meadows) often flounder. The scenes that take place around central London capture the kind of grand sterility of the architecture and the subdued palette brilliantly.

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Grave of the Fireflies

A young boy has to look after his sister after their mother is killed by a US bombing raid towards the end of the second world war. The story is relentlessly tragic, only lightened by closely observed and subtle animation.

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The Last King of Scottland

Another film in which James McAvoy plays a pretty unsympathetic character who the audience is ostensibly supposed to identify with.

Anyway the story is: Dr. James McAvoy goes to Uganda after he's qualified as a doctor to avoid having to work in his fathers practice. When he gets there he has a gratuitous sex scene and then gets employed as Idi Amin's personal physician. Forest Whitaker's performance as the brutal dictator is pretty impressive displaying charisma and crazed psychopathy side by side and totally convincingly. The film moves along nicely and gets the tone about right (though I have to say at points, there's a touch of the BA advert about some of the scenes). There's no flinching from some necessarily horrific scenes towards to the end, but it's hard to feel sympathy for the doctors predicament as he accrues more power with apparently no thought for the consequences or awareness of what's going on in the country around him. I'm guessing this is a weakness of the script rather than the fact that James McAvoy is somehow inherently unsympathetic. Or maybe it's just me.

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Incidentally, what kind of twat would think it's a good idea to make a t-shirt of Idi Amin? Presumably the same kind of twat who'd call their company sweatshop productions with apparently no hint of irony or any suggestion that their shirts aren't made in sweatshops.

Apocalypto

So historically it's nonsense but I don't think anyone with half a brain will have any trouble figuring that one out, though the decision to have the whole thing acted out in Mayan lends a kind of veracity to the proceedings which they certainly don't deserve and don't really need. Add to this some rather dodgy choices of language (a fairly explicit reference to the lords prayer, an implicit connecting of the Mayan civilization with the Jewish religion through a whole load of cues), and the totally in your face notion that these savages had it coming spelled out in foot high letters of the opening quote and well, you get the picture...

On the other hand the film is an intense, muscular, action horror chase film. Echoes of Predator, First Blood, a liberal crimson splattering of Cannibal Holocaust and a surprise homage to Tintin. It's really relentless and gory violence, and the whole thing has a kind hallucinatory intensity about it that you don't see that often in mainstream cinema. It's a real shame that the film's blunt and offensive political subtext prevented me from really getting on board for the ride.


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Touching The Void

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High School Musical

Apparently this film is popular with young children esp. eight year old girls. It's easy to see why, it's very shiny, moves along at a good pace with every scene pushing the story forwards and has un-threatening boys. As E_ pointed out it's pretty much the same basic story as Grease; a couple meet on holiday but the social pressures of high school prevent them from getting it on. Actually, that's not the only thing preventing them from getting it on, in this film their desires are also hampered by twisted neo-christian morality of the film makers (in my mind the film is made by a room full of suited middle aged men, Disney executives with a spreadsheet full of statistics). In spite of the uncomfortable way that the ostensibly under-age characters are sexualized, actual sexual desire or action is totally denied a place in the film, the main characters conspicuously never kiss, not even a chaste peck on the cheek, nothing. This strange state of affairs coupled with the in-human, heavily pro-tooled vocal style which renders all the singers, male and female, all but indistinguishable from one another, leads to the uneasy feeling that you're watching a kind of Stepford high school of perfectly smooth teenagers, blank plastic where the sex organs should be and digital synthesisers instead of lungs.

It's the cinematic equivalent of empty calories, whilst it may shut them up for a couple of hours, children deserve better.


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