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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