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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