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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