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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