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.