Goodfellas - Robert De Niro's eyes

Don't know what got me thinking about this scene this morning, but I suddenly felt the need to remind myself what a great actor Robert De Niro is. In this 30 second clip from Goodfellas Jimmy (De Niro) observes his gang post-robbery and makes the decision to kill them all and keep the money for himself.



I'm not sure what direction Scorsese gave to De Niro for this scene - something like "appear evil while sitting at the bar" I guess. Whatever it was, De Niro somehow conveys the calculating mind of a criminal deciding to murder his associates in cold blood - all by moving his eyes and smoking. Legend.

And, of course, the music is awesome.

Avatar

I guess you all know this, but it snowed on Friday last week. This minor meteorological phenomenon persuaded me that I really couldn't be bothered going into work (imagine all that potential for falling off my bike) and that I should kick it back old school, relive the heady days of my PhD and head down to the cinema for a matinee showing of whatever the latest exciting release is.

Turns out that the big release of the week is Avatar, James Cameron's first film for ages, a 3D extravaganza, a film decades in the making - and a load of other jazz making it sound pretty bloody exciting. This was my first 3D film experience, so I paid my £9.60 (!), donned my special glasses when instructed by the disembodied voice and watched half an hour of adverts. 3D adverts, but HALF AN HOUR of adverts none-the-less. For £9.60 they should really be making enough money already, bloody Capitalism.

Anyway, the film is neatly divided into two parts. Not the film itself, rather my opinions of it. There's the graphics and the plot. Let's start with the good stuff, the graphics. This was one of the most visually stunning films I have ever seen. The level of detail in the computer-generated environments and sets was beyond anything I've encountered before. How much of this was a result of the 3D aspect of the film is unclear, if I had seen the 2D version I could well have been underwhelmed.

The impact of the 3D technology was significant though. I struggled to follow the opening 20 minutes of the story; such was my wonder at what I was seeing. I kept looking around the screen and focussing on different parts to the test this new technology out. When Sigourney Weaver first appeared on screen I got a momentary shock as I thought she had somehow arrived in the cinema in person. A favourite moment of mine was the 3D representation of a see-through computer screen - rendered in luscious detail. This alone was probably worth the price tag.

I mentioned the word 'plot' above. Since I had gone to the cinema rather than a 3D art gallery I was expecting some kind of plot. It is here that Avatar turns into something of a sham as its paper-thin morality tale about tree-huggers fighting the big bad corporation falls apart under even the slightest scrutiny. Zero-dimensional characters and extravagant plot contrivances do nothing to help the thought that much of the plot is in fact an expensive advert for toys and computer games based on the gadgets, monsters, vehicles and weapons of the film. There isn't enough time spent at the start of the film setting anything up, the main character is someone we don't care about, the natives and planet of Pandora is a place we are barely introduced to. For a film that is 160 minutes long that is totally unforgivable.

And don't even get me started on the mineral the evil corporation are meant to be mining - Unobtainium? For fuck's sake.

However; there are moments in cinema history when I think that certain lapses are forgivable. James Cameron has created a slice of cinema history here, Avatar could yet be looked back upon as the moment when 3D cinema came into its own as more than just a gimmick. Or of course 3D cinema could remain in the confines of big budget blockbusters that can afford to splash the cash. Whichever way it goes, Avatar is a visual masterpiece that you need to see in the cinema in 3D.

Films of the Decade

There are a lot of blogs and film sites doing this at the moment, so I thought I'd throw my hat in the ring. I've decided to limit myself to one per year (and one special mention), so it has been really hard leaving stuff out. So without further faff, here are my films of the decade:

2000 - Memento
There were a bunch of films I wanted to put in this category, and was upset to discover that they came out in 1999. Turns out that both the Matrix and South Park the movie were both in the 90s, although I'm fairly convinced I didn't see them until after the millennium. Anyway, after a search through the annals of movie history there was only really one winner for me, 'Memento' tells a tale backwards - using the conceit that its main character is a man who has no long-term memory. Scenes are shown in reverse order, slowly revealing a twisting plot in which a man's disability is being used against him by those he trusts. It's a great idea and one that rewards re-watching.

Special mention - Amor Es Perros. A brutal and chilling film that launched the career of Gael Garcia Bernal.

2001 - Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
There can only be one winner of the best film of 2001. Peter Jackson's epic, special-effects laden adaptation of the classic fantasy novel of the same name managed to retain the magic of the original without putting off mainstream cinema-goers. There was nothing more special than seeing the epic scale of this story on screen for the first time, from the wonderful sets of the opening scenes in Bagshot to the unbelievable scenery as the fellowship travel to Mordor, it's a visual feast.

Special Mention - Donnie Darko. A proper genre-bender of a science fiction film that rips up conventions.

2002 - 28 Days Later
Part-filmed at the place where I work, '28 Days Later' is a modern post-apocalyptic horror in which a biological experiment gone wrong has turned Britain into a nightmare land filled with flesh-eating super-fast zombies. Cillian Murphy - quality actor - is a man who wakes up from a coma while this happens and struggles to find his sanity in the brave new world. There's nothing more terrifying to me than the collapse of civilisation, the idea that humanity as we know it is about to disappear into the night as a result of our own pig-headed abuse of science. The film has a couple of distinct acts, each of which deals with the confusion, then terror and then false hope of the situation. Admittedly the story is very similar to the classic novel ‘Day of the Triffids’, but then you can’t complain too much as the source material is first class.

Special Mention - The Man Who Wasn't There. One of my favourite Coen Brothers films which is often overlooked by others. Also it is possible that this was released in 2001 (there is conflicting information on the internet).

2003 - Goodbye Lenin
As an unashamed leftie I was taken in by 'Goodbye Lenin!' almost from the moment I heard about it. It's a wonderfully touching film about a young man who lives through the fall of DDR and his mother's stroke at the same time, then feels the need to pretend that the Eastern block is still as 'strong' as ever to make her feel better in her final days. It's a funny film too, mainly about family but at the same time managing to make a few clever political points without ever getting in the way of the main story.

Special mention - Touching the Void. A re-enactment of a true story of daring, endeavour, disaster and humanity; as two ice climbers discuss how they nearly lost their lives on a remote mountain in South America.

2004 - Shaun of the Dead
Well it was about time that a comedy film got into my films of the decade. As a massive fan of the TV series Spaced I was shaking with excitement when I went to see 'Shaun of the Dead' at the cinema, I can still remember going on the London Underground and seeing the posters of Simon Pegg crammed into a tube train with a load of zombies (see the film poster left). Thankfully it didn't disappoint; the film dragged British comedy into a new age with its self-styled rom-zom-com formula, making stars of Pegg and Nick Frost on the way and proving that the horror genre doesn’t just have to be about blood, guts and monsters chasing people around.

Special mention - Vera Drake. This tough drama about the working class in East London had a big effect on me when I saw it. A superb performance from Immelda Staunton.

2005 - Hidden
A small French film that pits a middle class family man against an outside unknown person who is spying on him, 'Hidden' is a clever story that challenges the typical conventions of film thrillers. By setting up the premise - a man is anonymously sent tapes showing his everyday life filmed from afar - and following through to a realistic conclusion it makes you think about what might happen in real life if something disturbing and inexplicable happened to an ordinary person. How would that person react? How long would it be before the terrorised became the terroriser? This might sounds all a little artsy, and to be honest it is, but in a good way!

Special Mention - The Descent. My favourite horror film of the decade, by setting a monster movie in underground caves the horror is generated in equal parts by the claustrophobia of the rocky interior and the terror of monsters in the dark. The bit at the end where the heroine jumps out of a lake of blood and brains a monster - awesome.

2006 - United 93
Tough year, very tough year, so many good films, 'V for Vendetta', 'Red Road', 'Casino Royale', 'Notes on a Scandal', 'The Lives of Others', the list could go on. However, I have gone for the definitive film on 9-11. Directed by Paul Greengrass, 'United 93' captures the confusion, disorientation and horror that the world felt when the World Trade Centre was destroyed. By following the lives of people on the ground who lacked an overall picture of what was happening and relied on images from CNN to work out what they were involved in, the film recreates the feeling that the world had – that we were and are bit-part players in a political game that has claimed the lives of countless thousands on and since 9-11. I was utterly speechless when I left the cinema after watching it, and the power it has doesn't lessen on DVD either.

Special Mention - Children of Men. Possibly the best-directed film I have seen in a very long time, it has genuinely touching storyline that brings a tear to my eye at the end.

2007 - Eastern Promises
Vigo Mortgenssen been involved in a number of interesting and artistic project since the Lord of the Rings trilogy finished (what a difference from the tripe that Orlando Bloom has ended up in), Eastern Promises is one of these. It's a film about Russian gangsters in London, where Mortgenssen is a driver who struggles to stand by while they run all kinds of illegal criminal rings. Naomi Watts demonstrates having an awesome English accent as she plays a nurse who tries to save a girl involved unwillingly in the mob’s business. I love films about London and the dark underbelly that the city might hold, and I also think Mortgensen is a brilliant actor. Plus the film has a visceral naked fight scene between two wicked-tough gangsters - if you're into that sort of thing of course.

Special Mention - Juno. Ellen Page is a fantastic actress, she stars in 'Juno' - a witty and heart-warming film about growing up with supportive parents and making the right choices for the right reasons (it sounds so tacky - but it's really not).

2008 - In Bruges
In Bruges has a great combination of quality actors, good dialogue, funny moments and gangsters that make it into the kind of film that Guy Richie clearly wants to make but can't quite work out how. Brendon Gleeson and Colin Farrell are Irish gangsters who are sent to Bruges by their boss with orders to lay low. There their contrasting personalities provide entertainment while the reason they have been sent to lie low is hinted and then revealed. Their boss - played by a Ralph Fiennes who is clearly relishing the role - is a psychotic Cockney who eventually turns up to create a three-way stand-off. It’s funny and touching, just about the best film of 2008.

Special mention - There Will Be Blood. It's about oil, religion, money, power and pretty much everything in between. Daniel Day Lewis is peerless in his Oscar-winning performance - a landmark film.

2009?
Well, I'll have a run-down of my favourite films from this year next week...

Harry Brown

Michael Caine is Harry Brown - ex Marine who sees one too many of his friends and neighbours terrorised by local youths and hoodies, an ineffective police force and criminality on every street corner; so he decides to take justice to the streets.

This is a really strange but interesting film that is split into two distinct parts. In the first part we have a somewhat artsy film in which a picture is painted of a society falling apart. In the second part we get a revenge thriller in which Harry Brown dishes out helpings of whup-ass to the local scumbags. The transition between these two parts happens in a very long and dull scene in which Harry Brown goes to buy and gun off a drug dealer and instead watches them take drugs, act trippy, treat a woman badly and generally behave like complete arseholes. The film ends in a riot in which an army of hooded drug-crazed inner-city teenagers battle the police while - in a ridiculously unbelievable twist - one of Harry's friends turns against him.

The film is interesting as it has ignited debate in some quarters about the meaning of the film and how it reflects on Britain. Is it a reflection on - as David Cameron says - 'broken Britain'? Is the only justice that serves in times like this the sort of justice that Harry delivers? There are a number of reasons why I don't think this analysis makes sense.

Firstly I don't buy the premise upon which this analysis is based. There are scumbag drug dealers in Britain as there are anywhere in the world, but there
surely does not exist an army of riotous teenagers ready to create a bloodbath in their own community in the pursuit - as Harry puts it - of entertainment.

Secondly, even if we accept that there is a terrible problem in certain communities - martial justice is not the answer even in the context of the film. Heavy-handed policing is the spark that causes the violence at the end of the film; and the question is posed - albeit fleetingly - about where the violence will end if justice is based upon revenge.

Thirdly, the film is clear that the root cause of the problems in Harry's community are not simply the fact that there exist scumbag teenagers. We only see a few people actually buying drugs in the film (without people buying drugs the dealers would go and the problem would surely relent), one is a smack-head in a bar, the other is what appears to be a 'nice' middle class couple in the underpass. The message is that we as a society are all at fault for allowing problems like this to fester.

So the right wing can gush over Harry's 'justice' if they want. But the film's premise is not rooted in the real world, and they would harm us all should they use this film as a model for dealing with society's underclass.

Political ramblings aside though I do recommend this film, it has a number of good performances from the youngsters playing the hoodies and provides an interesting insight into how many on the social right view Britain's problems.

The Men Who Stare at Goats

I went into this expecting to see a bit of a screwball comedy, what I ended up seeing was what I think was meant to be an anti war film - although I don't believe it worked as well as it could have done.

Allow me to explain. The title of this film, the subject matter, the trailers and everything I have seen about it have led me to believe that this was going to be some kind of comedy set in military intelligence. There is a lot of comedy in the film, but rather than being played purely for laughs the film is more of a parody of the crazy things that the military have spent money on. From Star Wars to ultra sound weapon systems, the military have invested ludicrous amounts of money in silly things – so why not a bunch of hippies who want to turn themselves into Jedi warriors?

All well and good so far. There's nothing wrong with a film that's trying to poke fun at the military. The trouble is that the film didn't really work as a satire. I think that this was because the jokes it was making were a little too outlandish to ever be anchored in reality. Its minor successes – for example the Iraqi man who is being driven insane in solitary confinement by music, or the two private armies shooting at each other – are fleeting and overwhelmed by the rather silly plot involving goats and hippies.

One of my favourite books of all time is 'Catch 22'. This is a book that analyses the insanity of war by presenting an insane system in which combatants work out that they are better off attacking their own side and commanders are spectacularly incompetent. In a way 'The men who stare a goats' is trying to be like that – demonstrating the stupidity of war by presenting the military in a farcical way – but fails because it never gets to the crux of what war is. 'Catch 22' takes a long time to set itself up, but when the horror of war is finally visited it is in the most terrifying and visceral way – a series of events that drive the main characters into hell. This never happens in 'The men who stare at goats', at the end I was left wondering if I was supposed to be thinking about the insanity of war or laughing at the (rather funny) jokes. It would have been nice to be able to do both, but they didn't quite mix.

Also, Ewan McGregor's American accent is terrible.

25th Hour - rant

I watched Spike Lee's 'Do The Right Thing' last night - pretty funny and thought-provoking but with a lot of nonsensical music. There was a moment in it that reminded me of a mesmerising monologue by Ed Norton in '25th hour' (also by Spike Lee).



Everyone's to blame but him. I wish I could monologue like this.

An Education

Lots of people in the film media have been getting very excited about this, a new British artsy film about growing up in the 1960s. Clearly you would expect the cinemas to be all over a British film with an up-and-coming young actress? Wouldn't you? Well only the Vue cinemas around my way had it on. The pit of despair that is the Bracknell Odeon will probably have it on the "director's chair" in 5 months time - epic fail.

Well I'm glad I went to the trouble of driving into Reading on a Wednesday after work for this fantastically acted and character-driven story a sixteen-year-old in the early 1960s who thinks she knows a lot, but learns she knows nothing. The heroine of the film is Jenny - played without fault by Carey Mulligan. She is a young girl on the up in a male-dominated world. She aspires to go the university, she has supportive and surprisingly liberal parents and has used her intelligence and charm to make herself one of the popular ones in school. She appears to come from a family who are not hard-up, but who have had to work hard for what they have and clearly appreciate their current lifestyle. A chance encounter with an older man (David – played by Peter Sarsgaard) changes this.

Suddenly Jenny (and her parents too) is swept off her feet by David's charisma, experience, knowledge of the world and money. Suddenly she realises that there's no point in getting an education if all it is going to mean is a long and difficult life working for not much. Why not have it all now - just as David offers? Jenny's parents are carried along for the ride too. In an age when the prevailing method of bringing up a girl was still to find a man to marry her off on to, even Jenny's father agrees that there's no point her going to Oxford any more.

Through this story the film asks some really interesting questions about modern British society. What is the point of getting educated if all that is going to happen to you is that you end up with a dead-end job? Why not try and live a life that's fast and loose while you're young? As Jenny asks of her headmistress, "you have to tell us what education is for!"

A big theme in the film is how people act out of convenience, how we can ignore obvious truths when it suits us to avoid reality. Jenny ignores David's obviously criminal activity, David's friend ignores the stunning stupidity of his girlfriend because she's hot and he's attracted to her, Janny's teacher Miss Stubbs lives in denial that the girls she teaches appreciate what she does and Jenny's parents ignore the obvious and slightly worrying age gap between her and David because he's a charmer and clearly well-off. I guess that in this way the film is about compromises that people make in. How far will the characters go in deluding themselves in order to have a trouble-free and enjoyable life? Will Jenny throw away the promise of her youth in search of fun and wealth?

One big drawback of the film was a terrible montage ending that neatly wrapped everything up in 2 minutes. The film could have ended much more satisfyingly a few minutes beforehand - still on the same note but not feeling rushed. This is a fairly minor point though compared to everything else. 'An Education' is funny, intelligent and fantastically acted by a great cast. British film of the year anyone?

Office Space - Printer Death

Office Space is a great comedy. Written and directed by Mike Judge - the creative force behind Beavis and Butthead - it captures the mindless grind that is the modern office environment where management buzzwords and meaningless figures generate alienation in the workplace in a very Marxist sense. Our heroes take out their anger at the system on a printer:



The first time I saw this I almost choked from laughing. There's loads more great stuff in the film too, including a couple of great performances from supporting cast members as various parts of the office's human machinery. All except Jennifer Aniston though, she is distinctly unmemorable as usual.

The X Files - I want to believe (I really did)

This came out ages ago, but I was kind of living in denial by not watching it. You see I am a big fan of the X-Files as it was. As I described in my post from a few months ago, the X Files was a seminal television series that combined great writing with episodic drama. It fitted in with the prevailing political mood of its time; it was perfectly suited to the mid 90s paranoia and governmental distrust in the western world.

I'm sad to say that this new film is a bit of a fail. There are too many nods to the original series to make it interesting for a casual viewer, and those nods are generally referring to events that took place in the final few seasons - when the series totally lost the plot - which alienate the hardcore fan too. I admit that there are a few nice touches for the avid fan - the mention of Luther Lee Boggs was particularly good - but they just highlighted how much this film really wasn't needed. When Skinner turns up near the end and helps out I think I was meant to rejoice at the return of a great character; I just sat there in the realisation that I hadn't seen him in anything since the X Files finished. Maybe he wasn’t a very good actor after all?

I turned my DVD player off thinking that they'd managed to miss what could have been a good opportunity to introduce this classic series to a new generation. By having a plot that looked more like a long 'paranormal event of the week' episode rather than reanimating the monster that is the alien conspiracy arc, they had a good chance to reach a non-fanboy audience. It just didn't work though.

What they should have done was gone for a slightly revisionist approach. Why not set the film in the middle of the original series, a new previously unseen case? Anderson and Duchovny don't look that much older so it wouldn't have been too much of a stretch. The producers might say that they didn't want to retread old ground; but then why make this film at all? At least then we wouldn't have to put up with the painful memory of the series' demise in its 8th and 9th seasons.

I've started watching my season 1 DVDs in protest.

Zombieland - a lesson for nerds everywhere

Zombieland is a spectacularly funny film. Whether you're an old hand at zombie genre movies or a newbie looking for a giggle, it's for you. The film is mostly a comedy with a couple of jumpy bits chucked in to remind you that it's a zombie film. Over 90 minutes we follow the nerdy and introverted 'Columbus' (I don't remember if the main character's real name is ever revealed), his chance meeting with the lunatic zombie-killing hick 'Tallahassee' (Woody Harelson) and their adventure across America with two sisters trying to get to a funfair in California - the sisters are also known only by the places they're trying to get to. Columbus has a series of rules for surviving the zombie apocalypse - which is pretty funny in itself. Throughout the film the rules appear on screen as he and Tallahassee fight their way unscathed past hordes of zombies. Nice.

That's just one of many nice touches in Zombieland, touches that include some wonderfully detailed sets and quality black humour moments like a pair of arms stuck to a steering wheel. The best comedy bit is the appearance of Bill Murray in the middle; I knew that was coming, but it was far funnier than I had imagined. To be honest I was in my element in the opening montage, in which slow-mo zombies chase people around in stunt-man's heaven while 'For Whom the Bell TOlls' by Metallica plays. There was no way I wasn't going to enjoy myself after that.

So what of the plot? I really don't get on with films without plots. Although on the surface the film is simply a series of blackly comic set-pieces, there is in fact a very simple and enjoyable story going on. It's a story about a lonely nerdy guy - Columbus - and his coming of age via some extreme violence, finding a girl he kind of likes and - of course - surviving a zombie apocalypse. It delivers an important message to the nerds of the world; keep on wearing your seatbelt and doing your cardio exercises, cos when the zombie apocalypse comes and all the other guys in the world have been eaten, the chicks will have to make time with you then.

Overall - it's a great comedy with a lot of heart. Although it's not quite as good as 'Shaun of the Dead' (what is though?), it's certainly going to find itself high in my movie of the year chart.

Deliverance - the duelling banjos

Although Deliverance may be a quality thriller about racism and middle class fear in modern America, it also has once of the great (and much-parodied) all-time scenes. In this scene the city dwellers arrive in a small redneck village trying to buy travel out into the countryside. They look on in dismay at the 'genetic deficiencies' of the locals, and then this happens:



It's a scene that embodies the central point of the movie, that although the middle class white collar city dwellers may think themselves a cut above these yokels; they actually don't have a clue about these people or their lives. In fact their opinions of and fears about them are nothing more than racism.

And it's some wicked cool music too.

Rosemary's Baby - a classic thriller

One of the great things about cinema is that there's such an extensive back-catalogue of films you can never say you've seen it all. There's always something new to discover, always a new 'classic' that you've never previously heard of or considered worth investing time in. So it was with 'Rosemary's Baby', recommended to me by a computer algorithm on the Amazon website a number of times, I finally bothered to read the synopsis and decided that this was a film I had to see.

As a cult 1960s classic about devil worship in New York City, it sounds like the sort of film that should be firmly placed in the cannon of the horror genre. Perhaps it is, but it's a film that had never been on my radar until just recently; I wonder if there is a cult of horror fans out there who like to hoard all these classics to themselves and never tell other people about them for fear of making them mainstream. They shouldn't worry, I don't think this is a film that would ever be able to survive for too long in mainstream consumption - it's far too subtle and psychedelic for that.

The plot revolves around a woman - Rosemary, played by Mia Farrow - her pregnancy and her increasing paranoia that a satanic cult exists in her block of flats and is planning to steal and kill her child. This is a story that works on number of levels. Firstly there is Rosemary's fear of losing her baby - a terrifying concept for pregnant couples to entertain. Secondly there is Rosemary's fear that those around her are out to get her. From her neighbours to her doctor and her husband, is her fear born out of delusion or is it real? Thirdly there is the fear of going mad. How do you prove that something you know to be real - but sounds absurd - is truth rather than fiction? How do you convince people you are not mad. Lastly there is the fear of the unknown. This is first time she has been pregnant, she has no idea what it is meant to feel like. When her neighbour gives her a special 'tonic' drink which gives her permanent stomach cramps, who is she to disagree with the assertion that this is perfectly normal?

It's this primal fear that drives the film along. There is one early scene in which our main character hallucinates (or does she?) being raped by a demonic creature, but aside from that all the tension comes from the awkwardness that Rosemary's neighbours and doctors show towards her. What are they hiding? Why are they hiding it? Are they really witches? Is Rosemary going mad? Will anyone believe her?

The ending is very satisfying and I am not going to give it away here. It certainly made the rest of the film worthwhile. If anyone has any cult movie recommendations that may have passed the mainstream by let me know - I'm going to be seeking more out in the near future.

Import / Export

Once again I got sent a film that somehow got put on my LoveFilm list without me remembering. As with all of these things they generally come from me listening to Mark Kermode on the radio and deciding to check out whatever strange arthouse weirdness he has decided is the best film of the week. By the time these films actually get sent to me I have no idea what they are about again, so looking it up on imdb revealed to me that this was a tale of two people, one going east and one going west, and their lives. Hmmm.

With this extraordinarily worthy-sounding synopsis lodged in my brain I sat down to Import/Export's slightly-more-than 2 hours. Whenever I watch an arty film I'm always slightly aware that I'm going to get something different to the norm, but I wasn't quite expecting what this film offered up. Within 20 minutes of the start there are some pretty explicit sex scenes. I don't just mean explicit, I mean explicit. The lead 'going west' character - a Ukrainian girl - goes and works in an online sex parlour and has to interact with some seriously nasty sounding characters over the internet. Later in the film the 'going east' character - an Austrian who is a jobless arsehole - hires a prostitute when he arrives in Ukraine; she looks well underage. The scene where his father gets her to curse herself in German is very disturbing and - once again - explicit.

So was there any point to all this? Well I recon it's all about the different ways that people act and react towards people from different social strata and different places in the world. Reading around a little on the imdb of other people's reactions to the film, there is a feeling that it's trying to highlight the way the people from Eastern Europe might sometimes be treated as second class citizens in the western world. I have sympathy for that point of view, since the two main characters are an Austrian man and a Ukrainian woman. He is a layabout who mistreats his girlfriend, she is a trained nurse. He travels east and with his little money can get what he wants; she travels west and can only get work as a cleaner in an old-people's home.

I am pleased I saw the film, as the major point it's making is a valid one, and one that I should probably give more time to thinking about. I'm not necessarily going to recommend it to everyone though, as it's very heavy and depressing (every scene in the old people's home is heart-wrenching). Also, if you're easily offended by really explicit sex scenes you'll probably want to give it a miss.

District 9

There's nothing like a massive and cleverly-directed viral video marketing campaign to get me interested in a new science fiction film. I'm a sucker for watching film trailers and teasers on the internet, so I was pretty hyped about the recent release of 'District 9' - the new film "by Peter Jackson" about aliens who came to Earth and had nothing better to do than slum it up in sunny Jo'berg. The teaser clips seemed to indicate that the film would follow a documentary style, kind of a Cloverfield thing. I'm a big fan of that style, so I'm surprised I even managed to wait for a whole week after its release before seeing it.

I knew before I got to the cinema that this wasn't just going to be a science fiction thriller, but an attempt at a clever piece of social commentary. I love it when story-writers can wrap intelligent stuff up inside a good plot and don't need to signpost the things you're supposed to see. In 'District 9' the aliens are ghettoed in a slum in Johannesburg, without basic rights and demonised by the rest of the population they engage in crime and looting to survive. It doesn't take a genius to work out that this refers to South Africa's Apartheid years and the institutionalised discrimination that surrounded it. There is also a nasty great faceless corporation trying to appropriate the aliens' technology for their own weapons research, not caring who gets in the way in the meantime. It also hints at attitudes towards mass immigration and how the people who settled in a place first react to other populations who come along later.

Apart from all the clever bits, which were fairly predictable, the film threw an exciting curve-ball at me. The documentary style which we had been promised in the trailers lasted only about 25 minutes, right up until the point where the main character gets alien goo on him and starts turning a little weird. The shaky-cam vanishes and we start to get a kind of normal film, the whole thing turns into a proper action film with massive guns, laser weapons, spaceships, explosions, evil Nigerians and a robocop suit. I really was not expecting that; and although I might often shake my head at the disappointing Holywoodness of it all, for some reason I went along with it this time. Maybe it was because the subtexts were so interesting, maybe it was because the film earned a flash-bang ending after a quality start, maybe it was just because the explosions were loads of fun. The bit where all the soldiers get blown apart in sequence by ever-increasingly bizarre weapons - call me a nutter if you want but I thought it was well funny.

It is about time that a film came along that lived up to the billing. So if you want explosions as well as social commentary - look no further. Best science fiction film I've seen this year (not seen 'Moon' yet though).

Anvil!

It is testament to the cultural hotbed that is Bracknell, that when I went along to the local Odeon last Tuesday evening to see the 'Director's cut' - a once-a-week screening of a film which is typically a limited release - absolutely no-one else was there. I say no-one, but there were chums of mine with me, and of course it was fun to act like we owned the cinema without having the inconvenience of annoying other people. However, I would have liked to see as least a small number of people turn out to see a film which has been billed as the real life 'Spinal Tap'. One of the greatest comedy films of all time - but in real life? Who is anyone to say no to that?

The film opens with some typically hazy footage of a rock festival in early 1980s Japan. The voice-over tells us we are watching a band that once stood shoulder-to-shoulder with acts like Bon Jovi and Anthrax. We see a vox pops of Lars Ulrich and Slash telling us how this band were an inspiration. We see an unrealistically-dressed bedraggled rocker desperately trying to play his guitar with a dildo. This band is Anvil.

My first reaction was to assume that this was a clever gag, that in fact Anvil were made up and we were about to witness a kind of post-post-modern Spinal Tap spoof in which the audience were being utterly lied to with a straight face. This fear wasn't allayed in the slightest when the lead singer of the band took us through Anvil's back-catalogue of albums. As the lurid trashy metal designs flew past the screen it was so reminiscent of the same scene in 'A Mighty Wind' that I became convinced I was witnessing a spoof. Then we are introduced to Steve 'Lips' Kudlow, the lead singer and driving force of Anvil - a man who now works in a groceries delivery firm in a cold outpost in Canada and dreams of things that never were. It was only then I realised that no one this sad and deluded could possibly have been created for screen, that in fact him and his drummer - his best friend from childhood Robb Reiner - were indeed the real thing, a band that never made it.

What follows is a surprisingly touching story about a couple of old guys who have seen their lives drift by. After entertaining dreams of becoming rock stars, the simply never made it and have been thrown on the scrap heap of life - where so many ordinary people end up. The band try to re-invigorate their career with a rather sad 'tour' around Europe - in which they play to pubs containing 'crowds' numbering in double figures. At first it is rather funny to see a bunch of sad old men trying to re-create their youthful days; but there's a point in the film when you realise that these people aren't caricatures – they could be anyone we all know in real life, after that the story becomes rather poignant. You can see through the face paint and the leathers and the devil horns and the other trappings of metal paraphernalia, you end up seeing a couple of vulnerable old men who only want to do what they enjoy the most - play music.

The film winds up with the band's attempt to record a new album in the UK, and finally being invited out to Japan to play the morning slot in a day-long metal festival. The film ends on a wonderfully uplifting note as Kudlow and Reiner realise that despite all the adversity of their careers, their failures and aging years, there is always hope for people who have a dream and want to work hard.

That probably sounds really hokey, but I left the cinema with a smile on my face and a renewed faith that getting old doesn't mean that all your best times are behind you. Go and see this film! Now!

The Hurt Locker

Heard some great reviews of this film and so decided to avoid Inglorious Basterds in favour of this when I went to the cinema last weekend. I get the cinema quite rarely these days, so it was quite a big decision for me. I think I'll be going to the cinema more often now that I've worked out I can cycle to the local Showcase from my new house.

Anyway, 'The Hurt Locker', a film about the Iraq war - or is it? Well it's a film about a bomb disposal team operating in Iraq, although the fact that it's in Iraq is fairly irrelevant. There's not a huge amount about the whys and wherefors of the US army's invasion of that country, what they're doing there or how the people react to them. There is a huge amount about peoples' reactions to war, the pressure, the exhaustion and the desire to escape in one piece.

The story is about a unit in Iraq who have the unenviable task (is any task in Iraq actually enviable?) of disarming booby-trapped bombs - Improvised Explosive Devices. The engineer in charge of the unit is killed in the opening scene and a new guy is sent to replace him, the new guy is a bit of a fruit loop who gets an adrenaline high off of taking risks and disarming bombs using traditional methods. The film revolves around the tension between this character and the people who have to live and work with him.

The first thing that impressed me was how the film kept its own tension going. The first time they diffuse a bomb it is tense, when the new guy arrives and does the same it is tenser still. By the third diffusing scene I was starting to wonder when it was going to get boring and repetitive - it never did. The next thing that struck me was the use of fairly famous actors in minor roles. Guy Peirce plays the bomb disposal guy who gets killed at the start, Ralph Fiennes is a British soldier who cops it and Evangeline Lilly plays the wife of the main character, she appears right at the end for only 2 scenes and barely gets any lines. I guess all these characters are supposed to be some kind of statement about loss in war, be it because of death (a la 'The Thin Red Line' but miles better), or by emotionally losing contact with those who have not experienced conflict.

I'm struggling to think of anything bad to say about this film at all. The usual habit war films have of treating 'the other side' as faceless goons doesn't really happen. Even the slightly gung-ho ending (which plays out to a rocking metal soundtrack) doesn't make the film feel any less about war being bad, more that the lead character thrives of the adrenaline war gives him - even if that adrenaline leads to deaths and woundings of others around him.

Overall I'm going to have to give this a big stamp of approval. Shame about missing Inglorious Basterds - saw 'District 9' yesterday (review soon) so I guess Tarantino is going to have to wait for the DVD.

Revolutionary road

Sam Mendes rides again! Ten years after American Beauty the British director returns to poke yet more holes in the suburban nightmare that is the American dream. Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio play a couple who are married, have two kids, live in a well-to-do neighbourhood and are desperately unhappy with life. DiCaprio works in a dead-end job while Winslet maintains the household; each wants out, and so they agree to relocate to Paris to chase a youthful dream of excitement and freedom. The fates conspire against them though, and I wasn't really that surprised when the film ended with the dream unfulfilled.

There are a lot of really good and really bad things about this film. Superb acting by the two leads carries the whole movie. There's a spectacularly emotional scene where they have a huge row – wonderfully acted. The less emotional stuff is just as good, Winslet carries off some great facial tics while playing the part of the wife trying ever so hard to appear happy. That's what great film acting is all about – attention to detail.

The subject of the film is really interesting too, but it's also in this regard that I felt the story-telling to be somewhat heavy-handed. So they're a couple in crisis, do we really need them to stand there in their kitchen and tell us that they're in crisis? There are hidden truths in their marriage, do we really need a character to be introduced who has a mental condition preventing from using tact? He then wanders around the set explaining the plot. Honestly, that's one of the lamest plot devices I've ever witnessed. I rather feel that the director should have had more confidence in his own ability to tell a story – ham-fisted plot crowbars are not needed Sam!

It's all about Winslet and DiCaprio though. I've never seen Titanic – but I understand that there was a whole excitement about this pair being re-united for Revolutionary Road. They certainly appear to have a chemistry of some sort, plenty enough to carry the story despite any unfortunate plot Macuffins. I kind of think that Winslet should have won the Oscar for this instead, since even though The Reader is a better film she's hardly been better than she is here. And she looks great in all those 1950s dresses too!

I'm still not going to watch Titanic though.

Valkyrie

Another film about the second world war, another film in which a Hollywood A-lister gets to star in a dramatisation of a real series of events. This time it's Tom Cruise, possibly one of Hollywood’s biggest draws, appearing as a German soldier who becomes involved in the plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler at the Eagle's Lair in 1944.

I was wondering how Hollywood would go about depicting a failed attempt on Hitler's life, an attempt after which almost all of the conspirators were either strung up or shot. After all, Hollywood doesn't normally get on too well with stories of failure. Rather than any dramatic re-write of history, the film concentrates on emphasising the heroism of what the bomb plotters did. They risked certain death while attempting to bring the Nazi regime down - no less than troops on the Allied side were doing.

I assume that certain liberties have been taken with the historical fact in order to make the characters more interesting, but overall I was pleased with what I saw on screen. Nice to see that the Hollywood world can make a film in which not all Germans soldiers are portrayed as Hitler-loving and in which the German people are trying to do something to bring down the tyrant from within instead of sitting and waiting for salvation from Roosevelt.

One dismal bit of the film was the accent of the guy who plays Hitler. For the most part the accents were good; rather than putting on silly German accents the cast all talk in their own native English-speaking voices. The guy that plays Hitler though puts on a slightly German accent. I was wondering whether this was because the producers didn't think the audience could cope with a Hitler who spoke the queen's English, so had to ensure he had a German accent to make him seem more sinister. I hope this isn't the case, but there doesn't seem to be any other reason for it.

Hannibal Lector

This clip has been parodied loads of times, but the original is still one of the great scenes. This is the first meeting between serial killer Hannibal Lector and FBI trainee Clarice Starling in the film 'Silence of the Lambs'...



It's an emotionally-charged piece of cinema; Lector effortlessly intimidates Starling, who despite visibly shaking in his presence has the mental strength to endure his psychological attacks on her. The scene sets up the emotional relationship between the two characters, a relationship which seems perverse but is crucial to the film's success.

The X Files

In order to be truly great a television series needs great writing, a great cast and great stories; but there's something more that a series having all these things needs to really stand out - timing. When a television series is aired which captures the mood of the moment it can, for good or worse, become a cultural phenomenon. It becomes more than a sum of its parts, it becomes something that embodies an era, something that expands beyond what its creator originally thought possible. There is no better example of this than the X-Files, arriving after the end of the Cold War at a time when international fears of nuclear war were receding, it tapped into a phenomenon of fear of the unknown within, of finding conspiracies within our own governments rather than those perpetrated by enemies abroad. The X Files benefitted hugely from tapping into a cultural phenomenon, how much this phenomenon was fuelled by the show and how much it existed aside from it is hard to say.

The X Files' main plot arc revolved around a huge international conspiracy to cover up the US government's knowledge of the existence of alien life forms. Each week Mulder and Scully would uncover some unexplained phenomenon which would lead them somewhere on the trail to uncovering the plot, but ultimately would be left in the dark with more questions than answers. Alien conspiracies were hardly the only paranormal events that they had to deal with; genetic mutations, ghosts, Artificial Intelligence, monsters, ESP, telekinesis and many more were all part of the show at one point or another. In fact, many of the best episodes were those that dealt with a stand-alone monster of the week rather than the often tedious conspiracy arc.

The X Files was a programme which broke new ground in television. The concept of an episodic drama with a story arc - standard these days - was extremely rare at the time. Television programmes which told a story were often in the form of short mini series (think 'Boys from the Black Stuff') or soaps. Long-running series like the X Files almost always existed on a show by show basis, with the characters existing for the purpose of telling this week's story (for example 'The Avengers'). The first series of the X Files has a lot of stand-alone episodes (and in fact there are many throughout), but as the series matured there was always a feeling that there was a plot moving along in the background.

The series benefited from some excellent acting and a willingness to trust in the intelligence of its audience. Certain episodes dealt with difficult concepts, often with very little explanation, other episodes moved the plot along rapidly, assuming that the audience would fill in the blanks without needing to be spoon-fed. This all meant that quite intricate stories could at times be told, without losing an emotional connection to the main characters.

The end of the X Files was long overdue when the final episode was eventually transmitted. David Duchovny (Fox Mulder) had long left the show, his character has been distilled into two new ones and the chemistry of the final two seasons simply wasn't there. In fact, most of what they did after the 5th series was fairly poor (with one or two notable exceptions). The end of the series in a cultural sense happened with the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre in 2001, with a new - all too real - enemy to fear, the world seemed less interested in conspiracies at home. Suddenly the X Files made no sense and was doomed to the annals of television history.

This limp ending was a shame, but the first 3 series of the show are still outstanding even for the modern viewer. There's nothing quite like seeing Mulder pick up a newspaper report of something weird happening and then zooming off to investigate while Scully tries to reign him in and stop him getting killed / fired / eaten / abducted by aliens. It's a series which had a place in the 1990s but which is still fantastically engaging, jaw-dropping science fiction.

Defiance

This is a film that went straight on to my Lovefilm list when I realised I wasn't going to get the chance to see it in the cinema. It's a story that couldn't fail to be captivating - the true story of the Bielski brothers, who helped themselves and others in Eastern Europe during the Second World War. When the German army rolled through their town and the Gestapo started rounding up Jews, they fled and started anew in the forests. After the war they sought no recognition of their heroic role in saving hundreds, they simply lived out the rest of their lives in peace.

As exceptional as this story is, I had a nasty feeling that it was going to get the Hollywood treatment and that a whole load of schmaltz would be added somewhere. It's not long into the film when this theory is checked though, as Daniel Craig's character mercilessly murders a collaborator in front of his wife in his own home. There are soon further scenes of death, murder and destruction by the German army, Russian partisans and Bielski brothers' group. There are no Platoon-esque scenes of people being gloriously mown down, the deaths of a Jewish fighters are treated with no more sympathy than that of German soldiers. All the destruction and death of a war is rightly treated as horrific

I was initially interested in the film because it's about an event in the second world war about which I knew nothing, I was prepared to put up with Hollywood mangling history. Thankfully there was none of that, the only thing that got mangled was Daniel Craig’s accent - good most of the time but with a few words he clearly can't credibly say with a Russian accent.

The end of the film has a Moses / Exodus parallel which is thankfully not as cheesy it could have been, mainly because one of the characters points out that Bielski isn't Moses and that the river isn't going to part for them. In fact, the biblical references are used as a motivating factor for the Bielski's and their group, spurring them on to make good their own escape without waiting for divine intervention.

Overall a surprisingly good film.

Harry Potter 6

When I saw my first instalment of the Harry Potter Franchise 6 years ago (Chamber of Secrets - as I hadn't read the books when the first one came out) I would never have believed that the release of a new Potter film would have me so excited. Chris Columbus' original two films are dire affairs, full of inconsequential Potterverse tit-bits from the books and borderline dreadful acting from the child leads. 3 films on and the prospect of a new Potter is an event in my calendar. As the books got longer the films have got shorter, with scriptwriters who were prepared to cut out all the fluff and directors who understood how to create drama on a screen the last three Potter films were genuinely good fantasy fiction movies.

So what of Harry Potter 6? This was my least favourite of the books due to lack of plot or anything of any consequence happening (and don't yell 'Dumbledore' at me - it's all just a set-up for book 7). On screen though, I found myself rather enjoying what was ostensibly the same story. Even though I was still confused by many elements of the Potter 'arc' plot (for example why is the fact that Snape turns out to be the Half Blood prince relevant in the slightest? Why does Ginny insist that Harry hide the Half Blood Prince's potion book?), it was everything else that made me enjoy myself. The teen angst will-they-wont-they subplot - which would normally be tedious and irritating - is handled with humour and makes the characters endearing and interesting, which ultimately made me care about what was happening despite my reservations.

Those reservations were in fact many. The scene in which Harry and Dumbledore fight creatures from the deep doesn't work for some reason - maybe because I couldn't get it out of my head that it was nowhere near as good as Gandalf on the bridge of Khazad-dûm. The behaviour of Harry at the end when Snape confronts Dumbledore is totally out of character (and in fact a change from the book which really doesn't work).

Ultimately though the good parts outweighed the plot holes. Rupert Grint is turning into a really good actor, the more comic stuff that they give him to do the better as he's rather good at it. Whether he's bigging himself up as a goalkeeper or desperately trying to unentangle himself from his accidental girlfriend, the lad's got good timing and it papers nicely over the film's many downsides. Add that to some quite spectacular special effects (Death Eaters flying through the streets of London at the start and - my favourite - the fluid and slightly out-of-focus style that is used when Harry watches Tom Riddle's childhood memory of Dumbledore's visit to the orphanage) and I find myself unable to complain. It may of course be a case of the producers covering up the lack of plot substance with comic filler, but the sixth book is only a holding pattern for the big finish in book seven anyway - so it's difficult to think of what they could have done to make it better.

I suspect that die-hard Potter fans will love it regardless, I enjoyed myself despite really not expecting to.

One final aside. There were very few children in the cinema where I saw the film. Perhaps the dark material of the later books is becoming a little too much for the under 10s out there and parents are keeping their kids away? Hopefully by the time 'Deathly Hallows part 2' comes out it'll be a 15 certificate.

Revenge of the Nerds

So I recorded this using my new-fangled 'Sky +' machine the other day. This is a film I've heard about lots of times. Apparently it was brought out as part of a wave of teen / adolescent comedy capers that came out during the early 1980s. So although it isn't quite the original frat boy slacker comedy, it certainly comes close. As such I kind of felt obliged to give it a watch.

Revenge of the Nerds has a very simple plot. A pair of geeky (yet worldly-wise) students move into their new university and are immediately harassed by the jocks of the local frat house Alpha Beta, mainly for the simply reason that they're nerds. They band together with other nerds, form their own fraternity and proceed to do battle with the Alpha Betas until everyone discovers their own inner nerd and lives happily ever after. Despite being a little misogynistic in places, it's actually a fairly funny film despite itself. This might have something to do with the cast; a group of unknowns at the time, but people who have gone on to have big careers (Anthony Edwards of ER, Timothy Busfield of West Wing and John Goodman of numerous Hollywood films). John Goodman in particular stars in a hilarious moment in which he leads his American Football team - full of frat house jocks - in an inspirational chant before sending them off to the showers to change. As they run off he declares with impeccable timing "Damn, we forgot to practice."

Not a classic, but funny enough to make the 80 minute investment worthwhile.

Once Upon A Time In America

I really object to long films. Not because I get bored or start thinking about other things while I'm watching, but because before I watch a film I'm not sure that I'm going to like I can't bring myself to dedicate 3 or more hours of my life. It is for this reason that I have been putting off watching 'Once Upon a Time in America' for so long. This is a film which is the best part of 4 hours long, a film that has an intermission built into it, a film which I'd rather not bother with unless I know I'm going to like it.

I picked a lazy Friday evening on which I had nothing else to do, sat down with my dinner and stuck the DVD in the Xbox. 150 minutes later, when the first DVD ran out, I decided to give up and finish it off on Saturday morning. Rather than seeing an epic of American Mafia history that even dwarfed The Godfather, what I got was an excruciatingly slow-moving tale of growing up in a world where robberies, alcohol trafficking and prostitution are all the norm. This is a world where young lads steal money off of drunks in the street and queue up to have sex with under-aged prostitutes. Not a nice place to be. However rather than setting the scene and developing a story, the film gets bogged down with 'meaningful' shots and knowing looks between characters. They really needed to cut a lot of this supposedly atmospheric stuff out, because I don't think it adds any tension.

I felt that the film played out in a fairly unimaginative way. There are the usual highs and lows; but rather than taking me along for the ride, I felt very little for the characters and their stories. Without that I guess there isn't really much else.

This was a real disappointment for me. As a huge fan of De Niro and mafia films in general, I was hoping for a lot more. It also didn't help me cure my aversion to long films; it's going to be a long time before I sit down to another 240mins of cinema.

Che - Part 1

I'm a bit of a Leftie. Well when I say bit of a leftie I actually mean that I'm a massive Communist - not one of those Social Workers Party, newspaper-selling, slogan-screaming, endlessly dissecting Marx, destroying conversations by insisting that "class is what it's all about!" types - but definitely a red nonetheless. I owned a poster of Che Guevara when I was a student - not exactly original I'll grant you, but it's the kind of thing you've got to do if you're going to be a socialist at University. I think it's in the induction pamphlet somewhere.

Anyway, the scene is now set for you. As a Leftie I doubted that I would have much trouble enjoying a film about Che Guevara - the man (in case you don't know) who was instrumental in the Cuban revolution of the late 1950s and became a worldwide symbol of revolution, struggle against oppression and resistance. He also became a symbol of terror and tyranny for those who didn't agree with his politics. So who is most likely to make a film about his life? Those who adore him or those who hate him? You don't have to watch Che for very long to work out that it's the former who are behind this film - phew!

This film is part 1 and concentrates on Che's involvement in the Cuban revolution. We see him leading troops in battle, conducting military tribunals, treating injured soldiers and organising local people. He argues loudly about not interfering with peasants, about respecting the local people. He frets about the fact that he is not Cuban and dutifully carries out a multitude of tasks assigned to him by Fidel Castro - including those he feels are beneath him - without complaint. Generally, the film presents Che as one of the nicest guys in the world; he's also intelligent, articulate and just.

The film is interesting in that it told me a lot about Che's life during the revolution, and indeed the revolution as a whole (assuming that the film is largely true of course). I'm kind of expecting part 2 to be much less reverential towards him, kind of like part 1 is setting him up for a big fall when things start to go wrong. If certainly hope it is, because as much as I admire what Guevara did and what he stood for I'm certain he couldn't have been that much of a paragon. The film kind of looses credibility by treating him with too much reverence, which is a shame as there is a lot of good stuff in it.

Looking forward to part 2 now, should be in the post as I write.

The Reader

Here's my first review of a film seen on a plane. Not much different from other reviews, apart from the fact that they decided to reset the entertainment system 5 minutes from the end so I had to fast forward through the whole thing to finish it.

Anyway, The Reader is the film for which Kate Winslet won an Oscar for best actress. I am a bit fan of Winslet, she's a down-to-earth lass who comes from my local area and has put in a fair few awesome performances. Now she finally has the Hollywood accolade she deserves. As a result I was expecting something pretty spectacular from her in The Reader.

Winslet's character is a lonely woman living in German in the 1950s who has a romantic summer encounter with local teenager Michael Berg. She seems to be a woman of contradictions, eager to keep her own company yet at the same time yearning to spend time with this youth. The boy reads to her and then they have sex - this is their relationship. As the story moves on a few years, the dark secret of Winslet's character is revealed - her involvement with the Nazi regime.

The film is interesting on a number of levels. Firstly there is the reaction of the post-war German population to the knowledge that everyone over the age of about 20 was probably complicit in the Nazis' crimes on some level or another. Secondly there is the nature of the relationship between the two characters. The obviously paedophilic nature of their relationship is never emphasised, maybe this is a comment on the reaction of the German population to the post war situation - in the clamour to blame someone for the Nazis' crimes, other transgressions are perhaps forgotten about.

Thirdly, and for me most importantly, there is Winslet's character herself. She is a study of how ordinary people react during desperate times. This is a woman who was a loner, going nowhere in life. Suddenly she was given a job by the Nazis, suddenly she was important. What would I have done in that situation? How desperate and lonely does someone have to get before they abandon their principles and start looking the other way? If Germany condemns one woman, why not condemn the entire population? As Michael Berg says to his lecturer - "Everybody knew!"

The entire film is about this character's desire for absolution. She wants to be punished for what she did and at the same time her nation is happy to use her as a scapegoat in order to absolve themselves of the same guilt.

Winslet carries this all on her shoulders. With a fantastically understated performance she manages to bear the burden of post-war Germany's Nazi guilt and desire for forgiveness. Needless-to-say, I thought she and the film were brilliant.

Twists

I was listening to Mark Kermode on Radio 5 some months back and he made a comment about not giving twists away - apparently there is a twist in the Will Smith's film '7 pounds' which he was not revealing. He made some quip along the lines of "It's a sled, she's a he, he's a ghost"; now of course that only makes sense if you know about all those movie twists to which he is referring, but it got me thinking about twists. About how long a film has to be out before it is reasonable to assume someone knows the twist, and about if a film is ruined by giving the twist away.

Let's take Citizen Kane as an example. As a film that was made over 65 years ago one might assume that its twist is common knowledge; however when I first saw it (must have been about 6 or 7 years ago now) it wasn't enough a part of popular culture for me to be aware of it. Therefore I was as surprised as any viewer in the 1940s.

Consider instead Star Wars or Usual Suspects. These films are much more recent and have a much more prominent place in people's memories; therefore one might assume that Luke Skywalker's parentage or the identity of Kaiser Sause can be talked about in polite company without fear of causing spoilers. For some reason though I always check to see if people have seen the Usual Suspects before discussing any of its finer points. 'Sixth Sense' is ten years old, but I would never give away it's final reveal without first establishing whether everyone within earshot had either seen it or didn't care.

People seem to attach too much importance to twists, as if a film which has a twist in it is automatically better and deserving of reverence. M Night Shymalan is the worst at this, the twists in The Village and The Haunting were awful - to the extent that I feel like giving the ending away to people to stop them wasting their time watching them. A twist is just part of the plot, if done badly then it feels stupid, almost as if the audience has been duped. If done well it allows pieces of a puzzle to fall into place, leaving you with a satisfied feeling. Any film which is actually ruined by knowing the twist is probably not a very good film. Jacob's Ladder is a good example, I had accidentally read an article which talked about the meaning of the ending. I decided that I wanted to watch it anyway as I was interested in how knowledge of the twist changed my perception of the film itself - and I really enjoyed it.

I will keep on checking first when talking about classic films with classic twists, but I want to try to convince people that giving away endings and twists in no way invalidates the act of watching the film. If someone lets their tongue slip and gives away a twist or two, don't fret, go and see the film anyway. If it's any good you'll enjoy yourself regardless.

Long time, no posts

It has been a long time since my last post, this is due to going on a 2 week holiday in Japan and then moving house. I have no internet at home at the moment so this post is being made from work.

I saw a couple of really good films on the flights to and from Japan, I'll write up some posts about them once the home internet is sorted. For now though I'll leave you with an outstandingly bizarre moment of recent cinema, the final scene of There Will Be Blood. Don't worry if you have not seen this film; the final scene isn't really a spoiler, it's more of a taster which makes you want to find out what on earth is going on.



I DRINK YOUR MILKSHAKE!

In The Loop

I've not been to the cinema in ages, but I certainly picked the right film to break my duck. “In the Loop” is a political satire based not-so-loosely on the run up to the vote for the Iraq war which took place at the UN in 2002/03. The film specifically focusses on the British involvement in that vote and how the shadowy powers behind the scenes cynically manipulate MPs, and the media to get what they want.

The main characters are a a limp-wristed middle-of-the-road MP called Simon Foster and the Prime Minister's director of communications Malcolm Tucker. Tucker is so blatantly based on Tony Blair's right hand man Alistair Campbell that it barely even warrants mentioning. He is a grumpy, foul-mouthed bastard who insults his way through every single conversation he has, even when people are being nice to him. Foster is a nobody who accidentally makes a comment about the likelihood of war on the radio, suddenly he is pivotal to the government's stance on international relations and is sent to Washington to liaise with the Americans at the UN.

The film has two strands to it. Most obvious is the political satire. Armando Iannucci's script lampoons the way that the British government went about showing its support for the US's war in Iraq. From the dodgy dossier to the spin and the merciless manipulation of the media, the film gets everything right in pulling apart the dirty tricks of Campbell and New Labour.

The strand of the film that you might not be expecting is the relentless barrage of sweary insults that are thrown around liberally by all the characters, but in particular Malcolm Tucker. I am happy to admit that I find swearing pretty funny, but this was the kind of swearing that a dockworker with a diploma in advanced curse words might struggle to match. There are a lot of films out there that employ a liberal use of the word 'fuck', “In the Loop” however generates a new a creative breed of sweary insults. I only wish I could remember them all.

It's a really clever film which is at the same time ridiculously offensive (in a good way) and funny. Now I'm off to buy the DVD boxed set of 'The Thick of it'.

The Counterfeiters

There seem to have been quite a few WW2 films recently dealing with Nazi oppression within occupied Europe, Defiance and Boy in the Striped Pyjamas are two I can name off the top of my head. The Counterfeiters is another of these; the true story of a plot in which the Nazis intended to use counterfeiters held in a concentration camp to forge millions of pounds and destabilise the British economy.

'The Counterfieters' won the best foreign language film Oscar last year, so I was expecting it to be pretty good. It starts out quite promisingly with scenes of the main protagonist's (Sally) life before and after the war before showing him being arrested for forgery by a policeman who will soon become a Nazi officer during the war responsible for organising the counterfeiting operation.

Depictions of the holocaust are rightfully disturbing, and this is true of the conditions and brutality of the guards depicted in this film. More than this though, 'The Counterfieters' shows a side of the holocaust which it is often more difficult to think about - the people who did unpleasant things which they hated themselves for simply in order to survive. In the same way that Sally and his fellow forgers help the Nazi war effort in order to stay alive, Sally's foil - the anti-forgery officer turned Nazi officer Herzog - clearly hates himself for what he does. Herzog may be complicit in the crimes of the Nazis, but is he only doing these things to keep himself and his family alive and well? What would we do in similar circumstances?

In addition to the two main characters who face these moral dilemmas, there are characters on the moral extremes too. Many of the prison guards take utter delight in humiliating the prisoners while one of the prisoners - Burger - risks the life of himself and the others by deliberately sabotaging the forging work. The fact that Sally and Herzog both know about Burger's forgery but refuse to act is one of the most revealing and interesting plot points of the film.

This is a film which is fairly compact and to the point. It has a couple of good performances and is disturbing where it needs to be while simultaneously arguing that not all humanity was lost during the holocaust. I suspect that the final few scenes are meant to be really powerful, they didn't quite work for me - but they certainly didn't detract from the rest of a quite excellent film.

Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter and Spring

What a pile of self-indulgent gibberish this film is. I'm all in favour of films which offer a more considered and thoughtful style of storytelling than the normal Hollywood fare, but 'Spring, Summer...' takes it too far.

The film follows the life of a boy, then a man, then an old man, who grows up on a Buddhist temple on an island in the middle of an isolated lake. His master catches him tormenting animals by strapping rocks to their backs, he tells him that he must go and untie the animals, and that if they die he will carry the stone in his heart for the rest of his life. Behold the METAPHOR!

So anyway, the animals die and he goes on to have a troubled experience brought on by falling in love and leaving the temple - all against the advice of his Buddhist mentor. I guess this is some kind of poetic justice for his tormenting of the animals; fair enough, but why does such an obvious and un-revolutionary plot require 100 minutes of film?

I don't want to trample over the film too much, as the scenery is really pretty and all beautifully shot. My problem with this kind of film making is that it belongs in an art gallery rather than on DVD. I'm disappointed now that I made such a fuss to LoveFilm about them sending me this film again when the first DVD they sent me was broken. If I'd known it'd be like this I'd have skipped over it and thanked them for saving my time.

V for Vendetta

Having seen and reviewed the latest 'best comic book ever' adaptation, I thought I'd take a look back at a recent comic book adaptation which is a classic (if you can get over the irritating Americanised version of Britain).



This clip contains the final few scenes of V for Vendetta, in which V has managed to mobilise the largely sheeplike population of a near-future totalitarian Britain to march on Parliament. Although V is about to commit an act of grand terrorism, the film is all about collective action and revolution.

The symbolism of the last few minutes is astonishing. The population of Britain march en masse on Parliament, the costumes and masks hiding individual identities as they stroll past armed soldiers - witness the power of ordinary people acting together. As the 1812 Overture plays, parliament is destroyed and the people of Britain one by one remove their costumes and regain their identities - through collective action freedom and liberty are restored.

Now ask yourself, what was the point of Watchmen?

Watchmen

For a film which is based on what is supposedly the greatest comic book of all time, I found myself remarkably unimpressed by Watchmen. Upon leaving the cinema I struggled to work out what the big deal was. Although the film's ending left me with an interesting philosophical question to ponder, I didn't see why it merited almost 3 hours of watching paper thin characters bumbling around not doing much at all in a poorly-drawn alternate version of the 1980s.

Let's get the good stuff out of the way. This is a film which opens with great promise. A character is killed by a mystery assailant in the first scene. While the credits roll there is a re-telling of post war US history in a series of visually-stunning slow-motion sequences. We are introduced to the idea of a world with superheros; but not superheros in the Superman sense, these appear to be ordinary people who have remarkable skills and have chosen to don capes, rubber and masks in order to become society's saviors.

Immediately the set-up is out of the way, the plot goes downhill. The film spends the next hour desperately trying to introduce its characters. There's a dude in a shifting mask who is a nutter, a bloke who gave up his life as superhero but wants to go back to it and a woman who is infatuated with the supernatural Dr Manhattan. That's really all there is to the main characters. Despite the many flashbacks which tell the backstory and reams of dialogue, I never felt like I knew these characters, why they decided to be 'heroes', why they gave up in the first place or why they've decided to don the capes and rubber for a second time.

Right at the start of the film on a wall a piece of graffiti asks 'Who watches the Watchers?' The film has no answer to this question as the Watchmen are a law entirely unto themselves, deciding the fate of humanity between them while presidents of nations are mere pawns. None of the superheros ever interact in a meaningful way with a normal person, everyone they encounter is either a evil criminal to be punished or a cowering weakling waiting to be saved. If Watchmen is supposed to be about the role that superheros could play in a real world, then it fails because it fails to portray anything about the real world.

Admittedly the special effects are impressive, but I kind of want to know what the point of a massive golden clockwork mechanism rotating above the surface of Mars is rather than simply being in awe of it. Perhaps I should read the comics books, because this film adaptation did absolutely nothing for me.

Hunger

If you're looking for a laugh-a-minute or a feel-good film, you'll probably want to give 'Hunger' a wide berth. This is the story of the final few weeks of the life of Bobby Sands, the IRA convict who starved himself to death at the height of the Northern Ireland conflict in the 1980s as a protest against the lack of political prisoner status that was awarded to him and the rest of the IRA. Not exactly the kind of subject matter that lends itself to light-hearted storytelling.

The story of Bobby Sands and the hunger strikers is fairly well-known. Rather than concentrating on the history, the film tells the story from the point of view of a number of minor underlings in this battle between the British State and the IRA. The film opens with and is initially told through the eyes of a prison guard. We then follow several months in the life of one of the many IRA prisoners living in utter squalor in his isolated cell before Bobby Sands is introduced with only about half of the film to go.

This is an extremely slow film which spends a lot of time lingering on shots which help to build a feeling for what the atmosphere in Ulster during the conflict must have been like. These are people who are fighting a battle which has been going on for hundreds of years, the long shots of a guard mopping up piss or a man smoking generate a feeling of tiredness yet at the same time demanding a determination to continue watching. Perhaps something like what people in Ulster felt during that troubled time; having been fighting a battle for hundreds of years people must have been so tired of it, yet the divisions ran so deep that simply not fighting any more was never an option.

In a film that is so full of atmosphere building camera work, it is interesting that one central scene steals the show. A scene, shot in a single take, has Sands talking about his motivations to hunger strike with his family priest. This is the most political part in the film, in which the motivations for the Republican movement and British government are hinted at but never signposted.

For a film which is about such a politically divisive subject, and one which is so fresh in the minds of everyone in Britain, it manages to be fantastically even-handed in the presentation of history. Every time I thought that the film-makers were going to become sympathetic towards Sands and the IRA, the true horror of their paramilitary war was shown. At the end I did think that Sands' sacrifice is seen as a vindication of the man, although I don't think this vindication reflects back on to the IRA.