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.

Jackie Brown

I was at a bit of a loose end on Friday evening as the DVD of 'Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter and Spring' that LoveFilm had sent me had a massive crack in it; so after I'd finished watching as much 24 as I could handle (series 6 now) I stuck my old Jackie Brown DVD in the player. I wasn't really intending to watch it that closely, but I always like to have light and noise in the background while I'm doing other things.

Jackie Brown is a film which somehow seems to get overlooked when people discuss Tarantino's films. Where his other films are often non-linear and set in a strange alternate universe where people speak in a gangster code language, Jackie Brown is oddly realistic, it is something that might actually happen in real life. Far from this being a failure though, I think it's a really entertaining film with just as much surreal coolness as Pulp Fiction or Reservoir Dogs.

It is one of the few times in a film that Tarantino has created a group of characters who have multiple dimensions, who aren't there simply as conduits for his feats of dialogue. The two main protagonists, played by Pam Grier as Brown and Samuel L Jackson as Ordell, don't need to have surreal conversions about hamburgers to be interesting. The eponymous Brown is trying to escape her connections to crime by playing both sides of the law, while Jackson plays a small time drug dealer with pretensions to being a big cheese. The film spends a lot of time setting these characters up, so that when the story gets into full swing it's interesting because we're interested in the characters.

There is a lot there for fans of Tarantino's other work too. Jackson and Grier get an enormous number of entertaining one-liners and there are surrealist moments too (most notably the shooting in the car park towards the end). My favourite character is Robert De Niro as the lazy washed-up criminal who spends the entire film loafing about in Ordell's flat, smoking drugs and ogling his girlfriend. It almost seems like a waste of acting talent for such a part, but acting that lazy yet still coming across as a dangerous criminal probably takes a lot of skill.

So don't let anyone tell you that Jackie Brown is the least of Tarantino's films. It's an entertaining and uncomplex crime drama which is nothing if not uplifting.

Eden Lake

This is a fairly modern horror film and one that I had been eager to watch for some time. Set in contemporary Britain, it's about a middle class couple who go out into a secluded location for a weekend together and instead encounter with the local youths. This is a horror film, so it's not going to be a surprise to discover that the youths are a pack of half-feral social outcasts who play their music too loud, behave lewdly and brandish a huge great hulking dog. There is a lot of blood in this film once it gets going.

When the film came out it received a lot of mixed and interesting reviews. Some people opposed the film's view of small town Britain, with families that are too tight-knit for their own good and refuse to discipline children. Other reviews took a dim view of the characterisation; are kids really that bad? Would otherwise nice middle class people really react like that? It is annoying that this word has to be used, but it is almost impossible to watch the film without seeing the kids as 'chavs' – unruly working class kids who act menacingly and appear to have no moral fiber or respect for others.

Rather than casting the story in a modern light in which annoying terms like 'chav' are banded about, I prefer to see the story as one that could have could have been told in any era. Misbehaving children who show a lack of respect to adults; it's hardly a modern phenomena. 'Rebel without a Cause' was over 50 years ago for Christ sake! It's a story in mould of 'Texas Chainsaw Massacre', in which an isolated community behaves in a way that's anathema to the sensibilities of the rest of civilisation. It just so happens that this community happen to be in modern day Britain. I'm pretty sure that the film makers aren't having a dig at local British working class communities; if anything they're having a go at the Middle classes, in which the 'have a go' culture and stubborn determination to 'not let them win' ends up exacerbating a situation which could easily have been diffused by simply ignoring it.

As far as a gory horror film goes, it ticks all the right boxes and I recommend having a watch.