Splice

Very much not the film I was hoping for, Splice was a big letdown in several departments. For a film with trailers that made it look like a horror and a plot that made it sound like a remake of The Fly it ended up flitting between genres. I found it deeply unsatisfying and something of a wasted opportunity.

The story is about two scientists working outside the mainstream to create a hybrid human-animal life form. Something like The Fly or Primer for example - films that draw a viewer in by setting up a claustrophobic atmosphere while hinting a mysteries and ambiguities in story and character. Such a shame then that 'Splice' gets nowhere near doing any of these things - instead opting for lazy scripting and hackneyed attempts at shock tactics to scare (which fail anyway). The writing was on the wall early on when our two scientists work hard to try to splice the human and animal DNA together - cue montage! Any and all tension there might have been in this is drained out pretty quickly by the needless application of scientists in white coats furrowing their brows in front of unlikely computer graphical representations of their experiments. I don't remember Primer needing a montage when the protagonists first stumble across their time machine.

The more I've thought about this the more I think Splice has very few redeeming features. At least 'Species' had a well-hot actress in the lead role; Splice is trying too hard to be a serious science fiction film to go down that route, but it fails at every other turn. Especially the end with its 'to be continued' final scene - completely dull, telegraphed and miles short of the 'beware the dangers of science' ending (a la The Fly) they should of aimed at.

I guess it's not really a surprise then that when it was actually out at cinemas the only place it was on even slightly near me was Basingstoke, for once the multiplex distributers have done me a favour and saved me £7.

No Man's Land

I got hold of this DVD after a friend of mine bemoaned the lack of exposure in the western media to Serbian cinema. I readily admitted that I had no real knowledge of Serbian cinema, the only things even vaguely connected to the Balkans I could think of off the top of my head are the Romanian film "4 Months 3 Weeks 2 Days" and "A Serbian Film" - so that's a film set in Romania (so not Slavic) and a film with has a plot synopsis so awful I'm not going to talk about it any further.

So, not much exposure to Serbian films indeed. 'No Man's Land' is a black comedy set during the war years in the ruins of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. Serbian and Bosnian troops face off against each other, two Bosnians and one Serbian soldier become trapped in a trench in no-man's land. One of the Bosnians is stuck on top of a mine that will kill them all if he moves, the other two have a gun each but are also injured and so agree to a truce until the UN can come to their aid.

Following this set up is an engaging farce in which French UN soldiers try to help the men while dealing with the bureaucracy of NATO. The media on the ground implore the soldiers to help the men, but their paymasters are only after a good story. The commanders of the Bosnian and Serb troops on each side seem indifferent to the men stuck in no-man's land while the men at the centre of all this confusion continue to argue and bicker about the war and whose fault it is. I don't think this takes a genius to decode this as an allegory for Yugoslavia itself; where the man stuck on the mine represents the nation as a whole, unable to move with changing times for fear of setting off a political bomb, while the nations of Serbia and Bosnia work themselves into an ecstasy of rage about each other before finally resorting to violence. All the while the world's media, NATO and the UN look on and try to help - but ultimately are unable. Perhaps it's the bureaucratic nature of the outsiders that prevents them, perhaps it's because no outsider truly understands the nature being Slavic. Perhaps though (as I think is hinted in the film) neither the Serb nor the Bosnian armies get any help because neither do anything to deserve it - they're agents of their own destruction constantly plotting each other's downfalls while the world looks on and sighs.

A lot of comedy mileage is made out of the language barriers between the protagonists, as well as the at-best incompetence and at-worst downright dangerousness of the people 'in charge' in the former Yugoslavia. It's a film that's very funny and provides (I hope) an insight into a conflict that we in Western Europe only ever really see through Kate Aidie style newsreels.

Machete

Guilty pleasures are a wonderful thing. In the same way that a Metaller might admit to liking the odd Bon Jovi track or a Rugby fan might secretly wish there was more American Football on TV, I bloody loved watching 'Machete' at the Bracknell Odeon last night.

'Machete' is the film of the trailer. Not in the same way that normal films are films with trailers though, this is a film made off the back of the fake trailer in the Robert Rodriquez / Quentin Tarantino double bill Grindhouse. In the trailer we see a massive dirty great Mexican scumbag / ex cop (Danny Trejo) hacking, shooting and dismembering his way through piles of dirtier and even less-appealing Mexicans, Gringos and all manner of other goons. Grindhouse wasn't that good, and the Machete trailer was one of the best bits, but when I discovered that Robert Rodriguez was actually planning to turn it into a bona-fide film I feared it'd make a bit of a dud. What looks fun in a trailer can't make for much of a good 90 minutes. Or can it...

The film opens with Machete being backstabbed by his Mexican Federale bosses and his wife being murdered by a local drug lord (Steven Segal - fuck yeah!). Machete is presumed dead; but fast-forward to Texas 3 years later and here he is, struggling to find work with the rest of the dishevelled illegal immigrants from south of the border. The surprisingly famous cast are slowly introduced; Michelle Rodriguez is a legal immigrant helping the illegals get their lives together, Jessica Alba is the local immigration officer and Robert DeNiro is the Texas senator who shoots Mexicans for fun while running for re-election. Machete is hired by DeNiro's aide to 'shoot' the senator. Machete is in fact set up though, the whole shooting incident is to be used as an excuse for tighter border controls and help the senator win re-election. Machete escapes though, and wants his revenge - they've just "... fucked with the wrong Mexican". This is where it gets fun.

We get a bit of Texas politics, a bit of bad Steven Segal hamming it up, a bit of De Niro slipping into his New York accent and a hell of a lot of extreme violence, blood, dismemberment, disembowelling and - strangely - laughs. Especially funny is a part where some hired guards have a conversation about why they're bothering to protect such a nasty man from someone as dangerous as Machete. Thankfully Machete gets past them without having to kill a single one - nice of him to do that.

For a film that involves quite so many extremely hot girls getting extremely naked I think it scores fairly highly on the feminism test. Rodriguez and Alba both play strong characters who are leaders of men. The fact that Rodriguez comes out kicking ass in her bra at one point or that Alba stars in a technically unnecessary shower scene need not detract from that. If anything the film is anti male, as far more simpering male idiots are dispatched by Machete than helpless girls are mishandled by the baddies. The only bit that's completely gratuitous is the appearance of Lindsay Lohan; who remains naked for essentially the whole film and seems to have no real sensible inclusion - apart from the being naked part obviously.

I knew I shouldn't really have enjoyed Machete quite as much as I did, but whether its meant to be a spoof of the genre or a film firmly rooted in that genre it still made me laugh out loud several times. And who can say fairer than that? Sometimes it's the guilty pleasures that are the best.

Harry Potter Part 7 Part 1 - AKA: HP7a

When I first read that the producers of the wildly (and mostly deservedly) successful Harry Potter series had announced their intention to split its final instalment into two parts I was immediately despondent. After the genuinely awful start to the Potter series the third through to the fifth films were exciting, dark when they needed to be and revealed their child stars as promising actors of the future. Much of the promise of those 3 middle films seemed to evaporate with the announcement that part 7 would be in two parts. There was only one reason to split the seventh film into two - money. Any talk of sticking to the original text is simply doublething on the part of the producers. The 4th, 5th and 6th books are both incredibly long texts and were both adequately reduced into screenplays of around the 140 minute mark.

I toyed with the idea of not going to see HP7a for this reasons and others. My experience of the original texts was one major reason. I was hugely bored with the first half of HP7 the book as it consisted almost entirely sneaking around bits of England hiding from baddies. Thankfully the second half of makes everything worthwhile - it has a wonderfully emotional finish and I recommend reading the lot. With this in mind I decided that I needed to see HP7a, since without it the payoff next summer wont be half as good. At least it wasn't going to be in 3D anyway. All this meant I went into the cinema with not the most open of minds - I was expecting to be disappointed.

The story of Harry Potter has moved on from its boarding school roots and for the first time in the series we are out of Hogwarts and into the unknown. Within the opening half hour Potter and his chums are thrown into mortal danger and are on the run from Voldemort and his cronies. The film sets itself up on a war footing from the outset, Potter and co are forced to go into hiding for fear that they are putting their loved ones in danger. They camp out in the woods, infiltrate the ministry of magic and fight against several dark mages to evade capture. It's a story in which the dangers are terrifyingly real and in which the quidditch of the early instalments seems like a twee sideshow by comparison. The film ends up being very true to the book and is full of a number of lovely touches - more of those later.

Before getting too carried away with praise though: the film is too long. For an adaptation of half of a book that isn't as long as some of the previous tomes in the series, over 150 minutes is just silly. I thought that we'd got over the need to include every little microcosm of the Potter-verse when we got to part 3. Apparently not, and we are subjected to a number scenes which could easily have been coalesced into dialogue asides or (forgive me for suggesting it) even a montage. An example is Bill Nighy's appearance to read out Dumbledore's will to the kids. It probably goes on for about 5 minutes and adds literally nothing that couldn't have been done by the kids talking about the event later. One part of the film that could be cut out but I'm glad they didn't is a cartoon-styled sequence in which Hermione tells a story of three brothers and the creation of the Deathly Hallows (the MacGuffins for part 2 btw). Some beautiful animation there and a credit to whomever on the production team is responsible.

Rather than being dull though, HP7a's long 'on the run in a tent' sequences take on the feeling of a character drama. Harry finds himself in the eye of a storm and is torn between facing his destiny and protecting his loved ones. Hermione is brave and resourceful, but knows that Harry must ultimately face his demons alone. Ron is best friend to both, but is tortured by thoughts of losing them to teenage lust. This three-way teenage melting pot of emotions and fears added to the physical dangers of dark magics is the recipe for a pretty bloody good drama. Much better than the book ever managed in my opinion.

Apart from the length and occasionally unnecessary sequences, the film is overall very enjoyable with a good mix of darkness, comedy and teen angst. It's the perfect way to set up the final battle of the next film and also fun to see loads of well-famous British actors with incredibly small bit parts. I'm looking forward to HP7b, roll on July 2011!

Monetarist Propaganda

I watched the last 30 minutes of this last night and after I gathered my jaw off the floor I struggled to comprehend the lunatic propaganda that I had just witnessed on the normally-progressive Channel 4. The documentary was a one-sided polemic in which the presenter blamed the latest financial crisis on 'big state' and 'big government'. He held Hong Kong up as a paragon of monetarism, shining a light on everything that works about that tiny city state as an example of the Asian tigers and avoiding all mention of the other Asian tigers who's economies have failed.

He suggested that Hong Kong is a beacon of prosperity and that Britain needs to emulate it if the nation is to return to the 'glory' years of the 18th and 19th centuries. One presumes that by Britain's 'glory years' the presenter isn't talking about when there was no NHS, no right to vote, no women's suffrage, no state pension, child labour, endless wars on the continent, rotten boroughs in parliament, disease, back-breaking hard work and short life-expectancies. I guess he means some kind of rose-tinted view of buccaneering British conquistadors forcing trade agreements on Indian and Chinese natives, waving a Union Jack around on the battlefield and rolling in pound notes in some kind of Jane Austin upper-middle-class fantasy. Just what I don't need.

The documentary produced a long line of vox-pops (exclusively city types and people sitting on right-wing think tanks) who told us that the ONLY way to repay the debt was to reduce taxes, release controls on business and downside government. This brazen hypocrisy on the part of those who created the financial meltdown is so ridiculous and it astounds me how few have challenged it. The program talks of a 4.8 trillion pound national debt in terms of a household debt, the presenter uses the same disingenuous arguments as the government and deliberately misconstrues the truth by equating a national economy to one of a family budgeting its incomes and outgoings. He parrots the government's line about treating this debt as something that has to be paid off by managing outgoings, rather than something that is dealt with by investing in Britain's economic future.

I was heartened to discover this morning that the presenter of "Britain's Trillion Pound Horror Story" is the same guy who recently has produced similar documentaries denouncing environmentalism and fear mongering about genetic engineering. Not a man who's grasp of science is the finest then. But I wonder how many of those who watched this program will go out of their way to discover the presenter's history of misinformation and lies. Few I suspect. However, while programs like this can find a place on a serious television channel during prime time the government's lies about its 'necessary' cuts will continue to be the mainstream.

The Disappearance of Alice Creed

This is the kind of thing we do well in Britain isn't it? Here is a small budget production with a tight script and interesting premise. Two stern-faced and occasionally-masked men spend the opening scenes of the film methodically and meticulously preparing a house and a room for god knows what purpose. They buy a series of tools, bin bags and plastic sheets, then boost and strip out a van, attach poles and hooks to walls in a warehouse and dig holes in a forest. They do all this without speaking a word, barely acknowledging each other let along the rest of the world. These are two guys up to no good. Then they kidnap a young woman and a plan begins to unfold. A simple plan of kidnap and extortion. Or is it as simple as it seems?

With only three actors in the whole film the microscope is on them and their ability to deliver a performance that carries the story. I remember Eddie Marsan from Vera Drake but had no idea how terrifying he would be able to make his beady eyes, Gemma Arterton seems to be turning into the next Brit to cross the pond and succeed so I guess there was no worry about her being able to express the terror of a woman kidnapped (as well as a number of other emotions - which would give away too much of the plot to discuss in detail). Suffice to say that there are a series of plots swings and twists as the histories and motivations of all three characters are revealed and then tested to the limit. At no point does the claustrophobia and tension of the plot suffer from awkward acting - full marks all round.

It's not just the acting that did it for me. The opening few minutes in which the kidnappers buy all their gear and fit up their lair has much more menace to it than even Eddie Marsan's eyes are capable of generating, it's all about the short disconcerting cuts and odd camera angles. Everything's there and in place to put the viewer off, to unsettle you ever so slightly and make you tense about what's coming next.

As I already said, the film is very claustrophobic. With only 3 actors and very few sets it feels at times as if you're intruding something very private by watching it. That's a feeling that paid off towards the very end when a character looks straight into the camera for about 5 seconds, it's kind of a 'what would you do?' moment and an absolutely brilliant way to finish. This is a film you should watch.

RED - bit of a let down

This was certainly a film to be excited about. Talk about a top quality cast and some kick-arse trailers, the bit in the trailer where Helen Mirren starts shooting a minigun gave me a strange reaction. At first I would disappointed to see that one of Britain's great actresses had decided to give into the pressure and take the Hollywood paycheque, but then I thought that there's actually something glorious in seeing a RADA luminary live the action film cliché. Well, let's say I had high hopes.

My understanding is that the film is based on a comic book. This makes sense as there are a lot of contrivances in the story that don't stand up in the real world. For a start, the opening 15 minutes focuses on a Bruce Willis connecting with a woman (Mary Louise Parker) who works in the social security office. He keeps on pretending that they've not sent him any pensions cheques as a pretence for calling her. Somehow she thinks this is charming and ends up falling for him when they finally meet (he breaks into her house while being chased by some kind of SWAT team). They then go on a trip around America - you can tell they're travelling places from all the post cards that say things like 'Delaware' on them - having hi-jinx and meeting all Willis' ex-CIA goons; Malkovich, Freeman and Mirren.

This gang then uncover a plot to kill them all, so they have to kill the US Vice President while chatting up Russians, winding up arms dealers and firing a huge amount of ordinance. It's a bit funny (John Malvovich especially) and fairly silly but all incredibly forced. Just not as good as I had expected it to be. Maybe that's because I saw it on Saturday morning when I thought I'd get a bargain matinee ticket but didn't (you only get bargain matinee at Showcase on weekdays - what use is that?!), but I was left fairly nonplussed.

The Social Network

No matter what reservations I may have had about watching a film detailing the creation of Facebook (a site on which I do have an account and use to share photos with friends), I was completely won over by a film that is littered by Aaron Sorkin's trademark dialogue. The opening scene was enough to do it for me, in which Mark Zuckerberg and his soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend engage in a twisting conversation that operates on multiple levels before swinging off in different directions. It was the West Wing all over again and I was smitten.

On the surface the film is about Mark Zuckerberg (the Facebook CEO) and how he created Facebook at Harvard University in 2003 / 2004. The story is not as simple as this though. Since several different groups of students were interested in creating online social networking sites at the time, the story is told from the point of view of a series of flashbacks from a later date at which Zuckerberg is being sued by most of the people who knew him at the time. Rather than being a story about web-development, it's a story about people battling each other to be king of a new online world - i.e. a story about characters.

The main character is of course Mark Zuckerberg. I don't know what Zuckerberg is like in person, but if Jessie Eisenberg is playing him true to life then he's an annoying nerd who always has a witty one-liner, a complete grasp of internet computing and an inability to communicate with real people. You might think that the story of Zuckerberg's young life is a story of affluence and roller-coaster rides to fame and riches, but 'The Social Network' paints him as a guy who only ever wanted to be accepted by people who matter to him. It is after his girlfriend dumps him that he creates the first beta version of Facebook, despite all the fame and riches and groupies he stumbles over it is still people like her to whom he looks for acceptance - the film's final scene being a poignant demonstration of that.

Whether this is true to real life or not is a question I don't have the information to answer. What I do know is that this film gives an in depth portrayal of an intriguing character as well as an eye-opening overview of the development of one of the world's most popular and successful websites (the truth of which appears to be largely validated by reading the Wiki entry for Facebook). And if that's not enough for you, it's written by Aaron Sorkin.

Alice in Wonderland - now in 2D!

This is one of those films that when it came out I wasn't particularly interested in, mainly because I've never seen what's so amazing about the Alice in Wonderland story but also because I was having one of my more militant anti-3D phases at the time. I found myself proved right yesterday as I watched the film in the classic 2 dimensional format without silly glasses and without a £2 charge for the privilege of having a screen force false perspective on my eyes.

The film is the story of Alice returning to wonderland. She is 13 years older than the original story and now about to be married off. However - she's a modern-thinking girl in a bygone age so despite all the trappings and social conventions of her time she eschews her suitor and runs off to think about her future. Within seconds she spots a magic rabbit and has fallen down a big hole into what fans of the book will no doubt recognise as yet another adaptation of their favourite story. When she falls down the hole I was baffled by several odd moments when the camera focuses on inconsequential things such as a piano flying at Alice. We then get an Alice-eye-view of the piano. It took me several seconds to work out that of course in the 3D version of the film the piano probably flew out at people and induced a number of yelps from the yokels. The effect was totally lost on the 2D screen.

From that moment on I think the movie was fairly lost on me. I watched the whole thing with one part of my brain systematically cataloguing the bits of the film that exist purely to make 3D tech look good. For example, there's a part when Alice flies through the air on the Mad Hatter's hat with lots of swooping and things flying past her. It's as if people making 3D films can't think of any way of making the tech improve their film, so they're resorting to just chucking stuff at the screen.

It's not that Alice in Wonderland doesn't have its merits. I'm a self-stated rookie when it comes to the Alice story, but even I can appreciate what Tim Burton has done here. As you would expect from a Tim Burton re-envisioning of the Alice story, everything has been stylised and warped into a darkened and slightly crazy version of the original. You've got Helena Bonham Carter screeching her way through her lines, Johnny Depp letting rip his insanity and an intriguing redesign of the Alice character, here a gothic stylised sword and sorcery heroine complete with pale white skin and a destiny to slay the dragon. And he's certainly sexed the character up too; all those dresses that keep falling off her? Indeed.

Aside from the styling there's not really anything that happens in this film. Alice goes here, talks to odd people, goes there and talks to mad people, becomes tall then small then tall then normal-sized and then decides to 'save' wonderland from a queen that the locals all acquise to. I don't get why this inconsequential wackiness is that interesting, which probably means I was never really going to warm to it. I think this is going to have to go down as my least favourite Tim Burton film.

Clerks - roofers in the Death Star

Someone at work reminded me last week about this scene in Clerks, the one where Randal explains his theory on how the contractors on the Death Star in Return of the Jedi were innocent bystanders in a war they cared nothing for.



Great stuff

Buried

I turned down the opportunity to go and see the re-released 'Back to the Future' with my mates on Wednesday night in order to make sure I saw 'Buried' before it vanishes out of the cinemas. I reasoned that a film entirely set inside the confines of a coffin would be hugely better viewed inside a massive dark room with surround sound than in my house. Winnersh Showcase have stopped showing it already, so me and 9 other randoms spread ourselves liberally around the Odeon in Bracknell (I snuck into one of the 'Premier' seats - how naughty am I?!) for 90 minutes of buried-alive trauma.

At least trauma was what I was expecting. 'Buried' has been marketed and reviewed as something of a game-changer for thrillers. Being buried alive is many people's worst fear (one of my own too), and you would think that by filming the experience in such an up close and personal way the fear would be more physical and terrifying than ever. I was disappointed that I didn't feel much in the way of fear at all, since the directorial style (always in a box) left me feeling somewhat bored.

Bored is not a word that I like to use lightly when describing a film, but when I look at my watch and then look again later to discover that only 5 minutes have passed, something is wrong. To put it simply, not enough actually happens in the film for it to be interesting. Guy is in a hostage in box, guy has frustrating phone calls while in box, guy wishes he wasn't in box - that's basically it. Ok so at one point there's a snake in his coffin, and at another point he is sent a video of another hostage being shot, but I didn't feel like I was part of the story. Seeing everything from inside the box kind of removed any context from the plot, something that ultimately left me feeling tired and willing the end on.

When the end comes it's no surprise. There is a nice part near the end that hints at a metaphor of the US government and corporations selling out their soldiers and citizens when the going gets tough - but it was too little too late to grab my attention. I was very disappointed.

Made In Dagenham

Ever since I first saw the posters of 'Made in Dagenham' I have been excited. I was first made aware of the film by the poster (rare these days) and was interested immediately - a film with 'Dagenham' in the title! I come from just up the road of Dagenham in nearby Ilford, so anything that is 'Made in Dagenham' had to be exciting. Then I found out what the film was about, the true story of a group of female 'unskilled' workers go on strike for the right to equal pay - and win! It was as if I'd commissioned the British Film Council to make my perfect film!

Trouble is that expectations get too high. The reviews were mixed, some were saying that it was trying to be like 'Full Monty' and failing, others said that it was being a too idealistic and right-on with its portrayal of the women. Thankfully Mark Kermode thought it was great - but then I have a history of disagreeing with him when he likes things. I was nervous.

As the film opens we see the girls of Ford Dagenham laughing and getting on with their jobs. They have a camaraderie and show little or no militant tendency. This is the summer of 1968 though, and with revolution happening over the world it is the most normal thing for them to have a day's stoppage when they are downgraded from semi to un-skilled. Only after management use heavy-handed tactics to scare them into submission does Rita emerge. Respected by the others, she argues for and leads them into an indefinite stoppage. At first all they want is to be re-graded as semi-skilled, soon though the issue widens into equal pay.

It was pointed out in the Guardian that 'Made in Dagenham' follows in a long line of British comedy / drama films set around the economic hardships of layoffs, industrial unrest and a changing world where skilled manufacturing labour is told it is no longer wanted. To name but a few - The Full Monty, Billy Elliot and Calendar girls. But what sets 'Made in Dagenham' apart is that the the characters fight back against the cuts and layoffs - and win! The women in the film recognise the injustice of their situation and stand up to do something about it. Rita is a wonderful character, not once does she spout left-leaning slogans or call anyone comrade, she is simply an ordinary person forced into extraordinary things by circumstance. Rosamund Pike's character tells her about how she read history in Cambridge and was fascinated by the people who make history, she then asks Rita to tell her what it feels like when she does the same. The message is clear: history can be made by normal people just as much as it can by kings and queens.

Making history is not an easy process though. Rita is harassed by her own union wanting to not rock the boat, the Ford bosses screaming that equal pay would destroy profitability (that old lie) and finally her friends and husband who - although trying to support her - struggle to cope with the economic realities of being on strike. The cracks in Rita's marriage and friendships demonstrate the truth of striking and put to bed the myth that it's all about workers being lazy and trying to get time off. It's one of the film's strongest themes.

The film does have a couple of downsides. Mostly that the feminist message is rammed home a little too strongly at times. The moment when one of the girls writes 'equal pay now' or some other slogan on her midriff during a photo shoot for Ford cars is a little odd. And did we really need Rita's husband shooting himself in the foot quite so emphatically by telling her what a paragon he is simply because he's never hit her? "That is as it should be!" she is right to exclaim in response, and though this is the main point of the film it just ends up making him look like a dick.

Thankfully these are very minor faults, and the film faithfully tells a tale of ordinary people struggling through hardships to win something that these days we all accept as a right. It reminds us that almost everything good and progressive in our society is something that someone had to fight tooth and nail to get. From the universal voting rights to women's suffrage to the creation of the NHS to the right to trial by jury, someone had to suffer hardship to get it.

The world is a different place now to what it was in the 1960s, but when Rita stands up in front of the TUC and addresses the dinosaurs of the union movement her question struck a chord with me - when did we in Britain forget how to fight? "Made in Dagenham" is nothing less than inspirational.

Cemetery Junction

If ever there was a case of a film being redeemed by its ending, it is Cemetery Junction. It is very rare that I get through 80 minutes of a film thinking a big fat 'MEH' and at the end find myself with a smile on my face and a glint in my eye - but it happened on Wednesday this week, and I'm here to tell you all about it.

But I'm getting ahead of myself, 'Cemetery Junction' is a film that purports to be about being young and having to grow up in small-town England in the 1970s. So we get to see lots of stuff about what it was like growing up in the 1970s - if you live inside Ricky Gervais' brain of course. Three youngish lads bum around town with starry eyes having a laugh, fighting with the townies and sometimes doing an honest day's work while winding the coppers up and swearing liberally with their parents - you could have a laugh back then of course, not like today. There's Freddie the earnest leader, Bruce the good-looking fighter and Snork the endearing thickie. They still think and act like they're in school, if only someone could come along and teach them that there's more to life than living in Reading and drawing graffiti on billboards! If only someone could open their eyes to the big wide world and give them a reason to get out and spread their wings! If only!

Thank Christ a pretty girl from Freddie's childhood turns up to tell him all about travelling the world. Praise be that her Dad / Freddie's boss is an insufferable career-minded twat who treats his wife like a waitress and crushes the life out of everyone he meets - thus teaching Freddie the importance of getting out of a rut while you can. Without these people to teach him the wisdom of following your dreams while you're young - who knows what might have happened!

For 80 minutes 'Cemetery Junction' is about as close to a sentimental paint-by-numbers coming of age 'drama' as I'm willing to get without turning the DVD off. In fact it's only the comedy (fart jokes, but funny fart jokes - although there is one great line Freddie says about not knocking his Nan's hair cutting "... it's cheap cos of the Parkinsons") that makes it worthwhile. Everything is predictable and conveniently-plotted, every character fulfils a specific and message-delivering role.

That's what I was going to write in this blog until the very last 7:30 minutes of the film. "7:30 minutes is an odd amount of time" - is something you might say. Well is so happens that it's the length of Led Zeppelin's Rain Song, a song which plays out over the final scenes of the movie. A song to which the events of the final scenes of the movie are edited to perfectly match the movements of. A song that I love. A song that melted my stern heart and made me smile. This is what movie making is all about; anyone who can be bothered to get a Led Zeppelin classic and write a story around it is worthy of praise no matter how saccarine sweet that story might appear to be.

So Ricky Gervais might still be a silly smug tit, but he's our silly smug tit - and so I'm going to stand up for him. Good work mate.

Latest Weird Film - Mullholland Drive

Watched Mulholland Drive last night with a bunch of mates, it's pretty much the definition of the weird film so I'm a little surprised that it took us this long to get around to watching it. I first saw it not long after it came out, before the days of imdb and so before I was able to easily research what on earth it was all about. Even these days though it still takes a lot of thought to get what's going on in this apparently non-sensical thriller

You can understand the basic plot fairly easily with a few pointers, but even without that there's a lot to enjoy. At a straight level the film can be seen as a comment on the shallowness of the Hollywood film industry - in which starry-eyed country girl Betty arrives anonymously in Los Angeles eager to see her dreams of stardom fulfilled while director Adam's film is taken out of his control by mobsters and the meek amnesiac actress 'Ruth' hides out from the very same mobsters who are probably out to kill her. Ooh isn't Hollywood nasty.

Of course in reality there's hugely more to it than this. It's a story of love and betrayal in the unforgiving world of the film industry and how an outsider's reaction to that has dire consequences. Part of the joy of the film comes from being confused by what's happening and then trying to put together the various pieces to arrive at a satisfying story. Believe me when I say that there is a coherent story in there, and that even when all the characters appear to become different people towards the end it does actually make sense if you pay attention to the clues. It's all about reality versus fantasy and how terrible events and psychoses in one can deeply affect you in the other.

Oddly enough, despite all the warnings of confusing dialogue, dream sequences, out-of-place scenes and intangible characters, I think it's one of David Lynch's most accessible films. This is probably because if you think about it enough the plot is understandable and linear (sort of), set in the real world and about things we can relate to. Plus there are two glamorous lead characters (that's right lads, two glamorous girls in the lead roles who - get this - get more than a little intimate!) and a number of superb stand-alone scenes such as the "It is all an illusion" scene at 'Club Silencio'. Plus it's the film where Naomi Watts got her break into the acting big leagues, not a surprise really given the range of emotions she's required to portray throughout the film's various realities. From doe-eyed wonder to the terrifying paranoia of jealousy and everything in between she gives an acting masterclass.

And if you're still lost after you've seen it have no fear though, you can always go here for help!

Exam

I saw a trailer for 'Exam' ages ago on the internet and I was pretty interested. I'm not entirely sure when or if it ever got released to cinemas, but I dimly remember seeing its release date on LoveFilm some months ago - on to my list it went, a week ago it arrived in the post. It almost goes without saying what a shame it is that a small budget British production with an interesting idea should pass all the mainstream cinemas by. For those of us who don't live in London (or possibly another major British City) it is pretty much impossible to find anywhere showing films like this. One wonders how much of an audience this film will ever have.

But I digress, for I have not yet told you what kind of a film this is. 'Exam' has a simple premise, 8 candidates for an unknown but extremely desirable job sit an exam. The invigilator provides them verbal instructions at the start of the film. They have 80 minutes to answer the question. They may not spoil their papers or leave the exam room; they may not attempt to communicate with the invigilator or the armed guard. He then starts a clock counting down from 80 minutes and leaves the room, the candidates turn over their exam papers to discover... nothing. A blank page. From there the candidates have to work out what is going on, what the question they have to answer is, and who the other people in the room with them are.

It's a great idea for a mystery story. Sitting exams is something that fills many of us with fear in a way that's more real than many a horror film, the anxiety comes from being able to leave at any time but knowing that to do so will mean disqualification and failure. Thankfully - unlike many a mystery story - by the end the resolution is fairly satisfying. I advise people to check it out.

Just in case you're worried, they don't all simply sit there in silence for 80 minutes scratching their heads.

Salt - insert pun here

As I start to write this review I wonder how common it is that when film producers come up with marketing tools for their releases they have one eye on the potential for punnery that could arise from the film's subject matter. I ponder this after considering how many reviewers of this film have tried to desperately come up with a pun based on something salty. If only Angelina Jolie was older you could say something like "... Jolie is well-preserved for a X-year old actress...", or maybe something about the ending “…leaving me thirsty for more”, or perhaps something even more terrible. Ho hum, the things that go through my mind while I'm killing time at the end of the working day. Madness.

'Salt' is a kind of OK type of film, a film about which I can't really think of anything brilliant to say but at the same time was an entirely reasonable way to spend an evening. Angelina Jolie plays a CIA agent who within the first 10 minutes is on the run from her bosses after being accused by a Russian 'walk-in' of being a Russian spy. She is going to kill the Russian president apparently, even if she doesn't know it yet. This is a film that doesn't take long to get going.

It then rattles along with a reasonable pace, plenty of chases and shooting and Angelina dyeing her hair a new colour. Surely Angelina is the good guy, isn’t she? Maybe, but maybe not – and who will / wont / should / shouldn’t believe her? There are plenty of nice twists and turns and guns and tech and stunts. Salt's world of backward motivations and clandestine agendas takes her eventually to a bunker underneath the White House and the brink of nuclear war – then it kicks off properly. I was pretty sure that the plot didn't hold up at the end after all those twists and shifting goalposts, but a quick post-film deconstruction of Salt's motivations and actions with my housemate proved I was wrong – turns out the writers have created something fairly solid.

As I already said though, there's not a huge amount to write home about here, and I guess that from this point of view it's a little depressing that it's done moderately well in cinemas. But then there wasn't really much out last week. The Runaways comes out next week though, should be good.

Pandorum

I'm not going to spend too long reviewing this, mainly because I felt like I wasted enough time already on Wednesday evening just by watching it. The plot is that in the future the world is over-populated, so a spaceship carrying thousands of people is fung off into space to an Earth-like world to populate it and essentially resettle humanity. Some of the crew wake up early and realise that something is not quite right on the ship. They can't get into the bridge to find out where they are and there are strange creatures knocking about - not what you want really.

I suppose that Pandorum could have been a good film if it there was (a) any attempt to generate suspense, (b) any plot at all and (c) a better director involved. The creatures on the ship are unmasked far too early to generate any kind of tension, every time anything action-based happens the director goes instantly to a shaky running camera and I don't really know what the plot was. Something about the main character having to restart and engine so that Dennis Quaid can get into the bridge?

Admittedly the ending was kind of satisfying, but by the time we got there I didn't care to be honest. If I were you I wouldn't bother.

Ponyo - the magical fish with a face

The sixth instalment of 'weird film night' at my new house this Tuesday had us watching last year's Studio Ghibli animation 'Ponyo'. This was the second Japanese animation in a row for weird film night (last time was 'Akira'), which proves that either Japanese animation is well odd or that we in the west don't really get it.

Ponyo is a story about a fish (with a face) called Ponyo who gets found trapped in a glass by a little boy. As the boy plays with Ponyo and feeds her, Ponyo reveals magical powers and demonstrates the ability to talk. After playing with the boy for ages, she starts to slowly turn into a girl. I guess in one sense this is standard fairy tale stuff, but there's something about Japanese animation that makes everything seem totally otherworldly, which makes the film seem a lot weirder than it would if the same story were told using a Western style.

We watched the version that had been dubbed over with English-speaking actors. There were some big names in there, mainly Liam Neeson and Cate Blanchet as the wizard and goddess of the sea. Tina Fey voices the mother of the young boy who befriends Ponyo, a fantastically comic character who seems like a great mum despite demonstrating some outright dangerous parenting. Something is always lost in the translation though, this is both a bane and a boon for films like Ponyo as deadly serious lines in the original sometimes take on an unintended but welcome comic tone. When Liam Neeson mumbles to himself about having to turn Ponyo back into a fish so that "...the balance of the world is not upset...", it's hard to take him seriously - but maybe that's not the point.

I think that's why I sometimes have a hard time with Japanese animation, I often can't quite get the point they are trying to make. I can never quite work out if they're being deliberately tongue-in-cheek or if a translation / cultural reference that should be deep or serious has gone wrong. In the end I sometimes feel a little lost. This shouldn't detract though from the film's visual experience though, and the fact that at its heart the film is a funny and endearing fairy tale.

"Ponyo like HAM!"

Scott Pilgrim v The World

I'm not really sure where to start my review of Scott Pilgrim v The World. Commonly I start my reviews with either a plot synopsis or an anecdote about my evening at the cinema, but any plot synopsis for Scott Pilgrim seems so puerile when I think it out loud that I'm not sure I want to write it down (and I went to the cinema in Bracknell, so I have no anecdotes to tell). Here's an attempt at a plot synopsis: Scott Pilgrim is a bit of a nerdy guy who spots the girl of his dreams (literally) and is forced to battle her 7 evil exes in order to win her hand. Sounds pretty silly doesn't it?

It's not the kind of plot synopsis that would normally get me interested, but for two crucial points. Firstly, the film stars the fantastic Michael Cera as the lead. Secondly (and most crucial), it's directed by Edgar Wright. When Edgar Wright's on board you know that a film is going to go in a certain direction, you expect a script littered with geeky references and unconventionally directed with fast zooms, non-linear cuts and strange angles. It's the kind of directorial style that either grabs you or doesn't. When the film starts and the screen is filled with descriptions of Scott's flat and friends in caption format you either go with it or you don't. When a door bell rings and a massive RIIINNNGGG travels across the screen you either accept it or you don't. When we relentlessly cut between scene after scene of video-game-laden in jokes and midi music with a general disregard for standard linear structure you either go with it or you don't. I went with it, and I loved it.

The film is - in a similar way to Spaced - so unrealistic as to almost be set outside the normal world. Some examples then; Scott Pilgrim must battle against the '7 evil exes' of Romana Flowers if he is to be allowed to date her. Why? Don't know and don't care, don't ask such questions. No one ever asked why Bowser kidnapped the princess or why Mario has to jump on the heads of mushroom-like creatures to save her. When Scott defeats the first of the exes in one-on-one combat in the middle of one of his band's numerous punk renditions, he turns into a pile of coins and 'earns' 1000 points. Now if like me you grew up with Mario games and the like you'll probably find this hilarious, if not then you probably wont get it. Either way, set in the real world this film clearly isn't. Either way it also doesn't matter, Lord of the Rings is set in a fantasy world, so is the world of Scott Pilgrim. Be it a fantasy creation of the film's writers or one inside the deluded head of the main character, a fantasy it remains.

As enjoyable as I found the film with it's many references to video games culture, I have started to wonder if I perhaps only enjoyed it because of this. Is 'Scott Pilgrim' some kind of 'Sex and the City' for nerds, in that I only liked it because it's full of the nerdly equivalent of Gucci handbags and shopping for shoes - i.e. so crammed full of fanboy tropes that there's no time to sit back and spot the flaws. Only a day after seeing it I think it's too early to tell, and that a second viewing will help. I don't think I'm being bamboozled by the 8-bit music, Street Fighter style 'vs' battles and Scott's "leveling up" when he gets something, I'm fairly convinced that I'm enjoying a film about a genuinely endearing and charming character. However there are a few holes in the plot, such as there being no explanation whatsoever for Scott's sudden infatuation with Romana and very little of why she reciprocates (or in fact who she is at all - although she is more than just a prize for men to fight over as she gets to do some Tekken-esque martial arts herself).

Maybe I'm thinking about this too much. After all, the comic book visual style of the film is amazing and Edgar Wright certainly knows how to direct an action scene. Plus it's hugely funny, a moment where Scott stumbles into his flat causing his housemate to scream in vampiric agony "Turn off the light!" had me laughing for ages. Perhaps 'Scott Pilgrim v The World' is simply a brilliant video game geek fanboy genre movie, one that needs no further analysis. I think people will either enjoy the genre and get it or fail to see what the fuss is about and not. Personally I think it's great!

The A Team

I never really cared that much about TV as a kid. Friends of mine can sing the theme tunes to numerous CBBC cartoons and speak of memories of Grange Hill, Byker Grove, Gladiators and countless other standbys of being a child of the 1980s. Obviously I did watch some of these programs, but they were a passing fad for me, something that went in one ear and out of the other as a stop-gap between playing Lego or religiously learning the stations on the London Underground (I'm a geek, I know that already). The first television series I ever felt a real affinity to was the X Files, which wasn't released until I was 14. Looking back I have no real memory of the television shows that undoubtedly permeated my life as a child in the 1980s. As such, I find it difficult to look back upon television in this era with rose-tinted glasses.

The A Team is exactly one of the shows that I don't remember and probably never watched (and even if I had watched I probably wouldn't have cared about it) - and as such the existence of an A Team film holds no particular draw for me over and above the pantheon of other brain-rinsing macguffin-ridden action films. As far as I can tell it was a brainless baddie-of-the-week gunfest in which a band of ne'er-do-wells killed a bunch of faceless goons in the name of 'helping' someone. No one ever was seen getting shot, no one ever bled or got injured and the same old gags and plot devices were wheeled out every single week. Hannibal was the clever one, Face the ladies' man, Murdoch was crazy and BA was tough - and if I had a problem, if I could find them, maybe I could hire: THE A TEAM. 1980s Reaganist US foreign policy summed up in a television show, great.

Notwithstanding this, I shelled out my £5 (Orange Wednesday sadly) and sat through 110 minutes of explosions, muffled dialogue, terrible physics, improbable contraptions, telegraphed plots twists and cheesy one-liners. Yes it made no sense, of course Liam Neeson will have fired his agent as a result and obviously it was completely silly, but I found it all rather enjoyable - mainly because at no point did it ever feel like the people who made the film were expecting anyone to take it slightest bit seriously. As a result every action scene defies the laws of science, every bad guy is a 1 dimensional parody and Face's relationship with every woman on screen ensures a dramatic failure of the Bechdel Test - in short, this is an action film for kids.

Every so often it's nice to leave your brain at the ticket kiosk. If you're happy to do that then A-Team will probably be fairly enjoyable. The bloke sitting behind me who insisting on yelling out approval when a US fighter jet shot down a helicopter at the start certainly seemed to have checked his sanity in at the cinema entrance - the only valid excuse for ever behaving like that is being an American. Thankfully I was in the right kind of mood on Wednesday and so I enjoyed my cinema trip. Rest assured though that The A-Team will figure well outside the realms of film of the year come December.

The Shawshank Redemption - "I don't give a shit"

I thought about this scene last night while I was watching A Prophet. This is Red's final appearence in front of the parole panel at Shawshank prison. After appearing twice in front of the board after being in prison for 20 and then 30 years, and each time making a case for his own release, Red finally realises the futility of the life he led that sent him to prison and tells the board that he no longer cares.

This is an interesting moment in a great film. The mantra of the film is that 'hope can set you free', yet in an odd way it is Red's realisation that there is no hope for himself that brings him to be released from prison.

Anyway, I could listen to Morgan Freeman deliver monologues all day long, so enjoy!

Inception

After the months of hype, years of development and days of waiting to find another time to go to the cinema, I am mightily relieved to be able join the mass of bloggers who are united in the belief that Inception is a very good film. Just in case you've been living in a cave on Mars for the past few months, a plot synopsis: it is the near future and skilled technicians are able to enter the dreams of others, Leonardo DiCaprio is the best at this and is hired to plant an idea into the mind of a powerful businessman. Planting an idea (Inception) is thought to be impossible since the mark is always aware that the idea came from a character in a dream and not their own mind. DiCaprio says he can do it, and claims he has done it in the past, so assembles a crack team for the job.

This is a novel concept as far as I'm aware (I'm happy to be corrected) which opens up a pandora's box of possibilities for the special effects guys. Firstly, the majority of the film takes place in a variety of people's dreams. This means that virtually anything can happen at any time. Secondly, director Chris Nolan tells his story across several people dreams, many of which are buried in the dreams of another - which means that when things do happen, they are subject to entirely different rules to 'normal'. Nolan has come up with a whole set of rules which govern the laws of physics of dreams within dreams. So if a person is asleep and thrown around in one dream, then the world of the dreams they are having in that dream will shake and move around. And if a dream is happening inside another dream, time moves differently. Confused yet? Hopefully not, since the magic of the film is based around accepting these premises and the possibilities they reveal.

The plot involves the creation of 3 'levels' of dreams, in which the protagonists enter the dreams of their mark and generate further dreams within those dreams, each of which moves at a different rate and exists according to different rules. The theory is that by implanting an idea in the deepest of the dreams, the mark will fail to realise that the idea was not his own. Once you put this together it becomes clear why the consensus that ‘Inception’ is a film requiring that you pay attention, lest you lose track of your position in the worlds within worlds.

Cutting through the effects, the film is about the nature of reality and what anyone can be certain is 'real'. DiCaprio’s character wants to implant an idea of reality inside someone else's head, but while doing this he has to struggle with his own perception of reality and what is going on inside his own dreams. DiCaprio has a cryptic relationship with his wife and children, a relationship that has something to do with his work as a dream hacker in the past and means he can never return to the USA. His wife appears in his dreams and the dream of others while he inhabits them, her nature as either a figment of his subconcious, a phantom or an actual presence is a central mystery of the film. It’s a mystery which once revealed generates questions about the of all the film’s ‘realities’.

With the premise that it has, the viewer should expect to question film's presentation of reality at all times and perhaps be unsurprised when characters suddenly realise they are in dreams. The film's final scene is a beautiful moment; one which some may be frustrated by but one which no one can be surprised by given all that happens in the preceding 2 hours. A perfect ending that I will not spoil here.

The whole film has a tremendous soundtrack which is laced with pounding bass notes and booming noises. As we follow 4 concurrent dreams moving at different rates with different rules of physics the music builds up to a thrilling and adrenaline-busting pace. One scene in particular stands out, in which a fist fight takes place in a room where the direction of gravity is constantly shifting. The knowledge that this scene was filmed without the assistance of CGI makes it all the more impressive.

Inception really is arthouse-meets-blockbuster. The fact that a film as densely-layered and intense as this can succeed so strongly at the box office is testament to the fact that the film-going public are deserving of more respect than many (including myself) are often prepared to offer.

Inception is the kind of film that people are going to write essays and doctoral theses about. It's an intense and complex thriller in which the rules of physics have been re-written and the nature of reality is questioned at all times. It includes some amazing special effects, impressive performances (Cillian Murphy, Ellen Paige and Leonardo DiCaprio are all great) and a plot that we'll be discussing the meaning of for years to come. Inception is rightly destined to enter the pantheon of great science fiction films, I feel privileged that I was able to see it in the cinema while I had the chance.

Toy Story 3 - Is isn't Inception!

I went to the cinema with the intention of watching Inception last night. As has been the case on a couple of occasions recently, the queues at Winnersh Triangle Showcase were out the door and - for the first time I can remember - the film I wanted to see was sold out.

For this I blame a number of factors. Firstly, the world cup. The world cup has generated a backlog of blockbuster films which the distributors had been reluctant to release until the football was finished. A couple of weeks after the final and we now have a choice of all the films people would normally have been watching over the month of June. Secondly, Orange Wednesdays. Despite only ever having an Orange phone I have only recently started making use of the 2-for-1 offer they run on Wednesday. This was because in the past I was convinced that I would rather pay full price and have an enjoyable experience at the cinema than get a discount and have to fight against the texting chatting masses. I think that after last night I'm going to return to my previous opinion and avoid cinemas on Wednesdays altogether (apart from the Bracknell Odeon - which is relentlessly empty).

I commonly don't make use of 'offers' like the Orange Wednesdays (or Tesco Club Card points) because it is self-evident that the organisation providing such offers is making a return on them somewhere, and that consequently I am (or someone like me is) getting screwed at some point down the line. It has been pointed out to me that this might be something of a paranoid fantasy, but last night offers hard empirical evidence. By using the Orange Wednesday offer I joined the throng of humanity trying to get into the cinema on the cheap and ended up seeing a film that I probably otherwise would have waited for on DVD. Since I am definitely going to see Inception in the cinema at some point the net result is that Showcase cinema has squeezed money out of me. Even if I had arrived at the cinema earlier and got into see Inception last night, the theatre would have been packed to the rafters with pick-n-mix-toting teenagers more interested in their latest apps than the film. Net result: I enjoy my cinema trip less and Showcase increase their margins. Either way we all lose.

Call me a grumpy old 30-something paranoid Luddite if you must, but no more Orange Wednesday for me. What they need to do is get the other mobile phone companies to provide similar offers on different days and spread the load out a little bit. O2uesday anyone...

The upside of all this was that I got to see Toy Story 3. Rather than being a rather feeble excuse to generate a bit of extra revenue out of an old franchise by making a 3D version of it (I saw the 2D version and can't think of any bit when I wished it was in 3D), Pixar have done rather well. Like the original, Toy Story 3 follows the adventures of a group of toys trying to do their best for their owner - the now grown-up and soon off to college Andy. The films are renowned for being funny and poignant with fantastic digital imagery - the third instalment certainly delivers on both of those. I am convinced that if Pixar wanted to make a movie that looked 'real life' they would be able to, but they retain the cartoon appearance because it looks cooler. There are a couple of awesome visual sequences, most notable in a tip towards the end of the film, where the technology they use to generate these images has clearly moved up a level since the original 15 years ago.

The Toy Story films were always very funny, and some of the best laughs come in the interaction between a Barbie and a Ken doll. Some great throwback material to the heyday of those toys for anyone who can remember it. I do hope though that the appearance of a Barbie doll as a toy wasn't some kind of expensive product placement - that would sadden me, the last thing the cinema industry needs is Pixar selling out.

It's not all about comedy and effects though. As with all of Pixar's films there's a great story that's intensely sad and uplifting. Although it doesn't touch the emotional rollercoaster of last year's 'Up', Toy Story 3 is about growing up and moving on. The toys, Andy, and Andy's family all have to cope with Andy becoming a man and moving off to university. To be fair to them, Pixar have done a lot more with this second sequel than simply re-hash a lot of old gags. They've created a rather good film.

Also, the short that comes before the main feature - 'Night and Day' - is charming and funny; a nice touch from Pixar there. So Toy Story 3 was a good film, but it wasn't Inception. I've got a very busy few weeks coming up now with house moving and a couple of holidays, but I'll squeeze it in somewhere.

Surrogates - making Bruce Willis look younger

Yet another film that didn't motivate me enough last year to break out my wallet for a cinema trip - Surrogates arrived on my doormat last Wednesday morning. The trailers last year seemed to be advertising a summer blockbuster with explosions and Bruce Willis jumping around on moving cars; that's what had put me off really, since I'd expect a film with a concept like this to be a little more science-fictiony (great English there). It almost seemed like this was going to be another blueprint for a Hollywood destruction of good science fiction ideas; i.e. take an interesting concept and ask the question - are there enough explosions in this? I was fearing another Paycheck, so my £7.50 stayed in my pocket.

The concept: it is the future and 99% of the world's population (well, 99% of America - but we're supposed to take that to mean the world) live their lives through the use of 'surrogates' - robots through which one can interface remotely and do whatever you want without fear of injury or prejudice and without leaving the comfort of your bedroom. An interesting enough science fiction trope, one which I'm sure Arthur C Clarke would have dissected the physics of over the course of 5 books, but one which is thrown at us here in the space of a 2 minute compilation of news clips from the future. The clips tell of the invention of surrogates (by James Cromwell => EVIL CHARACTER!), their mass-production and introduction into everyday use. We are told that crime is at an all time low and that only a small splinter group of refusenicks remain unconvinced by the new technology - kind of a bit like IPhones I guess. Anyway, barely has this set-up had time to be digested by the average viewer (me) than the plot begins; someone has a weapon that can fry a surrogate and kill its user - OMG! Fear not though, Bruce Willis and his youthfull-looking hair are on the case.

What follows is 80 minutes (nice and short) of a fairly good mix of science fiction imagine-ifs, beard-stroking future history concepts, action and special effects. There are a few flaws in the science and sociology of the use of surrogates (example: why would the use of surrogates result in a zeroing out of crime?), but there wasn't really enough time to think about that too much. Also I'm sure that the culmination of the main plot doesn't make sense, but I'm trying not to think about it. And talk about a quality Chekov's Gun when the police visit the nerdy bloke who can disconnect people from their surrogates at will:

Police Woman : "So you can disconnect people from their surrogates - isn't that illegal?!"
Nerdy bloke : "Useful though!" [actor playing nerdy bloke does well to not wink at the camera]

Nicely done.

Something I really did like about the film was the acting and the subtle differences in movement and reactions when the actors were playing surrogates or 'meatbags'. Goes to show that no matter how much cash and CGI you through at a science fiction movie it still in the end comes down to script and performances. Verdict - well worth 80 minutes.

Next up on Fried Gold: Inception - the most exciting film I haven't seen yet since before Lord of the Rings came out.

Up In The Air

With a synopsis that runs along the lines of 'George Clooney is a loner with a thankless job who finds a new love and perhaps finds the happiness that has eluded him for so long', you'd think this isn't the film for me. The trouble is though that I think Clooney is a very good actor, up there with the best in the last decade, so I always check out his new stuff.

As soon as I finished watching 'Up in the Air' I was annoyed. Annoyed because the film seemed to portray a picture of life and work in which being made redundant is an opportunity for growth and where living life outside of the mainstream is a disease to be cured, in addition to the expected trauma. You see, Clooney plays a guy who flies around America firing people who have bosses too shit scared to fire people themselves. His job is to avoid a scene, to dress redundancy up as a chance for new life, an opportunity to shake out the cobwebs and start again. He spends over 300 days a year on the road and has the sole goal in life of amassing 10 million air miles. After a chance encounter in a hotel leads to a one night stand with a similarly over-travelled business woman, Clooney's new work partner (a very young, sparky and intensely irritating graduate type) slowly convinces him that what he really wanted all his life was to settle down. It's winding me up to even recall this bit of the plot.

This is basically it, and after 80 minutes of I was getting pretty tired. Thankfully the film doesn't end quite as twee as you'd expect, there are a couple of twists and turns that result in a very different message coming out at the end. It took me a good 24 hours and a discussion with a friend to decide this, but in the end I recon 'Up in the Air' has a positive message about following your dreams. I wont give away the ending too much, but by the final credits most of the characters have ended up following a path that they had always wanted to, but never did because of thinking they wanted something else. This links in with the concept of sacking people being a good thing. Although I think dressing redundancy up as an opportunity is managerial bollocks to make the process easier for employers, the idea of willingly living your life in a dead-end job because you either can't be bothered to leave or feel you have a responsibility to stay has some merit.

So, 'Up in the Air' gets a tentative thumb-up from me. Eventually.

Charlie Brooker on Twilight

I saw this on the Guardian website today, it made me laugh out loud. I watched the first Twilight film as I was in one of my 'see everything so I can have an opinion' phases when it came out. I thought it was entertainingly silly but certainly not worthy of any kind of second thought, let alone the worldwide success it has generated. I think that not being a teenage girl doesn't help, but do girls really want to be as wet and bland as Twilight's lead? Seriously?

Brooker also has a go at vampire drama 'True Blood'. I watched the first series of that program and was initially entertained, but I soon got tired of the fast character turnover and fickle characterisation of the leads. I wont be watching season 2 any time soon. Maybe Brooker has a point about vampires being rubbish though, even in Buffy the vampires themselves were generally rubbish (they regularly got beaten up by Xander and Giles FFS!).

Anyway, now the world cup's over I'm sure some good stuff's going to come out soon. Like Inception - which is somehow scoring 96% on IMDB despite not even being released yet. Stupid IMDB.

Boys from the Black Stuff

There's a lot of interest in watching tv series on DVD these days. The trouble with this is that people seem to favour watching the next big thing over watching old classic television. Strangely this is the opposite to films, where the explosion of DVD rental has meant that a whole wealth of classic films are suddenly available to a modern audience. So here's a recommendation to you: go and watch some of the classic BBC television series, and start with Boys from the Black Stuff.

Written by Alan Bleasedale - Boys from the Black Stuff is both a gripping drama and a historical document. It tells the stories of the lives of 5 pavement construction workers ('Black Stuff' refers to asphalt) who are made redundant in Thatcher's Britain of the early 1980s and have to survive the dole queues and social upheavals of the day. The first episode is a feature-length one that sets the scene, the 5 other episodes focus on one of the main characters, looking at how they deal with life after their redundancy.

The series is firmly entrenched in a left wing view of events of the time, but rather than beating the drum about politics it focuses on the lives wreaked by economic policies and invites viewers to draw their own conclusions. Only one character in the whole series is an overt Marxist, and his views are derided as coming from ivory towers by the other characters who - despite largely agreeing with him - insist that he's living in a dream world thinking he change anything.

Instead of focussing on the politics, the series holds a microscope up to the mental anguish of being told that you're 'redundant', of being told that your job (and by extension life) has no further purpose. The men from the Blackstuff are forced into taking low-paid moonlighting work while claiming benefits in order to provide for their families. Several sides of this equation are shown; alienation of employees within the benefits agency is just as rife as those standing on the other side of the desk in the dole queue. The lives of entire communities are torn apart as neighbours fear each other as spies and families break apart under the intense stress of making ends meet.

The series isn't just memorable for its story; there are several outstanding performances including Julie Waters and Michael Angelis in one episode that shows how a loving marriage creaks under financial pressures. Perhaps the iconic image of the series is that of Bernhard Hill's Yosser Hughes imploring people to "... gizza job." It's easy to see why the character of Yosser carries so much weight; Yosser's second mantra is a simple "I'm Yosser Hughes", which he repeats to almost everyone he meets and in the episode focussing on him builds to a crescendo as he finally loses his mind. This desperate expression of individual humanity is so saddening, this was the 1980s, an age in which people were supposed to be expressing individuality through materialistic gain - the reality of which was a suppression of humanity through economic squalor.

It is the final episode of Boys from the Black Stuff which haunts me still even as I write this, in which a character is driven to an inevitable death by the state's uncaring attitude to his inability to work. The people around him know that his death approaches, they make his peace with him and help him to see his beloved Liverpool one final time. The character talks about his work on the docks and how strong and proud he was in the past as fought for what he believed - and his death represents a death of that way of life in the modern world. His funeral is a powerful scene, one in which the guiding hand of the catholic church is rejected by people who see not a caring priest, but someone trying to manipulate people in an emotional nadir. The final scenes of the last episode of Boys from the Black Stuff may appear confusing, but I think that they hint at a working class willingly losing its own power through indulgence and resignation to a position of underclass.

Boys from the Black Stuff now seems more important than ever, what with our new lizard overlords promising us an 'age of austerity'. At the moment it's an dramatisation of one of the toughest periods in the recent social history of Britain, it might not be long before we realise that it was also a portent for the future.

Law Abiding Citizen

Why did I bother watching this? Since the world cup started this is the first LoveFilm DVD I have watched - I shouldn't have done. I remember when the trailer for this came out at the cinema, it looked fairly exciting at the time what with Jamie Foxx frowning into the camera and Gerard Butler threatening to "... kill everyone!", hopes were high for an action-packed yet thoughtful drama that hinted at the difficultly of establishing a strong judiciary within a free democracy. Kind of like Batman Begins, but with fewer gadgets.

'Law Abiding Citizen' feels like it was written by three teams of people, each of whom had different ideas about the film and none of whom had any idea about the existence of the other. The first group wanted to make a action blockbuster with explosions and Gerard Butler shouting, the second group want to write an essay on the dark hidden agendas of the US legal systems, the third group are trying to make Saw 8 (I say 'Saw 8', who knows which version of that over bloated franchise they'll be up to by the time you read this article?). At various times in the film one of the groups seem to have total control, never are they all working together. I get the impression that the film was the originally the idea of a single writer, but that funding was a problem and as Hollywood execs got their mitts on it they insisted upon a series of non-negotiable changes that ballsed the whole thing up.

I guess a quick rundown of the plot wouldn't go completely amiss. Gerard Bulter is a 'Law Abiding Citizen' whose wife and daughter are killed by intruders into his home. One of the intruders testifies against the other, meaning that one gets the death penalty while the other gets 5 years in jail. Bulter's character (Shelton) decides this isn't good enough, and so spends 10 years planning the deaths of the murderers and those involved in the prosecution of the murderers - Jamie Foxx.

The film's problems start with its initial premise, that of Shelton as the 'Law Abiding Citizen'. In order to explain his near godlike ability to booby trap and kill at will, the background to his character is that he is some kind of ex-secret service black-ops assassin, the best of the best at killing people. He hardly sounds like a paragon for social justice to me, especially not when he decides it's his job to murder people he doesn't approve of. The problems continue when Shelton kills his cellmate (no motive at all for that - not a particularly 'Law Abiding' thing to do), ridicules and murders a judge (her crime - not locking him up without any evidence) and posts a tape of him sawing a man to pieces to a 10-year-old girl. Are we supposed to be questioning which of the characters is really the bad guy in all this? Are we supposed to be musing over what could possibly send this 'Law Abiding Citizen' over the edge? No. This is no man of peace, no man of law and certainly not a man with any right to issue or pontificate upon justice. No viewer with any sense can have sympathy for this reckless criminal mastermind.

Our second group of writers (see above) get a bit of a look in when Shelton appears in court as a criminal for the first time. He mocks a judge who is about to set bail for him, since he has 'confessed' (although he has already pointed out that his 'confession' is no more than the ravings of a mad man and as such useless) he insists he must be locked up and that the justice system is a farce for not thinking so. This is almost a good point, but it only lasts as long as it takes Shelton to set another booby trap.

'Law Abiding Citizen' is a film that with a bit of work could have been ok. In the end it's a mash of genres and plots that don't work.

4.3.2.1

Very much not the film I expected it to be, 4.3.2.1 is a story of 4 girls and one very strange weekend in their lives. Each girl goes her separate way on Friday evening, each girl gets into a wacky adventure, somehow gets connected with an international diamond theft and then ends up back with her pals on Sunday evening in a Mexican standoff. The story of the film is told four times, once from the view point of each of the girls. Bit by bit the story is built up until we see the whole picture.

The trailer made 4.3.2.1 seem like a copy of 'Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels' - except with lots more girls in their pants. The interviews with writer Noel Clarke billed it as an antidote to the much-panned 'Sex and the City' sequel - it's 4 girls having a crazy time! In the end I thought it was closer to the later than the former, but although the premise should be interesting I felt fairly let down. When a story is told non-linearly you kind of expect that the point is to generate a big reveal which if revealed in chronological order would spoil the mystery. That doesn't really happen in 4.3.2.1. Only the stories of the first and the final girls actually seem connected to the diamond heist, everything in between is filler (and at times off-putting misandric filler).

In fact, thinking back over the plot there is very little connection between what the girls get up to and the diamond heist. Their interaction with it is brief and fleeting, their interactions with each other are electronically facilitated and not entirely character-building. Therefore although I came out of the cinema thinking "that was ok", thinking back I'm not really sure what was "ok" about it - what with its loose plot and dislikeable characters (apart from Shannon - why is she friends with the others? They have nothing in common). Also there seemed to be a bit of a problem with the acting, Shanika Warren-Markland (Kerys) was a little wooden and Emma Roberts (Joanne) seemed to be constantly channelling Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Noel Clarke was solid as ever in his acting role, and once again he has made a film that is set in and amongst the less desirable parts of London - for that he should be praised. I am glad I watched 4.3.2.1, but it really wasn't the film I had been expecting, and I was not exactly pleasantly surprised.

Alien - the best film ever

I have not written a post in quite a while. This is because I found out last week that I am having to move house in August. That sucks on a number of levels, including that a lot of my spare time is now taken up looking on rightmove - meaning less time for watching films. Also, what with the world cup starting up this afternoon I am probably not going to get to the cinema for a few weeks anyway.

In the meantime though there is always YouTube. By naively typing 'Alien' into youtube I expected to get clips of the classic Ridley Scott film - sadly I ended up with rediculous footage of 'real aliens' and frat boys dressing up in 'alien' costumes. Anyway, I did turn up the original 1979 trailer for it, check this out:



Sends a shiver down my spine even now. Alien is one of my favourite films, it is at the same time one of the best science fiction and best horror films - all rolled into one. When I went to the Nottingham Showcase in 2003 to watch the remastered re-release I experienced 'Alien' on a large screen and with surround sound for the first time, it was breathtaking.

And that tagline, how can it get any better?