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.