South Park - Blame Canada!

South Park came out just as I was first going to university. Since that's almost 15 years ago now I am amazed to discover that it's still going. The other night though I was over at my sister's place and they were watching the new episodes. I had kind of assumed that it had gone off the boil ages ago, but I was informed that the opposite is true - South Park is still going as strong as ever.

South Park is on the surface about crudity, fart jokes and being as un-politically-correct as possible. Dig even slightly below the surface though and you quickly find it's a riotously funny satire. It still has crappily-drawn children doing fart and poo jokes though, which is of course quite a lot of its charm. We watched an episode on Friday that was ostensibly about laughing at people pissing in swimming pools. Beyond the crude hilarity of that though, the episode was a subtle satire on pseudoscience as well as poking fun at the elements of middle America who fear the ingress of 'minorities'.

Eric Cartman sings a song lamenting the minorities in 'his' swimming pool, a song that sent my mind back to South park's greatest achievement - south Park: Bigger Longer and Uncut. To you and me - South Park the movie. The plot of the film revolves around a smutty Canadian cartoon that gets blamed for encouraging children to swear and behave badly. The authorities and parents' groups overreact to the film, declare war on Canada and kick off Armageddon. It's a film that some might struggle to take seriously since it features Satan and Saddam Hussein as a cohabiting couple in hell - but it's satirical gold. The film cleverly lampoons its own potential critics and attitudes towards censorship. At the same time it's a musical - with musical numbers and songs that are pure Broadway. Not least of which is the fantastic 'Blame Canada':



"We must blame them and cause a fuss/before somebody thinks of blaming uuuuuuus" - great lyric. All the songs are on Youtube. In fact, all the episodes of South Park are freely available on the internet. Nice to see that Parker and Stone (the South Park creators) have stayed true to their anarchist roots and shunned the draw of big dollars. Maybe that's why they've retained their creative edge after all these years?

Brings back good memories all this. Has it really been that long since I first went to university?

Harry Potter part 7b - the end

So we finally come to the end of the Harry Potter series. With part 7b the story comes full circle as Harry and his chums return to Hogwarts to graduate by blowing up the school (a la Buffy the Vampire Slayer of course). Where part 7a was about hiding in the woods, part 7b is about explosions. Where part 7a was about character drama and angst, part 7b is about - well - more explosions I guess. That's right folks, you've sat through the prelude, you've endured Harry's teenage whining and Hermione & Ron's will-they-wont-they... now it's time for the payoff.

And what a payoff. Hardly any time is wasted before getting on with the big finish. Within minutes of the stylised Warner Brothers logo falling from the screen our trio of heroes are breaking into the Gringots vault in search of another part of Voldemort's soul. As soon as they escape that by riding a dragon over London they're immediately off to Hogwarts for the final confrontation. I didn't look at my watch in the cinema, but there's got to be a good hour of film all set on one night at Hogwarts - where the forces of good and evil finally collide in a climactic battle between Harry and Voldemort. Cue lots of very cool effects, running & chasing, firing off spells and soul-searching. Epic though all this is, I still thought the best scene was Harry's 'dream sequence' with Dumbledore in a ghostly apparition of Kings Cross station. It's here that the emotional heart of the story lies, even in a crash-bang finale like this.

The usual stellar array of British actors are in display as in the other films. It was particularly odd to see people like Jim Broadbent and Julie Walters reduced to little more than vessels for make-up and two lines of dialogue. One nice surprise was seeing Kelly MacDonald turn up for 5 minutes of mad nattering as a Hogwarts ghost, I guess there was at least 1 Brit left who hadn't appeared in this series yet. Her English accent is very good.

Basically this was a great finish to the series. Not as good as the book - although that probably wasn't possible - but essentially true to the source material and a fitting way to end it all. The final scene still grates a little on me though. I never liked it in the book and though I can understand Rowling's motivations for including it I think it's a little lazy. None of the young actors look in their late 30s no matter how much hairspray they put in Emma Watson's hair.

One tiny gripe, why didn't they fade to a 'THE END' logo at the end? Not too important but it would have been a nice way to round everything off. Also - minor point but important - do not attempt to watch this film if you're not seen the rest. Almost no attempt is made to cater to an audience requiring a 'previously on' recap.

A seminal moment for many, the final part of the Harry Potter series was for me the end of an enjoyable journey through a modern re-casting of many of the staples of fantasy fiction. Of the films, I think that HP3 was the best by a nose over HP5. Where the fifth had teen angst and Immelda Staunton hamming up the evil, the third had a big heart and freed the series from the clutches of the money men. Imagine what the series would have looked like if all 7 books had been filmed by Chris Columbus - Nightmare! As it is, the Potter series is an impressive achievement in modern fantasy. Though rarely groundbreaking and sometimes bogged down in maguffins and detailing the minutiae of its own world (what fantasy isn't though?), the series' main driving force was always the characters, their relationships and emotions. It's been an enjoyable decade.

And I watched it in 2D thank you very much.

The Last Supper

Now here's a weird premise for a black comedy: a bunch of liberal postgrad students have a redneck over for dinner and accidentally kill him during an argument about politics. They decide that it'd be a good idea to invite more right-wingers over and - if they fail to be convinced to liberalise their views - kill them too. Such is the premise for 'The Last Supper'.

Apart from the obvious black comedy here, the film has a nice theme running through it about the dangers of taking political dogma too far - be it from the left or the right. Indeed the film takes these positions too far through its characters, do overt racist nutters like that played by Bill Paxton really exist? Perhaps; I'm off to Texas later this year so there's a good chance I could meet some. I remember being a liberal postgrad, but no-one I knew was ever as wet and intellectually superior as these guys. Well - maybe one or too were. But we never lived in a mansion cooking massive 3-course meals for each other and having randoms over for an intellectual discussion between wine courses.

The film gets a bit in-your-face at the end when Ron Pearlman gives a speech from the pulpit of righteousness about how everyone should throw aside their preconceptions and learn to live and let live, but overall it just about hits the right mark.

Watching it made me feel as if I was sitting through a feature length TV episode rather than a film. Stacy Title (a female director - yay!) has done little else, perhaps not a surprise as the camera-work didn't feel right throughout. 'Last Supper' is notable for being an early Cameron Diaz film. With a release year of 1995 it came out just after Diaz's big break 'The Mask', but I assume this was filmed shortly before she broke it through to the big time. Also there's a brief appearance by Elizabeth Moss as the missing girl (she only appears as a photo on a 'missing' poster - so blink and you'll miss her).

It's a funny film that's interesting and has enough laughs to remind you that it's not meant to be taken entirely seriously. Don't expect any major political revelation though, its view of left v right and the US culture wars is far too simplistic for that.

Confessions - revenge Janaese style

So obviously the big film event at the moment is the final Harry Potter. I've been really busy recently so I've not had the chance to get to the cinema yet, I expect I'll be able to see it some time this week. Last week though I was able to catch up on watching some of the LoveFilm DVDs I've had sitting around for a few weeks. The first of these I watched the other day is a Japanese film called 'Confessions'.

Yet another one recommended by the Radio 5 Live film reviews, 'Confessions' is a film in which the opening 15 minutes consists of a near-monologue for the main character to explain the premise. She is a school teacher whose daughter has recently died, she explains to her class how she knows that in fact two of the kids in the room were her killers. She further explains that she has had her revenge on this pair by poisoning their milk with HIV-infected blood. As pandemonium breaks out in her class she tells them how the effects of this poisoning will become apparent in a few months, and that when they return to school after the holidays she will have long quit her job.

Fear of children is a classic storyline. And not just in Japanese film (although 'Battle Royale' is a classic case in point), John Wyndam's 'Midwich Cuckoos' is a classic of modern science fiction that plays up fear of the unknown and portrays children as an enemy within complete with their own codes of conduct, language and culture that adults can't hope of comprehend. Vilification of the teenager is so commonplace in media that it often goes un-noticed - consider James Dean in 'Rebel without a cause' to realise that this is hardly a modern phenomenon.

'Confessions' presents teen culture as an impenetrable web that a teacher can only scrape the surface of, but by making waves in can create unexpected consequences. Our teacher here, by telling the class that a killer lies within, creates a culture of recrimination and whispering that soon turns sour, then descends into anarchy and worse.

Part revenge thriller and part psycho-drama, 'Confessions' is an enjoyable film that's somehow sobering at the same time. It has an odd visual style that makes it look more artsy than it really is, so please don't be put off the first time you see a lingering shot of raindrops. Check it out - it has an interesting ending...

The Fighter

Of the Oscar bait films that came out at the start of 2011, The Fighter was the one that never really appealed. I feared either a rags-to-riches tale or a re-running of Million Dollar Baby (which is a good film, but no need to repeat it just yet). Turns out it's more about conflict and family, and how compromise is actually a rather good thing.

Mark Wahlberg and Christian Bale play boxing brothers Micky Ward and Dicky Eklund. Dicky is a washed up drug addict while Micky dreams his fading boxing career can go somewhere. Micky still trains down at the local gym with advice from his brother and support from his huge family of domineering sisters. When a new woman (Charlene - played by Amy Adams) enters Micky's life he begins to question whether his family has been hindering him, and if a making a clean break will let him live out his ambitions.

This is the stuff of Holywood wet dreams. Family, the underdog, a shot at the big time, small-town Americana - plenty of boxes ticked. The twist here is that the influence of Micky's family on him is doubtful, supportive they may be - but is their small town attitude squashing his ambition? Micky realises he has to get away from Dicky to succeed, but who will be left to celebrate his success if he alienates everyone he knows?

In the end the film's about sacrifice and compromise, which is rather pleasing as it doesn't make everything black and white. Add into this an amazing performance by Christian Bale as the wide-eyed Dicky (for which he won this year's best supporting actor Oscar) and we've got ourselves a film that's not all that bad.

And don't ask me why these brothers have different surnames. I'm just going with what IMDB tells me.

Pulp Fiction - Hamburgers

I was trying to work out what my favourite scene from Pulp Fiction is. Although the comedy of watching Vincent and Jules washing bits of brain out of their car and the sheer horror of seeing Uma Thurman catatonic from a coke overdose are both cinematic gold - you can't get away from Samuel L Jackson's career-defining moment when he delivers his Old Testament-inspired monologue.

I know it's not exactly an original choice, but Jackson's delivery of the line "Hmmm, that is a tasty burger" became something of an in-joke with my uni mates so it has good nostalgia for me. It's a scene that provided Jackson with a platform for the rest of his career. It's also a scene that Youtube don't let people embed.

Unknown

Liam Neeson's an odd one isn't he? I think I've wrongly pigeon-holed him as being in more artsy films than he ever is. I guess it must be the remnants of his landmark role in Schindler's List sticking to him as he desperately moves into ever more ridiculous roles. Playing Hannibal in last year's 'The A Team' might have done his bank balance good, but his credibility took a nosedive. Neeson also starred in 'Unknown' last year, a film in which he plays a man who loses his identity after being involved in a car crash in Berlin. This is crucially not to be confused with interesting and small-budget 'Unknown' from a few years back. This version is a big budget Hollywood behemoth.

The premise is that Neeson's character remembers who he is, while everyone he knows appears to have forgotten him - even his wife (played with ease by January Jones - who needs to be cast as someone other than an ice queen at some point). His doctor warns him that head injuries of the like he has suffered can cause delusions, but surely it is the world around him that has become deluded?

I was wondering if the film was going to go down a 'Vanilla Sky' route, and although there are aspects of that in there it ends up being a bit of a Hollywoodised cop out. It's not bad enough for me to deliberately give the plot away, there is an entertaining twist that I don't want to spoil. Don't dig too deeply into the intricacies of the plot or bits will start falling out of it at break-neck pace. The ending is a huge cop out and isn't entirely consistent, but then the whole film is pretty unbelievable if you think about it for more than a few moments. It's a film that can't help but immerse itself in Hollywood clichés - although one plus point was being able to see Bruno Ganz not being Hitler.

I wont advise people to avoid 'Unknown' - it's not worth the effort of getting worked up over. Instead I invite you to think about what's gone wrong with Liam Neeson's career.