Cosmopolis - anyone got any ideas what this is about then?

This is my second David Cronenberg film in the space of a couple of weeks; I think I need a lie down. I watched eXistenZ a few weeks ago and that was weird enough. After seeing Cosmopolis last night eXistenZ feels like a breezy walk in the park - at least eXistenZ has a vaguely linear plot running through its craziness.

On the surface, Cosmopolis can be summed up in the following way. Robert Pattinson plays Eric Packer, a highly-flying and extremely powerful businessman who takes a ride in his limo across the city (I guess it's New York) in search of a hair cut. On the way he meets a variety of people, some of whom he talks to in his limo, others of whom he steps out and meets in bars, cafes, libraries etc. Each of these people is quite different, but the connection is that each impacts his life in a different way and speaks to him in quick-fire poetic stanzas about something philosophical. Time moves in strange ways in the limousine as day quickly turns to night. Protesters appear outside the car, but still people appear within it to lecture Packer on the meaning of the modern world. What does it mean to have power? What is money? Why do we think of time the way we do? All these and others are questions that are either posed outright or hinted at in a whirlwind of hard-to-penetrate dialogue over 100 minutes.

It is very hard to watch Cosmopolis. There is nowhere to take an intellectual break from what's being said, hardly a moment of reflection in which to digest what's going on. Visually the film is tough, with odd lighting effects making the world outside the car appear ethereal and distant. At the same time it isn't any fun watching Cosmopolis, as you feel like you're being lectured by someone much cleverer than you, who's constantly watching you, waiting for you to show any sign of failing to understand the full depth of what it is they're saying.

Despite this though, it's a film about which you can have a very long conversation with your fellow movie-goer. Cronenberg seems to be trying to create some sort of treatise on the recent fall of Western Capitalism. I'm guessing that Pattinson's character is a metaphor for American Capitalism, on a journey somewhere for no apparent reason, a violently destructive force that projects power (in the film sex seems to be a metaphor for power) and is in a terminal decline. At the same time he is surrounded by a series of advisers who tell him about the creeping influence of technology on society and how what he does affects so many people's lives, but ultimately they can't actually help him. Pattinsons wife (Sarah Gadon) is perhaps a metaphor for the state, ever-present and stoic, aware of what Capitalism wants and happy to prop it up when it reaches its low ebb, but equally happy to roll over when Capitalism appears strong. Paul Giamatti's character could represent the masses, full of rage about something but not knowing how to use the weapons at their disposal or how to direct their anger if they could; they're desperate to be free of Capitalism but terrified of what will happen without it.

Maybe. Maybe not.

Essentially Cosmopolis is pretentious wank. But at least it's vaguely interesting pretentious wank. Plus it's good to see that Robert Pattinson has no desire to confine himself to a career borne out of the Twilight silliness. I can't bring myself to recommend Cosmopolis, mainly because I didn't actually enjoy watching it. I can think of better ways to spend 100 minutes if all you want to do is come up with fodder for a philosophical debate on the connection between the post-modern world, capitalism and the Occupy protests. This is the sort of film that would have had a tiny release in London arthouse cinemas were it not for the appearance of Pattinson. At least now I'm sure of something I suspected though, that David Cronenberg is a mentalist.

Red State - Kevin Smith makes another mad film

What an utterly mental film this is - in a good way. Red State is another Kevin Smith film in which he explores the madness inherent in taking dogmatic religious adherence to its illogical conclusion. Here the film's title alludes to the conservative deep south of the USA, those states that since the civil rights movement in the 1960s have always voted republican - i.e. the Red States. It is here that the outlandish excesses of America's right wing Christan zealots are often manifested, and as such it's the perfect breeding ground for the story that Smith wants to tell.

The story is of a preacher named Abin Cooper, and his Five Points Trinity Church, which engages in the practise of advertising on line to entice young men into having sexual encounters with a local promiscuous woman. Sadly for these young lads, the local woman is a member of Cooper's congregation, and instead of sex all they get is drugged up and chained up at the church waiting to be judged. Luckily (at least in the short term) for them, they accidentally hit the local sheriff's car earlier in the day, and so the police are on their case. Before long the FBI are on the scene (in the form of John Goodman) and a full scale Waco-style siege is underway.  These FBI aren't all good guys though!

This is an 18 - so be prepared for some chillingly gruesome deaths. This is also a Kevin Smith film, so be prepared for him not giving a crap about killing off characters and playing around with the usual conventions of film. The ending of the film is nothing if not wacky. Basically everyone's an idiot and ends up doing something stupid, mostly for blackly comic effect. The film has a nice false ending and then a bizarre epilogue with a final line that sums it all up as the tongue-in-cheek lark it really is.

I've come up with a new rule of thumbs for watching films, which is that if a film is less than about 90 minutes long I'm prepared to be a lot more forgiving than if it were overly long. If Red State were longer it would end up becoming tedious. At 88 minutes it's just the right length for creating a bonkers world solely for the purposes of dark comedy, without anyone worrying about all the bits holding together. Thoroughly enjoyable.

Cabin in the Woods - it's horror: Buffy style

I've known about this film for a good while now but it has taken me an age to watch the thing. Given that the script was co-written by Joss Whedon I'm amazed it took me so long, normally I'd be all over anything he or the Buffy writing staff generate. Though I still haven't watched Dollhouse, so maybe that's not quite true. Be this as it may, on Friday I finally watched Joss Whedon & Drew Goddard's take on this classic horror trope. You don't have to be a fan of horror to be aware of what I'm talking about. The classic set up is thus: a group of middle class American teenagers drive off into the woods / mountains / wilderness anticipating a fun weekend of inebriation and limited inhibitions. On the way they are warned about some non-specific danger by a weird yokel type but they carry on anyway and eventually encounter some sort of generic evil monster type thing. This is the plot of countless studio productions like Cabin Fever or Evil Dead as well as classic B-movie stuff like Texas Chainsaw Massacre and a whole host more.

100% of this happens in Cabin in the Woods. But Joss Whedon made his name by taking the horror genre in a skewed direction, and he and Goddard keep that up here. The film opens with a couple of men in white coats walking through a research facility having a conversation about some kind of generic experiment and generally shooting the shit. One of these guys is Bradley Whitford (that's Josh from West Wing to you) and so I'm immediately interested but thinking - isn't this a horror film? Then the action freezes and the title of the film flashes up on the screen in huge letters and a blood red font; cut to a group of sexy carefree teenagers preparing for their big trip. This scene sets the film up perfectly, it's a tongue-in-cheek cheesy opening that lets us know we're in for a horror film with a huge dollop of Wheedon-esque wit. The teenagers drive up to the cabin having the standard weird encounter with a local along the way and encountering something even stranger as they approach the cabin itself. They then start to get drunk and 'discover' that the cabin they're staying in has a mysterious basement filled with a cornucopia of mystical gizmos and ancient inscriptions in Latin. Who knows what evil they might stumble across while rifling through this junk? Who knows what horrors they might unwittingly unleash from all this surprisingly-convenient paraphernalia?

When Joss Whedon has done horror in the past he has done it in a funny, witty and sometimes bafflingly simple way. If the boogey man really existed, doesn't it make sense that The Man would be doing tests on it?  Season 4 of Buffy anyone? Such is Cabin in the Woods. The film is scattered with appearances from actors who were Buffy / Angel staples and also stars Chris Hemmsworth who has since gone on to play Thor in the Marvel comics film adaptations. The effects are cheesy but they're obviously like that deliberately, with the emphasis on the story and the comic unreality of what's going on. The overall visual style is to make the film feel like an darkly humorous feature length episode of The Twilight Zone, complete with 'they always come back' and a superbly zany turn of events for the final act.

Fans of Wheedon's work should love Cabin in the Woods (I am and I did). Fans of the horror films should enjoy the comic deconstruction of the fallacies of the genre's common tropes. Normal people should also enjoy the film for what it is, funny and jumpy in all the right places. It's not a particularly frightening watch (only a 15) and the blood and gore that you do see is clearly over-egged to the point of deliberate unrealism. Almost all of the gory bits happen off camera, are implied or are so cheesy as to defy anyone being frightened of them.

In conclusion, Cabin in the Woods is yet another brilliant production from the creative geniuses behind Buffy - directed by Drew Goddard though this time rather than Wheedon. They're going to have to slow down or they'll run out of ideas soon.

Snowtown

Blimey what a depressing film.

Snowtown is set in urban Adelaide in the late 1990s and tells the story of Jamie, his brothers, their mother and a man with whom she becomes romantically involved - John. The setting is one of depression, borderline poverty and assumed joblessness in a society with little hope. John takes on the role of a father figure in this fractured family, his easy-going nature and resourcefulness helps provide a stability and calm to their hitherto chaotic lives. The trouble is that John has a different side to his nature, one that slowly emerges when talking with neighbours and despite its unsavoury nature seems to flourish.

John holds a set of extreme views on how society should react to paedophiles. His views (that they should be killed, tortured, castrated etc...) find a friendly audience in the Adelaide neighbourhood; people are eager to listen to what he has to say and happy too to go along with him, fantasising about what they would do to a 'paedo' in their midst. The trouble with John though, is that he's actually prepared to act upon his big talk, and attack people he thinks are paedophiles, gay, funny-talking, different or simply don't agree with him. From tipping a pile of severed animal heads on to someone's porch to kidnapping, torture and murder, John seems to have no compunction in going after people he sees as different to his vision of societal norm. All the while John is slowly dragging his new family with him - after all, he is the father figure they have never had.

Rated 18 for its violence, Snowtown is a terrifying portrayal of how groupthink can result in the normalisation of extreme opinions and behaviours, the logical extension of which would be people acting out on those opinions. There are several scenes in which people in the community sit around with drinks talking about the various kinds of tortures they would inflict on a variety of deviants if they could get their hands on them. Though that might be only talk, it's the kind of talk that goes on in pubs and clubs all over the nation all the time. The film asks questions about how easily conversation can become violence when society is in disarray, and how when extreme views go unchallenged they can quickly become the norm.

It's a chilling portrayal of a society breaking down and people looking for an enemy within to blame. It's also massively depressing and not for anyone who doesn't want to watch intense scenes in which people are slowly choked to death. In conclusion, it's an interesting subject matter and very gritty but seems to be going out of its way to make everything as grim as possible and so will put a lot of people off.  Not a film for everyone, though its message is one we should all listen to.

Argo - Affleck directs another good film

On Friday evening last week my housemates were all doing their own thing, many of my other friends were away and so I took an impulse decision to cycle up to Winnersh to the Showcase and watch a film I had heard warmly reviewed by Mayo and Kermode in their interview with Ben Affleck the previous week. The film was Argo, the latest directed by Affleck. The cinema was nowhere near full, though the entire teenage female population of East Berkshire appeared to be queueing to see the latest (and last - I'm very pleased to be informed) instalment of Twilight. Plus there were a good number of women who looked old enough to know better really - though it's unlikely they read this blog so it probably wont help if I post this article about the self-misogyny implicit in the Twilight series.

Anywaaay...

...The story of Argo is a dramatisation of the real life rescue of 6 American Embassy workers during the US / Iran Hostage crisis of 1979. When the US embassy was stormed, these 6 managed to escape and found themselves at the Canadian embassy without any Iranians knowing they were there. The Canadians and the CIA then came up with a plan to get the 6 out of the country, a plan that involved a rather audacious cover story. The idea was to invent a Holywood film production, then send a CIA agent to Tehran to pretend that he was the Canadian executive producer on a location scouting tour of the Middle East. He would then give 6 fake Canadian passports to the embassy workers and walk out of the country with them in tow.

It's a story that's so audacious you wouldn't believe it was true, but it appears to be. The fake film - Argo - was brought into being and the plan set into action. Though what happens in the end is a matter of historical fact I wont give it away since you've probably never heard of it before. The real film called Argo - this film - is part historical drama, part action and part comedy in which criticisms are aimed at the Holywood elite, the CIA and the Islamification of the Iranian revolution. The film starts with a short introduction to the USA's involvement in Iranian politics since the 1950s, deftly pointing out that the US was far from an innocent bystander in the events that took place in that nation in 1979. But this is a film that restrains itself from doing any preachy liberal finger-waving, instead telling the story of this unlikely rescue - albeit from an American point of view - while making sure that we know the historical context.

It's a bit silly how they end the film.  The film goes down the ticking time bomb route where at each checkpoint at Tehran airports someone at the CIA / Holywood does something at the very last moment to thwart the Iranian authorities unveiling the true identities of the 'Canadians'.  Though it generates suspense, this stuff never happens in real life - and indeed it never happened in this real life story.  Bit of a shame as all that does is add to the plethora of propaganda out there in film and TV normalising the ticking time bomb spy scenario in the mind of the public - 24 anyone?

Argo is a fun film with comedy, suspense, John Goodman hamming it up, good one-liners and a bit of "Am-er-ica: fuck yeah!" thrown in at the end.  Another bonus was that it stars a bunch of people from US TV series who I've never seen do anything else.  Clea Duvall was the disappearing girl Marcie Ross from way back in season 1 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer; Tate Donovan was Tom in Damages, Victor Garber was Sidney's Dad in Alias - it's a spot-the-TV-actor-athon!

With this and The Town on his CV, Ben Affleck is becoming a promising director.  Also his acting isn't bad either - double plus bonus for him and us alike!

21 Jump Street - Jonah Hill's not bad then

I'm not entirely sure where I've got the impression from that Jonah Hill films are the sorts of films that I should avoid. The only film he's been in that I had actually seen was Moneyball (pretty good) and it's only from films I assume are bad that I get the impression he must be terrible (Get him to the Greek, Superbad). This review is essentially about me realising I had made a mistake in pigeon-holing Hill, and serves as a reminder to keep an open mind about film.

I have no idea why I put 21 Jump Street on my Lovefilm list. When I tell you the plot you might understand why. Jonah Hill (Schmidt) and Channing Tatum (Jenko) play a pair of useless green cops who get sent on an undercover assignment to infiltrate a high school where someone is dealing a new type of drug. Their boss for this assignment will be Ice Cube of NWA fame. Schmidt and Jenko knew each other in school, Schmidt was the classic nerd while Jenko was the classic jock - and they hated each other.  Now they're going back to school together, and who knows - when Jenko has to pretend to be a science nerd and Schmid has to do drama and run on the track they might finally see the world from each others' point of view and grow as people.

Sounds a bit crap doesn't it? Well that's what I would have thought, but someone at some point must have told me otherwise - and I'm glad they did. 21 Jump Street is in fact a funny, tongue-in-cheek slapstick comedy that spends a lot of time making fun of its own genre. Not only making fun of the buddy cop / high school stereotypes it portrays, but also the fact that it's a film adaptation of a 1980s television production. There are a lot of references to this "being done in the 80's" and how people are running out of ideas these days. The funniest bits of the film are the parts where things keep on not exploding. Such as a car crashing into an oil tanker on a bridge which - after several set-up cuts establishing the plethora of cameras waiting to capture the awesome special effect - doesn't explode. As Jenko drives away from the scene at full speed he quips "I really thought that one would explode". There's also a brilliantly observed moment after we briefly see an unlikely threesome at a house party that reminded me of the genius "fucking hell" moment from Father Ted's King of the Sheep Competition.

I'm not going to pretend that 21 Jump Street is entirely devoid of scatological humour, far from it in fact as the IMDB's parental guide points out in mind-bending detail. It includes 123 uses of the word fuck - that's once every 53 seconds. The film doesn't totally rely on that for laughs though, and as such I'm happy to let the moment when Rob Riggle attempts to pick up his own severed penis with his teeth pass as a misjudged scene in an otherwise decent comedy. Next time Jonah Hill writes something, I'll be paying it more attention.

The Shining - a classic at the BFI

On Wednesday evening I took the train into London with a group from work to go to the BFI on the South Bank for a showing of the extended cut of Stanley Kubrick's classic thriller The Shining. Got some food in the Herman-ze-German sausage shop just north of Embankment station, which had some great food and was authenticated in my opinion by the German guys that were with us giving it the thumbs up. I'll go there again.

I first saw The Shining on VHS when I was an undergraduate, over 10 years ago now. So even though I had seen it before I had forgotten a lot of the details and more importantly forgotten just how much of an amazing film The Shining is.

Though it certainly needs no introduction, I'll outline the plot here for completeness. Jack and Wendy Torrance (Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall) have recently moved to Boulder in Colorado after Jack lost his teaching job in Wyoming. Jack takes a job house-sitting the Overlook hotel for the winter, which gets snowed in and becomes unreachable without a specialist snow vehicle. He, Wendy and their young son Danny move there and settle in for 5 months of seclusion, peace and quiet so that Jack can write his book. Before taking the job though, Jack is told that a decade ago a previous caretaker slaughtered his entire family at the hotel and that the seclusion can do strange things to people. At the same time, Danny is having fits and his imaginary friend appears to know things Danny couldn't possibly have knowledge of. It's the set up for a brilliantly-paced ghost story / thriller / horror, one which has entered many a 'top films' list over the years.

There's so much more in The Shining than first meets the eye. There are hints at occult practices and ritual sacrifices from the soundtrack and the visions of horrors at the hotel. Kubrick dangles a variety of possibilities in front of the viewer who is prepared to think about what they're witnessing. There is the possibility that either the hotel manager, Jack, or both knew what was likely to happen at the hotel when he took the job - which then opens up questions as to why he would take the job at all. The final few shots of the film ask further questions about what the hotel does to people; and the question of if what happens there has an otherworldly aspect or is simply the product of human insanity is left open. Then there's the direction. Kubrick effortlessly sets up the space of the hotel without resorting to bland exposition and uses simple techniques to generate a suspense in everything that happens.

Every aspect of the film is outstanding, from the camerawork and attention to detail through to the casting and astonishingly unhinged performances from both Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall. Nicholson conveys an impression of a potential madman teetering on the edge even in the opening scene. At no point does he need to gurn at the camera or scream insanities, just the way he responds to questions with an overly-enforced calm tells us much of what we need to know about a character actively engaged in repressing rage. Duvall plays Wendy as a woman living a life she's desperately trying to pretend is normal. Trapped between Jack's violent potential and Danny's unknown abilities, she's slowly going mad in her own way. The straight horror elements of the film are used sparingly (we see only one death in the whole film) and therefore effectively. When we see inside Danny's visions of twin girls slaughtered and rivers of blood crashing down a lift shaft they are fleeting glimpses punctuating the image of the face of a terrified young boy - rather than a special effect to be leered over.  Proving once again that in the horror genre, less is more.

In conclusion then, it's hardly news that The Shining is brilliant. But it's such a long time since I had seen it I had completely forgotten what an outstanding example of film-making it is. If anyone reading this blog hasn't seen it then you've been making a big mistake all your life. It's currently being shown in its extended US version at the BFI in London - go and watch it!

A Dangerous Method

A very interesting film, though I can't work out why it was made. A Dangerous Method stars Michael Fassbender and Viggo Mortenssen as the psychologists Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud. The film is a fictional account of the interactions that these giants of their field had in the each part of the 20th century. At the time each was developing his own theory of psychoanalysis and looking for people upon which to test his ideas. Both men were convinced that human sexuality has a massive impact on the the study of psychoanalysis, but they differed on the extent to which it is the critical factor.

To turn this into an actual story rather than a tecious back and forth of letters arguing about human sexuality, the film muses upon the posibility of one of Jung's historical protegees being his secret lover. Keira Knightley plays Sabrina Spielrein, a young Russian woman who is brought into Jung's assylum and who is helped to deal with her childhood traumas via the medium of getting spanked by Jung. She then goes on to get a university education and become a prominent psychoanalist in her own right.

So this is another high profile film with high profile cast members that Keira Knightley's in. If ever an actress blew hot and cold in her films then it is Ms Knightley. Maybe this is going to sound unfair to her, or maybe now I've got it into my head I can't get it out, but whenever she's on screen she looks like she's 'doing acting' rather than it coming naturally to her. She's not helped here because her first scene requires her to gurn madly at the camera as the crazy Sabrina while Jung sits behind her trying to diagnose her mental state. Being convincingly mad sounds hard enough for an actor at the best of times, but when it's the opening scene in the movie for someone who's acting skills I'm not convinced by and they're trying to establish the character - it's very very hard indeed. Sure she's trying her best and doing a better job than I could, but I can't get over the realisation that she's an actress playing a role, it's a problem that seriously diminishes the impact of what she's doing, has a negative impact on the character she's playing and the film overall.

While watching the film I had no idea at all about the historical accuracy of what was going on, which prompted me to look things up afterwards. If you watch the film I encourage you to do the same. Jung's interest in psychic phenomena is something I had very little concept of.

Though the film is about an interesting subject matter and has a central trio of characters that form an interesting relationship - the film is nothing more than merely interesting. It's not really entertainment, doesn't really have a story or an arc in the traditional sense and as such I'm not really sure why it's a film at all.  It could easily have been a Discovery channel production. If you're interested in psychology you'll probably get a lot more out of this than I did, or if you're a fan of Mr Fassbender (as I am) it's yet another solid performance from him to enjoy. If you're looking for a film to be entertained by, probably best steer clear.

Skyfall

Went Monday evening to a very busy Showcase in Winnersh to see Skyfall - the 23rd official film in the Bond series. After the debacle that was Quantum of Solace I was very pleased to read and hear near universal praise for the new film.

As a Bond film, Skyfall is superb. The plot is simple and direct, the bad guy is a normal person motivated by revenge, there are grandiose set piece action sequences and a plethora of nods to the last 50 years of Bond. Purely as a film though, Skyfall does have problems, but no criticisms that couldn't also be directed at the 22 preceding films. The story is simple: while on a mission to Turkey to recover a computer containing the names of undercover NATO agents, Bond - played superbly by Daniel Craig - is accidentally shot and presumed dead. He resurfaces only when MI6 comes under attack and it becomes clear that someone with ties to M - the ever-excellent Judi Dench - is pulling the strings and responsible for realising the information Bond was trying to recover.

Bond here is Bond as I always hope it will be. No gadgets, cheesy lines and raised eyebrows; no invisible cars, double-taking pigeons or "I think he might be attempting re-entry" lines. What we have is Bond as the hard-as-nails loner, the drinking womaniser who does whatever job his superior tells him to without remorse and kills without pity. This is a character who should hardly be capable of feeling anything given the number of people he has killed and the betrayal he suffered in Casino Royale; in Skyfall this is the case. When presumed dead we see Bond living a dead-end existence drinking and screwing around without passion. The only thing that can re-ignite any semblance of feeling inside him happens when MI6 - and M specifically - are under threat. And it's this that really makes the story and film, since it's a story about Bond, M and their relationship. It's a Bond film that's also a character drama, with the drama being about this central relationship. As much as M tries to behave dispassionately around Bond, it's clear that she sees him as something of a son. And the same applies to Bond as he tries to convince himself and others that he hates M - whereas she's probably the closest thing he's still has to a friend.

I said the film has a few problems, and I'll briefly cover them here. There are a couple of plot holes and things that are a little too convenient. At one point our bad guy Silva - Javier Bardem - uses a train crash to try to kill Bond. Though this is no doubt a great special effect, it relies on Bond being in exactly the right place at the right time.  For something that must have taken ages for Silva to set up it is far too convoluted a way to kill Bond - even for a Bond villain. Plus there are no passengers on the train. I suppose you could argue that it's simply a train running without passengers, but this happens in the middle of the rush hour and so is hardly likely. The real reason is that in order to retain a 12A certificate the film has to shy away from showing the ramifications of the violence it portrays. This happens earlier in the film when someone is shot in the head by a sniper - and no blood can be seen anywhere. I understand that the BBFC rules are in place because people don't want children to see blood and people being killed in a train crash, but isn't it more dangerous to bring up a generation of children who are being conditioned think that such violent acts don't have violent consequences? It's a debate for another time I suspect, and Skyfall is hardly the only action film to be edited in this way, but sugar-coating some elements of realism in a film like this undermines a lot of the other realism that they're clearly trying to create.

The occasional film goer will enjoy Skyfall - the Bond aficionado will likely love it. There are probably more nods to Bond lore than I was able to pick up, but the obvious ones included homage to 'Live and Let Die' (escaping off a reptile's back), Q's disparaging remarks about exploding pens and the big one - the Aston Martin. I suppose it doesn't take a genius to write this stuff, but it takes a lot of care and skill to do it with such aplomb. The film holds back on using the classic Bond guitar theme music until the moment that Bond reveals the very same Aston Martin that appeared in Goldfinger - including ejector seat and machine guns. It's a simple moment that's perhaps a little hammed up, but it was the moment when I gave into any nagging doubts and embraced the film.

It's not as good as Casino Royale, but then I'm not sure any Bond films will ever be able to surpass those heights. Skyfall is an exceptionally good Bond film, a good film (it just passes the Bechdel test - and given that Bond films are traditionally a byword for misogyny that's good progress) and just great fun. I'm glad it has opened so well in UK cinemas and hope it does equally well when it opens in the US next month.

The Dictator - sort of half a film

Well I know I said that the next review would be Skyfall, but after my Thursday evening football was called off last night I had a few extra hours spare and so I was able to fit in Sasha Baron Cohen's The Dictator. Cohen plays Hafez Aladeen, the supreme leader of the made up nation of Wadiya that lies sort of where Somalia should be in the real world. Aladeen is a mentalist dictator kind of in the role that Uday Hussein might have been if he had lived. He and his trusted adviser Tamir - Ben Kingsley - must travel to New York to deliver a speech to the UN about nuclear weapons and arms inspectors and all that jazz. So basically the film's that classic Hollywood story about a yokel who travels to New York City, except this time the yokel is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The film has a funny opening and a funny ending, but in the middle it feels like the writers sort of only had two ideas and are just padding out the minutes between the funny bits. The opening is a series of skits set in Wadiya that lampoon many of the dictators who have moulded themselves in the shadow of Colonel Gadaffi. These are funny scenes. One scene in particular involves Aladeen inspecting his nuclear weapons capability with the eyes of a retarded child; another scene stars an extremely sporting Megan Fox who plays herself whoring her body out to Aladeen for a horde of expensive trinkets. The end of the film has Aladeen deliver a speech in the UN about the benefits of having a dictatorship - which are all things that the Americans have already (1% of the population owning all the wealth, media controlled by a few powerful individuals etc).   But that's it really, the remaining hour of the running time is padding that they had to come up with to justify a feature length film.

Much of the middle of the film is full of cringe worthy attempts at toilet humour. There is a scene in which someone has to explain to Aladeen how to masturbate.  Yep - really. There is another scene in which Aladeen and his nuclear scientist Nadal have an Arabic conversation in a helicopter over Manhattan in which they accidentally hilariously slip in English words like Bin Laden and 911. Just imagine how hilarious that is. Plus there's all the politically incorrect stuff Aladeen can say, about women being inferior to men, Jews being inferior to Arabs and most other kinds of stereotyping you can imagine.

It's only half the film it promises to be; I was excepting a searing attack on the modern Arabian patriarchal dictator. Instead it has a half-arsed go at doing that while appealing to a mass audience by doing a shed load of hackneyed gross-out jokes. It's good that the film is only 80 minutes long, because it made it worth watching in spite of it falling short of doing what I expected of it - and I assume short of what Cohen expected of it too, since he seems like a clever guy.

Well anyway, the next thing I write on here will definitely be about Bond.

Apollo 18

A depressingly tedious film that doesn't understand its own premise, Apollo 18 is yet another 'found footage' thing in which this time the footage was taken by the crew of the Apollo 18 mission on humanity's last ever trip to the Moon. For some reason the crew of Apollo 18 film absolutely everything they do up on the moon including when they're sleeping and having their miraculously able-to-zoom-and-focus-by-themselves cameras on all the time outside the ship when there's 'nothing' to film.  Sigh.

I actually saw the real Apollo 18 when I visited the NASA Space Centre in Houston last year. They have the unlaunched rocket and the command module on display in a humongous hangar to demonstrate just how large the Saturn 5 rockets really were. It's an impressive display and something that anyone who finds themselves in South East Texas should check out. One of the kids on our tour did ask the tour guide about 'what really happened to Apollo 18'. The guide batted the question away with some skill, and I followed up with a question about NASA's research into the next generation of rocket engines. I think he preferred my question.

So the idea here is that the reason Apollo 17 was the 'last' moon mission was because there is some kind of alien presence on the moon that manifests itself in the form of moon rock and dust. So Apollo 18 is some kind of half-suicide mission to the moon to find out what's going on.

It's tedious as there's no tension and the premise is undermined at every turn by the style and content of the film. If Apollo 18 was the final moon mission, how did the footage get found? They wouldn't have transmitted it as it was being filmed as a) no one would ever do that and b) anyone listening in on Earth would have been able to record it. So someone would have had to go to the moon to get it. The film also makes the classic mistake that so many badly-made found footage films make, which is to forget that the cameras are part of the story. What this means is that you can't have a wide-angle establishing shot for a scene unless there's a character in the film who has a reason to go and take a wide-angle establishing shot. There are a number of shots in the film taken from an angle and position at which it would have been impossible to take or position a camera within the context of the story. Though this may sound like tedious nit-picking, what it does is break down the 4th wall and remind you that this in fact isn't a found footage at all. It makes the director and editor look lazy for not realising that their artistic decisions are undermining the premise of the film. It just makes the whole film look rushed and like no-one cared.

Should be going to see the new Bond on Monday next week. Trailers look good, so here's hoping for something that gets back to the heights set by Casino Royale.

Air China

So the reason I had a large gap in my posting recently is that I've spent two weeks out of the last month in China having a holiday. I wont bore you with any clever anecdotes because 1: I don't really have any and 2: you're not read this to read about my holidays are you? Thought not. In short, China's very big and there's a lot of pollution, loads of people, some wicked food and terrible driving. Plus the sights are amazing.

Anyway, I watched 4 films on my various plane trips on Air China in the last few weeks. The selection was very poor and so I had to pass the time watching a couple of films I've just watched recently - 'X Men First Class' and 'Hunger Games', good on an 8 inch screen too it turns out. Aside from the healthy selection of terrible-looking Chinese films for some reason the 'entertainment' system had Citizen Kane. First time I've watched that for over a decade, still as powerful as ever exposing of the ultimate fragility of the so-called elites of society.

The only new film I watched was a twee little British / Indian film called "The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel", starring Judi Dench, Tom Wilkinson, Maggie Smith, Bill Nighy and a series of other well-known British actors. It's all about a group of older people who decide for various reasons to go off to India to seek out a fresh start to life / find somewhere peaceful to die - but they all learn something about life. It's a charming enough film with moments both touching and funny, but more than any of that of all it's pretty boring without any real storyline. I would have liked to like the film more - the cast is awesome after all - but it's a mash up of small story lines, none of which provide enough interest by themselves to make the overall film interesting.

It's a shame that the film experience on Air China was so indifferent, as normally a long haul plane flight is an opportunity to sit back and watch a couple of films I might never normally bother with. Half the films were terrible-looking Chinese cheese festivals that looked like they'd been directly remade from a Hollywood scrap heap, the rest were mainly the original Hollywood versions of said films. They did have Cleopatra as an option - which would have been fun as for years it was the most expensive film of all time adjusting for inflation - but even on a 10:30 hour plane ride I couldn't bring myself to commit to 4 hours of running time. Plus I was annoyed by the control system for the interactive entertainment. There was just one button to move a cursor around a screen and a second button to select options.  Epic fail.

Air China wont be my airline of choice if I fly back there in the future.

The Woman in Black - wait, I saw a play called that once...

So here we go then, Daniel Radcliffe's post-Potter film career starts here with a Hammer films adaptation of the popular horror novel and play 'Woman in Black'. Unless you've been a in a cultural backwater for over a decade now, you'll know Radcliffe from his role as the wand-toting teenager Harry Potter. With the final film out of the way last year it's time for the lad to move his career on. I can't think of another young actor who as ever been as type cast as Radcliffe must be right now. I'm not sure that ever in the history of film has anyone been cast into such a well-known role at such a young age, and then spent a decade of his formative years playing the same character across 8 feature length movies.  The world has literally watched Radcliffe go through puberty on screen. If he can get on with the rest of his life in any sort of normal way it will be a minor triumph for him.

His first major role after Potter is an interesting one for him. I can imagine the thought-processes of him and any advisers he has - get away from the fantasy genre & play a non-teenager. Hammer films might traditionally sit in the fantasy genre, but not here as The Woman in Black is a ghost story similar in feel and setting to the recent 'The Awakening'. Radcliffe plays Arthur Kipps, a young man eager to prove his worth to his firm by travelling to the spooky reaches of the English North East to sort out the estate of the isolated house of a deceased family. Certainly not an awkward teenage character by any means. Kipps spends time at Eel Marsh house and has a variety of other-worldy encounters, eventually becoming convinced that the dead ex-resident Jennet Drablow is the mysterious Woman in Black - who haunts the house and kills local children.

There's a way to make a horror film and I am surprised that whoever had the vision for this doesn't seem to get it. Surprised since the film was made by Hammer studios - who are sort of well-known for horror films. The biggest problem that a horror film can have is if it isn't scary, and endless scenes of Daniel Radcliffe tiptoeing around a house with things going bump isn't particularly frightening. From the first time we see the Woman in Black, it's obvious she's a ghost, there's no mystery. For all the too-ing and fro-ing around the house, the bumps, the lights going out, the rocking chair and unexplained gusts of air, at no point does Kipps seem like he's in any danger. If he was that worried wouldn't he run out of the house or something? All he does is carry on wandering around waiting for the next weird thing to happen. And when the guy who's actually in the haunted house isn't scared enough to try to get out of it, I'm not scared either.

What of Daniel Radcliffe's performance then? I thought he does very well and I think that overall he is a pretty good actor. I guess the people who cast him as Harry Potter over 10 years ago now knew their stuff. It's a shame then that he is miscast in this film. I can believe that he is a young man trying to make a name for himself at his new firm, but I struggle to believe that he is a father of a 5(?) year old boy. When he's interacting with his son in the film's opening scenes you can't help but think about how he's nowhere near old enough to have a child of that age. It's an unnecessary reminder that you're watching an actor playing a role, which only serves to undercut the character's set up and make it a less-effective horror. Having said all this though, Radcliffe is a good actor and I expect his post-Potter career to be full of plenty of good work.

The film doesn't work anywhere near as well as the stage adaptation of the original novel, it's neither as atmospheric or frightening and has a pretty weak ending (in my opinion). For that the film suffers and probably shouldn't have been made. Radcliffe on the other hand looks like he has a big career in acting if he wants to grasp it. I think he just needs to be a little cleverer about the roles he accepts in the future.

Martha Marcy May Marlene - herein known as MMMM

Yet another film that would have utterly passed me by were I not a semi-religious adherer to the Radio 5 film review podcast, MMMM was recommended as 'interesting' by Mark Kermode and so went straight on to my LoveFilm list before the DVD had even come out. Obviously a film like this was never going to get a release outside of London.

But what is 'a film like this'? The plot is that Martha (also known as Marcy to her family - played by Elizabeth Olsen) is a disturbed teenager who at the start of the film runs away from what appears to be a cult. The cult is strongly patriarchal. Run by the charismatic Patrick and several other men they charm lost girls and women to come and live with them by promising them an idealistic nature-loving lifestyle. Marcy runs away from the cult - who catch up with her briefly but let her go - and into the arms of her worried and conflicted sister (Lucy - played by Sarah Paulson who was last seen by me in the entertaining though mis-pitched Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip). Marcy then struggles to find her place in her old family as her experiences at the group are slowly revealed through flashback. At the same time, Lucy and her boyfriend can't work out what to do with Marcy, as her behaviour continues to be outside of the societal norm.

The film's main theme is what is 'normal' behaviour? It's just what is expected of you from the group you live in, and if you live in a cult you become affected by the usual kind of group think that affects any person living in any self-promoting community. There is no axiomatic definition of a 'normal' life, and so when someone drags themselves out of one close-knit group and into another, their behaviour will naturally be perceived as weird.

I can see the film being criticised for being simplistic and perhaps Olsen for giving something of a one-dimensional performance. She basically plays a couple of different iterations on the mopey teenager; you can either see that as something very easy for a teenage actress to pull off, or something that requires great mental strain to do with any kind of realism. Sarah Paulson was pretty good in Studio 60, but the fact I've not seen her in anything else since isn't a great sign. Here she plays the concerned / frustrated sister / mother figure very well and I would expect to see her back in more mainstream films at some point - but what do I know?

I saw this before I went away to China recently and I've got a bunch of new reviews are sitting on my hard drive ready to go up as soon as I get sufficiently bored at work.  So you wont have to wait long.

Total Recall - now with Colin Farrell

The new 'exciting' science fiction film of the moment is Total Recall, or Total Remake if you like. This is the Colin Farrell-led remake of the 1990 Paul Verhoeven cult classic starring Arnold Swartzeneggar, which in turn was a screenplay based upon a Phillip K Dick novel. The idea is that an ordinary factory worker at some point in a distopian post-apocalyptic future decides to buy himself some new memories to spice his life up. The company 'Rekall' will implant memories into your mind to make you think you've had all sorts of exciting experiences in your past. The catch is that the implanted memories can't conflict with anything you've actually done for real. So when Douglas Quaid (aka Farrell / Arnie) decides to get a false memory of being a secret agent everything quickly goes wrong because - and here's the fun part - Quiad really is a secret agent! Quiad's entire life is a fruad, his 'wife' (Kate Beckinsale) is an agent assigned to watch over him and in fact he has only been living this life for the last 6 weeks, since his mind was reprogrammed to make him forget his old life. This all happens in the first 20 minutes, then there's running and shooting and fighting and action aplenty.

Fair enough you might say, and indeed I would too. Trouble is that the film takes gigantic liberties with logic and science that leave big holes in the plot. And once you start picking at these holes, you start seeing holes all over the place. A central idea in the film is that there are only 2 places on Earth safe to live, Britain (where the upper class live) and Australia (where the working classes live), and that travel between them is facilitated by a lift (called The Fall) that travels through the Earth's core. This is a journey that takes 17 minutes and in the middle has a 'gravity inversion' where everyone becomes weightless and stuff turns upside down. Those with less education in physics in the audience might be happy to accept this, but as soon as this was stated my mind started trying to calculate the practicalities of operating such a system. And once you start doing that to any film, it's a lost cause.

Leaving aside the engineering absurdities of constructing a lift shaft through the centre of the Earth, the idea that such a journey could take just 17 minutes is literally stupid. The Earth is 12500km in diameter. So if you assume that the journey on The Fall accelerates constantly from the surface to the centre of the Earth, then decelerates at the same constant rate from the centre to the other side, it would have to be accelerating at approximately 5g for the entire journey. At such accelerations, people would be passing out during the trip - hardly able to conduct karate fights or have a nice conversation while reading a book. If The Fall were to simply do what it says on the tin, and 'fall' from the crust of the Earth to the centre then back out the other side, a crude calculation shows that this journey would take approximately 40 minutes to complete. But even like this everyone would be in free fall for the entire journey, not just in the 'Earth core' like in the film. The following diagram (brought to you by the Highways Agency) will illustrate:

And that's not even accounting for wind resistance.

Like I said, once your mind starts wandering and doing these calculations in the middle of a film - the film's sort of lost. Further plot holes and stupidities start to raise their heads, such as Mrs Quaid's continuing Bond-villain style attempts to kill Mr Quaid. Just put a bullet between his eyes woman! Or how when they travel to the 'no go area' where everyone has to wear gas masks to sheild them from the fall out from the chemical holocaust, they go there on the London underground - i.e. less than 10 miles from the centre of London where it's a paradise and perfectly safe to breath. Or how the messages that old Quaid leaves new Quaid could only have been set if he knew he was going to have his mind re-programmed, so if he knew it was going to happen why not take steps to do something about it in the first place. Or why there's a black 'uber android' at the end with better combat skills than the other androids. Or why the president of the whole Federation has to personally lead his androids into battle and have a fist-fight with Quaid. Or why they have Bill Nighy for such a small role? Or why everyone who's bad has a British accent, Beckinsale even puts on an American accent while she's pretending to be Quaid's wife, then reverts to her British as soon as her cover's blown!

Pause for breath...

Having said all this though, this remake of Total Recall is a very good action film. It was over 90 minutes before I looked at the clock. Kate Beckinsale is extremely well-cast as the action antagonist. I can see why she keeps going back and making more Underworld films - stick enough dark eye-liner on her, brush her hair in front of her eyes and she makes for a wicked badass. She's head and shoulders above Sharon Stone from the original film.  The problem is that the film forgets its source material and only makes a passing attempt to 'do an Inception' and question the nature of reality. Instead we get retarded plot devices, too many special effects and all too often an over-cluttered screen that just makes things confusing.

The original Total Recall is not a great film, but it's cheesey at the right moments and Arnie gets his one-liner. It's much better than this.

Tyrannosaur - if you weren't depressed before...

I think I picked the wrong film to watch on Thursday last week when I was feeling a bit low after my free trip to Rome to referee in the European Junior Championships qualifying tournament fell through. I should have been flying to Rome today, but instead here I sit in a glass building pretending to Create the Future of Transport. Bah.

Tyrannosaur is the first time that cult Midlands actor Paddy Considine has got behind the camera rather than been in front of it. He's not an actor with a huge profile, but he achieved cult status in my mind when in stared in 'Dead Man's Shoes' as an ex-squaddie who returns to his home town and immediately starts terrorising the local thugs who have been intimidating his brother - a film that he also wrote. He wrote and directed Tyrannosaur, a film that opens with a scene in which a man gets thrown out of a pub and then kicks his dog to death. Immediately it's clear we're not in a happy world.

This man is Joseph - played by Peter Mullan and shown in the image above - and the film tells the story of a couple of weeks in his life when all the pressure that have building inside him since the death of his wife finally spill over. He fights a verbal and then increasingly physical battle with his semi-psychotic neighbour and his attack dog, doing everything in his power to wind him up. He starts a brawl with local kids in a bar and screams at the heavens when no-one's listening. In an act of desperation he runs into a local charity shop run by Hannah (Olivia Coleman) to hide and find solace. Hannah has her own problems, her husband (the always-superb Eddie Marsan) has a twisted love-hate view of her, and the two find solace in each others company.

It's certainly haunting and I'm sure people in the right frame of mind will tell you it's also a brave depiction of depression and social decay.  Just look at the screen cap of the film above - talk about depression. It's also a little bit about killing dogs. I just wasn't in the mood the other night, so I wont be recommending it.

Hunky Dory - Better than High School Musical

If anyone who has seen Hunky Dory can think of a better word than delightful to describe this film, then please let me know. 'Hunky Dory' is a story set in the wilds of rural Wales in the hot summer of 1976. As anyone who lived through that year will confirm, 76 was the hottest British summer anyone could remember for a long time and it's long lazy days lounging around trying to stay cool are lovingly recreated here.
Minnie Driver plays Viv, the local girl who went away to university and came back as a teacher blessed with a desire to give children one last opportunity to express themselves artistically before being thrown into the alienation of working class work. To this end, Viv is putting on a modern musical production of William Shakespeare's The Tempest - using modern music. The film opens at a rehearsal 2 weeks before the play is due to be realised with a wonderful rendition of David Bowie's Life on Mars. If you're not sold by that then you might as well stop watching right away because there's plenty more where that came from.

There are people of a certain age who will be unable not to fall in love with this film for no reason other than the music. But there's a simplicity to the plot that has some appeal too. Nominally the plot is nothing more than a 2 week window into the lives of a small group of school kids who are living through an idyllic summer, a summer they'll spend the rest of their lives looking back upon with loving nostalgia. Leading lad Davey loves Stella, who in turn is infatuated by a mysterious young black lad who becomes the target of racial abuse by Kenny and his friends. Kenny is a confused lad though who isn't sure where his loyalties and future lie, he seems to have become a skin-head simply to fit in. Davey and Stella's friends form a tapestry of life that every teenager feels as their school days come to an end. That moment we all feel when the relief of knowing you never have to go back to school is tempered by the realisation that you're now less free than ever. All the while that this teenage drama plays out, Viv battles the age old enemies of artistic expression - the forces of conservatism within the school who see such expression as something to be stamped on. Where she sees an opportunity to give the kids one last harrah, there are others in the school who see only dissent and anarchy.

Wonderfully well-intentioned though this is, if it wasn't for the music I think the film would have got a bit tiresome. After all it isn't that much fun to watch teenagers mope artistically around in the stifling heat worrying about their sexuality. The film is made by the music, the musical performances by the young actors and actresses and Driver (who does a very good Welsh accent). If you don't at least enjoy the music then you've got a very hard heart, and once you're enjoying the music the rest of the film is more than passable.

Hunky Dory has to be a 'must see' if you were a teenager in the 70s and like David Bowie. For the rest of us - it's a bit of good fun.  At least it's better than High School Musical.

Outdoors cinemas - right here in Wokingham!

I walked back from the pub last Friday evening to discover that there was a massive screen on the grass outside the Lloyds bar in Wokingham, and it was showing a film. They were showing Grease, people were sitting around on camping chairs, teenagers were merrily drinking while parents pretended not to notice - this was Wokingham's outdoor film festival.

"What an exciting idea" said I. So on Sunday I went along myself armed with a few bottles of Franziskaner to watch Cool Runnings with a healthy cross-section of Wokingham's very middle class population. "Cool Runnings?" I hear you ask. Yes indeed; I can only assume that the festival organisers got swept up in the recent Olympics excitement and plumped for the cheapest, most family-friendly, feel-good Olympics film they could find. Plus of course John Candy - about whom I think one of my housemates might have an unhealthy obsession.

Last weekend was very very hot, which was fantastically jammy timing for Wokingham borough council. It was certainly a pleasure to sit out on the grass as the sun went down getting bitten by mossies while watching a classic 1990s feel-good movie. Plenty of people were chatting, eating and making all sorts of noises while the film was on. Didn't make any difference to the experience - in fact it probably enhanced it. The sound system was sufficiently booming that it was always possible to concentrate on the film over any chatter, but at the same time easily possible to have a conversation with people sitting next to you. There was even some audience participation as the film ended, with many clapping along in time as the Jamaican bobsleigh team carried their sleigh over the finish line.

There's no need for me to review Cool Runnings here. I'm sure everyone remembers its feel-good message about the purity of taking part in sport. I don't think I had seen it since I was a child and I had forgotten just how linear a story it is; there are no sub-plots or love interests and it has a very simple arc for each of its characters. It's not a great film by any measure, but you can't argue with its simple idealism. Or watching a film outdoors, you can't argue with that either.

Unless it rains of course.

Ted - aka Family Guy

From the writer of Family Guy comes a new comedy that's exactly the same as Family Guy. A goofy guy in his mid-30s (John Bennet - played by Mark Wahlberg) has a super-hot and adoring girlfriend (Lori - played by Mila Kunis) but is unable to commit to their relationship because of his other long term relationship with his boyhood friend - his teddy bear. John does everything with Ted. Oh, and did I mention - Ted is alive. Not just alive in the Disney fairy tale sense of alive; but a pot-smoking, foul-mouthed arsehole of a waster kind of alive. Basically he's Peter Griffin in cuddly bear form, which is convenient as he's played by Seth MacFarlane through the magic of motion capture. And that's just the start of the Family Guy comparisons.

Ted is a simple story about a man longing for his youth and being unable to recognise when to move on into true adulthood. Ted and John hang out in his flat smoking pot and obsessing over Flash Gordon. But when Lori makes it clear she wants him to propose (not a very modern woman is she, why doesn't she propose to him for Christ sake?!) John can't bring himself to take Ted out of his life. More important than any kind of plot though, is that this is a film packing the crude humour in by the spade-load. For those of you out there who have seen Family Guy - as I said already, it's more of that. Drug-taking, drinking, foul-mouthed put-downs, sexual crudity, casual misogyny & racism are all the norm here. It might be the only thing that Seth MacFarlane's capable of doing, so it's a good job that he's good at it. The film drifts into classic Family Guy territory more than once - notably the out-of-context reference gag is on display when the film cuts to a shot-for-shot remake of the Saturday Night Fever parody in Airplane! when John describes how he and Lori's first met. It's unimaginative comedy that has always been the weakest part of Family Guy, but thankfully it's kept to a minimum here.
Crudity is what we're talking about. If you're a fan of the kind of dry humour school of thought that says it's funny to simply be a grouchy old fart shouting obscenities about the world, then you'll be in your element here. The character Ted spouts misogynistic and racist rhetoric by the bucket-load, almost like you would expect of a character who is meant to be 50 years his elder.
So what about the casual misogyny and racism that runs through the film (and - let's be honest - Family Guy)? It sort of undercuts what Seth MacFarlane does, because I spend half the time wondering why he's coming out with it. I'm not sure if he's either trying to be avant-garde by declaring everything fair game or actually just a bit of a bigot. The line between a satirical take on culture and simply being racist isn't that fine. Watch the film and tell me how the Chinese fellow who turns up with a duck isn't racist. Ted even tells Norah Jones "Thanks for 9/11" at one point. Which makes absolutely no sense on any level - apart from perhaps to demonstrate that Ted is an even bigger idiot than we already thought. But then the character is supposed to be a lovable sort despite all his flaws, which kind of implies that we're supposed to accept racism as long as the person being racist is good at heart.
Given that I assume not even Seth MacFarlane intends for his audience to laugh along with Ted's racism. Perhaps the point is that MacFarlane's brand of comedy is simply a collection of anarchic stupidity, living on the edge of what is considered acceptable in the modern age. Though generally I applaud this (it's a logical extension of what Bill Hicks / Lenny Bruce were doing after all), I worry there's might be a section of the audience laughing because Ted / Peter Griffin are saying the things they would like to be able to say themselves but feel political correctness prevents them from doing so. I just hope that MacFarlane isn't one of those people and doesn't end up normalising casual racist language.

Purely as a film, Ted is very very funny in places but drags in others as it struggles to puff its storyline out into 100 minutes. The chase sequence at the end isn't needed at all and the film's final message (if it has one) gets lost as it runs rapidly out of steam. Though it probably would have been better as a shorter film, Ted is still funny enough to make it worthwhile.

A Serious Man

I have been waiting to watch the Coen Brothers' first film after 'Burn After Reading' for ages. I missed it when it was out in cinemas nearly 3 years ago, and I have waited patiently for almost as long for whatever embargo the distribution company has against LoveFilm renting it to vanish - finally last week a DVD copy entered my possession. The story of 'A Serious Man' has Coen Brothers written all over it. Michael Stuhlbarg (imdb's spelling) plays Larry Gopnik, a middle-aged Jewish man living in late 60s, middle class, middle-of-the-road Americana has a crisis of humanity and faith when a series of things in his life all go wrong at the same time. His wife wants to divorce him, his son cares only about TV reception, one of his students is trying to bribe him and his neo-nazi looking redneck neighbour is trying to encroach on to his land.

At first this sounds a like it might sit in the 'Jewish man struggles to understand world' canon of the Coens' films like 'Barton Fink', but the film has a fairytale quality to it that probably puts it in the same part of the Venn diagram as 'The Man who wasn't there'.  The setting is sort of a slightly skewed fantasy world of 1960s middle America, a Jewish purgatory in which our protagonist is being tested to his limits.  It's a film that opens with a pre-credits sequence set in rural 18th century Poland (or somewhere Eastern European & Jewish) in which a Jewish couple appear to encounter a sort of undead riddler who they chase out of their house. The scene is never referred to again.  When Larry encounters each of the priests from whom he seeks guidance throughout the film, they each tell him slightly non-sensical stories in attempts to help - stories not unlike the one told to us by the Coens in the open scene.  What to read into these stories?  Who knows?  As a film though, as well as being mysterious and off-the-wall, it is funny and darkly comic in all the ways you would expect a Coen brothers film to be.  Scene-to-scene it's an excellent watch, with very little coming across as filler.

'A Serious Man' is whatever you want to make of it. It can be a blackly comic throw-away tale about 2 weeks in one man's life, or just as easily be a modern re-telling of the story of Job (and of course Job was Jewish - so why not Larry?). For me it is a parable about the difficulty of doing the right things in life, while at the same time fearing what will happen if you give into your real desires. Thus Larry tries too hard to be the Serious Man; always unwilling to make the sacrifices to do what is right, but too worried of the consequences of doing what he wants. The film ends at an unexpected moment, a moment that provides several questions, the answers to which the viewer is invited to decide upon. Either Larry is a man living at the whims of random chance, or a man being tested by some unknown external force. Whether that force is God, the Coen brothers messing with their character or mere happenstance is up to the viewer to decide. Much like how we all must decide upon the existence or not of divine providence in the real world.

After all that though, it might be that the Coens actually don't expect us to take their film too seriously at all. It could be that the mysterious opening scene is there simply to make us realise that what follows is meant to be something of a joke.  One of the priests Larry visits tells a similarly unbelievable story about a dentist seeing a message from God etched in the teeth of his patient. I think the implication of the priest's tale is that all these stories and religious beliefs are two sides of the same coin, i.e. nothing more than stories that we are free to interpret, believe or dismiss as we choose. This could be the ultimate irony of a film called 'A Serious Man' - that the message is to not take things seriously.

Whatever the truth behind the Coen Brothers' intentions, I found 'A Serious Man' to be a fascinating film that was funny, thoughtful, interesting and engaging. It sparked a debate between myself and housemate Andy afterwards, as we tried to work out why the film ended so abruptly as it did. Personally I thought the ending was excellent, and the way it posed its big question about religion and faith was subtle without any overt attempt to preach either way. If I had to rank the Coen films (which I don't, but now I've thought of the idea I think I'm going to have to at some point), 'A Serious Man' would easily push its way into the upper echelons.

The Loved Ones - Aussie Horror

Since the Olympics have been on I have mostly been watching that and ignoring my DVDs and the cinema listings, but I did manage to squeeze in 'The Loved Ones' the other day. This tiny low budget cult Australian teen blood-fest was recommended to me through my usual channels (Radio 5 & the Guardian). At only 80 minutes long, it manages to pack in a lot of ick and turns on its head most of the usual conventions of teenage expectation.

The film follows Brent, his girlfriend Holly and best buddy Jamie on their prom night. Here I was thinking that they only have prom nights in the US - I guess the Americanisation of world culture is creeping into classrooms faster than I realised.  Do kids have them here in the UK now even?  Anyway, Brent is asked to the prom by Lola, who he lets down gently in favour of his girlfriend. While this is going on, Jamie asks out the school's cleavagey goth-chick over whom he has clearly been fantasising for some time. Each of Brent and Jamie now go on to have prom night experiences that differ from quite a lot from conventional expectation.

The main action focuses around Lola and her reaction to Brent's rejection of her.  And what a reaction. She kidnaps him, ties him up in her kitchen and - with the help of her father - proceeds to torture and maim him. We are treated to an extremely sick version of the father-daughter relationship, in which she is a sadistic Daddy's girl who likes to bring home 'unworthy' boyfriends for her father to 'disaprove' of. There is a lot of blood in this film, and if you think you might be put off by broken bones, nailing feet down, drill-bits and the rest then the film's probably not for you. For someone like myself who enjoys the escapism of this kind of unhinged horror fare, it's hide-behind-the-cushion stuff of surprising quality. And though it's the blood and the gore that on the surface provide the 'ick', it's the relationship between Lola and her parents that make the film truly disturbing.

The film's lighter moments arise from Jamie's date with the Emo's wet dream Mia, and his desperate attempts to impress her while she cooly gets higher and higher on a cocktail of weed and vodka. But in the end this is all about the sort of bloody revenge that many teenagers have probably fantasised about exacting upon the various bits of the world that refuse to conform to the expectations that they have. In one sense it hails from an extension of the Buffy canon in which the metaphor for high-school-as-literal-hell is taken to a new extreme, in another sense it's an entertainingly gruesome shock-horror that should keep fans of the genre happy. It certainly kept me happy.

Batman - The Dark Knight Rises

I had a minor operation Tuesday afternoon, but despite the local anaesthetic wearing off and the pain slowly rising in my back, nothing was going to stop me seeing the final part of Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy at the first possible opportunity. So in the evening I gritted my teeth against any discomfort and drove down to Winnersh Showcase for a half-full screening. The Dark Knight Rises is the final part of this series of films in which crime and crime-fighting are shown as two sides of a very dirty coin. The films have explored the legitimacy of fighting crime at all costs, as well as the morality of humanity left to its collective impulses. Crucially though, they have been directorial triumphs for Nolan - and helped him break into the Holywood A-list for film producer / directors.

Let's start with the cast. I'm going to provide a list and stop when I get to someone who who has not played a lead role in a major film: Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Gary Oldman, Anne Hathaway, Liam Neeson, Joseph Gordon Levitt, Marion Cotillard, Morgan Freeman, Cillian Murphy, Tom Hardy. Now that's an A-list. I can only assume that there would have been a role for Heather Ledger too had he not died.  With a cast like this and a director of Nolan's capability, could there be any doubt that 'The Dark Knight Rises' would be a classic?

And now the plot. It's 8 years since the Joker's reign of madness was ended by Batman. The Batman has gone into hiding and Bruce Wayne is a recluse, but a new grandiose evil - Bane - is threatening Gotham's security and so Batman is set to return to protect the city once more. This time though, Batman is wanted by the city's police and only trusted by police commissioner Gordon. While this is happening, a master-thief - the Catwoman - is beginning to ruffle the feathers of the city's rich and famous. As Bane's plan to 'free' Gotham's citizens from its police and governors is revealed, Batman is in a race against time to free himself from captivity and help the city's beleaguered residents. Classic comic book stuff. Let's start the review off with a positive shall we, Anne Hathaway.

Anne Hathaway plays catwoman - and she is amazing. Not in a pervy way, though she does look fantastic in the variety of figure-hugging outfits they must have sewn her into, but in a she can act after all way. Who would have thought she could pull off an action role? Most her lines could easily have turned into cheesy mush a la Halle Berry - they never do. All the best scenes are when she's fighting against her instinctive reaction - to go it alone in a laissez faire style and screw the world; can she be convinced to make a stand against all the injustice she knows is happening? When called upon to pull off high kicks, one-liners and ninja moves, she's no Heath Ledger, but she's more than up to the task. Though the film is nominally about Batman and Kane, it is Hathaway and Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Robin Blake who provide the central character arcs for the film. Each of these characters starts out as a naive idealist - he is the green cop for whom no criminal is too well-connected, she is the impudent thief for whom no treasure is beyond taking - each ends up learning that both sides of the law / crime divide have their dark sides and cannot be given unquestioning trust. He starts out as lawful good, she chaotic neutral - by the end each are probably chaotic good. Bonus marks to people geeky enough to understand this reference.

A lot of news print in the last few weeks has been dedicated to discussing the politics of this film. Despite being a summer blockbuster it's a film that has a lot to say about politics, and seems to be espousing a subtle right wing agenda. Bane - the arch-villain - is a Robespierre figure, who on occasion espouses the kind of pseudo-communist nonsense I can only imaging US Republicans think Socialists like myself believe. The parallels with the French Revolution continue as Commisioner Gordon reads from 'Tale of Two Cities' at the end of the film and Cillian Murphy's character sit astride a court reminiscent of the kangaroo courts of the Reign of Terror. Nolan seems to be creating a not-so-subtle anti-revolutionary agenda here, where the French Revolution was a terrible mis-adventure in which the barbarous and unwashed masses cruelly rose and obliterated western civilisation for a brief period.

An example of the subtle centre-right propaganda comes from Catwoman's character development. She starts out as an antagonist, and tells Bruce Wayne that he shouldn't presume he and his friends can have so much wealth and expect everyone else to let them have it. Bad Catwoman talks like a Commie you see. After Bane's 'revolution', her housemate comments that a house previously owned by a family is "everyone's house now", a comment that visibly saddens Catwoman. The subtext being that now Catwoman is coming around to the side of good, she's understanding the need for property rights to be respected.  Read into this what you will. I can only recall one moment in which anyone points out that Bane's 'revolution' isn't really a revolution at all, more like it's a huge ransoming of human life in which millions of people are imprisoned to his will. For all the anti-left wing messages in the film it's hardly a balancing moment. The film exhibits at best an establishment view of the world; at worst it's not far off a sort of subliminal propaganda.

In addition, the film has a huge number of plot holes and contrivances. Characters are constantly conveniently turning up at various points to provide input, rescue someone or explain the plot. There's a major plot twist towards the end of the film that is absolutely unnecessary. Also, they do that classic movie thing when a scientist says that a disaster will happen in about 5 months, at which point someone sets a clock with a countdown timer to the time exactly 5 months hence. I'm still shaking my head over that one.

In the end though, all is forgivable. All the plot holes, continuity errors, macguffins and right wing sub-texts are forgivable because this is a tour de force of blockbuster film-making. Christopher Nolan is the master of outlandish directorial feats, so each time when the camera expanded out to a wide view or the music swelled in anticipation of something I pushed myself back into my seat and thought "c'mon Chris - gimmie something amazing". I was never disappointed. From the opening scene of a kidnapping on a plane, through to several moments of epic destruction as Bane enacts his plan to bring Gotham to its moral knees, there was just too much to be in awe of to worry about the occasional continuity error. This trilogy of Batman movies has been an outstanding achievement by this landmark director. He has forever re-defined what is possible with a comic book movie adaptation. Never again will people automatically assume that such films are Val Kilmer-esque cheese festivals full of dodgy one-liners and fluorescent costumes. Nolan has proved that comic book adaptations not only can be dark and full of hidden depths, but that they're better like this.

Ferris Bueller's Day Off - still relevant

So I had to do a double take the other week when by housemate Andy announced casually in conversation that he had never seen Ferris Bueller's Day Off. There might only be 5 years between the two of us, so it is really possible that this is enough of a generational gap to mean that he has never seen a film that was so pivotal to my generation's psyche in the late 1980s? Perhaps it's just one of those weird gaps for him, a film he missed but then got too old and it became redundant to watch it.

Thankfully a work colleague saved him the other day by lending him the DVD, and so for the first time in well over a decade I sat and watched Matthew Broderick ham it up to the camera as Ferris Bueller in all its 1980s materialistic bollocks glory. It's something I never realised in the past, but watching the film now it is so obvious how wedded to 80's consumerism the film is. Consider the main characters, Ferris and sister Jeanie live in an upper middle class paradise where he has a room full of technological wizardry, while she has a car and all the designer gear she wants. Ferris' best friend Cameron's Dad is so rich he has owns a 1961 Ferrari 250 GT California (only a few hundred were made and they are very expensive apparently!). All of them decide they'd rather not go to school and so bunk off to Chicago where they have a great day out. Cameron is so cloistered that when they arrive in Chicago he assumes the slightly dark-skinned guy working in the car park can't speak English. Oh dear.

Of course the film exists in a complete fantasy world and as such is able to get away with a lot of this. It's a world in which it is a comic moment when a 15 year sics their Rottweiler on the school headmaster. It's a world in which Ferris - in one of cinema's great scenes - is able to lead thousands in a rendition of 'Twist and Shout' on top of a flotilla of caravans in downtown Chicago. It's the world of John Hughes of course, who is sort of an American version of Roald Dahl in that all his teenage characters are super-cool while their parents are half way to being idiots.

All this neatly comes together when the film has its own epiphany moment that ousts the draw of materialism for the empty chalice it truly is. When Cameron accidentally destroys his father's Ferrari - the film's ultimate statement of materialistic splendour - he realises that despite worrying all day long about the consequences of this happening, it's actually for the best. Cameron knows that the terrible consequences of this act will perversely allow him to connect to his father for the first time. Basically, money isn't everything and the material wealth of Ferris and his friends is irrelevant. The thing that's important is having a day out with your friends, going to an art gallery and stepping back and enjoying life while you can. As Ferris says - "Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it".

Of course these things are easier to say and do when you've got tonnes of money, great friends, enough to eat, a massive house and a loving family around you - but like I said, this is the middle class fantasy land of John Hughes. It would be easy to write off 'Ferris Bueller' as a relic of a now-irrelevant age. After all, the film stars Matthew Broderick and Jennifer Grey - how much more 1980s do you want? But in our continuing age of materialism-beats-all the film is a startlingly relevant reminder that stuff isn't important, people and relationships are.