The Artist

I managed to drag myself away from playing Skyrim last weekend for just long enough to get to the cinema and see a film that has since had Oscar nominations chucked at it from all angles. 'The Artist' is a film that follows the emergance of sound in cinema in the late 1920s and one silent actor's struggle to cope with the death of his medium. The film is interesting from a contemporary perspective because it is in fact silent (with a couple of exceptions) and in black and white with cards to provide dialogue.

The simple fact that anyone was prepared to finance and produce such a film in the modern age of 3D and lurid effects is in itself worthy of praise. Having seen 'The Artist' I can tell you that this is far from the only thing praise-worthy about it. The story is of George Valentin, a star of silent film who finds himself out of work when his production company - headed by the excellent John Goodman - begins to make only 'talkies'. The company's new star is Peppy Miller (great name for a young starlet btw), who shines from every movie poster and newspaper in Holywood unknowingly mocking Valentin's fall from stardom. It's a simple story of getting left behind by a changing world and the fickle nature of fame, but told in a novel way with comic turns and a lot of love for the medium of film. With tongue in cheek and rose-tinted glasses firmly glued to their noses, the producers of 'The Artist' throw the occasional noise in the mix for good effect and gush adoration for a simpler age.

To any who might be put off because it's a silent movie, put aside your fears and stop worrying. If people in the 1920s could work out what was going on from just the music then I'm sure you can too. If you're in doubt about the power that music has to drive a narrative, then look no further than Buffy the Vampire Slayer to show you how it's done. They did an episode without dialogue as well as one without music - you realise just how much you rely on the score to get your emotional cues for a scene when it's suddenly not there.

I was hugely impressed by 'The Artist', and from what I could gather from the reactions in the Reading Vue most others were too. I wouldn't bet against Holywood awarding its first oscar to a silent movie for 80 years come February.

Sucker Punch - girls 'n guns 'n swords

When the trailer for this came out early last year I can remember my exact thought processes. Something along the lines of "that looks like a great action film, plus the main character is a pretty girl in some kind of fetishised version of a school-girl uniform - this I have to see". Then the reviews came out and were universally bad. It was at this point that I realised I couldn't justify seeing the film without acknowledging that the only reason to do so was to gratuitously prev over girls in revealing costumes. Now while I'm not entirely opposed to that idea, I'm not going to pay good money to do it.

Thankfully my housemate Rich stepped up to the plate and rented the Blue-Ray, so we were able to appreciate full HD quality girls in fetish gear battling steam-powered WW1 German zombie-soldiers in the comfort of our own home. Allow me to write that sentence again: "girls in fetish gear battling steam-powered WW1 German zombie-soldiers". Seldom in the history of cinema has something made less sense while sounding like so much fun.

The story - as far as we might label it such - involves 'Baby Doll', a 20 year old woman who dresses like a school girl and is sent to a mental institution by her evil step father after an incident in which her sister is shot. Note that Baby Doll is 20, an entirely unimportant plot point, but something we are told none-the-less so that everyone can perv without guilt (aside - the actress playing Baby Doll is Emily Browning, and is definitely over 20). Anyway, Baby Doll copes with her time in the hospital by appearing to escape into a fantasy world where she and the other girls are part of a bordello run by the evil Blue (in real life a sleazy orderly) and their dancing coach Vera Gorski (who in 'real life' is the hospital's doctor). To escape, Baby Doll discovers she must find 5 objects. To do this she enlists the help of 4 other girls. When finding the items the girls appear to escape into a second fantasy world in which they glam-up, tool-up and mow down whatever baddies happen to be in their way.

As a film, 'Sucker Punch' is totally rubbish. As a spectacle, it's an eye-popping concoction of steam-punk influenced computer game levels complete with easily-dispatched goons, eye shadow, stockings, robots, orcs, guns, swords and crazy kung fu skills. The trouble is that none of this action has any connection to the story that's going on in the mental hospital. It's entirely possible that there's an interesting tale about dealing with mental illness hiding under the surface in 'Sucker Punch', but it's utterly blown away by this hail of bullets and samurai swords. When the girls escape into their fetish gear and tool up on anachronistic weaponry it's just an excuse to leer at their outfits and gawp at the explosions as wave after wave of pointless automatons (first zombie soldiers, then orcs, then robots) are dispatched.

I can't have too much of a go at 'Sucker Punch' as I knew what I was getting into at the start and watching the action scenes was definitely something of a guilty pleasure. However I am going to add my voice to the near unanimity of opinion that says it's rubbish. Sucker Punch sucks.

Kill List

Now here's a strange little film if ever there was one. Heavily talked up by Mark Kermode last year as an interesting British thriller / horror, 'Kill List' stars Michael Smiley (him who played Tyres in Spaced) as Gal and Neil Maskell as Jay, a pair of professional contract killers. We join the film at a dinner party hosted by Jay and his wife Shel, at which Gal and his new girlfriend are guests. As the conversation unfolds it becomes clear that Jay and Gal are hired killers, and that their partners are not only well-aware of what they do, but are of a military persuasion themselves.

Jay and Gal get a new contract that means they have to travel around Britain murdering people on a list (hence the 'Kill List'). At first they act in a 'professional' way; but soon they wonder why these people deserve to die and start to lose their cool. Admittedly they don't have a lot of 'cool' to start with, but their last vestiges of civilised behaviour quickly ebb away as they become more embroiled in their work and the dangers the contract entails.

The film goes off in a very weird 'Wicker Man' direction towards the end, culminating in a final scene that is almost impossible to believe. So much so that it almost ruiins the whole film. Thinking about what happens though there's just enough plausibility in events to justify such an extreme twist. Little hints of cult and paganastic behaviour are sprinkled around the film; for instance Gal's girlfriend carves a mysterious symbol on the back of a mirror in Jay and Shel's bathroom very early on - an event so out of place it might be easy to compartmentalise and forget.

There are several gruesome deaths in the film, one of which involves a hammer and is extremely explicit in its violence and gore. There are also several very tense scenes of dialogue and marital stress that are potentially quite upsetting for the underage or those with low fear thresholds. Probably not a film for all, but if you're happy to accept an off-the-wall ending it's quite a chilling ride.

Blow Up - 60s existentialism

Where my first review of the year was one of the latest releases hot off the projector, my second takes us back into the history of film. I enjoy watching films from all eras, obviously my Dad knows that well as he bought me a couple of archetypal 1960s films as Christmas presents - cheers Dad! I know he reads this blog and I guess he's hoping I liked them, well read on...

Blow Up is a film that fascinated me for its whole run time. I think this was in part because I knew nothing about what to expect, and partly because what goes on has a constant mystical unreal quality to it. I kept watching waiting for answers, but secretly hoping they would never come for fear that bringing everything down to earth would spoil its ethereal qualities.

It is the 1960s. The world is a collage of the greys and browns of London still emerging from WW2 contrasting against the pastel print dresses and shirts of those who inhabit it. We follow David Hemmings as Thomas, an apparently successful David Bailey-esque photographer who lives in a doss house with people that might be friends or lovers and spends his days driving London's street in a soft-top Roller shooting images of anything that takes his interest. On one of his usual jaunts he comes across a small park in which he sees a young woman (Vanessa Redgrave) and an older man kissing. He takes a series of photos of the scene and the surrounding space before the couple realise what's happening, the woman tries but fails to get him to give her the negatives. At this point the story goes off on a slight tangent when the woman starts to say and do slightly strange things. When Thomas blows his photos up and discovers something unexpected the story swerves off the road completely.

Thomas appears to lose touch with reality as he tries to work out what it is he has photographed, and what to do with the information. He goes in search of the people he photographed and has a number of very confusing encounters including stumbling into a gig where everyone is staring stoney-faced towards the front, seeing the woman he photographed vanish and a final sequence when he returns to the park only to discover a group of mime artists pretending to play tennis. Space, time and sound (or lack of it) are very important in this film. The sequence where Thomas develops his photos is 10 minutes long and virtually silent as the process of him creating batch after batch of photos is laboured over. With very few signposts for the audience the mystery that Thomas discovers is revealed at a creeping pace.

One might be minded to say that Blow Up is pretentious - and I guess that by any sensible definition of the word it is. But if you're going to make a pretentious film you have at the very least to make it interesting to watch. 'Blow Up' starts out as a knock-about mirror into the way Britain was nearly 50 years ago, then becomes a melodrama, thriller and eventually spirals down into existential 'what is reality?' territory. If you're confused (and I was) it doesn't take much effort to Google it and find out a variety of theories on what the film means, most of which are actually quite satisfying as they tie a lot of the confusing threads together.

Ultimately an extremely satisfying film that despite some pretense provides an interesting contemporary view of 1960s London. Just don't be shocked if you're confused at first!

Girl with the Dragon Tatoo - In English!

America hates subtitles, which I assume is the reasoning behind this English language version of a book that has already been made into a film (only 3 years ago) in its original Swedish. Rather than cast a group of unknown Swedish actors, David Fincher's English language version casts a number of extremely well-known non-Swedish actors (plus 1 Swedish one) and gets them to put on slightly odd Scandinavian-inflected accents. Everyone apart from Daniel Craig of course, who I presume is considered too famous to be forced to do a silly accent.

It appears I was somewhat remiss on my blog in the past and failed to write anything about the Swedish versions of these films, all of which I have watched within the last 2 years. I thought the first one was very good, the second pretty good and the third very boring. The story of the first installment is that of Mikael Blomkvist, investigative reporter, who is hired to investigate the 40-year-old murder of a wealthy businessman's (Henrik Vanger) niece Harriet. Blomkvist is enticed into taking the case because Vanger offers him information on Hans-Erik Wennerström, whom recently sued Blomkvist for printing libel about him. Vanger had previously employed a young hacker / tech expert Lisbeth Salander to do a background check on Blomkvist, a woman with a dark history who lives on the fringes of society, constantly one step away from institutionalisation.

The film follows the independent stories of Salander and Blomkvist until they are brought together when the latter requests an assistant to help him in his research. As the mystery deepens, Salander's sometimes blunt approach towards data mining and alternative life style choices point the pair towards a surprising and disturbing conclusion.

The most enjoyable part about this story is the central mystery, i.e. working out just what happened to Harriet Vanger and what secrets her family are hiding. There's some stuff about Sweden's Nazi past, a strong theme against violence towards women and some ultra-violence including a couple of scenes of sexual nature that deserve the 18 certificate. Obviously the film is setting up part 2, and so spends a flabby 15 minutes at the end opening up new threads in a story arc that isn't really that interesting. The relationship between the two main characters is a central theme, but I thought it made more sense in the Swedish version, in which the guy playing Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) isn't an international sex symbol. Given their casting I assume the main characters aren't meant to be overtly sexualised, rather that they're Swedish and so are socially adjusted to be more promiscuous than most.

Overall, as enjoyable as this adaptation is (and it is a good film), it seems slightly superfluous given that a perfectly good original language version came out only a few years back. Just like the Trent Reznor version of 'Immigrant Song' that plays through the film's intro sequence. Rooney Mara is excellent as Salander though, and if the film makes a lot of money I see no reason why we wont eventually see parts 2 and 3 in English in the next few years.

My favourite film blog

My favourite film blog FuckOffFilm appears to be back up and running. The first post indicates that its recent hiatus was due to the author having had some mental health problems. This (and I hope I'm not libeling myself here) doesn't come as much of a surprise given the content of a lot of what he writes.

The blog is one of the best places to go online for new trailers of films you've never heard of, and of course copious amounts of swearing. It's where I learn about new films and new words to slip into conversations with unsuspecting old people.

Films of the Year - 2011

The film world keeps on chugging on and I've already made my first cinema trip of 2012. A review of that to come, but for now it's time for my now-traditional top 5 of the previous year. I like that I've had this blog going for 3 years now and can claim a 'tradition'.

5 - The King's Speech

Enough praise was heaped upon 'The King's Speech' back in January, no need for me to repeat the process now. An outstanding performance from Colin Firth and a deserved pile Oscars tell the story. And it didn't even bother me that it was about the royals!

4 - Troll Hunter

I was expecting a 'Blair Witch' style horror but ended up getting a knock-about comedy with funny effects, slapstick and mad Norwegian trolls. Plus Norwegians - well they just sound funny don't they!

3 - Paul

Science Fiction film of the year goes to Simon Pegg and Nick Frost's latest foray into the geek - Paul. Helped partly by being loads better than the trailers made it look, and partly by an astonishing abundance of film references, it's a funny film that's anti religious and name-checks every science fiction film you can think of. Sort of a perfect film for me I guess.

2 - Senna

A humble documentary about a subject that raises emotions amongst Formula 1 fans of a certain age, 'Senna' neither fawns in adoration at its eponymous driver nor throws around accusations of guilt at his death. 'Senna' is a measured film that presents the life of a cultural icon.

1 - Black Swan

'Black Swan' went in to the top of my film of the year chart when I saw it back in February and nothing has managed to dislodge it. Probably not everyone's cup of tea, but I thought it was an outstanding and emotional performance from Portman as an artist trying so hard for perfection that she risks loosing all touch with reality. I need to see it again at some point.