Zodiac - a killer mystery

This 2007 film about the Californian police's attempts to apprehend a killer know as 'Zodiac' is a tense and frighteningly real portrayal of an enduring mystery.  The mystery of the Zodiac killer - for those who don't know - goes as follows:  In the late 1960s / early 1970s a series of unsolved murders took place in the San Fransisco Bay area of California.  A person calling themselves Zodiac sent letters to the police and newspapers taunting them about the killings, claiming nearly 30 murders over a period of about 6 years.  The police only officially pinned 5 murders on Zodiac, who was never officially identified.

This film follows the story of Robert Graysmith - played by Jake Gyllenhaal - who was a cartoonist at the San Francisco Chronicle at the time of the murders.  He becomes obsessed by solving them and ends up going to extreme lengths to try to collate and piece together evidence that the police lack the resources to follow up.  He initially works with a reporter at the paper (Robert Downey Jr) and a sympathetic police officer (Mark Ruffalo), but soon his obsession overtakes his life and family. At several points in the film he becomes convinced that a number of different people are zodiac, but though the evidence finally stacks up against one individual it is never more than circumstantial.  As the film skips forwards through the years, we see the case becoming forgotten about, right up to the current time when it remains open and the main suspect dead of natural causes.

It's a fascinating look into the world of crime investigation in the 1960s and 70s, and the story of the Zodiac killer specifically.  The fact that the case was never conclusively solved adds to the mystery and turns what could have been a history lesson into an engrossing 150 minutes.  Jake Gyllenhall plays the reclusive nerd very well, excellent casting here as the cartoonist who loves puzzles and becomes obsessed with the killings.  Similarly Robert Downey Jr plays erratic obsessives quite well, so he is well cast too.

Good source material, historical accuracy, good casting and a well-paced narrative make Zodiac an excellent film.

Right, I'm off to panic-buy stamps...

The Skin I Live In

On the surface, 'The Skin I Live In' is a film that should have my name written all over it.  I'm sure my housemates have said things like that in the past.  The reason is that this is a beard-stroking art house film, in Spanish, with a slightly near-future science fiction sounding premise.  I try to do my best to shake of my reputation of being the kind of person who is naturally drawn to such films, but then I do keep being drawn to them so it's quite hard.

'The Skin I Live In' came out last year and is a film by Almodovar (he has a first name, but like a Brazilian footballer he doesn't have to use it) - the legendary Spanish director who brought you Volver, Todo Sobre Mi Madre and Bad Education.  If you've never heard of any of these films then don't worry, most people haven't.  I tend to watch this stuff cos it's Spanish, but they generally star some well-known people they're well within the  mainstream of the Spanish-speaking diaspora.  'The Skin I Live In' stars Antonio Banderas as a twisted surgeon, who keeps a woman willingly locked in his house as a human guinea pig for a new kind of futuristic skin grafting experiment.  Who this woman is, what her relationship with the doctor is and why she allows herself to be held captive are all mysteries - mysteries that will be solved the the film eventually jumps back in time to fill in crucial gaps.  We then come to a huge and non-sensical twist.

The film is deeply pretentious and rather than inflaming some kind of inner realisation about the nature of gender roles (as I assume was the point) it just made me sigh and think 'is this it?'.  Does Almodovar really think he's making some kind of clever statement about sexuality with this film?  Most of his films do something to challenge gender roles or sexuality, but - and I'm trying not to give the twist away here - does he really imagine that homophobes across the land are going to be re-evaluating their opinions as a result?  I found the film to be trying far too hard to obliquely make a point that I struggled to fathom, but one that I'm sure isn't as radical as the director thought it was going to be.

Cinematography and art aside (the film has a fantastically clean look that hints at an upper-middle class setting in a world that is slowly going wrong) I didn't really think too highly of 'The Skin I Live In'.  Plus then there's the weird bit the the woman's son who turns up and is suddenly a rapist.  What was the point of that?  I'm not telling you not to watch this, just beware that it was too pretentious even for me.

Captain America - The First Avenger (apparently)

I'm struggling to fathom why I didn't believe all the evidence that told me not to watch this film. The only reason I even rented it was because of the up-coming 'The Avengers' movie, which will feature a huge crossing over between several recent Marvel films - one of which is this. I didn't bother to see 'Thor', and 'Iron Man 2' wasn't much cop - so quite why I felt the need to watch this I cannot remember. Since I already telegraphed the general sentiment of this review it seems a bit redundant now, but let's dive into it anyway - I'm just killing time before I go into London to watch football.

Imagine if you will a re-hashing of a classic science fiction trope, that of the Nazi who is obsessed with the occult. It's not enough in one of these films that you're a Nazi, to be really evil you have to be a Nazi who's trying to bring about the apocalypse by tapping into some kind of ancient power / ring / ark of the covenant delete as appropriate. This time it's Hugo Weaving using genetic engineering to make himself immortal and create an army of worse-than-Nazis soldiers to rule the world with.

At the same time Uncle Sam is running a similar program to make an army of cardboard cut-out, clean-shaven all American heroes who can be airlifted into Germany to kick Hitler's butt. Sadly for them, the designer of the program is killed by a spy and only one solider is produced. This is very good for the film though as it re-enforces individualism and shows that the American genetic engineering project is - though the same as the Nazis one - a good thing. Hollywood never passes up an opportunity to subtly re-enforce pro-US stereotypes. This solider is Captain America, and he spends most of the film charging around a series of underground bases battling with all sorts of hooded Nazi goons saving the day from I'm not really sure what and blah blah you know where this is heading.

Even as brainless films go, this is fairly tortuous. Tommy Lee Jones has a role as the hard-nosed colonel who's orders Captain America must disobey to get the job done. At most one dimension there. Hayley Atwell plays an utterly unnecessary character who is introduced as the super soldier project's British liaison. She fails to liaise with the British at any point and exists purely to fall for Captain America and punch a one of the recruits in the face. You see how this means it's a pro feminist film? You don't? Me neither. More like she exists to convince the target audience of brain-dead, male teenagers that watching a film about loads of strapping young athletic soldiers isn't going to turn them gay. Cinema's first ever zero-dimension character.

I'm assuming that the reason this was such a bad film is that in the rush to bring this out before 'The Avengers' they hashed a script together in record time. Even the special effects look ragged. Don't watch Captain America.

We need to talk about Kevin

This was Mark Kermode's 'film of the year' for 2011, so in settling down to watch 'We need to talk about Kevin' I was filled with very high expectations. Aside from that though I had absolutely no idea what to expect, having not read the book upon which it is based or having any idea what it was about. In fact, I wasn't even sure that the film had a character called Kevin until well over 20 minutes in!

In basic terms, this is the story of a boy called Kevin and the strained, manipulative relationship he has with his family. The film is so much more than that though. It's a psychologically disturbing amalgam of fractured scenes that happen at unsignposted moments in the history of Kevin's family. This style of non-linear story-telling creates a collage of scenes that set up a family steeped in unspoken truths, lies and a painfully poisonous mix of love and hatred. The film never looks like it's a story being told in retrospect or in flash forwards, rather it's a collection of events that make up a character's life, all happening at once like a life flashing before someone's eyes.

Tilda Swinton plays Eva - Kevin's mother - and gives a masterclass in the most intense style of acting. It is perhaps through Eva's emotional state that we get insight into the film's timeline. The more Swinton looks like she's in the verge of a breakdown, the closer to the present a scene lies. Her joy at having a child is slowly tempered over the years as he continues to treat her with suspicion, a suspicion that boils into occasional outbursts of shocking contempt. In Kevin's teenage years he continues to act with a chilling detachment that culminates in a series of shocking scenes, finally revealing the reason for Eva's present day emotional mire.

This is an extremely interesting story. There are a lot of themes in the film about parenting, upbringing, the origins of personalities and nature of evil. It seems crazy that there was no mention of the film at all at the Oscars, and though I don't agree with Kermode's film of the year accolade I recommend people watch it. Even if the story wasn't interesting and told in an exciting way, Tilda Swinton's performance is worth your 90 minutes investment alone.