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.