The Great Dictator - Racism or Satire? You decide.

The road to the IMDB top-100 continued the other week with another Charlie Chaplain film, this time his landmark satire of Nazi Germany, The Great Dictator.  Made in 1940, just as the world was waking up to the terrors of what the Nazis were doing across Europe, the film is unashamed in its demonisation of them.  It was a film that at the time could be considered very brave to make.  The US was not at war with Germany, and such overt criticism of a head of state of a powerful westernised nation would surely have riled the corridors of power in the US.  Chaplain doesn't just satirise Hitler and the Nazis though, he outright mocks them through his own unique style of slapstick, giving all the characters stupid names, putting on a ridiculous German accent and effectively blowing raspberries in their faces.

One could argue that Chaplain almost goes too far here though.  Is the garbled fake German that he speaks still satire, or is it bordering on racism?  Chaplain plays two characters in The Great Dictator, and it is perhaps clear from his portrayal of those characters that he hold the Nazis in contempt rather than the German speaking diaspora.  Chaplain plays Hynkel - dictator of Tomania (Hitler) as well as a Jewish barber who is a hero from the First World War.  The barber is eloquent and well-spoken, Hynkel speaks in a garbled mash-up of fake German and semi-retarded English.  The barber is shown as resourceful and strong, Hynkel a devious man fearful of his supposed allies.  Chaplain's disdain for Hitler and what he has done to the German nation is clear.

The film is well-known for its final 15 minutes, in which the barber is mistaken for Hynkel and hauled in front of a Nazi rally to deliver a speech to the masses.  Rather than ranting about Jews, the barber gives a moving oration about the brotherhood of mankind, imploring the world to step back from the madness of war, recognise there is good in all, enough for all, and work together for a brighter future.  The cheering of the crowds as he finishes his speech can be read two ways, either there is hope for humanity as the crowd realise the truth in what he says; or that there is no hope as the baying masses blindly cheer whatever is put in front of them, be they peace-lover or war-monger.  However the film's final scene does leave us with a feeling of hope for the future of the German peoples and the world at large.

Undoubtedly The Great Dictator is a landmark piece of cinema.

2001: A Space Odyssey - better on a big screen

The BFI recently re-released Stanley Kubrick's classic science fiction opus 2001: A Space Odyssey into cinemas.  Thankfully this got outside the M25, and so it was that last Tuesday both Reading and Camberley Vue cinemas were screening the original.

I last saw 2001: A Space Odyssey the best part of 20 years ago.  Back then I wasn't anywhere near as into film and cinema-as-art as I am nowadays, but even then I was aware that I was watching a masterpiece.  It's a film about big concepts, like the evolution of mankind and the emergence of new forms of life.  It's about concepts that are meant to be barely comprehensible by our mortal minds, all bound up in the presence of the brutally alien monolith, the true intentions of which remain unknown throughout the film and remain open to interpretation.  Its mysteriousness rams home the idea that the next step in human evolution will be as incomprehensible to us as a space station is to a pre-humanoid ape holding a bone.

Everything in the film is based on a scientific grounding, and like most of Arthur C Clarke's work - it's less about the characters, and all about the concepts.  In fact, the film's most memorable character is a computer - the HAL9000 computer who tries to kill the crew of the ship when he realises that they plan to disconnect him.  This is the one plot point of the film that makes no sense, HAL makes one small mistake and the crew decide the solution is disconnection.  If we all decided to throw our machines away when they made one mistake, we would need a lot more computers.  Anyway, the point is about evolution as a concept, conflict between competing groups for survival, and when a new intelligence emerges, there is necessarily a conflict to see who remains on top.

Some may criticise its lack of pace, its overly long use of shots of ships flying around, the barmy 5 minutes of flashing colours that represent Dave Bowman's journey through the infinite, the simple characterisation or a multitude of other things.  But this film is one of the purest hard science fiction experiences ever committed to celluloid.  The film's use of classical music keeps the tempo up during what might have turned into tedious sequences of space flight.  Kubrick's intention here is to demonstrate how far humanity has come, to make us marvel at that the things we have come to take for granted.  It's a film that has a stark aesthetic too, the sets are flawlessly designed and colours are used contrastingly to make everything feel disconnected and confusing.  It helps us feel even more uneasy about the presence of the monolith and what it represents.

To some, the last 10 minutes are too confounding to be anything other than a boring mess.  There is hopefully a majority out there who understand what Kubrick was trying to do, but think he took it too far into the world of the abstract.  For me though, this sequence stands out in science fiction cinema as a perfect way to end.  The monolith appears in the film at the start to usher in a new age of humanity, and then again at the end to do the same.  We as post-modern Homo Sapiens cannot comprehend the confusion of the pre-human apes who see the monolith for the first time and are inspired to use tools.  Perhaps our confusion as we follow Dave Bowman though his accelerated lifespan is as close as we can get to theirs.  Kubrick's use of cuts to show us Dave's ageing and his own disorientation at the passing of time is flawless.  The film ends on Dave Bowman being reborn as a child and returned to look over earth from a protective bubble.  Interpret this as you will.  Have the aliens delivered us a god?  Has humanity evolved again as it did when our ancestors picked up the first bone and wielded it as a club?  Is future conflict inevitable in the future as it was in the past?

To be honest, I probably would have paid my £10 just to experience this on the big screen with surround sound.  2001: A Space Odyssey is a landmark in the history of science fiction in film.  It's a film that changed cinema, and I am very glad to have finally seen it on the big screen.

They Live - A working class fantasy

Had an Xmas film experience last Friday, more of that later hopefully, but on Thursday we went full-on anti-Xmas by watching the cult action thriller They Live.  Starring ex-wrestling star Roddy Piper, and set in the contemporary urban dust bowl that is 1980s Los Angeles.  Piper plays a drifter called George, down on his luck and heading into the city to look for work.  He settles in to sleep for a few nights at a local commune but is shocked to discover that there's some sort of subversive underground movement going on fomenting discontent and agitating to make people 'see' the truth.

When the police move in to break up the commune, George is landed with a pair of shades.  When looked through, the glasses reveal that the world around him is an elaborate fantasy, and the real world is in fact being ruled by a small cabal of aliens disguising themselves as humans.  Bill-boards and newspaper headlines are in fact subliminal messages urging people to conform and consume.  Aliens disguised as humans are using the real humans as slave labour, and buying the silence of those they can't brainwash into submission.  George immediately decides to deal with this in the American way, with a shotgun and an attitude.

They Live is a cult film for a very good reason.  It's an brilliantly silly fantasy that portrays the world's elites as literal aliens using the rest of humanity for their own profit.  Imagine if your boss was actually an alien trying to take over the world?  Then it'd be ok to shoot him in the face - the ultimate working class fantasy!  The film's politics might be ludicrously overt and the acting bad; but the film is full one-liners, inane action and has a really gritty feel to it.  The design of everything when George is looking through the sunglasses at the 'real' world is great, with lots of greyscale and monotone words on billboards saying 'CONFORM', 'SLEEP' or 'OBEY' (see picture).  It's so silly it's brilliant.  I.e. classic cult.

At 80 minutes long, They Live is no classic, but definitely worth watching.

Excision - seriously messed up

It's a long time since I saw a film and I thought it was completely fucked up, but Sunday night reset the timer on that as I watched the independent American production Excision.  I think this appeared on my film-radar after a RedLetterMedia review of films-you-probably-didn't-see-yet highlighted it as weird enough to bother watching.  The story follows Pauline, a moderately disturbed teenager living somewhere in American suburbia with her frustrated-but-trying-not-to-be parents and younger sister - who suffers from cystic fibrosis.

Pauline is fairly weird, but on the surface no weirder than one might expect from the average teenager.  She has bad hair, bad skin, dresses awkwardly, hates the cool kids and worries about her changing body. Oh and she fetishises dead bodies.  Amongst the film's many scenes that seem to exist purely court controversy, Pauline dreams about having sex with a cadaver missing half its head.

It's almost as if the film-makers are trying to get as much in as possible that will wind up middle-America.  There's a scene in which Pauline seems to fantasise about having an abortion.  There are several comic scenes in which Pauline appears to pray to god with joking repentance as if she were chatting to an older sister.  She obsesses over a used tampon and losing her virginity when she's on her period.  Just your normal teenager then?

I suppose the subtext to all this is that being a teenage girl is weird - this isn't something I have actual experience of, but I'm assured it's a very trying time in the lives of all woman.  Pauline's mother expresses many of the things that the world expects her to do, crucially though she understands the difference between what society expects and what goes on behind closed doors - whereas Pauline does not.  She gets annoyed when Pauline kisses a random boy at a high-society dance, but at the same time seems to understand what's going on and approves when Pauline goes off to have sex with a random boy from her school.  It's the rules of society and etiquette that Pauline doesn't get and doesn't care about.  Basically she's a teenager.

Pauline also wants to be a surgeon.  She obsesses about blood and viscera and dead bodies.  If you can't work out where the film is going with all this then you need to try harder.  Given it's 80 minutes long I wouldn't go so far as to say that Excision was a total waste of my time.  I laughed out loud 2 or 3 times, and for fans of horror there's certainly something nasty about the stuff that Pauline gets up to.  Overall though, this isn't a film I would really recommend to anyone.  It's more of a cinematic curiosity than anything else, proving that the American film industry does have a dark side that sits outside the Holywood mainstream.  Excision - if you're going to watch it, don't eat anything while doing so.

The Imitation Game - Oscar for Cumberbatch?

Went last week to see The Imitation Game.  The combination of maths and Second World War history is a sure winner for me, so there was no way I was going to miss out on this one.  The film is a biopic of Alan Turing, one of Britain's all-time great mathematicians, a man who was instrumental in the Allied war effort and who remains largely unknown to the general public.  He was the leader of a team who worked on breaking the Nazi Enigma code.  His team developed what was effectively the worlds first modern computer, a machine that could quickly hunt for solutions to the code and allow the Allies to read otherwise unintelligible messages.

I'm going to heap a lot of praise on to this film in a minute, so let's start with one slight negative.  Though the film mostly avoids cliché when describing the enigmatic (see what I did there) Turing, a bit of it creeps in towards the start when Turing goes for his interview at Bletchley Park.  He puts on a reclusive genius act, answering his interview questions in a deliberately oblique way before throwing in a killer line just as he is about to get thrown out of the building.  He then spends the entire film as an autistic prodigy, unable to understand social situations or work with others.  Now I have no idea if the real Alan Turing was like this, but it's hardly innovative to portray a mathematical prodigy as a semi-autistic recluse.

Aside from that though, Benedict Cumberbatch plays Turing and absolutely nails his performance.  If there's any sense left in the Academy then he should be in consideration for an Oscar next year.  He is supported by a host of British talent including Matthew Goode, Keira Knightly, Mark Strong, Charles Dance and many others.  Cumberbatch's Turing is insular, brilliant and occasionally funny, but he is ultimately a man consumed by his own hopes and desires in a world that wants to persecute him for it.  All he wants to do is to solve puzzles, and the Enigma code is the greatest puzzle of them all.  We follow the action at Bletchley Park as Turing's team of code-breakers struggle against a bureaucracy that doesn't understand their work.  When they finally break the code their world turns upside turn forever as they're covered in an even greater veil of secrecy, forced to make code-blooded decisions about what intelligence to make use of, for fear that the Nazis will realise they've cracked Enigma.

I read one review recently that castigated the film for its lack of historical accuracy, and furthermore claimed that the film was actually slandering Alan Turing by accusing him of covering up for Soviet spies.  I think what this reviewer failed to understand was that this is a film that is meant to be a mainstream biopic of Turing, not a history lesson in cryptography.  I think it is reasonable to accept simplifications to the story of how Enigma was broken in order to do this.  Turing endured state-sanctioned prejudice and criminal prosecution because of his sexuality; given how far society has come since the 1950s, that's something a mainstream audience might struggle to connect with.  The film uses the spying subplot as a way to convey just how secretic gay men had to be about their personal lives back in those days, showing that a Soviet spy could blackmail a good man into silence just by knowing he is gay.  Once you accept this, then what you're left with is brilliantly-paced film that tells an amazing story about a man who's achievements should make him a national hero.

Ultimately the film is a rallying cry to the people of Great Britain.  It's a call for us to remember this man, a man who's name was airbrushed out of official history for too long, a man who came up with the theories that underpin modern computing, a man who's insular and eccentric ideas were a decisive factor in the second world war, a man who was used and then chemically castrated by an establishment for whom he won a war.  Alan Turing's name and achievements should be as widely known to the people of this country as Winston Churchill's, and if this film goes any way towards making that happen then it will have achieved its goal.  Tears were welling up in my eyes as the final scenes played out and Cumberbatch brought to life the horrors that the British state wrought upon a man who changed the course of history and got no thanks for it.   I thought it was absolutely brilliant.

The Shining - Delbert Grady

A quick post to get the morning moving faster, a scene from near the end of The Shining when Jack Torrance's mind is starting to fall apart / the ghosts of the Overlook Hotel start to get under his skin.  Here the previous butler / caretaker Delbert Grady starts off trying to clean Jack's shirt, but when the conversation turns he quickly starts screwing with his head, trying to get him to murder his son.



This is screen acting and directing at its finest.  Look at the subtle differences in body language between actors Jack Nicholson and Philip Stone at the start and the end of the scene.  Kubrick uses extremely simple techniques to frame the scene, but it maintains our focus on the characters and emphasises the power that Grady is exerting over Jack Torrance.

The Shining proves you don't have to be all about shocks and jumps and blood-curdling violence to be terrifying.  You just need to be Delbert Grady.

Interstellar - Great ideas, fumbled execution

170 minutes of brand-new release can mean only one thing at the moment - Interstellar.  Went for an opening week screening this week, 7:30 start at Showcase meant we were in the cinema until nearly 11pm - but was it worth it?  Interstellar is the latest 'intelligent blockbuster' from the fanboys' favourite Christopher Nolan, in which Matthew McConaughey plays a pilot-turned-farmer named Cooper, who is part of a mission to travel through a worm hole and seek out new worlds for humanity to move to.  The reason?  Earth is slowly dying, and humanity will die under a suffocating dust unless we work out a way to start again elsewhere.  Apocalyptic stuff.

The film starts with a 30 minute long section that introduces the pilot-turned-farmer Cooper, the future world and his relationships with his family.  It's an opening act that takes a long time and is clunkily-paced, but accurately sets the tone for the rest of the film.  We basically find out that Cooper loves his daughter but doesn't really give two shits about his son.  Then within the space of 10 minutes we go from farms and dust bowls to rockets, relativity and artificial gravity.  All of a sudden there's Michael Caine, he knows Cooper from 'the past' and immediately he's hired as a the pilot of their new rocket (which conveniently is located next to a boardroom with a movable wall so that they can have a dramatic reveal).  As an opening act, it's too long but manages to reveal too little, not a great start.

Note that there are many spoilers ahead...

We then get into the meat of the story, which is Cooper and the 3 other astronauts traversing a worm hole to another galaxy where humanity might find a suitable planet for colonisation.  Cooper and the others have to wrestle with the concept that their mission is one that might save the entire human race, but also one of great sacrifice in which the technicalities of relativistic space travel mean they may never see their loved ones again.  Does their mission outweigh their individual desire to experience love for another human?  Is love something that can transcend the boundaries of space and time?  Why are the mysterious higher-dimensional beings bothering to help humanity escape the boundaries of Earth?

No matter how exciting and bold the ideas behind the film are (and I think they are), the director doesn't seem to be able to keep the story on track.  Whenever the story starts to get going the director seems intent on slowing it down.  Anne Hathaway stands up and gives a speech about love that just about falls on the right side of being cheesy.  Matt Damon turns up as a scientist on a planet for a pointless 30 minutes to prove that humans are at fault for their own downfall.  We have multiple cuts to a docking mechanism between two spaceships - they're not docking properly and something bad might happen - WE GOT IT THE FIRST TIME!  Then when the film moves into its existential finale, the director keeps bringing it back to the mundane when he should be allowing the audience to share in Cooper's bewilderment at his journey through higher-dimensional space.  Cooper has to 'give them the message' in morse code in a wrist watch?  This is pretty cheesy in anyone's definition.  Can't we stick on the emotion of the moment?  Of Cooper's reaction to seeing his daughter again?  Of Cooper's realisation that though he would give anything to go back and be with his daughter, it was his choice to leave that saved her?  Please?

Having said all this though, I need to stress that I don't think it's a bad film.  It's just a film wants to have its cake and eat it.  It wants Cooper to go on an existential journey of discovery through multiple dimensions and realise humanity's place in the stars, but also it wants him to retain his humanity, shed a tear with his elderly daughter and get the girl at the end.  In 2001: A Space Odyssey, in order to transcend humanity's mundane existence, Bowman has to give up his humanity and be reborn as the star child - that's his sacrifice.  In Interstellar Cooper sacrifices seeing his daughter grow up, but in the end gets it all back because, well, for some reason he ends up back in the solar system just in time to have a weepy final scene with his daughter.

Comparisons with 2001: A Space Odyssey are easy to make and justified.  Interstellar is a visually stunning film and it should be commended for aiming extremely high.  In particular the sequences where they traverse the worm hole and then the black hole look amazing.  All the shots on the various planets they visit are beautifully rendered, the Tars robot works as an effective comic relief and the scientific rigour - though pretty far from actual science - is pretty darn good.  In particular I enjoyed the Einstein Field Equations for and the conformal spacetime diagram on Michael Caine's blackboard.

I guess my problem really comes from how if a film tries to set the bar higher, then I'm going to judge it with a different hat on.  I enjoyed Unstoppable, because that was a film about a train that can't slow down - so I judged it as such.  I didn't really enjoy Interstellar, because it's a film that asks questions about the nature of love, individual versus the collective and questions if we are alone in the universe - so I'm going to such it as such.  It's a film that wants to ask the same philosophical questions as 2001: A Space Odyssey, but at the same time wants to be about family, love and relationships.  That's a huge ask for any story-teller to pull off; and I just don't think the director gets it right.

Having said all that, you have to go and see this on the big screen.  3 hours be dammed, it looks bloody amazing.

Fury - a single-scene movie?

This is a film that was being very heavily advertised before it came out, and so with a couple of days off work and given my insatiable interest in all things WW2, I had to go and see it the week before last.  First time going to the Ilford Cineworld for quite a few years.  Don't really use Cineworld ever as there are several other chains much closer to Reading.  There's not really much to say about it though, it's pretty much the same as all the other multiplex cinemas out there, except you still buy your tickets from an actual ticket desk rather than the bit where you get your popcorn.  Nice.

So - Fury eh?  The basic premise is that Brad Pitt is an ace tank commander at the back end of the Second World War.  Him and his unit are operating in the chaos that is Western Germany in April 1945, as the Nazi regime is falling apart and only fanatical groups of isolated SS troops are operating causing chaos as the Americans advance.  They crew a Sherman tank, a vehicle that was mass-produced in the US and though somewhat inferior to the modern German Tiger tanks, won many battles through sheer weight of numbers.  It is a battle like this that forms one of the centre-pieces of film, when Brad Pitt's tank (named Fury) and 3 other battle a Tiger.  Only by presenting the Tiger with more targets than it can shoot before they get into point blank range, do they have any chance of victory.

It is this scene that forms the central part of the movie.  With the rest of the film lacking much in the way of a plot or character development or anything really, it feels like the whole point is to bring the modern age of Saving Private Ryan-style visuals inside the cabin of a tank. Such gritty realism has become standard for any film depicting infantry combat since around 2000, and it's about time someone shifted that brutality into the world of tank combat.  All fair enough, but it's not really enough to get 90 minutes of film out of.  One scene in particular that feels like out-of-place filler involves Brad Pitt and his green co-driver hanging out in a flat in a recent-conquered German town.  They sort of play house with the women in there for a bit, pretending to be normal in a scene that goes on for what feels like 20 minutes and doesn't really do anything apart from slow the pace of the film down.

I guess this scene is meant to contrast the horrors of war against the ordinariness of everyday life, or perhaps it's some other well-worn war film trope like the grizzled gritty soldiers freshly-off the front being bamboozled by the appearance of cleanly-dressed women.  There are a lot of war clichés on display in Fury.  Shia Lebouf plays a preacher always quoting the bible and describing himself as "god's instrument of death".  Michael Pena is the Mexican one one in the tank, cue jokey tension about where his loyalties really lie.  The film also feels the need to end on a last-stand scene which - though containing amazing visuals - is totally mental and makes the German army look like a bunch of morons lining up to be dispatched by American bullets.

So I'm going to recommend Fury, but with a big caveat - which is that it's almost entirely about the visuals and the visceral realism of tank combat in WW2.  It's a film that wouldn't have been out of place as a documentary on the History channel.  Don't go into it expecting a film that re-writes the rules of the war film genre, or even has much in the way of characters; just go into it hoping to learn something about what it was like to be in a tank in WW2.

Babadook - Ba Ba Dooooooooooook

Another week and another horror film.  This time The Babadook; which is less horror and more thriller, as is perhaps indicated in its 15 rating.  The Babadook is an Australian production that has received a lot of plaudits in various parts of the press, to the extent that several of my chums who wouldn't normally be into horror films convinced me to come and see it last weekend.  Showcase in Reading seemed to be giving it a strong showing, with screenings from midday and then every couple of hours through to the evening.  Perhaps not a great decision on their part since when we saw it at 2pm the cinema was completely empty, but good to see them giving a small production prominence for one.

The Babadook tells the story of Amelia and her son Samuel.  She is a single mother since her husband was killed driving her to the hospital to give birth to their son.  Hence she struggles each year to deal with Samuel's birthday, since it is also the anniversary of the day that his father died.  Samuel is a difficult child.  Caught in between Amelia's ongoing depression and his delusions of monsters living in his cupboards, he finds it impossible to make friends with other children and becomes increasingly maddening in his behaviour.  When a mysterious book appears on his shelf depicting pop-up caricatures of a thing called the Babadook tormenting a child in his bed, Samuel becomes convinced that the Babadook is real.  Amelia gets more and more exasperated with Samuel's behaviour, and as stranger things start going on in the house she gets visions of doing away with her son completely.

There are a lot of similarities to The Shining here.  Mainly because though the film is clearly tinged with the supernatural, you're never quite sure how much of it is really happening and how much is going on inside the minds of the characters.  There is a strong implication that the Babadook is either a metaphor for Amelia's fears for herself, Samuel and their future together; or that it is a supernatural force manifesting as a result of her ongoing pain at the death of her husband that precipitated Samuel's entrance into the world.  This is especially true in some of the rhyming couplets used in the mysterious book, and the way the film eventually ends.

The Babadook is a film that looks and feels intensely eerie.  It's all very pale, with bright exteriors and dim interiors that make everything grey and ethereal.  The horror comes from the constant tension throughout the film, the creeping understanding that either Samuel or Amelia could snap at any moment and do something terrible, the fact that the Babadook - whatever it is - may not be the real villain.  At 90 minutes long and telling a clever self-contained story, it is better than I could ever have expected going into it almost completely cold as I did.  I was pleasantly surprised, and I think you might be too.

The Zero Theorem - too much maybe?

Did you ever watch a film and think - "that's too much isn't it"?  Well I did, and it was Terry Gilliam's The Zero Theorem, a film that I watched last weekend with a group of friends who seemed only partly up for something as weird and absurdist as this.  Terry Gilliam is well-known for his abstract and existential take on life and the world, but with The Zero Theorem he has taken it to another level.  Here, Christoph Waltz plays Qohen, a high-level computer programmer working in a semi-totalitarian garish near future England.  He works for The Company, an organisation headed by the mysterious Management (Matt Damon) who's interests involve amongst others, proving the Zero Theorem.

Qohen's work takes the form of what we in the current age might recognise as computer games, one looks very similar to Minecraft and involves the solution to the Zero Theorem itself.  The theorem is that there is no meaning to anything, and that everything is pointless.  Qohen himself seems utterly detached from everything around him, and so is perfectly-suited to a job that might end up proving the pointlessness of it all.  He starts out working in a bling-encrusted garish communal area, but is soon moved into the complete seclusion of an abandoned church, where he gets visits from the Management's whiz-kid son, an online erotic entertainer, and a AI psychologist - all of them trying to help him solve the Zero Theorem.

In short, this is a film that's completely mental.  It's mental in its styling, mental in its dialogue and pacing, mental in its sets, colours and outfits, mental in its depiction of the future and utterly mental in is plot and meaning.  A discussion after the film led us to the idea that the story is meant to be about choices, fate, and working out what you want to do with your life.  Qohen is a man who wants for nothing, and the fact that he lives in a church might lead you towards a Jesus metaphor.  Maybe?  In the end the message seems to be that there may or may not be any 'point' to everything, but we might as well all just find our own path and enjoy it while we're here.  Other interpretations are probably better - but that's the best I've got.

The problem is that it's all just too much.  Qohen is a character who never gets introduced properly.  The world he lives in is too crazy to make any sense.  It's hard to work out what's going on or what the plot's meant to be about when you're spending enough time trying to work out what the green vials that Qohen keeps handing through a hole-in-the-wall are actually for.  It's a film that feels like an incredible self-indulgence on the part of the director.  It's like he dreamed a load of mental stuff up that made him chuckle without anyone really coming along and warning him that it might make little sense to the average film-goer.

If you watch The Zero Theorem, be prepared to be dazed and confused.  Also tell me if you think Matt Damon looks like Philip Seymour Hoffman in it.

The Grand Budapest Hotel - Anarchic, Funny, Anderson

Last Sunday evening was film night in the house, and the DVD was Wes Anderson's recent eccentric comedy The Grand Budapest Hotel.  The film is a story within a story, in which an old man who owns the eponymous hotel - now fallen on hard times - recalls its glory days in which he was a lobby boy learning the ropes under the tutelage of the legendary concierge Gustave H (Ralph Feinnes).  Gustave H is an absolute eccentric, meticulous in everything he does and proud of the internationally-regarded status of the hotel under his leadership.  When lobby boy Zero arrives in the hotel it is the beginning of an extraordinary story involving a will, a precious painting and a family's efforts to keep Gustave H away from their inheritance.

The hotel exists in the made-up eastern European nation of Zubrowka, the story is set at some point between the two wars at a time of changing national borders and uncertainty about the future.  The film is 100% Wes Anderson, in that everything is styled to within an inch of its life.  The colours are all bright and garish, the frame of every shot is interestingly constructed without an inch of space left free.  When the action switches between time periods, the aspect ratio of the footage also changes.  Weird stop-animation is used to capture a ski-chase scene.  The cable car up to the hotel is rendered in similar animation.  I'm not sure if there's any intention behind these effects other than to make the film look visually interesting.  If anything they enhance the feeling that the film is set in a surreal past that no longer exists.

The cast list for this film is quite unbelievable.  I guess it says something about the regard with which actors on the A-list regard Anderson.  Ralph Feinnes leads, but there are minor roles played by - amongst others - Harvey Keitel, Adrien Brody, Tilda Swinton, Jeff Goldblum, Ed Norton, Bill Murray, Jude Law and Saoirse Ronan.  Quite the A-list I'm sure you'll agree.  I can only assume that the script looked as good on paper as the result does on screen.  The Grand Budapest Hotel is a film that's sometimes outlandishly funny, but constantly funny is a sideways sort of way, with weird moments and strange asides providing moments of surreal humour.

Ralph Feinnes is superb as the film's main character, bringing the right amount of comic timing to Gustave H's role while maintaining his prim outlook on life.  Interestingly, the actors are all allowed to retain their natural accents in the film.  Fiennes' Gustave H is (I assume) meant to be French, but he maintains his stiff English accent throughout.  In amongst the sea of American accents, perhaps the one that seems most out of place is Ronan's Irish, she's got such a gift for accents in her other film roles that some might be surprised to discover she's even from Ireland!

Assuming that Wes Anderson's insistence on style and weirdness doesn't get on your nerves (for some it might), then The Grand Budapest Hotel is a funny and enjoyable caper that's worth watching.  I am recommending it.

Gone Girl - A completly mental thriller

David Fincher's latest film hit cinemas last week, and for the first time in a bit of time, I was in the first wave of people to go out there and catch it as I headed on into Bracknell last Friday evening.  One of my friends asked if we need to book tickets.  No, you never ever have to book tickets to see a film at Bracknell Odeon.  People in Bracknell don't really do cinema.

Gone Girl eh?  I was told to find out nothing about this film before seeing it in order to get the most out of it.  My views on spoilers and such like are a matter of public record amongst my friends, but this time I decided to heed the advice and learn nothing more about the film than what the trailers had told me.  I.e. Rosamond Pike (Amy) and Ben Afleck (Nick) are a couple, she goes missing, he is suspected by some of having something to do with it.  An excellent place to start any thriller, I'm sure you'll agree.

Since I want to try to avoid spoilers here, that's as much as I'm going to say about the plot.  The story of Amy and Nick meeting, their marriage and the happenstance that brings them to rural Missouri is told in flashback both from Nick's point of view and from Amy's diary.  The tone of the film twists and turns as details are revealed (or are they?) that challenge what you might be thinking is going on.  Nick is a guy who's loveable and caring though goofy, Amy is a woman ill at ease with her minor celebrity status and determined not to be the archetypal nagging girlfriend.  Or is that merely the impression their flashbacks would have us believe?  As the story progresses, we get a view inside a marriage that's initially stereotypical, but soon becomes more murky as the flashbacks dig deeper.

I think that Gone Girl is a criticism and commentary on the institution of marriage in the modern age.  What is marriage if not a compromise?  But how much of a compromise is too much?  It's about the personas that people in the public eye end up adopting in front of a critical media, a media that waits for any misstep as an excuse to paint a person as the devil.  Did that man smile too much at a press conference about his disappeared wife?  Well he must have killed her then.  The world of instant comment and twitter leaves no space for nuance, everyone is either a paragon to be worshipped or a sinner to be condemned.  Yet when you look deeply into anyone's life - or the private life of a married couple - the reality could hardly be further from the truth.  People are constantly wearing fake smiles to pander to a gentrified world, and the world doesn't like it when the mask slips.

The film focusses heavily on gender roles and the way that the world is reacting to changing gender stereotypes.  A man who behaves differently to how society expects is castigated by a gossip-hungry media.  A woman who cries rape is believed immediately despite circumstantial evidence that might indicate she's lying.  There will be some who might accuse this portrayal of gender roles of misogyny, since on the surface it appears retrograde to the cause of women's rights in society.  I think that's a simplistic viewpoint though.  The book and screenplay for Gone Girl were written by the same woman, and the film has a lot of female characters, some of whom embody stereotypes and others that very much don't.  Rather the film is a thriller that exists in the modern age, plays on the fears and possibilities of a changing world and says 'what if...'.

Aside from all this, Gone Girl is a film that looks amazing, with a lot of care put into individual shots and sets.  Everything is particularly well-lit; not something I would normally bother to comment on, but the opening scenes really look like a morning.  Great performances from everyone involved, especially Rosamond Pike who has been deserving of a central role in a film for some time now.  The film has an 18 rating for one moment of horribly bloody sexualised violence, aside from that there's little else to warrant it.  I fully recommend Gone Girl to anyway who wants to see a clever, witty thriller that challenges the way the modern world has conditioned you to think.  In time I may come to judge it differently, but at the moment I would say this is Fincher's best film since Fight Club.

Robocop - The new one

A large amount of excitement was generated in my house Thursday night when the Lovefilm DVD of the Robocop remake came through the door.  I think my housemates have got so used to me renting oddball films from history that they'll latch on to anything they vaguely recognise the title of.  So it came to pass that we immediately fired up the PS3 and watched Robocop - the new one.

Aside from some very cosmetic similarities, this is quite a different film from the 1980 original.  Gone is almost all of the satire, gone is the denunciation of corporate greed and corruption, gone is the 18-rated gore; in its place there's sentimentality, some nods towards the war on terror and the main theme, which is a battle between science and business.  Gary Oldman plays the scientist upon who's work Detective Murphy's conversion into Robocop is based.  At his heart he is a good guy trying to do good in the world, but he gets caught up in the world of trying to make a profit.  In the process loses some of his humanity and sells out his work to the money men.  When the new Robocop starts acting more like man than machine though, Omnicorp start panicking and try to eliminate their creation.

The film isn't entirely devoid of satire.  Samuel L Jackson plays a sort of shock-jock television host in the mould of the Fox network, conflating his opinion with news and demanding that the US people allow robots on to the streets in place of traditional human cops.  That's all the satire we get though, in what feels like a nod towards the mock news reports of a dystopian future from the original Robocop,  It feels somewhat out of place though as the rest of the film is chocked full of  sentimentality and takes itself much more seriously than its source material.  Definitely good casting though, there's no one else I would want to cast if I needed someone just to shout into a camera.

My biggest criticism is probably that it takes far too long for the story to go anywhere interesting.  It takes nearly 55 minutes for Robocop to actually appear on American soil, and even longer before he goes and solves any crimes or confronts any bad guys.  A film like this shouldn't be messing around with showing us Robocop's training simulations, get him out of the streets shooting up bad guys.  Is this an action film or isn't it?

I guess that's the crux really.  It's a film that feels like script-writing-by-committee.  It feels like someone wrote a script that was trying to be true to the satire of the original (note the Samuel L Jackson parts), but then a Holywood committee insisted on focusing on Murphy's wife and kid, then insisted on a chase sequence and removing any blood and gore so it can be a 12A.  Not that the film lacks good action scenes, a gun battle rendered in thermal imagery looks very cool even if it borders on being a little too busy.  But there just isn't enough of it.  Where Robocop the original had showed us a crumbling city falling apart and our protagonist brutally dealing with the punks on the streets and corporate stooges alike, Robocop the new one shows us a prosperous city and Robocop using tasers to coerce the punks into telling him where to find the guy who tried to kill Murphy.  The film's trying to be part satire, part science fiction, part action, and at the same time trying to have a sentimental heart.  It just doesn't mesh together.

I guess I'm only disappointed because the film is called Robocop, and therefore associates itself with another film that's nothing like it.  Anyone who remembers the ludicrous brutality of the ED-209 boardroom scene from the original Robocop will find nothing of that sort here.  In 1987 Robocop wins the day by shoving a spike through the neck of his nemesis, his bloody chest emptying on to the ground.  In 2014 Robocop wins the day by tasering a bunch of people and firing a bloodless bullet.

Don't expect much from this film.

Dead Poets Society - catching up on another 80s classic

This is becoming a big theme for me at the moment, catching up on all those classic 1980s films that I never saw for some reason the first tie around.  With the death of Robin Williams recently a lot of people turned their minds to thinking about their favourite performances of his over the years.  It was only so long until someone mentioned Dead Poets Society, and then the fact that I had never seen it came up.  Cue uproar.

For one friend of mine this film definitely has a lot of importance, and so when we watched it the other week I was not allowed to make any comments afterwards - I think for fear I might not like it and offend.  For some reason people think that I hate every film I watch, I'm going to need to be more positive about the films I like from now on, build up a better rep.  So what better place to start than right here and right now?

Dead Poets' Society is a fucking brilliant film with an amazing performance from the late Robin Williams.  The story revolves around an American prep school, and the new English teacher creates uproar when he strays from the standard syllabus and teaches the students about his love of language.  He treats them as young men and appeals to their creative side, allowing them to flourish and find their own passion for a subject they each previously hated.  We focus on two pupils in particular, one starting at the school for the first time and a second who's father completely dominates every aspect of his life.  Each are clearly gifted in their own ways, but will they find the confidence to express those gifts before they are crushed into conforming?

The film's main character is English teacher John Keating (played by Williams), who is the inspiration we all wish we had when we were young, and we all hope we can be when we're old.  A teacher who connects with his pupils on a level they've never experienced before, who opens their eyes up to the wonder of words and language, the power that they all have to shape their own futures and to be the people they want to be simply by reaching out and grasping the opportunities the world is giving them.  It's all about conservatism versus freedom of expression, about conforming versus being yourself.  The forces of elitism at the school are as fearful of the students as they are of Keating and what he represents.  They want to impress conformity upon them as quickly as possible, to do any other than conform is to challenge the established order - unthinkable in the elitist world of a New England prep school.  So when Keating comes to the school preaching freedom of expression and thought, it is like he is preaching revolution.

The film works on basically every level it needs to.  The pupils are each nuanced characters, and though Keating is perhaps a little too perfect as the inspirational professor, that's meant to be the point - he is supposed to be the paragon we all wish we had to inspire us as youngsters. When something bad happens to one of the students it is heart-breaking.  When the film's final scene rolls around wearing its heart on its sleeve with its call to arms against elitism, you can't help being carried along on a wave of optimism for the youth of today.

This is a film that also works as a counter-point to the received wisdom of the 1980s, i.e Reaganist economics, laissez-faire and Loads-a-Money!  It's a film that says money isn't everything.  Money is nothing compared to finding beauty in words, beauty in art and most importantly beauty in yourself.  It's a film that's an inspiration.

Dallas Buyers Club - another great McConaughey performance

I don't want to use the tern 'Oscar-bait' to describe Dallas Buyers Club, since it's a term loaded with a negative connotation, but this is precisely the kind of film that it's no surprise to discover easily courted the Academy when it came to awards season this year.  With its HIV positive lead character struggling through illness, then living the American dream and then learning something about not being such a homophobe while exposing the evils of big pharma - it ticks a lot of boxes.  But fear not - Dallas Buyers Club is still a very good film.

The plot gets going pretty quickly and uses clever storytelling to paint a picture of the life of our lead character Ron Woodroof (Matthew McConaughey).  He is a boozing, whoring redneck from Texas who works casually on that state's many oil fields.  One day a minor accident lands him in hospital, and a routine blood test reveals he has AIDS.  His doctor (Jennifer Garner) gives him 30 days to live.  This is the 1980s, and so the reaction of all his 'friends' is to disown him and treat him as an outcast - a gay outcast no less.  He reacts with rage, doing everything he can to get his hands on the drugs he thinks he needs to survive and lashing out at any hint he might be labelled a homosexual.  A brush with death lands him in a Mexican clinic though, where he learns about a series of drugs that control symptoms of AIDS but are illegal in the US.  He resolves to set up his own club to import the drugs into the US.  It's a club that people can pay a membership fee to be in, and then they get all the drugs they need.  This technically bypasses US law since he isn't actually selling the drugs on.  It's the Dallas Buyers Club.

It's an excellent film that just about rides the line between being overly mawkish and actually having a heart.  McConaughey is outstanding as seems to be standard for him these days - his recent performance in the TV drama series True Detective underlining that.  Here he plays a character who is superficially simple, but has many layers that only emerge when he finds his true calling - to help the HIV positive community of Texas get the drugs that Big Pharma doesn't want them to have.  Jared Leto won an Oscar for his portrayal of the HIV positive transvestite Rayon, who becomes Ron's friend and helps him to realise that gay men aren't as one-dimensional as he thinks.  Again this sounds pretty simplistic and sentimental, but the film just about has enough heart and realism to make it work.

Overall, another very impressive performance by Matthew McConaughey.  It's steeped in the traditions of the liberal Holywood elite, and so is probably a film that Bill O'Reilly would hate.  For these reasons alone, Dallas Buyers' Club is definitely worthy of your time.

Crimson Tide - Mutiny

Not posted anything for a few weeks, I've been away on holiday but the blog is still alive.  Here is the central scene from Crimson Tide in which Denzel Washington's XO conflicts with his captain (Gene Hackman) over the meaning of a message they've been sent to launch nuclear missiles:



There's a lot of testosterone in that scene, and a lot more in the film as a whole when a struggle plays out on the nuclear submarine between various factions each intent on doing what they see as right.  Crimson Tide is one of those films that will probably be forgotten about as the years of cinema roll by, but it's really very good, with a simple premise, interesting characters and a good cast (throw James Gandolfini and Viggo Mortensen in for good measure - each before they were famous for the roles we best know them).  The film is a political and psychological drama that asks questions about the nature of war in the modern age and questions the legitimacy of nuclear weapons in the post cold-war era.

Remember - Denzel Washington doesn't do bad films.

Lucy - Pseudo-Philosophical Bullshit

Why did I decide it was a good idea to go and see Lucy on Saturday evening?  I'm not sure I can come up with a reason that makes sense, other than the fact that one of my friends had already seen the film I wanted to see and that I guess the advertising campaign had done enough to make me go 'hmmm'.  The film is based on the pseudo-scientific premise that humans only use 10% of their brain capacity, and we are asked to imagine what would be possible if we used more.  Apparently we would turn into Neo from The Matrix (but with a much less interesting outcome).  Btw, this contains spoilers as it's so shit I don't care.

The 'plot' is that Scarlett Johansson is the down-and-out Lucy in Taiwan who is convinced by her shitty boyfriend into delivering a shady package to some Korean gangsters.  Everything goes wrong and she ends up being used as an unwilling drug mule, the drugs sewn into her abdomen.  When the drugs leak, they start to make her able to use more than 10% of her brain.  She immediately turns into a detached super-heroine, able to escape from her captors with ease and hunt down the people who did this to her.  As the portion of her brain she's able to use increases, she becomes less human and more powerful - capable of manipulating others and the world around her.

Morgan Freeman plays the sort of oracle character in Lucy that he has become type-cast as in recent years.  At the start he literally delivers a deeply unscientific lecture on his theories about humanity using > 10% of their brains, he the continues as the film's narrator, explaining plot points as they come along.  The Morgan Freeman parts feel like filler, which is true of a surprising amount of a film that's only 90 minutes long.  There's an awful cgi-heavy car chase through Paris and a gun fight that exist I think only to convince people who aren't into pop-philosophy that this is an action film.  Then there are the constant cuts to nature footage (do we really need to cut to a montage of nature documentary stuff to understand what Morgan Freeman means when he talks about animal reproduction?) and the insanely dragged-out opening scene, all filler.  This film could have been an episode of The Outer Limits if they cut all that out.

The opening scene is particularly terrible.  It spends several minutes in a close-up back-and-forth conversation between Lucy and her boyfriend, doing no character development and failing to set the scene in any way while he whines at her to deliver the package.  Then when she does she's obviously scared of the gangsters she's delivering it to, do we really need to cut to footage of a scared deer running from cheetahs to demonstrate her fear?  I think we got it already!  Though I will admit a possible visual foreshadowing of the rest of the movie here that was quite nice; when we cut to the deer being stalked by cheetahs, we naturally assume that Lucy is the deer in the metaphor.  However, Lucy is wearing a leopard-skin top at the time - perhaps foreshadowing that she's really the hunter here?

Regardless of that.  This is a film that's obsessed with a pop pseudo-philosophy that thinks if only humans could just use more of their brains we would all be superheroes / better off / have more knowledge / all get along man / whatever.  When Lucy finally achieves 100% brain usage she seems to go off travelling through time and space, all the time Morgan Freeman explaining what's going on as she transforms into some sort of black organic computer oracle.  She then produces a USB stick on which Morgan Freeman insists "all her knowledge" is stored.  What knowledge?  For who?  For what purpose?  Why am I still watching this?

Lucy is a film that's trying far too hard to 'mean' something.  It's an interesting premise that could either have been an action film where she has to find and fight the gangsters, or a science fiction film based on Flowers for Algernon.  We could have joined Lucy on a journey in which she slowly loses her humanity and how by striving to enhance herself to become 'better', but forgets what it was like to be the person she once was.  None of this happens though.  In the end Lucy is a loose collection of philosophical babble and half-conceived action scenes.  Please, for the love of all that is good in cinema, do not watch this film.

At least I had a free burrito before the film, so Saturday evening wasn't a total waste of time.

The Double - A dark Kafkaesque comedy

Richard Ayoade is an interesting guy.  Having appeared as the arch-nerd Moss in the now classic Channel 4 comedy series The IT Crowd for several years, he has entered into the realm of story-telling on the silver screen, writing and directing his own feature length productions.  Firstly in 2010 with the excellent Submarine, and now last year with The Double - which stars a number of actors from the Hollywood mainstream as well as those he has worked with in his previous small-screen British work.  Is Ayoade moving into the mainstream?  On the surface the answer is maybe.  Though when you watch The Double you realise his ideas are still firmly rooted in the absurd.

The Double is a sort of Kafka-esque black comedy set in a place of dark bureaucratic nightmares not unlike the world of Terry Gilliam's Brazil.  Jesse Eisenberg plays Simon, a small time office worker toiling away in a small cubicle with little or no prospects in the world.  His job appears to be routine and pointless, the security guard he passes every day hardly even recognises him.  The only thing that keeps Simon going is his infatuation with Hannah (Mia Wasikowska), who lives across the street from him and works in the steam-punk inspired photo-copy room in his office block.  He dreams about telling her how he understands her pain and loneliness, but whenever they're together, is unable to even maintain eye contact.

It's into this dystopia that Simon's exact double James (also played by Eisenberg obviously) suddenly appears as the new guy in the office.  Now the weirdness gets really weird, as some people seem unable to spot the similarities between Simon and James, while some like Hannah seem unable to tell them apart.  The similarities between James and Simon are only skin deep though.  James is as brash and outgoing as Simon is nerdy and insular, and before long James seems destined for promotion to the top while Hannah has fallen head over heels for him.  All the while Simon looks on as his doppelgänger starts to live his life better than he was - wondering how it is that someone ostensibly the same as him can be having such a different existence.

It's part science fiction, part dyspotian black comedy and partly a character study into the insecurities of people who find it hard to connect to others and see the world of human interaction as an incomprehensible Kafkaesque maze.  The world of The Double is intricately created, with interesting set designs that give us a number of contraptions and ideas firmly rooted in the steam punk genre.  It's clear that Ayoade is interested in the insecurities of the nerd, and the way that the world of the film is presented to us is almost too unreal to be anything other than simply the way that the introverted Simon perceives it.  James for example is too cool and confident to be real, Hannah too dreamy to be real - both more likely depictions of how Simon perceives others and his inability to understand them.

The film ends in as weird a way as the preceding 90 minutes, with a number of interpretations possible.  There was some debate in my house as to what the final looks between the characters actually meant, and exactly what Simon has learnt or decided about the way he's living his life.  It's entertaining, thought-provoking and darkly comic in just the right way.  It's easily worth your time.

Can you handle the truth?

It's clichéd maybe, but the final courtroom scene of A Few Good Men remains an outstanding example of how to build drama up to a tense conclusion.  The film is part buddy drama between the young lawyers played by Tom Cruise and Demi Moore, and part political intrigue in which the balance between security and freedom in the post-cold war world is analysed.  Sounds boring, but it really isn't.  In this final scene, Cruise the lawyer baits Jack Nicholson's Colonel Jessup into admitting in front of the court that he ordered a marine under his command to be beaten by his fellows:



The screenplay was written by Aaron Sorkin, and the themes running through the film were reflected on an almost weekly basis in his outstanding political drama The West Wing some years later.  Oh, and Spoiler Alert.  But then this is a A Few Good Men - surely you've seen it?

Borderlands - 90 minutes of popcorn horror

Friday night a week ago I was home alone and so I did what any normal horror film fan does; I watched a horror film with the lights off.  The Borderlands is a small budget British 'found footage' film that follows a team of paranormal investigators for the Catholic church who investigate something that has happened in a rural part of Devon.  The team consists of Deacon - a paranormal expert who flies around the world investigating events that people claim are miracles - and Gray - his tech guy who insists on installing cameras everywhere they go to record everything.  Which of course provides plenty of footage ready to be found by us the viewer.

The idea is that the vicar of the local church has submitted a video to the Vatican showing a supposed miracle during a child's baptism.  There appears to be some sort of earthquake during which the camera feed cuts in and out.  Deacon's job is ostensibly to investigate, but there is a strong suggestion that he's actually there to debunk the idea of the miracle ever happening.  Their presence in the local village is not appreciated, especially after the vicar suspects that people aren't taking him seriously and adopts extreme measures to try to prove his point.  The plot proceeds in the way you might expect from this sort of horror film.  Weird things happen, the locals set fire to some things, there are some strange noises, the cameras sometimes don't work the suggestion of something paranormal going on gets bigger and bigger.  It is a horror film after all.

There is definitely one moment of cleverness involving a headstone that pleased me greatly when I spotted it.  And aside from that the film does a nice job of setting up tensions and making you jump.  Ultimately the final scenes are spooky and then properly grim; and though I guess that's all you can really ask for in a film like this the ending doesn't seem consistent with much of what builds up to it.  It's very derivative though, and not really that different to a lot of the other films out there, so I'm not going to recommend anyone goes out of their way to watch it.  Overall, I'm fairly luke warm to Borderlands, but it certainly has it's place on a lonely night home alone in the dark.

Paths of Glory - a very unsubtle message

The march towards completing the IMDB top-100 began last Sunday evening by watching Paths of Glory.  This courtroom drama set in the middle of the First World War is particularly relevant at the moment given that the 100th anniversary of the start of that conflict has recently been upon us.  Here, Kirk Douglas plays a Colonel in the French army, tasked with planning and leading an attack on a fortified hill.  The hill is near-impregnable though, yet with thoughts of personal glory and promotions in his mind, Douglas' commanding general orders the command against his own instincts.  When the attack fails terribly, the French army demands that men from Douglas' regiment be punished for cowardice, and men are selected randomly for courts martial and execution.

With this movie, Stanley Kubrick is making a big statement about the class war that was implicit in everything that happened in the first world war.  It was a period in history where the elites and the upper classes of Europe ordered the working classes to their deaths in unprecedented numbers.  Admittedly war has always been about poor people killing each other for the benefit of rich people, but in the first world war it was done with hitherto unknown efficiency and on an unbelievable scale.  The generals of the day showed unbelievable callousness, which is depicted here in the way that the generals order men to their deaths for personal glory, then when it doesn't come they seek to kill even more men to 'restore morale'.  The generals cannot comprehend a world in which one would want to save an ordinary man for his humanity, and when Douglas' character tries to do this, they assume he must be acting out of desire for personal gain too.  It's a world where the rift between social classes is laid starkly out for all to see, and despite being armed to the teeth, the poor are unable to do anything about it.

A major problem I have with this film is that it lacks any subtlety.  Kirk Douglas's character is introduced with an offhand comment when his commanding officer says something to the effect of "let of not forget he is one of France's leading criminal lawyers".  He'll probably be involved in some sort of court case then?  Hardly subtle, and hardly the face of the ordinary man on the street.  Maybe it comes down to the thing that people always say about Kubrick, which is that he wasn't an actor's director - i.e. he's not a people person, he's more interested in sets, cameras and cinematography.  Paths of Glory is certainly outstanding in that respect, Kubrick does a fantastic job of letting the camera tell a story here, and allowing his cameramen to move around the amazing sets and demonstrate the enormous futility of this conflict.  The personal aspect of the story-telling seems a little bit like an afterthought.

The film's message is certainly an important one to remember just now as some parts of the media think that the centenary of the first world war is an excuse to wave flags and 'thank' the working class British men who were herded to a pointless horrific death.  The real lesson to learn from the first world war is that how little the ruling classes care for the rest of us, and this film sums it up - albeit in a somewhat heavy-handed way.  Overall, from a technical point of view, Paths of Glory is an outstanding film achievement.  From a story-telling point of view it's a bit unsubtle, though perhaps that was Kubrick's intention - to make it accessible enough for everyone to understand, regardless of education or background.

Either way, not Kubrick's best, but worth checking out for both its place in the context of film history and the message it's overtly pushing on to its audience.

Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure - a most funny film

I've got a few film projects going on at the moment.  In addition to my new IMDB top-100 project I'm doing a sort of cultural back-fill project, where I watch all the films I should probably have seen in my youth but didn't cos I was too busy doing Lego or Warhammer.  The very latest in this series was last night, and it was Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure.

Just like The Princess Bride and The Breakfast Club, there are people in my generation who stand aghast when you tell them that you haven't seen this film.  Though I suppose I do the same when someone tells me they've not seen Alien.  Such was a conversation in a pub last week that lead to a friend of mine buying a DVD of BATEA (can I use this acronym?) just so we could watch it.  The risk with these things is that the joy is in the nostalgia, and that by coming to it fresh, as an adult, 25 years after it was made, you lose all the context within which your peers elevated the film on to such a pedestal.  I was very aware that for the people I was watching it with last night, BATEA is something of a Pythonesque sacred text, complete with context-dependent quotes that will have those in the know creasing up with laughter.  I was very worried that I would offend people if I didn't like it!

Thankfully I was in luck.  At no point in BATEA could anyone think that they're watching anything other than a manic stoner comedy where nothing is meant to make sense, and the point is to laugh at the absurdity of it all.  The plot is brilliantly insane.  Two slackers in late 1980s Southern California are in fact somehow the inspiration for the entire future of mankind.  Therefore people from the future travel back in time from the year 2600ish to help them pass their history test, therefore preventing them from flunking out of school.  To do this, they go on a time travelling adventure, collecting famous people from history and bringing them to the present so that they can parade them in front of the school and get an A+.  What could be simpler?

Looking at it 25 years on, what follows is a cultural tour of an era and a way of life that alongside Wayne's World defined slackerism in the 1990s.  The most obvious part the way that Bill and Ted speak, with all those "Whoah dude"s and references to contemporary rock.  My personal favourite is how they seem to dumb down half of what they say, while a moment later they'll use weird flowery language to describe something simple - eg "we will flunk out most heinously" or "we will have a most triumphant time".  It's almost medieval.

As far as downsides go, the film feels very padded out towards the end.  There's only so many places they can time travel to and not reel out the same jokes, so when they run out of material they end up running around the present day trying to keep all the historical figures out of trouble at the mall.  The script unnecessarily ties itself in knots, but then gets itself out of them by implying that Bill and Ted will simply travel back in time after the film's finished and fix it all - which is either brilliant or a cop out depending on how harsh you're feeling.  Feels a bit like they were contractually obligated to get 90 minutes of running time out of the film, and so added a bunch of slapstick sequences to make it just long enough before calling on time travel to resolve everything.  Lazy yes; but funny enough that it can be forgiven.

And that's the point isn't it?  That it's funny?  No matter that the camera loses focus a couple of times, regardless of how ropey the drawn-on special effects look, however terrible Keanu Reeves' hair is or how dated some of the clothes appear or how out of place the weird slapstick sequence is in which Napoleon Bonaparte bloody loves water flumes (seriously) - ultimately Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure is definitely funny.  Plus it has George Carlin in it.  Win.

What's the most you ever lost on a coin toss?

It's Friday, work isn't really happening, therefore blog.  Here's a classic scene from No Country for Old Men:



Awesome way of establishing just how disjointed and psychotic Javier Bardem's character is.  In my opinion No Country for Old Men is definitely not the Coen Brothers' best film, but it's the one they won their best film and best director Oscars for so I guess it'll be what they're remembered for after they've given up making films.  Don't get me wrong, it's very good, but it's not up there with Fargo*.

Enjoy your Friday!

* - I am aware that they won an Oscar for Fargo too btw.

Her - Solaris for the post-modern age

Why doesn't Joaquin Phoenix have an Oscar yet?  What more does this man have to do to get his hands on one of those little golden statues?  Not even nominated for his role in Her, he gives a great performance in what is an outstanding film.  The premise is thus: in the near future a new generation of operating systems for computers promises the potential for real artificial intelligence.  When social introvert Theordore (Phoenix) gets his new operating system installed on his phone, he soon finds himself drawn towards her, and he begins to fall in love with Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johansson).

Now, the first thing to establish is the number of ways this could have been a terrible film, so that we can then marvel at what a brilliant piece of science fiction it is.  The film could have turned into a cheesy thriller, with the evil AI going all Misery.  The film could have become nasty, turning its ire on to Theodore and introverted nerd culture.  It could have become pious; finger-wagging its way through our post-modern present and our addiction to mobile phones.  It is none of these things.  Instead it's about humanity, relationships, love, companionship, friendship and how those very human traits will interact with an uncertain near future.  I.e. it's proper science fiction.

Theodore is a character who struggles to make connections in the real world.  He has an ex-wife (Rooney Mara) and works for a company that write heartfelt hand-written letters for their clients, so he clearly is capable of connecting with people on some level.  But for whatever reason he is intensely isolated.  The film suggests her is hardly the only one though, people on the street are constantly distracted on their phones, a woman Theodore goes on a date with seems unable to connect with him as a human, a woman who Samantha hires to be a sex surrogate for them seems obsessed with other peoples' relationships.  It's a world not too distant from our own, where the ease of connectivity through technology seems to have driven us further from our humanity, where society is driving us apart.

This is a world that is brought to life by the set and costume designers on Her, who have done a brilliant job of world-building.  What I mean by this is the small touches that bring this near-future alive and make it feel real.  The way people dress, the small technological changes that look ever-so-slightly-but-not-quite like what we're used to now, but most of all the mere ordinariness of it all.  This is simply the world of 10 or 20 years hence, a world we will all likely experience.  It's a world where some of us might really end up knowing, or being, Theodore.

Whereas the writers of the Soviet classic Solaris had to imagine an unknowable alien force that played on the emotions of the man sent to understand it, in the post modern age we have created our own very real alien intelligences that know all our secrets; and we keep them in our pockets.  Therefore the writers of Her are able to invoke something that we all already implicitly understand.  We experience much more through our computers than we ever have done in the past.  In return, Samantha the OS wants to know what it means to be human, and it's that desire to connect that drives both these characters.

Her is very close to being a perfect film.  The performances are poignant (big kudos to Scarlett Johansson by the way for choosing to take some interesting indie roles recently - it would be very easy for her to stay on the Hollywood bandwagon) and heartfelt.  The near-future world is perfectly constructed and presented.  The themes of human loneliness and friendship are subtly layered through everything that happens.  The eventual fate of Samantha is handled with just the right amount of mystery.  The film's final scene could easily have strayed into cheese, but is instead a wonderful visual statement about the dawn of a brave new world of human relationships.  And I've not even mentioned Amy Adams yet - she's in it too.

This is turning out to be a great year for science fiction.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes - it's summer time!

With summer in full swing and a heatwave sweeping across Britain, what better thing to do than get yourself into the air conditioning of a cinema to cool off and watch the summer blockbusters?  Now that the world cup is over, the summer season of movies has shifted into gear, and one of the first big ones on screens is Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.

Putting aside any reservations that I have about the existence of these spoiler-inducing prequel to the SciFi classic Planet of the Apes, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is a very good movie.  It's the follow-up to Rise of the Planet of the Apes and follows the continuing story of the super-intelligent Caesar, and ape who was created in a lab in the last film and now leads a group of apes living in the forests on the edge of San Francisco 10 years after the events of the first.  In those 10 years, the human race has been almost entirely wiped out by a simian flu virus and only small pockets remain.  When Caesar's band of apes encounter an advance party of humans from San Francisco scouting out a potential electricity source, tensions mount as there are those on each side who see the other as a deadly threat to their continued existence.

Where Rise... was a science fiction film about the balance that scientists have to strike between advancing their field and playing god, Dawn... is a film about politics.  On the side of the apes there is Caesar (Andy Serkis) and Koba (Toby Kebbel).  On the side of the humans there is Malcolm (Jason Clarke) and Dreyfus (Gary Oldman).  On each side one faction is pushing for all out war, while the other is calling for peace. The film-makers do a good job of not picking sides here.  'We' are on the side of neither the humans nor the apes, nor on the side of war or peace.  We simply stand at a crossroads in history, and watch as historical forces play out, each side as convinced as the other that it is in the right.  It's a film that asks questions about hard choices in realpolitik, about the courage it takes to make peace, and how the decision to do so can backfire on a leader who can be painted as weak and a traitor to his own people (examples throughout history are abundant - Anwar Sadat and Yitzhak Rabin come to mind though).

The special effects that are used to create the apes are outstanding.  There were a few moments when the green screened backgrounds seemed to float a little, but I think I was only noticing them because I was in such awe of the effects that were bringing the apes to life, that I was paying even more attention than normal.  Clearly a lot of care has gone into the motion capture process that made use of real actors to generate ape-like movements, the pay-off on screen is well worth it.  The film also allows its simian protagonists to communicate in their adopted sign language, with subtitles for the benefit of the human audience.  To use subtitles as standard in a Holywood film is both brave and serves as a narrative device to remind the audience of the genetic divide between them and the apes on screen.

In terms of negatives, the film does contain a lot of plot holes and conveniences that allow it to fit into the Holywood norm.  For example there's no reason why the humans couldn't already operate their radio without hydro-electric power, since they clearly have petrol and therefore have a way to generate electricity.  How many bullets do they really need to fire in order to test their guns?  Can a man really survive a detonation of C4 explosive in an enclosed area by simply jumping out of the way?  Just how many apes are there?  Like in the first film where they went from about 50 apes to several 1000 in a single cut, here the same thing seems to happen.  This is the biggest problem of all, since the film seems to want to have it both ways.  It seems to want the apes to appear to be a small band of loyal family members, but at the same time numerous enough to engage in a pitched battle against a heavily-armed fortified position.

I wonder how many more of these films there are going to be, and how many more of them are going to be given names that make them sound like the first of a series of prequels.  I guess in theory the studio could carry on making films as long as it has the desire to string out the narrative that the original classic starts with.  Given the kind of shit that we get used to being presented with from the big American studios, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is a refreshingly interesting film.  It has science fiction, politics, action and successfully pulls at the heart-strings too.  If all Holywood films could be like this, the world would be a better place.

The Thing - testing the blood

Time for a quick 'classic scene', this time it's from John Carpenter's classic horror The Thing.  Starring Kurt Russell, the film follows a group of Antarctic scientists who find something weird going on underneath the ice after they discover a previous Norwegian team who have appeared to kill themselves.  It soon becomes apparent that they are dealing with an alien creature that can replicate itself by taking the form of any living thing it comes into contact with.

In this scene, MacReady (Russell) tests out his hypothesis that he can work out which of them are aliens by putting a scolding hot wire into a sample of each of their blood.  The theory being that the blood sample is still part of the alien creature, and that it will feel pain as if the hot wire had been pushed into the person.  Enjoy...



It's an outstanding horror film that, partly because of its reliance on animatronic effects rather than digital CGI, still looks terrifying today.  The film's final scene is one of the best in the history of the horror genre, full of sadness and poignancy at the numbing realisation of what's to come.

You need to have seen this film.

City Lights - IMDB top 50, done

Finished off my long-running project to have watched all the IMDB's top 50 films the other night by watching Charlie Chaplain's classic silent romantic slapstick comedy - City Lights.

When watching films like this in the post-modern age, it is very easy to slip into a trap where you look at the production values, the lack of sound, the occasionally hammy acting and the back-lit special effects, and conclude that such films are historical artefacts.  They're something that can be appreciated only from the point of view of film history, rather than for what they were originally intended.  However it's a trap that one would do well not to fall into, as to do so would be to miss out on something genuinely enjoyable and touching.

City Lights follows the story of The Tramp - played by Chaplain - and his chance encounters with a blind flower girl and drunken upper class fop.  When he is kind to the girl and buys a flower from her, the passing of the rich man makes her think that The Tramp is in fact a man of great wealth.  When The Tramp saves the rich man from killing himself in a drunken rage, the two become great friends, but the rich man can only remember him when he's drunk.  When he's sober again he demands The Tramp out of his house immediately.  And so we have a story of a Tramp, the pariah of the modern city, ostracised by those who are able to judge him by his appearance, but loved by those that are either without sight or without inhibition and therefore free to judge him on the content of his character.  It's a stunningly simple premise, filmed in a stunningly simple way and rounded off with a simple scene of touching humanity that film buffs have occasionally labelled the best final scene of all time - in any film.

This is a Charlie Chaplain film, and as such there is plenty of slapstick physical comedy.  And most of it is pretty funny if slightly awkward-looking in places (again, desperately trying to avoid that trap).  Many people might find the lack of sound and slightly stagy production difficult to cope with, but it would take someone with an incredible hard heart to not take at least some enjoyment out of this film.  Personally I thought it was wonderful.

With the IMDB top 50 under my belt, the obvious progression is to move on to the top 100.  Clearly since the IMDB list is a living document that changes over time, I will need to keep on watching new films as they come out in order to maintain my record.  But that's not hard.  The top 100 has quite a few more titles that I've not even heard of before (and a few that raise my eyebrows - Snatch for example.  It's good, but top 100 all time?  Really?) so it might take a year or so to get through them.  Bring it on.