Splice

Very much not the film I was hoping for, Splice was a big letdown in several departments. For a film with trailers that made it look like a horror and a plot that made it sound like a remake of The Fly it ended up flitting between genres. I found it deeply unsatisfying and something of a wasted opportunity.

The story is about two scientists working outside the mainstream to create a hybrid human-animal life form. Something like The Fly or Primer for example - films that draw a viewer in by setting up a claustrophobic atmosphere while hinting a mysteries and ambiguities in story and character. Such a shame then that 'Splice' gets nowhere near doing any of these things - instead opting for lazy scripting and hackneyed attempts at shock tactics to scare (which fail anyway). The writing was on the wall early on when our two scientists work hard to try to splice the human and animal DNA together - cue montage! Any and all tension there might have been in this is drained out pretty quickly by the needless application of scientists in white coats furrowing their brows in front of unlikely computer graphical representations of their experiments. I don't remember Primer needing a montage when the protagonists first stumble across their time machine.

The more I've thought about this the more I think Splice has very few redeeming features. At least 'Species' had a well-hot actress in the lead role; Splice is trying too hard to be a serious science fiction film to go down that route, but it fails at every other turn. Especially the end with its 'to be continued' final scene - completely dull, telegraphed and miles short of the 'beware the dangers of science' ending (a la The Fly) they should of aimed at.

I guess it's not really a surprise then that when it was actually out at cinemas the only place it was on even slightly near me was Basingstoke, for once the multiplex distributers have done me a favour and saved me £7.

No Man's Land

I got hold of this DVD after a friend of mine bemoaned the lack of exposure in the western media to Serbian cinema. I readily admitted that I had no real knowledge of Serbian cinema, the only things even vaguely connected to the Balkans I could think of off the top of my head are the Romanian film "4 Months 3 Weeks 2 Days" and "A Serbian Film" - so that's a film set in Romania (so not Slavic) and a film with has a plot synopsis so awful I'm not going to talk about it any further.

So, not much exposure to Serbian films indeed. 'No Man's Land' is a black comedy set during the war years in the ruins of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. Serbian and Bosnian troops face off against each other, two Bosnians and one Serbian soldier become trapped in a trench in no-man's land. One of the Bosnians is stuck on top of a mine that will kill them all if he moves, the other two have a gun each but are also injured and so agree to a truce until the UN can come to their aid.

Following this set up is an engaging farce in which French UN soldiers try to help the men while dealing with the bureaucracy of NATO. The media on the ground implore the soldiers to help the men, but their paymasters are only after a good story. The commanders of the Bosnian and Serb troops on each side seem indifferent to the men stuck in no-man's land while the men at the centre of all this confusion continue to argue and bicker about the war and whose fault it is. I don't think this takes a genius to decode this as an allegory for Yugoslavia itself; where the man stuck on the mine represents the nation as a whole, unable to move with changing times for fear of setting off a political bomb, while the nations of Serbia and Bosnia work themselves into an ecstasy of rage about each other before finally resorting to violence. All the while the world's media, NATO and the UN look on and try to help - but ultimately are unable. Perhaps it's the bureaucratic nature of the outsiders that prevents them, perhaps it's because no outsider truly understands the nature being Slavic. Perhaps though (as I think is hinted in the film) neither the Serb nor the Bosnian armies get any help because neither do anything to deserve it - they're agents of their own destruction constantly plotting each other's downfalls while the world looks on and sighs.

A lot of comedy mileage is made out of the language barriers between the protagonists, as well as the at-best incompetence and at-worst downright dangerousness of the people 'in charge' in the former Yugoslavia. It's a film that's very funny and provides (I hope) an insight into a conflict that we in Western Europe only ever really see through Kate Aidie style newsreels.

Machete

Guilty pleasures are a wonderful thing. In the same way that a Metaller might admit to liking the odd Bon Jovi track or a Rugby fan might secretly wish there was more American Football on TV, I bloody loved watching 'Machete' at the Bracknell Odeon last night.

'Machete' is the film of the trailer. Not in the same way that normal films are films with trailers though, this is a film made off the back of the fake trailer in the Robert Rodriquez / Quentin Tarantino double bill Grindhouse. In the trailer we see a massive dirty great Mexican scumbag / ex cop (Danny Trejo) hacking, shooting and dismembering his way through piles of dirtier and even less-appealing Mexicans, Gringos and all manner of other goons. Grindhouse wasn't that good, and the Machete trailer was one of the best bits, but when I discovered that Robert Rodriguez was actually planning to turn it into a bona-fide film I feared it'd make a bit of a dud. What looks fun in a trailer can't make for much of a good 90 minutes. Or can it...

The film opens with Machete being backstabbed by his Mexican Federale bosses and his wife being murdered by a local drug lord (Steven Segal - fuck yeah!). Machete is presumed dead; but fast-forward to Texas 3 years later and here he is, struggling to find work with the rest of the dishevelled illegal immigrants from south of the border. The surprisingly famous cast are slowly introduced; Michelle Rodriguez is a legal immigrant helping the illegals get their lives together, Jessica Alba is the local immigration officer and Robert DeNiro is the Texas senator who shoots Mexicans for fun while running for re-election. Machete is hired by DeNiro's aide to 'shoot' the senator. Machete is in fact set up though, the whole shooting incident is to be used as an excuse for tighter border controls and help the senator win re-election. Machete escapes though, and wants his revenge - they've just "... fucked with the wrong Mexican". This is where it gets fun.

We get a bit of Texas politics, a bit of bad Steven Segal hamming it up, a bit of De Niro slipping into his New York accent and a hell of a lot of extreme violence, blood, dismemberment, disembowelling and - strangely - laughs. Especially funny is a part where some hired guards have a conversation about why they're bothering to protect such a nasty man from someone as dangerous as Machete. Thankfully Machete gets past them without having to kill a single one - nice of him to do that.

For a film that involves quite so many extremely hot girls getting extremely naked I think it scores fairly highly on the feminism test. Rodriguez and Alba both play strong characters who are leaders of men. The fact that Rodriguez comes out kicking ass in her bra at one point or that Alba stars in a technically unnecessary shower scene need not detract from that. If anything the film is anti male, as far more simpering male idiots are dispatched by Machete than helpless girls are mishandled by the baddies. The only bit that's completely gratuitous is the appearance of Lindsay Lohan; who remains naked for essentially the whole film and seems to have no real sensible inclusion - apart from the being naked part obviously.

I knew I shouldn't really have enjoyed Machete quite as much as I did, but whether its meant to be a spoof of the genre or a film firmly rooted in that genre it still made me laugh out loud several times. And who can say fairer than that? Sometimes it's the guilty pleasures that are the best.

Harry Potter Part 7 Part 1 - AKA: HP7a

When I first read that the producers of the wildly (and mostly deservedly) successful Harry Potter series had announced their intention to split its final instalment into two parts I was immediately despondent. After the genuinely awful start to the Potter series the third through to the fifth films were exciting, dark when they needed to be and revealed their child stars as promising actors of the future. Much of the promise of those 3 middle films seemed to evaporate with the announcement that part 7 would be in two parts. There was only one reason to split the seventh film into two - money. Any talk of sticking to the original text is simply doublething on the part of the producers. The 4th, 5th and 6th books are both incredibly long texts and were both adequately reduced into screenplays of around the 140 minute mark.

I toyed with the idea of not going to see HP7a for this reasons and others. My experience of the original texts was one major reason. I was hugely bored with the first half of HP7 the book as it consisted almost entirely sneaking around bits of England hiding from baddies. Thankfully the second half of makes everything worthwhile - it has a wonderfully emotional finish and I recommend reading the lot. With this in mind I decided that I needed to see HP7a, since without it the payoff next summer wont be half as good. At least it wasn't going to be in 3D anyway. All this meant I went into the cinema with not the most open of minds - I was expecting to be disappointed.

The story of Harry Potter has moved on from its boarding school roots and for the first time in the series we are out of Hogwarts and into the unknown. Within the opening half hour Potter and his chums are thrown into mortal danger and are on the run from Voldemort and his cronies. The film sets itself up on a war footing from the outset, Potter and co are forced to go into hiding for fear that they are putting their loved ones in danger. They camp out in the woods, infiltrate the ministry of magic and fight against several dark mages to evade capture. It's a story in which the dangers are terrifyingly real and in which the quidditch of the early instalments seems like a twee sideshow by comparison. The film ends up being very true to the book and is full of a number of lovely touches - more of those later.

Before getting too carried away with praise though: the film is too long. For an adaptation of half of a book that isn't as long as some of the previous tomes in the series, over 150 minutes is just silly. I thought that we'd got over the need to include every little microcosm of the Potter-verse when we got to part 3. Apparently not, and we are subjected to a number scenes which could easily have been coalesced into dialogue asides or (forgive me for suggesting it) even a montage. An example is Bill Nighy's appearance to read out Dumbledore's will to the kids. It probably goes on for about 5 minutes and adds literally nothing that couldn't have been done by the kids talking about the event later. One part of the film that could be cut out but I'm glad they didn't is a cartoon-styled sequence in which Hermione tells a story of three brothers and the creation of the Deathly Hallows (the MacGuffins for part 2 btw). Some beautiful animation there and a credit to whomever on the production team is responsible.

Rather than being dull though, HP7a's long 'on the run in a tent' sequences take on the feeling of a character drama. Harry finds himself in the eye of a storm and is torn between facing his destiny and protecting his loved ones. Hermione is brave and resourceful, but knows that Harry must ultimately face his demons alone. Ron is best friend to both, but is tortured by thoughts of losing them to teenage lust. This three-way teenage melting pot of emotions and fears added to the physical dangers of dark magics is the recipe for a pretty bloody good drama. Much better than the book ever managed in my opinion.

Apart from the length and occasionally unnecessary sequences, the film is overall very enjoyable with a good mix of darkness, comedy and teen angst. It's the perfect way to set up the final battle of the next film and also fun to see loads of well-famous British actors with incredibly small bit parts. I'm looking forward to HP7b, roll on July 2011!

Monetarist Propaganda

I watched the last 30 minutes of this last night and after I gathered my jaw off the floor I struggled to comprehend the lunatic propaganda that I had just witnessed on the normally-progressive Channel 4. The documentary was a one-sided polemic in which the presenter blamed the latest financial crisis on 'big state' and 'big government'. He held Hong Kong up as a paragon of monetarism, shining a light on everything that works about that tiny city state as an example of the Asian tigers and avoiding all mention of the other Asian tigers who's economies have failed.

He suggested that Hong Kong is a beacon of prosperity and that Britain needs to emulate it if the nation is to return to the 'glory' years of the 18th and 19th centuries. One presumes that by Britain's 'glory years' the presenter isn't talking about when there was no NHS, no right to vote, no women's suffrage, no state pension, child labour, endless wars on the continent, rotten boroughs in parliament, disease, back-breaking hard work and short life-expectancies. I guess he means some kind of rose-tinted view of buccaneering British conquistadors forcing trade agreements on Indian and Chinese natives, waving a Union Jack around on the battlefield and rolling in pound notes in some kind of Jane Austin upper-middle-class fantasy. Just what I don't need.

The documentary produced a long line of vox-pops (exclusively city types and people sitting on right-wing think tanks) who told us that the ONLY way to repay the debt was to reduce taxes, release controls on business and downside government. This brazen hypocrisy on the part of those who created the financial meltdown is so ridiculous and it astounds me how few have challenged it. The program talks of a 4.8 trillion pound national debt in terms of a household debt, the presenter uses the same disingenuous arguments as the government and deliberately misconstrues the truth by equating a national economy to one of a family budgeting its incomes and outgoings. He parrots the government's line about treating this debt as something that has to be paid off by managing outgoings, rather than something that is dealt with by investing in Britain's economic future.

I was heartened to discover this morning that the presenter of "Britain's Trillion Pound Horror Story" is the same guy who recently has produced similar documentaries denouncing environmentalism and fear mongering about genetic engineering. Not a man who's grasp of science is the finest then. But I wonder how many of those who watched this program will go out of their way to discover the presenter's history of misinformation and lies. Few I suspect. However, while programs like this can find a place on a serious television channel during prime time the government's lies about its 'necessary' cuts will continue to be the mainstream.

The Disappearance of Alice Creed

This is the kind of thing we do well in Britain isn't it? Here is a small budget production with a tight script and interesting premise. Two stern-faced and occasionally-masked men spend the opening scenes of the film methodically and meticulously preparing a house and a room for god knows what purpose. They buy a series of tools, bin bags and plastic sheets, then boost and strip out a van, attach poles and hooks to walls in a warehouse and dig holes in a forest. They do all this without speaking a word, barely acknowledging each other let along the rest of the world. These are two guys up to no good. Then they kidnap a young woman and a plan begins to unfold. A simple plan of kidnap and extortion. Or is it as simple as it seems?

With only three actors in the whole film the microscope is on them and their ability to deliver a performance that carries the story. I remember Eddie Marsan from Vera Drake but had no idea how terrifying he would be able to make his beady eyes, Gemma Arterton seems to be turning into the next Brit to cross the pond and succeed so I guess there was no worry about her being able to express the terror of a woman kidnapped (as well as a number of other emotions - which would give away too much of the plot to discuss in detail). Suffice to say that there are a series of plots swings and twists as the histories and motivations of all three characters are revealed and then tested to the limit. At no point does the claustrophobia and tension of the plot suffer from awkward acting - full marks all round.

It's not just the acting that did it for me. The opening few minutes in which the kidnappers buy all their gear and fit up their lair has much more menace to it than even Eddie Marsan's eyes are capable of generating, it's all about the short disconcerting cuts and odd camera angles. Everything's there and in place to put the viewer off, to unsettle you ever so slightly and make you tense about what's coming next.

As I already said, the film is very claustrophobic. With only 3 actors and very few sets it feels at times as if you're intruding something very private by watching it. That's a feeling that paid off towards the very end when a character looks straight into the camera for about 5 seconds, it's kind of a 'what would you do?' moment and an absolutely brilliant way to finish. This is a film you should watch.

RED - bit of a let down

This was certainly a film to be excited about. Talk about a top quality cast and some kick-arse trailers, the bit in the trailer where Helen Mirren starts shooting a minigun gave me a strange reaction. At first I would disappointed to see that one of Britain's great actresses had decided to give into the pressure and take the Hollywood paycheque, but then I thought that there's actually something glorious in seeing a RADA luminary live the action film cliché. Well, let's say I had high hopes.

My understanding is that the film is based on a comic book. This makes sense as there are a lot of contrivances in the story that don't stand up in the real world. For a start, the opening 15 minutes focuses on a Bruce Willis connecting with a woman (Mary Louise Parker) who works in the social security office. He keeps on pretending that they've not sent him any pensions cheques as a pretence for calling her. Somehow she thinks this is charming and ends up falling for him when they finally meet (he breaks into her house while being chased by some kind of SWAT team). They then go on a trip around America - you can tell they're travelling places from all the post cards that say things like 'Delaware' on them - having hi-jinx and meeting all Willis' ex-CIA goons; Malkovich, Freeman and Mirren.

This gang then uncover a plot to kill them all, so they have to kill the US Vice President while chatting up Russians, winding up arms dealers and firing a huge amount of ordinance. It's a bit funny (John Malvovich especially) and fairly silly but all incredibly forced. Just not as good as I had expected it to be. Maybe that's because I saw it on Saturday morning when I thought I'd get a bargain matinee ticket but didn't (you only get bargain matinee at Showcase on weekdays - what use is that?!), but I was left fairly nonplussed.