Zodiac - a killer mystery

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

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

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

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

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

The Skin I Live In

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

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

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

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

Captain America - The First Avenger (apparently)

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

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

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

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

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

We need to talk about Kevin

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

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

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

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

Billy Liar - More Britain in the 60s

The second of a pair of 'classic' British films from the 1960s that my Dad bought me for Christmas, 'Billy Liar' is a far straighter film that 'Blow Up' that follows a couple of days in the life of Billy Fisher. Billy (Tom Courtnay) is a young adult in an un-named northern town. For Billy, work, friends, family and commitment are a frustration, an aside that get in the way of his incredible imagination.

Billy is a compulsive liar, but not because of bad intentions, rather that his imagination takes over and ends up passing his lips before he has time to veto his thoughts. As such, the people around town each believe various truths, half-truths and outright lies about him. He has convinced two girls that he intends to marry them - when in fact he hardly likes either. Billy is a nice guy, but whose active mind and over-eager tongue have got him into more scrapes and problems than he deserves to be lumbered with.

I think that Billy is supposed to encapsulate what it was to be young in the early 1960s. The concept of the teenager as a separate social group had only recently been created, and with the huge difference in incomes and opportunities offered by the modern world compared to that of only 20 years before it was inevitable that social conflict would come about. Billy has freedom of choice and opportunity, money to do what he wants and an education. Yet at the same time his parents and societal elders were brought up in an entirely alien mind-set, one of settling down and responsibly earning a wage; they expect different things from him. Without anyone to guide him through these confusing choices of opportunities versus responsibilities, Billy inevitably comes into conflict with his friends, family and the greater world.

It is only when Billy meets Liz (Julie Christie) that he sees a way out. Liz is like a force of nature, breezing through the town the locals see her in hushed awe as the 'girl who got away'. She has been to London (seen as some kind of exotic and far away place in the film - "You can't just go to London" Billy says) and walks through the town like a ghost, aware of everything that's going on but touched by none of it. Only Billy seems to understand why she refuses to be grounded in one location, and only Liz seems to understand why Billy acts the way he does. Though his love for her is obvious to the audience, he seems oblivious to it, confused and awed as much by Liz as he is by the rest of the world.

Ultimately, 'Billy Liar' is a sad film that honestly looks at how people cope with the pressure of responsibilities versus dreams, and how making the choices you want alienates the people you love. It encapsulates the teenage contradiction and ends in a poignant way that I would never have predicted. It clearly influenced Ricky Gervais' Cemetery Junction, though the overall feel of this film is much more raw and grounded in reality. Holywood this is not, this is as British as they come and I'm amazed no-one told me to watch it earlier. An excellent Christmas present!

Melancholia

The latest of my catch-up films from last year is Lars Von Trier's Melancholia. Part science fiction and part chin-stroker, Melancholia tells a story about the emotional stresses of a wealthy family and how they deal with several types of impending doom. On the one hand, Justine (Kirsten Dunst) is an emotional cripple in danger of ruining her own marriage on her wedding day, on the other hand there is 'Melancholia' - an enormous planet on a potential collision course with Earth. Doom indeed.

The central theme is sort of given away by the film's title. It's about depression, the different sorts of depression people suffer from and how people deal with it in different ways. The first hour of the film shows Dunst's character in a psychological black hole, who is only able to emerge from her mire when Melancholia the planet appears in the skies. Justine's sister is Christine (Charlotte Gainsberg), who is her emotional rock until she becomes convinced that Melancholia is going to kill them all.

Melancholia has a narrative that's far from traditional. It's opening act plays out like an ITV drama complete with small parts from famous names (John Hurt anyone?), middle class angst, lavish surrounds and nookie with the lower classes. In part 2 we switch into vague Outer Limits territory, in which Justine talks openly about some sort of precognitive powers she claims to have and a humongous Chekov's Gun is winched into place to preempt the ending. Characters then react to what has happened and is happening in different ways. Whereas Justine has known true despair in her life and faces Melancholia with a detached calm, the ever-practical John (Charlotte's husband played by Keifer Sutherland) cannot contemplate a world in which scientific certainty is snatched away from him and starts to crack.

It's difficult to know precisely what to think about this film. On the one hand it looks amazing. From the opening super-slow-mo shots to the final scene, the film has a stunningly bright and natural light running through it. On the other hand though the film barely has a plot, is full of holes (why does Justine have an American accent while all her family have British accents?) and could easily be accused of the worst kind of artsy, upper middle class navel-gazing.

Whatever side of the fence you come down on, I think it would be hard to argue that 'Melancholia' is a waste of time. The drama of Act 1 is a very well-acted insight into a family falling apart, and the lighting, cinematography and effects look fantastic. And if nothing else floats your boat about it, Kirsten Dunst does some nude sun-bathing. Which is of course 'artistic', because this is an artsy film and therefore not at all gratuitous.

Closer to the Edge - TT Isle of Man

Mark Kermode is my go-to-guy when it comes to film recommendations. He sung the praises of this documentary from the roof tops when it came out last year, probably because he loves the Isle of Man for some reason. He reconed it would win a bunch of stuff for best documentary, but only managed a single nomination at the British Independent film awards - not great.

This is a documentary about the annual Isle of Man TT motorbike race. It's a race that exists because road racing was outlawed on the British mainland in the early 20th century, and so motorbiking enthusiasts went to the Isle of Man where the law was less strict. The TT race was born and remains an event in the calendar of all motorbiking afficianados to the present day. I'm not even close to being such an afficianado, but even I was able to appreciate the speed, danger and emotion that goes into this unique racing event.

The Isle of Man TT is a motorbike road race that uses the country lanes of the island and has little restriction on what the racers can do to increase their speeds. The film's voice-over talks us through some typical corners, describing how the racers can fly through village lanes at nearly 200mph. It is a surprise then - given the health and safety fixation of the modern world - that the race is still permitted to run in the face of all the deaths and injuries that happen every year. The history of the event is littered with the names of minor celebreties in biking circles who have willingly given their lives up to their hobby, the chance to win even a single TT race.

'Closer to the Edge' took me on an emotional roller-coaster. By talking up the dark history of the race, and introducing the wonderfully colourful characters who were to race in the 2010 event, the film brings you slowly to the realisation that there's a good chance someone is going to die in the film. Real death that is, not some fake movie world death where there's catharsis and heroism, but a real death in which someone is gone. One of the real people we have been introduced to in the opening hour of the film is going to be killed - in fact, has already been killed in real life, and quite probably filmed for this documentary. Who? We don't know, but when the races get going every shot of a bike flying through a narrow Manx lane brings with it a gripping fear. When something eventually happens I was on my seat edge, on the verge of shouting at the screen for them to tell me if anyone was hurt. For nearly 10 minutes the film manages to string out its revelations about the true drama behind the incidents that happened at the 2010 Isle of Man TT race - one of the most stressful and charged 10 minutes of my movie-watching life.

Obviously Senna was the best documentary last year, but this isn't too far behind. It's an insight into the almost anachronistic world of the TT race, which seems to be stuck in a time warp as the rest of the world marches towards wrapping everyone in cotton wool.