The Proposition

I will civilize this land


The film opens with a montage of yellowed, aged pictures of Australian settlers and Aborigines at the turn of the century, illustrating the harsh, dusty existence these people faced. This seamlessly transitions into pictures of members of the cast in their roles in the film (this was so well done that it was only when I thought ''that guy looks like Ray Wins- oh'' that I realised the change), then erupts into a furious gunfight. This brief sequence encapsulates a lot of the themes and techniques of the film; the idealised view of Australia's past contrasted with the grim realities of how it was forged, and moments of quiet reflection suddenly erupting in spurts of violence.

The plot of the film can be very quickly summed up thusly; three brothers who are members of a gang, two are captured and one of them (Guy Pearce) is given the chance to save the youngest brother by killing the elder, and far more vicious, sibling (Danny Huston). This would seem to be a straightforward, Robin Hood style tale of a corrupt lawman forcing the plucky outlaws to do something, but it is not that simple. This is not a film that is painted in broad strokes of black and white, but thousands of shades of grey. The only characters that could be seen as 'heroes' in the film would Guy Pearce's Charlie Burns, the brother given the task of offing his brother, and Ray Winstone's policeman, Morris Stanley. More on them later.

The performances in this film are all exemplary; Guy Pearce does sterling work as the brother committed to carrying out a grim task in the hope that his brother could have a better life, Danny Huston manages a mixture of malevolence and charm as Arthur Burns that is quite brilliant and adds to the overall sense of moral ambiguity that pervades the film. John Hurt also puts in a magnificent performance as an aging, racist bounty hunter who is also after Arthur. Ray Winstone is the star of the film, though. His portrayal of Stanley, the sheriff who is put in charge of 'civilising' the outback by bringing in the Burns brothers is a melancholic masterpiece of acting. Stanley may have condemned one of the three brothers to death, but he is by no means an evil man; he a man doing his job as best as he can; he is a loving husband; and he is a firm believer in justice, not vengeance, as shown by one pivotal scene in which he threatens to shoot anyone who tries to whip the youngest of the brothers, Mikey, even though his superiors have demanded that it be done . Emily Watson also provides a superb performance as Winstone's supportive wife.

The moral ambiguity of the film is easily one of its greatest strengths. You will constantly reappraise you're own opinions of characters as the film gradually rebeals more and more about their true nature; the 'good guys' do worse things than the bad guys, David Wenham is a case in point with regards to this idea. His character, a refined English superior to Winstone's character, starts off as the seemingly intellectual and moral superior to Stanley, but as the film progresses he is seen to be as ruthless, bloodthirsty and morally bankrupt as any other character in the film.

The cinematography of the film is nothing short of stunning; harsh, unforgiving outback is both backdrop and an extra character in the mix of the film. The visuals really enhance the sense that Winstone's character is facing near impossible odds in attempting to carry out his duty and help in the justification of his actions with regards to the Burns brothers. The film looks gorgeous as a result and gives a tremendous sense of scale and futility to the lives of the characters. This is hardly something that is new to the genre of Westerns (and I use the term in the loosest possible sense) but it is carried off stupendously here.

This film is an 18 for a good reason; the violence. This is not the stylised violence of Tarantino, but bears more of a resemblance to the full-on assault on the sense that can be found in Mel Gibsons' Passion of the Christ (except without the Jesus gubbins). It is gritty, morbid and often shockingly graphic, making the Australia depicted on screen seem ever the more realistic.

Much of the credit for the quality of this film must lie with Nick Cave for penning a truly awe-inspiring script. The film covers a lot of the recurrent themes in his music; violence, religion, redemption; and he has created an outback populated with fully realised characters that are incredibly flawed and, in many cases, downright horrible creatures. The portrayal of Aborigines in the film may be a bit one dimensional, but they are quite consistent with contemporary opinions about them and the way in which they related to the white settlers, so the racism the characters display goes a long way in establishing the realism of the film.

I couldn't review a Nick Cave film without commenting on the soundtrack now, could I? Written by Cave with Warren Ellis, it is a sumptous mix of traditional-sounding songs and modern musical stylings, most notably a few moments of electronic music that do jar somewhat with the old world visuals of the film, even if they do add to the mood of the film, they can be a bit distracting.

Don't see this film if you are expecting a good ole' fashioned Western full of action, blood and guts (though there is plenty of those) because you'll see a gorgeous piece of cinema that works as both a character piece, and as an interesting examination of the creation of a country.

Oh so close

And so we come to the end, my friends. This article marks the 31st article I've written in 32 days, just one short of the 32 in 32 days that I had hoped to achieve, but getting withing spitting distance of the total is fine by me, especially since the last week has proven surprisingly tough on me in terms of writing.

This has been an experiment to try and expand my ability as a writer, to push me beyond my normal limitations and to see if I could consistently produce work of a reasonable or high quality over a prolonged period of time, and I think that I have achieved that, with a few notable exceptions, most of which occurred in the last week when, due to split loyalties between writing about films and actually making a film, I found myself unable to sit down and write with the level of concentration that I had otherwise managed.

Last weekend, which marked the first few days in which I was unable to get content up every day, didn't help, either. That slight trip has snowballed and very nearly derailed the whole endeavour, in the end only serving to make me miss the total by that much.

Now, I could just write a quick review of the last film I watched (which was The Descent which, whilst technically very good, didn't engage me in the way that I had hoped it would. I still really rate Neil Marshall as a director, though, and am eagerly anticipating the release of Centurion later this year) but I don't think that the review would be any good, given how frazzled I am at the moment from having spent 6 hours filming and editing, and I'd rather reach the total with something I'm proud of, rather than something hurriedly tossed off in order to meet a quota. Quality must win out over quotas, and if I fail because I couldn't think of something good to write, I'd rather do that than succeed with a poor piece of work.

Overall this little experiment has been good for me. I've gotten better at writing reviews quickly and succinctly without sacrificing depth, and I've tried my hand at a variety of different styles of article, rather than just sticking to the tried and tested reviews. I doubt I'll ever maintain that level of productivity again (unless I were to sit down and write a novel, which is different to writing a different article every day) but I am glad that I gave it a shot and that I didn't a) fail, or b) resort to producing sub-standard work just to reach my goal.

Maybe inspiration will come to me in the next 90 minutes, but if it doesn't, I'll just say that I enjoyed it immensely, and I look forward to not writing for a couple of days.

Blood Meridian

Cormac McCarthy has achieved no small amount of acclaim in recent years thanks to the publication (and Oprahfication) of his bleak post-apocalyptic fable The Road and the film adaptation of No Country For Old Men which, coming pretty much back to back, alerted many readers (myself included) to the works of a man considered by many (myself included) to be one of the greatest American writers of the last 50 years.

Prior to his latter-day success, though, McCarthy had been gathering notices and acclaims for decades, knocking out great book after great book. One of the best regarded of McCarthy's masterpieces (that's how good the guy is; he offers up a selection of masterpieces) is his enigmatically titled 1985 Western (of sorts) Blood Meridian.

It is the 1840s, and The Kid is a young boy who runs away from his dreary home life and ends up as part of a group of U.S. Army soldiers who are making they way into Mexico, where they are promptly slaughtered by Comanche. In a bid to survive, The Kid joins up with the Glanton gang, a free-lance group of Indian fighters who travel the countryside killing Indians and scalping them.

A premise that seems almost quaint in its evocation of old-school Western traditions; a young boy searching for adventure, tragedy strikes early in his adventures, Injuns versus Americans, all seem to hearken back to the founding myths of the American West. McCarthy uses the familiarity of his audience to subvert this ideas by painting the American West not so much as a grand adventure for boys to play around with, but as a bleak and unforgiving existence in which violence begets nothing but violence in a land which, as one character says, is itself crazy, and which drives its people crazy as well.

It seems natural to categorise Blood Meridian is a revisionist Western since it posits that it was the White man that was so brutal in the days of the West and not, as traditional foundation myths would have us believe, the Injuns, but the book is almost post-revisionist since, rather than taking the line that it was just the Whites that visited brutality upon a people that didn't deserve it, McCarthy shows that the Injuns were just as brutal and violent as the Whites. McCarthy upends all pre-conceived notions of the West as a clearly defined struggle between people, defining it instead as an existential battlefield in which no one, not even The Kid, who is supposedly the hero of the book, could be considered 'good'.

Blood Meridian reads like a Nick Cave song sounds. McCarthy's language evokes images of a land forever claret red under an uncaring sun, and of violence so commonplace as to lose all meaning. Violence is a subject that McCarthy has covered in depth in a lot of his subsequent work, particularly in the form of Anton Chigurh in No Country For Old Men, but that is a mere three-minute pop song compared to the symphony of death and pain that makes up much of Blood Meridian. You can't go more than 10 pages it would seem before encountering some new atrocity.

I'm not by any means a squeamish person, I've a fairly strong stomach when it comes to violence and gore, but I reached a point in Blood Meridian where, after reading about a particularly violent encounter in which the 'heroes' attacked an Indian village, I found myself profoundly sickened by what I had read, and had to put the book down for twenty minutes whilst I composed myself. Now, the event itself, whilst horrific, is not necessarily the worst thing I've ever read or seen, but the genius of McCarthy's writing is his ability to describe something so sparsely that his readers have to fill in the spaces themselves. This rather impressionistic approach, feeding us just the right amount of information to give us a sense of what's going on without actually telling us what is going on, lets us use our imagination, and the more violence you've seen or read about, the more easily you will be able to fill the spaces in the text with violence of the most lurid and sickening variety.

Anton Chigurh may have become the iconic figure of McCarthy's writing thanks to Javier Bardem, but if anyone manages to get Blood Meridian made into a film (many have tried, most notably Ridley Scott, and currently Todd Field, writer-director of In The Bedroom and Little Children, is having a go at it) I feel that the character of The Judge, who is the book's defining character and greatest antagonist, would surely replace him as the truest embodiment of evil and cruelty in the world. A fat, pale, hairless man, The Judge is first introduced to us when he walks into a church and accuses the preacher of being a sexual deviant, at which point he incites the gathered crowd to kill the preacher. Mere minutes later, we learn that he has never met the man before, and has no knowledge of whether or not he is a sexual deviant.

The Judge is a chaotic force in the novel, one that comes along and destroys everything in his path, seemingly for no reason other than that is what he does. He takes an interest in nature, often cataloging different species of plants, but only because he feels that plants and animals don't have the right to exist until he says its okay for them to do so. He represents everything that is malignant and terrible about humanity and he is filled with an arrogance and a lust for destruction that is insatiable.

Blood Meridian is a dense and epic book that has shades of the great works of classical fiction, from Milton to Melville, and his broad vistas encompass not only the birth of a nation, but also the darkest sides of mankind. It's, quite simply, one of the most important books of the twentieth century.

Coraline

Button, Button, who's got the button?



Coraline Jones (Dakota Fanning) is a disaffected young girl who moves to a new state after her parents (John Hodgman and Teri Hatcher), who both write for gardening publications, get new jobs. Having had to leave her old life and friends behind, Coraline is understandably bitter about the whole thing.

As a means of getting her out of their hair, her parents encourage Coraline to explore the boring house that she now has to call home, at which point she meets her eccentric neighbours, who include Mr. B (Ian McShane), a Russian gymnast who trains mice, and Misses Spink and Forcible (Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French). Coraline is just about fed up with the whole situation until she discovers a doorway to another world that contains Other versions of her family and friends, all of whom seem infinitely better than the real ones, aside from their eyes, which are not eyes at all, but buttons.

I first saw Coraline about four months ago in a big theatre in Manchester - a far cry from my usual routine of seeing films in dingy, tiny cinemas - and I had very high expectations. I'm a massive fan of Neil Gaiman, whose novella the film is based on and which is one of the best pieces of children's literature of the last decade, and I'm also an admirer of Henry Selick, whose previous animation credits include The Nightmare Before Christmas and James and The Giant Peach. If you were to draw a Venn diagram of the two men's work, I would be sat squarely at the point where they intersect, jumping up and down with childish glee and an existential dread that I had somehow appeared at the centre of an abstract used to describe hypothetical possibilities. I hate it when that happens.

So, I left the cinema and I was...not disappointed, but not blown away, either. Everything seemed right. The animation was stunning, demonstrating how much you can achieve with a proper synthesis of traditional stop-motion animation and modern computer graphics, the film nailed the tone of the book (which is perhaps not surprising since the book has a very Roald Dahl-ish quality to it and Selick had previously adapted James and The Giant Peach for the big screen) and, most importantly, the film managed to be funny and have a sense of adventure about it whilst also remaining thoroughly creepy.

Why then, did I not love it?

I think it might largely be because the first half an hour, which takes place solely in the 'real' world, is pretty dull. The colour palette of the film during this point consists largely, almost entirely, of grays and variations thereof. Coraline's main distinguishing characteristic during this time is one of boredom, as she struggles to find something interesting to do, and I was right there with her since I found myself looking for something interesting in the film.

This is, of course, intentional. The real world has to be drab and dim and dismal so that once Coraline steps into the Other world, which by comparison is full of light (somewhat paradoxically, since the Other World is only seen at nighttime) and every inch of her world is suddenly infused with colour. I saw the film in 2-D, but apparently in 3-D this idea is taken even further since Selick has the real world feel close and tiny and the Other World stretch into infinity. Unless Selick establishes Coraline's malaise early on then her fascination with the Other World would not be totally believable. We need to experience her boredom in order for the excitement and wonder of the Other World to overshadow its obvious creepiness.

Even then, though, something seems off. The apotheosis of the problem is Coraline's Other Father, who speaks largely in non-sequiturs and fawns over his daughter, to the extent of singing songs about her that are perhaps meant to be beguiling but end up seeming cloying and embarrassing. This atmosphere lay over the film as I watched it, occluding the many positives.

I've seen the film a second time, now, and most of the problems on the second viewing seemed to vanish. Since I knew when the switch between the worlds was going to happen, I didn't find myself impatiently waiting during the opening half an hour, and the embarrassing, cloying atmosphere made sense within the context of the Other Mother's attempts to ensnare Coraline in her world.

Coraline is a film that has much to recommend it, but maybe only on a second viewing.

The Hangover

Continuing to catch up on reviews that I've been meaning to do fro ages, here's a belated review of The Hangover.



Doug (Justin Bartha) is getting married, and he's spending his bachelor party in Las Vegas with his friends Phil (Bradley Cooper) and Stu (Ed Helms) as well as, somewhat reluctantly, his brother-in-law to be, Alan (Zach Galifianakis). Things start off well, but when Phil, Stu and Alan wake up the next morning they have no memory of what happened the previous night, Stu's lost a tooth, there's a tiger in the bathroom and Doug is missing. They've got a day to find him, difficult enough, and that's without factoring in Mike Tyson or a naked Asian man.

Outside of that brief synopsis, there is no 'plot' to The Hangover. The amnesiac aspect of it allows for director Todd Phillips and the writers, Jon Lucas and Scott Moore, to layer on more and more absurdities as the cast try to figure out what they did last night. If you try to piece together the story, as the characters do, there is no real consistency since they have clearly done more in one night than is possible. This doesn't matter, though, since the absurdity of the plot (or whatever you want to call it. 'Premise' might be the best word) is its one real strength, making the situation ever more ludicrous and enjoyable.

The film follows in that recent tradition (an oxymoronic but apt notion) of modern American comedies in which the script has a deliberately loose feel to it, making it seem as if the actors have to find their way through the scene to uncover the joke. This can seem amateurish (as attested to by every Will Ferrell/Adam McKay film that isn't about Ron Burgundy) but here it works to the advantage of the film. Since the characters are so thoroughly, thoroughly hungover, their sluggishness and awkward line deliveries feel right for the film, rather than just a case of poor scripting or lax direction.

It's the performances, more than anything else, that make the film. The three leads are all hilarious in different ways. Bradley Cooper emits a sleazy charm that he never loses, even when people are shooting at him for seemingly no reason. His attempts to maintain his cool and try to find Doug are hilarious because we can see that he is so clearly over his head but thinks that he can get through it through sheer force of will. Ed Helms is very funny as the hen-pecked, weak Stu, a man whose life is so firmly settled into a nice rut that he ignores all evidence of his girlfriend's infidelities and general lack of redeeming qualities purely to avoid an argument. He is the one who suffers the most in Vegas, not only by losing a tooth but also through his marriage to a prostitute (Heather Graham), but he's also the one who progresses the most as a character, in that he progresses at all, and he gets a moment at the end that is weirdly uplifting.

The star of the film, though, is Zach Galifianikis as Alan, the cause of all the trouble in the first place. Alan is a not a character so much as he is a collection of traits and funny lines. He often makes outrageous claims about his life that seem to have little basis in reality, but this is all the more appealing since you need a character as fragmentary as Alan as a primer for the zaniness of the plot. Galifianikis plays Alan as a childish id, unable to control himself and constantly causing trouble and he's surprisingly charming, despite being rather repugnant in a lot of ways. Cooper seems like the one who will become the bigger star since he's the best looking of the bunch, but Galifianakis is the one who will hopefully go onto do better and similarly edgy work.

It's not a film so much as it is a collection of moments, but those moment, when they hit, are terrific.

Inglourious Proof/Death Basterds

As those of you who read this blog regularly (or anyone who has the capacity to look slightly to the left) will know, yesterday I saw Inglourious Basterds, the latest film about Quentin Tarantino. With the sort of synchronicity that so often befalls in life, I saw the film almost two years to the day after I wrote this long but not too bad article for [sadly now defunct website] Shefsteel.com, which I re-read to see what I had written about his career up to that point.

Apart from my pleasant surprise at seeing how good it is (aside from a few dalliances with grand sweeping statements, a pet hate of mine since it runs the risk of rendering the writing pompous and amateurish, though I think I get away with it), the biggest shock to me was how positive I was about Death Proof, Tarantino's half of the Grindhouse project. This surprises me because, in the subsequent two years, I have become quite hardline, regarding it as a sign of a director of great talent sliding inexorably into a regressive state of creative adolescence and obsolescence. Looking at my article then, I realised that much of what I wrote about Death Proof echoes what I wrote about Inglourious Basterds, and I began to wonder why I turned so strongly against Death Proof, and whether or not, by the time that Tarantino's next film comes out, I will regard it with the sort of barely suppressed contempt that I currently reserve for Death Proof.

Why do I dislike Death Proof so much?

Well, it's at least partly the result of discussions I have had about the film with people who like the film. Being somewhat on the fence about it when it was released, I was always in the centre of the arguments surrounding the film, and the more I encountered people who defended the film, the more I found to dislike in it. It's like an allergic reaction; I produced vitriol as a response to intrusions of contentment.

Aside from this, though, my problem with Death Proof can be summed up fairly simply. The film is (1) too long, in its uncut form, and even in its 90 minute/one half of Grindhouse form it felt sluggish and there were long, dull patches in which (2) the dialogue between the main characters dragged inexorably. Tarantino's dialogue is often the focus of the praise he receives, often justly so, but in Death Proof it falls completely flat. I can't tell if this is the result of the writing or the performers (I lean towards the latter, though more on that in a second) but the language feels tired and strained, it's like a bad cover version of Tarantino-esque dialogue. The film also (3) clearly doesn't know what it wants to be, and it's clear to the audience that Tarantino doesn't know what he wants it to be, though it is ironic how a film that is so unclear so clearly demarcates between the disparate elements that constitute it. Tarantino claims to love exploitation cinema so much and that the film is an homage to it, yet the film seems to feel that it is above the very kind of film that it seeks to emulate. Unlike Robert Rodriguez's half of the Grindhouse project, Planet Terror, which gleefully embraces the sleaze and shittiness of that style of film, Tarantino only really pays lip service to it in his film. The central concept, of a stunt driver who 'Death proofs' his car so that he can get involved in accidents that will kill his passengers but leave him unscathed, is rife with possibilities for a dark and dirty piece of sleaze, yet that aspect of the film so rarely surfaces, and is instead obfuscated by interminable stretches of dialogue between (4) uninteresting characters. Finally, (5) the film is rife with indulgences that distract, most notably the casting of Zoe Bell, a stunt double friend of Tarantino's, as 'Herself'. It's a piece of casting that might have added to the intensity of the film's (too) few chase scenes if Bell could act, but she sorely cannot. This is not wholly her fault, there are few things more daunting than being told to just act naturally in front of a camera or to 'be yourself', especially in a fictional film, but it's a self-consciously quirky idea that detracts from the film immensely.

So, those are my problems with Death Proof, are there any parallels to be drawn between it and Inglourious Basterds? Yes and no.

Both films are overlong, though even though Inglourious Basterds is clearly the lengthier effort, it is Death Proof that feels longer, thanks largely to its boring conversations between boring characters. Basterds gets one over on it thanks to its compelling characters, in the form of Hans Landa, Shoshanna Dreyfus and Bridget von Hammersmark (note how all the best characters in the film are and are played by non-Americans) and from having actors who can deliver the sort of fizzing dialogue with which Tarantino made his name. As much as I love Kurt Russell, he wasn't able to imbue Stuntman Mike with half the malevolence, sadism, intelligence and, perverse as it may seem, charm as Christoph Waltz is able to give to Hans Landa. So there seems to be a pro-, or at least lack of re-, gression on display here.

However, both films show signs that Tarantino's problems as a film-maker are deep-rooted and not down to problems of material or casting. Both films suffer from that confusion - no doubt the result of a hyperactive mind cartwheeling between ideas at the blink of an eye the shutter of a camera the tap of a key - that arises when Tarantino can't decide what film he wants to make. Both films have elements of the sleazy exploitation cinema that Tarantino so adores, yet they also seem like attempts to improve on it, make it serious, essentially stop it from being exploitation cinema anymore. This just doesn't work, making the moments that could be genuinely, unabashedly fun seem arch, and the serious moments seem out of place. Basterds is a better film than Death Proof because its non-exploitation moments (those featuring Hans Landa and Shoshanna) are so compelling, but they highlight one of the main problems with Inglourious Basterds; the Basterds themselves. Only two, maybe three, of the Basterds have any degree of flesh put onto their bones, and they don't show up in the film nearly enough to deserve a title being named after them. They often serve only to divert our attention from the interesting stuff that is going on elsewhere.

Thinking on it, Inglourious Basterds is a Frankenstein's monster of a film that has been assembled from two distinct, possibly unwilling, organ donors. It seems as if Tarantino came up with the subplot about Shoshanna and her cinema, realised how good it was, but was then lumbered with the Basterds, so he cut down their screen time but kept them in to keep the title (and the financial viability it entails). The two stories at no point cross paths, at most they come within an inch of touching each other when they happen to reach their respective crescendos in the same building, and even then they, independent of each other, achieve the same goal. The lack of integration between the plots (in every sense of the word) means that they could, like siamese twins, be surgically removed and the two could survive separated. The Basterds' film might be the weaker twin that dies shortly after the surgery, but it could still function shorn of its stronger sibling.

The two films also share moments of stunt casting that unbalance the film as a whole. Though Zoe Bell does no favours to Death Proof, Inglourious Basterds features the more egregious lapse in judgement on Tarantino's part since he decides to cast that odious spectre of former comedy glory/society's brief descent into idiocy, depending on your take, Mike Myers, in a brief role as a British general. With Zoe Bell you can kind of excuse her performance - she's a stunt person, who could have guessed she would be a bad actress? - but we all know how terrible Mike Myers can be. We've seen Goldmember, and we all fell over ourselves to avoid seeing The Love Guru. Surely any residual warmth felt towards him over Wayne's World can't extend to giving him a small role that you know he will ruin? Apparently not. He is allowed to inflict himself on the audience for an awkward scene of (Basil) exposition that serves only to introduce a character who, despite being played by the brilliant Michael Fassbender, doesn't make any real impact on the story beside being charming and spiffingly British.

Having exorcised some of my demons (and exercised my fingers), what conclusions can we draw? Will I look back on Inglourious Basterds as unkindly as I have looked back on Death Proof? I'd say 'no'. Both films show that Tarantino, whilst talented, has reached a point at which he has stopped trying to improve as a director, instead preferring to work within his own parameters and aiming his work at his fans, but there is more of a spark of the old magic in Basterds than there ever was in Death Proof. The moments that work show how good he can be, and even though the final package disappoints, it gives me a vague sense of hope that he could one day be the man who made Jackie Brown.

Take The Money And Run

Nobody wears beige to a bank robbery!



As I write this, in 2009, Woody Allen has been directing films for 40 years (43 if you count What's Up, Tiger Lily? But I don't, so we won't) and writing films for almost 50. Despite being a big admirer of his work, not all of it but most of it, I'd never seen his debut, Take The Money and Run, which was released way back in the mists of time (1969).

Woody Allen's reputation is largely built on his work in the 1970s and 1980s, when he perfected a brand of witty, neurotic but melancholic comedy film best typified by Annie Hall or Manhattan, and which reached its zenith in 1989 with Crimes and Misdemeanors. What is most striking about Take The Money and Run, watching it as I do so late in his career and with such firm preconceived notions about him as a film-maker, is what a energetic and lively performer he was in his early days.

This shouldn't be surprising to anyone, like me, who has seen Sleeper or Love and Death, both of which display his ability as a physical performer, but those are both films which are more firmly focused on Allen's verbal dexterity, not his physical dexterity. There is little dialogue for Allen in the film since, although he plays the main character, he actually says very little as the majority of the dialogue in the film is delivered by either secondary characters or by talking heads discussing the action.

And there are a lot of talking heads since Take The Money and Run is a mockumentary, arguably the first mockumentary film ever theatrically released. In it Allen plays Virgil Starkwell, a young man who grows up in New York and enters into a life of crime, rather ineptly as it turns out, and the opening 10 minutes of the 'documentary' detail his life up until his early 20s, making for possibly the funniest short film ever made; his early life trying to steal candy, only for the candy machine to get stuck on his arm; his love of the cello, which he played well enough to play with a marching band, dragging the chair along as he walked; and his eventual incarceration.

After a brief stay in prison, Starkwell is released after allowing himself to be a guinea pig for a new vaccine which, whilst successful, does briefly turn him into a rabbi. Upon his release, he meets Louise (Janet Margolin) and after 15 minutes he falls in love with her, and within 30 minutes he gives up on stealing her purse. They try to start a life together, but Virgil can't stay straight for long, and is soon, ineptly, trying to knock over banks, hampered by his bad penmanship.

Much like Sleeper and Love and Death, Take The Money and Run has a scattershot approach to its script that throws everything at the audience in a dizzying assault of comic styles. You get sight-gags, slapstick, wordplay and irony, often all employed one on top of the other. This barrage could be overwhelming but it works splendidly for one reason; the editing.

In the first of what would prove to be many collaborations, Allen's film was overseen by Ralph Rosenblum, who took the rather lax early cut and tightened it up, mixing up the lively 'film' moments with the calmer, but no less funny, documentary moments in which people who know Starkwell are interviewed to discuss the events we are seeing. The two halves of the film don't completely gel since there is no real explanation for the film parts - are they recreations? are they memory? are they part of the documentary at all? - but each part is hilarious in its own way.

In many way it foreshadows Allen's later work; he demonstrates the techniques that he would later fully realise with Zelig, his brilliant 1985 mockumentary; there are several scnes that highlight the neurotic, absurdist element that he would later bring to his more accomplished and dramatic work; and it also shows some of his early deficiencies, particularly his writing of female characters. However, it also stands on its own as something apart from much of his other work. It's a scrappy, fascinating debut that escapes being a curio by dint of how hilarious it is.

Inglourious Basterds

Don't know much about history...



Regardless of my feelings about Quentin Tarantino's long-gestating Jewish revenge fantasy, I've got to say that his version of history is a hell of a lot more fun than real history. Filtering history through the lenses of every film made about World War II, he applies his ''movie movie'' ideas to history, re-writing history as it would have been had Sam Fuller or Peckinpah been running the war effort. Consequently, he gives us a story in which a group of Jewish commandos is sent behind enemy lines to kill Nazis in luridly brutal ways, complete with scalping and beating skulls in with a baseball bat, to create fear amongst the German army.

What Inglourious Basterds best illustrates is Tarantino's skill as a writer and director, but not necessarily as a film-maker. Essentially, it is a film which is well-directed, is written in the loping, lyrical style and features the laconically loquacious characters to which we have become accustomed, but which, for some reason, disappoints. It's problems are wide ranging and run deep. It's far too long, at least an hour too long, and there are far too many indulgences on the part of Tarantino, be it in the form of a pointlessly long scene in a basement which serves little purpose other than to show off how good Diane Kruger and Michael Fassbender are (not that I'm complaining about them, just that the scene itself doesn't really serve any purpose by being so protracted) or the inclusion of Mike Myers in a cameo role that is distracting to a fault.

The main problem with it is that Tarantino seems to be torn over what kind of film he wants to make; he either wants to make an intense, intimate and wordy spy film full of scenes in which language, both verbal and physical, dictate the relationships between the characters and where holding up the wrong fingers can have the most dire consequences, and a rowdy, sleazy exploitation romp in which men get scalped, heads get beat in and history is gleefully re-written to the strains of Morricone songs. He can't decide which to go with, so he tries both, and we end up with a film that lumbers clumsily from one to the other.

Both elements are entertaining in their own ways - the opening scene with Col. Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) talking to a French farmer to discover if he his hiding Jews on his farm is unbearably tense, whilst the scenes of scalping have a gooey, rambunctious charm to them - they just don't mesh together.

The plot strands of the film don't mesh together either. On the one hand, you have the story of Shosanna (Mélanie Laurent), a young Jewish girl who, after escaping from Hans Landa, finds herself running a cinema in Paris and fending off the romantic advances of Fredrick Zoller (Daniel Brühl), a German war hero. Then you have the Basterds themselves who, led by Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) romp the countryside killing Nazis. Admittedly we hardly see them doing this, but apparently they do and they are rather good at it. Then there's Archie Hicox (Michael Fassbender), a British spy who is thrown into the mix, albeit briefly, after being involved in one of the most painfully awful scenes imaginable; Mike Myers gurning away as a British general.

Individually, these threads are fine, but they never feel as if they are part of the same story because they are not interwoven in the same way that (dare I invoke its name?) those of Pulp Fiction were. They all revolve around and wend towards the ridiculous finale, but they never cross paths or suggest that any part of the film requires any other part for the film to work. Its episodic nature, divided as it is into chapters, prevent any sense of cohesion, a problem that is compounded by the way in which the strands are forever kept apart.

It's enjoyable in places, I found myself laughing quite often and there were several scenes that were tense, but as a whole it is only 'OK'. The performances range from excellent (Christoph Waltz, as easily the best character in the film, Michael Fassbender, who out Niven's Niven) to appalling (Eli Roth, who looks like he knows that he can't act so is on the verge of tears throughout, the aforementioned Mike Myers) with varying degrees of quality between those two markers. Overall, though, it just ends up feeling so disparate and unfocused that its redeeming characteristics are undercut by its terrible failings.

Still, at least it’s better than Death Proof.

Reasons To Be Fearful: Shorts

Back-to-back blogging? I'll wear myself out at this rate. Anyway, let's continue with a bit of wittering about Robert Rodriguez's latest kid's flick, Shorts.



Robert Rodriguez is a very interesting guy. His now legendary debut, El Mariachi, which he made for practically nothing, all of which he supposedly raised by subjecting himself to medical experiments, has now passed into the annals of film history. His subsequent career has seen him remake and visit the world of that film twice (as Desperado and Once Upon A Time In Mexico) to diminishing returns, reimagine Invasion of The Bodysnatchers as a high school drama (the hugely under-rated The Faculty) and make a decent film out of the work of Frank Miller (Sin City), inadvertently fooling Frank Miller into thinking he has even the slightest modicum of talent as a director.

However, alongside his adult work (adolescent may seem more appropriate seeing as his films are squarely aimed at those whose development has been assuredly arrested) has been more heralded, his most successful films have been kid's films, specifically The Spy Kids series, which made a terrific amount of money despite costing surprisingly little, and achieving the terrifying goal of putting Danny Trejo in a kid's film. I think the guy is great, but he's got to be the scariest looking good guy you'll ever see. His kid's films are generally typified by bold colours, slightly dodgy effects and for being largely terrible. That trend seems to have continued with his latest, Shorts, which recently opened to massive piles of indifference in the States.

Here's the trailer if you can be bothered.

Now, there is nothing inherently wrong with Shorts, the tale of a kid in a weird town who finds a rock that allows him to make wishes that come true, with hilarious results. It's pretty bland and inoffensive, though the, way in which, the voiceover man, punctuates his, speech does annoy, the hell of out, of me. Seriously, did someone show him The Straight Story and tell him to just talk like Sissy Spacek?

My problems with the film are really to do with Rodriguez, who continues to indulge in these slight and silly films at the expense of doing the films that everyone actually want to see. He's really good at what he does, which is make fun, sleazy genre films that don't take themselves seriously and which pretty much guarantee a good time for all involved. He's hugely talented, often writing, directing, shooting, editing and scoring his own movies, and I have a huge amount of time for him. But not when he does stuff like this.

The film really does seem like something designed to make money, which is ironic seeing how it looks like to do precisely the opposite in the States. Even Spy Kids had a certain charm and vim about it, a sense that he was having fun and doing something a tiny bit personal since he had just become a father, but this just seems like he's realised that Grindhouse didn't make all that money so a cheap kid's film is the way forward if he wants to get Machete, Sin City 2 or his proposed remake of Red Sonja made. It's a calculating exercise in damage limitation that has resulted in a film that everyone seems to be scorning or ignoring. Whether that is fair or not (I know that I'm really not giving it a fair shake, but I don't pretend to be a fair person) is beside the point, it just looks like a false and plastic film. Why this film seems to have been ignored when stuff like G-Force has been embraced does leave me a bit nonplussed, but the occasional good sense of the public does wonders for the soul.

Reasons To Be Cheerful: Where The Wild Things Are

This may be the last weekly Cheerful/Fearful. This is not due to my recent laxness in posting, just the fact that as the weeks have gone on I've found that whilst they are easy to write, Cheerful/Fearful are difficult to research, as my rather strict guidelines for which films should be written about means that I wind up struggling to find films that compliment each other (this is best exemplified by the Jennifer's Body/Sorority Row entry, which is a bit wishy-washy). I think I'll do them monthly from now on as that will give me ample time to choose corresponding films.

Anyway, this week's installment concerns a film that I just could not be more excited about if you paid me (though if anyone would like to pay me to be excited about films then I would be open to any offers), it's Spike Jonze's adaptation of Where The Wild Things Are.



For the longest time I was worried, nay skeptical, about the film version of Maurice Sendak's book, widely acknowledged as a classic. I read it as a child and fell in love with its story of a young boy who creates an imaginary world of creatures (the titular Wild Things) when he is sent to his room. It's an imaginative and evocative story that really spoke to the wide-eyed little bundle of energy and ideas that I was. It seemed impossible to me that a film could capture that sense of wonder and joyous invention.

Then, I saw the Trailer. Needless to say, my skepticism has drowned in a wave of sheer glee.

Much has been written of the trailer, the consensus seems to be that it is one of the most exhilarating of recent times, and I don't think that I can add too much to the debate. I will say, though, that it encapsulates in its 2 minutes and 8 seconds all the joy, hope and fear that we feel as children. It manages, in so short a space of time, to evoke the unfettered imagination of childhood and its scope reflects the boundless horizon that children see in the world around them. If the film fails to deliver, at least it created a trailer that so wonderful recreates the concept of adventure and fun that we only seem to find in childhood.

The most striking thing about the trailer, and the fact that a film has been made out of the book at all, is how big it feels. I re-read the book recently and, aside from being struck by how much of a chord it struck with me a good 15 years or so after I first read it, the most surprising thing about it was how short it was. It's only 40 pages and nothing happens. It doesn't happen in the best possible way, but it's still not exactly an action-packed read.

Reports suggest that Spike Jonze and his co-writer, David Eggers, have got around the problems of there being little actual story by making it about characters, focusing on the relationship between Max (played by the awesomely-named Max Records in the film), his mother (Catherine Keener) and her boyfriend (Mark Effing Ruffalo!) in the real world, and his relationship with the Wild Thing Carol (James Gandolfini, who continues to be one of the greatest people ever). They seem to have found an emotional core around which to build the film and, based on his previous work with films like Being John Malkovich and Adaptation, Jonze seems the right man for the job. He's perhaps more renowned for his visual style but he can handle characters better than most directors and he can really make you feel for them. He even managed it in his music video work, as you can see in his sad and hilarious video for Daft Punk's Da Funk, which is really just a short film that happens to have a Daft Punk song in the background.

The film has had a storied and troubled production, with repeated delays and allegations that Jonze was forced to reshoot scenes after a test screening in which suits (and the men inside them) became worried that the film would be too dark for children, which seems somewhat oxymoronic to me. Criticisms of test footage that was leaked last year have also caused concern, though since the finalised images have started to come out, demonstrating the seamless way in which actors in suits are combined with CGI facial animation these objections seem to have died down.

In the past I've said that a troubled production is not necessarily a bad thing since it can represent a healthy exchange of ideas and the desire of those involved in to get the film just right. Since there doesn't seem to be any animosity coming off the film so far, I'm inclined to believe that Jonze is happy with the film and has produced what he wanted and that we will soon finally be able to see what he has wrought. Here's hoping that it promises everything the trailer does and more. Let the wild rumpus begin!

Filling time and blank spaces

Gah! As you can see, I've fallen a bit behind in my effort to Blog every day for a month (though 21 days in a row isn't to shabby, especially since some of the writing is actually pretty good) but real life has derailed my efforts over the last two days, as much of the weekend was spent drinking and hanging out with friends. In the future, I will try not to let fun in the physical world get in the way.

Anyway, I've not really anything new to say today so, in the interest of getting an entry up and to give me breathing space to catch up tomorrow, I'm just going to post up this short film I made earlier in the year, which I'm surprised I haven't already put up before because I'm a shameless whore who loves to promote himself.

Anyway, this is Tonguetied, a short documentary about my housemate Michaela's attempt to stay silent for a whole 48 hours in aid of comic relief.



This is actually the second of these that we've done and I'm quite proud of it. It's not great, but it's a great deal smoother and focused than the first one we made, Dreadlocked, which I've put below because, since it was the first film I'd ever made, I am quite proud of it and it's pretty funny.



As you can tell from the respective view counts, dreadlocks are apparently much more popular than silence. If only Trappist monks had wi-fi, I'm sure we could boost the numbers for Tonguetied. I feel like the Michael Cimino of YouTube videos. I'll never quite match that early success, though I've yet to make an over long and over budget epic, but we'll see what the rest of the year has to bring.

Anyway, those are two films I made, hopefully you enjoyed that and don't mind too much that there is zero actual content to this entry.

Late Night Bus Journeys and Other Reminiscences

There's been a lot in the news recently, as there always is at this time of year, about AS and A2 Levels and how they are apparently getting easier and easier year after year. It has been five years since I passed my A2 Levels and nearly five years since I started University. Understandably, passing such a milestone has got me contemplating remembrances of things past. I find myself thinking ''What happened to the guys on my corridor in first year?'' ''What happened to that girl I went out with for a bit?'' and ''Where did all the time go?''

The amount of hours clocked up on Paper Mario and Resident Evil 4 partly answers the last question, and in the age of Facebook the first two questions are no longer such an imposing proposition. In times past, it would take several phone calls, letters or e-mails to track down someone you used to know, at which point you could start a correspondence. Now, if you find them and add them as a friend, there's no such compulsion to get back in contact with them. It's so immediate that the contact becomes less meaningful.

Anyway, I'm really getting off-topic here since the merits of Facebook aren't what I want to discuss, this is just a pre-amble to establish that I am in a maudlin, decidedly Proustian mood today and, with nothing else to write about and a deadline to meet, I've decided to give writing an actual blog-style post, rather than a review, a go. I hope you will humour me in this endeavour.

Let me start from the beginning, which is, wonderfully paradoxically, the end, chronologically speaking. Yesterday was my day off and I had nothing pressing to do in the morning, so I watched Sleuth, starring Sir Laurence Olivier and (future-Sir) Michael Caine. I liked the film an awful lot, as my review will testify, but today I found myself feeling oddly dissatisfied about it. This has nothing to do with the film (or at least it does not stem directly from the film) but rather the way in which I chose to watch it; at home, on my own.

This is not my preferred way of viewing films, it's just that I tend to want to watch films that I know my housemates won't want to and we have wildly different shifts at our respective works (I work odd days and occasional nights, they can often be found working between 5 and 17 hours in a lab), so it's rare that we can all sit down and watch a film together.

My preferred way of viewing films is in a cinema or at home with friends so that we can discuss the film afterwards, and Sleuth is a film that begs to be discussed. It's an intricate film that repeatedly pulls the rug out from under the audience, and being unable to discuss it with other people is hugely frustrating to me since it's a film that you just can't discuss with people who haven't seen it without completely ruining it. That's the case with many films, obviously, but any film with the sort of jaw-dropping twists and surprises that Sleuth involves is more or less completely ruined if you discuss any part of the film other than the opening 45 minutes.

The act of watching a film then discussing it is very important to me. I feel that half of the enjoyment of film is watching it and the other half is in the discussion of it, though those respective values increase or decrease dependent on the quality of the film, i.e, a terrible film will be proportionally more fun to talk about than to actually watch. I have often found myself talking with people for hours after watching a film, which is why I generally like to walk home after seeing a film, rather than getting a taxi. It allows for a greater amount of time spent discussing the minutiae of the plot and the pluses and minuses of the film as a whole.

Now we get to the memory part.

My love of discussing film, in fact my love of film in general, stems from my teenage years, when I started going to films with my friends, rather than my family. This may not sound like much of an undertaking, but you need to understand that my formative years were largely spent in a small village in the Midlands named Market Bosworth, most famous for being situated near where Richard III offered his kingdom for a horse and lost both. The only options for seeing films were the Odeon, Vue (nee Warner Village) and the Phoenix Arts in Leicester - which, incidentally, is one of the best independent cinemas in the country. My quaint, parochial BBC sitcom adolescence and bittersweet Judd Apatow teenage years were spent with this as their backdrop.

Being fifteen and living in a small outlying village, whilst all your friends lived in similar outlying villages, and being unable to drive meant that you had to take a bus journey that lasted 50 minutes, then walk 30 minutes to get to whichever cinema you wanted to go to ("That's nothing, in my day, we had to travel four days on a bus, sitting on broken glass, then walk for a week to the cinema, which only had one seat and showed nothing but Irvin Allen movies"). This left plenty of time for talk and banter, and made the journeys home after the film rife for riffing on the films we had just seen.

We would dissect the films for over an hour at a time, poking and prodding, arguing and venting as we chose sides and debated whether the film was any good or not as we waited for our stops, then we'd say goodbye to one or two and continue until the bus reached its destination and we walked home, giddy from the evening's entertainment and intellectually drained from our verbal jousts.

In the years since these bus rides, so late at night and full of energy, I've taken to visiting internet forums and debating there, I currently work at an independent cinema and there is no shortage of lively debate there, and I have a generally quite argumentative attitude towards the discussion of film, but they've never thrilled me in quite the same way as the ones I had when I was 15, riding on an over-priced, crappy bus service with some of the best friends I've ever had. I do miss those days.

Sleuth (1972)

You're a jumped up pantry boy who doesn't know his place!



Games, toys and playthings play a central role in Sleuth; the film opens with a series of grotesque paintings of plays which, due to their high angles and composition, makes them seem like stills of marionette theatre; at one point the camera drifts through the house of Andrew Wyke, an aristocratic crime novelist, showing us his collection of hundreds of clockwork toys, from a laughing mannequin to a bear that drinks water from a jug; and, most importantly, the film revolves around a sly and serpentine game of misdirection and deception, carried out by Wyke against Milo Tindle, the young man who seeks to marry his estranged wife.

The 'game' starts when Wyke proposes that Milo should break into his house, steal some expensive jewelery, then fence it. Milo would gain a considerable amount of money as a result, whilst Wyke would get far more from the insurance company. Milo agrees, and the game begins, with Wyke playing the role of mater puppeteer, orchestrating the perfect crime, but what crime does he wish to commit?

Sleuth is a story about human malignancy, about our endless capacity for cruelty and deceit. This is not apparent right off the bat, as the film opens with Wyke, played by Laurence Olivier, dictating a manuscript for his latest novel in the centre of a hedge maze whilst Milo, played by Michael Caine, tries to find a way to him. The film proceeds at a similarly off-kilter pace for some time as tension between the two men broils and bubbles, barely hidden by their barded remarks and reciprocating witticisms. However, once Wyke makes his proposal, the film takes on a subtly darker edge. Even as the two engage in roleplay when choosing a costume for Milo to wear and they continue to offer up jokes to each other, there is a sense that all can not be as it seems; the crime is too easily carried off, the cover-up so well formed that there must be more to it than what appears on the surface. Wyke goads Milo with racist attacks on his Italian heritage, referring to him as a 'Wap' and 'Dago', he visualises the crime much too keenly and derives far too much pleasure from his own concoction, treating crime fact as crime fiction, forever the author, never the character.

Anthony Schaffer (who also wrote The Wicker Man) adapted his play for the cinema and, although there are some external shots of Wyke's vast country manor, it feels very much like a play. There are only ever two characters on screen, be it a combination of Milo, Wykes or the policeman who investigates them, and there exchanges are noticeably verbose and theatrical. The sudden shifts in tone from sentence to sentence, one moment deadly serious the next light and delivered in a cod-German accent, suggest its origins on the boards and the high-energy that the leads bring to their respective roles seem to be for the benefit of anyone sitting in The Gods, rather than for the audience in a cinema who won't have trouble hearing them.

This could all distract and make for a wooden adaptation but it works thanks to the two great central performers who, quite rightly, both received Best Actor nods for their work. As I've said, the two deliver their lines with an energy and intonation that is theatrical and somewhat inappropriate, given the medium, but both underpin their exuberance with steel, and they hurl abuse and jokes at each other with such wanton abandon that their theatricality passes by relatively unnoticed. Both know that their character is distrustful of the other, if not downright hateful of them, and their outward energy always serves as a disguise to how they are really feeling. This makes the moments when their masks fall away all the more effective as we see that malignancy and bile that I alluded to early.

Allusions abound in this review, which is pretty much solely because I can't talk about the film in any detail without spoiling it, to some degree. Whilst the characters play a game with each other, the film plays a game with the audience, taunting us and teasing us. Joseph L. Mankiewicz doesn't direct the film so much as misdirect it, pointing us one way only to come up on us from behind, delivering twists and surprises that make the film so thoroughly thrilling. To talk about it to much is too ruin it, since you can not enjoy this game if you know the rules.

Play the game, enjoy the ride, worry about humanity.

Intacto

Place your bets.



Luck. An ephemeral notion that some believe governs our lives, and that everyone is imbued with a certain amount of it, whilst others create their own. But what if it could be made tangible and transferable? What if people could trade luck, or bet for it?

That is the central idea behind Intacto, the debut feature by Spanish director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo. In this world, people can steal the luck of other people by touching them, taking a photo of someone captures their luck and makes it transferable, and a secret organisation of thrill seekers and gambling enthusiasts engage in games of chance in order to acquire more luck for themselves.

Such a outlandish central concept might be difficult to take, were it not for the skillful way in which Fresnadillo introduces us to his ideas, establishing very early on how serious luck is to his characters, and the lengths they will go in order to obtain it. Federico (Eusebio Poncela) works for The Jew (Max von Sydow), who lives in a casino and reigns as one of the chief collectors of luck in the world. Federico finds challengers for him so that he can test his luck in the most dangerous means possible. Years of this has begun to weigh on Federico's conscience and he wants out, but The Jew won't let him leave without first stealing his luck and leaving him beaten and broken at the side of a road.

Years pass, and Federico has spent his time trying to find someone to finally take down his former employer. He uses his connections with an insurance agency to find survivors of terrible accidents and trains them in how to use their luck. After one such trainee is killed in a car accident, Federico finds himself despondent and at a loose end, until Tomas (Leonardo Sbaraglia), the lone survivor of a plane crash falls into his lap. Unfortunately, Tomas is a wanted criminal, and the two have to go on the run, pursued by Sara (Mónica López), a cop with a tragic past, and they have to work to acquire enough luck to finally take down The Jew.

As we see, from very early on the film ensures that we are aware of the consequences of winning and losing luck. The violence meted out to Federico, the death of his protégé, and the mere fact that Tomas survives when hundreds of others around him perish, tell us that luck is a serious business. This gives Fresnadillo and his co-writer, Andrés M. Koppel , license to slowly increase the stakes of the competitions as we become more engrossed in Federico and Tomas' journey for revenge. They start off small, with contestants smearing their heads with molasses and seeing which of them an insect will land on, and gradually builds and builds until we are watching people running blindfolded through a forest.

Intacto is a difficult film to pin down. It refuses to stick to any single genre, encompassing aspects of several without wholly embracing any of them. The very idea of the film has shades of science fiction to it, yet the film utilises a fervently realist approach to its visual style that, whilst doesn't necessarily contradict the fantastical idea, goes a long way to establish its believability. There are also definite thriller elements to it, with Federico and Tomas' cross-country escape from the law making for moments of tension, yet we never feel as if that is the main thrust of the film, serving primarily to establish the relationships between the characters (they also make for one of the most visually striking images of the film; as Tomas lies sleeping by a pool, we see hints of red and blue light playing over the surface, announcing the arrival of the police in a subtle, lyrical moment). Finally, the story seems to be a standard hero's journey, with a definite beginning end, a protagonist and an antagonist, yet the film doesn't seem to side with anyone. No one is wholly good, all have definite darkness and cruelty in their past, and no one is wholly bad, even von Sydow gets to deliver a moving speech detailing why he does what he does.

Intacto is an intelligent film that takes an obtuse idea that could easily have been ludicrous or incomprehensible and makes it both practical and exciting. At a time when people are crying out for science fiction films that are driven by ideas and delivered with crowd pleasing aplomb, you owe it to yourself to discover this lost curiosity.

Open Hearts (Elsker dig for evigt)

Dogme #28



Getting hit by a car is hard. I don't mean actually getting hit by a car is hard, though I'm sure that it's not a cakewalk, but rather that realising a car accident on screen is difficult. It's rare to find an example that gets across the shock and sheer, out of the blue terror that one entails.

The Danish film Open Hearts, directed by Susanne Bier, is one such example, as the action of the film is kicked off by a sudden and horrific accident in which Joachim (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) is run over by Marie (Paprika Steen) right in front of his fiancee, Cecily (Sonja Richter). Wracked with guilt, Marie encourages her husband, Niels (Mads Mikkelsen), a doctor at the hospital where Joachim is being treated, to talk to and comfort Cecily. It is not long before Niels develops feelings of love for Cecily, and the relationships of everyone involved are thrown into turmoil.

I may be making a grave error in naming Bier as the director, since it is a Dogme film and acknowledging her role as a director is in contravention of the very nature of the Dogme 95 movement. However, as fun as it might be to indulge that slightly juvenile conceit, films do not magically appear. Someone has to direct them, Susanne Bier directed Open Hearts, and Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg will just have to live with that.

I've often been... 'dismissive' is too strong a word, but I've certainly been unresponsive to Dogme films in the past. I absolutely adore the concept and think that it can create great work, but often it produces films that are cold and self-conscious. Open Hearts is the first example I've found of a Dogme film that genuinely hit me on an emotional level. This may be because it breaks some of the fundamental Dogme rules (non-diagetic music is used, 'theatre blood' is used and the beginning and end are created using a thermal imaging camera), thereby breaking free from the same restrictions that have distanced me from past efforts, but I think what is more important is that it is does not draw attention to its aesthetic in the way that most Dogme films do. Too often with Dogme films, the stories are subservient to the method, producing films like Lars von Trier's 'The Idiots' that are the exact opposite of what the movement seeks to create; they try so hard to be 'real' that they feel self-conscious and fake.

Bier never lets her chosen aesthetic get in the way of her story, and that is why the aesthetic actually makes the film feel real, rather than just an idle experiment. Bier utilises the raw feel of Dogme film-making to immerse us in the lives of the characters. There is an almost documentary feel to the film, as if we are watching a real group of people struggling through a time of intense personal trauma, and this immerses us wholly in the story and making the melodramatic aspects of the central narrative, which is soap opera-esque when written down, seem utterly plausible.

Much of this plausibility is down to the actors, all of whom do amazing and subtle work, conveying the anguish of their characters in ways that are in keeping with the rest of the film. Every character has light and shade to them, some such as Joachim, who goes from charming and impish in the first scene to bitter and angry after his accident, are more obviously shaded but then again he is the character who goes through the greatest change over the course of the film, both physically and emotionally. Mads Mikkelson and Sonja Richter, as Niels and Cecily, have to carry the film and both of them give career-best performances. Richter makes Cecily completely endearing, even when her cloying desperation with Joachim could be insufferable. You find yourself wanting her to get everything together and realise who she should be with.

It is Mikkelson, though, who shines through as Niels. He plays him as a man who is almost reluctantly falling in love, a man who loves his wife and children, but who has met someone who may be his soul mate under the most tragic and unfortunate circumstances. It’s heartbreaking to see him torn between all the people he loves, yet you completely emphasise with him because he’s so vulnerable.

Apparently, Zach Braff has been shepherding a remake, which he will write and direct, towards some stage of production for several years. It is imperative that as many people as possible see Open Hearts before that base and contemptible event happens. To miss out on this film is to miss out on something sublime, don't wait until J.D. gets his hands on it.

Apocalypto

I am Jaguar Paw. This is my forest. And I am not afraid.


There is a temptation when discussing Mel Gibson's Apocalypto to tear it apart to throw the harsh light of history on its many inaccuracies and anachronisms. However, searching for historical accuracy in a Mel Gibson film is like trying to find healthy food at KFC; you won't find it, and you'd be better off looking elsewhere. Gibson has a storied history of mixing fact and fiction to crowd-pleasing effect, with the likes of Braveheart and The Patriot surviving the polemics of a thousand history professors to be successful and loved. Let's leave questions of accuracy behind us since they really are beside the point.

Apocalypto is a surprisingly (or unsurprisingly, considering who is behind the camera) volatile film that actively resists being pinned down as any single kind of film. If anything, it's four or five films. It goes through stages of being a broad comedy; an horrific fever dream as our hero, a young Mayan warrior named Jaguar Paw (Ruby Youngblood) is taken from his village and marched through the jungle, witnessing acts of cruelty and terror; a Bacchanalian orgy of blood and evisceration; an hour long chase sequence as he tries to return home to his pregnant wife and child; and First Blood with even lower technology as he fights for his life. It's a mix of styles and ideas that could overwhelm the film but, against all the odds, it fits together perfectly. Each scene, whether it is just a group of hunters talking after a kill, or a grand shot of thousands of baying Mayans standing at the bottom of a temple as a grand priest sacrifices men and cuts out their hearts, feels at home and the drive of the story is never allowed to droop or slow thanks to the guiding hand of Mel Gibson.

In light of his extra-curricular activities, which at one point seemed poised to turn him into the next Charlton Heston, and not in a good way, Mel Gibson's abilities as a film-maker are often overshadowed. Lest we forget, this is the man who somehow made a brutally violent film about Jesus and turned it into one of the most successful independent films of all time. That's the sort of success even Cecil B. Demille wouldn't have expected from a Bible picture. It's easy to characterise the success of that earlier film as solely the result of Gibson courting the Christian Right, but that is to completely ignore how good of a film it is. It's an unpleasant watch, certainly, but there is a confidence and a raw, visceral power to it that lifts it up.

That same confidence suffuses Apocalypto from beginning to end. Even it's title, Mel Gibson's Apocalypto, speaks volumes about his sense of self-possession; it's not a film by Mel Gibson, it is Mel Gibson's. His camera moves with a power and purpose that few directors can match. It's a very masculine style of directing that distinctly says that this is a film about men. It's got a tremendous physicality to it, its violence has an immediacy and an intimacy that many modern action films lack. The crunch of club on bone, the liquidity of a spear piecing someone's side, it all serves to put the audience right in there with the flailing bodies.

Despite being over two hours long, its a surprisingly economical film. It never lingers too long on a scene and, even in the early scenes in which we witness a man being tricked into eating tapir testicles, we never get a sense that the film is just killing time until the plot kicks in. These early scenes introduce us to the characters and help us acclimatise to a world that has long since passed into memory. This does lead to some horribly contrived dialogue about a mother-in-law wanting grandchildren that seems tailormade to appease an American audience, but I've already said my piece about historical accuracy so we'll just ignore that.

Once he's got us in the world of the Maya, Gibson throws everything we've seen before out the window, leaving us as disorientated as Jaguar Paw, and from there on in we are never given an opportunity to get our feet back on the ground, right through to the somewhat overcooked finale.

It's a vibrant, violent film which displays a bravura flair for the extravagant on the part of Gibson. He may very well have lost his marbles, but if he can keep occasionally making films like this, I'm happy for them to stay lost.

Trailer

Reasons to be Fearful: Dorian Gray

After writing about the upcoming adaptation of a noth [articularly good yesterday, today I will be writing about the forthcoming new adaptation of Oscar Wilde's classic tale of vanity and moral turpitude, Dorian Gray.

On the face of it, I should be excited about the prospect of this film, there's a lot on display that should appeal to me. The director, Oliver Parker, has previously directed two pretty solid adaptations of Wilde's plays, An Ideal Husband in 1995 and The Importance of Being Earnest in 2002, though he did also direct the St Trinian's remake and its forthcoming sequel (and, fans of Clive Barker will be glad to hear, he played Workman 2 in both Hellraiser and Hellbound: Hellraiser 2, a mighty pedigree indeed) but for the purposes of this article I'll ignore them to focus on the fact that he has directed some genuinely good flms in the past and it is clear that he has some genuinely affection and affinty for the work of Oscar Wilde.

The cast also has me interested. Mr. Gray himself is being portrayed by Ben Barnes, who despite not being in anything in which he has had to act all that much, most notably as the titular Prince Caspian in the second Narnia film, has received good notices and shows potential. It also stars the lovely, lovely, lovely Rebecca Hall, who is one of my favourite young British actresses.

The most intriguing piece of casting is that of Colin Firth as Lord Henry Wotton, the man who introduces Dorian to the hedonistic pleasures of London, setting in motion the events that will lead to him becoming eternally young and monstrous. Firth has become typecast as the cuddly character in romantic comedies, so seeing him play something with a bit of edge to him will make a nice change from his usual fare.

And finally, I love the book. The Picture of Dorian Gray is one of my very favourite novels and is a watershed moment in British literature. It's a novel that manages to be funny and witty, as Wilde's best work is, yet pioses pointed questions about life and the pursuit of pleasure as one's sole purpose. It's an amazing novel.

Which is my main problem with prospects of the film version. The novel is so rich and funny and complex that I just don't think that a decent version can be made, regardless of how good the cast are. If the belief that it is easy to make a good film out of a bad book holds true, then the reverse is just as, if not more true. With great works of literature, film-makers are often unwilling to make changes or to truly adapt the story for the new medium, venerating it too much to make substantial changes. This approach is often counter-productive since it fails to take advantage of the techniques that are uniquely cinematic, instead using editing, performances and music as garnish for the text, when all the aspects should be interwoven. Parker's work has been good in the past because he has been adapting plays, which as an artform is much closer to film-making than the novel is.

Maybe the strength of the source will win out, but I am dubious, to say the least.

Reasons to be Cheerful: The Lovely Bones

Alice Sebold's 'The Lovely Bones' is not a good book. It's an interesting idea - a young girl looks down from Heaven to watch her family cope with the aftermath of her murder, as well the hunt for her killer - that too often indulges in grandiose statements about the nature of existence. It's a banal exercise in faux-intellectualism wrapped up in the sort of pretty precious prose that guaranteed it a place of honour in Richard and Judy's Book Club.

If I have such antipathy towards the source, why then am I so excited about the film version? Two words: Peter Jackson.



The New Zealand director behind The Lord of The Rings Trilogy, as well as a diverse filmography that covers zombie splatterfests, sweary puppets, killer teens and wacky ghosts, has directed the film and I have a great deal of faith in him as a film-maker. He is one of the few film-makers currently working who understands how to ground fantasy in a real world and who can combine spectacle with emotion. The Lovely Bones seems tailor made to his sensibilities, encompassing the aspects of horror, mystery and vaguely supernatural drama that characterised his 1994 masterpiece, Heavenly Creatures, but which also allows him to display his visual talents and love of effects, as evidenced in the picture of Susie Salmon's 'Heaven' above, and in the trailer:

You can view the trailer at the official site for the film

The few glimpses we get of heaven suggest that Jackson and his team have let their imaginations go wild with this one; shifting landscapes, a field of stars and flowers that unfurl under giant ice-sculptures. If nothing else, the film promises to be a visual feast.

Jackson and his co-writers, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, also have a history of turning books that aren't that great into terrific films, as evidenced by their sterling work in turning Tolkien's hugely imaginative but languidly paced and turgid tome into three wonderful films. Turning Sebold's novel into a workable film should be a snap for them after that mammoth undertaking.

The mere fact that The Lovely Bones is a bad book may play into the film's favour, There is a long and storied history of bad books being turned into good or great films. Orson Welles quite famously took on the book Badge of Evil, a book he considered terrible, to prove that he could make a great film from a substandard book. The film he made was Touch of Evil, one of Welles' finest films and a strong contend for one the best entries into the film noir genre. If the adage that a bad book could be turned into a great film holds true, then The Lovely Bones could wind up being a classic.

It's also got an amazing cast. Saoirse Ronan, who shot onto the scene as a young girl who does a terrible thing in Atonement, plays Susie, the girl whose murder sparks off the events of the story; Mark Walhberg and Rachel Weisz play her parents; Susan Sarandon plays her grandmother; and Stanley Tucci plays her murderer. That's a hell of a collection of character actors, and that's before we even mention that further down the cast list we have Michael Imperioli (Christopher from The Sopranos) and Thomas McCarthy (writer-director of The Station Agent). That much talent should hopefully be able to bring the rather limp narrative to life.

I still have reservations about the film; early problems such as Ryan Gosling backing out from playing the father over creative differences, and rumours that production was stopped due to Jackson fighting with his art director, suggest that it may not have been the happiest shoot (then again, history is littered with great films that emerged from the unhappiest circumstances). And, of course, I am still worried that all the talent in the world could not make a good film out of a bad book (then again, I'm sure people didn't think you could make a good film out of say, The Godfather). We live in hope, as always.

Mesrine: Killer Instinct

No-one kills me until I say so



There is a history in French cinema of fetishising American culture, appropriating their styles and iconography to their own ends, often doing it much better. This is most apparent in their adoption of the film noir genre as their own, as seen in the early films of the New Wave period, such as Breathless and Shoot The Piano, two noir-ish tales that put a Gallic slant on the gangster picture. In a summer that saw the anaemic Public Enemies, it only seems appropriate that a full-blooded gangster film should come from France, in the form of Jean-Francois Richet's 'Mesrine: Killer Instinct'.

A loose biopic of Jacques Mesrine (Vincent Cassel), one of the most famous and notorious criminals of the post-war period, it follows Mesrine from his beginnings as a veteran of the struggles in Algeria who gets drawn into a life of petty crime, through his gradual indoctrination into the seedy underworld inhabited by the likes of Guido (Gerard Depardieu) and his eventual escape to Canada after he started robbing the wrong people. All of this takes place in just under two hours, making for a rather breathless experience.

Killer Instinct deals with many of the same ideas and motifs as Public Enemies, but it handles them in a much more deft and interesting way. Much like John Dillinger, Jacques Mesrine is a man who commits crimes almost for the thrill of it, both achieve a level of notoriety, even celebrity from their crimes, and both have great difficulty deciding whether to continue with that life or to settle down and pursue a new course. Both also feature, amongst other things, bank robberies and prison breaks, but whilst Public Enemies revels in the complexities of them, Mesrine approaches them in a sublimely simple way. If you want to break out of prison, why not just wait until the guards are hungover and cut the wires in the fence in broad daylight? This simple audacity marks not only Mesrine as a character, but also Mesrine as a film.

Richet's film manages to encompass a great many themes about France in the latter half of the 20th century. We are first introduced to Mesrine at the end of his life, as he is about to be gunned down by the French Secret Service, before the film takes us back to 1959, when Jacques is a soldier fighting against the rebels in Algeria. Already, we get a sense of France's shameful colonial past as Jacques is ordered to beat a man for answers, then is told to shoot the man's sister in order to get him to reveal the location of a bomb. Later on, when we are introduced to Guido, passing mention is made to Charles de Gaulle's 'Secret Army', suggesting that some of Guido's activities may have been sanctioned by the government, and the film is rife with references to the period and the confusion that existed in France in the early-50s and 60s.

Killer Instinct meticulously recreates the style of the eras it inhabits without obsessing over. It may evoke the calm cool mystique of the time, and the films that defined that era, but it does not dwell on them or try to emulate them, instead being happy to let them serve as dressing to its own story.

It would run the risk of being a mere indulgence in cool if it weren't for Mesrine himself, who is a fascinating character. Rife with inconsistencies and complexities, he's an all too human character. His relationship with women, in particular, often does a volte-face from tender and loving to ambivalent. Early in the film, we see Mesrine wreak bloody vengeance on a pimp who has badly disfigured a whore that Mesrine was seeing, displaying a distorted chivalry in his belief that a real man would not hit a woman. Later, however, when his wife Sofia (Elena Anaya) threatens to call the police to stop Jacques from going out and committing crimes, he beats her and shoves a gun in her mouth, revealing that he would always side with his friends if he had to make the choice between them and her, which contrasts sharply with early scenes in which he is shown to be a loving husband who is trying to go straight for the sake of his young family.

He's also very charming and cool. He's the sort of man who, after robbing one bank, would agree to rob another right across the street since he would have just enough time before the cops arrived. The sort of man who, when interrupted in the middle of robbing a house by the owners, would pretend to be a police officer investigating the scene of the crime. He's a smooth operator, yet also a clearly terrible person that the film shows little interest in redeeming. This dichotomy would not be possible without Vincent Cassel in the lead role.

Vincent Cassel absolutely dominates the film - as well he should, given the title - as Jacques Mesrine, displaying an ability to encapsulate two separate, opposing ideas at the same time. The script gives Mesrine his complexity and duality, but it is Cassel who is able to make him into a believable character, making Mesrine seem human, rather than a collection of anachronisms.

It's difficult to judge Killer Instinct since it is only the first part of the story, with the second part, Public Enemy No. 1, due for release next month. The very nature of this style of storytelling prevents the film from having any real sense of resolution, though it does at least offer up a defining final moment, rather than just a cliff-hanger followed by ''to be continued''. However, as a singular entity is a fine film and I was left slavering for more.

Observez l'annonce

The Strain

By Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan



A Boeing 777 lands at John F. Kennedy airport with its lights off and no response coming from the cockpit. Dr. Ephraim Goodweather of the C.D.C. (Contagious Diseases Center) is called in to investigate. Once they open the plane, they discover that everyone inside, barring a few survivors, is dead, with most of them exsanguinated; drained of their blood. Goodweather and his team try to uncover the cause of this mysterious plague, only to find that some of the corpses have started to change, physically, and are coming back to life in search of sustenance.

I love Guillermo del Toro. Whether he's making small, Spanish-language offerings or huge Hollywood affairs, he brings a huge and unquenchable imagination to them, conjuring up images and ideas that are truly breathtaking. Now, he turns his hand to a novel, co-written by Chuck Hogan, that deals with a subject that his dealt with in two of his films; vampires.

Originally planned as a television series, a detailed procedural akin to The Wire, but with vampires, The Strain is a hugely imaginative, if occasionally sluggishly written, entry into the recently revived genre of vampire fiction. Of course, by dint of being a vampire novel, does owe a lot to Dracula - the opening chapters, in which a plane lands at J.F.K. with seemingly no one left alive on board, deliberately evoke the image of the wraithlike Demeter running aground at Whitby - it stands more in the tradition of Richard Matheson and his seminal work, I Am Legend. Del Toro and Hogan take a deliberate and methodical approach to the nature of vampirism, providing possible explanations for their weaknesses, the ways in which their digestive systems work and how the disease spreads from person to person.

The authors try something new with the vampire, or at least something different. The vampires are not swarthy, lustful types, they appear to be little more than savage beasts driven by their hunger, turning people into their own kind left and right in search of food. The descriptions of these creatures, with a vicious stinger that comes out of their necks, rather than the traditional elongated canines, is vivid and terrifying. They seem just human enough, but with that extra, oddly phallic detail to through things off. It's refreshing, after all the years of cultured, slightly wimpish vampires that we've seen and read about, to read something in vampires are truly malevolent beings that destroy things with no regard or notion of what they are doing.

By having Goodweather work for the C.D.C. the authors are given ample opportunities to pontificate on how vampires could exist in a rational world of science. Their attention to detail and the ceaseless logic of their approach heightens the terror at the heart of the novel by making it seem plausible, at least within the world of the novel. Drawing upon contemporary fears of biological warfare, pandemics and the inability of governments to protect their people, Del Toro and Hogan give their work an urgency that could easily be found in a 'straight' crime novel or the sort of science gone awry cautionary tales that the late Michael Crichton used to do so well.

However, this very same approach to the subject matter is occasionally the downfall of the novel since it can make some passages seem terribly dry, and information is sometimes repeated, to no great gains. The minutiae of how a group like the C.D.C. would work drag and stand in stark contrast to the wildly imaginative creations that are the vampires and the breathtaking pace at which some of the book progresses.

The disparate focus of the book is also an issue. After the plane is emptied of its cargo of dead and nearly dead passengers, the corpses start coming back to life, whilst those left alive slowly find themselves hungering for blood. The book follows each of the ''survivors'' as they return to their homes, as well as the lives of people who happen upon the walking dead, and in trying to encompass all these narratives Del Toro and Hogan wind up delivering stories that are rather samey.

Some of them are amazing, though. One involving a woman who keeps her turned husband locked up in the shed at the back of their house because she can't bear to lose him, is by turns horrific, moving and deeply unsettling. These moments are too rare, though, as the sublime is often surrounded by marshes of workmanlike writing that, whilst perfectly fine, often doesn't match the imagination that drives the book along.

Its the first entry in a trilogy, with the subsequent books following annually, and even with my misgivings about the mechanics of the plot, the scope of the story and the power of its imaginings has me positively salivating at the prospect of future installments. The book ends of a definite cliff-hanger, and if the titles of the second book, The Fall, is anything to go by, it seems that things will only get darker as time goes on. I can't wait to sink my teeth into it.