Hidden
My friend Janine said this film was silly, but the Timey Outey enthused about it to the point of uncoolness, so I thought I might give it a look. It's about a Parisian couple who get sent surveillance tapes of their house. It's all very slow and intense and well acted, but unfortunately it doesn't end up meaning anything, so it's like going to a posh dinner party where they have nice plates and expensive wine and everyone sits around bickering like hell.
Janine was right about this film. It gets the coveted art-
shit rating. I forget which Douglas Coupland novel has the scene where the characters sit around discussing the merits of subtitled films, and one of them suggests that they are good because you can watch five of them in a couple of hours on fast forward. But that is just the sort of attention this film repays.
V for Vendetta: A Warning from History
I’m sorry, I’m not going to watch this film, you can tell it’s going to be
shit. How? Well, from the adverts, I was under the impression that the Wachowski brothers had directed this film, and you might have been too. But this is not true, some no-name, Tesco-value director has taken care of the helming duties. The Wachowski brothers merely have production and writing credits. It is never a good idea to go and see a film because of who produced it. It is sometimes a good idea to go and see a film because of who the writer is, but only if the writer is Charlie Kaufman.
Alan Moore, who did the original comic book, took his name off the credits in a big huff, and it looks like the Wachowski brothers pretty much did the same thing, only the studio realised this was the only way it could sell a shit film, so it splashed their names all over the marquee anyway. It's like turning up on your blind date to find that the Portman or Pitt-alike you had been promised is in reality an untidy old mouthbreather.
Together
This is the second film by Lukas Moodysson, and it's a cracker. I saw this when it came out at the cinema, and I watched it again on DVD because I was full of bird flu or something like that. It's a lovely comedy, which starts off really bleak with scenes of heavy drinking, wife-beating, and deranged hippies. As the beaten wife leaves home to go and join her brother in the weirdo commune to the strains of ABBA, you can see her kids' worlds collapse. It is just awful. Well, it gets better in unexpected ways and by the end of the film you think living in a commune would not be so bad. We never had a TV until 1982 either (so that my dad could watch the World Cup, bless him) so certain bits of this film seem freakily familiar, too.
Any film which you can enjoy twice has got to be pretty
good, and this is no exception. With regards to the rest of the Moodysson output, I haven't seen Show Me Love (aka Fucking Amal) yet but hopefully my DVD people will send it to me soon. Lilja 4-Ever is
good, but only just. Bad things about it are: there is more Rammstein in it than in xXx,
and it is depressing. I have not seen his most recent one, Hole in my Heart, but it is
shit. Some films you really don't need to watch, and you don't need to watch this one. Trust me or not, but if you watch it, you will find that I am right. It is like not putting the scorpions in your mouth. And that is it, that is all the films that Lukas Moodysson has made, I hope he gets better soon.
Aeon Flux
When you start watching this film, a load of guff comes up on the screen about how in 2011, a plague comes and wipes out 99% of the earth’s population, and since then everyone else has been shrunk down to the size of an atom and they all live in a discarded Burger King container or something. I wasn’t really paying too much attention but you get the idea. Well, at this point you know it’s not just your phone, it’s also your brain that you should switch onto silent mode.
This film aims low but it still misses. Apparently Charlize Theron won an Oscar a few years ago but you could never tell, there’s absolutely no acting required. I wondered if they were going to CGI it in over the top but it looks like they forgot. Frances McDormand is in it as well, the sum total of her acting is to get her voice vocodered, like that Madonna album from the 90s. There isn’t any dialogue, the characters just spout chunks of narcissistic exposition ("you’re the greatest assassin in the world, Aeon" "yes, I am") at one another. And there are absolutely no jokes or humour whatsoever.
On the more girly side of things, Charlize has a stupid haircut, and there are not enough costume changes. All the fights look like they’ve been copied from the cut scenes of the computer game of the film, or maybe it’s the other way around, it blends into the same thing. I was quite disappointed with this film, and although you get to see La Theron’s boobs, she could be entirely in the altogether throughout and it would not save it from being
shit.
