One Word Movie

Portico Quartet

2008-08-20T13:15:00.000-07:00

In April 2007 I wrote a review of Distant Voices, Still Lives, which very firmly got the shit rating. But after I'd walked out I saw a band busking out by the National Theatre which equally firmly got the good rating. And when I got back from holiday I found out the band in question, the Portico Quartet, had been nominated for the Mercury Music prize. So well done them. I mean, it's not like they're going to win but it's nice to see people with talent all growed up and doing well.

Hopefully Chris Dent will get nominated for the Turner Prize in a couple of years time and then I'll be able to take 6 months off work!

Thank you and goodnight

2008-02-25T13:39:00.000-08:00

Hello there, I am a bit bored of doing one word movie reviews, well I will still do them in my head but I don't feel the need to post them on the world wide web any more. If you would like to avoid shit movies in future you should a) avoid any film which is not 300 that has a number in the title and b) any film with Jude Law in it.

That should massively cut your chances down.

If you are interested in looking at some of my photographs then please go here, otherwise thanks for reading xx cp

Blade Runner: The Final Cut

2007-12-26T18:21:00.000-08:00

I don't care about the proliferation of different versions of Blade Runner - it's a good film, obviously, but it's not Ulysses. The changes are pretty minimal in any case - the only one I noticed was that Rutger Hauer says "I want more life, father" when he kills Tyrell, as opposed to the more Withnialian original. Which is a shame, because I used to enjoy imagining him shambling around drinking bottles of Haut Brion from the 50s while complaining that the Tannhauser Belt wasn't what it used to be.

Anyway, I didn't think it was that great a film. I don't know if it's because I've seen it, like, infinity times, but I'm not particularly interested if Deckard is a replicant any more. Although when I was a kid that seemed like one of the most amazing conspiracies which turned out to be true - a bit like Skull and Bones, for instance. And I don't rate his pulling technique either.

What I would like to know is why none of the action happens in the horizontal plane. It's almost like a visual tic that they are always getting in flying cars, or running up stairs, and you could make quite a big list of all the times that there are lifts in the movie. I wrote quite a pretentious essay about that in one of my finals papers, and while it's something that's certainly observable in the film, I couldn't come up with a good reason why. So if you have any good ideas that don't involve the word "stratification" I would like to hear them.

Silent Light

2007-12-23T02:19:00.000-08:00

Although this film is about 2 and a quarter hours long, it's so minimalist that there's only about 150 cuts in it, and I reckon all the dialogue would fit onto a couple of sides of A4. Even in Big Font. It's about a man in a Mennonite community in Mexico who's bowling in the next lane over, if you know what I mean and I think you do. I'd just done the last of my Christmas shopping and was feeling pretty tired, so I had a bit of a sleep - and when I woke up it was still the same shot.

I was thinking of getting up and leaving because it was quite boring but what kept me in the cinema was the old couple directly behind me. Her mouth was wired directly to her brain, while he grunted like a caveman in a Raquel Welsh movie. They'd started during the adverts.

"That's a clever ad" she said after the grim one where Ken promises to break your legs if you go to work on your motorbike.

"MMmm yes"

Then the trailer for The Diving Bell and the Butterfly came on.

"I'd like to see that film"

"Mmm yes"

The trailer for 4 weeks, 3 hours & 2 hours came on:

"Is that film in French?"

After I had my doze they were whispering away like dried leaves in a paper bag. Then two of the characters started having sex. It wasn't meat platter sex or anything, but it was definitely unsuitable for a 12A certification. Plus the characters weren't exactly buff - looking at their bodies reminded me of those sad wrinkly balloons you find in a cranny two weeks after a party. Anyway, that was waaaay too much for the whisperers, they got up and left. Presumably when they have sex they do it with the lights off, in two adjacent rooms.

In any case, I am not sure if it is a causal relation or anything, but after they left the film suddenly started being brilliant. It had that intensity that alters the way you look at things after leaving the cinema. So it definitely gets the good rating.

Happy Christmas to anyone who is still reading.

Sketches of Frank Gehry

2007-07-10T13:42:00.000-07:00

OK, so I think Frank Gehry's architecture is terrific, but this is a stinker of a film, and it feels long at 83 minutes. Sydney Pollack does a load of interviews with Gehry, but he commits the mistakes of a) knowing nothing about architecture and b) saying it at great length. Also, he shoots big chunks of the film himself, but he is clearly has no idea how to operate a camera. Basic rules of lighting and composition are ignored, and if you think I'm being hysterical about this, consider that there is one scene where Gehry is relating how his shrink told him to leave his wife, and he did, and while he's doing this Pollack doesn't get Gehry's eyes in the frame. In his relationship with Gehry in general Pollack strikes one as the thick one out of Mice and Men with a video camera clenched in his hairy fist.

There isn't really much attempt to explain why Gehry is such a talent, and Gehry himself is never caught off-guard, he's always performing for the stumbling, sycophantic Pollack. I wanted someone like Werner Herzog to fix Gehry with his cold blue teutonic eyes and laserbeam his soul. If you'd like to watch a documentary about architecture, may I recommend My Architect, which almost made me cry. This picture, by contrast, is a complacent and cock-heavy load of guff and heartily deserves the shit rating.

There is one redeeming feature, however, and that is that Julian Schnabel really looks like The Dude.

Tell No One

2007-07-10T13:29:00.000-07:00

Excellent silly chase thriller, with superb editing and sound. And a great chase scene which makes you flinch in your seat. The only downside is that it needs 15 minutes of exposition at the end to sort it all out - somehow I was sure that they were going to reveal that the evil paedo was behind not just 9/11 but he had also fixed Big Brother and got into my fridge and turned the milk off. But it is very good all the same, even though it could have done with being slightly less ridiculous.

28 Weeks Later

2007-06-27T19:28:00.000-07:00

The problem with this film is that you're not worried about the Rage virus. Instead a lot of the people in it seem to be infected with something much worse - the Spasmo virus. Everyone is so incompetent I reckon that in the third film there would be a scene where a zombie is charging towards someone who shuts their eyes in self defence, on the grounds that if they can't see the zombie then the zombie can't see them, and they are safe, QED. There is also a lot of emoting and family bonding going on. I don't want that in a zombie film, it is positively against the zombie rules. What will they think of next, dancing penguins?

And there is one hilarious bit where it is revealed that you can survive a chemical weapons attack by holding your t-shirt over your mouth and breathing through that. It is not entirely without merit but all the characters are such prime dimlos it is hard to feel any sympathy for them whatsoever. Quite a few of my friends liked this but unfortunately they are wrong and it is shit.

Primer (with the commentary)

2007-06-12T11:47:00.000-07:00

I thought I would watch Primer with the commentary turned on in case it could explain what the fuck was going on there. Well, the answer is, fat chance. It's still a good film, but Shane Carruth, the director, spends a lot of time talking about the sound editing and how tortuous it was getting the focus correct on the dolly shots. You or I would have thought, bollocks to dolly shots, I will do something easy. But I think it is noteworthy that practically the whole of Primer is a dolly shot; and it is almost as if the director has sought to pass some of his frustration with the process onto the audience by including dialogue that is not so much tangential as asymptotic, and a plot-line that deliberately makes no sense. But that is the sort of thing I really like. Sorry.

Idiocracy

2007-05-30T13:37:00.000-07:00

This is Mike Judge's remake of Sleeper; Mr Average, Luke Wilson, gets put into hibernation and wakes up 500 years later. However, instead of Orgasmatrons and The Orb, everyone has been dumbed down so much that our boy is now the smartest guy on the whole planet. And the same fate awaits him as awaited the brainy kids at school - CHINESE BURN CITY!!!!

It's not brilliant, and it spends a lot of time explaining its own humour, but it is sufficiently coarse, and the parody of Fox News is brilliant. To the extent that the studio who paid for it, 20th Century Fox (oops) gave it no publicity and a release on a handful of screens. So, as an exercise in shitting your own toast, it's certainly to be recommended. And it did make me laugh more than a few times, even after I had run 21.1km up and down Buxton in the nasty rain. So it just about scrapes into the good category.

Zodiac

2007-05-20T15:36:00.000-07:00

Even for a film about a serial killer, it's not very nice. It's long and slow and there are some really scary bits in it. It does get a bit silly because at the beginning it says it is based on the book by Robert Graysmith, and you realise that is who Donnie Darko is playing. So you know that until he writes a book he's not going to get chopped up, which sort of spoilt it for me but it was OK really because the film made getting murdered look very grim indeed. But if that had been me and I realised I had immunity I would go round San Francisco leaving graffiti about Zodiac's mum and he wouldn't be able to touch me, ha!

Robert Downey Jnr suits having a beard, and Donnie Darko is good as well, except that you never really get that much insight into his character. All he does is imitate Richard Dreyfus in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, remembering to stop short of sculpting a big effigy of Zodiac out of mashed potato in his kitchen.

It is a good film, but it is not exactly a fun night out. Mind you, have a read about these cheeky chappies, they are REALLY frightening by comparison.

Art School Confidential

2007-05-20T06:51:00.000-07:00

Pablo Picasso, as Jonathan Richman so eloquently observes in his song of the same name, was never called an asshole. And while this insight is fine material for a 4'21" pop song, when it's stretched out to feature film length it does flag somewhat (I do think the song gets a bit dull after the third minute as well, in fairness). The problem with the film is that it's too broad to be a drama and not funny enough to be a comedy, so I got bored after only 20 minutes of non-stop exposition and read some insurance schedules instead.

Even though Ghost World was brilliant, Terry Zwigoff and Daniel Clowes have let themselves down a bit here with this shit. Oh well, I am going to see that Zodiac tonight which hopefully will have neither students nor teachers in it and therefore might be good.

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension

2007-05-13T04:32:00.000-07:00

You may have noticed that it is nostalgia month in leafy Finsbury Park; I clearly remember watching Barry Norman reviewing Buckaroo Banzai on Film '84, thinking that it looked A-mazing, and my mum giggling at the dialogue. And then, because straight-to-video hadn't properly been invented, I never got to watch it. But the injustice of it all has always smarted.

Well, thanks to the wonders of online DVD rental, I finally got to watch this film last night. It's completely warped and incomprehensible, and I'm pleased as hell I never got to watch it when I was 13, because it would possibly have taken over my whole life, and maybe I would have thought that Jeff Goldblum's fluffy chaps (far left) were a laudable fashhion statement. It's a bit like David Lynch directing an Ed Wood, and there are more than enough authentic 80's moments to make it very engaging - check out the shoes on the geezer standing next to Jeff Goldblum in the photo. The sound engineering was pretty rubbish on the DVD I watched, so you couldn't hear them doing the very complicated explanations of the plot, which is a bit of a shame. And apparently there is a deleted scene available on the US DVD which has Jamie Lee Curtis playing Buckaroo's mum. Which isn't on the region 2 disc. Bummer.

If you like inexplicable deadpan retro-SF then you'll think this is good. And if you don't, I genuinely feel sorry for you.

Half Nelson

2007-05-07T08:47:00.000-07:00

I don't know why, but apart from School of Rock, there have been zero good films about teachers, and it is expecting a lot of Half Nelson to break this streak. Ryan Gosling plays druggy teach, but even in the first frame he looks too good, as if the film has been brought to you by the Crack Marketing Board of America. So you downgrade your expectations; it is evidently too much to hope for the film to be real and truthful, maybe it will be entertaining? This wish is cruelly shattered after a few more frames, and then I was just sitting there in the dark trying not to get too bored. But it's very slow - the central point of the film being teacher... is.... such.... an.... ass... hole..... yet somehow the filmmakers expect you to overlook this blatantly obvious information until the last few scenes.

On the positive side, Ryan Gosling's Oscar-nominated performance is quite competent, but then again I'm not sure that impersonating a tiresome nob-end is a very laudable skill. This film is so shit it makes you wonder if people who like it are just extremely incompetent human beings.

If you can think of any good films about teachers, please leave me a comment. I haven't seen that one with Sidney Poitier in it but I am open to suggestions.

Stasiland

2007-05-05T15:24:00.000-07:00

Here's an interesting article on the film The Lives of Others, by Anna Funder, who was responsible for the excellent history/memoir Stasiland. Check it out.

This is England

2007-05-05T04:46:00.000-07:00

When I was watching this film I was wondering how people who weren't alive in the 80s would take it. What would they make of all the carefully delineated tribes (skins, scooter boys, new romantics, two-tone, and so on) the FATCHA references, and the lack of proper computer games and iPods? Well, I'm not sure, and anyone who is of that age is welcome to tell me via the comments, but I thought it was spot on, and really captured how scary and exciting it was. Bliss it was to be alive but to be young was very heaven, wrote Wordsworth, yet somehow he neglected to mention Roland Rat.

The film is pretty much a remake of TwentyFourSeven, only with skinheads instead of boxing. But mostly it's about growing up, trying to belong, and fear. There's a great performance from the wee lead, and Romeo Brass is all growed up in this one and playing a lad called Milky; at first the skinheads break the kid down, and then they build him back up again. But as the film goes on he stops being built up again. All the characters seem real, even the shoeshop woman who pedals fake DMs, and the film hangs together in a way that other Meadows efforts, like Once Upon a Time in the Midlands, don't.

This film is good and you should definitely go and see it if you are a bit bored with emo superheroes.

Zéro de conduite

2007-04-25T13:38:00.000-07:00

Zero marks for conduct is what you get in school if you behave particularly shittly, but this film is fantastic. Even though it was made in 1933 and it's less than three quarters of an hour long, and even though it's about a bunch of naughty schoolkids reenacting scenes from Baggy Trousers, it's got an impossible poetic grace about it. It's by Jean Vigo, who made the equally wonderful L'Atalante, and who died a year after making this film, aged 29. It inspired the Truffaut of The 400 Blows, and If... is almost a remake of it. There's nothing else like it, and missing out on the films of Jean Vigo is like missing out on one of the smaller and more unique pleasures of being alive.

I thought it was pretty good.

Distant Voices, Still Lives

2007-04-24T14:13:00.000-07:00

The aesthetic experiment comes to fruition. This film doesn't start off too bad, very intense camera-work, a shot of a hall in a terraced house held for ages, before slowly zooming or dollying inwards to the sound of disembodied voices. And that's the high point. This shot and the idea behind it are repeated many times throughout the film, which is emblematic of its failings. There is no deepening of the drama, no understanding, no modulation of the emotional tone. Pete Postlethwaite smacks his missus; it is shocking. He does it again; it's tiresome, in the same way as a conversation with someone who really wants to talk about bus routes. He lies in a hospital bed. You wish he would die, in a slightly bored fashion, so as to be able to get out of the cinema earlier.

It's a funny word to use of an overly serious film about domestic violence, but I found it sentimental, in its unwillingness to engage with the characters as real people. And fortunately I had seen this film before, so I was able to do something I hadn't managed to do 20 years before, and walk out.

The sky had cleared and it was a beautiful evening by the river; this lot were busking by the moebius prism outside the NFT, and there was more enjoyment in five seconds of their music than in an hour of Terence Davies' best. A shit film that couldn't spoil a nice day.

Exciting Aesthetic Experiment

2007-04-21T11:17:00.000-07:00

Dear reader, for your edification, I am about to embark upon a thrilling experiment in cinematic aesthetics. Well, thrilling for you, fraught with danger for me. Because I am going to go and see Terence Davies' Distant Voices, Still Lives again. This has just been reissued in a clever new digital print, and all the critics are literally ganting for it.

Just as they ganted when it first came out, in 1988. Back then, when I was half as old as I am now, my dad was still under the illusion that he should try and mask his contempt for cinema. So he took me and my sister to see it, and we all hated it. There is a five-minute shot of some carpet in Pete Postlethwaite's hall that particularly sticks in my mind, for all the wrong reasons.

But I saw Barton Fink at about the same age, and I was well wrong about that. So have I similarly misjudged Distant Voices, Still Lives? Is it a work of cinematic genius? And did I have any real insight as a teenager? All will be revealed. I am very tempted to open a market for this on Betfair.

United 93

2007-04-19T14:15:00.000-07:00

Quite simply, essential viewing. It's remarkably restrained and completely gut-wrenching at the same time, as it turns from a dull morning into a nightmare in the office for the air traffic control to Das Boot on a plane at the end. When I was watching that Family Friend movie I got the impression that no-one cared if the film was any good and they all just wanted to get to the end of the shooting script. But the film-makers here worked with the surviving family members and you can tell they had a palpable obligation to do a good job. It's a remarkable document and an outstanding film. And the only DVD I've ever watched where the bonus materials make you blub.

The Lives of Others

2007-04-17T15:20:00.000-07:00

This is the Stasi-tastic winner of the Best Foreign Picture Oscar, and it's pretty good. It features a storming performance from Ulrich Muehe, the German Kevin Spacey, as well as loads of crap cars and brown telephones. It's a little obvious, and lacking the intensity of The Conversation, for instance, but expecting too much originality from an Oscar winner is like wanting deodorant on a tramp.

It made me want to go here, anyway.

Charulata

2007-04-17T14:53:00.000-07:00

The Time Out film guide described this flick as Jamesian, which I have to assume is a very literate way of calling it boring. Giving it the shit rating might be a bit harsh, but the soundtrack had so many crackles on it that it sounded like a Geiger counter factory. I really couldn't concentrate, plus I have just got a new computer with a big telly on it so I had to go and play for ages on Google Earth instead.

Memories of Murder

2007-04-11T13:31:00.000-07:00

This is a 2004 cops vs serial killer drama from the same Mr Bong as made The Host. It is good and well shot, but it suffers from a lack of ambition - you never find out too much about any of the characters or the world they live in. On the other hand it may have been the bastard-strength Polish beer I was drinking.

There is a lot to admire though - the coppers clearly learnt their kung fu skills at the Cantona academy (shame they don't get to practice on Palace fans as well) and the subtitles appear to have been compiled by Withnail. Any film which includes the line "is wanking a crime" has to be worth a look.

Sunshine

2007-04-06T06:21:00.000-07:00

Here is my monthly apology for not having blogged very much. I saw that Friend of the Family film by Paolo Sorrentino which was shit-tacular and about as much fun as watching a pigeon eat stale vomit. Sorrentino made The Consequences of Love, which was fantastic, so you can't help but think that half-way through shooting Friend of the Family he must have realised what a dog's arse of a film he was making and lost all heart.

That put me off films for a while until I went to the flash new Apollo cinema in Regent Street to see Sunshine. The big concept of the Apollo is that you pat £12.50 to get in but it is all very Premium Economy in there which means you get reclining seats and fake ice in the bogs. The film was good as well, apart from the ridiculous slasher subplot - only a buffoon would think that a movie about people flying an enormous nuclear bomb into the heart of the sun needed a bit more excitement. It is on a par with trying to liven up your journey into work on the Central line from Loughton with a bit of nude carriage-surfing in the Leytonstone area.

Plus when the crusty space gimp appears they all start talking about God and it threatens to go a bit Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Thankfully that doesn't go on for very long and there is the appropriately trippy ending nicked out of 2001. Go and watch this film at the iMax and take loads of drugs beforehand, lovely.

The Science of Sleep

2007-03-12T14:33:00.000-07:00

Sorry I have not blogged for so long, I went skiing, gave the office a cold and other glamorous things like that. Also I have written too many business-orientated e-mails and I'm worried that my brain is becoming full of suck and logic. Well, however cabbagey it may get but it is never going to be as ridiculous and downright fuckin' sauerkrauted as what's going on inside the cute Mexican boy's head in Science of Sleep. It's an inventive film that only topples over into tweeness, like, all of the time. But it is still good, despite him treating his woman real bad.

Shit triple header

2007-02-01T14:16:00.000-08:00

For the last three weeks now I've been buying the paper of a Friday looking for exciting new releases, but it's been even more disappointing than the cricket. By way of illustration, these were the exciting premieres on Friday January 19th:

Black Book: shit
Babel: shit
Rocky Balboa: shit
Iraq in Fragments: shit
Infamous: shit
The Return: shit
Play: shit
... and Asterix and the Vikings, which has teenagers in it for fucks sake. shit.

I thought I could hold out another week, and so, 168 hours later, on January 26th, these are the celluloid offerings which graced the nations screens:

Old Joy: shit
Blood Diamond: shit
Bobby: shit
Venus: shit
The Fountain: possibly worse than Highlander 2 and therefore really quite distinguished but not in a good way. Shit.
The Lives of the Saints: shit
Suburban Mayhem: shit
Them: sadly without any giant ants in it. Shit.
Salaam-E-Ishq: shit

And now, coming out in a few short hours time are the following gems:

Dreamgirls: shit
Arthur and the Invisibles: shit
Notes on a Scandal: shit
Running With Scissors: shit
Welcome to Dongmakgol: shit
Gridiron Gang: shit

Is there some scary new phenomenon occuring? When I walk through Clissold Park to see the fat goats, I can see crocuses trying to come up. Are we also in the middle of some kind of global shitting-up of films? I've got so desperate that I just added the Metallica film to my rental queue.

If you would like me to watch any film, leave me a comment and I will do my best. Even if it is a shit one. I'm dying here.

Breathless

2007-01-23T15:15:00.000-08:00

Not the 1983 Richard Gere remake, the 1960 Goddard original. This film is peculiar, in that it is about as old as my dad, but it is also has the powers of being piss-elegant, super-sexy and cooler than eating lunch in a hummus bar. I have never seen a Belmondo film before, but he models himself on Bogart and that is no bad thing. Also, he makes smoking look excellent.

Plus it is not all weird nouvelle vague editing tics, which is a bit of a relief. Sometimes it is nice to watch a film and feel that your forebrain is not going to pop clean out of your skull due to non-sequential composition techniques. Quentin Tarantino prefers the remake, but then again he also said "when I'm getting serious about a girl, I show her Rio Bravo and she better fucking like it."

The original is good. I will get around to watching the Richard Gere version sometime, honest.

Smokin' Aces

2007-01-15T13:03:00.000-08:00

We have a guest reviewer, which is nice, because I would never fork over six quid to see that pile of shit.

The Last King of Scotland

2007-01-15T12:28:00.000-08:00

People always accused Forest Whitaker of being a good actor, but I thought that must be like the customer service on Virgin trains - you read a lot about it but never actually see any. Dude was in Battlefield Earth for god's sake. I did like him in Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai (good) but he hardly taxes himself in that.

Well, all I can say is that he is completely triumphant as Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland, and if you could discern that talent from his performances in films like Species (shit) or Phenomenon (shit) you are more than welcome to eat my tins of mackeral, write this blog, and put my bets on. Essentially he plays the most nightmarish boss that you ever had - alternately charming and psychotic - except that rather than make you cry in the stinky work bogs, he'd prefer to play Mr Potatohead with your arms and legs.

It's shot documentary-style by Kevin MacDonald (the Touching the Void geezer) which works, and it makes you want to go to Uganda in the 70s, so that adds up to it being good. Incidentally, Kevin MacDonald's next film apparently features Klaus Barbie and Adolf Hitler as themselves. Nice. I am not sure if I want to go to any of his dinner parties any more.

A Prairie Home Companion

2007-01-08T14:16:00.000-08:00

A charming, whimsical film, almost entirely about death and Country music. Good.

Before Night Falls

2007-01-08T14:09:00.000-08:00

This is a beautifully shot, sensitive drama about the life and times of a gay writer in Cuba. But because it is set in Cuba and not Edwardian England it is not like farty Merchant Ivory, it is full of homosexual concentration camps, lashings of chunky man-cock, and Johnny Depp playing a cross-dressing prison guard. It doesn't really say much about why the bloke in it is a writer, but who cares? Good.

Bande à part

2006-12-23T12:45:00.000-08:00

As I found out when I tried to watch L'appartment, nothing dates faster than sophistication. By contrast, Bande à part, a new wave classic from 1964, still feels modern. Some of the sequences are pure cinema, but there are stretches where you wonder what in the name of hell is going on. A character is shown crossing a river using a tethered rowing-boat, and then later in the film you get exactly the same thing. There are endless shots of the two men doughnutting their car, and a bit where a tiger makes an inexplicable appearance. Sometimes when I was watching this I was rapt, and then at other times I was looking at my watch.

Similarly, it was hard to say whether this should get a good or shit rating. It's a complex and engaging in the same way as a novel, and it's much harder to have knee-jerk reactions about those unless they have too many adjectives or an insufficent semi-colon density.

Anyway, I saw it a couple of days ago and I've been thinking about it quite a lot since, so it definitely falls into the good category. Unlike Deja Vu, for instance, which evaporated like a fart in a high breeze.

Déjà Vu

2006-12-20T14:56:00.000-08:00

You know the bit in the shampoo advert when Jennifer Aniston comes on and talks about how all the Pro-V complex molecules re-align themselves in a new polarity for added body and shine? The science in this film is similarly entertaining, and it is sad to reflect that whilst they can send The Denz 4 days back in time, they can't make him (or fatty Kilmer) buff anymore.

The Denz plays Doug Carlin, an ATF agent who is quite possibly the nicest man in America. When I was sitting in the cinema, I found myself thinking that he does have a lovely smile, which he uses to defend New Orleans against nasty yet beautifully shot acts of terrorism. And to do this he also makes use of a government-built time machine to go back 96 hours so that the other version of Denz (the one that hasn't travelled through time) can get his end away. It is hinted that by doing this, the entire universe could be destroyed, but you never actually get to find that out, one way or the other. Primer it ain't.

I know it's wrong to enjoy these jelly-brained shit films so much but I do like them.

Van Wilder: Party Liaison

2006-12-18T13:09:00.000-08:00

If you like internet tests, why not have a go at this one? Simply read the following paragraph and make a quick note of how it makes you feel.

fat man big bum bum clam chowder guff wipe mega colon spunk cake barry white bum bum bum bum schlooong poo poo barf arse grape discharge wank wanking to wank bum he wanks bum bum bum bum

If you smiled more than about once when you read that, you will probably enjoy Van Wilder. It is quite funny, there is a disgusting joke every six seconds and you don't have to use your brain very much. There is also a memorable scene involving eclairs that is almost as disgusting as the naked wrestling in Borat.

Unfortunately this does not qualify the film as good, because it is flawed in its underlying premise. The Van Wilder character is made out to be quite cool. But really he is an attention-craving overfunded moral void who goes out with a vile girl who looks mostly like a withered twig. I bet if you knew him in real life and read a story saying that Bateman murdered him you would think it was a) just waiting to happen and b) funny. Because the sad fact is that Van Wilder bears a spooky resemblance to George W Bush during his "party" years. Look at the picture if you doubt me. It is not amusing, it is a bit frightening. Next they will be doing a film about Harold Shipman with arse gags in it and people will laugh.

Code Unknown

2006-12-09T12:18:00.000-08:00

Code shit more like.

Horrible Adverts

2006-12-03T09:02:00.000-08:00

I have had it with these adverts. You know the ones. You pay your nine pounds, and you sit down to enjoy the flashy cinema adverts. Only - here is one warning you not to ride your motorcycle to work or you'll smash into a lamppost and never walk again. Or one saying that if you get in an unlicensed mini-cab you're going to get raped while the camera leers at your tear-streaked face and it was practically your fault anyway. Or if you're in Leeds, there's one saying that you shouldn't get drunk, because if you do you'll climb scaffolding seeking to impress girls but instead you'll plummet to either piss-stained quadraplegia or death, and girls don't find either of these things particularly attractive. By the way, hope you like the film.

If they must have these adverts, I feel they should compensate by showing short films about nice things as well. Stroke a cat, you will feel better. Drink a pint of beer and eat some chips with your fella or bird. And don't eat your lunch at your desk in winter, enjoy the sunshine, humans were built for the savannah. That will put one in a much better mood for enjoying House of 1,000 Corpses.

Pan's Labyrinth

2006-12-03T05:56:00.000-08:00

Proper fairy tales are good because they tend to be full of horrible things - people are cut into a thousand pieces, devoured by wild animals, sent into a coma by nasty bastard thorns, boiled alive, preyed on by child molesters, imprisoned for a laugh, and generally shat on for no good reason. Unfortunately some people don't like that sort of thing and they tend to concentrate on the nice things in fairy tales - talking animals, candied fruits, and fauns. And that fucks it up, because fauns are the biggest wankers going. When a faun appears in Pan's Labyrinth I was ready to leave the cinema and treat my brain to a couple of nice pints of strong continental lager.

That would have been a mistake, because this film is really good. It is definitely nasty enough, because it is about civil war, fascism, and features an excellent wicked step-father as well as a faun, but the faun is OK because you are wondering if he's going to turn into a nasty paedo bastard. There were enough scenes to make Janine shield her eyes until they had finished cutting the man's leg off, too. The fantasy bits are not at all twee, because the set-up is right out of a spam-in-a-cabin flick - and most importantly, it obeys the first rule of spam in a cabin pictures, namely that anyone can die at any time.

It's a superior reworking of Del Toro's earlier The Devil's Backbone, which had a better ghost in it, but otherwise comes up a bit short. In summary, after the disappointment of L'appartement, Spain is the new France, although I am worried that Switzerland could be the new Germany.

L'appartement

2006-12-03T04:18:00.000-08:00

It is certainly true that the French have style, but the problem is that there is good style, and then there is bad style. The look of this film owes most to perfume adverts, and it has all the intellectual intensity of a Duran Duran video. Furthermore, it was made in 1996, so it's curdled bad style. It was literally true that I couldn't force myself to watch this shit - sleeping won after only about 20 minutes.

Casino Royale

2006-11-26T10:20:00.000-08:00

Surprisingly enough, this film is good. The new Bond-chap must have given up caviar pies, or whatever they eat in W1, and concentrated on the weights, boiled chicken (skin off) and brocoli, because he has nice big chests. He is also quite good at the acting lark, although his style does seem to consist of staring at things very hard like he is trying to do Superman eye-lasers through them.

Downsides are the amusingly vulgar super-rich locations, the racism, and the uncool clothes (wanker slacks) that he wears when he's in Venice. Oh, and there's one bit where he appears to be driving a Mondeo - ha ha ha. But fortunately the Innovations catalogue has gone bust so Bond cannot crush a baddie's head in a effort-free mango juicer.

The History Boys

2006-11-21T14:20:00.000-08:00

I have reviewed this film already (shit) but I thought I would go and see it so I could give you more of indication as to why it is so mannered and fecal. Let me deal with the good things first. It is competently made, and Uncle Monty is entertaining in it, although when I see him, I can't stop thinking of the pigs in Animal Farm walking on their hind legs. And if you like reading the back of cereal packets you will rejoice because there are lots of words in this movie. Rather too many in fact. I could have done with some bed scenes and an exploding helicopter.

Unfortunately, although the film is in love with high culture, it rather lectures to you about it, in the manner of a boring old farty who knows everything about the late Beethoven string quartets, but refuses to go and see The Big Lebowski. The whole thing comes across, not as history, but as nostalgia. And it is not even nostalgia for the eighties. This offends me. The kids in this movie are supposed to be five years older than me, but they are weedy little swots who would have been bog-washed repeatedly had they inhabited the real world. The whole thing is fake because it's sustained by nostalgia for Uncle Monty's vanished 50s childhood, and he's a miserable bastard anyway.

The other things that are wrong with this is that it has about 6 endings, presented in ascending order of risibility. The direction is uncomfortable, and the editing is stagey - at one point the camera even waits for people, just to move on and off the set. Why not film a fucking bus queue? Someone should tell Nicholas Hynter that there is a modern editing technique called the cut, which is designed to remove the boring bits I don't want to watch (after the bed scene, before the exploding helicopter). And it looks like they used really cheap film stock, because the grains of emulsion on the print are fucking huge, like a big man's fist.

The Prestige

2006-11-20T09:36:00.000-08:00

Bateman vs Wolverine, what's not to like? This film has been brought out in only a few, rubbish cinemas (like the Odeon Panton Street, London's second most shit venue) as if the distributors were ashamed of it, like an idiot cousin. I confess that I was a little worried that it was going to be duff, because magicians are duff, and the 1890s are duff (too much brown), but it is actually brilliant. Patrick Bateman is so good that you forgive his accent, Hugh Jackman will take any role that involves sideburns, and Scarlett Johansson is both pulchritudinous and good at acting.

People have talked a lot about how you see the twist coming, but that's not what it's really about The real twist is, you completely change your mind about who the psycho is. I thought about this film for ages afterwards, and I would quite like to see it again, only not at the Odeon Panton Street because a) like a toilet, it smells of wee but b) unlike a toilet, it's nine quid to get in.

In summary, this film is good, check it out, and yes, pulchritudinous is a codeword, meaning primo garbonzas.

Casino Royale (with cheese)

2006-11-19T13:00:00.000-08:00

I tried watch Casino Royale this afternoon but unfortunately it was sold out until the 9:30 showing on Wednesday in the year 3012 AD. So I came home and watched Zazie dans le métro instead. Louis Malle made this in 1960 and it is hilarious, to such an extent that it makes Dangermouse look rather staid (if you watch some old episodes of Dangermouse you will realise they all must have been on drugs). Also, Paris in 1960 looks well amusing - they have awesome motors and the Eiffel tower is properly dangerous. This film is good and when you consider that all the British films from this period were about Dirk Bogarde being castigated for not cleaning out his whippet cage properly maybe it's a bit of a shame that Napoleon lost in 1815.

Volcano

2006-11-12T01:16:00.000-08:00

If you look at old books, you really do get the feeling that back in the old days, people were a lot thicker. They had the occasional bloke like Shakespeare and the Buddha, but it doesn’t make up for the dodgy spelling and the lack of PSPs. Look at a bloke like Chaucer, for instance, probably the biggest name in English Literature before 1500. Not only can he not spell, by the looks of it he can’t even talk, and he only has two topics of conversation, namely: God and farting. As you can see they can't draw horses either.

It’s not just the dark ages that display the widespread dispersion of the shit-head gene. I was watching that Volcano movie on TV last night, and it seems like everyone was really dim in 1997 too. Back then people believed that nature was so piss-weak that it could be controlled by Tommy Lee Jones, and that lava had the approximate singeing power of your mum’s toaster. Ann Heche plays the vulcanologist, Don Cheadle has a look of barely suppressed despair, and there is a heroic dog as well. Shit.

Breaking and Entering

2006-11-11T06:21:00.000-08:00

This is the new Sam Minghella comedy, and let me tell you, it's pretty funny stuff. Jude Law plays a north London architect, who takes an interest in a young thief, and then starts boffing the thief's mum, who is a Bosnian Muslim, played by Juliette Binoche! At this point I was laughing really hard at Law's brilliant deadpan delivery, and then these people who I can only describe as cinema goons came down the aisle and asked me to leave. I pointed out that I had paid nine pounds fifty, and bought a load of pick and mix, and they ought to be more considerate of their patrons. At this point the smaller one gave me vouchers for TWO free tickets, and said I could have as much pick and mix as I could fit into a bag, "just so long as you fuck right off, sir."

You can't ignore value like that. When I got back home Dave told me it was supposed to be a serious movie, which explains quite a lot. With this in mind the film recieves the shit rating, but it is a good for a handful of stale cola bottles if you enjoy yourself enough.

Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan

2006-11-11T06:11:00.000-08:00

This film is like a highlights reel of the most disturbed and offensive things that have ever been comitted to film. It is the same as practicing really hard on a pinball game, then going down the pub with a bag of 10ps, and not leaving until all the high scores are yours. You will laugh so hard when you watch this film that actual defecation becomes a strong probability. If you don't think this is good then that's a sign that you have reached the point in your life (i.e. the 35-44 demographic) where you're never going respond to amusement ever again.

Down by Law

2006-11-07T13:00:00.000-08:00

If you have seen Leningrad Cowboys Go America or Blue in the Face, you may recall the extremely cool Jim Jarmusch cameos, where Jim rocks up and chats about how the SS officer smokes fags in old war movies, or some such guff, and the movie instantly becomes about five degrees cooler. Down by Law enables the devoted cineaste to gauge the exactly how cool Mr Jarmusch is, using the glory of The Scientific Method, and the answer is, extremely frikkin' C. He made Down by Law in 1986, slap bang in the middle of the least cool decade since the 1890s (when sideburns and brown were so in) and it is still highly cool today.

Most prison-break movies are extremely long, maybe to convey the tedium of sitting around counting sand grains while waiting to get bumholed, but Down by Law feels slight at 90 minutes. It makes Oh Brother Where Art Thou look like a bloated and unnecessary homage. In fact I am beginning to think that setting bits of Down by Law in a jail is a master stroke because the key to being cool is to sit around absolutely bored out of your fucking skull, yet not to show it. Anyway, I really liked this movie, it is good.

I saw Borat last night as well, but I have not recovered sufficiently in order to give an account of my experience. This will be coming soon.

Red Road

2006-11-07T12:48:00.000-08:00

This Glaswegian CCTV drama is made by that woman who used to be in Number 73, Andrea Arnold. It's a well made character study, and it's gratifyingly boring in places - you expect the main character to witness nasty crime from her control room, but most of the time she watches a bloke walking a fat old dog. I was really miserable when I watched it cos I did an interview at work and I couldn't remember what letter of the alphabet came after p, but I still thought it was good.

Frozen Land

2006-10-29T11:07:00.000-08:00

I thought that the ICA refused to show movies that weren't completely stinky, but last year I went to see Primer there, which was good, and this confused me. So today I went down there to have a look at Frozen Land, a Finnish version of Short Cuts, and all I can say is, fucking, fucking Primer. Frozen Land is the worst film I have seen in a long time. No-one smiles throughout the whole movie, and everyone wears retarded grey jumpers. It is essentially about how life is unbearably depressing and how the Finns would probably thank you for landing an atom bomb on Helsinki. Maybe if they could bring themselves to wear even the tiniest bit of beige they might feel better.

I don't mind films like that, but this is boring and stupid. The central genius premise that everyone lives in their own private hell and does their best to pass it on to the next arsehole in line is spelt out at the beginning, reiterated halfway through, and never deviated from. There are two good scenes in the film. # 1 is when two of the characters are doughnuting their stolen car in the motel carpark after getting calamitously wasted, and then the one who's driving hollers "let's wank!". # 2 is the most grim ashes scattering scene you can imagine, so much so that I started sniggering at how awful everyone's life was. You don't feel sympathetic for the people in the film anyway, because they are all morons. I've told you all the good bits now, you don't have to waste 130 minutes of your life on this shit.

Tzameti (13)

2006-10-23T14:08:00.000-07:00

Hello there, I am sorry about the wee career break last week, apparently Dave trod on the internet when he was doing the hoovering in the nude so we had to go without for a while. Still, the distibutors have been voiding their pre-Christmas nuggets upon us, here is a list of all the films that have been released in the last two weeks and their ratings:

Idlewild: shit
The Guardian: shit
Open Season: shit
New Police Story: shit
The History Boys: shit
Frozen Land: shit
Tais Toi!: shit
Stick It: shit
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning: shit
The Aryan Couple: shit
The Great Ecstacy of Robert Carmichael: shit
Marie Antoinette: shit
Barnyard: shit
I Saw Ben Barka Get Killed: shit
Gypo: shit
The Last Kiss: really remarkably fucking shit
The Grudge 2: shit
KZ: might be good but not a bundle of laughs

Maybe there will be a good one out this week, I live in hope.

Anyway, I have not been slacking off, there are still DVDs to watch. Over the weekend I watched Napoleon Dynamite, twice, once normally and then again with the commentary on. The commentary is fantastic, when you hear it you realise that Napoleon Dynamite is actually a documentary.

And I just finished watching Tzameti, a movie in French by a young Georgian filmmaker. Tzameti means 13 in Georgian. It starts off and you think it is going to be a load of black and white retro-bollocks, because it takes most of its style cues from that Rififi film, but that came out in like 1955, when human beings still spoke in grunts and Raquel Welsh walked the earth in a fur bikini. But it quickly gets pretty nasty and intense and in the end I really enjoyed it, this film is good but don't watch it with your mum.

Test Site (the slides in Tate Modern)

2006-10-14T15:27:00.000-07:00

This is the latest of the big art projects to get installed in the turbine hall of the Tate Modern and unfortunately it's a bit of a clinker. The slides aren't particularly interesting to look at and I would love to tell you what it was like to slide down them, but I can't, because the Tate has adopted a distinctly uncool ticketing policy, and even when you do have a ticket, you still have to queue for half an hour even to go down the rubbish girly ones.

The geezer who put it together, Carsten Höller, says that you can't help but come out with a smile on your face when you go down a slide. Well, when you have a nice raspberry icecream on a hot day that makes you smile as well, but it doesn't mean that raspberry icecream is art. Anyway, Carsten Höller must be a bit of a gufflord because he doesn't even have an entry on Wikipedia! Ha, what a buffoon! Anyway, his art is shit, not as shit as the Nauman sound thing but that's not saying much.

However, if you are in the Tate Modern, your day is not wrecked, you don't have to drown your sorrow under ten pints of mild in the Market Porter. Just invest seven quid in the Fischli and Weiss exhibition (proper artists with a Wikipedia entry, see) and you will have a thoroughly good time. There is the best film I have ever seen in an art gallery in there, The Way Things Go. And there is a series of 80 wee clay sculptures that will make you a) laugh and b) want to have a go at being an artist yourself, because it doesn't look very hard. And there is a load of other stuff that is a bit weird. Anyway it is good, even though you have to pay money to get in.

Night Watch

2006-10-13T12:44:00.000-07:00

This is a shit Russian goth-o-rama about crap vampires in Moscow slugging it out in an epic centuries-old battle between (surprise sur-muthafucking-prise) good and evil. None of the characters have particularly cool powers, and the main crap-vampire hunter can pack them in simply using a torch with a red sweet wrapper held over it. Wankers.

The other thing wrong with this film is, if you have watched more than about six movies in your life, you will know that if there is a slightly freaky looking Malam-child, it will obviously turn out to be the long-lost son of the main hunter dude. So there's no need to have half an hour of flash-back reminding us about something we didn't have to be told in the first place.

It is quite a distinctive-looking film, but none of the imagination that went into the design seems to have carried over into the script. For instance, there is a long sequence where the chief good bloke decides the main dude is a bit rubbish in a swedge and needs to get beefed up a little. So he gives him a stuffed owl which transforms into a real owl which transforms into a helpful lady vampire who hopefully transforms into a Mini Cooper in the next installment. This all takes ages, especially with the flashbacks mixed in. And then what does the helpful lady vampire do? She runs around on rooftops with the useless bloke, and you get to see her tits when she's in the bath, excuse me while I try to stifle my contempt.

The Departed

2006-10-08T09:25:00.000-07:00

When I was watching this film, the lady sitting next to me sighed "oh no" when something nasty happened. She said it quite a lot in the last ten minutes. Scorsese has assembled a fantastic cast (with the sad exception of Ray Winstone trying to do an Irish accent - does anyone remember Tom Cruise in Far and Away?), and most of them get butchered. It's the sort of film where, when the thugs catch the police captain on his own, they don't invite him to sit down for a nice game of dominos. "Oh no."

It's a remake of Hong Kong classic Infernal Affairs, but it's a better film. The original concentrates a lot on Tony Leung lounging around in a dark suit looking cool; in The Departed, Scorsese uses his tailor's eye to dress everyone as badly as possible - especially Jack Nicholson. The result is a much greater emphasis on characterisation and tough guy dialogue, so the film doesn't just warp your brain by making you keep up with the plot twists. It certainly suits Matt Damon's potato charm, and while I enjoyed Leonardo DiCaprio's performance a lot, there were certain moments where you felt he was in line for an Adam and Joe cuddly toy remake. Mark Wahlberg is also very good - he has the drill sergeant pathological belligerence thing down just fine. And it is a gold-plated fact that any film is better with a drill sergeant in it.

Oh, and Thelma Schoonmaker does an unbelievable job with the editing, particularly in the opening sequence. She won an Oscar for the Aviator and you can see her getting another here. This film is good, so much so that Martin Scorsese might just be able to pull off a remake of that international turkey par excellence, Infernal Affairs 2....

The Ice Storm

2006-10-04T12:42:00.000-07:00

When this film first came out, fate baulked me in my efforts to see it, on more than one occasion. There was a particularly memorable hour of waiting around at the wrong exit of Mansion House tube station that stands out rather clearly. Now through the wonderful technology of internet DVD rentals one can order these movies up and cringe at Kevin Kline trying to do the straight acting stuff. If you try to mock fate, then fate ends up mocking you, because this film is shit.

Zidane: a 21st Century Portrait

2006-10-01T15:18:00.000-07:00

This is the film which does nothing except follow Zidane around the pitch during a Real Madrid game, to the exclusion of almost everything else. I have been trying to work out if it is good or shit but one thing is beyond dispute, it is certainly boring. I reckon they chose Zidane, not because, Dalai Lama-like, he is the current incarnation of the best footballer in the universe, but because he is so unbelievably inscrutable. It is similar to watching Spock play footie, and disturbingly like going to a Kraftwerk gig. Mind you, one of the blokes who made this also did a video installation piece, called 24 hour Psycho, whereby Psycho was slowed down to 2 frames a second, so it literally took all day, and then had hairy enough bollocks to call it art.

So that sums up why it's shit (that, and the way the camera focuses on the crowd, and then pulls focus onto Zidane, about 500 god dam times). Why it's good is that when he smiles, or gets into a fight, or uses the most amazing skill to set up a goal that even I could score, that moment is stunning. By my count you get about four or five moments like that for the price of admission. But they'd hardly register without all the boring bits. So that just about pushes the whole film into good territory. With this in mind, I am going to do a video project where you show the old BBC1 testcard for four hours, and then right at the end the girl stabs the evil clown in the eye with her chalk and its brain squirts out. When it gets shown at Cannes I reckon everyone will run out of the cinema screaming because they will be unable to withstand the intensity of the emotion. And just imagine the extras you could pack on to the 3-dvd special edition!

Children of Men

2006-09-28T13:41:00.000-07:00

I normally like Philip French’s reviews in the Observer, but he spent most of a page gabbing on about this film on Sunday without saying whether it was any good or not. I was worried in case this meant it was going to be shit, and moody shit at that. But I’ve just got out of seeing it and I’m pleased to say that this film is brilliant, fucking brilliant. It is grim and futuristic, but at the same time it’s really funny, like The Day Today gone bad or worse. It’s beautifully designed as well, enough to make you want to buy the dvd and freeze-frame it so you can take it all in. There is even Roots Manuva on the soundtrack. This film is good, and then some.

Philip French’s review of Clerks 2 was spot on though.

Volver

2006-09-26T13:31:00.000-07:00

This is an entertaining film, but for me it is not Almodóvar at his best. Although the plot is convoluted relative to say, Snakes on a Plane, it's pretty pedestrian next to the rest of the Almodóvar canon: everyone stays the same sex throughout, and there are no deviant priests. I loved films like All About my Mother, Talk to Her and The Flower of My Secret, because they were utterly contrived and peculiar, and yet somehow, incomprehensibly, you feel for the characters. Volver is quite an intriguing story, and the acting is pretty good, you may have noticed that Penelope Cruz is still gorgeous, but it's not that engaging. It's still good, but no masterpiece. For me, the most entertaining thing was the unmasked contempt with which Almodóvar treats the male characters, that is when he can be bothered to raise the slightest interest in them.

Also, I noticed that A Scanner Darkly was my 100th post on this blog. Good heavens, I never realised I had been callously judgemental about quite so many films. So, thank you for reading and I will attempt to protract my knee jerk reactions, at least until they stop making shit films.

A Scanner Darkly

2006-09-25T10:37:00.000-07:00

I know there's a lot of scope for really poor jokes like, I was a teenage Dick fan, but I was, and A Scanner Darkly was one of my favourite ones. That and Galactic Pot-Healer. So, I was a bit worried when this film came out because of the vast opportunity to mess it up badly. I find the problem with Philip K Dick films is that they look wrong; so often the plot hinges on the fact that everyone lives in a constructed world, and the filmmakers can't show you a reality that lives up to the text. In this respect, the rotoscoping technique used by Richard Linklater works wonderfully well, because you know everything is fake, everything has been interfered with. I find it's also pretty entertaining just to look at, it reminded me of some phenomenal paintings by a bloke called Dan Hays. Unfortunately the paintings look shit on t'internet so you will just have to go and see them live.

The performances are excellent, but it is a little scary seeing Keanu Reeves and Robert Downey Jnr looking a little old and crinkly. And while the film is true to the novel in its deep pesimism, there is humour in it: after all, it was more like autobiography for poor old Phil K. In short, it's hard work, but definitely good. If you are interested, check out the original book, and an excellent and newly translated biography of the man himself, snappily entitled I am Alive and you are Dead, which makes Dick's novels look pretty much like reportage.

Crank

2006-09-24T14:50:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the interruption in service, I have been having a break in the Alps, very nice it was too and you really should go to Turin, etc. On the other hand, I can also recommend Crank to you, it is rather more violent than Turin but with fewer Fiats. In this film Jason Statham has been injected with the Beijing Mix, an nasty drug that forces him to stay over-excited or die. Golly, it is a good thing for him that he lives in LA and not Amersham, perhaps. Our Jase achieves the necessary levels of stimulation mostly through a) seeking vengeance and b) swearing a lot, because this is one of those films where a typical line of dialogue is permed from the phrases "fuck" "fuck you" "you fuck" "motherfucker" "motherfucking", and "wanker" on account of Statham is a Brit. But it’s not just entertaining for the dialogue, the whole thing is fresh and Statham mysteriously carries it off, despite not appearing hard at all, and having a eerie resemblance to a mildly vexed bollock. In sumary, this film is good, and more importantly, a lot better than Snakes on a Plane. If you are getting bored with the popcorn movies, next time I will review some arty films, thank you.

Snakes on a Plane

2006-09-06T15:44:00.000-07:00

Here is a nice cake of a plane. The movie is shit, though. Not offensively shit, just shit to the level of a good tv-movie.

Sorry for the brevity of this review, I am full of a dirty cold that Andrew gave me, nobber.

Office Space

2006-08-19T12:58:00.000-07:00

This wasn't a big hit in the cinema, but it has had an enormous DVD afterlife, and I can see why. I definitely wouldn't want to go out on a Friday night and watch a film about working in a shit job and how much it sucks, especially if I was working in said shit job. But I would be quite happy to slouch on my unhygenic sofa in a miasma of despair and make sardonic nose-laughs of recognition at the same material. Actually, it is pretty funny, and it has proper swearing in it (including a discussion of the relative merits of soi-disant resort jails, versus Federal 'ass-pounding' jails), so that is nice. It's directed by Mike Judge, who made King of the Hill, and Beavis and Butthead (note that the Beavis and Butthead movie is hilarious and I've seen it about 6 times), but this is more like The Monkey Wrench Gang for all the slaves rowing the big IT trireme.

Disturbingly enough, Jennifer Aniston is in this movie yet it is still good. Surely now that humanity has got to the stage where we can not merely think of the Poincare Conjecture, but we can actually prove it, surely we should be able to account for a discrepancy in the fabric of the universe like Ms Aniston appearing in a movie that doesn't completely eat it raw? The normal prize of out-dated racing tips applies to anyone who can furnish an even remotely rational explanation for this.

Miami Vice

2006-08-16T10:49:00.000-07:00

One thing you will notice if you watch this film (unless you watch it with biscuits taped over your eyes in an attempt to find out if digestives are see-through) is that Michael Mann really likes filming clouds. And I think clouds sum up the whole enterprise. On the credit side, they are fluffy, but on the debit side, they are nebulous and meaningless. They sum up the film in one of those peculiar kind of metaphor things that my dad is always on about. Because while it all looks amazing, with the exception of the bits with Colin Farrell in them, or Jamie Foxx's astroturf "Action Man" barnet (haircut as pictured), it is a big pile of Miami Schiess. I couldn't understand a word they were saying, it was like they all had marshmallows in their mouths. It is a bit of a shame because there are a few cracking action sequences, but apart from that you can't work out what is going on. And Colin Farrell is in it.

I think this is best appreciated as an art film, where you enjoy the thrusting aesthetics of it all. In this case it just about scrapes into the good category. If, however, you'd like something a little less infested with Colin "Mojito Fiend" Farrell, you may not enjoy it quite so much....

Fucking Åmål

2006-08-05T11:12:00.000-07:00

Åmål is a wee town in Sweden. It's not outstandingly boring, just averagely boring, which is even worse, it cannot even distinguish itself through the medium of tedium (unlike Pitsea, for instance). Strangely enough, the Åmål tourist board website makes no mention of the film. Anyway, the film is a little bit about teenage lesbians, but it's mostly about growing up somewhere shit and not even wanting to fit in.

It's the first film by Lukas Moodysson, who made Together, one of my favourite movies ever ever ever. And while it's not quite as good, you can see that it's the work of the same bloke. There is the same lovely nuanced storytelling, and all the characters are rounded out. You think the dad character's going to err on the side of niceness to the extent of being a bit of a dick, for instance, and he is, but you can see he's quite a cool dad as well. Everyone is like that, I reckon you could make a film about any of the characters. The end feels a bit idealised, but that's the film's only dalliance with uncoolness.

It's not one for the pervo brigade. And anyway, it looks like Lukas Moodysson shot it using his mobile phone. Definitely worth checking out anyway, this film is good. In England it is called Show me Love but I think prefer the other title.

I am sorry if this review is a bit shit, I was out with Dave last night and we got absolutely battered.

Renaissance

2006-07-31T14:16:00.000-07:00

One night a short while ago, I had a chat with a colleague who happened to mention that a particular horse in a particular horse race (6:10 at Newmarket) was the very image of good value. Coincidentally, I had just bought some cheapo French rail tickets. And when the good karma sunrays beam down into a man's life he must not cower in the shade. To this end, I invested £20 in said nag with the hope of paying for said rail tickets, and then took myself off to the pictures to watch Renaissance. It cost £9.50 to get into the Odeon Covent Garden, and when I emerged blinking into the sunlight at the end of the film, I scurried back home for news from the turf.

For some reason, when I checked the BBC website, the horse was not listed as the winner. There must be some mistake, I thought, and checked the Racing Post site instead. When I paged down to the race, I saw what had happened. My favoured steed had finished dead last. I had picked the one with three legs yet again. Bollocks.

However, I must admit that I felt that paying £9.50 to see Renaissance represented a far more disappointing loss, given that the film was actually a pile of shit, and I never would have won £100 if it been good. I was seduced into seeing it because it looked like a French version of Sin City, but while it looked great, it had none of the offensive gusto of Robert Rodriguez's film. The plot is mongo-headed and obvious, the script is derivative, and all the voices are too posh - while I can accept a French bloke saying "I sleep with my secretary, I sleep with my wife, I even sleep with my sister-in-law, but I never sleep with my researchers", you simply can't believe that Jonathan Pryce would say such a thing. But he does.

Even if you are a particularly putty-brained comics fan I could not recommend it. Sorry. Maybe if you sniffed some glue before going to the cinema you could get yourself into the right frame of mind but I doubt it.

Land and Freedom

2006-07-28T13:42:00.000-07:00

So some people have been a bit critical of Superman Returns for being a remake of Richard Donner's 1978 original. But Ken Loach's 1995 Spanish Civil War film is pretty much a remake of Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, and none the worse for it. It's thoughtful and well acted, but the poor old anarchists get it in the end. It's a bit of a shame for them, in the film they are all nice but unfortunately they have the same feelings about holding onto power as you or I would have about a nice big freshly laid turd, bam, right there in the middle of the pavement. Franco and Stalin never let that sort of thing worry them so they are always going to lose the argument but win the war.

The film doesn't actually say that much about anarchism, either. If you are interested, a bloke called Stuart Christie has written a fantastic book called Granny Made me an Anarchist about going to Madrid in the 60s in order to blow up General Franco. I recommend you read that, if only to find out what a good laugh the nick is in Spain, I think I might go stay there on my next holiday.

Anyway, in the case of this film, it would be bourgeois of me to inflict my views upon you. So, comrade, why don't you watch it yourself, decide what you think, and then come back and have a vote about it. I think it is good, anyway, 1-0.

Superman Returns

2006-07-27T10:31:00.000-07:00

I remember loving the original Superman film, which is quite perturbing, because it came out in 1978, pretty much 30 years ago, bollocks, but anyway, I remember collecting the Superman cards and chewing the bubblegum that came with them and sticking it behind the left wing mirror of the Mini, even though I didn't like bubblegum, but you had to do something with it, I remember being round at Stephen Lovell's house, it was for his birthday I think, when I got the Last Card, Superman's left eye, and after that I became completely disinterested in them (to the point of petulant ingratitude). I remember trying to draw Superman, which started off quite easy (primary colours & boots) but I never got the hang of the Superman symbol, because it's a weird cropped seriffy 'S' inside a bendy pentagon. And I remember thinking it was describing something that was real (unlike Star Wars, for instance) and if I concentrated hard enough soon I too would be able to do the Superman eye lasers.

Given that it didn't quite work out that way, the new movie is still really good, and definitely worth going to see at the IMAX. It's quite talky and leisurely, like the 1978 version - to the extent that all the cast wear strange 1970s versions of 40s clothes, and apparently Bryan Singer made a computer-generated RoboBrando to do the Jor-El lines. But there are a few cracking action sequences too, and the new chap in the cape is a disturbingly good Christopher Reeve impersonator.

I do have a few issues with it, however, but these involve major major plot spoliers. So, if you don't want to know the scores, look away now.
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#1) There is no way that Superman could benchpress an entire continent, made out of Kryptonite, out of the Earth's atmosphere. No frikkin way. That is against the rules, and it would never happen in real life. I can just about forgive this lapse.

#2) Superman makes it with Lois and she has a baby. However, considering that Superman is an alien, it is extremely improbable that they would have compatible DNA. Evolutionary biology dictates that a lobster, for instance, would be a much more recent Last Common Ancestor than Superman, and I really can't imagine Lois Lane wanting to get jiggy with the seafood platter. Furthermore, the resulting creature would be like what happens when a donkey goes out with a horse - you get a sterile hybrid like a mule, and no-one wants that.

This inconsistency is alright though, because the bits with the kid are pretty good. And it also means that Superman had a kid and then buggered off and got some other man to bring up is spawn, without paying no child support or nothing.

District 13

2006-07-09T04:10:00.000-07:00

If you take a shit-boring film like Hidden, and then add in a load of guns, drugs, kung fu and parkour, then you've got District 13, a much more interesting proposition. The plot is a load of guff about a cocaine baron living in a walled-off postcode, who gets hold of a nuclear weapon on a 24-hour countdown. And the only guy who can stop him is the local pk king, who is trying to save his tower block from the evil scourge of gak.

It is ridiculous, and the whole time I was in the cinema I was busting for a piss, but I didn't dare go for fear of missing some brain-popping kung fu / vertical pk ballet - like Jackie Chan used to be, before he got too old and stopped being subtitled. I can imagine this film having a strong DVD afterlife, with pallid teenagers trying to copy the moves, shimmying between piles of dog turd in incandescant white trainers in the loading bay of their local Morrisons.

This film is good, and it also appears to have influenced the recent Porsche-torching riot-spree in France, even to the extent of the film pleb-scum characters getting called racaille by the film Minister for the Interior. But while District 13 has only just opened over here, it was made in 2004. So well done them. Unfortunately the highly trained kung fu parkour gendarmes have not yet materialised but I am sure it will only be a matter of time.

Matewan

2006-07-03T12:41:00.000-07:00

An American miners' strike movie - which, like rom zom com Shaun of the Dead, is surely a film that defines its own genre. It was made by John Sayles in 1987, concerning itself with real-life events from 1921, in the town of Matewan, Central Deliverance State.

It's well acted, and perhaps because it was unfamiliar subject matter, I didn't know what was going to happen next. Some of the characterisation is too obvious, like James Earl Jones playing the heroic James Earl Jones character, and the evil warder from The Shawshank Redemption just changing his hat over. But the film has unexpected sympathies, like the way that the Sheriff is a good guy, or the way the wee preacher kid turns into a junior red. And I wish I knew more about cinematography, because it's shot beautifully by Haskell Wexler, with a variable exposure flicker to it - he also did One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

I don't think this movie is surprising enough to be a classic, but it's certainly interesting and enjoyable and it never flirts with the shit rating.

Lego Potter

2006-07-02T06:43:00.000-07:00

In a thoughtless comment on the latest Harry Potter film, I said that it would have been better if they had used Lego instead of real actors. Like one of those horribly loaded statements that never really go away ("you always steal my chips" / "blue makes your eyes look a bit fat") it has lingered in the air like toilet-fug in a curryhouse. Because, on further reflection, I think it's a great idea.

The main problem with the Harry Potter films is that they're in a big rush to make them before the cast either a) grow up, become ugly, and discover bad behaviour, or b) die. This results in them doing a shit job. However, with Lego, this would not be a problem, the film-makers could be as dilatory as they liked. Furthermore, the range of Lego already exists, and while it is almost as expensive as plutonium, and therefore definitely more expensive than hiring a load of crinkly old british thesps and kids, I feel they could afford it.

Further benefits are: the Lego is definitely a better actor than the kid who plays Draco Malfoy. Because Lego is very wee you could build the sets out of Lego too, and then use CGI to take the knobblies out. If the Lego has a rubbish haircut you can just take it off and replace it with another one, or leave him as he is so he can play the role of Luthor in the forthcoming Lego adaptation of Superman. Lego Potter will never break his glasses, and the Lego version of Ralf Fiennes (pictured) is fucking scary. It is easy to make mutants using Lego people, especially with a small saw blade and modelling glue, and Harry Potter would definitely be improved if it had mutants in it. And finally, you wouldn't need a Lego Robbie Coltrane to play Hagrid, you could just use a normal sized person and that would be about the correct scale.

In fact, I am so sure Lego Potter will happen, that I am a bit scared that it has started happening already and we just haven't noticed. If you watch carefully you'll see that Hermione's hair was looking a little rigid in that last film, if you know what I mean and I think you do.

Fearless

2006-07-01T01:40:00.000-07:00

In one of my first posts on this blog, I rather primly objected to the film Hero on the grounds that it was a might-is-right apologia for dictatorial fascism. Well, Fearless affirms the same politics, but the kung fu in it is miles better, and more frequent, so I really enjoyed it, and I definitely thought it was good.

Apparently Jet Li is retiring from kung fu movies now. However, as Fearless shows, he also has sweet swordfighting skills, so maybe he would consider being in a remake of Hamlet? I would like to see that, with Tony Leung as Claudius, Samo Hung as Laertes, and Gilbert and George as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Lovely.

X-Men: The Last Stand

2006-06-21T14:24:00.000-07:00

I saw this movie in Arctic Norway because a) I couldn't afford to get pissed, b) I couldn't get pissed anyway because I was going to run a marathon, and c) there had to be some way of getting away from the 24/7 sunshine.

The whole Norwegian cinema-going experience was pretty good. They even had amusing adverts for local businesses. But unfortunately, while X-Men: The Last Stand wasn't too bad for part three of something (it's a lot better than The Class of Nuke 'Em High 3: The Good, the Bad, and the Subhumanoid, for instance), it didn't actively refrain from being shit. Presumably all the plot and character development got used up in the first two movies, leaving just a series of increasingly ponderous face-offs between men wearing risible helmets. And Wolverine is a rubbish superhero. From what I could make out, his main power is that he's excessively hairy, and if he ever forgot himself and picked his bum he'd be in big trouble.

Also, is it a rule that any movie with a colon in the title is ridiculous? Just reflect on the fact that Mission Impossible 3 has got two of the fuckers in there, and draw your own conclusions. But seriously, if you can think of a decent colonated movie, drop me a comment, and if you win, I'll send you an out of date horseracing tip or something

Harry Potter and the g of h

2006-06-06T13:23:00.000-07:00

I knew this film was going to be shit. To recap, the scores for the first three Harry Potters are as follows:

Harry Potter and the a of b: shit
Harry Potter and the c of d: shit
Harry Potter and the e of f: good

Evidently, the Harry Potter studio execs thought something was a bit amiss with Harry Potter and the e of f, so they hired Mike Newell to revert to the hilarious formula of the first two pictures. Harry Potter and the g of h feels like it constantly has to shove amazing CGI images up your cortex, so it never gets round to telling the story. And then, after a while, you get tired of the CGI. It's like watching Super Mario Karts without being allowed to play it.

On the other hand, it employs every single British thespian ever, which is nice for them, but J K Rowling's got more money than God, so I suppose she can afford it.

Down in the Valley

2006-06-03T03:52:00.000-07:00

Poor old Ed Norton, he's not quite as du jour as he used to be. One minute he's growing a comedy beard while rebuffing flattering comparisons with the young Brando, and the next he goes and makes some movies like The 25th Hour (shit), The Italian Job (shit) or Red Dragon (shit). It's OK Eddie, it could happen to anyone. What happened next is that Ed's agent probably offered him second lead in a Shatner flick where The Shat gets dumped by the woman in Star Trek IV (they couldn't afford Rene Russo), and she goes off with Ed's character, but realises it was a terrible mistake when Ed gets her chocolate labrador drunk and then it chews up her orchid collection and Ed doesn't show a bit of remorse because it was the dog's fault not his, so she gets back with The Shat and then the credits roll to some jangly country music and everyone in the cinema wished they'd stayed at home and watched Green Card again on BBC9.

So maybe something like this never happened, but Ed did take a couple of years off after making all those shit movies. Why I think he came back is that he was envious of Jake Gyllenhaal and his massive du jour-ness. After Ed saw Brokeback Mountain I think he had something to prove, so he decided he was going to make a cowboy movie too, but this one was going to be interesting and original, where Gyllenhaal's was just painted-on gay. So Ed made Down in the Valley, and everyone absolutely acts the living shit out of it.

It's a very interesting film, well shot, with a sense of humour and Hope Sandoval on the soundtrack. You really don't know what's going to happen next, and I did find the ending moving, apart from I couldn't help but think of a certain scene in The Big Lebowski which contaminated it a bit. But this film is good anyway and it's nice to see Ed Norton back, with or without the funny wee facial hairstylings.

Brick

2006-05-23T12:42:00.000-07:00

I was secretly hoping that this film was about the triathlon training sessions where you do a bike ride and a run (hence, BRICK). But this turned out not to be the case, instead it's like The Maltese Falcon re-enacted by the cast of Napoleon Dynamite. And you can only understand about 30% of the dialogue. I really enjoyed this, I thought it was good, which I suppose is an object lesson in how pleasantly one can pleasantly surprise oneself when one has low or no expectations.

On the other hand, if you don't like pastiches of Bogart movies you might be a bit disappointed. My advice to people like this would be watch The Big Sleep and To Have and Have Not repeatedly until you can see Hoagy Carmichael on the inside of your eyelids when you blink.

Ping Pong

2006-05-17T13:13:00.000-07:00

I thought this was going to be a Japanese version of Shaolin Soccer*, but about table tennis, surely the greatest game to grace God's earth, but I was wrong. In fact, it's a sports movie about the importance of hard work and the Corinthian spirit over talent, with only one ridiculous kung fu moment. I felt a little cheated.

Nothing very much apart from table tennis happens in the film, but it doesn't have to, because the whole thing reeks of sublimated gay sex, almost as much as Chariots of Fire, officially the gayest film ever, even gayer than that Derek Jarman about the Romans where the naked centurions casually toss a prehistoric frisbee from man to man.

It's just about worth a good rating, anyway.

* Shaolin Soccer is shit, there are 3 very good minutes in it and that is all. Watch Kung Fu Hustle instead.

M:I:III

2006-05-17T12:59:00.000-07:00

You'd never believe me if I told you that this film, with its hubristically punctuated title, wasn't shit. It is ridiculously vulgar yet full of itself, for instance, no-one has nostrils, you have a nasal cavity, and yet into said nasal cavity Truman Capote introduces explosive bogeys or something, and Tom Cruise gets one up his nasal cavities and consequently he has to get his heart stoppped and restarted by his girl in a scene with the slow-mo on and the emotion tunes playing which could almost be sad if it wasn't for the fact that the camera can't resist oggling her (admittedly fabulous) tits.

It might be shit, but it's very entertaning. There's about 15 boring minutes of talking at the beginning, which is suceeded by a 100-minute non-stop action sequence. And Tom Cruise's acting is a joy to behold. When there is that scene in Men in Black where they have the TV screens showing all the resident aliens, Top Gun is playing on one of them, if you know what I mean and I think you do. I would pay big money to see Cruise's Hamlet, I really would.

Sorry I gave away the end, by the way.

Glastonbury

2006-04-16T14:13:00.000-07:00

I really wanted to like this film, because you know that the Daily Mail will hate it. And it's not positively bad, it's just like being stuck on a long train journey with someone droning onto you about how great it was in 1994, because they had a bad time in 1992 and they didn't go in 1993, and all the time you are being slightly distracted by the slight odour of spoiled milk coming out of this his bag. Not quite cheese, more like fat-man fold-sweat....

Just how long it was definitely pushed it over the edge into shit, I'm afraid. Had you ever actually been you might love it. There is just too much footage of people having a party while you are sitting in the Odeon Panton Street watching it. There are good bits. Especially good bits are a) the toilet cleaning sequence, and b) the Battle of the Beanfield. This has been the film I have been most torn about whether it is good or shit while I have writing this blog, so maybe you should watch it and make up your own mind.

Napoleon Dynamite is Useful

2006-04-16T14:04:00.000-07:00

I am evidently having a bit of an 80s retro weekend, because not only did I watch that Squid and the Whale film, but I also played Trivial Pursuit when I was round at my mum's. And one of the questions was, what is the cross-breed of a lion and a tiger called? Well, I haven't watched Napoleon Dynamite like 47 times not to know the answer is a liger, "bred for their skills in magic". So, Napoleon Dynamite is definitely good for something, cos we marched on to ultimate trivial supremacy on the back of that question.

The Squid and the Whale

2006-04-16T13:33:00.000-07:00

Poor old Bill Murray, he is trapped into a nightmarish situation where he must continually remake Rushmore. Unlike Groundhog Day, I think he started off enjoying it, but it must be getting quite tired by now, especially when he made The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, his 493rd remake of Rushmore in the space of 6 years. Unfortunately this peeved tiredness probably added another layer of authenticity to the role, and Murray's protests were misinterpreted as merely laudable.

So, Murray adopted a new tack with The Squid and the Whale. He signed up to be in it, but after Rushmore remake #494 (Dead Flowers) he decided he could not take any more goddamnit, so he didn't make the picture. Which gives us Rushmore remake #495, only without Bill Murray in it. Jeff Daniels takes the Bill Murray role, and he is very good. There is a Baldwin in it too, and a funny tennis fixation like in The Royal Tennenbaums.

The film is good, and I enjoyed it. I was ready to feel radically uncomfortable, because it's very similar to a lot of things that happened in my life in the 80s. And his parents got divorced in New York, whereas mine got divorced in Charlton, his fucking divorce was a lot more cooler than mine. But I really liked it because all the people were really horrible, so you could laugh at them. And there were loads of moments where you just squirmed at how terrible an arsehold the people were being. So when I got out of the movie my divorce envy had totally evaporated, which was nice.

I think the next stage for Bill Murray will be for him to appear in a ninja-assasin movie, that's the only way to stop Rushmore becoming the viral mastertext of Western Civilisation, with Wes Anderson as its Bertrand Russell.

I am sorry I have not been blogging by the way, I have turned into a jock.

Hidden

2006-03-19T15:27:00.000-08:00

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

2006-03-18T10:46:00.000-08:00

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

2006-03-15T13:39:00.000-08:00

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

2006-03-08T13:39:00.000-08:00

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.

Special Edition Judith Law Digest

2006-02-28T14:46:00.000-08:00

I know I have discussed the career of Jude Law in this blog before, but it is worth returning to the subject, because some people might think I like him. Well, if truth be told, he isn't a bad actor, if you think that acting consists of making your emotions really large and obvious, so that they can be discerned by children, and he is undoubtably something of a pretty-boy. No. The problem with Jude Law is that he has calamitous taste in films. He loves appearing in shit movies. Please review this listing of his entire cinematic career and make your own mind up. The list is chronological, by the way.

The Crane: n/d
Shopping: shit
I Love You, I Love You Not: n/d
Bent: shit
Wilde: shit
Gattaca: shit***
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil: shit
Music from Another Room: n/d
Final Cut: shit
The Wisdom of Crocodiles: n/d
eXistenZ: good
Presence of Mind: n/d
The Talented Mr Ripley: shit
Love, Honour and Obey: shit*
Enemy at the Gates: shit**
AI: shit*
Road to Perdition: shit
Cold Mountain: shit
I Heart Huckabees: shit
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow: shit*
Alfie: shit**
Closer: shit
The Aviator: good
Lemony Snicket: n/d (and it's just his voice, so I don't know if it counts either way)

Key to symbols:
n/d = no data
* = hilariously bad
** = painful
*** = Well designed furniture and fuck all else, at very very great length.

Of the good films on the list, he was only in The Aviator for three seconds, and I must confess that I'm unable to account for the presence of eXistenZ on the list. But this is demonstrably the one smear upon a career remarkably untarnished by cinematic merit.

PS: Steve's mum used to teach English to Jude Law, so I know what I am talking about.

Service Announcement

2006-02-26T13:15:00.000-08:00

Hello there gentle readers. I am sorry there have not been many reviews, I'm training to run a marathon and it is rather tiring. I suppose the important thing is, it's still not OK to watch films with Jude Law in them.

Sur mes lèvres (Read My Lips)

2006-02-26T13:10:00.000-08:00

I liked this movie, it’s good. It’s about a deaf girl and an ex-con, but pretty soon you stop worrying about all of that and just relate to them as characters. I investigated this film because I enjoyed The Heart my Beat Skipped, by the same director, Jacques Audiard. So I ordered Read My Lips off my DVD rental service.

And then, from almost the first frame, I realised that I had seen this film before, when it came out in the cinema, and then I’d totally forgotten almost everything about it. And it’s not that it’s not memorable or shit or anything, I remembered enjoying it, and that was only in 2001 It is a bit low-key and subtle, but that can't account for this phenomenon, I think someone must have neuralised my brain or something, like in Men in Black. And then I got to thinking, how many films have I seen that I’ve totally forgotten. It’s entirely possible that I might have seen Schindler’s List 12 times, for instance, forgetting it each time, and then having to watch it over, and going, why does he insist on doing that stupid German accent, every single time.

Oh well, it’s not so bad, unless I start getting tattoos done of the all the films that I see, I don’t think there’s much of a way around it. And plus, I got to enjoy this film for the first time, again.

Flavin

2006-02-16T08:33:00.000-08:00

Dan Flavin is an artist who used to do installations using fluorescent lights. He’s dead now, but possibly not because of the tubes. Fortunately for london-based electricians, there is a big retrospective about him in the Hayward Gallery at the moment. When you go in it’s like you’re a fly about to be electrocuted by one of those zapper things they have in cake shops. Also, the green ones make you and your mates look like the corpses.

If you don’t like the low hum that fluorescent tubes make, you wouldn’t like this exhibition. It’s also capable of giving you a green tan if you remain in there for too long. A further bad point is that most the gallery staff have been turned into violent zombies because of the brain-mangling intensity of the light; I found quite a few stray attendants victimising the skateboarders in that concrete hell-pit area underneath the gallery.

This is a good exhibition, anyway. I spoke to one of the attendants and told her that they ought to do a show of the Flavins in the dark, with all the gallery lights turned off. And then she said, the gallery lights are turned off.

If you would like to see more art reviews, please leave me a comment or invite me to your private view, but only so long as you have nice wine and canapes (if you don’t know if you have nice wine or not, you don’t). If you don’t want to see art reviews, please leave me a comment as well. Indicate which category you fall into (art-likers or non-art-likers). You can vote as many times as you like. Votes will be counted soon. Thank you.

Sympathy for Mr Vengeance

2006-02-14T14:13:00.000-08:00

The first half-hour or so of this film, you wonder why it's got a sticker on the front saying Asia Extreme. It's your fairly routine story about a deaf mute brother and sister who get mixed up with organ harvesting and a child abduction plot. But when it all goes wrong, that can only mean one thing. Yeah, you've guessed it. Spam city. Practically everyone gets it, but no-one gets shot. That's not nearly nasty enough for Chan Wook Park.

If this had come out in 1982 it would have been legendary as a prince among video nasties. When I was watching this, I was literally reduced to a state of slack-jawed gawping. I mean, I thought Munich was quite violent, but Sympathy for Mr Vengeance is so shocking that you cannot take your eyes away from the screen. It's totally unnecessary.

This film is good. I can't wait to see Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, but at the same time, I think I might give it a while, for the sake of my mental health.

Munich

2006-02-13T15:46:00.000-08:00

You might be thinking this film is a serious historical analysis of the events following the Black September terrorist massacre at the Munich games of 1972. Well, it is that, it is relentlessly low-key, serious and paranoiac. But mostly, it's an exercise in trying to make Eric Banana cry. With his handsome features and his big chubby cheeks, you know that Spielberg just wants to see him blub. Go on Bananaman, channel how it felt when you heard that Jim wossface got to play Jesus and you didn't.

I enjoyed this film, I thought it was good. Ultimately, it's a big wind-up of the more illiberal sections of American society, and that has to be applauded. It is very long, and but I like long films so that is OK. And there is one really tasteless sequence where Mr Banana is having banana-fun with Mrs Banana, but some kind of exploding helicopter flashback is going off in his head. You can just imagine the Adam and Joe toy remake.

People will probably also talk about the moral ambiguity of this film, but I thought the message was perfectly clear: never, ever, believe a word that the Geoffrey Rush character speaks. Stick to the yellow bendies in future, Eric, they are your friends.

I am sorry, I probably should write more of a serious review of this film, but I have just seen Sympathy for Mr Vengeance and it has done things to my mind. A full review will follow, but for now I'll just say, it makes Munich look like a fucking Disney.

Guest Review: Rumour Has It

2006-02-10T03:59:00.000-08:00

Here’s an exciting event for One Word Movie; our first guest review. Nick went to see this film last night with his bird. And he says that it’s the shittest film he’s ever seen, so I thought that I should warn you lot. It was so bad that it took him about 5 minutes to remember what it was called. And given that it’s totally a girl’s movie, even Nick’s bird disliked it. Yeah, it’s that shit. Nick used the word appalling, and Nick’s mum’s womens magazines gave it 2 stars. I wouldn’t trust publications like that to review Sympathy for Lady Vengeance accurately, for instance, but when it comes down to Jennifer Aniston films, they completely know their stuff.

Given that it was a shit film, it’s now quite a good situation for Nick: he has serious payback due. We are talking reparations. He could probably get his bird to watch Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer on the basis of this.

Kevin Costner’s in this film too. I think playing second fiddle to Aniston officially qualifies him as old and busted.

Grizzly Man

2006-02-09T14:33:00.000-08:00

I must admit that what drew me to watching this film was that I thought it would be Jackass with bears. And while there is a certain freak-quotient going on, there's a lot of sensitivity and beauty too. Alaska looks stunning. The foxes are cute. But the grizzlies just don't care.

Essentially this is the story of Timothy Treadwell, a man who refers to himself as Timmy. for god's sake. He reminded me of Paul Giamatti's mate out of Sideways, the sort of fellow who can't stop acting even if he really tries. Now take him, and plonk him down in the middle of Alaska for 13 years, and he's going to turn into something really freaky. But Herzog engages with his personality, and tries to understand it. There's even a point where he compares him to Klaus Kinski, and I suppose, from Herzog, there can be no higher honour.

The story of Treadwell is compelling, but there are so many pleasurable incidentals - the scary pathologist, the pilot with the mustache who chews on a blade of grass, and Treadwell's ex-girlfriend with her bear earrings - that make it a engrossing film indeed.

This film is good. Check it out, at the cinema or on DVD.

C'etait un Rendezvous

2006-02-02T12:36:00.000-08:00

What does that title mean in English? How about, stonk it like a bastard through the streets of Paris. This film is surrounded in many layers of mystery (mainly so that no-one had to end up in jail), but essentially, in 1976, director Claude Lelouch found himself in possession a gyro-stabilised camera, with a magazine sufficient for 10 minutes of film. He'd also just bought some ridiculous fuck-off Ferrari. So he got the genius idea of mounting camera on bumper, and you can guess the rest. It's Fear and Loathing at about 400 kmph round the Arc du Triomph. It's all one shot. And it's real.

Definitely the best car chase you'll ever see. You could never make this film now, that's how good it is. And I don't even like cars, they are boring.

It is true that the DVD contains only the 10 minutes of utter madness. But think of it as a condensed version of, say, The Bourne Identity, with all the dull bits with Potato Damon cut out, and I think you'll find it's remarkably good value for money.

The Powerpuff Girls Movie

2006-01-29T14:45:00.000-08:00

I've been trying to watch this film for ages, because I love the Powerpuff Girls. Where were all these fantastic cartoons when I was a kid, eh? All we had were revoiced Japanese ones, Looney Tunes, and Dangermouse. Now kids are exposed to Dexter's Laboratory and Pinky and the Brain. But I suppose they also watch Beyblade and that Pikachu shit, so maybe it all evens out.

Anyway, The Powerpuff Girls Movie is good, but not as good as it could have been. I love the design of it all, and the score is excellent - it's like the bleepy casio bits from the Life Aquatic soundtrack, speeded up by a million. And on the DVD extras you get to see the three women who do the voices of the girls, and they are surprisingly foxy, let me tell you.

I never realised that Mojo Jojo wore a turban to cover up his big brain, either. That is disgusting. I hope Monty Panesar is not in league with him.

On the downside, there are some very long bits where nothing happens. Well, OK, things do happen in these bits, but it doesn't involve fighting or destruction. So I got a little bored. Also, there is quite a lot of talking and that whole dialogue stuff. And I wasn't too keen on that either.

There is one more thing about this film which I really enjoyed. It has got Frank Welker doing some monkey sounds in it. I had not heard of Mr Welker before this movie, but basically he has built an entire career out of doing animal noises for film, TV, and computer games. Not necessarily actual talking, just the noises. Apparently if you tape real animals they don't emote. Whereas Frank Welker does. What a God. Maybe he is the next stage of human evolution? I bet women throw themselves at him.

So, anyway, I enjoyed this, but maybe not as much as The Incredibles or Toy Story 2. And if you don't already like The Powerpuff girls, maybe you might not like this. Damn fool.

Saved!

2006-01-25T13:56:00.000-08:00

Or, I Was a High School Jesus Freak. Given that this is definitely a girl's movie, with a load of girl indie-rock on the soundtrack, it's surprising how funny and offensive it is. It does go a bit slushy in the last half hour when it turns out alright for absolutely everyone, and Macaulay Culkin looks more like Steve Buscemi's brother (it's the eye bag thing) than a teenager. But this is a good film. And I'd forgotten how much I like Martin Donovan; I thought he had vanished, along with The Entertaining Hal Hartley Movie Period (hereafter referred to as TEHHMP, a period that terminated in 1994).

A Cock and Bull Story

2006-01-23T12:31:00.000-08:00

This is the adaptation of the notoriously unfilmable - or perhaps that should be unreadable - smash-hit literary sensation of the 1760s. I was prepared for the worst, and not just because I was going to see this in that awful flea-pit, the Odeon Panton Street.

It's just that post-modernism is more than a little jaded. Two Brady Bunch movies and a shit Arnold Schwarzenegger film have been at it, for God's sake. The textual awareness of textuality gets in the way of communicating anything to do with art, and one's normally left with the numbing sense that everyone involved in the project is awfully awfully clever. Which negates the whole purpose, if you ask me, so it's not really that clever after all. Oh yeah, and Jacques Derrida snuffed it ages ago.

Look, if you're interested in that, you can go and read a load of books like this. But it's not necessary for the enjoyment of A Cock and Bull Story, because although it's a film about making a film, it's not all about this. It's about vanity getting in the way of desire, and desire getting in the way of love. And a whole load of nob gags. Steve Coogan is excellent, but he's freakily good at playing schmucks. Rob Brydon's job is to steal every scene he's in, which he manages with aplomb. And Michael Winterbottom has a damn good thing going when he gets to cast the dashing Jeremy Northam as himself. If he'd had the budget I'm sure it would have been Clooney.

There are a few isolated moments when you think the film's going to disappear up it's own arse, and when I spoke to Adam about it he thought that he wouldn't read the book having seen the film. But apart from this, the film is good.

They also showed the trailer for Herzog's Grizzly Man, which looks fucking fantastic.

That Car Advert

2006-01-20T05:34:00.000-08:00

At the moment it’s quite easy to watch movies that are not complete bollocks, because everyone’s bringing out their Gyllenhaal flicks ahead of the oscars. Even though it result in you watching better movies, I still don’t like it, it’s like putting out a nice table-cloth for when your bird’s mum comes round, when normally you eat out of sweaty tandoori polystyrene.

Still, there is one thing that completely raises my ire. Not the people who laugh at the Orange Adverts. They are just dicks who would laugh at the same joke even if you tell it to them once a week for 900 consecutive weeks. No. I hate the car advert with the Frenchwoman and the public school, rugby-playing penis in a V-neck. This advert is scum on so many levels. As if smug yuppie couples trying to one-up each other about irrelevant cultural details wasn’t bad enough. These wee cars have been marketed to women for ages, by saying that you are a smart competent yet sexy young lady who has complete dominion over your fat sack of a boyfriend. Fair enough, but obviously no man could ever buy one of those hair-dryer motors without shedding at least an ounce of testosterone, and having to drink Dubonnet and lemonade for ever ever after.

So, the worst thing is this is a transparent attempt by the marketing men to try to reposition their product, and tell inadequate men (i.e. the sort who feel they need to validate themselves through automobiles) they’ll effortlessly able to put one over on some hot French chick whenever they want to, just to be able to watch her pout. And we lap it up. When this advert comes on next I’m going to spray the screen with arterial blood, that’ll learn those fuckers.

Joe Bob Goes to the Drive-In

2006-01-17T14:01:00.000-08:00

OK, you crazy kids, you caught me out again. This is not a movie, this is a book. But it's not so much a work of criticism, as a redneck soap-opera with a few breast-counts thrown in. If Flann O'Brien had seen Basket Case at an impressionable age, this may well have been the kind of column he would have ended up writing for the Irish Times. If Roger Corman is the Shakespeare of the Drive-In, then Joe Bob Briggs is his Johnson. I have just re-read that sentence and if you have a juvenile disposition you may think I am likening Joe Bob to Roger Corman's (ahem) unit. Strike that unworthy thought from your mind immediately.

I am bringing this fantastic book to your attention because you can currently get a whole shed-load of them on British Amazon for about two pounds sterling (plus postage) each. Americans might have to pay a bit more. I submit to you most humbly that there is no better way of disposing of two pounds. No. Not even if you chanced across the cricket DVDs in the bargain bin. You will have to move fast, however. At that price I am going to buy up a whole load of these boys and distribute them in hotel rooms, like the Gideon Bible.

This book is good. Check it out.

Jarhead

2006-01-16T12:14:00.000-08:00

When I first heard about this movie, I really hoped that it would be about a head, in a jar. A little like They Saved Hitler's Brain. Unfortunately this was not to be. Jarhead is slang for a marine, and this is a Gulf War I movie. Plenty of scope for a sequel, then.

This film is particularly adolescent. Everything is booooring, no-one understands the hero, and the staff sergeant's an asshole, man. And while this is not particularly a new approach, the film suceeds well, because it's very difficult trying to make a film about boredom without making a boring film.

This film isn't especially radical, but it is good, and it serves up the basic elements well. Any film is improved by having a sadistic drill sergeant in it. Any film is improved by having the hero forced to swab the latrines. And it's not even a bad thing to bathe Jake Gyllenhaal in the Kurtz light from Apocalypse Now. It communicates the brutality of half a million grunts in the desert, and manages to make it seem almost enticing.

Jake Gyllenhaal does well as Swofford; he's an appealing actor, with his features that are slightly too large for his head. And he's also right on the cusp of parody right now. In a few years time he's going to get bored with his craft and lose it big stylee, but for now he's worth watching. And if he doesn't get bored, well, what's the point of having talent if you can't be bothered to piss it up against the wall?

England v Australia: The Ashes 2005

2006-01-15T10:15:00.000-08:00

OK, look, I know this is not a movie, but it does come on DVD so I'm going to rate it. For England cricket fans this is good. In fact it's so good it's probably better than porn. For everyone else, it's shit. For Australians in particular, it's absolutely fucking appalling. Probably as bad as porno with your mum in it.

It is peculiar watching three DVDs, spending eight and a half hours (without extras) in front of the telly, and feeling that there's not enough, but there isn't. There's only the best bits, the big shots and the wickets. There's none of the brain-shredding tension, none of the build-up, nothing of the actual thrill of it. It's just a record of what went on. But. Let me get this straight. As a sporting achievement I had always dreamed of this, and England winning the World Cup, roughly on an equal basis. A world cup would be a bigger achievement, sure, but when you lost a world cup a nation of big-mouths didn't let you know about it for eighteen solid years.

Anyway, here are my top five moments from the DVDs, distilled for your pleasure.

5) Geoff Boycott purring "That's not hittin', that's batting" at a Flintoff off-driven four.
4) Ponting calling correctly and then opting to bowl, on the opening morning at Edgbaston, with a completely straight face.
3) Being able to relive Ponting getting run out by Gary Pratt, over and over and over again. And then see his subsequent tiff about it, over and over and over again.
2) Australian batsmen shouldering arms, and then watching their off-stumps getting ripped out by savage reverse swing. Even thinking about it makes me laugh
1) The demented parrot noise that Boycott makes when he thinks no-one can hear him. Gilchrist drops Vaughan on 40, and there is satanic off-mic cackling. Then Glen McGrath bowls him next ball, off a no-ball, and the noise is so loud Tony Greig has to ask Boycott to calm down a little. Yorkshire schadenfreude is a beautiful thing.

Brokeback Mountain

2006-01-09T13:06:00.000-08:00

OK, ok, given that this film is good, and it's sensitive and beautifully shot and acted, and you could probably take your mum to it, couldn't it please be a little bit more offensive? I mean, it's putrefyingly obvious what's going to happen, and if they hadn't have been gay cowboys, but maybe autistic cowboys, everyone would have thought this was sooo three years ago. Plus there is big swelling music to tell you when to feel moved. So by the end I was in clear and present danger of being extremely fucking bored.

One good thing about this movie is that I really couldn't understand half the stuff Heath Ledger was saying: he rivals Brad Pitt in Snatch in the comprehensibility stakes. Another good thing is that Ledger has an uncanny resemblance to England rugby legend Johnny Wilkinson.

Finally, can I just say, can you imagine going to one of E Annie Proulx's dinner parties? Have another glass of Burgundy, she might say, it has a fine bouquet, and over the next 20 years it will set you spiralling downwards into alcoholic oblivion, tearing your dearest loves apart and even leading you to shave half your dog off in a drunken rage. I haven't got the slightest idea why people read more than one of her books because a) they are all the same, and b) even Schopenhauer would find them unnecessarily moody.

Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace

2006-01-04T13:21:00.000-08:00

When I was over at my sister's house for Christmas, my wee nephew mentioned he'd seen all of the Star Wars films, except for Episode III: Revenge of the Shit, because it contained "moderate fantasy violence and scary scenes". So I asked him which one his favourite was.

When he told me it was The Phantom Menace I almost undigested my festive turkey. Why would you say such a terrible thing as that, I asked him, and his answer was most interesting: because there's pod-racing in it.

It's beside the point that The Phantom Menace is a shit film. George Lucas understands kids brains and marketing opportunities, and we do not. Even if you think back to the first Star Wars movie, everyone you knew either a) had Star Wars figures, b) wanted them or c), was a girl. These movies are about as innocent as a free Tetris game which, when you assemble all the blocks, spells out stuff your sweaty cash into the dribbling Lucasfilm maw, little boy.

Raising Victor Vargas

2006-01-03T13:37:00.000-08:00

I enjoyed this film, I thought it was good. It's not as if coming-of-age dramas haven't been done before, but this is fresh and well acted. Even if the director is a precocious little shit. My only problem with the movie, is, why do they have to put a picture of what happens at the end on the fucking box?