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Solomon and Sheba (1959)

Several years ago, I made a post in a forum asking for the name of this movie. When it was not forthcoming, I asked the same question two years later, and the answer was immediately forthcoming. Hooray for the internet! I watched this fillum as a wee bairn (which I presume means youngster) with my grandfather. He clearly loved the film, as he built up the scene for me, which is why I remembered that particular scene, and that scene alone: Wise poet-king Solomon, at near defeat from the Egyptians, rallies his remnant, decimated forces to face the attack of the massively superior Egyptian army. As their overwhelming numbers charge the small brigade, all seems lost. Suddenly, as the marauding Egyptians ride within range (I guess where they could see the whites of their eyes), Solomon and his small band of men turn their burnished shields towards them. The sun reflects off of the shields, blinding the charging Egyptians, and a hidden ravine lay before them. The entire Egyptian battalion rides into the crevice, wiping them all out.

It was spectacular for the time, and it's as damned spectacular re-watching it again. I'm not a fan of swords 'n' sandals epics; my knowledge of heavyweights like Yul Brynner and Charlton Heston is severely limited. Much like my only exposure to Westerns was once Sergio Leone and no-one else (I have rectified this over the past few years), my only experience of historical/biblical epics have been cursory nods towards Ben Hur, Lawrence of Arabia, and the odd Greco-Roman fantasy, like Jason & the Argonauts. I think I might have seen Cleopatra on a Sunday morning as a child, and a Sinbad film or two, but otherwise, the genre is one I've rarely dipped into.

What a mistake this was! The Thespian, Olivier-esque acting school never appealed to me, outside of filmed versions of Shakespeare (indeed, Olivier's 1948 production of Hamlet is still one of the best Bard-to-screen adaptations I've seen), and I've never really been one for realised versions of bible stories, but this biblical epic, with artistic licence firmly entrenched, insofar as it's all just a pack of lies, was actually a bloody good watch.

The story concerns Solomon (Yul Brynner) and his accession to the throne, as father King David nears death. Solomon, ever the thoughtful poet and sage, is preferred over his warlike older gung-ho soldier-brother Adonijah. Solomon has eyes for peace and unity, Adonijah has visions of conquering Egypt and Sheba (who have united against the Israelites). Unsurprisingly, Adonijah takes this as an affront to his character, despite Solomon's wishes that he remains military captain of the Israelite army. Adonijah attempts to woo the Queen of Sheba into forming an alliance, and she declines by whipping him in the goddamn face. Solomon, meanwhile, handily uses the time of peace to allow Israel to prosper. The Queen of Sheba (a rather kitten-with-claws-like sultry Gina Lollobrigida--one of the hardest names to remember (and spell!) in Hollywood) plots with the Pharaoh to seduce Solomon and seek to usurp the monotheistic religion of the Israelites to her own brand of paganism. Sexy, sexy paganism.

As expected, they end up falling in love, although the film keeps you guessing as to how honest and genuine her love for Solomon really is. He remains aloof, yet clearly has the hots for the Queen. I think it's testimony to their ridiculous stage-acting that keeps the guessing game going; are they in love? Or are they just acting wooden towards each other? (Answer: both)

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Barton Fink (1991)

It occurred to me, half-way through watching Barton Fink, that the Coen Brothers are masters of empty symbolism. I think they do this on purpose, as really, it's far too easy to inject symbolism into a film. Just employ a Checkov's Gun-style element early on, and occasionally allude to it, before implementing it in the denouement. It's easy to insert, but only a master filmmaker could get away with making it subtle enough to not notice until, as The Prestige puts it, the prestige is shown. Times when this has been monumentally catastrophic (in terms of film reception) would be, say, the religious symbolism hastily tacked on to the dross that was I Am Legend, or the ridiculous typewriter-falling-and-smashing in that film I can't remember. But it was in the early 1990s. And I'm sure it starred Nick Nolte, or Dennis Quaid. It was a film about a teacher who tries to kill his student because they'd written a brilliant piece of literature, and the teacher (Nolte, Quaid, Douglas, or one of those other crinkly Hollywood vets) gets all jealous and corrupted, and plans to do away with the student and claim the work as his own.

Nevertheless, one day that film I can't think of will come back to me, but I'm pretty sure I'll not forget Barton Fink.

In true Coen fashion, it leaves every door open, and outright refuses to close any of them. This complete lack of closure of any of their film's weaving, claustrophobic plot-threads, combined with the Coens' cult/fringe popularity, suggests that US audiences aren't just chewing-gum-for-the-eyes empty repositories into which infantile stories are spooned in like ice-cream scoops, all tied up in a neat bow so the zombified blockbuster cinema screen they stumble out from leaves an endorphic sense of catharsis in their otherwise empty heads. No, there are plenty of film-goers out there who aren't so vapid, and are discerning. The Coens cater to these peoples' taste much in a way that Michael Bay most certainly doesn't.

In a nutshell, a successful first-time Jewish playwright Fink (John Turturro) is hired by a major Hollywood studio to write a wrestling picture. He is shipped from his stomping grounds of New York to a curiously vacant LA, where he is shut up in a hotel whose only employee appears to be the ever-affable flunky bellhop Chet (Steve Buscemi) who repeats his name often and signs off with Chet! Confined to the hideously art-Deco room with the very wallpaper Wilde railed against during his travels in America, Fink becomes imprisoned in his stuffy, oppressive cell, and develops an acute case of writers' block. The only other visible human in the hotel is the lovely bearlike Charlie (John Goodman), Fink's neighbour (there are other spectres in the hotel; the shoes lined up outside each clonical room is testimony to that) and brash travelling insurance salesman. The pair form an unlikely friendship. Fink, to combat his writers block, seeks help and winds up meeting with a whiskey-sozzled established writer, W. P. Mayhew (John Mahoney), who is quite the recognisable Twainish Southern Writer, supposedly modelled on William Faulkner. Mayhew's wife, Audrey, helps Barton out, and the pair become quite close. Shenanigans happen, and Fink wakes up to find a murdered corpse in his hotel room. Enlisting everyman Charlie to help cover up the murder, Fink questions his own sanity (helpfully visualised by an incessantly buzzing mosquito), and becomes inspired to write his greatest work.

The isolation of the hotel is immense and brooding, quite similar to The Shining. The parallels between the films are obvious; silent and empty hotels, struggling writers, stifling atmosphere, tension. All is needed is a supernatural element; something which the Coens often allude to, but never actually acknowledge in their filmmaking. Before his character's raison d'être is made clear in the penultimate scene of the film, Charlie often serves as the wall in which Fink's character flaws are constantly bounced off. Charlie is the Everyman fellow, and before the trope is wonderfully subverted by the Coen bros., he is used to show just how hubristic and insular Fink is. One memorable scene has Fink interrupting Charlie every time he opens his mouth, as he delivers a polemic on what the Common Man wants and idealises, ironically ignoring the literal voice of the Common Man (Charlie) in his room.

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(500) Days of Summer (2009)

I am of the strong belief that the actors of 3rd Rock From the Sun are, in fact, actual aliens, for none of them appear to have aged a day from their tenure of the show, which ended over ten years ago. Joseph Gordon-Levitt, somewhat inexplicably, appears even younger in this non-rom-com, which is really distracting. Especially as I didn't even recognise him in Inception. (Then again, I was trying to pick the various exploded remnants of my brain up for the first hour as I tried valiantly to work out what in the heckins was going on).

In the quirky vein of Little Miss Sunshine and Juno, this is an independent film at heart, despite its small but impressive (and impossibly young-looking) cast. Indie darling Zooey Deschanel appears to have firmly taken the mantle of impossibly-beautiful low-key Sundance-fodder cool fillum actress from Christina "Buffalo 66" Ricci, and I still pronounce her name as if it rhymes with Huey, Dewey, and Louie.

The film is sharp, witty, and tightly directed. Its visuals suggest high production values, but its script suggests punchy visceral independent cinema. It's also written from the heart, as it concerns the plight of young love, when one side of the relationship sees more than there is, and when this disparity comes to a head, they end up heartbroken and the formerly Significant Other moves on, and moves on swiftly.

Although the plot is simplistic (500 days of boy meets girl, boy falls in love, girl dumps boy, boy falls into fit of depression, denouement), its non-linear format jumps back and forth between the aforementioned 500 days of Tommy (Gordon-Levitt)'s experience of Summer (Deschanel). The break-up, which we see first, hits at day 290, and the scenes leap back and forth between pre- and post-relationship status. Pre-relationship dissolution, we see happy Tommy, oblivious to the fact he is in love and does not see the cracks in the relationship, viewing Summer's reactions to his generally immature, happy-go-lucky behaviour as wholly positive. Jumping to post-breakup malaise, he sees in retrospect that her reactions were not of doe-eyed love as he once thought, but of pique and irritation. Tommy, high on the fatal speedball concoction of serotonin, endorphins, love-blindness, and sheer oblivion to reality never sees this. He is wrapped in his own rapt devotion to Summer. She is explicit in what she wants from the relationship--not love, for a start--but Tommy passes it off, possibly in hope that by hoping she is in love with him as much as he her, she may just reach that level of emotion.

She doesn't.

Post-break up scenes involve Tommy essentially falling apart; withdrawn and reclusive, he follows through the well-trodden steps of relationship withdrawal, from physical destruction (smashing plates) to mental destruction (outburst at his office building, culminating in quitting). The tropes are recognisable, if a little more extreme than your average heartbroken male would behave.

Essentially, Tommy is naive, sheltered, immature, and foolish. He has never been in love before, and blunders into the relationship with the subtlety of a motorcycle pyramid of bulls heading towards an unfortunately overstocked china shop. Summer, for her part, is completely honest and open with her feelings; something that Tommy either dismisses or re-parses in his cupid-heart-addled perception as more in line with his feelings for her. The direction makes it known that this is indeed all Tommy's fault; Summer can not be blamed for his subsequent depression, as what he wanted from the relationship was not what she could give (and she makes it clear).

I've realised I've spent this entire review calling him Tommy, when really he is Tom, and it's Gordon-Levitt's character in 3rd Rock From the Sun that is called Tommy. Still, not to worry, Tommy works well here, too. Seeing as he hasn't aged a day.

Okay, perhaps he has aged just a little. But only a little!

The film is rather good, for what has ostensibly been marketed as a chick-flick. Right from the outset, the omniscient narrator informs us 'this is not a love story', before we are subjected to a film that is most definitely a love story, just... just without the love part. Or, at least one-sided, completely unrequited love. It's an interesting pastiche of irrational behaviour, rare in that it shows the illogicality and hystericism as being the male trait in the relationship, rather than the female, which has has been depicted in some countless number of heterosexual relationship movies to point of culturally-ingrained cliché. It's certainly not misogynistic as, even though Tom (Tommy, whatever) paints Summer as a cold-hearted distant bitch--and the film is shown entirely through his perception--she's actually consistently emotionally honest and truthful, and this shines through despite the coloured, skewed perception. I put this down to Zooey Deschanel's fine acting.

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L'illusionniste (2010)

As a complementary piece to my outstanding review of The Triplets of Belleville, I spent a warm evening during the summer sat on the stone steps of The Scoop amphitheatre watching Sylvain Chomet's follow-up to 'Belleville: The Illusionist. Cunningly entitled L'illusionniste in French (do they not capitalise their film titles?) the film differs to 'Triplets in almost every way, except the fact that, once again, it has no dialogue.

This time around, the hand-drawn style remains static throughout the entire fillum. Whereas with 'Rendez-vous, the art style changed throughout the film, as homage or parody to the diverging cinematic styles of animation throughout the ages, The Illusionist simply sticks with one. Fortunately, it's beautiful, quaint, and genteel. Each and every scene has that wonderful hand-made look about it, giving the kind of cosy warmth that 3D and digital animation has yet to grasp (as cultural tastes change and technology improves, however, I can see this shifting over the next ten to twenty years, when people will reminisce over A Bug's Life and suddenly early 3D animations will have that thick shlucky coating of nostalgia liberally slathered over it. History is written by the nostalgists, as they say[who?], which is why it's so hard to alter once it's set in stone). Anyway, the entire mmmmovie feels like a living watercolour, and that is refreshing. Few non-indie animations capture that style nowadays. Howl's Moving Castle and Anastasia are two examples that spring to mind, and they are some seven years apart. Before the resurgence of non-Disney Western animation came about (mainly thanks to the influential Studio Ghibli), this style was going increasingly out of fashion as technologically-inspired realism and computational algorithmic jiggery-pokery usurped the artist's brush. Not since Bambi or Alice in Wonderland had the backdrop appeared so unique and like the personalised stamp of a single artist.

That's not to say L'illusionniste does not employ 3D; it does so, and wonderfully actually integrates it with the classic, hand-drawn two-dimensional style. Whereas in cheaper, mass-produced high-budget 2D/3D animation the concoction is jarring (think the horrific computerised 3D in Road to Eldorado), here it adds a layer of magic. The steam billowing from the chimney of the locomotive looks as though it is curling right off of the page, as if the smoke from the artist's cigarette somehow got caught up in the animation process.

Speaking of magic, the plot of the film is all about a down-on-his-luck ageing French magician in the late 1950s; stage entertainment is becoming outmoded, society is changing, and pulling rabbits out of hats isn't drawing the crowds as much as foppish teddy-boy post-beat pop-stars (who dress like glam 1950s Americans, but are clearly from Liverpool...) As his act reduces from theatrical stages, to clubs, to pubs, to private parties, the Illusionist travels to London (no luck there), then Scotland (at the behest of a recurring drunken Scots party guest), to a village some thirty years behind the modern world that shuns him so. The local pub has only just been wired for electricity (electrified? electrificated?), and the populace are a simplistic folk, amused by traditional entertainment (highland dancing, pulling rabbits out of hats), so the illusionist has finally found the audience that had been exsiccating from his act after so many years.

Taking interest in his magic is a young, destitute Scottish girl, Alice, who believes he actually has supernatural powers. She wants for nothing, and follows him as he moves his act to a modest venue in Edinburgh. An interesting father-daughter bond forms between them (the writer of the film, Jacques "Mon Oncle" Tati, originally wrote it as an autobiographical piece in the 1950s, which makes it even more heartbreaking). The illusionist spends what little he earns on clothing for her, gradually replacing her rags with haute couture, and secretly moonlights at a series of demeaning jobs in order to keep his income up. In return she cleans and cooks for the illusionist and all the other down-and-out entertainers in the run-down hotel they stay at. Alice meets a young Gaston-looking fellow; the classic all-round bookworm-with-biceps cardigan-wearing sporty, handsome chap. As the pair of them forge a romantic relationship, and the illusionist runs out of money, he departs Scotland, leaving a note for Alice, telling her "magicians do not exist".

Surely, The Disillusionist would be a more accurate title.

Why didn't he simply modernise or change his act? I rarely shy from clichés, so I'm going to stick with 'you can't teach an old magician new tricks'. The Illusionist's determination not to develop his trade, nor modernise his act could be construed as a comment on how the entertainment industry has traditionally treated its established members as tastes change; once you're no longer in vogue, you're abandoned by the industry that made your name. I guess that's how Jacques Tati felt, seeing as he ended up bankrupt and destitute. The film, in a melancholy-yet-paradoxically-heartwarming way, really captures this sentiment, rather beautifully.

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Belleville Rendez-vous (2003)

A while ago, they held free cinema screenings outside BoJo's offices in More London. The cinema, affectionately known by anyone who cares to know is called 'The Scoop', is a sunken amphitheatre and every September they deliver a monthsworth of eclectic films. My date had earlier been to see Dirty Dancing, featuring the late great Patrick Swayze in a role where he's neither dead nor a paedophile, and the film I had my eye on was Chomet's L'illusioniste. So, to get in the mood, I dusted off my copy of Belleville Rendez-vous, AKA The Triplets of Belleville AKA Les triplettes de Belleville. One things for sure, the word 'Belleville' increasing loses meaning and looks like a nonsense word once you've written it more than five times. Belleville.

The animation is as overwhelmingly Gallic as a string of onions round the neck of a beret-clad cigarette-smoking student bicycling past the Eiffel Tower and made me realise just how influenced by French animation Disney were when they made Beauty and the Beast and probably The Hunchback of Notre Dame (which I have only seen in part). It is also quite magical in execution, covering a range of styles from Roaring 20s Felix the Cat/Steamboat Willie-esque black-and-white frenetic exaggeration right through to computer-generated contemporary 3D animation. Unlike, say, The Road to Eldorado, and other Dreamworks' works, where 3D was shown unnecessarily in an attempt to do little but boast 'look at this scene! It's in three-dee!', the 3D non-static backgrounds of BR-v/tToB/LtdB only serve to enhance the fillum's atmosphere and integrates with the hand-drawn 2D animation perfectly. Interestingly, the animation is a chronological mélange of styles throughout the ages, from the silver screen to the latest Hollywood blockbuster, whilst retaining its unique French stylisation, which is present mainly in the anatomy of the characters; sinewy elongated forearms and necks, knobbled knees and elbows, and absolutely enormous hawk noses.

The story is of a lonely child raised by his grandmother. With only their loyal bounding dog for company, who has a loathing of trains, she diligently trains him in preparation for his entry into the Tour de France. However, during the race, he is abducted by Mafia goons who transport him to America, where they force him and others to race in a Tour de France simulation for an illicit underground gambling racket. The grandmother, ever the persistent stocky workhorse, pursues the thugs with her kidnapped grandson, (via pedalo across the Atlantic Ocean) and as she searches New York, hungry and penniless, she is taken in by The Triplets of Belleville, a singing trio who had their heyday in the 1930s, and are now living in squalor in a seedy hotel-cum-brothel. To make ends meet they perform in local concerts, using household appliances for instruments, and eat frogs they have dynamited from the local marsh. The moviefilm climaxes with a daring rescue attempt, and a very prompt, punctuated and abrupt ending.

The film is highly surreal, and full of a personal warm humour, from the sycophantic ingratiating waiter, who bends back so far his head is completely upside-down, to the perfectly rectangular identical French goons and their squat boss with a rat-like face, to the perenially-gasping-for-air competitive cyclist, whose mouth is permanently wrenched open in a gasping rasp, and his red, raw eyes never blink making your own eyes water at the very notion. There's biting social commentary, too, as the majority of Americans in what is clearly New York are immensely obese. The entire cast are so highly disfigured and unnatural anyway, the obese passer-byer New Yorkers are the only ones who don't seem comically and grotesquely exaggerated (despite their malformed, grotesque appearance). Kind of like when Homer Simpson tries on a pair of baggy clown pants and finds they fit perfectly, Chomet's caricatures of obese Americans end up being the only ones who seem accurately and realistically proportioned.

The entire film, aside from the lyrics of "Belleville Rendez-vous", sung by the Triplets of Belleville, is wordless, which really emphasises the fantastic and outlandish visual storytelling. More emphasis is placed on sounds and vocal noises (grunting, panting, hmm-ing, etc.) and the sound, music and ambience deserves recognition in their own right. So... there you go. Recognition.

The film is about as close as you'll get to experience the kind of circuses you see in horror films: everything is harrowingly skewed and gargoylesque in a grotesque and uncomfortable way, but, hey, it's a load of fun, even if it might scare the children.

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Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)

I thought Saturday night would be a good night to spend a lot of money sitting in a darkened room some three-hundred yards from my comfortable flat in Peckham. Alas, one of the most anticipated British films of the year, next to The King's Speech, was not even showing! So instead we opted for a midnight showing in Fulham Broadway, which involved crossing the river to the more moneyed side of town, where (on a Saturday night at least) the women wear more expensive clothes that paradoxically cover less of their body than an artfully-placed flannel, and the men all wear the same shirt and mark their territories nasolachrymally with liberal splashes of Dolce & Banana.

Anyway, enough social commentary. Much as I love the Hollywood-friendly explosions and loose women of James Bond, I've always been far more interested in the bleaker side of Cold War espionage; the tired, careworn faces of old white men talking in codes that have become common parlance through over-use, and the cat-and-mouse games fought from behind mahogany writing desks rather than on skis with machine-guns and Union Flag parachutes. This is why John le Carré, rather than Ian Fleming, is more suited for the silver screen.

Having only read/seen the incredibly excellent The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, I was well-geared for a Carrésque pensive panorama of stiff upper-lipped British espionage; more dialogue than detonations, more intrigue than ignition. The life of a spy as portrayed as one of isolation, tedium, and ultimately depressing loneliness is so much more realistic, believable and tangible than Fleming's fast cars, high-stakes poker and competitive golf with your arch-nemesis. Whereas the US audience is geared for Jack Bauer types killing anyone with brown skin and a funny accent (depending on which nation the Fox network feels is highest on America's Paranoia Index that season) ideally with the most imaginative (read:loudest) weapons available, British audiences have always had a tendency to go for character-driven aspects such as gossipy infighting, mind-games and the destruction of characters through witty repartee, rather than inventive methods of evisceration. 

And thus we have the ironically-named George Smiley; the cynical downbeat hen-pecked husband, beautifully played by the laconic and lugubrious Gary Oldman. In spite of the all-star cast, Oldman's name is the only one to appear before the title credit, and it's a good twenty minutes before the taciturn Smiley even utters a single word, choosing to passively react to the verbosity of the furrowed-brow upper echelons of MI6. As such, using the old clichéd adage acting is reacting, Oldman excels magnificently through his use of expression alone. One of the best actors in the world, proving their mastery of the art without saying a word.

Like all spy-films, and thrillers of the talky-talky variety, I found this equally as hard to follow as any Ludlum, Forsyth, Clancy or Higgins plot. It's inescapable that you get introduced to a large range of characters from the start, and as such, I spend a long time trying to align the names of the characters with their faces, just so I know who they're talking about when that character is out of the room. As a spy film, talking about someone who isn't there, that you're supposed to know the name and life story of, is rather common. In fact, names are bandied about here and there with such pace--Alleline, Haydon, Bland, Esterhase, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor, Richman, Poorman, Beggarman, Thief--I gave up and just tried to enjoy the show. Fortunately, like all well-made films, loose threads that you're trying to keep track of all entwine as the film climaxes, leaving for a satisfying denouement, and enough ammunition to chat wildly about as you leave the cinema.

In a nutshell, providing you have a large enough nut, as the story is rather complex: Control (huskily played by a chain-smoking, whiskey-sodden, prune-faced John Hurt) believes there to be a Russian mole in MI6 ("the Circus"), and--after a disastrous mission in Budapest which a top agent is gunned down--is forced out of the Circus along with George Smiley. It was Control's conspiracy theory that resulted in the loss of an agent, and the Budapest mission was an unauthorised attempt to get more information on the mole. His theory was that one of four men is secretly feeding the Russians information; 'Tinker', 'Tailor', 'Soldier', and 'Poorman', which he handily illustrates by sticking their portraits to chess pieces. Smiley picks up where Control (now dead) leaves off, and begins an investigation 'from the outside', i.e. with no access to MI6's intelligence. Essentially, he has to track down the mole before MI6 manages to open up a historic secrets-sharing deal with American Intelligence thanks to 'Project Witchcraft' - a mysterious secret source providing top-rate Soviet intelligence.

That old chestnut. What's great about the film is that it's paced fairly, with little slow-down despite the dearth of 'screen action'. Most notable is the mise-en-scène: as the film is set in the early-to-mid-seventies, the attention to detail is astounding, right down to the hideous patterned wallpaper, clunky black rotary phones, battleship-grey filing cabinets, and dark slate green Morris Minor light vans (you know, the ones with the wooden frame), along with a host of British Leyland cars and those funky tape-reel surveillance recorders with the chunky buttons (surely scavenged from the props department of Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation). What a wonderful time for technology! If the film were nominated for an Oscar, it would surely be a first choice for sound editing. Particularly in the opening scene, ambience and sound effects play a huge role in establishing the tone of the film; every flutter of pigeon wings, rattle of crockery, and mouthful of crispy pastry is superbly emphasised and nuanced without obfuscating the other senses. Cleverly done. I blame director Tomas "Let the Right One In" Alfredson's clinical attention to detail.

Speaking of which, for a Swedish director, and this being (according to WikiMDB) his first English-language film, he manages to encapsulate British quintessence to a 'tea'. MI6, like the Old Boys Club it was (still is?), is essentially your average corporation; a fussy environment full of in-fighting, management squabbling, power-play tactics for the tiniest iota of responsibility, and water-cooler gossipery. The heavily-lined faces of ugly aged men in PowerSuits with flared lapels and, uh, 'colourful' kipper ties is representative of any bank board, and the high-pressured environment is captured admirably. Other things that I'm impressed with is the director's insistence that the audience not be patronised; with precious little coming out of the protagonist's hewed mouth, there's no exposition. Everything is shown, never told, so you need your wits about you at all times, and can't let your guard down for even a blink, lest you miss vital details.

...Like a real spy!

I think I'd be good at this spy-lark thing, as I managed to watch the entire film. Clearly, I am perfectly geared towards a world of international espionage and intrigue. I haven't felt this way since I decided to become an existential P.I. after reading Paul Auster's New York Trilogy.

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Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2 (2011)

With the awe and wonder that accompanies magic long since dissipated in the Harry Potter series, both in book and film format, this is essentially the wrap-up fillum that ties up all the loose ends in a happy little package, after a dramatic good-versus-evil climax.

The series shifted from the marvel of the uninitiated entering a school where magic is both learned and mastered, to a teenage relationship-drama between three wooden actors who share no real chemistry, having presumably been chosen as 11-year-olds for their physical likeness to the characters, rather than their potential for great acting. Suddenly, the rumours of Haley Joel Osment playing Harry Potter in The Philosopher's Stone doesn't sound as absurd as it did in 2001. After all, he'd had a cracking performance as a disaffected child who sees dead people in The Sixth Sense, which was a great moviefilm up until the point where they allowed M. Night Shyamalan to make others.

I've never felt the magic in the films; nor has the simulacrum of manipulated supernatural trickery created by technical computer wizardry ever affected me in any way other than 'those are some nice computer graphics, there'. I wear the 'book was better' badge with pride each time I have come out of m'local cinematron, and I'm a guy who generally shies away from comparisons between the written word and the silver screen. At least, that is, for the first four films: Philosopher's Stone, Chamber of Secrets, Prisoner of Azkaban, and Goblet of Fire. After that, I think I devoured the rest of the novels within minutes of their release, not relishing, nor even remembering, the actual content. Ask me what happens in the fifth one (it took me a few moments to recall the title--Order of the Phoenix) and I'll probably shrug and mumble something about 'Dumbledore's Army', and some kind of 'Room of Requirement', but other than that, my mind draws a blank to the chronology of events after the death of Cedric Diggory. The series also became immediately dark and ominous at this point, so I'm not sure why I suddenly became as detached with the series as a whole as I did with Lost; reading predominantly to reach the end, rather than enjoy the journey. I bloody love dark and ominous! Ain't nothing more pleasing than to see a rook stood on a wooden fence-post framed by a menacing, bruised sky.

So with that, I entered the mighty architectural dystopia that is the PeckhamPlex to watch HP&tDH:P2 with little to no expectations. Of anything. I thought HP&tDH:P1 was passable as a film; only because David Yates, in his infinite wisdom, realised the true horror of Daniel Radcliffe's void of on-screen personality and monotone voice, and kept the horny teenagers as laconic as possible. Ron, the cheery ginger pillock, even went through some kind of 28 Days Later style of emo-zombification. The talk was restricted to the adults--a veritable powerhouse of established British acting talent--and the kids got to react with their faces, rather than their mouths. This was the best decision ever made; the adult actors in the Harry Potter series have been genuinely excellent in all regards, particularly Maggie Smith, Gary Oldman, David Thewlis and Jim Broadbent.

The film may well have been called "Harry & Ron in: Too Many Horcruxes!" as, in order to defeat the (frankly waning) power of Fiennes' Voldemort, Harold, Ronald, and Hermy-own have to scrabble around Hogwarts, destroying the seven horcruxes (objects imbued with Voldemort's shattered soul); a ring, a diary, um, a hat? Oh, then there's that cup, also some sort of locket, and the two living horcruxes; Voldemort's Dæmon pet snake, and, obviously, Harry himself. Long did I hope to see a climactic scene where Harry commits some sort of wand hari-kari; pointing the short stick at his own forehead, and uttering the words 'accio brain!' Now that would have been an image to scar your kids with. Alas, Harry lives, which is a disaster as there's some kind of epilogue which is supposed to be set 19 years after the final scene. Kudos to the make-up department for making Harry, Ron, & Hermione look like eleven-year-olds who have snuck into their parents' wardrobes and played dress-up with what they found there. Hearty laughter ensued, and I'm glad I wasn't the only one 'LOL'ing in the cinema.

Of all the Harry Potters, though, this is one of the better ones. A million miles from Chris Columbus' clumsy, horrendous early Potters, it still didn't imbue the film with the marvel of magic that Cuaron came close to managing with Prisoner of Azkaban. The Battle of Hogwarts was keen and impressive, as well as tense, even though it did gloss over some of the major character deaths. I can't remember which one of the Weasley twins bought the farm; they are the Ant and Dec of the wizarding world to me. In fact, I'm sure Fred and George only showed up for a few seconds in the film, and given a throwaway line or two. Alan Rickman, looking sufficiently aged, has a star turn as Snape, too, and manages to bosh around his acting chops with enough aplomb to elicit a tear and a sniffle from the audience.

I'm quite glad the series is over now; definitely poor decision-making at the beginning of the franchise (notably the casting of both child actors and directors) had left the latter films with quite a mountain to climb. Yates does well, though. 'A general goes to war with the army he's given', and all that. I would love to see Studio Ghibli take on an animated series; then I will, once more, believe in magic.

[felstaff]

La Haine (1995)

So, a black, a Jew, and an Arab go on a crime spree...

Actually, that's quite an accurate representation of what happens. Three immigrant friends, a West African (Hubert), a Jew (Vinz), and an Algerian (Saïd), living in a failed housing project in a Parisian suburban slum, witness a riot in which police send a friend of theirs, Abdel, into a coma. The Three Angry Men feel the full pressure of traditional French oppression to immigrants upon them, and are thus slighted. In the aftermath of the riot which hospitalised poor Abdel, Vinz finds a policeman's revolver and vows to use that to kill a policeman should Abdel die. The film follows the three delinquents (for they are delinquents) for a full 24-hour period, and climaxes pretty freakin' spectacularly.

Alas, not a film about ninjas.

Essentially, this is 24: The Movie, insofar as it follows the lives of a guy (and his friends) for an entire 24-hour period. The comparison ends there, really, as the protagonists in La Haine are probably what the bad guys in 24 would be, in terms of ethnicity.

What sparked most interest in me, on first viewing of this film, was the fact that the actors have the same name as their characters; Vinz/Vincent Cassell, Hubert/Hubert Koundé, and Saïd/Saïd Taghmaoui. Okay, that was interesting for a few moments, but interesting nonetheless.

The film addresses France's attitude towards immigrants. Anecdotally, I have learned that immigrants, particularly Algerians, other Africans, and Arabs, are generally treated as second-class citizens in France. I wonder how true this is; La Haine gives the impression that this is indeed the case, as demonstrated by the white, French police officers, and the general ethnic make-up of the various middle-class parties and events the three juves gatecrash. It's a unique social commentary--rarely does one see another nations' attitudes to racial and immigratial tension outside of various racist YouTube videos that crop up (who can resist clicking on 'Russian Neo-Nazis Beat Up Dagestanis'?)--and as such, it's good to know that I, as an outside observer, can feel comfortable in my own society's more successful integration and multi-cultural aspects.

Based on this, it is so hard not to compare the film to Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing. So... I won't. It's exactly like Do The Right Thing; ominous uncertainty, bubbling atmosphere, racial tension increasing to fever pitch; hell there's a destructive, explosive climax when things come to a head. The only difference is that Do The Right Thing has a cathartic denouement, and La Haine, not to give too much away, most certainly doesn't. What it does do, however, is give you an immersive, worrying picture of how cultural oppression to outsiders coming in can really influence the day-to-day lives of anyone living under such a monstrous cloud. You get the feeling these young men are delinquents not out of choice, but by being chewed out by the system. The system is broken, and France needs to hold a mirror to itself: equality for all, or just equality for those who already have it?

On another non-racially based note, the actors are pretty friggin' good, and by good, I mean intense, which is why I guess the film was such a huge breakthrough for all three of them. Vincent Cassell, obviously, has stormed Hollywood with his snarlingly-ugly-yet-somehow-hunky strong-featured French face, deep-set eyes, and highly Gallic nose. Saïd Taghmaoui has really, uh, hit the big time with his classic turn in From Justin to Kelly. Just kidding; he did that Three Kings fillum, too, and a whole bunch of other good films, G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra notwithstanding.

Parlez-vous de moi?  Parlez-vous de moi? Je suis le seul ici. Qui la baise pensez-vous parlez?

[felstaff]

Attack the Block (2011)

It's been several weeks since I saw this (apologies for the lack of updates to regular readers. Both of you) but sometimes you need a few weeks to let a film settle down in your memorybanks before you give a final opinion, you know?

I've been pretty stoked about this, being a fervent listener to the Adam & Joe podcast, but they only really ever talked about Joe (Cornish)'s involvement in the new Spielberg/Jackson production of The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn. This whole Attack the Block thing came about during the hype for Paul, as I recall, as Nick Frost was the big lead for the British Fillum marketing behemoth, despite the fact his role is cameo at best in AtB (my little acronym for "Attack the Block"... I don't think I'll continue using it for the rest of this article).

I haven't read any reviews or critiques of this film, so I'm sure this ground's been covered pleny; it being quite the pioneer in terms of racially diverse and ethnic lead characters. Despite being written and directed by a genial, posh, middle-class white man, the characters are polarising insofar as they're entirely black, working class (well, underclass) poverty-stricken teens from a sink estate in South London. Taking a good look at Blockbusters over the past ten, hell fifty years, you'd be hard pressed to answer 'who in film actually cares about:

Underclassed

South London,

Life on an impoverished estate in an otherwise economically advanced nation

Black people?

British film has generally led the way in showing the lives of the repressed and downtrodden (The Full Monty, Brassed Off, East is East, Trainspotting, et al.) and it's usually the ITV-grade period dramas who actually make waves outside our shores (The King's Speech, Gosford Park), and Attack the Block attaches itself to these fine fillums in showing a group of people normally under-represented in mainstream media. The Full Monty had it's post-Thatcherism Sheffield working class heroes, Brassed Off with its stout-hearted Yorkshiremen, East is East focusing on the lit touch-paper of interracial relationships in Bradford/Bradistan, and Trainspotting showing what regular pit-level Scots get up to. Now we have Attack the Block, showing South Londoners in all their gritty destitution. Before that we had Guy Ritchie's shiny cheeky-chappy vicious East-End gangsters, in everything he did pre-Madonna (ha! Unintended, but I lol'd) but no real representation of Londoners. Harry Brown is the only other film I've seen with Sahf Landan thug-life, but then they were portrayed as the wicked antagonists, oppressing the good who share the same pavements (old white men, apparently). Joe Cornish already dug himself quite the hole to work his way out of here, because the group of Yoofs who are the core protagonist bunch are these vile thugs, and the fillum begins with them mugging a nurse at knife-point. That's one in the eye for standard characterisation! Aren't you supposed to sympathise with good, vanilla characters who wouldn't hurt a fly, so long as it was an innocent fly and not, say, a terrorist? Cornish utters a resounding no, and spends the rest of the mmmmovie getting these characters to make amends for their wrong actions, to the point where you do root for them, you do find humanity in these characters who up until this point have been (mis?)represented in the media as a generation of lost, wasted, hooded youths heading irrevocably to a life of petty crime and no aspirations.

Does gentle Joe Cornish succeed in this endeavour? Partly! The film is very short, and the action very abrupt, and as such there's not much room for fully fleshing out the characters and their relationships. It's cool, though. It's his first big film and it's clear there's so much more potential there. The action moves at such a pace, you wonder if he's desperately trying to hold your attention with every frame. In that way, the film is paced too fast, with no breathing space given for establishing the audience's emotions for any given tragedy. Characters die swiftly and brutally, and there's no mourning period, as we've already rushed face-first into the next dilemma. In reality, this kind of thing would be praised as the harsh truths faced by characters in a war situation. However, this is a sci-fi film about marauding space monkeys attacking a small estate in South London we're talking about. It's hardly Band of Brothers.

Speaking of which; the film is about marauding space monkeys. One crash lands from outer space, and the gang (having just mugged the nurse and found out she's got nothing of value) attack the creature and kill it, hiding the body/trophy in the safe-room in Nick Frost's flat (Frost plays a marijuana horticulturist, and the safe room is his weed factory). Suddenly a plethora of the creature's gorilla-like buddies crash land and, in a seeming act of revenge, as the title suggests, attacks the block. The teen thugs have to group up with the nurse they robbed (as she lives in their block) which serves as a handy platform for regret and rehabilitation.

One of the trophies they took was E.T.'s finger, which they attached to their moped.

The gang encounter the sort of problem that affects your local group of friends, and not what happens to your average alien counter offensive force. Ripley and Hudson never had problems with their communications by running out of phone credit in Aliens, for instance. And I daresay any of the Starship Troopers complained that they just wanted to settle down in front of a game of XBox FIFA instead of routing the extraterrestrial threat. It's a beautiful, if weird, marriage of the extraordinary and mundane, and almost the kind of thing you realise is rather important when considering the threat of alien invasion. It's dead refreshing seeing aliens not being taken on by tooled-up Hollywood cigar-chewing Übermensch marines, or even grown-ups for that matter. No, the kind of characters who are the focal point of this film are the kind of characters you'd cross the road to avoid when travelling alone at night.

Going back to the characters; it's interesting to note their class and ethnicity. It's good to see the stars as being unknown black teens who speak in a vernacular rarely (if ever) heard on celluloid. I'm sure international audiences, hell, even regional audiences would need some kind of subtitling, as the dialogue is particularly nuanced and diasporic, you feel me, blad? It's the exceptional acting, performed with such gritty realism, and a million miles from luvvies treading the boards, that makes it so accessible. One thing I hear constantly from people who have seen (and obviously loved) The Wire is that "it was brilliant but it took me a few episodes to understand what they were actually saying", and this emulates the realistic dialogue of the show, but translates it superbly and accurately from Baltimore to Elephant & Castle. Good move, well-spoken Cornish.

Overall the film seems too bizarre to suspend one's disbelief for long; the marriage of realistic London black and youth culture with standard science fiction alien invasion yarn is sometimes too jarring to sit back and enjoy the film. It's definitely worth seeing, however, and I can't wait to see what the latter half of the Adam & Joe duo gets up to in his next project.

[felstaff]

Limitless (2011)

It's been a couple of weeks since I saw this, so I'm going to have to scan the old memory banks, dust off a few recollection files and see what I can remember of the film.

If only I had some kind of pill or something that let me remember!

So, I saw this on the basis of a recommendation by a guy who eats nothing but McDonalds and kebabs and yet retains a marvellously trim figure. Also it has Bradley "The Hangover" Cooper in it, and I haven't seen him in too much, but I know he's quite the actor. Although, in The Hangover, he did have a certain dislikeable alpha-male characteristic about him.

Essentially, he's a bum suffering writer's block, dumped by his girlfriend, and generally living like most writers; squalid apartment, no prospects, and the tyranny of the blank page sat before him (once a piece of paper in a typewriter, now a horrific blinking cursor). A chance meeting with his ex-wife's dodgy brother results in him taking a SuperPill of some kind (it looks a little like a contact lens) which opens up every neuron in his brain, making recall of any fact ever learned instantaneous. Ultimately, he becomes a mind-superhero: a brainial Übermensch. He writes his novel in four days, he sleeps with his landlord's wife, he sleeps with a lot of people, he gets invited to parties, he learns languages in minutes. His mind, effectively, becomes limitless. Oh! I understand the title now!

Of course, every medicine has side effects, and this one is some kind of Futurama-style time-skipping ("I've lost the last 16 hours of my life!") followed by what can only be described as a very vague death. Add to that a mysterious stranger constantly following him, and killing innocent bystanders, as well as a crazed Russian loan-shark, and you've got yourself a tense thriller!

Overall, it's rather good. I've heard rustlings of bad pacing, but I thought it cruised along at rather an enjoyable tempo. Bradley Cooper is a Good Actor, too. Impossibly handsome, clean-cut, and chiselled to within an inch of his life, he manages to pass off the 'homeless bum' look at the start (thanks to an impressive makeup department) and oozes the effortless cool of a millionaire playboy when he's atop his game for the middle third. When trying to keep his shit together when everyone seems to want to kill him (I think that's a Rudyard Kipling quote?), he's rather solid at looking like a junkie with the weight of the world on his shoulders. Robert De Niro, too, has a rather fine turn as the Trumpian business man; the untouchable CEO of MegaCorp. USA. Although the film paints him as the antagonist; really he's just a businessman. They're only evil in the eyes of the great unwashed lumpenproletariat (so... cinemagoers), and I don't really think he deserved his standard 'comeuppance' or whatever happens at the end that I'm not willing to spoil. Abbie Cornish does a solid job of being 'the woman' in the film. She has no real power or understanding of what's going on (as is with the majority of ManFilms) and serves as a useful tool to the rest of us, in being expositioned to, so we can follow the twists and turns as they're being explained to us.

It feels as though the film evolved whilst being made. The idea of a pill that can make you super-recollect the smallest snippets of information is a particularly well-trodden path; everyone wants to be in full control of every piece of information they've received (thus eliminating the age-old fear of The Examination) and those many idle thoughts we've had (learning martial arts/languages/the piano just by watching someone fight/speak/play the piano just once) is an elixir of human achievement; accomplishment without effort, all in pill-form. It's like the science fiction of the mid-twentieth century! However, once those aspects have been touched on, it gets all Wall Street; playing the market, "lunch is for wimps", rising meteorically up the business ladder until you're sitting at the desk of the Big Robert de Niro-shaped Cheese himself. Turns out, that's quite hard to do without wanting to be killed by just about everybody.

If someone offered me that pill, however, I'd take it: it would be great just remembering where I left my keys.

[felstaff]

Airplane! (1980)

As part of their Cult Movie season, m'local independent cinema showed Airplane! the other day, so naturally I leapt upon the chance to see a film I've seen more times than any other film, except Withnail & I.

It was quite exciting to see the old Paramount Logo flicker and wobble on the big screen. The reel was straight from 1980, complete with scratches, dust and washed-out Metrocolor tone. In places the film was so badly damaged, it would skip to the next scene, missing out a joke or two.

Nonetheless, 'twas worth every penny seeing it on the big screen. A paragon of surrealism and absurdism, I even enjoyed the frou-frou appearance of the camp Jonny, who aside from a few wicked sight-gags (unplugging the landing strip lights) had seemed so pointless and base in previous viewings. "What can you make of this, Jonny?" "Well, I can make a hat, or a brooch, or a pterodactyl!"

Although a spoof film, it's refreshing to see one that doesn't rely solely on film reference; the parodies in Airplane! are hilarious even if you've never seen Zero Hour! (I haven't), Saturday Night Fever, Happy Days, whatever-that-romantic-film-was-where-they-run-in-slow-motion-along-the-beach-and-kiss-in-the-surf, and various big-action 70s disaster fillums. It's got the perfect balance of everything, and a heavy dose of deadpan from a host of serious actors. "The life of everyone on board depends upon just one thing: finding someone back there who can not only fly this plane, but who didn't have fish for dinner." is the line that summarises the film perfectly. Delivered with such pokerfaced detachment, it's a perfect blend of grave Hollywood seriousness with a subject matter so absurdly nonsensical; the juxtaposition is borderline genius. No wonder Leslie Nielson was regarded as a Hollywood legend.

Airplane! has a lot to answer for. It's spawned a plethora of shit 'parody' films. Mostly made entirely by Aaron Seltzer and Jason Friedberg; two of the least talented people in Hollywood (although I do have a soft spot for Spy Hard, but I worry my adult self might not enjoy it as that 12-year-old did in the ABC cinema (since demolished) in 1996.) But I shouldn't begrudge it that. It's like blaming Bram Stoker for Edward Cullen. Like Napoleon Dynamite, Withnail & I, and Anchorman, directly quoting Airplane! out of context is likely to send each generation of in-joke obsessed students wild for years to come.

Observe!

Ted Striker: My orders came through. My squadron ships out tomorrow. We're bombing the storage depots at Daiquiri at 1800 hours. We're coming in from the north, below their radar. Elaine Dickinson: When will you be back? Ted Striker: I can't tell you that. It's classified.

Steve McCroskey: Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit {smoking|drinking|amphetamines|sniffing glue}

Captain Oveur: Joey, have you ever been in a... Turkish prison?

Ted Striker: I flew single engine fighters in the Air Force, but this plane has four engines. It's an entirely different kind of flying, altogether. Dr. Rumack, Randy: [together] It's an entirely different kind of flying.

...and don't call me Shirley.

[felstaff]

Biutiful (2010)

I'm getting to like this cinema that's technically closer to me (as the crow flies) than any other cinema on earth. They sell beer and wine and sweeties and chocolates and popped corn, for a fair price, but still much less than the megaplexatrons, with their £5 ($8) tubs o' stale, reheated polystyrene popcorn. £2.50 for a fresh batch of salty, crispy puffed edible corn-kernels actually seems like a good deal.

So, whilst sipping on a Johnnie Walker & coke, munching a few chocolate-covered edamame, and lounging in the lounge bar (when in Rome?), I read through the What's On? brochure and noticed that tonight's showing of Biutiful was two hours and thirty minutes in duration, just like every showing of Biutiful. Being a schoolnight, I've only just realised I am now averse to sitting in a cinema for a duration longer than two hours. I have work in the morning, dagnabbit! Hacks like Michael Bay have put me off the 3-hour monstrathon forever, and film length now plays an important factor of whether I watch said film, similarly as novel length is increasingly affecting what I read next. I blame MTV for shortening my attention span.

So we sat and we watched Biutiful, which I must say is a very well-acted film. Javier Bardem thoroughly deserved his Oscar nomination and Bafta win, even if I think Colin Firth's King George V narrowly pipped it. Saying that, the two performances were different beasts indeed. Biutiful is, in two words, not brilliant. It's not enjoyable, it's over-long (by, like, an hour it felt) and it didn't grab me in the way I'd hoped it would. Rather than an intricate weaving of sub-plot strands to form a rope-like end product, it's just simply a meshing of Bad Stuff That Happens To Javier Bardem. For two hours and thirty minutes. It feels as though the director has bit off more than he could chew, and has tried to make an arthouse film out of a visceral drama. Too many characters are left undeveloped, and this is because they each have a 'big scene', if that's the term I'm looking for, but no running commentary. It's like watching the third and fourth hurdle of a 50-hurdle horse-race, and having to figure out the result from that. Specifically, I'm thinking of the gay Chinese racketeers; an entire scene was dedicated to their (secretive?) relationship, but then nothing further was really mentioned about it until the end, and even then an unfinished-feeling 30-second scene is crowbarred in to wrap something up that, by this point, I really didn't care about. A good filmmaker would have either seen the relationship as plot-drivingly crucial, and hinted/referenced/paid attention to it at various points throughout the film, or expended it entirely as it didn't seem relative to driving the narrative. Like, at all. Alejandro González "21 Grams" Iñárritu chooses to lump it all in one scene in the first thirty minutes, then top it off in the penultimate in 30 seconds. Not the ideal ingredients for character development.

In a nutshell, the film is about Uxbal (Bardem), a man dying of cancer. Divorced from his bi-polar wife with no real idea of how to raise his (remarkably well-behaved) kids, he has to struggle the trappings of parenthood with exploitation; he and his party-hearty brother provide a protection racket for groups of African and Chinese illegal immigrants who populate Barcelona's hidden underworld. He also is closely connected with death; aside from the protection money he receives from the aforementioned gay Chinese traffickeers, and Ekweme, a Senegalese street-trader with a wife (Ige) and newborn, he also makes money (I think?) from speaking to the dead and passing on messages to the recently-bereaved. That part was unclear to me, as, like I said, concentration became harder and harder as the fillum dragged. What this basically means is that, whenever death is close, Uxbal has a tendency to see silent people on the ceiling. This imagery seems more confusing than artistic. Whether he is a charlatan or can genuinely speak to the dead remains unanswered. He seems to come from a highly spiritual background. A key plot point revolves around his compassion; he is concerned for the health 'n' safety of the trafficked people sleeping in the basement of an invisible warehouse, and resolves to buy them heaters. This complicates things somewhat, and he is torn by his own moral compass.

Despite the heavy presence of illegal immigrants, there is not much politicking about the state of immigration in Spain. Naturally, they are shown as a desperate people, who are willing to do the most unenvied and mundane of tasks in order to achieve whatever the Spanish equivalent of the American Dream is. They are also shown as necessary; as if the very foundation of Western Capitalism relies on the exploitation of these silent peoples to prop it up. Biutiful it ain't, but an uncomfortable truth that the film tries to educe from the shadows. Noted, the police are seen as faceless, robotic, inhumane. But then, they always are, aren't they?

Biutiful is not a bad film; just long and badly paced. It is extremely beautifully acted. When you don't understand the words being said (Spanish, English subtitles), you really take more conscious notice of the facial expressions, and it is here where the acting really steps into the limelight. Every sullen gaze, every furrowed brow is drawn by the stark, high-contrast lighting. Each adult in that film looks ten years older than they really are under such intense lighting, shadowing every crescive wrinkle. The range of Bardem's acting runs the full gamut; from morose to melancholy. Little joke there; the narrow range of his emotions are perfectly elicited. You genuinely feel like he's about to die from the gnawing cancer at any minute, making you question your own mortality. And under such a positive note, I shall end it there!

[felstaff]

Rango (2011)

For a bug-eyed, wirehanger-necked, Hawaiian shirt-clad lounge lizard suffering an existential crisis of identity, Rango sure isn't sure of what it wants to be. Marketed as a fillum 'for the kids', the film seems to be anything but. I get the feeling it wanted to achieve what Shrek dun with its something-for-everyone universal appeal. Whereas Shrek had a combination of cute kid-friendly CGI, adorable kid-friendly characters, and simple kid-friendly plot with distinctly adult themes and references, Rango only manages that last one.The cinema (a grimy West London neglectoplex) was filled with excited kids, and I can't help but feel that they most certainly did not enjoy this film. I, however, did, because I am an adult, and I recognise the satirical plays on some 70-odd years of cinema (I'm using 1939's Stagecoach as an initial reference point here), and I was expecting child-friendly fare with knowing winks towards a cinematic culture only a trained adult eye would perceive; effective parental fan-service to cinema itself. However, the film seems geared towards that latter point, with precious little concern for the former. But hey, what do I care; I'm grown up and I don't care if the kids hated this mmmovie.

Like Paul, Rango thrives on reference; if not specific films (except nods to Apocalypse Now, The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly, and an outright reference to Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas) but genre films. It's a constant homage to every aspect of the Wild West that's ever been committed to film; the saloon silence as the stranger enters the bar, the corrupt mayor, the hapless bank manager with a monocle and a puffy pushbroom moustache. Any film with these ingredients would be hackneyed and cliched, but these characters are amphibians, lizards, owls, cigar-chewin' toads and ... god knows what. Cute, they ain't. At least Shrek had a lovable, harmless charm to his ogre-ish exterior; he was never aesthetically threatening. Most of the toothless, one-eyed grizzled denizens of the town ("Dirt") were outright disgusting to look at. Some were so deformed and haggard, you couldn't tell what creature they were supposed to be. One of Rango's posse--a chicken--inexplicably had an arrow through his eye, protruding out the back of his brain. If this was a reference to some character, then I'm afraid I missed it. Still, despite its ugly nature, the animation is beautifully constructed; but that is de facto in CGI movies now. The animators went for realism, and they effectively got it, insofar as how realistic a human-pigeon barfly hybrid with a moustache could get. I'd put it on a par with Happy Feet: a brilliant recreation of imagination that is bereft of soul.

As far as the story is concerned: Rango (Johnny Depp), a thespian lizard suffering from a crisis of identity in a soulless tank, falls off the back of a car travelling down the highway in the Mojave desert, comes across a live roadkill armadillo who tells him to find his destiny. Wandering into the classic Wild Westian frontier town of Dirt, filled with a variety of human-like animals with browned teeth and missing limbs, Rango uses his over-fertile actor's imagination to construct himself as a dangerous outlaw. He proves his cojones by ridding the town of a predatory hawk, and is proclaimed a hero (and then the town's Sheriff). However, the town's water supply is drying up (water being the trade-able commodity and unit of exchange - the central bank's vault is a 5-gallon water cooler bottle), and Rango is tasked with finding out where the water's going. Also he finds out that, by ridding the town of the dangerous hawk, the exiled outlaw Rattlesnake Jake (Bill Nighy, recreating his Davy Jones voice from Pirates of the Caribbean) will return, and he doesn't care for the law.

Rango spends a lot of the film asking himself who he is, but I think the more pertinent question is What is Rango? It's a film that's more concerned with the postmodern ideal of reference and sly winks, and it seems to neglect many of the things that make a great film a great film - story for one. Identifiable, relateable characters for another. Johnny Depp is great (as are all the voice actors) in creating punchy dialogue; he bumbles many of his lines, revealing a razor wit. Combine Captain Jack Sparrow with James Joyce and Oscar Wilde, and you've essentially the same thing. Rango possesses l'esprit de l'escalier that we'd all like, which is why his character manages to fool the entire town, but his character has no depth, nor heart. There's characterisation missing there that only Pixar have really been able to coax out of imaginary, computer-generated characters.

[felstaff]

True Grit (2010)

So after several setbacks and cinemas close to me inexplicably refusing to show the picture, I finally saw my first Coen Brother's film in the cinema, some three months after the rest of the world. It was a weekend of Coening as well, as I watched Miller's Crossing the next day. Both are exceptionally good films, and have the trademark Coen auteurial magnificence of leaving you rather empty and bereft of catharsis at the end. What is it with them and never having a traditional Disney ending? Sometimes I like to just be happy at the end of watching a stomach-tautening fillum of graphic violence! I think the Coen brothers are a by-product of Hollywood's unease at having happy--or at least complete/satisfying--endings.

I also saw it at an independent cinema (closer to me than I realised) that I haven't been to since I was eleven years old. I can't remember the film I watched back then (it was around the time of Suburban Commando and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III), but I haven't been to that Everyman Picture-House since. The nostalgia was overwhelming; and they even serve beer at the concessions stand. To this day, I am unsure of the definition of "concessions". All I know is that a.) you get cheaper tickets to places (that require tickets) if you fall under the unworldly term "concessions", and b.) the popcorn-seller in a cinema is called the concessions stand. I call it the over-priced pseudo-food fat grinder.

Anyway, the film, like the novel its based on, is about a 14-year-old Mattie/Maddie Ross (Haillee Steinfeld) who seeks (legal) vengeance upon the man who killed her father. She recruits whisky-sozzled Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Rooster Tron Bridges), a one-eyed U.S. Marshal, anti-hero, and all-round lovable rogue to travel into Indian Country (Oklahoma? I think?) to find the criminal, whose name is Chaney. Simultaneously, Texas Ranger unrespected cock-of-the-walk and quintessence of nincompoopery LaBoeuf (pronounced "Labeef") (Matt Damon) is also looking for Chaney, as this trigger-happy son-of-a-gun fugitive also killed a US Senator in Texas. Mattie wants Chaney to be tried for her father's murder in Arkansas, whereas LeBoeuf wants him to be tried for the Senator's murder in Texas. American politics, huh? It ne'er changes. They all set out on the trail, thoroughly blazing it, and none of 'em particularly wants to be in each other's company. LaBoeuf & Cogburn set off without Mattie, in order to claim the Texan reward. Her precociousness and tenacity ensures she catches up with them, and threatens to take Cogburn to court for welching on their deal (that she accompany him). He doesn't want to appear to be a deal-welcher now, and after an argument, LaBoeuf continues alone. Cogburn asserts he is incompetent to navigate the territory, and indeed he appears to be wet behind the ears. After meeting two ne'er-do-wells in a lodge, Cogburn finds out that Chaney is part of the "Lucky" Pepper gang, who are heading to the lodge that night. They set a trap for the gang, but it is foiled by the reappearance of LaBoeuf, who is about to be captured by the gang. Cogburn kills three (of the four) and accidentally wounds LaBoeuf, and I guess the fourth one who escapes was Chaney? It was hard to tell, and I'll get to that later. More arguments erupt, and all seems hopeless, until Mattie stumbles upon Chaney watering horses down by the river. All sorts of kerfuffle happens, and much thrilling Western cowboy action happens.

The film is effectively the Coen Brother's road movie; the simple Quest + Adventure + Return format, as exemplified in Lord of the Rings, or Toy Story 2. As such, it is one of their simpler films, and, whilst sumptuously shot, does seem to have quite a bit of filler with zilch consequences. A scene involving Cogburn & Mattie discovering an unidentified man hanging from a tree, and the follow-up where a bearskin-wearing doctor/dentist tries to sell the (now toothless) body back to them seems to serve nothing except some light, if grizzly, entertainment. It's akin to Hamlet's Yorick scene, what with the characters being so blithe, jovial even, when confronted with literal death. Otherwise, it's completely unconnected with the rest of the film. People would argue why should it have to be? Why should every scene of every film exist merely to advance the plot? Well, scenes should always serve some purpose; and it seems as though this happens to lengthen the arduous (but otherwise uncomplicated) journey through Injun Territory, but it comes across as a bit of a non-sequitur. Plus, in Hamlet, the scene serves as light relief between a lot of bloodshed and turmoil. The hangin'/doctor scenes in True Grit have no such literary sandwich, and seem a little pointless. Still enjoyable, but leaves you with a "why was this in the film?" moment; kind of like the role of the fat Asian girl in Donnie Darko.

One other problem I had with the film, and this is my own problem, so as such probably doesn't affect others, is the fact I spent a lot of the flick unable to understand a goddamn word. Cogburn, being perennially inebriated, is supposed to be a rum-soaked mumbler, and Jeff Bridges really pulls it off, and I gather you're not supposed to understand half of his ramblings (as boy does he ramble) but I also realised I was missing out on vital plot points because I only gathered about 75% of what he was saying. As such, I missed out on the whole "Lucky" Pepper gang thing, and what they had to do with Tom Chaney. I'm sure it wasn't difficult to get, and maybe I was too busy being amazed by the sheer amount of detail the set designers lovingly placed into recreating the Wild West, but I found myself confused as to the negotiations and machinations of where Chaney fits in the gang. Still, like I said, my problem, and one a second viewing would quickly fix. And it's definitely worth a second viewing.

I think it's definitely one of the better Coen films, but then again, I'm a guy who thought Burn After Reading was superb. Its simplistic plot and reliance on character performance without development doesn't put it in the same league as Fargo or A Serious Man, but it's still darn-tootin' (or whatever Wild Westians say) rootin'-tootin', er, shootin', hootin'... hifalutin piece of Americana. Four spurs out of a Confederate flag, or whatever. My knowledge of colonial expansion and pioneering across the plains of America stops at "someone better run git the sheriff!" and John Wayne's awkward walk.

[felstaff]

À Bout de Souffle (1960)

Having another opportunity to see True Grit go a-wandering (I'm seeing it tomorrow, after finding out that my local cinema is no longer showing it, despite it being sold out last week. What gives, Vue? What gives indeed), I thought about creating more of a Movie of the Then-style review based on Wot Film I 'Ave Got Playing on my vlc media player app(lication); and this week I was watching a bit of the old Godard, with Breathless. Having not seen too much of Godard's repertoire--a crime in itself for any film student--my limited knowledge of him is restricted to Pierrot le Fou, Masculin Feminin, et Le Mépris, all of which were his mid-sixties offerings, and prerequisite viewing for anyone interested in Godard's French New Wave pre-Brechtian political-revolution offerings, which I believe coincided with the Vietnam war later on in the decade.

I'm still working through an anthology of his life through film, so I thought Breathless was a good place to start. I'll refer to it as Breathless from now on, mainly because it's damn annoying having to type the À part of À Bout de Souffle.

So, the film begins innocently enough, with a chain-smoking delinquent shooting a police officer. I'm not professionally qualified to judge the aesthetics of maleness, particularly that of 1960s France, but I'm sure the protagonist a pretty ugly dude. He's definitely got the Bogart hat and constant-cigarette lighting face on, but his face is boxer-ugly, and mean. Genuine bad boy look, for sure, but it's hideous to watch, particularly as Godard likes to utilise the close-up to full effect. So, this petty criminal steals a car, but is followed down that famous tree-lined avenue in France, and once in the countryside, he shoots the cop tailing him. Fairy nuff.

The rest of the film is spent him on the run from the police, and frankly, it does leave you pretty breathless. He's unlikeable enough (by modern standards?) for you to want him to be caught, but cocksure enough for you to want him to evade the police just that one last time. His goal is to a.) leave the country, and b.) recoup some debts he's owed from these guys he knows, who he can never get through to on the tele-phone. He fails at the constant attempts to flee France, too. As is expected in fillums of this nature, it all builds to a head, as the main character (his name's Michel, by the way) as Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo) finds the net closing in on him, what with his face being splashed about all over the news.

Tagging along in this is the stupid American-in-Paris Patricia (Jean Seberg) who somehow falls for his charms despite the fact he's a complete and utter arse to her. This is where I know I'm applying modern standards to a patriarchal 1960s 'treat 'em mean, keep 'em keen' culture. I mean, the guy acts like a complete douche to her, constantly, yet she's captivated by his reckless behaviour. I'd have told him to naff off if he was that crude and dickish to me, unrequited love be damned. She only met him last weekend! Still, she's sexy, and I guess that's all that matters. He hides out at hers for a while, and she acts naïve, unknowing (or at least unbelieving) he's more than just a petty thug; he's a killer and a sociopath and a top-rate misanthropist. Finally, she gets her act together and rats on him.

Which, in a way, makes her one of the more complex characters in the film. Blinded by love, she dismisses his criminal behaviour, and occasionally indulges in it, as a look-out (and accessory) to his constant desire to continue, as Judas Priest/Beavis & Butthead might say, breakin' the law. But as the news gradually penetrates her ditzy American woman-brain that he's more than just a two-bit car thief, her moral compass finally tilts the way the audience (or at least, I) wish it to go.

WHICH BRINGS ME on to the next thing: goddamn is there a lot of smoking in this film. I know smoking is really cool, and you can't look anything but cool when doing it, and the mere act of lighting up gives you roughly the same number of ManPoints as pulling off a grade-A Fonzie "eyyyy!", but this Michel guy lights up, sometimes twice or three times, in every scene he's in--which is every scene.

The first of 7,365 cigarettes smoked in this film

In terms of direction, the film is very rough and jump-cut. I gather this is because Godard employed the get-it-wrong-and-you'll-look-idiotic brutal cutting of shots, rather than scenes, to squeeze the time down from over two hours to a digestible 90 minutes, and everything seems just that little bit Dogme as a result; natural lighting, on-the-hoof locations, natural sound, (which, thanks to Parisian traffic, can drown out dialogue entirely-thank goodness my lacklustre French meant I focused on subtitles!)

Speaking of subtitles, the last lines of dialogue have been interpreted differently over the years; the version I watched had Michel saying "I'm such a creep", to which the police officer told his lover Patricia "he said 'you're such a creep'", but some versions of the film have this ambiguity made clearer; with Michel making a statement about the world around him, rather than the Brighton Rockish element of telling the love of your life just how much you hate her.

With all the jumpy, rough-edged editing, it all looks dead arty, rather than amateur. I guess that's why Godard is revered as a brilliant filmmaker; anyone else attempting this style would just look like an untalented hack; something Hollywood should take note of when assessing the Potential Stars Of Tomorrow on YouTube.

[felstaff]

Paul (2011)

Arriving several minutes before the start of True Grit meant we were informed, by a particularly sniffy young roustabout at the concessions stand of our local Vue, that the fillum was Sold Out, and we would have to make alternative arrangements. I wasn't about to let my buy-one-get-one-free Orange Wednesdays voucher expire for NOTHING, and fortunately, Simon Pegg's & Nick Frost's sequel to Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead was showing but ten minutes later, and had seats available.

As you can guess, we saw that instead, which may have possibly been deduced from the fact the very heading of this Tumbler post is titled Paul. I was looking forward to Paul, having scheduled a viewing for next week, and being a long-time fan of Spaced (although I watched an episode recently, and feel that it hasn't aged well; perhaps because I saw it in HD, and I don't think it's suited for such a crisp quality of picture. Give me a VHS or Betamax of the show anytime. ...However this is a discussion for another time and place and preferably not involving me) As I was saying, as a long-time fan of Spaced, I have come to appreciate Peggian references to popular science-fiction moviefilms and tellybox shows.

It's these references I want to talk about first and foremost, and everything else can come later on, in the appendix or something. (Do they put the appendix at the front or back of texts nowadays? I know some things have indexes and glossaries at the front, and I'm sure I've seen a book out there somewhere with a contents page nestled in the back! I guess the trend is mirrored in Hollywood, where they have a tendency to show the opening titles at the end. Tropic Thunder springs to mind, and Paul.)

Now, Simon Pegg clearly loves: i.) popular comic books, ii.) original-trilogy Star Wars (sans Ewoks), and iii.) Star Trek: T(he) O(riginal) S(eries), [and not Star Trek: Toss as I initially thought) as these are all alluded to in pretty much everything he's ever written. He also always plays an illustrator, named Graeme Willy in this iteration of the Frost/Peggson trilogy.

In this filmium, the references are far broader than those from the Spaced days: the Cantina Band from Star Wars; literally talking on the phone (in 1982) to Steven Spielberg about what powers to give E.T., from the spooky government warehouse that houses the Ark of the Covenant from Raiders of the Lost Ark for Chrissakes; a re-enactment the legendary terrible fight between Kirk and the lizard man from Star Trek (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1eFdUSnaQM), and many more, including Jaws, Back to the Future, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Total Recall, *that line* from Aliens (it does star Sigourney Weaver, after all), all three Star Wars films, and I'm sure Nick Frost does a line from the Big Lebowski at some point.

I'm sure many references went over my head, but I loved them all. And I'm not usually a fan of wink-wink see-what-we-did-there? pop-cultural referential humour. This is entirely due to the shambolic "[genre] Movie" series of dross films by Aaron Seltzer and that other talentless hack who came up with such gems like Epic Movie, Meet the Spartans, Superhero Movie, Stupid Movie and Oh No! Another Movie. These kind of comedies make me angry enough to not even bother going back and italicising their names. Because I don't regard them as films, they're that bad.

Where Paul is different from these reference-comedies, is that the film is funny and humorous and lovely and relateable and giggly and cute and cuddly and friendly and likeable and loveable and every other positive word you can append -able to, with the references used to dust the movie with, like so many sprinkles of hundreds-and-thousands on [that flavour of] muffin you really like. This was proved by the fact my date had not seen one single fillum referenced in the film (with the exception of E.T.) and still enjoyed it. Whereas with the lamentable [X] Movie franchise, where references to popular Hollywood fare were not used to any effect (except to repeat a scene from Harry Potter and add a chronically flatulent character, say) in Paul, they were blink-and-you'll-miss-'em asides, that undoubtedly cause glee to all those that recognise the very scene they're paying homage to. The Zucker-Zucker-Abrahams trio were the former masters of this type of comedy; subtlety in the jokes they use.

To drift on a tangent a little here, there's something that bothers me about mainstream Hollywood comedy. Back in the glorious days of Airplane! and Hot Shots! comedy films were liberally stuffed with joke after joke after joke. The office in Hot Shots, for instance, had a verbal joke playing at the same time a shot of the map of the Middle East (showing 'Iraq' on the left, and 'a Hard Place' on the right), alongside a stream of miniature observational wordplay jokes, all part of the mise-en-scène, that you sometimes wouldn't spot until a third or fourth viewing. Nowadays, however, that lost art of subtlety has gone. There's a scene in Evan Almighty where the movie-theatre (in the background) is playing a film called The Forty Year Old Virgin Mary, a gentle smileworthy pun on Steve Carell's previous comedy role. Whereas a ZAZ Police Squad!-esque film would have just left it there for a sharp-eyed viewer to spot and have a bit of a chuckle (it is a weak joke after all), Tom Shadyac (who had done a reasonable job with The Nutty Professor, less so with everything else to do with Jim Carrey or Robin Williams) chooses to track the camera towards it. Closer. And closer. And closer. Now it's a medium shot of the movie-theatre, with the words written in boldest of bold front-of-cinema Impact font. And then the shot hangs there, just in case you didn't see the joke. Perhaps my memory has exaggerated it a little, but having a shot linger on a massively spelled-out wordplay joke for what feels like an entire afternoon takes away the nuance of the joke that makes it funny.

So yeah, in case the point hasn't been spelt out with a bold enough font: subtlety. Humour is so much better when a modicum of it is applied. Modern Hollywood doesn't exactly leave much to the imagination. Unless the joke is there, and hits you in the FACE, like a clown-PIE, then it seems to be omitted entirely. Which possibly explains how Scary Movie had more scriptwriters than jokes.

...and this is why Paul is so excellent. So much is designed to be missed on first viewing. I think. I've only seen it once, but sometimes there was too much to catch on screen that I knew I was missing some quaint reference to Battlestar Galactica, or Independence Day, or Mork & Mindy.

So when it comes to the rest of the film; it's rather all-rightish. Cuddly, yes. Despite the potty-mouth of Paul (Seth Rogan) and the Creationist-turned-enlightened-fornicator Ruth Buggs (Kristen Wiig), it's rather gentle, family-friendly fun. With a couple imaginative curse-phrases thrown in (how typically English!)

The film reveals a lot about how Frost/Peggson view [the United States of] America, as many characters are backwoods hick stereotypes (shotgun-totin' bible-thumpin' conservative Creationist Christian? Slack-jawed, beefy-moustached homophobe? Slutty, ageing MILF with a coffee pot who says the obligatory 'more coffee, hun?' line? It has them all! I think that covers every stereotype of White America there is. Perhaps a fully decked-out KKK member wouldn't have gone amiss) and the Americans in the film are, for the most part inept, bumbling, stupid and incompetent. Yes, Pegg and Frost are all of these things, but when they do it, they're cute! The Americans, however, are slapstick idiots. The squabbling FBI agents are more Laurel & Hardy with guns than the adorable idiots of Nick Frost and Simon Pegg. Still, it works, and I doubt too many Americans will be particularly offended by the characters. It's all done with a light-hearted eye, to mix metaphors (and body parts) there.

Oh, and the story is two comic book nerds find an alien on a road trip exploring America's UFO hot-spots. He's on the run from a sinister Charlie's Angelsesque voice (Sigourney Weaver) who plans to extract his brain for scientific research. Alongside the runaway daughter of a crazy Creationist, who they pick up from a trailer park (natch), they are pursued by several men in black, the crazy Christian father, and two homophobic hicks (one of them's the cowboy from Anchorman). In between, the film makes references to every Spielberg/Lucas film ever made. It's good, rude fun. You should watch it. It gives an interesting Anglocentric perspective of some of America's less wholesome stereotypes, too, which is never a bad thing.

Oh, and there's a big deal made out of characters having three tits, like the chick in Total Recall. Simon Pegg is so geek-cool.