Dogville – 2003, Lars von Trier
It’s not perfect but it’s very good. I would even go so far as to say it’s ‘important’. I’ve not seen any of Lars’ other work but his challenging, unconventional films (often made in trilogies) put him in the same bracket as Andrei Tarkovsky, Wong Kar-Wai, Ingmar Bergman and any other ‘Greats’ you care to mention.
Dogville is famously filmed on a bare stage with the walls of the houses marked out on the floor. Nicole Kidman turns up one day, on the run from the mob, cautiously accepting the shelter the townsfolk cautiously offer. The morality tale that plays out is one of the most compelling stories I’ve seen in a long time. It’s a radical idea and it works very well, so well that the minor flaws are emphasised: the cast is full of exceptional talent but they all underplay their characters too much, the digital effects are simple but still obtrusive, it’s too long, and I don’t like the narration. The end credits are inspired.
Legion – 2010, Scott Stewart
I’m a bit fan of all the ‘War between Heaven and Hell’ stuff, in particular the Prophecy films and the comic Preacher. Legion is a nice edition to the genre which plays out the Final Battle on a very small scale, but it’s entertaining enough with some nice creature effects. Not quite as good as Constantine, which is a film with few fans, but I like it.
Spawn – 1997, Mark A. Z. Dippe
Who? Spawn? Oh yeah, the comic. Todd McFarlane’s forgotten work. I’ve not read the comic (who has?) but the story of the Spawn franchise is quite interesting. McFarlane was (and maybe still is) a very talented and driven writer and artist who wanted to create an iconic superhero to rival Batman and Superman. The result was Spawn, which can perhaps be interpreted as a pop culture metaphor for the 90’s, but I’ll leave that to someone else.
The film adaptation of Spawn was incredibly ambitious. Made a couple of years before The Matrix/Spiderman/The Fellowship of The Ring, it is probably quite an important film in the evolution of digital effects. The GCI in Spawn is very uneven, a result of two different companies creating different sequences. Some bits are very disappointing even for 1997, while others CGI shots still look passable today. The make up is very good too, John Leguizamo is unrecognisable and brilliant as the fat clown and without him Spawn wouldn’t be worth watching. Michael Jai White plays Spawn and does as good a job as necessary from behind his make up. Martin Sheen makes a fool of himself as the villain in what I can only assume to be a deliberate attempt to make the rest of the cast look good.
Battlefield Earth – 2000, Roger Christian
Oh my! It really is the worst film ever made. The third line of Battlefield Earth is ‘Nooooooooo!’ and it’s down hill from there. The direction and editing is very heavy handed, the director worked on the Star Wars films, and he’s clearly trying to do his own version (some of the music sounds like it may actually be from Star Wars). The alien bad guys are like a hybrid of Klingons and Ferengi in platform boots, and Travolta’s performance as the big bad guy is bizarre in its awfulness, although he was clearly having a lot of fun doing it. I suppose that it is quite fun to watch though, as every two minutes there’s another ‘What were they thinking?’ moment.
Soylent Green – 1973, Richard Fleischer
One of those films that’s quite famous, but nobody knows why, everyone’s heard the phrase ‘Soylent Green is people!’. It was made five years after the original Planet of The Apes and a couple of years after The Omega Man (based on I Am Legend), so Heston was getting a bit typecast in Sci Fi films. But it’s to his credit that he took these roles so seriously. Soylent Green isn’t particularly amazing but it was a mainstream 70s Hollywood film that had a definite social message about the disparity and injustices between the very rich and the very poor. In the 80’s Heston went on to become a bit of a paranoid nut-job and figure head for bigotry, but in the 60’s he campaigned for civil rights. It’s seems strange that he became so caught up in all the ‘white majority oppression’ bullshit, but for a time at least his heart was in the right place, and his decision to make Soylent Green is evidence.
Starman – 1984, John Carpenter
One of John Carpenters lesser known films, it’s a very pleasant tale about an alien being who comes to earth from the stars to learn about the human race, specifically 80’s sweetheart Karen Allen. Geoff Bridges performance as the child like alien gets a bit annoying sometimes but it’s not a bad film.
Dreamscape – 1984, Joseph Ruben
Somewhere between The Dead Zone and In The Mouth of Madness, and nothing like Indiana Jones despite what the poster suggests.
Poor mans Harrison Ford, Dennis Quiad plays a young man who squanders his physic talents down at the racetrack and in the singles bars until Mac von Sydow recruits his and teaches him to invade people s dreams. Some nice stop motion in the dream sequences and a suitably creepy turn by the always reliable David Patrick Kelly, and even Norm from Cheers pops up.
Croupier – 1997, Mike Hodges
Clive Owen is absolutely without charisma. Croupier has some value as historical documentation of life in England in the 90’s. It looks shitter than I remember.
Renaissance – 2006, Christian Volckman
French animated sci-fi noir.
Nice that they tried something so original, but it doesn’t quite work. Clearly made with a limited budget; it looks like they used off-the-shelf character software rather than creating there own, which is a good way to save money, but it takes away any emotional weight from the characters if they all look like mannequins.
Unknown – 2011, Jaume Collet-Serra
SPOILER ALERT (but you weren’t going to watch it anyway were you?)
I feel a little bit guilty about having watched this at the cinema recently. There are lots of films out there worth watching right now but I ended up going to watch this with some of the guys from work. I should put my foot down. Anyway...
Unknown is a bit boring, It follows in the footsteps of many other ‘European Action Thrillers’ from the last ten years: Set in a famous European city, lots of local colour and culture to try and make the film rise above the mediocrity of the plot, exciting but incredibly long car chase etc.
This one’s set in Berlin and covers the familiar ground of ‘Secret Agent loses his memory and mistakes his cover story for his real life’ a la Total Recall. The plot is stretched out over 90 minutes, then the big mystery is revealed, but there are still 20 minutes left at this point, so we descend into one of the most compulsorily climaxes to a film I’ve seen in a long time. “What’s that? You want a big action sequence at the end? Oh, all right then” Cue exploding hotel. Unbelievably and annoyingly Liam Neeson’s character loses his memory after banging his head, them at the end he gets another bump on the noggin, and all his secret-agent-close-quarters-combat-training suddenly comes back to him. Surly no one would consider employing the ‘two bump amnesia rule’ in this day and age?
This film is basically a result of the success of Taken, but it was the simplicity of Taken that made it work so well. Unknown trys too hard to be clever, and ends up compromising its own integrity.
