January 2012

Back on the old Blogger blog with what I hope will be monthly posts. In January 2012 I watched…

Collateral Damage – 2002, Andrew Davis
I consider myself a bit of a Schwarzenegger aficionado yet Collateral Damage always felt like the long lost Arnie film. I’d only seen it once before, it was the first time I’d ever seen one of his films in a cinema. I remember being quite exited by that at the time and perhaps that clouded my judgement as I had fond memories of this one. It was released the year before Arnold became Governor and stopped making movies (beyond the odd cameo appearance) and came after The 6th Day, which is very poor, and End of Days, which isn’t particularly good either but I kind of like it.
Collateral Damage is slightly better than End of Days but it still disappoints. The story tries too hard to be clever and twisty and is more than a Schwarzenegger film requires. There are some quite good moments that stem from the fact that Arnold’s character isn’t a special forces guy or a secret agent or even a cop, he’s just a regular guy (albeit a heroic fire-fighter) so when he does bad-ass things, it’s in a refreshingly humble way. This time Schwarzenegger isn’t playing it to-cool-for-school and it works well. The early digital special effects look quite ropey now but I think they’re charming.

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows - 2011, Guy Ritchie
No better or worse than the first one. The slow-motion-pre-imagined fight scenes start to drag a little by the end and it maybe suffers from having such a large budget as it all gets a bit like the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen movie by the end. I’ve never found Robert Downey Jr to be all that funny.

Rare Exports – 2011, Jalmari Helander
A scary Finnish film about a demonic Santa Clause. I really liked it. I think it has a 15 rating but it’s a Christmas film and the main character is a little boy, so while it’s violent and scary, it reminded me of films like The Goonies. The best kids films are the ones that aren’t really meant for kids but that don’t have anything beyond a little bad language and a couple of spooky bits or monsters or whatever. I’d make an awful parent.

Captain America: The First Avenger – 2011, Joe Jonston
Not as good as Thor, better than The Green Lantern. I always think that the bad guy’s creation stories are better than the good guy’s so it’s unfortunate that the origins of The Red Skull are glossed over while the we spend the whole first act waiting to see super buff Chris Evans. I hope Thor gets plenty to do in The Avengers.

Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol – 2011, Brad Bird
As much fun as you’d expect but I think the third one is better. It’s similar to MI3 in that it’s clear we’re not supposed to worry too much about what’s going on. It’s funny how such a big deal was made of the sequence in Dubai and the whole ‘international production’ when there’s not a single Emirati or otherwise Arabic character in the whole film, then when we end up in India for the climax and the one Indian character is just comic relief.

Source Code – 2011, Duncan Jones
Some people were under whelmed but I liked it, although I’m predisposed to enjoy high concept, low budget sci-fi in all its forms. The ending was a bit happy for me though. If you like this I’d recommend Surrogates. What next from Mr Jones?

The Duellists – 1977, Ridley Scott
I like Ridley Scott’s debut film. Harvey Keitel was very well cast as the villain who is a bit one dimensional; he just a complete prick who wants to kill the good guy in a duel. Harvey’s got the chops to make his character interesting even though he isn’t at all fleshed out. The two lead characters duel a lot throughout Napoleonic France while the hero (played by Kieth Carridine, who disappeared into obscurity) tries to get on with his life but can’t escape his nemesis. Harvey really pulls off the bad guy role leaving the good guy to provide the emotional weight. It’s very simple but it works well and looks lovely.

Summer Wars – 2009, Mamoru Hosoda
Not as disappointing as the tedious The Girl Who Leapt Through Time but still quite boring in parts. A lot more Animes receive high profile release outside Japan due to the success of Miyazaki, but films like Summer Wars just don’t ‘play’ in the west because (or not with me at least) because we don’t care about the love stories between high-schoolers that form most of the plot. We’re far more interested in the crazy, imaginative stuff that is, in the case of Summer Wars, frustratingly relegated to the background while mundane family drama/teenage relationships develop in the foreground. Boring

Stakeland – 2011, Jim Mickle
No cinematic release to speak of but it recently had a prominent Blu-ray release (by which I mean it was on the ‘New Releases’ shelf at the Prestwich Blockbuster). Post-apocalyptic road movie type stuff, it’s shot like a small indie film. More The Road than Zombieland, but with more scary bits and not so harrowingly bleak. And lots of Vampires in case that wasn’t obvious from the title. Shot on a low budget but with a high end digital camera (a Red One if that means anything to you) it looks very good it’s lovingly made, clearly inspired by Monsters. It’s let down slightly by some corny dialogue and would have been greatly improved if the plot and characters were just a bit better. It’s a good take on a rather tired premise but falls just shy of being excellent.

Mr Nobody – 2009, Jaco Van Dormael
138 minutes of pretentious guff that I couldn’t be bothered to finish.

I have moved on...

Hello. After some frequent updating my blogging slowed to a standstill over the summer. Rather than keep up this blog at a slower pace, I moved to another site that isn't effected by that google bug thing that makes viewing blogger difficult if not impossible for some folks

The new blog 'Last 5 Films' is here

http://last5films.weebly.com/index.html

and the format is self explanitary. No need to sign up to anything to comment either, so swing by and tell me what you think.

Thanks for reading,

Turner

Inglorious Basterds

Inglorious Basterds – 2009, Quentin Tarantino

I remember begrudgingly accepting that Inglorious Basterds was a good film upon its release a couple of years ago. I went into the cinema with an open mind after all the hype that comes with ‘The New Tarantino’ but there were a few things that put me off at the very start, Firstly there’s the three opening titles fonts. I had forgotten all about them, and watching it again in DVD, they weren’t quite so annoying but they’re still unnecessary and out of place (I wonder if Quentin regrets it now).

You remember, it starts out like this



then changes to this



then through out the film it's like this



apart from this bit



It’s a minor thing to moan about, and they only detract from all the good bits a little. Bastards is a self conscious ‘genre’ film like every film Quentin has made since Jackie Brown (I’d say the Jackie Brown and everything before are unselfconscious genre films, not to suggest that Quentin didn’t make genre films on purpose, he just never used to wear it like a badge of honour) And such films are idiosyncratic enough through the use of unorthodox sound and fast-cut flashbacks and such things, without resorting to crazy ‘look at me’ on screen text, which should really be far less obtrusive (in my old fashioned opinion).

The other thing that grated the first time I watched Inglorious Basterds was harder to put my finger on. I think I had begun to tire of what I perceived as smugness. Basically, Quentin’s dialogue isn’t as good as he thinks it is, and in Kill Bill and Death Proof, there are long talky bits that everyone gets bored of. The problem with Kill Bill and Death Proof is that the long sections of dialogue are an indulgence, serving no dramatic purpose, whereas in Inglorious Bastards, the conversations create the tension. Each of these films is full of peril, but because of the setting in occupied France, the peril the Basterds are put in is far more affecting.

Inglorious Basterds captures the politeness of 40’s Europe and contrasts it with the barbarism of the Nazis in a way that almost no other WWII film does (and I’ve seen a few). The characters are experts in polite conversation. They are very pleasant company, yet war and ideology force them to do despicable things. The long, occasionally one-sided conversations that take place emphasise this contradiction and create a very real sense of unease.

I suppose the reason I may have missed this first time round is because Inglorious Basterds slightly uneven. Half the scenes are tense, the other half are funny (the great Christoph Waltz is present in both varieties). Any cinemagoer will more likely remember the funny bits of a film rather that the perilous bits. Watching it again I think that the balance between drama and comedy, tragedy and farce, is pretty much perfect, further emphasising the contradiction of wartime Europe.

So belated congratulations are in order Mr Tarantino. I think the only bad thing about Inglorious Basterds is Brad Pitt. I hope that Michael K Williams gets the part in Django Unchained rather than Will Smith.

And what did you learn today?

Way back in early 2010 I started to write a review of Schindler’s List but ended up with a brief stream-of-consciousness blog about WWII films in general. I think I was trying to make the same observations about the atrocities of that period that Richey Edwards made far more eloquently in the song The Intense Humming of Evil.

Richey’s notes from the Holy Bible Tour Book read:

The Intense Humming Of Evil"/"Mausoleum:
"Brother/sister songs. Visited Dachau and Hiroshima. What reflections should be for everyone. Otherwise we're all Edward Scissorhands Avon Lady. Winners dictate history. Holocaust one of the few examples where even truth is being questioned. Revisionist historians. Danger of Schindler's List - Portrayal of merely flawed man. Never question our own past - myth of Churchill. "An individual death means little - millions must mean something?"

Schindler’s List is the obvious example of a big Hollywood Movie dramatising the holocaust, but since then (and since Richey’s disappearance) there have been others. I always felt a little uncomfortable watching the WWII veterans speak at the beginning of Band of Brothers, and I always wondered how they reacted to watching their experiences recreated on screen. Was it really like that? I’d believe them if they said it was.

So anyway, here is a clip-heavy and probably too long animated short about films about the Second World War.

Ten Short Film Reviews Eleven

Glen-Gary Glen Ross – 1992, James Foley
aka ‘Death of a Fucking Salesman’ aka ‘Famous Actors Swearing At Each Other’.
Based on a play and packed with an all male cast of stellar actors giving incredible performances. You may have stumbled upon the famous scene where Alec Baldwin rips into Jack Lemon, Ed Harris and Alan Akrin on Youtube but if you haven’t, rather than watch it in isolation I’d recommend watching the whole thing. Put it on your lists.

Marathon Man – 1976, John Schlesinger
I was expecting to be underwhelmed but this one is actually quite good. I was disappointed by The French Connection and The Conversation and even slightly let down by Mean Streets, so I though this 70s thriller would turn out to fail to live up to the hype. Dustin Hoffman delivers his typical style of character; all sincere vulnerability that comes across as charming (clearly a great inspiration for Jason Schwartzman, I’ve been watching Bored To Death recently, it’s the best thing on telly I reckon). The tense drama of the story combined with Hoffman’s youthful whimsy is what makes this one well worth a watch.

Undisputed – 2002, Walter Hill
I wasn’t expecting greatness but I was still disappointed by Undisputed. I’m a big fan of Walter Hill, not just his films but his attitude to film making. ‘Every film I’ve done has been a Western’ he famously said, and he’s right: The Driver, The Warriors, 48 Hours, Red Heat, and Last Man Standing are my faves. Walter also made more than his share of absolute duds, and though Undisputed isn’t a complete train wreck, it’s not so good. It’s a boxing drama set in a prison with Ving Rhames playing a Mike Tyson inspired character sent down for a sexual assault he vehemently denies. Once he’s banged-up the film becomes a predictable prison yard yarn with bent screws and screwy cons. If only Undisputed had been made in the 70s it might have had the same charm as many of Walter’s other films. As it is the story and characters are as stale as the ubiquitous and poorly compiled hip hop soundtrack. Sadly, Ving proves himself to be no more than a competent supporting actor unable to carry a lead, even when sharing the screen with a more wooden than usual Wesley Snipes.

Hard Eight – 1996, Paul Thomas Anderson
An unknown Gem.
Paul Thomas Anderson’s feature debut is excellently written with an excellent cast. John C. Reilly does very well in a non comedic role which makes it seem even stranger that he’s appeared in so many sub-par comedies. I suppose he was just best buds with Will Ferrell when he was at his peak of popularity. Quite similar to The Cooler, maybe slightly better? It’s a tightly made film, there’s nothing that might be unnecessary, dramatic but never excessive.

American Splendour – 2003, Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini
I had this DVD on my shelf for a year before I finally got round to watching it. I saw it at the cinema way back and remembered it was good, but I’d forgotten how good.
Paul Giamatti is amazing, and although he makes it seem like no other actor could have played Harvey Pekar, Harvey’s life and personality would make any film about him compelling. Pekar was the original loveable loser. Years ago I saw the documentary about Robert Crumb, who is equally interesting but far less endearing (coz he’s a massive perv). The directors of Splendour have worked together on a few films since that are all probably worth checking out.

Porco Rosso – 1992, Hayao Miyazaki
Far from the best of Miyazaki’s films but still excellent. It’s about an Italian fighter pilot at the turn of the (last) century who has been turned into a pig. Typically imaginative with familiar character design. No real environmentalist undertone this time, but a smattering of anti-fascist sentiment. Of all the Miyazaki films it’s the least ambitious in terms of scale and animation, it was followed by the almost epic Princess Mononoke which is every bit as good as Spirited Away in my opinion.

Happy Together – 1997, Wong Kar-Wai
Another dreamy tale from Wong Kar-Wai. I just read my previous post on a couple of films of his and on his style in general. I think I was a little harsh, especially now that I’ve watched a few Andrei Tarkovsky films. There’s a big difference between the free flowing, illusory beauty of Wong’s films and the bare tedium of Andrei’s. Happy together a very simple story about two lovers who try to escape to a better place, and end up realising that they really need to escape from each other. Visually, it’s probably a huge influence on scores of young cinematographers, and like most of Wong’s film it stars The World’s Finest Actor Tony Leung.

Coraline – 2009, Henry Selick
Stunning stop-motion animation from the guy who directed The Nightmare Before Christmas. I’m a big fan of stop motion and animation in general and this film is a real marvel. The story and the characters are slightly lacking, but then again it is a film for kids. Any thinness to the plot is more than made up for by the quality of the animation, and the more I find out about how it was made, the more in awe I am of the talented people who made it. It actually looks too good to be true in parts, and though there are clearly some digital effects, the character and the sets all exist in real life.



Planet Terror - 2007, Robert Rodriguez
Grind House marks the beginning of a kind of low in the history of cinema that hasn’t quite passed, but the disappointment of Machete could bring the ‘self conscious exploitation genre’ to an end. Neither Planet Terror nor Death Proof are completely awful, but both of them appear to have skipped a very important stage of pre-production; the script review. Normally (as is my understanding of the Hollywood Studio film making process) a script will be assessed and rewritten, maybe even eventually being written by committee, until the shooting script is ‘locked’. Often the good films closely resemble the original draft (Predator, Lethal Weapon) and the not so good ones end up as something completely different (Alien 3, Last Action Hero, although I like both). The Weinstein Company was so smitten with Tarantino and his mate Richard Rodriquez that they let them go off and do whatever they wanted to do, when really there should have been more input from other writers and producers. All style and little substance with some ideas that weren’t as good as they seemed when they thought of them. It lacks the soul of the films that inspired it.

Gangster No1 – 2000 – Paul McGuigan
Crappy British Gangster Film No 72.
Paul Bettany is in danger of becoming the new Clive Owen. He’s not quite so uncharismatic and boring, but he does the same ‘see how refreshingly understated I am’ thing. Luckily he seems to have found a niche that suits his talents; action-horrors steeped with Christian mysticism. I though Legion was OK and the new one about the futuristic vampire hunting monks or whatever looks fun.
Gangster No1 is just more over indulged cockney turd. Malcolm McDowell plays Bettany’s character as an old man, and delivers completely the opposite type of performance, chewing the scenery like crazy. It’s almost embarrassing to watch. Are there any British actors who aren’t overrated?

Splice

Splice – 2009, Vincenzo Natali

Genetic engineering goes horribly wrong in tense sci-fi horror. Sounds unoriginal and uninteresting, so it’s no surprise that even with a promising international trailer (‘Embed disabled by request’. Lame) Splice went by quite unnoticed.

The premise of Splice isn’t anything new; ambitious scientist take an experiment in ‘gene splicing’ too far and it’s all aboard to The Island of Dr Moreau, but this time it’s well written enough to rise above the usual B-Movie status.

The protagonists are scientists and lovers Adrian ‘Oscar Curse’ Brody and Sarah ‘been in loads of films but you still won’t recognise her’ Polley. At first they come across as un-likable, annoyingly cool, hip young scientist prodigy ‘nerds’. They live in a cool apartment surrounded by cool Japanese art and stuff and even in the lab they wear expensive and stylish clobber. As with all modern day would-be Frankensteins, their geeky ambition in the face of corporate pressure leads then to stay up late and, via Science Montage, isolate that elusive genome or whatever. And so what if we use human DNA, we’ll just destroy the embryo after a few cell divisions right?

Wrong. A monster is created. It starts out as the freaky rabbit thing from the clip and quickly grows into a super fast, super strong, almost human being. Things progress slightly predictably, but the lead characters are given enough subtly revealed background history to flesh them out and make their rash behaviour believable. Adrian and Sarah aren’t just crazy scientists, they progress from enthusiastic creators to unwilling custodians to loving parents to jealous lovers, all within a well paced 100 minutes.

The creature effects are well designed and executed and the director achieves just the right mix of suspense, gore, shocks and sexual tension that are vital to any horror (although it’s not a Horror horror if you know what I mean). About half way through the action relocates from the laboratory setting to the familiar creepy barn near the creepy woods, which seems a little lazy and clichéd but it makes sense to the plot and probably helped keep the budget modest. It’s cheaper to film things happening in the dark after all.

Good stuff all round, as good as my other favourite under the radar sci-fi film from 2009, Surrogates.

I was pleased to hear that Mr Natali is going to take the reigns of the long awaited Neuromancer adaptation.

European Crime Drama

Baise-Moi - 2000, Virginie Despartes & Coralie Trinh Thi

More should be done to warn the public about overrated films in order to save them the time and embarrassment of watching them. If I’d known before hand that ‘Baise-Moi’ is French for ‘Fuck Me’ I’d have known to avoid it. Baise-Moi became famous, or ‘notorious’, when the French censors tried to ban it and prevent its release unless heavily edited. This caused a certain amount of uproar amongst a few Frenchies who must have been fans of the book that the film was based on. ‘How can it be that in modern France, a film is banned just because it shows graphic sex and violence?’ was the argument the protestors put forward, disgusted at the idea of ‘the establishment’ censoring a film that didn’t feature anything that hadn’t been done before. An independent film representing the cutting edge of French cinema, self consciously continuing the spirit of Reservoir Dogs (according to what the author/director said in the special feature I watched on the DVD), and fighting against the American Hollywood Bullshit.

Of course the reason the French censors wanted to ban Baise-Moi is because , as Eric Daniel Pierre Cantona might put it, c’est un sac de merde. I doubt a French cinema censor is going to be bothered about watching hardcore porn in a film, or badly executed bloody violence (due to bad direction rather than the low budget). But if a film consists primarily of sex, violence and sexual violence, and there is no artistic merit to any of it, a censor might understandably feel that it is in no-ones interest to watch it.

It seems to me that everyone involved in the banning of Baise-Moi got it wrong. In trying to best fulfil their role of serving the public interest, the censors brought fame and notoriety to a film that no one should watch (as always happens when a film is banned. When will those censors learn?). Those who spoke out in favour of the film misinterpreted the reason for Baise-Moi’s initial censorship. It wasn’t prudish Puritanism that caused the French film authorities to ban Baise-Moi, it was defence of French cinema as a whole. There are a thousand incredible French films out there which are increasingly finding the international audience they deserve, and Baise-Moi lets the side down. By banning it the censors were doing the world a favour.

Inevitably the censors backed down, and even more inevitably the uncut DVD release appeared with enough quotes on the back from journalists who should know better to dupe the public into making Baise-Moi a home video hit.

The first twenty minutes or so aren’t actually that bad. The film has clearly been made on a shoe string with one camera and some amateur actors (and an amateur director?), but there is a grittiness to the opening scenes that is very promising. The two protagonists are introduced as women permanently down on their luck, victims of the small world they live in. Crime, drugs, rape and prostitution are part of their lives and for a long time they’ve accepted it. But things come to a head for the women individually, and when by chance they meet, it’s time for the main body of the story to begin, dragging the film down with it.

The two initially sympathetic French sluts embark on a road trip that becomes an orgy of sex and violence, more boring the more it tries to shock us. The rest of the film involves the women encountering a series of one dimensional male characters who will either get their cock out or suffer a gory death. That’s no exaggeration; almost every man in the film is either fucked or murdered. Maybe I missed some subtle commentary in this reversal of typical genre roles in such films, but I was too bored to pay close enough attention.

One of the things that I found so off-putting about Baise-Moi was the hardcore porn scenes. Of course I’ve seen loads of porn, but at the risk of revealing too much about myself, I find porn very boring when I’m not watching it ‘in anger’. The first close-up shot of a blow job occurring is a bit unexpected, but from then on it just gets tedious. The difference between sex and porn is that sex is between Person A and Person B, porn takes place between Person A, Person B and Camera Operator C. It’s carried out as a performance, not an act of pleasure. Un-simulated sex is always more shocking (and arousing perhaps) in mainstream cinema than ‘look what we’re doing’ porn. The directors and cast of Baise-Moi were too either too dumb or too keen to shock to notice this. Being unsophisticated is not a cinematic crime, and it can even be an asset to a film, but Baise-Moi takes itself far too seriously to get away with such poor film making decisions. Basically, it’s a bag of shit.




Pusher – 1996, Nicholas Winding Refn

The poster (or at least the UK DVD cover) of Danish crime thriller Pusher is very misleading. At no point does the main character Frank played by Kim Bodnia ‘dual-wield’. In fact there are very few shots fired in the film which is still refreshing a whole fifteen years later. At the time Pusher must have been a revelation; America had Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, the UK had Lock Stock and France had La Haine, then up pops Pusher, grittier and more realistic than them all. One hand held camera used throughout, filmed on location in Copenhagen, no sets from what I could tell, and with an excellent cast throughout, not a single dud between them. It also stars the sexiest Dane going, Mads Mikkleson.





There’s nothing cool about the main guy in Pusher. He’s a slightly inept drug dealer and he’s in a lot of trouble. From the picture on the DVD case and the description on the back; ‘Frank has two days to get loads of money before gangsters come to get him etc’ I was expecting to get something more like a violent version of Run Lola Run. Like Run Lola Run, the events in Pusher are propelled by the activities of an inept drug dealer in debt to some bad men. Unlike Run Lola Run, out main character is still a sympathetic guy despite his obvious failings and all the silly mistakes he makes.

Though the direction and the lead performance Pusher achieves a very believable characterisation; we can believe that this guy would fuck up the way he does. This is a very important part of what makes a film ‘very good’ and it’s often overlooked. Consider John Travolta’s character from Pulp Fiction, Vincent Vega. Half way through the film (I think, it's been a while since I watched it, too long in fact) he goes to take a dump while waiting for Bruce Willis to get home, and leaves his Uzi on the kitchen counter. Bruce comes home while Vic is in the can, picks up the piece and kills the hit man with his own gun when he opens the bathroom door. Ridiculous as the whole situation is, Travolta’s character is well enough defined by this point in the film for this scenario to be acceptable. We can believe that Vic would screw up like this so we’re not annoyed by his death, in fact it seems fitting.

Pusher is the same in this respect, and this is why Pusher is not a bag of shit.