The Sun’ll Come Out, Tamara!

Tamara Drewe 2010 US

Directed by Stephen Frears

Screening at UK cinemas now

Tamara Drewe is another in a long line of inaccurately credited (they just flat out lie to you) movies which claim to be based on a graphic novel. Anyone here know what a graphic novel is? Because it’s obvious that the people who do the credits of a lot of these comic strip based movies have no idea at all! Tamara Drewe is actually based on a comic strip which ran in The Guardian. It is not a graphic novel. A graphic novel is a totally original work which is written and drawn to be presented in a book format. Tamara Drewe was a strip which was later published as a trade paperback. A trade paperback is a reprinting of a comic strip which is shoehorned (quite badly sometimes when dealing with strips which weren’t designed to be read in that format) into a book format. First and foremost though, it’s a cartoon strip. Seriously, movie producers need to get into the habit of not calling everything with drawings and bubbles a graphic novel just because they think it’s a more sophisticated euphemism for comic book... it isn’t.

This film is actually a strange movie to get a handle on. I’m reliably informed that the comic is an updating of Hardy’s Far From The Madding Crowd, but since I’ve not actually read any of Hardy’s work I’ll have to pass on whether or not it’s a respectful take on his original. Trying to classify this movie as anything other than a stew of ingredients which hang together in a nicely British way might be a fools errand but I’ll give it a go. It doesn’t really have much of a storyline (not a problem, I love movies without stories or any kind of plot) and although the fly-on-the-wall views of the inhabitants of a small, rural English village which comprise the film may seem to be random and fleeting glances at best, there is a linear thread which ties it all together eventually... it’s just that the story just doesn’t have enough substance to actually bother tying it all up to be honest.

Tamara is a reporter who’s inherited a house in the village she grew up in from her dead parents and stays on a while to oversee repairs to get it on the market and possibly try to get together with her old flame who dumped her years before because of her unsightly nose. She’s had a nose job now (and afterwards, amazingly looks just like Gemma Arterton not wearing a prosthetic) but she kind of gets sidetracked on the “true love” end of things by having affairs with two of the other characters instead. One of these is the famous author husband of a woman who runs a writer’s retreat in the village and the sub-plot of this woman’s put upon life and the tentative steps towards pulling herself out of that life (and the agonising first steps towards love with her from one of her writer guests) is actually much more interesting than the main narrative thrust of the movie. It’s certainly where the heart of the audience lies anyway, judging from the reactions I observed in the crowd around me, which was a mostly female audience aged between 30-50 from what I could see (Note to self: future dating chances improve if you go to see more movies like Tamara Drewe... if you can figure out what a movie like Tamara Drewe actually is). Throw a couple of “meddling kids” into the mix to cause mayhem to everyones life because of a crush on a rock star Tamara is “seeing” for most of the movie, and that’s about all you have in the this cool collection of sketches of rural relations.

What I’ve not said here is that the movie has a lot of heart and some excellent performances, not least from Gemma Arterton playing the titular character (I’m resisting the urge, I promise). She’s been getting a lot of acting gigs lately and rightly so... she’s pretty good and could have carried the film really well if the emphasis of the script had been just a little more on her character.

I’m sad to say I don’t remember much about the score and was absolutely gobsmacked when I found out, via the end credits, that it was composed by Alexandre Desplat. He’s a composer I look forward to hearing but nothing about this particular score stood out enough to crack me over the head with a hefty, golden treble clef like his scores for The Girl With A Pearl Earring and Birth did. That being said I shall probably pick up the soundtrack anyway and explore the richness of Desplat’s smooth notes as a stand alone listen because there’s something about this French composer's scores that usually linger in the memory long after the film or CD has played out. Maybe I need to hear the mix of it on the album to get a better handle on it.

I think Tamara Drewe is actually only the second film I’ve seen directed by Stephen Frears, the other being his Dirty Pretty Things. Like Dirty Pretty Things, I really enjoyed this new movie but it has to be said that it’s not something I could really ever rewatch. Despite my own reluctance for repeat viewing, however, I would certainly recommend this one because it’s quite funny in places (gently so) and because British films need your support. Go catch it before it’s gone!

Exorcist Through the Gift Shop

The Last Exorcism 2010 US

Directed by Daniel Stamm

Screening at UK cinemas now

Beware! Although the power of faith compelled me to keep this humble review spoiler free, I have been unsuccessful in casting out the demon spoilers that reside within it!

There’s a point somewhere about two thirds of the way through The Last Exorcism where you may well let out a weary sigh, throw your hands in the air and proclaim in a loud and ultimately unsettling voice, “Well why did they just give the ending away? Now we know what is going to happen for sure!”

Just so you know... I didn’t actually do that, I was just thinking it at the time and it turns out that it is actually the little key you need to fill in any blanks at the end of the film, should you feel the need to fill them.

Like the on screen spoiler mentioned above, there are a lot of little moments in The Last Exorcism where it kinda grates because the shots are pretty much telegraphing their outcome more often than not... a common weakness of a lot of contemporary horror movies and perhaps a common ailment of the genre as a whole because the “rules of the horror film” are so easy to decode and to play with that you can very quickly have broad variations on those ingredients, like the comedy/horror genre such as Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein or An American Werewolf in London, while at the same time forget that these crossed or mutated genres are only valid because they are so easily deciphered and... therefore... care should be taken when going through a standard horror narrative to realise that everybody else will easily be able to guess what’s coming next too and that you should maybe try to limit that outcome.

That being said, The Last Exorcism is actually quite a slick piece of movie-making in some ways because even though, all the way through this little mini-masterpiece, you pretty much know what’s coming from shot to shot (no fake jumps followed immediately by a legitimate scare are going to fool you, right?), the film is so well handled that it still manages to scare you silly even when you know it’s going to happen.

The movie is one of the increasingly popular hand-held, shaky-cam, first person shooter kinds of film which were pioneered by movies like Cannibal Holocaust, popularised by films like The Last Broadcast and The Blair Witch Project and which continue to be flourishing in our cinemas with the likes of Cloverfield, Paranormal Activity and the [REC] series. The Last Exorcism successfully uses this format but, like George A. Romero’s stab at the genre in the fifth of his six zombie movies Diary of the Dead, the makers of this pseudo-documentary want to have their cake and eat it by including standard but effective spooky and unsettling music behind some of their sequences. Unlike Romero’s movie, however, the use of non-diegetic sound is not explained by any of the characters in the movie, while in the aforementioned zombie movie the narrator/editor of the film had her reasons for including a soundtrack in the final mix.

The Last Exorcism is the story of a lapsed/fake priest who has performed a number of fraudulent exorcisms, using cheap giftshop/novelty effects to give himself authenticity (there I fulfilled my obligation to my puntastic title by pushing a metaphor) and who is making a documentary showing what he really is before he retires and goes into some other line of business. Now you may think that the lead character is unlikable given this background but, truth be told, his motivations are not as one dimensional as that. Within the first quarter of an hour his reasons for originally questioning his spiritual belief are briefly mentioned and this, coupled with the fact that he is genuinely helping people who “believe themselves to be possessed by demons” by giving them a little fake but impressive showmanship (while admittedly taking their money) and giving them a tangible escape from their problems (in the form of an exorcism) which genuinely helps them, gives the character a little more sympathy than you’d first expect.

It’s hard to explain if you haven’t seen the movie but, I think the key point for me came after about a third of the way into the film when he finishes his first “exorcism” of the 14 year old girl, Nell, and is just about to leave the house when he has a “vision” from God with a message for the girl's father to unfree himself from the pain of the loss of his wife. This is not something our fake friend needed to do, he already had the money... this was him trying to help a person come to terms with his loss.

Similarly, when his director/sound lady and his unidentified cameraman (I think this is the only film I’ve seen of this kind where the cameraman actually manages to stay out of shot for the entire film... which is refreshing) are facing death with him and are urging him to cut his losses, run and go get help before it’s too late, he goes back to help out Nell in an attempt to grasp her from the clutches of evil. Something he does more than once and which will ultimately be his undoing.

One of the key things with this kind of movie making is, given the style of the camera work and the haphazard nature of the shots and the sound design (although as I mentioned earlier, this does have occasional soundtrack cues), all the emphasis is focussed on the performers. They are always under the spotlight in these kinds of ventures. No stylish camera moves or clever editing is really going to help them out from a tight or emotional situation... so you need to get really good performers. And I think the studios have also cottoned on to the fact that you need relatively unknown performers too in that you really don’t want a known star or personality bringing their own baggage/image from their previous movies with them. The illusion of documentary can’t be maintained so successfully if you have Angelina Jolie playing your sound girl!

And that’s exactly what you get with The Last Exorcism. Some pretty decent actors really throwing themselves into the roles and making everything just a little bit more believable. Added to this, the girl who plays Nell, Ashley Bell, is sinister enough and uses the ploy of looking directly into the camera (which in some ways feels like a direct threat because the cameraman has seen the fate she has predicted for him) and uses that in-your-face empathy hit to really unsettle you.

There’s a point near the end of the movie which is really neatly done and everything that has happened so far gets tidily explained as a psychological problem and our three main protagonists, including the cameraman, are riding off in to the sunset, so to speak. Then something happens to make them go back and all hell has broken loose again... and although you do know the ultimate fates of these characters before it happens, there is a little bit of a surprise within the last five minutes of the movie... because the film mutates just a little bit and goes from being a modern variation on Friedkin’s The Exorcist into the realm of the supernatural novels of Dennis Wheatley. The last five minutes is very The Devil Rides Out with a strong dash of To The Devil A Daughter thrown in for good measure. Nothing wrong there.

Unlike a fair number of other films of this nature, there is no explanatory wrap up in either the epilogue or the prologue to explain where or how the fictional footage was found and how it happens to be playing out before us now. I’m quite fine with that, art doesn’t always need to justify itself for the few people who are going to want that kind of detail explained to them and it’s good to see a film freeing itself from the shackles a little of some of the previous first-person-shooters.

A spooky and sometimes quite frightening film which is definitely worth a trip to the cinema to see... if only to listen to the reactions of the rest of the audience.

A Touch of Resident Evil

Resident Evil Afterlife 3D 2010 US

Directed by Paul W.S. Anderson

Screening at UK cinemas now

Here be evil spoilers!

I’ve mostly kinda liked the Resident Evil movies... (see my review of the first three here) even though I’ve never really got on that well with the game. I remember trying to play one of the first two Resident Evil games periodically only to keep getting either eaten or “crow’d to death”. I never really got in to the idea that I had to outrun things or sneak around them because I’d run out of bullets. I just wanted to mow all the zombies down Quake-style in a powerful ballet of gory violence... not worry about where my next shot might be coming from.

The movies though, I’ve pretty much enjoyed and this fourth installment is no exception. Like the last two movies, the opening sequence doesn’t quite pick up where it left off and the pattern seems to be that these movies can sometimes take a little while to hit the synch points from the last movie. On this one we have a really beautiful sequence of a babe standing in the heavy rain in Japan while pedestrians walk around her. This movie has been released in 3D and for once this really works “with” the movie... instead of against it. This is what 3D was meant for... giant axes popping out the screen at you and blood splashes coming at you from the back of people’s heads. And this opening sequence is probably the best bit of 3D I’ve seen in a while because it is dark but brightly lit in the heavy rain so it gives you a bit of texture and a lot of the focus is on a pair of extremely sexy legs clad in fishnets (if my poor memory serves) as a woman stands in the rain. At first I thought the 3D rain effect was so good that it was falling out of the screen onto me, on discovery of a wet patch down my shirt. After a minute or so though I’d figured out it was just where I’d been drooling at this woman’s legs.

But, of course, from the start it’s obvious that this lady is a zombie and as the big-beats title sequence ends with her taking a bite out of one of the passers-by, it’s obvious that you are right back at the outbreak of the T-virus again. What’s not obvious is what the heck this sequence is doing in the movie at all when it really touches upon nothing in the film... but it’s not too much of a problem, I’m fairly forgiving of it because it’s a cool looking title sequence. Also, how the heck would just one woman in Japan suddenly find herself infected with the T-virus and all zombied up on her lonesome. This makes no sense... but again, it’s a nicely shot opening so I’ll let it slide.

Straight away after this you get the Milla Jovovich voice over narrative along with, well a glorified diagrams and slide show I guess, catching us up with the plot of the previous movies and pretty much being a dead spit for the opening “catch-up” on the third movie.

Then... and only then... does it make good on the ending of the last movie, where a cloned army of Jovovich’s character Alice was plotting revenge against the bizarrely and consistently surprisingly evil Umbrella Corporation. After the Japanese Umbrella HQ is penetrated by a mysterious and deadly force it’s clear that Alice has decided to “Send in the Clones”. Unfortunately, all the Alices apart from the one true original seem to get taken out (although possibly not if the end of this film is anything to be given a clue by) and the one true Alice gets her superhuman powers taken away from her via an antidote injection... there’s lots of holes in this movie though... like why, if the supreme bad guy was able to be fast enough around Alice to actually inject her with this thing before she could stop him... why would he not just put a bullet through her head instead. He has no plans for her.

But no problem... we’re basically in reset mode as far as the status of our main girl is and it isn’t long before she comes across a machine controlled, amnesiacal version of the Ali Larter character from the last movie who tries to kill her. The two of them land on the roof of a prison to try to help some survivors who have decided, quite unwisely it turns out, that the absolute safest place to hide from a gazillion zombies surrounding your hideout is a maximum security prison. They’re kidding right. Anybody who’s ever had to deal with surviving a zombie holocaust knows that the absolute safest place to hole up and wait things out is a shabbily padlocked shopping mall with fragile glass windows and awkwardly positioned safety points. Blimey, these guys are amateurs.

Soon, of course, these fearless... well quite fearful in some instances it turns out... survivors are being attacked by squid-faced zombies that come out from the floor and, my favourite, a giant pointy hat-masked man with a giant axe-hammer who is following our heroes. It’s a completely surreal character, very reminiscent of a similar character in the Silent Hill movie, just a complete non sequitur of a character who is given no explanation for being in the film at all and who I assume is from one of the video games. One thing's for sure about this cool and menacing character though... the costume is a darn sight better than that awful Nemesis costume which totally destroyed the mood of the second movie.

Anyway, moving on from here a handful of characters end up on a ship fighting bad guys and rescuing a load of survivors in the process... however, this movie leaves the action in even more of a cliffhanger than the previous installments in that a whole fleet of lethal black flying machines carrying Umbrella Corp soldiers is descending on our heroes. Can they escape? Well, if there are still a large number of soldiers from Alice’s clone army lurking somewhere nearby then I suspect they can... but we’ll know more when the fifth movie gets made. If you want to catch a brief glimpse of long standing game character Jill Valentine, who also appears in the second movie, wait until just after the first batch of credits... where you can see her in her machine controlled amnesiac form about to unleash hell on Alice and her friends.

All in all this film hits a lot of the marks from the previous installments... lots of guns, gore and explosions plus those hounds are back again, this time in mutant form but the one point it didn’t hit and which I sorely missed were the weak pretensions to Alice's Adventures In Wonderland... could have really done with that.

Ditto the music. This time the score is by Tomandandy but the main theme from the first film which was alluded to in the third movie is not present here. Having said that though, the tone of the score is very much in keeping with the tone of the movie and the style of the first and third movies in the franchise. Probably the least successful score for maintaining a sense of synchronicity with the first film was the second installment... although it is still a pretty good score.

If you like movies with zombies, gals and guns and you like whizzy things popping out at you in 3D, then you could do a lot worse than to give Resident Evil: Afterlife some of your time. Be warned, though... it doesn’t feel like a stand alone experience and to get the most out of it you really need to have seen the three previous movies.

Once Upon A Time In The Hex

Jonah Hex 2010 US

Directed by Jimmy Hayward

Screening at UK cinemas now

A fistful of spoilers beyond this point!

One of my fondest memories as a child growing up in the late sixties/early seventies is flicking through and endlessly rereading old issues of DC comics such as Superman, Batman and Shazam! (with one magic word...). And of course, just as much as the stories inside these well thumbed tomes would be all those marvellous adverts for products and services which were rarely available over here in the UK.

“Man are you skinny?” Lot’s of people my age knew that, if you were, then you’d need to send off for some books from Charlie Atlas... just as sure as we knew that “You get a big delight, With every Bite, of Hostess Fruit Twinkies”... even if we’d never tasted the damned things over here.

And then, of course, there were the adverts for comics which appeared a little less frequently at our local comic’s stand (dedicated comic shops like Dark They Were And Golden Eyed and Forbidden Planet were just around the corner but weren’t quite with us yet). Comics like The Shadow and Jonah Hex.

Now I’ve long laid to rest my debt to The Shadow having since read a few of the pulps (which I hold were much less intelligently and stylishly written than their nearest rival, Doc Savage), heard episodes of Orson Welle’s radio show, watched various serials and movie versions of varying quality... and of course read some of the comics which were actually quite well put together. But I’ve never read a Jonah Hex comic... that ghost is still to be laid to rest. So please bear that in mind when you read the following review... I can’t vouch for its authenticity as an adaptation of said comic.

That aside, I really wasn’t expecting much from this big screen version of Jonah Hex... simply because the reviews I’d skimmed were unanimously underwhelming. I’m pleased to say that this was maybe the best attitude to go in with because... well, I was very pleasantly surprised because I do like spaghetti westerns (and the odd revisionist western... the odder the better) and this is what the makers of Jonah Hex have produced here. So I was well pleased with the final product... although it does have its problems, which I’ll go into later.

From the start I was hooked... Jonah’s wife and child are burned alive in front of him by evil baddie John Malkovich, who then brands Hex’s face and leaves him to die or live as fate decides. Although not exactly the same in content, the mood for me was very evocative of what I remember from the opening of Death Rides A Horse, so score one for this movie right there.

Then the media immediately switches to stylised cartoon, presumably in homage to one of the past Jonah Hex artists, and it gets all the origin and back story out of the way in the first five minutes. Well done Mr. Screenwriter! At last we don’t have to have a long, drawn out origin story taking up two thirds of the film and ending with a denouement that ties in to said origin. This is a big weakness of comic book movies today. When you are watching old serials, do they ever waste time exploring the origins? Heck no. Batman and Robin just got in there and beat everyone up... they were crime fighters... ‘nuff said. The Shadow was The Shadow. He knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men... and that was enough. You know he knows, now get into the story. So unlike most modern day superhero movies where even the villains get origin stories... you get all you need to know about Mr. Hex’s supernatural powers from this short cartoon sequence. Now we can get on to it...

The sequence cuts back into photography after the title of the movie comes up with Hex, now a bounty killer (I’d say bounty hunter but in the spaghetti westerns this movie is trying so hard to stylishly emulate, they always called them bounty killers), trailing dead bodies of his recent “catches” behind his horse in much the same way as Klaus Kinski would have in the excellent The Great Silence. And this sequence is a real homage to the spaghetti westerns of the past. Hex wears a cavalry uniform so already he looks like iconic character Django (and it really wouldn’t surprise me if the original Jonah Hex comic wasn’t pretty much inspired by the Django character as played by Franco Nero). Then you get the whole Yojimbo/Clint Eastwood western confrontation model where the lone guy confronts several in a shoot out with a comment made about the number of coffins. And then you get the classic, spaghetti western legacy, I’ve-got-an-unexpected-hidden-piece-of-hardware-for-a-weapon-and-I’m-going-to-kill-you-all moment where this film takes great care to top Django while still paying homage to it. In the first (of many, many, many) of the Django movies, Franco Nero goes for the coffin he’s been dragging around with him and pulls out a big Gatling gun to mow down untold numbers of the enemy with (as Arnold Schwarzennegger’s character makes apt visual reference to in a scene towards the end of Terminator 3). Here Josh Brolin, who does an excellent if cliched performance as Jonah (and I’d say it needs to be cliched to make this larger than life stuff work), flips up two big Gatling guns from the side of his horse and starts blasting away... of course, the horse would be deaf but who cares, it’s a great sequence. Maybe they could do a sequel called Deaf Rides The Horse.

From here on in the film is set up right and the spaghetti/revisionist tone permeates the movie all the way through. Lots of in-yer-face, snarling close-ups, perhaps not as stylishly handled as Leone but the intent is there. More odd weapons... in the form of hand held pistol crossbows that fire sticks of dynamite! And some weird kind of “pseudo-cameos” by people who look like more famous spaghetti counterparts of old - most notably a weapons inventor (Jonah’s equivalent of Q in the Bond films) who gives the same presence as Woody Strode and a guard who’s done up to provide the same kind of “recognition hit” as Bud Spencer! Great stuff and a joy to watch these classic tropes of the genre being lovingly invoked in a modern film.

On the downside, the editing is a little too modern for the kind of movies the writing and visual design is trying to aspire to... but that’s just modern movies I guess. The soundtrack too is a little off. Not to complain too much because it’s excellent and you can hear it trying hard to be evocative of the great genre scores of composers like Morricone, Nicolai and Bacalov... but with it’s synthesiser and rock shadowing it feels a little more Young Guns than Seven Guns For the McGregors. Still it serves the movie quite well to a great extent... just would have been nice to have a more classic musical homage to lift it at those points when something happens that highlight the inherent machismo of the genre. Probably would have been rejected by the suits if it had though.

Another problem is Megan Fox. She’s excellent in her role but she’s hardly in it and her inclusion in the final sequence makes no sense. How does the bad guy's henchman (played Billy the Kid style by Michael Fassbender) even know of her existence to be able to kidnap her and use her against Hex? I think she’s only in about three scenes in the whole movie and needed to be in this a little more I think (regardless of the fact that the majority of spaghetti westerns did not have a strong female presence). The whole last quarter of an hour and its unsatisfying denouement smacks of mishandling and studio re-editing. I don’t know what the story is there but I suspect this is a highly tampered with film and it’s a shame because getting there has been great fun.

A third problem is a little over-explanation alluding to Jonah's origins on certain points in flashback from the main narrative which touch upon things we’ve already picked up from the cartoon sequence. But these explanations are mercifully brief and don’t jar against the flow of the movie.

All in all though I’d say, if you don’t mind a movie with a weak ending, then take a look at this nice piece of escapist movie making. And if you’re a fan of the spaghetti western in general... definitely ride on down to your local cineplex or DVD store to see it because, whether you love it or hate it, you need to have an opinion about it.

And if you don’t have an opinion of it... Duck, You Sucker!

Dates For Your Diary!

The Cinema Museum

Film & Movie Memorabilia Bazaar

Saturday 18th and Sunday 19th September 10am - 5pm

The Master's House, 2 Dugard Way,

Kennington, London, SE11 4TH

Admission £5

A quick intro to this one. I don't know who these people are and I wasn't aware that we had this Cinema Museum in London until recently, but a quick look at their website tells me they are in trouble. This venue is endangered and they need all the financial help they can get. I think this is worth taking note of. They need your support! If you just go to one Film Fair this month... make it this one!

www.cinemamuseum.org.uk

Midnight Media's

"London Film Collectors Fair"

Saturday 25th September 10am - 4pm

Electric Ballroom, Camden High Street, London

Admission £2

www.midnight-media.net/id10.html

21st Paperback and Pulp Bookfair

Sunday 31st October 10am-4pm

Victoria Park Plaza Hotel, 239 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London

Admission £3

http://zardozbooks.co.uk/events.asp

Ed Mason's "Collectors Film Convention"

Saturday 13th November 10am - 4pm

Central Hall, Westminster, Storey's Gate, London

Admission £4

www.londonfilmfair.co.uk

The Toys Are Back In Town

Toy Story 3D 2010 US

Directed by Lee Unkrich

Screening at UK cinemas now

Slight spoilers!

I haven't seen many of the Pixar movies but I usually quite like the ones I have managed to get to watch. Loved the first two Toy Story movies, really liked the first and thirds Shreks (although not enough to brave the fourth one and thought the second one was awful) and had a blast with both The Incredibles and Monsters VS Aliens... so I was much surprised to find myself struggling to stay interested in Toy Story 3D when I finally got to see it.

It’s not that it’s a terrible movie or anything like that... it’s a very competently made movie, although it has to be said I’m not the best judge of modern animated films. It’s just that it’s not that great either and after the first two in the franchise, well I was expecting some wonderful things in this one... not the simplistic blandness on show in this third installment.

Now I was told this one was a real tearjerker of a movie so I was a little bit trepidatious of going to see this one because, quite frankly - and I think it might be something to do with my age - when anything the least sentimental comes up in a movie... I’m a cryer! Blade Runner gets me leaking my precious salty body fluids everytime. That bit in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom when the kids come running into the village at the end... complete meltdown. The Third Man when... oh, you get the picture anyway... sentimental movies make me cry buckets (and when I do that I tend to get a little pail). So I was surprised that there wasn’t actually too much in this new movie to do that. Sure the scene where Andy gives away what’s left of his toys (characters like Bo Peep and Etch-A-Sketch didn’t make it into this movie) tugs a little at the heart strings and I may have shed a tear or two... but honestly, nothing like what I did when that cowgirl action figure sang that tragic song in the second movie... that one really got me good!

I don’t know why, but I had no investment in the characters in this one... which is essentially a prison break movie. Everything seemed so dull and lifeless on the ideas front that I found myself just wanting it to end quickly by about the halfway mark. It didn’t really move me until those last scenes with Andy and that’s probably way too late to be of any good to anyone.

I think the thing about the first two movies is that, while they are obviously aimed at kids, they were also aimed at the parents and guardians of those kids and so the jokes and ideas worked on more than one level... which seems to be an essential ingredient of the Pixar movies as far as I can make out. This one doesn’t have any other levels to it... it’s just for kids it seems to me and maybe that’s why I had trouble bonding with the movie, which is something a film going for that kind of emotional pull needs to do with its audience...

I’ve clearly stopped becoming the audience.

And as for the novelty, 3D element! I like 3D, I really do... but I hate the way that companies are now trying to push this format on to us so they can use it to resell their more recent back catalogue to us again in another format after we’ve already bought the first one (a ploy which they are similarly trying with the dreaded Blu-Ray... but just don’t get me started on that issue!). The 3D in this movie was barely noticeable and completely unnecessary in my view... it added absolutely nothing to it that I could see. It was just kinda distracting on the odd occasion and I almost wish I’d gone to see the 2D version. I think if they’re going to try, yet again, to get people interested in 3D then they should save it for special event movies... not try and bring everything out in the format and let us get bored with it even quicker.

But I’m off track here so I’ll just snag a ride in the back of a boxcar and say that if you liked the other two movies in the series and you’re thinking of going to see this... just know that it’s the weakest in the franchise and that the DVD release will probably do as good a trick if you want to keep your young’uns entertained.

Like a Werewolf Scorned

Fury of the Wolfman

(aka La Furia del Hombre Lobo

aka The Wolfman Never Sleeps)

Shot in 1970 but released in 1972 Spain

Directed by José María Zabalza

The Camden Collection DVD Region 0

Fury of the Wolfman is the fourth (or third if you discount legends of the “lost film”) in the cycle of Paul Naschy’s 12 movies about the Waldemar Daninsky character made between 1968 and 2004.

I would also have to say, it’s certainly the worst of the seven Naschy movies that I’ve seen to feature the titular wolfman/Daninsky character. And it’s really a shame too because the movie started off extraordinarily well... for a Daninsky movie.

Unlike most of the other movies I’ve seen in this “loose series”, the film opens with some really good cinematography (reminiscent perhaps of the gialli that were being made in Italy at the time) with excellent use of contrasting colours and some quite unexpectedly competent sound design which gives the earlier sections of the film a nice, genuinely haunted atmosphere. In these start up sequences we are given yet another “origin"... this time around Waldemar has recently been bitten by a yeti during his scientific research visit in Tibet, although I believe this has nothing to do with the later entry into the series - The Werewolf and the Yeti (aka Night of the Howling Beast). Now I’m getting quite used, as I said in an earlier Daninsky review a month or so ago, to Naschy’s recurring character having a new and completely different origin to his lycanthropic curse in each movie... just as I am getting used to him being killed for good at the end of each picture, only to return in the next film in the series without any fanfare or continuity from the last picture.

That being said... Why was Daninsky on a scientific expedition in Tibet in the first place? You guessed it... because in this film he’s a scientist. What? So Waldemar Daninsky is a scientist now? Okay. And everyone is calling him Professor Daninsky? Okay, I can live with that. Paul Naschy is not the best actor in the world but compared to the lame theatrics displayed by most of the rest of the cast in these films... well... if they say he’s a scientist then he’s a scientist. He doesn’t possess a pipe though so I’m not 100% sure I can buy into that idea completely.

The soundtrack of the film uses a lot of audio flashbacks of conversations with words like pentagram repeated almost endlessly in a not bad trick which works quite well at the beginning of the movie to help create a certain sense of impending dread. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a cheesy and cliched way of handling things but it’s actually quite sophisticated and reined in compared to what I'd usually expect from these kinds of movies. But like I said earlier, it doesn’t take long for this film to take a detour into being an absolute mess of celluloid.

Here’s what I could make out of the plot in a nutshell (and if I had a nutshell I’d stick it in there and give it to a squirrel to horde somewhere far from me!)...

After being bitten by said yeti, Daninsky returns to Spain to continue his scientific research job with a fellow scientist, a woman with whom he has had a passionate three year fling in the past, prior to his marriage to another woman. Now I know this other woman is definitely a scientist because she keeps using terms like “chemitrodes”... rather a lot actually. I don’t know what a chemitrode is exactly but this lady loves them.

Anyway, Daninsky finds his wife having an affair with another man, but they’ve “fixed” the brakes on his car and he crashes it into a tree. He survives the crash and returns home to find his wife and her lover... the full moon has it’s usual effect on him and he kills them... or “wolfs them up good” as I like to say. During his hairy frenzy, he manages to electrocute himself to death. His ex-lady friend colleague takes his body away to her scientific retreat which seems to be a castle of some sort... easily affordable as a second home if you’re a scientist and dealing with unwieldy and worrying things like chemitrodes in your workplace, apparently.

She revives Waldemar with her chemitrodal meddling in her attempt to alter his mind... a term called “human zebra” here... but whatever it’s called, the plot is just not going to stay black & white for long. While she goes away for some supplies for her dastardly experiments (presumably Chemitrodes R Us is open 24/7), Waldemar rekindles love with a young scientific assistant whom he is trapped in the castle with... along with some drug crazed mutant hippies who sometimes seem to be their friends and sometimes attack them. In fact... by this point I’ve got no idea what’s going on anymore... other than the fact that Waldemar finds the affair his wife was having was caused by mad scientist lady altering his wife’s and her lover’s hypothalmus with... oh, you know what with by now. Those chemitrodes have a lot to answer for... it was all a plot to kill Waldemar so she could revive him and control him.

But seriously, by now the editing has got the better of this film... Why is Walfdemar’s girlfriend attacked by someone hiding in a suit of armour? Why is there a masked figure stalking the castle? Why are the hippie people friendly, then hostile, then friendly again, then hostile... honestly, by this point it’s like somebody has got all the footage cut in little strips, thrown it into the air, and re-edited into a sequence that makes no sense from shot to shot. I truly believe that the director, who was apparently disliked by Naschy and apparently spent a lot of the time drunk, just didn’t get the footage required to be able to edit this mess into a coherent, decodable narrative. More’s the pity since it had such a promising opening (been a while since I saw a promising opening but since I’m not writing a porn blog I’ll refrain from going down that avenue, gentle reader).

All I know for sure is that the scorned scientist revives Waldemar’s dead wife who is now infected with the lycnthropy passed on for her husband and you get to see two werewolves fight before Waldemar gets killed... again... and finds his final peace... which will be shattered when he revives for the next film in the series.

Fury of the Wolfman is, frankly, a terrible movie and, unlike most others in this wonderful series of bizarre Spanish werewolf movies, not much fun either. My favourite of the seven I’ve seen so far is still Doctor Jekyll and The Wolfman from 1971... love those swinging London locations which I remember as such from my childhood. If you want to see a fun Waldemar Daninsky movie... watch that one and let this horrible, ravaged carcass of a movie rest in pieces.

Do The White Thing

Trois Couleurs: Blanc

1994 Poland/France/Switzerland

Directed by Krzysztof Kieslowski

Artificial Eye DVD Region 2

White is the most conventional of Kieslowski’s classic trilogy... certainly in terms of narrative structure it’s the most up front and least ambiguous of his movies. Basically it’s a romantic movie which has equal parts of buddy comedy movie mixed up with a little revenge.

Visually, too, although still very interesting and wonderful to behold, there seems to be just generally less going on in this movie. Kieslowski, for the most part, seems to have abandoned his method of concentrating on just the little details like he did in the first part of this trilogy, and instead focusses on the character arc of the main protagonist in a more visually direct mode as he goes from being a man in love, bitterly divorced and also outlawed by his wife, to a popular barber and then, due to some shenanigans with land ownership, to being a wealthy businessman.

This also tells the story of the recovery of his sexual potency... his wife's reasons for divorcing him are on the grounds of being unsatisfied in bed... an unconsummated marriage is not what she wants from him. Later, as he is about to have revenge on his wife by clever manipulation and after faking his own death, the two of them make love and it is quite clear that he has regained the confidence to fulfil what she sees as his carnal duties to her.

There is obviously a fair amount of white in the shots... as you would expect from Kieslowski after the first part... but this is mostly not achieved through filters but through quite stark lighting in some shots... so white neon lights reflect white off of shiny surfaces, for instance. And some of the movie is set in Poland in the snowy landscape... so he doesn’t need to do too much work there ;-)

The music, again by Preisner, is quite nice but nowhere near comes through as potent as his score for Blue... I guess it’s not meant to. This is, after all, the Kieslowski spin on a light, fluffy comedy.

Like the Decalog before it, he film gently rubs against the situations and characters from the other two parts, although I can’t remember the overlaps from Red and so am waiting to watch that one again... I’ll leave about a week before I rewatch it. Certainly there’s a shot of Juliette Binoche in long shot which is a reverse shot of one we see from her point of view (more or less) in Blue. And there’s a sequence with a throwaway character of an old lady trying to recycle a bottle which viewers will get a sudden realisation from if they’ve seen the first part.

The only real ambiguity in the film is the final couple of shots... something is about to happen between the main protagonist and his wife... you just don’t know what... although if memory serves these characters, along with the characters from the first part, will get a resolution of sorts at the end of Red.

The film, for me, is the least interesting of the Kieslowski films I’ve seen and, therefore, it’s my least favourite of his popular trilogy... but you know what? If it’s a minor work by Kieslowski then that’s still pretty much a major piece of art compared to most other director’s works. Still essential viewing... but make sure you see all three in order.

When Buildings Bleed

RoboGeisha

2009 Japan

Directed by Noboru Iguchi

CineAsia Extreme DVD Region 2

Blimey! Where to start on RoboGeisha?

I’ve seen a few of these newish extreme violence sci-fi flicks from Japan in the last year or so and I’ve often wondered how much the audience for these things are supposed to be taking it seriously. The Machine Girl was playful with the genre and had a few laughs but it was really on Tokyo Gore Police that I begun to suspect that it’s not just us arrogant gaijins who are laughing ourselves silly at the extreme and, obviously ludicrous, ultra-violent concepts occurring in these kinds of movies. In Tokyo Gore Police, for example, “our heroine” slices the legs off of her enemy... the arterial spray from his legs is so great that he uses it to fly around the room as if they were rocket tubes on a jet pack and attack her from above for the next three or four minutes... pretty bizarre.

I think with RoboGeisha I can definitely conclude that these movies are played very much for laughs in their own country too. A story of two sisters kidnapped and trained to be robotically enhanced geisha assassins for an evil company, RoboGeisha has very much a cartoon approach (or maybe I should say anime approach) to the extreme violence on offer. One guy, for example, repeatedly gets his head punched down into his stomach... each time it springs back up to offer a nugget of explanatory dialogue before another punch sends it back down into his stomach again.

My one problem on this one, however, is that the storyline doesn’t even make sense. After quite a strong opening sequence of geisha and tengu carnage (including throwing stars launched from the tengu’s bottoms and a buzz-saw mouth for the ultimate kiss of death), the lead character tells a government candidate she has just saved from death her entire back story... which is the length of the movie in flashback. The problem with that is that she dies at the end of the movie and although you are still hearing her tell you the story in voice over, the events never once catch up to her starting point or explain how she’s even alive to tell the story. There’s absolutely no explanation and the credits just role... I’m sure the director would probably tell that narrative continuity is not the “point” of his movie... but as a westerner I still felt a little cheated when they set up a framing reference point and then don’t make their way back to it.

Nevertheless, there’s a lot to entertain in this fast-paced fest of bloody mayhem. One scene, for example has our heroine facing off against the aforementioned tengu, each using a samurai blade that springs out from their anus. The ensuing swordfight plays out with the various opponents facing away from each other as they wiggle their butts ferociously. Another scene has a man blinded by our heroine who forces shrimps into his eyes... so he carries on fighting with the offending crustaceans protruding ridiculously from his eye sockets. This is typical of the tone of the scenes in this movie.

One of the things I’m surprised about is the incredibly plagiaristic musical score used here. I’m well used to Chinese and Turkish movies from the 60s, 70s and 80s just out and out purloining their soundtracks from US movies and needle dropping them into their films to create the entire soundtrack... the Turkish film Captain America & Santo VS Spiderman, for example, has a soundtrack which is comprised almost solely of music lifted from the old vinyl recordings of Diamonds Are Forever and Shaft’s Big Score. But this movie has new music written to sound just like other films without actually being them... a classic case of temptrackitus if ever there was one. The main action theme, for example, is just a thinly orchestrated riff on McCartney’s (or perhaps Martin’s) Live and Let Die. When RoboGeisha’s legs transform themselves into a tank for her to sit on, the music actually (for some reason), starts to take on a strong resemblance to Basil Poledouris title character march from Robocop. The only really creative comment made from this musical "borrowing" is when the lead villain’s castle uproots itself and turns itself into a walking giant stomping castle monster robot so it can drop a bomb into Mount Fuji... the music suddenly transforms itself into something very reminiscent of Akira Ifikube’s lumbering slow Godzilla sub-theme. So that’s kinda interesting.

The giant castle monster robot sequence really hits it home to you that this movie is definitely a comedy, by the way. When it starts doing the inevitable stomp and crush routine... when it knocks big handfuls of brickwork off of buildings as it passes, the buildings let out big surges of bloody arterial spray in a parody of the standard, bloody Japanese hack and slash movies which have been so popular since Kurosawa unwittingly started the trend with his spectacular arterial spray shot at the end of Sanjuro (his sequel to his own masterpiece, Yojimbo). This is really quite funny and unexpected when it first happens.

All in all, another shaky but entertaining example of this kind of movie which seems to be pretty endemic of contemporary Japanese cinema... although I fear the genre is beginning to get a bit tired now. The film is pretty soulless and has no real heart to it... it just about scrapes in on novelty value is my verdict on this one. Definitely of passing interest though.

Chantastic Voyage!

Dangerous Money 1946 US

Directed by Terry O’ Morse

Monogram DVD Region 1

This review kinda contains spoilers... not that you’d know it.

Gee pop!

Yes, the Chan is back... well he’s back for me at least, in this 1946 far-from-classic adventure. Hot on the heels of the blistering Dark Alibi, here’s a Chan tale that I thought would be a really good one. All the signs were great... for starters, it’s set on a cruising liner (woohoo... love thrillers where the detective has to solve the murders while on a touring, luxury cruise)! And then, during the opening credits I let out a startling and, apparently, scary whoop as Tristram (King of the Rocket Men) Coffin’s name came up on the credits.

My joy was short lived however... in this one there has been a change of assistants. We’re back to Victor Sen Yung as Number Two Son replacing Benson Fong’s Number Three Son for a stint, although Charlie does receive a helpful telegram from Number Three Son during the voyage. And Willie Best is back as the racial stereotype black comedy relief, taking over again from Mantan Moreland for one film only before they switch back to Mr. Moreland. Although referred to as an “assistant” in this one rather than a chauffer... he still retains his chauffers cap. Just to make sure you are not confused that it’s a different person than the last film, Best plays Chatanooga Brown... as opposed to Moreland’s Birmingham Brown. So... must be a family thing I guess... although why Charlie Chan would need a chauffer on a luxury cruise is anybody’s guess. As an aside though... turns out Chattanooga’s legs shake in close-up under duress just like Birmingham’s... odd that ‘-)

This film is a hundred times weaker than the previous movie. Dark Alibi had some pretty creative photography and a certain amount of innovation in the shots... on this one we’re back into standard Monogram potboiler mode and I’m afraid any pretensions to creativity have been firmly picked up by the scruff of the neck and tossed aimlessly out of the window. And it’s quite obvious when actors miss their cues or, in one case, where Sydney Toler as Chan keeps looking around to read his script off of cue cards, that Monogram were way too cheap a studio to bother with retakes.

This story of murder, blackmail and conspiracy to launder “hot money” on an ocean liner suffers terribly from... well, being terrible I guess. For starters, the guy doing the actual murders is really easy to spot. He spends the whole movie masquerading as a woman and not being allowed to say anything... presumably so the audience doesn’t cotton on to the fact that this “dame is a man”. Secondly... you know those films that have so many suspects that you don’t know which person has the strongest motivation for being the culprit of the crime, in this case the crime of money laundering... well you don’t have to worry about any clever writing on this one because the writers have gone for something very much resembling Agatha Christie’s Murder On The Orient Express when it comes to the final solution to the problem. Honestly, if you kept just the people who aren’t guilty of this crime on the boat and threw everyone else off... you’d have a luxury ocean liner transporting just three people around the world... and two of them would be crew members.

Oh... and it turns out that my whoop of joy at a Tristram Coffin was short lived. Within the first 5 minutes of the film he reveals himself to Chan as an undercover government agent... and you just know that means this character is in for an early demise. Sure enough... after another five minutes have played out he’s survived one attempt on his life only to have a knife thrown into his back a couple o’ minutes later. Poor Tristram... never the starring role he deserved.

If you are a fan of Earl Der Biggers oriental detective and you like the Charlie Chan films in general, then you are duly warned that Dangerous Money is one of the dullest and badly made in the series... even the usually witty Chantastic aphorisms are slight and badly written. Not a happy viewing.

Scott Pilgrim VS The Box Office

Scott Pilgrim VS The World 2010 US

Directed by Edgar Wright

Screening at UK cinemas now

There’s something strange about my reaction to Edgar Wright’s movies when I first see them. I always, almost but not entirely, see nothing much special about them on my initial viewing but I always somehow have to see them again (oh, that person who’s not seen it wants to see it and has nobody to go with so it might as well be me I suppose) and then I end up loving them from the second time on. I’m telling you this right now, up front as it were, because I want you to know that... so far... I’ve only seen Scott Pilgrim VS The World once.

Scott Pilgrim is almost entirely unlike anything Edgar Wright has directed before... I say almost because, like a regular Edgar Wright movie (and there have only been two... Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz but I’m also counting both series of Spaced too) it is jam packed with loads of pop culture references. Oh... and it’s also a comedy. So that’s two things it has in common with an Edgar Wright movie. That being said, however, there are a lot of things in this which are really not indicative of his style... and maybe he will turn out in time to have one of those directorial non-signatures like Francis Ford Coppola where almost every movie he directs doesn’t have any real fingerprints on it.

Scott Pilgrim is a not so bad, quite fun movie based around the concept of computer games, which is one of the title characters’ hobbies. And when I say, one of the title characters’ hobbies, I mean Scott Pilgrim’s hobby... not “The World’s.” I know it’s not “The World’s” hobby because the box office numbers have not been so good and that’s a big surprise to me actually as I thought there’d be more comic book and computer game fans coming out of the woodwork for this movie. Which just goes to show, I think, what percentage of comic book fans actually come out for those Spiderman and Iron Man type movies as a percentage against the non-comic book fans who landslide those kinds of movies to the number one spot.

So... Scott Pilgrim. A movie based on a comic book about a guy who is part of an amateur rock band and who plays video games with his high school girlfriend. All that changes, however, when he meets the new love of his life Ramona Flowers and he finds that in order to stay with her, having gained her interest, he has to defeat each of her seven evil exes in mortal combat. And as we go through the inevitable boy gets girl, boy kills some of her exes, boy loses girl but still wants to kill that last, creepy ex and thus wins her heart all over again plot, it’s to Wright's credit that he manages to make all of the fights look a little different from the last one. Which is actually tougher than it sounds because he’s using both the language of comic books (think Ang Lee’s take on the HULK as the best example of another movie which actually uses the syntax of comics and substitutes it into the syntax of movie) while also using the information-overload, saturate your senses style of a large number of computer games thrown into the cinematic mix as well... which means your brain may literally fry if you even try to catch all the little on screen details simultaneously. The movie blurs along at an unnerving pace and it’s a bit like watching one of those kids playing Defender or R*Type (of whom I was one) hurtling through level after level and trying to take on the whole world... hmmm... apt title then.

There’s not a whole lot of stuff to complain about in this movie... in fact I can’t think of a scene that didn’t play out just right. In some ways it feels like this years Josie and the Pussycats (and I don’t say that in an unkind way, I’m one of those few people who actually adored the Josie and the Pussycats movie) but with a lot of extra and expensive looking sizzle but maybe not quite the same emotional hit. I’m actually wondering if that’s not a judgement based on trying to process so much information from the movie the first time around... suspect I’ll get a lot more emotional depth out of it when I’m not trying so hard to keep the pace the second time I see it. Another reason may be that there are no real standout scenes because they all achieve a level similar to each other and so the heart of the movie may seem a little flat on the first time in. Although there were some extra nice touches in it. When one of the characters kisses another character’s ring just before the last act of the film, for example, I noticed they’d used exactly the same sound effect as the little question-mark pop up when a gloved hand picks up Emperor Ming’s ring in the 1980 version of Flash Gordon. I actually laughed at this but soon realised there were obviously no other Flash Gordon fans in the audience :-(

I’d wholeheartedly recommend this film to anyone because it's quite quirky and inventive and it’s worth seeing just on the strength of that (although it’s not as quirky or inventive as a Jeaunet movie so don’t go expecting miracles). And as for the box office numbers, which weren’t that good in the US from what I understand... well I’m sure Edgar Wright doesn’t need to worry on that score. This movie is definitely going to find its audience on DVD... and there have been a fair few box office underperformers that have started successful franchises on the back of the DVD figures (The Transporter or Austin Powers anyone). Definitely worth a trip to your local cinema. Edgar Wright has a strong creative voice and he needs to be allowed to make a load more movies so we can find his weak points and grumble at them... or at least stand at the opposite side of the road as he goes past and point cheekily.

Une Couleur: Blanc

WHITEOUT 2009 US

Directed by Dominic Sena

Optimum DVD Region 2

Very minor spoilers here... not much peril but proceed with caution.

Whiteout is a thriller starring Kate Beckinsale as a US Marshall based in Antarctica. It’s also probably going to be one of my comfort movies for a few years to come... you know, one of those movies you put on sometimes just to unwind to and not necessarily have to pay attention to and will allow you some time to think through the days problems.

Why is Whiteout a good candidate for this? Well, to be honest with you... Whiteout is not a great movie. It’s certainly not a terrible movie and it’s made with some obvious skill and talent both in front of and behind the camera... and it just manages to keep it’s head above mediocrity for the majority of the film without making you feel bad for possibly wasting your time on something like this.

It is not thought provoking. It has no twists which you won’t see coming, in that, as soon as a certain actor walks on the screen for the first time... you just know they’re going to be revealed as the bad guy at the end. There’s no really clever framing or immaculate mise-en-scene which draws attention to itself and nor is that probably the point... it seems quite work-a-day in its atmosphere and pacing and I am sincerely keeping my fingers crossed that this is what the director was going for.

But it’s not terrible either... Tom Skerrit (Captain Dallas in ALIEN) turns up in it and he’s a fine actor to watch and, also, a fine actor to watch other actors react to (take note). A very naturalistic actor who, perhaps at the behest of his director, maybe telegraphed certain things a little too early in the plot than this audience member would have wanted.

I remember seeing this at the cinema last year and being quite pleased with it. It was always going to be a DVD purchase for me after that because... like I said, comfort movie.

Whiteout is very much a High Noon by way of it’s remake Outland, kind of movie because, although nobody is specifically gunning for our heroine, she has to solve the problem of a series of murders, a box full of “what?” from a plane crash 50 or so years before and stop the killer from killing again, before it’s time to evacuate the base, get out of Dodge and get in the last helicopter before the winter sets in and nobody gets in or out of the base for a good many months. So it has that "time is running out" element from those two movies I mentioned constantly ticking in the back of your mind.

This film also continues the tradition of films in which heroes take a beating in pursuit of the truth. In Chinatown, Jack Nicholson got his nose slit and had to wear a plaster throughout the rest of the film, which was kinda unusual in Hollywoodland. I remember when Kathleen Turner played V.I. Warshawski for the first time (in the movie version... she also played her a few times on the radio if memory serves) and the studios wouldn’t let her keep her bruising and general state of dishevelment after she is beaten up halfway through the movie. In Whiteout, I am happy to report that Kate Beckinsale gets two fingers amputated after she exposes them to extreme cold and gets frostbite trying to evade the killer in a sequence about halfway through the movie. She’s got two bandaged fingers for the rest of the movie and at least the scriptwriters tie it in to a reveal scene for the villain later on in the movie... that would have been really great if, as I said earlier... the villain had been in any way a surprise. Actually, lets not call him a villain... he's actually a quite likeable and sympathetic person. Bad guy will do.

There are two things which made me stand up (metaphorically) when I first saw Whiteout at the cinema... two things that is, apart from the snow. I love snow and I love snow in movies... if a movie has got snow in it (so McCabe and Mrs. Miller, The Great Silence) then I am going to be able to watch it no matter how bad it is... in fact, I’ve just realised as I was writing those last few words that maybe that’s partially why my favourite movie out of the original Star Wars trilogy is The Empire Strikes Back... it started up on an ice planet, what more do I need? Blood and snow... a winning combination in a movie if ever there was one.

Now where was I?

Oh yeah. Two things which made me pay attention. One was in a scene with Kate Beckinsale just after she has had her fingers amputated and she is taking it out on her quarters in the base by throwing a tantrum and wrecking the place. One of the DVDs in her collection, making a blink and you’ll miss it appearance, is the 1954 sci-fi B-movie THEM! Of course, it would have been more a comment on the kind of film Whiteout is in terms of setting if it had been The Thing From Another World or even John Carpenter’s remake of the same (just The Thing) but I’m always happy for movies involving giant ants to make an appearance. I love THEM! and happy to see it referenced whenever possible. The last time I remember a nod to it in a movie was in that great Area 51 how-many-sci-fi-references-can-you-cram-into-a-scene sequence in Looney Toons Back in Action. The same sound effect as the giant ants from THEM! was used.

Okay... thing number two is... the score. Never been the best follower of John Frizzell but I do like his style and I’m probably one of the few people on the planet who bought the soundtrack CD to a small sci-fi show he scored back in 1995 called VR5. The show was cancelled after less than ten episodes if I recall so the CD release must have been part of the deal before it started to air is my guess. I liked him then and I like him now. His score for Whiteout is quite breathtaking... it’s not really a score that relies on leitmotif to tune in the viewer, at least not that I can tell and that doesn’t seem to be Frizzel’s thing. His window into the material seems to be similar to the work of Bernard Herrmann... not in style, they're worlds apart, but in terms of scoring for the landscape and the psychological atmosphere of the environment rather than tying anything into a specific character. Some of his more sweeping, snowbound cues reminded me of his work on the score for Jeunet’s Alien: Ressurection (a score that I feel was much maligned when it came out but which I think people should maybe take another listen to).

So there you have it... not a great movie by any standards but certainly not an absolutely terrible one. Good thing to watch if you don’t want to think about anything in particular (everything is well telegraphed and spoonfed for you) but with some standout music and a reference to giant ants! Not the best kind of art in the world... but sometimes a light, unchallenging dessert is just the kind of comfort food you need.

Bleu Movie

Trois Couleurs: Bleu 1993

Poland/France/Switzerland

Directed by Krzysztof Kieslowski

Artificial Eye DVD Region 2

I remember going to see this at a late night performance at, what was then, the Lumiere cinema in London back when this movie was first released. A couple of mates and I had driven into London late one night to specifically see this movie and we were all really tired... but as soon as the movie started we were completely hooked on Krzysztof Kieslowski’s amazing movie. I’d persuaded my friends to drive into town to watch this on the strength of a TV screening of Kieslowski’s A Short Film About Love and his Decalog (which includes a shorter, alternate version of that film but with a different ending).

Blue didn't disappoint any of us... it was everything we were looking for in a movie right then... if we even knew what we were looking for. Rewatching it for the first time in a very long time, I was struck by how the director’s movies are both so distant and yet so utterly involving in their complex make up. Something about his movies gives you a very voyeuristic feeling... which is kinda strange considering that Kieslowski’s style of filming is quite artificial and the absolute antithesis of something like the “more than questionable” “style” of Dogme filmmaking which became slightly fashionable for a while (and don’t start me off about the inherent contradictions in the Dogme manifesto which make it impossible to even begin to shoot a movie in that style without ignoring the ground rules... I get kinda passionate and angry about it).

Kieslowski’s Blue uses a very strong colour palette (as some of his films do), and you will get primary colours juxtaposed against each other, much like in the movies of Mario Bava or Dario Argento, although they are not as deeply saturated as the colours those directors play with... but Kieslowski shows us that these colours are certainly strong enough to bounce off each other and create their own colour space without having to accent them so strongly. And of course... there’s a lot of blue filtering in this movie. It’s a visually striking film.

Blue tells the story of Julie, deftly played by Juliette Binoche, who is in a car crash at the start of the movie to which she loses both her young daughter and her famous composer husband. When she alone survives and finds that she is unable to take her own life, she runs away from it all and gets rid of as much of her previous life as she can and just tries to stay out of people’s way. Not so easy because a colleague of here husband, Olivier, is in love with her and tracks her down and keeps trying to find ways to attract her attention. It's suggested as a possibility, early on in the narrative, that Julie might be the actual writer of her famous husbands compositions. This is neither confirmed or denied because Kieslowski seems to have a fondness for filling his films with ambiguity and an acute lack of closure... which is absolutely fine. You make up your own mind. Certainly, as she assists and pretty much takes over from Olivier in his task to finish her husbands last important composition, the circumstantial evidence is compelling that she might well have been the true author of her husbands works.

Kieslowski tends to focus on little details in his films... little moments of extreme beauty like the drip, drip of the fuel from the tail pipe of a car or a feather lightly blowing in the wind. And it’s really interesting to watch these artificially accented shots because they are also a window into the main action which puts you in a fly on the wall position quite often and give you that sense of voyeurism that is in few director’s works. The performances are all absolutely amazing... as they always are from the actors in his movies... and this attention to pulling perfect performances out of very talented people allows room for the artificial concentration of some of his shots to work and breathe without worrying that bad performances are going to heighten the lack of naturalism... these really are expertly crafted films.

Kieslowski and composer Zbigniew Preisner’s fictional composer Van den Budenmayer (their equivalent of Hal Hartley’s Ned Rifle and Ryful) also pops up in this one (as his music does quite significantly later on in The Double Life of Veronique). Preisner’s score in this is fantastic and swells up at unexpected times when the screen fades to black in the middle of a shot... only to fade back in after the music... like the director is “pulling a Godard” and wanting you to see that he’s making a point. I think what he’s doing is highlighting every time the lead character is posed with a choice or question that pulls her back closer to the land of the living. When she follows music with her fingers in various sequences of beautiful close up photography, a filter is used so all but the one note being played is in focus in the centre of the screen at any one time... a beautiful film to look at.

And then, of course, there’s the sugar cube shot. Once of the most memorable celluloid images and perhaps my favourite single shot of any movie. Julie dunks a sugar cube into a cup of coffee and in extreme close-up we watch the cube soak up the coffee over the space of five seconds. This looks cool on DVD but I can’t stress enough how much Kieslowski’s films need to be seen on the big screen. When you see a giant sugar cube soaking up coffee in your face at the cinema... it’s a moment of true beauty. I didn’t know this until earlier today but apparently Kieslowski went through all the sugar companies until he could find one which absorbed the coffee in exactly five seconds. No more... no less. Now that’s attention to detail!

Kieslowski’s Blue is the first part of a trilogy which continues in White and Red. His movies are some of the most beautiful pieces of motion picture art ever shot. If you’ve not seen this and you’re seriously into film then you may want to give his movies some of your time.

French MicsMacster ReMixd

MicMacs

aka Micmacs à tire-larigot

2009 France

Directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet

E1 Entertainment DVD Region 2

I’ve always liked Jeunet’s films, right from the moment I saw his first feature, Delicatessen, made in collaboration with Marc Caro. I remember I was a student and I’d just been to see Merci La Vie at my favourite cinema, the Lumiere in London (now deceased) and had been totally blown away by it. A day or two later I saw Delicatessen at, I think, the Curzon Soho (as it’s called now) and thought it was a pretty cool film, even when compared to Merci La Vie (which was one of the coolest movies ever made in my book).

Jeanet’s MicMacs carries on the very strong signature style of the director with it’s rich and vibrant colour scape (this time he is back to doing his Amelie style reds and greens for a lot of the shots) and his lingering on inventive and creative mechanical processes which seem to be one of his prime obsessions... some of his style even made it into his strictly American film Alien Resurrection (the fourth in the Alien franchise.... everyone seems to forget about Jeunet’s involvement with it these days but he even got Dominique Pinon in it again... reuniting him with his costar from The City of Lost Children, Ron Perlman). And talking of Dominique Pinon, he gets two roles in this movie. One as a human cannonball and a cameo where he is reprising his role as the hero of Delicatessen... but don't ask me how those timelines match up.

MicMacs tells the story, in it’s own good time and with a whole host of atypical comic diversions, of Bazil played by Dany Boon who Jeunet seems to be treating as a modern day Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplin in this movie... perhaps that’s about right because a quick trawl of the internet tells me that he’s a famous comedian in France. Bazil’s father was blown up by a landmine made by one arms manufacturing company and, later (but still within the pre-credit sequence of the film), Bazil is accidentally shot in the head with a bullet made by another arms dealer... the result of which is that he loses his job at a video store were he used to spend his time watching old film noir classics like The Big Sleep (the soundtrack to this movie is half permeated with old Max Steiner cues) and after spending a couple of months homeless and Chaplinesque, he is adopted by a “family” or gang of people who live in a tyre yard and who are all as eccentric as himself. Plans of revenge hatch in his bullet penetrated mind... but knowing Jeunet as you do, you know it is going to be an Amelie-like revenge and not some brutal and cold revenge like another writer/director may inflict on his audience.

My one slight grumble is the directors re-exploration, in a more dumbed down form, of that brilliant sound trick he invented in Amelie where different letters are read with different sound atmosphere effects in the background, and when a new hybrid letter is created from these and read back, he plays the various soundscapes as they match back against the relevant words or phrase. A similar sound device is used in the duping of the two arms dealers to make them think they have ben on a long trek halfway around the world... the reveal of this device of others things like vacuum cleaners standing in for plane engines seems to me to just be a comment on the foley of a movie anyway and would have been exactly how Jeunet did it in Amelie. Why reiterate the technique here when the audience is already smart enough to know how these things are done? It just made the punchline of the movie seem a bit anticlimactic to me.

Still, it’s a minor criticism... the denouement of a movie, does not a movie make (although some people would vehemently disagree with me I know). I didn’t enjoy MicMacs half as much as his last two movies, Amelie and A Very Long Engagement, but that’s not saying much when this director’s movies are just so good... it’s still a joy to watch and a movie I would recommend without qualification.

Fiery the angel fell...

The Girl Who Played With Fire

2009 (UK release 2010)

Sweden/Denmark/Germany

Directed by Daniel Alfredson

Screening at UK cinemas now

Here be Dragons but, also, here be spoilers! These spoilers will extend to the third part of the trilogy, The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest as well as giving away stuff from the books which didn’t make it into the movies... ooh, and also gives away something which happens to Lucy in one of Patricia Cornwell’s novels. You have been duly warned and proceed at your own risk.

I’m going to start this review by trying hard to remember something Kurosawa once wrote (probably in his book Something Like An Autobiography I would imagine) about his early days learning the ropes at Toho and the difference between a novel and a movie script... a story he remembered which demonstrates the different dynamics between a book and a movie... this is as well as I can remember it so I apologise for any small inaccuracies but the message should remain undiluted.

He’d written an adaptation and taken it for approval. In the book he was adapting, a faction of people were wanted with a price on their heads. A wooden sign is posted in a village about them and when one of them saw it, he rushed to where they were hiding and told them all about it. Kurosawa was told that his direct translation was not cinematical enough. To rewrite it so that when the person in question saw the notice, he uprooted it from the ground and ran away with it to show his friends... and that this was the correct way to do things cinematically.

Why am I starting with this little anecdote from Kurosawa? It’s because I want anyone reading this review to know that I am quite aware of the difference between a novel and its on-screen adaptation. Of course things are going to be cut or handled differently to fit the demands of the medium... I get it, I really do. I’ve not got a problem with it and I want you to trust me on this one.

So I’ll go ahead and say now that The Girl Who Played With Fire is, just like The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo before it, a really good movie but it’s only a half good adaptation.

Stieg Larsson’s original novels are fantastic and I truly think they are bold, pulp masterpieces of their time. So it’s quite possible I’m a little too close to the source material to be totally subjective about this but I’ll give it a go...

I remember sitting at the cinema during the first movie thinking how annoying and commercial a decision it was that they’d left out the “swinging” sexual lifestyle of two of the main characters Mikael Blomkvist and Erika Berger. In fact, Erika Berger’s a major character in the books and has a very important role to play in the third part but she seems to be really pushed to the sidelines in the movies so far. When you think about it, there are hardly any of the female characters in that first book (save for a couple of the Millennium staff and the old lady who has the photographic link Blomkvist needs) who don’t end up sleeping with Mikael Blomkvist. He seems to be having sex with everyone. Both Salander’s and Berger’s affection for sado-masochistic sex is also kept out of the movies for some reason. I kept thinking that they would have to, at the very least, bring the Blomkvist/Berger sleep and f*ck together as the best of friends whenever they feel like it element into the movie at some point because what happens in the last couple of pages of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo has serious consequences in the way that Lisbeth Salander relates to these other characters for the remainder of the other two books.

For Salander, you see, Blomkvist is her first serious relationship... the one which she has decided to go against her best instincts and finally trust someone for and invest in them after all and attempt to be a committed, loving person for them. Then at the end of the first novel, as she heads over to Blomkvist’s place to give him a Christmas present she sees him from across the street in Bergers arms and... from that moment on... she hates Blomkvist and his betrayal (as she perceives it, it’s not a totally black and white issue in the book) of her and it’s not until the very end of the third novel, some months after the main events depicted in that novel, that she decides to let him into her life again as a friend... even though he’s been helping and fighting for her the whole way throughout the second and third novels.

It’s an important slant and it’s only briefly alluded to in the second movie when we find out that Blomkvist has absolutely no idea why Salander’s been avoiding him after everything they went through in the events of the first part (just like he does in the novels). Some viewers who haven’t read the book don’t twig at all that she’s deliberately avoiding him in the movie and it’s no surprise after that little “Thank you for being my friend” message she leaves on his computer in the movie. Can’t quite remember if this note was in the original novel or not but if it was, you can be damn sure it was a covert and coded message meaning something completely other than the warm, fuzzy sentiment it comes across as in the movie.

Another glaring ommission, although not as necessary as those stated above but certainly sorely missed, is Salander’s criminal but thoroughly sympathetic global practices across the world. As she syphons off the money from the criminal organisation she’s come into contact with from the previous book and employ’s “cut outs” etc to invest and embezzle more money, she instantly becomes a multi-multi-millionaire many times over. This Modesty Blaise/Simon Templar-like figure she cuts so impressively in the novels is, again, only briefly alluded to in the movies for people who have read the books. Great swathes of her exploits were alluded to in a brief scene of her in one of her many disguises at the end of the first movie. In the second movie there are three references as far as I could make out... one scene near the start when she is instructing one of her employees how to invest her money, another scene in her former boss’s office (another character relegated to the sidelines but they’ll really need him for the third movie if they do it properly) where she acknowledges that she doesn’t need any money and then a third oblique reference on some documents Bomkvist finds in her new luxurious apartment. It was a shame they couldn’t get at least some of this stuff in the movies but there’s only so much time you can push in a theatrical release.

The film itself is very good for what it is. A tad cliched in parts (the romanticised computer hacking sequences which pay lip service to the Salander character as portrayed in the books) and the characters have, perhaps, as you can see from previous paragraphs here, been softened down a few notches to make them acceptable to a commercial cinema audience (at least in the eyes of the producers and sponsors is my guess... people liked the characters in the books enough, didn’t they?).

I find it curious that the most cinematic of the three novels (the Hollywood action fest style novel) dropped so much from it including some of the action scenes... where was the brilliant three handed foot chase sequence when Blomkvist is trying to find Slander for example? It was strange looking down at my watch and finding only about 20 minutes of The Girl Who Played With Fire had passed but we were already maybe two thirds of the way through the novel when the big, shock death of two of the characters was already upon us. All of the characters suffered from severe cutting due to length of time (they’re quite thick tomes) but the director certainly managed to pull it all together and sew all the selected highlights together to make a pretty comprehendible and watchable movie. Well done to him for that. And you got to meet Blomkvist’s sister who represent’s Salander at her trial in the third book... for most of the third novel Salander is recovering from the events depicted at the end of this movie in hospital under police arrest and the remainder of the book is taken up with her trial and then an action sequence where she faces off against her Robert Shaw-like Bondian henchman brother (as he is depicted in the movie... a less lethal and more clever version of the character than that in the novels)... and you want to see how that fight turns out :-) Hope they do it like the novel!

Actually, I thought the amount of damage inflicted on Salander in the movie version of The Girl Who Played With Fire was a little toned down compared to the novel. I wonder how many of the movie audience realised she’s been shot in the head. That she survives in the book after you have already had to give up on the character and accept her as dead is quite a tightrope of credible writing to balance on... like Lucy in the Scarpetta novels, she is only the second character I can think of off the top of my head who has survived a bullet in the head (Patricia Cornwell did her character one better by having the near fatal shot handily remove a certainly fatal brain tumour which was growing in the head of her character... thus curing her rather than killing her). I think perhaps I’m being a little harsh here because if the excellent Noomi Rapace had played her totally as the at-deaths-door-can-barely-move-vengeful-ghost-spirit she becomes at the close of the second novel... it might have stretched the ability of the audience to continue to buy into the character.

Actually, I think I’ve said enough here... I’m probably being a little over harsh on the movie but it’s only because I enjoyed the novels so much. The Girl Who Played With Fire is a really great thriller and it’s bound to be better than the US remake of it which we’re all going to have inflicted on us in a couple of years time. If you’ve seen the first movie and liked it... rush to your cinema to see this one too. It’s well worth your time if thrillers and larger than life genre characters are your thing. And certainly better than any other crime thriller playing at the cinema at the moment I would guess.