The Fall of the House of Usher (1928)

I haven't seen anything like this before and yet, in many ways, I have. Experimental short movies of the silent era are hardly my forté and so this could be the very apex of the genre or quite run-of-the-mill. Hell, for all I know it could be the only one, though I doubt it. On the other hand, this could be a video for anything off REM's 'Document' with the sound turned down- though without the Soviet iconography, obviously.

As I understand it (from films, which is where I have learned everything I know) Edgar Alan Poe is taught in US High Schools in the same way that our schools rightly insist that everyone knows at least one Shakespeare text before leaving. You don't know how lucky you are, I had to find Poe for myself while my teachers oppressed me with the turgid Thomas Hardy. Anyway- to return to the point- that would give viewers of this film a basic knowledge of the text which is vital if it is to be anything more than a series of interesting visuals to you. What you see on screen doesn't tell you the story, the narrative is almost totally scrapped in favour of expressionist art.

Not having a great knowledge of the history of cinematic techniques, I don't know if what I'm seeing here was revolutionary or derivative. But it certainly features some fascinating superimpositions and juxtapositions, camera angles which add interest and are still in use today, lighting and reverse-motion trickery. It looks fantastic.

It tells the story of The Fall of the House of Usher about as well as it tells the story of The Three Little Pigs, which is to say not at all but that hardly matters. It is a visually arresting expression of the story. 4/10

Watch it on GoogleVideo.

Gran Torino (2008)

I thought this was fantastic. I have some reservations about it, but overall the film was great. Clint's screen presence has changed over the years but hasn't diminished. This is by no means a perfect performance (though it's much better than some of those around him) and he's ten or fifteen years too late to be totally credible as Walt Kowalski, but he does draw out a fully rounded character with passions and humour and fears below the curmudgeonly, racist surface. Also, he reins himself in better than in some of his previous Director/Star vehicles. There is a greater economy in this performance than in some of his others when he didn't have a director to chide him.

It is a much better film than the basic premise of 'racist war veteran meets immigrants and realises that we're all the same beneath the skin'. In fact, in some ways it is basically a Western where a grizzled gunfighter reluctantly protects the weak from hostile attackers. Parts of the film are almost a machismo hand-job but the film overall is hardly the kind of Ford/Peckinpah reactionary right-wing ode to guns and violence that it threatens to develop into. Quite the opposite, in fact. It is just as much a film about a man confronting his demons and making his peace with his God. Or about a man out of step with his times and confused, frustrated, befuddled or angry by the world around him. Or an unlikely friendship/coming of age movie. It is not by any measure a simple film. I found it multi-layered, resonant and moving.

On the down-side, some of the performances from the younger players are pretty ropey at times and some aspects are overdone (not least Kowalski's final Christ-pose or the snare drums that accompany him taking out his rifle) but the film works better as a piece than the individual parts would suggest. We should cherish a film-maker who is as prolific and brave as Eastwood while we still have him. 9/10

Che: Part Two (2009)

Just a quick note to say that this is the 100th set of notes I've done since I started on here on 23rd December last year. Maybe I should broaden my interests.

And now on with the waffle. I gave Che: Part One a bit of a kicking- certainly in comparison to the opinions of my more trusted friends- because it was a bit overlong and dull. That can't be said of Che: Part Two. The second installment is more focused and visually (maybe even viscerally) exciting. And I was more struck by Del Toro's performance this time too- perhaps being the leader in a losing battle, as opposed to Castro's lieutenant in a successful one, simply gave him better material to work with.

One of the things I was keen to understand was whether this film would stand alone as a piece of work or if it was simply an adjunct to the first film. And I'm not convinced that it does necessarily. As a biopic this teaches us nothing about the man and as an holistic film it makes references to events and people from Che: Part One without contextualising them at all. But does that really matter? The success of the film surely lies in the more important question of 'is it any good?', rather than 'is it all tied-up neatly?'. And so I have learned something today- I have learned that the questions you take into a film aren't as important as the answers you take from it.

Knowing from the outset that the film depicts a doomed Che doesn't necessarilly have to be a handicap- Downfall / Der Untergang manages to be gripping, for example- but it is here. The Bolivian Revolution which Che arrives, brilliantly disguised though he is, to lead is shambolic and has little popular support. The propaganda efforts of the Bolivian Government and the militaristic support they have from the CIA ensure that the little support it has from the outset dwindles and the prospect is bleak. In the midst of this, Che leads his small band of guerillas in ever diminishing circles around the hilly Bolivian jungle for a couple of hours as they get picked off by the surrounding armies. They get split up and stumble off in opposite directions with the vague hope that they will meet up somewhere as-yet-undecided. The lack of clear strategic thinking and decisiveness is palpable- this is not a fanciful or airbrushed depiction of the man by any means- and exemplified by his travelling without his asthma medication which hampers the entire enterprise, perhaps fatally. At no point is there any prospect for any of the guerillas but capture and death- the futility of the expedition which struggles against the wilful acts of sabotage by the peasants they are attempting to free is startling. But the narrative is weak, the political context of the piece woefully underexamined and the characters are barely any different when they finish from where they start. The script is so flimsy that it could be boiled down to "Small army takes on big army. Loses.".

Is it a good film? I'm not sure about that. It reminds me a lot of Quantum of Solace in that the shaky handicam action and intense action scenes act in lieu of character development, interesting dialogue or plot. Does it either lionise Che or vilify him? No, neither. Will I watch it again? Probably- though not for quite some time. 4/10

Network (1976)

I'm really in two minds about this. It's great- but not as great as I'd hoped. The direction, cinematography and performances are all great. What holds me back from loving this is the script- and I can see myself getting tied up in knots about this. For a film from over thirty years ago, the film is remarkably prescient. I don't think that ratings chasing, dumbing down, callous corporate politics or exploitation were new concepts in 1976 by any means- but the exploitation of a mental breakdown, on-screen deaths or murderous political activitism would all follow in the years that followed Network. I just feel that the way that these things unfold here is unrealistic- even when they have, in essence, come to pass. This is the apex of melodrama. And do ordinary people really decide upon a murder so calmly and certainly.

The other thing about the script which irked me was that every character in every scene no matter how animated or sullen or overwrought or in control or even psychotically deranged spoke in exactly the same polished and seamless voice. They all had a fantastic range of vocabulary, never stumbling or searching for the right phrase or capable of being misinterpreted as if they all had thesauruses (thesaurii?) to hand. Life isn't like that and so real-life drama shouldn't be like that. It's just a bug-bear of mine. The dialogue is great and quotable, it is beautifully delivered and sticks in the memory but it's never that easy to find the right... erm... you know, the right means of delivering an emotional message... articulating, that's it- it's never that easy articulating your thoughts off the cuff.

Aside from those gripes, this is first-rate movie making. Peter Finch gives a great performance as the deranged Harry Beale (like the Fool in Shakespeare's King Lear), William Holden is more understated but no less effective in the role which holds the whole piece together, Faye Dunaway delivers her usual performance of the era (usually very good, never excellent) and Ned Beatty with just one powerful scene in the whole film is mind-blowing.

Notwithstanding my reservations about the script (and it does make important comments about exploitation, dumbing-down and spoon-feeding) this is still a fine movie. 7/10 and I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more.

Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait / Zidane, un portrait du 21e siècle (2006)

I happen to think Zidane to be the most talented footballer of his generation, probably since Maradona (and since Maradona is the greatest footballer I have ever seen that's no slight upon him) but he has been pretty ill-served by this film. Zizou, though a big man, was so graceful and perfectly balanced that his movements were sublime- balletic almost. It is such a shame, then, that during the game which forms almost entirety of this film he has very little of the ball. And then gets sent off at the end. In some ways that says more about the volatile nature of genius than about Zidane the footballer, though, which is a happy accident.

But for a brief half time interlude, this film follows Zidane via numerous camera angles, throughout a ninety minute game near the very end of his career. It was by no means his best performance- though he does create a goal with one outstanding piece of skill- and he spends most of the film standing and waiting (curiously without a marker within yards of him) for passes that never arrive. Football fans happening upon this film will be infuriated by footage of Zidane standing at the edge of a wall while a team-mate takes a free-kick or watching his side concede a penalty. For a fan it's like looking peeking through the keyhole at a girl you know is getting undressed but maddeningly can't quite see. And the action going on around him- which should be unimportant according to the theme of the film- isn't always ignored. The score is flashed up occasionally and key match moments in which Zizou doesn't feature are played and replayed. Come on guys, we want to see all or nothing- these half-measures are disappointing in the extreme.

Purely as a piece of art, though, the film is more successful. Not successful, just more successful. Set to a great original soundtrack by Mogwai- with intermittent match noise and authentic commentary from Spain- and featuring sporadic subtitled quotes from Zidane himself about the nature of football as a spectacle and as a game, there are some great visual pieces and the utilisation of the footage is great. Especially on the odd occasions that he is doing something. But the task of making a sweaty guy standing around for an hour and a half at all invigorating is sadly too great. It cannot and doesn't hold the attention. But it does look and sound great. 3/10

Death in Venice / Morte a Venezia (1971)

After a few popcorn movies in a row, I felt that I owed it to my brain to give it a little workout and Visconti's meditation on mortality and beauty and decay is designed for exactly that purpose. This film is beautifully shot and artfully constructed, languorous and melancholic- the deliberate pace compels the viewer to consider the subtext carefully. The first five minutes, more or less, is dedicated to wordless shots of Dirk Bogarde sat uncomfortably and clearly troubled on a steamboat. Five minutes! It is a beautiful, elegiac composition and to see Bogarde in the condition that he is already opens up the suggestion of the withering influence of time. My first thought upon seeing him looks more like Ronnie Corbett dressed as a rather shabby Hercule Poirot than the handsome movie star I'm accustomed to seeing. The fact that, at this point, my only knowledge of the film was its title did serve to disconcert me a little- for all I knew I may be about to watch a broad farce in the vein of Without A Clue. Of course, broad farces do not tend to begin with a contemplative stretches of silence and so the misapprehension was pretty swiftly dismissed.

In fact, I worked through several theories during the watching of this film. Following this opening, Bogarde is taken on to his final destination by a gondolier who refuses all requests and instructions to change course and is later described as a criminal who only goes one way. Immediately I was put in mind of Charon, the mythological ferryman who transports the newly deceased from the world of the living unto the world of the dead (again, the title Death in Veniceis resonant here). The film also appears to show Bogarde developing a homo-erotic infatuation with a pretty long-haired boy, Tadzio (Björn Andrésen), who is dressed throughout in sailor outfits or period- 1912- swimming outfits. Through flashbacks we gradually learn of the circumstances leading to Bogarde's arrival. What I liked about this- and had never actually occurred to me until I considered it watching this film- is that the memories are haphazardly presented, jumbled in order almost non-sequiturs in themselves until the context is revealed during the course of the film. Isn't that exactly what memories are like? Where else but in the movies do your inner reflections follow a chronological pattern?

And so we come to understand that Bogarde's character Professor Gustav von Aschenbach (I'm not typing all that again!) arrives in Venice in failing health for rehabilitation. He has been married with a child who died. His reputation as a composer is tarnished by recent failings and his creative and personal standing is at a low ebb. A broken man who appears lost in the world of his choosing as he questions the validity of his existence of his works. He dissects his art and the nature of creativity (is beauty the result of labour or inspiration? Is it discovered or developed?) without conclusion. He seems unconvinced by his own assertion that "reality distracts and degrades us" and unconvinced by the counter-arguments in equal measure.

With this in mind the film is revealed to not be about homo-erotic, generation-defying infatuation but about a deeper admiration for , actually an infatuation with, youth itself and with pure beauty. And then I return to the idea of Charon the Ferryman, transferring the dead from the world of the living. As Bogarde feels the crushing realisation that his vapid emotionless world of intellect is dead he moves on to a world of natural beauty which renders everything else contrived and worthless. Bogarde's infatuation is not so much with Tadzio himself but with that which he represents. The inspired beauty that Bogarde longed to create but could not is natural and real, neither the product of inspiration nor perspiration. Dirk Bogarde conveys this beautifully. His performance, increasing in intensity and overt angst is measured and balanced. His flappable frustration giving way to confusion, then to fear, then realisation and finally to impotent surrender are rendered with very few words and no grand physical gestures but with, for example, an expression of horror as he learns the truth about the cholera epidemic or the way in which he grabs his arms around himself to chastise himself for daring to smile as Tadzio. Tremendous performance

Even more than Bogarde who dominates the film to the extent that he is in every scene and almost every shot, however, the film is a magnificent achievement by the director/cinematographer team of Luchino Visconti and Pasqualino De Santis. The slow and largely wordless nature of the film place a heavy burden upon the pair. The use of Mahler's music (is there meant to be a link between Gustav Mahler and Gustav von Aschenbach? I don't know anything about the composer and may be clutching a very tenuous straw) beautifully complements the stunning visual feast of the film- and it is a feast. One of the themes running through the film is of decay and the corrupting effect of time and this is beautifully demonstrated in a city which is presented as a deteriorating before our eyes. The whole thing is quite stunning and nothing is left unsaid.

This is a marvellous picture, high art indeed. And, while I would prefer to watch Carry On Don't Lose Your Head nine times out of ten, when I feel the need to challenge myself then Death In Venice would be an excellent choice. 9/10

My Bloody Valentine 3-D (2009)

I know that it's beyond-optimism-stupid to keep watching shitty schlock or exploitation films and expect something worth seeing but I still get disappointed. The whole reason that I went to see this is because I'd never seen a 3-D film in a movie theatre before and I'm up for all things. So, I knew what I was getting into but I'm still surprised by what I saw. I genuinely thought that Wes Craven's Scream had killed off this type of dumb slasher movie with its intelligent post-modern deconstruction of the genre and its 'rules'. I accepted the regrettable by-product of so-called torture porn movies like Saw and Hostel as a means for screenwriters to find new avenues for the slasher genre. Admittedly it was just an assumption as I rarely watch this kind of thing. But yes, I thought that at the very least there would have to be a movement towards a bit more ingenuity in the storyline rather than just in the number ways to get heads rolling across the screen. Maybe there is and this was just a one-off. It did occur to me that this may have been written by a couple of Producers over lunch during the screenwriters' strike. I could imagine them working out how to write a horror film by cramming every cliche known to man: right, it's set in a small town on the anniversary of a tragedy or massacre and there's an indesctructable psycho in a mask chopping up nubile teenagers with their titties out and the whole town are saved by the jock with the heart of gold coming to the rescue to save his girlfriend. For that's what this film is. No I'm not joking, that is the storyline. The only way it could be any more derivative is if it was a sequel to another film with the exact same storyline (and the way the film ended, you have to know that the sequel will be along next February or the one afterwards). There is nothing to be interested in or excited by here- even the 3-D is boring. Fuck it, I don't even remember jumping once. I know I can be a know-it-all art-fart but this is such a terrible genre picture that it's almost unbelievable. And it's so badly filmed that helicopter shots of a mining works look like miniatures more than they look real- what skill that takes. This isn't even entertaining in a so-bad-it's-good way.

If I want to see deep-voiced, handsome American teenagers (who are NEVER played by anyone under twenty-five) being chopped up, I won't go and see My Bloody Valentine 3-D part 2, I'll get hold of John Carpenter's Hallowe'en and see it done properly. I will never see this again. 0/10

Friday the 13th (2009)

Haven't a clue if this is a sequel or a remake or just a synonym, I don't think I've ever seen the original and in any case this looks like any and every slasher movie I've ever seen anyway. Having sat through Push- which was awful- and then My Bloody Valentine 3D- which was even worse- and experiencing the full multiplex phenomenon with a gang of rowdy teenagers having a popcorn fight, overloud speakers not quite in synch and the person behind me really pushing into the back of my chair as anyone over eight foot eleven would need to, I really felt that this was going to be a walkout unless something worth seeing happened quickly. It didn't, not really, but I stayed anyway.

This was probably the best of the three I saw in a row- though given the 0 and 1 ratings for the previous two this is hardly showering it with plaudits- because it was the most fun- this stems from the energy and pace of the film. It opens with Jason's mother avenging his death by killing a load of kids until the final one strikes first and chops off her head. Then Jason comes back from the dead to save the head- cue titles. Next a group of five teens (two couples and a geek) go camping and one of them tells the story of Jason and they all go off to have sex and get carved up one-by-one. Oddly, the titles appear again at this point but who cares we're about fifteen minutes in and it's goretastic.

The film slows a little at this point. The caption reads 'Six weeks later' and so either the first or second set of killings- is it giving too much away to say there'll be more killings?- don't happen on Friday the 13th. In fact, I don't recall the date ever being mentioned. Anyway, at this point a little bit of storyline is shoehorned in- the brother of one of the five already who Jason encountered earlier (a tall good-looking white-teethed teenager in his mid twenties) bumps into another group of seven teenagers all heading up towards Crystal Lake. There's a bit of friction with the alpha-male leader (a tall good-looking white-teethed teenager in his mid twenties) and some chemistry with his girlfriend. Then he heads off on his motorbike (ooh a rebel) and they go to a deserted house to strip off and get drunk before heading out in turn to meet Jason and never return.

Okay, calling that storyline is stretching it but it is at least a premise for the gore that follows. Jason- who has apparently grown to superhuman strength on a diet of rat droppings and woodworm unless he is dead and I'm not totally sure about this- kills them (and a few neighbours and a cop who is sceptical about the frantic calls from drunken kids- always presented as ludicrously naive that) with economy and blood a-plenty. One of the couples goes waterski-ing topless (is there any other way?), the rest either get drunk or go out into the dark investigating armed only with a torch which, like every torch in every horror movie ever, fails at just the wrong moment.

And it's all good forgettable fun. The demographic must love it- lots of gore, lots of nudity and over in an hour and a half. There are loads of non-endings, maybe ten, as Jason just keeps coming back. There's even one to close the film which completes tonight's hattrick of films blatantly being left open for a sequel. The lead actor Jared Padalecki looks like he could have a future ahead of him and Aaron Yoo has great fun as a drunken teenager.

So, for being short and fun and gore packed and even having a couple of adequate performances, Friday the 13th scores a mighty 2/10.

In Like Flint (1967)

I watched Our Man Flint recently and really enjoyed it and here we have the archetypal sequel: what it lacks in freshness and originality it tries to compensate for by lowering the bar. The acting is hammier, the gags are more obvious, the storyline is more outré and the whole thing is dumbed down to ensure the broadest possible appeal. And it is enjoyable, just a little regrettable.

One of my favourite things about the Flint films are the inventiveness of the writers in coming up with Flint's abilities. The best that we get here is when he is writing a dolphin dictionary- a feat which enables him to speak to a dolphin and gain its assistance in penetrating the enemy lair. It is almost as if the concept is funny enough without the extra effort which made the first so special- the gadgets from last time (especially the hearing equipment in the shirt) are missed here and although the 73 function lighter- 74 if you include lighting a cigarette- survives its usefulness is downplayed.

Even James Coburn seems to have lowered his aims with this one, he played the first film straight- as all the best comedy is- but here he starts mugging for the camera. It's a real shame as Flint on the one hand and Harry Palmer on the other provided a really strong counterpoint to the Bond films and, in the absence of Coburn's comic alternative, they were able to become ludicrous self-parodies themselves.

Another regrettable disappearance is the antagonism between Flint and Lee J. Cobb's Lloyd Cramden. Their spiky relationship in the first film was an interesting layer to the film however Cramden, who had found Flint's abilities no compensation for his disdain for authority last time out, simply fawns over Flint this time. The only interesting thing Cobb has to do this time is to wear a dress and shave off his moustache. A waste.

The storyline takes Flint to Death Valley, Moscow, the Virgin Islands and Outer Space (Bond would be 13 years behind him) but the sets are unconvincing and the whole thing has the naff cheapness of a budget sequel. You can see the series heading down the Escape From The Planet of the Apes route and perhaps it's for the best that this film wasn't followed up. The closing sequences see a battalion of nubile girls attacking a military colony on a flotilla of pedaloes- like the Dunkirk evacuation filmed by Russ Meyer- and the leaders of the female-only organisation who were trying for world domination conceding that it's best to let men run the show. Outdated that surely, even in 1967!

And so this is a disappointing sequel and the death knell of a series not yet out of infancy. Entertaining, campy but crap. 3/10. Mind you it was at least prescient- if only more Americans had shared Flint's disdain for the notion of an actor as President.

Nevada Smith (1966)

My choice of film is usually fairly arbitrary and often depends upon what TCM or Film Four have scheduled or which of my high-priority LoveFilm selections arrives next. In choosing Nevada Smith, though, I was swayed by one factor alone: Steve McQueen. He is my favourite actor. I love the way he never seems to be acting.

I didn't approach Nevada Smith much in the way of expectation. It hasn't amassed much of a reputation over the years, I don't know much of the director Henry Hathaway's work- aside from True Grit- and I really don't like the work of Harold Robbins on whose novel this is based. All this film really had going for it was its cast. And the fact that it might help me tidy up my tag cloud.

It's better than I expected, but not by much. The storyline follows a familiar pattern- Steve McQueen stars as a half-Caucasian/half-native American teenager (despite McQueen being a blond 36 year old at the time) who sees his parents killed in cold blood by three men and vows to track them down and avenge the deaths. The movie is episodic: he kills the first man (Martin Landau) in a knife fight, learns that the second (Arthur Kennedy) is in a Louisiana prison and gets sentenced himself just to kill him and then escape, and finally he hunts down the ever-reliable Karl Malden for the film's climactic scene.

Along the way he is taught how to fight and shoot and drink and play cards by a gun salesman he tries and fails to hold up (played by an impressive Brian Keith) and he encounters a couple of love interests and a priest (played by an unconvincing Raf Vallone, he was much better as the lead Mafioso in The Italian Job) and with each of them he uses them and then turns his back on them with no further thought for them. That is the interesting part of the film and is explored as fully as the genre allowed at that point. Meanwhile Sergio Leone was breaking down such considerations with the contemporaneous masterpiece 'The Good, The Bad and The Ugly' and in that context Nevada Smith is exposed as a formulaic genre picture.

It is just a standard western if, I suppose, a little more ambitious than most. And content to exist within the confines of genre expectations when the opportunity to examine the emptiness of revenge or the brutalisation of man as a means to overcome brutality was there. And for that wasted opportunity, 5/10.

I've Loved You So Long / Il y a longtemps que je t'aime (2008)

The absence of Kristin Scott Thomas (and Sally Hawkins for Happy-Go-Lucky) from the Best Actress nominations at this year's Oscars is a fucking farce. If anyone thinks that Angelina Jolie did a better job in Changeling, for example, then they really need to watch this again. And then if they still think it, then they're irredeemably lost. Kristin Scott Thomas, who I've never really admired before, is a revelation here. Her delicate, nuanced, progressively revealing portrayal of Juliette is everything that Jolie's unsubtle, tub-thumping, wailing banshee "look at me, I'm acting here dammit" approach is not. At least in the Best Supporting Actress category Penélope Cruz can hold her head up alongside Elsa Zylberstein who plays Léa here. And she's the only one who can because Marisa Tomei certainly fucking can't. This is a powerful, moving, sad- but not depressing- and engrossing film which acts as a vehicle for the lead actress. There is a profound sorrow in her every unpunctuated silence which seems to project and unsettle the viewer. I felt like I was watching the tortuous struggle within her as she thousand-yard-stared, fidgeted and groped for something positive to cling onto in almost every scene. It is an extremely discomfiting experience. The character arc she portrays is as gentle and gradual and utterly convincing as you could really hope for.

The film as a whole, however, is not the trying experience that it would be reasonable to expect given the strength of Scott Thomas's performance and the sombre material of the film. Indeed it is, to use the most hackneyed phrase I can think of to describe it, life-affirming. I had no clear idea about what I was going to see when I began watching this, I had read no reviews and seen no trailers- all that I really knew was that it was French (I am an unashamed Francophile, so that would be reason enough) and that it had been nominated for a couple of BAFTAs- though it won none and Elsa Zylberstein was again overlooked for fuck's sake- but the storyline was clearly revealed in stages. This isn't to say that the ending would surprise anyone, you don't need to be Columbo to deduce what it is that's coming, but that the way the story moves to reach the outcome is a success.

It isn't a perfect film by any means. As is often the case where there is a towering lead performance, the film tends to be overbalanced and becomes less than the sum of its parts- There Will Be Blood is a great example of what I mean. In a first time director, Philippe Claudel, this is pretty understandable. The sub-plots which do not focus upon Kristin Scott Thomas but are instead peripheral to her (Luc coming to terms with Juliette, the storyline featuring Capitaine Fauré, Michel's growing attraction toward her) feel a little underdeveloped- as if Claudel knew he was getting something really special from the lead and was terrified of focusing anywhere else. With experience the confidence to know how and when to do that will come, I hope.

And so, a good film with a couple of great performances and a Director to keep an eye on for better things to come. Smashing. 7/10

The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956)

The absolute tragedy of The Man Who Knew Too Much is that the opening half an hour of scene-setting and character establishment isn't anywhere near strong enough to match up to the genuinely gripping meat of the film. It is not that the film is boring, it's certainly not like The Deer Hunter where the viewer's resolve is tested and only the mentally strong can stomach the fourteen hour Wedding in order to get to the great stuff hiding away afterwards. It is simply that the opening half-hour establishes James Stewart and Doris Day as an irritating and slightly foolish couple who think rather more highly of themselves, though maybe not of one another, than they might. And when the film turns gripping suddenly it's not so much that I get discombobulated by the shift, it's simply that there's a period where I know that I'm not engaged in the way that I should be and need to be for the film to work. It happens of course, despite Doris Day and all the 'oh-so-wholesome, apple pie, Que Sera Sera, too good to be true and dull as a pair of old pants' baggage she brings I do begin to care. I do get edgy. I do want her to find a way to stop the shot. That's the skill of Hitchcock. But he has to use so much of it redeeming the first half hour and- let's be frank I hope this was forced upon him- the presence of Doris fucking Day and her fucking song, that the film is nowhere near the levels of dramatic excellence it could have reached. For him to have blown his second shot at this story, and I haven't seen the first in some years so I can only assume that he was unhappy with that too, is a real tragedy. And it is blown- a real wasted opportunity. Of course, as ever, I'm being hypercritical of someone I greatly admire. If this was, say, a Barry Levinson film I'd be raving about it and moaning that he hardly ever shows any signs of this kind of skill in his other films. But however good a job Hitch does of making up for it, there's still no getting away from the fact that he lets her sing that fucking song in his film. Twice! Oscar my arse (as an Aston Villa manager may have said back in the sixties).

So I'm not going to mention her again- other than to say in some scenes she's really pretty convincing, its just that in others she's useless which means that she may as well have been useless all along. Right, that's it! No more mentions of that woman again. And no I'm not on about that woman, Ms Lewinsky, I'm referring- or rather no longer referring- to the blonde bombsite up there ↑.

The film then takes a wonderful turn just over half an hour in. There has been intrigue before this with the urbane but mysterious Louis Bernard's behaviour perplexing the normal, upright McKennas. There's even been a murder- Bernard in largely unexplained face-paint is butchered in a busy Marrakesh market right in front of the McKennas. But 37 minutes in Jimmy Stewart receives a chilling call, Bernard Herrmann strikes up the band and Hitch focuses the camera on Jimmy's hand anxiously gripping a telephone directory and the film takes flight. Up to this point Stewart had played his character as grouchy and a little aloof, but this is stripped away instantly and he seems fallible and human and all of his ornery qualities become strengths. It's a clever performance by Stewart, playing an everyman character thrown into a volatile situation beyond normal comprehension could easily see the opening stages of the film played out by a sweet, happy, pleasant man- a male Doris Day if you like- rather than an uptight, opinionated, sometimes bolshie and sometimes funny guy. And because he is a real person with a genuine and convincing angst over the safety of his son I find myself hooked. The score helps, the direction helps but the real strength of the scene is in James Stewart's brow.

From that turning point we're off on a Hitchcockian rollercoaster. If you've seen The 39 Steps or North By Northwest, you'll have seen this done better but it's still exciting. The action sees Day and Stewart frequently separate and not always acting with the other in mind, their frantic and often instinctual actions are beautifully shot with each finding themselves in odd positions as a result of their impetuosity- the scene with Stewart barging through a taxidermists as the staff try variously to restrain him and to protect their stuffed animals is priceless, James Stewart being bitten by a stuffed tiger in a Camden backstreet is not a sight you see every day! There are false turns, red herrings, suspicious officials and plausible bad-guys but at no point does this get confusing, it's all deftly balanced and explained with great visual flourishes (though the earlier technicolour does look barely better than some colourised films I've seen) - and builds to the great Royal Albert Hall sequence.

The scene in the Royal Albert Hall is probably as dramatic as could be without tipping over into campy melodrama. The set-up is fantastic, though it does require a little suspension of disbelief, and allows Hitch to stretch the scene out. The viewer is already aware of the piece of music that will coincide in the shot being fired- a climactic cymbal crash- and the piece builds to it, then fades out several times heightening the tension through Doris Day's character. It is a beautiful example of how to control an audience.

After this, the film falls a little flat again. The drama of what has just gone on needs to be released in some way but the plot requires that the final loose end is tied up. This section of the film- lamentably shoehorning in another rendition of 'Que Sera Sera'- cannot help but be anti-climactic and the film loses some impact here too. It is a little too contrived, a little too neatly arranged and the final scene where the couple return to their waiting guests- who would have had time to grow a beard during their absence- is as cheesy as Hitchcock ever got.

And so I find The Man Who Knew Too Much disappointing. Plenty within it is of the highest calibre and much of the rest is really unworthy of such a great filmmaker. 5/10

WALL·E (2008)

I'm going to have to try and defend my hypocrisy again. A couple of days ago I lambasted "that impressive and hyper-detailed but oh-so-fucking boring and lifeless computer generated 3-D bollocks that all Pixar films are made with these days" and now I'm going to give a computer generated Pixar film the blogging equivalent of a blow job. Because this film transcends such considerations, it is simply great film-making and could only have worked by being made in this way. And that's why I feel no compunction in lambasting the look of Kung Fu Panda and praising it here, the former would have worked better done another way (as I explained with reference to the title sequence) and, as Balloo the Bear in The Jungle Book shows, a simple cartoon would've been fine. The advances in computer generated animation- which Pixar have been at the very vanguard of- allow films to be made now that display the most outrageous and wildest imaginings of film-makers and this is what it should be used for. And this is what WALL·E is. It is a work of art that easily stands comparison with the likes of 2001: A Space Odyssey as a visual epic, but is a thoroughly entertaining film in its own right too- which is more than can be said for 2001! I sat smiling with sheer joy when I watched it.

What is wonderful about WALL·E is that it isn't afraid to be clever. Not arch or wry or eyebrow-raising or ironic, just genuinely intelligent. The film is, for a long period, little more than a silent movie and- as such- really challenges the contemporary audience who have become accustomed to fast, loud, bright and brash. For (what is ostensibly) a kid's film to offer up this challenge is a brave risk but one which pays off beautifully. There is so much to see and consider, the musical accompaniment is sublime and the comedy is intelligent. It is a wonderful sequence and really sets this film up beautifully. And what follows is great too, but in a different way. Where the opening is beautiful but with a wistful melancholia as we see WALL·E alone on Earth, what follows is more comical and event-filled (if no less sad). It is also more conventional and narrative driven, which complements the artistic Tati/Keaton/Chaplinesque style of the opening wonderfully well. The 'message' of the film is beautifully delivered, with wit and pathos and- most importantly- without preachiness or bombasticity. The 'robots teaching humans to be human' idea is sublime, it isn't original but it's originally presented. This is a film about humanity and love but plays like a sci-fi movie. You don't have to look far for the meaning, but you aren't being clobbered over the head with it. How refreshing. In fact everything about the film is underplayed beautifully. It is utterly masterful and my paltry descriptive will never be able to do it justice. I've been amazed tonight- the direction is magical and the screenplay is as good as I've seen in a long time. The lack of dialogue presents a real challenge which is surmounted so easily that it is barely credible. There truly is genius at work here. Truly.

Even before the film gets predictable with the victory-from-the-jaws-of-defeat ending which is de rigeur I didn't care, I had been hooked long ago. My emotions were being played and I knew it and I didn't care I was hooked. I cried like a baby. Doesn't happen often and has probably never happened with an animated film but there you are- the film did its job in every way. I laughed, I cried, I felt great at the end and I wanted to see it again straight away. 10/10.

Black Samurai (1977)

The first film in my Kung Fu extravaganza (Kung Fu Panda) started off with me having low expectations and then tragically built them up only to dash them. With this film I fet much safer- the title and year of release tells me all I need to know. Blaxploitation, Kung Fu and Jim Kelly. Oh yes, set your phasers on dumb and enjoy.

Jim is a heavily-afro'd special agent with no respect for authority. He works for a group called DRAGON, an acronym standing for Defense Reserve Agency Guardian Of Nations- no shit, I'm not making this up! DRAGON want him to rescue a diplomat's daughter who has been kidnapped by a Voodoo priest and is being ransomed for a brand new super-weapon "The Freeze Bomb". As if that wasn't enough the Hong Kong-based kidnap victim is this California resident's girlfriend. What are the chances of that, eh?

I'm going to bang on about title sequences again I'm afraid. I'm usually underwhelmed by them, even in big expensive popcorn movies, but these are great. They are utterly simple, a set of negative photos of Jim in various action poses set to a standard funky guitar theme, but really pretty effective. From there it's straight in on the action with a carful of no-good hoodlums- you can spot them by their greasy hair, moustaches and denim- tracking the kidnap victim. They take her from her villa by beating up her guards and then, as if that wasn't bad enough, shooting them anyway- the bursting blood bags under their shirts stick out like overfilled catheter bags, if they'd only turned and faced thirty degrees in a different direction it wouldn't show but, ah, it's too late now.

And so Jim- Robert Sand, the Black Samurai- is called in. His undercover contact Pines keeps giving him tip-offs which lead to dangerous situations, Jim isn't daft he knows that they're traps but he isn't afraid either and goes in anyway. Variously fighting off shotgun-toting rednecks, weedy hit-men, jungle-dwelling Leopard men (the jungle looks a bit like a Florida garden), a muscular bodyguard who is set up as his black Superman rival, various dwarves, a vulture possessed by a demon (!), some rattlesnakes, several armies of bad Kung Fu dudes all in black and an axe-wielding Warlock he manages to save the day. What a bloke!

The production values are atrocious- the film is badly lit and filmed with indoor scenes being little more than guesswork, the editing (vital to the success of any Kung Fu film) is crap and with a little care could have rescued the project- do we need to see stuntmen standing waiting for their turn to get kicked in the face or the same kick from different angles during different fights? Something else that didn't help, I'm getting hypercritical here but I don't care when I'm on a roll, is that Jim is dressed in a red boiler suit (can they really have been fashionable) and then a red tracksuit and the ropey DVD transfer makes both a retina-burning pain to endure. While I'm on costume I learned from the closing titles that Marilyn Joi's costume was provided by Marilyn Joi- does that reflect the budgetary constraints they were under? Perhaps I should reassess the film. Marilyn Joi, by the way, plays a High Priestess of Voodoo named Synne who tries and fails to seduce Jim despite looking like Diana Ross with a figure. He's a one-woman man that guy!

The acting, of course, is dreadful throughout with one exception. Jim Kelly was a Karate champion turned actor and I actually prefer his acting to his Karate. Fine fighter he doubtless was but his moves always look a little clunky and unpolished- perhaps that's a legacy of being a real fighter rather than a movie fighter. So, I prefer his non-combat scenes. I mean it's not good acting, but his performance as a super-cool super-dude is convincing because the hokey dialogue deserves to be read with contempt. He carries off the suave badass thing to perfection and always looks the part- even when putting a helmet onto his immaculate afro to infiltrate the enemy hideout with his Thunderball-style jet pack! Yes, his jet-pack! And his delivery of the line "whitey faggot" as he grinds his heel into some dude's balls is magnificent. So cool is Jim that even the post-mix dubbing of some Muhammad Ali-style dialogue during the (frankly disappointing) final fight with his big black nemesis can't detract from him. Somehow he pulls off the shuffle, the "come on sucka! Hit me, is that all you got?" and the pretty boy with the unmarked face through his sheer ballsy chutzpah. Well, fair fucks to him.

And so, after bigging up Jim and slagging off everything else I'm giving Black Samurai a mighty 2/10. You ain't nothin', you out sucka!

Bananas (1971)

It's funny, last night I was sulking because Topkapi is 'just entertainment'and tonight I got in from the gym exhausted and only wanted entertainment. LoveFilm again came up trumps with Bananas. It's also funny because it arrived on the back of me seeing Allen's latest Vicky Cristina Barcelona twice (first, second) in the last few days and falling under his spell again for the first time in- I don't know- fifteen? twenty years? If you want a final piece of neat coincidence, it arrives right between the release of the two parts of Soderbergh's Che, which covers very similar material- though with somewhat greater resonance. The last time I watched a film with this much synchronicity (The Girl on a Motorcycle) it stank my DVD player out. Tonight's predestined movie fared altogether better. I laughed my lungs up at times and was never less than entertained throughout the whole eighty-odd minutes.

I do tend to like short films, you know. I've spoken before about my admiration for economy and brutal editing and this film is a great example of that. The sheer number and variety of gags employed is staggering. At this point in his career, Allen was still very much in the thrall of the Marx Brothers- this film could be a homage to Duck Soup- and any serious points made here about the corrupting effect of power are purely incidental to the story. I've always considered that Woody Allen's career followed the path from making madcap laugh-out loud comedies to cerebral wry smile comedies to bored expression films about dysfunctional people in dysfunctional relationships doing dysfunctional things- a bit simplistic maybe, but not too misleading. Here he's at his zany best. The storyline involves a sexually inept, bookish and neurotic Jewish New Yorker rebounding from a failed relationship (Allen, obviously) winding up leading a revolution in the South American republic of San Marcos and being named President there. So far, so dumb. This set-up allows Allen's imagination free-reign as we see sports reporter Howard Cosell commentating live on a Presidential assassination, Woody testing 'the Execusiser' a desk-based gym for people too busy to exercise, an incognito J. Edgar Hoover, a dream sequence involving a crucified Woody being reverse-parked by Nuns, a Battleship Potemkin skit, an advert where a Priest pushes New Testament cigarettes, the CIA sending US troops to fight on both sides of a revolution because they are afraid of being on the wrong side, Woody learning to be a guerrilla and pulling the pin from a grenade and throwing it (the pin!), Woody in the world's least convincing Castro beard. The characters involved, 2-D though they are, are hilarious- the charming despot, madcap revolutionary, paranoid FBI men, cause-of-the-month protester- they all provide great colour.

The range of humour, as I said, is important to the movie- it could have been a tedious series of prat-falls or of witty exchanges that grate. It is nicely balanced. My favourite gag of all was when Woody, trying to impress the activist Nancy says "for me the greatest crimes are the crimes against human dignity" and then falling down a manhole. Or the typically Woody exchange: "how am I immature?" "emotionally, sexually and intellectually" "yeah but in what other ways?". Even the music is great.

I think I'm rambling incoherently. I only make these notes so that I can look back and remember how I felt and this gibberish won't help at all. Suffice to say I really enjoyed it- 8/10.

Kung Fu Panda (2008)

I've decided to reward myself for surviving a terrible day at work with an evening of Kung Fu. I had no real thought of watching Kung Fu Panda before a friend lent it to me, but it seems like a suitably low key entreé and so I whacked it in the player. And you know what? It starts brilliantly. It's a bit obvious and blockbustery- well it would be- with the unfunny comedy actor Jack Black giving it all of that "in a time long forgotten" shit that every trailer for every expensive movie ever made has, but the animation is excellent. It looks amazing, stylish and bold and distinctive. I wasn't expecting much at all and then suddenly I was sat there in awe thinking that I could be about to get one of those once-in-a-blue-moon happy accidents that can only happen when my expectations are near zero for something which breathtaking. I'd even forgotten that Jack Black was in it. Just consider for a moment how great it looks:

And then this turns out to be a dream sequence and the film switches to that impressive and hyper-detailed but oh-so-fucking boring and lifeless computer generated 3-D bollocks that all Pixar films are made with these days. I nearly turned off there and then. But I didn't, I pressed on regardless. I hoped that there would be some kind of interesting story. There isn't- unlikely hero overcomes self-doubt and an unconquerable enemy to save the village/world/universe may well have been done better elsewhere. I was hoping for some wit or a film that was clever enough for adults and cute enough for kids. It isn't, though it's certainly cute enough for kids. If I want to watch an hour of fat jokes and someone looking gormless, I'll get a Chubby Brown video out (obviously I won't really- I'd rather watch a puddle evaporate). And that's all there is- Po the Panda is fat and clumsy and eats a lot and isn't very graceful and smashes, rips or breaks everything. There was probably a fart joke in there too but I can't remember it. All of which leaves the film to be rescued by the performances of its stars- and it is certainly a power cast: Jack Black, Dustin Hoffman, Angelina Jolie, Lucy Liu, Jackie Chan, Seth Rogen and- sticking out like an underpaid English sore thumb- Ian 'Lovejoy' McShane. And, maybe because he's the only one who has to justify his presence, Lovejoy is the only one who actually shows any dexterity or interest or engagement in the role. Then again his character the evil Kung Fu expert leopard Tai Lung does have the showiest role and the best dramatic lines, so that's probably why.

The biggest disappointment of all is Dustin Hoffman. His performance is so insipid and stilted that you wonder if the script had any direction at all. Hoffman is another of the De Niro/Pacino mould, resting on his laurels and content to sleepwalk and pick up a paycheck (as I believe that they're called in the US). When was the last time he really tried? Even as far back as Rain Man he was obvious rather than inspired. Is there anything more tragic than wasted talent?

I'm done. The title sequence is the great. Turn it off after that because it's professional and polished and wank. 1/10

Topkapi (1964)

Now this pissed me off when I watched it. And I feel sour about that because I love Jules Dassin and I have a high regard for Maximilan Schell but this felt like such a flimsy, glossy, insubstantial film that I just felt a bit cheated. I know that it's a caper and I know that not every film can be Wild Strawberries and I know that it's a bit tittish to bemoan a film for being 'just entertainment', but I just went in with higher expectations of the people involved. I'm sorry, that's the price of being so talented Jules.

I mean it's not a bad film. It's entertaining, neatly plotted, looks great, is nicely paced with just enough humour to lighten the tone without turning a drama into a comedy. Peter Ustinov has a ball as small-time crook Arthur Simpson, Maximilian Schell and the always entertaining Robert Morley are fine too and Akim Tarimoff is simply barmy as the haughty drunken cook. In fact, I don't know why I'm so down on it. I think I just wanted it to be Rififi and it's more like The Italian Job and if I can love that for being what it is, why can't I love this? There is, now I look back, a lot to admire here- not least in the sheer inventiveness of the heist. And I'm beginning to think that I misjudged this badly when I was watching it. The visual humour, tension, gadgets, dramatic scenery, outlandish characters and general tone of the film is something commonplace now, but I can't think of many films of that type which precede it. Even the matching suits which Ustinov, Schell and Gilles Ségal wear for the heist have become a recurring motif in movies like of Oceans 11 since. I'm talking myself around here.

Perhaps I should give it another try?

I was going to give this a three, but I've talked myself into marking it as 5/10 and one that needs re-watching soon.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008) *Second viewing

Today being Valentine's Day, I took my wonderful wife to see Vicky Cristina Barcelona at her request even though I saw this just a couple of weeks ago and rated it as a 7/10 film. On second viewing I think that's about fair- perhaps even a little on the stingy side. What stood out for me far more this time was the cynicism behind the film- every motivation and every relationship was treated as pretentious and false in its own way. As if Woody was simply sick of everything. I found it harder to engage with the protagonists- as it often is when a film is filled with spoilt people in big houses with no discernible source of income, but that's another matter- because I was more aware of the bitterness below the surface. I think that's a strength of the film, though, you can suspend disbelief and find yourself charmed by a film where for a short period of time people step out of their comfort zone and learn about themselves. A Spanish Roman Holiday, if you will. The easy flow and soundtrack-driven pace of the film allied to the use of a narrator (is there any better way to hint to an audience that it's okay to switch off their critical faculties?) aids this process tremendously and is probably the reason behind the film's relative success at the box office.

On the other hand, you can view the film as a critique of pretensions and the way that the desire to appear as a tortured artist or as a fully 'together' and in control are simply two sides of the same coin. Interestingly, Vicky and Cristina are shown arriving and leaving via Barcelona Airport at the beginning and end of the movie via a split-screen in which their positions are swapped- as if to represent the way in which they have to some extent swapped what they want out of life with one another.

In fact the only character to come out of the film with his 'image' intact is Doug (played by Chris Messina who does this kind of dull straight-laced lawyer/broker type of role really well, as he showed in the risible Made of Honour). I was going to say 'come out sympathetically', but his character doesn't elicit sympathy- even though he's cuckolded throughout- simply because he's a bit of a dick. Nonetheless, he is the only main character to have been honest throughout the film. Even Javier Bardem's frank and forthright Juan Antonio is portrayed as playing out a pretence of honesty as Penélope Cruz's Maria Elena explains when massaging him to relieve a tension headache "Oh, to the world, he's carefree, nothing matters, life is short and with no purpose kind of thing. But all his fear just goes to his head". Interestingly, and I say this having seen the film twice, I'm certain that during the Spanish dialogue in that scene Cruz refers to Bardem's character as Javier and not Juan Antonio.

And so, this is definitely a film I enjoyed seeing a second time. In fact, it had made me feel eager to re-engage with Woody Allen after sulking about his poor calibre output over the last twenty years and ignoring him for quite some time.

The Girl on a Motorcycle (1968)

This arrival of The Girl on a Motorcycle from LoveFilm couldn't have been neater. Consider that it is directed by Jack Cardiff, the genius cinematographer from Black Narcissus, who I have discussed in some depth recently, featuring Marianne Faithful (I've already discussed Anita Pallenberg the other infamous Stone-ette this week) and Nouvelle Vague icon Alain Delon ahead of my planned weekend of film Francophilia. How neat a bundle of coincidences could I want?

Jack Cardiff directs Alain Delon

Against that backdrop, though, the film could surely only disappoint. And it sadly does.

Often I will reflect that the more innovative and distinctive a film is, the more likely it is to be referenced, to influence and to be stolen from. And by that process the elements which inspire admiration- perhaps even adoration- come to seem mundane and commonplace. For the film fan trawling through the past, it is hard to fully appreciate the context in which a film was first seen. Coming just twenty years after the end of the second World War this film features Marianne Faithful passing a soldiers' graveyard and questioning the validity of the war and the sacrifices made- was this shocking iconoclasm or were many contemporaneous films exploring the same rueful territory?

I mention this because this film features extensive use of acid-coloured solarization, so much so that Jack Cardiff begins to irritate as if he were a child with a toy drumkit. Of course, the process also allows him to get away with longer and more graphic sequences of Faithful and Delon romping than would probably have been allowed otherwise. But I couldn't help thinking to myself "what's the point of going to all that trouble to show something that the viewer can't recognise anyway?". Whether these 'groovy' scenes achieved their aim in the 60s or not, I can't confirm- but they date the movie badly now and look clumsy and ineffective now.

And The Girl on a Motorcycle is really summed up by that. It is a film of worthy- though frankly ill-judged- intentions, attempting to record on film the thought and ambitions and streams of consciousness of a girl riding across continental Europe. Like a rites of passage road movie with one protagonist. Judged against such ambitious aims, it fails mightily. In fact, it is of no more merit than any number of cheap 60s exploitation B-movies. The plotline- the bit that isn't summed up by the title anyway- is told largely in flashback. Marianne Faithful's character Rebecca leaves her staid husband of a couple of weeks, the failing teacher Raymond (Roger Mutton- terrible actor but the wearer of a great quiff!) for Alain Delon's character Daniel, who she met and commenced an affair with in the run-up to the Wedding. Daniel is the only character in the piece of any substance whatsoever- maybe because Delon and Powell and Pressburger stalwart Marius Goring in a very minor role are the only actors of any merit on show. He is callous, manipulative and egotistical; though we discover that this bravado masks the deep pain of heartbreak.

The dialogue- which is mainly concerned with expressing Rebecca's inner thoughts and feelings- is stilted, obvious and typically vacuous Haight-Ashbury hippy nonsense- "not everyone who is dead has been buried"; "sometimes it's an instinct to fly. I'm not going to feel guilty"; "Rebellion's the only thing that keeps you alive"- that kind of bollocks. And only Delon's character- somewhat implausibly a university lecturer- has any lines which steer clear of cliché - during a seminar on, believe it or not, the morality of free love he opines "love without love, desire without love...so what is love? ... A blanket to cover all the dark emotions- desire, lust, a need to hurt, to be hurt". This isn't to say he escapes the scriptwriter's clunking prose throughout- his "Your body is like a violin in a velvet case" may well worst first line for any movie character ever.

It is all so disappointing given the calibre of the people involved. There are blatant continuity errors, logical gaps (Daniel must be supernatural as he appears in a locked room at one point without any explanation how), wooden performances and lowest-common-denominator innuendo with the motorbike as a big cock. The Girl on a Motorcycle features a girl on a motorcycle on a low-loader- did no-one think that the lean and steering involved in cornering would make Faithful sat bolt upright as the bike takes a hairpin look pretty bloody stupid? Oh I despair! A French film by an English Director shot in Switzerland with the Frenchman Alain Delon as a German and the English Marianne Faithfull as a Swiss. This is all too much to bear.

I'm not generally in favour of remakes (not least because they keep that goofy slapheaded tit Nic Cage in work) but there is the kernel of a good idea in here being woefully badly executed. This could have been an exploration of freedom, of the feminist movement, of the futility of free love, of the futility of marriage, of existentialism, of expressionism, of any message the film-maker wants to say. The premise is a blank canvas. It could have been an artistic exploration; it could have been a beautifully simple road movie; it could have been any number of worthy and interesting things. But what it is, I'm afraid, is a fucking mess. If any film ever required a remake, this is it.

Devoid of subtlety, intrigue, wit or beauty, this is a very poor exploitation film. The only bit I liked at all was the sequence where Faithfull composed her farewell letters in a café, whilst Jack Cardiff filled the screen with faces of old men. It said nothing of interest, I just thought it looked nice. Oh, and I also liked the following exchange: "Love is a feeling" "so is toothache". 2/10

Wings of Desire / Der Himmel über Berlin (1987)

This film makes me feel like I am a popcorn-chomping, blockbuster addict. Not only do I not really 'get it', but I have now called it quits after making eight attempts to watch this over the course of a year and falling asleep every single time. I don't find the film boring at all- pretentious and self-consciously arty certainly, but not boring. I just find that the film's measured pace, somnambulistic progress through the streets of Berlin and snatches of conversation, music, private thoughts and dreams overlapping one another to be the perfect accompaniment to my drift toward sleep. That this style has been done to death since by arty pop-video makers doesn't help either.

From what I can gather it is a paean to Berlin and the people of Berlin as seen through the eyes of the angels who can "do no more than look, assemble, testify, preserve". There are a lot of references to children and the death of childhood- as if the people are the children and the angels are the adults watching over them. We also see a dying man recount the things he will miss just as the angels continue to ("blackened fingers from newspaper") again as if their existence is just an extension of our own lives. It's difficult to say having seen little more than a quarter of the film.

I like what I've seen of it- never much more than half an hour- and I'm intrigued to know what I'm missing. But I've cut my losses on this one. I'll try again on a summer afternoon when I'm wide awake but, for now, it scores a pretentious but beautiful 2/10.

Performance (1970)

For a long time during my teens I nurtured a probably unhealthy obsession with Brian Jones, the result of which has been a weaning-off process causing me to lock away my library of 'was Brian murdered?' books (of course he was) and avoid seeing this for the better part of two decades. Seeing Mick play Brian- to all intents and purposes- opposite the girl Keith stole from Brian was always going to be a bit weird. That the film is an almost total headfuck anyway, didn't help matters either.

Performance could be the ultimate Emperor's New Clothes movie. It could be a trippy, surreal but ultimately vacuous exercise in style over content from which unintended layers of meaning and allusion can be divined. It could be Chauncey Gardiner as a film, I'm absolutely aware of that. But I'm going to follow my instinct that it isn't. And, furthermore, even if it is I'm going to say that the allegorical nature of the film is no less valid if it is unintentional anyway. Why should it be?

The film opens in the brutal world of London gangsters with Chas (an utterly fantastic James Fox performance) and we get about half an hour of a fast-paced gritty crime drama in the vein of Get Carter or Villain but then suddenly lurches head-first into a psychedelic acid nightmare full of "long-hairs, druggers, beatniks and foreigners" blurring the lines between reality and surreality. In exactly the same way that Chas gets discombobulated by what he experiences, so does the viewer. The resulting confusion is deliberate as the two worlds are shown as more similar than they are different. The integration of the two worlds occurs by allusion during the magnificent 'Memo From Turner' sequence and then in actuality.

The blending of identities and merging of entities is a recurrent theme. Chas and Turner, the hedonistic rock star in seclusion played by Mick Jagger, are increasingly shown as similar below their surface differences, they could almost be a masculine and feminine version of the same person. That duality is expressed in many ways; both literally (swapping styles of dress, superimposed faces etc) and by suggestion ("there's nothing wrong with me...I'm normal"). In fact the whole film investigates this identity confusion: there are mirrors and juxtaposed faces, picture disappear from frames between shots, sexual confusion, androgyny, altered perceptions, sanity and insanity, domination and submission, appearance changes and role swapping. Throughout the gangland scenes the phrase "it's not a takeover, it's a merger" is repeated and, in the end, we are presented with the surreal merging of people- Turner becomes Lucy, Chas becomes Turner, Turner becomes Chas. This bizarre distillation of Borgesian confusion is both challenging and illuminating.

As a film, as a piece of entertainment, I would imagine that Performance might be considered a failure. There is no obvious hero or villain, no linear narrative, no clear outcome and the performances range from Fox's coruscating portrayal of Chas to Pallenberg's patchy and uneven Pherber. As a work of art, however, it is outstanding. And the soundtrack is incredible- 9/10.

And everyone should own a copy of Happy Mondays' Bummed which samples this film's dialogue heavily.

The General (1927)

I was recently mesmerised by Buster Keaton's Our Hospitality and Sherlock Jr and was really looking forward to seeing the film that is generally regarded as his best and wasn't disappointed.

Buster's love of trains comes to the fore again here and they do allow plenty of scope for his breathtaking physical comedy. He really does these stunts as they look- it's literally inconceivable. The film takes time to get going, but once the chase begins (Buster is an engineer whose train is stolen and the film depicts his recovery of it- and the girl, Marion Mack) then it becomes amazing stuff. The stunts, as I've mentioned already, are phenomenal and generate real drama. The gags are constantly funny and inventive. Buster's performance shows an impressive ability to express a range of emotions with very little expression on his famous 'stoneface'- confusion, frustration, anger, happiness, adoration, rejection; all with a movement of one eyebrow. Like Roger Moore only good.

Most importantly, though, the direction- again by Buster- is excellent. The balance between action, comedy and romance is finely judged. The narrative is clear and the choice of camera shots is sublime. 8/10

A Night at the Opera (1935)

A quick note for my memory because it's late and I'm tired and I'm all giggled out. I've always found the Marx Brothers to be horribly overrated- Groucho is hilarious but Harpo's cute goofball act irritated me and Chico always struck me as superfluous. Admittedly, I'd only seen bits of their movies but they didn't leave me wanting more.

Tonight during the semi-serious musical interlude scene, after Chico's gleeful piano recital, with Harpo sat at the, ahem, harp I suddenly got it. Without my consent and by some devious and insidious double-dealing I realised that I had been and was being entertained. Somewhere, somehow I must have had preconceptions of the Marx Brothers holding me back and they had been shattered. It's funny but that's human nature, no doubt some offhand comment at an impressionable age left its indelible mark upon me- like the scar from a childhood tree-climbing mishap- and I'd had my guard up all of this time. ¡Sono un idiota!

Like all great comedy films, this is cleverly paced-out- a breathlessly funny scene like the Groucho/Chico contract negotiation ("That's what they call a sanity clause." "You can't fool me! There ain't no Sanity Claus!") being followed by a the liner boarding scene and Allen Jones and Kitty Carlisle's rendition of the song 'Alone'. It also features some great second-string performances from Margaret Dumont and Sig Ruman.

The gags come in all forms from slapstick to the very subtle, both verbally and visually, some side-splitting and some excruciating but all funny in their own way. I enjoyed it, I really enjoyed it. 6/10.

A quick note for my memory because it's late and I'm tired and I'm all giggled out. I've always found the Marx Brothers to be horribly overrated- Groucho is hilarious but Harpo's cute goofball act irritated me and Chico always struck me as superfluous. Admittedly, I'd only seen bits of their movies but they didn't leave me wanting more.

Tonight during the semi-serious musical interlude scene, after Chico's gleeful piano recital, with Harpo sat at the, ahem, harp I suddenly got it. Without my consent and by some devious and insidious double-dealing I realised that I had been and was being entertained. Somewhere, somehow I must have had preconceptions of the Marx Brothers holding me back and they had been shattered. It's funny but that's human nature, no doubt some offhand comment at an impressionable age left its indelible mark upon me- like the scar from a childhood tree-climbing mishap- and I'd had my guard up all of this time. ¡Sono un idiota!

Like all great comedy films, this is cleverly paced-out- a breathlessly funny scene like the Groucho/Chico contract negotiation ("That's what they call a sanity clause." "You can't fool me! There ain't no Sanity Claus!") being followed by a the liner boarding scene and Allen Jones and Kitty Carlisle's rendition of the song 'Alone'. It also features some great second-string performances from Margaret Dumont and Sig Ruman.

The gags come in all forms from slapstick to the very subtle, both verbally and visually, some side-splitting and some excruciating but all funny in their own way. I enjoyed it, I really enjoyed it. 6/10.

Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! / ¡Átame! (1990)

This, the third Almodóvar film I have seen, is much less intricately-plotted and challenging than either Talk To Her / Hable Con Ella or All About My Mother / Todo Sobre Mi Madre. This is a very simple story of a troubled youth who kidnaps a young actress with the intention that she should get to know him and fall in love with him. The kidnap victim does indeed 'fall in love' with her kidnapper, setting up a happy ending which feels wrong. Whilst she may or may not be suffering from Stockholm Syndrome, the fact remains that for me it is implausible and lends the movie a flimsiness with the inevitable consequence that it cannot endow the gravitas the subject deserves.

The simple narrative- with very little in the way of a back-story or subplots- is used as a vehicle for the exploration of male/female relationships. Throughout the film, female characters refer to independence as onerous and undesirable ("Remember freedom means solitude"; "Are you alone?" "yes, like a dog") and- in the Movie Director's wife- one character displays tolerance of his humiliating and unpleasant behaviour with stoicism and resignation. In contrast, only one male perspective is explored at all (the kidnapper Ricky, played well by Antonio Banderas) and this shows love and being in a relationship as a necessity and something to be achieved at all costs.

As in Talk To Her (where a rape scene is filmed with tenderness) a crime, here a kidnap, is shown as a justifiable and romantic act- which raises moral questions about passion, respect, compatibility and patriarchal dominance for the viewer to take away and consider. This is an extreme situation used to place every day life under the microscope. The imprisonment and subjugation of Marina (Victoria Abril) represents everyday suburban relationships- Marina's sister Lola (Loles León) asks "how can you love someone who ties you up? Do you think that's normal?". The concept of normality is examined throughout- coming from an orphanage and psychiatric institution, Ricky's only ambition is to lead a normal 'wife and 2.4 children' life- but his method of doing so is utterly abnormal. Having been- to some extent- incarcerated from the age of three, does he see the kidnap of Marina as normal, or just a means to achieve a specific end?

This, however, is all an interesting consideration of these issues, rather than the deep exploration that Almodóvar's later works would become. Nicely acted, nicley directed, well paced but slight- 6/10.

Never Say Never Again (1983)

I can only think that the title is one of the smug selling points the producers made when pitching this bloody awful idea to Connery- "just think how funny it would be Sean! Imagine Roger Moore's face when he sees you're back- that'll raise a few eyebrows. well, one...". That said, nothing should have persuaded him to get back in the toupee for this. Nothing. To coin a phrase- the world is not enough.

I've decided, in my wisdom, to watch all of the Bond's that I'm pretty unfamiliar with and after this and The Man With The Golden Gun I'm beginning to think I should abandon the plan- clearly there's a reason that I'm unfamiliar with them.

Presently I'm just short of an hour and a half in and I've paused it to write a few notes on here as an excuse not to watch any more. When Connery jacked it in because he was too old it was already an overdue decision- he had sleepwalked through the last couple he made- and this was made twelve years after that. There are concessions to that time-gap with Sean having a grey wig and a new stiff upper-lipped bureaucrat boss who has semi-retired him into teaching new recruits but it isn't very convincingly done. Anyway, M (Edward Fox- just how many of these Foxes are there?) sends Bond to convalesce in a Health Farm where he stumbles upon SPECTRE's latest domination plot! And so I'm thinking "this is fucking Thunderball isn't it?" and sitting and gradually growing in fury that they've got Connery in to remake a film he made nearly twenty years earlier, but I resolve to stay calm and give it a chance.

From memory this was brought out in direct competition with the 'official' release Octopussy. Now the Roger Moore film was embarrassing because of the slapstick humour, the fact that Moore is too old and fat and the all-round low standards of everyone involved. I think this is worse. One of the great things about Bond is it's fantasy- in Octopussy Moore got to fight a seven foot Sikh on the wings of a plane, Never Say Never Again's comparable moment was Connery fighting a bloke from Wolverhampton on the set of Dinnerladies. This is a very watered-down attempt. It isn't low-budget and, as I said recently, I often prefer low-budget movies- the problem is that the vast majority of the budget seems to have been spent on getting Connery in and flying the crew to Barbados, the South of France and wherever else they fancied going. Everything else is done shoddily and with disregard- the interiors are appalling for example. The purpose of the movie appears to be to get people in, irrespective of what they'll tell their friends when they leave. This is not a film that could ever be a word-of-mouth success. Even the dialogue- which is appalling- seems to have been designed with the trailer in mind- like this exchange between Bond and Q (not dear old Desmond Llewellyn, obviously): Q- "Now you're on this, I hope we're going to have some gratuitous sex and violence". Bond- "I shertainly hope sho too". Speaking of Q- who Bond mysteriously keeps calling Algernon- there is a slapstick appearance by rubber-faced so-called comedian Rowan Atkinson as a bumbling bureaucrat called Small-Fawcett- for fuck's sake!- who foresees John Cleese's cringeworthy Q. If this wasn't warning enough, I don't know what would have been.

But this could have worked. The premise, as I said, has real potential and Connery was certainly capable of delivering in the role a wearied, ageing, vulnerable Bond- which he really doesn't do here. I'm thinking of something like McQueen in The Hunter which I watched recently. It isn't a great movie by any means, but McQueen's "I'm getting too old for this shit" performance would have been a great example to follow. Aside from that, you have a magnificent Blofeld in Max von Sydow- bizarrely asked to use a Dutch/Flemish accent and Kim Basinger as a lead Bond girl. Both here, though, are wasted. The attention instead is paid to Klaus Maria Brandauer's appalling Maximilian Largo (a villain as sinister and threatening as a ball of wool) and Barbara Carrera's hilariously bad SPECTRE number 12 Fatima Blush. From water-ski-ing in a thong to throwing a hissy fit when Bond suggests he may have once had better sex with a girl in Philadelphia, she is hardly Rosa Kleb. SPECTRE were clearly hard up for villains after years of good work by Bond. The film also feature's Hit Man's American Football-player turned slab of wood blaxploitation star Bernie Casey as Felix. He is crap obviously.

So the film wastes the opportunities it has and instead focuses upon trying to out-Roger Moore Roger Moore. Bond is variously shot in soft-focus during a saxophone-scored bedroom scene (they didn't even bother covering Sean's tattoo for that one), chased by radio-controlled sharks, plays a video game against the villain Largo and fails to catch a woman in stilettos driving a Renault 5 despite being on a gadget-laden motorbike designed by Q.

I said above that I've paused about three quarters of the way through. I've decided that I'm not watching the rest- 1/10. One mark for simply being a Bond film.

Ed Wood (1994)

The first time I saw this I enjoyed it in the same way that I enjoy watching, say, Plan 9 From Outer Space-style tat- I enjoyed laughing at it rather than with it. This was my second viewing and I didn't enjoy it half as much and by the end I was bored to tears. I'm by no means a Tim Burton fan because of his 'distinctive style' which is a polite euphemism for lack of variety, but he has made some films I've really enjoyed. With this, though, he shows no objectivity whatsoever- more or less everyone is mugging for the cameras as if their lives depended upon it. Perhaps that's the joke- the relatively huge number of continuity errors I spotted would suggest so- but if so, it wasn't quite clever enough to pull it off.

Burton's regular lead Johnny Depp is as irritating as fuck in this, all hyperactive head-shaking and Porky Pig speech patterns, I usually like his hammy style but in this (as in last year's bloody dreadful Sweeney Todd) he was proper tat. In addition Bill Murray- by 1994 almost completely morphed into the 'Buster Keaton without the stunts' that he is today- is miles away from his best form. Add to that a script that gets repetitive and fails to intrigue at all and you're looking at a proper flop. A shame because the film could have been really good with just a little more care and attention.

What saves the film is the career-best performance of Martin Landau as Bela Lugosi. He is worth the admission price alone and for that I'm thinking 4/10.

Hunger (2008)

The director of this film is usually described as an artist-turned-filmmaker. I must confess that I don't know anything about him, though the name seems familiar somehow, but this film is very much a piece of art. For a directorial debut, this is an astonishingly confident piece- as if McQueen's art background him empowers him somehow and provides the freedom to produce very bold work. That freedom works extremely well.

The film is stark and brutal in its portrayal of the conditions within the Maze prison. It focuses upon the human story and not the political context. As little attention as possible is paid to the rights and wrongs of the prisoners' actions nor the British Government's, they are simply laid out as facts for context. It is possible to view the film as falling into three distinct parts- the first establishes the conditions within the prison, the second is a long scene between Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbender) and a Priest, with the final third charting his decline and death.

McQueen takes an unconventional means of making a 'biopic'. In a film which is ostensibly about hunger striker Bobby Sands, the main character doesn't appear until midway through. The first half of the film is all about establishing what life is like for the prisoners. There are long periods of stillness and silence, a microcosm of the boredom the prisoners endure. The degradation and inhumanity of the prison cells are starkly portrayed and the prisoners' blanket protest (considering themselves political prisoners, they refused to wear prison uniforms and were therefore naked but for a blanket) and long matted beards and hair emblematic of the bodily protests to follow. The cells are so vividly depicted that their stench seems to emanate from the screen. This is realism as a horror film. Terrible visual images of men smearing the walls with their own faeces and living amongst it, the grimy air thick and putrefying, their discarded meal remains eaten by hand and then smeared into the squalid mess already clinging to the walls. These men are brutalised by their conditions and by the guards and brutalise themselves, they regress to the point of animalism- a wordless, often mindless, unclean, base savagery.

The film, in fact, opens by following one of the Prison Guards through his meticulous domestic routine- neatly pressed uniform ready when he dresses, symmetrically laid breakfast table, checking under the car for bombs- into the changing rooms of the prison where the camaraderie of the other guards (presumably of the non-political prisoners) is juxtaposed with his steely solitude and absolute silence. As his hands are washed we see his lacerated knuckles clearly. The clean orderliness is a vivid contrast for what is to follow inside the prison and the officer himself is an integral part of the film's narrative. He appears only twice more. Once when he is part of an army of prison guards who forcibly bathe and cut the hair of the prisoners- this is little more than an opportunity to beat the men and is the source of those lacerations- and again when he visits a retirement home and is assassinated without warning by an unknown assailant. This is fantastic film-making because of the questions it provokes about the morality of both sides and what the viewer would do in those positions. No conclusions are offered, only questions.

The middle section of the film is stunning. A fixed camera holds Bobby Sands- forcibly cropped and sporting facial injuries- and a Priest (Liam Cunningham) in conversation. Their conversation develops slowly and carefully as though the men were boxers dancing from side to side, measuring the strength of the other. They smoke and discuss and the conversation turns to Sands' plan to lead seventy-odd prisoners on a hunger strike designed to force the British government to recognise their actions as political and not criminal. McQueen is very careful here not to preach a particular message, Sands speaks with sufficient detail and passion to convince of his own dedication without allowing the scene to turn into a soapbox tirade. The Priest and Sands argue at length about the motivation and justification for and repercussions of the action: "you want me to argue about the morality of what I'm about to do? For one, you call it suicide- I call it murder". It is clear to both men that this is a final protest and one which cannot achieve its ostensible aim. This is the only protest, the only significant action, the only act of defiance left open to the prisoners. The scene has gone on for ten minutes or more without a pause, a cut or a change of angle- as with Herzog's Woyzeck (discussed recently) it takes tremendous bravery for a director to pin a film on performances only with no recourse to editing whatsoever and in that vein this scene is a huge gamble but works excellently.

It works excellently right up to the first point that lets the film down. As the conversation draws to a close, Sands tells the Priest an almost certainly apocryphal story from his childhood as an explanation of his motivation. Where the film thus far has been grounded in realism and has had a clear intellectual integrity, there is now a pause whilst a fantastical element is added to offer unsubtle clarity at the expense of plausibility. The story jars horribly with everything that has gone before, undermining it and offering a concession to conventional cinematic expectations which is utterly disappointing.

McQueen uses the final section of the film to investigate in graphically close attention the process of the hunger strike. Fassbender's harrowing acting performance up to this point now becomes a disturbing piece of performance art as we see the starvation process played out upon his body. As Christian Bale did in The Machinist, Fassbender goes to extraordinary lengths of physical suffering, losing stones and weakening himself to the point of exhaustion to depict the dying Sands. His physical condition becomes genuinely sickening and you begin to ask yourself if this is morally acceptable in the name of art. What was an extraordinary performance becomes an unmissable one at this point but, sadly, the film deteriorates. For most of the final sequence the haunting physical decay of Sands is shown in stark silence by McQueen and this echo of of the opening section of the film works fantastically but at the very end- as Sands expires- McQueen begins introducing childhood flashbacks to the piece and some of the melodramatic story which disappointed in the middle third is acted out.

This is such a great disappointment, as if McQueen's courage failed to hold and he had to offer up a more acceptable, time-honoured and less risky conclusion to the film. It also moves the film dangerously away from the perspective of a fascinated but impartial and objective observer to becoming something of a hagiography of Sands. It isn't quite that, but the balance and thought-provoking manner of the opening two thirds certainly stops abruptly. In Sands last days his carer is changed from a medic who appears genuinely compassionate, though not necessarily sympathetic, to a huge muscular man whose first act is to show Sands the UDA tattoo on his knuckles and then to allow him to fall painfully to the floor. This isn't the intelligent and non-partisan approach which made the film so fantastic, it is heavy-handed and manipulative.

It is such a fucking shame. Nine tenths of this film is bold and artistic, it is a genuinely thought-provoking cinematic exploration and the remainder is disappointing, conventional melodrama. 9/10