Road to Bali (1952)

In 1978 the famous West Bromwich Albion became the first western football team to tour China playing exhibition matches. The whole thing was recorded for posterity by a BBC documentary crew including a famous exchange with the player John Trewick who asked why he hadn't joined his team mates on a visit to see the Great Wall of China replied "if you've seen one wall, you've seen them all".

The 'Road to...' movies were a bit like that. They may have been in exotic locations but if you've seen one, you've seen them all. It's not necessarily a criticism- Bond fans like me don't have a great deal of secure ground for attacks based upon films following a formula- but it does mean that they're pretty indistinguishable from one another and that there's an all-pervading feeling of unspectacular adequacy about them. In fact but for being the first one to be filmed in colour (and the only one for that matter; Road to Hong Kong reverted to black and white to hide Bing and Bob's advancing years) this could be any of them.

In fact, the opening five minutes sums up the whole series- there's a costumed song, a dance routine, some witty banter ("we've been fighting over you all week and I won. He's going to marry you"), some straight-to-camera wisecracking and it ends with Bob and Bing fleeing in fear of their lives after another failed romantic encounter. It's completely vacuous and pretty entertaining- if, sadly, dated. I say sadly because it is a real shame that films like this don't get made any more- I love them. The only exceptional thing about Road to Bali- as if you couldn't guess- truly is the colour, and that's only because they use so much garish colour that it's a bit like a Timothy Leary nightmare.

I might sound critical, I'm not. I enjoyed it, I'd watch it again if I want something cheery on a rainy day. But I won't remember anything about it a couple of days from now. 4/10

Police Story / Ging chat goo si (1985)

I last saw this when Channel Four ran a series of Jackie Chan films one Christmas. It must've been fifteen years ago, maybe longer. I'd forgotten how breathtaking this truly is. As a film it's pretty shady- cop sees drug dealer go free and goes outside the law to bring him to justice- but the stuntwork is completely mind-boggling. If you haven't seen any of Jackie Chan's Hong Kong films then you literally will have seen nothing like this.

Chan directs himself in this and his two great loves come to the fore: slapstick Kung Fu action and childish humour. This is not a weighty or cerebralwork by any means. It opens with the police staking out a drug dealin a shanty town, one of the cops (the cops and the bad guys are universally stupid and incompetent by the way, it just saves time making the plot plausible) is seen and the bad guys try to shoot their way out. The chase scene where cars plough down hill through shack after shack is a spectacular way to move the action from the gunfight to the street where Jackie hangs onto a bus by an umbrella hooked into an open window- truly amazing- and then brings the bus to a halt. A magnificent breathless opening.

From this opening we see Chan's career as a police officer go down the pan and his personal life in tatters as he single-mindedly tries to keep the star witness Selina (Brigitte Lin) and bring down the bad-guy (a pretty good Yuen Chor) and keep on the right side of the meddling, bureaucratic- and extremely young- chief of police (Fung Woo). There are other nice turns by Chi-Wing Lau as a crooked lawyer keeping Mr Chu out of the law's reach, Kwok-Hung Lam as Chan's supportive but powerless immediate superior and a very young Maggie Cheung as Chan's girlfriend.

The film proceeds through various comedy/action set-pieces. It's not really a kung fu film as such, the kung fu is incidental (like the dialogue and plot) to the stunts that it requires. And so we see Chan having a fake fight with a colleague and then- when his 'adversary' is inadvertently knocked out- propping him up and carrying on fighting by manipulating him as if he were the corpse in Weekend at Bernie's, fighting off gangs of adversaries in a car park, an apartment and a shopping centre. The only thing that there is more of in Police Story than stunts is glass. Every fight takes place within easy access of some glass and every single bit gets smashed (including a pane smashed face first by Jackie straight in front of the camera).

It sounds like I'm talking the film down but I'm not. Stunts in an action film are every bit as important as dialogue in a drama or the soundtrack in a thriller. And the stunts are- I may have mentioned this already- magnificent. The closing fight in the shopping centre is superb- it isn't just the glass that gets broken or the sheer athleticism involved, it isn't even the audaciousness of the stunts, it is the visual inventiveness and the use of props employed. Okay, so Jackie isn't the best director and there are some dodgy "I won't attack you until you've finished with the last guy" moments but so what. This isn't Lawrence of Arabia for fuck's sake and without harping on about it, as much as I love David Lean I wouldn't want it to be. The climactic 'big' stunt in the shopping centre deserves 4/10 on its own- Chan leaps from the top of a railing to grasp a fifty foot pole and slide down it bursting through loads of electricity bulbs which are decoratively wrapped around it and crashing through- yes, of course- a plate glass window. It is so good (and Jackie is so proud of it) that it is played three times from different angles.

In terms of brain-in-neutral, bang crash wallop cop films this is miles ahead of the output of Jerry Bruckheimer et al. 6/10

Closer (2004)

I'd avoided this with suspicion for some years. The poster and the reviews just made it seem a bit turgid and self-consciously edgy. I would have never seen it had it not been strongly recommended by a friend and I really enjoyed it. This kind of film never usually appeals to me- the number of times I've been disappointed by the likes of Carnal Knowledge or Sex, Lies and Videotape I can't count- and I'd come to the conclusion that I just don't do mature adult drama very well. This was an exception.

That's not to say I liked everything about it- it was, as I feared, deliberately provocative (I've no problem with people saying "cunt" except when it sounds false or forced) and I found the tangled relationships a bit far-fetched. I wondered if these were the only four people in London because they were eminently unsuited to one another and blind to the existence of anyone else. But that just requires a bit of disbelief-suspension and I'm happy to do that.

What Closer really has going for it, though, are some powerhouse performances. Clive Owen who I've liked since he was in Chancer is extremely good in this. And, perhaps even more importantly, his pretty face is looking more and more into a lump of clay on a potter's wheel with an ever-expanding nose on the front of it- which makes me feel a bit better about my rapidly disintegrating visage. Brad Pitt and his ageless beauty can fuck off. Natalie Portman is, if anything, even better as the wounded, vulnerable Alice. Jude Law does his usual 'stop mid-sentence with mouth gaping open and teary-eyed thousand yard stare' thing, but that's great because it suits the character and Julia Roberts comes in fourth with an earnest attempt that is good but never great. I have to confess a little bias here, I really dislike Julia Roberts- I absolutely hated Pretty Woman, obviously, and have hated her in pretty much everything else I've seen possibly in reaction to that. Oh, I just remembered I quite liked her in Charlie Wilson's War and maybe that and this indicate that I'm warming to her as she ages. She still looks like a stretched Chief Wiggum, though, and that's all there is to it.

I also like the concept- though I feel this was probably better achieved by the stage play upon which the film is based- of an unbiased and unsympathetic view of the pivotal moments in a relationship with everything else removed. I just think Mike Nicholls (and who am I to criticise the bloke who made The Graduate anyway?) might have achieved that better with more intimate framing, than less. Almost every indoor shot is opened out to take in the whole room, the settings emphasise this- huge stairwell landings, a mezzanine apartment etc. Maybe they were supposed to look small and intimate in context? Either way, it didn't work for me.

My final gripe- for a film I liked there somehow are an awful lot of gripes- is the closing scene with Natalie Portman bouncing down a New York pavement in slow motion being ogled by passers by. It doesn't work- does it say her attractiveness remains, that her future is full of possibilities? It says neither to me, it says she considers herself to be a piece of meat. Most uncharacteristic for me that. Unless- and this is a massive stretch of credibility for me- she considers herself to be that all through the film, hence her using a pseudonym for the scenes with Dan where he treats her well, and her real name as a stripper. The happiness is a front and the seedier side is how she sees herself. It's a stretch but I'm convincing myself- she sees herself as an object and when Dan sees her like that near the end, the spell is broken and she leaves him. Hence the reversal of the film's opening- instead of fleeing man-trouble in NY she's fleeing man-trouble to NY.

Yep, I've convinced myself. A much better film than I was expecting- cleverer by far. I bet the play is a belter. 6/10

The Seven Year Itch (1955)

I never feel that Billy Wilder was truly comfortable making sex comedies like this and Some Like It Hot or The Apartment. There is a bitterness and cynicism within them that is sugar coated by the comedy but still present. It is almost like he couldn't quite let go of the serious issues that he explored in his earlier, more overtly dark films like Sunset Blvd and Stalag 17. And it is this bitterness, this corruption at the core of the films that make them resonant and pertinent to this day. His jaundiced detachment and arch commentary on the social mores of the time enables the films to remain fresh for new viewers.

The storyline is pretty inconsequential- a husband alone for the summer is tempted by the sexy neighbour- and the dialogue lacks the sparkle of Wilder's better comedies, but there are some great 'fantasy conversation' sequences and the whole thing zips along and wraps in just over ninety minutes. Oh and Monroe's sex-bomb act here is probably even better than in Some Like It Hot, though her opportunities for dry humour are less memorable than in that (the best moment occurs when she and Tom Ewell fall from a piano stool after he lunges at her "This has never happened to me before" he says, to which she replies "it happens to me all the time").

Lots of The Seven Year Itch centres around Tom Ewell and his character's monologues on love and fidelity and trust and attractiveness. It's funny stuff but the film is still completely stolen from him by Monroe. It really needs a Jack Lemmon or a William Powell to do the part justice given the magnetism of the female lead.

But it's still a great way to pass an hour and a half. 6/10

Somers Town (2008)

It's not so much a film as a visual short story this. I wasn't expecting that. It is also far, far lighter than Meadows' previous films despite the potentially heavy subject matter. This Is England's Thomas Turgoose returns as Tomo a runaway from Nottingham who befriends the teenage son of a Polish immigrant (Marek played by Piotr Jagiello) working on the Eurostar extension at St Pancras.

The film follows a few days in their life when they do nothing but somehow enjoy it the way that teenage boys do. It's a low key coming of age film. The two young leads do a great job, Turgoose is all cheeky charm and Jagiello embodies the hesitant awkwardness of an outsider. Their comical scrapes and days spent working for a local Del Boy character called Graham are given a whimsical gloss, as if viewed with nostalgia from middle-age. They both fall for a twenty-something French girl who waitresses at a local café and set about trying to jointly woo her before she departs hurriedly for France. Then they buy some cheap alcohol and get drunk at Marek's flat before Marek's Dad kicks Tomo out (he stays with Graham) and the Polish lads have a heart-to-heart about the divorce from Marek's mother. It's all nice, heartwarming stuff. Even the early scene where Tomo gets mugged is downplayed. The incident itself isn't pleasant, though Meadows doesn't show the violence directly (muggers kicking a prostrate Tomo are shown from the waist up etc), but his recovery is remarkably quick, his injuries minimal and his psyche unaffected.

It's a nice little film. I'd enjoy seeing it again. But I must remember that it's extremely insubstantial. 4/10