Love, Honour and Obey (2000)

The guiltiest of guilty pleasures. A pointless, childish, shabby, guileless, ugly, cheap film that is little more than a home video of Ray Winstone and some of his mates pissing about. I love it.

The plot, such as it is, involves a bored postman who works his way up the heirarchy of a London gang only to find out that it isn't as glamorous, exciting or dangerous as a Scorcese film and so tries to stir things up a little. But the plot is largely irrelevant. The film is a set of largely extemporised scenes where established British actors mug for the camera and try to make each other corpse. It's as childish as a fart in a lift.

I'm not going to talk about performances, cinematography, continuity errors and logical flaws in the plot. They're all rubbish and miss the point. Instead I'll limit my notes thus:


Top 5 things I liked about Love, Honour and Obey.

Almost every character is given the actor's forename so that they don't balls up any improvised scenes and lose something that looks natural.

The heist scene where they dress like Arab sheiks and pop viagra is staggeringly audacious for the sake of a knob gag.

Sean "Don't mac me off like a two-bob"
Ray (aside) "Mac? What's that some new kind of slang we don't know?"

Rhys Ifans taking it all very seriously even while everyone else is giggling.

"Fix bayonets!"

44 Inch Chest (2009)

Generally I don't know too much about new films before I see them. I avoid reviews, never watch or listen to film shows and tend to close my mind to the thoughts of others. That process was less successful with 44 Inch Chest; one of my good friends had seen it and was underwhelmed, the posters had no rentaquote comments or 5 Star Film-Of-The-Week ratings attached and the BAFTA nominations I happened to glance at earlier in the day ignored it totally. In addition to that I knew that the original release had been shelved since last summer, though not why, and that is invariably a bad sign. So I didn't expect too much but I actually really liked it.

This is by no means a flawless film, the ending is botched for a start, but it is a very, very good one and some things about it are very good. It was written by the guys who wrote Sexy Beast and a few of the stars from that reappear here; so that was my initial point of reference as a viewer. And it remains so, this could almost be a companion piece to that film. If you strip Sexy Beast down to its bare essentials it is a story from within a relationship of the bond between two people holding them together and sustaining them. 44 Inch Chest is the opposite, it is an objective look at the destruction of a relationship and the impact of that upon the people therein.



The fulcrum of the film is Ray Winstone as the cuckolded husband Colin. He gives a tremendous performance; his bloated visage- all pupils and perplexity- tells of a struggle to comprehend what is happening to him and the utter loss of certainty about how to respond. Casting Winstone was an excellent move since he brings with him a resonance and an aura, his hard-man reputation precedes him and is cleverly pivoted here. The key theme within the film is the emasculation that comes with a marriage breakdown. How should a man react when he his wife leaves him for someone else? Everything in the film echoes this, most clearly the references to Samson and Delilah, but also in the four supporting actors who each advocate a different reaction and almost represents differing types of man. The four men represent the embodiment of Colin's confusion by being very distinct (and therefore one-dimensional) stereotypes: the mother's boy, the sexual predator, the verbal aggressor all mouth and no trousers, the glib youngster.

The performances of the four supports are key in this respect, they need to inflate the persona without slipping into caricature; to remain one-dimensional and yet convincing. All four do a great job- especially John Hurt who stays just the right side of self-parody throughout. Each in turn speaks to Colin and influences his thoughts, just as his mood changes with his own internal struggles and he slips between fantasy and reality.

The difficulty the film has is in sustaining the tension whilst revealing nothing of the backstory. We need to care what happens when we don't know who is 'right' in the dispute. Colin talks with great emphasis about being too good a husband and of loving her too much, in his recollection he arrives home with chocolates and a bouquet of flowers as if this happens every day. And yet the only scenes in which we see them together, she is cold and brutally vindictive and he beats the shit out of her. It's difficult to maintain intensity in a film where the viewer can be nothing other than impartial. In addition to this, the stagey setting and dialogue-heavy script create a narrative with no natural punctuation marks and the flashbacks which should serve to release the tension before it commences again are far too intense to do so. Eventually white-knuckle fatigue sets in and the viewer becomes more distant.

Perhaps this is why the ending fails; that lack of empathy or immediacy. The 'doing the right thing' and 'being the bigger man and walking away' message- if that was the intention- is lost in the confusion. Colin could equally have walked away as he believed- as he said at one point- it was his only hope of winning his wife back. It's a real shame that the climax is confused (not ambiguous, confused).

By turns 44 Inch Chest can be funny, gripping, thought-provoking and very, very sad. The performances are excellent throughout, as is the swearing. Even the title, with it's twin suggestion of a pneumatically enhanced hyper-feminine woman or else the a puffed-up bravado of a man is superb. And the dialogue referencing the gender-roles of the husband and wife sparkles: "It's your fault, look how feminine you've been", "A woman swearing- it's unbecoming", "He'll do it, he's a man. He just needs time". I thought it was great.

Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll (2010)

A hit and miss affair this. The story of how Ian Dury overcame the twin handicaps of polio and the worst forename in the English language, it manages to include some pretty balanced and honest story-telling (I imagine, I'm no expert on Ian Dury) and an utterly fantastic Andy Serkis performance with some bizarre sequences of pop-art styled Peter Blake artwork and some very unsuccessful Vaudevillian segments which bring to mind last year's terrible Bronson.

Apart from the lead performance, the best thing I can say to commend Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll is that it leads you to want to listen to more of Ian Dury's music, which is no bad thing at all.

Try to ignore the clumsy sub-plot with the increasingly ubiquitous Bill Milner's fear of swimming which references Dury's water-borne polio infection and his later struggles to accept maturity and responsibility and enjoy the film for what it is. A pretty good biopic.

Diamonds Are Forever by Ian Fleming

So, I haven't written about a Bond book for a while. And that's because this one took me the best part of a month to read. I'm making a fairly pulpy thriller sound like Dostoevsky there (or myself sound illiterate) but the truth is I've just struggled to make time for reading.

And yet I enjoyed Diamonds Are Forever far more than any of the previous Bond novels. It is tauter and more convincing. Fleming final discards all pretence that he is writing anything more than a modern H. Rider Haggard book and lets his talent for gripping prose do the rest. He seems confident and, more importantly, content with what he is doing at last and it shows.

There is, for the second novel in a row, a ginger-headed bad guy with ridiculous name (Shady Tree) and an ice-maiden heroine who cannot bring herself to trust him (Tiffany Case). Keep the good stuff, jettison the crap. The plot is effective with only one real leap where Bond and Tiffany's secret whereabouts are betrayed to the enemy organisation who despatch their two best killers all within the space of about a sentence. That and the heavy-handedness with which Fleming leaves clues for Bond which it is incredible that the character doesn't add up until it is too late are the only real flaws. I liked it an awful lot.

The only final thing I'd add is the chapter where Bond tells Felix that he is beginning to like Tiffany a lot and Felix relates her backstory of abuse and then alcohol addiction. She finally got off the drink, we learn, with Alcoholics Anonymous. In the very next scene Bond buys her three Vodka Martinis, a Pink Champagne and a liquer. He can't like her that much then!

Ah, I suppose it was a more innocent time.

Top 5 Anniversary presents for the lady in your life

Flowers from the petrol station
A frying pan
Something (anything) made by Elizabeth Duke
Peephole underwear
Two tickets to a midweek away game

Sherlock Holmes (2009)

Watching Guy Ritchie play out his machismo-related hang-ups on the big screen can be a very tedious business. His last film, Rocknrolla, was the kind of insubstantial, tossed-off nonsense that should kill a career. He survives, though. On the strength of an admirable ability to get big names into his films and the reputation of his first two movies, he still gets the crowds that gets the finance rolling in for projects that he can project his tough-guy fantasies into.

This is the best film, he's made since Snatch. Which makes it the cinematic equivalent of the best Oasis album since Morning Glory. In other words, it appeals to diehard lad-fans and is mediocre. Getting in Robert Downey Jr a charismatic lead still on a career-high from Iron Man makes the film what it is really. The script, a bastardisation of the Conan Doyle canon with the wit and ingenuity replaced by bombastic effects and CGI fight scenes, is appalling. Unnecesarily episodic with logic gaps and clumsy dialogue throughout, it is clearly the last consideration that any of the people involved had.

There is no heart in this film, no joy, no spirit. It is a vacuum.

I sometimes feel that the best thing that could happen to Guy Ritchie would be to be given a miniscule budget to force him to winkle out the talent he has from behind the flash. That or counselling over his issues about brawling macho men, anyway.

Top 5 "I don't personally know a bloke named”

Maurice
Keiron
Wilf
Barney
Theo

Federico Fellini’s 8½ (1963)

Having wasted time upon a dreadful film in Nine (and wasted more time banging on about it at length in my notes on here) I felt I owed it to myself to add my notes about the Maestro’s masterpiece here. Not that I would dream of comparing them in qualitative terms, 8½ is a thing of wonder and beauty; these notes are the befuddled ramblings of a halfwit.

In reality, the best summary of the film one could possibly hope to see is the opening scene. It may well be the finest opening scene in the history of film, though Once Upon A Time In The West must run it close. In any case the whole of the film is captured there- the constriction and claustrophobia, the seeking escape, the panic and fear, the oppressive voyeuristic outsiders, the relapse into the realms of fantasy the fleeting glimpse of freedom and the intervention of reality bringing the protagonist back down to Earth with a bang. That’s it: the whole film in a couple of mostly silent minutes.

It is, of course, a dream. The film begins and ends with a dream and throughout intersperses fantasy with reality so beautifully that you can be a couple of minutes into a scene before you realise that this is one of Guido’s (the protagonist, played by Marcello Mastroianni) daydreams. And isn’t that like life? How rarely in our dreams do we know that we are dreaming? And so we have a film director under pressure and struggling with a creative block trying to keep control of his tumultuous personal life and reconcile his own personal demons. It is an enormously difficult narrative to convey and one which Fellini does through the ingenious device of drawing the viewer into the film and sharing the confusion. Not only do we not know for certain what is a dream and what is real, but we often don’t know for certain who people are and what their role is until we have seen them two, three or even four times. Aside from flashbacks to Guido’s childhood, there is also very little exposition and scene setting. We are suddenly in the middle of it all and it is with no little irony that Guido is advised at one point “if you’re expressing confusion, do it more clearly so that people can understand”.

Much of the angst Guido experiences appears to come from the strictness of his Catholic upbringing and the way in which his personality brings him into contact with this. For someone such as I from a non-Catholic country and without that sense of oppressive guilt, this can be a tough thing to envisage and understand. Guido is advised that “there us no salvation outside of the Church” and yet there is nothing that the representatives of the Church offer him which is of any assistance with his struggle. Being told “He who isn’t in the city of God belongs to the city of the Devil” is no bloody use is it?

In making the film, Guido is trying to right the wrongs he has committed through his art and 8½ is in some ways an exploration of the conflict between knowing what one wants to do and actually doing it. Guido wants to make “a film to bury forever all those dead things we carry inside us”. It is an admirable sentiment; but one as futile and vague and inexplicable and unattainable as it is possible to imagine. And therein lies the key to 8½; we learn that you cannot repair a life by examining its faults, no matter how scrupulously. As Fellini (via Guido) sagely advises us “happiness is being able to tell the truth without making anyone suffer”.

Up In The Air (2009)

I'm surprised at the plaudits this film has got. Don't get me wrong, it's alright. But it's just alright. George Clooney plays George Clooney as a self-absorbed, loner whose only goal in life is to collect AirMiles as part of his job flying round the country firing people. As the film unfolds, he gradually comes to realise that no man is an island through spending time with a naive young girl and a woman who breaks through his off-puttish exterior.

It's effectively About A Boy with a more charismatic lead actor, a script that's a good fifteen minutes too long and a female lead who either has an arse that is fifteen years younger than the rest of her body or good taste in body doubles.

Not much more to add here, if it's on telly I'll watch it. But I love George so that's a given anyway.

Pete Townsend

An intelligent and articulate man, Townsend was once asked by a journalist: "given the nature and subject matter of songs like 'Mary-Anne With The Shaky Hand' and 'Pictures Of Lily', do you have a masturbation complex?". Pete replied "There's nothing complex about it". What a perfect reply.

Remaking Federico Fellini’s 8½

These notes are going to be longer than they deserve, convoluted, clumsy, almost entirely narcissistic and pointless which is more than fitting for the film.

So it began when I agreed to accompany my good friend The Leader to a showing of The Road and, because I necessarily had a couple of hours to kill first, I took in Rob Marshall’s abominable remake of Fellini’s masterpiece. I’d already seen a film called 9 which looked good but was soulless and bereft of wit in the last few months; the odds on another must have been long but such is life.

I didn’t know anything about the film as I entered the theatre, other than the stellar list of actors involved. I didn’t know that it was a remake of one of my most beloved films or who the director was (and indeed still is). Rob Marshall is, of course, the guy who made Chicago. I haven’t seen that- why would I?- but he seems to have been keen to repeat the trick here. There’s a lot of supposition there and here’s some more: Rob Zombie would have been a better choice for this film than Marshall. The point of the film is obviously to document a film director’s struggle for inspiration as he comes to terms with the tangles of his personal life. Quite where the idea to interweave this inner turmoil with mediocre show tunes and spangle-clad semi-nude starlets came from I have no idea. It sounds like an idea that was pitched to a producer for a bet.

Daniel Day-Lewis is a fine actor but sells himself short here too. I read an interview with him where he described the process for becoming Daniel Plainview, he said “I found the voice I wanted to use and began work upon him from there”; with Guido Contini he appears to have got the voice and then ended his work upon him there. Likewise a cast of female stars with differing levels of talent (Cruz and Dench at one end, Kate Hudson very much at the other) do just enough in the scenes between the songs.

The overall result is a very dull, ponderous, shallow waste of celluloid. Where Fellini projected his spirit into the film, Marshall sucks the life out of it. But, on the bright side, I did find myself with the recently rare luxury of having time to myself to absorb myself in my thoughts and I worked through some memories and emotions that I hadn’t really touched upon while I was bored with what was happening on-screen.

The protagonist in the movie is, of course, troubled by the fall-out from his irresistible philandering and I was reminded of a line from a Jack Nicholson biography that had a big impact upon me during my formative and highly-suggestible teens: “Jack had never claimed that monogamy was a virtue”. Wanting to be like Jack Nicholson- and what teenage boy wouldn’t- I took this as my mantra and spent the larger part of my adulthood with a spectacularly tangled and troubling personal life. This isn’t anything I’m proud of; it caused pain, heartache, regret and most of all the lost opportunity for happy memories. It also isn’t anything I’ve really thought about since but as a young man, you do seek affirmation and reassurance and you are clumsy and awkward and make mistakes and during the brain-numbingly boring film I found the time to make peace with myself for the events of the 1990s. I was just a kid and I know better now. I thought back to Jimmy Webb’s baroque masterpiece “MacArthurPark” and the line “after all the loves of my life, you’ll still be the one” and reflected upon my good fortune to meet my wife while I was readying myself to grow up and leave behind my careless, selfish, needy, philandering alcoholic ways to become a good and strong and devoted and supportive husband. I could see errors of my own being replayed upon the screen and I know now why I made them and how to forgive myself and why I could never make them again.

None of this is to in any way excuse or condone or show approval of the dreadful spectacle which was being projected above my head throughout the process. It is an indictment upon Nine that I was able to concentrate so easily upon strong and difficult memories. No, I have nothing positive to say about the film at all. But I do have questions about it or, more, specifically about the making of it. What is Marshall saying by making this? Is the conceit that he is the new Fellini? Or that the Maestro’s visual brilliance and deft weaving of fantasy and reality are no match for his rapid-cutting gaudiness? Who in the world could really consider the addition of some show tunes to be the key to making 8½ even better? I simply don’t get it.

8½ could be remade in theory- there is space for reinterpretation in the structure and for a different linearity of narrative; but in truth it is a film made by Fellini for Fellini and about Fellini. That the world is fortunate enough to be privy to seeing is the result of the Auteur being a film-maker and not a diarist or some other more personalised passion. And, if you think about it, the film already has been remade by Woody Allen as a broad farce in the hit-and-miss What’s New Pussycat? And so we’ve already had all the reinvention we need.

There are no show tunes in What’s New Pussycat? either, by the way. It’s a million times better than Nine.

Sponge and press

Ever since I saw Cary Grant send down a suit to be sponge and pressed in the wonderful North By NorthWest I've had it in the back of my mind as something I should be doing. And now I have more information on it- even if it is hardly convenient for a little lad in the middle of England.

Here's what I found: A Suitable Wardrobe.

36 Quai des Orfèvres (2004)

Okay so some more rushed notes on a film I probably won't see again. A friend recommended this to me but, if I'm honest, a film billing itself as France's answer to Michael Mann's Heat was never really a thrilling idea for me (if I have any notes for Heat, I'll put them up here in due course).

And so you have two of France's premier heavyweight actors (one of whom I only know from his name being on the posters for Jean De Florette, my ignorance and not his lack of celebrity I am sure) facing off in a town which isn't big enough for the both of them. Two cops with Depardieu painted as the cop gone bad (throughout the preamble this is flagged up: "he wasn't always like that") and Auteuil as the maverick cop who- sigh- isn't afraid to bend the rules if it means getting the job done. They're on the hunt for a ruthless gang of armoured car hijackers who leave no clues. Each is in charge of a separate police unit and, to add a little spice, the one who lands the gang will get to be the Chief of Police (or something).

It's all very routine with hints that there is something in their past that will become significant later, especially regarding Auteiul's wife, but never actually do. Instead we get the usual head-to-head where tempers escalate but nothing occurs due to a distraction, we get a slick pace where events happen more quickly than is credible (even suspending disbelief regarding the mad events themselves), we get tense music playing as contrasting scenes of the men doing their job are played out and we get the final fantastical denouement where the men push each other beyond ethical limits in their desire to outdo the other one. And then it ends with a final twist.

There isn't much to commend it really, it's a standard film which looks very of its time already (the clumsy slo-mo flashbacks and sterile white prison cells that look like they've come straight from a Björk video especially) but it's certainly better than Righteous Kill which was also supposed to be 'the new Heat'. And that's damning with faint praise isn't it?

The Road (2009)

A broken laptop, an unusually heavy work-load, a backlog of notes which I'd like to make and an indifference to the film generally means that these notes will be necessarily brief.

This isn't a bad film, in fact it has a remarkable intensity throughout which plenty of films fail to achieve. But it isn't very good. There are people who mistake bleakness for gravitas and will probably tout this as a significant film, but it isn't. I'm not asking for every film to be Singin' In The Rain, but saying that bleakness isn't enough. Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublyov is a good case in point, no less bleak it is however far more interesting, far more visually stunning and with far more to say. Though I suspect the source novel deserves its bravura reputation, the film doesn't provoke new or interesting thoughts: anarchy causes a societal breakdown and a loss of the humanity which we had as children is hardly a revelation or worthy of any deeper analysis.

Even that isn't the biggest problem, however, the biggest problem is Viggo Mortensen. I like him, I think he's a good actor generally but here he disappoints. In providing a brave face for his on-screen son, he fails to show even a glimmer of anything different to the audience. It's an unsubtle and consequently unengaging showing, he is either sorrowful or stoic or afraid but never a combination of his emotions.

It's not a bad film, but I won't be bothering again.

RIP Miep Gies

I've only just became aware of this sad loss. In these times of heightened racial and religious tensions, it is important to remain aware of the potential catastrophe that awaits if we allow bigotry and intolerance a free voice. Mies Giep, the woman who saved Anne Frank's diary and who helped protect the Frank family for so long, was a reminder of the perils of such folly.

People may think that, for example, the Daily Mail's persecution of minority groups is simply the exercise of the right to free speech and I would agree with that. But the manner in which they choose to do so can only cause further discord. The Mail exploits and stretches the right to free speech with half-truths, distortions, innuendo and falsifications (Jane Moir on the death of Stephen Gateley or the article about 'gypsies'- their term- being allowed to jump NHS queues are great examples). They seem to be actively pursuing an agenda of disharmony and disintegration. The constant stream of anti-Islamic hyperbolic bollocks that the paper prints acts to fuel the sense of alienation, isolation and resentment which allows British subjects to be hoodwinked into atrocities such as the 7/7 tube and bus bombings.

Just as importantly a light should be shone upon the Holocaust denial of Nick Griffin and his ilk. I would be delighted if his views were challenged in the mainstream media, not with a repeat of the Question Time pantomime where even the host was keen to be seen as 'the one to get him' but in serious debate. Put the question "why did you refer to the Holocaust as the 'Holo-hoax'?" and press him
until he provides an answer. Make him expose his darker beliefs which he is currently able to keep well hidden. I've quoted this before but this is Nick Griffin in 'The Patriot' (a BNP pamphlet dated Spring 1999):

“Of course we must teach the truth to the hardcore…. when it comes to influencing the public, forget about racial differences, genetics, Zionism, historical revisionism and so on…. we must at all times present them with an image of moderate reasonableness.”

The man wants to lie. He wants to keep his true beliefs hidden. Why do we play into his hands like this? If the man denies that the Holocaust happens, let him tell the world that. I've never got holocaust denial at all. I've been in a couple of arguments about it and people will say things like "it's only books and film footage, that could all have been faked" which I suppose is true, though it would have been far bigger a task than could imaginably have been achieved and no real contradictory evidence exists at all.

Then I'll tell them that my Great Uncle told me all about it because he was one of the first soldiers to enter Belsen when we liberated it. There's no real comeback to that.

All of which brings me back to the dangers of extremism, to the need to stand strong in the face of it at any cost and to the heroism of people like Miep Gies. She should never be forgotten.

Iris Robinson

I'm enjoying seeing the pious homophobe Iris Robinson shown up for the hypocritical vile, corrupt, base, shameless, amoral cow she really is. On the night after an horrific homophobic beating in Northern Ireland she popped up on a BBC radio phone-in show to recommend that homosexuals have therapy to "cure" themelves before she described homosexuality as an abomination on a par with paedophilia that made her nauseous. She cited bible passages from the book of Leviticus to support her stance.

Fast-forward eighteen months or so and we see Iris Robinson's political career in tatters. She has confessed to having had an extra-marital affair with a 19-year-old man Kirk McCambley (she was 59 at the time) despite the bible's position on adultery which she should be very familiar with as it is stated in the book of Leviticus.

So far so good, but this isn't all. It appears that she went further than merely sleeping with the boy behind her husband's back. Mrs Robinson (oh the irony) then solicited £50,000 in unsecured loans for her lover to start his own business, a café. £50,000 for a nineteen year old with no commercial experience or capital of his own? Makes you think doesn't it. The money came in the form of two £25,000 from property developers and at the same time Mrs Robinson was lobbying in favour of a development being planned by one of the men. But what was in it for her (aside from fumbling teenage humping and the illicit thrill of breaking her beloved bible's sacred covenants obviously)? Well, just ten per cent of the loan which she kept to pay off debts of her own.

Of course with a commercial venture like that, there's all kinds of red tape involved. It isn't as simple as just buying up an empty café and opening for business. Especially not when there are more people trying to buy the property and start the same business on the site. Young Kirk didn't need to worry though, when the bids for the lease of the café was discussed by the local council Mrs Robinson was on the committee. Imagine that, what a stroke of good fortune! And not only that but luckily for Mr McCambley the committee found her lover's bid to be the only appropriate one and so he got the café. Mrs Robinson, by the way, didn't officially reveal her conflict of interests in seeing his bid succeed although this was a legal requirement. I'm not sure where Leviticus stands on this but that's okay because pretty soon it became clear that the bible stands wherever Mrs Robinson chooses; as she told her aide after ending the extra-marital affair "God's word was very clear on it. He was reasonably OK on it. I am not". Barmy.

Ooh, you know what? I haven't mentioned the best bit yet. Yes, even better than the bible-bashing homophobe cheating on her husband and abusing her position to solicit dodgy loans for her lover and taking a slice of the pie for herself. Her husband, Peter Robinson, is the First Minister of the country. The head honcho, the top man, the numero uno. And when he found out about all of this, do you know what he did? He covered it up in return for her returning the money. And so we have the unseemly saga of the top man in Government covering for his wife's crooked financial and personal dealings in return for her bullying Mr McCambley's family for the return of the dodgy loan she secured for him. Shameful, isn't it?

You think that's shameful, though, it has nothing to do with his response to his wife's suicide attempt after he found out. He went to work as normal that morning after she told him she was going to do it and, when she was found and rushed to hospital, he stayed there. That's right, as his wife was on her way to hospital to save her life after an overdose Mr Robinson- having just been told about it- can be seen on television footage laughing and joking with Parliamentary colleagues. Of course when the truth came out last week he was overcome with emotions and choking back the tears as he was interviewed about the whole thing. Some people might think those were crocodile tears, but maybe it was just delayed shock. Delayed by ten months until the cameras were rolling, that is.

She deserves a cunt of a husband attempting to gain political advantage from her depression and attempted suicide like that. And he deserves to be cuckolded for a spotty boy with an eye on an easy few quid.

And obviously they both deserve the sack because the country deserves neither of them.

The Cruel Sea (1953)

I knew I was going to like this. I didn’t have a doubt in my mind. Even the opening Jack Hawkins voice-over “The men are the heroes. The heroines are the ships. The only villain is the sea, the cruel sea” didn’t piss me off the way that it normally would. Of course that kind of expectation usually sets me up to be disappointed as my hopes are too high, but not in this case.



The great thing about The Cruel Sea is that it doesn’t pull any punches. Films made pretty soon after the close of the second world war often gave a very airbrushed account of the war but in The Cruel Sea, we see the people left behind die or desert or cheat or grow apart. We also see the heroes as real people they die, have breakdowns, fake illness, squabble and have doubts and concerns about the rights and wrongs of the war. Tremendously realistic stuff this. I haven’t checked, but I’d guess that this was based on a someone’s non-fiction account of their wartime experiences. It features first-person narration from the main character and follows a pretty episodic structure. That said, this style of narrative works well and allows the film to draw the viewer in to a series of extremely tense moments. The intelligent use of silence and periods of intense concentration really crank up the tension which director Charles Frend stretches out for long periods of time. Very controlled film-making that.

And so what we have here is the war through the eyes of a Navy captain who guides ships which escort cargo convoys through the u-boat ridden waters of the Atlantic. It was made by Ealing and features a great cast who all do a great job. Hawkins in the lead role is the star but Donald Sinden comes awfully close to stealing some of his scenes, he just doesn’t have the kind of material Hawkins is given. The contrast between the grim stoicism with which Hawkins issues the instruction to drop munitions amongst the survivors of a wrecked freighter in the hope of destroying the u-boat he believes is beneath them and the hollow, broken remorse he shows in the scenes from that evening are the key to the whole thing. Horrible things were done and had to be done. Regrettable things, things that will live on your conscience until your dying breath. But they were done for the greater good and the sacrifice and loss and pain and regret that everyone endured was necessary to prevent Nazi success (though the film takes the last bit as read rather and barely considers it).

There are sequences in this film which are almost unbearably tense. As the ship lies still in the presumed presence of a u-boat under repair, the men are shown inside listening for the slightest sound, dipping with sweat, crossing themselves, lookin anxiously at one another. All of the time there is almost total silence on screen. The release of the tension when they move on again is enormous and the extent of that shows the strength of the film as a means of bringing the reality of the war at sea home.

And that is what there is to take away from The Cruel Sea, its very real depiction of the awful conditions that the war really entailed. Harrowing and memorable.

Style and Depression

I was talking with a guy who shares an interest in Mod style who had suffered from depression over the years. I suggested that fastidiousness in dress was probably helpful and he replied that it wasn't something he'd considered.

The conversation moved on quickly to happier topics, but the thought stayed with me. Smart dressing and taking a general pride in one's appearance, and therefore oneself, should be very therapeutic for sufferers of depression I would have thought. In my experience (of living with someone suffering from depression not as a sufferer personally) that kind of purpose and motivation is something that a sufferer of depression struggles to find. And I believe that, even if it begins artificially or under suggestion, finding that it in a pride in your appearance could be a great aid to the healing process.

Mad Men

Just wanted to drop a quick note in about Mad Men, apropos of nothing really. I'm currently enjoying Season 2 and what prompted me to put my thoughts down here so that I don't forget was that towards the end of episode 5 I realised that as I watched I was grinning broadly. I laugh a lot but I rarely smile from enjoyment and yet something about this programme clearly hits deeply home. And yet I can't pin it down to anything specific.

After concluding Season 1 (watched in two long late-night stints) I had Season 2 on order and, for one reason or another, the dealer took a couple of weeks to get it to me. During that time I decided that it was important for me to take a break from it and come back to Season 2 afresh, that was in late Autumn of last year. I didn't think about it too deeply, I rarely do, just followed my instinct. With hindsight I realise that I was becoming spellbound by the show and it is happening again.

Intellectually, I could put up a pretty cogent and persuasive argument that Mad Men is one of the great TV shows I have ever seen. I love it for its intelligence, the fascinating thematic ground it covers (kudos too to Sloan Wilson's The Man In The Grey Flannel Suit; a great book), its confident pace, the razor-sharp deconstruction of a pivotal time in modern history, the tremendous performances and apparently simple yet devastatingly complex character arcs, the beautiful contrast between artifice and reality and for the spare but terribly profound writing.

But Mad Men's intelligence doesn't leave me grinning like that. No, I find myself beguiled by the stylised beauty of the piece. Vanity and an obsession with the aesthetics of the period make me a sucker for the programme. It isn't just the beautiful suits- and I do love how each man's stylistic taste is consistent throughout each costume, subtle but definite- or the stylish women, or the wonderful decoration, or the beautiful but much underrated score (why does no-one ever comment on the music in Mad Men? It is sublime). It is something bigger than all of those things and yet not separate from them.

But I can't quite say what it is yet. And it isn't the smoking- as attractive as that is in the absence of it's pungent acridity. No, if Serge's breathtaking Intoxicated Man didn't make me a smoker, nothing will.

The question remains, then. What is the power that Mad Men has to entrance me thus? Maybe I'll know when I reach the Season 2 finale. If not, then all my hopes lie with Season 3 which is months from screening here in the UK and I don't want to wait that long to learn the secret of my infatuation with the world's most beautiful TV show.



The picture of Peggy Olson, by the way, is there in place of the predictable Roger and Donald looking cool shot because her character's progress gladdens my heart. Feminist thought and progress of the period is a particular field of interest for me as it directly relates to my wife's Doctoral thesis. Although Peggy isn't especially likable, warm or attractive a character I'm behind her all the way.

Lost In La Mancha (2002)

Don Quixote is one of the great romantic tragedies in literature and this film documents the great romantic tragedy of Terry Gilliam's attempts to bring the novel to the screen quite beautifully. An old teacher of mine Mr Leathem (I was in his class when it was announced that Thatcher was leaving 10 Downing Street and he openly wept with joy, I love the man for that) taught me that all tragedy stems from a single human flaw and I have carried that knowledge with me everywhere. That Aristotle said much the same thousands of years earlier is, I have decided, merely coincidental. The tragedy of Lost In La Mancha stems from Gilliam's dedication to the fantasy he is creating which is destroyed by reality hitting him square in the face. Just like Quixote himself, then.

The parallel between the source material and the events that transpire is suggested by the co-author Tony Grisoni at the close of the documentary and is happily not overplayed at all. In fact the documentary is played pretty straight being both chronological and even-handed. While everyone on-set praises Gilliam for his responsibility and dedication at the outset, as things fall apart the criticisms begin. But you do get the sense that either these extremely pacific, patient and gentle people or else that there's some footage of bloody noses and screaming tantrums left on the cutting room floor. Seeing a multi-million pound investment decimated and ultimately destroyed by a combination of the rain, a sore bottom, hubris and sheer bloody-mindedness is met with extraordinary on-screen patience. I wish I was that patient when I run out of milk and have to go out late at night and buy some more!

Of course the really tantalising thing about the documentary is the great "what if...?" question. Everyone believes in the project, everyone thinks it will be great, everyone is firmly behind Gilliam's vision and so the documentary works on the premise that we're witnessing the loss of Gilliam's masterpiece. I went with it, it heightens the sense of drama and sharpens the romantic tragedy. But as a lukewarm Gilliam fan (loved Brazil and Fear and Loathing, liked the Python films he directed, didn't much care for Twelve Monkeys or Parnassus) I find it hard to buy. What troubles me is the rewrite of the narrative he's done (adding another layer of fantasy with Depp travelling back in time and being mistaken by Quixote for Sancho Panza) because you're talking about one of the all-time great works of fiction. It doesn't need sexing up, it's not a bloody first draft!



We don't learn a great deal about The Man Who Killed Don Quixote beyond that, and the fact that Johnny Depp has to fight some string puppet soldiers at some point and is almost eaten by a giant (that was a wonderful piece of casting, by the way). But that's okay, the film is back on for a 2011 release with Robert Duvall taking the lead in place of the visually perfect but physically incapable Jean Rochefort (the Frenchman at least has the dubious consolation of having been in Mr Bean's Holiday since).

As someone who has limited knowledge of film-making but a fair degree of experience in commercial projects, this film also gave a fascinating insight into the way films are made. Apart from the sheer logistical effort involved (all those names scrolling up at the end have to have something to do I suppose) I was taken aback by the sheer ineptitude of the people running this thing. Tying the finance of the project to the participation of an elderly Jean Rochefort was a case in point; if Depp or Gilliam pull out it'll be tough to get an equal box office draw to replace them but Rochefort? Fine actor he may be, but he's no Will Smith when it comes to getting bums on seats even, I suspect, in France. Even more so was the sight of Gilliam and his First AD Phil Patterson trying to get to grips with the intricacies of their insurance policies and ascertain whether Rochefort's herniated disc qualified as a force majeure. Big and costly decisions were made seemingly on a whim and the producer René Cleitman's role seems to be to nod sweetly and sign the cheques. Perhaps Cleitman's inability to do his job was the fatal human flaw that sparked the tragedy. But whatever the financial quibbles, for the film fan it's fascinating to see the pre-production footage and the transition from vision to reality.

It's a terribly entertaining, terribly sad, terribly frustrating documentary and I'd recommend watching it. I somehow doubt the film we eventually see will be as clear and faithful a distillation of the spirit of the wonderful Cervantes novel as this is.

Bowie's Birthday Top 5s

Bowie gets two for being twice as good as Elvis.

Top 5 Bowie songs

Heroes
Sound and Vision
Ashes to Ashes
Life on Mars
Young Americans

Top 5 Bowie song titles

Chant Of The Ever Circling Skeletal Family
Unwashed And Somewhat Slightly Dazed
Joe The Lion
Always Crashing In The Same Car
Up The Hill Backwards

Black Samurai (1977)

This is much safer territory for a malfunctioning brain- the title and year of release tells me all I need to know. Post-boom 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 private international anti-terrorist 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 Jim (a 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 schtick through his sheer ballsy chutzpah. Well, fair fucks to him.

Happy Birthday Elvis, Here's Your Top 5

Mystery Train
Don't Be Cruel
Suspicious Minds (being overplayed doesn't stop it being wonderful)
[Marie's The Name] His Latest Flame
A Mess Of Blues

Election (1999)

Sleep-deprived, sedated and sneezing or spluttering my way through the day; I turned my attention to my ever-growing list of borrowed DVDs to try and pass the time between bouts of fitful sleep and violent hacking. My notes, therefore, may not be of much use to me when I look back upon them with my (relatively) normal head on. I enjoyed Election, I liked it a lot. It had a great blend of almost farcical humour and insightful social/psychological commentary. But thematically it was a little too close to the previous year's Rushmore and- given the visual and stylistic similarities too- I couldn't get the "poor man's Wes Anderson" thing out of my head the whole time.

Reese Witherspoon and Matthew Broderick are great in this and their non-chemistry really works. I have disliked- and will continue to dislike until I die- Broderick simply because he was Ferris Bueller and David from Wargames when I was growing up. And I wasn't! Childish isn't it? And that's partly the point of the film here. Aside from the comedy set-pieces (more wry than rip-roaring but funny all-the-same) the film is a consideration of the way our actions and judgments stem from our own insecurities, foibles or resentments and the impact this can have upon others.

Tracy Flick (Witherspoon) has been raised by her single mother to be ambitious, driven and focused. That it results in unpopularity, isolation and a whopping great chip on her shoulder doesn't seem to matter; achievements are all that counts. And so Tracy has never learned to be a person (her brusque eve-of-the-election prayer exemplifies this: "Dear Lord Jesus, I do not often speak with you and ask for things, but now, I really must insist that you help me win the election tomorrow"). While Broderick resents her constant striving, we learn, because he is dissatisfied with his own easy acceptance of mediocrity. And saw his best friend leave town after the fall-out of an affair with her. Thus the competitive edge which drives the movie is set. And the Morricone-styled soundtrack that accompanies this when they share a scene is a great touch too. I loved that.

The sub-plots are equally bred from personal paradigms. At the centre of this is Chris Klein's Paul, an affable jock version of Harry Enfield's Tim Nice-But-Dim. He is subject to the manipulations of those around him (Mr McAllister's plotting, Lisa's pointed using of him, Tammy's misplaced vengeance) but suffers them with grace and humility, everything that happens to him has been put into perspective by the career-ending injury described in the opening scenes. He is the only person to respond to adversity with a positive resolve and that serendipity carries him while all around him more fortunate people are floundering. Aside from Tracy's pushy mother (who cannot offer consolation, only reproach when the results don't go well) and the other protagonists above there are Dave (the best friend of Broderick's character) who betrays his wife Linda and suffers hugely, and then Linda herself who repeats the betrayal upon her best friend (Jim's wife Diane) with Broderick costing him everything at no great reward to herself. And on and on it goes.

Every time we hear Tracy Flick sneer at the richer and more privileged, we know that the resentment eating at her will drive her to become harder, colder and more insular in her bid to outdo them. I can certainly understand the resentment, believe me, but the response can only fail to bring her any peace.

As I said, I'm off my box and rambling. But I enjoyed it anyway. And the slogan "PICK FLICK" is great advice for anyone suffering nasal congestion to the degree that I am, so that's nice too.



Post Script - whacked out of my brain at 3.35 AM I texted myself the following "Election. No-one loves anyone else. Said a couple of times. Not meant" presumably as a prompt to write an addendum to my notes. Well, it's almost true that no-one in the film really appears to love anyone else. Except the Mettzler family and, with the possible exception of Tammy, they all love one another. That just goes to show, you can't trust a man on max-strength remedies.

Rushmore (1998)

Since I just flagged up Rushmore when writing up my notes on Election, I thought I'd drop my Rushmore notes in here too.


Amazing that I’d never seen this. It’s a cracking little film, but one that slips a little under the radar being a little overshadowed by the star-heavy The Royal Tenenbaums. It is a very Wes Anderson film; lots of great screen compositions, beautiful colours, lots of stills with graphics, a phenomenal soundtrack, quirky characters doing pretty incredible (and frankly uncredible) things in between smoking a lot and riffing some impossible-to-extemporise dialogue.

It is about relationships and the lengths people will go to in order to get their own way. And in Rushmore that familiar Anderson territory is better explored than he perhaps manages anywhere else. Jason Schwartzman’s Max Fischer is a scholarship student at the prestigious Rushmore Academy who hides his modest background (his father, played by Seymour Cassel, is a barber) and will do anything to remain at the school. He develops a friendship with a wealthy but unhappy middle-aged man Herman Blume (Bill Murray) and an infatuation with a teacher (Miss Cross, played by Olivia Williams). Inevitably, they develop a relationship between them causing conflict and a reappraisal of priorities.

Where most of Anderson’s films are a triumph of style over substance- not necessarily a criticism of course- this one has a little more depth. I particularly like the Oedipal themes which recur, Max has father-figure relationships with his own father (well, duh!), Herman Blume, Dr Guggenheim (Brian Cox, an underrated actor) and even is the father-figure for Dirk Calloway- I don’t know what it’s called in the US but here he’d be called Max’s fag. The way in which the same relationship is shown with differing dynamics is really quite nicely done. This also gives scope for some great characters and some really enjoyable performances, most especially by Bill Murray: Rushmore is a total gift for Bill. Probably his best ever role. Have I already said that once? Anyway, it bears repetition; for it is.

A Rare Feeling of Victory

Left work at midday because of the impending snowdrifts. Someone I work with said he wanted to stay and that people needed to get a grip but to me it felt like an unexpected gift of an extra few hours just for me.

Marge:
"The plant called and they said if you don't come in tomorrow, don't bother coming in Monday."
Homer:
"Woo hoo! Four day weekend!"

Vertigo (1958)

There is something about this film, something in the atmosphere of it, which is quite unique. It isn’t quite dreamy and it certainly isn’t surreal, I’m guessing the best word is hypnotic. The film lasts about two hours but feels longer because it immerses the viewer within- it doesn’t interest or intrigue or engage me, it enraptures me. Everything contributes- the storyline with its twists and juxtapositions, the cinematography which somehow makes contemporary San Francisco look ethereal (and this isn’t the lustre added by the intervening years, I am sure), the performance of James Stewart with conflicting emotions of guilt and confusion and love and hope writ large across his brow, the direction which is confident, controlled and unhurried and finally- perhaps most importantly- Bernard Herrmann’s haunting score.



There is such a great deal of depth to ‘Vertigo’ that you really can find new things to consider with each watch. Here’s what I mean: watching this yesterday I was, for the first time, pondering the control that the male characters exercise over the female characters in their lives- Gavin Elster over Judy, ‘Scottie’ over Judy, ‘Scottie’ over ‘Midge’ and the unknown man from the bookseller’s story over Carlotta (his comment “they could do that back then” being ironic in that context). Juxtaposed with this are the supposed obsession with Carlotta which Madelaine portrays and the obsession with Madelaine which leads ‘Scottie’ to possess Judy. The film examines these relationships without drawing conclusions- these are left to the viewer- in each instance the man is rich and substantially older, the girl becomes a plaything or a means of passing the time, to be moulded and shaped in whatever image suits the man’s mood. What this says about patriarchal relationships for Hitchcock is unimportant, he posits the question for the viewer to consider without guiding those thoughts.

There are culture snobs who claim that cinema isn’t art. If Goya or Rembrandt created anything that betters Hitchcock’s ‘Vertigo’ then I’ll eat my hat. In fact I'll eat ten hats.

Take Ivy

I'm not a huge fan of photo-books, even less so when they're texted in indecipherable Japanese, but the legendary Take Ivy is the one I would love above all others. Reprints can sell for well over a grand, so I thought I'd never get to see the whole thing but a bit of Googling last night landed me on the whole thing scanned and uploaded by a smashing blog called The Trad. Wonderful stuff.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

This kind of look is readily applicable for the English Ivy fan, but surely he wants to keep his books dry too!

Rope (1948)

Reputedly Rope is a film without cuts; a stage play filmed by a moving camera in real-time and that's almost true. But not quite. There are eight ten minute takes neatly edited to look seamless. I only spotted a couple of cuts - though I wasn't especially watching for them- most notably on 33 minutes when a shot of John Dall cuts directly to James Stewart, which is the only one there's no attempt to disguise. But that's most likely to do with the impossibility of filming the whole thing on one reel as opposed to any 'cheating'. The film does run in real-time and is, as near as makes any difference, a one camera one take film. It's a tremendous technical achievement in my eyes even with the odd trick.

And it's simply so dramatic- from murder to conclusion in about eighty minutes of intense dialogue and psychological cat-and-mouse. The impossibility of an unhappy ending in I Confess isn't replicated here, there's every chance that the protagonists of "the perfect crime" here may evade detection. The tension, present from the opening death-scream, never relents. Hitchcock marshalls the audience superbly in this film, ratcheting up the tension discretely- a pointed comment, a panicked look, the foregrounding of the cabinet and so on. Truly this one goes right up to eleven.



The protagonists whose attempt to commit that "perfect crime" are documented here are Farley Granger's Philip Morgan who is completely under the spell of John Dall's Brandon Shaw. Shaw is himself besotted with James Stewart's Rupert Cadell- the murder is done simply to impress him- and the whole thing is charged with an electric homo-eroticism. Each of them clearly has something going with the other- whether a history or an infatuation- and their range of mannerisms (affectations would be a better word) are clearly intended to suggest homosexuality: Granger- five years on from his similarly homo-erotic relationship in Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt- is sissyish, John Dall is preening and Stewart bitchy. The play was, I understand, based on a real-life case involving homosexual partners and the original cast was to include Montgomery Clift (gay) and Cary Grant (reputedly bisexual) which would have made the matter even more blatantly obvious than the coded, allusive nature of it's suggestion here- the dialogue about Dall and Stewart having both seen Granger 'strangling a chicken' would have been as risque as it was possible to get past the 1948 censors.

Aside from the nerve-jangling tension and the technical excellence (see the night sky become dusk before your eyes) and the intriguing undercurrents and the audacity of the whole project then, what has Rope got to offer? Well, there is a fantastic Jimmy Stewart performance. The keenness of Cadell's intellect is obvious in every measured comment, every searching look, every pause in the dialogue and yet to see the certainty and arrogance he has displayed throughout crumble almost instantaneously during the climactic sequence is astonishing. In a second you see the man's world turned on its head. Superb stuff. John Dall (who couldn't look more like Ben Affleck even with the help of CGI) and Farley Granger are also really good, but not in Stewart's league. The dialogue is fantastic, full of pointed lines (Kentley to the strangler Morgan: "these hands will bring you great fame" as he plays the piano, for example). Also, while not being as densely layered as his absolute finest films like Rear Window, Vertigo or Psycho this still raises questions about the capacity for murder- the distinction between the mens rea and the actus reus if you like.

Really, it is a very interesting piece and deserves a much better reputation than just being an experiment in film-making, it is simply a fine film.

Top 5 goals of the last decade

Messi vs Getafe

Zidane's left-footed volley to win the European Cup

Bergkamp vs Newcastle

Borgetti vs Italy

Zola v Norwich

Top Ten Films of the Decade

Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain/Amélie
Let The Right One In
Cidade de Deus/City of God
Mulholland Drive
Oldboy
WALL-E
Dead Man's Shoes
Le Scaphandre et le Papillon/The Diving Bell and The Butterfly
Casino Royale
Memento