Nobody Knows Anything

And I’m all out of bubblegum. Contains skilfully deployed swearing that may be unsuitable for younger audiences. Cinema releases marked with a *, Blu-ray viewings marked with a †.
Kick-Ass (2009) †

How did Matthew Vaughn become a better director than Guy Ritchie? Was it all that time standing on set watching Guy Ritchie put the camera in the wrong place and thinking he had a better idea, and suggesting it, and Ritchie saying he was the director, and then everybody pulled guns on everyone else, and it actually became a scene from a Guy Ritchie film? I’d like to think so. I remain quite proud that I still haven’t seen a single film Guy Ritchie has directed (I don’t think I’ve missed much), but on the evidence of Kick-Ass, I’m now terribly keen to see both Layer Cake (2004) and Stardust (2007). Vaughn seems to understand what Pixar have long understood: that what audiences want is what they haven’t seen before, whereas the majority of marketing and film executives seem only too willing to make their suggestions and greenlit projects based on what did well at the box office last year, hence a summer of expensive, over-produced mediocrity filled with sequel after sequel. So you get a year like 2003, a summer filled with lame-ass sequels like Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle because that’s a simple marketing question to ask. Did you see Charlie’s Angels? Yes. Did you like it? Yes. Would you like to see a sequel that contains pretty much the same stuff? Yes. Easy.

Whereas, the big hits of 2003 were as follows: Did you see Charlie’s Angels? Yes. Did you like it? Yes. Would you like to see a movie about a fish? Fuck, no! How about a movie with some pirates in it? No way, man, pirates suck, and anyway, there hasn’t been a good pirate movie for years, not since Cutthroat Island (1995), and that sucked. And yet the two big hits of the summer of 2003 were Finding Nemo, and Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. In other words, the original projects were the ones with the mass appeal (I know that the Pirates movie was based on a Disneyland ride, but in terms of contemporary Hollywood cinema, it’s an original project, though it’s probably also responsible for the worst development in modern Hollywood, the idea that you can turn board games into movies; anyone for Battleships? Or Asteroids? No? Thought not). Even Disney did not know what they had with Pirates of the Caribbean, they didn’t like the idea of a PG-13 rated movie, and they worried that Johnny Depp’s performance was too out there. Of course, this in turn was exactly what audiences loved about the film. And why? Because in Hollywood, Nobody Knows Anything.

What makes Kick-Ass so great is that everything about it is offensive in comparison to everything that has of late been systematically filtered out of Hollywood by interfering busybody insiders desperate to avoid offending anyone or outsiders desperate to issue a press release on the back of a film that claims that Film X is offensive to them in some way. You remove the offensive, and what you’re left with is a slew of PG-13 inoffensiveness that appeals to precisely no one. Kick-Ass has a lot of swearing. It has an 11 year old girl brutally massacring people to the theme from the Banana Splits. It has real world superheroes that are not a solution to anything: Kick-Ass can’t even rescue a cat! It deliberately subverts many of the absurdist conventions of the superhero movies Hollywood has spent the last ten years making and remaking and rebooting. If there is a certain amount of having its cake and eating it with the over the top final action sequences, well, who wouldn’t want to dispose of the bad guy like that? The film then very firmly returns to the real world with its conclusion; the superhero has turned out to be an adolescent passing phase, and the real work has yet to begin. Until the sequel, of course.

Did you see Kick-Ass? Yes. Did you like it? Yes. Would you like to see a sequel that contains pretty much the same stuff? Wait a minute…

The Red Shoes (1948)

Mad ballet movies are sadly few and far between, but the granddaddy of them all is Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s classic, a perfect storm of Technicolor photography, German design, and an international cast. Now 63 years old, the film at first seems like a quaint time capsule from another age, when everyone spoke with Received Pronunciation and students were excited by the ballet and classical music. Slowly, this changes, and repressed and expressed passions come to the fore. The film draws on Hollywood musicals of the 1930s and 40s - not to mention the day to day travails of filmmaking itself - for its “putting on a show” atmosphere. Appropriately enough, the film’s centrepiece influenced Hollywood in return; the Red Shoes ballet specially created for it was a direct influence on Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly’s Singin’ in the Rain (1951) a few years later. Seeing it again for the first time in a long time, I found the final scenes a little too hurried in comparison to what comes before them, though Anton Walbrook’s performance as Boris Lermontov is, if anything, even creepier than the similar role essayed by Vincent Cassel in Black Swan.

Black Swan (2010) *

Darren Aronofsky plays tribute to The Red Shoes quite early on: as Natalie Portman spins, the camera spins too, which refers to a similar moment in the earlier film when Moira Shearer dances in a rain swept hut, observed, as ever, by Boris Lermontov. Filmed using the same handheld, super-grainy Super 16mm technique with which Aronofsky made The Wrestler (2008), Black Swan goes further by entering the head of its protagonist, Nina Sayers, and experiencing her psychosis and breakdown from the inside. Finely crafted details liberally sprinkled throughout should have you contemplating notions such as just how early did Nina start going off the rails? Was it before the film even started? Not to mention a bunch of near invisible special effects moments: how many times does the camera rake across a wall of mirrors to reveal no one in frame except the characters?

Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) †

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen this film, but I’m still annoyed by Coppola’s insistence that the film is faithful to the book when the central premise of the film - Dracula is searching for his lost love Elisabeta across oceans of time - is an invention courtesy of the dead hand of screenwriter James V Hart. Take away this, and the historical conflation of Vlad Tepes with Count Dracula, and you might have a version of the film that’s faithful to the book, which this is not. Like, it’s okay for Dracula to go around killing people because he’s like a romantic poet, and that’s his motivation. Bollocks. Dracula is a monster, an archetype of repressed Victorian sexuality - he is not cute. It may well be that the nonsense of Dracula’s portrayal in this film gave life to the Twilight disaster that’s currently limping it’s way to a conclusion in the movies, and the never-ending horde of Twilight style young adult teenage vampire ripoffs that occupies an entire fucking wall in Waterstones.

True Grit (2010) *

It would appear that Hailee Steinfeld is the reason why this film was made now. Casting the lead actors was relatively easy, casting a 14 year old girl with the confidence to deliver an Oscar nominated performance was the tricky bit. When the Coens found Steinfeld, this became their next film. Steinfeld’s self-confidence and ease with delivering a mountain of rat-a-tat dialogue reminded me of a younger Holly Hunter, to be specific, the Holly Hunter of Raising Arizona (1987). And the film has also resonated with audiences worldwide in the way that previous Coen films haven’t. Quite why this is so is something of a mystery, since this is a film in a moribund genre, the Western, which no one’s been much interested in for some time. And I can’t believe there are that many fans of the 1969 John Wayne original (now available on Blu-ray!) still alive and keen on seeing a redo. Maybe it’s just a triumph for good filmmaking; how old-fashioned is that?

Gladiator (2000) †

Despite foreshadowing the ending far too obviously far too early on (15 minutes in, the film will end in the arena in Rome with Russell Crowe and Joaquin Phoenix going at it mano a mano – I knew this in 2000 at my first viewing; it’s become even more obvious over the years), Gladiator is a persuasive, enjoyable yarn, made at exactly the right time to take advantage of CGI technology to resurrect another dead genre, the historical epic. For the record, this was the original version of the film, which highlights one of the drawbacks of next generation technology. Famously, the film was originally issued on Blu-ray in 2009 with a compromised transfer that was reliant on 9 year old scanning technology for the original version and 4 year old scanning technology for the 2005 extended version. Unfortunately, when these two transfers were placed on the same disc, the shortcomings of the older transfer became apparent in comparison with the extended version scenes. The nerds of the internet were quick to jump on this, and, one would like to think, were emailing Ridley Scott’s agent while the Blu-rays were still warm from their players. If you want to, you can dig out screenshot comparisons online, but be warned it’s pretty horrifying; it’s very hard indeed to believe that anyone at Paramount US thought this was an acceptable presentation of one of their most prominent projects. One new transfer, and one disc replacement programme later, and all has been forgiven, but the original Gladiator Blu-ray fiasco stands as a warning to cost-cutting studios in the HD world. The world is watching back.

Full Metal Jacket (1987) †

In his interviews around the time of A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), the film Steven Spielberg effectively inherited as a part of Stanley Kubrick’s will, Spielberg mentioned some of the discussions he’d been having with Kubrick about film form, and Kubrick’s determination to find new ways of telling a story away from Hollywood’s obsession with the three act or five act structure and character arcs. Your Honour, I submit for the defence People’s Exhibit A, Kubrick’s Vietnam movie. A lot of reviewers were terribly puzzled by this film, not so much for its content, which many observed was quite brilliant, though somewhat compromised by being filmed in East London rather than, say, the Philippines, but for its form. Full Metal Jacket is a film of two halves, one half of basic training on Parris Island dominated by F Lee Ermey’s drill sergeant and Vincent D’Onofrio’s psychosis, the other half a bloody battle in the devastated city of Hue with a troubling resolution. There are the two halves, a compare and contrast perhaps, which have only Privates Joker and Cowboy in common. And I don’t want to spoil Kubrick’s fun by going any deeper than that, except how many female characters does the film have? I’d like to finish with a 24 year old observation I’ve never forgotten from my fellow film editor on our student newspaper back in the 1980s, Simon Taylor, who mentioned that Kubrick, IN EVERY SCENE OF THE FILM, always puts the camera in EXACTLY the right place. Watch the film again to see how true this is, and think how difficult it would be to do that if you were a director. Remember, every scene, every shot in every scene, there’s no other place for the camera to be than where it is to tell the story. So next time some fellow film geek admonishes your admiration for Kubrick and his Full Metal Jacket by saying it was all filmed in Deptford with visibly decaying palm trees, tell them about camera placement, and challenge them to do what Kubrick did if they think it’s so damn easy.

Confessions of a Shopaholic (2009) †

Every so often you come across a film where the script needs more work, and this is a classic example; there’s plenty of sit but not enough com. PJ Hogan has come a long way since Muriel’s Wedding (1994) and My Best Friend’s Wedding (1997), and not always for the better. Nobody went to see Unconditional Love (2002), and his Peter Pan (2003) redo was compromised by an inadequate special effects budget. The film suffers from the same having your cake and eating it mentality that mars the devil wears prada (2006) – a film I liked more than this one - in which whatever edge exists in the chick lit source material has been expunged by a committee of soulless development execs in favour of PG and PG-13 certificates and a wallow in the very same designer label costumes and accessories the novels are criticising. Every plot point in Shopaholic the film becomes about shopping instead of funny. Isla Fisher does her best with what she’s given and the film remains mildly amusing, but the maxim most applicable to it is this one: “Dying is easy, comedy is hard.”

Animal Kingdom (2009) *

From Australia comes a different type of crime thriller, one which focuses on what happens to a family criminal gang after the crimes have been committed but before the police have made arrests, or, to be more accurate, since this film draws upon historical real life corruption in the force in Melbourne, the police walk up to the criminals in broad daylight and shoot them in the head, possibly as an easy way out of all that paperwork. The film is a slow burner, with the tension built by the siege mentality that sets in among the gang, and the addition of a young, formerly distant relative and his girlfriend, and it is through him that the story is told. I don’t think it’s giving away too much to state that it doesn’t end well for anyone. Crime corrupts, and absolute criminality corrupts absolutely.

Straightheads (2006) †

A similar unsettling transference takes place in this short but sour British-made rape revenge movie. Until it comes down to pulling the fatal trigger, Gillian Anderson’s character has been gung ho for revenge after her treatment at the hands of three former soldiers. It is left to her fellow victim, an unexpectedly good Danny Dyer, to step up to the plate and take out the trash. But writer-director Dan Reed has an interesting late character development to pull out of his hat, and remembers the Hitchcock of Torn Curtain (1966) in which the master of suspense demonstrated just how hard it can be to kill somebody. Though remember, killing is easy, comedy is hard.

Melissa Leo is my new hero. Official sources at the Academy confirm that this is the first use of the f-word during the ceremony, well, that’s what the BBC said anyway. I’m convinced that more than one unlucky nominee has mouthed it in the past. I have not been able to post weekly yet, in part due to Assassin’s Creed II, and in part due to me not watching that many films. Nothing however can stop from me from a) the first use of the f-word in the title of these blogs in tribute to the great Melissa, and b) bitching about the Oscars. And Sky’s coverage of same.

The Oscars (2011)

Just when we thought it was safe to turn on our Sky Oscar broadcast and find that Claudia Winkleman has finally been banished to some unspeakable pit of darkness, then we find that she has been replaced by one Alex Zane, who apparently reviews films for The Sun, but is unable to afford a decent haircut for himself. There it perched all night, fashionably distressed but looking more like it hadn’t dried properly this morning and hadn’t had a comb or brush passed through it, ever. In short, the presenter looked like a twat, and was. To say nothing of was it Robbie Collin, film reviewer for the News of the World? (Spot the Murdoch connection, anyone?) I was fascinated by his legs, so long that it looked like that scene in Mulholland Dr. (2001) when The Man from Another Place from Twin Peaks (a little person, in other words), was sat atop what looked like a showroom dummy with normal length legs, and it was abiding strange. And Edith Bowman, not previously known for her extensive film knowledge as opposed to her extensive knowledge of indie bands, and a fashion guru who wasn’t Gok Wan, thank God, but could have been him in a dress with some padding. I’m not ready to call for the reinstatement of la Winkleman, though, as I do still have some standards, and the pitiful excuse for a broadcast has quite a long way to descend yet. Fill it with more minutes of advertising, please, anything but inane punditry.

And so to the show. Anne Hathaway, whom I’ve previously thought of as great, was not that great, and James Franco was a plank of wood - it seemed quite surprising that he can find employment as an actor on this showing, and frankly bizarre that he was actually nominated for Best Actor this year for his harmless part in 127 Hours (2010).

Stranger still, this pointless attempt to skew to a younger demographic ran aground on the crusty shores of the awards themselves, which this year demonstrated once again that an Academy membership with an average age of 57 likes nothing more than a) films about British royalty, and b) films in which lead characters have handicaps (though I would submit that stammering - which in many cases is quite treatable - is not quite on a par with a disability like cerebral palsy, cf. My Left Foot (1989) or autism, cf. Rain Man (1988)). Also, the Academy dislikes a) genuine script originality, cf. Inception (2010), and b) does not know what Facebook is, and cares less. Oh dear.

Those films are okay on a technical level, says the Academy, but they’re not whatever The King’s Speech (2010) is, and I don’t know what it is, because I haven’t seen it, yet I don’t feel the need to disparage a film that’s proved more popular than its budget says it could be (at least in Hollywood terms). The King’s Speech was the little film that could, and did, and we should hope to see more of them, not dismiss them because they personally have no appeal for us. I mean, I think David Fincher and the social network (2010) were robbed, but that doesn’t mean I’m right. Zodiac (2007) is not only one of the best crime thrillers of the last ten years but one of the best films of the last decade, period, and it wasn’t nominated for ANY Oscars.

The 2011 show was at least admirably short, and punched through the awards at a decent clip, though the promised expulsion of the dreaded montage wasn’t quite followed through upon, and the supposedly revolutionary set design just looked like a left over U2 stage show from the mid 1990s. The best bits of the show were as ever the off the cuff spontaneity of an old ham like Kirk Douglas, a self starter like Luke Matheny, and an old pro like Billy Crystal (who showed up the Anne and James show something rotten). Even Tom Hooper, director of The King’s Speech, had a terrific anecdote about his mother first finding the piece when it might have become a play and suggesting it to him.

In short, it was one of those share the awards Oscar parties where everyone goes away with a piece of the cake, though some pieces of cake were bigger than others. The problem of hosting the show remains the major unresolved piece of the Oscar puzzle, especially now we’ve had two double acts in two different years (Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin last year) that haven’t worked out. I’ve read some suggestions that Robert Downey Jr might be good for next time, though I could happily settle for Russell Brand (actually funny!) and Helen Mirren, who were the best double act of the night.

Peace, out.

The dead will remake movies. An all Blu-ray edition. Contains strong language.

Alien (1979)

Once there was a time when movie fans did not lovingly refer to Transformers movies as franchises, when the very idea of a franchise was itself an anathema. Back in the 1970s we regarded sequels as the lowest of the low - Every Which Way But Loose (1978) was bad enough, but Any Which Way You Can (1980)? Nurse, the screens! A sequel was, with perhaps the only exceptions of The Godfather Part II (1974) and Dawn of the Dead (1978), an excuse for everybody who didn’t get paid that great for the first one to pick up a proper paycheck for the second (eg. Ghostbusters II (1989) - I understand there’s been talk of a new Ghostbusters movie - I can confidently predict Bill Murray will NOT be in it - but if he is in it, he will be doing it because he needs a new extension on his house or something, not because there is a need in our culture for a new Ghostbusters movie - which there isn’t - or because he’s finally giving the fans what they want - some laconic one-liners from someone who clearly doesn’t give a fuck but has seen how many zeros there are on his cheque - which was pretty much Bill Murray’s performance in Ghostbusters II). Sequels were made to comedies which weren’t funny and disaster movies which were rubbish - did the world really need three sequels to Airport (1970) for example? Sequel mania really comes to the fore in the 1980s when studios started paying attention to marketing mavens instead of the filmmakers who made all those great movies in the 70s that nobody went to see (eg. Raging Bull (1980)). Sequels in the 80s were proudly numbered, and instead of making original projects like Alien (1979) (and yes I know in many ways there isn’t very much that’s original about Alien at all, but you wouldn’t necessarily realise that through the experience of watching the film - HR Giger’s contribution alone is one of genuine originality), studios were content to make sequels to anything that vaguely qualified as a hit but barely had a pulse of creativity, to the inevitable ever-diminishing returns. Sometimes something would accidentally go right and you’d get something like Aliens (1986), but mostly you’d get Porky’s II: The Next Day (1983) and who gave a fuck about that? I’ve only heard the word franchise applied to movies in the last ten years, and not as a term of abuse but as a phrase drawn from marketing and treated with respect. Well, I’ve just seen the now-uncut making of documentary Wreckage and Rage: Making Alien 3 on the new Alien Anthology Blu-ray set, which should be an object lesson in resting the financial hopes of your entire studio for that year on a second sequel science fiction-horror hybrid that went before the cameras without a finished script with an untried feature film director at the helm and no producer to protect him from the suits who seem to have believed initially that the more money they threw at the project, the better the end result would be, and by the time they realised they’d thrown too much money at the project, it was too late to stop the runaway train so they tried to rein it in and stop the film from being properly realised. David Fincher had other ideas, even though he’s disowned the film, and refracted through the prism of his later movies, in my opinion almost made the downbeat movie he wanted to make that was intended to kill off the franchise for good (except there’s always cloning - I have an idea!).

Piranha (2010)

My favourite laugh out loud moment in this movie was the penis/piranha interface sequence. I’m not proud. I didn’t feel that the measured calculation behind the excesses got in the way of the gratuitous nature of their onscreen execution. This was a film that was proud to be a throwback to the 1970s when a proper horror film had to include nudity as well as gore, or it wasn’t doing its job of living up to Roger Corman’s philosophy of filmmaking which is: in every reel of your film (approximately every 10 minutes), there has to be an exploitable element - a bare breast, a car chase, an explosion. Or lots of beer crazy, braindead, spring break college kids being chomped by prehistoric piranhas registering their disgust at a wet t-shirt contest. Joe Dante’s 1978 original also adheres to Roger Corman’s rules, which have come to define the modus operandi of modern summer blockbuster Hollywood filmmaking. A giant robot that turns into a car (or something, I really don’t give a shit) is an exploitable element straight out of a Roger Corman production, although it cost more to get on screen than possibly the budget of every film Roger Corman ever made.

Dawn of the Dead (1978)

It’s not all bad though. I think I’ve gone on record before here concerning my liking for the 2004 Zack Snyder remodel of George A Romero’s original since I see Snyder’s film taking place in the Romero universe, just in another town along the line where the zombies are fast instead of slow. However, this was the original, looking possibly about as good as it’s ever going to look in high definition. What struck me this time around was how good Romero’s editing was, and how effectively it conceals certain budgetary constraints and slight flaws in the storytelling. It even has a cameo from Michael Bay; he plays the zombie who gets a screwdriver in the brain; not really, still, we can dream, can’t we? The first line of the movie is, “Wake up!” The next time you hear some film fan droning on about how they’re building up the Crank franchise, remind them that there was a time when originality ruled in Hollywood, and if you have to make a sequel to a film like Night of the Living Dead (1968), make damn sure you wait until you have something to say.

You mean those black singers? All new for 2011! Cinema visits are marked with a *, Blu-ray viewings with a †.

Inferno (1980) †

A cross. How appropriate. Now, if you were one of the three witches who ruled a city like Rome, would you have not one but three copies of the very book by E Varelli that reveals all of your secrets freely available in some kind of a lending library in the very building where you live so that a rainswept Eleonora Giorgi can waltz in off the streets and pick one up and find out all about you and your fellow witches, so that you then have to dispatch the minions of darkness to murder her to get the book back? This doesn’t seem like much of a plan for city-wide domination, does it now? Wouldn’t it have been a better idea to not have the book on display, but kept back in the stock room, or something? No wonder it all ends in tears (in-joke). Or rather flames. And equally, why does the creepy antiques dealer Kazanian also have three copies of the book which he’s only too willing to sell to any suggestible poetess in a nice blouse with great backlit hair who happens along, and he’s in the shop right next door to the New York witch’s building? And what exactly do these damn witches do all day anyway, apart from cultivate a lot of nasty looking liquids in heated cauldrons, and recover books from people who shouldn’t have been able to get their hands on them in the first place? Ah, no, but Robert, you don’t understand, you see, you’re trying to apply logic and common sense to the irrational and supernatural, you’re pointing out that the film’s narrative doesn’t make a lick of sense when we know that and accept that and this is all part of Dario Argento’s genius for in this film he creates a world of the uncanny in which a young woman will dive into an underwater sub-basement through a hole in the cellar of the New York witch’s building to retrieve an item of jewelley that fell (OR DID IT?) from her blouse for no reason other than it will look really cool, which it does. I guess sometimes, that’s just enough.

The Next Three Days (2010) *

This is one of those films that’s attracted good and bad reviews, which as ever means the film will remain an interesting watch in the years to come. Uniformly good reviews and one is suspicious though these films generally tend to be rewarding, uniformly bad reviews and one never sees the film and this generally tends to be exactly the right thing to do. These are not hard and fast rules and obviously there are exceptions, but these have served me pretty well so far. Well, this film, Paul Haggis’ 3rd as director, worked for me, it had a nice scene early on where Russell Crowe gets beaten up outside a dingy pub and instead of getting up and taking on his attackers (as would happen in any other Hollywood movie), he lies there and takes it because he’s a powerless, unarmed teacher from a community college and not Maximus from Gladiator (2000). Some reviewers have taken against it because it’s an English language remake of a French film Pour Elle from 2008, and some reviewers have taken against it because it seems like more of a genre exercise than anything deep and meaningful like Crash (2005) or In the Valley of Elah (2007), Haggis’ previous film outings as director; it would seem appropriate here to point out that the jury is very much out on Crash, a film that seemed good while you were watching it, but less than great later when you were thinking about it, and nobody went to see In the Valley of Elah because it’s a film about the Iraq war that everybody’s now decided they no longer like. Maybe Paul Haggis (after his script work on the last two Bond movies) wanted to make something people would see, in which case, job done. If you like a good thriller that unwinds like a perfectly coiled spring, check this out, if you want deep and meaningful, then I believe Gulliver’s Travels (2010) is still playing.

TRON: Legacy (2010) *

I’ve seen the original TRON (1982) once, at the Gaumont in Birmingham, a lovely old cinema I’ve probably eulogised here before, and I don’t remember liking the film very much at all. Offered the opportunity to buy the 2-Disc Special Edition DVD of TRON for very little money on a number of occasions, I haven’t bought it. So why then would I go and see this very expensive sequel-cum-remake? Well, it does have a brilliant score from Daft Punk, and I like Daft Punk; in fact, I bought the score before I went to see the film. And the original TRON is, for better or worse, possibly the first cyberpunk film before there even was cyberpunk, and I like me some Neuromancer just like everyone who’s ever read it. And then there’s the chance that maybe, just maybe, something will have gone accidentally right, and a first time director handed a $170 million budget will have been able to achieve in 2010 what Stephen Lisberger so singularly failed to do in 1982, make something unembarrassing. I gave the movie the best chance I could, I saw it in 3D at the Imax, and, well, it almost is good. You certainly can’t complain that the money isn’t on the screen, because it is, and its commitment to its largely monochrome world with only small pieces picked out in blue and orange to differentiate the two opposing sides means it is flat out the most bizarre looking film to have ever come out of the Walt Disney Studios. Yet what’s stayed with me in the days after seeing it isn’t all the stuff that’s meant to look cool like the disc fights and the cycle race, but that this enormous super-production is in dramatic terms little more than a small scale family drama with eight speaking parts, like a play by Alan Ayckbourn with a very expensive set. How odd. How perverse.

Aliens (1986) †

I saw Aliens at the Odeon Queensway in 1986, and when Sigourney Weaver walks out in the power loader towards the end of the film, people actually cheered and clapped, and in England, that never happens in a cinema, except it did. Who can remember what a print of Aliens looked like 24 years ago? Who can remember what it sounded like in Dolby Stereo? All we used to have to go on was poor image quality on VHS and some kind of Dolby Surround soundtrack quite unable to deal with the film’s dynamics. All we used to have to go on was the grainy, noise-saturated 1999 DVD transfer that was recycled for the Quadrilogy in 2003, and served only to point out that telecine transfer technology wasn’t quite ready for prime time; the DTS 5.1 soundtrack was more like it, or was it just louder than Dolby Surround or Dolby Stereo? Well, fortunately, James Cameron really likes Blu-ray and was involved in this new transfer, so Aliens now looks like that newly struck 1986 film print of Aliens must look in the dusty recesses of my memory, although probably better. There were problems with the film stock used on set back in the 1980s, but you wouldn’t know that now that fine detail has been coaxed from a recalcitrant negative, though not at the cost of the fine film grain that’s part of the original emulsion. In short, Aliens looks really terrific on Blu-ray, and sounds like Dolby Stereo used to sound, though it had to take the introduction of DTS-HD Master Audio to do it. When Sigourney Weaver walks out in the power loader, it now sounds today like it sounded in my memory of 1986. This is quite an accomplishment.

So I’ve taken a year off writing this alleged weekly blog for various reasons. Principally, the suspicion that the filmjournal crowd is no longer loved by the dvdtimes website that created us, and that maintaining the filmjournal presence on the dvdtimes website was somehow inconvenient and no longer necessary. And then the website’s been updated to something else, and we’re lurking at the bottom of the new one finally, and then we’re not - again. It’s all very confusing.

But I think the real reason is that I didn’t have a HD TV of my own, until December, when I bought one, so that I could watch what I wanted to watch when I wanted to watch it. And this is a year when my DVD purchasing has seriously slipped and I’m now all about the Blu-ray, the majority of which I’ve not watched. This will now change. So, before the first real post of the new year, let me take you back to February 2010, I’ve just watched The Princess and the Frog (2009) and written about it. What’s next? As ever, cinema viewings are marked with a *, Blu-ray with a †.

L.A. Confidential (1997) †

Remains thunderously good on Blu-ray, the James Ellroy adaptation everyone loves, even James Ellroy (though he’s not super keen on Russell Crowe).

March

American Gangster (2007) †

Is there nothing Ridley Scott can’t do? Here, he makes a based on true events, 70s style crime thriller a la Carlito’s Way (1993) and extracts a cracking performance from Denzel Washington, who may play a lot of good guys but relishes the chance to play a bad guy who has his reasons.

Green Zone (2009) *

Apparently, no one went to see this Iraq-set thriller from the Paul Greengrass/Matt Damon team that made the Bourne trilogy, but I have news for you if you’re one of the naysayers, it is every bit as good as the Bourne films, and well worth the effort.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009) *

The first book in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy is complex, and a tough ask to adapt to another medium. Not that you would know it from the first entry in the Swedish-filmed version of the trilogy, which renders the storyline without missing out too much, and is perfectly cast.

The Lovely Bones (2009) *

Another much unloved film, but I thought it pretty effective myself, and it doesn’t spend half as much time in the protagonist’s CGI-generated heaven as some commentators may have led you to believe.

Alice in Wonderland (2010) *

In 3D Imax, no less. It doesn’t particularly have much to do with Lewis Carroll, though retains the same characters, but it is a visual delight. Apparently, Disney didn’t think anyone was going to see this, I guess $1billion at the worldwide box office just happened by mistake, eh, guys?

Zodiac (2007) †

What are the chances of David Fincher making a bad film with his English language redo of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo? The man who made this is not going to mess up that.

The Damned United (2009) †

It’s not David Peace’s book, but the film is still effective enough in and of itself.

April

Donnie Brasco (1997) †

A slightly eccentric Blu-ray that only includes a longer cut of the film not authorised by the director, and drops his commentary track. Film still top though, with great work from the cast.

North by Northwest (1959) †

First Hitchcock on Blu-ray (I think), looks like it was made yesterday. Hurrah!

Man on Wire (2007)

Finally got around to watching it, every bit as good as everybody says it is.

Kick-Ass (2009) *

The ordinary lad becomes superhero bit may well be the least interesting aspect of this film in years to come, the dead-on relationship bits and pieces and the very, very funny jokes will give it legs. And Nicolas Cage isn’t crap! Extraordinary!

Toy Story (1995) †

Oh, I’m sorry, this is the first, feature-length, computer-animated film, straight from the render farm at Pixar to your Blu-ray disc, it’s as shiny as a new toy from 1995 can never be again in comparison.

Toy Story 2 (1999) †

Now with added emotional content. If you don’t find yourself welling up during Jessie’s song (I think you know the one I mean), it’s entirely possible that you are certifiably dead.

Spy Game (2001) †

Nobody loves Spy Game except everyone who’s seen it, and then watched it again and again for the sheer pleasure of watching Robert Redford run rings around everyone else in the cast, and Tony Scott’s gratuitous aerial helicopter shots, of course.

Avatar (2009) †

I was concerned that Avatar wouldn’t hold up on a second viewing. This turned out to be a mistake. Avatar holds up very well indeed. One reason for the film’s alleged simplicity is that it allows the richness of the world that’s been created here to be properly appreciated. If you were trying to follow a more complex storyline with more ambiguous characters, you might be missing the point of the film, whatever that may be.

May

Fargo (1996) †

How well does Blu-ray do snow? Pretty well, as it turns out.

Sympathy for Mr Vengeance (2002) †

Never go to the wrong people to obtain money for your sister’s operation, and never kidnap a child and leave her on her own near a waterway full of rocks. Who says cinema has nothing important to teach us?

Robin Hood (2010) *

Is there nothing Ridley Scott can’t do? I have to admit I was highly sceptical when I heard that Scott and Russell Crowe were bound for Sherwood Forest for another bout of men in tights. I should have known better. This is more ‘Robin Hood Begins’, with plenty of battles on horseback and feistiness from Cate Blanchett, all to set up sequels which I can confidently predict will not be made.

Rising Sun (1993) †

One of those Fox titles which must be a hot seller in the after market as it was one of Fox’s first Blu-ray releases. The upgrade delivers a nice, lightly grainy transfer that looks like film rather than the disastrous, pseudo HD video of the new Predator (1987) redo.

July

Any Given Sunday (1999) †

Cliched, predictable, obvious, Al Pacino shouting, thunderous music, there’s lots to hate for doubters but much to love for everyone else including me.

Watchmen (2009)

On digital copy, this was the theatrical version of the film. I still have no opinion on the quality or not of this film, I still don’t even know if I like it or hate it. I guess I must like it as I’ve bought it three times on Blu-ray. I guess. I don’t know though.

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) †

A doomed attempt to watch all three theatrical versions. Will get there one day.

August

Mad Max 2 (1981)

Isn’t there a remake in the offing? Some no doubt all CGI crapfest. The most startling thing about this remains the for real stuntwork in the last half hour of the film.

The X-Files (1998) †

This is out on Blu-ray in Greece (which is where I bought it), but not in the UK, home of one of the largest fanbases for the series outside America. Another own goal from the morons at Fox UK.

Heat (1995) †

This is the 4th time I’ve bought the film, and I think the last. It remains excellent.

September - Quentin Tarantino Season

Reservoir Dogs (1991) †

Classic shock of the new stuff. I can no longer remember what a film print of Reservoir Dogs looked like, I would like to think it looked something like this.

Serenity (2005) †

I’m shocked. It’s taken FIVE YEARS for me to buy Serenity, first because by the time the initial DVD had come out, another SE DVD had come out in America, and then another even better one came out in Australia, or was it Germany? And then the Blu-ray arrives, and it’s taken me time to buy this. And I really like this film. Crazy.

Pulp Fiction (1994)

Why do we like Tarantino? Because his films deliver on the promise of their titles, with all the trimmings.

Jackie Brown (1997)

There was a time when the money exchange shenanigans at the end of the film might have seemed a little ponderous and overdone. Not anymore. Now, it seems right that there was no other way to do it, and the scenes do crackle with a tension that was always there.

Death Proof (2007)

I don’t know about you, but this gets better every time I watch it. This is not a bad movie, and if you think it is, shame on you, you should know better.

Foxy Brown (1974)

A brief detour back to the 70s for some low budget, high exploitation frolics.

Kill Bill Vol.1 (2003)

If it took me FIVE YEARS to buy Serenity, how much more shocking is it that it’s taken me SEVEN YEARS to buy Kill Bill 1&2, and on DVD no less? The reason is quite simple: it’s abundantly apparent that the original DVD releases (which I now own, and which have been reissued as such on Blu-ray) were vanilla stopgaps for the inevitable special edition, as clearly there was a long and complicated story to tell about the making of these films. And that special edition has still, disgracefully, not appeared. Also, Tarantino made the fatal error of releasing a different version of Kill Bill Vol.1 only in Japan, where the anime section is longer, and the House of Blue Leaves sequence is in colour, instead of MPAA censor-pleasing black and white. And that’s the version of the movie I want to own, and I’m not going to pay over the odds for a Japanese DVD release.

Kill Bill Vol.2 (2004)

See above. By the way, Kill Bill is terrific, but I’m guessing you already knew that.

Fight Club (1999) †

The first rule of Fight Club is, you don’t talk about Fight Club.

A Prophet (2009) †

Terrific French crime prison drama, in which a no-mark enters prison for a minor offence, and walks out as Tony Montana. Great on every level.

Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World (2010) *

A comic book movie about relationships based on a relationships-centred comic book series that filters everything through popular culture, especially video games, punk rock and TV sitcoms. The Social Network (2010) may be the best movie of the year, but this will be the most influential, and the most loved, once everyone pulls their thumbs out of their arses and actually gets around to seeing it. Great on every level.

October

The Informant! (2009) †

Matt Damon is terrific in this based on true events corporate conspiracy movie rendered as light comedy at the same time as it all actually happened. It’s a film from the same world as The Insider (1999), but with a Marvin Hamlisch score and a protagonist who falls apart in front of your eyes in a way that’s delightful, and breathtaking, and unbelievable, and true. Warner Bros are docked one star for issuing this with a Digital Copy that only works with Windows Media and not that new fangled iTunes application that is apparently only popular with everyone.

Duplicity (2009) †

More light comedy, corporate conspiracy shenanigans, this time not based on true events. But then Clive Owen and Julia Roberts are such a fun couple, you don’t care.

The Town (2009) *

No surprise to those of us who saw Gone Baby Gone (2007), Ben Affleck’s second film as director is even better. It is another, tough, Boston-set crime drama/thriller with action sequences that actually thrill and dramatic scenes full of good dialogue and character interrelationships for good actors to work with. A real treat, in other words, and horribly unsupported at the American box office, all those people who only go to one movie a year should have picked this one.

Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004) †

Put off by a lot of UK reviews dismissing it as a poor man’s Alan Partridge, I’ve stayed away from the legend until now, but have overcompensated by buying the 2-disc Blu-ray edition with HMV exclusive trading cards. A lot of the movie is awfully funny. But I should have got there sooner.

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010) *

Unlike the audience. Tepid, underbaked sequel that only sparks to life when Gordon Gekko gets in touch with his inner bastard once more. The rest of the film is full of people learning life lessons like this was just another fucking sitcom, that is, when they’re not overexplaining the plot again and again. In the original, Charlie Sheen’s inexperience as an actor worked for the part; here Shia Le Boeuf just looks inexperienced, and surely it can’t be too long before he goes off the rails and self destructs spectacularly in true Mel Gibson style so he can no longer be employed in Hollywood, because at the moment, everything the Le Boeuf touches just turns to shit.

The Social Network (2010) *

Utterly brilliant. I don’t have a Facebook account because friendship is not a competition and I am not plagued by a narcissistic desire to share the fine details of my every waking moment with 500 million other people. Thanks to the David Fincher directed, Aaron Sorkin scripted film, I now have another reason not to have a Facebook account: Facebook was founded by a robotic nerdy git who did it to get back at the girlfriend who dumped him for being a robotic nerdy git, when he wasn’t calculating how to screw over the best friend who loaned him the money to start it going in the first place. Also, when the internet began for me in 1997, quite a lot of companies, AOL among them, attempted to offer a regulated internet experience through which you could access bits of the internet as long as they were sponsored by AOL and whatever other businesses they could sell your personal details to. And that failed as a business model until the arrival of Facebook, which rather looks to me like an attempt to ringfence the internet again and deliver consumers and their personal details to advertisers, the government and the police, which was not meant to be the point of social networking in the first place. Epic fail, then.

November

Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse (1991) †

“My movie is not about Vietnam… my movie is Vietnam. There were too many of us, we had access to too much equipment, too much money, and little by little we went insane.” - Francis Ford Coppola, Cannes, 1979

December

Unstoppable (2010) *

Did anybody else notice that in the end, it seemed rather easy to stop the train? This didn’t make the movie any less fun to watch, but still.

The American (2010) *

Anton Corbijn makes his second film a Leonesque/Melvillesque thriller full of silence and pauses and tension that catch fire into extended action sequences when necessary. George Clooney is excellent again in a role that’s almost entirely non-verbal.

Inception (2010) †

I did see this at the Imax earlier this year but appear to have missed it out. D’oh! Regardless, this is the kind of summer blockbuster we want to see more of: Warner Bros’ current executives must have nerves of steel to have released this at the height of a summer of brainless trash. Well done them.

Toy Story 3 (2010) †

Well, brainless trash, and this, which I missed at the cinema, unforgiveably. Is it possibly even better than Toy Story 2? This is a very rare bird indeed, a second sequel that isn’t rubbish on any level.

Apollo 13 (1995) †

Age shall not wither it, it remains compelling and looks great. It also gave me an opportunity to set my HD TV properly. My new TV seemed determined to polish everything to a HD video sheen, so I had to embark on a journey through the settings options to turn off all of the stuff it was doing so that by the end of the film, Apollo 13 no longer looked like a disastrous Predator-style HD video scrubup, but a proper film shot on film with grain and flaws.

District 9 (2009) †

In the making of, both Neill Blomkamp and Peter Jackson pop up to deny any intentional political message in a science fiction film set in South Africa that INTENTIONALLY draws upon the legacy of the apartheid years for its story, its characters, its settings and, yes, its meaning. Nice try, guys, but I’m not convinced.

Holiday photos uploaded to flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/67347124@N00/
Wednesday 4th August 2010

I’ve been to Lindos several times before, but only on day trips. Due to some longstanding freak of Greek zoning laws, the town of Lindos has been entirely unspoilt by commercial development, so it retains the feel of the port it originally was, whilst being rammed to the gills with a mass influx of daily visitors trekking or donkey riding up to the Acropolis, of which more later no doubt. Because it is such a beautiful place, I quite fancied the idea of staying there for the duration of a holiday. And so I did. The weather in Birmingham today was bloody awful for August, the kind of insistent hard shower that can thoroughly drench you. It cheered up a bit by the time my father dropped me off in what has now been designated the Drop and Go area, or, this is what happens when otherwise perfectly rational health professionals amateurishly try to blow up Glasgow Airport, or at least one of its doors, and all UK air passengers have to suffer the consequences. Still. I join the queue at the Monarch check-in desk. Of the two women in front of me, one of them reveals that now might be a good time to buy some travel insurance, and disappears to do so. Quite a few people have over-packed in excess of the 20kg limit, and have to scrabble around on the floor trying to reduce the weight of their suitcases. Chastened by last year’s £20 excess fee, I have cannily under-packed this year, moving all of the bulky stuff to my “hand luggage”. So while a lot of people are carrying a small bag, I’m lugging around an overweight overnight bag that fits (but only just) the hand luggage parameters. My cunning plan works, and my suitcase clocks in at 18.4kg, and will be lighter on return; it always is (it was). And, joy of joys, my extra legroom reservation has worked as well. I’m in 1C. Zip thru security. Security check out my insulin vials, which resemble paints, apparently, but all is cool. Thence to Wetherspoons and a gourmet burger, but the drink is not free, as it is in non-airport Wetherspoons. Food arrives a little too quickly, but is otherwise okay. Around 7pm I head to the toilet for a pre-flight whiz, and the announcement of a delay comes over the PA system, a delay to my flight, and not a small delay either, a three and a half hour delay. I crack open Stephen King’s Under The Dome, set my iPod to Philip Glass, and read till we board. Shockingly, there is no in-flight entertainment, so I’m unable to ascertain whether or not DVD has yet penetrated the world of the low budget airline, or do they still kick it old school VHS style. The in-flight meal becomes ever more of a snack every time, and there’s no second refill for the coffee. Standards are slipping.

Thursday 5th August 2010

It’s hot in Rhodes, the night time temperature is 26°C. My suitcase makes it again, the Tigger stickers doing their job once more. Out to coach A1 and an hour’s journey to Lindos, via Cremasti. The drop-off point in Lindos is to the south of the town, where reps await to walk us in, for the very simple reason that there are (almost) no motorised vehicles narrow enough to navigate the passageways of the town. I will spend many days stepping out of the way of motorbikes, mopeds, small vans, motorbikes pulling carts, mini quad bikes, people on donkeys, etc. Our cases are transported by just such a vehicle, and mine is waiting when the rep and I arrive. We’ve shed everyone else in our walk across the town. Despite the daily mass tourist influx, Lindos has lost none of its charm, and remains photogenic at every turn. The Marianthi Apartments are organised around a central courtyard with a sun terrace above. I’m in Room 5, which is a two-floor affair intended for three people, but even though there’s only one of me, I’m still filling the place pretty effectively; I don’t know how three people could cope here. There’s a kettle (which I will discover on Friday doesn’t work) and a toaster (which I will not use). No TV, and no air conditioning unless taken up at a ludicrous price of €50 per week. I might go for it in the second week. We’ll see (I didn’t). I unpack and start loading up the fridge, cupboards, drawers, etc. I have breakfast up on the terrace and start to become aware of just how warm it is. As I am notoriously open-pored, the sweat is pouring off me, and there’s a limit to how effective covering myself in cold shower water and letting it dry on my skin can be. This doesn’t stop me doing it though. I wander around aimlessly in search of a supermarket, and find one just past the Lindos Spa, eventually. I buy some wholemeal bread, plus the usual beer and crisps and water and so on. I make it through lunch and up to the welcome meeting, but all I really want to do is go to sleep, which I do in the afternoon. I’ve started using my new camera, and I have no idea how many I’ll take by the end of the fortnight. Under The Dome continues. I head down to the beach around 6pm, and the sun’s gone behind a cloud, so I use this rare event to take piccies. I have tea up on the terrace with a group of six from the apartments, an elderly but friendly bunch, who are just warming up for their evening meal. I stick up there till 9pm, stroking the local, emaciated black cat, who wanders by for some fuss. And so to bed, which may be too hard, or I haven’t got the pillows organised properly, or something, but even though it’s hot, I don’t have any particular problem sleeping, so I might not need the air conditioning after all. Watch this space.

Friday 6th August 2010

Up around 7, thorough shower, breakfast, find kettle doesn’t work (see earlier), then a trip up to the main square to catch the free bus up to the bus terminus and the larger supermarket at the top of the hill above Lindos. So far I’ve found everything I need grocery-wise, except the burger things I found on Crete last year. It’s almost as if there’s a conspiracy to force you to eat out rather than cook in. I walk back down the hill to the apartment. At the welcome meeting yesterday, there was one particularly annoying OCD Scottish bloke who was convinced we were all sat in the wrong place, and the whole meeting should be moved around the corner to somewhere much cooler. But when we got there as a result of his fussing, it wasn’t much different. It takes real effort to be that annoying within minutes, but this bloke managed it. I ventured forth to St Pauls Bay, hoping to check out the various supermarkets en route to see if I could have more luck there, and I did. Lindos remains woefully short of poor angles, even amongst the height of the tourist tat areas. There’s something rather inspiring about a wall of t-shirts, and the image is duly recorded. I make it down to St Pauls Bay, Beach No.1, which is way tiny but is still served by its own plant-bedecked café. I say I’ll just go round to the other bit but my chronic lack of fitness and/or the sun/the heat comes into play and what I really need is a drink and no other stuff. In Supermarket Ena I find the instant hamburgers that served me so well in Crete last year and in another supermarket, possibly the Dimitris (but actually the Lindos), I find some hash browns, some oil and some savoury snacks. I sense a fry-up. Back to apartment for lunch, then out to read my book in my favourite spot in Lindos, a bench about halfway down to the second largest beach. When I start to feel a bit tired, I nip back to the apartment for a siesta. Shockingly, my camera runs out of charge, so I have to recharge the battery before reviewing the day’s efforts. The two electric hobs work (unlike the kettle) and the only dicey bit about them is discovering what the settings are to cook the burger and browns effectively. The hobs from last year in Crete are no guide; with this one you turn it up to max and hope for the best. Considering how improvised it is, it’s really tasty, and the Rodos 2400 goes down a treat too. I join the pre-dinner drinks crowd up on the terrace with my pudding of half a wholemeal roll and some cheese, and glean dining tips. Dionysus sounds good, if I can find it. Then some reading and thence to bed. I’m using all three pillows. It works for me.

Saturday 7th August 2010

Today follows a very similar pattern to the day before. The morning excursion to St Pauls Bay this time finds me arriving at the top of the same small beach as yesterday, but then following the car park/coast road around the curve of the bay and then down to the location of St Pauls Chapel, which remains as ludicrously picturesque as it was the last time I visited. There’s a mysterious square hole on the rocks near the chapel that I’m guessing is for christenings as it’s tiled; either that, or it’s the world’s smallest swimming pool. I pick up supplies and then head down to the other two beaches after lunch scouting around with photographs, with some success, I must say. I repeat yesterday’s burger/hash browns/wine combo, and it tastes just as good. I’ve come a long way from not cooking at all on holiday to this. More chat with the group of six who are together for reasons they have not revealed.

Sunday 8th August 2010

Today is mission Acropolis. I am up early enough to make a decent head start and, armed with my trusty cool bag and a bottle of water, I commence the ascent. Since I’m pretty much already there, it’s not much of a climb. It’s also not too ridiculously hot as it’s only 8 in the morning. The views over the town remain spectacular. There are very few people around, and us early risers have the Acropolis pretty much to ourselves. It was built on the rocky crag above Lindos, and the town developed down below it when it was the principal port on Rhodes. There has been a lot of work done on the site since I was last here 16 years ago. Back then, I’m pretty sure there was only one set of columns at the Temple of Apollo up on top, but there now appears to be a lot more. We have to trust that this current work meshes more closely with the site than the Italian rush job of 70 years ago. I take a lot of photographs, and when the tourists start rolling in around 9.20am, I take a lot more. Photographing tourists and photographing tourists taking photographs of other tourists has become one of the main themes of my holiday photography. And I don’t look out of place doing this because everybody has a camera, and are doing the same as me, although not as consciously, I would imagine. Eventually it’s time to head down for lunch, and an afternoon spent making random sorties out to the beaches, before being beaten back by the cauldron of heat down there. In the evening, I go out for a meal at the Dionysus Restaurant, which is full unless I say I want to eat downstairs, in which case it’s not full. I’m tucked in a corner of a downstairs room with two large parties, one of Greek women, the other of Italian women plus two men. A lot of them smoke but the air-con does its job and little of it reaches me. Smoking in restaurants is still a surprise. I order a stuffed chicken fillet, garlic bread, and a draught beer. When it arrives, it’s delicious, and I clean the plate. After I ask for the bill, there’s a long interval before it arrives when I force the issue by getting up to leave. I’m not going to bilk the guys, the food was too good for that. While I’m waiting, a trio of angsty Londoners arrive and are put out when they can’t eat upstairs and have seen other parties ascend before them, people who’ve booked in advance, I think, unlike you lot who roll up and expect everything handed to you on a silver plate. It’s called service, innit.

Monday 9th August 2010

To Rhodes Town. I’m up early, though not early enough to catch the 6.45am. I take too much stuff in my rucksack and walk up the hill to the terminus. The bus arrives smack on time at 7.30am; a small crowd has gathered, but almost no one gets on the bus with me. I don’t know what these people are waiting for, but if it’s not this bus, then what is it? The 50km trip to Rhodes Town takes around 90 minutes, but I’m entirely unbothered, even when it becomes apparent we’re going the long way round. It’s a cheap and cheerful way to see more of the island, including a brief stop in the centre of Afandou, where I stayed two years ago. The bus fills up with locals, but it’s not quite the same bus as those of 16 years ago. Now there’s air conditioning, where once there were only open windows. On arrival in Rhodes Town, I’m not drawn to take that many photographs. The place is heavily urbanised and the vistas much less inspiring than the vanishing corridors of Lindos. Besides, I’m on a mission, but I get thrown at first. There are three record shops in Rhodes Town: Top Ten, which is a bit of a cubby hole with not much stock (but it’s still there!); X Musicland, the HMV of Rhodes Town with €18 prices for new releases; and Manuel Music Center, the one I’m looking for, except they’ve downsized and moved since I was here two years ago. Fortunately, they haven’t moved too far. This doesn’t stop me from wandering around aimlessly for an hour or so with a big rucksack strapped to my back, staring at street corners and going, ‘I know this shop was here, wasn’t it this corner? What about this next corner? This next street?’ And so on. There’s also some unnecessary wandering in search of a drink. I don’t know Rhodes Town that well, so when you want to, say, replenish your 1 litre bottle of Coke Zero, you can’t find any bugger anywhere who sells the stuff. But if you don’t want it, every shop has it. It’s nuts. I give Manuel Music Center a good €100 going over. The staff are super nice and speak pretty good English. There are free hand-wipes to counteract the dusty CDs and I get to have one of my happy shopping moments when I hand over two €50 notes to pay for my goodies. My rucksack is now stupid heavy so rather than deciding to make a day of it, I decide to cut and run. I buy my ticket from the correct kiosk (you’d be amazed how many people get this wrong – there are two kiosks, one for the west coast, one for the east, it’s not difficult) and head immediately for the bus. We push-queue to get on, I get a seat cause I’m early, latecomers are not so lucky. And it’s 90 minutes to Lindos. We go back by a different route, hardly surprising as it takes half an hour to get out of Rhodes Town. At Afandou, road works on the main Lindos-Rhodes Town route are happening, and we detour down to the beach. This makes me feel extra glad this wasn’t happening two years ago. I was staying on this main route in Afandou, and it was easy to hop on and off buses. Not at the moment it isn’t. I prime myself for the moment when Lindos comes into view as we speed round the last corner and there it is. What a rush. I pick up a bottle of Emery’s Villaré at the supermarket on top and stagger back to the apartment. I make a small foray out to the beach, but it’s too hot, and to the shops, but it’s too hot, and the end of Under The Dome beckons. I focus on that until I’m tired enough to sleep. Tomorrow, James Ellroy.

Tuesday 10th August 2010

I stay close to home base today after yesterday’s journey. In the morning I head out to the end of the town above the smaller beach and discover a shotgun shack at the end of the cliff and the local school building. More photos ensue. I’m now pretty good at finding my way through the labyrinth of Lindos, and can get to my nominated supermarket (the Lindos) and back in about 20 minutes. Which is just as well as I take a siesta of 2½ hours in the afternoon and I’m still tired at 9pm. More burgers and hash browns and the first half of the Emery Villaré, a very decent wine. More of the same tomorrow, probably.

Wednesday 11th August 2010

Once the tourists start arriving in the main square, it’s time for me to head on out and see what they’re up to. I’m now in full-on “project” mode, where I assign topics to myself and stick with them until I think they’re exhausted. I move around the square to half a dozen different spots and lay myself open to whatever happens in front of me. This is mostly a group of 30-40 tourists of a similar nationality being marshalled into the square, lectured, and then dispatched up to the Acropolis via every shop selling every kind of tourist tat imaginable, and then some. One after the other. This is broken up at 10 minute intervals by the arrival of the free bus down from the terminus, belching pollution this morning, adding some atmosphere to the scene. Even though the square is packed with people with cameras, I am the only one to venture up to a small platform above the tourist office where a seat in a shaded area provides a grandstand view over the square, and that all-important shift of perspective that we photographers relish. Then shopping and at around 11am I head down to lurk between the two main beaches where I’m waiting for the daytrip boats to arrive. Once I catch sight of the first one, I motor (as much as you can motor in the heat and with people on the path) over to the floating jetty where the boats dock and go photo crazy as four of them enter the harbour and back up to the jetty, one after the other. Tourists disembark endlessly. This is the other daily injection of tourists into the Lindian economy. After lunch, I have a two hour siesta that feels like a lot less. There is then more book reading and more burgers and hash browns. And wine. At this time, the mother and her argumentative 11 year old daughter depart next door, and she offers around the remaining contents of her fridge to interested parties, including myself. We were negotiating a whole looking after suitcases thing, but in the end they settled for extending their stay in their studio and leaving them tucked under a table in the courtyard. I’m retiring at 9pm very solidly, and am not much help in the whole late night flight what do you do with your luggage scenario. It is a very sticky night, and dowsing myself with cold water at regular intervals (I am yet to even touch the hot tap in the bathroom – I never do) does very little to help. Out with the old, in with the new. Whoever was to my right and over the courtyard next to mom and daughter, not one of whom said word one to me all week, departed as grumpily as they came. They were all women, I think, and none of them looked anything like each other but behaved like family, so this will remain another mystery.

Thursday 12th August 2010

Did I say it was a very sticky night? The first night since the first night when I’ve thought maybe I should have had the air conditioning after all. But I remain determined to stick it out to the end. Today’s photo project was wandering in the town above the main square on the cliff face that has the bus terminus at the top. And then winding back down through the touristy areas where I kept bumping into new arrivals at the Marianthi. I’ve just begun the second half of this project when the battery on my camera dies, forcing a long gap during which I go shopping and have lunch, have another siesta, then venture out again to reserve a seat at the Dionysus tonight, and pick up on the touristy vibe the battery failure forced me to cancel earlier. There remains no shortage of material. I pick up the Ellroy and head out along the cliff top to a shady spot marked yesterday or the day before by a sleeping cat. The cats always know the cool spots. Out at 7.30pm and a seat at the Dionysus. Actually, it’s pretty empty, and it only really fills up by 8pm, so if I turn up around 7.30pm the next time, it should be okay to get a decent upstairs seat. I order a pork fillet in a brandy and orange sauce, garlic bread, and a draught beer. It’s fabulous again, full of flavours that complement each other, quite unlike English cuisine at its worst. I wander the streets at night again and notice quite a few restaurants have no customers at all, which can’t be good for them, but is also a sign that word spreads and people do their research these days, whether on the internet beforehand or by word of mouth once in the resort. Like me.

Friday 13th August 2010

I wake early enough to head off to Rhodes Town again. A brief moment of hilarity ensues when the Rhodes bus I want to catch passes me going down the hill to the main square as I climb the hill to the terminus at the top. I don’t head back down just in case it isn’t the Rhodes bus, but it is and it picks me up at the terminus at the top of the hill. This is one of those unspoken things about travel in Greece you can only find out by being there when it happens, since it’s never timetabled or detailed anywhere. But if I’d waited in the main square, the bus wouldn’t have driven down; that’s the way it is. The bus takes the same lengthy detours as the previous trip, though we arrive a little earlier. I head for the Old Town and pass through the gates just as the market craziness around Socratous Street is gearing up. It’s easy to slip past them into the depths of the Old Town and wander at random, taking photograph after photograph. I’m not the only one; a slim European woman in shorts is doing the same thing, we keep meeting each other at a distance. No words are exchanged; the photographs continue to be taken. Around 11am I’m in need of sustenance and take a full on break to gather myself for whatever’s next. I’ve completed a pretty full circuit of the entire Old Town. Some of the houses are in appalling states of disrepair; some of these are occupied by people. Others have been very done up to modern standards but in keeping with the original feel of the place. Some are for sale. I move down Socratous Street, hundreds of tourists led by clipboard-wielding guides head in the other direction. I have my lunch on a raised square of land at the base of Ippoton, the Street of the Knights. Portrait painters tout for business. After lunch, I head up the Ippoton. Unexpectedly, the French Consulate is open for an exhibition by some political cartoonist. I head in and greedily snap away. These buildings rarely open to the public; in all my visits to Rhodes and all my walks up the Ippoton, I’ve never been inside any of the buildings until today. I stick my camera out windows and capture tourist shots from elevated positions; this is a unique event and I don’t waste the opportunity. I hang around the Palace of the Grand Masters at the top of Ippoton and photograph tourists. I walk to Laurence Durrell’s house down Amerikis, and check out the beaches. They are stuffed with umbrellas in a way I don’t remember from two years ago, and there’s music from a live DJ. There’s a protracted wait for the bus back. There’s meant to be one at 3.30pm, but there isn’t. Instead there’s one at 4.30pm. This is by no means unusual in Greece. Once back in Lindos, I go shopping for tonight and try some chicken nuggets. It doesn’t say you can fry them in oil, but it doesn’t say you can’t either. And indeed, it works out pretty well. I buy too much bread though, which overcomplicates the evening. I must have drunk about five litres of liquid today, yet next to nothing comes out the other end. I don’t know where it goes. The evening winds down up on the terrace solving crossword clues with a Mancunian family while waiting for shooting stars, none of which I see. It’s another horrible, airless night, and it’s possible I don’t get any sleep until 2.40am, but that can’t be right.

Saturday 14th August 2010

Today becomes movie-making day. I spend the morning working out how to use my stills camera as an ad hoc movie camera. You get the feeling the video facility has been added as an afterthought, since it is in no way as heavily adjustable as the stills camera capabilities. You can’t change the focus once it’s set, although exposure does re-adjust automatically. The zoom function is iffy as well. However, as with all these things, it comes down to how you use it and what you use it for. Lots of tourists have video cameras; almost none of them seem to do anything interesting with them. It seems to get used as a glorified point and shoot stills camera. Turn up somewhere, point camera, shoot. This is not what I get up to. I film tourists arriving in the square and walking down shopping corridors. I think in terms of links and shots and footage I need to edit over gaps. I do runs walking backwards. Bits of some of the footage are quite good. I’m heartened. Another siesta in the afternoon and that’s kind of it. More chicken nuggets and hash browns in the evening. As tomorrow’s a feast day in the Greek calendar, tonight there’s a bash in the town square that starts between 9-10pm and ends up going on till 4 in the morning. I ought to be there taking photographs but I’m too damn tired. This is my only regret on this holiday.

Sunday 15th August 2010

The music from the town square was loud last night so I probably didn’t get as much sleep as I needed. So I don’t head up to the Acropolis again quite as early as I should have done. This turns out to be not as much of an issue as it might have been because entrance to the Acropolis is free, as it’s a feast day. Much filming ensues, once again with me filming tourists with slow pans and anonymous tracks through dimly lit rooms. Bits work, bits don’t. I track up stairs three times. The pièce de resistance is a slow five minute descent with people ahead of me and Lindos to the right. It looks pretty good. Another siesta in the afternoon and some last minute down by the beach tracks and I’m done. More burgers and hash browns. More consumption of Coke Zero. I try a cheaper wine called Lindian Cellars, it’s clearly not as good as the Emery Villaré, but it is half the price, so in some ways it’s quite respectable.

Monday 16th August 2010

I’m up early for the final Rhodes Town trip. Rather than the last minute dash last Friday, I can assemble the troops at a much more leisurely pace. Once again I get hoodwinked by the driver who heads down to the main square before coming back up to the bus stop terminus. We take the usual long-winded route. My first port of call is the X Musicland shop where I painstakingly search the A to Z section of the non-Greek releases and find a Peter Gabriel Super Audio CD. A similar search of the A to Z ‘bargain’ section uncovers Michael Brook’s Cobalt Blue CD. The morning is off to a good start. I have an extended Calipo/Coke Zero rest, then resume in the Manuel Music Centre checking out what I hadn’t gone through early last week. The music DVD section has a couple of pleasant surprises, so I steel myself to go through the A to Z section of the non-Greek releases, which takes more than a little time. I’m looking for items no longer available in the UK or items at decent prices, and I find both. Once again, hand-wipes are provided by the staff to wipe off dust from the CDs. Not that they’re that dusty, but still. A final splurge comes at the till where I used my credit card for the first time this holiday on a couple of Mylène Farmer live DVDs, having verified they’re the kosher French releases. I have to stare because the French design quality is so poor they look more like bootlegs than the real thing they are. Another brief visit to the 25 Martiou supermarket; and I discover fans on a stand for €18 (Note to self: next year if air conditioning is unobtainable and/or overpriced, I’m buying a fan and that’s that; later, further research back home reveals another more devious possibility). I walk down to the dockside to have lunch, and watch a bunch of Brummies gear up for a trip on a swanky, glass-bottomed boat. I debate about staying longer but decide not to and head for the bus back. The seats are unusually crap and designed for midgets, so I fit in with some difficulty. Another siesta ensues, along with more chicken nuggets and hash browns to the finish of both packs. As the end of the holiday approaches, I scale back the fridge contents accordingly. Time in the evening is spent sharing ice with the Mancunians and extolling the virtues of Team America: World Police.

Tuesday 17th August 2010

A very slow day indeed today. I do more moviemaking stuff in the morning, heading down to St Pauls Bay for some nice, picturesque shots. Then back for lunch and the inevitable siesta. Much lack of hilarity ensues when the news of departure letter arrives without any news of departure written down on it. Instead, we have to trek across half of Lindos to the Olympic office to be told a couple of timing details that we could already have worked out for ourselves if we had half a brain, which we do. I finish the Ellroy and have started David Simon’s book Homicide. Dinner is a roll and some crisps and everyone else is out.

Wednesday 18th August 2010

The heat has become somewhat less oppressive in the last few days, and the nights comparatively more comfortable. This still hasn’t stopped me drenching myself in cold water throughout the night. Regardless, I surface at 6.30am and commence packing using the now traditional stickler’s check list method, which once more ensures I leave with everything I came with. In a bold gesture, I pack the case with everything I don’t want to spend the day lugging around, knowing I can always withdraw the books at the airport should there be another weight crisis. By 9.15am everything is pretty much done, and I’ve had breakfast and a shower. Myself and the other departees move the cases into position super early and the bloke on the truck arrives around 10am as promised, eventually, by the Olympic rep. I do the cool bag thing, then head down to the landing to film the boats arriving. I have lunch behind the beach then spend the rest of the afternoon hanging around the smaller beach reading, listening to music and waiting for photographic inspiration to strike. Slowly, the day passes. Sweaty and unkempt, I arrive at the Dionysus Restaurant and have another fabulous meal. I go through 2 litres of sparkling water, a stuffed potato skins starter, lamb with mushrooms, bacon and garlic and some garlic bread. It is all good. After a very leisurely meal, I fire up Enigma on my iPod and wander the streets of Lindos at night, which proves to be quite entertaining. When the time comes, I make my way back up to the drop-off point to the south of the town where we arrived last Thursday morning to be reunited with my suitcase. The suspicion dawns that my suitcase, along with everybody else’s suitcase, has just been left to sit by the side of the road all day without being watched where anyone could drive along and sweep them away. And I’m sure that this is the case. I would normally change into going home clothes around now, but can’t be arsed, and it’s not like there’s anywhere to change. The drop-off point is over a very busy, curvy road, with two blind corners, and it is not easy to cross at night, to say the least. Lindos and the Acropolis do look stunning by night though, and this is where I finish taking photographs. I’ve clocked up around 900, which have been edited down to the 655 that can be accessed on flickr at the supplied link topping this piece. Slowly we all assemble, with the exception of one group of six who fail to turn up, so we leave without them (they probably make their own way to the airport, people do this all the time). The coach trip is uneventful, but at the check-in desk, when I reach the head of the queue (which takes some time), my extra legroom seat has not been booked for the return flight. Fortunately, it’s detailed on my itinerary, and there’s no need for me to act like some asshole, so after some consultation with superiors and the like, firm insistence wins the day and I’m placed in 10A by one of the exit doors. Result. There’s no posted delay on our flight back though we take off about half an hour late. I drift off on the way back a bit, there continues to be a lack of in-flight entertainment, and the meal is a snacky breakfast of very short duration. My case arrives safely at Birmingham, with extra Looney Tunes stickers adorning it from The Cartoon Store in Rhodes Town. I estimate I’ve drunk about 7 litres of liquid today, but the 20 degree temperature drop we experience will take care of that. I arrive in shorts and a t-shirt, freezing, like any other idiot.

Two posts! It’s like a revolution in your head! Blu-ray viewings marked with a †, cinema visit marked with a *. Another reason Cameron may have waited so long to release Avatar (2009) was he wanted it to come out at a time where there was no competition, and there has been nothing at cinemas for a month, which completely sucks. Of course, distributors may have guessed Avatar was going to reign over all and moved everything else out accordingly. Thanks.

Angels & Demons (2009) †

When I’d finished reading Dan Brown’s original novel over the course of 2 or 3 days, what struck me was how much it resembled a bad novelization of a mindless Hollywood action movie, perhaps something directed by Michael Bay. Apart from its unbearable prose style, it’s drenched in all sorts of ludicrous conveniences and poor narrative plants. Oh, so one of the leading characters is a helicopter pilot, and there’s a helipad at the Vatican - what’s the betting that sooner or later, a helicopter is going to figure into the action? Yes, that kind of poor narrative plant. So when the news came that Ron Howard was going to make this film as a follow up to The Da Vinci Code (2006), I thought, best of luck, mate, you’re going to need it. There is an awful lot of tyre screeching car action across Rome and leafing of ancient manuscripts in high-tech libraries. As a divertissement, it is at least fun and has a lot of doomed Catholic cardinals meeting nasty ends, so it’s not all bad news, and you are at least spared having to endure Dan Brown’s deadly sentence construction.

Frost/Nixon (2008) †

In between removing Dan Brown’s verbals from the two filmic adaptations, Ron Howard knocked out this gem, and this time he has an actual playwright and living history from which to draw. Attention to detail borders on the insane. To film the interview sequences between Frost and Nixon, the production team tracked down the actual house that was used to film the original interviews back in 1977 and restaged them in the same section of the living room. The film also enjoys an odd structure with supposed straight-to-camera interviews being interpolated as if by some documentary crew working alongside Frost’s interview team. This has the odd side effect of humanising John Birt (Frost’s producer on the interviews), a man infamous during his period as Director General of the BBC for instituting a number of policies that were massively unpopular with the staff (check out Birt’s entry on Wikipedia for further gruesome details). Birt was called a Dalek by the late Dennis Potter, a label which has stuck ever since.

Being There (1979) †

They’re all dead. Well, nearly all dead. There’s no one (well, nearly no one) left to provide a commentary track or take part in a retrospective documentary. And, well, does the film need that kind of thing anyway? Released at the end of the 1970’s with Reagan’s election as President imminent, the idea of a moron becoming President through his inane babbling about his garden which everybody takes as profound political insight, seems as relevant as ever today after eight years of Dubya in the White House. If you can tune into the film’s wavelength, it remains deliriously, deliciously funny – from the blank faces of the FBI unable to discover anything about Chance’s background to the hopelessly wrong scene in which Shirley Maclaine pleasures herself under the delusion that she’s been magnificently seduced by Chance’s blankness. At the centre is Peter Sellers in the role he was born to play; he famously pursued both Jerzy Kosinski and Hal Ashby with the assertion that he was Chance, no one else could play the part as well, and that was how it had to be. In the gag reel there’s a brief sequence which rather looks like it was made for whatever was the contemporary equivalent of ShoWest (the US film distributors’ annual bean feast) where Sellers and Ashby clown around and hint that the film was as fun to make as it is to watch, even though the film is not an out and out gag fest but achieves its effects in more subtle ways.

Year of the Dragon (1985)

It took five years after the failure of Heaven’s Gate (1980) at the American box office before anyone would allow Michael Cimino anywhere near a camera again. And he turns out this politically incorrect gem, filmed back when Mickey Rourke was originally engaged by acting. It was heavily criticised at the time for its portrayal of Chinese characters as triad villains and its refusal to shy away from the complex racism of Rourke’s character, Stanley White. Looked at today, I don’t find that this criticism makes a lick of sense. The aging triad guys have a whole subplot all of their own which involves a younger man being given overall control of their criminal enterprise and what they choose to do when things don’t work out. If this sounds like the plot of a film by John Woo or Johnnie To or Takashi Miike, that’s because it is. I guess somebody somewhere took offence at a white guy directing a movie like this. Go figure. Cimino is irresistibly drawn to the epic, and a standout visit to a Thai drug lord sequence with thousands of extras sees him at his happiest. In comparison, confrontation scenes in which Rourke and John Lone tear strips off each other crackle with so much electricity and tension that it can only be resolved by a showdown gunfight on a deserted railway bridge at night as they run screaming and shooting at each other. In other words, proper thriller filmmaking of the kind we so rarely see any more.

Che Part One (2008) †
Che Part Two (2008) †

Soderbergh maintains a cool distance from his leading man throughout the four and a half hours of Che Guevara’s revolutionary adventures in Cuba and Bolivia. The two films are a compare and contrast diptych, an observation that becomes more acute when you see the two films really close together. All of the things that go so well in Cuba (they have the support of the people) are reversed in Bolivia (the people have a natural suspicion of strangers), so that by the time the endless trekking through the jungle in Cuba has been completed, they have an aim and a purpose and a clearly more coordinated chance of success, whereas the endless trekking through the jungle in Bolivia, pretty much isolated from any support and with American-trained military forces ranged with determination against them, means there is only doom and death left to face.

The Princess and the Frog (2009) *

Disney’s widely heralded return to hand-drawn animation is mostly successful, but somewhat let down by an overly formulaic storyline, which is not compensated for by the exoticism of its New Orleans setting, a view of the city that remains steadfastly tourist level. What it does showcase is the ease with which 2D animation can shift seamlessly into another visual style in a way that 3D animation, with its emphasis on surface realism and the creation of an imagined world, hasn’t been able to manage convincingly so far. The jazzy score and songs by Randy Newman are terrific, but hardly suitable for a young audience; presumably, once the DVD/Blu-ray arrives, there’ll be some hideous video from another Disney Channel moppet giving the best song a good kicking. So, all in all, good fun, but nothing new, and the addition of an African-American princess to the Disney club of princesses is not much to shout about either, it feels more like the addition of another segment to a market demographic. So yay for that.

Back from the dead. Blu-ray viewings marked with a †.

My Wife is a Gangster (2001)

An entertaining action comedy from South Korea in which, due to the urging of her dying sister, the ass-kicking female head of a criminal gang is persuaded to find a husband and get pregnant to keep the family name alive. Thus ensues much Miss Congeniality (2000) style hijinks as the hard as nails crime boss gets an extensive makeover, starts wearing dresses, goes on dates, and so on, before landing some poor schlub who knows nothing about her day job. Director Cho Jin-gyu doesn’t compromise on the violence like an American director would be persuaded to, so when asses get kicked, they remain kicked, yet he handles the comedy, some of which isn’t terribly subtle, with a deft touch. Best of all are the initial attempts of husband to sleep with wife, which contain a highly effective blend of humour and bone crunching violence.

Wall Street (1987) †

One of the contemporary criticisms of Wall Street was that the female roles were flat and undeveloped in contrast to those of the men. Sean Young was subjected to a certain amount of piss taking on set, and her screen time is limited and pretty anonymous. According to Oliver Stone, Daryl Hannah was unhappy with the rapaciousness of her character, so why, he ponders, did she take the part? So it’s not like this isn’t true, but then Wall Street, like Platoon (1986) before it, is a story of fathers and sons, a story of the multiple masculine role models presented to Bud Fox in all areas of his life. From which of them must he choose to draw upon as he seeks direction in his existence? This is pinpointed by a brief “Who am I?” scene on the balcony of his deluxe apartment. Charlie Sheen seems perpetually puzzled in the part, though this may be inexperience inadvertently working for him in the role. The relationship of fathers and sons is where Wall Street is at, so criticising it for undeveloped female characters seems rather beside the point. Also, lurking on the new Blu-ray, is a 2007 documentary in which some shining examples of modern day trading excellence confess that they thought Gordon Gekko was the hero of the movie and admit he was the inspiration for their career choices. And a year later, the world economy collapses. Are these two events related? Discuss.

Raging Bull (1980) †

I’ve never seen Raging Bull in the cinema, but every step in the home video market has taken me closer to it. My first copy of Raging Bull was a Warner Home Video VHS ex-rental copy in a bulky plastic case, early 80s vintage. And the power of the film remained undiminished in low resolution. Then came the nicely packaged MGM DVD, early 00s vintage, ancient enough to have been non-anamorphic. Finally, a pile of commentary tracks and documentaries and a DTS soundtrack get added to a Definitive Edition re-release with a proper 16:9 anamorphic transfer. And then all of that gets ported over to the new Blu-ray, with increased resolution so you can watch De Niro sweat and bleed in 1080p. Which in many ways is the point of Raging Bull: as much as it’s a Martin Scorsese picture, it’s also Robert De Niro’s. De Niro initiated the project and thrashed through the final version of the script with Scorsese after Paul Schrader and Mardik Martin had taken it as far as they could. And then De Niro went further, insisting upon the famous weight gain tactic that forever put paid to the young De Niro that came before. De Niro looks different after Raging Bull, but then, after Raging Bull, everything looked different because of how high Scorsese, De Niro and their team of collaborators had set the bar.

Appaloosa (2008) †

The Western continues to limp on, the genre that is harder to kill than a Romero zombie. They tend to be made by directors who love them, like James Mangold, who made 3:10 to Yuma (2007). And Ed Harris, who made this one, and a very satisfactory job he makes of it too. It has all the clichés in place, and is none the worse for them. In fact, when it comes to Westerns, you kind of want the clichés to be in play and you’d be disappointed if they weren’t. This is one source of the deep pleasures that genre filmmaking can offer, and is maybe a clue to the resistance of the Western to a bullet in the head.

Burn After Reading (2008) †

What do we want from the Coen brothers? A film like a film that they made before that surpasses it, in the way that Blood Simple (1984) has been arguably trumped by No Country for Old Men (2007)? Or a film like a film that’s purposely obscure and a bit “off” but can win the Palme d’Or at Cannes and seems like a great film but may not actually be one, a film that appeals to a minority rather than a majority, in the way that Barton Fink (1991) is beloved and A Serious Man (2009) may be regarded in the future? Should we demand that the Coen brothers always achieve such heights? And what heights these may be will depend on your personal preference – I’ve always wanted them to make something as wild and crazy as Raising Arizona (1987) again but it would appear they have no interest in doing so. Why is the new Coen brothers film always judged so intensely next to the film that preceded it? Burn After Reading is precisely the kind of film the Coen brothers make, a film that toys with genre, subverts it, is packed with out there characters and laugh out loud funny. Yet because it’s not No Country for Old Men II, it gets marked down as a lesser achievement. To me, the Coens seem more like a flavour that you have to be able to get, and if you get the flavour, you don’t care about the variations the flavour can have. In fact, you savour the variations.

The Departed (2006) †

I still remain puzzled that it takes an extra hour for The Departed to work through the same story that the original Hong Kong Internal Affairs (2002) managed in 90-odd minutes. Still, what an hour it is, eh? The promise in the cinema that this is a film that would reward repeat viewings is more than justified by this return visit. Oh, and Mark Wahlberg really needs to find a lot more movies in which he swears copiously and behaves like an offensive prick, because he’s really, really good at it. Stay away from Disney would be my career advice, Mark, a long way away.

A Clockwork Orange (1971) †

“The point is it works.” Hmm, that’s pretty much it.

My excuse is that I’ve had a hideous backlog of database work to do on the excessive number of DVDs and Blu-rays I’ve acquired since September and so have been unable to make weekly updates during this period. Pretty pathetic excuse. However, all is now forgotten, I’m reasonably on top of the database, and I’m now reporting in with news of watched stuff for the last two months. This was how this all started back in 2007, so this is a kind of retro thing as well. Hurrah! Cinema visits marked with a *, Blu-ray viewings marked with a †. Contains gratuitous use of the word bastard.

Gangsters (1976-78)

I remember the theme tune from the second series, which means that my parents allowed me to stay up to watch this show, and having now seen it all again thirty years later, what were they thinking? It has violence, nudity, some fine writing and some ropy acting. But I think the real reason was that the show was filmed in Birmingham, and really Birmingham, not just somewhere else with a caption saying Birmingham. And what’s more, it was filmed in a Birmingham that doesn’t exist anymore, as the inner ring road has been defanged and made more pedestrian-friendly, and the old Bull Ring has been demolished and replaced by a new one. Despite that, not everything has changed, and scenes shot inside New Street Station and just outside where I work provided a high level of geeky pleasure. There are explosions in the street; there’s a car chase at great speed which looks like it was filmed off the cuff on the Inner Ring Road early one Sunday morning with no police supervision in sight. Great!

Gangsters started as a one-off Play for Today, an attempt to produce something that drew on Hollywood film genres and then transposed them to contemporary society, rather than the standard Play for Today trope of kitchen sink miserablism (I know, it’s a hideous generalisation, get over it). What this meant was that Gangsters uniquely fashioned itself as an actual crime thriller, threw in the iconography of the Western, had a multi-ethnic cast before it was fashionable, and also gently sent itself up both obviously and less obviously, which by the end of the second commissioned series, became more of a problem than it had at first seemed. It was extremely popular with viewers from all backgrounds and was roundly condemned by pofaced killjoys in the media. It is also gleefully politically incorrect (when judged with today’s supposedly more enlightened eyes), relying on tasteless racist jokes and insults delivered by white, black and brown comedians to white, black and brown audiences to provide a commentary on the clashes developing between the characters elsewhere in the series.

The Play for Today is a terrific pilot, and most of Series One follows it up admirably, but Series Two descends into surrealism and self-parody, and not in a good way. By the time the hero has been killed off via an untreated cut finger, and Philip Martin, the show’s writer who turned up in the pilot as the villain, has reappeared as WC Fields for no reason whatsoever, it was clear the show had run its course.

King of New York (1990)

Everybody knows about Scarface (1983) and its influence on a generation of hip hop stars, but there’s another film of choice for dispossessed urban youth, and it’s this one with Christopher Walken delivering another cold-eyed, mesmerising portrait of uncompassionate evil as Frank White, the heir apparent drug lord of all New York. The only people who can stop him are the police, and the only way they can do it is to play dirtier than he does, climaxing in a dazzling car chase in the rain. The look of the film has been copied ad infinitum ever since, and this is also one of those everybody’s in it movies, as most of the supporting cast have gone on to starring roles in TV and films.

Mad Detective (2007) †

It took some time but I’ve finally seen a film by Johnnie To. And what a film to see first! A dazzling Blu-ray presentation from Eureka Video and a real headfuck of a movie. You see, it isn’t just about a mad detective - it puts you in his head so you start to see the world the way he sees it as well, tilting you away from realism and off into some other stranger realm. And a lot of it is awfully funny as well. I want some more.

Lone Star (1995)

I’m not big on John Sayles like some film buffs are, but I did catch this one fourteen years ago and liked it enough to buy it on DVD. Although not in the UK, because it hasn’t been released here, which seems pretty disgraceful when you see how good it is again. Some films are just too good for the mass market, I guess. It’s been released in Spain, though, and Germany. Just too good for the UK, I suppose. If you’re moaning that deeply rubbish films (Exhibit A, Santa Claus the Movie) are being released on Blu-ray before proper movies like this one (and God knows I am), at least you can console yourself with the thought that no one thinks it’s a good idea to release Lone Star on DVD in the UK. Fantastic.

State of Play (2003)

Not the Russell Crowe movie, but the BBC original, courtesy of a £5 price point from HMV. Everybody said that as good as the Russell Crowe movie was (and it was pretty good), the original starring John Simm was better. And it is. Six hours better. Six hours of exemplary thriller acting, writing, editing, filming and directing. And barely a policeman in sight, and when one does turn up, he’s being played by Philip Glenister, which will make some people happy (not necessarily me, I don’t watch television).

A Serious Man (2009) *

To the cinema for the latest hilarious put-on from the Coen brothers, a film that couldn’t be any more Jewish if it came blessed by rabbis, but remains accessible to outsiders because all of us have absorbed so much Jewish culture throughout our lives that all of the events of the film (bar mitzvahs, rabbinic consultations, torments from God, etc) seem oddly familiar as they remain deeply odd. I think the film’ll be even better second time around as the aura of doom that surrounds its hapless protagonist will seem even funnier and doomier.

Paranormal Activity (2009) *

Yes, I jumped. You would think years of horror films would have made me immune to such tactics, but no. You would think I could have figured out the ending after years of plot twists and narrative convolutions and scares and frights, but no. Which must mean this film really works. Sometimes, all it takes is a simple idea perfectly executed (and some savvy marketing) to let you experience the cold, dead hands of cinematic dread clutching you around the ankles, readying you for the jump. Let us hope that it will be a lot easier for the director of this film to get to a follow up than it was for the directors of The Blair Witch Project (1999).

The Box (2009) *

I still haven’t seen Southland Tales (2006) (but then, not that many people have seen it either) so I can’t tell if The Box is a return to form or a continuation of the eerie uncanny Richard Kelly tapped into with Donnie Darko (2001), but either way, The Box, as an all out OhMyGod creepfest, is probably a better film than Paranormal Activity, but may have been let down by a confusing trailer, from which I had taken some doubt that the movie was actually set in the 1970s, when it actually is set in the 1970s. There may well be more than a sniff of Twilight Zone about the whole affair, but that would be Twilight Zone in a good way, and not just a neat twist ending, M Night Shyamalan style. And like Paranormal Activity, it remains true to itself and doesn’t compromise, which may explain its relative box office failure and its no doubt future rediscovery in the video aftermarket, Donnie Darko style. I don’t need to recommend Paranormal Activity because people have mostly seen it, but The Box could do with some help: I think it’s better, I think it’s definitely worth a rental, it’s even worth a blind DVD/Blu-ray purchase later on in 2010. If you like a movie that messes with your head, you can do a lot worse than hang out with this one.

Léon (1994) †

A very young Natalie Portman with a sniper rifle, an unshaven Jean Reno in a beanie hat as the world’s coolest assassin/cleaner, and Gary Oldman popping weird pills, channelling Beethoven and shooting people. Films don’t get much better than this. For the record, this was the International Cut of the film, not the US theatrical version. Creepiest moment in the extras comes when Maïwenn Le Besco mentions that she fell in love with Luc Besson when she was 12 and that the film is in some way their story (probably without the Mob boss and the shootings). It turns out this relationship only developed into an actual relationship in 1993 when she gave birth to a daughter, Shanna, with Luc Besson, at the age of 17. Maïwenn is very eloquent and passionate in defending her right to have such feelings at such a young age. It all seems very French. Another thing that struck me is how come Luc Besson and Thierry Arbogast photograph New York as the most exciting and beautiful place in the world, yet filmmakers who actually live in the city, like Martin Scorsese, Spike Lee, and Oliver Stone, are almost entirely unable to do the same?

Avatar (2009) *

It was quite good. It should do some business. This was opening night, first showing at the Imax in Birmingham in 3D. The 3D in this film was so good it made other 3D films look like 2D. One of the things James Cameron revealed somewhere, possibly buried deep in the extras on the Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) DVD, is that he’s always tried to direct his films in a kind of 3D anyway. Once you know this, it’s impossible to watch one of his films without being aware that attention is being paid to the foreground, midground and background all of the time, and there’s a depth being created on screen with a purpose. So it’s a relatively small step to make to filming in actual 3D. Cameron’s been testing out the 3D technology with a couple of undersea Imax adventures - Ghosts of the Abyss (2003) and Aliens of the Deep (2005) - as well as waiting for motion capture to develop to such a stage that production of the film could even be possible. Avatar is a classic style over content film, where the ordinariness and predictability of the story conflicts are overwhelmed by how the story is told. I’ve been hearing the word “immersive” a lot, and it is absolutely true. Maybe such an approach needs to have a fairly mundane storyline to keep you grounded as a viewer even as the characters on screen take flight. And at the corners of this film, what I sense is what the future may hold when a director really takes 3D by the scruff of the neck and tells a story that can only be told best in that way, much as Peter Jackson did with CGI technology, motion capture and large miniatures in The Lord of the Rings (2001-03) trilogy. The future of high tech event cinema remains fascinating, but it will need new, fresh storytellers with exceptional ability to take it to the next level. Talentless hacks need not apply.

The Doors (1991) †

Close your eyes. We’ll see the snake; see the serpent appear. His head is ten feet long and five feet wide. He has one red eye and one green eye. He’s seven miles long. Deadly. I see all the history of the world on his scales, all people, all actions. We’re all just little pictures on his scales. God, he’s big, he’s moving, devouring consciousness, digesting power. Monster of energy. It’s a monster. We’re going to kiss the snake on the tongue. Kiss the serpent. But if it senses fear, it’ll eat us instantly. But if we kiss it without fear, it’ll take us through the garden, through the gate, to the other side. Ride the snake… until the end of time.

In 1080p and DTS-HD Master Audio 7.1. It’s the only way to fly.

The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970) †

Looks awfully good for a nearly 40 year old film. It’s hard to believe that this was the Fistful of Dollars (1964) of the giallo as a lot of it looks awfully familiar. Of course, that would be all of the films worldwide that have imitated it.

Bad Santa (2003)

Because it was Christmas and I felt like watching a Christmas movie.

Well, my kind of Christmas movie anyway.

Team America: World Police (2004)

Matt Damon!

Revenge (1989) †

For the record, this was the newly shortened Unrated Director’s Cut which runs at least 20 minutes shorter than the original version of the film, and is sexier and more violent and pacier and in all probability the film Tony Scott was trying to make back in 1989, except notoriously hands-on producer Ray Stark got in his way in a time before Tony Scott had established a reputation as a man who could be trusted. For me, Tony Scott only becomes a proper filmmaker with this film, and, who knows, if it had been a success, he might not have bothered with Days of Thunder (1990), the Blu-ray of which sits in HMV tormenting me with its badness. It knows I’ll have to buy it sometime, and it knows I don’t like it. Argh.

Inglourious Basterds (2009) †

I’m not offended by the word bastard. At all. It’s a bastard PG swearword. It’s not bastard upsetting in any bastard way whatsoever to me personally. However, it would appear that the bastards at the BBC and the bastards at the ASA have a real bastard of a problem with the word bastard, because they won’t allow any bastard Radio 1 disc jockey bastard to use the word bastard in connection with the bastard film, and bastard local radio ads and bastard billboards and bastard adverts can’t use the bastard word bastard at all, which has had the hilarious effect that the bastard film has been regularly referred to as Inglorious, the new film from Quentin Tarantino. What a bastard!

And since last time, this is what I’ve watched on Blu-ray marked with a † and at the cinema marked with a *.

Wanted (2008) †

Has it remained as stupid but fun as it was in the cinema? Yes it has. I have seen Night Watch (2004) at the cinema but found it to be incoherent enough not to warrant an after market purchase yet. Wanted, however, was a much easier decision to make, it has lots of swearing, crazy action stuff and Angelina Jolie with a big gun. As far as I’m concerned, you could make a dozen movies with Angelina Jolie with a big gun in a tight t-shirt and I would see them all. Give the people what they want. And that’s what I want.

Up (2009) *

I wear glasses and I’m very resistant to the idea of 3D cinema as the saviour of cinema. Because for me to experience 3D in the cinema I have to wear glasses over my glasses, and this is okay at the Imax because they make them specially, but I’m not entirely sure that they’ve taken the same amount of care at my local Odeon. So I saw Up in 2D, old school style. And it was breathtaking and magnificent. All of the cinematography courses that were brought to bear on WALL•E (2008) have been carried over into Up, along with what looks like a lot of work on particle system clouds; the R&D demonstrated in the scrupulously excellent short Partly Cloudy (2009) which runs before the main feature. Unless I’ve missed something, Pete Docter will be carrying away the Best Animated Feature Oscar in February, but to me the more interesting question is when will Pixar win the Best Film Oscar? It could even be this year because Up is so fabulous it’s hard to see how live action filmmakers can compete against a film this accomplished, generous, warm, genuinely emotional and richly comedic. For being “merely” a bunch of pixels pushed around a screen, Up has genuine depth, and has enabled the company to reach a new plateau in excellence. I think Pixar is already better than Disney in the 1940s, and maybe better than their contemporaries at Studio Ghibli in Japan (Pixar wouldn’t think this themselves; John Lasseter’s immense respect for Hayao Miyazaki has been made widely known).

Jennifer’s Body (2009) *

In which Diablo Cody proves that Juno (2007) was not just a one-off, and that she has a sustainable talent which, if it can continue to produce films as fun as this, will run and run. Although there is a limit to how much Hollywood execs are prepared to invest in a woman writer with a yen for creative control. The film was made on a limited budget of $16 million and took pretty much the same amount at the box office in the States, and at the moment has a pretty mediocre imdb rating because most Americans (well, American imdb voters anyway) aren’t for the most part smart enough to realise what kind of movie this is. And they’ve even got this year’s most highly gratuitous lipstick lesbian makeout scene to point them in the right direction (see Amanda Seyfried and Megan Fox snog for a bit for no readily apparent reason other than that it’s hot, and it’s what we always secretly want). This film is a satire of high school movies very much in the vein of Heathers (1988), and has any number of dopey plot points and silly cliches not because of bad writing but because that’s what high school movies have to have.

Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) *

In which Wes Anderson takes his highly stylised, deeply formal, idiosyncratic filmmaking style, imposes it on the world of stop-motion animation, and makes an animated film that is in every sense the equal of his live action work. Anderson’s films are an acquired taste, and they might not appear to be for everyone, but I can report that a young boy sat with his family pretty near me in the cinema enjoyed the film as much as I did, so perhaps Anderson’s filmmaking point of view isn’t as arty and esoteric as the critics might like it to be; maybe Anderson’s had it right all along, and he’s making films that are accessible to everyone while not looking like they are accessible at all.

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009) *

Which will probably make a lot more sense after seeing the Blu-ray with a Terry Gilliam commentary in which he can explain the movie more clearly than the movie can explain itself. A big reduction in the price of special effects has allowed Gilliam to put on screen for fake what he had to build for real when he made The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988) twenty years ago. After all of the trauma of the production, which saw Gilliam endure not just the death of his leading man, Heath Ledger, but  the death of one of the producers, William Vince, as well, it’s amazing that what’s left is as coherent as it is, although it’s more of a Gilliam kind of coherence than what usually passes for coherence in the cinema. At its heart, the film may well be a simple restatement of the power of stories, and thus film, and thus the narratives we tell each other to sustain our lives, and story is something which should be valued in our culture and not denigrated or devalued or denied. It’s certainly what they think at Pixar.