Nobody Knows Anything

Just a couple of movies in three weeks. I’ve been reading books instead, specifically the works of David Peace, one after another, one after another, relentlessly, specifically, one after another. Blu-ray movie is marked with a †.

Little Miss Sunshine (2006) †

People say to me, they say, what do you mean, you haven’t seen Little Miss Sunshine yet? Why not? How can this be? Can this be happening? Can this really be happening? Has reality twisted so much out of true that I’ve managed to avoid a family comedy that’s right up my street. Surely, it’s a movie straight after my twisted little dark heart. And so it is. This is my kind of family comedy, full of unnecessary swearing and ironic edginess, the kind of film that once could have been made inside the Hollywood system but is now confined to the independent sector. Didn’t stop it picking up awards, didn’t stop it finding an audience. And somehow, somehow, don’t ask me how, I’ve managed to spend three years remaining blissfully ignorant of what just exactly Abigail Breslin’s pageant performance would contain, and I will not, I could not, I will not reveal it here, but it was beyond fantastic when it arrived. Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris come from the worlds of advertising and music videos (specifically some excellent promos for The Smashing Pumpkins, 1979 and Perfect in particular), but unlike no talent no-hopers like McG, they’re actually interested in people, hence this film, hence its success, hence its release on Blu-ray with all the extras that were originally only on the Region 1 DVD, so hooray for Blu-ray again.

Tin Cup (1996)

As it was US Open weekend, I checked out Ron Shelton’s great golf movie again. Shelton’s strength as a maker of sports films, as I’m sure I’ve mentioned here before, as I know I’ve mentioned here before, is that his films aren’t about the sports they seem to be about, they’re about the people. The film is a rescue attempt on Roy McAvoy’s hopelessness in life, and refreshingly doesn’t wrap things up with a big bow at the end. Maybe things won’t work out, just like they sometimes don’t in life. This is also my kind of romantic comedy, full of swearing and jokes and character turns, and not shopping and PG-13 harmlessness, as romantic comedies have edged towards a mere 13 years later. Back soon, hopefully less influenced by David Peace, and hopefully when some decent fucking movies have opened amongst the current summer drought of shite, marked as it is by Terminator 4 and Transformers 2.

Really, who gives a flying fuck about either of them? Not me. Out.

Bin busy. Mysterious absences below may well be explained later. Or even filled in. For now, this is what I’ve been watching for the last month, cinema visits marked with a *, films on Blu-ray marked with a †.

Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003) †

What makes this film work is its emphasis on simplicity, and its under-reliance on the supernatural. One of the big unlikely hits of 2003 together with Finding Nemo (2003) amid a sea of uninteresting sequels and box office turkeys, Pirates 1, for all of its skeletal shenanigans, keeps at least one foot on dry land, and narrative sanity. It has good sword fights, it has good jokes, and it has Johnny Depp as Keith Richards; it even has something resembling a heart, which is pretty good going for a film based on as soulless a source as a rather sad-looking amusement park ride.

Deep Throat (1972)

[Details to follow]

9 Songs (2004)

[Details to follow]

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (2006) †

Odd that the writers of the second two films spend the entire ten minutes of the credits on Pirates 1 going through their various sequel ideas, but by the time Pirates 2 & 3 go into production back to back, the script hasn’t been finished. And it shows. I imagine that focus groups conducted by Disney in the wake of Pirate 1’s success identified the supernatural elements as people’s favourite thing about it, so let’s give the people what they want, eh? So instead of a way more interesting direction for the sequel, one that focused on the people and their further adventures, something along the lines of Richard Lester’s rather brilliant The Four Musketeers (1974), we get a special effects extravaganza, a tough time for Industrial Light & Magic (erasing everything about Bill Nighy’s performance except his eyes, and so on), and a big beastie that doesn’t look half as good as the thing that creeps out of the lake outside the Mines of Moria in The Fellowship of the Ring (2001).

Baise-Moi (2000)

[Details to follow]

Ai No Corrida (1976)

[Details to follow]

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End (2007) †

And to think people complained about The Matrix Revolutions (2003)! From nowhere, the pirates now have a council and a king and a big book of law and all sorts of other uninteresting bollocks, and the damn thing goes on forever. Where the first film was content to stage inventive sword fights in real locations, the third film can only feel satisfying (apparently) if it climaxes with a sword fight on the top mast of a ship that’s circling around an enormous whirlpool with reality left far behind, and even more of a tough time for Industrial Light & Magic (because the rain obliterates the green screen and the blue screen and they have to put the sea and the other ship into the scene behind the fight and they have nothing to key off). The two Pirates sequels add a whole lot of stuff, but neither of them are as inventive as the original; you cannot predict when a hit will strike, and you can’t take what made that first film a hit, bottle it, redo it and throw it out again in hope, if you don’t understand why the first movie worked in the first place. If you did, you’d have made even more money, but alas…

The Fly (1986) †

The Pirate movies look great on Blu-ray, and so they should, because they were made, like, yesterday. A 20 year old film from the time of softer film stocks and smoky cinematography is a whole different kettle of fish. The Fly looks magnificent though. The images are pretty much what I remember seeing in the cinema back in 1987, and the special effects are something else. These are proper physical effects done the hard way on the set and they look great in a way CGI has barely ever been able to match. Sure, Bill Nighy’s Davy Jones has cool tentacles, but knowing those tentacles never existed takes enough off the illusion to deconstruct its impact a little. Jeff Goldblum has ten layers of crap all over him for half of the movie, but you can still see his performance through the latex in a way I don’t think you can with Bill Nighy.

Shortbus (2006)

[Details to follow]

Drag Me to Hell (2009) *

And to think Sam Raimi has spent ten years of his life making Spider-Man movies when he could have been making movies like these. Tch. Considering that the gypsy curse is about as hackneyed a story device as you could come up with, Drag Me to Hell delivers and delivers in spades, with a great, overenthusiastic sound mix that sets the whole theatre a-groaning, and a relish for some of that old school unpleasantness that made The Evil Dead (1982) such fun. Heh heh heh. It even starts with the Universal logo circa 1982, which certainly earns it some extra points in my book. And just because you can see the ending coming if you’ve seen enough of these movies, doesn’t mean you feel cheated when it arrives.

kiss kiss bang bang (2005) †

Is it as good as it was when I first saw it, or has its smart-alec tomfoolery paled a little? Not a bit of it, Shane Black’s directorial debut, a kind of comedy noir companion to The Big Lebowski (1998), still plays like a dream.

Only another three films watched this last fortnight, but a lot bought and a lot to come. And of the three, two of them are cinema visits , marked with a *.

Midnight Run (1988)

Was it a new phenomenon? The buddy cop movie? Hadn’t it been done before back in the 1930s? Or the 40s? Or the 50s? Or the 70s? Isn’t Freebie and the Bean (1974) a buddy cop movie? Whatever, in the 1980s, the success of Beverly Hills Cop (1984) and Lethal Weapon (1987) meant only one thing: every studio wanted a buddy cop movie, and you know what? Most of the movies that resulted really stunk up the place, as they combined harsh language, mild violence and male bonding, and most of them were not built to last. The Lethal Weapon series in particular degenerated into disinterested farce. Here is one exception. For some reason, Martin Brest has only directed four films since the first Beverly Hills Cop, and since the last film he directed was Gigli (2003), he may never be allowed to make another one. I didn’t like Beverly Hills Cop the one time I saw it, I felt the comedy was too broad and the violence too strong, I didn’t feel the mix was right. Then along comes Midnight Run with good reviews and an exceptional cast and knocks one right out of the park. Ludicrously, Universal Pictures have found themselves unable to release this back catalogue classic in anamorphic widescreen in the UK even though we’re now 12 years into DVD, and it’s taken me this long to acquire the Region 1 reissue. Midnight Run remains strong - if anything, it has more swearing than Beverly Hills Cop, but the violence isn’t quite as excessive - it’s an all round better mix - and Robert De Niro and Charles Grodin have fabulous chemistry as the leads. If you’ve never seen it, you owe it to yourself to check it out.

State of Play (2009) *

If every single review of this film says that it’s good, but it’s not as good as the BBC series from 2003 that it’s an Americanised remake of, then it looks like it might be a really good idea to check out the original, and, cannily, HMV have a truckload of them in stock for five English pounds. Result. And it’s true, it is very well done, it packs a heap of plot into a two hour movie, pulls solid performances out of all the principal players, enjoys itself with some endearing newspaper movie cliches, and points out that evil corporations may be evil, but they are no match for the duplicity of prominent figures in public life.

Star Trek (2009) *

For the record, this was a packed screening at the Imax in Birmingham. After Star Trek: Nemesis (2002) was the first even-numbered Star Trek film to be not much cop, breaking up a long line of successes that date back to Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982), JJ Abrams and his Alias and Lost buddies really have it stacked against them - having to contend not only with a writer’s strike that hampered the film on the set (the strike meant that coming up with better lines of dialogue on the spur of the moment was something that in theory could not be allowed to happen), the failure of the Enterprise (2001) TV show, and, of course, the notorious fanbase. I’m a long time Star Trek movie fan who’s seen quite a lot of the original TV series, but never really had much time for The Next Generation and all that other stuff. The principal problem I have with Star Trek is that, a lot of the time, if not way too much of the time, it isn’t any good at all; it doesn’t have interesting ideas, it doesn’t have engaging concepts, it isn’t really proper science fiction, it’s never really had sufficient budgets, it’s woolly and liberal and simple-minded and more than a little politically correct in the worse way - that the psychologist (Marina Sirtis) occupied a seat next to the Captain in the Next Generation always struck me as a deeply wrong idea. I’ve been to Star Trek movie marathons, which, in the days before DVD, allowed you to see again a whole bunch of the films in sequence ending with the latest one. Sometimes people would dress up in costumes. But not me. So, has JJ Abrams made the first good odd-numbered Star Trek film since the first one?

A slight digression here. I saw Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) when I was 12 and I loved it then and I like it even more now, when it should have become stale through repetition. If there’d been an internet in 1979, it would have been abuzz with fanbase devotees moaning about how could the film be called a motion picture since it never moved, it had no zip and it was really rather boring, but at least it was Star Trek on the big screen at last. I’ve never thought any of that. I love the endless special effects sequences as the Enterprise enters the V’ger cloud, I love Jerry Goldsmith’s music, I love the romanticism of it all, and I love the final title card; The Human Adventure is Just Beginning. All right, my 12 year old self thought back then, this is the kind of science fiction film I want to spend the rest of my life watching. And so last night I checked out the opening hour of Star Trek 1 just to confirm what JJ Abrams had missed, because he’s missed an awful lot.

JJ Abrams still has no idea how to make a motion picture in widescreen; he still thinks he’s directing TV. There is an awful lot of shaky camerawork which may be concealing shoddy special effects or bad acting; it’s kind of hard to tell. There are a lot of big heads; big heads have their place on TV because the camera needs to be that close for you to be able to see them act because the screen is so small, and even a 50″ TV is a small TV in comparison to a four storey high cinema screen. But in the cinema, you don’t need closeups to be that extreme all of the time because you have the space of the big wide screen, and you can afford to drop the camera back a little and frame your actors in any variety of interesting ways. Robert Wise, as old school a director as there is, comes up with countless shot variations on the bridge of the Enterprise that are never dull; he establishes the space the actors inhabit so you always know where they are and you are. Abrams has no idea how to do this, because he spends most of his time cheating the space; it’s how Alias was made in Los Angeles when it was meant to be taking place worldwide. You can forgive cheating on TV because you expect it.

That said, Star Trek [11] is the first wholly successful odd-numbered Star Trek movie since the first one, and it is enjoyable, it does have a decent villain (though not a patch on Ricardo Montalban, but then who is?), and it is a successful reboot of the franchise. What it doesn’t have is beauty, romance, emotional resonance or a music score you come out humming. I also have the feeling it’s a cinematic dead end; to me it feels like Abrams and his cohorts threw everything but the kitchen sink into this movie in the hope that some of it would stick, and most of it does. Not since the first two have there been two wholly successful Star Trek movies in sequence, and Star Trek 12 now looks like an awfully difficult film to make. Can Abrams and co do a Dark Knight and produce something better then their initial reboot? I don’t know if they can, because I think they’ve already shot their bolt. I hope I’m not right. I hope they prove me wrong. We shall see.

One cinema visit this week marked with a *, and one film on DVD.

Knocked Up (2007)

Persuaded to buy by HMV’s ludicrous loss leader price point of £3 for the 2-disc version and Seth Rogen’s strong and filthy comedic performance in Zack and Miri Make a Porno (2008), I finally got around to catching up with the Apatow thing. As with American Pie (1999) ten years earlier, Knocked Up turns out to be a film that’s more intelligent and contemporary about men and women than you’d have thought it would be, at the same time as it’s hilariously crude, at the same time as it’s more than a little conservative. In the end, and I don’t think I’m giving anything away here, it all works out for Ben and Alison and they finish up bonding over the newborn, but it’s the way in which they get there that makes the journey so fascinating. I was particularly struck by the earthquake scene in which Ben’s first response is to rush out of the house clutching his three foot long bong which has “helped” him through the years rather than his pregnant maybe-girlfriend who’s asleep in the next room. The arrival of the police in the aftermath causes Ben to cast his bong to the ground where it shatters, and I found myself wondering if this was deliberate Freudian symbolism of the most basic kind, or what? Is the film telling its useless, slacker, dope-smoking audience that it’s time to grow up and face the responsibilities of life in a conservative way? Yet this isn’t a film that can play to a family friendly audience, packed to the gills as it is with inventive swearing, drug use and unprotected sex. There’s a particularly nice scene in the hospital just before the birth where Ben tells Debbie, Alison’s sister, who’s been rightfully suspicious of Ben since the beginning, to stay the hell out of the delivery room since that’s the place he ought to be, and instead of being insulted by this, Debbie’s happy that Ben’s finally starting to show some responsibility for the situation, and is in love with Alison in a way in which she can approve.

Let the Right One In (2008) *

And at the other end of the spectrum, over in Sweden, in the winter, a young girl and a mysterious older man move into an apartment next to a young boy and his mother. The boy is being bullied at school, and the young girl has a need for blood. She doesn’t drink… wine… Favouring the slow build over the crash bang of a crass Hollywood project, coupled with some tight image framing and a point of view that is resolutely child high (very much along the lines of the child’s POV camera level in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial [1982]), this is a film of rising intensity that parcels out its moments of horror judiciously and to full effect. The vampire is the most tedious and overworked icon in the horror lexicon, and nothing can make a horror fan like myself groan more than the news that there’s yet another teen vampire movie with an anti-sex message on the way, namely Twilight (2008), or that Anne Rice or another member of her dark cabal has published another book. Vampires are what people who haven’t read widely in horror fiction think the genre is all about, and I would include publishers and movie companies in this who ought to know better. If I never saw another vampire film or read another vampire novel for the rest of my life, I could cope with that, because the capabilities and scope of horror as a genre so far exceed the simplistic vampire thing it isn’t even funny. And yet, every now and then, along comes a film like Near Dark (1987) or Let the Right One In, and you go, yeah, this is my kind of vampire film, a piece of art that brings something fresh and new to a table loaded with tedious crap like The Lost Boys (1987) or Twilight. It is a pity that it’s the tedious crap that tends to be popular, but popularity is no reflection of quality, and it would be nice to think that those teens who may grow tired of Stephanie Meyer’s lightweight mythology would find themselves in the need for something a little more meaty and disturbing, and they may find their way to Let the Right One In and its chilling, gloomy, dimly lit, Scandinavian pleasures.

Oh dear, a month has slipped by without posts, mostly down to an appointment at Memorabilia at the NEC where I finally paid full price for some Blu-ray discs from America - so far in the UK I’ve acquired over 60 in various deals and secondhand purchases and not actually bought one as priced in HMV. The last month has only seen a few films viewed, though this has included a cinema visit marked with a * and two Blu-ray screenings marked with a †. But first, satire.

Citizen Ruth (1996)

A first outing for the Sideways (2004) team of Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor in which the opposing camps in the abortion debate grapple with the paint-sniffing pregnant loser Ruth, played by Laura Dern in full dressed down mode, who’s been ordered to terminate her pregnancy by a judge or face a lengthy prison sentence. Both sides seem more determined to stir up trouble and/or secure extensive media time for their respective causes than act out of any concern for Ruth’s predicament. Some bits don’t work, some bits work only too well, and in an enjoyable plot development Elmore Leonard would envy, Ruth has chance meetings with a self-help tape and a bag of cash that might finally let her build a better life…

Team America: World Police (2004)

For the record, this was the uncut version of the film, finally. Five years have not blunted this equal opportunities savaging of both sides of the War on Terror: gungho American Idiots on one side, and peacenik Hollywood actors on the other, but both sides are but pawns in the plastic hands of Kim Jong-il, who, as Trey Parker and Matt Stone mention in the extras, is in real life a cinema nut, so he must have seen this film by now. Nothing will have prepared him, though, for the most sublime moment in recent cinema comedy, when his puppet namesake unleashes his deadly jungle predators…

No Country for Old Men (2007) †

This film won Best Picture at the Oscars, you know. I’d kind of forgotten that. As a measure of how good it is, I’ve already seen this film at the cinema, so I know what happens, and I still found it unbearably tense second time around. Now that is the mark of good filmmaking. I don’t think that this is a return to form after Intolerable Cruelty (2003) and The Ladykillers (2004), because I liked both of them. It’s just more of that good Coen stuff.

3:10 to Yuma (2008) †

I’m pretty good at snap purchases of films I wouldn’t necessarily go out of my way to see at the cinema. For example, this was James Mangold’s follow-up to Walk the Line (2005) which I liked quite a bit, once I got to see it properly after a disastrous cinema screening I walked out of. It pits Batman (Christian Bale) against Maximus (Russell Crowe), not to mention Bettie Page (Gretchen Mol), and is a remake of a 1957 film derived from a short story by Elmore Leonard. And, perhaps more crucially, Lionsgate were doing a cheaper Blu-ray promo with HMV which meant it was only £10. And it was worth every penny. Especially in high definition. It may be in some senses a hoary old oater, but it felt a lot more like an Elmore Leonard character-based thriller than a western, which definitely gave it an edge up.

Coup de Torchon (1981)

A Steadicam film noir from Bertrand Tavernier shot in Senegalese sunlight that alternates between humour and horror often in the same scene. Philippe Noiret is good value as a useless cop who may or may not be stupid, who may or may not be a sociopathic killer, who may or may not intend for what happens to happen, but somehow manages to make the most of it. The more criminal his actions become, the more easily he is able to commit them without any sign of remorse or chance of punishment. Fascinating stuff, and all very French.

Che Part Two (2008) *

In which the reason why there are two films and not one film becomes all too apparent. After the successful venture in Cuba in 1957-58, Che slipped into Bolivia in 1966, hoping to repeat the revolution from the jungle technique that had worked so well before. Unfortunately, as the film makes clear, exploited Bolivian peasants, the Moscow-inflected Communist Party of Bolivia, and the US-trained Bolivian military didn’t take kindly to Cuban interlopers interfering in the running of their country and grass roots support for Che’s efforts dwindled until the inevitable betrayal. The two films mirror each other, one a success, the other a failure, so this means that Part Two is a bit of a downer, since, and I don’t think this counts as much of a spoiler, it doesn’t end well for Che. There is an inordinate amount of aimless marching around in the jungle, ostensibly intended to train the rebels up, but more revelatory of Che’s desire to lead from the front, unlike Cuba where Castro led the way, and Che’s ultimate failure to do so. Part One establishes why Che entered the revolutionary mythology of the Left in the 1970s, and Part Two tells you why this was not a good idea, demythologising Che’s methods and leaving him shot to death in a shack in the middle of nowhere, aptly foreshadowing the plentiful failures, doomed insurrections and pointless deaths of revolutionary movements to come.

101 (1989)

Another reason for the lack of updates has been my pursuit of the 10 suddenly deleted 2006-2007 SACD/DVD remasters of Depeche Mode’s back catalogue, the DVDs of which contain short films running between 30 and 60 minutes, which, in tried and trusted Behind the Music fashion, amount to a lengthy documentary about the highs and lows of the career of one of Britain’s more unlikely success stories. A lengthy documentary in which both former members, Vince Clarke and Alan Wilder, take part, it serves as a reminder that the arc of growth sought by the majority of bands in the wake of the Beatles’ arc of growth can, in the end, only be developed by the few. Oasis, by comparison, hit the ground running and established their sound in 1994, but 14 years later have found themselves unable to move beyond it - there is no growth for Oasis, just a flatline. The Mode have transcended their synthpop origins more than once, been blighted by internal friction, unforgiving technology, drug addiction, alcohol addiction, depression, and massive success that arrived at the right time for the band but at the wrong time for Dave Gahan, who’s died three times but is still alive and now clean. The first big step to the next level is marked by this film, a record of the 1988 concert at the Pasadena Rose Bowl in front of 70,000 fans, captured by DA Pennebaker and his team in full vérité style, the progress to the Rose Bowl marked by earlier concerts and songs from the band and a record company organised bus tour of some fans who follow them on the road (inventing reality TV[!]), that’s if the world’s worst coach driver can find his way around a country he seems oddly unfamiliar with - the guy seems not to own maps either. The flash of transcendence that elevates this film to another level takes place at the end, when a simple, uncontrived, arm waving gesture by Gahan during Never Let Me Down Again sweeps across all 70,000 fans and the lights in the arena come up behind Gahan and reveal that everyone has joined in. This isn’t the mildly fascistic stadium hand clapping that marked Queen’s Radio Gaga at Wembley, this is something else, a spectacle of union between band and audience in the strangest of locations that signals the success to come and also marks Gahan’s own recognition that this is the summit, and the only way forward is downhill all of the way, and fortunately Gahan managed to survive the descent. Just.

No cinema visits this week, just the fallout from two doomed relationships instead. This week’s post was written to a midi file of Keith Jarrett’s 1975 Köln Concert that forms part of the score to Bad Timing.

the break-up (2006)

The biggest lie that romantic comedy sells is that there is a happy ending for everyone. The canniest romantic comedies take their lead from Shakespearean comedies, where the love of the romantic leads is torn asunder before being reconfirmed at the film’s/play’s end. Yet the tearing asunder of the relationship serves as a reminder that the status quo is more fragile than it may seem and that disruption and discord are never too far away from what may have seemed like an idyll. Vince Vaughn wanted to be involved in a film where a relationship came to an end in an amusing but more realistic way and the happy ending might be the realisation on the part of both sides that it was better the relationship ended when it did as a way of sparing them the pain that might have resulted if resentments had been allowed to simmer unchallenged for longer. The film surrounds its protagonists with all the accoutrements of traditional romcoms: best friends for the leads, a singalong at a family meal, a fabulous condo apartment well beyond the means of their respective salaries, and a bit of PG13-style nudity. The film’s ending suddenly reminded me of another film where a relationship goes nastily wrong, so I had to watch it again.

Bad Timing (1980)

If the break-up would be a bad choice for a date movie (or maybe it wouldn’t), this would be much worse. Bad Timing isn’t just a film from a director at the height of his powers (although it is), it isn’t just Theresa Russell’s finest onscreen work (although it is), it doesn’t just contain the finest musical choices any film could have (alithough it does), it’s something far more intense and insightful than the break-up could ever hope to even scratch the surface of. In a lot of ways, it’s unfair to compare Peyton Reed’s light comedy with a dramatic turn to Nicolas Roeg’s extraordinary masterpiece, because in all aspects of the filmmaking process, Bad Timing is superior. The editing is extraordinary and innovative where the break-up’s editing is polished but pedestrian. Eric Edwards does a valiant job of lighting the break-up so it doesn’t look like a bog standard Hollywood romcom, but his work is no match for a cinematographer like Anthony Richmond at the top of his game. The script of the break-up gives Jennifer Aniston and Vince Vaughn nothing like the opportunities offered to Theresa Russell and Art Garfunkel to tear emotional shreds off each other long before Bad Timing reaches its appalling climax, the central mystery I will not reveal here, and the reason Rank Film Distributors were so horrified they removed the gong from the front of the film. It’s more than a distinction between mainstream and arthouse, it’s more a contrast of American and European. Vince and Jennifer are only too keen to talk about what’s going on between them, but Art and Theresa don’t have the time to talk, such is the intensity of their passion and the depth of the lies and secrets they’re keeping from each other. Vince and Jennifer think that the other might be knowable, they think that there’s still hope; Art and Theresa remain strangers to each other even when they’re together, they’re in the grip of a sensual obsession that will not end well for either of them. Bad Timing is a Borges-inspired labyrinth of passion where there are only wrong turns that take you deeper and deeper into its maze. Every moment is exceptional and fascinating, crafted like a fine nightmare from which no one will be allowed to wake up. It has an intent and ambition that only great work has, and the merely mediocre is unable to stand up to it.

Quite a deliberate gap here as I didn’t watch any films the previous week, but this current week was a little different. Two cinema visits marked with a *. One Blu-ray movie marked with a †.

Gran Turino (2008) *

Eastwood’s late hot streak of quality shows no signs of abating. Presumably buoyed by shooting Flags of Our Fathers (2006) and Letters from Iwo Jima (2006) back to back, he does it again in 2008 with first Changeling, and then this, widely touted as his farewell to acting. The trailer promises a return to Dirty Harry (1971) style ass-kicking, but the film itself delivers something more than a little different. Eastwood, with the exception of a barber’s cameo from the Zodiac (2007) killer, John Carroll Lynch, surrounds himself with a cast of (mostly) young unknowns from multi-ethnic backgrounds, and it is the clash between the Eastwood character’s old school, Korean battle hardened ways and the brashness of modern youth that provides the invigorating cultural clashes that form the spine of the film. There have been few sequences more fun in recent cinema than Eastwood’s attempts to “man up” his somewhat wimpy young next door neighbour, Thao. And most of the spark comes from the anti-PC dialogue that throws around racial epithets with the freedom and confidence to assume that everyone is fair game and open to abuse and no one should be offended, and if you are offended, tough, deal with it.

The Bank Job (2007) †

Roger Donaldson is a 2nd generation Australian film director in that he follows slightly behind the likes of Peter Weir who made their names in the 1970s. Donaldson left for Hollywood as soon as he could, but he’s had most success with slick, clever thrillers like No Way Out (1987), The Getaway (1994) and Thirteen Days (2000) as well as the odd campfest like Species (1995). In short, he’s a safe pair of hands and exactly the kind of guy you want to be managing a complex 70s throwback thriller like this, with many characters and simultaneous plot lines to keep in the air at once. Jason Statham has rather oddly become something of a latter day Jean Claude Van Damme due to his continuing appearances in those dreadful Transporter movies I’ve avoided like the plague, but here, although he’s given a showy finale punchup to keep him in touch with his action man roots, he acquits himself as an actual actor, though clearly one who’s graduated from the Mitchell Brothers school of bald Cockney hard knocks.

Watchmen (2009) *

Watchmen is unfilmable. I’m not the first one to say this. Alan Moore has been saying it for some years. Dave Gibbons freely admits it. And Terry Gilliam, who was one of the first directors attached to the project, eventually came to realise it too. The essential problem is that to streamline Watchmen into a two hour movie necessarily means removing too many of the strands that make Watchmen uniquely itself: the Tale of the Black Freighter pirate story that parallels the rise of Adrian Veidt, the humanity around the intersection where catastrophe is imminent, the endless background details, the sense that every piece of dialogue or word balloon has multiple meanings across not just the panel that they’re in but across the work as a whole. And so on. And so on.

I bought Watchmen on an almost whim in December 1987 as a direct result of a very good review by Charles Shaar Murray in an early issue of Q Magazine. Watchmen brought me back to comics after a good 10 years away, and is the sole reason I am now the proud owner of a 5,000 strong comics collection, though it should be said that in recent years I’ve become increasingly disenchanted with American comics and their solipsistic retreat into work for hire superhero comics as the primary engine of their corporate profit making. The recent innumerable successes of comic book movies at the box office haven’t led to better comics from DC and Marvel, it’s just led to more superhero comics and meaningless year long pseudo events that have brought American comics to the brink of creative stagnation. Watchmen was published in a very different time and was part of the whole “comics aren’t just for kids anymore” phenomenon that bedevilled the medium back in the 1980s even as it revitalised it.

Watchmen is unfashionable. It stuck out like a sore thumb back in 1986 because it does all sorts of things that comics readers didn’t necessarily like but just had to cope with. No one in Watchmen (with the exception of Dr Manhattan) has super powers; they’re ex-vigilante human beings trying to muddle through an enforced retirement they didn’t agree with and don’t much like where it’s brought them. This carries through into the film, which has successfully captured the dark tone of Watchmen’s violence and the “grim and gritty” mode Watchmen’s creators unwittingly set in motion in the years that followed its publication. There is nothing audience pleasing about the brutality of Watchmen and the harshness of its vision, and there is no sense in which Watchmen is going to be a big public draw like Iron Man (2008) was last year, because there is precious little light relief in the movie. It’s a film which will find its audience, but the darkness at its core is going to turn off as many people as it turns on.

Watchmen is the product of brash young men. A mere three years later in 1990 Alan Moore was pretty much disowning the book and pointing out its many flaws, which include that “everything refers to everything else” strand that seemed to be one of the book’s strengths three years earlier. But it’s a device, and like all devices, can be compromised by overuse. To make Watchmen into a film (and Watchmen is unfilmable), what was required was a brash young man who didn’t realise that it couldn’t be filmed, but was prepared to go ahead and do it anyway. Zack Snyder is the only director in modern Hollywood who could have done it this well. His underrated remake of Dawn of the Dead (2004) showed that he was unafraid to remake the unremakable (even though Snyder’s movie is more an adjunct to George A Romero’s 1979 original than an intended replacement in the style of Ocean’s Eleven (2001)) and 300 (2006) showed that he could translate a comic book to live action, and to hell with the consequences. When I heard that Zack Snyder had been attached to Watchmen, I knew the property was in safe hands, because Snyder could be relied upon to be faithful to the source material, but that he would also find a way to make it move in filmic terms. And that he has done, almost too successfully.

Watchmen is not a film that is destined to be a straightforward box office success (even though it may be). It is R-rated at a time when PG-13 rules the American box office and dominates the thoughts of Hollywood development executives. It has sex scenes, over the top violence, and harsh, brutal gore, all elements that have been pretty ruthlessly excised from most every recent film that has exceeded $100 million in takings.

Watchmen is about Hiroshima. And about the morality of the act of will that possessed President Harry Truman when he gave the order that set the Enola Gay on its way on 6th August 1945. It is a contemplation of the motivations of the act that created the Atomic Age of the 1950s, the crises of the 1960s and the Cold War dangers of the 1980s when there seemed the very real possibility that a cowboy in the White House would unleash the end of the world upon us all on a whim, or by mistake, or through incompetence, or stupidity, or religious belief, or political conviction, or some other dumb reason that perhaps the end of Dr Strangelove (1964) could be brought to pass in the real world. Alan Moore’s contention is that if you want to write a novel about Hiroshima, you should write that novel, and not dress it up with a lot of superhero characters who are only going to get in the way.

Watching the film was a very curious experience, especially for someone like me who has read the graphic novel a lot in the last 22 years. There was a certain geeky glee every time I recognised how faithfully some minor detail had been translated to the screen, as well as a sharp intake of breath when a difference emerged. There was a very subdued, hushed reaction in the cinema; there’s a lot to take in if you’re not familiar with the original; there was the occasional chuckle, the occasional gasp as the latest atrocity flashed across the screen. For the most part, it’s a total success that should repay future visits, especially in the promised Director’s Cuts and Extended Alternate Versions that will mark the Blu-ray release in a few months time. As complex as it is, it’s one of those long films that feels quite short, and I for one wouldn’t mind if it had been an hour or two longer (like it perhaps should have been in the first place). Then again, perhaps Watchmen was always destined to be a gaudy big screen spectacle, a shill for its ancillary products and a 163 minute advertisement for Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ original.

Earth Girls Are Easy (1988)

Also from the 1980s, but in a more fluorescent way, is this kinda stupid lightly sci-fi romantic comedy musical, the principal highlights of which are Julie Brown’s “‘Cause I’m A Blonde” number and the 20 minutes Geena Davis spends in a wet, see-through, bright pink bikini, which has lost none of its power to thrill 21 years later. It also features Jim Carrey in an early role that gives very little hints of the superstardom that was to beckon him, and Damon Wayans in an early role that gives very little hints of the relative obscurity that was, equally bafflingly, heading in his direction too.

Trust Steve Martin to open a bad film and then turn up at the Oscars and deliver the best line of the night. Funny and original at the Oscars, unfunny and unoriginal in The Pink Panther 2 (2009). Absolutely exasperating. I only managed to see one film this week, but did manage to stay up late (as usual) and watch the Oscars live.

Heat (1995)

It’s now feeling a lot more like checking in with an old friend, the time spent watching Heat again. Last time, if memory serves, I went on about the women in this outwardly macho movie, but this time I thought I’d focus a little attention on Elliot Goldenthal’s brilliant score, which slides in and around the copious amounts of songs and other instrumental pieces that all combine to set the mood and pace of an effortless two and three quarter hours. The score does this by not containing hummable tunes but by reaching for intense atmospheres and quiet cacophonies, letting the break out songs hit the emotional high spots. It doesn’t particularly make any sense that the fabled Al Pacino/Robert De Niro meet in the restaurant is preceded by a non-chase on a LA freeway to the tune of Moby’s cover of Joy Division’s New Dawn Fades, or maybe it makes perfect sense, as the prelude to the main event, and De Niro’s quiet dominance of the scene frustrating Pacino’s attempts to one-up him at the acting table. Some films fade from view, some are never properly honoured on their first release (Heat was nominated for precisely zero Oscars, which looks really odd when you see what was released in 1995 and won in 1996 - it was the year of Braveheart and the talking pig movie), and some, like Heat, only become more of what they were when you first saw them every subsequent time you watch them: a masterpiece.

The Oscars (2009)

As if to spite me for my bitching about Claudia Winkleman in 2007, those callous bastards at Sky served up a double treat this time. Not only was the Wink back, oozing insincerity from her every pore, but who was the first to join her on the couch? None other than Gok Wan. It’s difficult to criticise someone for being who they are, but I found that both Dustin Lance Black and Sean Penn made more positive contributions to the unending quest for gay and lesbian equal rights through their acceptance speeches than did a camp bloke wearing too much makeup sat on a sofa being slightly bitchy about this year’s crop of Oscar gowns. I’ve seen the whole Gok Wan thing before, it’s got very old by now, and I am not captivated. Back to the show, which was almost entertaining. Hugh Jackman did a sterling job, especially with his opening number, and an awful lot of the flab has been pruned from the show. If only they could get rid of those endless montages and allow the original songs to be performed properly, and not glued together Moulin Rouge (2001) style, then you’ve got a winning formula that could work even better next year. The Oscars has only ever needed to be about the awards themselves, which hasn’t stopped the show over the years lapsing into lengthy and boring digressions (such as the not infrequent parades of former winners who are still alive, everybody!). This year, there were very few surprises except in the best foreign film category, won by a Japanese film about a cellist who works in a mortuary that wasn’t directed by Takashi Miike though it sounds like it could have been, and, of course, in the Best Actor category, where Sean Penn unsportingly triumphed and deprived us of another fabulous, expletive-strewn speech from Mickey Rourke. The shame! Time and all those awards still haven’t changed my mind about Slumdog Millionaire (2008); I still don’t think it’s all that brilliant, though the inevitable Blu-ray viewing a few months down the line may change my mind. As I enjoyed the music a lot more than I enjoyed the film, I was very happy that AH Rahman won for his score and his songs. As for the show’s major innovation, inviting five former winners of each acting award to present the Oscar to this year’s winner, we’ll see whether it survives the cut next year, because although it got a bit gooey, especially with the women, both Robert De Niro and Cuba Gooding Jr showed a few sparks of the fun it could be too.

I’ve successfully managed not to see any films all week, such is the way of things, but fortunately this week does sees the inauspicious release of The Pink Panther 2 (2009), so I’ve got something to write about, even if it is a film I have not seen, and will never see, at any time now, or for the rest of my life. But since I have been so rudely assailed by Pink Panther 2 advertising at every turn to and from work for the past month, I feel justified in having a go at the movie, even though there is another part of me that will not speak ill of a film (or indeed any piece of art) which I have not experienced for myself.

What Pink Panther 2 puts into sharp relief is the decline in quality of Steve Martin’s contributions to modern cinema. It is really depressing to note that a man, who made any number of successful role picks from The Jerk (1979) to L.A. Story (1991), has ended up a shadow of his former self, redoing roles in Sgt Bilko (1996) and The Pink Panther (2006) that Phil Silvers and Peter Sellers had set in stone, never to be bettered. I haven’t seen these remakes, but a lot of people have, and they do not have good things to say about them. In this case, I will let the imdb ratings speak for me, and both films are unable to muster much more than 5 out of 10s.

It is a cliché to speak of a comedian’s earlier, funnier work, and complain that it all went downhill when they started to take themselves too seriously, but it’s as true of Woody Allen as it’s true of Steve Martin. Fortunately, Woody Allen was so aware of the issue himself that he made an entire, rather fabulous film about it called Stardust Memories (1980), though he still can be found in interviews bemoaning the fact that he knows he’ll never be as great a filmmaker as Ingmar Bergman, to which, rather inevitably, I and a million others would say that Ingmar Bergman couldn’t make a film as funny as, to pick but one, Broadway Danny Rose (1984), and that perhaps Allen should take a leaf from Sullivan’s Travels (1941) and realise that entertaining people and making them laugh is as high a calling as depressing them with angst-ridden dramas about shitty marriages, cancer and the silence of God.

As an actor in cinema, Steve Martin hasn’t done anything really great since The Spanish Prisoner (1997), and that was a long, long 12 years ago. He was okay in Bowfinger (1999) and Bringing Down the House (2003) and more than a bit out there, but not necessarily in a good way, in Looney Tunes: Back in Action (2003), but with the possible exception of Shopgirl (2005) (which I haven’t seen also), that’s more or less been it. During this period, Martin has been more successful as a novelist than as a Hollywood player. I despair at the Steve Martin that Steve Martin has become because I remember just how great he was in Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid (1982) and All of Me (1984), and in fact I don’t just despair, I really miss that guy, and I don’t think I’m ever going to see him again.

And that isn’t just depressing, I think it’s a fucking disgrace. Steve Martin could still be good; he just chooses not to be. Maybe I shouldn’t take it personally, but I do and find Martin’s commitment to bad movie after bad movie exasperating. So, if you want to see Steve Martin make some more poor films, go and see The Pink Panther 2 this week, and maybe he’ll piss away his career making an endless succession of pointless sequels, just like Peter Sellers did, but maybe, just maybe, if everyone voted with their feet and avoided this movie like the plague, it might spur Martin out of sheer desperation to create another L.A. Story (1991) for us.

I’ll finish with a different note about the decline of the great and good. Nobody has much of a kind word to say about John Carpenter’s Ghosts of Mars (2001), a redo of a rehash of Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) and Rio Bravo (1959), in which Carpenter repeats and rips off himself and Howard Hawks in equal measure, gives the film an unnecessarily complicated flashback structure and some underdeveloped ideas about a ruling matriarchy on Mars.

And yet when I saw Ghosts of Mars for the first time at the Birmingham Film Festival back in 2001, it was still heads above a lot (if not all!) of the films I saw at the Festival because although it wasn’t great, it was still entertaining on its own terms, it was still slickly made with just the right amount of audience-pleasing, enjoyable elements to raise it above other more serious, more dopey films that had not been made with a sufficient amount of craft (I remember one film in particular from this festival which I will not name here which actually had poorly-recorded production sound; Kevin Smith’s Clerks (1994) did not have this problem, and that had been made for a tenth of this low budget feature’s budget; there really is no excuse for inadequate sound recording).

In short, there may still be hope for John Carpenter, even if the great years may be behind him. For Steve Martin, at this moment in time, I have no hope at all.

So, it was impossible for me to post last weekend because I was right in the middle of a six cinema film weekend (and I haven’t done one of those for a long time), and I find films nearly always need a bit of distance before you can approach them with critical comments, especially new films. So, the cinema visits are marked with a * and the two Blu-ray viewings this fortnight is marked with a †.

Valkyrie (2008) *

In which Tom Cruise and several baker’s dozens of British actors conspire to assassinate Adolf Hitler, which, in an interesting redo of the whole Titantic (1997) thing, is something you know going in did not succeed. What’s most startling about the film (apart from how great Tom Cruise is as an actor when he underplays) is the extent to which the plot of 20th July 1944 nearly succeeded and could have brought the War in Europe to an end a year early. Bryan Singer directs with engrossing, immaculate skill from a script co-written by Christopher McQuarrie, and John Ottman edits and composes the doom-laden score, which makes it more than a second cousin to The Usual Suspects (1995).

Revolutionary Road (2008) *

Talking of Titanic (1997), Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet are reunited on screen in a very different scenario, a feel-bad story told with mordant humour about a disastrous marriage in the 1950s gone only slightly wrong, that Kate Winslet’s second husband, Sam Mendes, directs. Most engaging when it’s uncomfortable in its scenes of Kate and Leo going at each other hell for leather, as well as bizarre interjections and interventions from a neighbour’s psychotic son, it’s ultimately a film about the dangers of letting dreams of a life you think you could have had distract you from the life you do have, and the dire consequences that can result if you do.

Frost/Nixon (2008) *

Ron Howard does an Oliver Stone thing and films a play so cinematically you wouldn’t know it had ever been a play if you didn’t know that was where it came from in the first place. Both Michael Sheen as David Frost and Frank Langella as Richard Milhous Nixon are ridiculously effective, though there is a certain disingenuous quality to the film’s portrayal of David Frost as an international playboy. Those of us with longer memories recall the trial by television of insurance fraudster Emil Savundra on The Frost Programme in the 1960s and know that Frost could be a heavyweight interviewer if he wanted to. The play speaks, as all plays must, to the age in which they were first performed, and the protagonist of this drama is as much George W Bush as it is Richard Nixon.

Slumdog Millionaire (2008) *

Of all the films I saw this weekend, this is the one that came off worst in my eyes. I went in convinced that it was based on a true story, though where I picked up that impression I have no idea. In fact, it’s based on a novel, which makes the numerous narrative contrivances by which the lead character answers the questions on the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? nothing more than novelistic devices, rather than any kind of interesting statement about coincidences and meanings thereof in the real world. I thought Danny Boyle did a terrible job of directing this film, and he clearly loves Dutch angles more than he should do. Every sequence from the leading character’s life is vibrantly overdirected, and then contrasted with the dreadful TV-style coverage on the Millionaire set. I wasn’t convinced, and not even convinced by the end credits Bollywood style dance sequence. Maybe seeing it again as a fictional film may change my mind. And I say this knowing that this film may be about to clean up at both the BAFTAs and the Oscars. And I’m not sure that it deserves to. Though I did think the soundtrack was excellent.

Ratatouille (2007) †

The weekend after my mother died in October 2007 I was going to go with her to see this film, and of course, that is something that did not happen. Mom had seen any number of featurettes about the film on Sky Movies and knew more about it than I did, as I’ve made strenuous efforts since I stopped reading Empire in the mid 1990s not to know anything about a film before I see it. And I just couldn’t bring myself to get to the cinema to see Ratatouille in 2007. I didn’t want to see it alone. Fast forward a year and a half and it turns up on Blu-ray at a price I can’t refuse, and guess what? It’s every bit as good as it should be, if not better than that, and my Mom would have loved it, but she never got to see it. The lesson I’ve tried to draw from this is not to put off to tomorrow what you can do today. And I might even live up to this one day.

Rachel Getting Married (2008) *

Jonathan Demme won the Best Director Oscar in 1992 for The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and was able to parlay this success into the Hollywood-does-AIDS movie, Philadelphia (1993), but then it all went horribly wrong. Beloved (1998) was a difficult film that was not much liked. The Truth About Charlie (2002) was not much liked either, mostly because it was a remake of the beloved Hollywood classic Charade (1963). The Manchurian Candidate (2004) was a workmanlike remake of another John Frankenheimer classic from 1962, and I’m pretty sure that I didn’t see it at the cinema, but caught up with it on DVD (though I could be wrong). In short, this might be the first time in 10 years that I’ve seen a Jonathan Demme picture in a cinema, and that seems terribly wrong because I’m a Jonathan Demme fan, and he just hasn’t been able to resume the great run that led up to The Silence of the Lambs. Demme hasn’t been idle; in the 15 years since Philadelphia, he’s also directed any number of documentaries. And so to this film, shot for next to nothing in 21 days, a multiracial, liberal fantasia of marriage for the Barack Obama era, maybe in part patterned on Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding (2001), in that harsh reality and too much emotional honesty combine with joyous, musical celebration. Of all the films I saw this weekend, I liked this one the most, even despite having a nosebleed in the dark halfway through it.

Batman Begins (2005) *

And so to the Imax for a double bill of Christopher Nolan madness. Nolan has continued the narrative indy deftness of Memento (2000) and Insomnia (2003) as he’s turned into the go-to guy for Hollywood bigness. Considering that the origin of Batman is one of the most overworked tropes in comics, Nolan brings a startling amount of originality to the project. In many ways though, it’s just a warm-up for the main event.

The Dark Knight (2008) *

That scene where they turn the 18 wheeler truck upside down on a Chicago street? The one that looks like an awfully expensive CGI shot? The filmmakers did it for real for the Imax cameras on a real Chicago street that had to be reinforced for the stunt to be performed; CGI was used to remove wires and mounts, but not to flip the truck. Quite often, screenwriters insert an emotional subtext into the film scripts of big blockbuster prospects to attract actors to the films and give them something to act. Thus, Jurassic Park (1993) is really about Sam Neill learning to embrace the concept of parenthood (and not 54 shots of CGI dinosaurs that everybody went to see the movie to see), and Twister (1997) is about the divorce proceedings of Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton (and not the CGI twisters that everybody went to see the movie to see). And so on, you get the idea. Unusually, both The Dark Knight and Batman Begins have any amount of emotional subtext, and much talk of justice and law and murder, but the difference is that this is what these films are actually about. The Dark Knight in particular is a post-9/11 movie if ever there was one, with a homicidal maniac running berserk on the streets of Gotham, and the only question being, is it acceptable to beat up, torture, or kill this man, because of what he is doing? The Dark Knight does not have answers to these questions, entrenched as it is in its world of symbols and meaning and metaphor, but they’re rich questions, and none of them have found their way into this film by chance.

Art School Confidential (2005)

If making fun of art school pretensions is as easy as satirising the fashion industry, then how come there haven’t been more movies like Pret-a-Porter (1994) and this one? The film is most fun when exposing just how shit bad art can be, and how ready pretentious idiots are to line up to praise it. The film is a lot more subtle than it may have been given credit for, it’s a kind of slow burn, and where it ends up seems more inevitable than it may have been at the start.

Bird (1988)

Bird is dark, really dark. Dark even by Clint Eastwood’s love of darkness and jazz. A film entirely unsuited to VHS that took an age to come to DVD. And an even longer age for me to acquire it. I saw it once, in a cinema, in 1988 (or 1989), and it was so dark that you could see how much light there is even in a darkened cinema. Charlie Parker burned the candle at both ends, and it’s amazing he lived as long as he did.

Female Agents (2008)

Haven’t made it to disc 2 yet, so am unable to verify how accurate the film may (or may not) be. Sadly more workmanlike than inspired, the film arrives on DVD with an appalling title that fatally mistranslates the original French “The Women of the Shadows” into the more prosaic (though accurate) Female Agents.

Be Kind Rewind (2007) †

Michel Gondry continues his series of naive films in celebration of the simple pleasures of his French childhood. This has manifested itself in the Lego music video for The White Stripes, the oversized hands of The Science of Sleep (2006), and now this paean to the age of VHS video rental, though set in modern times.