Nobody Knows Anything

This post does not support the use of illegal pharmaceuticals and frowns sternly in your direction if you have ever done so. Two cinema visits this week, marked with a *.

Tell No One (2006)

Why can’t more bestselling authors be like Harlan Coben? Not allowing Hollywood to ruin his novel, but giving a young, relatively untried French director a chance to deliver his novel to the screen adapted to Paris, spoken in French and pretty much unscathed proved to be a very smart idea indeed. Starting small (a man receives an email from his 8 year dead wife and complications ensue) and then delving into the kind of typically fiendish, labyrinthine plot so beloved of modern thriller writers, Tell No One derives a lot of its strength from the solid performances of its mostly unknown outside of France cast. There is a tremendous freshness derived from combining American overdrive pacing with Gallic character and atmosphere.

Iron Man (2008) *

Well it was great obviously, but $100 million opening weekend great? Definitely not. The film has all the entertaining, anti-establishment fun it can have with a disaffected millionaire arms dealer playboy as its central character, and Robert Downey Jr brings his best game and is well served by a smart script, as is Gwyneth Paltrow who makes an awful lot out of what is normally the thankless role of PA to the male lead. What the film leaves unresolved is the classic dilemma of the superhero that has haunted comics ever since Alan Moore’s reinvention of Marvelman in the 1980’s. The superhero is all-powerful by definition and can end war, remove poverty and create a superhero utopia with no problems of any kind (though it might not be the greatest place for humans to live). In a fantasy world you can resolve a problem like Iraq by sending in Iron Man to destroy all the weapons; in the real world you can’t. It’s election year in the States, and the country is looking for a hero; neither John McCain nor Barack Obama are heroes capable of leaping tall buildings at a single bound, and the collective yearning for a hero embodied in that opening weekend will not be fulfilled in November.

Speed Racer (2008) *

For the record, this was a screening of the film at the Imax. Well it was great obviously, but among the great miscalculations that surround the film are these: there may well be a Speed Racer cult in America, but it’s a really, really small cult (the whole Speed Racer thing didn’t even happen in the UK, we got Battle of the Planets instead, and that was pretty rotten); casting a monkey in a movie spells only one thing and that thing is “kids movie” and kids don’t want to see kids movies, they want to see Iron Man; the Wachowskis have built their reputation by making films for adults and this heartening urge to lighten up and do one for their families is all very well, but I predict that the next movie from them will be R-rated as all get out; there is a reason why Speed Racer has been kicking around for two decades trying to get made as a film and that is the source material has zero weight or substance or meaning - if the Wachowskis really wanted to make a live-action anime (as if The Matrix (1999) isn’t halfway there already), why didn’t they choose something better? Anything better. But having said all that, I really, really liked Speed Racer a lot more than Iron Man. It was no less predictable than Iron Man but way more interesting to watch. The opening race sequence in particular is a triumph of narrative storytelling, setting up the basic premise by cutting between three different time periods, sometimes “cutting” between them in the same shot. And it has Christina Ricci looking gorgeous. And it has John Goodman beating up ninjas. Yes, ninjas! Any film with ninjas is all right as far as I’m concerned.

The Matrix (1999)

Yeah I checked out The Matrix again just to see if it was still fabulous. Guess what? It was.

One cinema visit this week, marked with a *. More next week.

Innocence (2004)

A seven year old girl appears barely dressed inside a coffin in a room in a school building in the middle of some woods surrounded by a wall. There are five other buildings in the grounds, each occupied by five girls between the ages of 7 and 12. When the seven year old is discovered by the other girls, the first thing they do is clothe her, the second thing they do is exchange coloured ribbons in their hair which mark their ages. It is understood that the oldest of them will one day leave the grounds of the school, but it is not known what will happen to them. In the meantime, they will receive lessons in dance, biology and obedience from teachers who seem emotionally wounded and be waited upon by old women who barely speak to them. They will be isolated from their pasts and their families and encouraged to stay on the lit paths in the woods and not stray off into the forest. As with the majority of oddball, confrontational, foreign films I encounter, this started with an article in Sight and Sound some years ago, which I read and made a mental note that it sounded interesting and I should look out for it. Years go by, and HMV knock it down to £7. Perfect. As a longtime collaborator with Gaspar Noé, it should come as no surprise that Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s film is at the same time shocking and yet not shocking. Repurposing the notorious schoolgirl imagery of David Hamilton et al, Hadzihalilovic creates a world of exterior beauty and subterranean threat; the revelation of what the oldest girls get up to at night is deeply disturbing, but is not filmed that way. It is possible that how much innocence there is left in the viewer will be more of a factor in how you perceive this film than how uncompromising Hadzihalilovic is in the presentation of her imagery. The film’s ending may be hopeful, but that’s not how I read it. But I could be wrong. Make up your own mind.

The Oxford Murders (2007) *

There’s a category of movie known as the Europudding. To be explicit, this is a film produced entirely with European money from a variety of European sources from any number of European countries and funding bodies within those countries. Each one of those funding sources expects to have some national content within the final film; back in the 1960s this was the reason why German actors turned up in Italian Spaghetti westerns filmed in Spain for no other readily apparent reason than that an Italian-German-Spanish co-production required it to be the case. Since there can be any number of fingers in the pie, it will not surprise you to know that the chances of a decent end result start to recede into the distance even more than they do with your average American blockbuster. The typical Europudding is a disaster like Charlotte Gray (2001), a UK-Australian-German co-production whose central premise of a woman joining the French Resistance in World War II France was somewhat undermined by unrealistically filming everything in English with the intention of reaching a wider audience, which wisely stayed away from it in droves, helping to bring down an earlier incarnation of Film Four in the process. The Oxford Murders isn’t that bad, but suffers from being an adaptation of a Spanish novel filmed by a Spanish director set very much in England. There are any number of creaks around the edges, such as an airport scene very clearly filmed in a building interior a long way from a real airport with a single cheap-looking sign on a wall indicating the departure gate of Union Airlines, that well known British brand. The book has a fascinating premise that has only been adequately executed. It may be bold to present a film with any number of lengthy philosophical discussions on the nature of reality and hope to succeed with a mass audience, or it may be stupid. Points for trying though.

Control (2007)

A somewhat more successful co-production is the first film from photographer and video director Anton Corbijn, which focuses on the brief but influential and depressing life of Ian Curtis, lead singer of Joy Division. It is not the first time this story has been told, nor will it be the last, since the early rock death movie is almost a genre on its own: think of The Doors (1991) or Last Days (2005). The template is always the same: a young, charismatic figure achieves (or in the case of Curtis was on the cusp of achieving) international fame, sales and money in the world of rock, but is then almost immediately destroyed by indulgence in drink, drugs, sex and/or bad relationships, often with a mysterious, poorly diagnosed and badly treated medical condition stirred into the mix (Cobain’s stomach ailment, Curtis’s epilepsy). Death swiftly follows, normally in controversial circumstances that result in any number of outrageous conspiracy theories (though not, I think, in Curtis’s case). After their death, the artist commonly becomes more revered than they ever were in their lifetime (see Nick Drake) and the biopic beckons. Anton Corbijn brings both a satisfying intimacy and a fascinating distance to the story of Ian Curtis. Corbijn came to England to photograph Joy Division in 1979, and relies on Deborah Curtis’s biography of Curtis, Touching from a Distance, to fill in the gaps. What has become most apparent about Ian Curtis over the years is how absolutely normal and down to earth he was, how very Northern and unreconstructed he was as a man (he liked a drink, he liked a swear, he thought a woman’s place was in the home), how very extraordinary he was as an artist (the other band members recall how Ian would sometimes pick up on a riff they played during rehearsal and say, no take that and use it, that can be a song, and then fit his already written lyrics to it; Touching from a Distance includes all Ian’s lyrics and the poetry of them will always remain potent, insightful and chilling). Photographed in gorgeous, widescreen black and white, the camera mostly stands back from the action, studying it almost forensically, and the end, when it comes, has the same inevitability as the vocal of Dead Souls.

One cinema visit this week marked with a *. It would seem that at last the post-Oscars movie drought is over and the summer tentpole madness can begin.

Batman (1989)

I’ve gone back and forth on this film ever since its first release when I thought it was a piece of overhyped garbage. Looked at again all these years later accompanied by Warner Bros’ first ever DTS track, has it improved any? I still don’t think the script is up to much, Jack Nicholson’s one liners are deeply inane, the much hyped giant Gotham City street set, built semi-permanently in Britain to service a host of sequels and then scrapped once Batman Returns (1992) - which I really like - was filmed in Hollywood, doesn’t look as good as the much smaller one Ridley Scott built for Blade Runner (1982), there’s a giant unacknowledged debt to the 40s retro look of Brazil (1985), the pre-CGI effects look more than a little quaint and not so hot, and the climax of the film at Gotham Cathedral looks like it was made up on the set by the cast and crew, because it was. So Batman is currently in the file marked not that great for me. I liked it more ten years ago. Hey ho.

In Bruges (2007) *

I was concerned that this would be a playwright’s attempt to better the opening 15 minutes of Pulp Fiction (1994) and he wouldn’t be up to the job. Thankfully, Martin McDonagh takes the subject matter of two hit men sentenced to a vacation in Bruges into a whole bunch of different and more interesting areas, in which he’s helped enormously by a trio of vastly talented actors (Brendan Gleeson, Ralph Fiennes and Colin Farrell), a game cast of supporting players and Herculean amounts of swearing, so much so that the title of the film probably was In Fucking Bruges, but they decided in the end not to go with that one. The big surprise of the film is Colin Farrell, who actually delivers an actual performance once he’s got some proper dialogue and character beats to get his teeth into. Farrell is so good in this film that you wonder whether it was a total waste of his time to have gone off to Hollywood in the first place and that he should perhaps have concentrated on theatre and cracking parts in British films as good as this one.

One cinema visit, marked with a *. Contains one use of strong language, Shine a Light style.

Good Night, And Good Luck. (2005)

David Strathairn turns up as Estes Kefauver in The Notorious Bettie Page (2005) (see last week) organising a searing Senate investigation into the deadly effects of pornography and comic books on juvenile delinquency. At presumably around the same time, Strathairn had also been cast by George Clooney on the other side of the prosecutorial fence as legendary journalist of the old school, Edward R Murrow. Strathairn belongs to that unique group of second-string supporting players that exists in Hollywood to gladden the hearts of too-frequent cinema-goers like myself. Strathairn’s presence in a film, like that of say Dan Hedaya or Jeffrey DeMunn, once spotted in the opening credits, in an odd kind of way automatically steps the film up a notch in quality; the movie doesn’t just revolve around the big star, the supporting players have been properly cast as well. Strathairn occasionally plays lead roles in movies, as he does here, but he’s not Tom Cruise style leading man material, he’s an exceptional character actor, and he makes Murrow and Murrow’s contempt for McCarthyism and the witch hunt mentality it created burn off the screen.

Shine a Light (2007) *

I don’t even like The Rolling Stones that much, but I still got a kick out of this film. To me, the Stones were always a singles band (and what singles), who never really assembled a coherent album statement in the manner of the Beatles, and who have effectively been creatively dead for 25 years: their last decent recording was Undercover of the Night, and that was in 1983. And yet curiously the Rolling Stones have stayed pretty much together (some members having been shed along the way) and not stopped touring, perhaps turning into the blues band they really wanted to be in the first place. It’s probably just as well for all the other directors of live concert films that Martin Scorsese only directs one of these concert films every 30 years or so, since he has raised the bar once again as he did with The Last Waltz (1978). For example, the opening sequence of documentary material, probably through the timing of ever shorter cuts, creates a rising sense of excitement exactly the same as standing in a concert hall waiting for the show to begin, then ups the ante on it again, so that when the band hit the stage with Jumping Jack Flash, you feel like you’re in the presence of something really exciting, even though you’re not! What’s particularly great is the sense of communication between the band members on stage, especially Keith Richards’ self-deprecating grin after he’s slightly fucked up the opening riff of Start Me Up, and also Scorsese’s manipulation of the sound mixing desk so as the camera focuses on Ron Wood, we hear exactly what he’s playing. The film doesn’t have the end of an era gravitas of The Last Waltz, what Shine a Light is about is what happened to the band that carried on playing long after it was formerly proper for them to have retired. The new ground the Stones are breaking is discovering how old can you be and still be able to rock and roll? On this exhausting evidence, some time yet…

Sympathy for the Devil (1968)

For the record, this was the producer’s cut of Jean-Luc Godard’s film, the one where Sympathy for the Devil is played in its completed form at the end; apparently it was always Godard’s intention to deny this pleasure to the film’s intended audience, whoever the hell that was. Coming from the high Marxism period of Godard’s career, this now looks as absurdly quaint as Georgy Girl (1966) or Barbarella (1968). The film has essentially two streams: the Rolling Stones recording one of their most notorious songs (which evolves in an utterly fascinating manner from a slow blues stomp into the adrenaline rush, tribal percussion and woo-woos of the finished piece), and various humourless revolutionaries carrying out acts of defiance against The Man: a girl graffitoes left wing slogans on buildings and cars; a phalanx of Black Power revolutionaries brandish guns in a scrapyard and “shoot” white female victims in sacrificial dresses. There are voiceover readings from a non-existent Russian political pornography novel, and lots more time capsule stuff. I’ve always thought that the essential message of the film was that The Rolling Stones and the revolutionary groups are engaged in the same practice at different ends of the scale: that of protest.

No cinema visits this week. If we’re very lucky, I may make it to the cinema next week as a new Scorsese movie has arrived in the middle of the current drought, even if it is just a Rolling Stones concert movie.

The Seven Year Itch (1955)

In Cameron Crowe’s excellent series of interviews with Billy Wilder, Wilder remains completely indifferent on the subject of widescreen cinematography. He just didn’t care. It is extremely odd to see what is basically a filmed play contained within the most extreme of aspect ratios at 2.55:1, especially when there is only one person onscreen for great lengths of the running time. Marilyn Monroe appears essentially “playing herself” (whatever that was) as the archetypal embodiment of mainstream Hollywood 1950s femininity, blonde, overly made up, harmless (emotionally damaged, needy, desperate, addicted to booze and drugs). And in the 1950s, mainstream America had Marilyn, and Doris Day, and Jayne Mansfield, and at a stretch, Mamie Van Doren. And the rest of the country had…

The Notorious Bettie Page (2005)

One of those roles that any actress worth her salt would kill for, and Gretchen Mol, infamously hyped with a gratuitous Vanity Fair cover some years earlier, finally proved herself as a real talent with her wonderfully game performance in a film that both reveals the essential harmlessness of extreme fetish pornography (though not to the BBFC, who rather ridiculously gave the film an 18 certificate) as well as provides more evidence, if evidence were needed, of the ludicrous hypocrisy of American culture in the 1950s. Bettie Page regarded even the most absurd of bondage photoshoots as nothing more than innocent playacting, and Mol puts over the impossible to fake joie de vivre aura of Page’s photographic poses with an equal measure of shamelessness. Page prospered in the years just before Playboy changed all of the rules; she was a very American pioneer, striking out into new territory and claiming it as her own.

No cinema releases this week. I’ve taken a week off since I went to Memorabilia at the NEC last weekend and I’ve been catching up with various database and scanning related duties that coincide with the mass influx of 30 titles into my DVD collection. So, over the last fortnight, I’ve watched three films on DVD, which start with…

Any Given Sunday (1999)

There is something deeply satisfying about a sports movie that signs up to all the clichés with such joyous abandon and commits to them with such élan. So, going into this movie about American Football from director Oliver Stone, one of the things you know, without ever even having to have seen one frame of the film, is that it will all come down to a crucial play with five seconds left on the clock. And so it does, so you’re not disappointed. A sports movie has a duty to service these clichés, and Any Given Sunday is no exception. It also finds Stone in the short-lived entertainment portion of his career in the wake of the high seriousness of Nixon (1995) (though some may argue it’s continued with Alexander (2004)). It’s no surprise that Stone portrays a football game as warlike conflict, and he brings a brutality to the sporting arena that gets lost when you see American Football on TV. Or saw it in the 1980s on Channel Four during its brief period of UK popularity.

Miami Vice (2006)

Jaime Foxx’s first starring role in Any Given Sunday prompted a call to check this out again, not that I really need any excuse to watch a Michael Mann film, since I regard the man as nothing short of a filmmaking genius. Shot at night in available light with high definition video, the film breaks ground photographically in a way few others have even come close to so far. That it in very few ways bears any resemblance to the 80s TV show that is its foundation is yet another testament to Mann’s desire to break new ground rather than produce some sad nostalgia fest in which a lot of aging losers in designer stubble and suits with rolled up sleeves drive around Miami in expensive cars to the tunes of Jan Hammer and Phil Collins. And if that means it didn’t do that well at the box office and lies in wait for adult film lovers to rediscover on DVD, then so be it.

The Mist (2007)

For the record, this was the version of the film on Disc 2 of the collector’s edition DVD in glorious black and white. And damned if Darabont isn’t absolutely right in his introduction to this slightly indulgent version of the film; black and white does give the film the feel of a low budget 60s horror film from the lineage of Night of the Living Dead (1968). As a longtime Stephen King reader (but not his Number One fan, that’s a little Misery (1987) humour for y’all), I discovered The Mist early on its first publication in Kirby McCauley’s 1980 horror anthology, Dark Forces, five years before it officially joined the King canon in his 1985 collection, Skeleton Crew. Maybe because it’s a second cousin of a lot of things, including James Herbert’s 1975 novel, The Fog, and any number of low budget B-movies from American cinema history, filtered through King’s intense pop culture imagination and squirted out the other end, there’s something genuinely haunting and mythic about King’s story, in which Lovecraftian beasties from another dimension are let loose upon the world as both a Lord of the Flies style analysis of societal breakdown and a dire warning against scientific progress very much along the lines of Them! (1954) or The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). And if there’s an even bigger fan of the story than me, then it’s Frank Darabont, who read it in 1980 with as much excitement as I did, but has actually been able to bring it to the screen utterly uncompromised, red, raw, and dripping, like a horror movie ought to be. Indeed, compared to the anemic nonsense shat out by major studios in the last few years in the name of PG-13 rated horror, this is the real thing, character based, gross when it needs to be, and deeply unsettling from first frame to last, especially last. The only thing The Weinstein Company now needs to sort out is a UK release, because I really don’t think that it’s right for me to see this film on DVD before I’ve had the chance to see it in a UK cinema, but there you go, that’s closing the theatrical window for you. The first film I happened to see this way was Hellboy (2005), and here we are again.

No cinema visits this week. I do intend to get back to the cinema, perhaps sometime in June, I’m thinking, at the moment. In the meantime, I’m going to celebrate the death and crucifixion of Jesus by watching movies full of gore, slugs, zombies and a not-very-friendly teenage girl. Praise the Lord!

Slither (2006)

A monster movie like they used to make them back in the 1980s, only done with exactly the right tone and not a hint of camp. It’s taken me an awful long time to work my way around to this one, but it was worth the wait. It’s so cheerily disgusting, I was mildly diverted by wondering why this hadn’t been handed an 18 certificate. James Gunn did such a nice job of directing his own script that I was moved to check out one of his earlier screenplays, the infamous remake of…

Dawn of the Dead (2004)

John Skipp and Craig Spector were two horror writers who teamed up in the 1980s to produce a number of novels that for the most part weren’t published in this country. They formed part of the so-called Splatterpunk movement, horror’s version of the cyberpunk wave that brought us William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, among others. One of the projects Skipp and Spector collaborated on was an anthology set in the world of George A Romero’s zombie trilogy called Book of the Dead. (Since this is horror, there was also a sequel called Still Dead: Book of the Dead 2.) This remake attracted a certain amount of heat from internet-based horror purists still wounded by the appalling length of time it seemed to have taken Anchor Bay to release their definitive 4-disc DVD of Romero’s 1978 original. But after seeing the 2004 version, I’ve always thought of it as another entry in the Romero universe along the lines of those contributions to Skipp and Spector’s anthology. This is just what happened in another mall in another state, “fast” zombies and all. And aside from all of that stuff, Zack Snyder is a really interesting director, and he makes a lot of excellent choices of staging and point of view and camera angle, all of which would be then pushed to the next level in his follow-up film, 300 (2007). I don’t envy Snyder the task of producing a film of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen (1987), but if anybody’s got half a chance of producing something decent from the War and Peace of comics, then he is the man.

Hard Candy (2005)

Only in the making of documentary did I learn that the director David Slade is an alumnus of RSA, the advertising agency run by Ridley and Tony Scott. Some of the filmmaking techniques looked very familiar, and no wonder. But this wasn’t showy technique for technique’s sake, it was all at the service of character and story. These kinds of films, where you’re basically filming a play (though this was an original screenplay) with only two characters, live and die not only through the performances of the actors, which are awfully good, but how they are made. It’s always refreshing to come across a film like this with a hard edge and an uncompromising attitude, that deliberately puts the viewer in a moral quandary between two indefensible positions and leaves it up to them to see where their allegiances lie.

No cinema visits this week.

Mission: Impossible III (2006)

Americans, eh? There was a time when summer blockbusters were R-rated extravaganzas like Total Recall (1990) and nobody really gave two hoots that the principal audience for these films were teenage boys, who shouldn’t technically have been able to see the films unaccompanied by an adult, but who quite clearly did anyway. Then a number of bodies in the States, some of them archly-conservative Christian organisations like Focus on the Family, started issuing press releases and making noises in Washington about what they regarded as the appalling practice of marketing R-rated movies to kids. And once it became apparent that lawyers and lawsuits might be involved, there was a certain amount of backing off on the part of the studios and we find ourselves in the current era where an enormous majority of mainstream releases are deliberately tailored to be PG-13 rated in the States and 12 rated here in the UK. Amusingly, nothing has really changed in the content of the films. I enjoyed The Bourne Ultimatum (2007) as much as everyone else, but I also did think the film seemed to be awfully violent for a 12 rated movie, and wouldn’t a 15 certificate actually have been more appropriate? And so it is with the third of Tom Cruise’s appearances as Ethan Hunt: in a lot of ways this is just another blockbuster extravaganza from the 1990s, it’s just as violent as those films used to be, except without the swearing. This ludicrous cultural crisis has its origins in the introduction of the R-rating in 1968, with its proviso that a child may see a R-rated movie only when accompanied by an adult. The result in reality of this was that 10 year old kids and younger could see Basic Instinct (1992) if their parents wanted them to, or they could find anyone who looked adult enough to get them into the theatre. Whereas if the R-rating had been the equivalent of our current 18 certificate in the first place, a lot of the censorial nonsense and hypocrisy of the last 40 years simply wouldn’t have happened.

Caligula (1979)

For the record, this was the unrated version of the film with all of Bob Guccione’s hardcore inserts intact. The comparison with I, Claudius (1976) is particularly instructive, I believe, since what Caligula so noticeably lacks is a point of view. Jack Pulman’s brilliant adaptation of elements of the two Robert Graves historical novels I, Claudius and Claudius the God (both 1934) puts Claudius centre stage as narrator and observer of the extraordinary upheavals, scandals, violence, sex and murders that characterised the ruling family of the Roman Empire of the time. Tinto Brass’ film has Claudius played by the Italian equivalent of Christoper Biggins, and he has no part to play in the wider narrative, although the murder of Caligula, his wife and his daughter at the end and the sudden elevation of Claudius to Emperor are pretty much identical in both versions of the story. What is most obvious about the film is that it hasn’t been finished, hasn’t been properly edited, hasn’t been properly scored, and what has stood as the definitive Penthouse version of the film for all these years is actually a work in progress on which the work had stopped long ago. There may be a good film lurking amongst all the genitalia, but it will in all probability never be allowed to emerge. What remains is something that, for all its craziness and excess and fantasy, may resemble the actuality of Imperial Rome in more ways than we can possibly imagine.

No cinema visits this week.

Natural Born Killers (1994)

Quentin Tarantino’s original script for this movie was published in the Faber script frenzy that followed the lengthy delay in awarding Reservoir Dogs (1991) a video certificate in the early 1990s. It was designed to be shot by Tarantino himself possibly in 16mm on an even lower budget than his eventual debut. Tarantino’s script has only one location: the jail cell where Mickey gives his interview to Wayne Gale, though a lot of the interaction with the camera crew that made it through to Stone’s finished film first turns up in Tarantino’s version of the screenplay. There was never any attempt to depict Mickey and Mallory’s killing spree, no indication of the continual changes in film stock, all of what could be fairly described as the intense postmodernism and breaking of the fourth wall that goes on in the first half of the film, there was no direct indictment of the media, all of the stuff that continues to make the film compelling 13 years later in other words, when real life has upped the ante on celebrity culture to an extent unforeseeable back in 1994. The whole famous for being infamous thing has got a whole lot worse since then, to the extent that celebrities are now being deliberately manufactured for no other reason than to celebrate their celebrity in celebrity magazines, and not because these people have any talent or skill, or are likely to acquire any talent or skill in the future, or ever possessed any talent or skill in the past. What Natural Born Killers looks like now is a dire warning from the heart of the Tabloid Decade, when murderers became more famous than their victims through their presentation, celebration and glorification in the media. Natural Born Killers does likewise, both having its cake and eating it, glorifying its two killers while at the same time showing how the media plays as big a part in creating their notoreity as they do themselves. And Mickey and Mallory are meant to be fictional. Chantelle and Preston, Jordan and Peter, Cheryl and Ashley, Victoria and David: are these couples any more real than their fictional counterparts? Are their lives any more worth chronicling in unending detail? Is there really an insatiable appetite for this material, or will there come a line that shouldn’t be crossed, that is then crossed anyway? As there was when Heat magazine thought it was a jolly good laugh to circulate a badge making fun of Jordan’s handicapped son? There will be more of this, it will only get worse, our non-culture will continue to feed on these non-celebrities with their non-lives, non-liposuction, non-breast implants, non-breast reductions, non-weight loss, non-weight gain, until someone somewhere takes the kind of decisive legal action that will end it all forever because a celebrity magazine has taken it over the edge. That day is coming, and it cannot come soon enough. Either that, or Britney Spears, hounded by paparazzi and stalkers and users and abusers, will turn into Mickey and Mallory Knox and the whole house of cards will topple down in flames.

I don’t watch television, and this is why.

No cinema visits this week.

Smokin’ Aces (2007)

Second films can be tricky, they can confirm the promise of the debut and hit one out of the park – a recent example would be Pulp Fiction (1994) – or they can lie there like a horrible mess bleeding to death, promising only that the filmmaker is going to have a really tough time making it to film number three – Lynne Ramsey’s Morvern Callar (2002) might be a good example here, except I really liked Morvern Callar; the problem is that almost nobody else did and her third film has yet to materialise. Joe Carnahan made a mini-splash with the excellent Narc (2002), a tough cop thriller like they used to make ‘em back in the 70s, released through Paramount at the personal instigation of Tom Cruise, which in turn led him to the director slot on Mission: Impossible III (2006) after David Fincher but before JJ Abrams. Creative differences reared their head and it’s taken Carnahan five years to make his second film. And… it isn’t that great. There is a ton, and I mean a ton, of plot and character exposition in the first half hour of the movie, the characters are basically a bunch of colourful lowlife scumbags (and that includes the FBI as well as the Mob guys), and while the violence has been expertly filmed, the movie’s rendered really rather meaningless in that none of it seems to matter, and Carnahan makes a fatal mistake in the plot denouement near the end where the plot’s MacGuffin is inadequately explained. Oops.

La Vie en Rose (2007)

Unlike a lot of recent biopics of musical performers, Olivier Dahan’s film takes a kaleidoscopic approch to Edith Piaf’s extraordinary life. Piaf suffered more heartbreak and disaster in any one year of her life than most of us would be unlucky enough to experience in our entire lifetimes. Accordingly, the film jumps around throughout the chronology of her life without paying attention to one of the deathly methods that can strangle a biopic at birth: introducing characters through clunky exposition along the lines of “Edith, here’s a lonely Frenchman in New York, he’s a boxer called Marcel Cerdan, you may remember he fought Jake LaMotta last year.” In this film, Piaf just meets Cerdan in a diner and we don’t necessarily know who he is. Whereas some may find this a minus, I found it very much a plus. We know how the other method of making a biopic works since we’ve seen it so many times, so why not try something different? If the film reminded me of anything, it reminded me of the films of Nicolas Roeg, and that is never a bad thing. Obviously, I bought the movie in the wake of Marion Cotillard’s Bafta and Oscar for Best Actress, and I have to say that the voters definitely got it right this year: Cotillard, who is yet another in the unending supply of beautiful French actresses, is fantastic in a role the quality of which she may never see again. And there’s the music; about halfway through I worked out where the film was heading at the end, and if you think about it a bit, you can work it out as well, but this didn’t spoil the film for me at all.

Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006)

Every bit as good as everybody said, and then funnier still. It’s not often that all of the deleted material could have been left in the film, but this film could have happily been 24 minutes longer. Except maybe sketch films should be short; the Pythons found that there would inevitably be a sag in the more sketchy of their films, and that there was almost nothing they could do about it. The only thing missing from the DVD is any information about how they did it, who was real and who wasn’t, and how the lawsuits are doing. The lack of behind the curtains material (and I can understand Baron Cohen’s reasons for not including any) is almost made up for by the sequence in the promotional reel that climaxes in a making the bed scene with Martha Stewart live on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno that is almost as good as the naked wrestling.