Nobody Knows Anything

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.

No cinema visits this week. And only one film. I guess I’m just not trying anymore. Actually, I’ve been watching quite a few DVD extras this week, and they’ve proven rather more illuminating than the films themselves. Last year, I complained rather vociferously about Sky’s dreadful presentation of the Oscars ceremony, but this year I managed to evade whatever atrocity was served up by the good burghers of Sky Premiere by turning to the internet and watching the whole thing as a no doubt illegal stream courtesy of the great nerds of America who want to watch the Oscars on their computers and will sacrifice anything to make it so. And with only one slight dropout during the nominations for Best Actress, it was highly successful. And I got to see, or rather hear, lots of crappy American ads, so that was nice.

The ceremony itself was pretty good, long but the Oscars should always be long, and lots of the right people won, especially the Coen brothers and Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová and Diablo Cody. I think those ceremonies that share the wealth between several films are often better than those where one film sweeps the lot, although The Return of the King (2003) deserved everything it won. It was also nice to see that Transformers (2007) won nothing, and that Brad Bird thanked Jan Pinkava, the original sole director of Ratatouille (2007).

Blood for Dracula (1974)

Stefania Casini has a relatively small role in this film as one of Udo Kier’s intended “wirgins”, one of the four Italian daughters Dracula is attempting to marry in a “wirginal” state before handyman Joe Dallesandro can deflower them. It’s all to do with the blood, you see. As well as having her neck bitten (it may be a Paul Morrissey directed Dracula movie but it is still a Dracula movie), she also spends most of her time onscreen naked, but this was the 1970s remember and screen nudity had not yet been curtailed by the arrival of the internet. And she was slim, young and Italian. Casini also turned up two years later in 1900 (1976) as the epileptic who has a close encounter with the penises of both Robert De Niro and Gérard Depardieu at the same time. She appears in a brief bitchy role in Suspiria (1977) and meets a memorably bloody end in a room at the dance school which has been thoughtfully filled with a truckload of bailing wire. The Suspiria DVD has a 25th anniversary making of documentary in which Casini appears, and she is utterly captivating in this. She’s lively, sparky, full of fun, and comes across as a real character. It is no surprise that her later film career in Italy developed into both writing and directing for television and the cinema. A pleasing development for a woman who started her career on the cover of Playmen magazine in April 1973.

Two cinema visits this week, marked with a *, and both of them were doozies. There may be some swearing at the expense of the noble film bookers of the cinema chains of the British Isles, who receive a firm telling-off for some There Will Be Blood related ineptitude.

Beowulf (2007) *

For the record, this was a screening of the film in 3D at the Imax in Birmingham. The majority of people reading this will never have read anything in Old English, never mind Beowulf, perhaps the most famous of ancient OE texts. Well, I have wrestled with Old English, but found the barrier of the language was getting in the way of any literary appreciation of the story, so I never took it any further than the first year of my three year English degree course. So that’s where Beowulf comes from, as filtered through the imaginations of writers Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary, both perfect choices for the job as far as I’m concerned – I started reading The Sandman in single issues around the time of #15 and I have a lot of time for Avary, especially after The Rules of Attraction (2002). Made using the same elaborate motion capture process as The Polar Express (2004) and Monster House (2006), but now both more refined and more complicated (there are more dots on the actors in their blue suits, there are more mocap cameras, the space in which they can act is larger), the film looks incredible, more real than real, yet at the same time more fake than fake. The rationale for doing it this way is really quite simple: the story requires the characters to do things that real actors could not do, and to even attempt to get real actors close to what would be required in those scenes would be so expensive as to make the film unfilmable. Much better to fake it and know that you’re going to be not just fixing it but making the film in post production. There are also a ton of amusing 3D effects, more than a few of which are designed to dump a load of blood in your face, so thanks for that. And it has the best yet CGI dragon, better than the dragons in Reign of Fire (2002) – and they were pretty damn good dragons.

There Will Be Blood (2007) *

Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2nd and 3rd films announced themselves with such authority after the low key start of his 1st that great things came to be expected of him, a situation he dealt with amusingly by engaging Adam Sandler to be in his 4th film, just to piss off film critics I expect. However, PTA’s problem was this: though lauded by critics, his films (with the possible exception of Boogie Nights (1997)) have not set the box office alight, and this, the 5th film, was as difficult to finance as all of the others have been. Thankfully, it was more than worth the effort. It more than reconfirms that Daniel Day-Lewis is one of the best actors on the planet and that his Robert De Niro in the 1970s attitude of taking gaps in between parts and waiting for the juicy stuff is absolutely the right one. I don’t have the words to describe how extraordinary his performance is, but I’m convinced there are a lot of actors out there who’ve watched this film who are a) realising that someone has raised the game for everybody else and b) filling in his name on their Oscar ballots. These days, the quality of film reviewing has declined so far that the word masterpiece is strewn about like so much confetti and attached to movies written by people who couldn’t even spell masterpiece without a spell checker. But that’s what this film is. A masterpiece. Go see it.

If you can find it that is, since the cunts who run cinema bookings in this country appear not to have booked enough prints of it to go around, when they’re perfectly content to book multiple copies of fucking shit like Rambo (2008) because it’s got that punch drunk old has been attached to it. Fuck you, cinema bookers, and the fucking horse you fucking rode in on. Ahem.

The Black Dahlia (2006)

Second viewings of films are funny things. It took me at least three screenings of The Matrix Reloaded (2003) before I realised that it was a good film after all, when I was able to have absorbed the plot and enough of the Architect’s dialogue to work out just what the film’s intentions were, or at least the intentions as they appeared to me. And once you know a film is good, you tend not to revise that opinion unless you see the film 20 years later and realise you were mistaken. That may happen with the two Matrix sequels, but at the moment I’m confident enough in their brilliance to assert that they can’t be released on Blu-Ray soon enough.

Now the first cinema screening of The Black Dahlia was unsatisfactory, and not because I was sat next to someone crunching popcorn or slurping a giant Coke or using their mobile. I’m a big James Ellroy fan, and have even briefly met the man twice. But there was an awful lot of plot in James Ellroy’s original and brilliant novel, and although screenwriter Josh Friedman did a man’s job of reducing the amount of plot for the film, there was still an awful lot of plot in Brian De Palma’s finished film to get past before you can start seeing whether or not the film works as a whole. Things that pop out, like Hilary Swank’s curious English accent, or the ages of the protagonists (some people thought Josh Hartnett and Scarlett Johansson too young for their parts) tend to magnify in that situation.

So it is with some relief that I can report that these first screening impressions were mistaken. Once the plot complications have been sorted out in your head, the strengths of the performances and the camerawork and the production design and the costumes and the music and the direction start to come to the fore. Brian De Palma has made a decidedly old school film with a lot of longish takes and sweeping camerawork and not that much editing, as well as a couple of Untouchables (1987) style set pieces and some disconcerting switches in tone. The second screening of The Black Dahlia reveals that the film hangs together a lot better than it did first time around.

And that’s not always the case. The second screening can end with you asking yourself: so why did I buy this on DVD? It doesn’t work. Oh dear.

One cinema visit this week, marked with a *.

Juno (2007) *

One of the criticisms of this film I’ve come across is that all of the characters seem to speak their dialogue with the same voice, as if all of them have been written by the same person, which is in fact the case. What I find interesting is that I don’t recall this criticism  being directed at, say, Woody Allen, Kevin Smith or James Cameron, all of whom have a distinct authorial voice that comes across in their dialogue. Of course, they’re all men, and the screenwriter of Juno is Diablo Cody, who happens to be a woman. Interesting, eh? What’s most admirable about the film is that it takes its TV Movie of the Week subject matter (downscale underage pregnant teen acts as surrogate for upscale yuppies) and plays absolutely nothing for mawkish sentimentality and concentrates instead on utter realism and big laughs. What’s probably responsible for the film’s success is its positive attitude and unpatronising approach to and contempt for serious issues. In the same way that Richard Linklater was the perfect man to direct The School of Rock (2003) because he had no interest in making a kids movie, so Juno the film has no interest in melodrama and just wants to get on with life.

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

There is a disconnect between the relative plot coherence of the movie and its chaotic production schedule as detailed in an excellent hour long documentary on Disc 2 that is as good as the similar piece on The Phantom Menace (1999) DVD. They started the film without a finished script and could have ended up with a disaster like Alien 3 (1992). And somehow they didn’t.

The Fly (1986)

Dead Man’s Chest is awfully long and probably could have done with at least half an hour of running time trimming from it. In direct contrast, The Fly runs a very lean 96 minutes (or 92 on DVD here in PAL land) with every ounce of excessive fat having been carefully pruned away from it. Throughout the two and three quarter hour documentary on Disc 2, none of the extra footage and unused shots and deleted scenes and strange concepts look like they belong in the movie. The Fly is about as perfect as filmmaking gets, a film where no scene goes to waste, no line of dialogue is without its place or point, and where its haunting emotional wallop will stay with you forever. I’ve probably written this before, but Martin Scorsese, widely reckoned to be the greatest living North American film director, thinks David Cronenberg is a better director than he, Scorsese, will ever be. And The Fly may not even be Cronenberg’s best film, though it is the one time in his career when he had an unashamed popular success and a real opportunity to smuggle a lot of tough ideas into the mainstream.

Three cinema visits this week, marked with a *.

World Trade Center (2006)

There’s a certain amount of reverence and respect accorded this film by American reviewers, whereas British reviewers have been keener to point out the film’s apparent shortcomings. There’s also a certain amount of surprise expressed by reviewers that this isn’t some crazy wacked-out conspiracy flick along the lines of the notoriously poor and ill-considered online documentary Loose Change. For someone like myself, who’s been following Stone’s films since the brilliant Salvador (1985), Stone overcomes the principal problem of inertia at the drama’s heart (two men pinned down under the rubble of the South Tower) through sheer filmmaking technique; 20 years ago, Stone used a similar methodology to bring Eric Bogosian’s one man show Talk Radio (1988) to the screen. And yes, Craig Armstrong’s music may be a touch too melancholy, the character of Dave Karnes seems a little too convenient, but, and it’s a big but, as the excellent documentaries on Disc 2 make all too clear, these events really happened, the reality was much worse than anything that could be depicted on film, and was it worth making this film just to give a taste of what it was like to be in the worst place in the world on September 11th 2001? Yes, it was. The highest compliment I can pay this film is that it is exactly as good as the Naudet Brothers’ 9/11 (2002).

No Country for Old Men (2007) *

I don’t personally think the Coen brothers have suffered a loss of form since O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000). I even liked The Ladykillers (2004) because I thought it was about time we had a comedy with some proper swearing in it. There is no denying though that this entirely unironic return to the dark Western noir world of Blood Simple (1983) is on an entirely different level of filmmaking. There are immaculately constructed suspense sequences that rank with the best of Hitchcock. There is a thoroughly unnerving turn from Javier Bardem as a black-clad psychopath and a neat appearance as a working class Texan housewife by the Scottish Kelly Macdonald. There are probably going to be awards as well.

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007) *

This film combines three of my favourite cinemagoing tropes in one: the dark vision of Tim Burton, musicals, and excessive gore. There are any number of over the top throat slashings in this film, all perfectly executed, and all different from one another. The posters for Planet of the Apes (2001) promised that Tim Burton dark vision thing, and instead, in what must have been Conceptual Mistake #1 on that project, Burton elected to shoot the entire movie in bright sunlight with no darkness. Big mistake. No such chances have been taken here: Fleet Street looks like a suburb of hell, grime, filth and smoke are everywhere and the phrase sepulchral gloom comes irresistibly to mind. Add in a pitch perfect Londoner’s accent from Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter as the Goth Queen of the pie shops (a close relative of Fight Club’s (1999) Marla Singer) and some tremendous music and lyrics from Stephen Sondheim and you have an entire package of bloody excess well worth surrendering to.

Cloverfield (2007) *

I must clearly not be as tuned in as I thought I was, because all of the alleged internet buzz around this film passed me completely by. Existing really as a sharp reprimand to the dreadful American remake of Godzilla (1998), the creators of this film are quite clearly saying, no, you fools, THIS is how you make a monster movie. Although the conceit of continuous filming in the face of any number of imminent and certain deaths does stretch credulity a little, for the most part this is an unnerving success that very satisfactorily leaves an awful lot unexplained. And it’s about damn time there was a mainstream popcorn movie that let the audience have a chance to fill in some of the gaps for themselves.

Flesh for Frankenstein (1973)

Oh if only Tartan had released it in 3-D so Udo Kier could be dangling chunks of liver in your living room. Filmed in Italy at Cinecittà just before Blood for Dracula (1973), this is a film both inspired and uninspired, both grotesque and irritating. Udo Kier’s endless barking gets on your nerves early, and he’s got a lot of exclaiming still to do as Baron Frankenstein, obsessed as he is with creating a new master race, obsessed as he is with noses, obsessed as he is with molesting the internal organs of a female zombie (Dalila Di Lazzaro) while impotently humping her, having already had sex with his sexually voracious sister (Monique Van Vooren), which has produced two young children who will carry on his work after his death, his liver impaled on a ten foot pole and dangling in your living room, in 3-D, if Tartan had released it that way. And so on. And so on. The BBFC’s continued attempts to cut this film over the decades look particularly childish now the film’s available uncut. There was a continuing lack of appreciation of the film’s absurdist tone over a period of thirty years; the film’s gore isn’t pleasant, but it isn’t realistic either, and it’s successfully drowned out by all of the amateurish performances and intentionally bad dialogue.

Two cinema visits this week, marked with a *.

The Golden Compass (2007) *

As I’m currently reading the His Dark Materials trilogy for the first time, it seemed like the right moment to nip to the cinema and catch New Line’s filmization of the first book in the sequence. I was deeply impressed. Who knew that Chris Weitz had a film like this in him after American Pie (1999) and About a Boy (2002)? Those two films were competent but only slightly surprising and certainly no standouts. No wonder Weitz walked off the project once, daunted by the technical challenges, but thank God (that’s a His Dark Materials in-joke by the way) he came back to finish what he started. The only blip in the continuation of the series is its dismal non-performance at the American box office. However, the film has done really well worldwide, and hopefully New Line will figure out some ingenious way to promote the film on DVD in the States and allow it to find its audience. Although it may look like a children’s film, it is so not, it’s about as deeply adult and disconcerting as fantasy films can get, and it knocks CS Lewis into a cocked hat, which is where he and the rest of his wretched Christian brethren belong.

Blade Runner (1982) *

For the record, this was the Final Cut version of the film, projected digitally. As magnificent as Blade Runner now looks on DVD (see previous post), this spanking new cleaned up digital version on a big screen with a decent sound system is simply overwhelming. Vangelis’ score has real presence, the special effects look better than CGI, and the subtlety of the performances and the great craft of the direction really come to the fore. The other thing, even though Golden Compass was coming to the end of its run, the cinema wasn’t crowded at all, but the Blade Runner screening was packed.

A Scanner Darkly (2006)

So it takes Richard Linklater and Bob Sabiston’s proprietary rotoscoping software to bring Philip K Dick to the cinema really for the first time, reasonably undiluted and very out there. Maybe what a Philip K Dick adaptation needed was an approach as extreme as Dick’s own approach to science fiction, and it certainly gets it in spades here. Filmed in Austin, Texas, in the summer of 2004, it took 18 months to essentially reanimate the film frame by frame to deliver the final product. The blur suit, especially, would be a challenge even in CGI, but the approach here, halfway towards a comic book, works better than CGI would. A Scanner Darkly is an edgy, paranoid, very political film about drugs and the people who consume them and are consumed by them and the people who let people consume them for twisted purposes of their own.

Total Recall (1990)

The other kind of Philip K Dick adaptation is this beauty with its slam bang direction and driving Jerry Goldsmith score, which uses one or two ideas from We Can Remember It For You Wholesale and then has Arnold Schwarzenegger beat people up Dutch judo style, when he’s not shooting them in the head and delivering pithy quips, or using dead bodies as shields. By the way, the scene in the hotel room where the head of Rekall arrives to tell Arnold he’s living out a fantasy while suffering from a schizoid embolism is real; Arnold plants the “giveaway” sweat on the Rekall director’s head because he doesn’t want the fantasy to end; and the final fade to white, after Arnold has got the girl, killed the bad guys, and saved the entire planet, is a symbol of his ultimate lobotomy. And then he became Governor of California. Sorry, but can someone pinch me every time I read this or see this? Because it can’t be real, can it?