Inception

Wow.

This is hugely visually impressive, but as a rule I'm not hugely visually impressed. I don't wonder how it was done or take a vast interest. I go:

"Not seen that before. Nice"

and then wait for it to get properly interesting. Properly interesting for me is a conceptual thing, and this kinda got there.

It reminded me a bit of first seeing The Matrix, and people who loved that will love this. I didn't love The Matrix. I found it interesting, but the bits that I found interesting were the concepts, and they got tangled and complicated and it felt like "never mind, you're on a moving walkway to the next set piece so just wait and then there'll be something cool to look at!" And cool it may well have been, but I respond much the same way as I do to stage magicians - "Yes that looks impressive, but I know it only looks impressive, and don't flatter yourself I'll be concerned with how you did it".

Inception does a better job of the same thing, for me. There are concepts relating not just to dreams but to the subconscious that everyone can relate to behind the premises of the film, and it's interesting the way that one character's psychological trauma impacts on the events of the film.

if there's a problem with it for me it's that i felt that it was too tangled - there's no way on first viewing you can decide whether the movie's following its own rules, which puts you straight on the matrix set piece moving walkway. You start to become seduced by the idea that it's solveable, that because you're thinking hard to keep up with the concepts that a point will come in the film where you get there ahead of the main characters and turn into the Poirot of cinema. If you watch this and start thinking this way, stop it immediately. You will feel robbed. It's a set piece film with the human touch, and a very, very good one. Just don't get caught up figuring it out.

Letters From Iwo Jima

I've had this a while and not watched it, because I knew it would be sad/heavy going. I got very drawn in though.

Firstly, it's beautifully, expertly made. It is sad, and I knew it would be, but it's taught me a lot and opened up something which I understood very little about. Particularly interesting is the way that the film evokes the Japanese sense of honour not just as something to aspire to, but something to attain at all costs. It's a hard thing to understand the seppuku ideal as a westerner, but it comes across in a very heartfelt and sensitive way exactly what it meant to the Japanese. The feeling of duty being all important is clear. The feeling of lack of individual choice also comes across really powerfully. The stories of the protagonist and the commander were put across extremely well, and both actors were superb. Eastwood picks his symbolism well too. The gun, the dog...


There was a lingering sense, though, of this being propaganda for an American audience who might not have started out feeling too compassionate. This is where the honourable Mr Eastwood comes slightly unstuck for me. The commander? He'd been in America, was sympathetic to America and just found himself in the Wrong Place At The Wrong Time - but we can like him, because he liked America! The main character guy - he was forced to fight, he only really cared about his wife and unborn child, and he only wanted to survive and make a good life for them - like an american born in the wrong place really! What's not to love? And of course the least American, most japanese Japanese constitute the bad guys of the film.


I'm picking holes. Essentially the film is about what being in a war and being faced with the choice of giving your own, personal, valued life to serve often dubious national ends does to human beings - that's done brilliantly. I'm always going to respect a movie that does such a good job of exploring this territory.

Snakes on a Plane

I've seen some cult movies in my time, and I've seen some "so-bad-it's-good" movies. I have to say, though, I've never seen such a cynical and calculated attempt to out-and-out make something actually fit into those categories.

I started with an open mind, I really did. I like Samuel L. Jackson, I like Juliana Margulies from ER, I like the opening titles. All was fine. Enter the snakes. Snake 1 bites hot girl's nipple. Snake 2 bites cocky guy's nob in the toilet. Snake 3 makes an overweight woman have a rude dream when it crawls up her dress. By snake 4 I'd stopped paying attention and instead was wondering which of my Year 8 lads they'd got in a script consultants. 

It didn't get worse, it just got more predictable. I think the writers thought that this playing into stereotypes would be part of the film's cult charm. I also think that the writers assumed everyone who watched the film would be an idiot.

Particularly special was the Playstation vs. X-box product placement line. That's when I knew that the filmmakers were thinking "Product placement = win. Appealling to teenage gamers = win! Also - this has got to be so ridiculously blatant that it makes the film so-bad-it's-good, right?= WIN!!!" 

Wrong. Sorry. I watched it until the end out of some odd sense of fairness I have to any film or book I start out on, but in truth towards the end of the film I was less interested in what was going on and more interested in why I have said odd sense of fairness.

In the spirit of which, I should say that by watching this and then talking about it for this long, I've already spent more of my time on it than I ever should have. Thank you and goodnight.

Gran Torino

Loved this one. (Contains spoilers, as they say. Read this after you've watched it. Oh, and watch it if you haven't. Do it!)

One of the great hooks in a movie for me is a miserable, anti-social git proving that they're completely in touch with their humanity and it's just the world around them that's astray. This had this quality in spades. It put me in mind of Leon, one of my all-time favourites.

Things I loved about it:
1) Eastwood's growl. Well-employed, if a little nasty :)
2)  The way the priest was portrayed. Perfectly balanced, in his intentions and his ineffectuality.
3) The street scene that he watches from his truck, then gets up and sorts out. What you like to imagine you'd be able to do in those circumstances.
4) The attitude and approach of the female lead (back to this later)
5)  The funny (and spot on) approach to manning-up Thao. I could do an A-level language lesson just on those scenes. In fact, I might :)
6) The beautifully judged weighing of tensions towards the end (Eastwood is a great director!)

The ending is powerful; there's a dark turn, but it's the one aspect of the film I was less than happy with. In many ways I liked what was done, but for me Thao's sister was as important as Thao, and I felt a narrowing as it ultimately became a role-model movie. I was left with the sense that in movie terms she'd been sacrificed to some masculine greater good, and that bothered me given how strong the character was.

I still love it though.

The Damned United

Loved this. Mainly because Michael Sheen is an incredibly gifted character actor - he's just so good as Brian Clough. Memorable lines, a memorable performance, and plenty of...well, it's not nostalgia if you're not old enough to remember, but an affectionate evocation of an entirely different era in football.

In reading about it afterwards, though, I was a bit concerned to find out how far the story had been fictionalised, and that a lot of the people portrayed in it were very against the film, and the novel that it was based on. I do have a bit of an issue with this. I could never have written it myself because I'd be so uncomfortable with the idea of making real living/recently deceased people into my little fiction puppets - do writers have that right? I will be pondering this.

In the film's defence, for me all involved come across well - especially Cloughie, for all his faults - just because of the quality of the performances (with the possible exception of Billy Bremner, and I think that's just because Stephen Graham reminds me of Fred West). You can even make the case that this is a nicer version of events than the real one. However, I think if it had been my dad, I'd have been pissed off too.

Now, I also thought Michael Sheen was great in The Queen, and I didn't have any moral objection to that, so I need to think about this one more...

Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks

I really should have read this years ago. I wish I could have talked to my Grandad about it. I remember that it made a powerful impression on him.

Firstly, it's beautifully written. The detail is so evocative. I'm always fascinated by historical novelists who can truly bring a period that they didn't live through themselves to life for a reader who is also from another time. The trenches in this novel feel real. More importantly, the characters feel real. They are emotionally complex, placed in extreme situations, and yet Faulks has exactly the right kind of light touch required to infuse them with a humanity that makes you ache for what they have to endure. For me this is what makes it so successful. They are not heroes, or stereotypes of any kind, in fact. They are just people, with a full and recognisable range of personality types, pushed in various ways to and beyond the limits of what humans ever expect to live through. Understanding this truly brings home the trauma of WW1, the full extent of the sacrifice, the true pity of a wasted generation of sons and husbands swallowed by the mud or - to no lesser extent in some cases -  by the cost of surviving.


At the same time, Faulks balances the destruction, mind-numbing banality and horror of war with a story about life at its most vital, which bookends and interweaves the war sections. By beginning with the story of Wraysford's affair before the war, we are reminded that he is a young man first, soldier second - again, undermining 2D generalisations of what the names on the monuments represent. Throughout the novel, the sense of potential rebirth, of some seed or shoot surviving is ever present. It's delicately done - always small things, never suggesting easy remedies, never undermining the vulnerability and fragility of the lives that were placed so casually before the mechanised slaughter - but ultimately we are left with a sense of healing and continuation that feels more honest and respectful than a straight war novel might have been.


I wonder what my Grandad would have said about it.

 

Dirty Harry

I knew this was supposed to be a "classic" but it didn't automatically grab me as something I needed to watch; not being too familiar with Clint Eastwood, I kinda had it down as a bit of a macho boy-film. Borrowed it from Matty, though, and I'm glad I did.

I knew I was going to like it from the opening sequence. I have a real soft spot for 70s crime stuff - the gloves! The silencer! The funk soundtrack and massive yellow font! I was hooked even before Harry got called into the mayor's office and started being stroppy at having his valuable crime-fighting time wasted by the suits in City Hall. Next thing I knew he was foiling a bank robbery while facing the other way and eating a hot dog ("the usual")...doesn't get much better really.

Yeah, it was silly - some very questionable police procedure and, if you stop to think about it for too long, a bit fascistic. But to be honest, if you stop to think about it for too long, you'll be missing the point that this is a simple world, where the bad guys are Bad, and Harry has to be even Badder just to protect the Good guys. So switch off your brain and enjoy the macho-boy-film aspect of it, as well as the highly entertaining 70s suits.

88 Minutes

Rented this because I'm a big Al Pacino fan, even though I'd heard it was bad. I'd heard right.

I have never in my life seen such a badly made film. The first thing you notice is that the dialogue is absolutely dreadful.

AL: "It's not a bomb."
STUDENT WITH A CRUSH WHO'S YOUNG ENOUGH TO BE HIS DAUGHTER: "That's good."
AL: ( after a smell-the-fart-acting dramatic pause): Yeah.

The next thing you notice is that criminology lecturer Al's relationship with his students is decidedly odd. They hero-worship him, despite the fact that he's arrogant and borderline sleazy. At first you think it might be some kind of interesting characterisation and that he's going to turn out to be some kind of maverick genius. But no.

So, he's receiving death threats from a killer that he's put away and that (we've already established) he still considers to be dangerous, whilst continuing with his lecture and making no effort to report it. As things unfold, it becomes clear that we're supposed to believe two things: 1) that the psycho has people working on the outside in a fiendish and massively complicated ploy to totally discredit him and 2) despite all the effort that's gone into this and to the 88-minutes-to-live countdown, the psycho is quite prepared to attempt to murder him along the way by running him down/blowing him up/burning down his apartment/shooting him if the film needs a bit of tension injected. Which frankly it does, because it's directed in such a way as to make you feel that you've got ADD. Flashbacks are pointlessly overused throughout, and the director doesn't concentrate on any one thread for long enough for you to care about it.

Far from coming across as some kind of genius, the doctor is basically yanked along at the end of a string, making ridiculously bad calls at every turn and yet somehow inspiring trust and devotion in everyone. Al gets stopped by a police colleague who has been presented as part of the set-up with seemingly watertight evidence that Al's actually the killer. (Two women, raped and murdered, forensics have found Al's semen at both crime scenes). Al persuades him to give him ten minutes to prove his innocence. What kind of moron cop is this? Mind you, none of the professionals seem that professional. His devoted assistant shags a student in the restricted office, one of his criminology students has a girlie fit of hysterics when she sees a body (allowing Al to comfort her) and Al himself, with his years of experience and amazing reputation, doesn't EVER answer any questions about what's going on when asked by people trying to assist him, and instead phones up a TV channel to wind up the killer, only to get owned in the face with stories of massive monumental errors of judgement that he has made in the past that he can't deny.

Worth a watch with a friend if you want to entertain yourselves with just how bad a film can be.

Casino

Borrowed this one from Matty (cheers Matt).

I remember it getting good reviews when it came out but I never felt compelled to give it a watch. I'm not a huge fan of gangster films (Goodfellas in particular is a film I found to be completely overrated). This is mainly because they feature completely unsympathetic characters and watching their inevitable fall from grace doesn't engage me much. Las Vegas has never held much interest for me either - the notion of discovering that it's a glitzy good-time place with a dark underbelly is kinda lost on someone for whom glitzy good times are pretty much associated with dark underbellies from the get go. That's just me.

This was different to what I expected though, whilst being exactly what I expected in terms of plot. Very well made, good story, interesting but flawed main character (De Niro) with a truly shady associate (Pesci) and an even shadier wife (Stone). It's long, so I watched it in chunks and I found myself looking forward to seeing where the story was going to twist next.

Worth a watch.

Funny People

From Steve (again). This was directed by Judd Apatow, and I did quite like The 40-Year-Old Virgin so I thought I'd give it a go.

This one irritated me from the outset, really. It was partly because of the title. What we have here is a bunch of Hollywood comedians playing comedians (ooh, clever! Life imitating art eh?) but actually exposing the fact that stand-up comedians are insecure, whiney and ruthlessly ambitious to the point of screwing over their friends on a regular basis. This is a risky strategy on the part of the director - apparently the irony of having Adam Sandler "playing" a comedian who's not even slightly funny and is in reality an arrogant, unsympathetic arse has been lost on all concerned.

It's hard in this film to know how you're supposed to feel. It's poorly structured, too long and Apatow seems to think he's being some kind of directorial maverick by not having a single sympathetic character in there. I think you're supposed to like Seth Rogen, but you get the impression that he's slow on the uptake rather than a nice guy lacking in the vices that characterise the others - he has his moments of being just as shallow, insecure and untrustworthy as all the others. I also think you're supposed to find the jokes funny. They're not (deliberately not in places, accidentally not in others) and this is the problem - there's no reason to care about anyone or anything that happens to them.


So by the time Sandler's character George Simmons is staring at his own mortality, any element of this story that might be moving at all has already been wrung out. You find yourself watching completely dispassionately as he struggles to get to grips with what's happening to him and what he's done with his life. He's just too much of a bastard for the movie to have the charm of This is Spinal Tap, which is probably the closest reference to what it's aiming for.


The last part of the film shows Simmons trying to fix his empty life by pursuing the now unhappily married one-that-got-away. Again, it's hard to care about anyone in the scenario, sympathies are undermined all round. Maybe there's supposed to be something clever about the ending, some defying of expectations, but ultimately movies should take you on some kind of ride, and this is like sitting for two and a half hours in Apatow's car waiting for him to start the engine.  This is ultimately my objection - despite being vain, weak, unpleasant and unfunny, Apatow still thinks Hollywood's comedians are worthy of my undivided attention. Ultimately, it's an arrogant film and that puts me off.


This was the 2-disc collector's edition of the DVD as well. I have to say I have never in my life seen a wider range of extras or been less tempted to investigate. "35 minutes of deleted scenes and classic stand-up!" If you deleted everything self-indulgent, smug or painfully unfunny from the movie you could really add to the bonus material.

 

Lake Placid

Again, this one was borrowed from Steve - cheers bud!

It's a horror/comedy hybrid about a giant man-eating crocodile living in a Lake in Maine. After it gruesomely kills a diver, a team made up of the local sherrif and his deputies, a paleantologist, a park ranger and a kooky crocodile obsessive head off to find it.

The plot is paper thin, as is the characterisation, but it's pretty clear  that the director has no interest whatsoever in putting those things in the film,  figuring (correctly) that the audience for a horror-comedy about a massive killer crocodile aren't really going to be too interested in the characters' motivations or the whys and wherefores of how the creature came to be in the lake. This is explcit in places - for example, there is a debate at one point about why they would send a paleantologist to track down a killer reptile (clearly they wouldn't) and why she hangs around the camp instead of going back to the town if she hates the countryside so much.  It's obvious that the real answer is "because that would lower the ratio of snappy dialogue and amusing one-liners as the motley crew bicker amongst themselves", and even the crocodile comes second to this to be honest. As for the old lady who lives by the lake - nothing about that makes any sense whatsoever. But she says some rude words, and despite yourself, you do laugh.

As a horror film it's not amazing. There are some gruesome moments but overall I'd say this is weighted towards the comedy end of horror-comedy, and the comedy's pretty good - not witty, not clever, just well-timed and dry.


Next time you feel like switching off your brain completely, give this a watch and see what you think.

 

Alfie

Mandy brought this one over the other night. I'd never seen it before and I've got to say it wasn't what I was expecting.

I do like Michael Caine and his performance was very good, but the character wasn't the swinging-London-cheeky-chappie I'd been led to expect. He's a deeply selfish, misogynist bully, deluding himself that he's found a way to skip through life avoiding responsibility whilst actually getting trapped in the ever-more problematic mire of the consequences of his own actions.


Although probably not something to stick on to watch when you're in any way depressed (it's a feel-bad movie) it's still well worth watching for fans of Michael Caine, fans of movies that make you think, or fans of truly hideous sixties wallpaper.


it's pretty dated too - not something I mind though, but I'll be interested to compare it to the remake.

Bruiser

Thanks to Amazon recommendations for this one, otherwise I'd never have heard of it.

It's a sketch show with a number of writers starring Mitchell & Webb, Olivia Colman (Peep Show), Matt Holness (Garth Marenghi), Martin Freeman (The Office & stuff) and Charlotte Hudson, who apparently is on Braniac though I didn't recognise her (makes me zone out, that show).

This is a before-they-were-famous deal, similar in style to The Fast Show and Big Train, with a number of recurring characters. It's hit and miss (I find most sketch shows are) but there are enough good ones to keep you interested. I particularly liked the patronising A-level revision Bitesize programme ("Fact 1! Don't Panic! Help is at hand!") and the horny macho Australian tosspiece ("Know why I do archery? It's pussy on a stick!") but my favourites were Gary the Tottenham-shirt wearing faddy "lifestyle" enthusiast and his permanently irritated wife ("See this is what he's like. He comes home Friday night saying he's a Muslim and I don't get no say in the matter, I just gotta lump it").

Worth a watch for fans of anyone in the show, but otherwise I'd Youtube it first to see if you like it. That way you can skip Sparky the puppet. You'll be glad you did. So will Martin Freeman, who went onto better things but was obviously young and needed the money.

Daddy-Long-Legs/ Dear Enemy by Jean Webster

D

Daddy-Long-Legs is a novel that I first read as a kid. It was a big favourite of my Grans. It tells the story in a series of letters of a girl (Jerusha "Judy" Abbott)  brought up in an orphanage who is sent to college by a mysterious benefactor, who asks that she writes to him without her knowing his name. All she knows about him is the shape of his shadow, elongated against the wall in the lamplight, and so she refers to him throughout her letters as Daddy Long Legs. 

The sequel, Dear Enemy, is written in the same style but this time the protagonist is a college roommate of Judy's called Sallie McBride, who has been given the task of running the orphanage.

Jean Webster has a lively style and the two heroines are smart and feisty enough to overcome a degree of predictability in the plots and hold the reader's interest. Easy, entertaining reads. 

On a side note, it was interesting in Dear Enemy to read about the books the Doctor leant Sallie because I'd studied some of them doing psychology at Uni. Mostly they were discussed in disapproving terms because of the pro-eugenics/sterilisation slant. Different times I guess - it's important to remember that it wasn't just the Nazis who were interested in weeding out what they saw as the weak links in society.

Moon

T

Thanks to Steve again for this one. The basic premise is that in the future we learn how to harvest energy from the moon, all from a station manned by one guy on his own...stay with it....

Steve warned me beforehand that this was psychological - no action...to me, with a film, that means "bring it on". The movies that stay with me engage the brain rather than the eyes, and this one was a thinker.

Too much at times, but oddly it was the action bits where I found my attention drifting. I found it hard to get involved with anything that happened outside the base - too little pace with too little dialogue makes the Melv's mind wander.

While I'm pickin' the nits, there were plot holes at times from a motivation point of view - nothing I couldn't forgive though - but I would definitely recommend this film, and that's due to the thought-provoking power of the theme, but mainly due to some amazingly good performances.

Firstly, Sam Rockwell is fantastic. I say this because I found myself reminding myself that there is only the one Sam Rockwell. There is a seamless brilliance to how he handles his roles - and kudos to the director for this too. I was completely absorbed in the situation presented; even more so when I started thinking about how it must have been put together.

For me, the most interesting character in the film was the computer, and Kevin Spacey was perfectly cast. It's the best portrayal of AI I've ever seen, and it undermined a lot of cliches.  (Kevin Spacey could read the phone book and I'd be agog, but don't let this sway you.)

This film raises a number of fascinating questions and i know it's one that will stay with me for a long time. Hearty thumbs up!

The A-Team

Thanks to Matty for the cinema trip to see this one. 

I absolutely loved The A-Team when I was about six - it was Saturday afternoon viewing round at Granny Mary's, and I used to sit there avidly with my BA figure waiting for them to start blowing things up (I was too young to know if there was much of a plot to it). I did think it looked pretty good from the trailer, but I'd heard mixed things about the movie version.

If you like cheesey macho action films, this isn't a bad one. You have to really like cheese though. Take along some crackers. Liam Neeson and the guy who played Face were pretty good. The BA character was up against it - Mr T is a hard act to follow, but he did OK. The Murdoch character just wasn't funny, however, which pretty much killed it as a nostalgia exercise. The other thing that killed it as a nostalgia exercise was the lack of appreciation of how much we all liked the original theme tune as kids. The movie ends...the old familiar voice-over rattles through and then...some pointless metal track starts up. Luckily some reasonably imaginative action sequences meant that I didn't feel compelled to demand my money back, though I did feel a hankering to watch the series as it was back in "the day".

I am informed that there were some cameos from the original Murdoch and Faceman at the end of the credits - I missed these due to pressure to conform to the Sixfields tradition of getting out of the cinema the very second the credits start to roll. Do they do this in other places?

Click

I've borrowed this one from Steve, and I realised a few minutes in that I'd actually seen it, or at least the first part of it, before. 

The fact that I'd forgotten tells you quite a bit about the movie - as with all the Adam Sandler films I've seen, it's based on a lightweight and pretty daft concept. If it was a crisp, it would be a Quaver. Usually I can happily nibble on Quavers but every now and then they annoy me because they're just not enough like having a real, satisfying crisp. So it is with Sandler films.


Click just about stayed the right side of the line for me, despite essentially fitting into the "hilarious comedy!!" genre that consistently fails to amuse me (I know that some people will  watch The Hoff get resized/talk in a funny voice and split their sides, but it makes me feel so...very...tired...). It's quite warm and hard to dislike in places, particularly the scenes with his kids. I also felt they ended up with quite a clever metaphor from what started as a daft idea, and I like the the way the playfulness of the early part of the film morphed seamlessly into something really dark and existentialist by the end. It never quite stops being silly, but it definitely gets reflective.


On a side note, I was troubled by Christopher Walken more than usual in this film. How did his voice get like that? I will be pondering this...

The Wrestler

I was first told about this film by my friend Jonas, and I know that he is a gentleman of discerning taste, so I was looking forward to this one despite the fact that I've seen Mickey Rourke on enough talk shows to be of the opinion that he is in fact a nutter.

I have a fresh respect for the guy now. He brings a lot of warmth and pathos to the title role of a man who's dedicated himself utterly to something that the world doesn't take seriously, only to find himself without any other anchor points in life when he starts to realise that he can't go on forever.

Everything that's tacky and daft about wrestling comes across really well in the film, yet the overriding sense that you're left with is that this is a story with a lot of heart and humanity to it.

Five stars, which means I'll probably buy it at some point :)

Intro

Hello all. This is my first go at writing a blog. It's August 2nd which means I'm in the middle of my holiday, but like the dedicated professional that I am I'm always thinking of ways to develop and enhance my English teaching. At the same time I'm on holiday, so I can stretch my definition of doing constructive work to include learning how to create and keep a blog. Yay holidays!

The plan so far is to use it as a record of what I'm reading, watching and listening to. Let's see how it goes!