Due Date

This is a movie about a stressed out individual who goes through a series of increasingly stressful situations, mainly created by an irritatingly stress-free character whose main function seems to be to cause the main character stress.

If you don't mind that premise, it's an OK film. Personally I didn't find it that funny - it has its moments, it's pretty well written - but it's essentially part of that "hilarious comedy" sub-genre with a road trip/race against time twist.

If it was a bit funnier, the fact that it's pretty silly at times and involves a spectacular character u-turn at around about the expected point in the running time without any real explanation, I maybe wouldn't have minded, but for me this is a film that wants to be a bit more meaningful than your average comedy. It doesn't hit the mark from this point of view at all. 

It's not the worst thing I've ever seen, I quite like Robert Downey Jr and he's pretty good. If you're still not sure whether to watch it or not, see whether you find the following funny...

The angry, frustrated character gets shirty with an unhelpful Western Union clerk and makes disparaging remarks about his claims of having served in the Gulf. The clerk reveals that he's in a wheelchair and proceeds to give Angry Guy a beating.

The King's Speech

So then. I'd been told how good this was, but I must admit I approached it with a certain amount of prejudice. British film...period drama...I was expecting something well-made and worthy, probably a bit slow-paced and dull in places though.

I was wrong. I enjoyed this from start to finish. In many ways it's a simple story, and the ending isn't going to be a surprise to anyone, but the journey is so enjoyable. The performance - all the performances - are just excellent.  The casting is perfect. The pace is exactly right. The script is a treat - not overdone, well-judged, natural in feel but surprisingly profound in places. The film is really moving, in quite unexpected ways. As the credits started to roll in the cinema, there was a moment when I thought the audience were going to applaud. I felt like applauding. 

I don't want to single any particular scene out, because I want you to go and see it for yourself. We'll talk after :)

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...