Transformers

I should have known.

I am not the demographic this film is aimed at.

I hated it. It sucked. In fact, it was pants.

But I’m really glad I saw it because it taught me a thing or two about the state of the nation.

First things first, why did I bother? Good question. Essentially, I was fooled by the trailer – it actually looked quite exciting and then I came over all nostalgic for Nephew’s company and I sent him a text suggesting we see it together because he is my comic-hero/sci-fi/genre viewing buddy and because I miss him.

In the end he couldn’t come but the dirty, seed had been planted like e.coli, waiting to have me doubled over in regretful agony only a few days later. So I called Phallatia; we both have pay-per-month cinema passes which means we’re more liable to take risks with our viewing. She being a lot younger than me, was brought up on the Transformers TV cartoon and was a big fan. Like that’s an excuse. But it was better than mine.

Well, it was full of robots fighting. I should have known.

I like a bit of fighting – two of my favourite films are House of Flying Daggers and Kill Bill but…but…this was shite fighting. I couldn’t tell the Deceptamoron (baddy) robots from the Automoron (goody) ones and once I’d ‘enjoyed’ the first transformation moment (in the first two seconds of the movie), er…that was it. All the transformations were the same. The robots (to my un-teenage eyes at least) looked the same. I did notice some were smaller. Or ‘cute’. Two robots (goodies) did so much jiving they would have made Huggy Bear blush,

“Racial stereotypes much?” I snarked at Phallatia in the seat next to me.

And because I’m on regime, I couldn’t even comfort eat.




Meanwhile, the rest of the audience made up of teenage boys, young boys and their dads and one or two family groups were having a terrific time. I passed the long hours studying them carefully. I wanted to know what kind of people went to these films. At least my excuse was fairly elaborate. I wish I’d heard Xan Brooks of the Guardian’s answer to the exact same question before I’d wasted my time. He said, “Morons. And there’s a lot of them.” I am a moron.

So what was wrong with this film other than the boring robots, their boring fights, the incessant NOISE and EXPLOSIONS and SPARKS? Everything else.

I think director Michael Bay had better have his excuses carefully rehearsed when he’s reached the front of the line at the pearly gates.

GOD: How can you excuse this pile of sexist, boring shite, Mr Bay?
MICHAEL BAY: I fucked the frame, sir.

Very loud sound of eject chute swooshing Bay to Hell.

If only.

By the way, that is exactly how Mr Bay(tor?) describes his ‘work’.

If I was the frame, I would have smothered him with a pillow and snuck out the bathroom window.

When I’m prime minister, making films like this will be illegal.

The ‘performances’ are worth a mention. Mr Le Boeuf looking bewildered and dorky, which demeanour apparently (in teenage boy fantasies) pulls the hawt chicks and helps him save the planet, has absolutely zero charisma. The floosie playing the lead woman, Megan Pouty, is straight out of an FHM wank centrefold.

“Her mother must be very proud of her.” I told Phallatia. Then, “Does she have to pout every ten seconds?”

Fortunately no one in the audience leant over and told me to shh because they couldn’t hear me due to the burst eardrums from all the EXPLOSIONS.

Megan Chesty gives an extraordinary display of her range, pouting, running really well in slow motion, and straddling a motorbike like a pro.

And wtf was John Turturro doing in this movie? He must have a heavy gambling habit to pay back, or paying bollock busting alimony. Or something. He, like everyone else over the age of teen involved in this sorry excuse for celluloid, was required to do the staring eyes, the table punching, SHOUTING and spitting. And no one should sweat that much even if they are in the desert.

I didn’t realise that watching a pair of toy dogs have sex could be quite this hilarious.

So why did I enjoy it?

Because I learned something. This explains things to me. It gave me a snapshot (admittedly skewed) of the very young male psyche. What they like to see; what they get to see whether they want to or not; the level of violence that’s acceptable in their lives; the portrayal of women they’re given. When I see some girl draped across a motorbike I find it as offensive as the worst Jewish stereotype. And shouldn’t everyone? Somewhere in my brain newsreel footage of a suffragette throwing herself under a horse plays out. I wonder whether she’d have thought twice if she knew that women would be wondering round and round in little circles still and in the 21st century?

The other thing I learned is something hard to define; it’s about the level of ‘concentration’ required when watching anything aimed at children these days. I’ll digress for a moment…a while ago, in my professional capacity, I was searching for information on how to broach the prickly issue of internet-stranger-danger-security for very young kids.

The BBC had a fabulous series of videos aimed at children covering all sorts of things including not giving out your details online etc. But. They were unwatchable. At lest by this old lady. For a moment, and I promise you I don’t mean this disrespectfully, I wondered if this must be what it’s like to have epilepsy. While the ‘characters’ spoke, in the background there was incessant noise. And the mix of sound was such that the talking, which was actually mumbling could hardly be made out over the background. And, for good measure, there where occasional, random, infuriating chirrups and twitters and crashes drowning out the words.

The overall feeling was that none of this was worth listening to, nothing was worth paying attention to fully and it’s entirely ok for people to talk over each other. And this was the BBC. It made me understand certain hyper individuals that I’ve taught over the years, generally male, at least a handful in each class, who are just twitchy and impossible to engage for more than ‘goldfish time’.

So, no surprise that the same thing was in evidence when cock-bearing Michael Bay, had exactly the same thing going throughout this piece of crap film: throbbing music in every moment; people falling over, being humiliated, bullied and loads of fast talking; gibberish exposition giving you no time to say, “Now wait a minute! That doesn’t make sense!”

I can’t believe that parents will bring their kids to a 12A when they are only five or six. In one case, a toddler sat on his mum lap. I asked myself, what did he make of the incessant NOISE, the constant violence, the misogyny (for we must hate women to not entrust them with personality). Ok, the decapitation and eviscerations were of robots and frankly, they deserved it, but they still are what they are. I’m proud of the fact that this bothers me. My own children have a healthy love of zombie films, the more gruesome the better, but they didn’t watch anything like that until they were in their late teens and had a chance to form a context. We mustn’t make the mistake of looking at the world through our eyes when making decisions for children about what they should and shouldn’t watch.

Don’t give this guy your money. Just don’t. Every little counts.

I leave you with this story. Apparently Megan Booby’s audition went like this. Michael Bay asked her to come over to his place and wash his Ferrari for him. And she got the part.

Like I said, her mother must be proud.

Star Trek

It took a second viewing and a lot of deep breaths before I was half able to articulate why Star Trek was such a good movie; there is much to praise but, it won’t surprise you, that which delivers for the sternest, old school fan and yet also engages the husbands, wives and girlfriends who came along for the ride with their Trekkie dates, was the casting.

For loyal fans of the original series, much was familiar to give that feeling of security; and director JJ Abrahams took everything very seriously, consulting advisors along the way on important minutia such as which sides to holster up phasers; just like back in the day, Kirk was beaten up on a regular basis and slammed face down onto dusty surfaces and table tops; there was the same multicultural, multi species crew; and an undercurrent of racism - while Bones only made one ‘dodgy’ comment sotto voce when he refers to Spock as a goblin, most of the unsavoury remarks come from the Vulcans and were directed at the humans and, specifically at Spock who as, half human , half Vulcan (is there anyone who actually needed me to tell them that?) was seen as tarnished and weak by his dual heritage; and the ship made the same sounds: the swish of the bridge doors, the transporter whine and the hailing whistle. And, the guy in the red shirt who beams down to the planet and we know is going to die, he’s there too!

There are some upgrades. The bridge of the Enterprise was a modern take on the 24th century, all white and shiny with, so I read somewhere, more safety barriers than in 1966. The uniforms are the same but different with updated lines still shorty but not as skimpy ; the transporter beam is swirly not speckly and the phasers look less like they fell out of a cracker.

And gone are the dodgy sets.

This is the story of Kirk, McCoy and Spock before the Enterprise. We meet them while they are children and then as twenty-somethings on their first missions for Starfleet. The casting is spot on with the leads bearing enough resemblance to their predecessors and enough flair and personality of their own that they become entirely believable within minutes. All roles are filled with respect and no sense of irony with all parties finding a hook to link them to their predecessors’ performances yet managing to remain themselves. You could sense instantly that the actors believed in this universe and so, by default, did we.

Kirk, the “genius level repeat offender” from the mid west, is played by the gloriously handsome Chris Pine, who brings a touch of James Dean and young Steve McQueen to the role with a slouchy, cocky physical performance which is more of an homage to William Shatner rather than an impersonation. When he takes his place in The Chair, it’s as if Shat in his hey day had been reincarnated.

Spock, played by Zachary Quinto, is a tortured, more emotional Vulcan than we have come to know and who, we are shown, has to learn to get a grip on his impulses; it all makes sense if we understand his origins and how defensive he is under the surface.

McCoy played by the dashing Karl Urban is a perfect Clark Gable impersonation; I had forgotten the sexy Southern drawl from the original series.

We also have Scotty, Sulu and Chekov who bears a striking resemblance to Justin Timberlake and provides a tongue in cheek comic turn where his pronunciation is hammed up to 11 - “wick-tor” rather than Victor.

The baddies are the Romulans; I hadn’t realised on first viewing that it was Eric Bana playing Nero, the rogue Romulan leader in louche, mildly stoner-like performance; a cross between a snake and a Tahitian native in his tattoos. He and his henchmen, dressed in Issey Miyake style coats stride runway style down unnecessarily dangerous walkways with no barriers keeping you form the sheer drops.

JJ Abrahams does a fine job: with slick, even editing and deft pacing he manages to pull off a sense of scale which is vital in ‘space’ with sweeping camerawork and a deft use of swelling music and silences; this is particularly effective in the scene with Kirk senior, where Abrahams creates a beautiful, emotional change of mood caused entirely by the shift in sound from the chaos and buzz on the bridge and the silence of space. The movie, like the cast, is easy on the eye, painted with a pale blues and gold palette which gives a timeless solidity to the scene rather than it being a washed out view of the future, here we could connect.
It’s the perfect fusion of mind and body, ideas and sex.


We never forget that Starfleet is a military organisation and it particularly resonates in these times of the Iraq and Afghanistan situations. One reviewer spoke of how one way Star Trek has been brought up to the minute is that it no longer represents the forward looking, hopeful sixties. Instead this is a movie for the inward looking noughties.

The journey now, isn’t to seek out new lives and new civilisations but to boldly go inwards and find out who you are.

In Star Trek, the characters are on a journey – to find out what their destinies are and without wishing to spoil you, this knowledge is the real climax for the film.



I loved this film; for me it’s everything SCI-FI should be, the perfect fusion of mind and body, sex and ideas. I only wish we’d had a few more domestic details to fulfil my inner geek.

The Boat that Sucked

The Boat that Sucked
Avoid this film at all costs; thanks to my timely warning, mark it down as the biggest pile of pants you’ll never see.

I know there are mixed feelings about Richard Curtis films but I generally fall into the ‘for’ group. I loved Four Weddings, loved Blackadder and, as for the rest of his stuff, while I wouldn’t call it art I’d say it’s mildly entertaining, instantly forgettable, harmless cheese. The Boat that Sucked was, on the other hand, an insult to everyone: women, music, anyone who can remember the seventies and especially freedom fighters everywhere.

Having read a couple of negative reviews, I expected little. The opening scene was a great montage, great music and, I confess, I immediately settled in to enjoy people smoking in a period way but, as soon as the first track faded out and the luvvies began to espouse their inane dialogue, my tiny bubble went ping. The snark-circuitry in my brain got a sniff of freedom and from then on I was all nah-nah-nah-nah: did people really clamour around their trannies in their nightwear of an evening? When did Kenneth Brannagh forget how to act? Where was Hugh? What about people who didn’t smoke – did they listen to the radio too? And if so, what did they do with their hands? Had the ‘dolly birds’ taken a wrong turn from the set of Confessions of a Window Cleaner? What was the point of the floppy-haired youth? How many times is it legal to crack the same, unfunny joke in a movie – I refer, of course, to the frightfully amusing idea of naming one character ‘Twat’. Nearly as funny as having the only girl on the ship be a… and you might want to put your cup down at this point… a lesbian! I know it’s hilarious! (NB, American friends, ‘trannies’ means ‘transistor radios’ here.)

I found I was looking over the luvvies and dolly birds’ shoulders at the décor, the spot-on product packaging and the lesbian’s crocheted waistcoat which looked alarmingly like one of my favourite pieces I often wore in the late sixties over a white polo-neck jumper and above a purple velvet mini-skirt, white tights and some ‘patchwork’ platforms. I thought that memory of a former me had been buried under my new romantic outfits, smothered by my nineties aerobics wear and was never going to make it through into my conscious mind. It seems my belief that I was the coolest was on a par with Mr Curtis’ belief that his film rocked.

I loved the bridesmaids’ dresses complete with pearly nails and short beehives but it didn’t make up for watching this has-been karaoke. What has become of Richard Curtis? I suspect this is what happens when your advisors turn into brown-nosers. Surely someone somewhere in his gang must have known that cinema goers don’t want to suffer a bunch of middle aged men singing into a beer bottle? The performances were hammy and drawn out in scenes that went on as long in perceived time as internal examinations do.

The characterization was clumsy and slip-shod; it was as if a tick-list of ‘types’ had been used as guidance: “Hey!” Curtis might have said, “We could have a character who always gets the girls,” pausing for a round of applause, “And how about one who is stupid but, wait for it, the twist is that occasionally he’ll say something clever!” Gasps from the sycophants.

And what was all this about Freedom? Ok, I was too busy plaiting my dolls hair to read the papers but even I know it wasn’t pirate radio station that represented freedom at this time in history? What about writers in the eastern bloc, women’s lib, strikes, new equality laws etc, etc? I wanted to stand up and shout, “Long live iPods and fuck vinyl!” just because it would have annoyed the hell out of the luvvies. In the year that England won the World Cup, the closest we got to dry land was a piece of Ennio Morricone music and a mild reference to the Vietnam war. Er, that’s it. I would have liked to have seen real people – what was going on while they were listening to the radio? This was beautifully conveyed in Withnail and I – such as in the scene with the demolition ball – and the volume was still on maximum.

Curtis would have us believe that what really counted was that this bunch of miscreants got to shag lots of dolly birds. The film was misogynist - this bollocks about this teenager trying to get sex being post-modernist blah blah doesn’t cut it with me. The scene where they do a real life mock up of the bare breasted women on the banned Electric Lady Land album cover was plain gratuitous and left me feeling embarrassed.

I almost laughed once but it might have been because I was getting low blood sugar. The cinema was two thirds full on the Friday night early show and any laughter just sounded polite and supportive - the woman sitting in front of me who found the film hilarious stood out as much as that one funny moment I alluded to. I suggest she was mashed.

Even the music couldn’t save this empty, meaningless film; I knew the Stones were fantastic anyway and I don’t need that twat Curtis to tell me. Not one track was played all the way through – I’d have more fun dancing in my pants in the kitchen while gazing upon just the one wrinkly face. My own.

Philip Seymour Hoffman was the only actor who came out of this debacle with dignity. The only heavy weight ‘star’, he delivered and understated, believable performance. What a contrast with Emma Thompson who looked so pleased with herself it made me want to hurl in the popcorn bag. Rys Ifans was underused and looked a little embarrassed

One who-cares scene after another, this was a self-indulgent plundering of the dressing up box with the few good ideas nicked from Beatles movies.

Curtis would probably argue that this film was escapist – the only thing I wanted was to escape my seat – quite simply the worst film I’ve seen since Blues Brothers 2000.

Usually I include a film still but I felt this photo I took the other day to be more suitable.

Twilight

I’d read so much comment about how the phenomenally successful books, on which Twiglight is was based, were works of misogyny that I couldn’t approach this movie with an open mind. Yet, I can’t resist a vampire film.




Teenager Bella, is forced to leave sunny Atlanta where’s she’s lived with her mum to settle with her taciturn, police officer father in the cold north of America.

She accepts this with the same passivity as she accepts everything else that is thrown at her. Bella is quite a little withdrawn but despite having no visible personality of her own, on her first day in her new school she manages to attract the friendly attention of the most charismatic, pleasant and beautiful school kids you can imagine. What great kids – shiny, humorous, affectionate, zit free and really hard working!.

Then one day the cool kids (vampires, of course) stroll into the canteen turning heads and, as one reviewer put it, with the entrance of Edward, the romantic ‘lead’, the camera almost falls over at his good looks.

Hopelessly attracted to each other, the lustful glances and hungry huffing soon transform into lying stiffly (in his case, at least) alongside each other, with one foot on the floor in case he is overcome and slips into his real nature and kills her. They are the most undesirable little dweebs I’ve ever witnessed. Edward wears too much makeup – in these days of CGI you’d think they could afford to go easier on the pan stick. He manages a weak but sustained poor man’s James Dean impersonation Angel wings at beginning. To be honest, he was too young for me to even feel vaguely comfortable finding him attractive. Imagine my relief when the ‘evil’ vampires made their entrance. They were easy to spot because they pouted sexily at the camera and wore great clothes. One of the guys, Jason I think was his name, all Brad Pittish slutty pout and swagger, made me breath one shuddery sigh of girl relief,

“That’s more like it!” I breathed into my friend’s ear.

“I knew you’d like him!” she groaned. She had no computation about fancy the fey, ball-less vampire. I, on the other hand, said I’d feel a bit like a kiddy-fiddler if I even acknowledged that he was dashing.

And what did he see in Bela? It confirms my worst fear about men – they hate women with personality and just want a demure little miss who never says boo. The feminists argue that she behaves like an abused wife, totally subjugating her needs and life to Edward’s ‘ways’. While this may have been true of the books (which I haven’t read), it’s a little more even in the film. Neither of them gets what they want. The Jonas Brothers would be proud.
Dangerous liaisons
As most teenage girls in Britain will already know, Twilight - a tale of love between a young woman and a vampire - has now been made into a movie. It will no doubt be a huge hit. But what a shame it's not more like Buffy, writes Lucy Mangan


Unfortunately, there’s only one remotely Buffy-like line,

“Your moves are giving me whiplash.” Bella says when Edward swooshes past her to save her life. Again.

Another writer argues that the film is a wonderful evocation of female lust and is in fact a study in female sexuality:
Bitten by the female gaze
I wanted to hate Twilight, but it subverted its weak source material and provided a rare vision of female desire


In the end, I didn’t really care about the couple so much. What I did love was the cinematography, the cold, cold landscape and pine forests, the bracing beach scene. There was some fabulous altered reality camera work although the CGI seemed a bit ‘fake’ at times. The very silly baseball game was better than quidditch. And, I found myself becoming a little too interested in home décor at one point.



The concept of the vegetarian vampire was amusing and I loved the little domestic details revealed but, in the end, although
I was pleasantly distracted by Twilight - anything it did well, Buffy did better.

Apocalypto and Adventures in Advertising

golly, gosh, I’m agog
If you’re off on your travels and you hear someone in front saying something like,

“golly, gosh, I’m agog!”

it’s not Bertie Wooster but Dan Cruikshank on location for ‘Adventures in Architecture’. Half man, half Muppet, he causes unintentional hilarity frolicking across yet another foreign vista, alternately making jazz hands and enunciating his glee at a pillar, pyramid or slum. This TV series is un-missable and has made me consider selling Casa Sangue and travelling the world. Maybe not… I don’t mind displacing the rest of the Sangues but I wouldn’t want to upset Twiggy.

Each episode is themed; my favourite so far was the one on death in which Cruikshank led us breathlessly through India, Guatemala, the Czech Republic and Italy and showed how places and building reflect how societies views death.

Go here to enjoy the Cimitero Monumentale di Staglieno, Genoa, in Italy The site is in Italian but this doesn’t matter; hover over one of the labels on the plan then follow the link to the photo pages – you will never have seen anything like the monuments to the dead in this extraordinary temple to the Gothic. The sheer beauty and self-indulgent almost kinky representations of various tableaus of death would feed any pre-pubescent, or indeed middle-aged Goth.

(This place, by the way, can go on the proud to be Italian stack.

More Gothic horror to be found in the Sedlec Ossuary, a Christian chapel in the Czech Republic where some crazy carpenter recycled the contents of overcrowded cemeteries. You couldn’t make this up…

Then Cruikshank took us to the banks of the Ganges where Hindus cremated their loved ones in a chilling, to modern eyes, but beautiful ceremony. It brought home how anaesthetised we are to death in our society. In Mamma Sangue’s time, family members laid out their loved ones and sat with them until the funeral – we’re one small step from Tescos doing even that for us.

Finally, Cruikshank visits Guatemala and the site of an ancient Mayan temple where he mimed with spit-spraying relish the ancient, horrific blood rites. I was so impressed/horrified by his graphic description of human sacrifice that I re-thought whether or no not I should watch Apocalytpo…I’ve always been a bit too scared of it having read some awe-struck reviews with grudging respect paid to Mel Gibson’s fascination with brutality. I really get squicked by decapitation as I’ve mentioned more than once in my film reviews such as in the abysmal Kingdom of Heaven. Why would you need to see such a thing? Fortunately I came to my senses.

Apocalypto
Mel Gibson…what can you say about a man once so beautiful revealed to be seriously ugly on the inside by his grotesque, anti-Semitic comments? He’s no longer a draw to see a movie for me and I haven’t seen anything linked to him since the fabulous and very silly Braveheart.

Apocalypto is one of the most exciting films I have ever seen! It tells the of an ordinary, Mayan villager and his fight to escape the clutches of a kind of tatooed, ruthless press-gang whose sole purpose is to provide an endless supply of bodies for sacrifice to angry Gods in a time of disease and famine. Sent into the jungle to harvest men and women, these characters are so good at what they do and so accomplished in the art of killing that you get the feeling they did their work for love not money. There has been some discussion about how historically accurate this is and how routine the scale of slaughter depicted in Apocalypo actually was but, thanks to Braveheart, we know better than to believe any of this as fact. What we have is an utterly gripping, bloody, violent, funny and beautifully shot story.



And, get this, its in Mayan dialect with sub-titles. I wonder what the popcorn audience made of that? With an uncomprising, meticulous attention to detail, Gibson brings the ancient world horrifically and savagely to life. These people are ‘real’ and the distance provided by the language maintains the illusion that we have somehow actually travelled back to the time of the conquistadors in the 16C. Gibson went to great lengths to cast indigenous actors for the key roles including the delightfully named and rather hot Rudy Youngblood. You’ll see some of the scariest villains ever too. And who knew that, as the subtitles reveal, ancient Mayans at play conversed like guys in a dug out?



If you have a strong constitution, see this film; I can promise you a spectacle.

No Country for Old men

No Country For Old Men is an adaptation of the novel of the same name by Cormac McCarthy. Set in the bleak borderland of New Mexico, it deals with the fate of almost retired, disillusioned sheriff, Edward Bell played by Tommy Lee Jones, as well as the story of Llewellen Moss, Josh Brolin, a down at heel welder who has an unexpected opportunity to haul himself and his young wife out of near poverty, if he’s willing to risk his life.

It’s won four Oscars, best movie, best adapted screenplay, best director and best supporting actor for Javier Bardem. While I’m not sure if this film is quite as incredible as many critics make out, it is rather wonderful in that it manages to exist successfully on two levels, the popcorn and the philosophical.

On the one hand, sitting squarely in the universe of entertain-me-while-I-scoff we have a super tense, perfectly paced, bleak ‘chase’ movie where our ‘hero’, Llewellen, played by James Brolin, stumbles upon $2 million, part of a drug deal that went wrong, decides to make off with it and is pursued by the menacing, psychopath Anton Chigur, played by Javier Bardem complete with scary, floppy hair and faintly bloodshot eyes.

On the other hand, if you prefer, and I certainly do, you’ll have something else, a very, very deep and essentially dissatisfying experience …in an existential way, which is to say this is exactly what the Coen brothers were hoping you’d feel, because, like, that’s what the human condition is like. Man.

It’s inevitable then, that main protagonists and a plot evolve into anti-climax and a sense of ‘huh?’ Those dastardly Coens know exactly what they’re doing and, while it’s exciting and thought provoking, ultimately I found the ending bloody annoying. Just like life, I guess.

When you leave the cinema, you’ll be asking those questions which, for Parisian waiters at least, are every day ones: are our actions dictated by Fate? Or, you might say as you munch on posh food, peut etre, life is meaningless and we are engaged in haphazard meanderings where each decision we make, every action isn’t pre-ordained and we can be easily, randomly thwarted by chance, by accidents, by…?


So we have a bloody, tense, modern (set in the 1980s) ‘western’; life and death struggles, gritty, visceral themes set in hideously modern buildings; trailers, motels – essentially fragile, ugly shoe boxes perched on the barren, unforgiving landscape of New Mexico, a terrain which will outlive the main characters no matter how muscular and brutal they are. The place names are familiar, El Paso, Rio Grande etc, they are the names of Western legend and movie mythology and while the struggles in this film are for life and death, and the bad guy, Chigur played with terrifying lack of humour by Bardem, is memorable and the perfect amalgam of every hitch-hiking, relentless, psychopath you’ve ever seen on screen, you’re never in any doubt that this all means nothing. A conversation between Tommy Lee Jones, the sheriff and his retired from law-enforcement uncle outlines the philosophical heart of the film. His nephew talks about how things have changed, how the criminal has become almost untouchable and his uncle says simply, in that tobacco chewing way of westerns,

Whatcha got ain't nothin new. This country's hard on people, you can't stop what's coming, it ain't all waiting on you. That's vanity.

We cast ourselves as the heroes, the principal characters, it seems the Coens are saying, yet we’re not.

In this blank view of human existence and purpose, there’s a smattering of humour, plenty of desperate, painful violence and a relentless tour of the interiors of one Texan motel after another. In this film, everyone is on their own and vulnerable to sudden death. There are huge spaces between people physically and long moments of silence, no traffic, no other people – it’s a huge country. There is no perceptible soundtrack in the film yet the use of sound puts you right there in the protagonists’ shoes so you can hear their breath, feel their reactions to an ominous footfall. It’s extraordinarily tense and self-assured work. Special mention has to go to English cinematographer, Roger Deakins, who has found beauty somehow in the angular plains and ugly architecture.

The three main protagonists are played with agonised intensity: Tommy Lee Jones cracking dark jokes and filled with blank wonder at the horror of the crimes he’s witnessed, his face a barely contained wrinkled mask of horror with only the eyes showing how he’s lost the heart and belief in what he’s doing. For this character, the good guys are too small, too weak to fight the modern evil; Josh Brolin is amazing; he looks like Nick Cave without the hair dye and his determination and virile fight against evil is both superhuman and human. He struggles against this Terminator style bad guy and has all our hopes pinned on his success. The actor’s struggles with mediocrity and his own personal demons before this role add poignancy to the experience. Hopefully this will be the beginning of a much deserved rise to the top for him. Javier Bardem won an Oscar for his part which, apparently, wasn’t fleshed out in the novel where all we told is that Chigur has no sense of humour. Unlike the actor who, in his acceptance speech said,

"Thank you to the Coens for being crazy enough to think I could do that, and [for putting] one of the most horrible haircuts in history on my head!"



The exchange between Chigur and a hapless gas station proprietor will go down in cinema history as one of the most agonizing moments you’ll witness – on a par with Joe Pesci’s “In what way do I amuse you?” in Goodfellas. Chigur believes in fate and he has constructed his own fucked up rules and moral code about what has to be and what must happen. The man with all the power believes, ironically, that every action he takes is down to fate.

It is a testament to the casting in this film that everyone, from the main characters to one-line speaking bit parters have such real personalities, so much history, such uniqueness that their deaths, if that’s how they’ll end up, hurt you. These aren’t the faceless victims of a serial killer, no; these are real people with real aspirations, real outlooks on life, coming up against a genuine monster and all we can do is cross our fingers for them.



Whether or not you’ll ‘enjoy’ this film is questionable. It’s shockingly violent, unexpectedly visually beautiful, epic in theme but ultimately rather depressing. And it makes no sense – which is the point. You’ll be unsettled and haunted by it for days.I want to watch it again just to make sure, after all, what was all that stuff about the dreams at the end…?

Sweeney Todd

Tim Burton’s version of Sweeney Todd does not disappoint; it’s a glorious, over the top, dark, broody, operatic assault on the ears and eyes. After two hours of white pan stick, Robert Smith hair styles and gin swilling kids, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven, or should I say – hell.
It’s an unmistakable Burton picture right from the opening credits which haul you straight into the movie’s universe; Sweeny Todd’s titles are to the Gothic what James Bond is to spy films. From the first breath, the rush of a climbing organ lifts you into a dreary, dangerous, studio-London where the sky is always inky and tears inevitably turn to blood. Rivers of blood.



I knew very little about the tale of Sweeney Todd, the demon barber of Fleet Street, who took gratuitous and grisly revenge on the people of London when he was deported for a crime he didn’t commit. He was set up by a pervy and corrupt Judge Turpin, played by the gorgeous Alan Rickman, and separated from his wife and baby daughter. Now back in London, Todd changes his name, takes up with the equally amoral Mrs Lovett, played by Helena Bonham Carter, and sets up a grisly production line,

“How about a shave, sir?”

And before the towel has settled on their chests, he’s slit their throats, and Mrs Lovett’s transformed the plentiful victims into delicious meat pies to be fed back to eager but unsuspecting Londoners.

Johnny Depp, in the title role, is unrestrained but magnificent. I have never been the biggest Jack Sparrow fan. I loved the novelty of the first Pirates film but I’ve refused to watch the last two in the franchise. In Sweeney Todd, while Depp’s mock-ney accent rankles on the English ear, it’s more David Bowie than Keith Richards this time round, the film is so theatrical that somehow it can take it. It’s his fifth collaboration with Tim Burton and, there’s no doubt about it, they’re good for each other. Burton keeps Depp’s feet down on the ground by challenging him and in return, the Depp’s presence, the sheer brilliance of his physical acting, gives the film just enough reality and weight to keep it from looking like animation. I have never seen a man walk through a door like Mr Depp does.

What I didn’t like, of course, was the music. I love a musical but I’m not au fait with the Sondheim phenomenon and I felt mildly uncomfortable at the sheer volume of singing; the songs aren’t catchy or melodious but instead are vehicles for plot and motivation and no sooner are sung than they’ve disappeared down the drain like regular dialogue. There’s nothing to lift the spirits there and certainly no tune to hum in the shower.


Fortunately, I got so much pleasure from the visuals that I didn’t exactly suffer.

The film is dark and beautiful; Monochrome lit faces and midnight blue are a perfect canvas for the relentless bloodletting. Rooftops and skylights, dodgy pie fillings, attics and slums – it’s a London you wouldn’t want to live in but which you can’t tear your eyes away from. My favourite shot is where Sweeney Todd and Mrs Lovett stand in her shop window; he holds a cleaver and she holds a rolling pin – the perfect couple. http://www.movieweb.com/movies/film/50/4450/gal2878/
"> loads of lovely stills here

I understand that Helena Bonham Carter, Mrs Burton, auditioned with the rest of the pack; in one interview she said, a hint of faux bitterness in her voice,

“The fact that I was the mother of his children made no difference.”

And she’s fine. I just wasn’t convinced and I can’t quite put my finger on why. Depp, was Sweeney; in every frame he frowned and brooded and was driven by vengeance. God knows how he slept at night. Helena, on the other hand, looked like she was playing a pantomime villain and I sensed a flicker of irony in her performance which may have been her characteristic, English, dead-pan humour or, it may have been something to do with that slight mad look in her eyes which, while it made it seem believable that Mrs Lovett would adapt to the new pie filling overnight, means that she never looks at the camera and doesn’t engage with you.

There are strong supporting performances from everyone: Rickman is first choice for unsavoury but well-spoken types in a wing collar. Sporting calcified nails he is lascivious and pathetic, inappropriately showing off his leather bound porn collection, he reminded me of Tiberius in I Claudius. The judge is ably assisted by the best turn in the movie – a cross between Joe Pesci and Tweedledum - Timothy Spall, ballectic, Dickensian and riveting. Sacha Baron Cohen plays an Italian barber and it shows what kind of movie this is that he fits right in. Did anyone else notice how ‘packed’ his tights were? A special mention must go to Ed Sanders who plays the gin guzzling boy who falls right out of the workhouse and into the fire.

Treat yourself; go see Sweeney Todd. It’s worth it just to hear the word ‘tonsorial’ uttered on screen. And remember, it’s all fake blood.

The Golden Compass

I haven’t read Philip Pullman; reading children’s books is a bit like a busman’s holiday for me, but I was intrigued by the trailer I’d seen; Pullman’s cool idea of a daemon, a person’s soul made ‘real’ and concrete, in the form of an animal or bird, was convincingly brought to life – birds flew around children’s heads, monkeys leapt ahead of their masters and a snow leopard pud-pudded alongside Daniel Craig.

The Golden Compass is set in an alternate universe similar to Earth. It tells the story of Lyra Belacqua, a young girl who overhears a plot to kill her uncle, Lord Asriel, played by the remarkably un-bookish looking Craig, and is thrown into complicated adventures full of kidnappings, betrayals and silly names which, may have meant something to Pullman fans, but which I found exceptionally hard to follow. Multiple plot threads were launched and faded out with little storytelling skill so that at the end of this first instalment, I felt utterly dissatisfied. One of the three stories reached a resolution and Lyra spoke dreamily of “next time” and the next adventure…which made me respond, “Huh?” They should have got the director from 24 in on the act and show them how it was done.

The daemons didn’t disappoint. In one delightful scene, children chased each other through a meadow with their little CGI souls scampering and flitting around them. It added this incredible dimension where you wouldn’t just read another person face, or tone of voice or their body language but also their daemon. It was fascinating watching the daemons interact with each other too expressing arguments through their own fights and threats. Amazing too observing the interaction of a human with its daemon which in some cases, such as one scene between Mrs Coulter and her ‘monkey’ was tantamount to abuse followed by intense regret on her part which was disturbing to behold. Worse of all was the
dreadful sense of violation if anyone touched or forcibly separated a daemon from its human.

Lyra’s daemon hadn’t ‘fixed’ because she was a child and varied in form - sometimes a cute gerbil creature that peeked out form under her collar, other times a Pantalaimon, a racoon (I think) and occasionally a baby snow-leopard. I wonder what mine would be? Just think, it would be another area in life where we could develop complexes; imagine the internal conflict caused by the discrepancy caused by the daemon you had and the one you wanted? Or the dismay when you thought your child would turn out to be a snow-leopard but instead she ‘stuck’ as a crow?


Pantalaimon

I loved all the philosophical, pseudo-religious mumbo jumbo too about ‘dust’ and free-will although I had no idea what any of it meant. Does ‘dust’ represent God or knowledge or what? There seems to be as many theories as nutters out there; for all its flaws, I loved that a mainstream movie encourages children to navel-gaze and maybe take a peek at a dictionary once in a while with statements such as, “there will always be free-thinkers and heretics”.

The film was a feast for the eyes: it was beautifully lit and everyone’s eyes shone. It had the look of the 1940s with a smattering of Victorian technology: romantic airships; gas lamps; springs; clockwork and documents sealed with wax. The period feel made one think immediately of Orwell’s 1984; this might have been what the sets would have looked like - before it all went to rack and ruin. The splendour before it faded.

With all these Big Ideas and Big Visuals, the characters faded somewhat: I liked Lyra, played by the gloriously named, skinny and boyish, Dakota Blue Richards, although she faltered a little on the highly emotional scenes; Daniel looked a bit strange with a beard, spent a great deal of time gazing into the middle distance and disappeared from the story line for ages; Nicole Kidman tried very hard to be a less camp Cruela de Ville but the part wasn’t intimate enough for her to shine; Sam Elliot was his usual, effortless, charismatic self but I felt mildly resentful of his American Cavalry role.

Did I mention I hated the polar bears? A great concept in the book, perhaps, but I loathed the whole idea on screen. Polar Bears, well, they just aren’t very…nice…see the recent story about a Mamma Polar Bear chowing down on her Baby Polar Bears. The storyline fell into the picture like an unwanted dinner guest. Despite the cool Norwegian style names, I wasn’t convinced. There was a touch of the Watership Down discomforts – they were all earnest voices and motivation when, in fact, they were polar bears in very silly outfits. And polar bears can’t talk.

I hated the annoying Harry Hausen-style climactic fight complete with appalling, corny music; a cacophony of trumpets and strings such as you might find in a b-movie Roman movie; I found myself getting a bit bored. And why did no one not once mention how cold it was?


I doubt I’ll bother with the next instalment so I’ll never have my very own daemon puzzle solved: why does my soul-mate enjoy nothing more than rolling in dead rats by the river?