Movies Can't Last.

Slant Magazine's Films of the Year.

2007-01-19T22:39:00.000Z

Just what I put above. A nice selection, try sifting through the occasional pretense.

Review: Superman II - The Richard Donner Cut

2007-01-06T00:14:00.000Z

In the absence of vermislitude, camp frippery prevails. So learnt Dick Donner, as Hollywood lore has it, when he was notoriously fired from completing a quarter of the sequel to Superman: The Movie for no other reason (ostensibly) than personal distaste and Svengali tendencies. There has been far too much ballyhoo, contempt and indifference met with the release of this fractured mini-masterpiece, and I won't bore you with the intricacies of that Salkind mentality. For once, Superman II doesn't anticipate a Richard Pryor comedy. And it means a lot more than sniggering at awkward CG updates, useless NY inserts, and a plot device so painfully re-transfigured that even the most ardent fans don't seem willing to turn a blind eye at the sake of artistic retribution.

Donner's vision, here shown for the first time 'as originally conceived and intended', is a hotpotch of wanton fanboy acquiescence and extemporising humanity. It's more meaningful than the version you saw in 1980; and you'll have to forgive Margot Kidder in a towel for forgetting to dye her hair. Much has been made of Richard Lester's unwelcome slapstick in his version of Superman II, and one can't help but exhale comfortably in the knowledge that the Man of Steel no longer tosses cellophane badges at his foes, Metropolis civilians don't keep using the phone whilst being blown down the street, and someone's not afraid of telling Terence Stamp that bellowing "KNEEL BEFORE ZOD!" as surrealistic Vaudeville as often as possible isn't wisest of the choices.

Unfortunately, taken alone, this remains an impoverished curio, a malnourished footnote on the cutting room floor. Something Superman Returns fails to recognise aside from the fact it's too expensive, is that character isn't a boorish collection of snippets of momentary reconciliation. The 2006 version is a screenwriter's dream - there are three painfully defined acts, and Superman's 'dramatic journey' is perfunctory as pie. Whereas Donner's films understand mythos, but mythos in the context of reality. Superman spends the night with Lois because Superman wants to spend the night with Lois, not because the world was less complicated in 1978 or our hero had no tangible qest to embark upon. Compare a similar altercation in Singer's blockbuster in which Superman meets Lois on the roof of the Daily Planet: the interminable Kate Bosworth excepted, it is so entrenched in creating a chemistry between the two leads whilst affixing some timely relevance (Lois doesn't smoke, the world doesn't need Superman) it misses the point entirely. There is always a point, always avail, never character and, crucially, no jubilance.

Dick Donner understood how to have fun without juggling panda bears - that's why he opened Superman with a kid opening a comic book instead of staving in Christian allegories we're already aware of. That's why he has Lois Lane 'out' Clark Kent by shooting him instead of having his child. And that is why Donner's version of Superman II eclipses both Singer's and Lester's, even over the stilted pacing, glib conclusion, and weak villainy. Or it may just be that Lois Lane in a towel makes me all gooey.

2006-12-21T19:22:00.000Z

Chinatown.

Shamelessly overdramatic and a little hokey (I'm referring to the doc, and certainly not Chinatown) this is still interesting viewing. Not too keen on Bob Towne, I'm guessing. And where's my sexually irrational horse when I need her?

Ballet and Bolsheviks.

2006-12-09T23:07:00.000Z

It's been a funny old day. Riddled with self-anxiety I thought the best place to turn was the intrinsically charming duo of Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger; those formerly 'out-of-step' Brits who've since enjoyed lollops of praise from Coppola, Lucas and Scorsese amongst others. This fact is cited quite a bit seemingly to expunge both the 'quaintness' and, in the case of The Red Shoes (arguably their most celebrated picture), the overwhelming ballet factor. If that's drawing in the arthouse crowd, brilliant. But there's more to be had from this work of art than glib reference. Scorsese calls it one of the most beautiful films in colour, because it is. It's achingly beautiful. And in a state of emotional fragility, it's impossible not to be affected, not to be moved in some way, by the fairy tale of Victoria Page. The fact that The Red Shoes includes a seventeen-minute ballet number is largely immaterial. That's not to say it's a gratuity (it isn't) but it's impossible not to be completely swept away by the sheer hyperbolic poignancy. Ballet is totally beyond me, but The Red Shoes isn't.

I was really quite shattered after my P&P fix for the day -I'm currently working my way through their boxset- though it affirmed my love for Anton Wallbrook. And so, perhaps rather erroneously, in my continued rehabilitation, I turned to another British institute: David Lean. Three hours of the chap. My History teacher decried Doctor Zhivago as "so overrated". The tagline sells the film as 'A Love Caught in the Fire of Revolution!'. Well, that isn't faintly true. Omar Sharif and Julie Christie barely spend the first hour of the film together, but that's entirely the point. I think it works in Zhivago's favour. It simply isn't Brief Encounter, nor is it trying to be. So, sure, the film is vast and loaded with scatty emotion -and it really can't be considered a favourable History lesson- but it's very readily accessible. A story this grand, filled with as many grand performances (Rod Steiger is the obvious highlight) is accelerated by Lean's bullied artistic drive. Stodgy and epic? Of course. Feel good and gorgeous? Why the hell not? It does gloriously skim over the horrors of Russia's governmental troubles between 1917-1923, however, but it will make you feel that love can be pure and tragic once in a while. And not just the other type.

2006-12-04T19:34:00.000Z

INLAND EMPIRE Trailer.

Lynch. Dern. Zabriskie. Breathless. Release this surrealistic pillow, and release it now!

Bah.

2006-11-25T14:04:00.000Z

Wow, they pull Marie Antoinette and The Prestige after a week and Pan's Labryinth won't even be showing. I'm not holding out much hope for Requiem. God bless Showcase Cinemas. My irony device just exploded.

RIP Robert Altman.

2006-11-22T19:30:00.000Z

You may have noticed that I've been neglecting my duties recently but I felt it necessary to pay tribute to the passing of a true Hollywood great: Robert Altman. Without question, cinema has lost one of its last auteurs and mavericks (he's one of the few actually worthy of that usually peurile title). I'm in no position to comment at length on his tremendous and varied and filmography; but he is survived by his third wife, five children and a daring legacy.

Robert Altman 1925-2006

Robert Altman talks to Elvis Mitchell about A Prarie Home Companion.

Review: Casino Royale

2006-11-19T22:29:00.000Z

Ah, is it that time again? Have we all become a little wearisome of camp debauchery? Apparently so - and when film analysts come to examine our socio-economic mindsets long after we're all dead, I'm sure the glut of the Iraq conflict and post-9/11 lethargy will be determining factors as to why these nittier, grittier origin stories like Batman Begins and latterly Casino Royale proved financially viable. The times they are a changin'. In 1995 James Bond was "a relic of the Cold War"; now his ballsier, script-doctored boss bemoans a time when conflict was a little simpler than all of this. The audience feel the same way.

It's not that the numerous psychoanalyses inflicted upon our touchy-feely hero aren't welcome (that through line has been prevalent throughout the Bond series, no matter what they tell you) they're just a tad unbridled. The unceasing pseudo-playfulness of both Bond (Daniel Craig, beefy) and the austere Vesper Lynd (Eva Green, ravishing) quickly become nullified by the extinct want to sexy up a bland narrative only satisfying dual purpose: give that sexist, mysoginist dinosaur some emotion now and -hey!- we'd better not dedicate the second act of an action movie to a few rounds of Texas Hold 'Em.

That's not to belittle Casino Royale. There's much to like. A sprinkling of Euro stars and Jeffrey Wright are certainly preferable over a cross-dressing director, an invisible car, a moot Halle Berry and Madonna.

****THIS REVIEW WILL BE COMPLETED SOOOOOOOOOOON. SO DON'T NOBODY GO NOWHERE. *****

2006-11-12T11:35:00.000Z

Mark Kermode introduces The Exorcist.

Well, Kermode's got more charismatic over the years and perhaps he's been just too outspoken about his Exorcist love for this to be anything but dated yet, despite the awful fake breath, it's always quite nice to hear the good Doc pipe up about something. James King can go to hell.

The barf bag please.

2006-11-08T17:09:00.000Z

Director David Meyers on his purported remake of 1986 genre classic The Hitcher:

"Well just the, I mean my main approach to the original was solving some of the logic flaws it had. You know I think it was a very good film for what it was and if you really study it like I have, I've kind of pinpointed certain things that really bothered me in... just in the believability of it all."

Excuse me, "for what it was"? What The Hitcher was, and is, amounted to unhinged, surly, pulpish psychodrama with zero pretension and completely zany compulsion, provided mostly by Rutger Hauer's chilling precision. Trying to iron out "flaws" in logic is ill-judged and stupid. If we suddenly see John Ryder barraging down the highway looking for C. Thomas Howell and Jennifer Jason Leigh with some fudged attempt at mock profundity (believe me there'll be one, he was probably abused as a child or something) then it will seep any thrill/horror out of the blind bizarro of the original. It works so effectively because we don't know why John Ryder does what he does. The film is in no way realistic, at least not dramatically, the mustard-keen resourcefulness of Ryder is merely means to extrapolate the inadequacies of our hero, and in turn strengthen his own validity. Origin stories don't gel for serial killers. The prequel to Texas Chain Saw Massacre is proof enough of that . Alas...

"Such as, why is Ryder trying to... What is Ryder's deal? Sort of embrace the idea that he's a looking to kind of end it all for himself and trying to choose the proper opponent."

This is all eloquently done in the original, which is barely twenty years old to begin with. Meyers is clearly brown-nosing with his villain. Come 2007, and by the end of this gratuity, the new Jim Halsley will not have learnt how to be a man, will not have changed in his ways, by being accused of mass murder and having his would-be girlfriend literally torn in two. He'll simply be relieved at having defeated his moustache-twirling adversary. And there'll be zip sexuality. I'd normally be reticent pooh-poohing a director just because his past was in music videos (Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry speak for themselves, but even Francis 'I'm a Slave 4 U' Lawrence used his obvious stylistic traits to exaggerate Constantine; and for the better) yet with Meyers reeling off ditties like these...

"It has the inspiration from the original but we've reblocked it so that it hopefully plays more believable and more intelligent as far as what you would really do and I'm hoping that that subtlety upgrades it from kind of a cold TV film to something that's actually an A level thriller."

... it doesn't hold much hope for his first feature film. Believability isn't a factor with The Hitcher. It's feeling. He hastily adds:

"But it's all theoretical at the moment."

You ain't kidding.

The whole gory affair can be read at your leisure here.

My Filmspotting mention!!

2006-11-06T22:32:00.000Z

Holy cow -- wasn't expecting this. I was little behind -ok, nearly a month- on my Filmspotting fixes but oh! to my surprise when my favourite hosts Adam & Van Sam read an email from "Samuel" (that's me) in response to their Departed review. Filmspotting's one of, if not the, best film podcasts out there - though wasn't it more fun when it was called Cinecast?- so I'm a little bit chuffed to hear my amateurish criticisms broadcast.

And yeah, it sounds dumb that "good entertainment doesn't have to make sense." but I'm sticking to my guns, guys! As I feverishly type on 6th November, I lament the fact this gushy blog could've been thrust upon my non-existent readership 25th October.

The link's here and feel free to gasp in awe at around the thirtieth minute. And if you're not a regular subscriber to the Crackspotting phenomena, ask yourself: why the devil not?

Review: Little Children

2006-11-04T19:28:00.000Z

I wanted to want to like Todd Field's Little Children. My problem lies with the Dubus family - those responsible for Field's previously Oscar nominated screenplay for In the Bedroom, and likewise the unfortunate duo of equally hemmed-in, delusional, precocious melodramas (read: House of Sand and Fog and marginally grubbier We Don't Live Here Anymore). On the surface, Little Children -which cribs instead from Tom Perotta's novel- seems no different: a bunch of holier-than-thou suburbanites decide to shake things up a little, only their self-inflicted prejudices get in the way. Tragedy ensues.

And perhaps with greater tonal clarity, the gimmick may have worked. The refreshing difference between the screen translations of Perotta vs. Dubus would be the former's nubile characterisations smack less of sexless misanthropy. Hedonistic Gen X'ers they may be, but at least their moral righteousness won't fuel rampant audience alienation. Kate Winslet's Sarah Pierce is knowingly deserving of a better life (or what she perceives to be a better life), yet without the unwelcome tang of American Beauty smugness. This is, in part, aided by an omnipotent narrator, whose dry remarks fire the much needed black humour but also highlight Children's innumerate problems: surely it's a little -get this- infantile to tell us rather than show us. It's also a little presumptuous.

Backscored by the hum of trains sans cesse, Little Children is by parts cheeky social satire and doom ridden serialised drama. From the moment stay-at-home parents Winslet and Wilson clap eyes on each other, there's an instant expectation of adultery, partly through their broody performances but also that pesky narration. Field seems more in love this device's functionality, tonality, and personality than the enviable array of talent at his disposal. This may explain why Jennifer Connelly gets lost in the mix somewhere. Moreover the apparent catalyst of the entire affair is the undesirable integration of a former sex offender (laced with an appropriate creepiness by Jackie Earle Haley) into the neighbourhood. The trouble being it doesn’t serve the film’s central conceit at all except for want of narrative cleverness. Other than that, it’s just interesting jibber-jabber. In fact our interest peaks right about the time Winslet does. From there on in, it feels like about nine months of unwanted pregnancy. One well-acted satiric skit bungles its way into another by proxy of gawky expressiveness.

Indeed, the film is largely plotless but that shouldn’t matter, it’s simply the hysterical attempt at profundity in the last ten minutes that serve to bury the entire film's mock philosophy. Falling off a skateboard just doesn’t warrant a critical re-evaluation of your dead-end existence. Similar tries to legitimise its glib disconnectivity in its final reel appear rushed and messy- an awkward contrast with the relaxed steaminess Field tries hard to maintain from the clincal opening titles. Little Children is too plimp and natty to be solely driven by dialogue, yet it lacks the booksmarts of its female protagonist to exorcise a fitting conclusion worthy of its genuine moodiness. File under interesting experiment.

What you should've watched this Halloween.

2006-10-31T17:51:00.000Z

I like Halloween. I like Halloween. I like The Thing even more. I like the sloshy stylings of Eric Red, writer of Near Dark and The Hitcher. I adore The Nightmare Before Christmas despite it being tarnished by 'depressed' teens who abuse it to make themselves feel better with glitter. H.P Lovecraft would be proud of Alien. Vietnam allegories fly wildly in the likes of Aliens and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Scream proved postmodernism breeds. Horror movies are smart, and they're dumb. And the best ones do both at the same time. This is without even tapping into the inordinate number of sub-genres: science gone loopy (Frankenstein), the hotpot of religiosity (The Exorcist, The Wicker Man), technology and flesh (stand up David Cronenberg), comedy (The Evil Dead), slasher, snuff, faux snuff, and the big kahuna of them all: sex. At least since Janet Leigh took a shower in 1960.

Yes, sex is usually the death knell for any eager adolescent ready to pop their cherry in the vicinity of a serial killer. But it can also be the stuff of emotional validity or volatility, and nowhere is this more poetically expressed than in Nic Roeg's 1973 thriller Don't Look Now: simply the greatest, most haunting, beautiful, and sublimely unsettling picture I've ever seen. And even with my relative inexperience with the genre, I realise it takes a lot to incense a blind fear of the colour red. The stretched sex scene in which Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland make love to consummate their dwindling grief for their dead daughter is the one everyone remembers. Partly because it further showcases Roeg's tricksy editing (which is, by the way, unsurpassed), the scene remarkably intercut with the couple getting their clothes back on, but mostly because it suffuses the entire film with the heart-wrenching sincerity which will reach devastating proportions come the time that figure decides to turn around and face the camera.

Scraped down to basics, it's completely barmy. An old blind psychic waltzes through a church exhaling majestically. But the mood Roeg creates, contained within the unit of John and Laura's relationship, is perpetually truthful. It's intuitive. As the mind wanders, so does the camera. Once the foundation of togetherness is shattered, the frenzied explosion of "nothing is what it seems." is kept in check by sheer instinctive circumvention. If frozen lakes aren't flat, then they're certainly deep. For an ostensibly a British production, but there's nothing quaint or humble about Don't Look Now. Julie Christie will break your heart.

I was going to write a lengthy dissection of the film's burrowing psychology, but it seems rather unnecessary when the BFI rightly rank it as the eighth best Brit flick of all time and Roger Ebert waxes favourably about it here. So say a little prayer for sex in the cinema, it can be done right, with sensitivity, and consequently scare the living daylights out of you. The Baxter marriage is the most emotionally worn and realistic relationship this side of a John Cassavetes film. And when you're dealing with the dumb/smart genre of horror, that's really quite an achievement. Just wait until the remake.

2006-10-21T11:15:00.000Z

Angelo Badalamenti - Piano Mulholland Drive

FYE.

Ebert.

2006-10-20T15:23:00.000Z

Roger Ebert is back. Here's the proof.

I loathe twonks who over-simplify the Pulitzer winning critic with the thumbs up/thumbs down logic. There's much more sincerity than that. Especially since he cites Aguirre, The Wrath of God as his favourite film.

Good to have you back.

Mini-review: X-Men 3

2006-10-12T20:26:00.000Z

The standing theory amongst film critics cleverer than I is that just because Bryan Singer happens to be gay, homoeroticism must pervade every frame of the first two wildly successful X-Men films. Though with Singer off in favour of returning Superman, the hurried installation of hetero-hack Brett Ratner in the franchise's third (and ostensibly final) instalment seems to suggest something more in line with the churlish machismo of the Rush Hour films. Alas, an entirely different kind of camp infiltrates X-Men:The Last Stand, the kind where Ian McKellen can foist the Golden Gate Bridge over to Alcatraz whilst bellowing, “Charles always wanted to build bridges!” and –geddit?- literally doing so. Suddenly Iceman ‘coming out of the closet’ to his folks in part II seems nuanced.

That's not to completely disregard this comic book fare. It's certainly more to the point than Superman Returns. But clocking in at a lean 104 minutes, Last Stand eschews characterisation in way of dumb one-liners and a schizoid dual narrative (mutant cure= bad, crazy Jean Grey= bad) which would make even the most complacent Hollywood screenwriter blush. Any goodwill toward our hard done-by mutants friends is reliant on the innate affability of Kelsey Grammer or any broody emotional hold-over which may have miraculously stumbled its way across from the first two pictures. In the end, just about as bafflingly threatening as the rise of the Conservative party; but come closing time as gleefully vapid as David Cameron the environmentalist. All filler, no killer.

Review: The Departed

2006-10-07T17:32:00.000Z

There's a reason why Martin Scorsese is Earth's greatest living filmmaker. For now, it's called The Departed. In a few years it'll probably be called Silence - his purported next project, a tale of trouble in feudal Japan, and his most radical departure since Kundun- and then cower before Deed Poll following his proposed Roosevelt biopic; which again pairs him with recent bell-ringer Leo DiCaprio. The point which I'm basely trying to make is that Scorsese's career continues to be one of constant and endless re-invention: instinctively transcendent of hammy genre trappings, and whilst most of his oeuvre is riddled with angsty Catholicism and subsequently deep-rooted existential fissures, they manifest themselves in both bloody gangster sprawls and charged period drama. Yet it's the former for which this Italian-American Oscar-dodger and sometime documentarian will be remembered for. It's both a blessing and curse.

With some diffidence, then, we approach The Departed - not only a 'return' to the well-tread mean streets, but also with the added stigma of being smacked with the remake stick. This is of course is not a virginal thing for Scorsese (he eloquently updated J. Lee Thompson's Cape Fear in 1991) but subsuming the poetic Hong Kong verve of slick-as-you-like Infernal Affairs with a quasi-Bostonian underworld is a potentially fatal choice. Don't heed these warning signs. They're infantile and disreputable. If you think a sexagenaric auteur who's had a dodgy decade can't make Dropkick Murphys covering Woody Guthrie work, you're gravely mistaken. He'll even make it a frequent cue.

The Departed is about as subtle as genocide. It's an extreme, pervasive, meditation on crime and law enforcement and the grey in-between. Any idiot could you tell that. But it's also an extremely entertaining meditation, one which screams out for commercial approval -or the approval of the Academy?- amid the dizzying stylistic verité that punctuates the entire picture. This isn't Scorsese being lazy, it's just this particular story calls for less moralistic inclination than Raging Bull and, to a lesser extent, Goodfellas because of the sheer weight of plot and the paunch of Jack Nicholson. The "even keel" between truth and duplicity Vera Farminga's character talks about is one Scorsese works hard to retain. So Nicholson might dust his floozies liberally with cocaine and spook Matt Damon with a dildo, but paradoxically it's with restraint. Or at least Smilin' Jack is countered by a knowingly idiosyncratic screenplay with an intrinsically starry ensemble to boot.

The same can't be said for the sporadic narrative; the thread of which pits undercover romanticist cop Billy Costigan (DiCaprio) against the functional bastard-of-sorts mole Colin Sullivan (Damon) with disastrous results for the pair. But that's largely inconsequential as the film brims with such heartfelt ingenuity (I really cannot subscribe to the elitist theory Scorsese's become emotionally detached over the years) and its seeming simplicity wisely mimics both Michael Mann's cleaner Heat and its stylised Chinese precursor while ignoring the gentle compulsion of blind exposition. In fact, taken as a whole, The Departed houses such consistent guttural intensity, we all breathe a sigh of relief when Alec Baldwin's Ellerby casually summarises and dismisses one of the film's several McGuffins with, "I don't know what it is, you don't know what it is, who gives a fuck?".

It won't come as much of a surprise that Martin Scorsese feels the same way.

Joe.

2006-09-23T20:33:00.000Z

You must listen to this. Joe Morgenstern + him not liking a movie = me simultaneously wetting my pants at its hilarity and shitting them at how gosh-darn brilliantly he writes/speaks.

Book review: The Fall of the House of Usher

2006-09-17T21:10:00.000Z

Let me just preface this by typing I know this is film site, but I've spent a literally about three hours writing this garbage so I'm thrusting it upon my non-existent readership whether they like it or not.

People think they know Edgar Allan Poe because he married his thirteen year-old cousin. Granted, its ethical implications are more than a little questionable and as such could be considered grounds for an appropriate affixation for Poe’s foaming, vitriolic ramblings on love, hate, insanity and ostensibly everything in-between. Such a criticism, though, profoundly over-simplifies and understates a personality at once disconnected and yet palpably ferocious.

This duplicity is no more prevalent than in The Fall of the House of the Usher, one of many short stories by Poe, which does away with the usual barmy protagonist as narrator and instead supplants this upon Roderick Usher: the one-time friend of our nameless guide, not only plagued by his unearthly place of residence and ill-fated twin sister but also an oppressive mental disorder which may or may not have something to do with the previous two. By eschewing the first person in this manner and up-playing the non-didacticism, Poe simultaneously adorns and degrades the soul. For itself is an emotional terror, not one of factual integrity. And so, as you’d expect, initial descriptions of the house sniffle of perpetual indulgence (“a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit”), but Poe merely uses these fantasist extortions to legitimise his realist intentions. Thusly Usher has little to do with a wildly transmogrifying abode, and everything to do with the wearing of individualism – an admittedly sensationalist conclusion is poignantly two-fold; as the Usher house falls so, too, do the lives and lineage of the ashen siblings.

One can accuse The Fall of the House of Usher, and by extension most of Poe’s repertoire, of being comfortably digestible in its own horrific way. Its finale is a fitting one, it flirts with both the supernatural and spiritual, and the plot serves to typify insanity just enough to entertain. Poe is restrained and let loose at the same time, both pure and puerile, frothing at the mouth like a witless animal circling the epicentre of innate ‘Baroque-ness’. And yet this is not a desperate lunge like the slovenly poet who overflows his passion in For Annie, neither the murderous semantics of The Tell-Tale Heart. Instead Usher teeters somewhere in the middle: suitably aware of its own grunge and stream of consciousness but less audaciously. Then it is not with grim fascination we enter the House of Usher as the host’s ‘friend’, rather with a snooping curiosity. We are drawn to its grotesqueness not because we ourselves are grotesque – that honour is bestowed upon, ironically, a house more animated than its inhabitants- but because we ask why. Why is it the house compares to “no earthly sensation” other than “the bitter lapse into everyday life” one receives after an opium trip? Our narrator even feigns a shaky justification, and in this vein taps into some odd wealth of primal human emotion. Poe makes us afraid, and out of nothing other than opinion and manipulative observation.

The fact that Poe is able to mask these machinations so completely is nothing short of intimidating. So whilst there’s a veritable gamut of now familiar horror staples (internment while alive, doors slamming, the original haunted house) it’s a tribute to the author that his story of the corrupted individual transcends any potentially dating genre trappings. The most obvious manifestation of this would be the invention of The Mad Trist, supposedly by Sir Launcelot Canning in fact Poe himself, which serves as unlikely means to extrapolate the reader’s fear further as the sounds contained within the story-within-a-story begin to mimic those in reality. Appropriately, though, Poe drenches the story of the knightly drunkard deep in satire and the plot is intentionally nonsensical. This gimmick in other hands would be nothing other than a scant excuse to showcase the author’s talents. In Poe’s case, it rings of a knowing selflessness many strive for but few achieve.

Subtlety is not something one usually associates with Poe, and The Fall of the House of Usher is no exception. Indeed, he all but stops short of bludgeoning us over the head with the novella’s wanton spirituality and vagaries of quietude. But there, in that moment, in that house, when Roderick Usher gives up his soul to bellow “MADMAN!” at his alarmed guest, there is an instant of such utterly sublime terror that strikes such a chord of unspeakable feeling that it warrants the excess that has preceded it. Expectedly compulsive and emotionally shattering, yet just as deliciously disordered as its titular dwelling, Usher is a decisive work with a slobbering intensity. Just what you’d expect, then, from an American who married his thirteen year-old cousin.

“By utter simplicity, by the nakedness of his designs, he arrested and overawed attention. If ever mortal painted an idea, that mortal was Roderick Usher.”

For Edgar Allan Poe, that idea is fear.

Mini-review: The Sentinel

2006-09-06T15:22:00.000Z

The Sentinel is just as gratuitous as its sensationally meaningless title suggests: a botched attempt at sexifying a tired sub-genre, with a tired leading man and sexy supporting cast. The trouble is it's so obviously inconsequential that no-one attempts to mask this and, as such, this type of film (which died a slow death in the '90s) is erroneously out-dated from the get-go. With a story so painfully high-concept (a Secret Service Agent is framed for the future assassination of the President, whilst banging the First Lady to provide convenient leverage for motive-less bad guys), one can expect at the very least a suckling pleasure dripping from the teat of convention -- especially with one alpha male attempting to re-assert his mojo (Michael Douglas) and another (Kiefer Sutherland) confirming it by playing his TV counterpart with less daughter/dead wife issues.

Alas, there is zero conflict and zero energy in The Sentinel; dialogue is so meticulously trimmed to provide ostensible yet 'subtle' plots point to an unwitting audience who are really more interested in Eva Longoria's sweater puppets than conspiracy. Which is a good thing, I suppose, when all potential for this to be a relevant, post-9/11, political doozy is completely and utterly cast aside. Instead, the film is tarred with that cornball Scooby Doo logic and just plain swirly-for-the-hell-of-it direction that when it finally does unloosen its shackles a tad for a sweaty third act, one can't help but notice that everyone involved is capable of much more -not least the un-expressive Douglas- and, frankly, should know better than to sign up for such evident Hollywood hooey with an unsatisfactory penchant for being frugal rather than gluttonous.

Marty doesn't live here anymore.

2006-09-02T12:42:00.000Z

Anyone who over-simplifies Martin Scorsese to a mono-dimensional, Italian-American, gangsta-lovin' auteur is profoundly missing the point. His earlier work is far more in line with the Nouvelle Vague, a somewhat jerky surrealism with Catholicism nigh on invisible, or leastways existential experimentations which would later give way to the more familiar extortions of faith, doubt and self-destruction. And whilst dark situation-comedy is present in his later films (Jake LaMotta screaming about an overcooked steak to his hapless first bride, "It's like a piece of charcoal!" is just one of several moments of bleak hilarity that punctuate Raging Bull), it is none more prevalent than in his early shorts: What's a Nice Girl Like You Doing in a Place Like This?, It's Not Just You, Murray!, and -at a stretch- The Big Shave. All three criticisms of society, character, and typically American ideals; yet never pushy in their execution (The Big Shave can be seen as an extreme counter-culture indictment of consumerism, or simply a nut slitting his throat). Of course the results are sketchy and, in the absence of Steadicam, rough around the edges but they possess heart, vigour and personality The Departed can't hope to match.

All three can be found on YouTube here, starting chronologically with What's a Nice Girl Like You Doing in a Place Like This?

Review: A Scanner Darkly

2006-08-19T16:08:00.000Z

There's a lovely transitory period in Richard Linklater's A Scanner Darkly in which it ceases being a non-starting, affable yuppie-stoner amalgam warning with an undercurrent of post-Watergate/post 9/11 paranoia, and becomes something else entirely. It becomes emotional. An undercover narc, Fred, removes his scramble suit (so-called because it conceals its wearer as a "vague blur" under the constantly shifting identity of millions), walks down the street, goes home, and becomes Bob Arctor (here played by Keanu Reeves) - the trashy, thrashy boyfriend of Donna Hawthorne (Winona Ryder), who's hooked on the super-drug Substance D and debates missing gears on eighteen-speed bicycles. Arctor lies down, the music swells, and little Keanu narrates his heart out. "What does a scanner see?", he muses, "Into the head? Down into the heart?". Up until this point the film has been as schizoid as its protagonist, ostensibly flitting between junked-up, cyclical stoner talk and cagey science-fiction, but here Linklater asserts his real rabble-rousing intentions. Dual personae compete and converge, and even as Reeves occasionally clunks his dialogue, and stirs and looks sour; something odd happens. We care.

Everything points to A Scanner Darkly being another of Linklater's cheeky, well-written escapist fantasies. The damn thing is rotoscoped. It plays with genre expectations initially in this manner, but quickly Linklater is unafraid to make deliberate and literal character insinuations, given the medium's, and this particular breed of animation's, advantages. So, yes, come closing credits we have a couple of fittingly obvious plot points and an ending to satisfy that nagging narrative, and yet it also reaches a poignance of sorts, augmented by a snippet of the author's coda. For some this may prove sentimentally unwarranted and cack-handed, but at worst it's oafishly cine-literate and at best emotionally transcendent. Reeves is actually called upon to emote and more than partially succeeds, Robert Downey Jr. balances delirium with insanity, and Winona Ryder, still her bug-eyed and charming self, brings a surprisingly welcome messy emotional depth and availability to a character as complex but potentially alienating as Donna.

Just as Before Sunset excised the blithe, giddy enthusiasm of Before Sunrise in place of reasoned maturity nine years later (whilst losing none of the original's happy lyricism) so, too, does Scanner transpose the philosophical naiveté of Linklater's previously drug-addled users of Slacker and Dazed and Confused with adult consequence in a fictitious police state "seven years from now". Of course it helps when your source material is Philip K. Dick, a pond Hollywood has been gladly dipping its feet in since 1982's Blade Runner through to 2003's Paycheck, only this time with less of the whizz-bang and more of the whimsy. In fact, the novel is so fiercely personal and so far removed for the author's self-professed earlier "ray-gun phase" it seems fitting that Linklater, a director known for talk rather than action, should graft a tale of innate human self-destruction and tragedy; even if he fumbles with a none-too-sly masking of conspiracy and awry sub-plot.

The film and novel may suffer from the same curse and blessing -the plot is consciously languid and intermittently off-the-boil, Arctor's real 'motivation' for drug abuse isn't apparent until near-conclusion- but overwhelmingly Linklater focuses on the folly of self-induced arrested development and the perpetual childishness of narcotics over hollower, mainstream machinations. It's not as grim as, say, Requiem for a Dream but is just as intellectually and gut-crunchingly viable, if a little vegetative for its own good at times. Eye-candy for nose-candy is a wonderful thing, and if A Scanner Darkly is guilty of any cliché, it would be only be the eternal message of any drug movie: snort carefully.

Back.

2006-08-12T16:16:00.000Z

I'm back, I'm here, and I'm going to be working at slightly fuller capacity from now on : dwelling more on current reviews than news (there's some perfectly good links to your right), and hopefully a greater concentration on some of my favourite classics, contemporaries, and those downright overrated stinkers. The perpetually dull Kate Bosworth remarks in Superman Returns, "Well, you're back. And everyone seems to be pretty happy about it.". Kudos, Katie, because if movies can't last; then this blog sure as hell hasn't been.

2006-06-23T17:39:00.000Z

VERTIGO. opening titles and first scene

Review: The Da Vinci Code.

2006-05-26T13:12:00.000Z

If Ron Howard were a culinary fellow, and his adaptation of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code were a soothing three course set, I could only comfortably akin it to a fully-baked gastronomical disaster: not so much tasteless as vapid, not so much shockingly disjointed as it is mired with an arid sensibility. Howard and his buffet Akiva Goldsman have slunk back into mediocrity, if indeed they were ever out of it, creating a world so utterly uninterested in entertaining, populated by non-personable persons, that it's only sure-fire use would be a cure for insomnia.

Brainy Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) is summonsed to the Louvre following the murder of casual acquaintance Jacques Sauniere and is warned by flaky Sophie Neuveu (Audrey Tatou) he is in "grave danger". Police chief Leon, sorry Bezu Fache (Jean Reno), has ulterior motives. Or something. And everything is connected to Leonardo Da Vinci, his paintings, and a crazed albino monk. But do we really care? Isn't this just an appetiser for the main event to come? Alas, no. Howard's biggest set piece is a high-speed reverse chase in a Smart car, surmounting only to a smashed wing mirror. Hardly what one expects from an ad campaign bristling with Clint Mansell and set to make a gajillion dollars. Not that action should act as the be all and end all of a summer tentpole release (although it's preferable) but the film seems so hell-bent on Bible un-bashing and simply brooding around darkened corners; Tom Hanks may as well be painting a wall for two and a half hours. We might have had a little more fun. Goldsman, not one to shy away from a helping of turkey, has seeped any personality from one of the world's most affable everymen, and that in itself can be considered the film's only remarkable achievement.

Critics have been attacking The Da Vinci Code from all frontiers, but they don't seem to tap into its primal undoing - the lack of narrative drive. Howard has stuck to novel's pages like semen, and as such one can only interpret the final product as a bungled history lesson. Nowhere throughout the film's lengthy running time are we given license to halt plot and enjoy the proceedings, it's drivel followed by more drivel, and of course the 'casual' and grainy flashback - a device so festooned in screaming at an audience- it's easy to feign superiority over such a limp squib. If Da Vinci had loosened its shackles at any point and allowed itself to become the dizzying "treasure hunt" it promised, we may have had something. Instead we get a middle-brow, painfully average and non-controversial mess, whose only saving grace may be the utilisation of one Ian McKellen. Frankly, I'd rather go hungry.

Verdict: 4/10

O & U #5

2006-03-26T09:33:00.000Z

Apologies for not updating in a while, I'm kind of getting lethargic.

Swimming With Sharks, 1994, dir: George Huang

Plot: Guy (Frank Whaley - he got to say "What?!" a lot in Pulp Fiction) is an intrepid but woefully naive and newly-recruited Hollywood studio assistant for Buddy Ackerman (Kevin Spacey). In a business this cut-throat, and with constant squirrelly torment from Buddy, Guy finally snaps and attempts to serve his own kind of justice on his employer.

Why I like it: I like movies that are about movies. Steve Martin's last respectable foray before Shopgirl was Bowfinger -an unabashed stab at Hollywood's 'You either got it or you don't' mentality- Sunset Blvd. is consistently placed highly in the greatest movies of all time, and even David Lynch took to transposing his nightmarishly potent studio system interludes in the great Mulholland Dr. Which brings us to Swimming With Sharks or 'The Buddy Factor', a film seeking to emulate these notions in a much more literal manner.

In case we hadn't guessed from the name, Guy characterises the straightforward and eager-to-please, easy-to-corrupt suckers; if Huang will have us believe anything. Thankfully though Sharks aptly steers away from the usual familiar chit-chat, choosing instead to cross-cut between our three protagonists with a surprisingly confident hand. Certainly it's moulded somewhat from a chic 90's sensibility (although it's far from postmodern), but this is not shunned in favour of accessibility. Indeed one of the strengths of the movie -along with fine turns from Kevin Spacey and the eternally underused Michelle Forbes- is that it takes a grudingly simple, even repetitive story, and rolls with it in unexpected ways. Chiefly this is festooned within Buddy Ackerman, a man who'll explode if you give him the wrong kind of sweetner.

Riddled with quotable dialogue ("My bathmat means more to me than you do!"), Swimming With Sharks sets about to be a Tinseltown revenge story interspersed with black comedy, and that's exactly what it achieves. Scratch the gimmicky ending and you've got an intelligent, demanding, but most importantly personable movie, and one that manages to fulfill an impressive scope of emotion. Worthy of your attention.

See if you like: Glengarry Glen Ross, Sunset Blvd., Grosse Pointe Blank

Hot Fuzz news.

2006-03-02T20:14:00.000Z

I direct you here. It's about bloody time the Spaced boys got back to work.

James Cameron is making more movies.

2006-02-27T17:37:00.000Z

James Cameron is finally making up for lost time with no more than three projects lined up in sucession following a excruciatingly long nine year hiatus after Titanic. Not that he hasn't been working -a couple of underwater docus Ghosts of the Abyss and Aliens of the Deep- but his long-awaited return to the big screen should be met with some big fucking banners proclaiming, "You're the King of the world.", "We'll never let go, Jim.", "Stop your grinnin' and drop your linnen." or a variation on the three. Let's no mince words here: James Cameron is easily one of the most important filmmakers of our time, even if you only appreciate his work on a technical level. He's long been rumoured to have been developing an adaptation of Battle Angel and the eponymous Project 880 (read: Avatar), both of which heavily deal within the realm of science-fiction, perhaps more so than Cameron's previous films.

Today comes the news that after finishing off Project 880, which has now been moved into "first position", and his work on Battle Angel Cameron will be setting his sights on The Dive. Uninspired title aside, this does sound genuinely interesting although decidedly vague; the movie centred more in reality than escapist fantasy dealing with the true story of a pair of divers who try to better their records for diving without oxygen. I'm guessing not everything works out alright. All of Cameron's films deal with a love story in some capacity, normally set against the backdrop of a seething disaster, and they work so well (particularly in The Abyss) because they deal with normal people trying to come to terms with their own feelings whilst attempting to fend off terminators, aliens or Art Malik. I'm altogether delirious that James Cameron will be unleashing a new motion picture next year, and the fact that there's two more after that has me pissing my pants like an over-juiced four year-old.

Spidey 3 teaser.

2006-02-24T13:36:00.000Z

Did someone say Venom?

Thank You For Smoking.

2006-02-23T10:37:00.000Z

I'm still kind of surprised that Hollywood would invest in such glossy satire like Thank You For Smoking and American Dreamz (both released later this year), and then I remember Michael Moore and his infectious controversy, and that maybe the general cinema-going public do care what films have to say about the world we live in. It also helps that they've been packaged in a rollickingly witty way, tackling fairly light subject matter -reality TV and smoking- and reaching out at something deeper at the same time, Dreamz even going the whole hog and touching on our new-age taboo of terrorism.

I really started this blog to summon your attention toward Thank You For Smoking and its exceptional cast. Bar Katie Holmes, I can't fault the masterful ensemble of Aaron Eckhart, Maria Bello, Rob Lowe, J.K Simmons, William H. Macy and Robert Duvall. Watch the trailer here. Even if both these movies royally suck, at least they're trying.

Billy Bob back behind the camera.

2006-02-22T18:08:00.000Z

I'm a huge Billy Bob Thornton fan and he never gets the attention he deserves, particularly directorially, and more particularly for his work on and in Sling Blade. Praise be the Gods then that after five years, he's returning back to the director's chair for Floyd Collins- in which he'll play an intreprid cave explorer called, you guessed it, Floyd Collins. I'm not going to pretend I know the details (Collins is turned into a media sensation for getting trapped in a cave or something) but if Billy Bob comes near to matching the greatness of his performances in The Man Who Wasn't There, U Turn, One False Move, Friday Night Lights, A Simple Plan and numerous others I'll be a happy man.

Oldman fears the Order of the Phoenix.

2006-02-22T17:50:00.000Z

He might only have got to stick his face in a fire in volume four, but it's looking more and more likely the Gary Oldman fabuloso won't be reprising his role as Sirius Black in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix for reasons unbeknowst to anyone but the WB fatcats. Read the whole thing here. This is all very strange as the character plays an integral part in the next chapter; and I can't think of many other actors who would have the ability to nail the part as well as Zorg did in Azkaban. Nothing's set in stone yet, but don't go holding your breath.

O & U #4

2006-02-19T19:30:00.000Z

Strange Days, 1995, dir: Kathryn Bigelow

Plot: It's December 1999 and Lenny Nero (Ralph Fiennes), a self-styled seller of fantasy, lives a largely miserable existence pining after his ex-lover Faith (Juliette Lewis). He deals in dreams: illegally allowing his clients to 'jack in' and experience emotions and memories of desire, lust, greed or as he puts it "the forbidden fruit". When Faith becomes entangled in a web of blackmail and murder, it's up to Lenny, reluctant sidekick Macey (Angela Bassett), and best friend Max (Tom Sizemore) to save the day, uncover conspiracy, and hopefully see out the new year.

Why I like it: Kathryn Bigelow has consistently made engaging and thoroughly entertaining movies her entire career (scratching K-19 and most of Blue Steel) and she continually goes without due credit. All her films explore extremities in human emotion, while underpinning and repackaging them in a more accessable fashion. In Near Dark we had a band of unhinged vampires roaming the countryside, killing at will, despite being a tenderly fierce surrogate family unto themselves; and the film itself being set against a sporadic love story. In Point Break she blatantly mocked machismo whilst channelling it into a seductively flagrant action movie. What then is she up to with Strange Days?

In short, quite a bit. The film works not only as an exposé on human corruption -racism, voyeurism- but couples this with a dystopian tale of love and violence in the closing days of the 20th Century. The murder of a hooker and the ensuing events are pure MacGuffin, James Cameron's screenplay reliant on the bigger picture and the underlying Y2K hysteria to add urgency and potency to the movie, though still unafraid to exercise style and crucially enjoyment at the right times. This is why I enjoy Bigelow so much as a director. She'll let Juliette Lewis writhe onstage for a good five minutes just because it looks good. Because it's cinematic. And because of this her movies are free of pretension: keeping things lucid but at the same time insistent.

Point in fact, Bigelow's hyper-reality doesn't form a tangible plotline until we're about an hour in, when we're subject to a brutal rape from the rapist's literal perspective. From here on in, the film is less hung up on being a parable for our own troubled times (Lenny's 'clips' only a chance to extrapolate this further) and treads more familiar, if superior, genre-bending territory. Despite a muddled, albeit magnificently frustrating, third act Strange Days remains chewable brain candy, a "skull-fuck" brushed in an unscrupulous world. It also helps that the cast is onboard, Fiennes' embodiment of a redemption-seeking low-life is particularly charming and Bassett is quite the badass. Brimming with confidence, free of the usual Hollywood qualms, Strange Days is cerebral and relevant diversion, and what's best the result is effortless. Are we impressed yet?

See if you like: Collateral, The Terminator, The Last Boy Scout

P.S Fatboy Slim's 'Right Here, Right Now' is directly sampled from this movie. The immortal words are uttered when Mace pins Lenny up against a wall toward the end of the film. Just a titbit for you.

Casino Royale casting FINALLY over.

2006-02-19T16:04:00.000Z

I don't have an irrepressible urge to write about Casino Royale seen as it's been thoroughly documented all across the world wide web. Suffice to say I'm happy Daniel Craig landed this gig (although Brosnan deserved a better send-off than Die Another Day) and they've vouched for an unknown as the Bond girl. The biggest surprise for me would be the return of Felix Leiter -last seen disagreeing with a shark in 1989's tragically crap Licence to Kill- and, indeed, that he's being played by Jeffrey Wright. I'm not surprised in bad way, Wright was fantastic in Broken Flowers, I guess I thought they'd kissed that character goodnight. Anyway enough of my yakkin' here's your principles:

The Girl:

Eva Green as Vesper Lynd.

The Bad Guy:

Mads Mikkelsen as Le Chiffre.

The Guy Who Helps Occasionally:

Jeffrey Wright as Felix Leiter.

Looking on it, it's not a bad cast and I'm pleased they've taken their time deciding who'll play who. Martin Campbell worked wonders on Goldeneye, let's hope he can replicate this with Casino Royale. And surely Eva Green's hotness counter-balances the lack of Moneypenny or Q. In fact she trumps them by a country mile.

A Scanner Darkly trailer (a new one).

2006-02-18T13:55:00.000Z

I can't think of any movie I'm more excited about seeing right now, A Scanner Darkly even trumps The Departed for the most anticipated feature film of 2006. Take an acclaimed writer (Philip K. Dick), throw in an indie darling director (Richard Linklater, now out of his 'let's make kid's movies' phase), and a cast so well-picked it hurts (Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr, Woody Harrelson and the lovely Winona Ryder) and you've just about got the measure of A Scanner Darkly. Not only is it utilising a band of actors who have all flirted with narcotics in their time, it streamlines Linklater's dandy rotoscoping (introduced in his 2001 movie Waking Life) and has a dystopian message to top it off. Everything Scanner related so far has been liquid -the only bum note I could really finger is Radiohead declining the chance to do the soundtrack- and the new trailer's no exception. Watch it here. This movie deserves to be huge, Sin City huge, a mainstream movie pushing the envelope so far it falls through the door. It opens in July. Go watch it.

Basic Instinct II trailer.

2006-02-16T17:08:00.000Z

If you haven't seen the 'leaked' adult promo reel for Basic Instinct II: Risk Addiction do so now, then divert your attentions here for the movie's official trailer. I have an inexplicable want to see this movie, partly because of its unabashed trashiness but mostly because of Stone's ambrosial characterisation. The trailer itself overreaches a little in wanting to sensationalise the whole affair; but at the very least Instinct is bound to raise a few eyebrows. I only wish they'd got Paul Verhoeven back.

Captain Tightpants nabs White Noise sequel.

2006-02-15T17:39:00.000Z

White Noise was dross. Utter, utter dross. The premise was nice enough and Michael Keaton was trying for a comeback (which he fully deserves I hasten to add) but that aside it sucked in the fifth dimension. So news of a sequel -White Noise II: The Light- doesn't exactly have me rushing out to tell my relatives. I can at least take comfort in the fact they've cast Nathan Fillion in the lead role, who's assault on the A-list couldn't come soon enough after star turns in both Firefly, Serenity and the upcoming Slither. Still this'll be shit and you can mark my words, as the plot veers off in a Final Destination-lite direction and Fillion plays the same character as Keaton did. Hollywood's never been one for continuity, unless it's mantaining the crappiness of a franchise, and White Noise II won't be any different.

Scoop poster.

2006-02-15T17:29:00.000Z

Woody Allen seems to have developed an affinity with England and the buxom Ms. Johansson (with those golden globes who wouldn't?) because he's sticking with both in his latest Scoop, the poster for which can be seen below.

As you can tell it has a rather splendid cast (Hugh Jackman, Ian McShane, Allen himself) and essentially revolves around journalist Scarlett getting off with aristocrat Hugh while trying to solve a murder mystery. Allen has officially 'returned to form' (or so the critics tell me) so let's hope Scoop delivers and then some. It opens later this year.

Respect That Actor! #2

2006-02-12T12:47:00.000Z

#2 Xander Berkeley

Forever lumbered as 'that guy' or perhaps more precisely 'that evil guy', Xander Berkeley is the definiton of a hard-working character actor. Chances are you've seen him in a bunch of things, you just didn't realise it. His smattering of impressive -if hardly showcasing- roles throughout the 80s and 90s range from the sublime (Heat) to the dire (Poison Ivy II), but always maintaining a trademark swagger with unmitigated cool. He very much reminds me of Lee Van Cleef before Sergio Leone broke him into the mainstream with For a Few Dollars More. Pre- spaghetti western Van Cleef was always the second bad guy from the right, the one who always got shot half-way through the picture. It's not much different for Berkeley.

However at the age of 51 (and with a huge body of work behind him) I can't really see him being thrust into the limelight any time soon. Which is a crying shame because the guy is capable of so much more. Take a look at him in Terminator 2. He takes to the role of John Connor's foster parent with such confidence, right up until the point he's blitzed through the head by Jenette Goldstein. Likewise in Andrew Niccol's glorious Gattaca where he draws on subtleties to carry his performance. The role itself is deliberately underwritten and Berkeley is relied on to bring immediate but not overt clarity to the film's iambic climax.

Of course when he needs to be he can play anything from inquisitive cabbie (Leaving Las Vegas), dirty agent (Air Force One) or Pacino wife-stealer in Heat. He's frequently summonsed upon to liven up these one dimensional roles, and does so time and time again. When he's actually given something to do, the result is unprecedented. As George Mason in 24 -undoubtedly his crowning achievement- he not only brought about a new dynamic in the show (levying up the show's humour, which would continue to snowball with characters like Chloe O'Brian and Edgar Stiles) he also animated Mason's progression throughout 24 hours with a touching, imperfect humanity. He may have strolled on in the show's pilot as a stock bastard, but by day two this was all "background noise". The makers saw Berkeley's potential and ran with it; producing some of the series' most poignant scenes. It's a shame by season 3 he was discarded -the same has just happpened to Reiko Aylesworth- and fans consistently rank him as the character they would most like to see return, no matter how amazingly skewed in logic it would be.

Xander Berkeley just plain rocks. And I can't think of any better recommendation than that.

If you see him in one movie, see him in: Gattaca

X3 pictures.

2006-02-10T18:57:00.000Z

While X-Men 3: The Last Stand (concluding chapter, anyone?) seems to include every mutant ever created by Marvel, some new ones, and all their pets I'm still inexplicably stoked about seeing it, mostly because Bryan Singer's first two installments were such dosh garn fun. If you haven't checked out the well-boding trailer, do so here, and peruse the veritable mountain of pictures over at Dark Horizons. Juggernaut still looks like a fucking idiot, though.

Del Toro likem fantasy.

2006-02-09T15:59:00.000Z

Guillermo del Toro is a fantastic director. Make no mistake. And after breaking into the mainstream after Blade II and Hellboy, he has a whole smorgesboard of projects to keep him happy and slake his lust for all things invariably weird, wonderful, and intrinsically fucked-up. The latest to add to his growing list is Killing on Carnival Row, involving a serial killer offing faeries in a seedy world with vampires and elves aplenty, is no exception. Hopefully he'll be able to squeeze Hellboy II: The Golden Army into all of this, make good on Halo rumours, and be home in time to have Pan's Labyrinth ready for October because it looks like one hell of a show.

Baz gets back to work.

2006-02-09T15:41:00.000Z

It's a been long five years since Baz Luhrmann wowed audiences with Moulin Rouge! (I too was wowed, but not as hysterically as some) and it can only be a good thing that he's finally settled down, aborted his attempt to make an alternative Alexander The Great movie, and set to work on his 'Austrailian Gone with the Wind'. Frankly, I've always thought that while Luhrmann's pictures have largely -if not exclusively- revolved around love stories, some parts inevitably fire blanks and to call his films slightly 'girlie' wouldn't be an overstatement. That said I'm still excited to see what he can pull out of the bag, primarily because of the presence of screenwriter Stuart Beattie (the man responsible for the rather excellent Collateral) and also leads Nicole Kidman and Russell Crowe; neither of whom have really been given a chance to shine recently. Discounting Cinderella Man and Kidman's increasingly large forehead, of course.

Stone gets bare.

2006-02-06T18:13:00.000Z

Well, I told you she was a great actress here (and she is) but it might be a stretch 'respecting' this 48 year-old after you feast your eyes on this uncensored, unadulterated and unofficial promo reel for Basic Instinct's sequel which features Ms. Stone in various positions and states of undress. Mature audiences only please, and might I add I'm more than a little excited about Basic Instinct II: Risk Addiction no matter what my better judgement tells me.

O & U #3

2006-02-03T19:13:00.000Z

Rounders, 1998, dir: John Dahl

Plot: Mike McDermott (Matt Damon) a recently retired 'rounder' -someone who makes their living playing cards- comes a cropper when his one-time poker buddy 'Worm' (Edward Norton) is released from jail and is chased down by an insane Russian mob boss by the name of Teddy KGB (John Malkovich).

Why I like it: Rounders is consistently branded with the underrated stamp and is probably one of the classic examples of entertaining filmmaking slipping beneath the radar. So let's get it out of the way. The film itself isn't particularly original -from riches to rags to riches again- but takes conventional subject matter (dreary romanticism) and sets it against the backdrop of career gambling. While the film isn't nearly as hip as it wishes to be, it's still a plumb clambake for two hours, even if there's a little flab around the edges.

Matt Damon is essentially modifying his Will Hunting model with less of the schtick -not that there's anything wrong with that- and transplanting it onto another misguided but supremely talented youth, only this time with a knack for playing poker. It's a noble effort from Damon and he only really struggles with the badly-written 'serious' scenes with Gretchen Mol as the love interest. Rounders operates best when under the guise of a mainstream movie going indie: bereft of law school hindrances but rife with a 90s sensibility. The movie's success must largely lie with Ed Norton, though, who slides onto the screen and off again with an unglamourous and selfless vigour.

Rounders works because it's not about poker but totally about poker, relying on the construction of the screenplay and some fine supporting performances to elevate it to another level. Thinking of the latter we've got our fair share: Famke Janssen, John Turturro, Matin Landau, and a delightfully accented and unhinged John Malkovich who not plays with Oreos but lends a much-needed edge to the picture. Ultimately, Rounders has honest intentions and they all pay dividends from Dahl's rich yet introspective direction to its disarmingly abrupt ending there's much to hold dear, and if the much-mooted TV series finally comes to fruition; I know I'll be watching.

See if you liked: Reality Bites, The Cincinnati Kid, Beautiful Girls

Oscar Noms.

2006-01-31T20:32:00.000Z

Well, nothing we weren't expecting but here's the full list. I'm particularly pleased to see William Hurt, George Clooney and Paul Giamatti getting some credit.

Ford likes coffee.

2006-01-30T19:56:00.000Z

The trailer's been up for Firewall (an early contender for worst title of the year) for a while now, but I've only just gotten round to watching it. The movie breaks Harrison Ford back into the fold as Jack Stanfield -a security specialist forced to rob a bank to save his family's life. While that might not sound like a wholly thrilling premise, the trailer gets the job done, and also features Ford getting frisky with a coffee pot and fire extinguisher. I've never been a huge Paul Bettany fan who gives life to film's villain, but the rest of the supporting cast is certainly there with an ensemble boasting Virginia Madsen, Mary Lynn Rajskub, Robert Forster and Alan Arkin. There may be life in Indy 4 after all, even if President Ford is looking rather bedraggled these days.

Guevara goodness.

2006-01-30T18:30:00.000Z

Benicio del Toro as Che Guevara.

From Gandhi to BloodRayne: Is Ben Kingsley going to Hell?

2006-01-28T22:06:00.000Z

There was a time when Sir Ben Kingsley was a sure sign of solid, if not entirely flawless, filmmaking. If knighthood wasn't enough, he convinced us with his elegiac and unique screen presence. A hub of quiet intensity, he captured imaginations in the likes of Gandhi, Twelfth Night and Schindler's List with the ability to brood but also enthral. More recently, however, he's been caught in a movie its studio is trying to sweep under the rug, another directed by the next Ed Wood, and can be shortly seen in a film critics are touting as Revolver Redux. Which beckons the question, what is Ben Kingsley smoking and can we all have a taste?

The answers, almost certainly, have to be crack and no respectively. The horrific rejection both financially and artistically of pseudo-fantasy cum trite action/adventure A Sound of Thunder, in which Ed Burns is sent back to the prehistoric ages on Kingsley's 'time travel safari' only to unwittingly kill a butterfly and bring about the apocalypse (or something), is a huge blemish on his already frankly bizarre filmography. I personally haven't had the pleasure of seeing it yet, nor do I want to or think I'll get the chance to, especially since the original production company went bankrupt during post-production. It's these kind of lazy choices which we've seen Kingsley grow more accustomed to recently (remember Thunderbirds?) purely done for hard cash and nothing else. What's more tragic is that Sir Ben is a terrific thespian and this hasn't declined with age: this century alone he's knocked out two dizzying performances in both Sexy Beast and House of Sand and Fog showing when stimulated he's capable of grounded, painful realism but also a charming degree of the fantastic.

Which leaves me flabbergasted that he'll even consider working with someone like Uwe Boll -the film community's equivalent of Hitler but without the charisma. Gamers everywhere slit their wrists when he massacred the already slight Alone in the Dark and House of the Dead and then turned his hand to BloodRayne (currently voted the 23rd worst movie of all time on IMDb) which aside from Kingsley features Michael Madsen, Meat Loaf, and Billy Zane hamming it up in 18th Century Romania. If anyone, anyone, can explain to me why the Oscar-winning gentleman who gracefully translated the Mahatma to the silver screen would star in a piece of shit like this wins a prize.

Kingsley's been quoted as saying that acting gives him "that strange old tribal pulse" and "actors are hunters, we hunt for our characters". If he still holds true to this notion, he must be touched in the head. You would hunt to work for Uwe Boll? Even Oliver Twist has been met with a relatively lukewarm reception. All of this exemplifies the tragedy of House of Sand and Fog and really draws to attention the fine work Kingsley can do, if he could be bothered. He has a whole a slate of films ready to be unleashed -chief among them the aforementioned Lucky Number Slevin- with only a handful showing any real promise. Sir Ben has really built a reputation for himself on a foundation of dignity and effortless commanding presence, working with directors like Steven Spielberg and Richard Attenborough, but his career choices of late are inexcusable -even more so than when he did Species.

I can understand an actor wanting to push himself, but this is not an example of that. And if Don Logan is "sweating like a cunt", surely Ben Kingsley must be.

Review: Munich

2006-01-27T23:25:00.000Z

It's strange that Munich seems to have bi-passed the American public, given the director, the heavy subject matter, and the director's knack for tackling heavy subject matter. It's also gone virtually ignored by all the major awards ceremonies. Set following the tragic events of the 1972 Munich Olympics, in which eleven Israelis were murdered, Munich picks up with the Israeli government enlisting five would-be assassins to repay the blood spilt at Munich by Palestine. Chief among them is Avner (Eric Bana), an inexperienced Mossad agent who must commit murder without hesitation.

While this is an uniformly excellent film, I came out of the cinema not feeling as emotionally rocked as I expected. Certainly Spielberg's direction is as sound here as it's ever been, all of the principal cast make terrific turns, and plot never loses focus or becomes undone through a "I could've got one more out." forced sentimentality. Nevertheless, while taking the audience on a journey it sorely needs to go, Munich begins wanting to be profound and to the point but ultimately comes off loose and limber; and it took me a good half an hour to finally settle down and forget I was watching a movie. The initial pace is plodding but never tedious, naturally upping the frustration (which thankfully strays the right side of melodrama) and building to a genuinely heart-felt conclusion.

But Spielberg never really gives us time to get to know our characters. Avner is whisked away on his mission from God in a matter of minutes. Clearly this is a deliberate choice but it robs us of any emotional connectivity with Avner, we are denied any kind of glimpse into the eyes of our protagonist until we have earned his trust. This was a glaring problem for me: while I can understand the reasoning behind it, (we're thrust into this world just as suddenly and naively as Avner is) it cheats us as the audience a chance to invest in the story and, in turn, Bana's nifty characterisation. These are minor grieveances with the film, but they upset the tone for me at least, and left me nagging for a little more. Spielberg's obvious want for objectivity is one to be admired and really doesn't mar the film in the slightest, I just think we perhaps could've gained more by understanding who Avner in the first place rather than having it revealed to us.

There's an awful lot this film does right, though, both on levels of complexity and style. Be it intercutting between drama and sweaty sex, or the shocking frank violence held over from Schindler's List, Spielberg is completely in his element. In the end, I find myself viewing Munich as a film I respect more than I thoroughly enjoy, but this robs it of none of its credibility. It's a bold, unassuming piece of work which doesn't take sides and brazenly casts aside formulaic 'drama/thriller' cliché. Not quite what I was expecting, but a formidable undertaking nonetheless.

Verdict: 8/10

Disney clinch Pixar deal.

2006-01-26T19:19:00.000Z

Frankly I'm glad all this is settled. Disney have 'merged' with Pixar Animation Studios to the tune of $7.5 billion, and effectively making the world a calmer place. Cars -which, I'm sorry, still looks pretty underwhelming- would've marked their last collaboration together production/distribution wise. Maybe this team type deal is condusive to a better working envrionment (let's hope so for Disney: Chicken Little got ravaged) and Pixar won't have their artistic integrity comprised for they travel around work on scooters. The best thing to come out of this though has to be the abortion of Toy Story 3, which would surely have squandered the lyrical perfection of both parts I and II had it been allowed to continue. So rock on Pixar and keep boundin' for our sakes.

Respect that actor! #1

2006-01-25T17:42:00.000Z

#1: Sharon Stone

People don't like to admit they like Sharon Stone. Which is a shame. There's no doubt about it, she's starred in some absolutely trogloditic, god-awful, films (Diabolique is diabolical, Gloria is far from glorious, and let's just forget about Catwoman) but yet she maintains this refreshing 'fuck you' attitude which many actresses aspire to but never achieve. I use the term 'actress' very carefully: had she been born twenty years earlier, I truly believe Ms. Stone would've been regarded as something quite special. Instead she'll be forever synonymous with puerile trash; someone who cemented her stardom by flashing her flange.

If all she's remembered for after she's gone is Basic Instinct I don't think that's entirely a bad thing. Even with the proposed (and admittedly limp) sequel, Catherine Tramell is a character so universally-recognised people actually view Stone as this person. And that's the mark of a job well done, to still have a role permeate into popular society over a decade after its release. Let's get one thing straight, though, Basic Instinct is a far from perfect film but it's no Showgirls: it's shameless entertainment. People forget the sleaze is deliberate and this in vein feel free to lord superiority over it and Stone's performance. It's the same with Total Recall -another Verhoeven film in which she gets her groove on sufficiently well. But throw in Arnie, a three-breasted woman, and a guy with another guy sticking out of his chest and it must be dumb, right? Wrong.

If Sharon Stone is good enough for Jim Jarmusch and Martin Scorsese, she's good enough for me. Broken Flowers and Casino were certainly uncharted territory, but both roles demonstrate an underlying grace and versatility to her abilites as an actress. So even if Basic Instinct 2: Risk Addiction flops -which I'm sure it will- and serves as the lid on her prematurely assembled coffin, don't feel bad for Sharon. Just consider it a divorce.

Watch this movie.

2006-01-24T19:54:00.000Z

Peppering nearly everyone's best films of 2005 (at least where release dates permit) Downfall is a staggering piece of work which deserves to be seen by as many people as possible. Set in 1945, when the walls of Berlin are closing in around Adolf Hitler (a stunning performance by Bruno Ganz), Downfall juxtaposes the dictator's fraught last hours underground with civilian turmoil above. It's amazing German cinema took so long to return to its country's darkest hour, and in this no-holds-barred approach it strikes its audience dumb. I can't recommend this highly enough.

Review: Jarhead

2006-01-22T14:58:00.000Z

Receiving mixed reviews at best, I went into Jarhead with relatively low expectations. Most of which were met. The all-too-timely story of Anthony Swofford's misadventures during the First Gulf War is charming and largely inoffensive; but ultimately falls short when trying to reach some deeper level. My qualms with Jarhead stem not from its inaction but rather its apparent lack of plot: Swoff's story is far too easy to disregard, and as a protagonist he fails to fully engage. By the start of the movie, he's just as jaded to war as we are.

Jarhead doesn't recall the subtlety of Sam Mendes' previous works and instead comes off too caught up in its own politics, or at least in its desire to foreshadow today's trouble in Iraq. Visually it's a feast -Roger Deakins' staunch cinematography leading the way- but this doesn't go a long way in adding weight to an already flimsy story. You can't help but feel manipulated throughout, (especially when the movie radically switches gears about half-way through) and this is best expressed with a shockingly heavy-handed and unnecessary coda, which plays out like 'What the Marines Did Next', eliciting no remorse or sincerity for our Jarheads probably because we never got to know them in the first place.

Don't get me wrong, Jarhead is not a bad movie (far from it) but it's too easy to see the cracks in the plotting. We should be seeing character through actions and not words, and because we're denied this the film plays out like a whimsical stroll through the desert with the occasional glare of flourish. It's hard to absorb Jarhead on a superficial level but this is where it works best, not when bungled between getting to know Jake Gyllenhaal or making a political statement. If you want a contemporary war picture that pushes all the right buttons, go for Three Kings.

Still, there's much to cherish here, if only for the film's terrific sense of humour. We get star turns, too, from Jamie Foxx, Chris Cooper, Lucas Black and Dennis Haysbert -each enthusing their characters with genuine personas despite their screen time. Gyllenhaal as Swoff has this acting lark down pat by now, and while the character doesn't really seem to go on any kind of emotional journey on-screen his laconic voiceover goes a long way in adding depth. I could only outrightly pick fault with Peter Sarsgaard. Although he seemed more awake than usual, whenever he had an emotional outburst it felt false and out of place, coming off like a crap John Malkovich impression.

The film may stumble in some departments and suffer from pacing problems, but on the whole Jarhead is a diverting and encouraging way to spend two hours. And while it doesn't possess the grandiose of Apocalypse Now, the heart of Platoon, and the grace of Saving Private Ryan this isn't necessarily a bad thing. As Swoff remarks, "Every war is different, every war is the same." and Jarhead is gloriously care-free in its experimentation. It's something of a shame, then, that in the end it fails to muster as much excitement as it deserves.

Verdict: 7/10

Gwen in Spidey 3.

2006-01-20T18:59:00.000Z

Spider-man 2 for all its greatness had one big glaring problem: Mary Jane Watson. Not just because Kirsten Dunst lallygagged her way through the entire movie (which she did), there were also those excruciatingly long 'intimate' talks she'd have with Peter, declaring she was standing in his doorway with an apparently seductive demeanour. Praise be the gods, then, that Raimi & co. have decided to complicate matters with the introduction of Gwen Stacy. For those not familiar with the comics, Gwen was Peter's high school crush who got chucked off a bridge by the Green Goblin only to have her neck broken by Spider-man himself in a botched rescue attempt. The first movie switched Gwen's character with MJ and had her survive. How they'll work Gwen into this story remains to be seen (already a little crowded with Thomas Haden Church as Sandman, Topher Grace as Venom, and James Franco more than ready to don his father's embarassingly oversized helmet) but expect a love triangle of some description.

The girl ready to take the role is hot young starlet Bryce Dallas Howard. That's right: the daughter to Ron, the neice to Clint, and the M. Night Shyamalan frequenter will have the task of tempting Peter over from the ginger side. I'm pleased with this development, but I have to admit that's a fair few characters to manage all in around two hours. Of course we're not quite reaching X3 absurdities just yet; and so far Raimi hasn't let us down. Spider-man 3 hits next year.

R-rated Slither trailer.

2006-01-18T19:55:00.000Z

Slither is one of the few horror movies I can get excited about. With these endless remakes being pushed forward (the latest being The Hills Have Eyes), it's nice to something so far removed from our traditional view of the horror genre -at least for this century- and doesn't take itself seriously. Slither stars Nathan Fillion (he was in Serenity, if you haven't seen it yet do so immediately) and a bunch of other people you'll probably recognise. Check out the restricted trailer here. This promises a return to horror with credibility and artistry (well, I certainly hope so) and I can't wait for this PG-13 backlash to finally make some kind of an impression.

Brick Poster.

2006-01-18T19:38:00.000Z

Sorry about the recent lack of posting (I've been somewhat distracted by the incredible new season of 24) but here's one of four posters from the upcoming high school noir movie, Brick:

I don't know who or what 'The Pin' is but it's all very intriguing. People are already dubbing this 2006's Donnie Darko which is all very good unless legions of teenage girls (and boys, for that matter) adopt it as their true calling, at the same time not enjoying the movie but what the movie is supposed to stand for. I'll save that rant for later, but I'm supremely excited to see what writer/director Rian Johnson can pull out of the bag, especially if the trailer's anything to go by- find it under 'Coming Soon'.

You can find the other three posters over at JoBlo, CHUD, Movieweb and Coming Soon.

1."ATTICA!"...

2006-01-15T19:52:00.000Z

... and 19 other reasons why Dog Day Afternoon is the best heist movie and Pacino's best performance.

2. The lead character has a fat wife, is called Sonny, and is robbing a bank to fund a gay guy's sex change operation.
3. It has one of the best down endings in cinema history.
4. The 'heist' isn't exactly successful, the leads have little to no idea what they're doing, and freak out over food.
5. Pacino is marvellously unrestrained. Coming off the back of The Godfather Part II, this solidifies his range and place as one of cinema's greats. He has something DeNiro can't touch: spontaneity.
6. "Sal, Wyoming's not a country."
7. The hostages talk back. Something which more modern (less successful) films like The Negotiator would gleefully rip off.
8. The film relies on tension, but not created through action rather its slapdash nature and dialogue-driven diatribes with real, flawed people.
9. John Cazale is in it.
10. Lance Henriksen is in it (and not as a cyborg or vampire).
11. It is just as relevant today as it ever was. A would-be armed robber holds up a bank only to be exploited on national television. And he likes it.
12. We want Sonny to get away with it.
13. It takes place in one shot, lending a greater depth to Pacino's unpredictability, and shows superb passage of time -something which most movies fail miserably with.
14. This poster:

15. The classic conversation between Sonny and Leon was largely improvised.
16. Pacino knows when to shout.
17. The police don't pull one false move, and we never really know their motivations. In fact the whole movie feels completely organic
18. That cool-as-fuck bank manager who tips them off. Also he's fat.
19. It's a brutal, unflinching look at down-own-their-ass guys, and it's directed by Sidney Lumet. It says so much about people (not just Pacino, but think of the girls that work there) and manages never to hammer its message home overtly, instead filtering this through a now familiar vehicle to elicit the right amount of humour, tension, and rivalry.
20. And it's all true.

Overlooked & Under-appreciated #2

2006-01-15T15:53:00.000Z

Crash, 1996, dir: David Cronenberg

Plot: James Ballard (James Spader), a mildly misanthropic TV director with an ailing marriage, is involved in a serious car accident which leaves him physically and mentally scarred. With the aid of a fellow recovering crash victim (Holly Hunter), the two become embroiled in a perverse underground world of auto-eroticism: a bizarre sub-culture where the car crash is viewed as an erogenous act for all to admire.

Why I like it: I don't particularly 'like' Cronenberg's Crash (nor do I think we are intended to), a film which manages to be one of the most challenging and diverse of the nineties, but also one of the filthiest. Then perhaps the title of 'Overlooked & Under-appreciated' wouldn't be the fairest to adopt, Crash is more 'Misunderstood & Proud of it'. It's certainly a tough film to love, and by no means perfect -far from it, actually- but the intense portrait Cronenberg paints with his paradoxical brush means Crash gets under your skin. And stays.

Immediately following a seedy opening credit sequence set to Howard Shore's equally lurid twangs, a woman is sprawled across a red bonnet and taken from behind. Thus the nature of Crash. Cronenberg forces us to accept his portrayal of sex as both an artistic and base action, one that is rough and disgusting but also understandable given our zombified protagonists. It's a consistently grim movie which is not an easy task to achieve, when Ballard exclaims "After being bombarded endlessly by road safety propaganda, almost a relief to have found myself in an actual accident.", it is both sincere and cynical. One can't help but applaud Cronenberg for trying something so radically different, even if he does come up short on several occasions. By the end of the film we're so emotionally drained and morally shattered, it doesn't matter if we're left with a beautifully haunting image of two people by the side of the freeway.

But Crash is a film that grows on you. Once you get past all the sex -and there's plenty of it- you begin to appreciate the underlying messages the movie presents you with. It's no accident that the film's tagline is 'Love in the dying moments of the twentieth century.', this ironically potent statement blaming a placid, consumer-friendly society for the freaks it creates and then punishing them afterwards. Cronenberg throws us into this world with the dumb naivety he affords his characters. By coupling two seemingly opposed elements and mashing them together, regardless of the results, and by swapping the novel's quaint English backdrop to a gnarlier America he ensures that not only is Henry Ford's American Dream shattered from the get-go, but also stands testament to the fact you can get away with a hell of a lot more on paper than you can on film. Despite this however, the cinematography is flawlessly done contrasting with the shenanigans of the fine cast the film boasts, all present realising the deliberate distastefulness and manifesting this in their performances.

Don't expect to be entertained by this film, especially now it's been eclipsed by Paul Haggis' effort of the same name. Don't even expect to like it. Are there any socially redeeming qualities to a person that would get his kicks by re-enacting James Dean's famous death behind the wheel, and then get fucked afterwards? Probably not. But at least expect this film to take you in directions you normally wouldn't go. Overall, it's different, it's visceral, and whatever your disposition; it will provoke a response from you.

See if you liked: The Cooler, Blue Velvet, Fight Club

Robbins to helm 1984?

2006-01-13T17:40:00.000Z

Tim Robbins: politically outspoken, grossly underrated. Anyway there's news he wants to direct his own version of Orwell's 1984 which sounds like a terrific idea, the novel being more relevant today than it ever was (take a couple drinks for the World Wide Web). Spank me because I haven't seen the original with John Hurt, but with a deluge of shit remakes already littering our screens, I can't see this one doing much harm. This is all tentative though so read more here.

Lynch returns!

2006-01-13T17:22:00.000Z

David Lynch is one of the only true visionaries we have left. So let's savour him. Having last pulled the wool over our eyes in the devastatingly well-made Mulholland Drive (it's certainly the best fim of the 21st Century), it seems he's finally returning to the fold with INLAND EMPIRE due next year. Predictably it's all very hush-hush, unless he's blabbering about it on his pay-to-enter website, but you can check out a few choice pictures from the set here which tell us nothing but look very nice. This flick's bound to be a doozy with Lynch whatever happens -they're not even shooting with a script- and brings Lynch regulars Laurs Dern (finally venturing out of the 'Where are they now?' closet), Harry Dean Stanton, Justin Theroux as well as Jeremy Irons. Look out for it.

American Dreamz.

2006-01-10T18:21:00.000Z

Here's the one-sheet for American Dreamz, which sets out to be a sharp, biting satire on, well, American dreams:

From Mr. Paul Weitz (who seems to be getting better with every movie) and boasting an inordinate of famous yet respected people, American Dreamz is shaping up to be one of year's most interesting and ballsiest films. I won't bore you with details, watch the trailer instead .

Clerks II trailer.

2006-01-09T18:15:00.000Z

Clerks II: The Passion of the Clerks is one the films I'm most looking forward to in 2006, and the newly released teaser trailer showcases exactly why. Clerks remains of the freshest comedies out there even after twelve years; and if this little ditty is anything to go by, the sequel will only expound this. So sit back and reminisce with Dante, Randal, Jay, Silent Bob, and apparently Ben Affleck, Jason Lee and Wanda Sykes set to the dulcet tones of Anthrax. Enjoy.

War of the Worlds defence.

2006-01-08T18:34:00.000Z

The Internet Movie Database recently ran a poll on the worst picture out of the top ten highest-grossing of 2005, and to my surprise Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds took the top spot above the likes of Madagascar and Hitch. This struck me wildly off-balance and I was little displeased. In fact I shouted "What the fuck?" loudly and failed my arms about. So here's my attempt at tipping the scales back to a healthy level with the top four (sorry, my fifth is somewhere tangled in what I've typed) reasons as to why War of the Worlds is one of the freshest and most challenging movies of the year. Allow me to begin by busting the most popularly petty greivances and drawing on its superior qualities:

1. Tom Cruise is not a shit actor.

Let's face it, 2005 wasn't a great year for Mr. Cruise publicity-wise:

He came off as an arrogant prick, and for all I know he's a big one. "He's always playing the same role!", people remark (as if they've met him at several social occasions). Maybe something about his portrayal as 'everyman' Ray Ferrier didn't sit well with audiences, but this shouldn't suggest media attention can take anything away from his performance, which is deftly measured and -shock!- without ego. Look past the skin-deep. Perhaps now with his sister publicist fired, and his stab at 'redemption' in M:I:III we can get back to people actually respecting the diverse (albeit overpaid) work he does, banging out razor-wire performances like in Magnolia, Born on the Fourth of July, Collateral, and numerous others. No, the guy's not a perfect actor, he just happens to like Scientology, and this shouldn't mar War of the Worlds just because he's currently out of vogue.

2. This girl is in it:

Dakota Fanning is, without a doubt, a fantastic young actress. She enthuses the character of Rachel with a realistic vulnerability. And no, she doesn't just bawl all the way through. Couple this with Man On Fire and it's easy to see how well she can deliver, and it never feels gratuitous, probably because she doesn't realise that she's doing it. In particular the kitchen scene ("Since when?" "Birth."), and the section with Tim Robbins allows us to feel something about the character, and one of the most exciting careers to come -once you excise ages 13-17.

3. The second half is just as good as the first.

If the title proves misleading - it's hardly an epic war- then it's because the movie operates on a level above your atypical popcorn fodder. As much as I enjoy Independence Day, the film is layered with cheese and it's shallower than a deflated paddling pool. War of the Worlds though takes what the audience should expect and turns it on its head: our hero is a dick, we never see outer space, and Bill Pullman's nowhere to be found. It works more like an action-drama, and when this kicks into overdrive after the unrelenting first half, I guess the claustrophobia is too much for some to take with Tim Robbins' Ogilvy wielding an axe willy-nilly and aliens without thermal vision. I'm sorry if you're suggesting a movie with a premise over a century old which cites aliens coming to Earth and exterminating mankind is "unbelievable", I think you're missing the point. The scene works on more than just suspension of disbelief.

In fact the film works on a very personal level and I applaud the creative talents for being so bold in the direction the story takes. For once, CGI feels naturalistic. Of course there's no defending the eventual ending (or H.G Wells' seemingly lazy wrap-up) which does throw the movie off-kilt. But still the movie manages to bow out gracefully on a downer, and a hopeful one at that. It fucks me off so much that people would attack a film for its flaws in logic rather than storytelling. I'd be watching the Discovery Channel if I wanted an accurate and scientifically-sound portrayal of events, I'd just rather have one that moves me.

4. It's made by Steven Spielberg.

Do I really have to argue my case? This is the man who brought us Duel, Jaws, Jurassic Park, Minority Report, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Saving Private Ryan, Schindler's List and however many other movies he's managed to affirm life with. Suddenly he just loses his touch? I'm not excusing Hook here, but just a mere prologue into War of the Worlds and it's obvious that he's not poaching on foreign territory, or even repackaging his own. The film is a breathless journey which doesn't need to justify its own existence because it's playing by its own rules, and not the established ones. If this is too much for you to handle, go rent Stealth or something.

Time deserves to be kind to War of the Worlds. Just blame Katie Holmes for this temporary debacle.

Flight 93 trailer.

2006-01-07T18:28:00.000Z

Flight 93 is the first of two takes on the events of 9/11 -the second being Oliver Stone's as yet untitled effort with Nicholas Cage- focusing on the 'flight that fought back'. It's an interesting perspective to take on the events (Stone's movie will take place in the aftermath of the attack itself), and if anyone is up to the job handling something like this tastefully, it's assuredly Paul Greengrass who should be seminal in lending an intense realism to the piece; but not in 'Hollywood thriller' fashion. The teaser trailer can be found here , and is sufficiently engaging if a little thin. Whatever the weather this is sure to be one of 2006's most controversial and important movies, taking its cue from Spielberg's Munich and will hopefully handle itself with dignity to bring the most harrowing events of the 21st Century to the screen.

Overlooked & Under-appreciated.

2006-01-07T18:07:00.000Z

Any Given Sunday, 1999, dir: Oliver Stone

Plot: Tony D'Amato (Al Pacino) has been the coach of the Miami Sharks for a very long time. Grappling with his own personal demons both on and off the field, the new rich bitch owner (Cameron Diaz), and now his newly immobilised quarterback (Dennis Quaid) being replaced by the juvenile Willie Beamen (Jamie Foxx). While Beamen is more concerned with personal gain, he forces Tony to up his game.

Why I like it: I don't like playing sports. I've never been much good at them, nor can I find myself taking enthusiasm toward a particular one. What does interest me, though -and what this film realises so beautifully- is why people play sports. Any Given Sunday is admittedly an easy film to dismiss on paper: yet another feel-good case of underdogs against the odds. Thankfully, Stone manages to dispel this notion from the off, affording not only his characters but also his story an impersonal yet sincere depth and richness which subverts Sunday from a simple morality tale to touchingly-rendered universal story for all to exalt.

Stone manages to switch between the poignant and besmeared in equal measure, and this why the movie comes off so overwhelming enjoyable. The sub-text is allowed to shine through without the usual political intensity of Stone's earlier work. It's not that he's not emotionally invested in the story (he even cameos as an impassioned commentator), we're just allowed to have more fun this time round, and the result is an easier immersion into the fictitious world of the Miami Sharks. There's much to cherish here, not least Pacino's endearing performance as the bedraggled D'Amato which is simply astounding. The man is so good at delivery it sends shivers to the spine. Cameron Diaz may fall flat occasionally but otherwise this is an convincing ensemble (James Woods is still underused though) and Stone juggles each of their separate stories with a dizzying array of stylistic techniques.

It's easy and hard to see how something so finely-tuned can slip from public consciousness after only seven years. On the one hand, 1999 was an uncommonly strong year for American cinema: The Matrix, Fight Club, Magnolia and Galaxy Quest to name but four. On the other this is the best kind of cinema; the kind that beats the shit out of you then leaves you for dead. Despite moments of self-indulgence and a seemingly messy appearance Any Given Sunday is, at its heart a simple tale of 'gladiators' elevated to levels of true sentiment. And I'm still trying to figure out why it had such an effect on me. Maybe it's the unassuming nature of the storytelling, Stone's vibrant wall-to-wall soundtracking and brilliant editing distracting for the moments when Pacino can sidesweep you with his 'inches' speech or a naked man can suddenly appear in frame.

Wasn't it Stone himself who said "Nothing exceeds like excess."?

Amen to that.

See if you like: Friday Night Lights, Crash (2004), Heat

I honestly believe that woman would eat her own young.