sibelian Reviews

Alice in Wonderland (I) (2010)

Jabberwocky is a PARODY of heroic epics and you dolts took it SERIOUSLY.

[1/10 · 10 March 2010]

You dolts took a meandering, plot less masterpiece and turned it in all seriousness into a soul-less CGI dirge with the same plot that it's source was LAUGHING AT.

The Jabberwock is not a dragon. The Jabberwock is the IDEA of a dragon. It wears spats and a waistcoat you DOLTS.

The Queen of Hearts never ACTUALLY chops anyone's head off, the Gryphon SAYS SO. There is nothing oppressive or dangerous in Wonderland. Wonderland doesn't make enough SENSE for anything to be dangerous.

Where WAS the Gryphon? Where was the Mock Turtle? Where was Bill the Newt? Where was the trial of the Knave of Hearts? Come to that, where were the Mad Hatter, the March Hare and the Dormouse? The Dormouse is a sleepy fat thing that likes treacle, not Reepicheep.

Where was the Duchess? Where was the Duchess's cook? Why does everybody make such a big deal out of the Cheshire Cat and the Caterpillar? They're among the least significant characters in the book!

Who's this bandersnatch? What's the Jabberwock doing in it at ALL? The Jabberwock's a work of fiction even on the other side of the looking glass!

What's all this faux-sinister creeping about with wounds and murky skies and burning buildings and severed heads?

You DOLTS. Don't you remember the ending? The oppressive queen, the insulting know-it-all tea-party guests, the bewildering fluctuation in one's own sense of self-importance almost like growing and shrinking, the unhelpful people, the stupid people, the bad-tempered people, yes, and even the hero waving his little magic sword at the scary dragon in a waistcoat and spats, what does Alice say to them? "Who cares for you? You're nothing but a pack of cards!" Your story-telling has regressed to the shuffling of tropes that children were laughing at over a century ago.

Did you even READ the book?

Sherlock Holmes (2009)

Full marks, Mr Downey Jr!

[10/10 · 9 January 2010]

MAGNIFICENT.

This is a hugely enjoyable adaption of Sherlock Holmes. Adaptations depart from their originals in movies through necessity - movies don't work like prose so new elements have to be introduced and ineffective ones removed, simple as that. Adaptations should be assessed on their own merits. A good rule of thumb in a re-imagining of an old story is to see how people who don't know the original react and my friend who didn't know much about Holmes thought this film was excellent.

It's a funny movie! Most of the movie's driven by its humour and most of the humour comes from Holmes being wonderfully obnoxious.

Many complaints will be/have been made regarding the new Holmes/Watson dynamic - I think it's hilarious. What would be the point of just re-filming the Brett take? The whole point of doing the same stories/characters again is to find different things and see if they work. I say this version of Holmes works! In fact...

I'm really REALLY impressed with RDJ's and Guy Ritchie's take on Holmes - an OCD maniac with manipulative tendencies, impatient to the point of despair with what he must see as the slowness of those surrounding him, incapable of switching off his brain, never still. RDJ has made a Holmes that is frankly superhuman, not merely an elegant, witty and superbly disciplined intellectual, but some kind of freak that just can't stop analysing everything around him. It's actually more faithful to Conan Doyle's vision than a lot of people are going to give it credit for.

And I'm ANNOYED with people complaining about the extra weight placed on fisticuffs in this movie - Guy Ritchie goes entirely out of his way to include a scene wherein Holmes wins his fight hands down not with superior brawn but with superior *knowledge*. And then has the sense to balance this with that huge French guy later in the movie to show that even Holmes isn't indestructible. The physical violence isn't predictable in this movie, it matters and adds weight and power to the story. It simply isn't comparable to the silly Matrix-styleeee fight scenes that have plagued the movie industry of late! AND they had Irene Adler. And they mentioned Mycroft. AND a certain someone else "appeared" who was portrayed very cleverly, oh yes, and oh YES, Mr Ritchie, if THAT'S what he's going to be like, I WILL come to watch your sequel! There's just one quibble. RDJ's Holmes was a teeny bit too cool for Mark Strong's Blackwood to confront convincingly. But never mind. with luck, Guy Ritchie will ramp up the baddie a notch or two in the next instalment... wink, wink, Mr Ritchie...

Up (2009)

Up there with the rest of the Pixar masterpieces

[11 October 2009]

There's a difference between Pixar and most of today's movie studios that makes it stick out like a rose in a sea of sore thumbs. The difference is that the first thing they do their best to get right is the story and the first thing they do to get that right is to find the story's heart. There are a lot of clever movies, scary movies, exciting movies, silly movies and just plain bad movies out there released year after year, but Pixar goes for the heart every time and there's just no replacement for movies that want to speak to people's hearts.

The opening sequence in this movie is a series of images that another film-maker might have done as a series of flashbacks. It's a simple story of two people who have found that they must be near one another to be happy - true love. Where is true love in the other stories pumped out like mortar shells from the industry's product-connection and tie-in merchandise addled belly? It's rare these days. Sex, sure, flirtation, mawkish sentimentality, but love? 100 million stars for that sequence alone.

The rest of it had me howling with laughter, as usual they just don't seem to be able to put a foot wrong. Could Pixar be the greatest movie studio of all time?

Dune (1984)

What a gloriously beautiful mess.

[3/10 · 26 July 2008]

There are two films interwoven here, one is an uncompromising masterpiece and the other is a complete turkey.

The first half of the movie is extraordinary. I was *floored* by the opening scenes, floored UTTERLY. They indicated an intricate, sober reality, stuffed with dreadful mysteries and frighteningly intelligent monsters. I love the secret Guild report. The low humming, the cold echoing, flat voice, the treatment of the Empire as a system to be manipulated, "oooh," I thought, "What's THIS?" The approach of the Navigator, gliding in in his great, monstrous black box and his bizarre, stilted conversation with the Emperor resonated with me deeply, it spoke volumes about the nature of the world I was seeing, its age, its sophistication, its dangers and its habits of thought. It had the gorgeous alien-ness and magically imaginative richness of a high fantasy flick blended seamlessly with a solid, cold and ruthless universal paradigm. The emperor's palace was festooned with riches, but he had no choice but to receive the Navigator. He was not some mere despot or a benevolent father figure, but a politician. The Navigator was obviously phenomenally dangerous, but this wasn't communicated through meaningless threats but by how the reverend mother and the Emperor reacted to him and his towering, chillingly dark, hissing black box.

I respect film-making of this quality, where alien worlds are brought to life with mere moments of dialogue and strokes of the visual designers brush. It's all about the mis-en-scene, guys. A picture truly is worth a thousand words. Star Wars did this also, brilliantly, in its opening scenes, but not as well as Dune, I think. I thought: "Golly. I'm watching a grown up science fiction movie. Oh my GOD. I'm watching a GROWN UP science fiction MOVIE. They really did it." And then it carried on like that for a bit. Geidi Prime was awesome, a hideous offense to nature, like a cross between an old hospital and an oil refinery. I'd never seen anything so ugly yet still underpinned by human tropes. Again, it spoke volumes about the inhabitants of the planet. And the baron himself was just so disgusting, so extremely evil that I was mesmerised by him and his relatives. The Beast Rabban was a bit rubbish, but I could believe in Sting's character, I think he pulled it off.

Brad Dourif and his little litany still fascinates me. All the little litanies throughout the movie, these were lovely touches. I had no knowledge of the Dune Universe and these, again, brought the world to life, indicating a profoundly obsessive human society, guided by bizarre motives expressed in intensely focused, ritualised behaviours. It was freaky but *plausible* and in some ways terrifyingly familiar.

There was one more moment of brilliance, the spacing guild taking the Atreides to Arrakis. The heighliner sequence was amazing in terms of visual design (although the effects were low quality even for the 80s), I was looking at an ANCIENT ship, utterly VAST and secretive and silent, like a gargantuan wreck at the bottom of the sea, a vessel that could easily be 4000 years old and could only come from an enormous intragalactial spacefaring empire, as I had been told of in the prologue. The docking port was half a kilometer high, framed with what looks solid gold and resembles the entrance to a leviathan's cathedral. Not been done again, that image. And instead of a space battle, we got a religious ceremony, potent and serious and filled with unclear but deeply felt meanings and stunning music. It was amazing. I'd never seen anything like it. I still love it. I'm one of those British people that Beecham said "don't know much about music but love the sound it makes", and I'm the same with movies. I don't mind if a movie scene doesn't make sense if I like the "sound it makes". It's probably silly to be so affected by images that are, in essence, so simple, but what is imagination for, then, hm?

But... the Atreides.

The Atreides turned up and the whole movie started to sag.

Their dialogue was ponderous and dim-witted. They were slow and unconvincing, all of them. Jessica was totally silly, Kyle McLaughlan was appallingly miscast and the rest of Duke Leto's entourage were reminded me of nothing more than the Three Stooges. The only good bits were the fight between Gurney and Paul and between Paul and the robot and that's only because they had a cool idea about how to do forcefields and an interesting sound weapon. It was kind of cool to have a big, old-looking castle with lots of wood panelling many thousands of years in the future, in the 80s this idea was still new and fresh, but it wasn't enough to carry the Atreides as a narrative force just to have nice interior design.

And don't get me started on the Fremen. They just didn't work. "I will take the boy-man. UH!" For pete's sake...

It just descends into farce after they get to Arrakis. The film slowly but surely gets sillier and sillier until we reach the stupid climaxes of Paul riding the sandworm which had me covering my eyes and peering through my fingers at the appallingly bad acting and painfully bad dialogue. "Long live the fighters. Long LIVE them. YEAH! GO FREMEN! WE'RE NUMBER ONE! Bro, I am so STOKED about this!" It's AWFUL.

Oh, and Alia. Nooooooooo, nononononononoNO. That was just wrong in every possible way, the way she talked was just sad. Alia's meant to be a kid that behaves like an adult, she's supposed to exhibit an unselfconscious absence of childishness that freaks people out and that kid playing Alia didn't do this.

"Oh dear," I thought. "They screwed this up very badly." But it wasn't a total failure. I went and read the Dune series afterwards. So in the end the movie did serve *some* purpose....

WALL·E (2008)

We all know Pixar are incapable of making bad movies, but THIS movie has taken them to a new level.

[10/10 · 21 July 2008]

WALL-E was perfect.

Of course it was perfect, it's a Pixar flick! ALL Pixar flicks are perfect. They've never once even made a film that's a flawed masterpiece. They don't DO flaws.

The design is fantastic. The most stunning thing is the way the robots are animated. Pixar have reached a new level in minimalism here, they hit some brilliant new peak in using the least necessary cue to signal emotion. My favourite robot is halfway through the movie. It's not so much a robot as some sort of processing unit, processing *what*, I don't know. It's attached to the wall, pushing buttons slowly and deliberately. All it has to express emotion is one big sphere for an eye and a couple of robotic arms that can barely move outside a very small and obviously highly ordered and... well, I suppose "prescriptive" way.

It looks bored. It looks SO. BORED.

WALL-E waves at it. It looks at him slowly and at it's own "hand", which it wiggles. "Oh", it thinks. Later on in the movie, as WALL-E is passing, it waves back, still bored, but just a teeny bit less so.

That whole sequence for me is the best bit of the movie in terms of Pixar's artistry. I'm really glad they did it, because it goes right back to the roots of Pixar. Remember the short with the anglepoise lamps? Pixar have been showing for years that they can make the simplest of inanimate objects have dreams, adventures, failures and victories as convincingly as any other character. Robots was an obvious choice for them. I'm surprised they didn't do this movie earlier.

Oh, and they've taken a leaf or two out of Studio Ghibli's book in some areas. They usually have "out-takes" at the end but this time there's a Ghibliesque confection that really made the point of the movie, for me.

Brilliance.

The Ring (2002)

Mildly Unsettling

[3/10 · 17 June 2008]

Yeah.

Kinda moody here and there, kinda liked the kid coming up out the well, liked the way she came out the TV. Nearly worked. Liked the flickery look of her, like she was made of TV. That was kinda cool.

Liked the horse on the ferry, nearly worked with those worrying cellos thumping away a la "Jaws".

But, um, its got that problem that movies have now, where everything's in the Modern Style, desaturated images, tastefully composed shots of grime and electric cables looking more like a still life in an art gallery than a scene from a movie, blurry shots of eeeevil Samara in the asylum, BEAUTIFULLY composed and tinted, making me think "oooh how tasteful and elegant" not "cripes, what a creepy little girl". My poor brain won't do "arrg scary" at the same time as it's doing "oooo tasteful". During that bit where they find her room in the barn with the cute little TV like something out of a spooooooky sort of Calvin and Hobbes strip (it had cutely angled little ariels like a friendly grasshopper) and the little carousel and her little bed all uniformly tinted in pale browns and faded sour creams I thought, how EVOCATIVE. How MYSTERIOUS. And how thoroughly FAKE LOOKING. Such a perfect, sweet little theatre set - it would have been beautiful on a stage but in the movie it just looks like something that would have been beautiful on a stage.

If you over-stylise these things, they stop being scary and just become static, like images in a gallery. They're lovely to look at, but why not just make images and put them in a gallery? They'd work better and probably actually be scarier. It's fine to overdo the interior deco in a fantasy film or a comedy or a sci fi flick, but not a horror movie, horror movies have to be real, nail-scrapingy, eye-bulgingly real. Reality isn't tasteful or well-composed. Or cunningly tinted to look older than it is.

Having said all that, the girl coming out the TV nearly worked, because it's supposed to be supernatural.

Guys, horror movies have rules.

Also, no, no, no, filmmakers, don't add pointless subplots about parents trying to reunite for the sake of their kid. It's a horror movie, not a chick flick.

3 stars, all 3 for Samara coming out the well, which, had I been significantly younger and had seen fewer horror movies, would probably have been quite scary.

Beowulf (2007)

The film that should have been called "Dennis", or something...

[9/10 · 11 December 2007]

...NOT "Beowulf", because it rogers the very concept of the epic poem Beowulf up the arse. Quite deliberately, too. It's a razor-sharp side-swipe at heroism itself, this tale, and bears a peculiar and quite knowing relation to the source material. It's up there with Starship Troopers. I think a lot of people have missed this.

Essentially this is the story of what the film-makers would like us to imagine is the REAL Beowulf. We're to believe that the real reason we're left with the epic as it is now is because that's just what stories do over time. This is clearly signalled during the film, in particular during the sequence where Beowulf's exploits are performed for him in miniature by the dwarfs. This movie is a calculated, grim-eyed stab at the original's heart. Whether this is a good or bad thing I will leave to others to decide, but make no mistake, the re-write was in no way an *arbitrary* remix of the source material, as some seem to think.

And therein lies the pity. A lot of careful effort's gone into making the story good. As an anti-hero's story, it's really bloody good. Beowulf starts out being a hyper-heroic cock and then becomes a good deal more human as the story progresses. Real, fleshy, palpable, flawed. He screws up. And then he redeems himself! And becomes a much more potent hero figure in the process! A hero whose true struggle, the hardest, most unforgiving one, will never truly be known as the unimaginative, bloodthirsty fools he shares the hall with won't tolerate any of his real feelings. This is much meatier stuff in terms of story-telling than the original. People will be angry with me for saying so, but it's true.

UNFORTUNATELY, this very good story has been tainted with the word "BEOWULF", the title of another story, also a very good story, but *quite different* in terms of theme, and I think this movie would be doing a lot better for itself in the IMDb tables if it was called... ummm... "Simon". Or something.

Cos, it's a very good story, I think.

I ended up liking Beowulf after at first thinking he was really a bit of a thick twit. I liked Grendel's mother from the start and now think she's one of the most interesting characters I've seen on screen this year, maybe in the last five years. Gravitas and guile, oh yes. And Grendel was brilliant, a truly hideous accident, a price paid, a warning, the personification of *dreadful consequence*. And everyone, really, all the actors did brilliantly, the script and acting and plot and effects and mis-en-scene were superb! Also, I really REALLY like the ending. It was a really strong, simple, unexpected ending that sent delightful shivers up my spine, cinematic shivers the like of which I rarely feel these days. Well done, Mr Gaiman! I imagine quite a few people will be cursing you heftily, I personally think you've done rather well... although, after making that strong, clean story, you should just have called it: "Jonathan". Or something. I know you like to be clever, but really, it would have been even better.

3D stuff was good, too! Not in your face at all. Well, apart from the odd tentacle.

Pity about the motion capture, though. Ick. Would have been 10 otherwise.

Oh, yeah, and the stiletto feet were daft. Don't do that again.

But that sequence where Grendel's mother sings over his corpse and starts going nuts... That was MENTAL. Do THAT again.

Nine shiny, watery, fiery, fate-filled stars...

The Golden Compass (2007)

Not good enough.

[3/10 · 10 December 2007]

Meh.

On reflection, it's extremely difficult to see how they could have done it. "Dark Materials" is one of the most densely written trilogies there is, far more imaginative than the dreary Lord of the Rings, resonant, complex, profound and really pretty dark.

This movie had all the problems I expected it to have, overlit, slimy CGI (when are they going to get the idea that shadows can be BLACK? When are they going to get that no matter how much fake computer-dirt they put over their CGI garbage, bizarrely it ALWAYS looks SLIMY? Well, except for the daemons who suffered from a different problem, they were over-humanised. Cats and stoats don't have facial expressions at all, silly film-makers, so they didn't look like animals, so they didn't come across as daemons. They looked, ironically, like dolls), hammy script, bad casting (Daniel Craig... NOOOOOO!!!), poor plotting, predictable design (yet again Myst rears its hideous head...), blech...

The whole movie, which, in fairness, would have had to have been another 5 hours long to do justice to the book, was a series of confusing, disjointed expositions followed by flat action sequences. Nowhere did I feel the gears meshing. I didn't care about ANY of them. Well, except Iorek. Good old Ian! Everyone seems to think Dakota Blue was good, I think she could probably have done quite a bit better with a better script.

IMAGINE WHAT THIS COULD HAVE BEEN IF DONE BY STUDI GHIBLI?! I have no doubt that this film should have been animated, and I mean properly animated, none of this hideous motion capture garbage. Ugh! But, 3 stars. Why? Lee Scoresby and Hester were perfect. Exactly as I imagined them. 1 star for them.

Iorek Byrnison was perfect. 1 star for him.

The Bear Fight. The only part of the movie where I felt anything was happening that *mattered*. 1 star.

Not impressed. In fairness, really, impossible to adapt to live action, that trilogy.

Still... I guess I'll go and see "The Subtle Knife" and "The Amber Spyglass"... although, sitting through the Golden Compass and subsequently realising exactly just how packed with ideas the first book was, I cannot for the life of me see how the hell they are going to film them, as they're even more rich and complex than "Northern Lights" (which lights were, irritatingly, completely ignored in the movie. They're central to the book! It's because of them that everyone ends up in the Arctic, the films leaves one very much with the idea that it's all a sort of accident. Messy!) "Dark Materials" has MUCH MORE STORY in it than LOTR, even though it's slightly shorter, and has far more alien and fascinating ideas. My BF, who hasn't read the trilogy, could tell straight away that there was a lot more going on in this story than was being shown on screen.

I'm getting him the trilogy for Xmas now, so I guess the film's useful for something...

Stardust (2007)

Magnificent!

[10/10 · 26 August 2007]

A feast of fun! I've read the illustrated novel, and while it was one of Gaiman's better excursions into the genre of fantasy, it wasn't as good as this movie adaptation.

I was particularly taken by the acting and characterisation. Lamia in particular was a PROPER fantasy villain, the likes of which hasn't graced our screens for quite some time. Her "counterproductive beauty routine" was hysterically funny, but she was still scary, in fact she got scarier and scarier as the movie progressed.

The ghosts of the Stormhold Clan were hilarious, Robert De Niro delivers a performance that should steal the movie but the rest of the movie's so good it *just* gets away from him, I even ended up liking snooty Victoria and Humphrey! All of the characters were likable, even the nastiest of the witches.

The thing I like best about this movie is the way they handled the magic. There's always a sense that it costs something, that it has rules. And there's magic happening all over the place, but it never really dominates or interferes with the movie, it just spices it up beautifully! A romp! I felt 10 years old again!

Se7en (1995)

Pretty good, but a bit over-rated...

[7/10 · 23 November 2006]

It might be because I've seen a lot of films since it's release in 1995 that have borrowed heavily from its visual style, which was possibly very unusual at the time (I can't remember) but this didn't ring with me as strongly as it has with some people. It's very much a David Fincher with decay and desaturated colour tones everywhere, lots of grand, decaying buildings and a feeling of gloomy, low tech nostalgia sliding in at the sides, and that's very welcome, but it's not as gripping as some make out.

It certainly isn't a *bad* film, by any stretch. The plot's well balanced, the characters nuanced and believable (except Brad Pitt who's such an annoying brat I can't see how anyone anywhere would hire him as a cop) and the dialogue is good enough (although really Morgan FReeman brings a real shine to it that Pitt can't match), with the exception of some slightly hammy bits.

The main thing that seems to have gripped everybody is the serial killer's supposedly insanely clever twisted, creepy, dark, disturbing plan, but I don't really think it's as creepy as all that. Saw, a far less interesting film, was WAY creepier, although I suppose it borrowed heavily from Seven.

Also, I don't really care much about how creepy serial killers are anyway, I think it's just a cheap titillation device.

Where this film's most interesting is where Brad Pitt's character gets his come-uppance for being such an annoying little twerp. And even that feels a little bit cheap, there isn't a moment where he's on screen that he doesn't irritate, which may be the point, but it's a bit much to make an entire film about an evil serial killer just so you can give an imaginary jackass a slap in the face.

But Morgan Freeman was good...

The Dark Crystal (1982)

Only for us.

[10/10 · 14 October 2006]

It's difficult to see how a film like this could ever have mass popularity. It's melodramatic, poorly scripted, mechanically plotted and hasn't got any people in it.

But I *love* it.

This is a dark, ponderous, elegant, film. The emotional tones are murky, sometimes quiet, sometimes startlingly loud, always alien and dreamlike and only ever vaguely comprehensible. The design is just drop-dead gorgeous, and entire alien WORLD brought to life. It's mesmerising, and more details can be found buried deep within it on every viewing. Thick layers of meaning were woven into this movie, revealed only when reading the accompanying coffee-table book, which records in a painstaking watchmaker's manner every tiny bit of "iceberg" under the surface of this story.

There ought to be a word for the feelings aroused by this film, a word that means "alien yet hauntingly familiar". I still get the same dreamy mood as I did when I first saw this film many years ago when this movie begins, the first crash of the cymbal and the first recital of the theme of the Skekses sounding as if from terribly far away, a high, yearning phrase on a single horn, lonely and beautiful, calling from another time. The Age of Wonder.

It's what this film's all about, Wonder. There's no explaining it to people who don't like that sort of right-brain thing, they just won't like it.

Why does it make sense that staring into the reflection of a cracked crystal from deep within the bowels of a tortured castle will, with the aid of some ugly machinery, suck out your very soul? That the Trial Stone glows when it's cleaved completely in two by the General? That the shard responds to the notes of Jen's pipe? It doesn't, of course, but it DOES.

I also love the pace and the mechanical plot. This is the one film whose mechanical plot I must forgive, and even love, as it's supposed to be mechanical. The sand painting diagram at the beginning of the movie is a representation of the history of the entire world, including the events to come. The whole world is one huge piece of metaphysical clockwork, and so the film is as well, the tension building clearly and slowly towards the extraordinary climax, which still gives me the shivers... Prophecies are stupid things to have in films, except this film, in which the prophecy is the entire point of the movie instead of an unnecessary condiment. The slow machinery of this movie lends a great weight to it, the feeling that vast, invisible forces are at work intensifies pace by implacable Mystic pace...

I also approve of the ending's inherent mysticism, taken straight from Jung, the key to transcendence being the joining of the Ego with the Shadow, the Skekses and Mystics representing these structures respectively. It's true, and this film says so, pretty much in so many words.

It's not at all surprising that it's not very popular with people who don't particularly buy into the things I've outlined above. It's geologically slow. It's inhuman. It's VERY weird. But it does all these things *deliberately* with an artistry rarely seen these days.

And I just love the music...

Labyrinth (1986)

An absolute CLASSIC of Children's Fantasy

[10/10 · 14 October 2006]

Not a foot is put wrong in this masterpiece of modern fairy-tale telling. Every line sings out, every character a gem.

Bowie has no talent at all as an actor, but in this he shines out as he's essentially playing some strange personal aspect of himself... He's constructed an excellent villain in this, *how can it be* that he's so effective despite the slight cockney accent, the ridiculous wig and boots, the daft dialogue? Confidence! He throws himself into the part full-tilt and has a ball, and it shows! He LOVES being Jareth, and so Jareth becomes a very lovable villain, vain, pompous, mysterious, never, actually *dark*, you understand...

Jennifer Connelly is even better. She IS Sarah.

But the real star is the story, which gives Lewis Carroll a fine run for his money, a story full of games and jokes and tricks and a labyrinthine host of delightful minor characters, perfect for a children's story.

I think perhaps the two sequences for which I have the greatest admiration are the sequence with the Peach, the Masked Ball and the Junkyard, and...

THE BOG OF ETERNAL STENCH! ... which is probably the most GENIUS children's fiction thing EVER.

The appeal of this sort of story-writing for kids can't really be pinned down to a formula, you have to have a natural talent for it, and it's clear that the makers of the this movie were completely saturated with this natural talent.

A Delight...

"SSSHHHHHHH! ....

she's going to say the *magic words*..."

Event Horizon (1997)

Not bad...

[7/10 · 14 October 2006]

7 stars.

I'd give it an 8, but it's not QUITE an 8. 7.8, say.

The design is good, REALLY good, unique and compelling. They manage to make the ship look beastly creepy. It's a bit OTT and obvious, but V effective...

The acting is really surprisingly good. The script ISN'T that good, but is made more than palatable by excellent interpretation by Sam Neill and most of the rest of the cast except Lawrence Fishburne, who spoils his part sufficiently to bring this film down from a "9".

(I simply can't understand why people keep casting Fishburne in Sci fi or Fantasy films. He obviously despises the genre...) The premise is a Hellraiser rip-off, but sufficiently different to make the new angle work in surprising ways.

Sam Neill really pulls this movie back out of Fishburne's clutches and away from the brink of turkeydom several times and *then* his gravitas slingshots it into well-deserved cult status...

Good last shot, too...

Sphere (1998)

Never watch a movie named after a geometric solid.

[1/10 · 14 October 2006]

eye-roll...

This film, like it's cousin "Cube", is pseudo-intellectual garbage.

Dustin Hoffman and Samuel Jackson are exquisitely miscast (although how you would cast this script is a mystery) and don't seem to have any idea what they're supposed to. Hoffman bimbles about aimlessly, obviously uncertain as to how to go about "humanising" the subject matter, but all he ends up doing is Hoffmanising it. Jackson does the "Look! I'm Samuel Jackson!" dance admirably, obviously caring not one sausage about this stupid movie, counting the days until his check falls through the mail box. This prancing about looks ridiculous, and it looks like he knows and doesn't care.

The dialogue doesn't make any sense. The story is jarringly illogical and confusing, the special effects are slight and unimpressive, the basic premise an unpalatable rip-off of "Solaris", the pace alternately dragging and too fast, the music pedestrian and uninspiring and...

Basically, I've learned that you shouldn't watch a film whose title is a geometric solid.

So there.

1 star. Would t'were zero.

Children of Men (2006)

Well, that was a laugh.

[9 October 2006]

I'm not rating this as I can't really be honest. It's like "Brazil" except not funny, it's "Threads" for the post-Cold War generation.

It's horrible. It's like "War of the Worlds" done by a Brit. We are spared nothing. It's one long, slow slide into despair and chaos.

The most affecting scene for me were the torture chambers at the refugee camps with people having their clothes stripped off in lines at gun point. The camera makes a long, slow point in this sequence, hovering first over men kneeling with the arms clasped behind their heads, then people tied up in cages, then rows of people being marched around in circles, then rows of naked bodies. None of it's done with slick sci-fi technology, it's just the same old techniques on display across the news everywhere these days.

Nothing works properly in this society. Even the getaway car won't start. The terrorists motives are entirely understandable but they are so totally wrong-headed in everything they do that they're doomed from the outset.

SPOILER The minute Jasper walked on-screen I knew he was completely doomed. "GET OUT OF THE MOVIE!" I wanted to yell at him. "YOU'RE A HIPPY IN A FASCIST POLICE STATE!" There is doom and failure and death and weeping by the bucketload in this movie. From the soul-deadening opening sequence through the art collector's warped and twisted little empire to the Rape of Bexhill, there is not one moment of lightness or hope.

DOOM. BLEAKNESS. HOPELESSNESS. DESPAIR...

Ahem.

It's all a bit... *self-absorbed*...

So, I'm not really sure how to rate it, because although it's a very horrible and convincing projection of *present day* society's fears onto the future (which is what much of science fiction often is rather than a prediction of the future), I don't think it's *convincing* because there's any real likelihood that that's what the REAL future's going to be like. I think it's convincing because it's currently extraordinarily fashionable to wallow and the wallowers are easily convinced of a sort of indefinable inevitability. Especially if you're fiscally comfortable.

Personally, I disapprove of this wallowing, and the entire film's awash with it. So, although as an exercise in stylish, grey-minded, desaturation-filtered wallowing it deserves the full "10", as a *film*... I can't say it's all that good.

This film has many serious axes to grind, and worthy axes they are too and long due a sharpening...but I have a nasty feeling the film-maker doesn't know which end of an axe is supposed to be the sharp one...

Cube (1997)

NO. RAISE SHIELDS. This is Meaningless Gibberish.

[1/10 · 30 September 2006]

NO. This is NOT a cerebral film. It's a "cerebral-y" film, like "science fictiony" films, which are *not* science fiction.

Up there (or down there) with Mission to Mars, this pseudo-intellectual tripe is a *poor* excuse for a philosoflick. I am *displeased* with this film, its teenaged cynicism and its makers.

It's an interesting idea made dull by spattering it with gore, scary "freak-out" scenes and tedious confrontations that reveal nothing and simply bore. Also, the dialogue is appalling. The acting's pretty film-studentish, too. "B-side" character development. Stuffing 6 characters (cubes have 6 sides, folks! OOOOO) into a box and shaking them to see what happens...NOTHING. Nothing happens. They get bored and annoyed and start hacking lumps out of each other.

Yeah, I work in an office, too, buddy. I know that's what happens, and it's boring. I don't want to watch a movie about it.

An exercise in futility...

1 star for the pro-intellectual rant by the maths student at the stupid guy who thinks shouting at people louder will get him what he wants. The only intelligent thing in the entire movie...

Volver (I) (2006)

Hmf.

[4/10 · 30 September 2006]

Oh, bother, said Pooh. I REALLY wanted to enjoy this, but I have to be honest, I didn't.

I'm not at all convinced by this movie. Bits of it were really good, particularly the moment where Raimunda's mother turns up in the boot of the car, but there were opportunities to capitalise magnificently on the humorous situations or the tragic situations or the suspenseful situations that were just completely wasted.

It feels like the beginnings of three really excellent but totally unrelated movies slotted into one another and, by tripling the volume, taking us up until about half-way through, when it turns into the re-complication phase of the least interesting of the three and then just peters out.

Auntie Paula was the best character, and she only took up a tine scene at the beginning. Raimunda's husband and the whole subplot surrounding him should have been the PLOT. Agustina was a very appealing character who just didn't have enough to do. Raimunda was a sympathetic character for about half of the film and then... she got increasingly annoying.

Irene is an excellent character. She very nearly saves the movie.

The whole flavour of Spanish female culture is wonderful, but it's not enough to carry the movie by itself, not for me.

4 stars. 1 for Irene, 1 for Auntie Paula, 1 for the surreal opening scene and 1 for Agustina.

Hmf. I really expected better. Unsatisfying. There's little more irritating then seeing the potential of a truly great masterpiece being squandered before your eyes. If has the seeds of one, certainly...

Howl's Moving Castle (2004)

Moving

[10/10 · 27 September 2006]

Well, I saw this movie when it first came out with my current partner, near the beginning of our relationship. So, I'm biased.

Yes, I love this movie.

It's like a more grown-up version of Spirited Away. The characters are rounder and warmer and, if anything, more magical. The magic is richer and cleverer and darker and more compelling. The dream has burst into reality, the magic is not dreamy, but *awake*, wide awake and sizzling with wild delights, in the form of a castle that walks around on chicken legs with a fire-demon at its heart. It's every bit as good, the emotional tones are even more beautiful than in that other masterpiece of the unbridled childish imagination.

My favourite scene is the flashback when Howl watches the falling star people fizzing across the sky to the high, clear, pale blue lake near his little house in the mountains, and catches one and starts talking to it. It lights up his face in the dark...

You either love this sort of thing or you don't.

And, better still, it has a *grown-up* fairy story, the story of a girl who must cast away her self-imposed prison of excessive common sense and dare to dream.

Again the plot is meandering, but it's even less important in this than in Miyazaki's other movies. The last scene is a breath-taking and unashamedly primitive romantic confection. Just like Disney used to be...

10 stars. 100 stars... 1,000 stars...

The Man with Two Brains (1983)

The Best Steve Martin Movie

[10/10 · 27 September 2006]

Yes, the very best of them all.

I love over the top stuff if it's done properly, and this highly-strung movie froths with it. It has the kind of nervous silliness that makes everything in it funny whether the punchlines are "good" or not.

Kathleen Turner OWNS this movie.

And...

I can't help it. I know it's stupid, but I think it's romantic, falling in love with a brain in a jar. And she's such a *nice* brain in a jar. And... and, and, and I like their little song, and I think it's romantic when he says at the end: "What fat?", and David Warner's funny.

So there.

"If *I* lika you and *you* lika me..."

The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989)

A Nasty Piece of Work

[7/10 · 27 September 2006]

So many, many people miss the point.

The jarring contrast between the lush backgrounds, lovely set design and gorgeous soundtrack and the hideous violence is the whole point. Bountiful riches smothering a rotten core of moral decay. Exploitation and brutal manipulation seething beneath a thin veneer of respectability. The Elephant in the living-room that no-one talks about. The gangster's leer at the heart of the lipstick-smeared culture of greed.

This is an unforgiving film with a starkly *un*pretentious *political* message. It is propaganda, and should be seen as such.

Structured visual allegory with narrative footnotes. Meaning that each character is a *symbol*, not a character. The Thief is the filth-obsessed brute force necessary to power the engines of capitalism, the restaurant full of patient diners ignoring the hideous monster at its centre are the consumers of late 20th Century, the Cook is the intelligentsia attempting to construct society, The Thief's Wife, the choirboy and the other victims are various stages of Innocence being abused by the system and (for the sake of narrative) Her Lover is Mercury, the lightning bolt that brings Change. All very simple. Far too simple for an ordinary movie, really. Not exactly "entertainment".

The volume in everything in this movie is turned UP. It sounds and looks pretentious, yes, but this film is an exercise in *stripping away* unnecessary detail, not *adding* it as in previous Greenaways, to sharpen the knives to an exquisite edge, to flay the rotting flesh from the 80's paradigm's bones. It's a polemic, a rant, a scorched-earth blaze of cold rage.

But is it a good movie? Objectively? No. Not really.

It's too long, it's stomach-churningly violent, the lover characters are subtle and clash with the rest of the cast bizarrely and th colour-changing between environments, whilst stylistically clever, is disjointed and meaningless.

But is it a good series of perfectly lit photographs strung loosely together through time for neatnesses sake whose visual structure lends deep and powerful meaning to the central message of the film, that the only hope is that Innocence can triumph over Brute Greed? Subjectively? YES.

But... should one DO such things? SHOULD one make such movies? Who knows? Who cares? But... IS Capitalism REALLY that horrible? Did we really have to sit through all that filth just to be told that our social systems have consequences that we are not only completely aware of but are quite happy to ignore even if these consequences are blaring in our ears, interrupting our enjoyment of the choice sweetmeats the same system bestows on us so long as we let it do it's thing? Loaded question. And those who think they already know the answer will love or hate this film accordingly.

Me? I liked the costumes. And the dialogue. And the imagination. And I *respect* a film-maker who openly despises Evil. As for the political subtext... on some days I can forgive it and on others I can't, but one cannot expect to go looking at works of art that people have made and *never* see something that disturbs you. Artists have things to say.

Certainly he says it very loud, but that doesn't bother me. I have no problem with the grinding of axes, so long as the axe-grinder knows which end of the axe he's grinding...

Bagpuss (1974)

The most IMPORTANT... the most BEAUTIFUL... the most MAGICAL...

[10/10 · 27 September 2006]

....saggy old kids TV programme in the whole wide world...

Yes, it is perfection, moth-eaten, sweet as honey, innocent as a 3-year old's summer Sunday morning in the 70's under a duvet in the living-room. Why do they not make *more* such programmes? Look to Oliver Postgate's personal website for the answer.

Such great care and attention put into such small and delightful things! Animation of this kind can no longer happen, sadly. Where are the songs of the mice? Transmuted to Pokemon babble. Where is Professor Yaffle? Gone! Forever! But we mustn't be glum. Through the magic of television, this tiny gem, glowing a thousand times more brightly than it should be able to, will only gleam stronger and stronger as the generations pass...

All we can do is polish it up and put it in the shop window, where perhaps it will be recognised by a passing children's television executive who has lost his childhood...

The Wicker Man (1973)

Um. Hm. No.

[5/10 · 27 September 2006]

Actually, it's, er, not that great.

Oh, okay, when I saw when I was a little kid the shock ending was really shocking and the whole build-up and stuff was reasonably interesting and affecting, particularly Britt Eckland's pretty yet creeeeepy seduction song....

All the creepiness of the villagers, however, wasn't creepy at all when I saw it again recently, in fact they were so much nicer than Edward Woodward that I had pretty much no problem with them setting him on fire at all. I know, this is bad. This, coupled with the fact that I had already seen the movie when I was young, meant that the best bit, the shock ending, was neither a shock, nor particularly emotionally affecting in any *other* way. Which I didn't expect. After all, this is supposed to be a horror classic.

When the schoolteacher at the end of the movie says: "You shall be *revered* and *anointed* as a king" along with a neat, confirmatory nod of the chin to indicate the ceremonial appropriateness of this anointing, she could just as easily have been saying: "You shall be *ritually burned alive* for being *irritating* public nuisance" and it would have been just as good.

Not that I'm advocating copper-torching. Far from it. It's just that the islanders come across as so ordinary and pleasant that the ending, far from being a horrendous shock, just looks... fake. Edward Woodward acts his little heart out, but everyone else looks like extras.

Also, I have an ambivalence about the film's basic premise. As an adult I couldn't really take the film seriously as I regularly visit the Scottish islands and the idea of paganism bursting into bloom in a hundred or so years to the intensity necessary for this movie's plot seems now to be a dim-witted idea, much MUCH more dim-witted than it seemed when I was young. The Scottish Islands, particularly the far out, far up ones, are DEEPLY Christian. Although I suppose you could postulate that it's the depth of religion itself, whatever it is, that hangs around those distant beaches and mountains. Certainly they are soul-stirring places... Meh. Dunno. That spiritual aura is there in the islands themselves, and the movie seems to tell of it a little in the images and music... but going there in reality is better.

I do rather like Christopher Lee's little speech about animals. That was well-written, and, though very much of the time, contained sentiments that one might keep close to one's heart without *too* much danger of developing a law-enforcement officer incineration tendency, I would hope.

5 stars. 1 for the acting, which *was* good, very good in places, 1 for Christopher Lee's little speech about animals, 1 for Britt Eckland's dirty dancing and the nice song, which I like (that sequence wasn't half as daft in 2006 as I expected it to be), ermmm... 1 for Christopher Lee himself, who does pull his bit off wonderfully, and 1 for...... well, cough, I suppose a conglomerate of May Morrison, the Harbour Master and the daft gravedigger, actually no, he was behaving like he was in a "Wicker Man" parody, er... say the schoolteacher...

There. 5. Happy?

War of the Worlds (2005)

Good!

[9/10 · 22 September 2006]

Yes, very good.

SPOILERGASM

Some folk have complained about the fact that the some electronic devices stopped working and some didn't. This is exactly what would happen if the cause of the electronic failures was that well-understood scientific phenomenon (and often pondered candidate as a basis for weaponry), *a massive electromagnetic pulse*, which looks reasonable from all that lightning. EMPs only affect devices that are *already switched on* (This would include the entire power grid). Anything switched off would work fine *after* the pulse.

Also there have been mutterings about the aliens planning it for millions of years. Well, who's to suppose the aliens were planning an *invasion*? A colonisation is certainly at least one of their goals, but it's quite possible that they had no idea that humans were on Earth at all! This dovetails nicely with the alien bods looking in Tim Robbin's basement scritching their heads over all his basement stuff.

For all we know, cows blood would have been just as good...

There's also been annoyance that certain characters turn out not to have perished, well, I think Spielberg's allowed ONE of these given how much hell he's been giving everybody throughout the entire movie.

POST SPOILER CIGARETTE...

Anyway, all that stuff aside, it's all very affecting. The effects are excellent and thankfully the CGI doesn't try any of those impossible POVs that have been plaguing Hollywood. It's all done from ground level, only one annoyingly disorientating swooping sequence. This brings about a very tight atmosphere, very tense. The war machines are well-designed, clearly alien without being hokey, but they still look and sound like machines. The harvesting / fertilising sequences are *bloody scary*.

The plot's a bit unidirectional. It reminds of Grant Morrison's writing in places, when Morrison's at his most unidirectional he tends to up the scale of whatever's going on when he needs a change, in this movie Spielberg's direction is similarly one-track but when he needs something to change he just drops the protagonists in it even deeper. I'm a sucker for this trick.

Not *ten* stars, because he didn't go the whole hog. He could very easily have done even worse things to those protagonists, or even some of the extras, that would be more like a proper war laid bare, and he held back. He should have gone the whole hog.

Having said that, the feeling of the mad-eyed hopelessness faced by an utterly overwhelmed invaded country he projected onto that screen was shockingly clear and, perhaps, almost, sobering.

A feat of the imagination...

Spirited Away (2001)

Beautiful

[10/10 · 21 September 2006]

I'm not really the sort of person who sits through a movie with a list of mental check-boxes that I need ticked before I can say I enjoyed it, or would give it a "10". We all have these little checkboxes and are mostly unconscious of them while were watching a movie, but can become painfully conscious of them when the movie leaves them unticked (no plot... grrr NO tick in little box... patronising exposition... grrr, NO tick in little box) and a lot of people who need certain of these boxes ticked will be annoyed by Spirited Away. It's plot is meandering and "join the dots" at best and its characters, when viewed objectively, are actually somewhat skewed, either too peculiar or too saccharine to relate to.

But *I* don't care.

I'm the sort of person who can forgive any number of flaws if there's anything in the movie resembling genuine imagination, particularly if it's used in a meaningful way. Sometimes only one sublimely imaginative moment will satisfy me and make the film something that I will love and treasure forever however bad the rest of it is. For this reason, I love the whole of, for example, "The Dark Crystal", however dated it seems and stilted and wooden the dialogue, because it just DRIPs with dreamy originality.

*Every single scene* in Spirited Away seems to throb with a unique magic, it's a continuous *string* of these sublimely imaginative moments. To me, it has exactly the timeless wonder of Alice in Wonderland. And, amazingly, because writing a new fairy story is always very difficult, on an inexplicable fairy-tale logic level, it all rings true, hangs together and makes sense! Everything in this movie seems at once alien yet hauntingly familiar, like a particularly vivid and startlingly colourful dream. I felt, as the story unfolded, as if I had already seen it and loved it when I was a very small child, and had simply forgotten it.

SPOILERS My favourite sequences are: 1. Just after Chihiro and her parents walk through the archway into the sun-drenched Field of Smiling Stones and the music seems to lift off the ground like a dandelion seed in a soft breeze. I have spent many happy days on islands of the coast of Scotland in the summer that felt just like that, awake yet dreaming, bright and beautiful.

2. The water train sequence, which was strange and delightful. (That house on the tiny bit of land not much bigger than the house itself reminds me so *very* strongly of places I visited as a child on holiday in Scotland that I can hardly help but love it.)

3. The Cleansing of the River God, which was wonderful! SPOILERS END One warning, this movie might be frightening for very small children. My 5 year old nephew found it a bit too spooky in places (but loved it), even though he laughed all the way through even the scariest bits of "Twilight Zone The Movie"...

Not *really* a kids movie, a movie for the kid inside adults...

Red Planet (2000)

Oh, go AWAY.

[1/10 · 20 September 2006]

Mars Attacks was WAY better than this.

Depressingly bad, unimaginative, sneering lip-service paid to long-established and well-milked sci-fi tropes to make a quick buck off the Red Wave of the time. "How do people get away with this sort of thing?", I wonder to myself sometimes as the long winter nights draw in and I'm feeling my age.

I just couldn't rid myself of the feeling that the actors felt they were in another stupid kiddie-brained science fiction movie that was only going to be watched by geeks. When the astronaut complained about algebra me and my flatmate just looked at each other and groaned. "You're an astronaut!" he said to the screen, "You're GOOD at algebra!" "I hate this planet," says one of the 'nauts near the end as the... scary...killer...robot... zzzzz approaches for yet another action sequence. No. It's the movie he hates, and who can blame him? Badly shot, badly written, badly directed, just plain bad through and through.

1 obligatory star. A Pile of Space Poo. And exploitative to boot. Boo! Hiss!