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Wednesday, February 25, 2004
Elephant
Gus van Sant's take on the Columbine High School massacre follows a day in the life of a number of high school students, two of whom end their day and the lives of several others with the gratuitous use of semi-automatic weapons. For much of the time the camera simply follows the subjects, hovering just behind their heads, on seemingly endless tracking shots through the school. The students, all played by non-actors, wander isolated along corridors, across playing fields, only occasionally interacting with each other. The kids are all from the well defined social groups we know better than our own school lives thanks to our diet of American high-school movies -nerds, jocks etc. And then there are the type we are starting to know from the blurry CCTV footage of American news reports - the internet obsessed, misfit psycho-killers. Stylistically though, Elephant differs hugely from your average high school movie - the time-line shifts, the conversations are sparse and meandering at best - the only narrative is the overhwelming sense of the inevitable as the focus switches more and more to the characters of the killers. The film comes across as a particularly bleak Richard Linklater movie (before he went all School of Rock) then re-edited with claustrophobicly long takes by the ghost of Kubrick. Its been hailed as a masterpiece by some critics, yet I also know quite a few people who've been utterly bored and un-moved to tears by the whole experience. Both points of view are equally as valid, as the film avoids so well the conventional methods of audience involvment that many people will be alienated entirely. Personally, I found it an interesting and unusual experiment which should be applauded for providing no answers to a difficult subject - but there's plenty of you out there who'll want an answer as to why you had to sit through it.  Sunday, February 08, 2004
Its time for a brand new featurette on this bloglette - yes, its film reviews. I use my UGC cinema pass and go and see the multiplexe's latest big screen brain slop and arthouse posturing and then rush back to my PC to spill my opinion guts across the interweb like small slippery eels of film criticism. First off, I'll explain my review system. I'll give each film a mark out of, lets say 10, and illustrate this mark in a handy at-a-glance visual guide. Each mark of goodness a film earns from me will be represented by one of these
. Yes, that's Paul R*ss's grinning fat face with a spike through his forhead. So, the more times TV's most unlikeable rent-a-twat gets his brain splintered by Buffy the Useless TV "Personality" Slayer, the better the movie. Should a movie be really, really bad, it may even earn an un-staked Rosshead, a gormless grinning skull-and-crossbone warning you not to even step foot inside your local cinema for fear of your brain being offended beyond belief. I'm not going to show an unspiked Rosshead, as there's no need for it now, and so far I'm being quite charitable to the movies so far, but for example if I'd just seen P*arl H*rbour, that would have earned a not-to-be-cherished 10 twatheads.Lost in Translation The comedy deity that is Bill Murray stars as a washed out American actor over in Tokyo to record a whiskey advert, where he meets the delicious young Scarlett Johansson, a similarly lost soul. And they hang out for a bit, and er, do some stuff. And thats about it really. Well, actually it isn't. Sofia Coppola's film is funny, heartwarming and intelligent - all those words that will feature on the publicity posters for about three other films out this week that are blatantly anything but. The two central performances are excellent - Murray pretty much plays himself and Johansson is all pouty boredom and sitting around in her pants. Matching these two for all round shiny goodness is the eye-seducing cinematography and ear-licking soundtrack and you have a beautiful and and mouthwatering Japanese meal for your senses - even if yes, nothing much really happens. Kill Bill (Volume 1) Tarantino's much awaited martial-arts revenge movie stars Uma Thurman as a woman wronged by an elite bunch of female assasins led by the mysterious Bill. When I say wronged, I mean they kill her family, husband-to-be and leave her for dead, all on her wedding day. She recovers however, and sets about tracking them down one by one and dispatching sword-edged justice. The film is a mish mash of low-budget genre film-making, from marshall arts movies to spaghetti westerns, with even a slice of ultra-violent manga thrown in for good measure. But its all done with such a sense of style and swagger that it manages to be both an effective homage to the best of genre film-making, and more than a sum of its parts. The soundtrack veers from Morricone to Japanese girl-pop, and the violence from bloody realism to blood-spurting comedy gore. If this film has its faults, its that these changes in tone occasionally jar, and whilst the script is full of witty one-liners, there's little in the way of those rambling musings on pop culture that have sinced passed into filmic legend from the likes of Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs. Of course, lack of dialogue and reliance on action is a defining feature of the kind of movie Tarantino is plundering for cinematic excitement, so thats not too much of a problem. The film has been chopped into two with a big fat sword for reasons of length, and there's plenty enough here to make me eager for the next installment School of Rock Jack Black plays a slacker wannabe rockstar who gets kicked out of his band just weeks before they're due to perform at the Battle of the Bands, lies his way into a job as a substitute teacher at some school for overpriveleged ten-year-olds - who just all happen to be musically gifted and well, you can guess the rest. Despite being directed by arthouse slacker Richard Linklater and featuring plenty of "stick it to the man" posturing from Jack Black, the film manages to be slightly less rebelious (and less funny) that Kindergarten Cop, which at times this undemanding kids movie sometimes resembles. Sure, the kids learn something about 70s rock, and find that spark of rebellion in their overly protected lives - but then again they are only ten and surely by the time they'd hit teenagerdom they'd be finding these things out for themselves. Its very much a vehicle for Black, and he gives his all in terms of manic energy and facial grimacing, yet when his co-stars and the film's target audience are no older than ten and find the word "ass" cause for shocked giggling, this is very much a radio-friendly, censored performance. Hopefully the success of this move commercially and its bewildering critical acclaim will allow Linklater and Black to go and make something much more challenging, but unless you are a particularly up-tight and undemanding ten-year-old yourself, this school project only merits a tenacious "D". Big Fish Tim Burton's tall tale of a dying man's fantastical fishy fables. Albert Finney plays Edward Bloom, recounting the strange story of his life to his grown up-son who's come to his father's death bed in an effort to hear the truth. Ewan McGregor plays Bloom in the flashback sequences as he encounters various strange characters and situations, involving giants and circus performers, siamese twins and witches. For a Tim Burton film, the picture lacks the darkness of his best work, and at times the sentimentality of the whole thing threatens to overwhelm you like a tide of kitten-vomit. However, in the fantasy sequences there are enough quirky touches and imaginative situations to lift this well above the run-of-the-mill-dying-relative emotional pornography. McGregor grins his way from adventure to adventure like a slightly smarter Forrest Gump, and the supporting cast of freaks including Steve Buscemi and Danny DeVito all add class to the fairytale. Like a kiss on the lips from a talking fish - magical and unusual but probably you could do without that sort of sentimentality. The Dreamers Wannabe arthouse nonsense from Bertolluci. The plot such as it is concerns a naive american student (played by some guy who looks and sounds way too much like Leonardo DiCaprio for my liking - all blonde floppy hair, pouty mouth and whiny american false modesty) who meets a couple of French students in Paris in 1968. You can tell they are French because they chain smoke constantly and quite often can be seen drinking red wine - you get the feeling maybe the costume department had run out of berrets. Anyway, these students (called Theo and Isabelle) are twins, and seem to be in the midst of a very incestous relationship. They invite the young yank into their apartment, where they spend the rest of the movie fucking, wandering around naked, playing film-trivia games and of course chain-smoking. Outside are the Paris student riots, and probably loads and loads of other interesting things - which we rarely get to see as we seem to be stuck watching a glossy French retro version of Big Brother. The film is in essence a homage to those classic French movies where people sit around a lot, talking and smoking and not doing much else. There are even clips from such movies littered around like visual footnotes incase you don't get it. However all these nods, winks and nudges at the French New Wave only make you wish you were watching one of those movies, rather than this wannabe copy. Its attracted a certain amount of controversy for its hot sex action - and yes, there is quite bit of nubile young flesh on show, flaccid penii, untrimmed French bush and a lot of pouting from everybody. At one stage there's so much masturbation and flashing its like Bertolluci's attempting to emulate American Pie rather than his intended influences. Its not all bad - its well made, nicely shot, with a decent soundtrack of songs of the time - but in the end you'd be better off shacking up yourself with a nice bottle of St Emillion, a packet of Galluoise and watching something like A bout de souffle . Then if you still want some Euro-flesh to pop your baguette to, try something like Private Gladiator |
