Musical interlude 7

Here's a song from Les Demoiselles de Rochefort, sung by Catherine Deneuve and Francoise Dorleac. A cleaned up print of this movie has been playing at BFI Southbank lately, I highly recommend it.

Freedom?

It seems that the 25-year-old law governing video censorship in the UK was, through some oversight, never actually enacted. It was a simple oversight: the European Commission was never notified of the act, but it now means that the 1984 act and the revisions of 1993 and 1994 are invalid and that, in effect, the system of classifying films for video release no longer exists.

This will likely prompt tabloid scare stories about how our children can now be sold porn. Technically this may be true, as there can now be no legal penalty for supplying films to underage customers, but it’s a distraction from the actual issue. Shops aren’t suddenly going to begin selling 18 rated films to five year olds just because of a loophole in the law. The more disturbing part of this is what it may mean for the future of our system of classification and censorship.

This legal issue, discovered during a routine look at the act before the latest amendment, enacting classifications for video games, essentially means that, should it wish to, the government can now throw out the entire system we’ve had over the last quarter of a century and rewrite the guidelines. This worries me. With lunatic fringes like Mediawatch and Christian Voice well organised to mount high pressure campaigns for more restrictive censorship and a Government unpopular and headed into an election year there is a real danger here for movie lovers, this could genuinely affect and restrict our freedom to choose what we watch.

The BBFC, as yet, have made no public comment on the issue, if they don’t do so soon I shall write and ask them about it. I’ll have more on this as it develops, including my own proposal for what a new system (should such a thing be proposed) ought to look like.

Review Post 42: Afterschool

AFTERSCHOOL
DIR: Antonio Campos
CAST: Ezra Miller, Lee Wilkof,
Jeremy Allen Wright, Addison Timlin



It is easy to see that somewhere in Afterschool there is the germ of a good movie. Which makes it all the more frustrating that this is a terrible, terrible movie.

26 year old director Antonio Campos has already been making films for half his life and he clearly isn’t short of confidence (he dedicated a short made when he was 13 to Stanley Kubrick). His most recent film Buy it Now was intriguing. It was the story of a girl who decides to sell her virginity on ebay, told both as a ‘documentary’ and a drama. Afterschool, similarly, focuses on teenagers and has the same unpolished, observed style. The difference is that in (at least the first version of) Buy it Now that style seemed to have purpose, to be used to the advantage of the story while here it seems like Campos showing off how clever he is, to the great detriment of his film.

The slight story is set at an American boarding school where two students die of a drug overdose. The film chronicles the school’s reaction to this event, largely through the eyes of Robert (Miller), a chance witness to the event. Much of the film is concerned with the making of a tribute video to the dead students and this is reflected in Campos’ style, which is defiantly unpolished. The problem is that, while I understand why Campos shoots the film in this fashion, it looks amateurish and is frustrating in the extreme.

Campos' framing is often deliberately off. Characters only half appear in shots, the camera is too close, or too far away, to get them entirely in focus. He’s trying to express how teenagers are wrapped up in themselves and their tight groups of friends, to the exclusion of the outside world - especially the adult world - but it just looks like he’s randomly positioned the camera and hired a drunk focus puller. The shallow focus is incredibly irritating; it means that you can only ever see about 20% of what is in the shot. It might be clever to begin with, but it begins to look like the only idea Campos has.

If the visuals were the only problem with Afterschool then the film as a whole might have worked, but sadly nothing here really works. The story is fundamentally broken and impossible to care about. The girls whose death precipitates the story appear only to die. We never know anything about them as people, or their relationship to the other people in the school. There is a similar idea running through Heathers, where we see the hypocritical tributes to Heather Chandler after her ‘suicide’. There is no real clue to what Campos is doing here - are the tributes to these girls heartfelt or hypocritical? - we never know or care, because we don’t have a clue who they were.

Sadly this lack of engagement also extends to the people we actually meet when they are alive. Every character in Afterschool has a maximum of one note and Robert is as blank a slate as Twilight’s Bella. Endless minutes of this already punishingly long 107-minute film are devoted to Robert staring into space, or at a desk, or at his feet. Why does Campos think I’m going to care about this? With so little to work with it is perhaps little surprise that the film’s performances are almost uniformly bereft of emotion, stilted and false in the extreme. The only glimmer of light comes from Addison Timlin, a 17-year-old actress who impresses with a strong performance as a freshman less innocent than she looks.

At the heart of Afterschool there is an interesting story, but it is so badly told from both a narrative and a technical standpoint that this ends up being one of 2009’s very worst films.

You're welcome

I've just got back from seeing a restored print of Jacque Demy's Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (review tomorrow), and I thought I'd share with you two of the things in it that really bowled me over.

This post contains some nudity

Catherine Deneuve



Francoise Dorleac



Catherine et Francoise

Musical Interlude 6

Continuing with the Isabelle Huppert is awesome theme, here are a couple (including Huppert's) from Francois Ozon's endearingly bonkers 8 Women - An Agatha Christie style murder mystery rendered as a high-camp, pastel coloured, musical starring the cream of four generations of French female acting talent.

Great Performances 1

Isabelle Huppert in
La Pianiste [The Piano Teacher]
Dir: Michael Haneke



MAJOR SPOILERS

Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher won its star Isabelle Huppert (who appears in every scene in the film, and perhaps 90% of the setups) her second Best Actress award at Cannes, as well as several more festival awards and a European film award. The surprise isn’t so much that Huppert won awards, for she is an exceptional actress, but The Piano Teacher is not a film that screams award season glory. I’ve seldom seen a colder, darker film. If the extreme nature of the movie itself weren’t enough the fact that Huppert’s performance is so understated should have done for her chances, awards bodies tend to notice big, bold ACTING, and there’s none of that in what Huppert does in The Piano Teacher.

Huppert plays Erika Kohut, a pianist in her late 30’s who teaches at a musical conservatoire in Vienna. She lives at home with her domineering Mother (Annie Girardot). At a recital she meets Walter Klemmer (Benoit Magimel), a young man 20 years her junior. Having fallen for Erika, Walter arranges to have lessons with her, and pursues her at every opportunity, but when he gets what he’s wanted Walter is deeply troubled as Erika reveals her sadomasochistic fantasies to him.

For most of the film Erika is an extremely passive character. She’s used to hiding everything behind a mask that, to the world at large, has never slipped. Her total lack of outward emotion is even seen at what should be a moment of abandon as she watches pornography in a private booth at a sex shop, but even there she stays literally and metaphorically buttoned up. This is perhaps the hardest thing an actor can do. They have to communicate every ounce of emotion their character is feeling to us the audience, but without ever making us think that the other characters in the movie are able to see what’s going on beneath that fragile, but rigid, surface. That’s something that Huppert does perfectly. She’s especially outstanding in the scene in which Klemmer auditions to be in her class, with tiny variations as she listens to him play telling us more than any dialogue - even an interior monologue - ever could.



In a later scene (watch it above) Erika sees Walter bonding with a young female student at a concert rehearsal. Jealous, she retreats to the cloakroom and sabotages the girl’s coat, breaking a glass and putting the fragments in her pocket. The action, though, isn’t the most interesting part of this scene, because it is here that we really get to see just how much is going on in Huppert’s performance, how she is acting with her every muscle. When she enters the room Erika sits down, her back to camera, trying to decide what to do, and it’s here that Huppert amazes me, because she’s still acting - every flicker of movement, every flex of a muscle, the turn of her head, it all gives us the process. In its own way this shot tells us as much about what Erika is considering as a shot on her face would. It is astonishingly good and subtle screen acting from a woman who clearly completely understands the craft.



Above is my favourite scene in the film. Here Walter is reading a letter Erika has given him; outlining in minute detail the exact sadomasochistic acts she wants him to perform on her. Huppert is sensational throught this scene, but for me the great moment comes when Erika pulls a box out from under her bed, and begins laying out her S and M toys for Walter. The selection process, the care with which she lays them all out, the way she looks to him for approval, it is as if Erika, after being so completely, icily, controlled the rest of the film has reverted back to being a little girl. This is an odd scene in the movie, it is an unusual mix of blackly funny and deeply, deeply sad, both of which come from Huppert’s beautifully judged performance.

I could write about many more scenes here, but I wouldn’t want to spoil this great film or the performance that is its very centre. The Piano Teacher is a rich, dark treat and Huppert’s performance is probably one of the three or four best I’ve ever seen on film. Discover it now if you haven’t already done so.

News: Zombies will kill us all

I’m going to University next year, I hope I get to do studies like this. Researchers from the University of Ottowa and Carleton University recently posed themselves the question: “If there was to be a battle between zombies and humanity, who would win?” Their model was based on a zombie attack by the “classical pop-culture zombie - slow moving, cannibalistic and undead.” Sadly, they concluded that we are pretty much doomed, saying; “a zombie outbreak is likely to lead to the collapse of civilisation.”

Of course what this fails to account for is the fact that anyone can fight zombies, and that pretty much everyone knows how. My best friend is by no means a horror fan, and has seen just one zombie movie, but even he knows how to kill a zombie “shoot ‘em in the head.” I think humanity will be fine if confronted by a zombie outbreak, as long as we’ve got plenty of bullets. As the scientists said “the most effective way to contain the rise of the undead is to hit hard and to hit often.”

Musical Interlude 5

Two from The Royal Tenenbaums
Wes Anderson always uses music well, but the soundtrack of The Royal Tenenbaums is as much a character in the film as any of the actors, here are a couple of sequences where he uses it especially brilliantly, one using Elliot Smith, the other using Nico. Enjoy.

Cinematters: Offend in every way

Movieguide.org, a US website that bills itself as “A family guide to movies and entertainment” has recently declared that the ratings system of the MPAA (American equivalent to our BBFC) has “failed”. In an article posted on their website on August 13th Movieguide founder Ted Baehr called for a return to “A standards based code of decency”. Baehr said “it is clear that the entertainment industry must return to the kind of system it had during the Golden Age of Hollywood and the Golden Age of Television, when it was a wonderful life in America because Mr. Smith went to Washington, Ricky still loved Lucy, and the Bells of St. Mary's rang out across the whole land.”

The system he is referring to is that of the Motion Picture Production Code, better known as the Hays Code. The code, though adopted in 1930, was enforced between 1934 and 1968. Prior to the code censorship in America was State run and unpredictable, because producers had to deal with many different sets of censor, each of whom might have different standards. The code wasn’t forced on Hollywood; rather it was adopted as a way to avoid the advent of central governmental censorship.

The code set out three general principles:

No picture shall be produced that will lower the moral standards of those who see it. Hence the sympathy of the audience should never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil or sin.

Correct standards of life, subject only to the requirements of drama and entertainment, shall be presented.

Law, natural or human, shall not be ridiculed, nor shall sympathy be created for its violation.

These would seem to be a reaction to the gangster films that were popular in the early 1930’s, and certainly the code had a major impact on the original 1932 version of Scarface (a film still violent enough to get a 15 certificate in the UK, to be fair). The original version was judged to glorify gangsters, and so censors insisted on a title change (Scarface: The Shame of a Nation), the addition of a text introduction and the softening of the film’s ending. Director Howard Hawks disowned this version of the film.

The code’s more detailed rules and prohibitions were grouped together under headings like… Crimes Against The Law, Sex, Vulgarity, Obscenity, Profanity, Costume, Dances (i.e. suggestive movements), Religion, Locations (i.e. the bedroom), National Feelings, Titles and "Repellent Subjects" (extremely graphic violence). The code included rules on such petty considerations as how long a kiss could last (three seconds) and the position a couple could be seen in on a bed (at least one foot had to remain on the floor). Alfred Hitchcock, ever the prankster, circumvented the three second rule in this famously sexy scene from Notorious.



The code also included prohibitions that would today seem, at best, outdated and at worst - as in the forbidding of the depiction of interracial relationships - offensive in themselves. Of course Movieguide may not be suggesting that we re-adopt the Hays Code as a whole, but that we apply the morals of today to generating a new code. Fair enough. Whose morals? The answer, of course, ought to be ‘those of the majority’ which is, essentially, what MPAA and even the less restrictive BBFC do in applying their certificates. What Movieguide are suggesting, actually, is that movies should be governed by the morality of the small minority that is the Christian right, for no reason other than, well, that’s what they think.

The problem with basing censorship on moral, rather than legal, grounds is that morals change a great deal, in short space of time. Here is a film that, when first shown in 1896, got this notice from a contemporary commentator: "The spectacle of the prolonged pasturing on each other's lips was beastly enough in life size on the stage but magnified to gargantuan proportions and repeated three times over it is absolutely disgusting." What do you think?



Okay, they aren’t the world’s best looking people, but surely there is nothing remotely offensive about that. At the time though people wanted it banned. Of course you can make the case that the reaction to that particular film was because film itself was so new that seeing these images was shocking, so let’s move forward a bit, to 1953. That year The Wild One came before the BBFC, it was deemed scandalous and dangerous, a charge exemplified by this famous quote:
Mildred: What're you rebelling against, Johnny?
Johnny: Whaddya got?
The film was banned for 15 years, finally receiving an X rating in 1968. Forty one years later, The Wild One is a PG and few, I imagine, would try to argue that rating.

The other problem with basing a censorship system on morals is that everyone’s morals differ. Mine are not even the same as my parents’, so how can we possibly find a representative system this way? This is not to say that there aren’t films being made that I find morally objectionable, there certainly are, in fact there has been a glut of them this year. The thing that has troubled me most lately is that many Hollywood films seem to have adopted a vein of misogyny, played for laughs, which disgusts me. For example Summit Entertainment (a subsidiary of Sony) released The Hottie and the Nottie, a disgusting, body fascist movie that tells its audience of teenage girls that they must subject themselves to painful surgical procedures to fit the ideal of beauty. Lionsgate released Crank: High Voltage, in which every single woman is either a stripper or a prostitute and Columbia and Sony are both involved with The Ugly Truth, which tells women that if they want to meet and keep a man they must live as a reductive male fantasy. I find all those movies morally repugnant, and I would assume that Movieguide (and British counterparts like Mediawatch) would agree with me. The difference between me and them is that I don’t assume that my being offended trumps either a filmmaker’s right to say what they want to say, or anyone else’s right to watch them say it, even if it is repugnant.

Another problem with introducing a moral code is that it can be argued that offensive films (and books, and music) are actually good for us as a culture. A healthy culture has a wide variety of forms of expression, it allows people to tell the stories they feel they want or need to tell, in the way that best suits those stories. That might mean Pingu, but it might also mean Antichrist. Boxing filmmakers in with set of largely arbitrary and draconian rules will not enrich our culture, it will deaden it. Some of the greatest films ever made have been considered, in their own times, to be offensive. Take Universal’s horror cycle of the 1930’s and 1940’s, produced under the Hays code, but still judged so dangerous that the BBFC created a whole new certificate to cover them: H, for Horrific. Those films didn’t pass the Hays office without incident though. One of the best scenes in Frankenstein was long thought lost because the Hays office insisted on its deletion; that lyrical scene in which the Monster accidentally drowns a little girl is one of the most beautiful in James Whale’s film, it was restored in the 1980s for a video release. Also deleted by the Hays office was the climax of the scene in which the Monster is created, with Colin Clive shouting, “Now I know what it feels like to be God.”

Perhaps the most repugnant film ever made is DW Griffith’s 1915 landmark The Birth of a Nation. Racist doesn’t even begin to describe this adaptation of a story called The Klansman. It depicts black people (mostly played by white actors with boot polished faces) as little more than animals, and ends with the Ku Klux Klan riding to the rescue of the main characters. However, hateful as the film is, you can’t deny its brilliance. Griffith pioneered many of the techniques that made film the artform it is today, without The Birth of a Nation cinema itself would be very different. You shouldn’t ban films like this, or like Leni Riefenstahl’s documentaries, because they feature repugnant philosophies, and if you shouldn’t do that then you shouldn’t be able to suppress films on any moral grounds.

Blasphemy is an interesting case, largely because I imagine that Movieguide would consider a ‘blasphemous’ film a prime target for banning. Only one film is currently, officially, banned in the UK because it is blasphemous. Nigel Wingrove’s Visons of Ecstacy is a 19-minute nunsploitation short, eaturing a depiction of Saint Teresa of Avila caressing the body of Jesus on the cross. Here’s a clip, if you watch it please don’t send me mail about how offended you are, I’ve warned you about the content.



However, blasphemy has come up in reference to other offensive films such as The Last Temptation of Christ, Monty Python’s classic The Life of Brian (you can throw that DVD away if censorship is considered under a moral code) and even the Harry Potter films. Religious issues are also interesting because they have a tendency to expose the hypocrisy of those who seek to censor. Lets take a look at CAPalert, the site of Thomas Carder (who is, essentially, a more bonkers version of movieguide). Carder says that he makes no allowances for the message of a movie in analysing it for ‘sinful’ content. Well, in his review of The Passion of the Christ, while he notes how violent the film is, Carder offer excuses for the violence “The Passion of the Christ,… is viciously brutal and intensely violent, but it truthfully depicts what Jesus suffered for you and I that we might have eternal life.” He even suggests that you might want to let children see this (18 rated) movie “That it is truthful to the actual events does not excuse exposing your kids to it unless you, mom/dad, say so.” Let’s, just for a second, imagine that there was a film with the exact same content as The Passion of the Christ, but that it was about a man named Ted, rather than a man named Jesus. Would Carder then suggest that it should be seen by children, or indeed by anyone? Morals are malleable, and thus you can’t base censorship on them.

We need offensive films, just as surely as we need completely inoffensive ones, if only because if we attempt to remove all offensive material from films we’ll end up with no film at all, because whatever material you have you’re almost certain to find someone who for some reason finds it offensive.

Musical Interlude 4

Faye Wong
Singer and actress Faye Wong is hugely famous in the East, and she's sold 97 million albums. As an actress she's worked several times with Wong Kar Wai, giving acclaimed performances in both Chungking Express and 2046. Here are a couple of songs, a cover of the Cranberries 'Dreams', recorded for Chungking Express, and an original called 'The Moon at That Moment'

BBFC Update

No cuts to report this time out, fortunately.



Morning Light [mild language]

The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus [infrequent strong language, scenes of threat, hanging and smoking]


Blind Dating [frequent moderate sex references]
Birdwatchers [strong sex and scenes of hanging]
Bustin' Down the Door [strong language]
The Final Destination 3D [strong gore, sex and language]
Jennifer's Body [very strong language, bloody horror, sex references and drug use]
Taking Woodstock [strong language and hard drug use]



The Firm [very strong language and strong violence]
Gamer [strong bloody violence and sexualised nudity]
Sorority Row [strong bloody violence]
Thirst [one use of very strong language, strong bloody violence and sex]

Review Post 41: Inglourious Basterds

INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS
DIR: Quentin Tarantino
CAST: Brad Pitt, Christoph Waltz, Melanie Laurent,
Diane Kruger, Daniel Bruhl, Michael Fassbender



“Y’ know what? I think this might just be my masterpiece.”

So ends Quentin Tarantino’s long awaited Inglourious Basterds, the men on a mission movie he’s spent a decade talking about making. As Brad Pitt leans into camera and delivers that line it is hard not to see Tarantino in his place, addressing us the audience. There are, indeed, moments in the glorious mess that is Inglourious Basterds that come close to justifying that statement, but as a whole the film doesn’t quite hang together.

Given that Tarantino’s been working on it for so long you would have thought that the story of the Basterds - a team of Jewish-American soldiers sent behind enemy lines to kill, and scalp, Nazis - would be the beating heart of this film. That’s not the case. Not only do the Basterds play a more minor role than you might expect in terms of their screentime, they have little role to play in the film’s real overarching story, and what they do doesn’t really change the outcome of anything. If Inglourious Basterds didn’t feauture the characters it is named for the only real difference in the film would be that it would be shorter, tighter, and more focused. It is the other story in the film that really holds things together, and really commands the attention as a narrative. That story is about Shoshana Dreyfus (Laurent), whose entire family is murdered by ‘Jew hunter’ Hans Landa (Cannes Best Actor winner Waltz). Four years later, now running a cinema in Paris, Shoshana gets a chance at vengeance when her cinema is chosen to host the premiere of Goebbels’ latest propaganda film, with the entire Nazi high command in attendance.

Tarantino does, late in the day, and very loosely, draw these threads together, but the overwhelming feeling is that he wrote two films and decided to shoot them as one. Brad Pitt is cartoonish as Aldo Raine; with a southern accent straight out of comic stereotypes r us, and he gives a big, bold, strutting performance. It’s about an inch from going too far, but ends up working because it fits the tone that Tarantino is going for here. This is a film largely about wish fulfillment: the Nazi’s were so foul and evil that it is easy to empathise with the desire to kill them in outrageously violent and pitiless ways, and equally easy to empathise with the desire to do what Tarantino does here and comprehensively rewrite history. It is the tone that Tarantino takes that really allows Inglourious Basterds to work, he’s so clearly dancing on the edge of becoming parodic that even the film’s most outlandish flourishes work within this alternate, heightened world that he’s building. It may be a gigantic mess of a film, but it’s a ridiculously entertaining mess.

My attention was most engaged by the story of Shoshana. In one outstanding scene she encounters Landa at a restaurant. That scene is full of Tarantino’s snappy dialogue, but it is the physical performances of both Laurent (her constantly darting eyes) and Waltz (his total assurance and frighteningly matter of fact manner) that really make it play. Pitt may be the name, but Waltz and Laurent are the stars of this movie and whenever either is on screen the film is better for it. Waltz gives what, by right, should be a starmaking performance as Landa. At times he’s a riot, hamming it up outrageously during the movie’s funniest scene, in which he reveals an ability to speak fluent Italian. In other scenes he’s shark like, predatory, threatening, dispassionate, and fucking scary. This works best in the film’s long opening scene, a brilliant short film in it’s own right where, despite his outward friendliness, Waltz hints at Landa’s total corruption. It’s a very nicely judged piece of acting; technically accomplished in all four of the languages it is delivered in, and steals the film completely. Melanie Laurent is another real find, a gorgeous young French actress who I had never previously heard of, but will now be looking out for. She makes for an interesting avenger, because her slight frame and willowy beauty belie her intentions.

In this story we really get to know the characters. Landa may be entertaining, but he’s instantly hateable, while Shoshana is easy to like and her desire for vengeance is easy to share. There’s also more good work done here, particularly in the story that has Daniel Bruhl, as a German war hero and the star of Goebbels’ movie, falling for Shoshana. That’s an interesting thread, because Bruhl is charming and engaging, and if his character weren’t a Nazi war hero you can imagine that we’d soon be watching a romantic comedy. It adds a little complexity to what is, by its own admission, a rather shallow film. The best part of the whole movie lies in the detail of Shoshana’s plan; using a pile of highly flammable nitrate film in place of explosives, to destroy her cinema and Nazi high command. It is a genius idea, and one that feels like it belongs in a film by the world’s most famous cinephile, and Tarantino pulls it off beautifully in a stunning, exciting and frenetic climactic sequence.


If this were the whole of Inglourious Basterds then I think it would be among the best films of the year so far. The problem comes in the film’s bitty and digressive nature. Every so often, as this story advances, we’ll get what feels like an episode of The Adventures of the Inglourious Basterds. These often resemble an ultraviolent cartoon, and seem, for the most art, to exist in a strange limbo, some way from the main thrust of the movie. These episodes, with the notable exception of an interminable set piece in a basement, are all highly entertaining, but they are digressions. They also lack even the modicum of character and depth afforded in Shoshana’s story. Only three of the Basterds (Pitt, Eli Roth and Til Schweiger, great as a German fighting with the Basterds) has more than a handful of lines, indeed a majority remain mute and because of the narrow parameters of their mission (“we’re in the killn’ nazi bidness”) none ever really develops much depth, or engages our sympathy the way Shoshana does. They feel more like the film’s jesters, but the rest of the movie hardly takes itself seriously, and so their presence is barely required.

Tarantino isn’t a director given to restraint, but he really lets himself off the leash here. Inglourious Basterds is a real visual treat. During the opening sequence there is one great shot that, after a long preamble, takes us under the floorboards of a house and ratchets up the tension to almost unbearable levels, without a word being spoken. The most stunning sequence, though, is the final set piece, with Shoshana’s face taunting her victims from the cinema screen, and the going up in flames. There is perhaps nothing as iconic as the Reservoir Dogs walking down the street, but visually this is Tarantino’s freshest film in some time, he leans less heavily on his visual obsessions (though there is a foot fetish moment, and Diane Kruger’s feet are, it has to be said, much more attractive than Uma Thurman’s). Tarantino is having fun here, and so do we. It’s ill disciplined and overlong, but that is forgivable.

For the most part Inglourious Basterds feels less like a feature and more like a series of short films. Most of them are great on their own terms, though one falls flat. As a whole the film is massively entertaining, and throws up many memorable moments, but it ends up being too much of a mess to be a truly great movie, which it could have been.

I think I'm in love

This is Melanie Laurent. She plays Shoshana Dreyfus in Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds (of which, much more tomorrow). I loved her in the movie, and, since she's fantastically beautiful, thought I'd use that as an excuse to post some pictures of her. It's the eyes that really get me.

Musical Interlude 3

The Knife: Hannah Med H


I haven't seen Swedish teen move Hannah Med H (a.k.a: A Different Way), and would likely never have heard of it were it not for the fact that brother/sister electro duo The Knife, who are perhaps my favourite band in the world right now, did the soundtrack. Their music is, as ever, both evocative and exciting. Here I've posted two tracks that are very different in tone. Wanting to Kill is a dark, propulsive instrumental, while the very short High School Poem is a dreamlike thing with great lyrics by Karin Dreijer. Enjoy.

Incoming: More movies I want to see, RIGHT NOW: Part 1

In this first part of this article I'll be covering films with a UK release date set for 2009. Next time I'll cover set release dates for 2010, and a selection of films with no confirmed date.

Fish Tank (Sept. 11th)

Andrea Arnold’s first feature, Red Road, was one of the most promising and interesting debuts by a British filmmaker since Tim Roth’s The War Zone. This is her second. It was rapturously received at all the festivals it has played at, with Michael Fassbender and newcomer Katie Jarvis (who was discovered yelling at her boyfriend at a station) being singled out for praise. It doesn’t sound like a huge leap for Arnold - another contemporary kitchen sink drama - but she’s clearly a massive talent, and that’s something the British film industry needs to embrace and nurture.

Ip Man (Oct. 2nd)

Wilson Yip’s latest, based on the life of the man who taught Bruce Lee Wing Chun (perhaps my favourite martial art to watch on screen, largely thanks to The Prodigal Son), was nominated for 12 Hong Kong Film Awards and won two (Best Picture and Best Action Coreography for the legendary Sammo Hung Kam-bo). The film marks the fourth in Yip’s series of collaborations with Donnie Yen, and reunites them with Simon Yam, with whom the pair worked in Sha Po Long. The film should provide some of the finest martial arts you are likely to see on screen, what with Hung and Yen working together.


Toy Story in 3D (Oct 2nd)

Here’s a fact that makes me feel old… Toy Story is nearly 15 years old. That’s long enough, I think, to declare it not merely a great film, but a timeless one. It’s an interesting film to re-process into 3D, because Toy Story was a film that transcended its technological achievements. It was, of course, the first fully computer animated film, but that took second place to story, character and laughs. Avatar is coming in December, but for me this is the real test of whether 3D is viable, because if re-processing a film that is already as close to perfect as you’re likely to see doesn’t add something to that film, to that experience, then what’s the point? Toy Story 2, the even better sequel, is coming out in 3D as well, that opens Jan. 22nd 2010.

Shutter Island (Oct. 9th)

The words ‘A Martin Scorsese Picture’ are almost always a reason to get excited, and that’s certainly the case here. He’s working from a book by Dennis Lehane, who also wrote the source novels for Mystic River and Gone Baby Gone, but it’s the cast that’s really getting me interested. Scorsese’s new muse Leonardo DiCaprio is, again, the lead and he’s backed up by some of the greatest character actors around: Mark Ruffalo, Ben Kingsley, Jackie Earle Haley, Emily Mortimer, Michelle Williams, Patricia Clarkson, to name just a few. I’d be watching out for this one come Oscar time.

Thirst (Oct. 16th)

I’ve been looking forward to this for a few years now, ever since Park Chan-wook (Oldboy, Lady Vengeance) announced that one of his future projects was a vampire movie starring his frequent collaborator Song Kang-ho, entitled Evil Live. Well, Evil Live has become Thirst, but otherwise this looks exactly like the film Park has been promising us. It’s the story of a priest who becomes a vampire, and the woman he falls for. The trailer looks amazing, with Park’s visuals as gorgeous as ever and the suggestion of a pair of brilliant performances from Song and Kim Ok-bin. In a year that has seen vampire movies become very fashionable, this might well be the best of the bunch.


Cold Souls (Nov. 6th)

The trailer paints this as something of a cross between Being John Malkovich (this time starring Paul Giamatti as a version of himself) and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (only it is the soul that is removed here, not memories). Still, even if the rest of the cast weren’t as interesting as it is - Giamatti, Emily Watson, David Strathairn - I’d be seeing this purely for Russian actress Dina Korzun. She’s only been in two English language films before this, and in each she’s given a brilliant performance and she’s become one of my favourite actresses, so I’m sold on Cold Souls, and so should you be.

Das Weiße Band [The White Ribbon] (Nov. 13th)

Michael Haneke doesn’t make easy films. His Palme D’or winning latest is long at nearly two and a half hours, black and white and once again (after his English version of Funny Games) in German. The White Ribbon is set in a rural school in Germany in 1913, apparently ‘strange events’ take place there, and many people have read the film as Haneke’s comment on the origins of the fascism that would give rise to the Nazis. I’m looking forward to going into this one blind, Haneke always surprises me, and that’s usually a very good thing.

Spread (Nov. 27th)

David MacKenzie is, for my money, one of the best young filmmakers around. His first four films; The Last Great Wilderness, Young Adam, Asylum and Hallam Foe are all showcases for distinct and diverse talent. Spread is his biggest film to date; he’s got American money behind him and a couple of stars in Ashton Kutcher and Anne Heche, I’m just hoping that trying to appeal to a bigger audience won’t blunt Mackenzie’s hard edged style or his unflinching approach to depicting every aspect of relationships of all kinds. He’s good with actors, so I’m hoping he’ll get better work than we’ve seen so far from Kutcher and be able to make people take note of the fact that Anne Heche can actually act. I’m looking forward to this one.

Zombieland (Nov. 27th)

This looks like a great deal of fun - think buddy comedy meets zombie mayhem and you’ve hit the tone of the trailer. After a few disappointing horror comedies it seems that this one may have hit just the right mix of guts and giggles, thanks largely to what looks to be a highly entertaining turn from Woody Harrelson.

Avatar (Dec. 18th)

Avatar is the year’s big mystery. It is director James Cameron’s long held dream - he’s waited 15 years for technology to catch up to his vision - and it will be required viewing. Make no mistake, this is the film that will make or break 3D. Cameron is promising to revolutionise cinema with this film. It had better be good. Personally I’m uninspired by what I’ve seen from it, and I have yet to be won over by Cameron’s beloved 3D, but I’ll be there on opening day, because if this really is going to fundamentally change the world’s greatest artform then I have to see it, and so, I suspect, do you.