24 FPS Top 100 Films

89: JACKIE BROWN [1998]
DIR: Quentin Tarantino


WHY IS IT ON THE LIST?
By and large my enthusiasm for Quentin Tarantino’s films is something that I’ve grown out of, because they just don’t seem as fresh and as different as they did when I was 15. That said, Jackie Brown is the one that bucks the trend. I didn’t love it the first time I saw it (on its 1998 release, just before I turned 17), and that, I think, is because it’s a film that feels pitched more to an adult audience. As I’ve seen it again over the years I’ve always come away more impressed after each viewing, it’s a film that has gained strength and richness over time.

One of the main reasons I think Jackie Brown is so successful is that it is adapted from Elmore Leonard’s book Rum Punch. Tarantino’s punchy, profane dialogue was, when his films first came to prominence, quite new and different. So much so that many viewers (myself included) didn’t really see how much alike all his characters sounded. In a Quentin Tarantino screenplay everyone talks like Quentin Tarantino, but not in Jackie Brown. With Leonard’s book and characters as a blueprint he manages to give each personality their own defined voice, finding a melancholy in Jackie Brown (Pam Grier) and bail bondsman Max Cherry (Robert Forster) that I doubt he’d have achieved without that roadmap.

Tarantino’s biggest contribution, character wise, is to make Leonard’s Jackie Burke (a white character) Jackie Brown, played by a brilliant Pam Grier, who is so natural as the 44 year stewardess, forced to help the Police bring down gun runner Ordell Robbie (Samuel L Jackson), that you can’t imagine anyone else in the part. Her presence also allows Tarantino to pay tribute to some of his favourite Blaxploitation movies, for instance by casting Sid Haig as a judge and with the use of Across 110th Street over the opening credits.

The performances are all brilliant, from Grier’s tough but vulnerable Jackie right down to Chris Tucker’s highly amusing cameo as a low level hood. There are a few standouts though. Samuel L Jackson simply has a cadence that fits Tarantino’s dialogue, and as Ordell Robbie he is both hugely charismatic and hugely scary, with an almost disconcerting ability to turn on a dime from lighthearted to threatening. Another great turn comes from Robert Forster who, along with Grier, fills Tarantino’s traditional career resurrection slot (previous beneficiaries Harvey Kietel in Reservoir Dogs, John Travolta in Pulp Fiction). His playing of Max’s infatuation with Jackie is just wonderful; as warm, sweet and mature as the screenplay. Robert De Niro, as slobby criminal Louis Gara, gives perhaps his last great performance (I have a pet theory that he died after this film, and was replaced by a talentless doppelganger… well, you explain the last 13 years then!)

Right down to the cameos the film is perfectly cast and acted. Michael Keaton is so good as ATF agent Ray Nicolet that when the same character was called for in Steven Soderbergh’s Out of Sight he had Keaton reprise the role, but for me the film’s little masterpiece is Bridget Fonda’s laconic performance as dumb, stoned, aging surfer girl Melanie. Fonda, always an underrated actress, manages to be utterly charming just by lying on a sofa smoking a bong for most of the movie - okay, the bikini helps - and when she exits the film it’s both shocking and sad.

This is a mature work from Tarantino; rich not just in dialogue but in character, and making much better use of the non-linear storytelling he’s so fond of than he’d managed before. That’s because here it’s not just a gimmick, he tells the story out of sequence only when doing so will enhance it. The best example of this is the outstanding mall sequence, which involves all the characters in a complex scam of Jackie’s design. We see the whole sequence three times, from three different character’s perspectives, each time getting a different read on how things play out. It’s a masterful sequence, perhaps the best Tarantino has ever put to film, and indicative of a director in full confident command of his film.

Tarantino was always good at crafting little bits; good sequences, cool dialogue, but in Jackie Brown he draws it all together into a complex patchwork which is as interesting as a whole as it is as a series of pieces. That’s why it’s his best film.


STANDOUT SCENES
Chicks who love guns
We are introduced to Ordell and his business, with some immortal Tarantino / Jackson dialogue.

Across 110th Street
Okay, almost nothing happens in this credit sequence, but it’s very, very cool, and capably introduces Grier without her speaking a word.

The Mall
A hugely complex sequence of events, told from many different perspectives, in a thrilling twenty minutes of cinema.

MEMORABLE LINES
Louis: Who's Beaumont?
Ordell Robbie: An employee I had to let go.
Louis: What'd he do?
Ordell Robbie: He put himself in a position where he was going to have to do ten years in prison, that's what he did. And if you know Beaumont, you know ain't no god damn way he can do ten years. And if you know that, then you know Beaumont's gonna do anything Beaumont can to keep from doing them ten years, including telling the federal government any and every motherfucking thing about my black ass. Now that my friend is a clear cut case of him or me. And you best believe it ain't gonna be me.

[Louis and Melanie are looking at a picture]
Melanie: That's Japan.
Louis: Uh, looks like... I can... It shows...
Melanie: Wanna fuck?
Louis: Yeah.
[three minutes later]
Melanie: That was fun.
Louis: Yeah, that hit the spot.
Melanie: Now, we can catch up.

Ordell Robbie: AK-47. The very best there is. When you absolutely, positively got to kill every motherfucker in the room, accept no substitutes.

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Mini-Reviews: The Losers / American: The Bill Hicks Story

THE LOSERS
DIR: Sylvain White
CAST: Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Zoe Saldana, Chris Evans,
Idris Elba, Columbus Short, Jason Patric



The Losers is a stupid movie. A very stupid movie. It’s overblown, the story barely holds together, the characters are all caricatures with names like Roque and Pooch. The villain is a hammy megalomaniac with an ill defined and fundamentally idiotic plan. Lots of things go boom. And by God it’s fun.

I can’t tell you that this movie is any good, Jeffrey Dean Morgan is a bit dull as (stop me if you’ve heard this one before) the head of a special forces team looking for revenge on the person who framed them for a war crime, and while the people surrounding him are having more evident fun you couldn’t really accuse any of them of acting per-se (except Jason Patric, but we’ll get to that). It doesn’t really matter though. Columbus Short and Chris Evans trot out their comic dialogue perfectly well, Saldana looks mouth wateringly lovely in a selection of skimpy costumes and Elba’s perfectly proficient as the jealous second in command to Morgan.

The action, despite some irritating staccato cutting, is solid when it’s allowed to flow, and it’s appropriately silly in scale, given that The Losers is paying homage to the overblown action epics of the 80’s. But one thing, all by itself, makes this film worth the price of admission, and that’s Jason Patric’s hilariously over the top performance as the lead bad guy, Max. His dialogue is deliciously silly, the sort of ridiculously evil things that Bond villains often say seriously, all of it played with a knowledge of how totally ridiculous what he’s saying is. Patric completely nails the tone, as do most of the cast, and the result is that The Losers is a fun little throwback. It won’t change lives, it won’t be the best, or even one of the twenty best, films you’ll see this year, but for 97 minutes it’s a pretty good laugh.


AMERICAN: THE BILL HICKS STORY
DIR: Matt Harlock / Paul Thomas



The great comedian Bill Hicks died tragically of pancreatic cancer at the age of just 32, just as it seemed, after 16 years on the road as a comic, his work was beginning to break out in America. Matt Harlock and Paul Thomas’ film is the first major documentary about him. Stylistically it’s interesting. Rather than a lot of talking heads the interviews (with childhood friends, fellow comics and family members) are used largely as audio, and set to animated images, which digitally manipulate hundreds of previously unseen photos of Hicks to try and create a flavour of the events the audio describes. It’s an interesting technique, and certainly more fun to look at than an endless succession of people talking to camera.

There are also plenty of Hicks clips, including lots from before he really became the Bill Hicks people know, the famous Outlaw comic whose jokes combined with social commentary in a style akin to preaching. As you’d expect, the film is both funny and, towards the end, very sad, as with everything that mentions Bill it closes on a note of promise not unfulfilled, but still never fully recognised. For newcomers this is a fine primer on a great comic and an interesting man, for fans there’s little new here, but the story is well told and the style is interesting and different.

The world is like a ride in an amusement park, and when you choose to go on it you think it's real because that's how powerful our minds are. The ride goes up and down, around and around, it has thrills and chills, and it's very brightly colored, and it's very loud, and it's fun for a while. Many people have been on the ride a long time, and they begin to wonder, "Hey, is this real, or is this just a ride?" And other people have remembered, and they come back to us and say, "Hey, don't worry; don't be afraid, ever, because this is just a ride."

Bill Hicks 1961 - 1994

Film Review: Prince of Persia

PRINCE OF PERSIA: THE SANDS OF TIME
DIR: Mike Newell
CAST: Jake Gyllenhaal, Gemma Arterton,
Ben Kingsley, Alfred Molina



I haven’t played a computer game for any extended period of time in over a decade, and when I did play them I’m pretty sure I never encountered any of the Prince of Persia series, so I came to this film unencumbered by expectation, simply looking for a fun romp; some action, some comedy, a pretty girl to look at, a hissable villain, all in all a hundred minutes of pure blockbuster entertainment. It baffles me that in the last few years this mix, which used to seem so simple, has been so rarely got right. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, sadly, doesn’t buck the prevailing trend. It’s bunch of stuff in search of a reason to exist.

Let’s be clear, this isn’t an especially terrible film. It’s too dull to be really strikingly awful, it’s just non-descript in every possible way, it’s a mish mash of bits and pieces from other films, rammed together into what appears, more often than not, to be a rolling demo for a computer game. The – ahem – plot, revolves around Dastan (Gyllenhaal) who, as a child, is adopted by the King of Persia (apparently, it seems, because lobbing an apple at people who are chasing a child marks you for greatness). Anyway, he grows up to be a great fighter, and when he and his brothers invade a holy city he obtains a dagger that has the power to turn back time. Then Dastan’s father is murdered, and Dastan framed for the crime, which means he has to go on the run. He still has the dagger, so he’s followed both by baddies who want it and by Gemma Arterton, a princess sworn to protect it.

For me the great problem with Prince of Persia is in its central McGuffin. I can see how the dagger would work well in a game; giving you a second chance to do something important, rather than dying, but in a movie the equivalent of a portable cheat code has major drawbacks. The thing is that the function of the dagger is to undermine any real tension in the film, because you know that much of the time Dastan can just activate it and get out of his sticky situation, it also means that the character doesn’t have to do much in the way of problem solving; instead he can time travel his way out of a corner. Imagine if Indiana Jones was just allowed to rewind time, how much fun that wouldn’t be. It also means that you know pretty much exactly how the film is going to end, so nothing that happens during the course of it has any weight, there’s never any reason to care when someone dies, because it’s likely not to matter in the long run.

It doesn’t, of course, help, that the film’s screenplay is horrific. There are no characters, none whatsoever. Most of the people in this movie have absolutely no traits, let alone a personality, while leads Gyllenhaal and Arterton have to make do with one note each (he dashing, she stroppy). It’s the exposition that really weighs the film down though, the endless explaining of new characters, locations and things, all of it playing as if it’s been transcribed directly from the manual for the game (Level four: Infiltrating Avrat). It’s all just so crushingly, crushingly dull.



Throughout the film there are echoes of earlier, better, movies. The Indiana Jones films, the 1999 The Mummy, Pirates of the Caribbean (all of these are especially strongly evoked by Alfred Molina’s desperately unfunny comic relief character) and in the action, which is heavily parkour driven, it’s very easy to see the influence of the Bourne films and Daniel Craig’s Bond movies. It’s all well and good to have these elements, but you’ve got to weld them together into something, preferably something original, or at least something fun, but that’s beyond Newell and his screenwriters. The action is pretty awful. It looks exactly like somebody else is playing a computer game, and the constant, barely motivated, use of slow motion is a real irritant. Gyllenhaal has got into impressive shape here, but he’s no action star and ultimately the film’s fighting is neither spectacular nor involving enough to be interesting.

To give credit where due, Gyllenhaal has also worked hard on his English accent, and though it is overly broad it’s actually less fake sounding than Gemma Arterton’s, and she’s English. Unfortunately, and it’s not entirely the fault of the performers, the acting is wretched. Arterton, having impressed lately in The Disappearance of Alice Creed, is supremely irritating as Princess Tamina, and brings to the part all the personality of a lump of plywood. Gyllenhaal works hard, but he can’t overcome the screenplay, which gives him no character and appalling dialogue. The two of them are paired together in a completely insipid, unmotivated, love story, in which they exhibit all the natural chemistry of fire and water. Then there’s Ben Kingsley, who hams to high heaven as Gyllenhaal’s uncle, stinking up the screen in depressingly familiar fashion.

I didn’t quite hate Prince of Persia, but from its fundamental lack of drama, to the proficient but still oddly fake CGI, to the sense that I was watching not a movie but a computer game, there was nothing about it that I really enjoyed either. Within a week I will have forgotten it exists. I suggest you save yourself the intermediate step of seeing it.

24FPS Top 100 Films

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90: LA CEREMONIE [1995]
DIR: Claude Chabrol


WHY IS IT ON THE LIST?
I’ve often said that it is a shame that the great French director Claude Chabrol is so frequently seen as little more than a Hitchcock homage artist. That’s true, but it has to be said that this film - for me the best of what little I’ve seen of his 56 year, 60 plus title, filmography - is one of his most Hitchcockian.

Based on Ruth Rendell’s novel A Judgement in Stone, La Ceremonie casts Sandrine Bonnaire as Sophie, a rather withdrawn young woman who goes to work as a domestic for the rich Lelievre family (including Jacqueline Bisset, Jean-Pierre Cassel and Virginie Ledoyen). After a little while Sophie befriends local postmistress Jeanne (Huppert), who seems to have a feud with the Lelievres, and may be opening their mail. Over the course of the film there’s a slow build of the bond between Sophie and Jeanne, and a growing sense that both women are hiding dark secrets.

Chabrol is a past master of the slow burn thriller and, though little of any real consequence actually happens for most La Ceremonie’s 108 minutes he, along with Bonnaire and Huppert, creates an atmosphere of growing tension. That atmosphere is all the stronger because you’re never quite sure how the growing resentment between Sophie and the Lelievres, and the ever more brittle behaviour that Sophie exhibits as she gets closer to Jeanne, will play itself out.

In the hands of lesser talents this would be a boring film, but Chabrol has a firm grip on the film and his leads happen to be two of the most gifted actresses in France. Neither Bonnaire nor Huppert does anything flashy, they simply become these women. Huppert is often a cold presence in films, but she’s outstanding as the initially bubbly Jeanne, but convincingly becomes more and more evidently unstable with each passing scene, it’s a masterful piece of acting, demonstrating exactly why she’s seen as one of the best actresses of her generation. That said, in this case Sandrine Bonnaire is perhaps especially outstanding; her every utterance simmering with barely repressed feelings and her icy countenance, especially her eyes, speaking volumes without the aid of dialogue. In the final shot her passivity, the emptiness behind those eyes, is chilling.

It’s very difficult to discuss La Ceremonie without divulging a couple of important plot points, and so I’m just going to draw things to a close here by saying that you’d be hard pressed to find a better entry point into the outstanding work of Claude Chabrol than this tense, brilliantly constructed, and sometimes shocking film.


STANDOUT SCENES
“I know something about you”
The secrets in Sophie and Jeanne’s pasts are revealed. Exceptional work here from both Bonnaire and Huppert.

Don Giovanni
After the slow build this is a shocking pay off.

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24FPS Top 100 Films

91: THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE [1974]
DIR: Tobe Hooper


WHY IS IT ON THE LIST?
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was banned in the UK for over a quarter of a century. This was at a time when, especially on video, cuts for category were prevalent, but the BBFC’s head, James Ferman ruled that Chain Saw couldn’t be cut, because it wasn’t one scene that presented a problem but the atmosphere of terror created by the film. It’s a sad day for a critic when the best possible review of a film is given in one sentence by a censor.

When I finally saw the film, on its uncut release after Ferman left BBFC in 2000, I was blown away by it. Parts of it are clunky as all hell, some of the acting (especially from the extraordinarily annoying Paul Partain, as wheelchair bound Franklin) is really awful and the script is incredibly basic, but what it really hits you with is that sustained atmosphere of abject horror. The film is based loosely on the exploits of Ed Gein, the real life murderer whose grisly crimes also inspired aspects of Psycho, Deranged and The Silence of the Lambs but rather than just one of him the film proposes a whole family of Ed Geins.

The film takes a little time in getting its cast into jeopardy, but once they stumble on the family’s home it ratchets up into a pressure cooker of terror. The violence is brief, and not very bloody (incredibly, Hopper made the film with a US certificate of PG in mind, hence the lack of claret) but the build up to it and the impact of it are genuinely disturbing. A couple of moments are actually all the more disturbing for their brevity, in one Leatherface (Gunnar Hansen, creating one of horror cinema’s great bogeymen) hangs a girl on a meathook, and it’s the ease and speed with which he does it that really make it scary. The other is, for my money, one of the great shocks in cinema, as a wounded young man makes his way through the house and, quick as a flash, a door opens behind him, Leatherface smacks him with a mallet, drags him through the door and slams it shut again. It’s not explicit, but it’s terrifyingly brutal and nonchalant.

The other great scene is the family dinner, in which final girl Marilyn Burns is served up to the families dessicated Grandfather. Here again it’s the speed, or lack thereof, with which things are done, along with the mounting hysteria of the scene, that really allows it to get under your skin.

The 2003 remake of TCM is drenched in blood and viscera, is much better acted, and boasts a glossy beauty to its camerawork, and not one frame of it is frightening, for all it’s technical problems this film understands fear, and that alone makes it a rare and brilliant horror film.

While it’s not glossy it would not be fair to say the film is badly made. Leatherface in particular is a brilliantly realised character, and his mask - made from the peeled off face of a victim - is horribly convincing. It’s also worth noting that whether by luck or by design, Tobe Hooper hit on some iconic images here, not least of all the final frames, with a screaming, blood covered, Burns getting away as Leatherface dances, whirling his chainsaw over his head against the rising sun.


STANDOUT SCENES
Supper time
A pressure cooker of terror, shot in one 26 hour shift, which surely explains the hysterical tone.

Meathook
One of the most authentically painful scenes I've seen in a movie.

Door
The aforementioned appearance of Leatherface from behind that sliding door. One of the greatest shocks in all cinema.

MEMORABLE LINES
Narrator: The film which you are about to see is an account of the tragedy which befell a group of five youths, in particular Sally Hardesty and her invalid brother, Franklin. It is all the more tragic in that they were young. But, had they lived very, very long lives, they could not have expected nor would they have wished to see as much of the mad and macabre as they were to see that day. For them an idyllic summer afternoon drive became a nightmare. The events of that day were to lead to the discovery of one of the most bizarre crimes in the annals of American history, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

Old Man: I just can't take no pleasure in killing. There's just some things you gotta do. Don't mean you have to like it.

Hitchhiker: My family's always been in meat.

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Film Review: The Killer Inside Me

PRE-RELEASE REVIEW

THE KILLER INSIDE ME
DIR: Michael Winterbottom
CAST: Casey Affleck, Kate Hudson, Jessica Alba,
Elias Koteas, Ned Beatty, Bill Pullman



In a feature film career spanning just 15 years, The Killer Inside Me is Michael Winterbottom’s 18th directorial credit. Despite a work rate that makes even the likes of Woody Allen and Francois Ozon seem like slackers, Winterbottom has never yet made an uninteresting film (bad ones, sure) and this film, a controversy magnet since its debut at Sundance in January, has proved no exception.

The film is based, apparently extremely closely, on a 1952 novel of the same name by pulp noir writer Jim Thompson and tells the story of Lou Ford. Ford (Affleck) is a deputy in Central City, West Texas. He’s also a psychopath. The twists and turns are many, and the exposition minimal, but it seems that Ford wants revenge on local businessman Chester Conway (Beatty) and when he gets involved in a blackmail plot involving Conway’s son and the prostitute (Alba) they are both having an affair with, he takes his chance, killing them both brutally. That, however, is only the beginning, as Lou’s secret threatens to come out and the body count rises.

The Killer Inside Me feels almost out of time. It may be set in the 50’s (convincingly so, with Winterbottom and production designer Mark Tildesley coming up with strong period detail that suck us into the time and place), but the film itself, the way it plays, is more reminiscent of the first generation neo-noirs of the 70’s. Like those films The Killer Inside Me isn’t afraid to let you have questions. There’s not, as seems so common these days, expository dialogue to introduce each of the characters, instead writer John Curran expects us to do a little work, to understand these relationships step by step, from the way the characters relate to each other. It’s also willing to take its time, a quality which leads to one of the film’s most indelibly disturbing moments, as Ford simply, patiently, waits for someone to die. In an age where everything in movies seems to be about making sure that there’s hardly time for audience to take a breath, and that everything is explained as if to a retarded chimp, this approach is genuinely refreshing.

This is perhaps Winterbottom’s most star studded cast, but there’s no stunt casting at work here. Casey Affleck, who doesn’t work all that much, again seems to give himself over completely to his performance. He’s interesting casting as the psychotic Ford because with his baby face and his soft voice, which sounds at times as if it is yet to break, he appears completely unthreatening. This is, of course, why he’s perfect for the part, because watching him you can believe that he wouldn’t be suspected. That’s not to say that when Ford’s mask slips Affleck is ineffective, quite the reverse. In the moments when Ford is unleashed, Affleck is quite chilling, never more so than when, as he’s beating Alba’s face to a pulp, he says “I love you, it’s almost over”. It’s a complex character; a man who seems to need to destroy everything he claims to love in the most personal, brutal, way possible, and Affleck’s layered performance brings some much needed humanity, while never letting us miss the monster beneath, something especially strongly felt as he sits and calmly submits to questions from Simon Baker’s detective, not betraying a single hint of emotion.

Since The Killer Inside Me is Lou Ford’s story, and he’s in every scene, the other actors all have rather small roles, but each of them impresses in their few scenes. Jessica Alba really doesn’t have much to do, and it’s hard to see what attracted her to the role of Joyce, as most of her part is lying semi-naked in bed with Affleck. There’s not a huge amount of acting involved. However, she’s affecting as she cries “I love you” to Ford as he beats her in that horrific scene, and there’s enough genuine emotion in that moment, and the few others when she’s called upon to do more than lie on a bed in her pants, to suggest that if she had part that allowed her to stretch, there’s perhaps more to her than a pretty face. Kate Hudson has a better part as Lou’s fiancé, and for the first time in a long time she gets to show just how good she can be when there’s a part for her to get her teeth into. As Amy, Hudson is much harder edged than we’re used to seeing her on screen, given her previous work she seems an odd fit for noir, but she manages to disappear behind the character. As with Alba, her character is rather underwritten, but Hudson makes more of the role than was likely on the page, making Amy an interesting and rather complex character. In still smaller parts there are strong one or two scene contributions from Elias Koteas, Ned Beatty, Brent Briscoe and Bill Pullman, who turns up unexpectedly towards the end of the film, bellowing.


After several films that have been very loose and improvisatory in nature, this is a bit of a departure for Michael Winterbottom. Stylistically it’s much more controlled, with the camera much more steady than in his recent work, this contributes to the film’s retro feel, while also helping place it in its period. However, there is still a loose feel to the acting (perhaps a result of the fact that Winterbottom doesn’t do rehearsals) which results in several strong and memorable moments, notably a shocking one in which Affleck spits at Kate Hudson’s character, in a moment that feels as vicious as any of the punches thrown in the film.

The very first audience reaction to The Killer Inside Me, at Sundance, was from a woman who stood up during the Q and A and said that Michael Winterbottom should be ashamed for having made it, and Sundance should be ashamed for having screened it. That reaction has snowballed into some rather hysterical press coverage of the film’s violence. Let’s be absolutely clear about it; The Killer Inside Me is a very violent film, and the violence in it is graphic and upsetting. However, there’s nothing wrong with that, it’s brutal, but it’s not gratuitous.

Personally, the violence I find offensive is that of films like Crank - High Voltage, in which brutal violence is meted out to women and played for laughs (a stripper is shot in the breasts, causing the silicon from her implants to leak out). The Killer Inside Me deals in very personal violence, but the scenes are deceptive. Their protracted nature and bone crunching sound effects make their impact more explicit than what they actually show. Much of the time what you are seeing is not the punches landing, but Lou’s face as he lands them, like every scene in the film, those scenes are about him. The second outburst of violence shows only two punches, and again it is the sound, the erratic breathing of the victim, and the drawn out process of death, that makes you feel more than you actually see. Here’s the other thing about the violence of the film; it’s upsetting. Isn’t that a good thing? Lou is a psychotic killer, shouldn’t the film show his brutality in the ugliest way possible? It’s not fun, sure, but why should it be?

I was hoping that writing this review would help me shake out my feelings about The Killer Inside Me, but it really hasn’t worked. There is much I admire about the film, from the performances, to the direction, to its sheer impact, right down to the excellent opening credit sequence. It still troubles me though, though I don’t think the film is out and out misogynistic I do find the relentless focus on women being hit, often in a sexual context, pretty disturbing (and, in the case of several flashback scenes, pointless). I respect this film, I can’t deny that it’s well made, or that Michael Winterbottom has added yet another genre to the list of those he’s mastered, but I don’t know that I can recommend this film to anyone, and I don’t even think I like it very much. Make of that what you will.

24 FPS Top 100 Films

92: IN THE COMPANY OF MEN [1997]
DIR: Neil LaBute


WHY IS IT ON THE LIST?
Neil LaBute’s debut, shot in just eleven days on a miniscule budget, is often seen as exhibit a in the case prosecution case casting the writer/director as cinema’s most extreme misogynist. If you’re one of the people who buys into that argument then, I’m sorry, but you’ve spectacularly missed the point.

The story sees Chad and Howard (Aaron Eckhart and Matt Malloy) two 30ish executives, both recently left by their respective girlfriends, decide to play a game on a business trip. Chad suggests that they find a vulnerable woman, and that they both begin to date her, make her fall for them, and then dump her in the cruellest way possible, as vengeance for all the times women have shit on them. He chooses Christine (Stacy Edwards) a pretty, deaf, temp in their office but as both men date her Christine begins to fall for Chad, and Howard begins to fall for Christine.

I have seen hundreds of violent films, films that deal with pain explicitly, films awash with blood, but despite that and the fact that not a single punch is thrown in its 93 minutes, not one drop of blood spilled, In the Company of Men may be the single most brutal film I’ve ever seen. Neil LaBute doesn’t spare you for a second, once ‘the game’ begins every line said by Chad (Eckhart debuting with a career performance) lands like a punch to the face. He’s so hateful, so completely evil, so unrepentant in his cruelty, that you can’t quite believe someone put him in a movie. The thing is, despite the fact that Chad is essentially Satan in a tailored shirt, LaBute’s screenplay is so brilliant, and Eckhart’s performance so matter of fact, that you absolutely believe that not only does Chad exist, there’s one of him in every office.

Even the sympathetic side of the central pair is pretty loathsome, Howard goes along with his friend’s plan, and seems to relish it to begin with. He may have some emotion, some soul that Chad appears to lack, but he never challenges Chad’s idea until long after it is too late. Malloy does a great job though, it would have been easy to play both these men as cartoons; Chad the strutting epitome of evil and Howard the nebbish type who can’t stand up to him. These things are what they’re playing, but the subtlety of both actors work means that they both feel like frighteningly real people, not like mouthpieces.

There’s also a lovely (and technically remarkable) performance by Stacy Edwards as Christine. She’s the only sympathetic, perhaps even the only truly human, character in the film, and Edwards plays her with a simple decency that radiates off the screen, and makes the dénouement even more devastating than it would otherwise have been.

There’s nothing flashy about In the Company of Men. It takes place largely indoors, often in very drab, basic rooms, and the camerawork is unobtrusive. All of which allows the dialogue to be the focus, and that is to the film’s great advantage, because every line is razor sharp. This isn’t, strictly speaking, a horror film, but because it is so believable, because Chad is so completely plausible and because there’s never a single hint that he learns anything, In the Company of Men is one of the scariest and most disturbing films I know. It’s funny, in an extremely black fashion, but it’s the way that the film just crawls under your skin that really makes it stand out.

To return to the beginning, if you think that, as a film, In the Company of Men is misogynistic, that means you think the film sides with Chad. First off, I don’t see how you could possibly take that from it, but more importantly, I think that says that YOU side with Chad. In which case, fuck you.


STANDOUT SCENES
“Let’s hurt somebody”
The finalising of Chad’s plan and his statement of his one, horrifying, objective.

“I hate that dude”
The depths of Chad’s misanthropy revealed as he goes through a company brochure, pointing out to his co-workers all the people he hates.

“Because I could”
Final proof, if proof were needed, that Chad is the devil.

MEMORABLE LINES
Chad: Women. Nice ones, the most frigid of the race, it doesn't matter in the end. Inside they're all the same meat and gristle and hatred just simmering.

Chad: Fuck her! Let's get a sandwich!

Chad: No matter what happens after it - jumped over for promotions, wife runs off with some biochemist, who knows what.... But we would always have this thing to fall back on. We could always say, "Yeah, fine, but they never got me like we got her."

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24 FPS Top 100 Films

93: eXistenZ [1999]
DIR: David Cronenberg


WHY IS IT ON THE LIST?
eXistenZ is the most underrated film in the long career of the body-horror master. In many ways this film (Cronenberg’s last, to date, with a self-penned screenplay) is a restatement and updating of themes, first explored in 1983’s Videodrome, of the way media (in this case an immersive virtual reality computer game) affects people’s minds and bodies.

Jennifer Jason Leigh stars as auteur game designer Allegra Gellar, who is premiering her latest game; eXistenZ and playing it with a select group of fans, however, she’s attacked at the event and, finding herself on the run with security guard Ted Pikul (Jude Law), she has to find a place to plug in to her game (though a ‘bioport’ at the base of the player’s spine) and ensure that it hasn’t been damaged. This is, to date, the last of Cronenberg’s seminal body horror films, and as with the likes of Dead Ringers, The Brood and Rabid before it eXistenZ explores issues of identity (we never really know if Gellar and Pikul are who they believe they are), sexuality (immediately on entering eXistenZ Gellar and Pikul have a sexual encounter, and there is much sexual metaphor, particularly in Pikul’s fear of penetration), the fragility of our bodies (“what’s happening to them?”, wonders Pikul) and of course the question of reality (as the film goes on it becomes less and less clear exactly how much of it takes place in game).

This amount of complex, layered metaphor, sounds like it could bog a film down, but Cronenberg marshals it all brilliantly, letting the film’s commentary play as a background note for those who wish to plug into it, but also crafting a genuinely fascinating and often thrilling sci-fi movie. eXistenZ is certainly a cerebral film, but the audience really gets to set the terms as to how much they want to engage with its themes, and its enjoyable on whatever level you wish to engage with it.

It also helps, of course, that as his lead Cronenberg has the single most gifted actress of her generation. It’s a little bit of a departure for Leigh, anchoring a relatively large budgeted sci-fi movie, but she brings the same astonishing commitment as usual to playing Gellar. What’s really striking is her physicality, and how she subtly changes when she's in the game, becoming somewhat more confident, and very much more sexual, in her own domain. There’s also a strong supporting cast, Jude Law is okay as Pikul, but the cameo performances are a wonderful mix of character actors doing intriguingly oddball things; Willem Dafoe makes a particularly strong impression as ‘Gas’, but there are also turns by Don McKellar, Christopher Eccleston, Ian Holm and Sarah Polley to enjoy.

eXistenZ is a film that I’ve enjoyed more, and seen more layers in, every time I’ve watched it. Eleven years since I first saw it I’m still not entirely sure I understand it completely, and that’s part of the way it continues to pull me in. It’s a major, overlooked work, from one of the greatest working filmmakers.


STANDOUT SCENES
Waiter, there’s something in my soup
Perhaps the most purely Cronenbergian moment in any of the director’s films; an ingenious concept, brilliantly executed.

“It’s a permenant hole into my body, won't it get infected?”
Jennifer Jason Leigh’s reaction to this line of Jude Law's is one of my favourite pieces of improvisation ever, one small, brilliant, gesture which is incredibly insightful about her character.

MEMORABLE LINES
Allegra: So how does it feel?
Ted: What?
Allegra: Your real life. The one you came back for.
Ted: It feels completely unreal.
Allegra: You're stuck now, aren't ya? You want to go back to the Chinese restaurant because there's nothing happening here. We're safe. It's boring.
Ted: It's worse than that. I'm not sure... I'm not sure here, where we are, is real at all. This feels like a game to me. And you, you're beginning to feel a bit like a game character.

Ted: eXistenZ is paused!

Ted: What was your life like before?
Gas: Before?
Ted: Before it was changed by Allegra Geller.
Gas: I operated a gas station.
Ted: You still operate a gas station, don't you?
Gas: Only on the most pathetic level of reality.

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Superpodcast Episode 30

I was on Superpodcast with the excellent Supermarcey, and her semi-regular co-host Bede Jermyn, this week. Our topic was EPIC FAIL, and we discussed terrible movies from the past five years. First we each made a couple of honourable mentions, and then we ran down our Top 3 choices.



We talked shitty movies for about 70 minutes, and had a really good laugh doing so, which I think (I hope) translates into the listening experience.

Listen Here

24 FPS Top 100 Films

Click the title below for a trailer

94: CAPTURING THE FRIEDMANS [2003]
DIR: Andrew Jarecki


WHY IS IT ON THE LIST?
Andrew Jarecki was going to make a film about clowns; birthday party clowns working in New York City. But one of his clowns told him a family secret, and in that moment the film completely changed. David Friedman, who until then Jarecki had been following in his day job as ‘Silly Billy’, told him that in the late 1980’s his father Arnold and youngest brother Jesse had been convicted of child sexual abuse, and that he had videoed everything during the months between arrest and convictions as the family tore itself apart. The result is a shocking first person document of a family going through truly horrendous stress.

It’s a film that both angers, because Arnold was, demonstrably, a paedophile and child abuser (though he may very well have been falsely accused on the charges of which he was convicted, and saddens, because Jesse Friedman, then a terrified 19 year old seems, at very best, to have been deeply unfairly served by the law and at worst to have spent 13 years in prison for something he didn’t do. The case came at the time of a huge panic in the US about child sexual abuse, which seems to have led to a lot of the problems with the case.

With the reams of footage he had to choose from, Jarecki crafts a focused narrative, leaning heavily on the home movies so that we see the story unfolding from within, as well as being informed and offered comment about it after the fact from some very even-handedly used interviews. For all its apparent sympathy for Jesse this isn’t a campaigning film, Jarecki calmly lays out the case for both guilt and innocence in respect of both Jesse and Arnold and leaves us with as many of the facts as he can cram into 103 minutes.

The most striking aspect of the film is the home movie footage of the Friedmans; an eccentric and entertaining family becoming more so as they try desperately to cope, with little help, with what’s happening to them. It’s hard to watch at times, as tempers flare in all directions, and yet there are also beautiful moments of levity, moments in which the family comes together.

This is an exemplary documentary, it is informative, but thanks to the intimacy of the footage and to Jarecki’s exceptional sense of drama in the way he shapes the story, and allows it to unfold twist upon twist like a great thriller, means that despite the difficulty of the material it is also a riveting watch.

STANDOUT SCENES
Jesse’s last night
The night before Jesse goes to prison his family try and have as much fun as they possibly can. After such acrimony as has gone before this is a beautiful and moving sequence, but also very sad.

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24 FPS Top 100 Films

Click the title below for a trailer

95: DER UNTERGANG (a.k.a. Downfall) [2004]
DIR: Oliver Hirschbiegel


WHY IS IT ON THE LIST?
In the past decade, with the generation that fought the war entering their 80’s, and their grandchildren behind the cameras, the German film industry has finally begun to tackle World War II head on. Downfall has perhaps the smallest scope of these films; it is confined almost entirely to Hitler’s Berlin bunker, in the last ten days before his suicide, as Berlin falls to the Russians above the fuehrer and his inner circle. It is also the best of this impressive cycle of films.

Much of the reason for that is the exceptional performance of Bruno Ganz as Hitler. In many ways Hitler is easy to play; after all he’s seen (rightly, given his beliefs and actions) as a monster, and a monster is easy to play, because a monster is simple. Ganz and director Hirschbiegel refuse to play Hitler that way, because the reality is that he wasn’t a monster, he was a man, and Ganz plays him as one. He’s a man whose capacity for evil is seldom in doubt, but at times Ganz also gives him an almost unsettling warmth. The scenes where he’s almost fatherly as he gives Traudl Junge (Alexandra Maria Lara in her breakout role) a trial run at taking dictation is among the film’s more haunting moments, not because of how Ganz and Lara play it, but because of what lies behind that façade.

Ganz does dominate the film, appearing, until the last twenty minutes or so, in practically every scene, and demonstrating such imposing presence (despite the physical frailty, including hints of Parkinsons, with which he plays Hitler) that even when he’s offscreen the character hangs over the film. However, it isn’t just the Bruno Ganz show, the rest of the cast are excellent, especially Lara, as the conflicted Junge, who is the closest thing to a character we can identify with and Ulrich Matthes and Corinna Harfouch as Joseph and Magda Goebbels. Indeed, perhaps even more than Ganz’ Hitler it is Harfouch’s Magda Goebbels who is the most terrifying, most evil, character in this film, and the mix of steel and casualness with which Harfouch plays her chills me to the bone every time.

Though the war is largely an outside presence, Oliver Hirschbiegel really captures an ever increasing feeling of impending doom, this, mixed with the claustrophobia of the bunker in which most of the film takes places makes for a tight, tense and challenging viewing experience, but Hirschbiegel maintains a firm grip on the tale, telling it not dispassionately, but thankfully without editorialising. In the end he’s made a film which manages to both an exceptional war movie and a genuinely fascinating study of collective evil.

STANDOUT SCENES
Medal ceremony
Hitler pins medals on the (very) young fighters in the battle of Berlin, in a scene that really begins to show just HOW wrong the war is going.

A drink before bedtime
Magda Goebbels poisons her young children, in one of the most chilling scenes in cinema.


MEMORABLE LINES
Joseph Goebbels: I feel no sympathy. I repeat, I feel no sympathy! The German people chose their fate. That may surprise some people. Don't fool yourself. We didn't force the German people. They gave us a mandate, and now their little throats are being cut!

Adolf Hitler: That was an order! Steiner's assault was an order! Who do you think you are to dare disobey an order I give? So this is what it has come to! The military has been lying to me. Everybody has been lying to me, even the SS! Our generals are just a bunch of contemptible, disloyal cowards... Our generals are the scum of the German people! Not a shred of honour! They call themselves generals. Years at military academy just to learn how to hold a knife and fork! For years, the military has hindered my plans! They've put every kind of obstacle in my way! What I should have done... was liquidate all the high-ranking officers, as Stalin did!

Magda Goebbels: Sleep tight, children.

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Mini-Reviews: La Danse / Four Lions

LA DANSE: THE PARIS OPERA BALLET
DIR: Frederick Wiseman



Now 80, Frederick Wiseman is perhaps too old a dog to be learning new tricks, but his dedication to the direct cinema style of documentary that he helped found is actually rather refreshing at a time when a lot of documentaries do not document but rather instruct or preach.

Wiseman here sets us down in the world of the Paris Opera ballet as they travel through a season, developing and performing two performances, for even that much shape he makes us work, because there are no captions, no interviews, no narration to guide us through the events, we simply sit in on rehearsals and meetings, only slowly seeing the two productions come together, or clearly recognising that they are separate.

At two hours and thirty nine minutes La Danse has an epic feel about it, and yet it seldom feels long. Occasionally sequences outside the dance studios (a discussion with the dancers about new pension arrangements, for instance) can feel drawn out, but whenever we are watching the crafting of the dances, or indeed the finished pieces, this is a truly mesmerising film. Much observational documentary, especially in the age of youtube, isn’t especially artful, but Wiseman’s shot selection emphasises the beauty of what he’s filming, he stands back most of the time, letting the dancers whole bodies dominate his frames, and finding beautiful design in shots as well as in what he’s shooting.

The only real downside to the film is that we never get to know anyone in it, there is no sense of personal engagement at all, perhaps that’s appropriate though, like the people he’s depicting, Wiseman sacrifices everything else in the service of La Danse.


FOUR LIONS
DIR: Chris Morris



British satirist Morris has always courted controversy, most notably with his Brasseye special, which brutally satirised the way the British media was covering the issue of paedophilia, but even for him the subject matter of Four Lions; a broad comedy about a group of inept British Muslims with aspirations to become suicide bombers, seems very near the knuckle. The tabloids were predictably outraged, and the Father of one of the victims of the London underground bombings has called for the film to be banned, once again, people are misunderstanding Morris.

Since September 11th the world’s media have been trying to scare us, and right wing press especially has leapt on any and every opportunity to portray Muslims in a negative light. At a time when we are still being primed to live in constant fear of terrorism, Four Lions is an ideal response. It’s a finely balanced film; an uproarious comedy about unspeakable evil, but impressively, though it extracts near constant guffaws from its audience, Four Lions doesn’t trivialise the issue. Indeed the end of the film, which is shocking and, paradoxically, also rather sad, confronts it head on.

The script, by Morris and Peep Show writers Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain, leavens its serious issues with some very broad comedy. The terrorist cell we see here is composed largely of men who barely have a brain cell between them. There’s white British convert Barry (Nigel Lindsay), Gormless Fessal (Adeel Akhtar), who does his martyrdom video with a box on his head, because images are haram. Then there’s Waj (Kayvan Novak), who thinks paradise will be short lines at Alton Towers, and endless rides on Rubber dinghy rapids. The only one with half a brain is Omar (Riz Ahmed), he’s probably the most frightening character, because beneath a friendly, sharp exterior there’s a scheming manipulator who really does want to die and kill ‘for allah’.

The playing is flawless, with Novak and Ahmed really standing out. Ahmed is especially good in some pretty upsetting scenes in which Omar explains jihad to his son, using the story of The Lion King. Yet, such is the strength of the performance, that you can’t quite hate Omar, especially when he has to say goodbye to his wife (an excellent and under-used Preeya Kalidas) in code. This undertone of drama is always there, always strongly felt, but the film is overwhelmingly, and hugely successfully, a comedy. It’s often absurd (which is surely Morris’ point) witness the many scenes in which Barry proposes his idea of a target for their bombing; the local mosque, or the several abortive attempts at martyrdom videos (“eh up y’ kaffir bastards”), or the many things that the group feel they should be fighting against (“Fuck mini babybels”).

Morris reserves his mocking for those who perpetrate these crimes, showing them largely as idiots duped into evil by liars. He never mocks the victims, though he does make a thinly veiled reference to the Jean Charles De Menezes shooting, with a policeman shouting “It must be the target, I’ve just shot it” into his radio.

Four Lions may rub some people the wrong way, the subject matter is unquestionably near the knuckle, but it’s a film that should only offend potential suicide bombers, and really, fuck them. Capably directed, this film marks out Chris Morris as a complex cinematic voice, but one who’ll make you bend double with laughter even as he makes you think.

24 FPS Top 100 Films

96: THE SCIENCE OF SLEEP [2006]
DIR: Michel Gondry


WHY IS IT ON THE LIST?
Much as I love a lot of really fucked up, brutal horror films, I’m actually something of a romantic at heart, and right from the first time I saw it the surreal, yet personal, story that Michel Gondry (writing his own screenplay for the first time) weaves here appealed to that part of me.

I’ve always said that reactions to movies are very personal, and I won’t go into the details (because this is a movie site, not a therapy session), but let’s just say that with my romantic history I found it easy to identify with Stephane (Gael Garcia Bernal), his infatuation with his next door neighbour Stephanie (the enchanting Charlotte Gainsbourg), and with the fact that she just wants to be friends.

Visually speaking, like much of Gondry’s work, The Science of Sleep feels very handmade. Rather than using CGI to create his alter-ego’s dreamworld Gondry constructs much of it from household items; toilet roll tubes, washing up bottles, CDs and papier mache all figure heavily in the film’s very individual design. At first Gondry moves you deftly between quite well defined real and dream worlds, but as the film goes on he blurs the line further and further, mixing the real and the surreal ever more freely, without losing sight of the film’s bittersweet love story.

The performances are excellent. Gael Garcia Bernal makes a real change of pace as the naïve, nervy dreamer Stephane, who manages to woo Stephanie very successfully in his head, but can’t quite do it in the real world. Charlotte Gainsbourg is perfectly cast as Stephanie; the girl you’d kill to have living next door, she’s dynamic, smart and funny as well as being gorgeous and you can completely understand why Stephane falls for her and, equally, why she doesn’t fall for him.

In Gondry’s previous films, written by Charlie Kaufman, endings had been a problem, but here he finds just the right note, a happy image with a sad undertone, which fits the film perfectly but can be read differently depending on what audiences want to be true. It’s a personal film from Gondry and a personal reaction from me, but for me The Science of Sleep has a lot to say about love, and says it in a way that, despite its surreality, has a lot of weight, while also being hilariously funny.

STANDOUT SCENES
Stephane TV
The recipe for a dream draws you right into the film’s strange reality, and Bernal’s genial performance here makes it easier to engage with what is a rather wet character at times.

One second time machine
A perfect Michel Gondry idea; barmy but charming, in a scene that beautifully captures the tone of the whole film


MEMORABLE LINES
Stephane: Hi, and welcome back to another episode of "Télévision Educative". Tonight, I'll show you how dreams are prepared. People think it's a very simple and easy process but it's a bit more complicated than that. As you can see, a very delicate combination of complex ingredients is the key. First, we put in some random thoughts. And then, we add a little bit of reminiscences of the day... mixed with some memories from the past.
[adds two bunchs of pasta]
Stephane: That's for two people. Love, friendships, relationships... and all those "ships", together with songs you heard during the day, things you saw, and also, uh... personal... Okay, I think it's one.

Stephane: [after giving Stephanie the one second time traveling machine] For the occasion of... you're pretty.

Stephane: I like your boobs. They're very friendly and unpretentious.

Stéphanie: I have big hands.
Stephane: That means you have a large penis.
Stephane: [embarrassed] ... That was inappropriate...

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Film Review: Robin Hood

ROBIN HOOD
DIR: Ridley Scott
CAST: Russell Crowe, Cate Blanchett, Mark Strong,
Max VonSydow, Oscar Isaac, William Hurt



I have seen worse films than Robin Hood this year, and will certainly see more, but of everything I’ve seen this year no film, not even the awful remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street, has encapsulated so completely the reason why most Hollywood films are so awful. This Robin Hood started life as Nottingham, a spec script that apparently radically reimagined the myth, and posited the sheriff of Nottingham as the hero and Robin Hood and his gang as something closer to a group of insurgent criminals. Ridley Scott has described that script as terrible, and said it was a page one re-write (which begs the question of why he got involved to begin with) but at the very least Nottingham might have been an interesting take on the Robin Hood story, while at the same time retaining enough familiar elements to still feel like a Robin Hood story. Instead what we get is a dour, dull, film, which seems to have little idea of what story it is telling and feels as though it has been cut to ribbons between filming and release.

The first thing that has to be said is that Robin Hood is no more a Robin Hood film, at least in any recognisable fashion, than a film called The Three Musketeers which ended with D’Artangan’s first fencing lesson would be a Three Musketeers film. The story is totally unrecognisable, in fact this is a prequel, barely a story in itself it is in fact a two and a half hour setup for sequel, which, by the end of this determinedly unentertaining opening chapter, you’ll be praying that you never have to see.

The story sees Richard the Lionheart (Danny Huston whose English dialogue, in a film that purports to historical accuracy, is a pretty big crime) killed during the crusades. When the party bearing his crown home is ambushed and killed (as part of a French plot led by Mark Strong as the traitorous Sir Godfrey) Robin and his men Little John (Kevin Durand), Will Scarlet (Scott Grimes) and Allan A’Dayle (Alan Doyle) take the crown back to London and to the now King John (Isaac). Robin, here named Longstride, has promised the man he’s been pretending to be, one Sir Robert Loxley (Douglas Hodge) that he’ll take a sword back to Loxley’s father (VonSydow), when he arrives Loxley as Robin to pose as his late son, and husband to the feisty Marion (Blanchett) to prevent (HOW?) their land being taken when Loxley dies. That’s the setup, but there’s a lot more; a ridiculous amount of talk about tax (finally, another blockbuster after The Phantom Menace that recognises the thrilling potential of arguments over tax policy), a couple of totally perfunctory battles, a hugely forced (and ridiculously fast) romance between Robin and Marion are just a few of the storylines competing for your, and the filmmakers, attention.

However good an actor you think Russell Crowe is (and I’ve got to say, I’ve never been entirely won over by him) he’s completely miscast here. First of all, Crowe is in his mid 40’s, in fact he’s older even than Sean Connery was when he played an old Robin Hood in (much better) revisionist version Robin and Marian, and so setting this up as a prequel to all the better known tales makes little sense. This was a time at which most men, especially poor ones, died by the time they were 40 and the weather beaten Crowe looks every one of his years. The casting would be less of an issue if Crowe stamped any authority on the part, but he doesn’t. In a joyless film his is the most joyless work, he seems bored, speaks much of the (often risible) dialogue with a barely disguised contempt and generally looks both miserable and bored, even when acting opposite the magnificent (and, though she is dressed down here, luminously beautiful) Blanchett. There are further problems with Crowe’s credibility thanks to his accent, which sometimes has an aussie twang to it, but more frequently migrates between Ireland and Northern and Midlands England, it wouldn’t be such an issue if there were some consistency (Kevin Costner’s Californian Robin Hood is silly, but at least it’s consistent and you adjust) but instead Crowe’s accent chops and changes from speech to speech.

Strictly speaking, at 41, Cate Blanchett is also at least ten years too old for the role of Marian, but to her credit her performance is perhaps the only thing in Robin Hood that unambiguously works. She’s done the English accent before, for the Elizabeth films, but here she’s less clipped, giving Marion a voice that is both consistent and suited to both location and class. The script makes Marion something of a feminist caricature, but even so, Blanchett sells almost every word, and those moments she can’t make work are solely the fault of screenwriter Brian Helgeland and of Ridley Scott. One especially awful moment comes in the big battle scene, when Marion squares up to a foe she’s every reason to want to kill and, having set her up as a tough woman, able to fend for herself, the film bottles it in seconds so it can have her rescued by Robin. It’s a betrayal of both the character and Blanchett and it rings completely false.


Talking of things that ring false… Oscar Isaac. As King John the unknown Isaac is just titanically awful, swinging wildly between bland inexpressiveness and ridiculous scenery chomping (“I declare him to be an OUTLAAAAWWWW”) by the end of the film John’s beard (artfully trimmed for 1199) is a more interesting and layered character than the king himself. As the real villain of the piece, Mark Strong is decent enough, but after Sherlock Holmes, Kick Ass and then this performance in quick succession, it is beginning to look like there is a particular, and largely unchanging, Mark Strong performance.

In terms of delivering the expected Robin Hood goods, Scott and Helgeland do it only in the most grudging and perfunctory manner possible. There is one scene in which Robin and his men hold up a cart transporting grain (and Crowe makes, presumably at gunpoint from his delivery, an awkward reference to them being made merry), but it lasts barely a minute. We learn, late on, that Kevin Durand is playing Little John, but there’s no reason behind the name, nor is he ever recognisably Little John. In the incredibly forced and quickly dispensed with coda King John describes Robin as “also known as Robin of the hood”, which is laughable, since the only reference to that name in the whole film is in that one minute hold up (also the only time he wears a hood, by the way). It’s as if, every few weeks during shooting, someone nudged Ridley Scott and reminded him of the title of his film, and so a short scene was written, shot and inserted as hurriedly as possible.

Of course the script problems don’t end there. Amazingly the screenplay manages to be incredibly talky and dull, while not actually saying anything much. Take for example Robin’s backstory, to which much implied importance is attached (especially regarding something his Father apparently said “Rise and rise again, until lambs become lions”), plenty of screen time spent on this, and yet nothing really comes of it, Robin turns over an old stone, reads the words, and then we’re back to our main feature, already in progress. For a film that is about exploring the origins of a legend this one presents a frustratingly incomplete picture (indeed Robin is really a very minor player in the overall story). There are also huge gaps in the film’s logic. The aforementioned relationship between Robin and Marion seems to go from her initial ‘come near me and I’ll cut you’ atttitude to their being hopelessly in love within 48 hours. That’s small beer, however, compared to the plot line which has Robin impersonating Robert Loxley, in which we are supposed to believe that villagers will automatically buy this ruse, though the two men don’t look very similar, just because Max VonSydow, whose character is blind, say it is so.

For Ridley Scott’s part, the film does look decent (and at a cost of $237 million it bloody well should), the period recreation and production design are beyond reproach and while I’m not sure it fit Robin Hood, the dark, gritty, washed out look that Scott has adopted here is beautifully executed. What works less well is the editing and the pacing of the film. The editing really comes unstuck during the battle scenes, which look rather messy and are uninvolving because of that. It’s choppy, as if individual frames have been removed within shots, and this emphasis on technique removes us from the action. The pacing is well and truly broken. The midsection of the film is saggy, full of talk, often about tax, and always deathly dull, and it seems to last forever. The battles that provide the only real entertainment in the film come right at the start and the end of the film, and both are brief, and of very little importance to the story (though that’s true of just about everything in the film, to be fair). The biggest problem occurs after the second battle, it seems that Scott has now realised how arse-numbingly long (140 minutes) his film is and in three minutes, with no justification at all, he has Robin declared an “OUTLAAAAWWWW”, the Sheriff of Nottingham (Matthew MacFadyen, who has about seven lines) putting up a wanted poster for him, and Robin and Marion moving to Sherwood. WHY? Why is any of this happening, where the hell has the half hour of film that clearly needs to be there to set this coda up gone? Why can’t we see that instead of arguments about tax, Friar Tuck (Mark Addy) and his bees or Allan A’Dayle playing his magically amplified lute again? Did a chimp edit the last act of this film? What. Were. They. THINKING?

I might have gone a touch easier on this film if it had had a different title, but at the end of the day one of Scott’s key sins here is calling a film Robin Hood and then making a film that bears almost no relation to Robin Hood. Of course, it doesn’t help that it’s badly acted, overlong and also somehow too short and utterly, utterly, tedious.

24 FPS Top 100 Films

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97: HAUTE TENSION (a.k.a. Switchblade Romance) [2003]
DIR: Alexandre Aja


WHY IS IT ON THE LIST?
Haute Tension (please ignore the terrible, and inaccurate, title it was given in England) did two really notable things. Importantly for the rest of this list it launched a brutal new wave of French horror, but what earns it a place of its own is largely the fact that it delivers - in spades - exactly what it says on the tin. High Tension is the literal translation of the title, and boy does Alexandre Aja deliver on that promise. This slasher may, at times, be unspeakably violent (and that was in itself a treat for genre fans, especially with the great Gianetto Di Rossi crafting the make up) but where it really wins out is in sheer ring tightening, knuckle whitening, nailbiting tension.

This film made a huge impression on me when I saw it in the cinema, thanks largely to the reaction of the girl sitting behind me. I saw her for a moment towards the end of the film. She was curled up in her seat, clutching her knees close to her face; a terrified, weeping, ball where a person used to be. That, I thought, is a proper horror film. She wasn’t the only one to be scared out of her mind either. Haute Tension is a simple stripped down story about two friends (Cecile De France and Maiwenn Le Besco) who are spending a weekend away from college with one of their families. The night they arrive a truck driver (Phillipe Nahon) murders everyone in the house except for Le Besco, whom he kidnaps, and De France, who manages to hide from him. At this point De France has to follow the truck and attempt to save her friend.

There are several sequences here that demonstrate Aja’s total mastery of his chosen genre. The home invasion stands out in particular, it takes up about a quarter of the barely 90 minute film, and is torturously tense, especially as the trucker searches for De France. Aja also marshals the violence brilliantly, creating some genuinely horrific kills (though fewer than you’d expect in a slasher, thanks to the limited cast of characters). The brutality is often completely astonishing, but so too is the inventiveness and the sheer awful reality with which Di Rossi (whose work has come a long way since Fulci’s Zombie) manages to, pardon the pun, execute the effects.

Many people have a problem with the ending of the film, but I loved it right off the bat. If you unpick the film, and remember how it is framed, it absolutely tracks, and plays equally brilliantly, if significantly differently, on subsequent viewings. Much of this is down to the fantastic performances of De France and Le Besco, each of whom are playing things on multiple levels, which only become clear on a second look, throughout the film.

Sadly, Alexandre Aja has never delivered on the huge promise of this film, decamping instead to Hollywood and churning out remakes. Still, we’ll always have Haute Tension.


STANDOUT SCENES
Home Invasion
A perfect twenty minute sequence of unimaginable tension and insane brutality.

The bathroom
So knuckle whitening that British filmmaker Mark Tonderai lifted it, shot for shot, for his horror debut Hush.

The circular saw
HOLY. FUCK.

To buy the film, and help 24FPS out at the same time, please use the links below. Thanks!
UK: DVD / Blu-Ray
USA: DVD [Unrated] / Blu-Ray [Unrated]

24 FPS Top 100

98: THE NAKED GUN: FROM THE FILES OF POLICE SQUAD! [1988]
DIR: David Zucker


Why is it on the list?
It’s FUNNY. Plain and simple, The Naked Gun is just one of the wall to wall funniest films ever made. Made long before David Zucker begun wasting his undoubted comic talents on the excremental Scary Movie fanchise and even longer before his right wing agitprop ‘comedy’ An American Carol, this movie, like Airplane and the Police Squad! TV series that predated it just concentrated on bringing the funny in the most consistent and concentrated manner possible.

Leslie Nielsen, until Airplane best known as the mission commander in classic sci-fi movie Forbidden Planet, became the go to guy for spoof movies after his performance as Frank Drebin, and it’s not hard to see why. Neilsen is a masterful player of deadpan comedy. Too many of today’s comedies see the actors almost begging you to laugh, as if they’re screaming “look what I’m doing, isn’t it outrageous and funny?” (to which, by the way, the answer is almost always a resounding no). Neilsen’s Frank Drebin doesn’t expect you to laugh at him, he’s just doing his job, and that’s WHY it’s funny.

Take the brilliant scene when he first meets love interest Priscilla Presley, she’s up a ladder fetching something, he’s standing underneath her with, potentially, a nice view up her dress. “Nice beaver” he says, “Thanks”, she replies, “I just had it stuffed” then, with perfect timing, she hands him a stuffed beaver. In Disaster Movie the characters would then spend a long time telling you why that joke is funny, explaining the double meaning of beaver, for example. The Naked Gun just tells jokes, it’s up to you whether you get them or not.

The humour comes thick and fast, the film is barely 80 minutes long, but manages to pack in literally hundreds of laugh out loud moments. There are verbal jokes, physical jokes, visual jokes, lots of slapstick and a couple of gross out gags (though they are generally more subtly deployed than they might be these days). Barely a second of screentime goes by without a gag of some sort, even if it’s in the background. The film never lets up, and almost every gag is a direct hit to the funny bone.

The cast all get the tone absolutely right, with an impressively game Priscilla Presley as love interest Jane and George Kennedy as Drebin’s boss being particular standouts and Ricardo Montalban making for a suitably hammy and amusing villain.

Now 22 years old The Naked Gun is, with the exception of its opening teaser scene, as fresh as a daisy, this kind of comedy doesn’t date at all because it’s mocking not the pop culture references of the moment but long established genre traits and, lets face it, because the visual of a chalk outline showing where someone has fallen into the water is just one of those gags that will be as funny in 100 years as it was then and is now. Ther are moments, watching this film, that I’ve laughed so hard and long I’ve become worried about the loss of oxygen. THAT is what funny is.


Standout Scenes
The opening credits
An iconic moment, repeated in each of the films; brilliantly simple, hilariously funny.

Meeting Vincent Ludwig
The extended set piece in which Drebin breaks Ricardo Montalban’s unbreakable pen and kills his extremely valuable fish is just a masterpiece of comic timing.

First date montage
Every romantic movie cliché, skewered in two minutes, to the sound of Herman's Hermits.

Favourite Lines
Frank: It's the same old story. Boy finds girl, boy loses girl, girl finds boy, boy forgets girl, boy remembers girl, girls dies in a tragic blimp accident over the Orange Bowl on New Year's Day.
Jane: Goodyear?
Frank: No, the worst.

Jane: How could you do something so vicious?
Vincent Ludwig: It was easy my dear. You forget, I spent two years as a building contractor.

Ed: Don't you worry, Wilma. Your husband is going to be alright. Don't you worry about anything. Just think positive. Never let a doubt enter your mind.
Frank: He's right, Wilma. But I wouldn't wait until the last minute to fill out those organ donor cards.
[Wilma cries again]
Ed: What I'm trying to say is that, Wilma, as soon as Nordberg is better, he's welcome back at Police Squad.
Frank: ...Unless he's a drooling vegetable. But I think that's only common sense.

Thug: Drebin?
Frank: Yeah!
Thug: I got a message for you from Vincent Ludwig!
[Shoots gun at Drebin]
Thug: Take this, you son of a bitch!
Frank: I can't hear you! Don't fire the gun while you're talking!

To buy the whole Naked Gun Trilogy, and help 24FPS out at the same time, please use these links. Thanks!
UK: The Naked Gun Trilogy
USA: The Naked Gun DVD Gift Set