2010 In Review: Part 1 - The Worst of 2010; Runners Up

NOTE: This post contains some very strong language.


2010 was a busy year for me, the busiest I’ve ever had in terms of the amount of new films I saw. For all of the following posts I’ve assessed as eligible those films that either showed at UK festivals or in UK cinemas between January 1st and December 18th, which I saw for the first time. For example, though both played at LFF 2009 and I saw DOGTOOTH at that festival, I was only able to see LOURDES on its 2010 cinema release, so DOGTOOTH was eligible for last year’s lists and awards, while LOURDES is eligible this year.

Over the next five days I’ll be revealing my highlights and lowlights of the year. We’ll start with a The runners up lists for the worst and the best films of the year films, then move on to the 24FPS awards for the year and finish up with the bottom and the top 10 of 2010. Enjoy, and Happy Holidays, whatever you’re celebrating.


There was plenty to choose from when attempting to sift through all the chaff that was vomited onto screens in 2010. These are some of the very worst, okay, they aren’t quite as toxic as the upcoming Bottom 10, but you should avoid these films with extreme prejudice. This list is in alphabetical order by title.


THE AMERICAN
DIR: Anton Corbijn

I, admittedly, have seen a lot of films, several times the amount that most normal people will ever see, but still, you don’t have to have seen something approaching 8000 movies to realise how staggeringly predictable this movie is. Five minutes in I knew EXACTLY what was going to happen in the rest of this paralysingly slow and tedious film, right down to predicting the details of the final ten minutes in pretty excruciating detail. George Clooney doesn’t help matters, as he’s been doing for a little while he coasts here, assuming that his (admittedly extraordinary) charisma will take the place of an actual character. THE AMERICAN is beautiful to look at, but for me it was like watching a slide show of George and Anton’s Italian holiday, while knowing exactly what each slide would show before it came up.


THE ARBOR
DIR: Clio Barnard

Why? Honestly, that was the only question I had after watching this movie. Not so much why does it exist (we’ll come to those movies soon, trust me) as why is it in a cinema. This experimental documentary uses audio interviews to tell the story of playwright Andrea Dunbar (who died aged just 29) and of her daughters, but, curiously, has those interviews lip synced (not entirely brilliantly) by actors. The sound and the images are so totally disconnected that it feels less like watching a film than watching karaoke. The story is riveting, but its telling is so odd that it disconnects you from it. This is radio, why the fuck was I seeing it in a cinema?


DUE DATE
DIR: Todd Phillips

A few years ago I was clinically depressed, and nothing threatens to put me back in therapy with more reliability or regularity than mainstream Hollywood comedy. Todd Phillips’ latest attempt to break my mind is an uncredited and desperately unfunny remake of John Hughes deathlessly wonderful PLANES, TRAINS AND AUTOMOBILES, following Robert Downey, Jr’s utterly loathsome architect as he tries to get home for the birth of his child. ‘Jokes’ include wanking and multiple instances of assault (once on an 8 year old… FUNNY!!), and each one made one more little part of my soul die. Too many more films this depressing and I’m not only going to be in a care home, I’m going to be literally soulless.


GREENBERG
DIR: Noah Baumbach

It is, perhaps, unfair to list a film so well acted alongside the inept likes of some of the films yet to come on this list, but despite the fact that I can only admire the work of Ben Stiller, Greta Gerwig, Rhys Ifans and Jennifer Jason Leigh there was almost no other film this year that I so desperately wanted to be able to stop watching. I hated GREENBERG because I hated its title character so much. Roger Greenberg was such an insufferable cunt that not only did I want to punch him in the face, I was unable to buy any of the events of this film, largely because it didn’t show him living a totally miserable, friendless existence. More than the fact that I didn’t buy in to the drama (especially Greenberg’s relationship with Greta Gerwig’s charming Florence) it was the fact that I hated him so much that I just wanted to leave so that I no longer had to be around that twat.


HEARTBREAKER
DIR: Pascal Chaumeil

Proving that the Americans don’t have a total monopoly on insufferably hideous romantic comedy, here’s a (rampagingly misogynistic) contribution from France. Romain Duris is a man who breaks up couples for a living, he’s hired to destroy the impending marriage of Vanessa Paradis. Guess what happens. The comedy is predictable, poorly executed and groan inducing. The drama is laughably undernourished, and suffers from a plot so join the dots simple that a five year old with limited motor skills could draw you this picture and the romance is insipid, unconvincing and quite frankly impossible to root for because both the characters are pretty hateable. Charmless.


INCEPTION
DIR: Christopher Nolan

First off; yes, really. Now that we’ve got that out of the way let’s cut to the chase shall we? Is it a dream? God, I don’t care; not, at least, beyond the fact that I wished that I could have woken up to find myself watching something else. INCEPTION has a huge amount of ideas, and spends such an endless amount of time explaining them (to little avail) that it forgets to have little things like characters worth caring about or a story that engages you. The whole film seemed like one huge McGuffin, which might have been fine if I gave a shit but, despite some decent performances, I just didn’t. I knew where it was going (down to calling the final shot) and was bored as it meandered its way there. I keep hearing that Chris Nolan is THE great filmmaker of our time, but all I see is an emperor with no clothes on.


PIRANHA 3D
DIR: Alexandre Aja

It’s been a shame to see Alexandre Aja, whose career began with the spectacular slasher HAUTE TENSION, gobbled up by the Hollywood remake machine. This, his third remake on the trot, is an horrendous version of Joe Dante’s silly, but effective, JAWS parody from 1978. Aja substitutes the wit of Dante for hideously unfunny jokes, boobs (lots and lots of boobs) and overblown gore, all delivered in sub par converted 3D. This is, apparently, what is now regarded as progress. Somebody kill me.


ROBIN HOOD
DIR: Ridley Scott

When is a Robin Hood movie not a Robin Hood movie, apparently when it’s directed by Ridley Scott. Scott and his frequent collaborator Russell Crowe transplant GLADIATOR to early medieval England in this unfathomably boring prequel, which feels about as much like Robin Hood as MONSTERS INC. feels like The Three Musketeers. The sole interest lies in trying to figure out from Crowe’s globetrotting accent where Robin is supposed to come from and in seeing whether Oscar Issac, as King John, can possibly keep continuing to find new pieces of scenery to chew in every scene (yes, by the way). There’s just no excuse for a Robin Hood movie this boring.


SOMEWHERE
DIR: Sofia Coppola

Talking of boring… as wonderful and as charming as Elle Fanning is, she can’t rescue Sofia Coppola’s latest from its director’s spectacular lack of ideas and self-indulgence. SOMEWHERE is essentially LOST IN TRANSLATION: Redux, only with an even more slappable main character. We’re actually expected to sympathise with Stephen Dorff’s bored movie star, I just wanted to scream DO SOMETHING at him, because a good hour of this movie consists of scenes of Dorff’s character sitting around doing nothing. The closest SOMEWHERE comes to an action scene is when Dorff and Fanning play Guitar Hero and, lucky us, we get to see the whole song. It’s a film about nothing, and is even more dull than that makes it sound.


THE TWILIGHT SAGA: ECLIPSE
DIR: David Slade

To David Slade’s credit, this is the least worst Twilight film yet, and yet it is still mind bogglingly awful. Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattison and Taylor Lautner still have, between them, the personality of a tree stump, the effects and action scenes are still absolutely appalling. The script is still sub moronic, painful to listen to and spectacularly disturbing in its sexual politics. The vampires are still laughably unthreatening, the stakes are still incredibly low, the threat remains laughably weak and the conflict is still fantastically stupid. The sole bright spot remains the lovely Anna Kendrick, who has more talent and charisma in her little finger than the series three ‘stars’ can muster between them. It’s a depressing sight to see; teenagers eating this shit up at the box office.


Fuck. I’m depressed already, and these aren’t even the bottom 10.

Tron: Legacy [PG]

This review also appears at WWW.MULTIMEDIAMOUTH.COM

DIR: Joseph Kosinski
CAST: Jeff Bridges, Garrett Hedlund, Olivia Wilde,
Michael Sheen, Bruce Boxleitner

I’m not, by any means, Tron Guy, but in watching this movie I felt bad for him. I can’t imagine the level of disappointment I’d feel if I really had been waiting with anticipation for 28 years for TRON to have a sequel, and then this was what was delivered. I don’t say that because TRON: LEGACY is awful, but because it is mediocre, and because you can see how it might have been far better.

The original TRON was the first film to use computer-generated imagery, and it did so brilliantly. As basic as the CGI was (a few very simple polygon forms) it was used to enhance live action footage, and to give a genuinely new and otherworldly look to the film. LEGACY picks up the story 28 years later, and focuses on Sam Flynn (Hedlund), son of the original’s main character Kevin Flynn (Bridges) who has grown up without the father who disappeared 20 years ago (as is explained, along with the events of the first movie, in a graceless ten minute infodump at the beginning of the film). When Flynn’s old partner Alan Bradley (played again by Bruce Boxleitner; a good actor who really should get more work) receives a page from Flynn’s office he tells Sam, who goes to investigate, discovers his Dad’s secret office and soon finds himself on ‘The Grid’, a digital world ruled over by Clu (Bridges, with the assistance of the next generation of the technology used to make Brad Pitt appear young in THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON).

That’s just the setup, but lets be entirely honest, the story isn’t what’s really important about TRON: LEGACY, what people are coming for, what they’re hoping to be sucked in by, is the design. It’s not quite the triumph it should be. The 2D trailers blew me away with their visual beauty, but for me, as with so many other films, the 3D process not only fails to add to the visual splendor, it detracts from it. Joseph Kosinski has deliberately made The Grid a dark world; dark blues and blacks dominate, highlighted with glowing lines of sky blue or white (for goodies) or orange (for baddies). This is pretty poorly served by the 3D process, which casts a murky grey sheen over everything and desaturates all colour. Add to that the fact that the depth is no more impressive (with the exception of the title card, which does look amazing) in the 3D segment of the film than it is in the 2D real world scenes and I’m hankering to see this again in 2D.

Another problem with the 3D is that fast motion still doesn’t quite work; it retains a blurry and indistinct quality, which made the otherwise excellent lightcycle scenes difficult to understand, for the most part I couldn’t tell who was driving which lightcycle, and the geography of each of those scenes (thanks largely to the many transparent layers of the grid) is incredibly hard to follow. This said, the design is astounding, the grid is beautiful and the effects work is, for the most part, very strong. Kosinski has, at least, succeeded in credibly updating the look of the grid we saw in the first TRON and showing us an evolution and expansion of that world.

Quite apart from being something that people had never seen before, TRON had ideas that were incredibly ahead of their time. The idea of people having a digital presence that is as much themselves as their real life presence is a reality now (though not in the same way as TRON depicts it) and the concept of digitizing objects (again, not quite so literally) is also a huge part of how we live. What LEGACY fails to do is have similarly ambitious ideas and subtext, at one point Bridges’ Kevin Flynn observes of wireless communication between digital devices “I thought of that in 1985”, and that’s really the problem, it doesn’t feel like LEGACY brings anything new to the table, not in terms of ideas and certainly not in terms of story, which is the same old orphaned kid searching for his dad tale that we’ve seen in roughly EVERY DISNEY MOVIE EVER. It’s not even very well told. The only time the script really comes to life is when Bridges - clearly having fun - gets to inject some of himself into Flynn (To Sam: Quit messing with my zen thing, man). Otherwise it’s all exposition and colourless character interaction, focused, sadly, on a somnambulant Hedlund. However, Hedlund’s not the worst thing here, no, the performers wooden spoon goes to Michael Sheen, whose outrageously camp performance as club owner Castor (who he plays as a gayer Aladdin Sane era Bowie) is completely insufferable.

The only good news on the new casting front comes in the shape of Olivia Wilde, who is appealing as Quorra, a program whose true nature will prove interesting in the surely inevitable sequel. She makes the most of the few lines she’s got to help give her character depth, and she really does look like she’s been custom designed in a computer to make every geek on Earth go weak at the knees. And then there’s Jeff Bridges. This film essentially casts him (at least as Kevin Flynn) as God, and why not? Who doesn’t want that to be true? As poor as Hedlund is, Bridges does manage to make his side of the father/son story play, and is the only character you have any real emotional investment in, and there are also a handful of moments when he’s just being his own unassailably cool self, which is never a bad thing. Of course Bridges also plays Clu. Digitally de-aged (with AGAINST ALL ODDS used for reference), the Clu avatar seldom entirely works, plunging us frequently into uncanny valley by being, all too obviously, a head digitally attached to a double’s body, but the work done on Bridges’ voice is remarkable, he sounds exactly like he did in his thirties and that and his performance sell the character, if not always the effect.

The one thing that is truly outstanding about TRON: LEGACY is its score. Written and performed by the French electronic musicians Daft Punk (who appear in the End of Line Club as MP3s) it is this pulse pounding mix of strings and electronics that really powers the film, more than the script, more at times than the visuals. Ultimately its so good that it reduces the film, making it at times feel less like a movie than the best Daft Punk video ever made, even during a spectacular fight scene in the End of Line club I was considerably more interested in the fact that the brilliant Derezzed was pounding out of the cinema sound system than I was in anything happening on screen. In this way LEGACY’s score is both its strongest element and its biggest liability.

If you like 3D more than I do then I’d heartily recommend TRON: LEGACY, if only because it does show some intent to use 3D to tell a story, by using it only on The Grid (and despite what the opening caption says DO NOT leave your 3D glasses on during the 2D scenes), if you’re not fussed by 3D then I’d say buy the Daft Punk album and wait for the DVD.

EARLY REVIEW: I Spit On Your Grave [18]

I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE opens on January 11th 2011. You can see the UK trailer HERE

DIR: Steven R. Monroe
CAST: Sarah Butler, Andrew Howard, Jeff Branson,
Daniel Franzese, Chad Lindberg, Rodney Eastman

It’s not the most censored, though 32 years later you still can’t see it uncut, but of all the video nasties the original I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE, which was made for peanuts by Mier Zarchi, is perhaps the most infamous, and not only because of its spectacularly lurid title. It’s perhaps one of the most difficult and distressing films I’ve ever seen and, for all its many flaws, it gets under your skin to the point that after watching it you feel like you need a shower to get it off you. It is, then, an odd choice for a remake, because what more can you do, how much more extreme can you be?

Steven R. Monroe’s film is, in general shape, very faithful to Zarchi’s blueprint. Jennifer Hills (Butler) is still a young novelist who arrives at a remote cabin to work on her second book. After a few nights some local men come calling, they break into the cabin and ultimately rape and beat Jennifer almost to death. A few weeks later Jennifer, physically recovered, enacts a systematic and terrible revenge on the men who attacked her. It is, essentially, the same blueprint as every rape/revenge movie from THRILLER: A CRUEL PICTURE to THE BRAVE ONE. Where Monroe’s film differs from Zarchi’s is in the amount of detail it provides. Where Zarchi’s film seemed most interested in the horror of the acts it depicted, Monroe’s takes more time to build its characters (especially those of the group of men that attack Jennifer), with the characters of the rapists this is pretty effective; they are cartoons in the original, and if anything giving them more background serves to drop them from an even greater height.

In many ways this I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE is a better film than the original, and yet that’s also what sometimes undermines it. Though it was made for just $1.5 million, the 2010 film looks outstanding. The images are crisp and cinematic, and that’s exactly the problem. This sheen about the film (which continues with the casting, Butler in particular being rather too Hollywood pretty for her role) is a little distancing when compared to the down and dirty feel of Zarchi’s film which, whatever you feel about the morals of this choice, really did put you right in amongst what was happening, and created at times the deeply unnerving feel that what you were seeing just could be real. Put simply you watch this film, but you survive the 1978 version.

To give credit where it’s due, most of the performances here are considerably better than those of the 1978 version. Along with being given more character traits and being much more fully developed we now have some capable actors playing Jennifer’s attackers, with Andrew Howard turning an especially impressive performance as a sadistic sheriff who is also a family man (in the film’s most striking, and in some ways most horrific, scene he takes a phone call from his young daughter while the other men rape Jennifer just a few feet away) and Chad Lindberg much more convincing as a retarded adult than the original’s Matthew. On the whole the first half of the film, documenting Jennifer’s arrival at the cabin and the series of attacks and rapes she is subjected to, works very well. It may look prettier, but the events are still just as nasty, brutal and horrendous as they were in the original film. It’s when we reach the revenge section that I begin to have real problems with this I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE.

For me the original I Spit… is a film about the degradation of violence. Jennifer’s vengeance is short and brutal; an act of purging, driven, it seems, as much by a need for closure as for vengeance. It’s also surprisingly underplayed, with the gore much more implied than it is shown. This, however, is the age of SAW and thus here the vengeance is played up to a ludicrous degree. The problem is that I think we’re supposed to enjoy it, and that’s a real sticking point for me. There is an interesting question about the second half of this story, which the film never quite addresses, which is whether Jennifer actually lived through her ordeal. Butler’s performance is ambiguous, but there are definite hints here that Jennifer may be little more than a spirit of vengeance, and I think I prefer that idea to the perhaps more persuasive alternative, which has her dealing with her ordeal through complex tortures meted out to her attackers, each capped off by some meaningful detail or wisecrack to get us to embrace and applaud this extreme vigilantism. The violence here is much more explicit and dwelled on much longer than in the 1978 film, to such a degree of extremity that I began to question exactly how justified Jennifer’s actions were (especially in relation to the Sheriff). It’s unpleasant, sure, but feels more like a carrot for the audience than anything else.

This is a difficult film to review. From a technical standpoint, especially given the budget, it’s excellent and Monroe certainly shows that he knows how to discomfort an audience (a skill that will serve him well in this genre) but it’s so bound up with another film, and though the 1978 film is not, by most traditional measures (excepting Camille Keaton’s remarkable, haunted, performance, which Butler completely fails to match) as ‘good’ as this one it is for me undeniably the more effective film. I guess it comes down to what you want out of a movie. If you want the catharsis of cheering at Jennifer’s vengeance then this is the version for you, but if you really want the full impact of this story then stick with the 1978 version. Neither is an easy watch, but neither is uninteresting.

Mini Review: London Boulevard [18]

After seeing London Boulevard I sat down with Ray Winstone's character, Mr Gant, to discuss the film. This was our conversation. It was very, VERY sweary.

DIR: William Monahan

24FPS: Hi Mr Gant. Fancy a beer?

Gant: Yeah. So what did you make of the movie, you facking c**t?

24FPS: To be honest Mr Gant, I thought it was largely bollocks.

Gant: The dog's bollocks?

24FPS: Afraid not, just regular bog standard bollocks.

Gant: You think you can do better, c**t?

24FPS: That's really not the point, it's more that hundreds of directors before William Monahan have already done better, that this movie plays like the cutting room floor scrapings from every sub-average British gangster movie ever made.

Gant: Give me some facking specifics.

24FPS: Well, let's start with you, and with the actors playing your criminal gang.

Gant: You want to watch yerself sunshine.

24FPS: You're fictional Mr Gant, I'm really not scared of you. Anyway, you're all cartoons, spouting out the mouldiest of cliche gangester lines, all of them liberally festooned with obsceneities.

Gant: Like fack, and c**t?

24FPS: Like, as you - repeatedly - say, fack and c**t. Frankly it's a bit boring, and the fact that neither the plot nor the characters were keeping my interest meant that I ended up wondering what the exact ratio of swear words to other words was in the script. It's not as though THE DEPARTED, which William Monahan also wrote, was lacking in swearing, but the dialogue was intersting, so you didn't end up counting fucks, here it just sounds like Monahan, whenever he couldn't think of anything else for a character to say, just threw in a c**t.

Gant: Didn't you fink the plotting was clever, like how I made Colin Farrell my facking bitch?

24FPS: No. I've seen it all before, especially that car park scene where you try to induct him into your organisation, a scene which comes complete with dialogue so cliche I wonder if Monahan got it from an examplar passage in screenwriting for the near brain dead.

Gant: Alright you facking smart arse c**t, was there anything you did like?

24FPS: They're both underused, but the two lead actresses; Kiera Knightley (as a movie star who shuts herself away in her home to escape the papparazzi) and Anna Friel (as Farrell's alcoholic sister) are both good. They each feel like they're in a completely different movie to the impoverished man's GET CARTER that you and Mr Farrell (who is not bad here so much as he's just bland) are participating in, and while Friel's storyline is also familliar, Knightley's was actually the more furstrating, because I didn't feel like I'd seen that movie before, and yet it kept cutting back to you and Ben Chaplin doing your boring mockney villain thing.

Gant: Awright, what about the tech side, not going to tell me it looks shit too are ya? ARE YA?

24FPS: No, actually it's often gorgeous, and that's what happens when you hire Chris Menges to photograph your film, and cast such fabulously beautiful people as Farrell, Knightley and Friel.

Gant: And me.

24FPS: Well. Anyway, it's something, but it's not much compensation, because it doesn't stop the storytelling from being plodding and the plot being depressingly telegraphed (the 'surprise' ending is anything but). Nor does it keep the dialogue from clunking, especially Knightley's speech about the role of women in cinema, which couldn't have landed with a more resounding thud if it had been wearing concrete boots.

Gant: So you saying my facking movie's shit, ya c**t?

24FPS: Yes, bluntly. LONDON BOULEVARD is so predictable that if you've ever seen a British gangster film before you'll know exactly where it's headed right from the start. It's a shame, because there are some interesting ideas here (who, for example, is the photographer outside Knightley's flat who isn't among the press corp) but Monahan's flat refusal to explore these ideas, in favour of a story we've all seen, done better, fifty times already, is really irritating. Also, it's annoyingly sweary, I may have mentioned that.

Gant: Well if that's what you think; fack you.

24FPS: You too. Nice talking to you.

Superpodcast: Masters of the Universe commentary

So I'm back with Marcey and Bede, and fellow guests Nick Bosworth and Pat Torfe, on Superpodcast for a commentary which seems as though it's been months in the planning. The five of us sat down on Saturday to watch (and to mock the living shit out of) Masters of the Universe. You can listen to this track as a regular podcast, but you can also, if you've got a copy, sit down with you Masters DVD and sync us up with the picture (something which, admittedly, we had some amusing trouble with). It's chaotic track, but it was fun for us and I hope you'll enjoy it too.

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest [15]

Reviews of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played With Fire can be found HERE and HERE

DIR: Daniel Alfredson
CAST: Noomi Rapace, Michael Nyqvist, Annika Hallin,
Anders Ahlbom, Lena Endre, Micke Spreitz

And so the big movie event of the year (as Momentum and Yellow Bird have sold it) comes to a close, not with a bang but with a whimper, with a film so forgettable and inconsequential that it may as well be merely an expulsion of air. It’s a real shame, but I can’t say I didn’t see it coming. Stieg Larsson’s final (completed) Millennium novel is a doorstop; a huge beast of a book filled with a rambling, ranty, mass of detail and freely mixing a little fact with increasingly outlandish fiction. It’s also incredibly static. On the page that’s not entirely ineffective; Lisbeth Salander (played again by the extraordinary Noomi Rapace), confined to a hospital bed, unable to do much of anything in her own cause (which, this time out, involves a trial for attempted murder that could see her committed), is a somewhat effective counterpoint to the fierce, active, character of the first two books. Unfortunately, translated to the screen, it’s often – like much of the rest of the book - just dull.

For what seems like an eternity (the cut down cinema release is 147 minutes long) nothing happens. Endless screen time is filled with Mikael Blomkvist’s meetings at Millennium, with meetings at ‘The Section’ (a shadowy institution which has been conspiring against Salander), with Salander lying in bed and barely speaking, and, as ever in this series, with people typing. Because the book has had to be reduced so much the narrative here will be largely lost on those who haven’t done their homework, and for those that have the mass of connection and detail is reduced to a series of brief scenes of people we’ve never met before sitting in chairs and explaining the plot to one another. For much of the middle section of the film scene after scene after scene seems to reveal yet ANOTHER new character, who’ll pop up for a scene or two, explain something, and then never be seen again, but the problem is we already know what happened to Salander, it’s been obvious since THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE, so it feels like the movie is spending two hours putting together a 1000 piece jigsaw of a blank wall.

Even when we get to the set pieces (the attempt on Lisbeth’s life at the hospital, the attack at Erika Berger’s (Endre) home) director Daniel Alfredson fumbles the ball. The hospital sequence in particular lacks any suspense, and feels tossed off and perfunctory. The same is true of the courtroom set third act. This should be the great dramatic dénouement but, in spite of a fine performance from Annika Hallin as Lisbeth’s lawyer (also Blomkvist’s sister) and the customary excellence of Rapace’ quieter, but still forceful, turn it just doesn’t work. It’s all delivered so flatly, the other performances run towards the hammy (Anders Ahlbom as Dr. Teleborian is especially guilty here) and Alfredson’s matter of fact direction does nothing to energise the sequences. Where Neils Arden Oplev managed to truly adapt THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, make it a different but equally valid telling of Larsson’s story for cinema, Daniel Alfredson has only managed to put some bits of the books on screen. This is an inert film, were it not for Rapace and a handful of other performers (Nyqvist, Hallinn, Endre) it would be totally worthless.

All this said, it’s hard to lay all the blame at Alfredson and writer Ulf Ryberg’s door. THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNET’S NEST doesn’t work as cinema, and it was never going to. As a novel it is neither claustrophobic enough to work as that kind of thriller nor expansive and exciting enough to work as a more action driven film, and by sidelining its most interesting character the book shot itself and this adaptation in the foot from the start.

Mini Review: Alice in Wonderland [XXX]

ALICE IN WONDERLAND [XXX]
DIR: Bill Osco

The mid to late 1970's is generally seen as something of a golden age for porn, that time when even people making X Rated movies were at least attempting to make real films, even if they weren't especially artful. ALICE IN WONDERLAND has fascinated me since I first heard about it; a porno musical? How could that not be at least interesting? It's by no means a great film, but ALICE IN WONDERLAND certainly is interesting.

The thing that is perhaps most intriguing about the film is just how much of it doesn't revolve around sex. There is a long establishing sequence in which Alice (played by the sweetly pretty Kristine DeBell, who had several mainstream roles after this film) makes it clear to her boyfriend that she isn't ready to have sex with him (the film is careful to establish that, despite this stance, Alice is 18), then the White Rabbit shows up in the library where Alice works and leads her into Wonderland. Even in Wonderland, where events become more sexual with each passing scene, there is at least an attempt to tell a story, and to allow DeBell to act. Alice wants to grow up, but she's a little reluctant to join in the various sexual games in Wonderland, and to the filmmaker's and DeBell's credit, they do attempt to carry this through even in Alice's approach to the sex scenes.

The songs are pretty awful, and so is the bawdy comedy, but there is something about this movie. Even though, at the tea party, Alice doesn't so much have tea with the Mad Hatter as, well, blow him, there is a strange innocence about the whole thing. It has a playfulness that makes it, for all its rough edges, bad acting, silliness and shagging, feel like something that a group of friends - pardon the pun - tossed off for a bit of fun. I can't exactly recommend it, because it's not actually any good, but I certainly enjoyed watching it.