Author: Chris

I was in an airport bookstore browsing for something to read while I waited to get re-routed around the hurricane, and I saw a new edition of Tinker, Tailer, Soldier Spy, It had the tag: “Soon to be a major motion picture.” And sure enough, on the back there was a cast list including Gary Oldman and Colin Firth. Really? Wasn’t the Alec Guinness TV mini-series version about as good as television got in the 1970s? I still have tremendous affection for the mini-series, and I can’t think of George Smiley except as Alec Guinness. And the book has so many moving parts that I doubt it can be compressed into a couple of hours without doing serious damage.

More than any other movies, including those from the Pixar studio, the Harry Potter series is one I can only really watch through the eyes of my children. The publication span of the books almost exactly mirrors my older son’s time from entering kindergarten to entering high school, with the movies occupying the same period for my younger son (who starts high school in a month). There was a time, right after the Goblet of Fire appeared, when my older son read the four books in a continuous cycle for what seemed like months, to the point that he barely looked at each page before turning it, so well did he know the lines. As a result I have evaluated them as events in my children’s lives, for how satisfied or disappointed they were; my own reaction has been much harder for me to parse. Continue reading Deathly Hallows Part 2

I feel sure that there is already a thread on this topic but I can’t find it, even by typing in Matewan. So a short post about Made in Dagenham, mostly to say how much I disliked it. The movie tells the important story of 187 female machinists at the Ford Dagenham plant, who went on strike in 1968 for the principle of equal pay. It is an important story, both because it was path-breaking, and because the strike played some part in the passage of equal pay legislation both in Britain and elsewhere (though not as much as the movie claims).

But this movie is just a shining example of the worst kind of tear-jerking, melodramatic, feel-good crap that passes for social realism these days. Is there some factory buried deep beneath the BBC building in central London that pumps out these miserable excuses for movies about the class struggle? Brassed Off, Full Monty, Billy Elliot… we have got a steady diet of films feeding off a caricature of British class society to give us heart-warming drivel. This is little more than class porn.

Anyway, Made in Dagenham is utterly predicable: strong working class women; their menfolk who first support them, but then prove to be more sexist than interested in class solidarity; cowardly unions; personal tragedies that throw obstacles in the way of the strike; evil American Ford management (the UK Ford management is just incompetent); a ludicrous portrait of Barbara Castle (Labour minister for employment at the time); and most nauseating of all, a side story of the friendship between Rita (Sally Hawkins), the strike leader, and Lisa (Rosmund Pike), the wife of one of the Ford bosses. We even have Lisa visiting Rita in her council house to tell her how proud she is of the struggle for equal rights. Oh, and Bob Hoskins plays an adorable and saintly union steward. At a time when we desperately need good films about labor, when we need to be reminded of the central role the working class has played in constructing a civilized society, we get this instead.

Takashi Miike’s 13 Assassins is set in the middle of the 19th century, as the age of the samurai became unsustainable, and the clash of its values with those of modern politics rendered the former more quaint than noble. Of course, these values were always at least as mythologic as real, but Miike offers a fresh take on the familiar theme of competing notions of duty: service to authority versus honor in the face of the immorality of those in authority. The film opens with a graphic, yet almost bloodless, act of harakiri. The camera lingers on the man’s face, but the sound of the blade tearing at his insides is powerfully gruesome. The story follows a band of samurai who take it upon themselves to assassinate the half-brother of the Shogun, a man whose careless brutality threatens the entire social order. Much of the film is taken up with the recruitment of the assassins, and their own internal moral debates, but the final 35 minutes is a tour de force of swordplay. The 13 take on close to 200 retainers without the noticeable help of CGI. The quiet dignity of the samurai, as they face near certain death in their quest to rid Japan of a madman, is hardly original to the genre, but somehow it works here. I have often found Miike to go way over the top in his films, for my taste at least, but he gets this one just right.

A quick word about the previews on the DVD for 13 Assassins. There was Hobo with a Shotgun, starring Rutger Hauer in the title role, an extraordinary movie called Rubber, about a killer tire (yes, the thing you put on the wheels of your car), and a bizarre and macabre horror flick starring David Hyde Pierce and entitled Perfect Host. Watching these was like being invited to an evening of grindhouse with Quentin Tarantino.

This doesn’t really deserve its own thread, but the Enjoyable Crap thread is already too long. So, Priest is a perfectly serviceable bit of summer silliness. I don’t quite know why Paul Bettany has agreed to become the go-to guy for supernatural/scifi action flicks. He does brooding quite well, and he has honed his American drawl to the point that you can only detect the false notes on the rare occasions that he speaks in whole sentences. This could almost be a sequel to Legion, so light is the patina of religiosity, so deeply is it buried beneath the action. [How can something be both patina and deeply buried? Dunno, sounded good at the time.]

Anyway, Priest imagines an alternative history in which humankind has been at war with vampires since the dawn of time — we get images from the graphic novels of crusading knights battling hordes of vampires — and has reached the point of appearing to eradicate them thanks to the emergence of a group (how large we don’t know) of ninja-like priests. The vampires are imprisoned on reservations, the Church controls the walled cities and the priests have been disbanded. Then lo, rumor of a vampire resurgence appears, the Church denies it, and Paul Bettany defies his vows to head into the wasteland and do battle once more. The action sequences are fun, Maggie Q. is suitably in thrall to the Bettany character, and Karl Urban makes a cool bad guy. When he utters the words, “we have created something the world has never seen: a human-vampire…” you know all will be well, even if Wesley Snipes is not available to help out. The ending explicitly sets up a sequel. Worth a rental.

I guess the summer starts in April now. If you like the Fast and Furious franchise, you won’t be disappointed with this iteration. In the internal chronological sequence of these movies this is technically the fourth, with Tokyo Drift being the last. That allows the director, Justin Lin, and writer, Chris Morgan (hilariously spoofed on The Onion for this movie) to reunite co-stars from each of the previous movies, including Han (Sung Kang), who was supposedly killed in Tokyo Drift. It also throws in Dwayne Johnson and a handful of other newbies for fun. The result is exactly as you would expect: bigger, louder, more of everything. But it still sticks to the essence of the franchise: lots and lots of fast driving; supernaturally beautiful women; and the brooding presence of Vin Diesel. And that makes it work, within the confines of the genre. The final chase scene, however implausible, of two cars pulling a giant bank vault around Rio de Janeiro is a tour de force. It is a heist movie, and a buddy movie, and a stunt movie, and a story about family values. What can I say, I’m a sucker for this kind of thing. I’m pretty sure I never took my car out of third the whole drive home, and some of that was on interstate.

Is anyone watching this? It is the new AMC series, an American remake of the wildly popular Danish series. Each episode is one day in a police investigation of a killing, so presumably it will be solved in 12-13 days. I have not seen the Danish original, but apparently this first US season hews pretty faithfully to the original. It is too soon to say how good it is — I am three episodes in — but there are promising signs. It is highly derivative of… well, countless dramas of the recent past. There are elements of Twin Peaks, without the supernatural gloss, and several interesting echoes of the X-Files. It is set in Seattle, and the rain and gloom are a major part of the atmospherics. The lead detective is Mireille Enos, and she bears a striking resemblance to a young, harried Gillian Anderson. You don’t get clues so much as new elements of horror. The cast of potential killers gets longer every episode. But while it tiptoes along the edge of melodrama all the time, there is something that sets this drama above the run-of-the-mill police procedural. The depictions of the family of the slain girl, Rosie Larsen, are especially poignant: that father trying to comfort the remaining children; the mother holding her breath under water in the bath to try to imagine what it was like for her daughter to drown to death; the younger son setting a plate for Rosie by mistake. This may not deliver on the promise, but there is promise.

Mesrine tells the story of the real-life French gangster Jacques Mesrine (pronounced Merine), who was active as a bank robber, kidnapper, gun-runner and occasional radical in the 1960s and 1970s. He was finally gunned down in a deliberate execution by the French police in 1979, an execution that opens the movie before returning to the late 1950s when Mesrine returns to Paris from Algeria. Continue reading Mesrine

This really doesn’t deserve its own thread, but I wasn’t sure where else to put it. Aliens invade, landing off 20 cities in 17 countries (the US is important enough to have three of its cities attacked; poor old Sweden is deemed not important enough). As usual, the aliens appear invincible until a small band of marines turns up to kick ass. The backstories of the marines and staff sergeant Nantz (Aaron Eckhart) are meant to make the playing out of the movie more poignent, but they are forced and discarded when inconvenient. There are homages to Assault on Precinct 13, Speed, and, of course, Independence Day. It is not very good, and I’d normally be harder on it, but this is March and I’m starved of blockbuster-type crap. The action scenes are competent.

Lebanon follows an Israeli tank crew through the first day of the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. The director, Samuel Maoz, was in the IDF during that war. The film’s central gimmick, and I use that word reluctantly, is that the point of view is entirely that of the four soldiers in the tank. We either see conversation inside the tank, or we see the exterior through the cross-hairs of the turret scope.  Other soldiers, a prisoner, and a Phalangist irregular enter the tank for various purposes, but our four protagonists never leave it. The result is a deeply claustrophobic feel, and a heightened sense of the bewilderment and terror of those inside. Continue reading Lebanon