Checking On My Sausages

Helicopters

2012-01-25T09:22:00.000Z

Annoying little insect* hovering haughtily above. Spying on us, sniping at us.

Light it up like a firework and bring it down to earth.

What knavery is this to deny us explosion by cutting away before the deed is done (I Am Legend) or worse leave a crumpled heap of metal, dry and unexploded?

If you want a picture of the future of cinema, imagine a helicopter exploding - forever.

Its eye is shining...

...is it here for good or ill. Is it here to take us away from this hell...?

...and we ascend vulnerable, hanging as if by a string.

A helicopter can be devil, a swarm of death from above, or, in the same guise, angel - mercy and salvation on its whirring wings.

Maybe it is just a mystery...

*A helicopter being looked upon like an insect is an image brilliantly used in the first (later pulled) trailer for Spider-man, when it is caught like a fly in a web that spans the gap between the twin towers of the World Trade Center :

Remakes : Why not?

2012-01-09T12:35:00.002Z

Nothing seems to raise the hackles like the news that a film is being remade, with the idea more likely to be scorned if it is a remake of an old American classic or a rushed reboot of a modern gem of foreign cinema.

The Thing, the second remake, after John Carpenter's The Thing, of The Thing From Another World from 1951, has just been released and David Fincher's remake/adaptation of the Swedish film/book The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo followed a few weeks ago. There are plenty more in the pipeline too, such as South Korean Park Chan Wook's Oldboy in the hands of Spike Lee and Japanese manga/anime staple Akira given over to Jaume Collet-Serra. Soon we will discover who will walk in the footsteps of Paul Muni and Al Pacino to play Scarface.

Why not just watch or promote the original? Whither originality? Is it knocked down in the pursuit of a fast buck?

Why might films be remade?

Perhaps the original has a formula proven to be successful. A good idea is a good idea. Take something strong and economically viable and repeat. Take something cult and roll it out. A name, a brand could represent the closest to a sure thing.

Films might be remade for love of the original - to be part, in retrospect, of the process of the object of one's affection, to be responsible for the extension and curation of its life. On the other hand it could be dissatisfaction with the original that drives the project - the ideas were sound but the execution could be improved upon.

Although we tend to poo-poo the idea, different countries do have different sensibilities. Remaking a film in your own language whilst paying attention to cultural nuances will engage more people. Either way, with a new director, actors, director of photography, landscape, language etc nothing could possibly remain the same.

Likewise, we adapt ourselves as receivers of signals depending on who we know is sending it. Would Exorcist II, feverish and outlandish as it is, be beloved if it were an Italian horror film? Would its oddness, borderline amateurishness, be more easily enjoyed and admired? I hazard to guess 'yes'.

Subtitles, which distract attention from the image and which turn the aural into visual, change the nature of the film more than we might acknowledge. What is written, even with an aural and acted accompaniment, is experienced quite apart to the same thing heard, responding uniquely to their unique forms and the conventional ways of interacting that appear to govern them.

Was Wong Kar Wai's first English language film, My Blueberry Nights, his least successful critically because his poeticism doesn't work in quite the same way coming out of people's mouths (frankly artificial) as opposed to written and underscoring the action with gobbets of charming romanticism? Does the brilliance in his chinese-language films become soppy and inauthentic in the simple step from those white letters (accompanied by a musical, purely emotion-infused vocal murmuring) to the aural plane? What is said tends to have more responsibility to realism and functionality.

Furthermore, and paying no heed to the snobs, there are those who find it hard to watch subtitled films and it is obvious why.

Remakes (or adaptations from one media to another for that matter) offer fascinating insights into story making and story telling. They make you think about how something is put together, about structure, about characterisation, about technique, cause and effect. These are vital educational tools for the young and old - how has Martin Scorsese transposed
The Invention of Hugo Cabret to the screen in Hugo? How has Middle Earth changed through Peter Jackson's lens? What is happening to the frameworks of Rio Bravo as it transmogrifies through Assault on Precinct 13 and the French film Nid de Guepes? How has Therese Raquin, in tone and pungent odour, been transformed into 21st Century South Korean vampire story Thirst?

Remakes, comparisons, allow us to think about the soul of the thing. To think about the craft of art. Riffs and versions on the same idea - Infernal Affairs and The Departed. [Rec] and Quarantine. Not dispiriting. An exciting opportunity.

[Rec] and Quarantine

Once a film has been remade and we have two passes over basically the same material, a HYPOTHETICAL ORIGINAL is born - a ghost but with a form. The hypothetical original exists in our mind even without a remake but a remake brings it into focus. What it is is not so much what the versions share but what they appear to be responding and commenting on. The two films are in fact both versions of this hypothetical original.

The original isn't the be all and end all, its own mausoleum. It is living. Why do Directors remake their own films? Hideo Nakata remade The Ring in America. Likewise Takashi Shimizu and The Grudge. Yasujiro Ozu remade the black and white A Story of Floating Weeds as the technicolour Floating Weeds, Michael Haneke, Funny Games. Leo McCarey's Love Affair was indeed An Affair to Remember. Alfred Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much knew it twice, and Cecil B DeMille adapted the play The Squaw Man on three occasions, in 1914, 1918 and 1931.

They want to get closer to the perfection in their heads. They want to take advantage of new technologies. The original is not the original. It is in the mind and out there like a mist. They want another opportunity to revisit the same people and places and make right. Art lets you come back and remould, albeit with new clay.

Even though Alfred Hitchcock himself remade his own films and adapted a vast amount of short stories and novels, Gus Van Sant's remake of Hitchcock's Psycho was greeted by outrage. Is Van Sant's film redundant because it is almost a carbon copy? Far from it. It is redundant because it is not a carbon copy (in terms of shots). If it were it would be a once-in-a-lifetime experiment in which variables could be studied and where the magic of film would be shown to reside between the shots and without their confines.

What is a sequel if not a species of remake?

Do remakes hold back American cinema? Are they made to bury the originality of non-hollywood cinema? Are they supermarkets stocking products you can purchase in delicatessens and selling them cheaper?

The Thing (2011)

Is it vandalism?

Does it do the original works a disservice? Does it alter the brand even if the original remains untouched? Does it replace the original in the public's mind and if so, would people only be aware of the original because of the remake?

Why are commerce and money dirty words? Art has always revolved, and needed to revolve, around money as a facilitator and a spur. All artists should be penniless, destitute martyrs (warming their hands over their authentic inner voice) in their lifetimes and enjoy fame and fortune from the grave.

When we think 'remake' do we actually think that the films are re-made as if something that was sacred is now sinned against and reanimated as a zombie, abhorrent to behold? No two films could ever be the same. Swapping Peter Lorre for James Stewart, or Tony Leung for Leonardo Di Caprio, brings an entirely different colour to a character. A remake will always be worthwhile. The present doesn't change the past. A remake does no trampling and means no disrespect.

We accept countless incarnations of plays because there is no original performance, and endless repetitions of classical music written before the era of recorded sound.

Film is obviously a special case, nevertheless perhaps we could try to forget what remakes might mean and enjoy them for what they are - to use something of the approach we take when it comes to the fertile cross-germination of high art when we think of film, an art that, although it may give us pleasure, we are awfully quick to bring low.

Sucker Punch - Film of the Year 2011

2011-12-09T08:20:00.023Z

Sucker Punch is the story of the abuse of women, domestic and institutional historical and modern. It is the story of five girls/young women, and one in particular - Baby Doll, an orphan.

She has been placed in a mental hospital (framed by her step-father for the death of her sister) in which she is destined to receive a lobotomy. As she is about to be operated on, she finds it within herself to move to a new reality - a brothel. Here she is being prepared to have sexual intercourse with a man called the High Roller. In preparation for this meeting, Baby Doll is told that she must learn to dance.

Her dancing transfixes the men in her presence, which hypnotism her new-found friends (also present in the brothel reality) take advantage of to acquire five items that she believes will help them escape. Just as the men are distracted, so are we, for we do not see her dance but are instead led into a splendidly exciting third reality - where the girls fight battles with samurai monsters, zombie nazis and fire-breathing dragons (traditionally male arenas) - through which we see those quests played out.

Here the girls adapt the costumes of exploitation, cutting their outfits into attractive uniforms for battle against it, draining them of associations of filth and breathing soul into body, turning revulsion into revelry and an adventure of freedom. Within seconds I did not see exposed flesh and live toys to be fondled - I only saw them. We revel in them and with them (and of course there is nothing wrong with finding women attractive or with lust).

What is ugly is made beautiful, just as the tomb of a moth secretly becomes the womb of a butterfly. What may tempt some is acknowledged, laid in front of us and then remodelled.

What is more, there is no hatred, no vindictiveness, no revenge. Baby Doll's abusive step-father quickly disappears from the stage. No-one is hounded, humiliated or 'made to pay'. The girls show mercy throughout. Only inner strength and self-respect count. This is not about women versus men but right versus wrong and humanity versus inhumanity. Calling for a reductive label to be put on a film (feminist, chauvinist, degrading or empowering?) pretzel-twists all nuance, delicacy, and personal responsibility and morality out of the equation.

All that matters is that we care. And I did.

Sucker Punch speaks the right language. It places us both in the girls' shoes, pained, uplifted and inspired, and in those of their oppressors. Sucker Punch lives in the midst of what it criticises.

Are we to be distracted from what is really happening in the brothel, what is really happening in the hospital? Will we allow, like those men in the dark, our soul to be stolen from under our nose, bewitched by these loud noises, these propulsive songs and intense gyrations? These abstractions are used to divert us, to make the story palatable, to turn barren, po-faced lecture (many films about abuse tastefully leave our possible complicity and the gradations of exploitation to one side) into apt demonstration and to mirror the closed doors and drawn curtains behind which awful acts are perpetrated.

There are risks to giving medicine with sugar (to having one's cake and eating it) as some will taste only the sickly sweet and relish the boobs (albeit there are no lascivious or gratuitous shots whatsoever), the lipstick smears and the ejaculatory gunfire. For them the film may be encouragement for 'objectification' or 'mindlessness'. Many critics and viewers have indeed seen the film itself, rather than its situation, as degrading and misogynistic.

What do you see?

Each action is code for another on a different layer, each object has a counterpart elsewhere on a second and third map. Sucker Punch is strong and dark with metaphor, its structure brilliantly interwoven with its message. These are not the tangential puzzles found in Mulholland Drive or Inception. Rather they drive to the very heart of the narrative. There is no obfuscation.

We are exhilarated and moved by camaraderie and solidarity and sacrifice. We are saddened and perturbed as the meaning of what we see is exposed by its echoes. Sucker Punch is massively enjoyable and increasingly hard to watch for what's at stake.

When do these stories begin to break through the screen?

What do the dances in the brothel mean in the hospital - do they stand for therapy or for rape? Does sex with the high roller in the brothel mean a lobotomy in the hospital? There is no easy way out. The realities are not dreams or escapes, but vivid and tangible expressions, paths to clawing back a little independence, dignity and happiness. This is non-escapist entertainment that, cleverly and (I believe) necessarily, looks and sounds like escapist entertainment.

Sucker Punch promotes the significance and power of love, of the mind, of stories, of film, of allegory, and of physical intimacy.

Are we perverts for pulling these curtains back? Or are we exposing something true and rotten?

Fun, intelligent and emotionally powerful. The finest film of the year.

Film and Musicality : The Importance of Tempo, Rhythm, Length and Timing

2011-11-19T15:39:00.006Z

Why we like or dislike a film may rarely be in step with our conscious rationale of why.

Art is an odd spell and few of us know which of its words make us fall into a slumber and which snap us back to reality. The tiniest things can make all the difference - even a pink sweater instead of red...

We talk about liking the plot, the ideas, the look, the atmosphere, the music, the characters, the acting and all the combinations of the above. It is easier to quantify, understand and communicate these bigger and more obvious components of a film, and much harder to pin down the smaller parts that give each film its unique fingerprint.

We must struggle, too, with the idea that films may be made out of different components but that they categorically do not work on us in that way. These components cannot be fully separated once they have been put together.

One of the elements least (consciously) acknowledged when we look over our experience of a film is what we could call the work's 'musicality'. Yes, we may talk about a film being too long or too short, or about it moving too slowly or too quickly, but little else besides.

So what are we discussing when it comes to tempo, rhythm, length and timing?

Shot length / Placement of Cut

Is the shot too short or too long? In a film that sets its heartbeat at 40 a shot that lasts for a few minutes may be perfect. One such is a mesmerising journey on a train at the beginning of Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks.

One shouldn't underestimate the difference that a fraction of a second can make. Intrigue can flip to boredom at a moment's notice.

Is the movement of the camera or movement within the frame demanding a cut? Is the action inappropriately truncated? Has an emotional arc, or a developing ambience been betrayed?

Scene length

Is the scene too short or too long? There will come a point where a scene will outstay its welcome or, on the other hand, stop when we wish it hadn't. This may only be felt as a barely perceptible twinge.

The pace/build of action and plot progression

Is the story being served properly? Is it being allowed to breathe the right air? Is it ahead of itself or behind? Is too much said too early or too late? Is there enough in the film to sustain the time given to it?

What is the mix of quickness and slowness? Is it too programmatic, episodic or set to one particular rhythm?

Time spent on each part of the story or each geographical location

Is too much emphasis placed on certain plot strands?

Let the Right One In, having established the core of the story as the relationship between the two youngsters and courted our interest with its flourishing, wastes a surfeit of time on Eli's quest for blood.

Timing of reactions to actions / Timing of Edits

We must bear in mind that actors aren't actually 'reacting' to what is news to the characters.

Let us take Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull as an example. On multiple occasions people act and react a split second too early or too late, whether through the fault of the acting or of the editing. We are instinctively alarmed by the unnatural.

These are only brief thoughts, a polite pointing in the direction of something camouflaged. The right thing at the right time can produce magic; the right thing at the wrong time, discordance; wrong thing at the wrong time, ruin.

All of these elements form part of an overarching mother rhythm and length. Have we spent enough time extracting the juice of the story - exploring implications, feeling emotions, sensing surroundings...?

It is a mistake to think of a film as having one body with one unchanging rhythm. It changes itself and it changes as we change in response. It is constantly adapting itself to serve the story. You cannot think of a film as being in four-four time or six-eight.

This is not pro the metrics of cinema, which are intriguing as tools to map cinema's mechanical evolution, but of limited use in explaining our idiosyncratic thoughts or sensations. Such-and-such a technique can never guarantee such-and-such an effect. We can say that something made us feel in a certain way but there are no universal conclusions to be drawn.

It is for each of us to feel and, in any way we can, explain our individual responses.

It is useful, nevertheless, to be aware of what may have an influence on the viewer. We should try and engage with the musical in film, that which flits between the scientific, the personal and the philosophical

This musical nature will make or break a film in spite, often, of everything else within it.

Forest of the Hanged (Pӑdurea Spânzuraţilor)

2011-11-09T16:58:00.003Z

Forest of the Hanged opens on a dusty road. Hundreds of soldiers are marching. Suddenly one of them turns around and looks at us. Conscience, a challenge. He has turned against the tide and looked us in the eye, humanising in an instant the whole machine of war.

This 1964 Romanian film is an adaptation of a novel written in 1922 by Liviu Rebreanu. The novel was inspired by the fate of the writer's brother Emil, a soldier who was executed during the First World War for attempted desertion from the Austro-Hungarian army

In the story Emil is Apostol Bologa, a sub-lieutenant. We first meet him as he attends the hanging of a deserter; the look in the dying man's eyes as he swings from the noose will come to haunt Apostol, a man who prides himself on his acute sense of duty.

The Austro-Hungarian Army comprises many different nationalities. This means that, across Europe, from Italy to Russia to Romania, men are being asked to fight against their own people. The General is aware of these temptations and complications. Loyalties are tested : friends asked to condemn friends, countrymen to kill countrymen. The man we saw hanged, Svoboda, was a Czech trying to cross to the Czech side. Now Apostol, a Romanian, has been transferred to the Romanian front.

What will Apostol choose, death for betrayal on one hand or moral death on the other?

Eventually, disgusted by the senseless carnage of war and by his part in the fate of his own kind, Apostol takes a stand and refuses to take part in the show trial of twelve Romanian farmers.

In the midst of his turmoil he had found love with a Romanian girl Ilona, the only purity still sparkling in the quagmire. Nonetheless, unable to live with himself, he chooses to die with his soul untouched : he is caught crossing to the Romanian side, an act for which he will pay with his life.

Apostol is taken off in a cart to be hanged. He is taken away smiling. They ride under the trees, from whose leafless branches hang dozens of men like strange fruit. Here is the forest of the hanged:

* * *

Forest of the Hanged, directed by Liviu Ciulei, is an especially evocative film. The characters not only debate their philosophical dilemmas but live them with every fibre of their beings. The world they inhabit is a dirty one in all senses of the word. It is hard to get out of the mud and find your way from darkness to light.

The black and white photography is wonderful and runs deep with rich shades. Two examples : the carriage surrounded by a wall of old shoes in which Apostol's friend Muller has made a home is a fantastical creation. Even in a black and white film it looks golden; the beautiful embraces that Apostol and Ilona share are bathed in a stunningly clear, virginal, light. Images such as these recall those of Andrei Tarkovsky's Ivan's Childhood. Both films place particular emphasis on quality and tone of light.

In the opening scenes of the film the camera seems too near to, or too far from, the action as if trying to get its bearings. Throughout the film it glides (for example into and out of mirrors - symbolic of reflection and introspection) but also turns violently or even swoons...sometimes the director will leave a part of the image deliberately out of focus. What, I think, helps make Forest of the Hanged so involving is that the film has both rawness and elegance to it; visualising our worse and better natures.

We also come to find subtle religious allusions. The film makes an apostle of Emil by calling him Apostol. Furthermore, why, we may ask ourselves, are there twelve Romanian insubordinates?

Apostol, though, is no saint. He values some lives (Romanian), above others. Muller, on the other hand, finds all killing wrong and teases Apostol, who wants to be transferred away from his quandary to Italy, with biting sarcasm : “On the Italian front there are no brothers....only here there are brothers”.

With so much degradation and death around them, and when suffering reduces us to our basic, naked, human characteristics (those we all share), such discrimination on the basis of nationality suddenly seems ludicrous.

The film puts this across in quite brilliant fashion. At one point Apostol is asked to act as interpreter for three Romanian prisoners. All the characters in the film speak in Romanian. However, none of them, apart from Apostol (a Romanian), can understand the Romanian characters. In this way the director underlines the idea that the differences between sides and the reasons for lack of understanding (or indeed for war itself) might as well be imaginary (or at least are intentionally exaggerated). The distinctions between nations are confused and blurred again: Muller is heard musing to himself “Mozart...a great composer”, to which his companion responds: “Ah, one of your Germans”.

With Apostol's fate secured, Ilona comes to bring him his last meal. All dressed in black, she prepares the little table as if it were an altar or a grave. She is honouring and mourning him. They look at each other without saying a word and eat. What caring and dignity...

A soldier stands watch over them. He says that she begged him to let her see Apostol. He gave in. “We are people, aren't we?”, he explains. What beauty...

It is easy to see why Forest of the Hanged is considered one of Romanian Cinema's greatest achievements gained international renown in 1965 when Liviu Ciulei won the best director prize at Cannes.

Words as Visual Storytellers

2011-10-21T13:57:00.005+01:00

One rarely come across discussions of the visual manipulation of words and letters in film. I am not referring here to the symbolism of naming characters or places (to denote personality, role, destiny and so forth) or of the sometimes unorthodox presentation of subtitles and unvoiced emotions (e.g. Night Watch or Crank 2 : High Voltage, Scott Pilgrim)

I am talking about putting words (and their constituent letters) on screen and altering them or presenting them in such a way as to add to, or comment on, the story. There is something in the world inhabited by the character, a world whose fabric, imbued with a new and nascent reality (effected by the character) communicates directly with us. An aside, if you will.

As a start, here are three examples I have mentioned in passing before. The first comes from Superman Returns. Superman is taken to hospital through the transparent doors of an operating theatre called "Trauma 1".

We see the name only from the other side, from which it reads "I AMUART". The film is about how the "father becomes the son" and "the son becomes the father". It is also about the ties of life between God and man and how we are made in his image. All that he is we can be. I AM U ART. I am, you are:

Click to enlarge

In a flash that may pass us by, much is encapsulated (like the inscription over church doors) with inconspicuous ease.

Olivier Assayas, in his film Demonlover, uses the same subtle technique, that of simply flipping a word back to front. The purpose this time is to reveal, to those sharp enough to notice, a hidden truth and an imminent danger. Diane is a conniving woman in a conniving business that thrives on back-stabbing. Repairing to an aeroplane restroom, she prepares to drug a colleague's (a superior) tub of water. She thinks, and we think, that she has the upper hand but as she plunges the syringe into it we see that she is:

Evidently Evian spelt backwards is naive, but flipped over visually the clue isn't at all obvious. A little work is needed to decipher this piece of dramatic irony.

A third example, found in a chase scene in G.I. Joe The Rise of Cobra (full analysis of the scene here), does not alter the word seen on screen but springs it into the frame at the perfect moment.

The scene involves Duke (part of a team of good guys) chasing Ana (and her team of bad guys) as she and her partners in crime attempt to blow up the Eiffel Tower. Duke and Ana used to be together and used to love each other, though we are led to believe that those feelings still linger beneath a new animosity. The chase through the streets of Paris (the city of love) can be seen as a variation on a romantic chase.

Duke gets to Ana just too late, as she already launched a missile at the tower. The missile's load, crucially, works over time, eating away at the metal. It can be stopped by a remote control that Ana wears around her waist.

Ana, fleeing from Duke, boards a craft. Duke leaps onto it and quickly reaches out to press the button strapped to her waist. The physical contact is brusque and Ana's gasp can be read as both one of frustration and gratification.

He reaches to push the button...

Ana gasps.

The word that tells us everything both in terms of the bomb and Duke and Ana's future is on the screen of the remote control in bright red letters. The bomb and she have been :

The same double entendre, I suggest, could not have been done verbally.

The reconciliation is not complete, though, as the Eiffel Tower is already falling and beyond help.

* * *

Now for the transformation of Selina Kyle into Catwoman in Batman Returns. As she undergoes this change she does many outrageous things : gulps down cartons of milk, stabs her soft toys and sets fire to her doll's house.

She does one thing, though, that is a throwaway gesture. On one of her walls she has the words "Hello There" written in neon lights. Sashaying through her apartment she nonchalantly flicks at these letters, smashing two of the bulbs. She doesn't seem aware of what she is doing. We though are shown a long shot from outside the window of a new message she has spelt out that sums up the fieriness of her metamorphosis : "Hell Here".

The next example comes from an episode of the television series Moonlighting called "The Dream Sequence Always Rings Twice". One of the main characters, David, is a self-satisfied sort. In the dream of the title he is a horn player. We see him sitting on a window sill..."I always play my horn with my shirt off, late at night, by an open window next to a flashing neon light, I know I look good that way".

Across from the window is a neon "HOTEL" sign. The camera slowly moves back and then stops. Now, next to this apparent paragon of manliness, with a couple of letters now obscured, is the flashing word : HOT.

One final example, not so much of manipulation but of subtle and amusing visual commentary, comes from Jean-Luc Godard's Une Femme est Une Femme. A young woman, Angela (played by Anna Karina), is waiting on the street at night. Before we see her, we are shown a large neon sign affixed to a building which we presume houses a beauty shop. The sign is in the shape of an arrow pointing down. On it is the word "Beaute".

We pan down the arrow...

...which points almost straight down at Angela:

Melancholia - Lars Von Trier

2011-10-10T17:53:00.003+01:00

Contains spoilers

Justine suffers from depression. She is detached. She is sad. She is mournful. She feels things both deeper and not at all. She is a foreign body weighed down by the world. Her emptiness has such mass, this black bile.

At first things simply happen to her: a wedding she cannot delight in, a job that follows her all the way to the reception. As the night draws in she withdraws from the festivities and, through apathetic bitterness, takes control. Her active disinterest makes her husband see that their marriage is already null ("What did you expect?"). She erupts in a vicious parting shot at her selfish boss. She doesn't want the rituals, the constraints of position. She doesn't want the company. These are the death throes of social niceties. This is the casting off of artifice.

The next day, with the reception over, she falls deeper into depression, unable to eat or wash or even get out of bed. She seems defeated.

As night turns to day and as our focus moves from the disastrous wedding to the threat of looming planetary catastrophe, Justine moves (slowly, as if across the night sky) from mourning...to acceptance...to complicity.

Somehow knowing her fate, she succumbs to it. Nay, welcomes it. Her and it are magnetised and in unison. Melancholia has destroyed her life and now it will end it. She, suffering for too long, believes that the world is "evil" and that "no-one will miss it". Before Justine's depression appeared like mourning. Now she stands in a sublime and calm detachment. There is nothing to lose.

Her sister Claire, meanwhile, seeing the end coming, trembles from her very soul. The film's power comes from these two opposing forces - halting panic and the dark eye of peacefulness.

* * *

It is wrenching to see Justine suffer. It is painful to see her tangled in the grey roots of melancholy and to see Claire's passionate love for her sister disguised in passionate loathing : "sometimes I hate you so much". Cynicism and nothingness show the opposite. It is amusing and triumphant to hear her scorn her sister's tasteful plans to celebrate annihilation with a glass of wine on the patio ("I think it's a piece of shit").

And it is overwhelming, all of it. Moving, battering and crushing. Wagner's Tristan and Isolde prelude (the only non-diegetic music in the film) swells aloofly, comforting, teasing, epic, romantic and tender. It is played in its entirety to begin the film and from then on dipped into; parts are introduced, played and replayed, the canvas repainted with an echo of those first images.

The key to a brilliant film can often be the spectacle of something strange, new and extraordinary witnessed by characters whose every movement, decision, and every uttered syllable makes perfect sense. Even though no reason is given for Justine's state of mind, we understand. It all becomes terribly clear.

Top: Melancholia, Albrecht Durer

Above : Melancholy, Paul Gauguin

Toy Story 3

2011-09-22T11:37:00.004+01:00

Saying how you think a film could be improved isn't arrogant or disrespectful. People are more comfortable with 'it's too sentimental' or 'it's too long' than 'it should be less sentimental' and 'I would make it shorter'. If you have judgement then you should be constructive and offer an alternative vision.

The basic story of Toy Story 3 - a child grows up and goes to university; what will happen to his toys? - is a good one. There are a number of things you can do with this premise.

Toy Story 3 takes the first step towards something interesting and enriching just as the first step of Up, the home lifted from the ground by a cloud of balloons, offered so much promise. Would we see challenging things for children, new things, truly breathless things? No. We see not much more than shortcuts to the surface of emotion, to a sadness and a reflection that dries out as quickly as the tears.

Firstly, I think that it's a shame that neither Andy nor Bonnie, to whom he gives his toys at the end, ever discover that the toys are alive. How would they treat them? How would the toys act? Given that the toys are meant to be representations of people or at least types of people, then the revelation that they are alive would open up a raft of possibilities. Could they ever be disposed of or left lying around? What of their individualism, seeing as there are, for example, "100 million just like" Barbie? If Andy knew about the toys the story would become one about the responsibilities that come with being an adult. It wouldn't be just about moving on or leaving childish things behind. The themes we are given are rigged. We know he won't take his toys to university.

A third film should give creators some leeway to try new variations once the basis of the story has been established - to improvise on the foundational chords of the first two. Trilogies tend to either return to a starting point, with new light shed upon an old order, or opened to a new future and a new order.

Each Toy Story film is essentially the same as the last – the toys are separated from Andy. Toy Story 3 ends differently but with the beginning of the same story : Andy is reincarnated as Bonnie. “To infinity and beyond”, toys never die. Will these miniature Peter Pans really go through these upheavals of death and renewal for eternity? They never really grow up.

Interesting avenues again briefly appear...

Dragged towards a hellish furnace on a pile of trash, the toys look to their erstwhile enemy Lotso to help them. He climbs to the button, saying he wants to stop the machinery, and then runs away leaving them to their fate with the words : "Where's your kid now, Sheriff?"

It sounds like 'Where's your God now?'

Earlier Lotso, "the evil bear who smells of strawberries", shouted : "Think you're special? You're a piece of plastic, you were made to be thrown away".

What if he had said 'You're flesh and blood, you were made to die'?

These troubling ideas (too troubling for children if laid out in the open quite so clearly) and incidents end up going nowhere as the film returns to the antiseptic world (no insects, or dust) of being played with. Their minds are not opened by danger, by exposure to new ways of living, or by the bonds they make with each other. All the toys want is to be part of someone else's story, such as the opening chase over a crumbling railway bridge. They are happiest when floppy and submissive. Mrs Potato Head “deserve[s] respect”, she says, because she has “over 30 accessories” and not because she is a living thing independent of her owner. The toys do not mature. They don't even look scratched or beaten up with age (which would help put across how time makes them obsolete). I suppose, as a throwaway joke, it is funny to hear a toy say that it improvises its role, but it is also sad. They wear the same expression as they are flung about, made and forced to smile. And they like it.

Toy Story 3's 'darkness' (Lotso's prison camps, destruction by fire) is nihilistic. Critics have said it is an allegory for Communism or Socialism or even the Holocaust. Does it make the film more worthwhile if you can constipate out a link between its simple story of bullying, control and violence to something else more 'adult' or 'intellectual' or politically significant? There are no specifics in the film that justify these parallels, let alone illuminate the story through them.

Nothing comes of the darkness. It is only there to scare and terrify kids. It is a black hole. It isn't mitigated by imagination or transfigured by the good of the characters or of the world.*

* * *

What would have been interesting in a story about people growing up is if, just as Andy realises that he can live without his mother, the toys realise that they can live without Andy (or any humans at all for that matter). What if he had gone to his box of toys at the end and they weren't there? What if they had taken the same step into adulthood?

I understand that they are toys with a toy outlook (and it is admirable that they are a little more than stand-ins for people) but, when so human in other respects (and we are invited to empathise with them), their actions seem eternally childlike, their existence depressing and their minds stuck on original factory setting. If they are to stay on this smiley treadmill, the film would need to be changed quite significantly to properly grasp at all this would or could entail.

It is charming that Chuckles the toy clown has a tag from her owner that reads “My heart belongs to Daisy” but it appears that it actually does. The toys cannot just be. They are unable to form a proper family together, one that gives them meaning and security, not without the benevolent Parent / Guardian / Owner / Friend / Companion / God above. All this is a little abstract for young children. There is nothing that they can relate to, from the toys point of view, as they grow up.

This would work better if the toys were more literally 'given life' by their owners. It would work better if a good owner had good toys and a bad one bad toys (touching on nature / nurture) but bully Sid in Toy Story's nightmarish toys turn out to be perfectly friendly. The fact that the toys are more than what they were made to be makes it even more disappointing that the protagonist toys are not allowed to make a break of their own into the adult world.

Although the toys are saddened that Andy may not want them any more, they are never angry at him. Their loyalty is almost perfect. They wish for the joy, enlightenment and fulfilment that comes from being played with. They never truly turn against him.

It reminds me of Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ. Jesus has profound doubts about whether he is the son of God and about what God may want from him. He rails at God but never, not once, doubts that he exists. It is those hard yards, much like the ones avoided in Toy Story 3 (turning against Andy or Andy realising that they are alive), that would have made the narrative stronger and deeper. Where is that lack of faith and certainty that one would expect? Will they reject their Gods for a life of self-made fresh-grown morality? The little green aliens end up controlling the claw that they worship but can't make anything of this discovery of the mechanics of the world.

* * *

In Up the antagonist Muntz fell to his death from a Zeppelin. In Wall E human beings were polluting, obese babies. In Cars the fundamentals of the human character were depicted in the automobiles – farting. Toy Story 3 continues the trend of mean-spiritedness. For a second or two it looked as if Lotso was going to help the toys and turn over a new leaf. Instead, despite being told that his former owner replaced him (the start of his bitterness) precisely because she loved him and missed him, and despite being saved by Woody from the trash compactor the film would not let him be good. Evil cannot be transformed. In fact irredeemable Evil exists, children, and deserves to be tied to the front of a truck for flies to splatter into him for the rest of his life (which is neverending, don't forget). Stuff the stuffed bully.

Why? What if Andy had taken Lotso to College? It's a thought.

What I did enjoy, in Toy Story 3, how children like Bonnie are seen as givers of meaning, as nurturing, as magical (the way she strokes Jessie's cheek when she receives her). It is a shame that that goodliness was not extended to everyone or everything. A film doesn't need a message or a moral (and, yes, destruction can be fun) but does it need a negative one? Defeating evil is one thing, but revelling in your victory with schadenfreude is quite another. Who knows what the film-makers meant but this element of the story leaves a sour taste.

I enjoyed how Mrs Potato Head could leave her eye somewhere else and still see through it remotely. I enjoyed how Mr Potato Head could stay alive, his mind and soul somehow intact, with his eyes ears and mouth embedded in a tortilla. The latter is perhaps the only flash of imagination, of something that makes you giggle or sends shivers down the spine.

I have always thought that Pixar's films, and many of the new breed of animated films, are schizophrenic. Half the film is aimed over children's heads at the adults who they know are accompanying them. The other half is the simplest and most banal 'kids' stuff' whose progression can be guessed after five minutes. At times, parents and their children are watching two separate films. What is wrong with a children's film for children? Why do we need any innuendo, or meaningless pop cultural shout-outs, or tedious and strange riffs on Ken's 'girliness'? Something can be wholesome without being safe.

A good story for children is a good story for anyone : Aesop, Roald Dahl, Kipling, C.S.Lewis...I think of animated films like the Danish animation Valhalla or America's own Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs or anything from Studio Ghibli. They are fun and clever, excting and enthralling for children and adults on the same level.

Toy Story 3 isn't fun or funny. I think that the gags are too obvious. What is most disappointing is how predictable it is. Once a ball is set rolling down a hill, you can never predict exactly where it will go. But Pixar can. Once the story starts it is only ever going in one direction...

*In a way the hands of the film-makers' are tied, as they cannot fully follow through on all the implications of life and death that occur to us because we are in a children's film. We are just left with unnecessary dread.

A Fearful America : Heroes and The Village

2011-09-03T19:12:00.003+01:00

After years of doubt and struggle Claire Bennett, with television cameras following her into the night sky, climbs to the top of a Ferris wheel. At this moment our eyes, the eyes of the world, are fixed on one young woman. She isn't hiding herself away any longer, nor any part of what makes her her and what makes her different. Is it desperation or is it hope? What does she mean by "people never change"? Does she think that she (and other 'specials' like her) can live in the open as part of a harmonious society?

Standing on top of the wheel as if on top of the world, she spreads out her arms and jumps. She hasn't given up on us. She has taken a giant leap for mankind.

Will they, will we, welcome her? And so Heroes ends on a note of ferocious optimism.

M Night Shyamalan's The Village tells of a place isolated from the world, set back from modern civilisation. Its elders were caused great pain and grief by society. Their hearts were blackened by the "towns". Out of fear they built the village to "protect innocence" and to shield the young from suffering. In an effort to keep them safe, they tell their children stories of creatures, monsters lurking in the woods that separate their homes from the towns.

One day one of the younger villagers, Lucius, falls ill and Ivy, who is to be his wife, fearlessly travels through the woods to the towns to get medicine. She is blind. Beyond the boundary of the village and beyond the woods, she meets a man from the towns. She is shocked to find "kindness" in his voice. "I did not expect that," she says.

She arrives at Lucius' bedside with the medicine. Has she brought hope back with her from this encounter? Can she conquer the fear of those who have only pessimism and mourning to comfort them? Will she lead them out to a communion with the world?

In both stories an older generation has control over how a younger generation experiences the world. They keep them from dangers real and perceived and jealously guard the secrets that maintain illusions. These tales concern responsibility and power - the power of special abilities, the power of being a parent and the responsibilities inherent. The Village and Heroes show how genuine concern allied to power and opportunity can lead to a possessiveness as damaging (in Heroes children were even experimented on, given injections of a formula meant to give powers - for example Company co-founder Angela Petrelli to her son Nathan) as that which they seek to protect their charges from.

They keep them fragile, using fear, perpetuating fear.

Earth-mover Samuel, the embittered visionary of Heroes' Season 4, gathers 'specials' in a travelling circus where they can hide in plain sight. He talks of founding a "homeland". He has created an America within America, one like the one it is, or was, meant to be. Tent-poles and archways are decorated with American flags. His brood of misfits, of foreigners, of aliens recalls the nations who first came to form the America we know now.

Edward Walker, founder and chief elder of The Village's community, has also forged an America within America and set it in the late 19th Century (1897 is written on the headstone of a newly buried villager) whose values and behaviours, we infer, he believes offers a healthier template for living.

They have both retreated in and from fear and harsh reality to comfort and to a narrative - of gifted circus performers and of villagers in a benign and gay 19th Century that may never have existed.

However, whereas Edward and the men and women who have collaborated in his project want to completely remove themselves, Samuel plans to eventually burst out of the womb and to confront, defeat and ultimately use fear against the world entire rather than benumb his little nation with illusory comfort. He wants to show the world his powers and, by revealing what he and they can do, force acceptance, and the opportunity for life, liberty and the fruits of labour, through fear.

Two Ways of Facing Fear - Edward Walker and Samuel

Claire is different. She exposes herself and her kind, in those last moments of the series, not through a threat but a prostration (landing face first). Her stare into the camera, and into the homes of potentially millions of Americans, is part challenge, yes, but part hesitant reaching out.

How real is the danger that causes these characters to fear and to act in these ways? If fear can ever be fully rationalised, what are at its beginnings?

The elders of The Village reacted to real acts of violence, mostly murder, that affected their families. A TV screen appears near the end of the film that tells of a girl's body being found and soldiers lost in Afghanistan. This is not a representation of the world, from the Director's or our point of view, that is skewed to the negative. This is what the world is like. What is key is that the villagers are the usually unseen victims of the stories we watch. They try to withdraw to the fiction with which all we see of distant and unknown people is glazed.

The fear they teach to the younger members of their community is all-encompassing (creatures, people) and no less real to them for being half-based in fiction. Perhaps it is apt that where make-believe stands in for fact (or grows from it - the elders talk of rumours of creatures that were the basis for the full-grown horrors they visit on the young), Lucius will conclude a plea to go into the woods with "The End". This could be their route to salvation, too, as the mind of a young person is moulds and is receptive to the magical and transformative nature of fantasy.

The people of Heroes face the threat of murderous collector of abilities Sylar. In Season 3 the threat is wider, as they are hunted and rounded up (tied up, orange jumpsuits, no charge, flown abroad - all echoes of Guantanamo Bay) by the Government. Noah, Claire's father, knows about the cruel and brutal experimentation undertaken on Elle (who can create electricity) by her own father. The 'specials' and their families know too of potential or embryonic futures witnessed and reported by time travellers Peter and Hiro. These futures involve being driven underground (by what levels of society we are not sure), war and quasi-apocalyptic destruction. However, how a normal person in a position to shun or embrace, would react to a 'special' in their midst is largely unknown. The heroes will occasionally show an individual what they can do, when it is absolutely necessary, and the thrill of showing off and of danger that they seem to take from it can be extrapolated to the ecstasy and dread exposure they may feel if their secrets were blown onto the wind once and for all.

The authorities in Heroes are fearful too. Wary of those who are different, especially given Sylar's initial killing spree, they seek to hide them away in prisons or, in a possible future, cure them with injections. These authorities are led (The Company, Pinehearst), or encouraged into action (the Government in Season 3), by 'specials' themselves out of fear of harming or being harmed. Power and, one could say, a healthy dose of self-loathing (more on this anon) would lead these institutions to become more and more destructive.

Those working for the Government, made aware of 'dangerous' specials by another of their 'kind', Nathan Petrelli, manipulate them as patsies, as false-flags to rally support for more stringent actions against what they would begin to paint to their superiors as a group of terrorists. Matt Parkman (who can read minds) is drugged and sent out into Washington with a bomb strapped to him. The chains of imprisoned Tracy Strauss, who is able to freeze objects, are loosened so that she will escape and cause untold (and convenient) damage before being apprehended again.

In The Village Ivy, as she is about to journey to the towns, is made aware that the creatures are only men in costume. When she is subsequently stalked by Noah (a simpleton apparently driven to insanity by his knowledge of the "farce") now dressed as the monster, her testimony give the elders a chance to perpetuate the myth and to bolster the boundaries of the village.

These are the tactics that some in America and beyond have suspected their governments guilty of - exaggeration, opportunism and borderline falsity - using consciously or unconsciously to gain backing against terror through terror. That of course is the whole set-up of the village - a fake ring of danger used against a larger danger beyond. Again, fiction built on fact and used to embellish and strengthen it.

Excuses and Fear used against Fear:

Matt Parkman primed to explode (above)

and

Noah dressed as a Creature

Sometimes those in power are the terrorists themselves. Linderman in Heroes advocates the use of a nuclear explosion in New York City to bring people together (and to achieve other desired results) : "a united sense of hope couched in a united sense of fear".

Fear coming from actual experience can grow larger upon closer scrutiny (dwelling in grief and hate) like the shadow of a menacing shape lit closer and closer. It is fuelled by ignorance, by a lack of confidence and by pessimism.

Perhaps one can reduce it all to age or to the battle between optimism and pessimism. The older generation of Heroes and The Village have, respectively, gone off the straight path and given up on it. They are set in their ways. They are afraid to live. They cannot imagine a life different to their own. Their fear is ossified. The elders tell the children to eradicate the colour red from the village as it attracts the creatures ("those we don't speak of" - a classic occupatio technique). Red is blood. Pain attracts more pain and fear multiplies exponentially.

It is no surprise that those who are immortal or capable of healing in Heroes, such as Adam Monroe, who has seen so much suffering, so many lives come and go. the same chronic illness afflicting mankind, that their pessimism transmogrifies into desperation and misanthropy on a terrifying scale. Adam wants to wipe out humanity with a virus and Linderman, as has been discussed, wants to wipe the slate for a new world order. Only a cataclysm will do. Claire too, herself (according to Sylar) undying, flirts with militancy and rage in her darkest hours (at one point she stands in front of an oncoming express train having pondered whether she is "even human").

And hope? Can they truly achieve freedom and tolerance?

The natural curiosity and will to be independent of youth are bedfellows of hope. They want to dig up secrets and to test limits and it is this lust for discovery and truth, for finding out who they are, that is the motor for both narratives. It will look to shatter the skeleton of fear once and for all.

As has been discussed, fear offers children a thrill. The boys in The Village stand with their backs to the dark woods and see how long they can go before becoming too scared. The young here can achieve baby-step victories over fear, dipping their toes in the water. Only Ivy and Claire will eventually dive in, no longer fearful of drowning.

The younger they are the more optimistic they seem. Candace, in Heroes, is a woman who can make you see what she wants you to. We are led to believe that she is a fat woman who was most probably bullied and abused. She appears to us and the other characters as thin and pretty. Candace talks to Micah, a young boy, about the planned nuclear explosion will "heal the world". Micah replies defiantly: "I didn't know it was sick". In The Village Ivy, blind, says "I see the world, just not as you do".

If you are at peace with yourself, your circumstances and your abilities then you view the world bathed in a forgiving light. This is because the world isn't Us vs Them or the U(nited) S(tates) vs Them, whether them is other races or nations or beliefs or physical attributes. Us is them. Heroes is firmly rooted in this idea. Those who are normally 'them', the odd, the 'specials', are our protagonists, our eyes and ears. They are our heroes.

So, for these people hidden away physically or hidden away within themselves, is the world good or is it bad? That is the pivot upon which their actions swing. Can fear be conquered?

In other words, is it a world worth taking a chance on?

If I, Claire, am good and hopeful then the world can be too. If I, Ivy, have trust and love, then the world will move for that love. There are many obstacles for those haunted by loss and those onto whom grudges and insecurities are passed. But life cannot be retreated from. That society you run from will grow around you from under your feet. Out of fear came hope. In The Village a bloodied knife in Lucius' chest forced courage to the fore. In Heroes when her mother burnt the house down Claire needed to be able to heal, she did. When Becky, hunted by The Company, hid under the bed and didn't want to be found, she turned invisible. When Daphne was struck down by cerebral palsy she was given the gift to run. And faster than the wind.

Shameful Criticism

2011-08-26T16:18:00.008+01:00

There is a mean streak in film criticism or, more specifically, film reviews. It isn't enough for some people to say that a film is bad or unsuccessful. Some reviewers are negative with a force that seems personal. They hurl insults that are over the top and insinuations that are baseless.

Reading certain reviews it would be hard to believe that a bad film is not an attack on someone's God-given right to honest-to-goodness entertainment. They are paid to watch films and, when presented with a poor film, act like a spoilt child whose lollipop turned out to be bitter, not sweet.

Every release provides an opportunity for these critics to bend their basest instincts into vitriol. At the merest encouragement a review of a film can turn into a writer's showcase, the more creative and insulting the description of the failure, the more heroic the reviewer. It's a see-saw : the film goes down, the critic goes up. A few may even feel rigged, exaggerated, in bad faith.

There's nothing wrong with saying a film is bad. You cannot prove somebody wrong in their opinion. What we want is sober, erudite and constructive appreciation. So much of what we have (in the mainstream, linked to on sites like rottentomatoes) even sometimes from the more lauded, is an eloquently embroidered "it sucks!". Even the best, most level-headed, critics can indulge in snarky puns on the film's title. The problem is in approach and attitude.

And it is spreading...

"Marshall deserves credit for putting the "show" back into the Pirates business. But, let's face it, he's polishing a giant turd"

"[Sucker Punch] proves that while masturbating over your cast may not make you blind, it can impair directorial vision."

"...a film that unspools as a limp, cynical attempt to replicate the nuance-rich tapestry of her 2003 gem Lost in Translation..."

"Yes, Sofia has unfairly had to live with the embarrassment of being blamed for the failure of The Godfather Part 3, but it wasn’t just her fault. The entire movie and casting were terrible. As payback for that crippling humiliation, Francis Coppola has given his daughter a career as a writer-director."

"I simply hated The Last Airbender and I know I'm not alone in this. This is one of those times where hate may not be a sharp enough word for such wasted potential. In the right hands, this could have been something special. Instead, it was in Shyamalan's hands, and if this film is any indication, he didn't wash them after using the restroom."

Jean-Luc Godard - Women in Close Up 1959-2010

2011-08-15T14:10:00.000+01:00

If a film-maker has a singular voice, each frame will be as good as a signature and each image like a self-portrait.

Some believe that the Leonardo Da Vinci's Mona Lisa is a self-portrait. In that spirit here is a portrait of Jean-Luc Godard (and his films) via the faces of his actresses - from Charlotte et Veronique in 1959 to Film Socialisme in 2010.

Music: Rachmaninov prelude op.23 no.5, played by Sergei Prokofiev

WWE: World Wrestling Entertainment

2011-07-15T14:17:00.073+01:00

There has perhaps been no more consistently inventive or enjoyable television in the past 15 years than World Wrestling Entertainment’s flagship shows Raw and Smackdown.

In what other programme would an Olympic gold medallist spray milk at his opponents out of a fire hose and another week perform a 'moonsault' from 15 feet off the ground? In what other show would the millionaire owner and his family participate as fearless fighters and offer themselves up as the chief villains of the piece? In what other show would you find the most childish of behaviour and the most brutal of beatdowns?

It is funny, clever and exciting. Most importantly it is ridiculous.

Professional wrestling is one hell of an odd bird. If a limousine is dropped from a crane, we could call it Action. If two enemies mock each other, Comedy. If a daughter slaps a mother, we call it Soap Opera. It is more often than not lazy and imprecise to diagnose genres, especially if the art in question isn't trying to follow or break conventions. The WWE isn’t a mishmash of types. It reminds you of other and varied things (Saturday Night Live, Dallas, anything and everything) but it is its own thing. There really is nothing like it.

North American professional wrestling (as opposed to Japanese professional wrestling, which goes without storyline set-ups, albeit retaining character styles and types) is fundamentally about so-called feuds, compelling confrontations over honour or ego or title belts. These rivalries are the bread-and-butter of the WWE (the finest of all wrestling organisations) and even extend to the snide banter between commentators who will sometimes side with particular competitors. For feuds, the build-up is as important as the fight that takes place in the ring. These are the speeches (promos), the challenges, the interviews, the backstage sketches that create personality and motivation. Resentment, rage, disdain, negative chemistry. Hype.

The WWE avails itself of many different tones and colours; types of humour, of character, of plot or of match.

There are hard-hitting brawls with very little complication or variation of 'moves'. Then there are intricate tussles that involve speed, holds, a repertoire of moves and counter-moves that are amateur wrestling (in which a few wrestlers have a grounding) sprinkled with gold-dust.

The first kind are more 'fights', so to speak, and can degenerate into ultra-violent encounters (often sanctioned as 'no disqualification' matches) involving sledgehammers and steel chairs, ludicrous considering this is meant to be a real organisation with real rules. In these matches intelligence is used to be sly or underhand or vicious. The second kind is often known as 'technical' and intelligence here is knowing how to get the upper hand with a flick of a wrist, the flip of a body or a perfectly applied submission hold. These are more 'believable' as true battles for supremacy.

There are spectacular moments in the ring too - leaps off the top rope, a ladder, or onto the perennially cursed, and crushed, Spanish Announce Table. A good mixture of these in-ring ingredients, as with those outside, makes for a satisfying two-hour programme.

The WWE doesn't want for creativity or fantasy. The Undertaker has made a habit of 'dying' and then rising again and Mick Foley played three characters (Mankind, Cactus Jack and Dude Love). Once two of them discussed whether the third, Cactus, should emerge from the shared psyche. In the past couple of years the dashing and narcissistic Cody Rhodes has suffered a broken nose and, believing himself hideous, shuns the camera's gaze. Elsewhere CM Punk has led a Straight-Edge Society to save people from the dangers of drink and drugs. The entire roster has recently been menaced too by the Nexus, a group of rookie wrestlers who announced their wish to rule the WWE by dismantling the ring and anyone who would stand against them ("You're either Nexus or against us").

A few years ago the WWE began to take the edge of its violence (no blood), profanity and provocation. Thankfully the dirty side (going as far as necrophilia and hanging in their two darkest hours) has been washed away with a new commitment to a PG certificate. Intensity of combat and pushing the envelope artistically need not entail cussing, sex and gore. Going specifically after a younger fanbase should eventually help creatively as well as financially; restrictions are the mother of invention.

There are many elements that need to convince and work in harmony to put across such wild concepts as WWE offers. The person striking or speaking needs his opponent to 'sell' surprise or anger towards words or appropriate physical discomfort towards blows, just like in any drama or fiction on television. You won't look good unless the person you are fighting wants you to. The commentary team must do justice to the larger-than-life goings on, to imprint them in our minds as incredible ("Oh my GAWD!") and credible ('he's focusing on the injured right knee'). The live crowd, in fact, plays the biggest part of all with cheers, boos, signs, shock and the accumulated energy they bring to the arena. If we see people excited then we will be too.

The crowd is both audience and performer (unscripted, even if they know their role) for the second audience sitting at home.

The men and women who perform in the WWE are athletes, actors, choreographers and creators of personas with distinct backgrounds, ideologies, catchphrases and gimmicks. Professional wrestling in its mainstream American guise is the craft of an all-round entertainer. It is the craft of an athlete training and preparing not for competition with others but, with the same dedication, preparing to meet the demands of themselves, their audience and their art.

No matter how much you work to minimise injury, the almost daily trans-American schedule is punishing on the body and the mind. This toll has been blamed in some parts for a couple of high profile tragedies that have befallen wrestlers in the past decade. It takes courage. Things can go wrong. Fake or not, the human body remains flesh and bone.

Some of the performers are best in the ring. Some are better at talking. Some are better at telling a story non-verbally, of nuancing a physical and emotional dynamic in the ring. Some shine at being mean, some at being heroic. The trait that most characters share is arrogance. They think they deserve a shot at success, they think they're the smartest, the coolest. the most righteous.

A number of these personas cleave closely to the person at their heart. Several of the storylines of corporate machinations or of love or of poisonous grudges originate in the real. The actual purchase of WCW by WWE owner Vince McMahon was dramatised and spun, with his son Shane buying it from under him out of spite. Conversely, stories can bleed off-screen and outside the fictional sphere. Triple H and Stephanie McMahon were married in the show and then subsequently fell in love and wed in real life (they are still married in the show too). In the past few months CM Punk, rumoured to be annoyed at how he was being treated by management and dissatisfied with the direction the company was taking, was allowed the freedom to give an in-story speech bemoaning the self-same things.

When you buy a Rey Mysterio or Stone Cold Steve Austin toy, you are buying a character and a real person all at once. When you buy a toy Thor, you aren't in the same way purchasing Chris Hemsworth along with a Norse God.

Indeed, performers have been known to get caught up in their personas to the extent that they are reluctant to, or downright refuse to, relinquish a title (let's not forget that success in the story is success and money for the 'actor'). How far an artistic persona represents the artist him or herself is a debate that causes much consternation and confusion. The line that separates the two is one that we sense and understand instinctively, taking into account the conventions of each genre.

There is a sliding scale. In some arts the two overlap more than others , at least according to unwritten rules. An actor is not attacked for his character's deeds. The ideas and viewpoints represented in a book may or may not be espoused by the writer unmediated. In music we feel that the persona is more transparent. Do rappers speak as themselves or are their lyrics filtered through a character? In the last case a defence of violent proclamations seems, rightly or wrongly, harder to make.

Professional wrestling plays with the balance and understanding of real/fiction and the WWE does this more brilliantly than any other television. As a matter of fact it exposes the extent to which real and fiction in these arenas and elsewhere are in opposition at all. If there is an accidental or a fleetingly purposeful revelation of that which cannot be fully understood or explained within the story-frame (known as Kayfabe) an audience educated in switching between viewership registers will easily put it to one side. Those who are curious about the world is put together or negotiated would consider behind-the-scenes and on-stage as forging a newer, stronger and more vital 'reality'.

This isn't like Moonlighting or The Simpsons (or Shakespeare's soliloquys, or the Marx Brothers) where characters break the fourth wall. The WWE is constantly giving and taking from the audience , seeing what absurdity it can get away with, adjusting plots as they are unfolding, skirting the myriad lines between too much and not enough.

The WWE shows how quickly we can put ourselves in a different place mentally - how very little square footage is needed to suspend disbelief. We can get involved with something that has only the surface of truth. That is all we need : a mask of pain, an expression of delight, the thud of the canvas. If it looks right, who can say it isn't?

Having said all that, constantly making oneself aware of the irreality of the contests does not make for greater enjoyment of the contests and tales at the core. It isn't clever to know that something fictional is fictional. Though it is interesting to dissect its creation (for essays such as this, for example) I doubt it does anybody any favours to constantly alienate oneself from the story in this way. You have to, or at least I have to, get 'into it'.

* * *

In some circles Professional wrestling has been given 'legitimacy'. Roland Barthes and others compare it to ancient Greek theatre. Others say it is like a live-action cartoon. These essays can sometimes smack of cowardice. The writers clearly enjoy wrestling but can only laud it indirectly through more established and respected forms. Wrestling should not seek such dubious cachet.

Wrestling is still being attacked. They say "it's not real" or "it's a farce". The fact these criticisms exist shows that the world created by the WWE is more realistic and its artifice therefore more disquieting than other programmes or plays. Regardless, that no-one is actually trying to cause brain damage is a strange criticism.

Even in a fresher and younger incarnation the WWE has a grungy energy to it. It is slick, yes, but not antiseptic or anodyne. Other wrestling promotions are comparatively amateurish in terms of acting or camerawork even if they may occasionally surpass the WWE in wrestling quality (the lowlier organisations are called 'Indies', a bit like independent studios against WWE's Hollywood machine). The sets are impressive. Wrestlers enter to fireworks, a wall of big screens flashing out their entrance videos, speakers roaring with their theme tunes. John Morrison (the goofy and gymnastic 'rock star') comes out in slow motion while Mexican jumping bean (the Mexican 'luchador' style of wrestling is high-flying and acrobatic) Sin Cara fights in a dimmed mysterious blue light.

The WWE leads the field with their video packages. Montages are used to summarise a feud or a story and whet the appetite for the coming final showdowns on Pay-Per-View. These two/three minute trailers are superbly edited and rarely fail to make the so-so epic. With the quality of film trailers in decline the employees of the WWE are simply the best in the business:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ceWfiotkGc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sod3MoDj_Zs

The company structures its product along the lines of genuine sports. It has a hierarchy of belts and titles. There are marquee events like the majors of golf or tennis Grand Slams (such as Wrestlemania, Summerslam, Survivor Series). The way the calendar is arranged to peak at PPVs gives a satisfying rhythm of ups and downs.

For all its spangly ostentation and insolence, Professional Wrestling can actually make boxing (from which it takes a few of its modes of confrontation) or mixed martial arts look silly. Why? Because something that is surreal or unreal can digest a lot of hype. Hype in real fights, with people going out to hurt each other, is laughable and disturbing. They try to make the real into a film. Are all boxers deluded egomaniacs? They don't really want to decapitate others or eat their children. Yet they still act up to an image. Or just act up.

Because outcomes are pre-determined the WWE is not sport. It is true sport in another sense - play and trickery. They make harmless fun out of the spectacle of harm. The WWE is great entertainment : rib-tickling and rib-cracking. It is fantastic fun.

Letting Objects Tell the Story : Robert Bresson

2011-07-04T15:54:00.007+01:00

Instead of showing what has happened to the person we can be told the same through the objects that they are, or were, in contact with.

I am not referring here to the metaphorical or symbolic aspects of these moments but the simple 'What has happened?' and 'What is happening?' that they answer.

Robert Bresson may be the finest at communicating in this way. He accentuates, paradoxically, the physical presence and the soul by not showing it - and he does so with brevity and with power. Here are two examples taken from L'Argent and Une Femme Douce (first thirty seconds of the clip) :

They are different. The first is a product of what we already can hear and expect. A hand is raised but we do not see it strike. Instead the cup shows the force. The woman then carries her pain (the cup and coffee are now a representation of and vessel for it) away with her. The second is the purest of this technique; it uses objects to reveal or take us down a path towards understanding.

Another well known example, of the first kind, is in Fritz Lang's M. Elsie's treasured ball is seen rolling alone on a patch of grass. This is the most elegant of a representation of loss that has become hackneyed - balloons floating free, a slipper left on the road...

Humanity Through Excess

2011-06-10T10:47:00.002+01:00

Elizabeth Berkley in Showgirls

A group of films in the last couple of decades have highlighted the perturbing underbelly of entertainment businesses through super-saturating and adrenalising their most loved qualities.

They offer a more concentrated version of our dreams, fantasies and desires. They place them under a microscope and, by doing so, push them gently to absurdity. They show us potential presents and plausible futures where what is now deemed excess will be the accepted norm.

Showgirls (Paul Verhoeven 1995), Demonlover (Olivier Assayas 2002) and Gamer (Mark Neveldine, Brian Taylor 2009) take what we want from unrestrained entertainment (power, unlimited possibility, freedom for expression and exploration) shake it up and hand it back to us fizzing.

It is critical that what we are shown remains recognisable and believable for the exaggeration to work. If they do, they can sicken us as they thrill us. It is a fine line to tread, here finely trodden. We could compare them to the similarly brash They Live (John Carpenter), whose vision of a world under complete government control is too far removed and too jokey (purposely I’m sure) to make us stop and think.

The three films in question are, in different ways, about the commodification of people. They are about the image becoming untethered from its origin – the real. They are about a chosen profession (striptease vaudeville), a particular field (animated pornography) and a certain trend (video games becoming more ‘realistic’ and immersive) in which people give themselves to, or are lost within, an amoral web. We find that people are no less disposable or controllable than icons and avatars; exploiting, being exploited and allowing oneself to be exploited.

There is a sliding scale of agency for the human protagonists that moves from control to complicity, acquiescence and, finally, enslavement. Backstage politics and back-stabbing in Showgirls; power over pornography rights and over others in Demonlover; a struggle to keep one’s body and soul from the puppet hands of a grand game player/designer in Gamer. These are the battles that allow a climb or a fall.

These films say that the virtual or the escapist can change our attitude to the real. Everything is a representation of something else; an echo on a new plane. The image can replace the real. The problem with increased game realism is not that it will appear like real life but that real life will seem just like the game. These films play on the two meanings of the word “object” – something that is acted upon (1) can become a mere thing (2).

Only in Gamer does the main character gain leverage and is able and willing to extricate themselves from the milieu. Tillman is able to turn off the network that allows his brain to be at someone else’s fingerprints (for the purposes of a deadly video game with real live people controlled) and free the world.

In Showgirls Nomi witnesses bitchiness, selfishness, inhumanity and rape on the Las Vegas strip (expose yourself to get a place on the strip) yet, despite seeking revenge for the last, stays in the feverishly glamorous and seedy world. For her the exterior image is what matters : on the billboards, pumped pink and shiny through neon tube veins. Once she has conquered Vegas as the star of the show "Goddess", she emerges from her chrysalis to take the road to even greater stardom. The final image of a road sign directing her to Hollywood is an awfully dispiriting one, a kick in the guts to "A Star is Born" cliches.

In Demonlover Diane, no longer an executive playing with chips, becomes the slave to a teenage gamer, the victim of the next level of play: interactive sexualised torture. Skin pores, the pupils of eyes are reduced to pixels. It’s different when you are porn’s pawn and not its pimp.

These films imply that it is hard to get out of the system when hidden compulsions can dictate one’s ‘decisions’. Circumstances can make decisions compulsions. Tillman’s wife in Gamer has allowed herself to be controlled in a live game called “Society” to gain money. There, in society, she is more often than not subjected to violent sex. What more should we expect : she is an attractive woman at a man's mercy. Nomi, the face of Showgirls, is practically “forced” to step on others and turn a blind eye to degrading practice in order to reach her perfectly reasonable aspirations. Money, desperation and low self-esteem lead these people to market places where hierarchies, and we, as the drivers of the market, hold them and weigh down on them.

Gamer - A teenage boy controls a real man with real bullets

These films use fun, or the style of high-end low "trash" to percolate our defences. They exaggerate and extrapolate. Ultimately shown 21st Century’s possible destinations, the journey that had seemed so pleasurable sours and hollows, collapsing in on itself.

By the end we wonder what violent games, and our control over things that look like us, may do to us. We wonder how human images, that can be twisted and deleted, may alter us irrevocably. We wonder why people ‘willingly’ offer themselves up to exploitation and what it may mean to sit by spurring the flesh fair on. We think how the quest for fame at all costs may be anything but a sign of aspiration or a beacon of inspiration.

The direction in which our moral compass is set, or the extent to which we separate what is within the cinema from what is without, will determine the nature of the films. I believe that they rely on us to follow the path from excitement and titillation to disgust and disquiet. They can be seen purely, and perfectly legitimately, as an indulgent taste of the forbidden but they work best as efforts to bring together image and reality, fiction and reality, to show us what we may not want to see. They bring the distant viewer and player face to face with the consequences of his actions. Is this what you want? Then have it.

Lest we be reminded : the experiences and memories that we bring into the theatre mean nothing can ever truly be ‘just a film’.

Some critics may call those films that show people degraded “degrading” as if depiction can only condone. They may also call them “sick” for even touching upon such potentially sickening subjects. They call them “sexy” just because there is sex or nudity, without looking at how or why. They call them “guilty pleasures” but they do not appreciate or specify that the guilt is not at the quality of the production (they are superbly put together) but at the increasingly self-conscious pleasure we may derive from the troublesome things that occur on-screen. The films' high-mindedness is (necessarily) camouflaged.

Showgirls, Demonlover and Gamer manage to both celebrate themselves and question themselves.

They use the staples of lavish and lurid storytelling (what could be referred to as ‘Exploitation cinema’) to both royally entertain and subtly satisfy a vital aspect of much Exploitation Cinema : a mirror and commentary on emerging social trends (cf. George A Romero's zombie films). They are almost completely guileless, a lesson without a professor, satire (of megalomaniacs, C-list wannabes and Hollywood rags to riches conventions?) with barely a wink. In other words, straightforward not snarky, and never condescending.

Yes, these are films that really are studies of exploitation. Maximalist, outrageous, in-your-face, balls-to-the-wall films with a profoundly human(ist) bent.

Demonlover - Waiting to be abused by an unseen player

Veiled Faces - Attraction and Love

2011-06-07T17:41:00.001+01:00

Day of Wrath (Carl Theodor Dreyer)

A veil to conceal and to beautify, a frame to display, a face just beyond touch, a flirtation, a seduction, a vision and ineffable emotion through a glass darkly, a mystery with a hint of danger...

Apocalypse Now Redux

Medea (Lars Von Trier) - New Wife

Let the Right One In - Something strange and fascinating

Romeo + Juliet - Through an aquarium

Superman Returns - X Ray view : Lois in the lift

Tree of Life

What stands between two people can be symbolic, too, of a witch's web of seduction (Day of Wrath), of the natural and pure (Romeo + Juliet). These flimsy walls may be used to represent an infinitesimal but often uncrossable distance to the magical other. Can we ever fully understand someone else?

Action Scenes : Levels of Complication

2011-05-26T16:02:00.001+01:00

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This article is an attempt to show the degrees of complication in action scenes, the simple elements that are used to build excitement. Separating and classifying the blocks that build action scenes is by no means an exact science and there are, undoubtedly, messy dribblings wherever cuts are made.

One Level

This is the bare bones Fight or Chase.

Thor : Fistfight vs Security Guard. A simple tussle.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon : Flight into the forest. Jen flees pursued by Li Mu Bai

Two Levels

An extra element of danger or uncertainty is called into play. This could be the geography of the place or nature of the arena in which a chase or a fight takes place - height, fire, or unpredictable foreign elements such as traffic. The reason for the fight can also be the second layer, for example a bomb primed to explode. In other words: time. The two levels could equally be the combination of a fight and a chase (i.e. firing at each other while running/driving).

Quantum of Solace : Suspended and swung over the ground on ropes, Bond and Mitchell attempt to kill one another. This evolves from a chase (three levels - involving gun fire and rooftops).

Batman Begins : Monorail fight - the track is destroyed and time waits to trigger a fall

Attack of the Clones : Arena Battle. Obi-Wan, Anakin and Padme fight off the Geonosians as well as the monstrous creatures that have been set upon them. Two adversaries are present with separate and differing motives to be vanquished.

Three Levels

Yet another danger. Another action or consequence to be taken into account. Maybe another person is put into the equation.

Spider-Man 2 : Fight on the side of a building. The fight itself, the height of the building on whose wall it takes place and the precarious position of Doctor Octopus' hostage, Aunt May, used as a pawn to weaken Spider-Man's position.

Fast Five : Two cars chased through traffic (two levels) pulling a bank safe that destroys cars in their wake. A chase with weapons and serious obstacles.

Four Levels

Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull : Jungle Chase. A chase through the jungle by car (one), weapons such as swords and rocket launchers (two), height in the precipitous cliff that suddenly appears to one side of the chase or the possible fall awaiting the swinging Mutt (three), and the perils and pitfalls of deadly ants (four).

Yes, these don't all take effect simultaneously but I think it qualifies nonetheless.

Five Levels

Mission Impossible III : Wind Farm

One: Having rescued one of their agents the team board a helicopter and fly off. They are then pursued by another helicopter. Thus an action scene is born.

Two: The team's helicopter heads into a wind farm, introducing a level of danger and uncertainty requiring skill and nerve to overcome them.

Three: The enemy chopper enters the wind farm. By shooting a heat-seeking missile (which the team will head off by swerving and shooting flares) they have launched the scene onto a third level.

Four : One of the team (Lindsey) is lying on the floor of the helicopter in great pain. It is discovered that she has an explosive device in her head. A defibrillator is readied that will deliver a charge that may disable the explosive. Two countdowns converge: the machine's countdown to readiness and the invisible one behind her eyes.

This is not strictly a direct part of the action but it does divert the energies of those involved. It is, regardless, part of the scene.

Five : Height. Zhen slips out of the door of the helicopter because of the pilot's tight manoeuvres. She hangs on for dear life.

Eventually the enemy helicopter is chopped up by a blade. Lindsey, however, dies seconds before the defibrillator is ready to save her.

* * *

Of course none of the above takes into consideration Emotional Complications. Take G.I. Joe Rise of Cobra or Mr and Mrs Smith, where men and women must fight people they once, and perhaps still, love. What about when the eponymous hero of Spider-Man is faced with the balanced fates of a tram-load of passengers and the woman he loves, Mary Jane.

There are many ingredients at the disposal of artists. By using or eschewing them they excite, tease and torture.

100 Posts! Full Archive

2011-05-17T16:20:00.000+01:00

Checking On My Sausages has reached 100 posts. Here they are, give or take a few that were updated by later posts or have been removed.

Essays / Thoughts

A Wounded America : Bad Lieutenant and Southland Tales
A Cinema is A Cave
Acting in True Grit
The Action/Sports Film (particularly Unstoppable and the Bourne films)
A.I. Artificial Intelligence : Love, Self-love and Self-hate
The Animated World and Books

Avatar and Language
Avatar and the Fusion of Male and Female
Avatar : The American Flag

Chungking Express : Identities and Labels
Close Ups

Dekalog : Chance and Control
Dekalog III : A Dialogue through Light
Dekalog : God in Man
Dekalog IX and X : Greed, Mistrust and Acceptance

Do Films Need Music?
Drag Me to Hell : Three Thoughts
Film Criticism and the Action Film
Film-makers' Intentions
G.I. Joe The Rise of Cobra : Paris Chase Scene
Golden Age Gals or Why the Stars shone brighter in the Forties
Hulk : What Has Been Passed On ? (Physical and Emotional inheritance)
Inglourious Basterds : Observations
Is Every Film a Documentary?
The Last Airbender : Circles, Globes and Peace
"Me Too" Cinema
Pixar : Just a Toy
Reacting to Characters' Reactions
Viewer Authorship

Reviews

Alice (Jan Svankmajer)
Antichrist
Auschwitz, by Uwe Boll
Avatar
Black Swan
The Bourne Ultimatum
The Box
Bridge to Terabithia
Cinderella / Battle of Kerzhenets - Cutout Classics
Citizen Kane
Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs
Damnation (Bela Tarr)
Dekalog
Demonlover (Olivier Assayas)
Destino (Salvador Dali / Walt Disney) and Computer Animation
The Exorcist and Horror before The Horror
Film Socialisme (Jean-Luc Godard)
Flight of the Red Balloon (Hou Hsiao Hsien)
Jeanne La Pucelle (Jacques Rivette)
La Joie de Vivre (Animated Film)
Lady in the Water (M Night Shyamalan)
The New World
Police, Adjective
Psycho II
Public Enemies (Michael Mann)
Revolver (Jonas Odell)
Scenes of the Decade
Scream 4
Star Wars Episode I : The Phantom Menace
Stone Wedding (Nunta de Piatră)
Story of a Street Corner (Animated Film)
Terminator Salvation
The Top 50 Greatest Films
The Trial of Joan of Arc (Robert Bresson)
Twin Peaks : Fire Walk With Me
Whisper of the Heart (Yoshifumi Kondo)
Your Animated Film Reviews

Image Galleries / Essays

Deer in Film
Gallery of the Cinematic Image
Images Recalling the Passion and Resurrection
John Carpenter - Under Siege
The Matrix Revolutions : Symmetry
Memorable Kisses
Muses (Actress/Director Partnerships)
Performance of the Decade
Romance Language
Swings
Travelling through film by Train

Miscellaneous

Directors' Art Outside of Film
Disturbing Moments in Film
Revenge of the Sith Companion : Why is Star Wars so loved?
Taxi Driver - Writing while Watching

Videos

(Videos by Me)

Love
In Praise of Godard

(Other Videos)

Lotte Reiniger's Animation The Star of Bethlehem

Scream 4

2011-05-14T12:44:00.000+01:00

(Contains Spoilers)

The new heroes and heroines of Scream 4 are savvy technologically, connected by mobiles, Facebook and live web streaming. They are thoroughly clued in. too, on the conventions and convolutions of the fiction they find themselves in.

The older characters, including the original three (Dewey, Gale and Sidney) find it hard to keep up with modern ways. Sheriff Dewey doesn't realise how quickly rumours of the new murder case have spread on the internet and Gale's attempts to film the Stabathon with hidden cameras end in failure.

We see the generation gap in the way the killer deals with them. The girls are teased and manoeuvred into position via the social media sites they frequent and their mobile phones. For Jill's mother, on the other hand death is delivered the old-fashioned way : by post. She's knifed through the letterbox.

However, the new generations know-how proves of little practical use. They are the ones who die. Furthermore, on two occasions, gadgets enable victims or potential victims merely to see the killer on their screen before they see them with their own eyes (screens and interfaces are as another pair of eyes, often detaching them from immediate sensations i.e. intimacy).

* * *

Among these students are those who have not (especially the persons behind the Ghostface mask) been able to make the leap into maturity without disaffection, bitterness or confusion. While there are distant echoes of high-school massacres, what are most frank and explicit are frustrations that come from being invisible to others (in affection, attention and the anonymous mime of fragmented 21st Century communication), not knowing how or where to get respect ("I don't need friends, I need fans") or being uneducated in, or unaccustomed to, coping with rejection.

Their parents are almost completely absent, even at night; these young people uncomfortably straddle the threshold between childhood and adulthood. Some get by, some struggle, all suffer.

The bonny, middle class, hyper-domestic living rooms and bedrooms (virginal in a manner of speaking) lack any of the messiness associated with teenagers and the sight of them disordered, smashed and covered in gore is harrowing. Surfaces, neat and beautiful; depths, foul and befouled.

When Jill beats herself up to look like a victim ("everyone loves a victim") it really is painful. With every blow the internal wounds become written on their face. It isn't the jumps or the shocks or the stabbings that hit home but that pain. When Kirby is stabbed by Charlie he is almost weeping when he spits that she hadn't noticed him in four years. He walks away hunched over and decidedly non-triumphant. Later, it is apparent that Charlie is seeking Jill's approval, in vain, as Clyde to her Bonnie. The mask is the face of a ghost - the person who puts it on is already, to all intents and purposes, dead.

Under the Bed : Jill in the position of victim and stalker. Hiding and lurking.

The killers are highly self-conscious and reach out for self-esteem. Not only for them is technology providing an impotent remote closeness.

Sidney, whose changing face is the very portrait of Scream, is haunted and hollowed upon seeing her nightmare returning to life, is another damaged (yet in some ways hardened and more determined) soul.

Jill's monologue, once she has revealed herself as one of the killers, seems both an unconvincing (as if fed into her earpiece by Director Wes Craven and writer Kevin Williamson) appraisal of a modern world gone wrong and an arresting and ascerbic diatribe/confession.

* * *

Ghostface is just a mask : the mask of the angry, the jealous, the lost. It is an adopted identity. Any one of us could put it on. One of the traits that distinguishes the Scream films from the pack is that we already know the killer. We don't know who exactly but we have already met them. It can be anyone - not a person of supernatural strength or gothic fairytale degeneracy.

Masks - Enough for Everyone

Perhaps this is why the killer is filmed differently from other slasher film perpetrators. In the first scene proper of Scream 4 Jenny runs up the stairs towards the camera pursued by Ghostface. As she goes past the camera we turn to follow her. Then exactly the same happens with Ghostface.

Generally speaking, when gazing at a killer, the camera would be static. The killer may come past the camera, or through it or across it but the camera won't adjust to follow his movements. It doesn't happen in Halloween or Black Christmas or countless other Slasher films that the Scream series takes its inspiration from. It may pan, but it won't twirl or spin. It is about the otherness of the character, its relentlessness.

Scream is different. "There's something really scary about a guy with a knife who just...snaps"

* * *

The original cast all survive the killers' attempts to remake the incidents depicted in the original in-film film Stab (based on what we see in Scream). They reclaim the series from its imitators and from itself : "Don't f**k with the original!" (even the Stab films have become clever sillies - Stab 7 doesn't even bother to mask the killer* and Stab 5, we are told, involves time travel).

The final word uttered by Sidney, in killing Jill, is "Clear". Defibrillator paddles are normally used to restart a failing organ and to revive the patient. This is what she does to the franchise, returning us to the beginning (or to zero) with a jolt that, ironically, kills the enemy.

* * *

Scream 4 is a film wrapped up in itself. The characters talk about horror films all the time. Bit by bit, aware that the killers are adapting real-life events and tipping their hats to cinema's heritage, they start to feel like they are now part of a movie. They watch their tongues ("I'll be right back" says a police officer, and quickly regrets it) and they wonder if the murderers are playing by the book or breaking the rules (surprises are cliched, as someone says).

Because the Ghostfaces could be adhering to convention or departing from it there is no way of knowing how to be safe. There is no rhyme or reason, no discrimination made between who will die and who will not. There are more deaths in this film than in the other three Screams and they are matter-of-fact. They can come at any time. It is so easy to take a life with a simple movement of the arm.

The previous Screams were exasperating because the angle of a horror film about horror films and people who like horror films seemed tacked on and not deep in the sinew of the narrative. Here it is the film. Layers upon layers, not decoration. There is something charming about a work that feels like an essay on and love letter to horror films.* It is lovingly and precisely engineered. It's a film that was clearly worked on with much care.

* * *

Scream 4 not only plays with itself, its past and its inspirations but connects with the real world...

Jill is fed up with playing second fiddle to her cousin Sidney, disenchanted with her life in the shadows. She is played by Emma Roberts, the niece to a (currently) more well-known actress: Julia Roberts. The film doesn't hide the parallel. Jill's surname is also Roberts. A frisson, a trembling, an added kick.

Dewey and Gale are now married in Scream 4, though they are going through a rocky patch. Scream was the film that brought together the now married actor and actress who play them: David Arquette and Courtney Cox. The film plays with the tension between them as characters and the tension between the film and real life. It has been suggested that Scream 4 has brought them closer after a period of separation (sounds lovely).

Then there is horror buff Kirby. She is played by Hayden Panettiere, best remembered as Claire Bennet in the TV series Heroes. Claire had a special healing power that meant she could survive being shot, run over or... stabbed. When she is suddenly punctured by the knife and told that it takes longer to die than in the movies, because of the images we associate with her, it pierces us still deeper.

So Scream 4 is wrapped up in itself, in the world of film and how the world interacts with fiction. It is, too, furnished and coloured by the backgrounds of its players.

* * *

Scream 4 doesn't terrify you in the moment but afterwards, in the dark streets where your fate may be waiting for you camouflaged in black.

Scream 4 is not very scary, nor very funny. It can be frightening (Kirby desperately reeling off sequels in an attempt to appease Ghostface) and it can be amusing. If one were to watch and judge on strict genre lines (having said that, which one film would be the template, because all are different?), it could be deemed a failure. "It's not a comedy, it's a horror film!" says Ghostface but it needn't be experienced as answerable to either. Seeing films as fitting genres is like seeing the world only out of train windows. There is so much land between the tracks.

It is what it is : engrossing and likeable.

The characters are believable and interesting (Kirby, Trudie and Sidney especially). Sub-plots, gradually and delicately advanced, are made vital.

The inhabitants of Woodsboro are the kind of people you can care about for as long as the film lasts, and longer.

Reacting to Reactions

2011-05-02T10:30:00.001+01:00

Good acting and writing is in the creation of a character anchored to the fictional world around them. The integration of person and place (and the successful interplay of one to another) makes both appear real and lifts the work in suspension above disbelief.

Good acting is in intonation, facial expression, body language. It is in the illusion of control in pre-decided action and spontaneity in reaction. Good writing is in filtering the story through the eyes of these characters.

However, the importance of acting, and hence the merit of good acting, is more fundamental still than fashioning something credible that we can understand or distantly connect to. The characters, the fleshy ghosts behind the screen, are us, they are our representatives, our vessels, avatars that allow us to run through the verdant landscape of fiction's fancy.

When something happens that is moving or scary or surprising it is just as important, if not more so, that the characters appear appropriately and authentically moved, scared and surprised. We echo off them. No matter how the sight awes us, we need to see the awe of those actually there (the characters) to found our feelings, to validate them, to fulfil and fortify them.There is a back and forth, audience and character feeding off each other.

Good acting and direction and writing geared towards showcasing reactions, are paramount. Acting is not something that I can dismiss as easily as some do, dedicating a mere sentence to how the acting is wooden yet frankly insignificant when set against the majesty of its action. Steven Spielberg is a master of accentuating the reactions of characters (either before we ourselves see the object or after) turning around in shock or joy, eyes wide and turned heavenward. These witnesses are often gathered in groups too and the sense of community makes the events more palpable.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind: Which is more wondrous - the alien spaceship or the awe of those who see it? Do we say only "Did you see that ship!?" or also "Did you see the look on his face?"

The trailer for Super 8 (produced by Steven Spielberg and said to be made by J J Abrams in part homage to Spielberg's films) is replete with shots that revel in the glory of the grand reaction.

To dismiss the importance of a character's reactions to what we see in this way is to amputate our own importance, to accept a benumbing of our own senses.

If that strong bond is created between character and audience (of a remote link, of sympathy and empathy) then we will begin to look forward with worry or with excitement to see their reactions to revelations that we know are forthcoming. We know how it will further charge our own gratification. We can't wait, or dread, to see what these characters we like will make of it.

The best revelations (and reactions to them) are not only those we don't expect, like Harry Lime appearing smugly in a doorway of The Third Man, Sonia hearing that Bruno has sold their child in L'Enfant (perfectly acted), or Peter sat behind the desk in Charade (Cary Grant's self-satisfied face and Audrey Hepburn's shock, annoyance and delight are priceless), but those we know are coming.

Charade : The revelation and the perfectly acted reaction that cements a brilliant scene

L'Enfant : The Shock of Bruno selling his son only hits home when we see the mother's reaction.

In the latter cases (the character being unaware) we act and root for them in response to what they can't know, and then the tension is released through the characters, when they are enlightened. Their gasps, their tears, their smiles and smiling eyes are projected onto our faces, the light of the image using our faces as a screen.

Clark Kent is revealed as Superman, Peter Parker as Spider-Man, comic books and comic book films work on and through this dramatic irony, on first establishing a relationship through an imbalance between what the audience and the character knows and then making it stronger through consummation via a revelation and a reaction.

Yes, it is not just fiction and reality that is brought together in this explosion of revelation but audience and character are suddenly and violently fused in knowing the same, feeling the same, being the same.

* * *

Abbas Kiarostami manipulates this bond in Shirin, swishing it about our heads like a rapier. Here we have our backs to the screen and watch the reactions of people to the film that they are watching. We can only hear it. Watching the reactions - serenity, concern, tears - we ourselves are split between the audience, each person in the auditorium taking a part of us, as the film echoes off them into us.

One discovers later that Kiarostami had showed the actresses a screen of dots and not the romantic tale we could hear. They are acting. A rotten farce. The bond of empathy, of a disbelief wilfully and cooperatively suspended is violated. However, the revelation of the subterfuge (the film itself never admits it) reframes it as a sobering and fascinating meditation on the nature of cinema and of fiction as a whole, on layers of reality, on the control we want to have on the deception (the structure also provides a pretext to look at beautiful, "unveiled" women). We want to be complicit in the trick and not its victim. What a tangled web.

We want to walk hand in hand with the character, with the person, and that is why, at first, we grieve when we are disabused - they are ghosts, it is fake, and the traces of our shared response will soon fade.

* * *

Think of when we discover, in Rebecca, that Max hated rather than worshipped his wife. Is it our shock that makes it? Is it our joy? Or is it Mrs de Winter's (excellently depicted by Joan Fontaine) and ours through her? The second revelation, of Rebecca's illness, is undermined by a paucity of reaction shots. In The Empire Strikes Back how much of the impact of his father's true identity is its impact on us through Luke? The proportions may change but sights and sounds in cinema are nothing without those who are there and make us believe that they are there experiencing them. So much of cinema is faces, the actual presence of a person upon the white sheet. It isn't our real after all. It's theirs. Otherwise film is just events, dear boy, events.

Symmetry : The Matrix Revolutions

2011-04-18T15:27:00.000+01:00

Mirrored images

Two sides

Neo

and

Smith

Of the same equation

Events with a centre, an order, a logic and a destiny. Compositions with a vanishing point, a destination beyond the here and now.

Auschwitz (Uwe Boll) Review

2011-04-07T12:45:00.004+01:00

Auschwitz begins with Uwe Boll addressing the camera, telling us why he has decided to make the film. He gives three main reasons : because he believes that films that dealt with the Holocaust have not properly communicated its horrors, because young people today (with special emphasis on Germans) are ignorant of what occurred and because we need to be reminded that genocides are still taking place.

The first section of the film proper involves Boll (off camera) interviewing high-school students. He asks them what they know about the Holocaust and about the Germany of the 1940s.

It is a clever device, implicating us as questioners, responders and analysers of both. What would we have done in the Germans' shoes? Laid out in front of us, too, is the primary reason and spur for the dramatisation that follows: the film is made for these young men and women who have, at best, a sketchy understanding.

However, these interviews are problematic too. One problem is that we are shown the responses of those who know as well as those who don't. Thus the film can no longer be seen as purely a direct response to the results of the interviews. The interviews, in the way that they are edited and ordered, become not only portraits of those asked but of the Director (in all senses of the word) - his point of view, his interpretation and his concerns. They are leading questions.

Although that same editing, accompanied by the approving silence of the interviewer, indicates who is giving the 'right' answers, the film cannot function fully (at least in this section) as an educative tool: we need to think "Yes, he has it right" and we cannot do that only by inferring it from the presentation of the responses. We need to know already.

Equally, in the contrast between those who know and those who do not (or worse, have false knowledge) there emerges an undercurrent of mockery, or at least head-shaking.* There is a sense too that a guilt may be being laid at the door of people who were not even born at the time.

I do not believe that we are meant to challenge or ponder too deeply upon whether this (perhaps unmeaning) inheritance is right or wrong. In fact, through the interviews' subtly probing and latently aggressive tone, one is moved from the premise and purpose towards an opposed stance : How much do they really need to know about Auschwitz, the other concentration camps and the Holocaust as a whole?

Without doubt, it is a useful film that stirs up these dilemmas. It is a fine intention to battle against complacency (bringing up modern genocides) or forgetfulness, especially in a school where we are told that there are still "Nazis". But one is always aware of a disquieting clash between intention, noble and good, and result.

Nevertheless, there are affecting and thought-provoking flashes in this section that break free from the shackles of the black and white and the prescriptive. The most notable of these is an answer given by a young woman. She talks of how Germans who helped Jews were imprisoned and therefore, under the boot of the regime, it was easier to simply 'follow the current'. To this she is asked what she would have done. "The same", she says.

* * *

There follows a 37 minute dramatisation of a day at the Auschwitz concentration camp.

Stanley Kubrick once said that a successful film on the Holocaust would be "unwatchable" and Jean-Luc Godard that the ultimate Holocaust film would concentrate on the day-to-day workings of the camp - the paperwork, the administration, the challenges of finding the right furnaces and coffins and so forth. In other words communicating how 'normal' the horror had become for these human beings.

The Director himself says : "It was the biggest organised killing of humans in history and in the film we see just another ordinary day for the victims at the death camp...from the train until the oven"

Uwe Boll's film concentrates on the process of disembarking Jews from trains, categorising them, stripping them and gassing them. A business, a meat market. It is sickening to watch. We do not get to know anyone - neither Nazi or Jew - and little stands in the way of the true face of the killings. We go into the gas chambers, into the fires, into the offices where officers discuss one man's reluctance to kill children (they nominate someone else who doesn't have such qualms) and the malfunction of equipment.

It is something else. It is very very hard to watch.

However, perhaps keeping in mind the Catch 22 of the watchable unwatchable mooted by Stanley Kubrick (who himself struggled with a desire to make a film on the Holocaust), Boll may not have gone far enough.

This section of the film begins on a train carrying Jews to Auschwitz. Here Boll plays tense and tragic music. Later there are stabs of music and sound recognisable from Horror films. Granted that the conventions of horror make more sense than the strains of past sentimental odysseys, another layer of filmic 'artificiality' is not needed here. Yes, it may be part of the armoury used to make the unwatchable watchable but the music cheapens, makes the story like any other. Or, rather, makes it a story.

Likewise, in at least a couple of instances, Boll uses slow motion to drag out or draw out the desperate wailing of the people as they beat the walls of the gas chamber or when a couple of children are shot in the back of the head. This is a tacit admission that he feels that what we see is not horrific and sorrowful enough. It betrays a lack of confidence in the film 'as is' - an admission of failure. We don't need to be told how awful what we see is. It is horrible, yes, but it should not dress itself up as a horror film.

We are shown Jews nude in the gas chambers but when they are shown dead many of them are covering their private parts. This is an inappropriate (but understandable) coyness that undermines the verisimilitude of the moment.

The film needs to discard as much as it can in order to fulfil its purpose and its promise. It cannot possibly show us how it really was or make us feel the same dread and pain but it can seek to reclaim ground lost to sentimentality and poignancy in the realm of films or art in general that intends to show the horrors of the Holocaust. Within that remit, not trying to stand for true witness or even documentary, it can succeed.

There are two particularly fine scenes. One shows a Nazi guard standing bored outside the door to a gas chamber. We hear the screams and the anguish and see an eye, a cheek, sometimes a whole face through a little round window. It sets your teeth on edge, torturous and protracted. Whether outside or inside the chamber we dwell in the arena of pain as a witness. We do not dwell on the intimate and holy details of personal pain, nor intrude on the walls of the soul. We are shown the full abuse of the dignity of man without participating in it (though the implication of all may be a perfectly legitimate approach).

The second scene involves two officers discussing wives, children, the normal things people may talk about. They also discuss, in the same matter-of-fact manner, the amount of people coming on the next train or whether all the machinery is operational. All the while, far in the background, we hear a few gunshots, the rumble of a fire, or a shout.

Normality and the outrageously abnormal. Evil reduced to the clerical, to chit-chat. Auschwitz here treads well a fine line. This juxtaposition (although almost certainly historically accurate) could easily have carried an irony, a humour with it that could mollify the outrage it wants to stress. In other words, the film could inadvertently become as blithe as the guards. It does not.

These scenes remain awful, as does the final image of a dead child pushed into the furnace.

* * *

The dramatised section concludes and we return to the high-school students for more interviews, interspersed with documentary footage. The same benefits and drawbacks apply as to the first section. One question, asking why Hitler was popular (and by extension what his qualities may have been) is awkward and it cannot be properly answered by people of their generation.

By the same token, the possibility that there would be a reluctance on the part of some to speak of such things to a stranger in front of a camera must also be taken into account.

The film ends with a reprisal of the Director's mission statement, humble but self-assured.

In conclusion, I believe that Auschwitz demanded of itself to reach a point where it could barely be judged as a work of art - where its techniques were made as invisible as possible and where (the illusion of) an un-mediated relationship between the audience and history (and our future) were forged. The middle section is mostly excellent, with sequences perhaps among the most strong I have seen. It is shocking and it has an aura of the essential. The bookends of interviews are thought-provoking but raise just as many questions in terms of its form as those about the subject.

It is a shame that Boll did not go a little further and fully eradicate from mind the shame of those films that did no justice to the true and unimaginable (that should not be allowed to be unspeakable) nature of the Holocaust. It is always timely to be shaken by what is happening to people at the hands of others, then and now.

Shock, Auschwitz and Enter the Void

Is it 'exploitative' to show? Is it exploitative to dwell behind closed doors, to stare at what we'd like to take our eyes from?

A succession of films that took the Holocaust as their subject have numbed us. They have euphemised and euthanised the true horror of what occurred. They have begun the work of turning fact into fiction, war and death into a trope and a genre.

It is more exploitative, disingenuous and damaging to turn the massacre of millions into a backdrop for heroes, for comic jaunts, for beknighted individuals, for the saved few. Is it respectful to sanitise? Is it great art to make the Holocaust a context for something else? How can you be witness to something if you refuse to look it in the eye?

Genocides in the past or in the present must be shocking and must be shown, as far as possible, for what they are. There can be in certain cases an imperative to shock, as it were, one that itself risks annulling itself through overuse.

When we are shocked we feel a rush of anger, an anger that we direct at the person responsible for the shock. Why would he want to make me feel that way? Why would Uwe Boll want to make me uncomfortable? He must be a sick man to want that.

We can never imagine what it was like or is like to endure and suffer such horrors but the fact remains that we want the uncomfortable to be made comfortable and yet, if the uncomfortable is dressed up in symbols, in tears, in the solace of chosen protagonists, we are not experiencing it at all.

Manipulative? All films are. The question is : to what end?**

In Gaspar Noe's Enter the Void, another film where we are let (through the perspective of an unbound spirit) behind closed doors to see what we rarely see, we are shown an abortion and an aborted fetus (neither are real). If something that is so important, final and sobering as life and death does not shake us then their depiction does not do justice to any kind of physical or emotional truth. As in Auschwitz, Oscar's gaze (ours, given we see through his eyes) is not intrusive. It does not relish - or look for entertainment - in any way.*** Twice, seeing his sister in wretched tears, he pulls away and departs.

Where is the edification, we may say. The edification is looking at things as they are and thinking anew (a film cannot show things precisely as they are but they can create an understanding and curiosity in its audience). Intellectual and moral complacency promoted by soft-soap insincerity is far more damaging than something raw, even if meant purely to provoke or dismay, that may leave a temporary scar. Shock knocks us back and takes us out of ourselves.

*Is their lack of knowledge the shortcomings of the school system or the usual inattentiveness or disinterest of the pupils?

**And to what final effect on the audience?

*** I have not yet come across a film (a work of fiction) that I would call immoral, but that is not to say that there are not films that are distasteful, disgusting, off-putting and that appear pointless. There is also the fact that, taken together, a group of films can have the effect of normalising morally dubious thoughts and behaviour.

Auschwitz is available on DVD from Monday the 11th of July

Hulk

2011-03-30T14:00:00.001+01:00

"What has been passed on?"

David Banner, an ambitious and hubristic geneticist, conducts dangerous experiments upon himself. When he and his wife have a son, Bruce, a mutation is inherited.

Young Bruce inherits memories too, memories of his mother's death at his father's hands (a clouded and upturned image of her anguished face).

The parallel : whatever parents do, however they act towards their child or to each other, whether purposely or not, is an emotional experiment.

We witness Bruce hearing his father and mother arguing behind a closed door. He hides under the table as he would if there were an explosion at the research facility nearby. He turns away and re-enacts the scene with two soft toys, mashing them against each other. As he does he growls. He is manic and distressed. What has been passed on? Pain that is buried deep and forgotten and the seed for that pain (and the subconscious) to become flesh.

Bruce is now working in genetics, in the manipulation of the immune system to promote regeneration. Like his father. We see him conduct an experiment on a frog, attempting to improve the healing powers of its cells through the use of nanomeds, microscopic living beings. The frog explodes. Family life, like the nanomeds, is meant to heal and repair. Instead it makes him explode.

Laying out a detailed emotional and genetic foundation for the Hulk*, and making exposure to gamma radiation the trigger rather than the root cause, establishes the Hulk as a regression. It was conceived as a child and, when it appears in its full and monstrous form, a child it remains.

Its facial expressions recall those of a child - wide-eyed, confused, curious and sometimes, surrounded by carnage in front of Betty, ashamed. Like King Kong before him, Hulk is a child becalmed, cradling and protecting its adopted mother in its palm.

Bruce describes becoming the Hulk as "like being born, coming up for air". Having fought off mutant dogs, Hulk shrinks and Bruce staggers to Betty naked, clinging to a motherly warmth. It is in this light that Betty's decisions to hand him over to the military, that could be seen as the betrayals of a partner, are understood as a parent's mature realisation that her son needs intervention.

Bruce's father, who reappears from the dead, calls him "my physical son and the child of my mind". He is another Doctor Frankenstein taken to extremes by an obsession with control and wisdom. He wants to intrude and trample on nature in order to "partake with the essences". He wants to be a God, knowledgeable and almighty, "a hero of the kind that walked the Earth long before the pale religions of civilisation infected humanity's soul". He wants to "improve on" his nature.

Science is nature, nature is nurture. The tiny are the building blocks for the large. A cell compared to a planet, a drop of water birthing a galaxy. Lichen and lizards and jellyfish, Hulk sees in these something of himself. We are all connected to everything (Betty and Bruce's family histories, too, are intimately intertwined) and affected by everything, our atoms once part of something else.

What are we born with? What are we given? Hulk is a product of his human environment. What is tragic is how he attacks it or shrinks from it, afraid. Upon first seeing Betty Hulk seeks to meld into the tranquil, ostensibly amoral environment of nature, hidden by the knotted roots and branches of an old tree.

* * *

Bruce lost his mother and Betty is by no means close to her father. She has memories of being left alone as a young girl, weeping. She has dreams of the same scene in which Bruce is now the father figure, at first smiling and then menacing. Once Bruce has met his father again, who he thought dead, he has visions and nightmares of the future.

Encrypted traumas stymy the present and project or anticipate a tragic future. Roles are confused between lover, friend, father and mother. Time has no meaning : the past is here.

When Bruce first turns into the Hulk (the idea of competing alter egos is touched upon - Hulk first disdainful of Bruce ("puny human!") and then rescuing him from a water chamber) it is his watch** that is first discarded by his growing body. The corridor at the University facility recalls that in which his father waited for him to be born. The door behind which his parents had fought reappears in his laboratory as he struggles to contain his anger - it opens to reveal the Hulk standing in the shadows, in the void where his mother and father struggled unseen.

Later, the camera will move out of a scene and take in a wall of panels, each a different moment from the film, and then zoom back in on a new image. Everything co-exists, the past, the present and the future living together.

There is a tyranny of time. In a couple of instances, General Ross leaning in to interrogate Bruce and Hulk smashing out of the military compound, an action is reprised from a different angle, extending it into something insistent and entrapping. On another occasion, helicopters surround him like the laser guns that surround the subjects of his and his father's experiments.

Bruce has absorbed a lifetime of suffering. When Hulk first appears he directs his rage at the machine that irradiated him, tearing the globe from its tethers and awkwardly carrying its great weight on his back as Atlas did the celestial orbs. He bounds across the deserts of America. He cannot escape because his enemy is within.

Escape from this burden is only in confrontation with his father, now 'The Absorbing Man'. They meet one last time on a stage stripped bare - a theatre where the spotlights shine oppressively, voices echo, and where the natural world or visual load no longer offer a hiding place. The focus is on the internal. The black space is there for it to be externalised with unprecedented clarity and force.

His father teases the Hulk out into a battle of elemental forces. His father carries Hulk through the clouds along a bolt of lightning. He takes the shape of a lake, attempting to drown his son within him, within his bitterness, his twisted and selfish lust for his son's incredibly destructive and healing power.

What has been passed on can be let go of. In a cathartic roar Hulk screams "Take it All!" just as Betty's father, General Ross, orders a nuclear strike on the site with the word...

"Release"

*The explanation makes the Hulk something of an inevitability, rather than a magical apparition.

**The second is his wallet, his identity card showing.

The Ten Greatest Films I've Seen

2011-03-19T17:40:00.000Z

The trouble with writing about art is that you can betray or fail to do justice (or just plain get it wrong) to one's imprecise, complex and fundamentally ineffable experience by trying to put it into words. Worse, you can begin to wall it in and overwrite what you felt with the verbal label you have now stuck on it.

What I have written here only describes or explains a fraction of what I felt or thought. I have tried not to trample on the magic.

What I can do without problem or qualification is wholeheartedly recommend these films.

10. Le Pont du Nord

1981 FRA Jacques Rivette

The feeling you get from a Jacques Rivette film is of lightness and of space, of a story sprouting from the cracks between the pavements of our world rather than a world built for, and filled to suffocation by, a story.

Le Pont du Nord is delightful. Two homeless women stumble upon (or invent) a conspiracy taking place on the streets of Paris. The joy of it, really, is in the freedom Baptiste (left), Marie and we enjoy to walk the streets, to practise martial arts, to philosophise, to shop at markets and to get embroiled in dark plots nobody understands. The naturalness between the two (Pascale Ogier and her mother Bulle) is beautiful to watch.

Le Pont du Nord's wonder makes you smile, simultaneously utterly fantastical (Baptiste is literally caught in a web created by an unknown assailant) and the everyday with a merry twist (a woman whose car they broke into to sleep in awakes them not to shout or call the police but to warn them she'll have to leave in a couple of minutes). Life can be a game if you want it to.

There's no better compliment I can pay than to say that when Marie asks Baptiste if she wants some fruit, part of me thought "None for me thanks, is there a sandwich shop near here?".

9. Love Exposure
2008 JAPAN Sion Sono

The pivotal moment of Sion Sono's story comes as a teenage boy, having lost a bet with his friends, carries out a forfeit of strutting downtown in drag. Long before the end of Love Exposure's four hours, filled with bawdiness, misunderstandings, sabotage, cross-dressing and grand excitement, it has begun to resemble something Shakespeare might write if he were egged on by the Earl of Rochester and François Rabelais.

However, all this, though never superfluous or less than enriching, is rococo decoration for the central love story, which is as beautiful as any on film.

Love Exposure is exciting both emotionally and intellectually. It is irreverent towards the corruptible and corrupting margins of religion yet reverent to its tenets of love. At first glance it may appear sensationalist and provocative in its depiction of familial abuse or teenage 'perversion' yet it is always serious and believable (and original) in how upheavals affect them at this vulnerable age. These aren't just the symptoms of angst, but its core causes: What am I for? Why should I care? Do I have a stake and a place?

Love Exposure's heart is enormous; towards the charming circle of friends fashioned out of shop-lifters and up-skirt photographers; towards Yoko and Yu, who battle to remain on an even keel; even towards the girl Koike whose 'Zero Church' (in many ways the film has the protagonists return to zero, a spiritual source) attempts to brainwash them.

In the end Yoko, who longed for a man like Jesus, realises that perfection can be found in the imperfect. Yu, who searched for his own Virgin Mary, finds that lust and perversion can be happy bedfellows with true love. Through hatred, disaffection, cult programming and deprogramming and an unreasonable amount of fun, its course flows - sometimes at a trickle or a snaking drop, but never running dry.

How often do we feel unadulterated joy in a cinema?

8. The New World

2005 USA Terrence Malick

[Edited from previous review]

Terence Malick takes us back to the beginning of America as if back to the beginning of time itself.

Ephemeral and eternal, the title The New World refers to the first steps on American soil, the first shivers of love, the first glimpse of heaven. It feels like we are slipping in and out of consciousness, sometimes within, sometimes without, sometimes just lost - internal monologues, wordless sequences, moments that seem like meadow-bound dreams and ones that are live and filthy and crawling. 1st, 2nd, 3rd person narratives pass across each other.

What impresses is that there is no hard and fast dichotomy made between pure-of-heart 'naturals' and English 'invaders'. We see that, through fear and mistrust, both sides jealously guard what is theirs and both sides may turn to violence in defence of it.

The New World is immersive. It does not want you to pass by on the waters as the English ships, but dive beneath as the natives. It is able to lift images of grasses and moons, the first symbols and signs, up from banality and into rapture.

7. Labyrinth

1986 USA Jim Henson

The 1980s was the motherlode of the films of wonder and fantasy. From Raiders of the Lost Ark to E.T. to The Goonies, Gremlins and Honey I Shrunk the Kids, movies were made with craft and love, with each effect and decision and challenge made to mean something. Substance and timelessness.

Labyrinth is the best of all these films. It is so spellbinding that its events, its colours, its designs, its music, like Sarah's toys, take shape and live in the rooms of our mind. They are there far beyond childhood - there should we need them for comfort or to reawaken an anxiety that makes us tingle.

Fifteen year old Sarah journeys through the maze to rescue her brother Toby from the Goblin King. As she does she grows to understand that she can control her dreams and fantasies of Princes and castles rather than have them control her (we could say that the whole adventure is conjured by her mind given how what is in her bedroom populates Jareth's world). It's clever and heart-warming because she doesn't finally reject childish things. She has moved on but can always look back.

Nostalgia isn't indiscriminate. It doesn't bow down to anything we saw when we were young. Labyrinth above all others sealed within me its songs (David Bowie's music fits snugly), its riddles, its costumes, its sense of wholeness and wholesomeness. Even now there are bits that are perfect or just right.

Would that those days of the intelligent artist, the sorcerers of storytelling, would come again.

6. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

2000 CHINA Ang Lee

A mark of a viscerally rousing film is that it sends you out onto the streets mimicking its action, the film still speaking through your movements. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, exhilarating beyond compare, makes you want to, and feel like you can, fly.

The sine qua non of superb action is not choreography but emotional significance. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon has both in harmony. The parries of swords are an extension of real and profound anger and frustration. The breathtaking floating flight the logical and natural result of a multi-faceted wish to be free. One could draw a comparison with musicals, where, at their best, a burst into song is the inexorable result of an out and overpouring of emotion.

In this way Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is a quiet and meditative film of thwarted love and ambition whose emotional peaks are represented by the force and elegance of dancing conflict.

5. Mirror

1975 USSR Andrei Tarkovsky

Light touches objects and the wind moves them as in no other film, as if bringing them to life. Our gaze moves like a ghost, sliding slowly so as to not disturb the dream.

Judged purely on aesthetic merit, Andrei Tarkovsky's Mirror is supreme.

Tarkovsky can summon a spell, an ambience, like no other - in Solaris a car journey is so mesmeric as to be nigh on upsetting.

The sounds, birds, creaks, children calling, are dropped into a bottomless well of silence giving each thing and instant a sort of spiritual power and existence of their own (for example the vase that we wait to fall or the vanishing condensation left by a coffee cup), The music darkly dredges up the past, shrill, eerie, euphoric.

I was awestruck. After it no film seems worthy of the form, banal and amateurish by comparison.

However, Mirror is incorporeal and fractured. That is, evidently, integral to its charm but the people and what they lived, told piecemeal and with no chance of full comprehension, didn't move me as they might. The sometimes cryptic and hallucinatory recollections of one man as he lies dying lack that soupçon of humanity that would have made Mirror even more remarkable.

4. Three Times

2005 TAIWAN Hou Hsiao Hsien

It is 1966. Chen and May play pool. They have known each other only a day. They are awkward and tentative. They are nervous for new love is sensitive to the touch. They look at each other and then away. They are comfortably uncomfortable. Later the quickening pulse of the heart will surface as hiccups of laughter. This electricity keeps them wary yet every collision of ball on ball, known as a "kiss", works as a nearing, as a way of saying "I want to be with you".

This first part of Three Times is an immaculate depiction of that immaculate emotion.

Our palate is cleansed by the second part, an even more sedate story of a courtesan in 1911 who longs without fulfilment for a client. The plucking of instruments, the tweaking of costumes, the wiping away of a single tear. Everything is minute and unspoken. Its lyrical stillness gives us time to breathe.

The third part, set in the modern day, is noisier and more complicated with the relationship between the two (each pair is played by Shu Qi and Chang Chen) involving other people. It is a sad section. Here they are together physically but not altogether in spirit. They are broken people who hope, perhaps in vain, that the other they cling to can fix them. They only understand one thing about themselves: they don't want to be alone.

Three Times is excellent from start to finish. Those first forty minutes, though, are perhaps film's finest hour.

3. Star Wars Episodes I - VI

1977-2005 USA George Lucas, Irvin Kershner, Richard Marquand

Star Wars is the epitome of myth - a family saga whose fate determines that of the entire galaxy.

It is excitement and camaraderie. There are monk-like priests who fight and there are bug-eyed patsies. There are kings and there are fools. Star Wars is slapstick and it is planet-shattering tragedy. It is the teeming detail of alien life and the sweeping scale of light years. It is the temptation of adventure and of power. It is a terrible fall into dictatorship, war and evil and a rise into democracy, peace and redemption.

It is kinetic spectacle without equal. It is timeless, the ancient past set within the schemata of science fiction futures. It is transporting, carrying us into the stars on its title crawl. It is deep too in allusion and allegory. It is a universe designed in 360 degrees. It is invention and giddy fun. It is colourful and it is grey and forbidding.

It is a cultural monolith that remains agile and surprising. Star Wars is the greatest story ever told on film.

My essay on Star Wars (via Revenge of the Sith)

2. Twin Peaks : Fire Walk With Me

1992 USA David Lynch

[Adapted from previous review]

The tragedy of Cinema is that we are looking through a one-way mirror at a world that is unreachable, that is blind and alone. I have never seen a film where the screen has felt so thin, the story so immediate and raw as it does in Fire Walk With Me. The screen, though, is still too thick to smash, too thick to allow us to intervene.

Since the beginning of film, there have been depictions of abused and exploited women such as Kenji Mizoguchi's Oharu or Robert Bresson's Mouchette. I find those depictions to be somewhat withdrawn. The character is little more than a doll in a cardboard house beaten by an outsized hand. Their sorrow is cathartic and our emotions are easily washed away with tears. There is a tasteful distance, a slow pan, and eyes ultimately turned away.

In Fire Walk With Me there is awful horror and staggering beauty but neither is fetishized. And Lynch never turns away. He shows us what others imply, and shows it unsparingly. He shows what we want to see, not out of titillation or the promise of retribution, but out of sympathy. The world abandons Laura but we do not. We must not.

Suffering, Laura has turned to prostitution. She has become a drug addict. She has become selfish and cruel. She is manipulative, childlike and devilish. What's more, she is always aware of what she has become:

"Your Laura disappeared...it's just me now"

She fears that she cannot be saved. The angel in the painting on her wall disappears. She fears that she cannot be loved and is beyond redemption. When her end finally comes her angel is waiting for her. Disbelieving joy convulses out of her. It is the first time she has been happy for years.

The film ends on a freeze frame of her smiling face, just as every episode of Twin Peaks concluded on her beaming high-school portrait. Only this time the image that was once a cliched symbol of a corrupted innocent, a good girl gone bad, a suburban town with dirty secrets, has been brought to life and reconstructed. Laura is no longer a mere object around which the TV show's weird and farcical storylines revolved. The closing image is no longer a lie. The pain and the happiness is real.

The only qualm is the nature of Bob which is unnecessarily muddled and muddied. It worries me that he might be Evil possessing Leland as opposed to a representation and projection of Leland's evil. I am thankful that the film doesn't confirm either point of view as the possibility of Leland being exonerated in some way could make the film distasteful.

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me is true horror - in other words, hurt and the fear of hurt. It has a love for the character that is noble, beguiling and bewitching. It is an absolutely wonderful film.

1. Dekalog

1988/9 POL Krzysztof Kieslowski

Dekalog appears plain or even artless. It was made as a television series and it looks like one.

Dekalog is humble and a masterpiece. It is made of ten stories each rooted in one of the Ten Commandments. Eschewing pontification and didacticism, we are shown that life is hard to live by law and diktat, and that some commandments may indeed overlap or even contradict each other.

In a manner of speaking each film is in fact a parable on Jesus' 11th Commandment - one that was not carved in stone - "love one another as I have loved you". The Dekalog is Old Testament law and ideals seen through the prism of New Testament compassion.

Every episode is perfectly scripted and acted, always credible and never artificially adding drama. Where there are symbols they are seamless and illuminating. Following the steps these people take as they wrestle with the burdens and moral conundra of life is all the drama we need. We are distant but consoling simply by being there.

No moralising, no sensationalism, just the cold faces and hands of men and women.

Each film ends with a fade to black as if inviting us into contemplation and prayer. I was speechless.

[A few essays and a previous review of Dekalog]

20-11 The Greatest Films I've Seen

2011-03-15T11:28:00.000Z

20. The Exorcist

1973 USA William Friedkin

The Exorcist is an adult film. No, not adult in its profanity or blasphemy or chilling horror, but adult through its seriousness and serious-mindedness.

Its characters are mature, intellectually curious and principled enough to be bedevilled by doubts about their roles. These people are dignified and they are noble.

The Devil enters the chasms that have been left in their lives - by an absent and uncaring father, by a lapsed faith. He preys on them. He attempts to consume them. Only, by his very presence, he elicits a strengthening of resolve. His challenge, his baseness, requires an elevation of the heart.

A young girl's life is at stake. They fight, they pray. We stand by her bedside. She disappears and then returns.

The Exorcist builds on the worst nightmares of any parent, the simple things that can disturb an onlooker. It doesn't startle you or make you cower. It frightens you beyond shivers or jumps. It leaves you shaken and concerned.

[The Exorcist and 'the horror before the horror']

19. Korol Lir (King Lear)

1971 USSR Grigori Kozintsev

King Lear has inspired three striking cinematic adaptations. Jean-Luc Godard's King Lear, Akira Kurosawa's Ran and the greatest of all Shakespeares on film - Grigori Kozintsev's Korol Lir.

William Shakespeare's verse. Dmitri Shostakovich's cutting, clashing and tumultuous score. Cold, rocky, windswept landscapes. Kozintsev's sharp, intense monochrome.

One of Kozintsev's great achievements (as he did to a lesser extent with Hamlet) is that, after so many dreadful versions of his plays, he reminds you of what a great talent Shakespeare could be.

He makes King Lear earth-shattering. He gives it authority. Crucially he has actors who suck the dramatic pulp from the text and leave aside the tough skin of theatricality. Their performances mock the conventional wisdom that Shakespeare's work is somehow harder to perform than anyone else's (as if he invented emotions) or speaking his language were really like juggling oranges with your tongue.

Korol Lir is masterful.

18. Film Socialisme

2010 SWI/FRA Jean-Luc Godard

Film Socialisme is funny, profound, farcical, beautiful (especially his close ups), clever, philosophically adroit, pretentious, wilfully silly, detached and tenderly warm.

Film Socialisme is an essay, a documentary, and, at the same time, the most blatant of fictions. It enchants the eye, the heart and the mind.

Godard's single best film may only rank at 18 but, uniquely, all his films have the best of Cinema in them. Taken as a whole, including the outstanding television project Histoire(s) du Cinema, his career's work outstrips any film-maker's. He consistently offers something to inspire, excite and challenge.

Film Socialisme is incomparable and only comparable to Godard's other incomparables.

A full review here.

17. My Neighbour Totoro

1988 JAPAN Hayao Miyazaki

Japanese directors Mamoru Oshii, Satoshi Kon, Mamoru Hosoda, Hideaki Anno and many others (on TV as well as the big screen) have led animation into its golden age.

The greatest of all of these storytellers is Hayao Miyazaki.

One could point to self-improvement, to down-to-earth fantasy, to environmental concern, to respect for one's cultural heritage as the foundation of Miyazaki's films. While these are indeed constants of his work, what truly defines them is their meticulous and kindly attention to character, to the minutiae of mannerism and mood, to the volatile relationships between young people and the world around them.

My Neighbour Totoro is cute and upliftng beyond words. It gives you a spring in your step and a song in your heart.

It doesn't use emotional whitewash on its tale of the girls' ill mother - nor proposes the spirits as crude escapism or mere subconscious projection - and never lets the delights of the forest run treacly. It is sentiment made gloriously unsentimental.

16. Jeanne La Pucelle

1994 FRA Jacques Rivette

Jeanne La Pucelle is a work of abundant light and luxurious space. Like all of Jacques Rivette's films it is airy, cool and elegant. The places and the people are so alive, present and unvarnished that the film enthrals from start to finish.

It is rare for so many characters to become so familiar to us and so dear (diaristic entries to camera very cleverly break up the film, bring us closer to the people and elide the more mundane milestones). In Jeanne La Pucelle they are so distinct and interesting that Jeanne's farewells feel like ours too.

As for Jeanne, she has a smile in her eyes that reflects both the tranquility of the divine and the unfettered amusement of a normal girl. She gives herself no airs and demands respect only for God and the Saints who guide her.

Once she has achieved what they wanted from her - the crowning of the Dauphin in Reims (marvellous, rich pageantry) - the voices stop and she finds herself caught and tried for blasphemy. The end is near.

All great tales shock us with the memory of their beginning, appearing so hazily on the horizon behind us that we cannot believe we were ever there. It isn't the length of the film, or the miles we cover on foot and on horseback but the people we travel with that make it into a journey.

Full review here.

15. Rosetta

1999 BEL Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne

Keeping the camera unsteady, and invading the characters' space with close ups has become a shorthand for 'gritty' realism (for the 'real' can never be happy of course), for describing an isolated figure in turmoil.

In Rosetta we are tied to her in close up. To her face, to her back, as focused on her and her troubles as she is. She feels that there is no-one to reach out to and that she will never get out of "the rut". She is cut off. Off-screen is the world. Rosetta's world is the trap of her existence. The Dardennes aren't playing at the game of miserabilist martyrdom, of cosmetic instability. It isn't 'true' or 'raw', but a fiction we can believe in (in its situation, its characters, its purpose for existence).

Rosetta wants a steady job. She almost lets a colleague drown so that she can take his place. He, in return, resents her and torments her, pursuing her like a demon on his bike, its roar tearing at her peace.

She prepares to kill herself, carrying a gas canister back to her trailer. The man circles her on his bike, taunting her. She falls three times and begins to cry. Then, a miracle. An arm comes from off-screen. The world has stepped into her frame and intervened to save her. In the face of her suffering (passion) her tormentor's hate and jealousy has been burnt away to reveal the basis of all humanity - compassion - the same compassion that compelled Rosetta (despite her selfish impulses) to save him from the river.

Her tears subside and ours swell.

14. Au Hasard Balthazar

1966 FRA Robert Bresson

We don't know why they do what they do. Evil is committed. It is allowed to hold power and sway. Inevitability presses down on people.

Bresson's film too, with its cast of elegant and complaisant sufferers, flirts with sanctifying suffering.

Bresson strips away everything but the barest gestures of emotion - an outstretched hand, a sole tear, a head turned away. The core, the soul is afforded a gravity and a burden unique to his films.

Taking away the details of motivations and sensations, actions and consequences are clearer. The purely human, hiding behind the layers of expression and signs.

Au Hasard Balthazar, mighty in an austerity that presents objects as though with a neutral fondness, does not sanctify people merely because they accept their cross. Instead it illuminates how the vice of life's suffocating grip strains and buckles against the holy and the irreducible in all of us.

13. The Apu Trilogy

1955-59 INDIA Satyajit Ray

While revered Indian Directors Ritwik Ghatak and Guru Dutt tipped their style into the quaint, the picturesquely "just so", the films of Satyajit Ray succeed in their balancing act. They are sensitive, optimistic and fair without being over-embroidered, precious or too arranged.

The Apu Trilogy, regardless of its series of tragedies, is relaxed, unbuttoned and fine. The relationships between people are gentle and grown gently in soft light. The reeds sway, the train chugs by, the lovely little crises and mischiefs of family sparkle like trickling water in the sun.

There are always struggles to make ends meet. They are met with hope and good faith. There are deaths that tenderise the heart and open the eyes to look for new love.

The trilogy lives its moments of clumsiness - actions that are not natural but self-regarding symbolic gestures. Yet these are rare. I feel that they must be mentioned if only because they stand out from the exceptionally restrained tone, pace and feel of these beautiful films.

12. Fanny and Alexander

1982 SWE Ingmar Bergman

The faces, the colours, the movement, the light (musty, harsh, painterly), Fanny and Alexander is dressed with the vibrancy and vivacity of a fairytale, the fragrant, ineffable fleshiness of dream, of nightmare, of shadows of childhood, of wild memories thrown onto the wall.

To Fanny and Alexander, like for all children, the world they are growing into is crazy - full of ghosts and monsters, ecstasy and fun, cold fear and blank desolation. Family is riotous, uproarious, an amorous embrace.

It is as an abundant novel, a saga, a story whose tinted pages have the aroma of age and wisdom. The moustaches bristle, the whip cracks, the wax drips. The men are more than men - they are lascivious, they are curmudgeonly, they are magicians and sorcerers. They are pompous, earthy, heroic. The women are more than women. They are angels. They are nymph-like creatures moulded by Rubens, put upon and putting upon. A mother is comfort and peace. A father is strength and certainty.

Fanny and Alexander is a sitcom, a farce, a myth. At its best it is unmatched.

11. Chungking Express

1994 Hong Kong Wong Kar Wai

Chungking Express is here purely on the strength of its second story of a cop (Tony Leung) and a waitress at a snack bar (Faye Wong).

The first story is fine but doesn't show or evoke anything special. The second, an infectious blossoming love, is Cinema of the very highest order. The chemistry between the two actors/characters, the grinning of the eyes, that catchy excitement, is so wonderful that it is difficult to describe.

Faye takes to breaking into his apartment and rearranging his furniture, bringing in goldfish, swapping his soft toys, ironing his shirts. As the Cop is wont to anthropomorphise his home and his belongings as an extension and representation of his own feelings, she is effectively signing her name on his heart.

It is very hard to divine what goes into making a great love story. We know what should come out : we need to feel a certainty that the two belong together and a desperate, nervous yearning for it to happen. Chungking Express is that.

[Read my essay on Identities and Labels in Chungking Express]

30-21 The Greatest Films I've Seen

2011-03-11T18:01:00.000Z

30. Playtime

1967 FRA Jacques Tati

Jacques Tati's Playtime is whimsy, dozens of amusing observations and occurrences intricately choreographed.

As well as conventional gags quickly set up and delivered (the woman who seems to float by, the window cleaner who tilts the window and those reflected, the neon halo above the priest) Tati orchestrates protracted set pieces through which a dozen funny ideas happily run along. In an airport, a roundabout, an office block and, most notably, a restaurant, Tati lays down a picnic blanket and brings delicacy after delicacy out of his hamper.

Then there is the comedy on a still larger scale - the bewildering bureaucratic utopia/dystopia, the homogenisation of cities, or the breaking up of social orders.

Like no other film, Playtime demands and rewards your attention. There's nothing uproarious or crude about it. Droll and clever, it shows that if we keep our eyes peeled everything can tickle us, or even pleasantly pass the time infuriating us.

29. Rebecca

1940 USA Alfred Hitchcock

The success of Alfred Hitchcock's best film, Rebecca, is that it takes Daphne Du Maurier's wonderful story and avoids messing it up.

There's nothing particularly striking about the way Rebecca is shot. The key is in following the dramatic throughline with style but not with a panache that overwhelms and makes tawdry its, admittedly high-concept, pleasures.

The film does change the nature of Maxim's past actions but the story was never focussed on Maxim's character. It's focus is his new wife (the book's narrator) and her battle with the ghost of Rebecca, his late first wife. The sensations of discomfort and anxiety (tormented by close friend of Rebecca's Mrs Danvers) are very well portrayed by Joan Fontaine. She is only just learning to be a woman and now she must learn to be a wife, a second wife, and a lady of a grand house. Sometimes it's like a dream, other times a nightmare.

The shocking twists that shake her certainty and self-confidence are perhaps the best in all of film.

28. Hail Mary

1985 FRA Jean-Luc Godard

Understandably causing controversy upon release - changing but one word of a sacred text will lead to dismay and offence - Hail Mary may be at times abiblical but it is never anti-biblical.

Perhaps only by exploring the story afresh and extrapolating upon its psychologies (there is not that much on what Mary and Joseph felt in the New Testament) can we shake ourselves out of our complacency with its mysteries and earth-shattering significances.

It is a film that allies innocent/cheeky mischief (the Angel Gabriel's grumpy dutifulness, Joseph's suspicions of Mary) with a glowing depiction of nature (an coalescence of God, the beginning of time and a new wind of change in the sunsets, the moons and the grasses) and Mary. We see a woman's body, fully nude, as if never before - not sexualised or objectified.

There are exquisite flashes throughout : Mary plays basketball and the squeaking sounds of the court are interpolated with the strains of Bach, God's calling; life breathed into Mary's belly as she lies on her bed; Joseph learning that love is self-sacrifice, not touching Mary's body but holding his hand by her belly.

In the end Godard has done something that seems impossible. Hail Mary is fresh and bold without courting controversy and honorific without ever being obsequious towards the material.

27. Hotel Monterey

1972 BEL Chantal Akerman

There is a burgeoning movement in art which shows less to create the illusion of more. There is a climate where those who have little craft or ideas hope the credulous viewer, desperate to prove themselves a discerning connoisseur, will fill the void themselves.

In Cinema there are Directors who think the "simple" can only be a veil for the deep, for their depth. Chantal Akerman's Hotel Monterey strips the minimalist altar bare and, through showing what it can really do, rudely exposes those who exploit it.

Of course I am sure plenty would accuse Hotel Monterey of the same pretentiousness. Only there is not one moment where an image is doing more than being itself or asking for more than to be looked at for its concreteness, its lines, its colours. Chantal Akerman has a great eye for a seductive composition. Still shots last for a couple of minutes and instead of losing interest in them we are entranced, our eyes relaxing and focusing and then relaxing again.

The film is entirely silent and what is around you (birds, the whir of a fan, distant roadworks or nothing at all) is your soundtrack. It is all-enveloping. Bit by bit we work our way up the foyers and corridors of the hotel until we emerge on the roof. Only a very talented artist can treat the simple simply. It is an awfully difficult thing to do.

26. The Trial of Joan of Arc

1962 FRA Robert Bresson

[Edited down from previous review]

Jeanne and the men who judge her are never in the same composition. There is a rupture. The rhythm of question and response is a harassment. She withstands, parrying their strikes. They ask, and she glances down. She responds, eyes lifted. There is a word that sounds and feels such as the dynamic of this trial : impitoyable, merciless and implacable.

Le Proces de Jeanne D'Arc does not incite pathos or gather tears. So much can come from observing this 'model' (Florence Delay). Performance can be a veneer. It hides the person who acts.

There is no music, save the drums that beat at the beginning and at the end.Le Proces de Jeanne D'Arc does not use adjectives. Only verbs and nouns. It renounces spectacle. There is an immaculate profundity : feet and hands, shackled and unshackled. The sound is heavy. Shouts snipe from offscreen demanding that the "witch" be burnt. The roar of the fire is unbearable and not only because of what it means.

Jeanne is tied to the stake. A dog passes between the onlookers. It looks up. It doesn't understand. It is looking. To this dog Jeanne is not a witch and she is not a saint. She is. It cannot know why this murder is happening. The dog takes us out of the human experience. The shot refutes hate, fear and hypocrisy. It makes empty. It makes things be seen again.

It is hard to judge Le Proces de Jeanne D'Arc, if in fact we must judge it. It did not make me feel anything in particular. It made me know.

25. Flight of the Red Balloon

2007 FRA / TAIWAN Hou Hsiao Hsien

The dilemmas of a single mother (Suzanne) struggling with her son (Simon), her absent daughter and a nuisance tenant reach no resolution and no conclusion.

We float in and out of their story watching while she attempts to anchor her life. The titular balloon is rarely seen but we know that at any time it may be there, a calming and un-judging observer, a counterpoint. The balloon is like the notes the piano tuner sounds over and over while Suzanne's anger and sadness is 'tuned' into a simple gesture of love between mother and son.

Little things go out of their control. The balloon appears to have a mind of its own but it is only being carried on the wind. Suzanne and Simon are too lacking in full control. Only they are not peaceful about it.

Here is the power of film and memory and the way someone's voice or someone's camera can give new life to old. The balloon kissing its own image painted on the wall is the now honouring the past.

The film doesn't play with grand decisions and solid finalities. The story is each moment.

Full review here.

24. Die Hard

1988 USA John McTiernan

A smirk, a grimace, a disbelieving chuckle. The fly in the ointment, the monkey in the wrench, the pain in the ass.

The big kid. The anti-authority authority. The outlaw with a badge.

Die Hard is hyper-tense, and super-thrilling, two dozen storeys of blue steel, grey concrete, pipes, glass and smoke : a dangerous city built upright. You feel every knock, every inch of punctured skin, every bit of sweat, every cheeky triumph. It is the apogee of all action films, the non pareil, and McClane is the perfect hero to pop Hans' balloon. Then there's Al, Agents Johnson and Ellis, Holly, brilliantly strong characters all.

What better way to prove you're a man to your wife than by killing a load of bad guys?

23. Poltergeist

1982 USA Tobe Hooper

What makes Poltergeist such a spectacle of wonderment and worry is the giant heart of a tangible family love.

From the children's bedroom (a technicolour shrine to Americana) where a tree smashes through the window, and the kitchen where the chairs arrange themselves, to the garden where poor Tweety is (temporarily) buried, this home and its objects come alive in more ways than one.

We care when the light show turns hysterical. We care when Diane holds a whispered night-time vigil with Dr. Lesh. Everything is vivid. Poltergeist is sweet (the mouthed "I love you" between husband and wife), funny ("Can I have a goldfish?"; the duelling remote controls) and clever (after everything that's happened Steve still finds the idea of a medium ridiculous; Diane turns the channel over to a violent film because Carol Anne is staring at static).

It is exciting (Diane dragged along the ceiling), terrifying (the dog-like beast), sad (Carol Anne saying "no more" as the closet door opens again to take her inside) breathtaking (Carol Anne's spirit is felt by her mother : "It's her. It's my baby. She went through my soul") and truly moving (mother and child are reborn from the other side together in the bathtub).

Poltergeist is a film of many wonders.

22. Gion Bayashi

1953 JAPAN Kenji Mizoguchi

The softness of the black and white, the poses of the geisha, the smartness of frames and faces speak of delicacy, order and despondency.

Gion Bayashi sits and settles. It meditates upon those women whose profession is at the crossroads between a noble craft and a sordid exploitation. As in Street of Shame (Akasen Chitai) it is through the eyes of the newest and youngest geisha (Ayako Wakao) that we see the perils and restraints of this life, the sacrifices made to learn music, dance, deportment and those made too to one's dreams and dignity.

Mizoguchi steers clear of sensationalism. He shows the fine line between something good and something wrong, what should be carried forward and what should be discarded. He shows too that, whichever way society as a whole faces, it is the individual men who decide what becomes of these women.

21. A.I. Artificial Intelligence

2001 USA Steven Spielberg

A.I. is emotionally draining. It is overflowing with sadness. Yearning and rejection walk hand in hand, and love, always incomplete, always malfunctioning.

Is love ever selfless? Do we love because we are loved? Do we love what people do for us? Is an emotion real if that which inspires it is an illusion?

There are critics who have decried A.I.'s ending as sentimental or in some way upbeat. There is nothing upbeat in A.I. except the splendour of a magnificently realised story. The end is the end of a cycle - Monica created David to love her and now David brings back Monica to love him.

A.I. is not another future where robots may take over or turn against us or keep us apart. A.I.'s future is more believable and more troubling: if we could create things that seemed so much like us but were disposable, how would we begin to see ourselves?

Here's my essay on A.I. entitled Love, Self-Love and Self-Hate.