Up In The Air

Prescient cinema is always a bit tricky. United 93, for example, was, for me, a bit of an abomination, dealing as it did with the doomed occupants of a hijacked flight on that fateful day. There was no need: the film lent nothing to the devastating media reports, the bravery, the poignant horror. It airbrushed events for mass-palatability, for those that couldn’t really be bothered reading a newspaper, God forbid. Here, we have a film about down-sizing, redundancies, economic meltdown and those that capitalise on such devastation. It doesn’t render the job-loss experience as anything other than what it is: confusing and catastrophic. But it does manage to fashion a sophisticated romcom out of the debris.

George Clooney is a happily itinerant and un-moored p45 ghoul, paid handsomely to jump on and off planes around the US and fire people (whose responses are jump-cut encapsulated: tearful indignation, perplexed numbness, proud rage, incomprehensibility) and then do it all again, 300+ days a year. Home is whatever hotel room he currently occupies and responsibility and normal life are the preserve of weaklings.

He meets female equivalent Vera Farmiga (superb) in an airport bar and their status-obsessed exchanges lead to a transaction of a non-business kind; they agree to re-rendezvous as and when their schedules tally as they criss-cross the US and each other. Clooney is also soon saddled with the baggage of a zealously blank, icy go-getter type (Anna Kendrick, suitably vapid and reptilian – initially, at least) who he has to ‘show the ropes’ and who has derived a computer-based means of terminating employees without the inconvenience of even addressing them in person. She is a deadweight for about five minutes – they soon thaw each other out. A staple Hollywood tool for achieving this – alcohol – is made good use of.

Clooney also has the looming wedding of his sister to contend with, and the lack of a ‘Plus-one’ on his arm should he trouble himself with attending. Vera Farmiga, anyone?

Clooney and Kendrick go about their work until Kendrick realises she doesn’t have the stomach for it (well, that and her boyfriend dumps her) and Clooney is temporarily grounded as Kendrick’s new idea is jumped on and given the go-ahead. His oft-empty flat is no home but that’s his lot. To refer to the last 10 minutes in any detail or so would reveal and ruin the best hand the film has: you’ll see it coming by then but it’s a strangely downbeat, admirable way to play things out, and it makes sense in a world in which the likes of Clooney and his boss (Jason Bateman playing Patrick Bateman) thrive.

The film feels like the Coen Brothers meets Alexander Payne, and could’ve been a masterpiece, a touchstone for the times, Clooney’s best film, but instead feels like a charming, engaging missed-opportunity that you’ll be more than happy to watch again, partly because, Michael Clayton aside, it has Clooney at his best and partly to recall what actually happens for most of the films’ duration.

Adventureland

Does the thought of a bunch of Chris Ware-esque slackers, malcontents, navel-gazers, geeks, air-headed bimbos, losers, weirdos and general leftfield, left-behind types do it for you? Me either, really – these characters, in latterday cinema, tend to be sterotypes or ciphers, stick-on rent-a-whiners or just plain ridiculous. Mini Kurt Cobains in check shirts grumbling about their (normally not too shabby) lot or dopey girls that really belong in the latest Dawson’s Creek-alike but have been told to wear no make-up and look like they’ve got mild toothache.

In Adventureland, though, they all ring true and are at no point unlikeable, even the largely unlikeable ones. Adventureland being the fairground that Jesse Eisenberg stoops to in order to bankroll his college plans when his parents admit their finances are none too good. It’s a typical affair – con amusements and underpaid staff moping about, sharing misfortunes and anecdotes and dovetailing in and out of each others lives. What’s out of the ordinary is the fact that Kristen Stewart and Ryan Reynolds work here, the latter taking the former into his mother’s basement when the mood takes him. She likes Eisenberg, though, and a relationship kindles, threatening to go somewhere despite her reluctance and general discord (parent trouble). Reynolds drops a few rogue pieces of advice into chats with Eisenberg, Eisenberg pulls the cheerleader who fancies ‘normal guy for a change’, Eisenberg feels bad, Eisenberg gets wind of Reynolds mucking about with his beloved and it all goes sour, though not for long, obviously.

The last scene and shot are exactly right; the performances are perfectly underplayed and the musical touchstones and cinematography suitably evoke a time that never was but that you want to keep revisiting. Eisenberg is a slightly more winsome, appealing, humbly bumbling version of Michael Cera, Jon Heder is particularly wired but instantly endearing and Stewart is exceptional. Gregg Mottola deserves a great deal of credit for getting the balance between sunlit nostalgia and vitality right and the script is sharp but never arch; the gently disaffected protagonists are never submerged by the pervasive sense of summer nights long gone. Adventureland feels like a mish-mash of all the best contemporary indie comedy moments but stands alone as a teen film abundant with unassuming charm.

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans

Bad Lieutenant Port of Call: New Orleans

Werner Herzog can do anything he feels like, and if you want proof, here’s some more.

Bad Lieutenant POCNO is only tenuously associated with Abel Ferrara’s Harvey Keitel vehicle. There, religious overtones lend (or detract, depending on your take) another dimension to the film as an essay on the ruination of human civilisation. Our devolving protagonist pretty much embraces hell as a coping mechanism, a means to a tortured end.

Herzog is not as downbeat, but he is as empathetic as Ferrara in that he accepts the corruption of Cage’s bad lieutenant as one manifestation of a survival instinct amidst chaos.

Rather than being a merely unflinching portrayal of hopelessness a la the Ferrara film, there is much laughter in the dark here, some of which revels in the extremes catalogued. Herzog is not interested in defeat and pointless savagery – he is interested in a human response to horror and impinging, glaring mortality. And he has great, grim fun in letting Nicolas Cage tear up the screen as a means of embodying a perfectly reasonable and hallucinatory madness amidst the wreckage of New Orleans.

Cage, from the outset, is off-kilter and keyed up to perpetual abrasion, nursing a call-of-duty inflicted back injury with pills aplenty and a gambling addiction to boot. He is kinetic disquiet and a post-Katrina short-fuse dancing around flames. His partner, Val Kilmer, suitably grumpy, is a jock- gone-to-seed type, XL rumpled suit and poised to lurch at anyone he feels like. Things are such that Cage keeps him in check, despite being a seething mess and irked to the point of restlessness. The ‘law’ here is as capricious and unpredictable as everything else, from second to second. He bribes a young girl for sex as her boyfriend looks on, setting a tone Herzog maintains throughout.

In any case, Cage (who within minutes is impossible to take your eyes off) is detailed with nailing drug dealing prime suspect Xzibit of the murder of five Senegalese immigrants. Cue Cage emerging from a house with an associate of the suspect, breaking into a chuckle and muttering: ‘I love it…I just love it!’

He’s soon stepping in and out of various scenarios, occasionally accompanied by hallucinated Iguanas that mark his encroaching meltdown. There is much Lynch in this motif – in one scene an Iguana fills the screen as a delighted, onlooking Cage smiles in recognition. Things are unravelling but Cage is far too gone/amused to worry. And so are we: we’re egging the imminent lunacy on as we know it means more scope for an unhinged Cage to luxuriate in the glee of anarchy. There are plenty more examples of Cage letting his hair down to hilarious, frenzied effect. One of cinema's more indelible moments in recent years involves a rapt Cage enjoying a near-dead soul breakdancing - seriously. It’s his best performance in years and is a manic gift of improvisation, brilliance and freewheeling abandon – he’s clearly, though, having far too much fun for those doling out awards. Shame.

There’s great support from Xzibit, Eva Mendes (as his prostitute girlfriend in peril) and, in particular, Brad Dourif as his world-weary bookie. They’re all wise enough to get out of Cage's way, though, as he steals virtually every scene and then sets it on fire. Please, Mr Cage, more of this and less of turgid marquee rubbish.

2012

Roland Emmerich. Perhaps it’s a weakness on my part, but I tend to forget just how dismal the vast majority of his endeavours have been. A new Emmerich extravaganza rolls around, the trailer offers up broad, large-scale mayhem and I duplicitously cancel my disbelief and think: ‘Yeah, big stuff, a world in peril, buildings ripped in half by vast crevices opening up in the shitstormed planet, apocalyptic nightmares writ large. Who cares about how crap his films are? This is a bomb-subtle ride I WANT TO GET ON!’

I don’t hate myself for this goodwill. It’s perhaps a remnant from decades gone by, when pretty much ALL films, particularly disaster movies or sci-fi epics, offered up everything I wanted. I didn’t ask for much, and I often got more. ‘V’ the TV series, if you watch it again, has its moments, but it’s pretty shocking on the whole. Nostalgia can do terrible things. At the time, it was a terrifying assault on Earth, humans you cared about being nicked for food, lizards masquerading as humans (with peely-off skin!), an epic tussle for the future of our planet. Ultimately, I’m easy pickings for this kind of film.

So I still have this supine expectancy when given any encouragement. Memories of Godzilla being truly abysmal are gleefully cast aside. John Cusack is onboard! He’s not just being ironic and paying for a new condo! I’m ready for Armageddon and Earth getting ravaged by all manner of shit! Etc.

Then you watch it. You buckle up for the funride. You switch your brain off and wait for your senses to be bombarded with glorious catastrophe and John Cusack looking pained as houses collapse and he legs it from state to state avoiding the snapping jaws of CGI death. The pre-amble unfolds. The madness is imminent. But…

Big but. Never in popular cinema has such little regard been paid to character. These are ciphers. Okay. This isn’t Rachel Getting Married and never strives for that. It’s a marquee mash-up with no time for such deliberations. But Emmerich serves up the most feebly perfunctory suggestions of human beings I’ve ever seen outside Australian soap opera. We are informed, more than anything, about the relationships between the protagonists through shameless exposition and off-the-peg plot-advancement dialogue.

There is the implicit understanding that we wouldn’t care anyway, and we’re only here for the fireworks. So here’s ‘A’, they’re doing such and such and ‘B’ is really important to them so they need to avoid ‘C’…let’s just topple shit, shall we? The upshot being that there is rarely a sense of remote concern, let alone mortal danger or dread. It’s the work of a little kid in a sandbox smashing up all his toys just for the hell of it. Which, in theory, might be quite fun to watch. Emmerich, however, really has gone to great lengths to make the end of the Earth as unstirring an event as you could possibly imagine.

Nothing as large-scale has ever been as uninvolving or blandly realised outside a crap console game. You will suffer the strange experience of watching the world get the shit kicked out of it whilst checking the remaining running time. It is an innocuous dribble of a film.

Tony Takitani

Tony Takitani is an adaptation of a Haruki Murakami short story. Not an awful lot happens in the story itself: a particularly lonely man, an animated cadaver, who has a fractured relationship with his father goes through the motions, earning a lot of money but hardly living, and eventually decides that he might as well get a wife to try and initiate a bit of drama and an end to meals-for-one.

Things start well and Tony emerges from his cocoon of melancholy and inertia, but soon starts to see the downside of not being a hermit – you start caring for people. He frets about possible calamities and notes with increasing displeasure his wife’s all-encompassing addiction to pummelling his bank account in order to fill a room of the house with designer clothes. One subtly savage montage shows a series of close-ups of shoes wearing their owner rather than the other way round, walking hither and thither, out of control but maintaining a semblance of normality, a thin façade of equilibrium.

She reneges on her habit, briefly, with fatal consequences and Tony fails to endure the loss, replacing her with almost physically identical hired-help that he gets to dress up in the deceased woman’s redundant wardrobe. He thinks better of this idea and sends her away with a week worth of attire and a request to keep schtum about the whole thing. He sells the rest of the clothes and then, when his father dies, cuts his last link to the world by selling his bequeathed jazz vinyl. He is absolutely alone, as he was, but resorting to the comfort of a familiarly dead existence, we already know, is no answer. The film leaves us, and Tony, hanging on the telephone, desperate to re-connect with someone, many blank years yawning ahead.

The story itself is a predictable tragedy that essays the futility of attempting to go it alone. The central character is conditioned to isolation, but given a tantalising glimpse of the alternative can’t go back. His, and everyone else’s, solitude is captured brilliantly by the film. The slow sweep of the camera, which refuses to dwell on anything for fear of being caught looking, so it feels, lends an air of glacial ruthlessness to the lives observed that both Murakami and the director Jun Ichikawa clearly ascribe to. We’re peering into lives that are impinged on by quiet chaos and imbued with sadness, but it’s never a maudlin film. Indeed, the clever, confounding way the shots are sometimes framed, and the gapingly incomplete feeling sets create a stark, marginalised theatre of complicity that both refuses to avoid the desperation of the protagonists and almost celebrates the inherent hoplessness of the human condition. There is a sense as the film draws on that this is a defiantly reasoned retort to life as meaningless. Everyone is pressed up against the margins, framed like Hopper, and everything seems half-finished, like an elusive memory. Having the actors utter parts of the voiceover adds to this sense of dreamlike, makeshift creativity, and works brilliantly, lending the performers a sense of resigned equanimity that laces the whole thing with poignancy and elegance.

The film is a lonely place to inhabit for even 76 minutes, but it does not suffer for comparisons to Ozu, wears its heavy convictions lightly and when Tony breaks into an unfamiliar smile as he watches his wife and the unfolding of a life he might never have contemplated, it’s a smile you know can’t last but is no less meaningful for that.

District 9

It’s hard to know what to expect from a South African sci-fi horror film, in the same way that you might struggle to accurately perceive what a Cuban screwball comedy might be like, or a Dutch political drama. You’re curious from the off. District 9, then, has no precedent that I’m aware of, and that lends the film a constantly surprising allure.

Johannesburg is chosen, for some reason, by a horde of some million aliens (‘prawns’) as an earthly base, and they outstay their welcome. Our hero (Sharlto Copley) is tasked with the thanklessness of serving up eviction-notices to these itinerant creatures as part of a ‘relocation’ programme, from a ramshackle base reminiscent of a third-world slum, ‘District 9’, to ‘District 10’, a newly positioned alternative alien site (more like a back-of-beyond isolation camp) for them to reside hundreds of miles outside the city, where they can be forgotten about and kept in distant check by the authorities. Short-shrift being given to any obstinate evictees: they’re exterminated on the spot with nary a shrug.

During this process, Copley raids an alien home and inadvertently sprays himself with a substance that ushers in an old horror-staple – a spin on the old ‘infected’ vampire/zombie/werewolf metamorphosis. Copley grows a ‘prawn’ claw, a glossy black pincer that renders him a bit of a curiosity initially, but he is soon put to nefarious means by a government keen to capitalise on his new-found ability, due to DNA enactive geek plot development, to engage with alien warfare and become a weapon against the interlopers. They are ready to vivisect the poor chap before he blossoms into another prawn, so he legs it, becomes a fugitive and an intriguing initial premise morphs into a genuinely compulsive thriller with shades of Alien Nation, Enemy Mine and countless others.

The sci-fi elements, so often the downside of this type of film, are totally believable throughout, and the ‘prawns’ are engaging, empathetic and likeable, with a neat line in sardonic, aggrieved dialogue that renders them ingratiatingly cynical. We also have a protagonist in Copley that’s basically floundering much of the time, a weedy suit forced into defending his existence, albeit as a fraught human/prawn fusion.

The film has a few simple but clever conceits. By merely affording the prawns human-like movement and gestures, the savagery of the humans disparagingly shepherding the prawns into a ghetto compound is exacerbated to the extent that it’s not just injustice that puts us onside with the ill-treated tribe of aliens, but a neatly manipulated anthropomorphic recognition. In other words, the clever effects make us care about their plight. In other, less dextrous hands, the aliens might merely be a neat array of expendable CGI gestures, an interesting looking bit of insignificant bullet-fodder. Here, our sympathies are muddied, then subverted in an intelligent, pointed way.

The finale is perhaps a little time-honoured, but there’s much to be impressed by in District 9. After drivel like Knowing and a slew of uninvolving effects-led films over the last few years, this is a welcome addition to a recently ill-served sub-genre.

500 Days Of Summer

Rom-coms: whatever the state of the world, from multiplex down to fleapit barely staying afloat in marginal towns, cinemas unflaggingly stick them onto their screens for couples of smirking victorious women and compromised men, jaunty groups of over-garrulous teens and 'the older generation' who never fail to pile in with breezy assurity that THIS is the pill they need. The new Jennifer Aniston over-perfumed, clean-cut and airbrushed vehicle of nice; the new Kate Hudson screeching party of over-energised fluff; the new Gerard Butler heart-string-twanger with a glinting eye. Rose-tinted inevitability and succour for the feelgood seekers. Great houses overlooking everything. Shrill Clairol faces jostling amid bouncing hair, temporary setbacks and ultimate baby-abundant or Hallmark-written resolution.

500 Days Of Summer promises to be ‘a different kind of rom-com’. The tagline, for example, reads: ‘Boy meets girl. Boy falls in love. Girl doesn’t.’ Hey, that does sound slightly different. Then you notice that Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel are in it. Gordon-Levitt seems to have almost accidentally fallen into ‘indieboy’ pole-position that Tobey Maguire lightly grasped before Sam Raimi and Spiderman shot him onto the A-List. Ever-young of face and effortlessly likeable with a hint of easy-intelligence and enough of the maverick, quirky solemnity about him to render him polished slacker elect.

Deschanel has the gleaming face of eight-year-old health, like something off a breakfast cereal box, but the kind of unforced charm and allure to make you miss her absence whenever she isn't in a scene. She has clearly worked out how to look like she doesn’t care and yet make you care a lot. For this, you need to be very cute and clever. So both leads, then, are multi-dimensional and appealing. Expectations raise.

We start near the end, and the film is a jumble of non-linear glimpses of different moments on the central relationship timeline. We already know the relationship will end (but we suspect it will all tie together seamlessly, somehow) so it’s a case of watching how the whole thing falters. Cue some neat editing juxtapositions (Gordon-Levitt getting into a lift full of joy; pictorial timeshift from day ‘37’ to ‘188’, Gordon-Levitt exiting lift looking crushed) that help develop the central conceit and well-placed splicing of high- and low-moments. That such a device is employed to capture the recollection of the ebb-and-flow of a relationship is understandable, and it works pretty well. We see the same footage twice, with very different attributed observations. ‘I love the way she smiles!’ becomes ‘I hate her crooked teeth!’ as these things are wont to as the demise of the relationship hoves into view.

You get the big ‘I see the light’ moment akin to John Cusack foisting the tinny-blarings of Peter Gabriel’s ‘In Your Eyes’ upon a bed-restless Ione Skye at twilight, or Billy Crystal sprinting through streets towards Meg Ryan to Sinatra’s ‘It Had To Be You’. Only here, it’s the downbeat shrugging off of idealism that a departing Deschanel augments. Gordon-Levitt quits his job as a greeting card writer, citing his lack of wanting to ‘add to the bullshit’. He then hangs out in his musty apartment and wanders down to the 7/11 for fresh supplies of whiskey and junk-food as he waits for the misery to filter out of his lethargy-freighted system. He decides to chase his dreams of becoming an architect and cultivates a portfolio. Things, clearly, can only get better etc…

Gordon-Levitt is extremely good at this kind of thing. Affable and with enough reserves of complexity to remain compelling. He’s the new Heath Ledger (he even looks a bit like him). Deschanel will eventually run out of these roles and presumably become a Disney-mom but this may be the film that defines and captures her best. Unattainable but impossible to dislike, she’s the perfect object of Gordon-Levitt’s doomed attentions.

The film isn’t a laugh-fest and isn’t a navel-gazing wallower either; it’s an enjoyably unprecious, smug-free charting of a briefly igniting romance that threatens to go somewhere and then doesn’t, much to Gordon-Levitt’s despair and Deschanel’s empathetic indifference, and it gets the balance right. And, in the end, it deserves credit as being a genuine attempt at something unusually bittersweet. (Until the end, where it resorts to type, but 500 Days Of Summer has earned enough goodwill at this point for you to let it go.) The architecture job interview: he meets a fox in the foyer, also waiting to interview. Do you think he’ll get the job? Clue: the woman, who (eventually) agrees to join him for coffee afterward, is called ‘Autumn’.

Girl Cut In Two

Girl Cut In Two is spectacularly French. And that’s a good thing. It's entirely ridiculous and charming in equal measure. Claude Chabrol gives us Francois Berleand as a 50-something author of considerable repute and not inconsiderable kinky proclivities engaging in a gleefully permitted adulterous tryst with the gawkily attractive weather-girl Ludovine Sagnier. She likes quoting from books and saunters around her mum’s bookshop like some cultured coquettish dream. It’s not only Woody Allen that does this: Chabrol basically puts his ideal of cerebral beauty up there and has his aging artist pull her with ease as she initially bats off the awful attentions of a dreadful dandy, played by Benoit Magimel, who does a good job of channelling a young De Niro meets fey aristocratic waster. The kind of guy you might encounter in a nightmare after watching Brideshead Revisited whilst you were learning French.

However, our old scribe is the kind of chap that says impressively uppity things like, when confronted at a restaurant table by Magimel, ‘The impertinence of an inferiority complex’. The guy is pompous, but we loathe Magimel to such an extent that we immediately side with the gnomic writer. Which isn’t particularly easy. And is made harder still by his continually baffling toying with Sagnier, who clearly loves a bit of clever old arty guy but isn’t too fond of being bedded and then dropped like a bit of merde. And Magimel’s vulturous playboy waits in the wings, loaded and loathsome. He’s a prize berk and she’s clearly in need of a slightly more favourable love triangle, but we’re in a French film, so it’s never going to be run of the mill. You want to lead Savigner in the direction of the nearest scarecrow for a better deal, but that’s not just Chabrol’s drawing up of a couple of spoiled – in different ways – characters. Savigner is, let’s face it, adorable. It’s akin to watching a small child careening between two very different monsters.

Savigner loves the reclusive old writer who likes having her perform sex acts on his friends at an exclusive gentlemans club he frequents. He continually plays come-hither daddy-figure and then palms her away. The empty playboy loves her, or should I say covets her and can’t understand why anyone wouldn’t succumb, and she rebounds into the arms of the young disaster, eventually marrying him. She continues to yearn for Berleand and Magimel gets jealous – and the to-and-fro continues until a shooting clears the stage of both men and leaves Sagnier to contemplate what on earth she’s been doing for 90-odd minutes. In the meantime Savigner’s relatively new husband’s family uses her to get murdering hubby’s sentence curtailed before tossing her aside.

Sagnier muddies the directors intent, I’d say – which seems to draw some kind of conclusion about the contemporary power of women to shrug off dreadful men without becoming forever tarnished – by being the only likeable member of the cast. We wouldn’t care if she was done a hundred times by a reincarnated Hitler with a rusty iron swastika whilst dressed as Eva Braun: she has one of those inviolable screen presences that render the whole attempt a little futile.

Unless, of course, I have read the film wrong. I do, though, feel that a more complex, less likeable female lead might have posed one or two more interesting questions and might have lent the film a little more much-needed ambivalence. This is no ‘Girl Cut In Two’ – this is a girl manipulated by a couple of soulless men for a while but ultimately fairly okay thank you, better off well adrift of any of the characters Chabrol seems to delight in peopling his films with.

That all sounds rather critical: the film seems to strive for a certain feminist piquancy but instead seems like a bit of a confession. And either way, the film is supremely entertaining even when it doesn’t quite work as well as it thinks it does. Berleand wears a face that says, affably enough, ‘Yes, I am a pretty hollow, problematic guy that can’t get a hard-on without playing out all manner of elaborate fantasies. And I’m quite happy to mess people around for a bit of fun. So sue me!’ Benoit Magimel is a pantomime brat. Good support comes from the likes of Mathilda May. But Savigner not only steals the film, she saves it: a frothy, slight comedy of buffoonery, cold sexiness, moral decreptitude as sophistication and ruined people playing games. If France was that good, I'd move there.

State Of Play

I didn’t watch the BBC original: this is probably a good thing as tiresome comparisons would no doubt be pointless anyway. Let it stand on its own merits, or lack thereof. A bit of both, in fact.

Baffleck is a dour congressman. Is this good acting or is he phoning this in? It’s hard to tell. He’s certainly lacking substance and makes for a believable cipher politician, all slick poise and nascent abrasion. Anyway, one of his staff gets shoved in front of a speeding train and he’s all grief-stricken. He wells up. But in no time, he’s being romantically-linked with his late former underling and it’s not looking good. His whiter-than-white façade is looking flimsy and his future ambitions are at stake. What to do?

Implausibly enlist the help of former room-mate Russell Crowe, now a Pullitzer-winning (the film never confirms as much but you can imagine) journo with an edge and a taste for the big stuff (and the hard stuff – this is Crowe, you immediately imagine him glonking down a pint of Jim Beam as he bangs out his latest Gonzo-esque masterpiece at 3am). Crowe is unhesitant and quickly gets about finding out as much as he can about the deceased as part of his Affleck character-reboot. Several unlikeables join the fray: Jeff Daniels as a poisoned-looking suit, Michael Baresse as a dead-eyed assassin and an impressively detestable Jason Bateman as a smug club promoter.

As is always the case with the conspiracy-thriller, all manner of things unfold and one or two twists are never too far away. Unfortunately, there are no surprises, and that's without having seen the original or wikipedia-ing the story. It's all a bit unexciting and rather obvious. You will probably figure it all out before the first major scene is over, but that serves you right for not suspending your disbelief.

‘Corridors of deceit’ political films had their heyday in the 70’s, and Michael Clayton (Tony Gilroy has a hand in this) was a superior hark back to those days of intellectual thrillers. This isn’t terrible by any means, and is a worthwhile effort. Some of the scenes aren’t lit sufficiently (what is this obsession with ridiculously low light in films these days? As though it lends a film dread and sophistication: it doesn’t – it makes you squint) and the film is too slight to keep you that interested. But it’s respectably respectful of its audience and some scenes are extremely well done. Underground car park dread? Lurking oddballs on night-time street corners? Always good to have these present and correct in such an endeavour and there are perfectly good examples within the two hours.

Helen Mirren is also in this as Crowe’s editor, and she’s having far too much fun to give any kind of performance. She’s not bad, she just isn’t trying. No need. Rachel McAdams is trying, but she’s lost: trying to buy her as some kind of driven cub reporter with an eye on Mirren’s job in 30 years is laughable. She’s cute with an IQ, with a Disney, box-office face but no real acting chops or spine. Robin Wright Penn is superb but gets about three scenes, and may well not even have a line in one of them. Wasted.

It’s left to Russell Crowe – drafted in as Leonardo DiCaprio jumped due to other commitments – to give the film its ballsy integrity and he carries the whole slightly daft thing with ease. He offers up a well-judged, clever performance – nervy when he needs to be, dubious at all the right times, always believable – that must rank along with his best. And you’re happy to see him bound off through the office victoriously at the close of play with doe-eyed McAdams by his side. You’re just worried if she can handle what’s next. Anne Hathaway would surely have gone several rounds, at least.

John Cazale

Some people just have one of those faces, destined to be utilised in a very specific way. Lantern jawed and furrowed of brow – bruiser. Dot-eyed and emaciated – nerd or geek. And so on. But what if you looked like John Cazale? Like a clown sans greasepaint in maudlin repose, or a 1920’s Italian-American barber fallen on fallow times. A puny conman, a boozehound salesman, a dyspeptic bus driver. Cazale could be anything, all too convincingly so. He was a slack bag of hangdog poses, and he had the only face I can think of that could shrug.

His great performances are numerous but, for me, he is especially heart-breaking and believably hopeless in Dog Day Afternoon, as the beleaguered catastrophe depressively trudging his way through an ultimately botched bank job in the shadow of Pacino’s overwrought pyrotechnics. He is tragedy manifest as a floppy-haired failure, exuding incompetence and discomfort, mumbling his way to disaster. A man forever glaringly out of place at just the wrong time and suitably unimpressed.

Dog Day Afternoon is considered Pacino’s film for obvious reasons: he’s very busy in it, a cartoonish volcano of over-zealous method acting. He yammers away and chews the scenery with aggressive abandon but it’s Cazale that holds it all together and embodies the true soul of the film. He knows what’s coming to him and we know it, but we can’t stop watching his meltdown. He’s quiet panic, the flipside to Pacino’s cocksure livewire. He’s us.

The Holy Mountain

Watching The Holy Mountain, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s second film, made in 1973, is like poring over a blueprint of the man’s mind; a mind so clearly abundant with ideas, insight and wisdom, so attuned to spirituality, ancient teachings, arcana and mysticism, that it’s something of a privilege, and a rare pleasure, to be granted access to it. Jodorowsky, now 80 years old, has made seeking enlightenment his life’s work and, like, for example, Lynch, Herzog and Tarkovsky - geniuses and visionaries all - sees it as his duty to use cinema to further our understanding of humanity, ourselves, the world and our place in it. It’s an admirable cause, certainly, and one you wish was more prevalent throughout filmmaking.

It’s not always easy - in fact, it’s never easy - to decipher the complex creative vision of a guy like Jodorowsky, but you wouldn’t want it any other way. The satisfaction of the experience comes, not with fighting to comprehend the workings of his brain, and his methods for converting the output into image form, but with simply immersing yourself in his ideas, his prescience, his skewed humour, his craziness. Jodorowsky may not possess the technical acumen of a director like Stanley Kubrick, for example - few do - but his every frame manages nonetheless to be a new, fresh and spellbinding work of art, a brief but pure and potent snapshot to add to the collections of images we’ve each stored away in our minds. Explaining this film - this masterpiece - is beyond someone of my intelligence, but, and it’s a cliché, yes, you really won’t have seen anything like it.

Fish Tank

The Observer recently conducted a poll to find the best ever British films, prompting luminaries and Ordinary Joe to shuffle their Merchant Ivory, Anthony Minghella and Danny Boyle films around. Withnail and Mike Leigh were present and correct, as were the other usual suspects. (No Morvern Callar, though - craziness.) But they should’ve hung fire until Andrea Arnold’s masterful new film, Fish Tank, was released. It’s hardly a departure from the fine Red Road, but it’s considerably better, and is surely the best British film since Trainspotting. It injects new strife into the Brit gloomfest, and every grubby, dread-inducing second of it makes Looking For Eric look like a charming TV movie. It’s determinedly scruffy, confrontational and doesn’t care whether you like it or not. But you will.

Arnold loves basking misery in sickly sunshine, high-rises that are blankly poised realms of imminent rebuke and defiant lost causes. She also loves people, particularly fuck-ups, the more problematically wound the better.

Katie Jarvis, remarkably a newcomer with zilch acting experience prior to this, is, honestly, staggering as Mia, pent-up and wired with erratic bile, self-hating and condemned to counting off her ASBOs and contemplating a life of fraught compromise. She’s trapped in a hellhole with her gobshite, mini-me little sister and her fuseless, wasted and left behind mum. Unless she heads out into the locale, which only leads to trouble of a different ilk. Before you know it she’s atomised and bloodied a young girl in a needless face-off and been thwarted in her attempt to free a horse. And the lairyness doesn’t lessen.

Michael Fassbender, as ubiquitous as it comes at the moment, is exceptional as mum's new piece, all rugged effervescence, a charismatic, platinum-tongued character that Mia doesn't really know what to do with. Clearly starved of a male role-model, she is by turns reluctantly intrigued and wilfully obstinate, unwilling to accept the possibility, initially, that he's anything but another let-down in-waiting. She slowly warms to him, notwithstanding the odd petulant eruption, and the combination of her sexual awakening and her gradual acceptance of this potential father-figure become horribly meshed in devastating fashion. Credit to Arnold for rendering the whole climactic episode with such unflinching, unjudgemental power. There are no victims and no perpetrators here: people collide and shit surely happens.

There are some great dialogue exchanges and lines in the film that don't try to hard to ingratiate themselves or make forced commentary, as can be the case too often with kitchen-sink cinema. 'I like you, I'll kill you last.' 'I've got the number for Childline, if you want it?' And, during an embrace, 'I hate you!' 'I hate you too!' All such exchanges just hang there, as much humorous as pointed, perfectly believable and extremely affecting.

Fish Tank is a picaresque, a sequence of scrapes, a drably electric nightmare, with our vantage point, Mia, ducking and diving and ducking in-and-out of dives with clenched fists. Arnold throws her into various scenarios almost as though to record her ability to repel all-comers, accusatory finger gleefuly poised on her self-destruct button. Her combustibility is never more than a fraction beneath the surface, and anyone and everyone seems likely to fuel it any given moment. Equilibrium is an impossibility and hope is drowning in pint dregs. Yet, and testament to the brilliance of the young star, she is easy to empathise with, despite her snapshot irascibility. When we see beyond the vitriol, there's a lot to like, and for such a previously unbeknownst first-timer to imbue Mia with such depth is remarkable. We know her dreams of becoming a dancer are likely a pipedream but we want her to make it anyway. She is driven, but to where? Right to the upper echelons of British cinema, if nowhere else.

Two Lovers

James Gray’s fog-cloaked triangle of torment hit cinema screens a few months back to less-than-zero fanfare and respectful if largely whelmed critical response. It finds its proper home on DVD, cataloguing as it does (think Cassavetes meets PT Anderson, or a downer spin on Hannah And Her Sisters) the story of Joaquin Phoenix’s deeply troubled coaster, allergic to life but hanging around (by a thread – the film begins with an abortive suicide plunge) on the off chance that something will emerge to provide much-needed succour to his wearied, tragedy-freighted existence.

Two such glimmers puncture his malaise. Vinessa Shaw’s slow-burn option 1 – elegant, malleable, altruistic family girl, and option 2 – frazzle-burn Gwyneth Paltrow’s beautiful, game, bruised, fluctuating drug-addict. Phoenix spends the film allowing his mother and father to coerce him into Shaw’s gentle, securely appealing orbit whilst coveting Paltrow, polar opposite, a flaky disaster zone of caustic magnetism.

Phoenix, a lead-limbed phantom of a man who ebbs rather than flows, works at his Israeli immigrant dad’s dry-cleaning business but is barely there: he plays the fool and waits for closing. He is teetering, still consumed by the hell of a catastrophic engagement that was brought to an abrupt end, and he wears the expression of a man with no core, augured vacuous and vanquished by torment.

Phoenix captures such a debilitated state brilliantly in a career-peaking turn. He is not self-consciously showy about his character's mental state, and underplays things to a pitch-perfect level, allowing his brief bout of delirium as the film culminates have that much more impact. He emanates despair but is strangely likeable. It's without doubt the best thing he's done. Paltrow is similarly mesmerising and warrants more attention for another exceptional supporting role.

The inexorable elision with Shaw draws close and Phoenix, with no seeming convictions or entrenchments, inevitably lets things happen; anything is a distraction. More of a distraction, and perhaps a chance of a reclamation of whatever life Phoenix had prior to the capitulation of his life, is Paltrow, the plaything of Elias Koteas’ adulterous sleazebag, in limbo between animated allure and black-hole of evasive malaise. Phoenix gravitates toward danger, furtive curiosity prompting his pursual of Paltrow, the neighbourhood femme fatale, in full-view in her amber-lit apartment across the yard, and strikes up a burgeoning, easily-forged friendship via late-night telephone exchanges and ‘chance’ meetings on subway platforms.

The crux of the film, which path Phoenix will opt for – thrilling doom or comfortable acceptability – is left right until the last gasp of the final reel, and the decision is, in any event, made for him. He inadvertently finds, in the end, equilibrium, and fate steps in to absolve his careening self-destructiveness.

It’s the epitome of bittersweet, and it’s absolutely the right way to end the film. Resolution, of sorts, in tangled, achingly definitive finality. As the end nears, there is a scene that both captures and provides a fitting microcosm of Phoenix’s fate. He walks alone through darkness, a mercilessly exiled figure, as a muted carnival of New Year parties unfold mutedly in his peripheral vision. He is ostracised, ineluctably, and he is in his element: out of the picture, a silhouette on a street whilst revelry and life comes and goes everywhere else.

James Gray will do well to get anywhere near the nuanced poignancy of this film again. He lets the actors breathe addled life into their characters, and Phoenix and Paltrow mutually benefit from their jostling for supremacy in each of their shared scenes. Koteas and a wonderfully subdued Isabella Rossellini, as Phoenix’s quietly fraught mum, also do stellar work. The masterclass performances lead the film away from being considered an admirable curio to being within touching distance of classic status.

The Hurt Locker

It might be that the wounds haven’t yet healed, or that the pro-war, patriotic section of America won’t hear the voices that oppose the conflict, but, for whatever reasons, Hollywood’s attempts at meaningfully portraying the war in Iraq have, by and large, failed. Box-office figures for the likes of Rendition, Lions for Lambs, In the Valley of Elah, Stop/Loss and Redacted, films which, to varying degrees of success, all took issue at America’s War on Terror in the Middle East, don’t make for good reading, so it’s interesting to see how The Hurt Locker, the latest film directed by Kathryn Bigelow (Point Break, Strange Days), is being so widely lavished with praise.

It tells the story of Sergeant First Class William James (Jeremy Renner), a soldier assigned to a special bomb-disposal unit to replace the previous team leader, Staff Sergeant Thompson (Guy Pearce), who is killed while trying to deactivate an improvised explosive device (or IED) in a town square in Baghdad. The film begins with a tense sequence showing the lead-up to Thompson’s death. The unit – Thompson, Sergeant JT Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and Specialist Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) – first sends in a robot to dismantle the IED by remote control; the camaraderie and banter between the three men a sign that they’re a strong team, calm, at ease with each other, and completely full of trust. The robot breaks down, however, and Thompson makes the decision to go in himself, donning the special bomb-disposal suit and approaching the device under the watchful eyes of his two colleagues, who are primed to look out for any possible dangers or disruptions. Bigelow ramps up the suspense by streeeetttttcccchhhhing time to its fullest limits, with Thompson taking short, unbearable baby steps towards the bomb, reporting his progress every few paces until he’s in the ‘kill zone’, the IED’s blast radius, the place he’ll leave only in pieces if the bomb goes off. He deactivates the IED and is setting off slowly back to safety when Eldridge spots a man at a nearby butcher’s stall holding a mobile phone. Both Eldridge and Sanborn know what this means but they’re too late; the man dials a number into the phone and detonates the bomb, killing Thompson instantly.

When we encounter Sergeant James, the unit’s new leader, for the first time, he’s telling Sanborn that he doesn’t intend to step into Thompson’s shoes; he’s just there to do his job. He’s strangely relaxed, removing the protective coverings from the windows of his barracks (‘I like the sunshine’) and kicking back on his cot listening to music. Where Sanborn seems to be the ultimate professional, attuned to any sort of risk and determined, as any soldier would be, to steer himself and anyone else clear of it, James seems to almost welcome the danger, as proven by his first bomb disposals with the unit.
The set pieces Bigalow constructs to show James’ complete ignorance of, or disregard for, the risk he’s exposed to are brilliantly done and, at times, hilarious. In the first of these, the unit is sent to dismantle an IED which is buried under trash and debris in a deserted section of the city. Though Sanborn advises sending in the robot to investigate, James immediately rejects the suggestion and opts to go in himself, putting on the bombsuit and sauntering casually towards the kill zone. He sets off a smoke bomb to create a diversion, much to the chagrin of Sanborn and Eldridge, who are there to provide surveillance and rifle cover. James cuts the wires on the first bomb, only to discover another longer cable leading off away from him. It’s a superb moment, shot from directly above, when James softly yanks the cable out from beneath the dust and rubble and unearths another four or five of the same IEDs, all connected to each other. Where most people, at this point, would probably shit their pants, with James it’s a trifling inconvenience – like he’s opened a bottle of milk to find it slightly curdled – and he calmly goes about neutralising the bombs one by one. When he returns to his unit moments later, Sanborn chastises him for his recklessness.
The darkly comic tone of this scene is present throughout most of the film, and it’s certainly refreshing given the subject matter. (You’ll do well to find laughs in Rendition and Lions for Lambs, for example.) It reminded me of the HBO series, Generation Kill, written, as with The Hurt Locker, by a journalist who was embedded with the US army in Iraq, which both portrayed the American soldier as one who largely welcomes the opportunity to put his life on the line and showed that many elements of war are humorous and ridiculous. (It’s not a new idea, but one which doesn’t seem to have been widely explored in relation to Iraq. As I said, maybe, in some cases, the wounds are still too fresh.)

Regrettably, but inevitably, the suspense that propels the first half hour of the film eventually subsides, when the unit, out in the desert, encounters a team of British private militants, led by Ralph Fiennes, and eventually becomes embroiled in a firefight with unseen Iraqi insurgents. All of the Brits, bar one, are shot, and Sanborn and James are forced into a slow watch-and-wait cat-and-mouse sniping game with the Iraqis, who are hidden in a building way off in the distance. It’s here, and in the macho male bonding scenes that follow, that the relationships between the three men in the unit are initially cemented, as James seems to finally take on the responsibility of team leader and helps the panic-stricken Eldridge, who, as we’ve seen earlier in the film, is having trouble coping with both Thompson’s death and his own vulnerability.

Not every part of The Hurt Locker works. There’s a distracting subplot in which James befriends a young Iraqi boy, ‘Beckham’, who hangs around the soldiers’ camp selling fake DVDs. Later in the film, the unit is on a mission reconnoitering an abandoned warehouse which insurgents have been using as a hideout for making IEDs when they discover the dead body of a boy. Although the boy’s face is bloody and disfigured, James is convinced it is Beckham – Sanborn and Eldridge aren’t so sure – and explains that the insurgents were intending to use the boy’s corpse to make a ‘body bomb’; indeed, James cuts open the boy’s chest and finds explosives planted in it. The impact Beckham’s apparent death seems to have on James doesn’t quite correspond to how his character has been presented to us so far. OK, so we see that he is human – who wouldn’t be traumatised by such an experience? – but, until now, our impressions of him are that he’s an adrenaline junkie, at home in the army; a guy who you’d expect to mark the killing of a child down to the unnecessary yet inescapable collateral damage of war. The fact that James then sets out on a rogue mission to find Beckham’s house and track down the people responsible for the ‘body bomb’ doesn’t quite ring true. (Incidentally, Beckham turns up alive and well later.)

All war films tend to make some sort of judgement; usually, in its most boiled-down form, that the act of war is futile. Some, rightly or wrongly, set out to glorify military action and bestow hero status on the men whose stories they’re telling. Few, however, go to pains to encapsulate the thrill some men get from participating in the conflict. As the quote that begins The Hurt Locker says, ‘War is a drug’, and, however unfathomable it may be, there are men out there who find their only true place in life is in the military. There’s a scene towards the end of the film when James returns home to his wife (Evangeline Lilly) and child, and we see his discomfort at having to visit the supermarket and do odd jobs around the house. Home is the last place he feels at home in. He tells his child that the boy will grow up to learn that sometimes there’s only one thing in life a man can love. In James’ case, it’s the thrill of war, and the film ends with him disembarking the plane in Baghdad for another 365 days in rotation.

The Hurt Locker isn’t flawless, but it’s undoubtedly a fine film and deserved of all its plaudits. Bigelow’s direction is taut and assured, and her typically accomplished handling of action scenes and set-pieces (a la Point Break) is once again in evidence. With British cinematographer Barry Ackroyd (United 93, The Wind That Shakes The Barley) on board, the film is visually spectacular; the ruin and heat of Baghdad made to look, at times, breathtakingly beautiful. The cast is marvellous too: despite being relatively unknown as far as lead actors go, Renner, Mackie and Geraghty each turn in superb performances, particularly Renner, who possesses the laconic swagger needed to do justice to William James, screenwriter Mark Boal’s brilliantly fashioned character, a composite of several soldiers he encountered in his time in Iraq, all of whom got that same satisfaction from being there, in the desert, waiting for that next hit, the drug of combat.

Soldier Blue

Soldier Blue was released in 1970, at a time when the Vietnam War was raging and US soldiers were being court martialled for the horrifying atrocities committed at My Lai. Its antiwar stance, its revisionism and its graphic depictions of violence and rape attracted much controversy, yet, despite its faults, the film does still carry some power and poignancy; its condemnation of war as valid today as it was then.

In November 1864, a regiment of US soldiers attacked an Indian village at Sand Creek, Colorado, massacring around 400 men, women and children. The backdrop to this horrific violence was one of dishonesty, greed and subterfuge. The US and the Cheyenne, Arapaho and other Indian tribes had signed a treaty which officially permitted Americans to create roads and military posts throughout the Colorado Territory without impinging on the Indians’ rights to the land. It wasn’t long, however, until the peaceful relationship the treaty intended to foster gradually deteriorated, as thousands of American prospectors came forth to mine the gold in the Rocky Mountains. White man’s villages sprang up and grew, settlers staked claims to Indian territory, politicians manoeuvred for the tribes to surrender more of their land. Despite all this, the Indians maintained peace.
A second treaty was put forward which proposed containing the Indians in one area bordering Sand Creek and the Arkansas River. The Indians would retain their rights to move freely throughout the land to hunt and trade, but would cede most of their territory to the US. Only six out of 44 Indian chiefs signed the treaty, supposedly without the approval of the others, yet the document was ratified.
When the American Civil War began in 1861, the Colorado Territory began to see much activity in the form of military mobilisation, and conflicts arose frequently between US soldiers and the Indian tribes. One regiment in particular, the First Regiment of Colorado Volunteers, under the direction of Colonel John Chivington, a man who saw it at his God-given duty to kill Indians, would come to play a terrible part in the violation and bloodshed at Sand Creek, an event that plays out the final act of Ralph Nelson’s provocative film.

The ‘Soldier Blue’ of the title, Honus Gant, is serving with that regiment (or the fictionalised version of it, the 11th Colorado). The film begins with the soldiers escorting a coach to Fort Reunion, the regiment’s base; the coach carrying not only a strongbox full of gold but a female passenger, Cresta Marybelle Lee (Candice Bergen), a beautiful white girl who has escaped after spending two years living captive with the Cheyenne. The travelling party is ambushed by Indians and only Cresta and Honus (Peter Strauss) survive the bloody battle, fleeing into the mountains. The film is centred around the relationship between these two diametrically opposed characters, as they set off through the wilderness in search of help.
Along the way, the pair are stopped by a small band of Indians out hunting. Cresta, the more world-wise and experienced of the two, knows they will rape her if Honus refuses to take part in a life-or-death knife fight with the head Indian. Against the odds, Honus emerges the winner and they continue on, later stumbling upon the camp of Isaac Q. Cumber (Donald Pleasence), a snaggle-toothed sneak of a man who makes his living selling guns to the Cheyenne.
It is here that the conflict between Honus and Cresta reaches its peak, and it leads the two of them to re-evaluate their viewpoints on life. Honus, the soldier, knows there are guns hidden in Cumber’s coach – guns that will be used to kill fellow American soldiers -- and is determined to destroy them. Cresta, however, sides with the Cheyenne, who she sees as kin, arguing that the Indians are forced to defend themselves against the white man, who is stealing their land and destroying their way of life. Honus discovers the guns but is apprehended by Cumber, and he and Cresta are taken prisoner. They eventually manage to escape, but Honus is shot and wounded and the pair are forced to hide out in a cave. The next morning, Cresta sets out alone across the plains, where she is found and taken to the camp of the 11th Colorado. Here, she is reunited with her fiancé, a Lt. McNair, and asks him to help bring back the seriously wounded Honus. Her pleas fall on deaf ears, as she finds that the commanding officer, Colonel Iverson (based on John Chivington), is planning a retaliatory strike on the Cheyenne for the killings we saw at the beginning of the film. Horrified, Cresta rides back to the Cheyenne village where she lived for two years, and warns them of the forthcoming attack. Although the Indians are able to prepare themselves for war, they cannot hold back Iverson’s regiment of pumped-up, barbaric and bloodthirsty savages; women and children are brutally murdered, Cresta is attacked and raped, and Honus looks on, helpless and impotent.

Soldier Blue seems to serve as both historical document and Vietnam War allegory, and some critics have argued that these intentions for the film fail to work in tandem. It’s a fair point, as Nelson’s desire to capture some of the liberal attitudes of the early ‘70s results in the film coming off, at times, as a bit too ‘peace and love’, when a low-key, balanced exploration of both sides’ perspectives -- the US and the Indians -- would have worked better. This straddling of ideas certainly hinders the characters, though that may also be down to Nelson’s choice of actors. Although their performances are by no means terrible – a lot of the interplay between Honus and Cresta is funny and engaging, and both are likeable ‘protagonists’ – Strauss and Bergen lack the depth and range to make the characters truly memorable and believable. (Bergen, in particular, has a little too much of that ‘hippie’ vibe; it’d be no surprise to discover that she walked out of Woodstock and straight onto the set of this movie.) Indeed, it isn’t until Donald Pleasence turns up as Cumber – arguably one of his most underrated and least-known performances – that you get a sense of a really great actor at work.

Despite being panned and reviled upon its release, and subsequently hacked into incomprehensibility by the censors, Soldier Blue, in its full form, is still worthy of a place in the canon of American westerns from the 1970s. It isn’t The Searchers, or indeed Little Big Man, but its examination of the conflict between whites and Indians is mostly well executed, arresting and poignant, if not for the faint of heart.

The Boat That Rocked

These are films for people that start yearning for Christmas when the bonfire is still warm. Maybe earlier. These are films for people that don’t want to accept the fact that they are not the centre of the huggy universe. These are films for people to cosy up to, round the fire, as fluffy snow flakes caress the window, and Cliff Richard plays as heads nod in an ironic but happy way: they know it’s uncool but to them, uncool is cool, right?

All Richard Curtis films are thus: things may go wrong, but let’s not get too distracted by that. Let’s count our blessings and high-five our cares away. So, Keira Knightley is charmed by an idiot with cue-cards on her doorstep professing futile love. Hugh Grant is acceptable as Prime Minister, quashing the dastardly yanks with a stammer and a raised eyebrow. Martine McCutcheon is a delightful chav made good. Rhys Ifans is still getting sizeable roles in major releases. Baubles gleam and bad stuff is just a temporary inconvenience. No-one really means it, they’re just human. Everything turns out okay in the end. Switch the news off, it may disturb. Airbrush the discontent, it may corrode the saccharine. We are strapped in for Richard Curtis – let the Andrex puppies endearingly tumble into view, let the world disappear, it’s time to ease yourself into a parallel world.

You can see the allure. The world is shit. It’s escapism, a balm, 90 minutes of succour for the harassed. And it’s vaguely enjoyable, in the same way that listening to a cute 19-year old Jehovah’s Witness talk nonsense is cute. There’s no harm done, and we’ve all had a laugh. Philip Seymour Hoffman takes a well-earned holiday and reads his lines out, he looks like he’s having a ball and you can hardly deny him that. This must be a delightful little side-project for him, knocking about with a few Brits for a bit, japing about between takes. Every scene reeks of fun, out-takes, barely concealed mirth, endless bonhomie. Kenneth Branagh, eesavinfun. Stereotypical killjoy figure, old-fashioned curmudgeon. Think 70’s TV authority figures: Blakey etc. Stick up his arse, board-rigid, no pulse. Straight from the archives, dusted off and reanimated 30 years too late. Oh, where’s your sense of humour reviewer man? Well, the last time I checked, it was alive and well in the year 2009. Which shows re-runs of classic comedy from time-to-time. And what I do is, I laugh along if it’s funny, and if it hasn’t aged well I just think, ‘That was obviously something that worked for my parents/grandparents/easy-to-please dullards whenever it came out, maybe still does. But it’s now obsolete. Unless you’re undiscerning or desperately undernourished in the old laff department.’

The story? Forget it. Radio Caroline meets Benny Hill and Morecambe and Wise via On The Buses. But with that incomparably twee Curtis feel about it all, and not nearly as funny. Yes there's plenty of easy charm and you're not in a bad place. Father Christmas has got his arm round you and he wants you to get involved and stop being such a cynic. So what? It’s not cinema.

King Of Comedy

In the post-reality-TV age (the welcome demise of Big Brother surely heralding a shift away from drably manipulative shows that line up idiots-with-issues for puerile pot-shots) it’s always good to re-acquaint yourself with a film that, well over a quarter of a century ago, had a wry, hilarious, disturbing look at a floundering, intensely and talentlessly warped wannabe.

De Niro’s Rupert Pupkin ‘Often mis-spelt and mispronounced!’ is a besuited delusional that spends his time either daydreaming about airbrushing his disastrously limp existence (memorably getting a fantasy apology from his ex-headmaster on live television: ‘We thought you’d never amount to a hill of beans. Well, you were right, Rupert. And we were wrong.’), talking to cardboard versions of Liza Minelli or Jerry Lewis or over-zealously pursuing the latter for a spot on his show and a leg-up as a stand-up. He helps Lewis, hassled amidst the throng outside the studio exit, get into his waiting limo and temporarily rids him of the rabid attentions of Sandra Bernhard’s unhinged stalker.

We then squirm as Pupkin haltingly attempts a kind of ingratiate/persuade number on Lewis’s Jerry Langford in order to catch an unlikely break. Langford fobs Pupkin off (eventually) with a breezily dismissive invitation to call his office, which is totally misconstrued and leads to increasingly ridiculous invasions into Langford’s life, including painfully obstinate loiterings in Langford's office foyer as various minions humour and ultimately tire off his relentless avidity, and a somehow charming, idiotic wooing of local cheerleader turned bartender. His mounting desperation culminates in the doofus kidnapping (initially laughed-off as a hoax) of Langford and those 10 minutes of fame that lead to worldwide fame and money-toting clamour for ‘the new king of comedy’...

As a commentary on self-obsessed, vapid no-marks hellbent on fame, it’s non-pareil. There’s no judgemental guff or carefully laid out descent into any kind of morality lesson – we leave Pupkin on (imaginary?) stage, lapping up applause, milking adulation, in his element. He’s talentless, but he’s where he needs to be: in peoples’ faces. For everyone out there that’s looked into the dead, lovestarved doll eyes of whoever is currently out front in the reality-goon jostle, here is recognition. The lights are on, but the only people home are cardboard cut-outs and imaginary acolytes.

DeNiro is as good as it gets, and exhibits more range than most actors could ever dream of. He is by turns hilarious, empty, terrifying, gauche, bumbling, parasitical, endearing. He is absolutely magnificent. Lewis is brilliant and perfectly judged as a seen-it-all all-rounder in the twilight of his career, and Bernhard is plain scary. And the whole thing expertly occupies the scant netherworld between hilarious and nightmarish. As the man says, it’s better to be king for a day than schmuck for a lifetime. A line that must be imbued with a certain poignancy for the once-great testosterone-tornado star of this career highlight.

Moon

There a few ways you might look at Moon. One might be to get sniffy about the Solaris parallels; another might be to question the disingenuity of having a Hal-lite up front in proceedings. Many a critic has been easy with the faint praise, and one reviewer described the film as 'possibly the most boring film ever made.'

I think we need to get these matters out of the way early on: if anyone finds this film boring, it means that they are either a) a replicant programmed to hate films that don't involve Brad Pitt mugging away in a desperate attempt to save the latest travesty that he's involved in or b) idiots. That simple. Moon is about 384,403 km far from boring. For those that watched it that 'didn't get it', it might as well be a matter of quarks and dark matter - but when will critics watch films and admit as much?

Sam Rockwell is an astronaut contracted to keep things ticking along on his lunar base. We see him doing everyday things, as we must: this is not really a film about space, or isolation, as it initially seems, just as Solaris or 2001 weren't. But we are led along that path for a while, and things take a turn for the worse as he crashes on a scouting mission. He ends up in computer-overseen rehab (Kevin Spacey as a stoned, benevolent version of Hal - a wimp of an onboard computer. Really, we expect far more underhand bedevilment from our electronic counterparts) and soon becomes aware of a 'clone' inhabiting the same ship. Whereby it gets genuinely intriguing.

In terms of capturing its environment, it's spot-on, and it evokes a wondrous sense of subtle awe with its meagre budget. The time-honoured bolt-ons are perfect. Interiors are effulgent, pristine cosiness, and the canopy of stars and dustbowl exteriors lend themselves beautifully to the intimacy and unencapsulable nature of space. Indeed, the only bugbear you might have is the fact that it's all too welcoming - there's nothing to be intimidated by, and you're more than happy luxuriating in it all.

Rockwell, with nothing to bounce off other than an unseen replica, is miraculous, lending a deep humanity to our multiple protagonists that the film lives and thrives upon. He is exceptional: a dual counterweight amidst the questions being put forward. Can we change and leave our old selves behind? What does 'we' mean? Do beards make us look more astronauty?

The film doesn't pose too many of the 'big' questions that cinema has grappled with to different levels of success over the years. There are no monoliths, no meetings with nefarious aliens, no real oddities as such. But the film has an underlying human quality, a generous, sympathetic strain of understanding of 'our' plight, whatever that might be. It revels in our quirks and behavioural tics through the guise of Rockwell, and it puts its arm around us and punches us on the shoulder. We're just here, the film says, and we're not all that bad. The finale, which has Rockwell (or a version of him, or a projected death-throes daydream - you decide) blasted back into Earth's orbit in an orgasmic hurtle of homeward-bound elation, throws in a kind of cross-sectional news transmission beamed from the big blue homeland, and it's perfect. Someone is overheard whining about something or other, but Rockwell is too chuffed to be on the way back to be getting down about workaday chatter and babble and in any case has been rebooted; his exile has squeegeed his malaise, and it evoked memories of a recent documentary about the Apollo astronauts, In The Shadow Of The Moon. In it, Alan Bean, as avuncular an astronaut you've never seen, says 'I never complain about the weather now. I'm just happy we have weather!'. And you're left with, perish the thought, a new-found sense of appreciation that should last until you're out of the cinema car-park at least.

The film is a great, understated success that no-one will go and watch. That doesn't give you an excuse to sit at home while a genuinely brilliant piece of filmmaking flits through your multiplex unawares. If you watch this in several years on ITV at 4am whilst semi-pissed, you're a lightweight. You're a lightweight. Take a few small steps for mankind, hand your money over, and help cinema evolve a little by encouraging small, thoughtful movies such as this. It was worth a try...

The Worst Films I've Ever Seen #1

The Number 23

Jim Carrey can act. The Truman Show and Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind prove that. But his 5-second motionless cameo as a corpse in Clint Eastwood’s ‘The Dead Pool’ had more zing about it than this paycheck performance. Here, he can’t be bothered to strive for involved angst or tortured immersion or any of that. Here, he’s pantomime-poor. What’s behind you? The best part of your career, Jim. The film itself is a travesty even on Joel Schumacher’s bottom-heavy shitometer, and silently screams at you to switch off every few seconds. Yet more guff about the WEIRD manifestation of numbers as prescient and relevant and signifying something catrastrophic and fateful about our protagonist. It seems you can waft a few pages of premonitory dribble in front of a studio exec nowadays and get any old tat greenlit.

Martha Meet Frank, Daniel and Laurence

Insipid, glib, pointless ménage a quatre, featuring three punchable male leads tiresomely orbiting a drably pretty and unconvincingly magnetic Monica Potter. Something about an art gallery, crossed-wires, near-misses (is this even what it's about? Does the writer or director even know?) and yet more scandalously inept money-frittering from a sporadically none-more-awful British film industry. The kind of cheesy, pseudo-sophisticated rubbish you’d expect last-minute from a swindled creative writing student.

Human Traffic

Feels like being locked in a terrible nightclub, surrounded by the endlessly dumb chatter parping out of the gaping mouths of pampered, listless, dull southern arseholes. Mistakes energy and enthusiasm for vitality and relevance. The front cover says it all: John Simm looks both hammered (on cider) and exceedingly irritating and delighted with himself for being so hammered. The film seems to be very chuffed with itself for, like, hitting the nail on the head about how the olds just don’t geddit and how hedonism is preferable to becoming your mum and dad and other really sharp insights that no-one has ever made before. Certainly never as tediously. And as you can see, it's got arch bellend Danny Geezer in it, so it's even more of an absolute doozy.

Face

Like a series of cockney drama workshop sessions strung haphazardly together, during the enactment of which the performers were asked to improvise gangster film clichés, lazy appropriations of seething menace (limp gurning) and edgy poise (hungover cantankerousness), only to come across as bored, lethargic versions of themselves whilst doing it. So spectacularly bad as to be mesmerising. Damon Albarn can’t even stand still convincingly; as for the involvement of the likes of Robert Carlyle and Ray Winstone, it’s strangely comforting to know that even top-performers like these are capable of being this atrocious.

Sliding Doors

This took years for ex-Bread knob Peter Hewitt to come-up with, and you can see why: it takes time and diligent care to plumb such labyrinthine turgidity and manage to make Gwyneth Paltrow seem completely unappealing and difficult to remotely endure. Ah, the dilemmas that affluent 30-something women have to wrestle with – ditch knobhead boyfriend and end up with a really dull, paper-thin guy with a nice line in unconvincing seduction patter? Double-realities unfold and serious questions are posed, such as: who put up the money for yet another irredeemable affront as this swanky, empty disaster?

AI

Haley Joel Osment (who hasn’t aged well – Google him!) is a small boy, but he’s not happy. He’s not really a proper boy, he’s a little artificial child that feels human. He finds out as much and ends up lobbing himself into the murky depths, only to be cut out of the frozen waters millions of years into the future by aliens observing a desolate Earth, who create a mother figure for him in order to make him feel whole again. What would surely have been ace under the aegis of Stanley Kubrick is a tosswad of mawkishness and ham. It’s the Chlamydia cum-stain on Spielberg’s pristine cinematic Y-Fronts (though there is a coffee-coloured starburst near the arse-crack that spells ‘Amistad’). Jude Law also skitters about as a kind of Fred Astaire gigolo figure. An expensive, airless, mard extravaganza of wrong.

Good Burger

TV spin-off travesty that will puncture your soul and make it feel like runny, salmonella blighted yolk. Kenan and Kel of strangely amusing kids knockabout show take the money and somehow trot out their lines like shameless goons. The most memorable scene involves Kel (or is it Kenan?) being told to 'Watch yo ass!', followed by Kel/Kenan spinning on the spot whilst 'watching' his 'ass'. Ingenious, but never hits such heights often.

Death Proof

Tarantino was once good, though you can hardly believe it watching this contemptuous rubbish. A load of nonsense about (a wastedly ace) Kurt Russell being a psychotic stuntman with yet another foot fetish. Featuring the most godawfully inept dialogue of ANY of the films on this list of turds. And this from the guy still on a crusade to convince us that he's 'beyond Godard' etc. He described this as his 'Eugene O'Neill movie'. Hoho. M Night Shyamalan, anyone?

The Day After Tomorrow

Hideous CGI spunkfest of submerged skyscrapers and laughably trite family values waffle, thrown at you loud enough and disagreeably enough that you'd hopefully not notice how crap it is and just go with the (not bad) effects. The world goes to shit and we're too annoyed by the feeble nature of what's served up to care.

United 93

I've got to be careful here, haven't I? We're on hallowed ground. You can't really have a go at such an enterprise as this: the reconstruction of a still-raw moment of hellish contemporary history in choreographed, verbatim detail. Here's my problem: there was no need. Not for reasons of sensitivity, but for reasons of superficial ambulance-chasing pointlessness. Here we have an incident already thoroughly mapped, recounted, and filed away for regretful, thoughtful reconsideration. Greengrass would say (and has) that it was a 'valuable' endeavour, bringing such a dire disaster into forensic focus for those who might not understand what happened. This is what I think: that it's tawdry, airbrushed opportunism masquerading as political art, and that the people that couldn't be bothered to wrestle with the permutations of such seismic worldwide horror in print such not be hand-held through a rousing celluloid version. Bankrupt, misguided tosh.

Knowing

Nicolas Cage, eh? Sometimes truly perfect (Wild At Heart, Raising Arizona, Leaving Las Vegas) and yet synonymous with airhead, samey bollocks of a number too hefty to waste time counting. And you watch Knowing unfold as pretty much more of the same and think, 'Cage, you're decent. Get a new agent. You don't need the cash.' And so on. And Knowing dribbles away in the last 20 minutes to such cloying, deus ex machina effect as to give you plenty of time to muse such matters.

It all moves along in a far more accomplished fashion than you have any right to expect for a good 70 minutes. It's reasonably gripping; Cage's son ends up with a scroll of numbers from an excavated time-capsule during a bicentennial celebration laid on by his school. Cage places glassful of whiskey on said screed and 'circles' a group of digits he notices are factually relevant, and this 'reveal' gathers apace as voices question the veracity of such random gusto - he's 'stressed' due to the death of his wife, says one. But Cage is Cage and will not be deterred, and we know those numbers are going to nudge Cage towards imminent devastation...and it quickly starts to get a bit baggy.

A shame as the two major set-pieces are pretty good for CGI, realistic and authentically orchestrated, and actually quite ingenious for those used to the same old wooly-looking explosions and collapsing buildings that feel like computer game add-ons. These ones are good, and as such are wasted.

Rose Byrne turns up as the daughter of the woman responsible for penning the numbers, creepy looking automaton-types follow them around and it all gets a bit sinister before the most odiously tacked-on culmination to a film I can remember. The hack director, Alex Proyas, seems to think it's okay to build something passably tense for 70 minutes only to veer away from all coherence and respect for the audience with a howling Spielberg rip-off finale that has to be seen to be disbelieved. It involves pebbles, fluffy white bunny rabbits, aliens and an unlimited amount of shameless chutzpah that makes it okay for you to demand your money back from Proyas, should you ever run into the charlatan. If you thought Southland Tales had a majestically bonkers coda, forget it. This has cojones the size of space-hoppers. It's so crackers it'll make you chuckle, until Cage delivers the least convincing rendition of a devastated man you've ever seen and your ironic mirth is ruthlessly shattered by reverse Schadenfreude.

Proyas is also obsessed with over-gloomy lighting that make a lot of the scenes feel like theatre pieces. Badly lit ones. You can barely see expressions register on faces - not that there are any. Just pained approximations of drab TV-movie-standard mugging.

Nicolas Cage throws up a non-performance of epic disinterest, frowning his way to his paycheck. He's barely there, and I can only assume he knew what a bag of toss he'd got involved with and that any kind of performance would be totally wasted. He owes himself, and us, a lot better, if only because we know how good he can be and this just won't do.