Films Seen - October 2004

[Pre-'96 films not included.]

COLLATERAL (56) (dir., Michael Mann) Jamie Foxx, Tom Cruise, Jada Pinkett Smith, Mark Ruffalo [It's inadequate and not too well phrased, but Time is short so I'll just go with the "Cyprus Mail" review. Bottom line: (1.) Style is content to a large extent here, the cosy home-made look validating the cabbie's view of LA as against the hitman's; this is not just a case of pretty pictures. However, (2.) the pictures are pretty - or at least impressive - and I don't know how people can say there's no beauty in video; it's the same diffuse, source-less light as in (e.g.) UNKNOWN PLEASURES, expressing the same sense of hazy reality and living in a bubble. Also, (3.) Tom Cruise should really stop trying for stillness and movie-star Presence - it's okay in M:I because all he does there is run around, but stillness didn't work for him in EYES WIDE SHUT, only half-worked in MAGNOLIA, and its badass variation here doesn't work at all: his strong suit is frantic activity (poignantly revealing his vulnerability through his attempts to hide it), whether puppyish charm or its BORN ON THE FOURTH OF JULY angry-activist cousin; he needs to be a hustler, if he'd only put his vanity aside and admit it.]   

RAISING HELEN (44) (dir., Garry Marshall) Kate Hudson, John Corbett, Joan Cusack, Hayden Panettiere, Helen Mirren [And now, a little something for the red states. Knew I'd have to re-think my Hollywood indicators when Perky Kate Hudson - newly saddled with three kids, and looking for a good school - having checked out the public schools where the teenage daughter gets surrounded by ethnic-minority types going "Dat girl is fine", decides instead to try a Lutheran church school, where the first things we see are a line of docile kids in uniform and a teacher saying "Lisa, stop dragging your sweater!"; looks like it's being set up as a Bad Idea waiting to happen - but in fact it turns out to be a great place, also allowing Kate to meet hunky and fun pastor John Corbett ("I'm a sexy man of God"). She also grows up, learns to work an honest nine-to-five on a car lot in Queens - a long way from her glitzy job in modelling - and finally realises that "kids need boundaries", confiscating her new daughter's fake ID in a touching climax (at which point her uptight suburbanite sister hands her a gift-wrapped rubber baseball bat (!) and announces: "Welcome to the mamahood!"). Not exactly good but at least it's surprising, and surprisingly sweet - it's one of those films where no-one's a villain, except perhaps teenage punk "BZ" who lusts after the daughter (we know he must be bad news because he's a DJ, and besides the fun-but-firm pastor said so); looks like Hollywood is making an effort to court the pious clean-living family audience, except the pious clean-living family audience no longer goes to the movies (unless it's THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST), watching pious programming on their idiot-boxes. How Devo - with "Whip It" - ended up as the theme song for a film so determinedly un-punk is just one of those bizarre fault-lines of pop culture.]  

DIG! (68) (dir., Ondi Timoner) [What exactly is Courtney Taylor's (of the Dandy Warhols) involvement in this documentary? He gets the opening (and only) voice-over, giving him a measure of ownership over the story, but if he had a hand in shaping it - as a kind of elegy-cum-backhanded-compliment to an old semi-friend (Anton Newcombe of the Brian Jonestown Massacre) whose paths diverged - that's different to being caught within it, with his diva airs and vanity and implicit self-loathing about not being rock'n roll enough, heading "the most well-adjusted band in America" ("This is so cool," he says in the midst of an onstage brawl. "This never happens to my band"). It makes a difference, because if Courtney's self-aware the film becomes more problematic - an act of generosity to the BJM, or a patronising dig by "success" at "credibility"? - and if he's not, he becomes by far the more interesting of the two protagonists, testifying to the enduring appeal of rock'n roll as self-destruction. Indeed, the film's slight problem is Newcombe, mostly because he gets such a massive, Brian Wilson-esque build-up - "genius", ahead of his time, etc - but his music isn't allowed to speak for itself, and what we hear (which isn't much) doesn't seem to warrant the hype; the Dandys' admittedly better-known tunes - of which we hear a lot more - sound more accomplished, and if Taylor knows this and keeps the spotlight on Anton anyway, it becomes a fairly perverse piece of passive-aggressive back-stabbing. Obviously fascinating, as with any look at a closed world in thrall to its own delusions, and the muddy incestuous closeness of the relationships adds to the fascination; drunken scuffles, wasted-looking figures on the fringes, flavourful fucked-upness in all sorts of ways.]     

DIRTY WORK (64) (dir., Bob Saget) Norm Macdonald, Artie Lange, Jack Warden, Christopher McDonald, Chevy Chase [An opera gets demolished at the climax, but Marx Brothers anarchy may be overstating it; it's really just a joke movie, with engaging heroes who don't especially stand for anything - but, incredibly, almost all the jokes work, though they all work in the same way. Hard to pinpoint what that way is without writing a thesis, but it's fair to say it's (a) snarky, and (b) geared to the worldview of a middle-class nice-boy adolescent - whores are automatically funny - who's not quite in touch with his feelings and not-quite-secure in his masculinity (hero's best friend tries to give him a hug, and provokes panic signals: "Hey, keep your distance there, Liberace!"). Funnier - much funnier - than you'd think, despite or because of Gary Coleman jokes and instantly-dated soundtrack hits by Third Eye Blind and Better Than Ezra; oafish Lange and suave Macdonald make a smooth team, doing a classic brawn-vs-brains. "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?" "Huh? ... No, no, no, I have a plan."] 

MAN ON FIRE (58) (dir., Tony Scott) Denzel Washington, Dakota Fanning, Christopher Walken, Radha Mitchell, Mickey Rourke [How to even process something like this? Assassin gets religion - "You think God will forgive us for what we've done?" - and redeems himself by doing exactly what he used to do only this time in a Good Cause, so what was once evil and sadistic now becomes the Wrath of God (though he also turns martyr in a rather confused climax). Reference to the current state of the world, wars being fought in the name of various Good Causes etc, relevant but probably irrelevant given the film's overwhelming visceral power, sparked by the tension between Scott's sensory overload - now gone beyond mere Bruckheimer-hood to incorporate CITY OF GOD montages, grainy inserts and film-stock-shuffling, not to mention lyrical sounds ("Clair de Lune", Linda Ronstandt) ostentatiously thrown in with the harsh and percussive - and Washington's perfectly still performance, his noble face quivering with suppressed emotion (strong men will blub when he silently accepts a present from the little girl). He brings Malcolm X levels of gravitas, till the film finally defeats him - not least by decking him out in a silly football jersey, making the American-avenger-in-the-Third-World subtext uncomfortably obvious and echoing early mention of John Wayne. High seriousness in the service of blatant immorality, with the audience urged to be as supine as the ravers who cheer when Denzel blows their club to pieces, oblivious to everything but the explosion; the definition of a guilty pleasure, esp. when Scott throws in random meaningless captions with the fonts expanding dramatically for emphasis (*). Also, Dakota Fanning is less annoying than she used to be - maybe she's slowly catching up with her precocity, and will actually seem normal when she turns 16 or so. Also, Mickey Rourke - what happened? Seriously.]    

(*) ... which, I'm now reminded, also happens in TARNATION. No question of one stealing from the other - just an odd synchronicity between similarly self-indulgent works at opposite ends of the budget spectrum...

THE BIG BOUNCE (65) (dir., George Armitage) Owen Wilson, Sara Foster, Morgan Freeman, Charlie Sheen, Bebe Neuwirth, Vinnie Jones [Owen Wilson in excelsis - slouching through Life with "my two pals, Bad Luck and Bad Choices", sparring hilariously with belligerent British hard-man Vinnie Jones ("D'you wanna piss wiv me?" "I don't even understand what you're saying. Do I want to piss with you?"), finding a soulmate of sorts in tough-cookie femme fatale Foster (they have the same jagged fleshy mouth, and similar noses though of course his is broken), amiable to everyone but of course trusting no-one, which is what gives this laid-back film its edge. Very much in MIAMI BLUES territory, our distracted shaggy-dog hero standing for a kind of dilapidated larceny - "Have you ever stolen any money?" "Well, I'll grab something if it's lying around..." - but redeemed by implicit sense of honesty, not in terms of being law-abiding but in seeing through the world, rejecting its bullshit about friendships and fairness and being altruistic (or indeed law-abiding). Gnomic, funny and quietly cynical, though the climax - the heist itself - seems thin, or maybe the film itself is too laid-back to stretch to a climax. If you hate Owen Wilson, forget it, obviously...]

CATWOMAN (34) (dir., Pitof) Halle Berry, Benjamin Bratt, Sharon Stone, Lambert Wilson [This post-feminist culture really makes me feel unsophisticated, like when you see some Vivienne Westwood fashion show and exclaim "What kind of woman would wear that, for goodness sake?" (not the point). Catwoman-hood is liberation, an empowerment from patronising patriarchy, giving "a freedom other women will never know," our heroine is told - just a couple of minutes before the camera lingers for a good long prurient look at her leather-clad behind and bulging tits; is it OK because it's her choice, i.e. "freedom" includes the freedom to be a sex-object as per CHARLIE'S ANGELS - or is the whole thing just a post-modern scam? Easy to see why this flopped, at any rate: comic-book movies are becoming ever more po-faced and portentous (SPIDER-MAN 2, anyone?) whereas this is zippy, frivolous, ineffably camp (Catwoman credo: "Time to accessorize!") and fake as a feature-length music video. Intermittently enjoyable, though good job naming the villain's lethal beauty cream "Beau-Line" then getting everyone to pronounce it "Bew-lean" and "Bee-o-line"; poor Lambert Wilson must've slunk off to his trailer and yelled imprecations in French after each take.] 

SOUL PLANE (40) (dir., Jessy Terrero) Kevin Hart, Tom Arnold, Method Man, Snoop Dogg [Lowbrow, but authentically lowbrow: gives the sense of having been made by and for a specific (black) sub-culture, not translated for the mass (white) audience à la BRINGING DOWN THE HOUSE - Tom Arnold's token presence is a lot less representative than, e.g., airplane pilot Snoop hanging a big pair of fuzzy dice at the front of his cockpit. Besides, there's nothing wrong with lowbrow: kindergarten 'potty humour' is insulting but I have no real problem with e.g. a blind man feeling up girls' bottoms (thinking they're seat cushions), or an old lady reading a magazine called "Great In The Sack", or Mrs. Hot Momma wanting to choke her hubby with a leather belt while he's going down on her 'cause that's how she saw it on a show called "Real Sex". No surprise that the Soul Plane has a class structure, or that there's such a chasm between Business Class and "Low Class" - though they're brothers under the sharp suits, one man's strip-club being another's gaming house - or indeed that the jokes are often homophobic; check out Deleted Scenes on the DVD (under "Fudge") for a virulent bit even my non-PC self found hard to take: "Please don't pack my fudge..."]    

MONSIEUR IBRAHIM (46) (dir., Francois Dupeyron) Omar Sharif, Pierre Boulanger, Gilbert Melki [Omar Sharif as the gimmick-slash-selling-point - a sympathetic Muslim, so rare and valuable in these Dark Times, who says things like "A man's heart is like a caged bird" and "You can find Beauty wherever you look" (the Muslim religion also gets a good press, its mosques tinged with the honest whiff of human feet - from all the barefoot faithful - instead of artificial incense and candle-wax); he also becomes a mentor-figure to a Jewish boy, using his Koran for instruction - and, if you missed the thoughtful subtext in that, then the song over the final credits is for you: "Why Can't We Live Together?". Rest of it is KING OF THE HILL-ish in many aspects - absent neglectful father, boy forced to fend for himself, neighbour girl who likes to dance - except the kid is slightly older, poised between boy and man (he smashes his piggy-bank to buy his first hooker), and the tone is a lot more rose-tinted, with happy jazz on the soundtrack and no real problems to contend with; Boulanger is a pretty-boy, not too expressive beyond a general winsomeness, and he doesn't shed a tear when abandoned - though supposedly longing for his father's love - just settles into sullen independence. Struggles to transcend cute-kid / wise-old-man stereotypes - except the final section in Turkey, which is strange and spectacular; but it doesn't really connect with anything.]   

S21: THE KHMER ROUGE KILLING MACHINE (63) (dir., Rithy Panh) [Those (like me) who tend to be dubious of nationwide contrition mechanisms like South Africa's post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission - mocking them as wishful-thinking stunts dreamed up by woolly-minded NGOs - should perhaps think again: looks like such public acts of closure may be necessary after a country goes collectively insane - not to give the victims a voice or whatever but, more bizarrely, to make the perpetrators admit (not least to themselves) that they did wrong. "I don't think of [those days]; it gives me a headache," says a former Khmer Rouge guard and executioner, which is probably the closest he or his fellow killers get to some kind of remorse; others wheel out the "just following orders" routine or, in the film's most remarkable scene, re-enact their old roles with an unselfconscious alacrity that suggests being cogs in the "killing machine" still counts, for them, as the best years of their lives (implicitly because it's also linked with their teen years and "youthful vigour"; will even e.g. the brutalised boy-soldiers of Sierra Leone ever again live so intensely as they did in their teenage reign of terror?). Not a lot else to talk about - filmmaking is conventional and the subjects seem a little stiff, their speeches sounding rehearsed - but the realisation that morality remains fluid long after the 'moment of madness' has passed is quietly chilling. Perfect totalitarian doublethink: how could the Khmer Rouge believe the coerced confessions were true? "We had to believe, or we couldn't arrest the enemy".] 

FATHER AND SON (49) (dir., Aleksandr Sokurov) Andrei Shchetinin, Aleksei Nejmyshev, Aleksandr Razbash [Strange how the mother in MOTHER AND SON was such a nebulous presence - defined only by her dying - while the father here is so powerful and intricate. Virile physicality is the film's motif - not just the homoerotic overtones but characters running, leaping, wrestling, playing soccer or balancing daredevil-like on a narrow plank strung between balconies - because a father (it says here) is the one who teaches his son how to be a man; women are generally ignored - and the son's only lengthy conversation with a girl is jarringly shot through a window, with angles and eyelines not quite matching - and at one point the boy is shocked to hear his friend's Dad was thrown out by his Mom - "a man chased out of his own house!"; yet the physicality carries an inevitable charge of mortality, because a father also (inadvertently) teaches his son about growing old(er) - being "next in line", waiting for your "time to come". That last part connects with MOTHER, yet Sokurov has changed in the intervening years: that film felt primal, dolorous and distinctly Russian, this feels international, urbanised, a lot more accessible, e.g. in its use of music to push things along (one scene gets a constant techno-style backbeat). Festival-ready, and very nice to look at - beige and brown, like a yellowed photo - but kind of disposable, calculated, even superficial; I wouldn't be surprised to hear he only made it because a companion-piece to a (relatively) well-known property was a (relatively) easy sell - i.e. not because a companion-piece was useful or necessary.] 

OPEN WATER (51) (dir., Chris Kentis) Blanchard Ryan, Daniel Travis [A noble effort, and it makes quite a lot out of very little (girl I saw it with claimed she was practically pinned to her seat with tension), but it needed to have about 10 times as many ideas - esp. visual ideas - as it actually has. It's not that BLAIR WITCH was better-made, necessarily, but the nature of the threat was different there, less defined hence more dreamlike and disorienting ; here, it's all a bit literal - here's the couple in distress, there's the sharks and jellyfish and whatnot, with only the occasional shot from below to break the monotony. Not awful when it tries its hand at psychological drama - couple's shock and fear turning into rage and bickering - but the starkness of the concept makes such complexity (or attempted complexity) feel incongruous, and the flat video look doesn't help. I'm not about to knock it, because it's totally admirable - if only European filmmakers were so resourceful, instead of chasing after subsidies - but it raises the bar way too high for what it has to work with. CUs of car-doors opening and closing as the couple set out at the beginning are so TV-reconstruction it has to be a joke.] 

THE BOURNE SUPREMACY (57) (dir., Paul Greengrass) Matt Damon, Joan Allen, Brian Cox, Franka Potente [Random thought #1: breathless fast cutting is surprisingly effective in the relatively slow, frustrating chase through narrow streets: can it be they've been using this style for the wrong things, and it's actually better at evoking claustrophobia - too much action, too little space - than the mad excitement it's invariably used for? Random thought #2: Bourne fits the superhero template to a surprising degree - mild until provoked, superhuman fighting skills, murky past that he struggles to escape or understand (traumatically 'bourne' out of another identity), finally wandering the streets of the city like Darkman or Spider-Man. Not a huge amount to say otherwise: airport-novel thrills with globe-trotting and torn-from-the-headlines detail - "Pekos Oil" instead of Yukos - slick and stylish, though some of the connective tissue gets lost in the rush: who's the guy Bourne has the fight with, how do the authorities find the evil Russian at the end, etc. Stuff I Learned From The CIA: (i) straight vodka (Smirnoff, as I recall) can effectively cauterize a bullet wound; (ii) CPR is also possible underwater; (iii) a telephone display shows the room number when a hotel receptionist calls a guest, allowing the alert bystander to ascertain which room is being called; (iv) if you want to get a really big explosion - delayed by a few minutes, targeting any would-be pursuers who might come to the house after you've gone - just stick a rolled-up magazine in the toaster, then turn the toaster on as you exit. Works every time.]       

THE PRINCE AND ME (34) (dir., Martha Coolidge) Julia Stiles, Luke Mably, James Fox, Miranda Richardson, Ben Miller [Poor Julia Stiles: she's obviously intelligent - obviously - but the market wants WHAT A GIRL WANTS-type fluffiness. Compromise: first hour is played as juvenile shenanigans - fun-loving prince, sensible Julia, prim-and-proper butler faced with life in a college dorm ("I thought you had to be convicted of a crime before you lived somewhere like this"), sappy romance capped by marriage proposal with fluttering CGI butterfly - but then, once the romance is resolved and "Me" gets her Prince, switch gears abruptly to the Princess Di Story, striking a thoughtful blow for self-fulfilment and against the princess fantasy that still enslaves so many starry-eyed young girls ('Be Yourself!' cry Julia Stiles and her woman director). Vaguely interesting, if only as the space between one fantasy and another - the Superwoman fantasy of having it all - but the second part is rushed and too much in the first part is lame (a lawnmower race? I mean come on); even the can't-miss scene where the prince watches Julia dancing gets mangled, Coolidge showing the girl either in wide-shot or close-up when the scene cries out for an intimate MS that'd still give her room to move. Is princess heroine shopping for Prada, Harry Winston etc really such a different form of product-placement than a couple of shlubs eating at Burger King?]   

RED LIGHTS (74) (dir., Cédric Kahn) Jean-Pierre Darroussin, Carole Bouquet, Vincent Deniard [God's-eye views over the opening credits, then a film in three acts, each veering further and more surprisingly than the one before. The first is a fairly standard neo-noir about a marriage under strain, done with all kinds of sly tension-builders - slow zoom into family photo, or subtle time-compression when our hero's sitting in the bar having a beer (background noise doesn't change, so what looks like a normal cut turns out to be 10-minutes-later) - set on a DETOUR / KISS ME DEADLY highway that's magic-hour luscious and insanely dangerous. The second is a mordant Kahn joke, from the twisted mind that brought you L'ENNUI, about the emasculated husband who decides to assert his masculinity, tired of the "red lights" of social norms and his wife treating him like a lapdog - only to find himself chatting up men in bars and becoming the "dog" (more properly bitch) of an escaped con who chews him out about his driving. The third is initially the most unexpected - the series-of-phone-calls scene a virtuoso bit of acting and real-time staging, but seemingly too mundane for a thriller - but in fact illustrates a new kind of manhood, not the hard-drinking macho fantasy but a gentle strength based on quiet persistence, dealing with the nightmares, comforting the kids, etc, taking the story to a new plane (*). Not as dense and mysterious as ROBERTO SUCCO but perhaps Kahn's most worked-out and satisfying film (to date), though some may be irked by the cautionary-tale aspect and paean to family values; clear suggestion that the entire middle section - approx. from our hero seeing the blue arrow - is a dream or fantasy, though it doesn't alter the power of the bloodied figure suddenly appearing in the woods, followed by a slow fade-to-black...] 

(*) I also like Mike D'Angelo's darker take, which is that the hero can now finally connect with his too-perfect wife because she's been Damaged, i.e. brought down to his level ; just thought I should mention this, since (of course) it's nowhere to be found on his site. You're welcome readers.  

SKY CAPTAIN AND THE WORLD OF TOMORROW (39) (dir., Kerry Conran) Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, Angelina Jolie, Giovanni Ribisi ["The story grows stranger at every turn," says Gwyneth (whose spunky-heroine character - pushy, flighty, deceitful - is intensely annoying), but in fact the story is inert, and even the much-hyped look offers diminishing returns: there's grandeur in the skyscrapers and sky-scanning spotlights (and the fetishised 40s fashions) when we're still in a noir-ish, tinted-sepia metropolis - ZENTROPA comparisons are well-taken - but then it moves to snowscapes and spaceships and dino-infested jungle, and it's really just a spiffed-up version of the same old CGI murk. Digital reconstruction of Laurence Olivier turns out to be a brief and pointless stunt, John Williams pastiche score would embarrass even (or especially) John Williams. Typically under-imagined bit: "We'll never get to [the villain]! He's too well-guarded!" says Sky Captain's friend. In fact he's behind a door guarded by two (2) robots, and they get to him in less than a minute.] 

THE CHRONICLES OF RIDDICK (32) (dir., David Twohy) Vin Diesel, Thandie Newton, Colm Feore, Judi Dench [Theo aksed me to right this but their is not much to say about the movie. It is in space. Their is Vin Diesel as Riddick. He says Stay away from me becose he is an outlaw. First he has a beard, then he wares shades. He has good mussles and obvosly works out. Their is no plot it is all action, well their is some plot but mosly is all action, it is pretty cool. Their is like a jale and they say Feeding time! and this lizard dog comes out to eat Riddick. Then it is hot and one guy gets his skin burnt of. I went with my buddies Paul and Blade, and this guy sitting behind us said how the bad guy's are like Convert or Die! so they are like Moslim's and it is like the war on terror, maybe that is bullshit tho. I liked the part where one guy says Throw on a fresh pare of panties and let's do this thing. That was funny.]

COFFEE AND CIGARETTES (66) (dir., Jim Jarmusch) Roberto Benigni, Iggy Pop, Tom Waits, Cate Blanchett, Alfred Molina, Steve Coogan, Bill Murray, GZA, RZA [Toasting (among other things) "New York in the late 70s" - a wondrous place apparently, akin to Paris in the 20s, when Jim Jarmusch was 25 years old and you could (presumably) have coffee and cigarettes without a lecture on the dangers of caffeine and nicotine. More than just nostalgic, it uses its unique gestation period - made over 17 years - to express its theme, which is the loss of a certain ease and kinship between people, exemplified in hanging out, the clinking of cups, the intimacy of ordering coffee for the other person; we begin with hyper-caffeinated Benigni happy to do a favour for a fellow slacker, but we end (elegiac epilogue aside) with RZA and "Bill Murray" - not necessarily Bill Murray - peering at each other across a generation gap, "the coffee-and-cigarettes generation" that of course includes Jarmusch himself ("I've Lost Touch With the World" is the Mahler song that plays over the final segment). Celebrity culture is the chief suspect for this loss of humanity, specifically the Hollywood/paparazzi kind of celebrity: there's a qualitative difference between the unease of goofy Iggy Pop humouring a grumpy Tom Waits early on - ending on a handshake and muted-but-respectful "Maybe next time" - and the poisoned relationships in the Coogan/Molina and even Wu-Tang/Murray episodes, where Celebrity Value takes over and the people don't even say goodbye (could our current jones for glossy, superficial brand-name fame also be connected with the health-Nazi culture that inveighs against coffee and cigarettes, obsessed with a healthy body over a healthy soul? Discuss). Some of it is filler - Descas/De Bankolé and "Renée" episodes being the most disposable - but overall a poignant riff on Time passing from a director previously concerned with the fine art of Time-wasting. Is it mere coincidence that among the recurring motifs is Nikola Tesla, inextricably linked in the pop-science mind with experiments on Time-travel? Hint: the answer is no.] 

SHAUN OF THE DEAD (62) (second viewing: 56) (dir., Edgar Wright) Simon Pegg, Kate Ashfield, Nick Frost, Bill Nighy [Hollywood lessons learned perhaps a little too well, esp. the one that says your hero has to Grow as a Person as well as fighting zombies; final act a bit too on-the-nose in using the situation to incidentally resolve Shaun's various life-crises (and then the feelgood coda undoes much of what it does accomplish). Generally runs out of steam - when the characters stop (at the pub), so does the movie - but  mostly a nimble and smart entertainment, the filmmaking flashy but witty with lots of whoosh! transitions (whip-pans, or an opening door that turns into a wipe) and breathless montages in the funny AMELIE / RUN LOLA RUN vein (not the empty-calorie Jerry Bruckheimer vein). Best of all in linking Romero-style apocalypse with everyday zombie-dom, characters resorting to their stock responses - "I don't see the point of owning a car in London" - even in the midst of chaos, or just totally in denial of the situation, too set in their boring little lives. "What do you think we should do?" "Er ... Have a sit-down?..."] [Second viewing, 3 years later. I'd forgotten how clever the opening half-hour is in insinuating zombie movie into slacker comedy - it's very clever. I'd also forgotten how oppressive the movie grows as it tries to be a home-grown blockbuster; it's very oppressive. Aggressive editing turns monotonous, and stupid behaviour by some of the minor characters doesn't help at all.] 

THE NOTEBOOK (48) (dir., Nick Cassavetes) Ryan Gosling, Rachel McAdams, James Garner, Gena Rowlands, James Marsden, Joan Allen ["It was an improbable romance. He was a country boy, she was from the city. She had the world at her feet, he didn't have two dimes to rub together". So high-flown and novelettish it'd take a real sucker to fall for it - and I guess I am that sucker, at least for an hour or so and a few minutes at the end, when the very potent framing device kicks in ("It was us!"), though they do over-milk it a little. Before that, McAdams squeals a lot but acts with her bone structure as the spoiled Southern belle, while Gosling has a lanky, hungry quality that cuts through the mush (at least till he grows that silly beard); and they stand in the street and dance without music, and she gigglingly smears him with ice-cream so she can kiss it off - "That girl has too much spirit," sniffs repressive mother Joan Allen - and WW2 lasts about two minutes and there's always a glorious sunset or a silvery full moon over the lake. In my defence, I've always been a sucker for tales of Time passing and the Transience of Love, and I guess sappiness is one thing and passion - even PG-rated passion - is another; and some of it does add psychology, e.g. heroine babbling like mad as they try to make love for the first time, though admittedly most of it doesn't. Maybe I'm just irony'd out or something...]

KING ARTHUR (52) (dir., Antoine Fuqua) Clive Owen, Keira Knightley, Ioan Gruffudd, Stellan Skarsgard, Ray Winstone [Pure bombast, but it gets to you in the way of a heavy-metal song or something : stately and portentous, super-macho - Fuqua loves male camaraderie and the dour 'warrior' sensibility (leavened with compassion, here as in TEARS OF THE SUN) - moody but hard-to-make-out in a visual equivalent of heavy-metal's doomy, opaque riffs (at least half the shots are obscured by mist, smoke, rain or swirling snow), finally going all-out in the battle scenes, which may not be very smart but are certainly effective - or at least more coherent and worked-out than the ones in GLADIATOR, which shares a scriptwriter and composer. Owen is lugubrious, Enya-style Celtic chants tiresome, shots of horses silhouetted against the crest of a hill somewhat overdone (also, if I hear one more grungy medieval person yelling about "Freedom!" I'm going to get medieval on their ass); Ray Winstone steals the show, proving the TRAINING DAY theory - viz. that Fuqua works best with colourful frontmen messing with his tendency to self-importance. Regrettable Sexism Alert: is it just the clothes, or is Keira Knightley actually quite flat-chested?]  

SUPER SIZE ME (54) (dir., Morgan Spurlock) [Michael Moore disciple - self-serving, prone to stunts and cartoon moments, affecting a goofy persona that makes it seem like the information is being divulged organically, i.e. in spite of him, whereas of course he's orchestrating it - takes on the fast-food industry, which is akin to shooting (Filet-O-)fish in a barrel. Ranges far and wide, taking in stomach surgery and the state of school cafeterias among other things, and includes a number of cheap shots - making a fuss over finding a hair in the food (so what?) or the lobbyist admitting "We're part of the problem" when it's really not such a big deal in context - but most of the material is so devastating and incredible it can't help but work. Implicit public-service justification for the whole thing - i.e. that Spurlock's stunt will help future litigants against McDonald's, as per the judge's ruling - not too convincing, because of course the fast-food people don't intend for you to eat their product three times a day, though it's gleefully ironic how they keep calling soberly for "good education" and "more information" (you want information? here you go...). By the way, does this mean we can now stop haranguing smokers about their habit and start getting all preachy and self-righteous with fat people? Because that would be awesome.]