Films Seen - November 2007

[Pre-'96 films not included.]

BEOWULF (63) (dir., Robert Zemeckis) with the voices of Ray Winstone, Anthony Hopkins, Angelina Jolie "The Christ God has killed" the Age of Heroes, replacing it with guilt and shame - shame over lies and guilt over secret fornication, which may be why the climactic dragon destroys a crucifix among his first iniquities; he's a symbol of the past, affording Beowulf a chance to revert to his pre-Christian heroism, save the day and print the legend. Motion-capture animation makes for some breathtaking moments and techno-geek Zemeckis is fearless as ever, tackling sophisticated elements - an impotent king, a victim monster - without dumbing down (maybe he's just being faithful to the source but I've never even seen THE NIBELUNGEN, let alone read the original); he's also a superb action director, choreographing action scenes to tell a story instead of using them for chaotic energy - yet the animation is also in the end what robs it of impact because the pain of conflicting emotions simply can't appear as powerfully on a cartoon face, however artful; Zemeckis' ambition (and faith in new technology) is awe-inspiring, but the tools he uses simply can't do what he wants them to do (cf. a fable like THE POLAR EXPRESS). Tries to work as a 'real movie', but it's more a case of good fun punctuated with stray amusing thoughts, like e.g. Does the photo-realism extend to the glimpse of Hopkins' bare behind (in which case he looks pretty good for a septuagenarian)? Is Beowulf's captain - who frowns on sex and weeps for the men killed in battle - coded as secretly gay (which would certainly add an extra layer to the final shot)? And how can Grendel be a good name for a monster when it irresistibly suggests a flaxen-haired little blonde girl in dirndl and pigtails?

FIDO (52) (dir., Andrew Currie) K'Sun Ray, Billy Connolly, Carrie-Anne Moss, Dylan Baker Nicely morbid send-up of boy-and-pet pictures from LASSIE to E.T. (a shot of silhouettes and starry sky suggests the latter, except our youthful hero isn't taking off on his bicycle but taking down a zombie with a shovel to the head), as well as 50s-style suburbia - sharp enough to note that conservative family values based on exclusion of the Other are in fact only skin-deep, because they're infected with the paranoia that family members will also someday 'turn' ("Don't let them get too close!"). Alas, it becomes conventional, most obviously in reducing Mother from status-obsessed consumer to sweet sitcom Mom, generally growing more reassuring as it goes on instead of more nightmarish. First half, however - with talk of protective walls and front-page headlines reading "Town Even Safer Than Before" - is downright Maddin-esque in its Canadian-ness.

THE GO MASTER (43) (dir., Tian Zhuangzhuang) Chen Chang, Sylvia Chang, Akira Emoto Flirts with self-parody when e.g. some children are playing Go - a board game with button-like "stones", for the uninitiated - and are sternly enjoined to play quietly; God forbid there should ever be a riotous game of Go (one recalls W.C. Fields, speaking of "beanbag" in NEVER GIVE A SUCKER AN EVEN BREAK: "It becomes very exciting at times. I saw the championship played in Paris. Many people were killed..."). Go is an escape from political strife ("Go knows no nations"), a religion, a spiritual pursuit, a Zen koan, "a soul-stirring struggle" - yet the film never shows its hero's prowess at the Go board, pointedly cutting away as soon as a game begins and leaving his achievements mainly offscreen ("By that time I had dominated the Go world for many years," he says towards the end, which is when you realise that most of the plot has been elided); instead we see a quiet, somewhat hollow, often indecisive man, as if all the strategic thinking he expended on Go left him without any strategy for real life. It's a brave way to make a biopic, if it's deliberate, upending the usual structure of an accumulated life capped by a glimpse of the real-life subject giving his blessing (in this case we start with the real-life subject, after which the life grows increasingly scattered and elusive) - and maybe it is deliberate, given Tian's political troubles in the 90s, as if to say a man who takes no part in politics will miss out on his own life (and be easy prey for those who want to use him, viz. the religious cult) - but subverting the plot only makes the film even more deadly. Almost all the directorial choices are stultifying, from plodding rhythm to drab colours to tentative piano on the soundtrack. Meanwhile, Go goes from strength to strength: "A man must be prepared to face even death on the Go board!".

EL GRECO (42) (dir., Yiannis Smaragdis) Nick Ashdon, Juan Diego Botto, Dimitra Matsouka Better than expected, inasmuch as Euro-pudding biopics tend to be actively ludicrous whereas this is merely uninspired. Art is liberation, a Truth that not everyone wants (or is ready) to hear; it's "a different kind of resistance, the resistance of Light against Darkness", the latter being the forces of repression - above all the Church, with its Inquisition and repressed-homosexual priest, though El Greco sounds far too modern in his arguments, e.g. challenging a bishop's criticism that his painted Crucifixion is factually inaccurate with "How do you know? Were you an eyewitness?" (an artist might've argued for artistic licence, but would anyone have doubted the Church's monopoly on interpreting Scripture, circa 1580? even blasphemers would've taken that as given, I suspect). Care has been taken so e.g. the light in Titian's studio looks vaguely like a Titian, and e.g. our hero's played by an English actor for maximum appeal, the dialogue mostly in English (amusingly, he starts off talking Greek with his brother but they've switched to English by the end of the movie) - but the "oooh"ing crowds still sound like amateur hour, and the Greek - actually Cretan - nationalism still shows through at every opportunity, harking back to a pre-EU sensibility. El Greco, "you crazy Greek"!... 

Thessaloniki Film Festival

AND ALONG COME TOURISTS (46) (dir., Robert Thalheim) Alexander Fehling, Ryszard Ronczewski, Barbara Wysocka "I haven't had a chance to look around," says our hero of Auschwitz - and neither do we, the former concentration-camp never establishing itself as a more-than-generic location. This may well be deliberate, since the single Great Idea here is that stark reality - the camp itself, the memories of actual survivors - may eventually be useless or inadequate in preserving the past; "Show them SCHINDLER'S LIST," says the old survivor, "it's got more impact". Alas, the Idea is surrounded by too much hackneyed waffle, the cranky old man protected at every turn (of course) so he never looks bad, our initially apathetic young hero - "I'd actually planned to go to Amsterdam" - getting involved like every good German should, etc. Veers close to cynical brilliance when we glimpse the old man being paid to recite his memories for schoolchildren, then the point is underlined and the impact is lost.   

THE SECRET OF THE GRAIN (76) (dir., Abdellatif Kechiche) Habib Boufares, Farida Benkhetache, Hafsia Herzi The nominal plot of BIG NIGHT, the working-class rage of a Ken Loach domestic drama - it's especially distressing when scenes involve infants and toddlers getting yelled at by their onscreen mothers, or witnessing a full-on quarrel between the actors playing family members; I sure hope they cast those toddlers from dysfunctional families - and the gossipy expansive Marseillais vibe of Marcel Pagnol and the Marius Trilogy, all combine in a stunning human comedy, Kechiche's camera getting almost too close for comfort (at least it looks better than L'ESQUIVE, purely because DV technology has improved in the four years since); when his people eat you can see the stray crumbs of couscous on their lips, when they fight you note every quiver of emotional ebb-and-flow. Maybe none of it is very original, but Kechiche burrows so deep and keeps looking for so long - as if trying to ferret out the truth by sheer force of will - the film becomes epic, operatic; a girl trying to talk her mother into doing something is a fairly banal scenario, but when it's observed in such detail - the girl trying flattery, then wheedling, then self-pity - it becomes like a symphony of human behaviour, all the tricks people pull when they're trying to get their way. Always entertaining, then it builds (unexpectedly) to a tense cross-cutting climax - which it works so 'wrongly', ignoring all the precepts about having the action culminate, building tension, shortening the intervals between cross-cuts, etc, you have to assume it's deliberate; the ending surprises, partly because we've become conditioned to expect a certain type of ending from a cross-cutting climax. New cinematic language? It's possible.   

SECRET SUNSHINE (67) (dir., Lee Chang-dong) Jeon Do-yeon, Song Kang-ho, Jo Yeong-jin Seems pretty clear, yet my audience was puzzled (lotsa walkouts) and even the reliable Jeremy Heilman speaks of the heroine's "sinful pride", which I didn't see at all. The key, as I understand it, lies in her (coded, but fairly inescapable) mention of having been abused by her father in childhood, sparking a lifelong psychological pattern where she deals with trauma by sinking into denial and being pointedly virtuous: faced with a cheating husband, she denies his transgressions and pointedly moves to his hometown in order to honour his memory; faced with family tragedy, she finds refuge in happy-clappy religion and pointedly decides to 'forgive' the man who wronged her (honesty is a theme from the opening section, albeit ironically, the heroine in denial even about her denial - she's brutally honest with the woman in the shop, and disapproves of putting up a fake diploma on her wall). The problem, of course, is that denial gets her nowhere - she's a stranger in her husband's hometown, and her lies lead to tragedy; later on, forgiveness goes wrong when the man she's trying to absolve steals her thunder - because deep down she's still an abused child, like the put-upon teenage girl who keeps reappearing and keeps being ignored by our heroine (even in the grip of religious fervour, she turns away when the girl is being beaten by her boyfriend; even at the end, in the hairdressing salon, she can't face the girl's presence or look her in the eye). It ends - per the title - on sunshine, tying in with an earlier conundrum wondering if God may be found in a sunbeam - the answer being perhaps that there is a secret in sunshine (and everything else, all the "things we cannot see") but it's not necessarily God, more the repressed desires we project as God; often the answers are mundane, hence e.g. the car that won't start at a crucial juncture, simply because it's not in gear. A fine, very artful psychological portrait.

CALIFORNIA DREAMIN' (ENDLESS) (39) (dir., Cristian Nemescu) Armand Assante, Razvan Vasilescu, Jamie Elman Not a good idea putting "Endless" in the title of a 155-minute movie (apparently it's due to be shortened before release). Dan Sallitt cites Billy Wilder - I assume he means AVANTI! - though one could also cite any number of city-types-scammed-by-canny-villagers films, from THE MAGGIE to WAKING NED DEVINE. Strangely obsolete portrait of Americans in this case (it's set in the Clinton years), still the confident superpower of Marshall Plan days - WW2 flashbacks suggest the connection - as opposed to the humbled ambivalence of post-9/11, though the film seems unaware of this disjunction; the result is obvious satire (the village has an Elvis impersonator!) at unconscionable length, albeit with moments of charm. The ending seems to carry echoes of the first Gulf War, specifically George Bush Sr.'s betrayal of the Shia (i.e. when the US encouraged their rebellion then left them high and dry), but the staging is so fuzzy - actions rushed, blame not clearly apportioned - it's hard to say for sure.

HONOR DE CAVALLERIA (60) (dir., Albert Serra) Lluis Carbo, Lluis Serrat Unlike some contrarians, I don't think it's awesome when a film leads to fully 40% of its audience walking out - especially when it's mostly local people who took a chance on a festival movie, and probably won't do so again (the 8 p.m. screening was a mistake imo); aesthetic daring is all very well, but filmmakers also have some responsibility to connect with the average viewer. That said, the film is beautiful, Sancho and Quixote set against a curtain of twigs, silhouetted against a deep-blue twilight sky on the brink of night, etc (an entire shot is dedicated to the sloooow rising of a full moon) - and also hilarious as the Knight constantly harangues his Squire, Serrat's sheepish glances irresistibly recalling Oliver Hardy. He also incidentally talks to Sancho about God-in-Nature - and the film is nothing if not pantheistic, recalling the tranquil likes of Lisandro Alonso and COCHOCHI though the style is less becalmed, at times following Quixote in his nervous inconclusive wanderings, other times suggesting thoughts of "adventures" churning in his mind; when he says a knight has an obligation to the Truth it sounds at first like a slam - since he's living a lie - but there's a truth of sorts to the film's revisionism, locating the titular honour in the duo's relationship and their absurd (but sincere) commitment, as well as the 'truth' of the digital image. Walkouts started in the first 10 minutes, unsurprisingly since most of the first 10 minutes is a single shot of muddy vegetation from a static camera. 

THE TRAP (57) (dir., Srdan Golubovic) Nebojsa Glogovac, Natasa Ninkovic, Miki Manojlovic Speaking of audience response [see above] brings me to the woman behind me who firmly declared "Now that was a good movie!" as the closing credits rolled, in the style of someone who hadn't seen many good movies over the preceding few days. Very solid, and if it sometimes goes in obvious directions that shouldn't be a deal-breaker; half AMERICAN FRIEND-style plot, half intriguing musings on the state of Serbia - slowly being gobbled up by EU foreigners, riven by a massive wealth gap between those enriched by Westernization and those still struggling to live the old way. A side-note on 9/11 (to the effect that not all lives are worth the same) seems contrived, ditto details like the doctor talking of Renault 4's (sometimes it's okay for a minor character to remain generic), and the hero's infuriatingly closed-off and taciturn in the second half - but the darkness is sobering, and the ending packs a real punch. Has two things in common with the flimsy IRINA PALM [see below], a scene in a bank and Miki Manojlovic; the contrast is instructive.

STRANGE CULTURE (49) (dir., Lynn Hershman Leeson) Thomas Jay Ryan, Tilda Swinton, Steve Kurtz (as himself) Steve Kurtz - arrested by the FBI on terrorism charges arising from the accidental death of his wife - can't tell the whole story for legal reasons, so some of it is staged with actors playing Steve and Hope; meanwhile, academic colleagues testify to what an inspiring teacher he is/was ("able to respond ... in a remarkably open and giving way"), the film piles on the evidence against the FBI - reaching some kind of indignant pinnacle when it charges them with having falsely imprisoned Kurtz's cat - and the actors finally join the discussion as themselves, pontificating on the climate of fear in America ("People have to know what's happening in this country"). Not remotely balanced as a documentary - no-one speaks for the FBI, nor is there even a caption along the lines of 'the FBI declined to be interviewed for this film' - which speaks to the polarised mood in America and the paranoia among academics; not only is McCarthyism cited, the fact that students don't know about McCarthyism (don't they? really?) is cited - and it's hard to know how to respond, because it's so obviously a bunch of outraged friends speaking up for their buddy, tinged with the kind of deadly earnestness one tends to find among academics: the use of actors could've been a devastating joke, e.g. if they'd used it to explore the limits of documentary truth (maybe the film could've spiralled off into speculative fiction, making political points on the line between reality and fantasy), but instead we get people talking "performativities" - is that even a word? - and "the hyper-reality of it all". Still a valuable time-capsule for the sheer self-aggrandizing fear and loathing among those interviewed - and they may even be right, though it sounds like the FBI merely fucked up and couldn't drop the case entirely for political reasons, reducing the charges to "mail fraud" (it's unlikely Kurtz will be convicted, admits his lawyer, "but strange things happen"); the real point is the one-sidedness of the film's assault, and the underlying assumption that it has to be one-sided or risk being destroyed by the Enemy. Maybe so - but then most of it also fulminates against GM foods (the target of Kurtz's radical Art), not just the point that GM food should be labelled as such but also the concept itself, with talk of "mutant humans" forced to relinquish control over their identities (Swinton meaningfully notes that her part of Scotland has declared itself a GM-Free Zone); fair enough, but then what about this? Polarisation is a poor way to debate issues.     

GREAT WORLD OF SOUND (54) (dir., Craig Zobel) Pat Healy, Kene Holliday, Rebecca Mader Didn't know about the gimmick going in - viz. that the featured musicians are real musicians filmed on hidden cameras - though knowing it still doesn't clear up the question of the film's own take on these people; are we supposed to agree when e.g. our hero enthuses over the "new national anthem" sung by a young black girl? (It actually sounds pretty cheesy.) Healy's performance is a problem, not just opaque and introverted but actively diminishing the film's energy (his scenes with the girlfriend feel like contractual obligation); the whole thing feels like a 90s indie, from the functional under-populated look - it doesn't look like it even had a production designer, though in fact it had David Gordon Green's production designer - to such details as the cellphone gag. On the one hand, it grows inert and a little oppressive, the 'twist' (that Great World of Sound are a fly-by-night outfit scamming these musicians) being obvious early on, so all we have to watch is Healy's low-energy path to enlightenment. On the other, the byways of dirty capitalism - bad faith gradually revealed, cash-flow issues taking over, cheap excuses offered when money isn't forthcoming, corporate pep-talks turning out to be hollow - make for queasy fascination. Will Kene Holliday end up in Hollywood doing Delroy Lindo roles? We hope so.    

MUNYURANGABO (42) (dir., Lee Isaac Chung) Josef Rutagengwa, Eric Ndorunkundiye, Edouard Bamporiki Uwayo Maybe it's the African way of acting, declarative rather than demonstrative, as when our hero's father launches into a long tirade about his shortcomings (including the obscure admonition "Don't rely on your height") and it's all delivered in the same low monotone. Maybe it's the fact of a non-African director - and the creeping suspicion that he piggybacked on this subject (the Rwandan genocide) because he knew he'd get Western guilt-money to finance it. A bloody machete appears in the opening shots, and the same machete prompts the ostensible climax - the recital of a poem written for National Liberation Day ("Liberation is a journey"), calling not just for peace and Hutu-Tutsi reconciliation but also such UN-approved tenets as a focus on domestic violence, an end to illiteracy and an overhaul of the sexist education system. Agreeably low-key, avoiding the perils of extreme didacticism, but not quite dramatic enough to redeem the earnestness. Not dramatic at all, actually.

THE UNPOLISHED (59) (dir., Pia Marais) Ceci Chuh, Birol Unel, Pascale Schiller "Our daughter thinks we're losers," says Junkie Dad to Hippy Mom - and that's really all there is to it. They're not abusive, just kind of scuzzy and scabby, doing drugs, planning inept scams, lounging around in parks and dirty flats with their loser friends, and it's true they can't give the daughter what she needs - "You're always so materialistic," chides Mom, yet pushes her away when the girl tries to crawl on her lap - but the film is borderline-snobbish about their "unpolished" manners, even though the title probably refers to our heroine and Marais is probably unaware of the double meaning (they're such slobs! Mom bums a lighter from the next table in a restaurant without even asking!). Still atmospheric, with a strong sense of lives adrift and as much inappropriate early-teenage sexuality as a film can take nowadays, but the main dynamic seems a little hackneyed. Girl looks out the window at other people's parents - rich, respectable parents - cuts out her own folks' head-shots and pastes them on other families' photos, etc. Then sits in the van looking winsome, trying to figure things out.   

HANNAH TAKES THE STAIRS (66) (dir., Joe Swanberg) Greta Gerwig, Kent Osborne, Andrew Bujalski, Mark Duplass Absolut mumblecore, probably the film people will turn to decades from now, when the whole movement is a mid-00s footnote - which doesn't mean it's the best example, merely the most definitive. Its people are young, white, insecure, superficially restless (a two-and-a-half-year relationship is "longer than I've been into anything") yet annoyingly clingy, politicised in a basic way - two of them are working on an ant-Bush blog - yet totally lost in their bubble of break-ups and relationships. They quote THE BIG LEBOWSKI, claim "chronic dissatisfaction", play endless games to stave off self-consciousness, and profess a cynical view of humanity (viz. the conversation on why people shake hands and clink glasses) probably - you suspect - because blanket cynicism absolves them of the need to engage with the wider world - thus e.g. Hannah's comment that the world may be grim but the biggest tragedy is that "people don't listen to each other" (bigger than Darfur? bigger than global warming? you can almost hear her whine "You don't listen!" at Mommy and Daddy). They're middle-class parasites, and the film does indulge them, but it also finds some poignancy in their endless evasion tactics, and succeeds in the obvious way that we see more of them than they see themselves - literally so in its best (or only) visual gag, the soon-to-be-ex boyfriend calling Hannah for a joke though he's standing just a few feet away (in the background of the shot) then looking crestfallen as she glances at her phone, sees his number and ignores him, a clear harbinger of their imminent break-up. There's an arrogance in the DIY aesthetic, thumbing its nose at visuals and acting - casting your friends is all very well, but would a girl like Greta Gerwig really hook up with someone as geeky-looking as Bujalski? - yet that's self-confessedly part of the deal, total intimacy (with attendant blemishes) touted from the very first shot; its arrogance is the self-negating (hence perverse) arrogance of a youthful Western sub-culture that's been given so much, weaned on self-esteem and post-modernism, its only valid statement is to opt out of everything, except itself and its own uncertainties (you think this is bad, wait till the YouTube crowd start making movies). Neurotic motto for a New Generation: "I don't like things that are explicitly about what they are".      

JUNO (64) (dir., Jason Reitman) Ellen Page, Michael Cera, Jason Bateman, Jennifer Garner THANK YOU FOR SMOKING might've been a mere provocation but this confirms Reitman's worldview as basically conservative, anti-abortion and anti-divorce with incidental jabs at feminism, as well as a heroine who's squarer than she seems. Juno may be "freaky" but she's more mature than most of the adults around her - she's really just a tomboy, like an urban-teen version of Scout from "To Kill a Mockingbird" - and hurt by her Dad's comment that "I thought you were the kind of girl who knows when to say when" (having sex is her only minor lapse); "I don't really know what kind of girl I am," she replies, adding a touch of vulnerability beneath the Attitude. She's hilarious, blithely insensitive to manners and decorum, steeped in irony ("Hello, I'm calling to procure a hasty abortion"), as oblivious to everyday pieties as Groucho Marx - all of which makes it slightly disappointing that she ends up in conventional girlfriend-hood, though Michael Cera's tentative-teen act never grows old ("I love how you're cool without even trying," she burbles, and his shamefaced confidential expression is priceless as he mumbles: "I try really hard, actually..."). Reitman always goes for the cute shot - e.g. hero and heroine's feet as they lie in bed - and unwisely fills the soundtrack with songs that sound like they're written by Phoebe in "Friends" - but the dialogue sparkles, Jason Bateman's arrested adolescent is deeply scary, and the whole thing's just too funny to dislike. Gerrrta RAUSS!

IRINA PALM (23) (dir., Sam Garbarski) Marianne Faithfull, Miki Manojlovic, Kevin Bishop "Remember, you are in control," our heroine is told - even when her job is jerking off a line of unseen clients at a strip-club! Looks like even exploitation can now be re-cast as liberation in a post-feminist world. Audience Award winner at Berlin, and my audience also gave it a warm round of applause - then again, they also laughed when a stripper says "I've had a better offer" (why? what are strippers supposed to say when they've had a better offer from another strip-club?) so maybe it's just a variation on the Profane Granny pap of CALENDAR GIRLS, sleaze re-packaged as harmless entertainment. Suffice to say that absolutely nothing works - not Faithfull's catatonic performance, not the plot (why would any strip-club owner give such a job to such a hopelessly naive granny?), not her son's fake, inexplicable freak-out when he finds out the truth, not the dialogue, nothing. Full of small annoyances, from the bank clerks wearing Santa Claus caps (it's Christmas) while refusing the loan - cf. the similar moment in THE TRAP, which is turned into a mordant joke on corporate culture - to the "penis elbow" gag actually explained ("You know how you get tennis elbow..."), to our heroine not knowing that the word "hostess" is a euphemism, then claiming not to know the word "euphemism" either (I mean come on). Made by "Entre Chien et Loup" Productions - "Between Dog and Wolf" - inadvertently typifying both its stifling m.o. of domesticating the wild and dangerous, and the way it ends up being neither one thing nor the other.

CARGO 200 (54) (dir., Alexei Balabanov) Agniya Kuznetsova, Alexei Poluyan, Leonid Gromov Balabanov takes on Soviet Russia, specifically the stagnant benighted period of Andropov and Chernenko with the State on its last legs. Period detail must be overwhelming for Russians - home-made beer, food shortages and of course the spectre of Afghanistan (the title refers to corpses of soldiers being transported back from the war), with Western influence creeping closer (pop songs at the club - a building with a sign reading "Club" - are still in Russian, but e.g. the cool dude says "That's it" in English to sound extra-cool) - but it's much more than a period recreation, getting increasingly bizarre and outlandish. Hard not to think of Russian stereotypes when you get two guys sitting across a wooden table in a shack on a bitter-cold night, discussing the Existence of God over vodka and mushroom soup (say what you like about the French, they seldom appear in their movies wearing berets and holding strings of garlic) - but one man teaches Scientific Atheism at Leningrad University while the other heads a utopian mini-community called "Sun City", adding meat to their respective theories that moral norms are created by social relations or God Himself. Utopianism (like Communism) is a flop, leading only to whoring and senseless murder - so the atheist is probably right, but not in the way he thinks because the godless, corrupt Communist society is deeply amoral. Starts as period mosaic, looks like it's going to be some kind of philosophical discussion (are we going to stay in the shack for the whole movie?) - but then it goes off the rails, bringing in a psycho cop, visiting absurdly OTT tortures on the teenage daughter of a Party official and ending as demented black comedy with the cop solemnly reading out a love letter as flies buzz around the corpse of an Afghan-war victim. Also gets mechanical, shock value starts to trump coherence and a couple of minor performances (e.g. the girl's parents) are pretty bad; maybe it'll take a director who didn't live through Communism (Balabanov is 48) to recall it without going nuts. 

THE HEARTBREAK KID (37) (dir., Peter and Bobby Farrelly) Ben Stiller, Michelle Monaghan, Malin Akerman The usual question: Should this be judged as a gloss on KID '72, or on its own merits? Seems unfair to assume potential viewers have seen the original - then again if they'd called it something else I'd have been within my rights to say 'This is kind of like THE HEARTBREAK KID, only dumber', so why should they wriggle out of the comparison by actually calling it THE HEARTBREAK KID? It is (vaguely) like the original, only dumber - not just missing all the mordant satire of American go-getter-dom (that's to be expected) but significantly weakening the central dilemma by making the new girl delightful and the wife a nightmare (her only real demerits in KID '72 were being somewhat plain and somewhat Jewish), aligning with KNOCKED UP and LICENCE TO WED in the recent trend for hysterical anti-Marriage tirades, derived in turn from the evil-in-law sub-genre kicked off by MEET THE PARENTS; marriage turns a sweet-looking girl into a shrew, the bachelor life keeps hero's widowed Dad young and spry, and meanwhile his hen-pecked best friend offers "the secret to a happy marriage: plaster on a fake smile, plough through the next half-century and wait for the sweet embrace of Death". The Farrellys clearly think they've made a wry comment on the ways of the human heart - "Love, love, love..." muses Stiller - but in fact the deck is stacked too ineptly (Grodin's behaviour in '72 was self-destructive, but there's nothing remotely irrational about the hero's choice in this case), leaving only crude farce and an almost sinister fear of commitment; the extended family is viewed more favourably, possibly because it resembles the close-knit gang of friends Western 20-somethings now seem so loath to grow out of. The point in '72 was that Grodin was ultimately wrong - you could see his problem, but his motives were finally selfish and shallow - whereas the point here is that Stiller is ultimately right; his plight is exaggerated slightly, but Marriage really is grotesque. Just a Hollywood trend, or a more seismic societal shift? Discuss, etc.  

WIND CHILL (53) (dir., Gregory Jacobs) Emily Blunt, Ashton Holmes, Martin Donovan It's official: horror films only really work - I mean really work - when they also reflect psychological tension or disturbance in the main character(s) (see e.g. THE OTHERS, with mother and kids all on the brink of insanity). This one is tense - I mean really tense - for about half an hour, building unease from a strained central relationship (see also VACANCY) - heroine stuck-up, abrupt and rather unpleasant, hero creepy in a shy-person way, possibly guilt-ridden (he's a Catholic boy!), increasingly revealing a stalker-ish hidden agenda. Potential horror comes from their potential hidden depths - they're on a road trip, he's giving her a lift, she gets unnerved, he might be a psycho - a skull-beneath-the-skin scenario that infects everything around it (silence, darkness, glimpses of mysterious shadows shuffling through the snow) with its own uncertainty. Then the relationship gets resolved, hero and heroine understand each other (and more), they're on the same side against the monsters - and the shadows no longer seem so scary, the film deflating, forced into superficial cleverness (lengthy scenes that turn out to be dreams, etc) to disguise its emptiness. Conclusion? The horror-movie world could really use a connoisseur of twisted psychology - a.k.a. a new, younger Cronenberg - about now. Also, Martin Donovan as a villain? Sorry, no.

HALLOWEEN (45) (dir., Rob Zombie) Malcolm McDowell, Tyler Mane, Scout Taylor-Compton Comes across like Zombie tried to make a serious study of a psychopath, except he has nothing much to say on the subject beyond changing the standard horror-movie emphases to make it clear that he is indeed serious. Actually it often feels like he's remaking KING KONG, or maybe FRANKENSTEIN, rather than John Carpenter (the clips of b&w horrors on TV add to that impression); the monster is a great hulking brute - surely he wasn't so yeti-like and Lurch-like in the original - and many of his victims are killed almost mechanically, as if brushed aside by a great monkey-paw; he's pre-human, a creature of instinct, which presumably is how he tracks down Laurie in the first place. Above all he's looking for love, killing with purpose only when bullied or rebuffed (the only exception is the jailer, but he is a jailer); we see him trying to be a normal boy at the hospital - trying to put the horrors behind him - only turning into a monster, retreating behind the mask, when he realises he's now thought of as a monster (Loomis' final admission that "It's my fault; I failed you" actually rings true, insofar as being institutionalized turned a disturbed young boy into an out-and-out bogeyman). Sympathy for the devil, to some extent, and the hospital scenes have a certain charge, showing how psychosis takes hold in a youngster too alienated or inarticulate to communicate his craving for affection - but the psychopathology runs dry in the second half (which is just a catalogue of killings), and the rhythm stalls and the look is drab, with none of Carpenter's compositional sense (the camera's too close, for a start; it's the icy detachment of synth score and underpopulated wide-shots that gave HALLOWEEN much of its chill factor). The final confrontation is lengthy and notably well-mounted, without ever making the leap into exciting. 

DEATH AT A FUNERAL (55) (dir., Frank Oz) Matthew Macfadyen, Andy Nyman, Alan Tudyk, Peter Dinklage Easiest film in the world to describe: assorted one-dimensional characters, each with a single obsessive trait that gets repeated every time we come back to them. Howard's maladroit, Robert is arrogant, Justin is obsessed with nailing Martha, Daniel is obsessed with his eulogy ("My father was an exceptional man..."), Daniel's wife wants to buy an apartment, Simon's accidentally ingested a pill laced with LSD, Martha's dad is pompous, Uncle Alfie is a nasty old man, the priest needs to be out by 3 o'clock, etc. Choose a location (the funeral), add comic props - a bottle of pills, a pile of incriminating photos - and stir vigorously, salting with jaunty music. Et voilà: instant farce! Works pretty well in a one-dimensional way, at least till the sappy final speech wraps things up in a feelgood glow (no surprise that the film doesn't follow through on its title), at which point the energy flags and you realise it's time to go home.   

MR. BROOKS (69) (dir., Bruce A. Evans) Kevin Costner, Demi Moore, William Hurt, Dane Cook My only (minor) problem is the slightly over-neat way it sets out its ingredients - the ex-husband, the daughter as Achilles' heel, the killer on the loose (an obvious set-up, barely connected to anything else in the movie) - but that's also part of its satisfying methodical quality, just like the many layers it allows Costner's anti-hero (the guilt, the desperate inarticulate prayers, the bourgeois fear of how "very embarrassing" it would be to get caught). Simply put, he's an unusually convincing middle-aged man, and the middle-aged vibe makes this an unusual thriller (its low-key attention to detail recalls THE SECRET LIVES OF DENTISTS, with which it shares an obvious dramatic device), all the more chilling for mostly eliding murder itself. Silky-smooth music score, steely and sleek city-at-night exteriors, nice bits of style - see e.g. Hurt's first appearance, and it's good to find the mad eccentric streak that curdled his leading-man status now providing for loony late-career roles like this and HISTORY OF VIOLENCE - jolting, if predictable, sting in the tail.

CAPTIVITY (46) (dir., Roland Joffé) Elisha Cuthbert, Daniel Gillies, Pruitt Taylor Vince Roland Joffé is 62, co-writer Larry Cohen is 69; never let it be said graphic sadism is a young man's game (probably the opposite, given how often it reflects sexual inadequacy). Woman-in-peril thriller studded with SAW-style nastiness so arbitrary, and so obviously the product of brainstorming sessions with everyone trying to come up with the grossest torture possible - woman showered with acid; woman forced to kill her dog; woman forced to drink a blood-red smoothie made of human body parts! - they're actually kind of funny. Worth a look for hysterical bits of style and occasional invention - she who lives by the camera (NB. she's a model) shall be tormented by the camera - but it will make you feel dumber for having watched it. Six months later, she became an urban vigilante...

YOU KILL ME (40) (dir., John Dahl) Ben Kingsley, Téa Leoni, Luke Wilson, Philip Baker Hall Initially the joke seems to be on the Western therapy culture, set in AA meetings where people flaunt and wallow in their addictions and disorders ("I was never full, because I felt so empty on the inside"), little knowing there's a man among them whose disorder - he kills for a living - would blow all of theirs out of the water, if it ever came to light (it's the same joke when he tells Leoni about his drinking - but not the other thing - because "it's important to start honest"). Then it does come to light and nothing happens, so instead the joke seems to be on our hero, and how the therapy culture will cure his mass-murder issues like it cures any other 'victim' of addiction - but that doesn't turn out to be the joke either, nor does our hero's job at the funeral parlour lead to the hoped-for redemption (I'd assumed coming face-to-face with corpses would prompt him to re-evaluate his career in murder), leaving absolutely nothing except a kooky idyll with Leoni - she's so kooky she likes to walk backwards! - and late-breaking "precision" motif. Dahl also goes for very hot colours - some of those skin tones are bright orange - making it look like shoddy DV (it isn't, apparently), though he's still enough of a classic-film buff to add a soundtrack flourish out of SOME LIKE IT HOT when someone says "Nobody's perfect!". 

SUPERBAD (70) (dir., Greg Mottola) Jonah Hill, Michael Cera, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Seth Rogen Why this one over KNOCKED UP? Partly because "all men are boys" is a more problematic Message than "all boys are boys" - but mostly because of Michael Cera, who civilises the frat-boy proceedings with his hesitant, birdlike quality and makes an amazing double-act with Jonah Hill, the former tall and twitchy, the latter squat and blustery. Cera looks uncertain, thoughtful, embarrassed; he speaks in a soft boyish voice, often gives the impression he's trying out words for size - "We don't negotiate with terrorists ... terrorism ..." he joke-mutters half to himself while blowing up videogame villains - and never knows what to do with his hands (it's worth the price of admission just for his horrified look when his friendly shoulder-punch accidentally turns into a boob-lunge); Hill is volcanic, Chris Penn-like, and it barely matters that the actor is older than his character - at 23 he already looks like a ravaged, sexually depraved 50-year-old electronic-goods salesman. The film is overlong, but moving beyond the (hilarious) Harold and Kumar quest adds richness - the girls turn out to be surprising, for one thing, taking the edge off the sexism - just like adding the cops creates subtext, esp. in the wake of KNOCKED UP: the two boys are desperate to grow up - "Try and look older," says Seth to Evan - but in fact almost all the 'adults' they meet want to be just like them (the cops are merely the ones who do it consciously), both an undertow of nostalgia - like the opening Columbia logo, or the film's very genesis as Rogen's high-school project - and a poignant locating of teen sex comedy in a fragile evanescent moment defined by its imminent destruction; it's much the same dynamic as in Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN, though in a way this is sadder because the boys aren't just going to grow up (and apart), they're going to grow up (and apart) into the arrested adolescents of KNOCKED UP. Loose and creatively foul-mouthed, though it's a moot point whether "dick-taking abilities" and a fucking-with-lube discussion are more likely to corrupt our children's minds than "Yoda, from ATTACK OF THE CLONES".  

DAY WATCH (36) (dir., Timur Bekmambetov) Konstantin Khabensky, Mariya Poroshina, Dima Martynov The look: garish, music-video, relentless. A simple scene in a bar gets a blood-red background, a conference-room is awash in fluorescent bottle-greens, a death scene gets close-ups of fish (?) and stiletto heels. The pace: sprawling, self-indulgent (note the 9th COMPANY gag), pausing for comedy as our hero finds himself in a woman's body, wasting time on an abortive trip to Samarkand. The plot: convoluted, verging on incomprehensible, with giggle-inducing incidentals. Everyone's searching for the "Chalk of Fate" which looks like ... well, a piece of chalk, though when they eventually find the Chalk of Fate they realise it doesn't help at all (as Rick said about the waters in Casablanca: "I was misinformed"); Dark Others attack their Light counterparts with special mosquitoes which target their eyes, what you might call the "Mosquitoes of Doom"; their only defence is to put on their shades - the "Shades of Life"! - then fire back with their special flashlight (the "Flashlight of Destruction"?). Great opportunity for a lesbian make-out session in the shower - when our hero's stuck in that woman's body - sadly squandered, but you do get a red sports car velodroming across the outside of Moscow's iconic Hotel Cosmos. Is the bureaucratization of good and evil - a porous system where Light and Dark have frequent dealings, and rules are supplemented with behind-the-scenes horse-trading - a veiled comment on Putin's Russia? Only if you're a film critic.

PAPRIKA (66) (dir., Satoshi Kon) with the voices of Megumi Hayashibara, Toru Furuya, Koichi Yamadera "Implanting dreams into other people's heads is terrorism." How about implanting joyously surreal images - a marching parade (with infernally catchy soundtrack) led by a mailbox, a refrigerator and the Statue of Liberty? a cloud with a human face? a porcelain doll with kimono and evil cackle? a stunning climax with an overgrown - and ever-growing - baby and a freakish, denuded old man-oid towering over the city, battling it out like modern Godzillas? That too may be terrorism, given the film's explicit conjoining of dreams and movies (not to mention the internet, another case of the "repressed conscious mind" venting), its hard line against cinemania - a grand delusion, "a collective dream" - and the dark edge it gives the potentially cuddly figure of the fat childlike geek, not a harmless Harry Knowles but actively dangerous in his immaturity; then again it does admit that "truth comes from fiction", and it's hard to see Kon as a scold - more a fellow sufferer - when his hero, a recovering cine-holic, finds his dreams haunted by the fear of crossing the eyeline. Plot becomes hard to follow, but the free-associative delirium of the Charlie Kaufman-esque opening - jungle to circus to hotel - suggests a way out of that particular problem.    

OR (MY TREASURE) (66) (dir., Keren Yedaya) Ronit Elkabetz, Dana Ivgy, Meshar Cohen How determined is Yedaya to preserve the integrity of her observational style? So determined she refuses to move the camera, even when people disappear at the edges of frame, heads get too close to the top and so forth; it actually happens so often it's clearly not a mistake, and maybe not even fortuitous but in fact deliberate, the actors having been directed to wander beyond the limits of accepted composition - an Effect, like the (somewhat hackneyed) ending where Or does a Marky-Mark-in-BOOGIE-NIGHTS stare into nothingness then looks into camera for the first time. That effect may be intended as accusatory, given that she's slipped into teenage prostitution (following in her mother's footsteps) and working for an escort service called Sexclusive, though it's hard to assign much blame to the System or Society - also an effect of the observational style, which privileges intimacy and honesty with a minimum of preachiness, though the girl's trajectory is a bit melodramatic (the obvious model is ROSETTA, which solved the problem by introducing a spiritual dimension). Ivgy is outstanding and the script is strong, with one extraordinary scene where the next-door neighbour tries to explain she doesn't want her son dating Or because Or is a slut, only without hurting anyone's feelings or causing offence ("You're older than he is," she points out, not looking Or in the eye; "Six months! Does that count?" asks the bewildered teen, and meanwhile Mom just sighs and looks unhappy) - proof that the observational style works best when it has something awesome to observe.

AQUA TEEN HUNGER FORCE COLON MOVIE FILM FOR THEATERS (65) (dir., Matt Maiellaro & Dave Willis) with the voices of Dana Snyder, Carey Means, Dave Willis "You know, the internet is a popular source of information." So she ate it, goldfish and all. A priest, a rabbi and Elton John walk into a bath. "Plastic novelty vagina." In the beginning was the yak, and the elephant ring around the roses and saw that it was food. Checking the mic, check. Checking the mic, check. Checking the mic, mic checking, check. Checking the mic, check. Sibilance, sibilance, sibilance.