Movie Roundup, 2003

The film Dolls, is made up from three interwoven tales of love and loss in modern Japan, framed by a traditional puppet story on the same theme. The main story ( of a salaryman who breaks with his fiancée to marry the boss' daughter, then leaves the wedding when he hears that on being abandoned, she had attempted suicide, and the two of them ending up wandering around Japan tied together) fails to have the clean resolution of the other episodes (an otaku almost stalks an idoru who has retired after beign disfigured in an accident, and of an aging yakuza oyabun who on getting bad news after a medical check-up, goes to find the woman he abandoned when he took to crime), and spends rather too long on admittedly gorgeous scenery shots. I was surprised to see that the wedding was to have been held in church — I suppose that is, like Kirimasu, another quaint foreign custom that the Japanese have taken to heart.

Matrix:Reloaded is another film that will have been seen by most people who would want to by now. Pity it was only the first half of a five hour movie :-( - there really wasn't a resolution, just a cliff-hanger. The FX were kewl, though. Interestingly, apart from the councillor and Neo, the real-world Zion characters were women, non-white, or both - the white males (Agents and Architect) were Matrix constructs. I agree with Howard Tayler's assessment in an open letter on his Schlock Mercenary site that it could have lost the bump'n'grind/Zion Party digression, near the beginning. Placed where it was, it didn't even have the utility of the smoochy bit in Armageddon which at about half way through the film, came at a good time for taking a leak without missing anything important.

X2 - about as perfect a realization of what have been for most of the last 35 years my favourite super-team as one could hope to see. Good performances all round, and fans will know what has to come in X3.

Russian Ark is a 96 minute single take as a viewpoint character wanders through the St. Petersburg Hermitage Museum, and through the last couple of centuries of Russian history. Visually sumptuous, though it probably packs more punch if you have a decent grouding in the history being covered.

Caught Divine Intervention at the local independent cinema. This is the Palestinian film that did well at film festivals in '02. Strange, quirky, bleak, with a very black sense of humour, from the opening scene where Santa is being hunted down by youths outside Nazareth, to the final one where a mother and son sit in a Ramallah kitchen watching a pressure cooker and she says “It's been long enough. It's time to stop it, now.” via a number of vaguely interwoven slices of life and vignettes. Everything in the film could be read as a metaphor for the desperate situation there, while simultaneously showing that even so, the people can still laugh at human folly.

See 2002 section for Avalon and Revenger's Tragedy.

Also continued at the Film Festival.

Movie Roundup, 2002

Some of these I saw at the Cambridge Film Festival, and didn't actually see full release until 2003...

I hadn't planned it that way, but I almost managed the year without seeing a Hollywood blockbuster (read - I explicitly didn't see the latest Star Wars, and nothing I've heard made it seem like I made the wrong decision, nor SpiderMan, as I always felt that Spidey was a tedious tosser. But, at a loose end one evening while Karen was out gaming, and having had good word of it, I went to see xXx. It has action, wise-cracking, sticking it to James Bond, gratuitous hip-ness, and keeps the slushy bits to a minimum – just the sort of thing to indulge one's inner 12-year-old with.

Having broken the clean run, I compounded it by seeing Chamber of Secrets – which I felt was better than Philosopher's Stone for spending more time on plot and less on gosh-wow scene setting. The station exterior shown for King's Cross is actually the next door station at St. Pancras – its recently cleaned Victorian Gothic brickwork being more spectacular than the low, modern, frontage of King's Cross, even were it not at the moment surrounded by the desolation of the works being carried out for the new Eurostar terminus.

Two Towers wasn't bad, but in a situation where they were having to juggle three storylines anyway, and trim to fit into 3 hours, adding the needless extra Aragorn material from whole cloth wasn't what I'd've done. I was amused to see them continuing to top their previous “elf stunts” with the snowboarding with a shield trick. Overall, though, I didn't think it was quite as good as part 1, which I'd seen again a couple of weeks previously.

Le Roi Danse (distributed in the UK under the translated title The King is Dancing) is a behind-the-scenes story of the youth of Louis XIV, the Sun King, from the point of view of his Italian dancing master, Lully. While Louis struggles against the severe demands of his mother's faction, Lully has to contend with maintaining his popularity against the scurrilous Moliere.

Avalon (2003 release), from the director of Ghost in the Shell, and shot in Poland, with a local cast (Polish dialog subtitled in English). The film is in some ways the Matrix in reverse – people from the dark depressing future (shot with Eastern European locations in a colour subdued style – not quite sepia, but nearly so, to the same effect as the bleached out 1984 version of 1984, but darker – by halfway through I had almost forgotten what green looked like, except as an artefact of low-light scopes) lose themselves in the eponymous VR wargame. The game takes the language of D&D – characters form parties of Warriors, Thieves (self described as guides or scouts), Mages or Bishops, and gain levels and experience; though it is all modern small-unit combat – even when there's a Bishop in one scene we never see him do anything other than be Command and Control. In another Matrix-like touch, the future computer UIs (outside of the immersive VR) are very retro – those shown here would have been cutting edge c1975.
The plot follows Ash, a 12 or 13th level Warrior, at the top of Class A, the highest division. She has been playing solo since her once famous party split up, following a game that they didn't complete after one of their number bailed out midway through. She is following leads that suggest another member of that team has managed to find the way into a higher set of game levels (Special A). It's all very atmospheric, but pads itself out by repeating a number of bridging scenes, and eventually ends a couple of minutes before we'd find out what the hell was really going on. In all, unsatisfying but pretty.

Lost in La Mancha, a documentary about the abortive production of Terry Gilliam's film The Man who killed Don Quixote, as it accumulated one jinx after another (on a tight schedule, stars don't show, the locations turn out to be next to an airbase with constant overflights, a flash flood wipes out the first day's shooting, and the actor playing Quixote is invalided out with prostate and back problems). In its 90 minutes, we see just about all the film that Gilliam actually shot, as well as seeing the true life story of a Murphy's Guide to making a film. Perhaps one of these days the real film may get made; as it is, this gives an idea of what really goes on behind the scenes.

Revenger's Tragedy (2003 release), Alex Cox (Repo Man)'s realisation of Middleton's (or Torneur's - the authorship is disputed) 1607 play, described at the time as the product of a diseased mind, transposed into a dark future Liverpool. It was shot on location there, with an all-local cast. Intertwining the original dialog with just enough Scouse for context, it makes the old story feel modern. Unlike Avalon, this dark future is all night and neon, where the Duke (Derek Jacobi, playing an aging roué) rules with an iron fist, and takes his droite de seigneur seriously. Disturbing this comes Vindici (Christopher Ecclestone, eXistenZ,Elizabeth) to take revenge for the poisoning (for refusing the Duke's advances) of his bride on their wedding day, playing his sons (Eddie Izzard superb as Lussurio, the eldest) against him and one another until the predictable Jacobean gorefest at the end. Simply superb, with a soundtrack by Chumbawumba.

The Warrior, a Hindi language film, based, I believe on a Japanese tale. Not Bollywood; rather think Kurosawa in colour.

Movie Roundup, 2001

Working in traditional reverse order..

Harry Potter – This was a “take Karen to the flicks” expedition, and not one I'd've gone to see by myself. It was stunningly well cast, and well acted by a sterling cast of British character actors who probably cost between them less than Tom Cruise asks for an appearance. But boring – I was twiddling my thumbs by the time of the quidditch match (a pleasant surprise – quidditch was less boring to watch than read about – I guess they'd choreographed it off some real sports footage). After the Big V had had his come-uppance, I was silently pleading “roll credits now, please” as each scene terminated.
Nitpick – At King's Cross, platforms 9 and 10 face each other across two lines of track in a little annex (along with platform 11) off the side of the main station, and 9¾ would be approached from the railings in front of the buffers; the movie looked like they were going on to platform pi! In the real world, probably as a result of all the tourists coming to see the site, at the start of December '01, platform 9 was decorated with all the Hogwarts banners and such from the movie. I'm still surprised that nothing's been made of the fact that the platform 9/10 area is also the fabled site of Boadicea's tomb!

LotR part 1 - A joy to the eyes, but I was on to trivia scanning immediately, like I did about the 8th time I saw Star Wars, coupled this time with too much of an analysis of how they've gone about realising it within the limited confines of a 3 hour film. You know the sort of thing – “Ah yes, they'll use the birthday party to introduce the hobbit characters, then cut out the 17 years of delay.” “Is that a chunky black ring Gandalf is briefly shown wearing in the first conversation inside Orthanc?” “Spot the elf walking on the snow!” “Isn't the two arrows at once trick shot too reminiscent of some really cheesy 1980's fantasy film,” “Maize and canola are more Sharkey than Shire.” “Aren't the lines ‘They've got a cave troll with them.’ and ‘Let's hunt some orc.’ a little jarring in their delivery.”
We could have done without the crumbling stair in Moria, especially with that magnificent Balrog about to make its entrance with its cunningly ambiguous “wings”. Boromir's death had much of the “Agh, I'm hit! Cue death scene. No, wait, I'm a high level fighter and that only did a d8.” about it along the way.
They were faced with an impossible scene to film (one that so far as I can recall Bakshi wisely dropped completely), and made what I felt was a brave, but ultimately failed attempt at, in the Temptation of Galadriel. Playing it low key would have been better, I feel, as the infinitely beautiful ice queen isn't a one size fits all image.
Yes, of course I'll go see the rest. Unlike with Harry Potter, I didn't feel the time dragging.

OK, now onto the good stuff, in roughly ascending order:

Atlantis, the Lost Empire – This little steampunk/lost world gem felt like an anime scenario that ended up with the Mouse by accident, and certainly wasn't your average cute Disney cartoon – no bursting out into song, no cute slapstick supporting cast. Nothing profound, but it did at least entertain.

Lara Croft, Tomb Raider – This film did exactly what it said on the tin. Well, we could have had dinosaurs, an underwater sequence and the obligatory attack by dogs while in Italy (did one of the game designers have a bad Doberman experience one holiday, we wonder), instead of the dodgy "men in her life" sub-plots, but you can't have everything. A pleasant surprise in that it underpromised and overdelivered within its premise.

Shadow of the Vampire - A secret history of the making of the original Nosferatu, with John Malkovitch as the director. Worth it just for the scene where he demands that Count Orlok feed only on the dispensable members of the film crew.

Ginger Snaps - A pretty damn definitive “werewolf in the modern day” movie, all the better for not being a big budget spectacular. A plot summary wouldn't do it justice - just go get the DVD.

Brotherhood of the Wolf (Pacte des Loups) - The film I made most effort to see all year, eventually finding it on at the late, late show at the local multiplex, presumably because it was thought to be rather recherché in its appeal. For a start it's a French film, with subtitles - And a werewolf(?) hunter movie. Set in pre-revolutionary France. Costume drama meets kick-boxing action. This film has it all, while remaining intelligent, artistic and, well, French.

And at the top of the list? Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, of course. Wuxia done by a serious director. What more can I add about this one? It will be interesting to see what he does with the Hulk