Schwarze Schafe (Oliver Rihs, 2006)

At its best, the portmanteau or anthology film can be a real feast, a table overflowing with the tapas of life's rich tapestry where parallel and often almost wholly unconnected storylines with disparate characters meld into a multicoloured whole rather than just crowding each other out. Pulp Fiction, Amores Perros and Short Cuts are solid modern examples of the format.
And then there are those works where the format is chosen because deep down the filmmaker knows that no single one of their strands is strong enough to sustain a whole film. Black Sheep is one of these sorry derivatives. Berlin as a setting is a marvellous font of eclecticism, so Rihs gives us a wide panoply of stereotypes united by their obnoxiousness, from horny Turkish lads, limp-wristed queens and drunken loafers to pitiful satanists. Then he gives himself a get-out clause by calling them all losers. There's little to connect with, bar a few occasions for smirks, and it's quite undeserving of the patina that its crisp and imaginative cinematography lends it.

3/10

Flickan som lekte med elden (Daniel Alfredson, 2009)

The second part of Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy of novels, rattled off the production line in swift succession,  The Girl who Played with Fire sees a change of director and an obvious slash in budget from the first film, both of which prove detrimental.
Again, the director has to grapple with the book's unwieldy length and dispassionately implement cuts to bring the running time to manageable proportions. Niels Arden Oplev was mostly successful with this in the first film; Larsson's books do after all contain a lot of pedantic padding in anything from detailing societal background history to the characters' eating habits, which cry out to be chopped. Alfredson isn't. Even a recent reader of the novel will struggle to make sense of the opening half hour, where scant explanation is given in jumps from scene to scene (for the international viewer, having the added burden of appallingly illegible white-on-white subtitling hardly helps either). And the directorial blundering continues, with his apparent unawareness of how to translate the written medium to cinema: you can't always just show what the characters do; you have to find other means to convey what's going on in their minds lest you lose a great chunk of the rationale behind the action.
The casting, one of the strengths of the first film, remains intact. But since Alfredson doesn't give us access to the protagonists' interior drives and also severs our main empathic connection with Lisbeth Salander's fury in neglecting her crucifixion at the hands of the police and the media, it all turns into a perfunctory plod to the soapish conclusion.

5/10

Flags of Our Fathers (Clint Eastwood, 2006)

Whereas Eastwood's depiction of the assault on the island from the Japanese perspective, Letters from Iwo Jima, was almost wholly focused on the grim battle itself, here half of the running time is taken up by an exploration of the angst felt by the surviving marines who raised the victory flag in an image that galvanised the American public, as they get carted around the States from one fund-raiser to the next, cogs in the government's propaganda machine.
Eastwood's tone has become increasingly statesmanlike, indignant and humanistic over the years, and it would take a churl to take issue with American hand-wringing over wars that never hurt their country at an extinction level as they did their adversaries; Eastwood balanced his books neatly with the stoic fatalism of the doomed Japanese in Letters, and there's enough cynicism here to leave no doubt that the title of the film is far from celebrating jingoism. My critique is rather that, as with his more recent Changeling, Eastwood is ultimately too concerned with covering the whole history, and dramatic structure suffers as a result. To be filed under worthy but dull.

5/10

300 (Zack Snyder, 2006)

Good God, where to start? It's a thinly veiled Western civilisation vs. the dirty Asians (gooks, Arabs and anyone else you care to mention) parable. And also the most homoerotic film ever chucked out by a big studio in the name of manliness. In a very topsy-turvy view of history, the Spartans are a bunch of bodybuilders in little pants who are vastly outnumbered by a horde of assorted foreign weirdnesses. They shout a lot, everyone gets slaughtered in slo-mo CGI and the Americans get a victory of morale if not of morals. It's only history in the sense that mythical events live on to provide a back story for current crusades. Nothing here is more than stupid, and even the few lines of defiant statements that Gerard Butler is given to deliver to the cartoonish baddies are puerile farts compared to the Braveheart standard that Snyder probably imagined he was hitting.

3/10

Chopper (Andrew Dominik, 2000)

Mark Brandon 'Chopper' Read, career recidivist and ultra-violent sociopath, has become a folk hero of sorts in Australia for his decades of war against various gangland foes, largely in chokey, and parallel self-aggrandisement which have led him to best-selling status with his autobiographies.
Not unlike Jacques Mesrine in France, then, but with the crucial differences that Read's murder and mayhem was mostly only directed at other criminals, and that he's still around, making the transition to 'a bit of a character' all the easier. Hence it's not startling that Dominik's slice of biopic casts Eric Bana, a stand-up comedian prior to the film, in an overly sympathetic portrayal of the unrepentant thug. And Bana invests the role with such charisma that there's no choice to outright rejection of this hero-worship but to be swept along by a witty script that sidesteps a lot of cliches of the prison film genre. The comic tone still leaves a nasty aftertaste, though.

6/10

Micmacs (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2009)

Or, roughly translated, 'shenanigans'. Jeunet's latest joyous foray does exactly what it says on the tin: a bunch of lovable Parisian misfits engineer a series of ingenious schemes to bring down two arms manufacturers. The plot is initiated by Dany Boon's genial video shop assistant, who's understandably sore after having a landmine deprive him of a father in childhood and then a bullet to the head put him out of his job, both objects courtesy of the two rival death merchants.
All of Jeunet's trademarks are present: cute freaks, fantasy cutaways, daft machines, lists of curios and the scrunched-up face of Dominique Pinon. The wackiness is revved a bit too much over the redline at times, but Jeunet brings such zest into his presentations of all that's humane and worthwhile in life that you just have to indulge him.

7/10

2012 (Roland Emmerich, 2009)

Roland Emmerich is a kind, selfless man who only wants to act as an intermediary to transfer the big studios' money to poor CGI artists in their thousands. And if, by doing so, he gratifies enough Americans who were gutted at not being near enough the WTC Ground Zero to witness the awesome levelling of big buildings whilst people ran around screaming, so much the better.
Connecting a worldwide apocalypse to any religious prophecy is too hard work for this director: the priority is to  blow up, crush and flood as much stuff as possible in 2½ hours, and he does this with an admirable aplomb. Sure, some pseudoscience about er, solar flares, the Earth's core, magnetic realignment and the like has to be wedged in, along with the tedious necessity of providing a generic bunch of principal protagonists to 'provide a human dimension' - meaning the likes of John Cusack as the divorced dad and Chiwetel Ejiofor as the scientist no-one listened to have to do some sharp mental arithmetic to determine whether delivering yet more credibility-blighting shite is really outweighed by their paychecks.
So, Emmerich is also yet another artist who's forced to make compromises for the sake of getting his vision to the screen. And what a vision! The White House getting flattened by the JFK aircraft carrier is a highlight, but to Emmerich's credit, despite 2012's demanding length, the stupidity well never runs dry.

3/10

Bakwji (Chan-wook Park, 2009)

It was only a matter of time before Chan-wook Park, Korean auteur of stylish and bloody revenge and horror films, got on the vampire bandwagon. And Thirst is stylish and bloody, with a garnish of religion and self-analysis, as Park regular, Kang-ho Song, a Catholic priest turned vampiric through a blood transfusion, agonises over what his God-given needs are now that they mostly consist of blood. Gradually, of course, his appetites start getting the better of him, though more in that sexual desire now proves overwhelming.
While Park's films are always value for money in so far as you never quite know how the next scene will play out, he may have made a mistake in choosing such a depleted genre. Nausea, sunlight, enhanced powers - the formula's growing stale and it takes more than this to revitalise it. And the director seems to have taken a step backwards with the denouement too, which is nicked wholesale from an otherwise inferior Hollywood vamp flick. Perhaps Korean cinema exists in a bubble too.

5/10

Le Temps du Loup (Michael Haneke, 2003)

A widowed and grieving parent wanders with her children through a landscape in rapid decline following an apocalyptic event of undisclosed nature, and isolated encounters with other survivors only underline how rapidly civilisation has broken down. Familiar? Yes, The Time of the Wolf is a largely unacknowledged source for the hyped-up The Road, with all the feral self-interest of those who remain, the parent's fierce instinct to protect her children and the inescapable atmosphere of hopelessness. But, for once, the plagiarism proves justified: Haneke's vision may tell it straight, but it's also lacking an empathetic core. Isabelle Huppert as the mother is her usual tight-lipped cold fish and the introduction of a host of other desperate victims just serves to further muddy whatever engagement there was with the protagonists.

5/10

44 Inch Chest (Malcolm Venville, 2009)

The title, as with the same scriptwriters' Sexy Beast, is presumably just to sucker unwary punters into the land of the geezer gangstah once more. Ray Winstone is the main lummox again, here crying his eyes out over being cuckolded whilst various gangland cohorts urge him to do the time-honoured thing by offing his wife's lover. It's extremely stagebound, bar the occasional flashback and fantasy interlude, with messieurs Hurt, McShane, Wilkinson and Dillane hovering around a static Winstone in an East End safe house, trading fs and cs like they were going out of fashion. The writers rely too heavily on the mere presence of such big guns in the same room being a guarantee of Reservoir Dogs-calibre wit, and any pretensions the film may have towards actually saying something revelatory about love, jealousy and relationships would be rather misguided. But Winstone does get to do earthy angst in at least one scene in his own inimitable way, so it's not a complete waste of time by any means.

6/10

Frostbiten (Anders Banke, 2006)

Frostbite can, I suppose, lay claim to having inspired a Hollywood splatterfest, beyond just being derivative of Hollywood splatterfests. Unfortunately what the scenario of vampires in a dayless Arctic inspired, the following year's 30 Days of Night, proved to be just as uninspired as this. An uneven application of tasteless comedy over a rudimentary plot of teens turning into the ravenous undead in a frozen Lapland town does not do for genre enrichment. Oh, there's also a Nazi connection too, so presumably blame can also be attributed to the director for the germ of the almost as shoddy Dead Snow an few years later...thank God Let the Right One in came along to salvage the whole concept of a Scandinavian vampire flick single-handed. After all, the setting alone should ensure some kind of novelty. This ineptly acted and edited botch-job shows no evidence of that potential, however.

3/10

Mon Oncle (Jacques Tati, 1958)

Tati's films are fairly difficult to bracket: they occupy a middle ground between social satire and slapstick that comes across as quite opaque at times. My Uncle is Tati's strengths and weaknesses in a nutshell: it's sprinkled with charming moments of whimsy and sly observations on people's unconscious mannerisms and foibles, in particular as we return again and again to a bourgeois couple's ultra-modern and ludicrously sterile home. Naturally, Tati as Monsieur Hulot, the wife's phlegmatically eccentric brother, turns up soon enough to provide a chaotic counterpoint, enchant his stifled young nephew and generally make a nuisance of himself in a Mr Bean-lite fashion. And here I encountered a serious concern: I found myself actually wanting Rowan Atkinson, with all his irritating gurning, rather than Hulot, who's just a cypher, a blank in the middle of the film. He's more an obstacle than an active participant, neither funny in his inefficacy nor particularly endearing when he does act. The film only breathes whenever he's off-screen. Tati as director is clearly full of ideas: he should have stayed behind the camera, on this outing at least.

5/10

Pandorum (Christian Alvart, 2009)

You know the drill: two astronauts wake up from suspended animation on one of those Nostromo-clone ships where the lighting's atrocious and all the plumbing is open to view. You wouldn't catch me going within a mile of these sub-like mazes: they're always haunted houses, falling to bits and full of monsters. And so it goes. There's lots of blood, rust and muck, survivalist nutters and superfast zombies, in the course of the usual messed-up giant spaceship mission where you have to manually reactivate some gubbins rather far away because the systems are down. It's an equal opportunities robber, at least, chucking Alien, Event Horizon, 28 Days Later, The Descent and countless others into the blender until reduced to an indeterminate mulch, with no shame at all. No wonder, then, that it's hard to care about any of it, and surprisingly easy to doze off inadvertently despite all the screaming.

3/10

Zombieland (Ruben Fleischer, 2009)

All zombie films, comic or splatterfest, have to acknowledge Romero's Dawn of the Dead as a starting point and then add an angle that justifies a hackneyed genre's continuation. 28 Days Later has probably managed this best in recent years by making the incurably undead rabid, supercharged killing machines and choosing thereby to forego the inherent satire of our fellow citizens being reduced to shuffling uberconsumers. Zombieland doesn't really take these lessons on board; the zombies are somewhere in between, not terribly menacing for all the human flesh caught in their teeth, just obstacles along the nerdy teenage narrator's progress to some kind of comfort zone.
Woody Harrelson and Bill Murray turn up just for laughs...there's not a great deal to add. Films like this will do when you're half-drunk; they'll kill enough time if you're sober, but there's no meat on the bone.

5/10

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (Terry Gilliam, 2009)

This will be chiefly remembered as Heath Ledger's last film, for all that Gilliam proclaimed it as one of his best. It's not; it does contain quirky characters aplenty and some marvellous imagery, but there's little a Gilliamophile hasn't seen before.
Ledger's completed scenes are segued quite neatly, by means of transitions into the fantastical world behind Doctor Parnassus's portal-like mirror, into Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell as the same character, and Christopher Plummer as the aged Doctor, a sort of a senile carnie crossed with a weary Christian God, tormented by Tom Waits's poker-player of a Satan, provides a cosily eccentric centre rather reminiscent of Peter Cushing in his odder Amicus productions roles.
Despite these elements, it's all too disjointed in the end to linger in the mind, lacking the psychological depth of, say, Brazil, whilst remaining perfectly serviceable as a fairytale - Gilliam still has more imagination in his little finger than most fantasists have in their entire souls. More focus would have been welcome, though.

6/10

Inception (Christopher Nolan, 2010)

I haven't rewritten anything in its entirety so much since I started posting. I watched this in a cinema and the first time I saw it, my gut instinct was that it doesn't help to have explosions going off around you all the time. It may not help that I've worried about Christopher Nolan since the twin successes of Memento and Batman Begins. Ridley Scott's career might be a cautionary tale here: bigger and bigger budgets just give the means to fill more screentime with more chases, booms and bangs shot from every conceivable angle and plot and characterisation suffocate under the weight of having to justify the budget and the studio's need for the pyrotechnic trailer where every shot wails for attention like a needy toddler.
Leonardo Di Caprio leads a team of cool crooks who infiltrate their marks' dreams to steal or plant information within their subconscious minds. In terms of cinematic reference points, it's equal parts standard heist film and The Matrix, but plotwise is most directly plundered from Philip K. Dick's novel Eye in the Sky, in which a group of characters find themselves stuck in the fantasy worlds of each other's psyches. This is a pity, as that will now probably be one Dick novel that won't be filmed.
And yet, it's brilliant. Don't focus on the reality-warping imagery, which is cosmetic stuff good for trailers, or the shoot-ups, but  on the sheer density of it. This is five hours of content crammed into two-plus, including complex ideas to do with the nature of the subconscious and what we do with our dreams, which makes demands on modern action-film goers they might not be able to take. The first time, I felt it was just Di Caprio grappling with the guilt he feels over the death of his wife, with guns and chases. I now realise they're just the trailer sellers for what can truly be called a thoughtful script which makes entire worlds out of our unconscious desires and their accompanying regrets. This proves Nolan has deserved currency alongside the best filmmakers of the day.

8/10

Communion (Philippe Mora, 1989)

Gawd bless Christopher Walken. He'll approach projects which are basically mountains of manure with such goggle-eyed relish that you can't help feeling more indulgent towards whatever hapless bungle his presence has suckered you into watching. Communion is, in this respect, one of the most seminal works in his portfolio.
Walken plays Whitley Strieber, a real-life novelist of slight renown who wrote the story based on his memories of alien abduction in the mid-'80s. Gradually his suppressed memories emerge in a succession of increasingly hilarious scenes, culminating in his dwarf-like abductors actually boogieing around him while he cracks up talking to himself. Add a stupendously inappropriate guitar soundtrack from Eric Clapton, dialogue that doesn't so much limp along as walk repeatedly into cupboard doors and to cap it all, as Strieber's wife, the presence of perhaps the most plank-like actress to have graced '80s cinema, Lindsay Crouse, and you get damn close to a classic of terrible cinema. It's particularly hard not to snigger, recalling Walken's ass-fixated cameo in Pulp Fiction, when he pretends to be anguished about rectal probes. The truth is up there!

2/10

Fish Tank (Andrea Arnold, 2009)

Andrea Arnold's second feature, following on from the harrowing Red Road, is also an exploration of frustrated lives on the wrong side of the tracks, this time at the other end of Britain, where the East End crumbles in a succession of estates and disused industrial sites into the countryside.
Mia is an embittered 15-year-old with a potty-mouthed sister and a single mother who doesn't give a toss, and her life revolves around just two foci: drink and hip-hop dance. For a while the film seems stuck in a perpetual rut until the mother gets a new live-in boyfriend, a charming Irishman who gradually brings the spiky teenager out of her shell.
Katie Jarvis, a teenager spotted by Arnold at a train station, is astonishingly magnetic as Mia, conveying both abrasiveness and vulnerability. Arnold's direction, meanwhile is even more assured and nuanced than in Red Road, repeatedly avoiding the obvious plot turns that the venerable likes of directors such as Ken Loach, who could be said to operate in the same genre of British underclass realism, are sometimes guilty of. It's a heartrendingly moving piece of work.

9/10

Das Weisse Band (Michael Haneke, 2009)

Let's be charitable to veteran Austrian psychodrama merchant Haneke for his decision to sell out in the style of, say, George Sluizer with The Vanishing, as he remade his thoroughly unsettling Funny Games for Hollywood, dutifully acceding to the studio strictures and draining out all traces of unconventionality and interest. We see now he clearly needed the money for the greater good, just in choosing to screen 7,000 children for The White Ribbon. And a creepy bunch the selected ones are too.
We open in a Northern German village in 1913, and the initial tone, repressed and monochrome, suggests an environment somewhere between Fanny and Alexander and Heimat. But this is Haneke, of course, and even if it takes a while, a darker undercurrent will out. And it's of course man's inhumanity to man, as a series of grisly incidents divide the community and bring out the rot at its core.
It would be a step too far to draw great parallels between this development and the rise of fascism, and to his credit Haneke doesn't hammer home the point. This, however, brings a concomitant problem: the black and white tones are in danger of fading to grey as no similarly dramatically strong theme replaces the political metaphor. Well executed, then, and sincere, but in the end a little flat.

6/10