Kino Runner

In Bruges (Martin McDonagh, 2008)

noreply@blogger.com (Jan J.) — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 16:30:00 +0000

The picturebook location may have helped to give this Irish crime drama a necessary kick up its arse. No matter. Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell, as hitmen out of their depth, ordered to spend a sabbatical in Bruges, stand out as an odd couple and the environment is used to the full to play on their differences. Sure, it's just a B-movie, but one that's sure of itself and leaking dry wit through most scenes. And then Ralph Fiennes turns up and does a fairly good job of giving Kingsley in Sexy Beast a run for his money as the surprise thesp being a horrid Cockney villain.

If McDonagh gets beyond more than moneymaker fare, he may yet go far.

7/10

Parlez-moi de la pluie (Agnès Jaoui, 2008)

noreply@blogger.com (Jan J.) — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 14:53:00 +0000

Agnès Jaoui has ploughed a single furrow for a while now, ever accompanied by her husband Jean-Pierre Bacri, and the soil may be wearing thin.
Her directorial debut, Le goût des autres, 9 years ago was a breathtakingly fresh slant on the easy-to-sterotype French cinema of middle-class people excessively intellectualising over their lives and relationships, but Comme une image 4 years later had only angst to add to the equation.
Refreshingly, in Let's Talk about the Rain the tack has changed: humour is now on board, and France's leading comic light Jamel Debbouze is on board to bolster this shift, although it's Bacri's stock persona as a misguidedly self-important mid-lifer who gets to carry the laughs. The pair play bumbling documentary makers, Jaoui an aspiring politician who is the butt of their documentary, and various affairs get hatched and discarded along the way. Slight but at least light. Jaoui will have to come up with more the next time around, though.

6/10

Død snø (Tommy Wirkola, 2009)

noreply@blogger.com (Jan J.) — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 12:31:00 +0000

How could a devotee of schlock horror resist something promising Nazi zombies?

Quite easily, it turns out. The premise is a pale mish-mash of any number of scenarios with young folk stuck in a remote cabin threatened by menacing hordes, with evil Germans undead thrown in for good measure. Sure, there's a dash of wit thrown in and the makers beg for forgiveness for their daylight robbery by including a character who keeps on relating their predicament to The Evil Dead, but once you start watching the whole enterprise through a US teen filter, to layer out the Norwegian and historical facades, precious little remains.

At least in Outpost they had guns.

4/10

La habitación de Fermat (Luis Piedrahita & Rodrigo Sopeña, 2007)

noreply@blogger.com (Jan J.) — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 20:10:00 +0000

Fermat's Room taps into the popular perception of the obsessive mathematical genius (see A Beautiful Mind), driven into a mania by the hidden truth behind the numbers and liable to form deadly rivalries with their counterparts in the quest for perfection. Much like another group whose work the layperson doesn't really understand, then, i.e. composers.

Four minds are invited by a man hiding behind the pseudonym of Fermat to a deserted farmhouse with the challenge of solving the greatest of conundrums. This promises a great deal, as they find themselves locked in a room with the power to kill them unless they continue cracking a succession of timed riddles.

Except that the link to the actual Fermat is utterly spurious: the makers cop out swiftly at this point in the script and instead present a series of brainteasers familiar from puzzlebooks with no particular relevance to mathematics. Having flaunted the prospect of an intellectual work-out, and then at least the visceral kick of an entrapment horror piece like Cube, they deliver neither.

5/10

Låt den rätte komma in (Tomas Alfredson, 2008)

noreply@blogger.com (Jan J.) — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 16:31:00 +0000

Let the Right One in comes in the midst of a deluge of re-imaginings on vampirism, given fresh blood as a genre by the teen emo culture, that anaemic take on '80s goth. This is unfortunate, as it's best viewed as a growing-up drama instead, which is only added a chill and frisson by the horror theme.

And it's a superior example of either genre, the sense of confusion and otherness of the alienated pubescent bolstered by the haunted outsider status of the nightstalker. The idiosyncratic two young leads do much to contribute to its power, and the glacial setting of an anonymous mid-winter early-'80s Swedish suburb, beautifully framed and lit, make for a whole that far transcends what may seem to be stock ingredients. There hasn't been a vampire film this good in terms of rising above the genre cliches since Bigelow's Near Dark, and beyond that it holds its own against acclaimed coming-of-age pieces such as Stand by Me or The 400 Blows.

8/10

Tôkyô monogatari (Yasujiro Ozu, 1953)

noreply@blogger.com (Jan J.) — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 16:11:00 +0000

Age withers as well as ripens. Tokyo Story, almost always as the sole Japanese representative, save for the occasional Kurosawa, crops up on Western critics' lists of the best films ever made. Do not let this prejudice you.

It's just a simple, well-crafted tale of an elderly couple making their final rounds around their children's preoccupied lives. They're met with irritable tolerance by all but for their widowed daughter-in-law, and their stoic acceptance of how things are when the progeny view their progenitors as just a burden must have struck a deep and shocking chord in a Japan just on the mend from the ravages of the war. That it manages to speak to audiences worldwide is very much down to the beautifully understated performances of the elderly duo, and, above all a prevailing sense that we're dealing with a universal emotional truth.

7/10

Happy-Go-Lucky (Mike Leigh, 2008)

noreply@blogger.com (Jan J.) — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 15:30:00 +0000

Mike Leigh's films have always gone for a naturalistic feel, where commonplace people with drab lives undergo small dramas and discover little diamonds of positivity in the muck. Happy-Go-Lucky may be a step further towards a feelgood experience than most of his previous output, but is still in the same vein and could not feasibly be attributed to any other filmmaker in its formula of banality unmasking fundamental truths.

It revolves around a few weeks in the life of 30-year-old schoolteacher Poppy, a nuclear-poweredly irrepressible chirp machine who embodies the film's title. What little plot there is hangs on her driving lessons with a bag of pent-up Little Englander indignation, played finely between comedy and pathetic pathos by Eddie Marsan, and the scenes between them are by far the most substantial parts of the film. As for the rest, Poppy mercifully winds down a little by the end from her nigh-on insufferably screeching motormouth Cockney persona (a bit of a Leigh staple, this), with the benefit of a few sobering experiences. But it all remains basically life-affirming, and one must infer from this that Leigh wants us to rate excessive positivity over bleak pragmatism, even if the cost is terminal irritation.

6/10

Doubt (John Patrick Shanley, 2008)

noreply@blogger.com (Jan J.) — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 14:31:00 +0000

In 1964, a priest at a Catholic school is accused by the Principal, a nun, of sexually abusing one of the pupils.

Based on Shanley's own stage play, this is a surprisingly morally complex exploration of a topic that could so easily turn tortuous and sermonising. At one point the realisation hits home that we're more in an exploration of hierarchy and character than one of the nature of abuse. To enable this to unfold without the overbearing burden of condemnation, the true nature of events is left clouded. Our doubt at what occurred is therefore unforcedly mirrored by the doubt the principal protagonists feel towards each other, and eventually towards their faith.

This must be Meryl Streep's finest performance in years, as the self-righteous nun and accuser: what could so easily have turned out as an embittered harridan, a fanatical martinet, comes out instead as a woman on a mission that she must believe in in order to be able to go through with it, and it is quite startling to find a degree of sympathy for her zealotry. Meanwhile, Philip Seymour Hoffman, as the avuncular priest, is at his usual standard of excellence. It becomes as easy to believe him guilty as innocent, and this takes some command of nuance.

Perhaps the stageplay origins are betrayed by the verbiosity present, and some gripes might be had in that there is no real interest shown in a conclusive judgement of an odious issue. No matter: this is an outstanding study of character, not a lecture, and all the more life-like for it.

8/10

Watchmen (Zack Snyder, 2009)

noreply@blogger.com (Jan J.) — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 13:36:00 +0000

Adaptations of the graphic novels of crusty visionary Alan Moore have not had an entirely happy history, from V for Vendetta to From Hell, and he seems to have disowned this one as a precautionary move. This was a mistake.
Watchmen, published over 20 years ago, is probably Moore's most emblematic work. Set in a parallel 1985, with Nixon still in the White House and the world on the brink of armageddon, it follows a group of former superheroes as a mysterious assassin starts trying to bump them off one by one. A complex plot, at least by the standards of the genre, is held together by the narrative of the vigilante Rorschach, a sort of an unhinged Marlowe with a mask, and contains more darkness than a Batman film could ever hope to entertain. We're firmly in adult territory here: this is an utterly broken world, full of cynical politics, and at the finale the main villain of the piece comes out as far more ambiguous than the mere idea of a superhero film could lead us to expect.
It helps a great deal, of course, that Snyder wisely sticks to the original work, virtually frame by frame, and adds only his one forte: gut-wrenchingly visceral action (see 300). Even the casting is slavishly faithful.
Don't go expecting great depth here, but it will also not insult your intelligence and it's a hell of a ride, far more involving than the much-feted but ultimately lumpy Dark Knight.

7/10

Burn After Reading (the Coen brothers, 2008)

noreply@blogger.com (Jan J.) — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 13:14:00 +0000

After a pair of ill-judged adaptations of other people's ideas, the Coens seem to have settled more or less back on track with another of their black comedies. Here, we get something like a butterfly effect of a story on human ineptitude as a stellar cast of characters, each imbued with a single clearly-defined flaw, end up doing each other over in paranoid encounters across Washington, all believing they're somehow caught up in an espionage intrigue. Meanwhile, the CIA watches in bafflement.

So, there's George Clooney as a philanderer, Tilda Swinton as an icy bitch, John Malkovich as an irascible former G-man who's lost his way badly, Frances McDormand as a dippy fitness instructor obsessed with her fading looks and Brad Pitt as her lunkhead friend. The casting itself is wonderful, and the interest of the whole relies a lot on this.

However, unlike in the Coens' last, the searingly dark No Country for Old Men, there's no consistency of tone: it falls between the two stools of relationship-based comedy and thriller, and so requires constant readjustment of viewer response from scene to scene. It's not a painful process by any means, and there's plenty here to entertain, but one hopes that the Coens will take a look at what their knitting is and not hedge their bets next time round.

6/10

Lakeview Terrace (Neil LaBute, 2008)

noreply@blogger.com (Jan J.) — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 12:54:00 +0000

An interracial couple move into what seems like a suburban haven until their neighbour, a black policeman raising his kids single-handed on a tight rein, starts to turn the screw on their relationship and lives, fuelled by indignation at their co-habiting existence.

LaBute's directorial debut back in 1997, In the Company of Men, demonstrated a keen awareness of the real poisons that can run through people's souls, in a dog-eat-dog framework. In the light of some of the debacles that have followed, most notably the bottom of the barrel that his last film represented, i.e. the godawful remake of The Wicker Man, Lakeview Terrace could charitably be viewed as something of a return towards serious film-making. In this it fails on a big scale.

It should not have ended up as a psycho stalker pic like Pacific Heights, which it ends up resembling (and to its detriment by comparison, being far more muddled). But any real debate on racial divisions becomes badly lost by the end, probably not helped by the casting of Samuel L. Jackson as the racist cop, set out with instructions to just exude his customary menace throughout until flipping.

4/10

Intermission: Points Explained

noreply@blogger.com (Jan J.) — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 12:01:00 +0000

Though a wide range of heavyweight film critics may like to pretend otherwise, i.e. that there's a scientific system behind their rankings, we should all have confidence in our gut reactions...in other words, something either works for you or doesn't. The validity of your view to a first-time reader therefore rests on whether you can explain your point both succinctly and convincingly enough, and the latter part of this is highly reliant on those same skills you probably always hated hearing at school - being able to reference your comparisons and back up whatever you come up with. This is no tutorial, just a bleat of frustration at, because of the nature of the medium, how every idiot from the age of 12 on the webby thing is accorded equal voice and will get to skew ratings on the bigger film sites like imdb, will mean those sites cannot be trusted.

I'd like you to believe that my ratings have flexibility built in to a degree: however, as stated, you can't keep subjectivity out. In the end, Mozart is no less valuable than Beethoven. I just don't like Mozart.

10 - this, for me, is a masterpiece, and needs to be in a time capsule for the year 3009. If you don't at least acknowledge the merits of this, you are sub-human. Example: Once upon a Time in the West
9 - so close, but I might have felt the weight of critique and actually taken some on board. A lot of the 'difficult' classics that cinema has ever produced belong here. Example: 400 Blows
8 - you can't really go wrong here. At worst, you'll think it was just enjoyable. Example: Terminator
7 - the repository of films that some of you may think are the best ever, others will be indifferent to. Example: 8 1/2
6 - this is where the last films worth watching live. Too many flaws, but still enough quality forces its way through that it will leave you with an ambiguous reaction. Example: Akira Kurosawa's Dreams
5 - you shouldn't really be watching this any more, but you'll be forgiven for having gone with an actor or director. It'll have merits, but those will be outweighed by any random combination of messes. Example: Strange Days
4 - you have now got out the wrong DVD. There'll be John Hurt or someone similar there to reassure you it'll be ok. It won't be. Example: Southland Tales
3 - you are now in the land of the damned. It will be both boring and frustrating, which, I suppose, in a film Olympics ought to be recognised as a separate event in itself. Example: Franklyn
2 - this will be just be unbearable shit. Do need to provide an example that at least some demographic will think is brilliant? Ok, : The Goonies
1 - oh good, the lowest of the low. I have a sincere belief that you can skip over marks 2-5 and just dip into the 1s when you really need to remind yourself of how low a form of high art can go (think William McGonagall). I think I've only ever seen one entrant for this accolade: Superman IV: The Quest for Peace.

That gave me anxiety attacks for weeks afterwards. It's actually a real feat to see everything go wrong.

And no, you can't give zeroes.

Blindness (Fernando Meirelles, 2008)

noreply@blogger.com (Jan J.) — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 11:33:00 +0000

In an unspecified city, people start losing their sight in a flash and no cause is found. The epidemic spreads and quarantine centres are set up in the spreading panic. One woman retains her sight in the midst of the contaminated and chooses to hide this to stay with her husband, an eye specialist.

Once you know that Meirelles was behind City of God, a viscerally masterful exploration of the brutality of life in Brazil's favelas, a lot of what follows can only be viewed through that filter: the quarantined detainees swiftly become brutalised by their helpless situation and then by their prison confinement as a group of males amongst them go feral, ignored by a terrified government. It has uncomfortable echoes from early on of Carandiru, Hector Babenco's telling of the mass murder that occurred in an overcrowded and out-of-control Sao Paulo prison.

This is not science fiction: Meirelles is not interested in the causes of the blindness or finding a cure, only in how it can be used as a metaphor of disempowerment. To be frank he never really gets to the bottom of what his metaphor means, or how much of it is a metaphor, and so by the end we're still rather left in the dark as to what we're to have understood by it. But it's easy to forgive a lot of what Meirelles does accomplish: there are stretches along the way which drip with insight into the human psyche and power relationships, and some of the images of desolation take the breath away without lapsing into pornography, which really requires a fine balancing act from a director.

7/10

The Time Traveler's Wife (Robert Schwentke, 2009)

noreply@blogger.com (Jan J.) — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 11:13:00 +0000

Based narratively as closely as the limitations of the medium will allow on Audrey Niffenegger's phenomenally successful novel about a man who keeps disappearing and finding himself in another part of his life, this goes more explicitly for the romance angle. This is a wrong turn: while the original plot was clearly a reworking of Slaughterhouse-Five, it wasn't without a point in that it replaced the autistic metaphysics with a more universally accessible anguish. Here, this is replaced with an overpowering soundtrack and the blandly pretty Rachel McAdams weeping a lot as the chrononaut's hard-put-upon wife. Eric Bana does make for a watchably stoic lead and it is possible to sympathise with the couple's predicament, but something is lost is the slush: just being able to sympathise is no great shakes.

Overall, it's no disaster, but probably far more palatable to those not familiar with superior examples of the 'great love scuppered by temporal disparity'-genre such as, oh, Somewhere in Time, to pick one out of a hat.

5/10

Franklyn (Gerald McMorrow, 2008)

noreply@blogger.com (Jan J.) — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 10:51:00 +0000

The director summed this up as a fleshed-out working out of ideas from a short in which a young woman is recovering from yet another suicide attempt. Always beware hacks when they justify what they've done as being through a need to explore everyone's backstories.

McMorrow piles on everything he can think of and it's all derivative: there's a Rorschach clone stalking a futuristic/gothic city overrun by religious fanatics under an obscurely oppressive government, cutting to Eva Green as the would-be suicide going hysterical with her mother in middle-class North London, Sam Riley (he of the excellent Control) seeing the dead and Bernard Hill agonising over his son's whereabouts. Having no confidence in one film, McMorrow gives us four, and then we have to suffer pointless narrative contortions as they're drawn together by hook and crook. A waste of time for all those involved.

3/10

La graine et le mulet (Abdellatif Kechiche, 2007)

noreply@blogger.com (Jan J.) — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 10:21:00 +0000

The English title, Couscous, may seem as hackneyed for a film about North African immigrants in France as calling one on Asians in Britain 'Curry', but couscous is at least heavily present as a concern as ageing boatyard worker Slimane is laid off and turns to setting up a couscous restaurant on a boat, drafting in his extended family. The fulcrum of the story, Slimane is also a diffident presence, prone to panic attacks not unrelated to certain members circling him like vultures. The film owes much of its cohesion, despite its rambling length, to Habib Boufares's performance, which carries much strength in its understatement.

Early on, as he loses his job, there is a key scene in which Slimane explains to his daughter that 'they're only taking on non-French people now' and this really encapsulates what's refreshing about the whole attitude of the film: we're not dealing with a straightforward piece on the hardships of immigrants, but, rather, an ordinary working-class family. And the plot subsequently mirrors this by constantly choosing the less predictable turn. If the director is too fond at times of the realism he's chosen to go with by also letting his actors yammer on freeformly, the end result is still rewarding enough.

7/10

The History Boys (Nicholas Hytner, 2006)

noreply@blogger.com (Jan J.) — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 20:52:00 +0000

Alan Bennett's award-winning play is, for the most part, successfully transferred to the screen by Hytner, previously best known as a director for The Madness of King George: that is to say, it rarely feels stagebound until the postscript, by which stage the shift in tone seems natural.

Eight boys at a public school in '80s Yorkshire are being coached towards Oxbridge, and the headmaster, a dunce masquerading as a martinet, decides that their chances need to be beefed up by more rigorous training than that provided by Richard Griffiths's poesying blimp (basically, his Uncle Monty reworked), whose 'general studies' lessons indulge the boys' playing out of musical numbers and old movie scenes. So, in comes a young new recruit to the staff, who proceeds to tell the boys at once that competence alone will not make them stand out: tactics are called for, from playing devil's advocate to outright lying.

It's not reality by a long chalk: almost every character in turn is employed as a mouthpiece for whatever quip or observation Bennett wants to chuck our way, which frequently jars with most of them, after all, being just teenagers. Griffiths's tentative molestation of his wards is also treated rather too lightly for comfort, as if it were just an endearing foible. But there's no denying the wit at work: it's frequently very funny and also comes with an understated, unsettling undercurrent concerning what it takes to succeed in a class-centred society.

7/10

The Walker (Paul Schrader, 2007)

noreply@blogger.com (Jan J.) — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 20:17:00 +0000

Woody Harrelson gets to flex his acting chops further as a preening professional companion to a host of Washington politicians' wives, moving further than ever before from the lovable country doofuses of his earlier films.

Carter Page III is a man constantly overshadowed by the looming legends of his forefathers and taking refuge in the superficiality of his chosen milieu, where bon-mots serve as currency, until the murder of an acquaintance, the lover of one of the wives he ferries around social functions for his living, forces him to examine what values he actually has.

The setting of the glass cage that is D.C. high society might at first also seem a departure for Schrader, who as a screenwriter has repeatedly plumbed the depths of breakdown and despair, particularly through his work with Scorsese on Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and, most recently, Bringing out the Dead. But at heart the song remains the same: a man comes to realise that he stands alone and can either sink or swim. The Walker doesn't in truth have a great deal to add to this refrain, but gets by creditably enough on dialogue of superior intelligence and a heavy-calibre cast, including Lauren Bacall as an armour-plated society queen. Harrelson, meanwhile, just keeps getting better and better: southern gent pomposity, flamboyant campness and a quiet moral determination are all delivered without a false note.

6/10

Things We Lost in the Fire (Susanne Bier, 2007)

noreply@blogger.com (Jan J.) — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 21:14:00 +0000

Bier's first Hollywood film sees her pick up on much the same themes as her last Danish piece, Efter brylluppet, that is, the pain of loss and how we come to terms with it in our individual ways. Here, Halle Berry is abruptly widowed and pulls her husband's best friend, junkie-in-precarious recovery Benicio Del Toro, into her orbit to fill the void left by his death.

On the technical side, there's absolutely no need for the modishly deconstructed narrative structure, and it's becoming apparent that Bier will keep trying to squeeze emotional content out of those eye close-ups. Also, both leads are perilously close to being typecast: Berry as the strong but damaged mother in denial of her pain, Del Toro as a mumbling mess just one wrong turn away from the gutter; Monster's Ball and 21 Grams respectively. But at least these are proven parts, and so both are used to their strengths, Del Toro particularly convincing in his instability.

Not a step forward for Bier, then, but still streets ahead of most Hollywood competition in terms of empathic depth.

6/10

The Last Horror Movie (Julian Richards, 2003)

noreply@blogger.com (Jan J.) — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 20:41:00 +0000

Director Richards at least makes no attempt to deny having been 'influenced' by C'est arrivé près de chez vous, otherwise known as Man Bites Dog, in what is basically a North London retread of Rémy Belvaux's seminal Belgian shocker. So, we follow a serial killer amiably chatting away, documentary cameraman in tow, as he despatches a broad assortment of victims in a range of banally clinical ways. Richards does adopt a slightly different tack - and this would have to be the overriding justification for the plagiarised framework - to Belvaux, in that his killer is actually the instigator of the documentary and as such exercises editorial control, which enables him to dwell over several points about the nature of the voyeurism of the media and, by extension, us, the viewers.

However, his philosophising to camera hits a film-schoolish note far too often, directorially too insecure to proceed without constantly trying to second-guess the critical viewer. In the end it's actually far more effectively black and satirical, as Belvaux seemed to have instinctively grasped with Man Bites Dog, when it lets its sociopath's actions speak for themselves, and our presence as witnesses isn't even acknowledged.

5/10

JCVD (Mabrouk El Mechri, 2008)

noreply@blogger.com (Jan J.) — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 10:25:00 +0000

File under curio: a number of people will watch this just for B-action-movie star Van Damme skirt an uncomfortably close line to how they might see his real life panning out, especially since J-C gets a weepy monologue in the middle to detail his actual life with its failings.
He arrives in Brussels, in the middle of a custody suit for his daughter, and gets sucked into a bank heist where his celebrity status puts him centre-stage, as spokesman for the captors, and then has to start agonising as to whether he can actually do anything resembling all his other personae. None of this will mean much to the casual viewer who hasn't gone through all the set-piece kickboxing moves from Timecop et al. It's also a partial shock to realise that, worldwide, he's still Belgium's biggest star (forget Audrey Hepburn; she was appropriated by others too early on). It's as if Dolph Lundgren was Sweden's.
A neat enough idea is wasted: Van Damme is actually very good at playing the saddo version of his own life, but there's endless wind-and-rewind with a small plot idea that probably fancies itself as Rashomon crossed with Dog Day Afternoon. Not disgraceful, but too big for its post-modern boots.

5/10

Der Baader Meinhof Komplex (Uli Edel, 2008)

noreply@blogger.com (Jan J.) — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 15:41:00 +0000

Edel's telling of the story of the Red Army Faction, anti-imperialist terrorists in '60s and '70s Germany, crams virtually every recognisable face from voguish recent German historical cinema, and while it avoids the trap of making a postulating egotist like the group's leader Andreas Baader anything other than an obnoxious arschloch despite the risky casting of the usually sympathetic Moritz Bleibtreu, it does end up creaking under the weight of the sheer number of passengers. The story of the would-be revolutionaries is narrated with a fair degree of punch and even-handedness, but in insisting on grinding out the full historical course of events, ends up rather dramatically directionless, particularly after the premature death of Martina Gedeck's Ulrike Meinhof. After that, we're left with a succession of court cases and increasingly flat acts of petty terror: Edel has simply stuck too closely to Stefan Aust's original book, and forgotten to adapt it to another medium. By no means a disaster, it nevertheless ends up leaving far too little aftertaste for an episode so sour.

5/10

Suxxess (Peter Schildt, 2002)

noreply@blogger.com (Jan J.) — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 13:59:00 +0000

A Swedish IT company gets a new boss, who swiftly turns out to be a soulless hatchet man in Schildt's dark satire on the evils of the corporate world. He's opposed by Daniel, one of his employees, and eventually comes crashing down, impaled on his own hubris. So Daniel gets given the poisoned chalice of leadership in his place, just to end up as amoral and platitudinous as the man and values he initially stood up against. Power corrupts: the message is as old as the hills.

But it's carried out here with some real brio, featuring a set of effectively unctuous leads and some scenes of stark inhumanity that, combined with an icily plangent soundtrack, occasionally really pull the rug out from under your feet. Creepy fun, as long as you don't work in one of these offices.

6/10

Hancock (Peter Berg, 2008)

noreply@blogger.com (Jan J.) — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 13:30:00 +0000

Strictly one for superhero aficionados, Hancock starts out with an amusing enough idea: Superman as an out-of-control alcoholic slob, causing property damage wantonly wherever he goes. Since he's also Will Smith, however, this state of affairs will clearly not last. And the change to a force for good comes far too soon, as he's coached by a PR man with principles, who inevitably also has a cute kid who soon puts a spark of sentiment back into the hero's jaded eye. Still, it's amiable enough with a few decent gags that go some way to compensate for the cheese, until a fairly pointless attempt in the second half to introduce a meaningful backstory for the character and thereby somehow try to reangle the whole enterprise as a romantic tragedy.

4/10

Comme une image (Agnès Jaoui, 2004)

noreply@blogger.com (Jan J.) — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 19:25:00 +0000

This was titled Look at Me for the English audience, which neatly missed the point of the title already telling you the central premise of like father, like daughter. It's populated with a self-centred closed circle of literary and arty middle-class couples, with the main attention on the overweight ignored daughter of a novelist who can't see beyond his next review. They, equally self-regarding, form what there is of a dramatic hub.

Both Jaoui and her partner Bacri, reprising much of his warmer draft on emotional unawareness from Le goût des autres, are on less solid ground here. But, all said, it's really not bad. What will always save writing of this quality, even when lacking focus, is the truthfulness of its characterisations. You go away unfilled but not displeased, which doesn't necessarily apply to all pieces of this ilk.

6/10