The Game (David Fincher, 1997)

Michael Douglas is back in his Gordon Gekko suit as a soulless banker, his life about to be sucked into a live action role play nightmare - the game of the title, a 'life-changing' experience bought for him as a birthday present.
Fincher's taking on a game himself, namely that of trying to outtwist Mamet's or Shaffer's best mindgame plots with decoys and false denouements. Unfortunately, the end result of too many plot twists can just be to leave you feeling battered and queasy. The script blithely disregards the implausibilities of the situations that it throws Douglas's character into, and so reduces the spectator's emotional involvement in his predicament. The game is all linear, where it should at least give out the illusion of being a sandbox.
To compound the error of judgement made here by Fincher, the protagonist chosen is such an ogre that a lot of delicate handling would be required to achieve his epiphany and make us care when it actually comes. What we get is bludgeoning instead.
I rarely condone remakes, but there was a promising starting premise here and it really was too young to die.

4/10

Vier Minuten (Chris Kraus, 2006)

An elderly piano teacher in a women's prison discovers a student of hers, jailed for murder, is a musical prodigy. Give that to Judi Dench and Halle Berry and watch the Oscars roll in...
Instead, we're in something like the real world, and there's scant promise of the rise of a heartwarming phoenix spreading her wings from the flames. The relationship etched out between damaged teacher and damaged pupil flickers but holds out no hope of blossoming. Both characters are quite simply too abrasively and self-destructively unlikeable for this. And all the more compelling for it: when their guards slip, even a little, it's worth all the more.
This is no little gem of a film: it's far too rough-hewn with its intermingling of stock plot elements with notes of real pathos. But Monica Bleibtreu's and Hannah Herzsprung's entirely credible performances as teacher and ward, glued together by musical performances that for once reinforce the characters, rather than merely carrying the film forward, make for reward enough.

7/10

The Departed (Martin Scorsese, 2006)

Scorsese's gangland epics have become a genre in their own right to such an extent that the motifs of honour among thieves, snitches, insecure hierarchies and bloody cycles of retribution (all lubricated with lashings of faux-macho 'fucks', of course) can be processed swiftly this time round, without need for recourse to exposition. This is refreshing in a work of this length, and further streamlines what is already a tautly wired structure.
This remake of Andrew Lau's 2002 Hong Kong thriller Infernal Affairs plays it safe with the casting by banging immovable objects against unstoppable forces as monuments of Hollywood like Nicholson and Sheen Sr. deliver their standard packages at each other at close range. Nicholson's cartoonised gangster is in fact uncomfortably close to his riveting Joker, and at times threatens to drown the centre of the film, which is the chase to uncover each other by the far blander next generation leading men Di Caprio and Damon, moles on opposite sides in, respectively, Nicholson's band of merry psychos and the State Police. One can't help wondering whether the casting of the two, physically such monotypes, is intended to highlight their quite diametrically opposed motivations, and if so, whether this heightens the contrast or just ends up muddying the issues.
There is no moral here, besides the stock 'blood will have blood', and no real exploration of deeper issues of identity and alignment - the chalk-and-cheese backgrounds of the two main characters serve only as a frame on which to hang a plot of breakneck twists and turns. It at least amply delivers on tension, and thereby picked up 2006's Best Picture Oscar by default.

6/10

My Blueberry Nights (Wong Kar-wai, 2007)

The Hong Kong maestro's first English-language feature packs a suitable cavalcade of big names, and, despite the departure of long-time cohort cinematographer Christopher Doyle, looks the part too with Darius Khondji (responsible for, amongst others, the spell-bindingly sumptuous La Cité des Enfants Perdus) a ready-made replacement.
It's less than the sum of its parts. Wong Kar-wai's recurring theme of relationships attempting to reconcile conflicting desires, that made Chungking Express or In the Mood for Love such ethereally captivating flights, is perhaps wearing thin by now. Alternatively, the director has simply lost focus in transferring his vision across a cultural divide that is nowhere near as wide as he might suppose. The actors have little to go on. Rachel Weisz and David Strathairn make a decent fist of what they've got to work with, whereas the actual leads of first-timer Norah Jones, the perennially painfully wooden Jude Law and lightweight Natalie Portman just seem lost. There's just about enough in the visual package and occasional turn of thought to make the entirety keep rolling, but it's by no means a filling meal.

5/10

Le Dernier Combat (Luc Besson, 1983)

Or what Besson does when he doesn't even have a percent of the budget of The Fifth Element. His first feature kicks off with a man on a blow-up doll. In short, the world has ended and this is what we're reduced to. No-one can speak any more and communicates in violence instead, shuffling around in the dust. All personae are emblems: The Man, The Doctor, The Brute, and as such clearly represent aspects of the psyche when having to face up to existence being stripped bare.
This is an archetypal first statement of intent for any director with big ideas, as the opulent pyrotechnics of his later work cannot swamp the naked symbolism. Along the way, sidesteps into humour and flashes of vulnerable humanity are also enabled by the supple framework. Eric Serra's unhinged soundtrack, which somehow finds room for 70s jazz-funk in between moody sound effects, adds to the patchiness of execution, but the spine of the piece is strong.

7/10

eXistenZ (David Cronenberg, 1999)

Is Mr Body Horror just too lazy to craft a film with decent dialogue and photography or is he making a pointed attack on the proliferation of computer games? The realisation that satire may be afoot dawns fairly early on after Christopher Eccleston's atrocious American accent as a games marketer in the first shot, and gains strength as Jude Law is presented, even more wooden than feasible, while Jennifer Jason Leigh's indecent relationship with her console sets us straight as to what Cronenberg is on about. Yet, in order to be able to make pertinent observations on the glitches and stock plot formulae recurring in role-playing games like Grand Theft Auto, the director must be spending a fair deal of time immersed in unreality himself. The overall effect is of a pornographer preaching against porn: we're asked to condemn the banality, vicariousness and induced isolation from reality of computer games and yet partake in a film experience dependent on all these elements.
Is it a game or is it real? And, if so, did anyone tell Jude Law?

4/10

Pleasantville (Gary Ross, 1998)

Is it The Truman Show? Back to the Future? Blast from the Past? No, something perhaps less rib-tickling but ultimately with more to say about our relationship with the utopias of TV yesteryear, particularly those in the heightened form of '50s Americana.
Tobey Maguire and Reese Witherspoon are perfectly cast for their mix of knowingness and goofiness as teenagers sucked into the anodyne black-and-white world of his favourite re-run show, where they then proceed to turn society upside down in a thrice. The time-travel vehicle accommodates comment on a broad variety of issues here, from racism, the counterculture and McCarthyism to the whole notion of what constitutes a utopia. The I Love Lucy world may be a tad contrived as a target, far more of a sitter than the 50s really were, but then the particularities of the device used enable Ross to keep a suitable distance from accusations of having set out to make a simple historical critique. If mawk eventually overwhelms the message, as is inevitable, it at least comes late and mercifully undercut.

7/10

Homicide (David Mamet, 1991)

Having a story that reaches no conclusion is in principle a good place to start, and the first of Mamet's signature staccato exchanges between short-fused characters promise an enjoyable ride to that end.
Joe Mantegna is cast here as a Jewish cop falling between all stools in what might be seen as a critique on loss of cultural identity, but instead comes out as an assault on all the factions around the ragdoll lead, as he is flung from rock to hard place. The moral of the story is therefore only that shit happens. Besides that, the hope of suspense is also dashed by a succession of gaping plotholes and improbably uniform personae communicating in a manner that Mamet has been accused of before and since i.e. everyone carries a massive chip on their shoulder and repeats themselves like a stuck record: 'Do you see? Do you see?'.
Spare yourself and watch the Mamet-Mantegna twister formula work to far more rewarding effect in House of Games instead.

5/10

Les Enfants du Paradis (Marcel Carné, 1945)

Any film slapped up together in the end days of Vichy France and saddled with the accolade of Greatest Ever French Film would do well just to avoid being a crushing disappointment. However, Carné's unhurried tale of unrequited love and deception in 1830s Paris survives the plaudits and works perfectly effectively as a witty soap scattered with snippets of real insight into the workings of desire. Darker characterisations such as the cynical bandit Lacenaire are also featured, which carry a far more contemporary resonance yet never derail the prevalent deft lightness of tone. I even felt generous enough to forgive the protracted sequences where we're asked to acknowledge the genius of mime, the Greatest Ever French Comedy.

7/10