I see you shiver with anticip.....

This morning was awful. I got my act together and determined to watch a film to cheer myself up.

Question is, what? Lets put it this way, I knew what I wanted to watch. Can you guess, folks? Unfortunately, I don't have my own tv, and watching the same film three times in two weeks smacks of borderline insanity. If it weren't for my family...

Now a few months back I saw Rififi, and at the time it made a big effect. I kept thinking "What if I never see a film this good about a diamond-heist-gone-awry ever again?". This was the reasoning behind recording The Asphalt Jungle, which was also in black and white. Anyway, I recovered eventually and the film remained unwatched on the video.

Time passes, I discover there is another great movie along those lines, watch it, love it and get hit by "Hang on, surely there can't be three movies this good about a diamond-heist-gone-awry?" Enter The Asphalt Jungle, still patiently waiting to be seen. So I wound the video back and discovered the beginning had been partially wiped over by somebody else.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!

Lesson learnt: you can only ever see a film for the first time once. And there is no way to get around it. No matter how hard you try.

By gum I was cross. I was pretty irritable beforehand, but this really made me mad. Anyway, I rather halfheartedly pulled Run, Lola, Run.

Thank-ee goodness. It was just what I needed to run the stress out of my system. I've wanted to see this ever since hearing the theme tune, which is jolly exciting let me tell you! It's very exciting, fast paced, and totally great.

My mother hates whizzy cinematography, films where the camera won't stay still. She would have left almost immediately. It's part music video, part advert, part computer game. Lola has twenty minutes to get 100,000 marks to save her boyfriend. Now that's what I call high concept.

There are animated scenes, black and white, slo-mo, speed-up, scenes in red, cut screens, wipes, fades, dissolves - somebody has had a lot of fun with their editing suite. Lucasitis! But for once it doesn't feel superfluous. To quote some info cribbed straight from imdb, in a 71 min film they use 1581 transitions. That's an average shot length of 2.7 seconds. makes a nice contrast with all those tortuously long edits from Alien.

To start with it's disorientating, but priceless when everything falls into place. For example...the first time round she almost kills someone taking the safety catch off the gun. Second time round, she's learnt. This is what I mean by video game - you try to beat the level, you get killed, you learn and try again. She knows the bike's been stolen. Every time, things are different. Minor ripples result in one woman joining the church instead of winning the lottery. It actually reminds me slightly of a script I wrote once; but for once, the similarity didn't annoy me. Have I mentioned the music yet?

All in all, this'll go in the same box as Moulin Rouge - some people are going to hate this on account of the visual style, but if you get into it you'll adore it. There's a layer of whimsy propelling the plot which may annoy some people, but not me and not all 'em folks who put this on the imdb top 250. And it's equal to what I imagine a good dose of ecstasy to feel like.

Best of all, it entirely cured me of my apathy and I managed to zip through all my jobs for the day in about ten minutes. And it gave me the edge I requred to climb out of the window and jump about my own height onto gravel with bare feet when I got trapped in the toilet instead of sitting around lamely for an hour until my family came home and let me out (the handle's stopped working from inside, so if you shut the door you can't get out).

And it was such a boost, that when mum and sis finally did return and told me I had an hour to get ready, I actually had the drive to sort out two costumes and my tea within twenty minutes.

I hadn't told you, had I?

We're gonna see the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Properly. The way it was meant to be seen. Going to one of these, as has been one of my dreams for as long as, oh, forever. I couldn't find a proper costume in time, so I'm just going as a random Transylvanian in pink slut-wear. It's gonna be great. It had better be great.


PS - last night we played the movie game again, and guess what? Not only did me and my sister win both times, but the diretor card that came up was WARNER HERZOG! It's become a bit of an in-joke, really, especially now he's taken over the position as "Favourite Director (of whose filmography I've actually seen zilch)"

Still, playing with my sister is tiring. One day, i'll be on a team with someone where I can say "Lawrence of Arabia" instead of two minutes of "David Fall? David Jump?" in reply to the best possible clue - "First name, like as in Goliath, second, what you shouldn't do over a cliff..." and

Reviews and moviechat

Yesterday, the family had a go at the new movie board game. . My little sister insisted she wanted to be on my team, so I gave her a crash course in famous directors using Empire's top 20 list. Warner Herzog did not come up, much to our team's distress (I'd already briefed her that he chased his actors on set at gunpoint) The highlight of the exercise went something like this:

Me - "Okay, Orson Welles?"
Sis - "Rosebud!"
Me- "Very good...[turns page] okay, it's an old game so he won't be in there [turns page] Ah, Hitchcock. You know him, right?"
Sis - "Yes - he made the Terminator, didn't he?"

...

I am surrounded by idiots. Not like I'm The Master's greatest fan, but I'd expect people to know The Da Vinci Code was not written by Shakespeare. However I feel about the stories and dudes involved, I would expect them to know it. Needless to say we lost - but only by one card, and only via a technical annoyance whereby the other team could pinch a card of their choice from the enemy. Oh yeh, and we kinda deserved to lose because we, er, cheated...

It goes like this. There are Suspense cards, which the entire table can answer. Now this particular card had 6 pairs of actors on it and my sister had to pick one of the pairs for the entire table to guess a film they'd been in. The entire table= me, mum and dad. So she flashes me a discreet peepy at the card and I casually throw up two fingers. "Okay..." she starts, a tad apprehensively, "Richard Dreyfuss and Roy Schnei..." "Jaws!" I call back. We kept the turn and won another few cards. Henry Gondorff would have been proud. Not that I was particularly...

Anyway, onto the reviews:

Runaway Jury

In a vitally important gun case, THREE sides fight to control the verdict using less than honest means, for profit, prestege and personal something-beginning-with-p.

Now surely I've told you the Runaway Jury story before. It's the final proof why exciting trailers work so well. Believe me, I'm not normally swung by trailers, but this and Hero are the exceptions. My sister and I saw the trailers and were hooked! It was the first film I ever obsessed about before seeing it. And we both put it on every birthday and Christmas list from habit more than any desire to see it. Fascinating, non?

Runaway Jury is great fun. With a fast paced and pleasantly twisty plot, it really doesn't allow you to get bored. It's just complex enough to feel satisfied at understanding what's going on, while remaining actually pretty simple.

There are a couple of rules I want to share with you today, which I've probably shared before, but nevertheless you may need to be reminded of. NEVER get involved in a Gulf War. NEVER try to kill the Godfather. NEVER go into the army if you have a fiancee or baby on the way. But NEVER retire either. In fact, the less backstory the better - but not too little, because then you're in for a nasty surprise. And NEVER allow the camera to focus on a happy family for more than half a minute, because we all know exactly in what direction it's going...

I just need to add that while our couple do nothing special, they look awesome together.

Rachel Weitz (however you spell it) is, as always, very good. She's kinda underrated, I think. She was great in both The Mummy and Constantine, though perhaps those names are why she isn't more widely appreciated. Dustin Hoffman acts exactly as I expected him to, which I suppose is not a bad thing. The best character was undoubtedly the twitchy jury. Henry Fonda never had that lot to deal with, and even he'd have had a pretty tricky job convincing them of anything, what with their various murky problems. I just liked the way they all interact.

Our hero in the jury is Nick Easter, and he's basically great. Can't think of much more to say. Good looking chappie too. Somehow the style does not get repetitve (I was sure I'd be sick of the Gene Hackman Is Shouty scenes by the end, but no...)

However there is one flaw - a big one. The entire plot hinges not on the characters, but on the ending. So like so many mystery films, once you've seen it once you won't need to see it again. I call 'em sprint films. You get sprint books as well - they're usually found abandoned in airports and at second hand book sales.

Another flaw are the computers. Somehow, for all the technological advances, Hollywood has never discovered the humble mouse. No, all you need to do is tap a few keys and lots of cool popups appear on screen - all containing the relevant information, none containing adverts for dating agencies or spam claiming they've one $1,000,000. Similarly, they always have really snazzy computer programs which suit their every need. Now honestly...you watch this film (or, indeed, most films) and try not to be cynical about the baddie's hardware (PS, can you really download an entire computer harddrive in under half a minute? And is it possible to download them to an mp3 player?)

Final comments - though the initial twist that... Nick really wanted in on the jury was great, his scene in the candle shop was unecessary. Why were they acting like they didn't know each other? Purely to lead the audience off, no other in-plot reason. And if they were worried they'd be seen together, why go to her apartment later and why does she reveal her identity at all? ...Not that it really matters, I'm being picky.

New York Minute

The plot? Why, of course there's a plot! Whatever made you think otherwise? Snooty-sister and Scatty-sister attempt to get to a competition and concert respectively, while dodging hitmen with unfunny accents, rescuing poodles, dodging truancy officers bumping into cute lads and running around in towels while learning about friendship and tolerance.

I'm going to let you in on a secret. Off the record, on the QT and very very hush hush etc...I LOVE Mary Kate and Ashley. Don't tell any of my posh film friends, and if you are any of my posh film friends forgive me I have sinned, I've a copy of Metropolis on hand to cleanse my mind. So when the parents bought New York Minute for my sister, she was less than happy, I was overjoyed. So let's think about this for a moment - as a film, it has nothing original or too different from any MK+A movie. But if we sweep away those layers of predjudice to begin with and allow it's going to be pretty dire, then it's great!

I grinned from start to finish, excluding any scene which appealed to our emotions because they were all painfully scripted. There's a montage 3/4 of the way through which made me want to attack my own eyes. And the House of Bling hurt a bit as well. The romances were unforgivably one-dimentional, and not helped by my (younger?!) watching companion who implied twincest at every available oppertunity (twincest = exactly what it sounds like)

The style (dear God, I'm talking about cinematography...) was similar to in their mini-film things - fast cutting and abusing every trick in the editing suite. Still, it kept it visually interesting.

As always the plot was unbelievable. They manage to get on stage at the Simple Plan concert and pull off a stage dive? Mary/Kate/Ashley manages to run about New York for what seems like an eternity wearing only a towel which doesn't fall down? (Seriously, we've all tried the towel-wrap thing - it doesn't work) Oh, and they mayaswell been handed a box labelled "deus ex machina" at the end. There's also a lot of coincidence, but I don't really object to that.

It was funny at times. At the beginning they bump into a chap on a train and terrorise him. I laughed every time he showed up. And while usually I don't like Matrix spoofs, the sunglasses chap+slowmo birdies+train station fight did raise a smile. And the neurotic-one's obsessing over her day planner made me grin too - I know people like that...

So OK, it wasn't all that classy, but at the end of the day, it wasn't boring either. Even though we all know where it's going, the journey there is fast paced, moronic, but fun. Now compare it to My Big Fat Greek Wedding, the only film I've truly despised this year - the ending was obvious from looking at the box, but the journey was tedious as hell. So New York Minute retains 3 star status, for at least being a bit of a laugh.

All in all, girls of a Certain Age will love it, as will anybody else who loves MK+A or wants to kill themselves laughing from mockery.

PS, a massive helicopter just passed over the house - with two rotating-propellor-things. Reminds me, as always, of Black Hawk Down.

PPS, They're trying to remake the Sting. And unlike the previous Butch Cassidy and the Unecessary Remake rumour, this one's come from a reliable source. Kill me now.

PPPS, you may have gathered by now I have a lot of friends. And one of them made a new friend on a course last year, and now he's visiting our town for the week. And the only reason I'm mentioning this is that out of the blue he said he thought Q.Tarantino should direct a film of the Bible. He said it might increase interest in religion. Now isn't that an, er...interesting thought. It's making me think of other director's "Bibles". Tim Burton, for example. Jesus - the quirky, outcast loner - Nazareth all done in pastel colours, plus score by Danny Elfman. In fact I want to see this one - it'll really capture the magic and enchantment of the miracles. David Lean's an obvious candidate - big screen, deserts. In fact, hasn't he already done one? It's such a good idea that perhaps I'm just remembering it. Terry Gilliam is ideal for filming Revelations, because they're approximately as wacky as each other. Peter Jackson can handle the Old Testament, what with his new penchant for 12hour epics AND his old penchant for plenty of gore.

Paradise...a review of The Beach

What do we do when we wake? Groan? Yawn? Swear? Keep one eye on the sky (as anyone who has ever seen Reign of Fire should know). Well this morning I heard my door open and I replied "Rio Bravo". Because it's been written on my hand since Sunday, just above the words "Remember Sammie Jenkins" just so I can't possibly forget that it's on today.

My desire to see this film came at precicely the same moment as my unconditional and irrational admiration for Quentin Tarantino. He was quoted in Empire speaking about this film: "When I'm getting serious with a girl, I show her Rio Bravo, and she better ****ing like it"

He most definitely has his priorities in the right order.

Anyway, if that's not enough to inspire curiosity, I don't know what is. Anyway, I spent an entire day of mustnotforgetmustnotforget and then guess what happened? Missed it. By half an hour. I was furious, absolutely vase-smashingly irritated. So rather cross at missing my classic (it's also on the Total Film top 100 list, and considering a different friend than the one in the next paragraph has somehow seen twice as many as me and still thinks that Van Helsing wasn't so bad I really need to catch up! [PS, dude if you're reading, no offence right?]) I sat down rather apprehensively to watch this=

The Beach

A thrill seeking, dope-smoking backpacker on the search for experience discovers the heart of darkness in the guise of paradise. My, didn't that sound catchy!

So on the face of it this seemed like a recipie for disaster. A book I liked as a film - nay, a book I was positive couldn't be adapted, into a movie starring Leonardo diCaprio. Oh my. What a hell. But I have pursuasive friends and difficulty refusing people anything, and so rather grudgingly I agreed to borrow the dvd.

And thank God for that!

Absolutely fantastic! I mean, if you have or ever do read the book, you'll see what I mean - it's a first person narration of a meandering plot, lots of psyched out stuff and yet somehow it actually worked on screen. They stayed perfectly true to the tone of the novel, even if not entirely to the plot.

The cinematography was inventive and pretty - the shots of the beach. The speeded-up camera sunset. The glowing prawns underwater. The colours in the evening, in Bankok, on the Beach, in the jungle - all perfect and a joy to watch.

I also think the music was excellent. I didn't like it - I would have no desire, for example, to buy the album. But in the context of the film it was perfect - unintrusive, yet unsettling.

And what about the doped-up, Vietnam-guilt, (there's a lot about Vietnam in the book, not quite so much in the film, or at least not as obviously - though I was amused to note they're watching Apocalypse Now in the lobby before cutting to a shot of our Richard on his bed beneath a spinning fan) bloodsoaked flashbacks and general surreality? All present and correct. Shocked? Well I was. Particular mention must go to the scene when our hero is transmorphed into the hero of a tacky gameboy game. Excellent!

In the book there's an awful lot more of Daffy - I understand why there had to be less in the film, but it was still a shame. He's pretty ace though, with the limited time he had. As I've said, I had my doubts about Leo diC, and they're still not entirely shaken. I'll admit he can act, and act well - and in certain lights he's even good looking. But (and it's a big but, like mine) as soon as the lad opens his mouth...monotone. 'Tis a shame, because they give him a voiceover and he does have some interesting things to say, it's just irritating to listen to.

The only thing I think could have been improved (and the friend who lent me the DVD is about to disagree with me very loudly) was Tilda Swinton's role. Now she's good in Constantine, absolutely great in fact. But she puts virtually the same saintly-but-scornful performance in here, and it just doesn't work. Nothing I can add to that statement, really. Just wasn't... convincing.

I also prefered the "alternate ending" on the dvd to the actual one. Isn't odd how in films, everyone remembers precicely what everyone else said? Like in Godfather Part II, when Kay parrots back exactly the same thing to Michael about the family turning legitimate as he said in Part I and then comments that that was five years ago. Sure, perhaps it stuck in her memory as vitally important, but I don't think so. And I certainly don't think Francoise would have remembered the "parallel universe" thing. And this goes for every other film which utilises this annoying quirk.

And things learnt from this film? I will NEVER judge a movie by its cover ever again.


I went into town today to protest at the police that they hadn't recovered my dvd yet. I also popped into the library, where they have a nice classic-movie rental shelf. They can be borrowed by 18+ people only, but luckily I'd dragged my father along too and he let took Casablanca out for me. I'll watch it in a few days, it'd better be good. I'll lose all faith if it's another Vertigo experience...

While there I visited Oxfam. I always go when I'm in town, to check if anyone's donated interesting records, look lovingly at the trash on the video shelf and buy a bar of fair trade dark chocolate. Today I found a fun game. It was only £3, it was practically unopened and, as I said, it was in Oxfam so the money was going to a good cause. It's called Screen Play, and it's the type of thing our family plays all the time - two teams, miming words on cards. And plus, it's a subject I can win at! The mime-a-movie charades look pretty easy, but somehow I think trying to guess Warner Herzog in under a minute may prove tricky. I mean, how would you mime Warner Herzog? The only thing I know about him is that he chased his actors back on set with a gun when they went on strike. How about Claude Chabrol? I mean, I've heard of him but apart from that...those are the odd few impossible ones however, and I'm sure that "name a film with the word Red in it" and it's ilk will be simpler.