The Social Network

When we first heard about it, we had no real urge to go and see the story of the founding of Facebook. That was until everybody kept saying how good it was. So now here we are, The Social Network.

It seems it all happened in 2003. In the same year that someone cut their arm off with a blunt pen knife in Utah, across in Massachusetts someone else was stumbling across a half decent idea.

The film opens with a socially inept Harvard University student called Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) in conversation, if you can call it that, with his then girlfriend Erica (Rooney Mara). He is so immensely annoying that you soon wonder what possessed her to become his girlfriend in the first place. Your second thought is why is she still his girlfriend and then, why hasn’t she hit him yet because you, the audience, certainly want to.



Suddenly she comes to her senses and dumps him. In some style as well. ‘You're going to go through life thinking that girls don't like you because you're a nerd. And I want you to know, from the bottom of my heart, that that won't be true. It'll be because you're an asshole.’ Don't mess with Rooney Mara; she's to be the new Lisbeth Salander you know.

So Zuckerberg is an asshole and he reacts as most teenage assholes would. He goes home and dreams up the least likely way of making himself more appealing to the opposite sex. In one night, whilst drunk, he hacks into the databases of various student halls, downloads pictures of all the female students and creates a website called ‘FaceMash’ that enables male students to rate the 'hotness' of their fellow female undergraduates. His best friend Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield) is on hand to provide the scoring system, an algorithm previously used for ranking chess players.



It's such a success that it brings down the computer network at Harvard, gets Zuckerberg into trouble and of course takes his status with the ladies even lower. It does however impress the Winklevoss twins, Cameron and Tyler (Armie Hammer, both of them). They plan to launch their own website called Harvard Connection, a social networking website, with the main attraction being exclusivity to Harvard students.

They ask for Zuckerberg’s help and he agrees to work with them. Only that, Zuckerberg’s social interactions are about as false as your average Facebook user’s. He immediately sees a better idea and although he maintains a sham 'friendship' with them, he has no intention of helping them, as he sets up his own site.

Again Eduardo helps him, this time providing the finance to get the project off the ground. Once complete, they distribute a link to ‘thefacebook’ and it quickly becomes popular throughout Harvard. The ‘Winklevi’, as he calls them, are enraged that he effectively stole their idea.

The story zips along at a frantic pace as ‘thefacebook’ expands into more universities. Zuckerberg certainly comes over as a nerd but a determined one and also one that can be easily lead, if it gets him what he wants. Enter Napster co-founder Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake). Parker discovers Facebook in the bedroom of a girl from Stanford University, presumably he knew he was at Stanford because Stanford girls seem to have, rather helpfully, the words ‘Stanford’ written across the back of their knickers.



Eduardo is immediately sceptical of Parker, whilst Mark just about falls in love. As Parker persuades Zuckerberg to drop the ‘the’ and ingrains himself into Facebook's project, Eduardo gets more and more sidelined as Zuckerberg increasingly sides with Parker on business matters. Eduardo gets angry, freezes the company's bank account whilst simultaneously falling out with his girlfriend over why his Facebook profile still lists him as ‘single’. With such cast iron evidence that he’s having an affair at her fingertips his girlfriend sets fire to the scarf he just gave to her as a present. Yep that's Facebook.



Then when Eduardo discovers his share in the company diluted to next to nothing, he feels betrayed by his one-time best friend, he confronts him and announces his intention to sue. Parker, the wag, offers him his original stake back. Meanwhile the ‘Winklevi’, after much heart searching over the un-Harvard-ness of suing a fellow Harvardite, have also eventually decided to take Zuckerberg to court over intellectual property theft.



At first the film is a little hard to get the hang of. There is a lot of rapid fire dialogue and the format of the film is a little confusing at first. We are watching the two resulting court cases, or at least the two pre-trial deposition hearings, in tandem with flashbacks to the events being submitted as evidence in them, namely the founding of Facebook. Both lawsuits ultimately resulted in large out of court settlements.

This film come docudrama may be about Facebook but it’s also about the universal themes of friendship, loyalty and betrayal, where money and greed can ruin almost anything. The characters may represent today's world but the themes are as old as the hills.

The principal male characters were all pretty odious, so you don’t really care too much about what happens to them but then I guess they were all supposed to be, well, assholes, and to this end they all played their roles really well. It's hard to feel empathy with any them, well except perhaps a little for Eduardo, the outsider, who’s a far nicer guy than any of the others.



The film ends with Mark sending Erica, his ex, a ‘friend’ request on Facebook and then refreshing the page every few seconds searching for a positive response. After all, getting girls was the whole idea of the Facebook project in the first place.

As one of the lawyers puts it. ‘You're not an asshole, Mark. You're just trying so hard to be one.’

Zuckerberg may now be a millionaire but in one sense he’s learnt nothing at all.

The Social Network is an engaging film, a good film. It may not be a classic, but it’s trying so hard to be one.

Blue Valentine

Blue Valentine, pretty small town girl meets nutter with a ukulele and he falls in love, whilst she marries him for convenience... kind of. Happens all the time, just without the ukulele. This nutter though, does appear to quite charming. Well I liked him, at first.

What follows is a kind of a weighty relationship study. Several years Dean (Ryan Gosling) and Cindy’s (Michelle Williams) marriage is failing. They both know its failing but they just haven't quite reached the endpoint yet. He seems to want it to continue, she doesn’t.



The story of everything falling apart is told in parallel with the story of them/him falling in love. See I’m not convinced she ever loved him. We see how they met and how they fell for each other. In his case at first sight. In her case after he stalked her on the bus with a ukulele with lines like ‘In my experience, the prettier a girl is, the more nuts she is, which makes you insane’. She seems amused and sort of flattered that he can ‘compliment and insult somebody at the same time, in equal measure’.

He’s more nuts than she is though. Later he strums said ukulele in a shop doorway whilst warbling eccentrically the song ‘You Always Hurt the Ones You Love’, which should have been a warning to both of them, but it works, he pulls the girl and gets into her knickers. Which is impressively quick work until we find out that she’s had 'about' 25 partners from the age of 13.



Dean doesn’t know this though, so it comes as a bit of a shock to him when she almost instantly announces that she’s pregnant. Not that it’s his of course but courtesy of the guy she’s been hanging around with before Dean.

When she goes for an abortion and we learn about her promiscuity, we wonder why it’s taken her so long to get caught out? It’s an abortion she finds she can’t go through with and aborts the procedure part way through. Luckily for her Saint Dean is all too willing to devote his life to the gorgeous girl he’s just met and her unborn child, even after getting beat up by the biological father. So he marries her and raises her daughter as she’s his own.



Back in the present, we see their relationship deteriorate further. Cindy is stressed out, overworked and claims to be raising her husband along with her daughter. He meanwhile still appears to be infatuated with her and puts up with more rejection than most people could stomach but for her, it’s clearly already all over. Cindy notes early on that her parents very quickly fell out of love with each and wondered how anyone can trust their feelings when they can just disappear like that? It’s like she was waiting for it to happen.

Yet he still tries to breathe life back in to their relationship with a perhaps ill advised and ill timed trip away to a motel for a night. She's not keen, not keen at all. Especially when it turns out the room they book is a futuristic themed room that looks like the inside of Dr. Who’s Tardis or as Dean describes it a ‘robot's vagina’. Perhaps romance died then.



Perhaps because I'm a man I look at Dean and wonder what it is that he did wrong. I felt sorry for him; on the surface he's done a lot for her but now she seemed to be out of gratitude and now more narked about what he hadn't done. Get a better job for instance. Although probably just so that she could afford to go back to medical school.

True, somewhere along the way, his character has changed. The nice guy started to smoke too much, drink way too much and become very short tempered. Here lies the problem with the film. Just when did this character change occur? When did their relationship suddenly go bad? There seemed to be a bit missing in the middle between the past and the present, a big bit.

Dean say early on about girls in general that 'they spend their whole life looking for Prince Charming and then they marry the guy who's got a good job and is going to stick around'. So perhaps he knew it wasn’t going to last. A better observation would have been 'don't marry someone you just met ten minutes ago and who is pregnant by someone else'.

Gosling and Williams are both very good in this, although only Williams got an Oscar nomination yesterday. The film itself, whilst a good watch, is flawed and nothing special, nothing we haven’t seen before, like say in Revolutionary Road. The film itself got a nomination in the now expanded list of ten Best Film nominations but if they’d stuck to the original five of old, I guess it wouldn’t have.

Oscar Nominations 2011

BEST PICTURE

Black Swan
The Fighter
The King's Speech
The Social Network
True Grit
127 Hours
Inception
The Kids Are All Right
Winter's Bone
Toy Story 3

BEST DIRECTOR

Darren Aronofsky - Black Swan
David O Russell - The Fighter
Tom Hooper - The King's Speech
David Fincher - The Social Network
Joel Coen and Ethan Coen - True Grit

BEST ACTOR

Colin Firth - The King's Speech
Jesse Eisenberg - The Social Network
James Franco - 127 Hours
Javier Bardem - Biutiful
Jeff Bridges - True Grit

BEST ACTRESS

Annette Bening - The Kids Are All Right
Nicole Kidman - Rabbit Hole
Jennifer Lawrence - Winter's Bone
Natalie Portman - Black Swan
Michelle Williams - Blue Valentine

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

Christian Bale - The Fighter
John Hawkes - Winter's Bone
Jeremy Renner - The Town
Mark Ruffalo - The Kids Are All Right
Geoffrey Rush - The King's Speech

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

Amy Adams - The Fighter
Helena Bonham Carter - The King's Speech
Melissa Leo - The Fighter
Hailee Steinfeld - True Grit
Jacki Weaver - Animal Kingdom

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY

Another Year
The Fighter
Inception
The Kids Are All Right
The King's Speech

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

127 Hours
The Social Network
Toy Story 3
True Grit
Winter's Bone

Obituary: The Screen Room

I found out last night whilst checking their website that Nottingham’s smallest and in fact the world’s smallest (check the Guinness Book of Records), cinema is no more. The Screen Room, in Hockley and just across the road from our favourite cinematic haunt Broadway, had been closed over Christmas but now will not be reopening.



I'm on their mailing list but they didn't tell me, either that, or they tucked it away at the bottom of their last email and I didn’t see it. Well, at least I suppose it was a fitting low key end for a low key sort of place. The cinema was a mere 15ft by 15ft, had one screen and just 21 seats. Because of its size, the projector was behind the screen, unlike in a conventional cinema.

Once a porn cinema it opened in its current guise in September 2002 and showed mainly independent films and was great for catching things you'd missed at Broadway. You could though book absolutely any film you liked if you rented the whole place out.

According to the manager there, their nine year lease had simply come to an end and they chose not to renew it. ‘Time to move on!’ their website says. They leave the place on their own terms and debt free. So if anyone fancies taking it on, despite its smallness, it appears to be a going concern.

The Screen Room is survived by several local independent cinemas. The four screen Broadway of course, Derby Road’s traditional Savoy, Belper’s Ritz and Derby's new Quad.

Oh and if you’re missing an umbrella, give them a call, apparently they have at least thirty of them in lost property.

The place will be missed.

127 Hours

Tonight '127 Hours'. A film I fancied seeing but was unsure as to whether I could get through it. I warn my partner that I'll probably faint on her.

Danny Boyle's film tells the true story of Aron Ralston (James Franco), a reckless young adventurer who spends his weekends bombing around America’s wilderness.

The film opens with Ralston packing his gear, but unfortunately not his Swiss Army knife, for a trek into Blue John Canyon in Utah. He jumps on his mountain bike and is off determined to traverse his route 45 minutes quicker than the guide book suggests is feasible.



After a stint on his bike, he’s locks it up and continues on foot, running. It’s a fast moving start to the film and the pace doesn’t let up when he rescues two female hikers Kristi (Kate Mara) and Megan (Amber Tamblyn) who are lost. This, you get the impression, is the speed at which Ralson lives his life.

He spends time walking with the girls, showing them his beloved canyons and how to drop, rather scarily, into an underground pool, where they spend a while repeating the drop and swimming.



Then just as quickly he says goodbye to them and heads off on his own canyoneering. 'We did not even feature in his day' they say, disappointed. Before he departs they invite him to a party, look for the huge Scooby Doo they tell him, but they know he won’t show. Ralson is his own man. Little did he know that they could well have been the last two people he ever saw.

Then the pace slows down, as he takes a tumble, a boulder falls on him and traps his arm. He makes frantic efforts to pull himself free but gradually it dawns on him that he is stuck and this is where he will stay, and we will stay with him, for the next 127 hours.



Ralston, being the sort of guy he is, had not told anyone of his plans and therefore assumes no one will come looking for him. It is just him, the boulder and a fight to survive. He starts chipping away at the rock with the only knife he has, a cheap one, ‘what you'd get if you bought a $15 flashlight and got a free multi tool’. It doesn’t help.

He spends the next five days eking out his water supply and when that runs out, he has to drink his own urine. Because this is Danny Boyle we get to see this from the inside of Ralston's water pack.

Ralston re-examines his own life, philosophises, battles the elements, hallucinates and even fantasies for the best part of four days. Some of it is real in flashback, some of it wishful and hopeful thinking.

Dehydrated and delirious, we see him wonder about the two hikers and there are also a few Scooby Doo induced illusions about the party he's been invited to. Whether this is the same party as the naked one he imagines in a people carrier I’m not sure.

In fact, it’s so terribly ‘Black Swan’ (that we saw yesterday) at times. Two consecutive days, two films, two lots of hallucinations.

He thinks about his ex-girlfriend (Clémence Poésy), who dumped him for being too self centred. His ex turns out to be no other than Fleur Weasley nee Delacouer, we saw her get married last year. These Harry Potter people get everywhere.

He also feels regret. Regret at not returning his mother’s phone calls and for not seeing enough of his family. Regret at not telling anyone where he was going. Whoops. He does a darkly humorous talk show style interview with himself on his camera admitting this failure. Then he carves his name, along with his dates of birth and death, into the canyon wall before videotaping his last goodbyes.



Throughout his time stuck in the canyon we have seen his life perspective change from being a total loner to suddenly include other people, his family, his friends, the two female hikers, even his ex. Together they have given him the will to survive.

Finally he decides he has the courage and the means to extract himself from his predicament, whilst we wonder what we would do if placed in similar circumstances. Problem is you know what's coming. You know how all this ends before you even step foot in the cinema, hence my partner’s initial reluctance.

Ralston starts to amputate his trapped arm at the elbow. First he snaps the bones because he knows he won't be able to cut through them. It’s enough to make you feel faint as it’s all captured painfully on screen. I tried to look away but oddly couldn’t. At which point I believe I blacked out. Oops.

Then without an arm, Ralson still has to abseil out of the canyon and walk out of the valley, where at least he gets to drink from a lake. Finally he encounters a Dutch couple on holiday who help him get rescued.

It’s a tribute to Boyle that he kept us engaged in the film for the length of Ralson's ordeal, the boulder incident occurs very early in the film, but he does. Once trapped, the film becomes a one man show starring James Franco and his facial expressions. Franco puts in a brilliant performance. The camera is right in his face the whole time and shows us graphically as the situation gradually takes its toll on him. In the end 127 hours turns out to be less a film about a man who cuts off his arm and more one about why a man cuts off his arm. It’s a performance that ought to snatch the Oscar out of Colin Firth’s hands but we’ll see.

Ralston survived and lived happily ever after but how many of us would have died in that canyon?

He now has an artificial arm, his real arm was eventually retrieved by park authorities and cremated by Ralston, who then went back to the canyon to scatter the ashes there.

127 Hours is an experience that I survived. I think. Unforgettable, for several reasons.

Time to put my head under the cold tap, grab something to eat, and get a stiff drink.

Black Swan

Tonight, a film about ballet, Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan.

Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel) is the artistic director of a New York ballet company. His latest project is a new production of Swan Lake for which he promptly forces his star ballerina Beth (Winona Ryder) into retirement.



Boo hiss, always been a Ryder fan. You’re too old love. Her replacement in the coveted role of the Swan Queen is to be Nina (Natalie Portman). Boos turn to cheers over here. Always been a Portman fan.



Ryder is so distraught, that after insinuating just how down ‘n’ dirty Miss Nat P had to get to land the role, chucks herself under a car. Of course our Nat, well I best call her Nina, wouldn’t do any such thing, she is the White Swan personified, a real goody two shoes.

Let me explain and give you the idiot’s guide to Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake... Evil sorcerer turns pretty young girl into a white swan and she can only be turned back if her prince swears eternal love to her. Evil sorcerer though has dirty trick up his sleeve, he invents an identical black swan who he sends to seduce the prince and divert his affections. You know how easily men are swayed.

As Swan Queen, Nina has to play both swans. The good, sweet, innocent White Swan as well as the wanton black one. Nina has all the technical ability to dance the White Swan dance but the director seriously doubts her ability to capture the brazen sexuality of the Black Swan.

Enter the rather fetching Mila Kunis as Lily.



Mmmm. Move over Ms Portman, slowly. I’ve suddenly become a Kunis fan. Nina finds the self assured Lily totally incomprehensible. She’s the sort of a girl who dabbles in all sorts of naughty pastimes, such as fun, as well as drugs ‘n’ alcohol, and carries her knickers around in her handbag. Nina feels threatened by her, more so when she finds out she’s to be her understudy. Lily has the all the sensual blackness that Nina lacks, she is the Black Swan immortalised, at least in Nina's eyes. Oh and she even has black feathers tattooed on her back. Subtle? Not.

Somehow Nina must find a way to evoke her inner Black Swan. Thomas tries to provoke and manipulate her into the role, demanding that she live a little and be less 'white'. He kisses her, she bites him, he’s impressed, and she gets the role.



Nina tries hard to live the role but still struggles to discover her dark side. The stress begins to tell on her and she starts to have delusions. Thomas, getting sleazier by the frame, takes her back to his place, for what we assume is an education in sleaze. Though you suspect he’s going to seduce her more for his own ends rather than just for the sake of the production and that she'll go with it for the role, as Ryder implied and maybe did herself, but that's not what happens. He sends her away with 'homework'. Homework she throws herself into with abandon (nice technique Nat), until she realises her mother is in the room.

Ah yes, her mother, Erica (Barbara Hershey). She too was once a ballerina but gave it up to raise Nina and now lives her life through her daughter. Always pushing her to be successful, whilst sheltering her from the world. She has raised an insecure young woman who looked fragile from the opening scene.

Nina’s hallucinations grow. The scratch marks she inflicts on her shoulder, yet we never see her do. She tears a piece of skin off her finger, ouch, but then realises it didn't happen. Her reflection in the mirror moves on its own... Nina becomes increasingly unhinged and before long she can barely distinguish between what is real and what isn’t and nor can we.

Enter again, the black haired temptress to lead her further away from reality. Lily takes Nina into what is probably uncharted territory, a bar and a night club, where Nina is so uptight that Lily offers her a drug to lighten her up.



Tugged along by Lily, Nina has a few drinks and the two of them indulge in an alcohol and drug fuelled night of clubbing and flirting with a couple of chaps called Tom and 'Jerry'. Then she takes Lily home and to bed, at least in her mind, via an argument with her mother. They lock lips, in several configurations, as Nina embraces a more lustful version of herself. Nina wakes up the next morning, alone and late for rehearsal where she finds Lily in her costume, dancing her routine, fresh from spending a night with Tom.

With so much pressure being exerted by her director, her mother, her rivals and herself, Nina continues to buckle under the strain. Becoming more and more obsessed with the role and the role takes her over. Aronofsky takes his audience inside her deteriorating sense of reality, making sure we see what she sees, we experience what she experiences. It is intense stuff.



It may have been her mother's paintings moving and talking to her that caused her to fall and hit her head. She comes round, in her own bed, on opening night to find out that her mother has called her in sick... mothers don't you just love ‘em.

When Nina finally gets to the theatre and performs, things don’t go that well. Lily is still up to her tricks, flirting with one of the male dancers. Nina loses her concentration and falls. The girls argue in the interval and fight or is Nina fighting with herself? Are these two girls actually two halves of the same person? Is Lily even real?

Whatever happens in that dressing room, Nina comes out and dances the Black Swan with the sensuality that Thomas has been asking for all along. She leaves the stage to rapturous applause and kisses him passionately, finally having seduced him with her dancing.

Then in the final scene of Swan Lake, as the White Swan commits suicide, perhaps we finally realise what is real and what isn’t... or perhaps not.

Either way, it’s a brilliant piece of filmmaking. An enthralling experience from start to finish, something you would not expect from a film about a ballet. So perhaps the Kings Speech isn't the best film of the year after all. As for Portman, does she deserve the plaudits she’s been getting? She’s always been easy to look at but as an actress, the jury was out. In this though, you have to admit she was terrific. Best film, best actress, best director... maybe, we have a few more to see yet.

The Kings Speech

‘The Kings Speech’ opens with King George V (Michael Gambon) asking his second son Prince Albert, the Duke of York, to deliver a speech at the 1925 British Empire Exhibition. The Duke (Colin Firth) is not the most confident of people, not helped by or possible the cause of a speech impediment and the prospect of public speaking simply terrifies him. He immediately becomes tongue tied in front of the crowd and stammers what words he can manage.



The Duchess (Helena Bonham Carter) takes her husband to see Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush), a speech therapist from Australia. A man with no academic credentials but one who comes highly recommended although with unorthodox methods. They have already tried many professional therapists without success.

Before he realises who his new customers are Logue suggests that if her husband cannot cope with public speaking then perhaps a career change might be in order... not really possible she admits.



Logue agrees to treat her husband but only under his own rules in his own office. He doesn’t do house calls he tells her, not even for royalty. He also insists on using Christian names, so a reluctant ‘Bertie’ is coaxed to his first appointment. It doesn’t go well and when Logue records him reading the famous opening lines from Hamlet, you know ‘to be or not to be’ and all that jazz, but whilst wearing headphones so that he can't hear his own voice, the Duke’s patience runs out and he storms off.

It is not until sometime later than the Duke plays the recording of this speech that Logue gave him and realises his reading was almost perfect. Oddly the headphones trick is one that Logue doesn’t reuse; although it probably leant itself perfectly to some of the radio work the Duke has to do later.

So the Duke goes back to Logue and his therapy continues, during which an unlikely friendship develops between the two.



If he thought being in the public eye as a Duke was bad, circumstances were about to make things a whole lot worse. His elder brother David (Guy Pearce), the heir to the throne and a much more confident person, is chasing the American divorcee Wallis Simpson. Meanwhile, going on in the background is the build up to World War II. It’s all actually a nice history lesson and for once no one has seen the need to alter the past. So this film will educate many people who do not know the history of this period.

When his father dies, David becomes King Edward VIII but in less than a year he has been forced to abdicate making Bertie now reluctantly King of England and his first task is to face a very public coronation ceremony.



Then the weight of leading Great Britain into conflict is thrust upon him as Britain declares war on Hitler’s Germany and the King is required to broadcast live to the nation on radio.

Now if I was King and was handed a nine minute broadcast I’d have told them to reduce it in size or face a trip to the Tower. Nine minutes... no thanks, shall we do four? Or off with your head. I'm sure that's how Queen Elizabeth I would have done it.



It is a tension filled scene but Logue is there to coach him and thankfully it is a resounding success.

It is a true story that the screenwriter David Seidler had wanted to write for some time but when he first attempted it in 1981 he was thwarted. Lionel Logue's son would not let him use his father’s diaries without permission from Buckingham Palace. Permission was given in principle but King George VI’s widow, by then commonly known as the Queen Mother, insisted that it would not be done ‘in her lifetime’. Poor Seidler then had to wait another 30 years to write his script as she went on to live to be 101.

I was very impressed with some excellent casting; everybody looked like the real people they were portraying, right down to Prime Minister’s Baldwin and Chamberlain. Even Timothy Spall was near perfect as Winston Churchill and I can't help thinking comedy whenever I see Spall.

Colin Firth gives a performance for which he is certain to be nominated for an Oscar while Helena Bonham Carter was spot on as his wife but for me, it was Geoffrey Rush at his best as Logue who stole the show.

It’s a thoroughly entertaining piece of historical cinema that gives a fascinating insight into King George VI. Not only into the struggles he had with his speech but it also paints a picture of a man who never thought he would be King but, unlike his brother, he wanted to do his duty. He wasn't meant to be King, he wasn't groomed to be King nor was he particularly suited to be King but he did it and ultimately history shows that he did it well.

The Count of Monte Cristo (2002)

This film version of ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’ is of course based on Alexander Dumas’s classic tale. My partner says it’s one of the best books she’s ever read. So it’s sure to be a rubbish film then and consequently she hated it. So I thought I best do my research as I haven’t read the book, although I may now have to. To be fair, it’s a complex book that clocks in at 50 hours and 47 minutes on audiobook, which could probably never be perfectly transposed into a two hour film but... they probably didn’t try very hard. I guess the director and scriptwriter assumed most people have never actually read the book and they’d probably be right.

Edmond Dantes (James Caviezel) is a sailor for a shipping company and is engaged to a beautiful girl with the rather racy name of Mercédès (Dagmara Dominczyk), who rather appropriately everyone is quite keen to take out for a spin.



Dantes is set up by his friend Fernand Mondego (Guy Pearce), who is narked at Dantes being named the captain of one of their company’s ships but also sees the opportunity to acquire the keys to his Mercédès. Dantes is unjustly accused of treason, imprisoned and confined to life in Château d'If, a prison on a remote island.



Once there his cell is tunnelled into by none other than Dumbledore (Richard Harris), well actually an old chap called Abbe Faria. Faria is trying to escape and they attempt to dig their way out together. They never manage it but Faria teaches Dantes many things and then on his deathbed fourteen years later tells him the whereabouts of a great treasure, which enables Dantes later to transform himself into the wealthy Count of Monte Cristo. Faria’s death also gives Dantes the means to escape.



Once free, he clashes with the crew of a pirate ship and acquires the help of one of the pirates whose life he spared. Together they make plans to take vengeance on the men who were responsible for destroying Dantes life.



Fernand and Mercédès are now husband and wife, part of Parisian highlife and have a son. Dantes rescues their son from a fake kidnapping that he himself set up, in order to endear himself to their household.

Dantes gets his revenge on everyone; Hollywood manages to fit in a few swashbuckling sword fights before our romantic adventure film ends with the traditional made up happy ending. Dantes gets his girl and even gains a son, which will be news to Dumas. Someone ought to dig him up and tell him.

This was the tenth adaptation of the book and perhaps there are better ones. Thing is, bad or not, this adaptation has made me want to read the book, so it can't all be bad.

The movie is entertaining, more so if you discard the title. I guess like most adaptations, avoid if you’ve read the book.

The Way Back

‘The Way Back’ is the story of a group of men who were imprisoned in one of Stalin’s Siberian gulags but escape and walk to safety. That’s just a mere four thousand miles over a couple of mountain ranges and across a desert.

It is based on the international bestseller, ‘The Long Walk’, which is in effect the memoirs of Slavomit Racuwicz, a Polish army officer, who himself was a prisoner in the gulag. Although since his death it has come to light that, and I’m trying not to say that he made it up but, it appears he didn’t make that journey himself and apparently based it on stories he had heard. However director Peter Weir claims to have done his research, so presumably he thinks such a journey would be possible. I’m not so sure but it makes for a captivating couple of hours cinema.

The film starts by introducing us to some of the characters inside the prison and the harsh reality of life there. The inmates are warned that the gulag itself is only part of their prison and should they feel the need to escape, nature will take its toll upon them. This prospect doesn't however put them off plotting an escape.

Key among the escapees is Janusz (Jim Sturgess), a pole who has been imprisoned for allegedly being a spy. The evidence paraded before him was his weeping wife, Janusz is convinced must have been tortured, who betrays him to his face.

The escape itself bursts out of almost nothing and the men break out into a blizzard. Among the motley band of escapees are the knife wielding psycho Valka (Colin Farrell) and a grizzled American who wishes to be referred to only as Mr Smith (Ed Harris).



The men head out across the hostile terrain, scavenging for food and water, towards Mongolia, only to discover when they get there that it too is under Soviet rule and they have to rethink their final destination.



Directorial licence also adds some female interest to an otherwise all male story. Not sure why Weir felt it needed it but I suppose Saoirse Ronan does break up the bickering between the escapees who have to make their uneasy alliance work just to survive.



A few do fall by the wayside and the ones that don’t endure a perilous journey to freedom, which continues out of Mongolia across the seemingly endless Gobi Desert where they struggle against the blazing heat and sand storms as well as a distinct lack of food and water.

They finally reach Tibet where they are faced with crossing the Himalayas in order to reach English run India. A final trek that is rushed compared with the rest of the film.



It’s a long film but thoroughly engrossing, one that has you captivated the entire time. A story of human endurance and the stark struggle for freedom. Though it’s a bit repetitive at times. You know: - mountain, desert, mountain, desert, etc but it’s all beautifully filmed and does drive home the vastness of their task but also the implausibility of it.

Then once he’s achieved his aim Janusz has to wait almost half a century for the fall of communism so that he can be reunited with his wife. Life’s a bitch.