Chasing Ice

'Chasing Ice’ is a documentary about a chap called James Balog and his Extreme Ice Survey team who go out to photograph the melting glaciers by using automatic cameras, set to take shots over a long period of time. The resulting time lapse scenes are as equally impressive as they are shocking, showing the rapid retreat of the glaciers.

The film does preach a bit about climate change and Balog has an obsession to document it. That as well as a passion for photography and a dodgy knee. He has my sympathy there. It’s a knee on which he’s had several operations. He ignores his physio too and we see him out on the ice on his crutches at one point. This along with the problems they had setting up the cameras in the harsh environments of Greenland, Alaska and Canada, make the film more interesting for me.

I suppose on the climate change front the film never really gets to grips with the issue, other than providing irrefutable photographic evidence that it exists but doesn’t prove that it is man-made. While, if it is, they don’t suggest anything to us that we can do about it. Cracking photography though.

Django Unchained

Set in the pre-Civil War Deep South, Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Django Unchained’ is a Western and the story of a slave named Django (Jamie Foxx) who becomes, well, unchained. He is set free by a German dentist turned bounty hunter Dr. King Shultz (Christoph Waltz). He needs Django’s help to identify the three guys who are his next bounty and were Django’s previous owners. 

Schultz quickly discovers that Django has all the right attributes for the bounty hunting game, basically he’s good at killing people. So they team up and Shultz takes him under his wing. Shultz though makes Django a promise, that once the winter is over, together they will rescue Django’s wife from slavery too.

Broomhilda (Kerry Washington), Django's missus, is owned by Calvin J. Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio) and works on his plantation home of Candieland. Which he is assisted in the running of by his head slave Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson), who’s somewhat of a turncoat for the anti slavery cause.

Tarantino films of course, divide opinion. If you like Tarantino, you’ll like scenes like the one with the KKK arguing for a good ten minutes about not being able to see out of the holes in their pillow case masks before one member rides off in a huff because his wife made them all and feels it’s unappreciated. Or you won’t.

You’ll like the gratuitous, over the top bloodshed. Or you won’t. 

You’ll like the prodigious use of the word nigger, which I assume he gets away with because it’s relevant to the time period but then again he’s got previous with this, having used the word in most of his films, just less often. Or you won’t.

Obviously it’s also got his other trademarks. Such as a great musical score, great acting, a character driven plot and someone losing their testicles. So you’ll like all that as well. Or you won’t.

You might even like Dicaprio, who it has to be said plays probably his best role ever and he talks Tarantino-speak like he’s done it his entire career. Or you won’t. 

It’s still good to see him shot though. You’ll like that.

So yes it’s a good film but I would say it’s not one of his cleverest and it’s a little too long. Certainly for our neighbours who had to make an awful lot of bathroom visits. The last half an hour seemed an unnecessary way of resolving things that could and should have already been resolved but perhaps Tarantino had forgotten to write himself into the script, so had to quickly fit his cameo in, as well as a bit more violence.

 

One final thought. Django is your typical deadeye movie gunman. He’s always first to the trigger and never gets shot no matter how many bullets are fired at him. He goes off on multiple killing sprees in the name of revenge, even if his victim’s association to him is tenuous. You would have thought that all this would have been on very dodgy ground considering several incidents worldwide in recent times including the most recent in Connecticut but no, apparently not. Just saying. You’ll like that. Or you won’t.

Sightseers

It’s very rare that I find a film funny but ‘Sightseers’ was murderously funny, literally. Tina (Alice Lowe) is a mummy’s girl but she steps out of her sheltered life when her new boyfriend Chris (Steve Oram) offers to show her his world, Yorkshire mainly, by caravan. She is thrilled, her mother is appalled. Her mother doesn’t approve of Chris; she doesn’t know how right she is.

So the two set off for a romantic sightseeing getaway, him supposedly for inspiration for a book he's writing, her to get over the death of her beloved terrier Poppy who met a grisly but accidental death, on the end of a knitting needle. First stop Crich Tramway Museum.

Then from there, the road trip continues to the delights of Blue John Cavern, the Ribblehead Viaduct and of course Keswick’s Pencil Museum. Whilst in the evenings their ‘erotic odyssey’ is consummated in a rocking caravan, for which Tina has knitted her own 'sexy' underwear. Yep it’s another Rom-Com.

The only problem is that Chris harbours an angry streak and a low tolerance of other people. When someone threatens to report Chris to the National Trust his response is swift, deadly and quite unsettling at first for the viewer but you soon get used to it as several folk quickly breach Chris’s low threshold for annoying habits. Some of the scenes are not for the faint hearted, particularly if you’re in charge of PR for the National Trust.

When Chris backs the caravan over someone who picked the wrong van to drop their ice cream wrapper by and subsequently has to wash the blood off the wheel arches, Tina cottons onto the fact that her new boyfriend literary ambitions are just a sideline to his serial killer ones.

She doesn’t seem unduly fazed by this discovery, declares herself his ‘muse’ and joins in; cue Soft Cell's 'Tainted Love' as the two of them leave a trail of dead bodies across several northern counties. Well it was either that or return to her overbearing mother. She even acquires herself a new dog to replace Poppy.

She does more than join in though, she takes over, which just has the effect of heightening Chris's insecurity which doesn’t aid the path of true love much and drives him into friendship with an equally weird chap who travels with a bicycle drawn ‘carapod’.

‘Sightseers’ is written by Oram and Lowe themselves both of who put in chillingly convincing performances. It’s full of understated dark humour, my favourite kind, with some of the most disturbing deaths you’ll ever see and it’s also very British.

Yes it's pulpy, doesn't really go anywhere and has only really one joke but some films are better that way. It’s also smart enough to know that once the joke has run its course its time to wind up the story, which is done with an equally blunt finale.

See this and you'll never be able to look a caravaner in the eye again. Loved it, film of the year so far... well ok, so it’s only 5th January.