Kite Runner

My partner has been really looking forward to this film. She's already read the book. The film is Kite Runner and is the story of two boys being brought up in pre-Soviet Afghanistan. Amir is of a well off family, while Hassan is the Hazara son of Amir father's servant. They become best friends and the boys fly kites together in the skies over Kabul, competing against other kites and 'cutting' them down.



Hassan will do anything to protect Amir but when Hassan is raped by other older boys, Amir is unable to reciprocate and protect him. This results in Amir thinking he has committed what his father refers to as the greatest and only crime, theft. Hassan has had his innocence stolen from him. Amir now knows he must let his friend go and manufactures a situation over a 'stolen' watch.

After seeing the boys on screen for so long, it is quite a shock when the story moves to America, as Amir and his father flee the new Communist regime. There he grows up and gets married.

Then years later he gets a call, to return home to Kabul where he has to risk his own life to find Hassan's son after Hassan himself is murdered by the newly installed Taliban. Afghanistan was first shown as a beautiful country but it is now depicted as bereft of colour, all the trees cut down by the Russians, and buildings demolished during fighting with the Taliban. A country where adulterers are now stoned in the soccer stadiums by the Taliban, who have even banned kite flying. Amongst all this he seems to find himself, rescues Hassan's son and takes him back to America.



The film was compelling and the cast were excellent, in particular the children who played Amir and Hassan, but I would have liked to have gained more insight into Afghan culture, the political situation, and life under the Russians and the Taliban. It is much less graphic than it could have been. Both with the war and in the way the crucial scene involving Hassan's rape was depicted, which just didn't come across strongly enough. There is only a small amount of violence actually shown in the film but I think more would have added to the effect. The 12A certificate was perhaps too restrictive.

Also the escape from Afghanistan was extremely implausible and descended into a typical Americanised shoot up/car chase. Apparently, according to L, this was not true to the book. For me it distracted from what was a very good film and a moving story about where 'There is a way to be good again.'

I’m Not There

One way of making a biography different is to never mention the name of the subject. Another way I suppose is to cast six different people in the lead role. This is what Todd Haynes does with tonight's film 'I’m Not There', a portrait of sorts of Bob Dylan. This was a hard review to write because I am not a Bob Dylan expert, I'm not even a fan, but here goes.
Some of names of the leads come from the inspirations in Dylan's life, so we get the poet Arthur Rimbaud (Ben Whishaw) who links the film. We get the young 'black' folk singer Woody Guthrie (Marcus Carl Franklin) indicating his early life where Dylan went around claiming to be different people, from different places and invented friendships.

Then we get his early folk career, Jack Rollins (Christian Bale), when Dylan first made his name and also became political. Julianne Moore plays Alice, who is possibly Joan Baez. Dylan though wants to move on, his band plays at a New England Jazz Festival and machine guns the audience. So Jack disappears and in his place we get Robbie Clark (Heath Ledger), Clark is an actor who played him in a film. He is the more homely face of Dylan and marries Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg), aka Sara Dylan. When their turbulent marriage ends, we get the divorce settlement being mirrored with the signing of the Vietnam ceasefire.



Meanwhile Dylan the artist, re-emerges as Jude Quinn (Cate Blanchett) but his audience feels betrayed as he shifts his sound from folk to rock. This Dylan goes on to be even more famous but continues to be misunderstood, particularly by the British TV journalist Mr. Jones which evolves into a particularly brilliant scene.



Later Dylan is reborn as Pastor John and is now signing gospel.

Finally we get him as a recluse; Billy The Kid (Richard Gere) in a Western Town called Riddle, a nod to his 1973 album (Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid). The threatened destruction of the town causes him to meet his public again.

It's a surreal film, disjointed at times but towards the end, all the different characters begin to come together. There's some top acting and throughout the music is excellent, mainly Dylan originals but also including some covers by the likes of Iggy Pop and Sonic Youth.

The films called 'I'm Not There' and he isn't. The film itself is a jigsaw where the pieces never quite fit together but this I suppose was Dylan's life. It would be out of character for Dylan to let anyone try and define his life, so he hasn't.

L thought it portrayed Dylan in a bad light but I think it depends on your opinion of him in the first place. I started indifferent and came out the cinema still feeling indifferent but I thoroughly enjoyed the two and quarter hours in between. I assume his life was just this mishmash of lies, childishness, and arrogance, alongside his undoubted musical genius. The more I think about this film and the more I read up on it, the clever I think it was.

At the start and end there are images of Dylan 'dying' and scenes of his motorcycle accident in 1966 yet he is still very much alive, and still performing. Perhaps it is saying he would rather have died, which would have embellished the mystery of the man even more.

Enchanted

I've been tempted by the good reviews of what really isn't my type of film and we go see 'Enchanted'. At least it can't possibly be as bad as the 'Golden Compass'. Made by Disney studios, the film starts in animated form, that is proper animated not CGI, in 'Andalasia' where Giselle (Amy Adams) is desperate to be rescued by her Prince Charming. The animated sequence goes on a bit but eventually Edward (James Marsden) duly turns up and saves her from a troll and consequently they are set to be married. But Edward's wicked stepmother (Susan Sarandon) does not approve and throws Giselle into a portal that leads to hell.


Hell turns out to be New York, where she climbs out of a manhole cover in full princess regalia. A pessimistic divorce lawyer (Patrick Dempsey) gives her a room for the night where she makes herself clothes out of his curtains. While he introduces her to the 'real' world, he is intrigued by Giselle's attitude towards love and her belief in living 'Happily After Ever', usually in a huge castle, which contradicts his own real life experiences and the modern day notion of getting to know someone first.




When he walks in on her taking a shower and subsequently ends up in an embarrassing clinch on top of her, with her in just a towel, just as his fiancée walks in. He finds himself resolutely dumped. Giselle helps him out by sending round a few doves and flowers, which works a treat and his fiancée forgives him for having a half-naked girl in his apartment because she trusts him. I shall remember that one. Women are strange.


Her prince follows her down to 'hell'. Where he stabs a bus after mistaking it for a monster then gets run over by cyclists in the park. I can sympathise with the cyclists, bloody pedestrians.

As Giselle enjoys the New York experience she realises that her Prince Charming is not the right man for her and instead falls for her lawyer. Of course, it all ends happily ever after, albeit after an overblown scene with a dragon. Giselle is put in to a deep sleep only to be rescue by her lawyer's 'True Loves Kiss' and they all lived happily ever after...


HELLO? This rat you've just run off with has just dumped his long-term fiancée for you, a girl who he's only known for a day or two and who crawled out of a sewer. Love lasts forever? Clearly it doesn't. His ex gets the booby prize of the dopey Prince Edward.


I went into Enchanted not expecting too much and therefore was not disappointed. It was actually better than I had expected, although very cheesy and full of clichés. Timothy Spall does a good turn as the henchman Nathaniel, and an animated chipmunk called Pip puts in a star performance. Another fluffy bunny of a movie.

Notes On A Scandal

Based on Zoe Heller's novel 'Notes On A Scandal' is the tale of two seemingly sophisticated women who's lives become entwined but then dramatically unravel, proving themselves to be anything but sophisticated.


Judi Dench plays Barbara Covett (note the name), who is a well respected schoolmarm but also a lonely spinster. Cate Blanchett plays Sheba Hart, the raw new totty in the art room. Sheba proves herself not to just be inexperienced as a teacher but also in life. She is a teacher, a wife, and a mother, who is out of her depth in all three and for someone her age, thirty-something, she is astonishingly naïve. She is just begging for someone to take her under their wing. Barbara is eager to oblige and quickly moves into the flighty newcomers life.


Dench voice-overs the film as her character scribbles in her diary, adds gold stars, and makes bitter observations about the world. The film moves at a fast pace and doesn't keep you hanging around while it builds the scene. Sheba starts giving a young pupil after school art tuition but he quickly makes it obvious to her that he can think of better things to do with her after hours. Her attempts to repel him are not convincing and he senses that Ms Hart could be putty in his hands. Of this, he is not wrong.


She seems cast under his spell, caught like a rabbit-in-the-headlights and falls for the youthful passion that he dangles before her. Although even he must have been surprised at just how free and easy she is. So they embark on a tawdry and adulterous affair, generally carried out down by the railway line. Yes I know, here we go again, another film about married women who can’t keep their loins in check.




When they upgrade from the railway line to the art room, Barbara stumbles upon what's going down, but promises not to tell for the sake of all, as long as she ends the relationship. Sheba though is weak and fails to give up her toy boy. She finds herself addicted and simply can't stop herself digging a deeper hole to throw herself in to.

Meanwhile Barbara installs herself as a regular feature in Sheba's life and family, who consist of her much older husband, played by the excellent Bill Nighy, who left his wife and children for the younger Sheba and her two children who are of similar ages to her lover, a son with Down's syndrome and a daughter with her own love troubles.

Barbara herself has skeletons in the closet and they slowly come out to play. We come to understand that Barbara has designs on Sheba, after another teacher spurned her and fled her job the previous year. Both characters at times get your sympathy but equally you start to feel pissed off with them but before you get too one-way or the other, something else happens and the story moves on.

When Sheba is torn impossibly between her family and her friendship with Barbara, she chooses her family. So Barbara betrays her secret to the school and everything in Sheba's life falls spectacularly apart as the police and the media get involved.


It's a gripping, intelligent film with a raw nastiness to it and which has so many layers to it. You simply hang on every scene and every word. It's a film about predatory behaviour but who exactly is preying upon whom. It's short but packs more into it’s running time than most films of twice the length. Excellent script by Patrick Marber of Closer fame. Another great English film with superb performances all round.

Golden Compass

In the evening we go for our weekly film. You can tell it's getting near XXXXXmas as there's not a lot on, so we see the Golden Compass. I'm really not sure I can bear (that's almost a pun by the way) to review this. I did see a review on the internet entitled the 'Golden Turd' and nearly just put up a link to that but here goes...

The story surrounds a very uncharismatic young girl called Lyra, not Lycra as I first thought, who is given a golden compass to help her find a kidnapped friend. This leads to her ending up in an airship with Nicole Kidman, which is traumatic enough for starters, but Kidman is a weirdo who hates it when girls wear their handbags in the house? Then we get 'introduced; to loads of other characters, who mutter about 'dust' and 'intercision' without really convincing even themselves that they know what they're taking about. The only cool bit is that all the characters have daemons, which are animals that are attached to them which represent their souls. These daemons are CGI generated cats, birds, dogs or even tigers. Kidman gets a monkey, enough said. Is it only me that thinks CGI is now so last century? Let's get back to real animals, much cuter.

The funniest bit of the film was when a dog daemon fell off a rooftop but no one else laughed. Although plenty of people laughed at other random points and I couldn't really see why, or was it just because of the bad acting or senseless plot.

Daniel Craig turns up, does a touch of James Bond, for all of about ten minutes, and then disappears again. He isn't the only one; several characters turn up, do a one scene, and vanish. This, unfortunately, isn't true of Kidman, who receives far too much screen time.

Then suddenly they're all tramping off to North Pole because the compass tells them to, to look for the ring, or is that another story? The movie also borrows all the bad bits from Harry Potter, Narnia etc too. There our heroine befriends a giant polar bear, who I think is drunk. I'm trying to get to sleep at this point but for some reason it's not working, it was probably the armoured polar beer fight that disturbed me.



The film is adapted from the Phillip Pullman novel, which I haven't read but seemingly most people who have are appalled at the butchering of the book, apparently the film even ends four chapters back from the end of the book. It was also supposed to be story for teenagers but it appears to have been blatantly dumbed down and aimed at younger kids, which even insults their intelligence. The books have been criticized for being a bit controversial on some religious topics but that must have been dropped from the film or else I dozed through that bit.

Overall a confusing, poorly acted, badly directed mish-mash of a film. Apparently two sequels are due. Oh dear.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

Tonight’s film is long in title and long in length ‘The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford’. Which actually 'does what is says on the tin' and gives away the plot in its title.

I think part of the idea of the film is to get us better acquainted with Jesse James. The legend suggests he was a Robin Hood type character targeting the rich banks and railroads. The film says otherwise and paints him more as a moody ruffian. The story opens with what proved to be his last train robbery at Blue Cut. After the robbery, he attempts to retire. James is sick of being on the run with his family, even his children don't know his real name, for fear of capture.



Most of James's usual gang are no longer with him, all either jailed or dead, so for this job he has recruited a new one. One of which is Robert Ford. Ford idolises James but is also in fear of him as he quickly learns that the murderous train-robbers are no Robin Hood's. After helping James move his family to their latest new safe location, Ford stays on as a house guest.



Meanwhile the rest of the gang grow restless waiting for word of their next job. James begins to fear them turning him in or killing him in exchange for their own safety and the reward money. So he decides to get rid of those that may be conspiring against him. Unfortunately the film doesn't quite let you a feel for who these characters are before they disappear. After a while he seems to give up and begins to act like a man who knows the end is coming but no longer has the will to try and avoid it.

When the Sheriff enlists Ford to help him get James, Ford assumes that this will lead to him becoming a hero. So Ford cowardly shoots James in the back. When it happens, it's all a bit of a surprise because after waiting so long for it to happen, it is all over so quickly.

Ford though is mistaken about becoming a hero instead he is met with disrespect and called the biggest coward in history whilst James's star just grows brighter. Then another man gets the idea that Robert had; to murder someone famous to be remembered and this second murder ends Robert Ford's life too.

I wasn't sure what to make of the film. The word ‘epic’ springs to mind. There's some unforgettable imagery, stunning shots of floating clouds, desolate landscapes, smoke, snow, rain. It’s more art than movie.

The story itself, is a complex tale of betrayal, paranoia, suspicion, and often-disturbing acts of violence. It works in that respect because you do get a sense of the fear that they all feel, knowing that around any corner they could get shot.

Then there are the intense performances, some superb acting. Brad Pitt is excellent as the brooding, tortured mess that is Jessie James. Casey Affleck too is good as Robert Ford.

Unfortunately everything unfolds at a slow, methodical almost snails' pace in what is a very long film. Although apparently the directors original cut was near on four hours but the studio thankfully made him trim it a bit. It is a western without action. An oldish couple in front of us leave early although his wife clearly nagged him into it.

I am tired before we arrive and I rest my eyes a little during the adverts but yes I do doze off at some of the slower parts of the film.