Favourite Films Of 2009

My favourite ten films of the past year.

10. Marley And Me (April)



I hate films about dogs, they're all designed to make grown men cry and this was no exception.

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9. Fish Tank (September)



Excellent gritty drama set on an Essex housing estate.

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8. A Serious Man (December)



Shock horror. The Coen's only at number 8. Well I'm still not sure I understood this film at all, but I'm sure it must have been good.

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7. The Damned United (March)



An inaccurate history lesson but still probably the best film about football ever made.

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6. The Reader (January)



Not as good as it should have been and Kate Winslet isn't as as good as she thinks she is but still a intriguing tale.

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5. OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies (January)



This James Bond parody was one of many films that I was dragged to this year. Loved it.

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4. Slumdog Millionaire (January)



Feel good movie of the year apparently, bloody depressing if you ask me.

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3. The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button (February)



Brad Pitt again impresses as he lives life in reverse but still experiences all life's usual ups and downs.

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2. Let The Right One In (April)



A great film that leaves you both repulsed and fascinated at the same time.

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1. Inglorius Basterds (August)



Tarantino does the war, as only Tarantino can.

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Humpday

‘Humpday’ is about a guy called Ben (Mark Duplass), who has settled down into what he describes as the ‘white picket fence’ lifestyle of marriage with his attractive young wife Anna (Alycia Delmore). Perhaps the only ingredient they are missing is a child but they’re working on that.

What they probably didn’t need was for Ben’s old college buddy Andrew (Joshua Leonard) to show up, out of the blue, on their doorstep in the middle of the night. Andrew has been away travelling, he sees himself as a bit of a ‘Kerouac’, and consequently it's been a long time since they’ve seen each other. They immediately drop back into a ‘two lads together’ type situation.

The following night, Andrew ends up at a party thrown by a girl he just happened to meet and he invites Ben over to join him. After drinking too much alcohol and smoking too much dope, they end up agreeing to make a short film for ‘HumpFest’, the local amateur pornography festival. Their idea is to produce something truly unique, a film of two straight guys having gay sex and they propose to star in it themselves. The idea being that it would not be gay, it would be beyond gay and it would not porn, it would be art...

Ben gets home to find that his night has gotten in the way of the baby making process much to Anna’s frustration. His next problem is how he’s going to square his new acting career with her. This is the best part of the film, as Ben spectacularly fails to tell Anna his plans and then Andrew spills the beans because he assumes Ben has told her. Problem is from here, the film goes downhill.

In the cold light of day, both Andrew and Ben regret what they have agreed to but neither will back down. Both feel they have something to prove. Ben that he’s not as ‘white picket fence’ as Andrew thinks he is and Andrew that perhaps he’s no ‘Kerouac’.

The ‘porn shoot’ in a hotel room is long and drawn out, we spend half an hour or so with the guys in that room, when a few minutes would have done because in the end, they don’t go through with it. They quickly realise their idea is going nowhere, the audience has already realised this fact but the director just didn’t seem to want to give it up and milked it for all it was worth. You end up just willing it all to end.



The film comes to a believable conclusion but takes an inordinate amount of time getting there. It’s also immensely unsatisfying when it ends there. I for one would have liked to have seen Anna’s reaction to what they did or rather didn’t do, and would she have believed them?

A Serious Man

We don’t go on the park this morning because despite some heavy rain dog training this afternoon is on. At which MD is hopeless, although in his defence I suppose he has had a few weeks off and also he gets into a fight, which in his defence, I would say wasn’t really his fault. I’m always sticking up for that dog.

Meanwhile L is out running and cycling. I’ve done a bit of maintenance on her bike for her, swapping her back to bog standard flat pedals and reassembled her bike computer for her, putting back the parts I had stolen to fix mine. When she gets back after an hour’s cycle she tells me she’s done a grand total of 0.38km. Ah, she likes to take it steady but not that steady. I think I may have reassembled it wrong.

Later we’re at the cinema only to find that our membership cards have expired. So we have to fork out on renewal fees. The upside is our first two films are free, so tonight’s is a freebie and what a weird one it is. Then again it is the new Coen Brothers’ film, so what did we expect.

‘A Serious Man’ is clearly a dig at the lives and faith of a Jewish community in late 1960s America but of course if you don't know a whole lot about the Jewish faith then you could be stumbling from the off.

Just to make sure you are stumbling from the off, the film opens with a possibly irrelevant, possibly not, prologue set a century or two earlier and spoken all in subtitled Yiddish. In it a woman stabs an old man because she thinks he's a dybbuk, that’s a dead person possessed by an evil spirit. She’s wrong because the old man starts to bleed before getting up and wandering off into the snow outside. Does this action perhaps lead to a curse being bestowed up on someone? There’s no way of knowing for sure.

Could this someone be Larry Gopnik, a physics professor who is the main focus of this story? Larry is hoping for a life long tenure from his University but things are slowly starting to go wrong for him. Not least of which is an anonymous letter writer trying to derail the tenure.

On top of this his family life in comfortable suburbia is rocked when his wife informs him that their marriage is over and she wants to marry someone else. This someone else is, inexplicably, Sy Ableman, supposedly a pillar stone of the local community but in reality a patronizing old git. Meanwhile his kids are proving to be even more of a handful than kids are supposed to be. His son likes to dabble in marijuana and is consequently in debt to the school bully, is running up debts on an account with a record club at his Father’s unwilling expense whilst generally being more concerned about the poor reception on the TV than his studies.



Then there’s Larry’s daughter, who is saving up for a nose job with money straight out of Larry’s wallet and spending the rest of her time washing her hair, that is when she can get in the bathroom. Larry brother is occupying the bathroom, when he’s not sleeping on the coach, bringing to the family his medical, social and gambling problems. Larry is incredibly hopeless in the face of all this adversity and his wife soon banishes both him and his brother to the Jolly Roger Motel.

At least this gets him away from his goy (non-Jew) neighbour who is encroaching on Larry’s garden with his building plans but not from the Korean student who is pushing envelopes of cash onto Larry to persuade him to upgrade the F he gave him, while simultaneously threatening to sue him for defamation...

Now let’s just stop right there shall we. If you’ve broken cinema rules and not turned your phone off, then perhaps you ought to fire up Google right now. Google ‘Schrödinger's cat’, which is something we see Larry teaching to his physics students. Do it now, rather than afterwards like I had to.

Schrödinger's rather unpleasant, and hopefully theoretical, experiment consists of a live cat, a vial of Hydrogen Cyanide and a small amount of radioactive substance all together in the same box. If even a single atom of the radioactive substance decays, a relay mechanism will break the vial with a hammer and the cat will die. The point of it all is that no one can know what is happening in the box without looking inside it. Therefore according to the laws of quantum physics, the cat must be assumed to be in a superposition of states, e.g. both dead and alive at the same time. It is only when someone opens the box that they can find out the condition of the cat.



The F grade student and his father have grasped the theory of Schrödinger's cat, if not the maths of it, which is why he got an F. Like the cat, their bribe is seemingly alive and dead at the same time until Larry decides what action he is going to take. This film is possibly far too deep for its own good.



So, Larry, along with us (the audience), is slowly going out of his mind, particularly as a mathematician he’s used to things adding up, and he goes off to consult with the local Rabbis to find out just what he’s done to upset Hashem (God).

A junior rabbi tells him 'things aren’t so bad' and cites the car park as proof of the wonders of God. Larry isn’t impressed.

A more experienced rabbi rambles on for ages about a dentist who desperately tried to find the meaning of the Hebrew words 'Help Me’ that he found engraved on the inside of a goy patient's teeth but he finds no meaning. Larry isn’t impressed. Perhaps the rabbi is telling Larry he’s better off not worrying about it, sometimes there are no reasons for things that happen in life. Perhaps the Coen brothers are telling us we’re better off not worrying about trying to find meaning in this film.

The only person in the film who threatens to come up any answers is the lawyer enlisted to solve the problems Larry is having with his neighbours encroachment but the lawyer drops down dead just as he’s about to deliver up his findings.

The most senior rabbi of all, Rabbi Marshak, won't even see Larry. He’s seemingly too busy listening to a transistor radio confiscated from Danny, Larry’s son. This, after Danny’s Bar Mitzvah to which Danny turns up stoned, is returned to him by Rabbi Marshak.

So the story rambles and roams all over the place and goes nowhere and everywhere. This isn't unusual in a Coen's film but usually the journey to nowhere is a bit more exceptional than this or perhaps you just needed to be Jewish. It has the usual dark comedy laughs but it’s certainly not hilarious. It all makes for a very strange and challenging film.

Folk in the know say the film is a retelling of the book of Job from the Hebrew Bible, in which God and Satan bet on whether Job will remain faithful as Satan makes life as uncomfortable for Job as he can. Apparently the three consultations, even the whirlwind that comes at the end, it’s all in there. Yep, this film is definitely far too deep for its own good.

So does Larry remain faithful? Well so far he has, unlike Sy Ableman who was attempting to take another man’s wife. Suddenly God seems to get even with Sy and he dies in a road accident, coincidentally the same road accident that Larry is involved in, but he escapes unhurt.

Finally Larry cracks. He gives into temptation with the Jewish woman next door who sunbathes nude and invites Larry to ‘take advantage of the new freedoms’. Then he rubs out the Korean’s F grade... and the cat is dead. Then it just ends, in Coens style, with a ‘come see me’ call from his Doctor and a whirlwind approaching his Son’s school.



This is probably one of those films that grow on you. In fact the more L and I discuss it and the more I Google it, the more I like it but basically it helps if you know a bit about quantum physics, a lot about the Hebrew bible and oh, perhaps a bit of familiarity with the music of Jefferson Airplane.

Katalin Varga

‘Katalin Varga’ is set in ‘upbeat’ Transylvania, Romania.

Katalin lives in a remote Transylvanian village with her husband and her son. However her husband has found out her big secret and throws her out. So Katalin, together with her 10-year-old, take to the road on a horse drawn cart.



She decides to track down a chap called Gergely, a man who was an accessory when she was raped 10 years ago. A rape that produced her Son. She extracts out of him where she might find her actual assailant before she bludgeons him to death with a rock.

When she finds the man, Antal, but both he and his wife are very friendly towards her. They take both her and her son in. We find out that they have been unable to produce children of their own but they don’t know which of them is at fault. Katalin has a pretty good idea.



She recounts her whole story to them when she is taken on a boat trip by the couple, although she omits names. Katalin has clearly come to kill Antal but things take a twist when his wife works it out. Then to complicate matters further, Katalin herself is being pursued by the brother of the first man she killed, in an act of counter revenge.



It’s a dark movie, in terms of mood as well as subject matter and quite brutal too when the violence comes but it was also at times difficult to follow and to fully understand people motives. This was a shame because the story had potential. I mean, why wait for 10 years if it was all so important to her. Why come to kill them, wouldn’t some other form of retribution had been better? Throughout the film I never felt like I was rooting for her. The film ends with two more deaths, neither of which particularly added up to me, but still, not bad though and it certainly scores points for being gloomy.

Fish Tank

‘Fish Tank’ is one of those ‘kitchen sink’ dramas, a bit like the ones Shane Meadows or Mike Leigh like to make, complete with hand-held camera work. This one is set somewhere on the urban wasteland of a housing estate in Essex and is rather good, if you like the sort of gritty drama where everyone and everything is on a downward spiral.



Fifteen-year-old Mia (played with aplomb by a total newcomer Katie Jarvis) has been kicked out of school, we don’t know precisely why but we guess Mia is no good. This is drummed into us early on, in a blur of scenes around the estate. She’s your typical stroppy teenager but with added anger and extra lip. She’s a bit of a loner and seems to be purely biding her time until her mother packs her off into care. She spends her days drinking and practising dance moves in the empty flat upstairs, a flat that she’s broken into. She scowls at the other kids in the street, she thinks she’s better than them, both at life and at dancing. But is she?



The mother (Kierston Wareing), like her Daughter, often has a bottle in her hand. She has clearly failed Mia and herself, consequently there doesn’t seem to be much love between them and certainly no sign of any parenting. At times she seems less mature than her Daughter, as she trowels on the make-up, dons the bleach blonde look and goes in search of conquests down the local pub.

One such conquest, an Irish bit of charm called Connor (Michael Fassbender), wander out of her mother’s bedroom into their kitchen one morning and crosses swords with Mia. Mia puts the barriers up but there’s an immediate, if uneasy, magnetism between them, which is clearly going to lead to one thing. Like a lot of the film, you are unsurprised at what happens but all the same gripped by the journey there.



The film makes you wait for each outcome and tension builds every time Mia and Connor are on screen together. Mia visits him at work, asks his advice when she gets an audition at a dubious local club and spies on him in action in her mother’s bedroom. We don’t know where Mia’s father is in all this. Is Connor perhaps a similar ‘father figure’ that she couldn't help but be drawn to? Things are not always explained, this is not an A to B plot film.

Then one night all three of them are the worse for the alcohol and, with the mother conveniently crashed out, the inevitable happens. After which it all blows up and he returns to his real family. Yep, he has a wife and Daughter elsewhere. Mia follows him and what follows is an uneasy kidnap scene as she absconds with and nearly drowns (accidentally) his young daughter.



The film is fleshed out with a sub-plot about a local gipsy (Harry Treadaway) and his white horse, with whom Mia eventually runs off into the sunset. That’s the lad, not the horse. Although she tried that as well. Then there's her sister, the equally neglected, Tyler, who provides some light entertainment with some great lines.

I assume the title, ‘Fish Tank’, implies that we are looking in at their lives but it could equally apply to Mia, being on the inside, looking out, and longing for something different.

The characterisation is terrific, believable, and the acting equally so. The film is always interesting and edgy with it. Katie Jarvis turns in an excellent performances but all the cast are excellent.

(500) Days Of Summer

Before watching (500) Days Of Summer, I suspected that the film was probably just another Rom-com in an ill fitting disguise. Although the trailers claim ‘this is not a love story’, it probably is. It's apparently a story of ‘Boy meets girl. Boy falls in love. Girl doesn't.’ They never made a film about that when it happened to me; on any of the numerous occasions.

Tom Hansen (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) has failed in his attempts to become an architect and instead works for a greeting card company, writing those awful inside bits of romantic propaganda. He is looking back, not so fondly, over the 500 days that he knew a girl called Summer Finn (Zooey Deschanel), the ‘summer’ of the title.

Each scene is introduced by a caption saying which of the 500 days it relates to but this is not done in order. In fact we start at the end and then flit back and forth. Which means the plot is dispensed with immediately by telling you how it all ends.

From the moment Summer walked into his office as the new admin girl, he apparently knew she was ‘the one’ he was going to spend the rest of his life with. This immediately makes him very different from most men. A unique sort of guy, one who craves commitment. Girls do the ‘love at first sight’ sort of thing, boys don’t. Girls fall instantly in love; boys fall instantly in lust and then kind of get their head around the ‘love’ thing later. This, I think, is the whole point of the film, which promised a reversal of the normal male-female roles but I just don’t think it worked.



Tom plays it cool and she makes all the running, being chatty in the lift when she finds out he is a Smiths fan. Then at a company karaoke evening, a colleague lets slip Tom's feelings for her but he misses this golden opportunity and it is left to Summer again to make the running, as she snogs him at the photocopier the next day.

Summer makes it clear that she isn't looking for anything serious, doesn't want a relationship and just wants to be friends. If a guy was doing this, he wouldn’t admit it, it would harm his chances. Then she pursues him anyway. They go out and when he takes her back to his place, he has to extract himself from their clinch on the bed to go to the bathroom, seemingly needing time to think through this ‘just friends, we’re not having a relationship’ thing, not understanding at all why ‘his friend’ is seducing him on his bed. Is that how a girl would react? Maybe, but you just want to shout at him to stop over analysing and just go with the flow. When he returns she is naked. Of course this is most guys’ fantasy, an attractive female friend with ‘benefits’.



Summer is the sort of girl who will watch a porn movie with her man, say 'that looks achievable' before trying it out in the shower. Most men would kill for a girl like that. The film is ninety minutes of Summer jumping into bed with him, all the while being totally upfront about not wanting a relationship. So just what was his problem? Whether he believes her or not, get out or enjoy the ride. Every boy knows a girl like Summer, who they want but can't have. Yet he got the gig, most of us don’t.

He skips out of the apartment the next morning, cue cheesy dance number to a bit of ‘Hall and Oates’. ‘Hall and Oates’ apart, the soundtrack is probably one of the best things about the film, featuring songs from the Pixies, the Doves, Black Lips, Regina Spektor, Temper Trap and of course the Smiths.

They develop a typical office relationship, spend a lot of time together, have a lot of fun and seemingly grow closer and closer. Which if it’s supposed to be a film about the reversal of the bad boy-good girl roles is wrong. She’s just not malicious at all. She needs to treat him like dirt, not call him, use him like an unscrupulous guy would and perhaps even try to get off with his friends. It’s not brash or bold enough in that way. In fact the film gives us the impression that Summer very obviously does like Tom and the attraction between them comes over as very real. They become more than just friends. She doesn't want to label things but he thinks that they're in a relationship because, well they are. It's a film about an argument about terminology and it becomes just another boy meets girl story. If this was supposed to turns the genre on its head, then once it had done so, it toppled back over and fell on its back.



Later after she dumps him following a realisation that comes after she interpreted the ending of the ‘The Graduate’ as sad and he didn’t, they meet up again at a colleagues wedding and she catches the bouquet, signifying that she is next. Yet when she invites him to a party at her place, Tom finds out that it is not to be with him. The girl who didn't want to be anyone's girlfriend is now engaged to someone else.

The film had potential and a clever idea but never got there, at least not for me. Part of it was role-reversal and part of it wasn’t, which just left me confused and frustrated with both of them. It offered a few good lines and a few clever scenes but not enough and far too many clichés. I daren’t mentioned the precocious younger sister or his seemingly pointless friends which helped to drag it down.

We don’t even get an unhappy ending. The film ends with Tom at a job interview as he returns to architecture. His rival for the job, a girl, claims to recognise him from a local bar. They agree to meet for a coffee afterwards. Her name is Autumn. Oh dear. So now it’s Day 1 of Autumn. This will be an interesting start to a new relationship knowing one of them beat the other to the job. I wonder if they had to subtitle that for the American audience to explain what Autumn was.

Moving swiftly on.

Inglorious Basterds

I always look forward to a Tarantino, although you’re never sure which Tarantino is going to show up. As it happens, we get a pretty good one tonight.

The film is set during World War Two in Nazi occupied France and is played out sort of like a western. The opening ‘chapter’, as the film calls them, sets a pattern that the rest of the film will follow.

SS Colonel Hans Landa (Christian Waltz), the 'Jew Hunter', is at the farmhouse of Perrier LaPadite (Denis Menochet), a local farmer, who is suspected of sheltering a neighbouring Jewish family. The tension builds during the scene as Landa interrogates the farmer with built in German efficiency. Landa is the ‘good cop-bad cop’ all in one, polite friendly official one minute, chilling evil bastard the next.



This is one of those big Tarantino dialogue scenes and during it you're never quite sure what’s going to happen next. The masterstroke here is that we all know what happened in the war and how that turned out but we’re now in a Tarantino parallel universe where he's prepared to take liberties with history. This is a film all about revenge, where he wants to put the boot on the other foot, rewrite history, and give the Jews a chance to get their own back. So anything can happen.

On this occasion, what probably would have happened happened, and the farmer sacrifices the family for his own survival. Only one member of the family, the teenage Shosanna, survives and manages to get away.

Then we finally get to meet the eponymous Basterds. They are a kind of Jewish Dirty Dozen with Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) at their helm. They have arrived in France with revenge on their minds and are intent on brutally killing and scalping as many Nazi's as they can get their hands on. They take immense pleasure in this project, especially baseball bat wielding Eli Roth with his own trademark style of retribution, as they give the Nazi’s a taste of their own inhumanity.



The only downside to the Basterds is that we don’t see enough of them and their crazed brand of vengeance because the film quickly moves back to Shosanna (Melanie Laurents), who is also plotting revenge. She seems to have fallen on her feet and has ‘inherited’ a cinema from an ‘Aunt’ and ‘Uncle’, improbable though this may seem. I'm as suspicious as Landa on that one. When German war hero Fredrick Zoller gives her the eye she shuns him but when he persists in his attention she finds herself in the situation where her cinema is selected for the première of a film paying tribute to Zoller's heroics, also starring him. Equally improbable is that all the Third Reich's highest ranking officers, even Hitler, will be attending. For this reason, the première also catches the eye of the Basterds, who see it as an opportunity to bring about an early end to the war. Cue Mike Meyers, who pops up as the Allies send a film critic turned spy (Michael Fassbender) over to help and David Bowie’s ‘Cat People (Putting Out Fire)’ is used to dramatic effect as the two fractions prepare their different plans for destroying the cinema with all inside, and as one of many nods to other films.



'Inglourious Basterds' is a collection of long scenes, loosely connected to each other, which kind of come together but the film's two similar plots never actually meet in the middle. Which I assume is very deliberate, I think he's been learning or unlearning from the Coen Brothers, depending on your point of view.

It’s been said that some of the scenes drag on, I didn't think that at all. They all stay interesting despite their length. Occasionally deeply serious, at other times humorous and you wonder whether you're allowed to laugh or not. Overall it all has a nice pace to it and the two and half hours simply fly by.

A word about Christoph Waltz, who probably stole the show in a film that contained many impressive performances. Throughout the film Tarantino made use of English, German, French and even a bit of Italian and Waltz acted in all three, as well as playing the part of Landa brilliantly. Brad Pitt’s performance is also top draw (again), all the way from his minimalist Italian to his interesting line in forehead carving. I really think I’m becoming a Pitt fan? Another one to single out is Melanie Laurents who easily upstages Tarantino's hailed new muse Diane Kruger.



Certainly one of the best films I've seen this year and I haven't even mentioned the ending.

The Time Traveller’s Wife

I read a synopsis of ‘The Time Traveller’s Wife’ last week and it turns out it’s one of those stories that I so love... backwards... and then forwards... and then backwards again... The complexity of it means that I’d probably be lost before the end of the opening titles but I loved the general idea of it.

In the end though I needn’t have worried because the studio has done a bit of dumbing down of the story, which meant I didn’t get lost at all but the movie clearly suffered at the hands of this tampering.

At the start we see Henry, the time travelling librarian, at the age of six in a car with his mother. The car gets shunted and this triggers Henry into a time jump, his first. Seconds later, he is back in the present but standing at the road side as the car driven by his mother crashes into a lorry.

His elder self appears alongside him to comfort him and to reassure him about all this time jump malarkey. Henry has a rare genetic anomaly that causes him to live his life on a shifting timeline, involuntarily jumping back and forth through time. He can’t control it and has no idea when he’s going to travel or where to, except that it often seems to be triggered by stress, and that he usually travels to places related to his life, just at a different time. This could of course all just be a great ruse and an excuse for nipping down the pub when his misses isn’t looking but we’ll give him the benefit of the doubt. A slight inconvenience is that he never gets to take anything with him and so arrives stark naked, meaning that his first task is always finding something to wear.

In the next scene, the grown up Henry (Eric Bana) is at work in the library when he is approached by Clare (Rachel McAdams). He’s never met her before but this babe declares undying love for him. No never happened to me either. He’s oddly reluctant about her offer of dinner. Just get in there mate, don’t worry about the detail, just nod in the right places and go along with it. To his credit, his reluctant seems to have evaporated by the time she talks herself into his apartment and takes her clothes off.

Clare claims to have known him all her life because he has been visiting during her childhood and teenage years from the future but because he isn’t in the future yet, he doesn’t know that. Now I’m not sure how it’s handled in the book but we’ve just been given 90% of the plot in the first ten minutes...

Then we get flashbacks to when Henry visited her in the past but what we don’t get to see enough of is the progression of their relationship. What caused Clare, as a young girl, to fall so madly in love with him? She just seemed to believe that they were destined to be together and it was so inevitable that she never bothered to doubt it. It’s like chunks of the story have been cut out and it doesn’t help you to relate to the characters.



It’s the same with other characters. Henry’s father drifts into the story at one stage and there’s an obviously been some history there and there’s a story to be told but it never happens and his father disappears again.

The other 10% of the plot is revealed not long later when we find out that Henry dies at a young age. So that leaves us with no suspense left at all, leaving us with basically just a rom-com.

They get married, of course, which Henry nearly misses by dematerializing just before his bride walks down the aisle. Conveniently, when he time jumps he usually seems to pop straight back, although having aged or un-aged. Several sticky situations, like the one at the wedding, were avoided which could have added to the plot but equally might have ensured we ended up with an unpalatable slapstick comedy instead.



There's only one moment where he leaves for a long period of time, which causes an argument but the rest of the time it’s just played as a bit of an inconvenience, like he was diabetic or had a lisp or something like that. You would have thought his time travelling would have caused a lot more grief for everyone but you just don’t get that impression.

In fact very few people seem to notice his disappearances and reappearances or his random ageing and un-ageing, those that do just accept it, but then the makeup department seemed to simply rely on you counting the grey hairs on his head to gauge his age. It didn’t work. This was no Benjamin Button on that front, it was almost impossible to distinguish whether he was a younger or older.

They try for a baby and Clare easily gets pregnant, time and time again, each time the baby time-travels out of the womb and Clare risks bleeding to death but I’ve made that sound more dramatic than it was. Henry decides he’s not going to put her through another pregnancy and has a vasectomy. Undeterred, Clare slopes off to meet a younger pre-vasectomy version of Henry who has time travelled forward to the present and shags him in a parking lot. She falls pregnant again and this one goes full turn. Bingo, time travelling Daughter is born.



It’s a film that seems in a rush to tell its story and consequently doesn’t, it trips over itself on occasion and unnecessarily so because at only an hour and forty minutes, they had time to spare to flesh out the full story, which I’m sure is in there somewhere.

Apparently in the book, two of the things that keep Henry in the present are running and sex, as both these activities relieve his stresses. As a big fan of both, I was sad to see these aspects overlooked. He also has to avoid alcohol but it was never really explained why. Another good stress reliever surely?

What we have in the end is another film about a couple who face adversity due to their circumstances but in the end, of course, love wins through, except this has a bit of time travel in it. Apparently the book isn't as mushy.

So a pleasant enough film but incredibly disappointing. It wasn’t a film that needed too much dissecting in the pub afterwards.

Harry Potter And The Half Blood Prince

It’s almost two years to the day since I saw the last Harry Potter film. After that film I blogged that I didn’t feel qualified to review a Harry Potter. I hadn't read any of the books then, and I still haven’t, so I have found the films all a bit confusing. I reckon I could easily get lost in this one too.

This film though turned out to be more engaging to me than most of the Potter films have been and miles better than the last film. Book purists, and yes I’m usually one of them, will I’m sure argue that too many sub-plots and characters were left out and that even the odd scene appeared that shouldn’t have been there but, this version, stripped down it may have been, suited me better. It left you needing to know less about what had come before or even after in the series.

Most of the baffling bits came early but even I could follow the Millennium Bridge being destroyed by the Death Eaters, so it's no wonder Harry is reluctant to return to Hogwarts, where security has been tightened to keep those Death Eaters out for his sixth year and it’s not just because he’s chosen the wrong ‘A’ level subjects. That old geezer Dumbledor persuades him to go back and Harry doesn’t seem too bothered that he has to stand up the girl he’d just chatted up at the tube station. Why Harry, why? Oh yes, of course, there’s always Ginny Weasley.

The baffling bits give way to a more human story. Ron gets to become Gryffindor's number one, as in their Quidditch goalie, thanks to Harry boosting his confidence by pretending to give him a luck potion. Good job he didn’t, statutory two year ban for drug cheats these days.



Ron's success pulls the babes; well it pulls Lavender Brown. Hermione is thrilled for them, not. Meanwhile Harry continues to have the hots for Ginny. Which is hardly surprising when she meets him in her dressing gown and then when she got down on her knees in front of him we all held our breath in the cinema... and then she tied his shoelaces.



There’s perhaps too much of the plot concerned with the vagaries of young love, Oh please someone bang all their heads together, but it lightened the darkness of the rest of it. The dark parts of the film certainly were dark and moody, also just like a teenager.

I even follow the clever bit about the tampered memory of Horace Slughorn, (see I have been listening) although isn’t that something we all do, all the time. Jim Broadbent as Slughorn the potions teacher would probably have stolen the show, had it not been for the ever excellent Alan Rickman as Snape. Harry uses the tried and tested routine of getting Slughorn drunk, with the help of Hagrid to jog his memory and fill in the blankety blanks.



Of course it all lost me a bit again at the end with all this talk of Horcruxes but Wikipedia put me straight later.

So not a bad film although I notice with each one they use more and more CGI in the sets whereas I’m sure the earlier films were basically set in real castles. They’ll probably CGI the cast next, so they can keep making films beyond the last book. A CGI Helena Bonham Carter could possibly be even scarier than the real thing, and she’s pretty scary already as the mightily strange Bellatrix Lestrange.

The lack of an ending makes it obvious there’s more to come... but of course you knew that already.

Il y a longtemps que je t'aime (I loved you so long)

‘Il y a longtemps que je t'aime’ better known as ‘I loved you so long’ features Kristen Scott Thomas speaking French. She plays Juliette Fontaine, just out of prison after fifteen years inside. Juliette is taken under the wing of her younger sister Léa, who goes out of her way to make her feel part of her family. Juliette seems a bit unnerved with this unexpected goodwill and at first, barely speaks at all and never mentions her life inside or what took her there. Whatever happened seems to weigh heavy on her and everyone skirting around the subject makes it worse.

She goes through the motions with a social worker and with her parole officer. An odd chap, who is obsessed with visiting the Orinoco that is until we are told that he inexplicably put a gun in his mouth and shot himself. She tries to get a job, not easy when the employers want to know why she’d been in jail but eventually she prevails. Getting back into something else she’s taken a sabbatical from for fifteen years proves a lot easier when she gets propositioned in a bar.



Right from the start, you know that there’s some big revelation on its way but the film makers keep it under wraps until the end. Details do come out but slowly. It turns out that Juliette was in prison for killing her six year old Son. Why? Well that’s the big secret. We are told that she offered nothing in her defence during her trial and that her husband testified against her.

Being a ‘child killer’ makes her a dubious guest for her sister to have in her house. Léa trusts her, which is a tremendous leap of faith considering she has two children, both adopted from Vietnam. Léa’s husband Luc clearly does not share his wife's trust, well certainly not at first, and he understandably fears leaving his kids alone with her. As the viewer, you're not sure who to side with.



As the film progresses along Juliette slowly opens up and starts to enjoy being back in the real world again. So far, so good, it’s a strong story and well told but it starts to go awry when she discloses at a dinner party that she was in prison for murder. Almost everyone assumes it’s a joke, illustrating I suppose that the French media hadn't given her case the saturation coverage it would have got over here and that nobody has had the forethought to ‘Google’ Léa’s mysterious sister who appeared from nowhere.

I feel a little cheated at the end because having been dangling on a thread for ninety minutes, wondering what the big secret was and I have to say enjoying it... bang, the film falls down a large plot hole.

Léa finds a picture of the murdered child along with a note written on the back of his medical card. Lea gets her doctor to check out the medical card and it is revealed that the child had a fatal illness, probably from birth. It appears that somehow Juliette chose to keep this secret from her husband, her sister and her parents.

Instead, being a doctor herself, she ended his suffering by injecting him with an overdose of something and then let everyone believe that she was a child murderer. For what reason? It is suggested to punish herself. For what? Saving her son undue suffering? Whilst at the same time she punishes everyone else around her by not telling them the truth. Then there’s what her fellow prisoners would have thought of her and they would of course had tried to inflict their own justice on her. She must really like self-punishment.

After her trial her parents disowned her and told Léa to do the same. Her father took this misunderstanding to his grave, in fact it probably helped kill him, and her mother took it with her into Alzheimer’s. They will never know the truth.

Even more unlikely was the fact she managed to keep her reasons secret. It’s just not plausible. Which failed A level law student defended her? Even the prosecution would have gone digging for a motive. Didn’t they perform an autopsy? Consult doctor’s notes? It’s just like in ‘The Reader’ but more so.

This implausibility ruined an otherwise good film, which is a shame because otherwise it was excellent!

The Pianist (2002)

On September 23, 1939 Polish Radio was forced off air by the German invasion of Poland. The last live broadcast was Chopin's Nocturne in C Sharp Minor, played by a young Jewish pianist named Wladyslaw Szpilman. Bombs rain down on Warsaw as he plays. The other people in the studio are panicking but still he plays on. Then a bomb hits the studio and Szpilman too takes cover.



Szpilman’s account of what happened next was first published in Poland during 1946 but it was almost immediately withdrawn by Stalin’s new Communist Government. Finally it was published in Germany in 1997 after Szpilman's son found it on his father's bookcase.

The film of that book is a dark, depressing tale about a man and his fight for survival and it’s simply brilliant. Roman Polanski, himself a survivor of the Krakow and Warsaw ghettos, directs.

For Szpilman, life becomes one long struggle to keep his family together as the German’s move in and impose their anti-Jewish laws. The Germans rapidly increase the restrictions, forcing Jews to walk in the gutter, wear the star on their arm and anything else they can think of to humiliate them. When they get bored with that, they brick them up inside the Ghetto instead. Life in the Ghetto is at first tolerable but quickly gets worse as the persecution escalates.



The full horror of the atrocities that go on there is not spared us. Jews are often lined up for no apparent reason and shot. One woman asks a Nazi officer, ‘What will happen to us?’ and promptly finds out first hand as she is shot point blank in the head. A man in a wheelchair is tossed over a balcony because he failed to stand up when the soldiers walked in.

Finding food becomes difficult, Szpilman’s father has to barter for a single piece of caramel and then cuts it in six pieces to share it with his family. This is also practically his last action because it’s not long before everyone is being packed into trains bound for Treblinka, an extermination facility. Szpilman himself is fortunate that a Jewish policeman recognised him and saved him. This was just one of many lucky escapes that Szpilman manages.



Everything in the film is shown from Szpilman's point of view and we become part of his frantic plight for survival. We share his guilt at not going with his family, although he knows that to do so would have been futile. You can feel the hopelessness he feels, his loneliness, his desperation.

He is conscripted into working for the Germans but manages to escape and goes into hiding outside the Ghetto. From where he witness's, from a safe distance, the failed Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

He manages to get help from other non-Jewish Poles and with their kindness manages to survive, moving from place to place. First in safe houses and then in bombed out ruins. He is continually hiding and fleeing, gradually becoming a shadow of his former self, visibly losing weight throughout the film and suffering jaundice along the way. All the time death via a German bullet never seems far away.

In one of the `safe house' there is a piano. As he sits at it and we hear music playing, we think he’s gone mad and the sound of his playing will give him away but then we see his hands are moving above the keyboard and realize that the music is playing only in his head.

His final hiding place is the attic of a bombed out building where he discovers a large can of pickles which might just keep him alive until the Russians come. The pickles though are his undoing. He makes such a din trying to open them that he is discovered by a German officer. You expect another quick shooting but when the officer finds out he ‘was’ once a pianist he tells him to play. After so many years of being unable to play you wonder at his capacity to pull this one off but after a few tentative chords, he does. This seemed to save his life and the officer ends up helping Szpilman, bringing him food and, finally, his overcoat.



When the Russian troops finally liberate Warsaw, after all he’d been through to survive; Szpilman is almost killed by his rescuers when they see the German coat he is wearing. Their shots miss him and then when they realise that he’s a Pole, they ask

“Why the ****ing coat?"

Szpilman manages to gulp a reply,

"I'm cold"

The officer who helped him tries to contact Szpilman from the pen he is incarcerated in and although Szpilman tries to find him, he fails and the officer is taken away to a Stalingrad labour camp where he was to die seven years later.

When broadcasting resumed on Polish Radio, six long years after it was bombed off air, it was with the same piece, Chopin's Nocturne in C sharp Minor and the same pianist, Wladyslaw Szpilman.

I was riveted from start to finish and although it can be hard to watch at times, it is a remarkable film. Szpilman is portrayed as a man that we can all relate to and that you care about what happens to. What would we have done in his situation? He doesn’t try to be a hero; he is just a man doing what he can to stay alive.

Also the film doesn’t try to judge anybody, although that would have been easy to do and just gives you the historical facts and what affect it had on one man's life.

The film was nominated for seven Academy Awards in 2002 and won Best Director, Best Actor, and Best Adapted Screenplay. I had to check to see what defeated it for Best Film that year. Now I haven't seen Chicago and no disrespect to it but I imagine most people who saw it back in 2002 will have forgotten it by now. Had they seen the Pianist instead, they wouldn't have forgotten it so easily. This film will stay with you for some time afterwards.

There were 3,500,000 Jews in Poland before the Nazi occupation; after it there were just 240,000.

Easy Virtue

Easy Virtue is based on a 1920's play by Noel Coward but I assume it's a fairly liberal adaptation. The male lead is John Whittaker (Ben Barnes), who marries a thoroughly inappropriate girl, the glamorous Larita (Jessica Biel), a racing driver whom he met in France. Naturally he's thrilled to have landed himself such a delightful catch but he should have kept her to himself. His mistake is taking her home to England to meet his family.

The first words his mother (Kristin Scott Thomas) utters to her new daughter-in-law are ‘Oh, you're American’ and it's all downhill from there. She immediately resents Larita's presence as part of the family and proceeds to be as vindictive as possible towards her. This is all before she finds out that Larita has been married before, to a man who died in suspicious circumstances.



John’s mother believes in upholding the traditions of the aristocracy whilst Larita has no intention of fitting in with that sort of lifestyle. Unfortunately for Larita, she is also poor and the Whittakers desperately need their son to marry into money so that they can maintain that lifestyle. It’s post World War One Britain and the status of the gentry is fading fast. His mother had hoped that John would marry his childhood sweetheart Sarah, the daughter of a wealthy neighbour.



The polar opposite to his mother is his father, the wonderfully sardonic Jim (Colin Firth). Firth is simply fantastic as the father. A man so disengaged from the family and all it stands for that he spends most of his time in his workshop. He's a World War One survivor, dresses down, unshaven and shuns the traditional country pursuits. He approves when Larita objects to fox hunting on moral grounds and then when asked ride with the hunt, does so on a motorbike. He likes Larita and sees her as a soul mate.



Easy Virtue is a romantic comedy and then some. There’s some great visual ‘gags’ some of which are so quick they’re easy to miss which means it doesn’t work too well on the small screen and would be better at the cinema on a bigger screen. That said there's nothing subtle about the 'traditional' can-can which doesn't endear Larita to John's sister or the nasty end that became of the Chihuahua (dog lovers should look away). There’s also the subtlety of songs such as ‘Car Wash’ and ‘Sex Bomb’ redone in period style.

Ultimately though, it isn't just a comedy. The brilliance of the film is how it explores the relationships between the various family members. There are some great exchanges between John’s Mother and Larita, who can give as good as she gets. Thrown into the mix are John's sisters, who don't know what to make of Larita at all, and some interesting staff members. Larita could have been a breath of fresh air blowing away the entrenched stuffiness of the family but is seen as more of a cold wind demolishing it.



As well as Firth, there are great performances by Biel and Scott Thomas and well most of the cast.

In the end, Larita whirls out in much the same fashion as she whirled in, realising that she’s totally wasted on John, advising the daughters to run away and destroying the Venus de Milo.

The final scene is interesting too. If this was the way the original play finished, then it would have been greatly subversive for its day. ‘Easy Virtue’ is a bit off the wall, which is probably why I liked it a lot.

Chéri

I liked the look of the pedigree of Chéri because the film was from director Steven Frears and writer Christopher Hampton both of who worked on ‘Dangerous Liaisons’ twenty plus years ago. That film featured Michelle Pfeiffer and she stars again here. There are other similarities between the two films, both being French period pieces and both involving libertine-esk behaviour or so I thought.

The synopsis for Chéri looked good. It promised the son of a courtesan being initiated in the ways of love by an older woman. Ah, a young boys dream.

The film opened with an annoying voiceover which explained about the ‘Belle Époque’ and what a ‘courtesan’ was, but thankfully the voiceover didn’t last long. A courtesan is, in this case, a woman who offers her charms to clients, usually rich folk in return for some of their money. These tend to be long-term arrangements, not brief encounters.

Michelle Pfeiffer plays one such upmarket prostitute, Léa de Lonval, who’s feeling that perhaps she’s getting too old for all this and she’s considering retirement. However she is persuaded to embark on one last assignment by a former colleague and ex-courtesan, Madame Peloux (Kathy Bates). Bates, incidentally, is as good as ever, not that I can really picture her younger self as an appealing courtesan doing the deed.



Léa agrees to spend a few weeks ‘educating’ Peloux’s 19-year-old son Fred (Rupert Friend). He has known her all her life as an auntie and when he was young she christened him Chéri, while he knows her affectionately as ‘Noo Noo’ or perhaps ‘Nu Nu’.

What they haven’t done before though, is get off with each other, obviously, and it somewhat spoils the film that this happens within seconds of Peloux giving them the green light. There’s no chase. Pfeiffer doesn’t have to be talked into her task and Chéri certainly doesn’t need asking twice. Our Fred, you see, is no shrinking violet. In fact he’s been a bit of a playboy and has been quite adept at putting it about, which is why his mother wants him with Léa and away from praying on other more impressionable young girls. Which is a shame, because had Chéri been more innocent then Rupert Friend would have been perfect as a blank canvas for Pfeiffer to work on but he’s not really believable as an object of lust for her. Surely an experienced woman such as Léa would have eaten him for breakfast and been bored to tears by lunch.

Apparently not, their few weeks’ turns into six years of living in sin, as their not terribly dangerous liaison blossoms into a full-blown romance. Quite what she saw in him I have no idea.



I’m also not sure what she educated him in. She certainly didn’t make him any more of a gentleman. He comes with very few redeeming features and he doesn’t seem to develop any under her tutorship. She even ends up paying for him rather than making money out of him.

The romance comes to an end when the Machiavellian Peloux corrals Chéri into an arranged marriage with some young crumpet that she’s found for him, the daughter of another courtesan.

Married life, unsurprisingly, doesn’t suit him and he soon comes running back to Léa’s boudoir offering her a second bite at the Chéri. Sorry couldn’t resist that.

Naturally she takes him back just long enough to ruffle her chiffon before she packs him back off to his wife.



Michelle Pfeiffer is as good as ever and looked the part, Rupert Friend does ok too but it’s a pretty uninvolving film, you just don’t feel much attachment to the characters. At the end, we are told that Chéri is tortured by his love for what he can’t have, a woman who is too old for him. Unfortunately this is the first time we get any inkling of this, at least from such a dramatic angle. The story of an ultimately doomed affair between an older woman and her toy boy could have been dramatic all the way through. It’s not particularly steamy either, despite all; the ‘educating’ going on. Dangerous Liaisons it certainly wasn’t.

Låt den rätte komma in (Let the Right One In)

Two 12-year-olds meet one evening in the courtyard outside the apartment block where they live. He is Oskar, a sad and lonely little boy who is constantly bullied at school and has a scrapbook full of stories about murders that he’s cut from the newspaper. She is Eli, the new girl next door. She advises him on how to deal with the bullies and tells him that if standing up to them doesn’t work, she'll help him herself.



They are two misfits drawn to each other and you perhaps expect a typical ‘coming of age’ movie as Oskar's fascination with her, develops into a full blown crush but all is not what it seems with Eli. We are in Stockholm in the middle of winter but Eli is not wearing a coat or shoes even though there’s snow on the ground. She also smells real bad and all the windows to her flat have been covered with cardboard to block out the light. Her ‘Dad’ goes out at night stringing people up by their feet, slitting their throats and draining their blood into a bottle that he takes home for Eli. She may be 12 but she tells Oskar she’s been 12 for a very long time. Yep it’s the same old story, boy meet vampire and falls in love.

So it’s a horror movie but it isn’t. It’s like no other vampire movie that I’ve seen before. It is at times quite horrific but the film doesn’t rely upon cheap scenes of gore and unlike most horror movies, it has a plot. The main element of which is the close friendship between Oscar and Eli.

Her ‘Dad’ is not very good at the blood gathering lark and after one particular botched attempt, knowing that he is about to be found out, he pours acid on his face so that he can't be identified. When he is taken to the hospital, Eli climbs up to his room where she feasts on him before he falls to his death through the open window.

Her ‘gatherer’ gone, Eli goes to Oskar’s apartment and knocks on his window, asking to be let him. A vampire can only enter a home when they are invited in. It is good to see that throughout the film, the ‘vampire rules’ are upheld.



They spend that night together and Oskar asks her whether she'd like to go steady with him. Even though Eli tells him that she’s ‘not a girl’, he isn’t deterred, boys never are, so they go steady anyway. Oskar cuts his own palm to seal their new found status in blood but she falls to the floor and begins to drink up the blood. Oskar, smart boy that he is, suddenly sees her for what she is but still they go steady.

When Eli attacks a woman but the woman is rescued, all it does is condemn her to become a vampire too. She is viciously attacked by her friend’s cats and develops an aversion to light. She knows something is badly wrong and doesn't want to live. When her doctor open the blinds to her room she impressively combusts. A great moment.



Almost as good is the closing swimming pool scene where the elder brother of the bully, who Oskar finally fought back against, intends to dish out some retribution but he gets much more than he bargained for as Eli holds good her offer to come to Oskar’s aid. A loving gesture... perhaps, if such brutality be seen as an act of love.

At the end, as our two young ‘lovers’ elope together, we are left to ponder the future. Oskar may have escaped the bullies but what has he traded this for? Is he simply stepping into the shoes of her ‘Dad’? Is this how she works? Seduce a young boy to help her survive until he has grown old and outlived his usefulness, at which point she can replace him with a younger model... hmmm sounds familiar, but I digress. All the way thorough the film is played as a romance but the end is, when you think about it, simply chilling.

‘Let the Right One In’ is a great film that leaves you both repulsed and fascinated at the same time and asks, among other things, whether good and evil can coexist in the same person.

Hollywood, of course, has seen the money making potential here and will remake this film next year, without the subtitles. Presumably also with a lower certificate to make even more money and presumably with a lot of the darkness and especially the sexual undertones removed, so as not to offend anyone. Of course they’ll also have to add a happy ending and I for one, hate happy endings. Avoid like the plague, see this instead.