Spatch Merlin's Blog

Oh yes! A movie review by James Berardinelli tells all but you must see ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’ first. At the time of writing it’s still showing in cinemas, the alternative is to get the video…

Get It Here

The Girl Who Played with Fire, the second part of Stieg Larsson’s enormously popular The Millennium Trilogy, follows The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and precedes The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest. Filmed back-to-back-to-back, the three movies feature the same actors, although there have been changes to some of the behind-the-scenes crew. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was directed by Niels Arden Oplev from an adapted screenplay by Nikolaj Arcel and Rasmus Heisterberg. For The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, the directing duties were assumed by Daniel Alfredson from scripts by Jonas Frykberg. The films opened in 2009 in Sweden and late 2009/early 2010 throughout most of the rest of Europe. The United States was late to the party. Initially, U.S. distributor The Music Box purchased only the rights to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. When that film became the year’s biggest foreign language success during its March 2010 release, the company quickly acquired the other two films. The Girl Who Played with Fire opens on July 9 and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest is due on October 15.

In a strange way, the structure of The Millennium Trilogy reminds me of the first Star Wars trio. The first movie establishes the characters while providing a largely self-contained story with a few “hooks” that can be used to further the narrative in additional installments. The second and third movies are inextricably wedded and function best when seen as parts of a whole. Installment #2 is darker than its predecessor and ends in a cliffhanger. Admittedly, it might sound like a stretch to compare a Gen-X touchstone space opera to a Swedish mystery thriller series, but I’m referring only to the rhythms of the stories, not the content.

In terms of tone, pacing, and approach, The Girl Who Played with Fire is different from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The first movie features a partnership between the lead characters, computer hacker extraordinaire Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) and investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist), and follows them as they embark upon an unconventional romance while investigating a particularly nasty kidnapping/murder. The style is in line with contemporary British and American murder mysteries: P.D. James, Ruth Rendell, Sue Grafton, Elizabeth George (all of whom are said to have influenced Stieg Larsson, and some of whom are expressly mentioned in the novels). The second movie is more of a straightforward thriller with mystery elements and the lead characters do not interact, approaching the central dilemma from different angles. One can assume that the shift in director and screenwriter played a part in the subtle changes to the movies’ feel. This doesn’t mean The Girl Who Played with Fire is inherently better or worse than The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo; it’s merely different. The important things – the characters, their relationships, and the way in which the story builds and twists – are italicized in both productions. This is a testimony to the faithfulness with which the source material has been approached. (One wonders if the same care will be taken in the English-language remake.)

The Girl Who Played with Fire concerns the double homicide of Millennium Magazine writers who are working on a story about a sex-trafficking ring. Forensic evidence places the blame for these murders, as well as the killing of parole officer Nels Bjurman (Peter Andersson), on Lisbeth, and the police begin hunting her. She, in turn, is tracking down the man she believes to be the real killer: a mysterious underworld crime lord known only as “Zala” (Georgi Staykov). Meanwhile, Mikael, convinced of Lisbeth’s innocence in the matter, makes every attempt to contact her and, when that fails, he launches an investigation of his own which places him Zala’s trail, headed toward a potential collision with Lisbeth.

With apologies to Michael Nyqvist, who is solid as Mikael, the real star of The Girl Who Played with Fire is Noomi Rapace. With a film under her belt as Lisbeth, she has become the character. It’s an amazing, transformative performance – the kind that rivets the attention and allows one to forgive some of the minor “cheats” that often occur in mysteries. As good as Rapace was in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, she’s better here. No longer saddled with the need to breathe life into an unknown character, she can now set about adding breadth and depth to Lisbeth, and the results are astonishing. On those occasions when The Girl Who Played with Fire drags – and they are few – it’s because Lisbeth is not on screen. Mikael isn’t exactly boring but, compared to his female counterpart, he exhibits considerably less flair and color. The villains are suitably nasty: the sleazy Bjurman, whose rape of Lisbeth from the first film is re-visited; the cruel Zala, who is afflicted with a bad makeup job’ and Zala’s super-strength henchman, Ronald Niedermann (Mikael Spreitz), who reminds me of Robert Shaw’s Red Grant from the James Bond film From Russia with Love.

The Girl Who Played with Fire is a firecracker of a story – sharply written, superbly acted, and fast-paced. The plot features the kinds of twists one expects from a good mystery. The characters act intelligently and rationally – the screenplay doesn’t require instances of inexplicable stupidity to keep things moving. The content is adult in nature, both in terms of sexual candor and violence. Viewing a production not forced to self-censor to achieve a particular ratings standard is refreshing. With The Girl Who Played with Fire, I felt like I was seeing the undiluted vision of the filmmakers (and perhaps something of which the late Larsson would approve – these are his characters and his storyline) rather than the unsatisfying result of creative compromises.

If I had to make a call, I’d rank The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo slightly above The Girl Who Played with Fire. However, asking how the second part of a trilogy stands up to the first part without having seen the conclusion is in some ways an unfair question. Nevertheless, two-thirds of the way through, The Millennium Trilogy is looking like the North American cinematic event of 2010.

A movie review by James Berardinelli

This film was very enjoyable and well worth the effort, I was amazed at how quickly the time passed. Not for the crash, bang, wallop brigade. Anthony Quinn’s review describes it very well indeed…

Reviewed by Anthony Quinn

Some cities become the ghosts of the movies that immortalised them. When we visit, we see their romance through the prism of the screen. Vienna in The Third Man. Rome in Roman Holiday. Venice in Don’t Look Now. New York in Manhattan. To this list we can now add Edinburgh in The Illusionist, Sylvain Chomet’s beautiful and melancholy portrait of a man out of time, which also happens to be a valentine to Scotland’s capital.

That it is an animated film should not be any reason to doubt its place among those urban classics; indeed, it’s hard to imagine a more exquisitely crafted picture of Edinburgh’s gaunt, handsome streets, its weather, its light, even its traffic.

The French-born Chomet’s previous animation, Belleville Rendez-Vous (2003), was a spikily baroque kidnap drama with a champion cyclist as its hero. His latest dials down the surreal grotesequerie and amps up the charm, being an adaptation of a script written but never filmed by comic-cum-national treasure Jacques Tati. It marks a change in mood from his Monsieur Hulot misadventures, less whimsical, more heartfelt, which is reportedly the reason why he left it on the shelf. Chomet, having negotiated with the Tati estate, could hardly have paid its creator a more loving tribute than he does here. The story, set in the late 1950s, concerns the travails of an illusionist, Tatischeff (Tati’s real name), who finds his livelihood in the music-halls of Paris and London being usurped by the brash new wave of rock’n'roll (“Billy Boy and the Britoons”, no less). His stage act belongs to another era, and no amount of “magic” can halt the disappearing audiences. A Tati-bye, you might say.

With only his recalcitrant white rabbit for company, he ends up travelling to Scotland to perform in a tiny pub on the Western Isles, where he encounters Alice, an innocent young chambermaid. Enamoured of his magic tricks, she follows Tatischeff when he departs for a season in Edinburgh, and the pair set up home in lodgings, like an old actor with his dresser. Change is in the air here, too, signified in the ominous newcomer on the High Street, a television and hi-fi shop. Yet, in spite of Tatischeff’s narrowing circumstances, The Illusionist offers joy amid the sorrow, notably through its glorious recreation of Edinburgh – in the majestic winding lanes around the Castle, the open-backed buses tooling up and down Princes Street or the magnificent Victorian behemoth of Jenners department store. Tati’s script was originally set in Paris and Prague, but Chomet changed the latter, having fallen in love with Edinburgh when he presented Belleville Rendez-Vous at the film festival. (Prague has cause to feel miffed on seeing this).

We have become rather used to the super-exact clarities of 3D animation. The argument now runs that, if you can do it on a computer, why bother with the manual labour of D? The Illusionist offers the perfect riposte. The hand-drawn graphics have a charm and individuality that digimation could only approximate. It is a little like the difference between hearing a song on vinyl and hearing it on CD. Computers offer precision, but hand-drawn brings warmth and vibrancy. As Chomet puts it, “CGI is good for robots and toys, less for humans. I want to see the work of an artist on the screen, not a machine whose visuals are too neat, shiny and clean.” The retro look of Edinburgh here harks back to the Disney of the 1960s, notably London in 101 Dalmatians and Paris in The Aristocats. It’s a matter of dingy pub lighting and of shop facades that our grandparents would have recognised, but it’s also heard in the gurgling of ancient plumbing and the shuddering of bathroom sinks.

The sound of human voices is scarcely more articulate; Tati doesn’t much care for dialogue, and you’ll be pushed to hear Tatischeff or Alice mumble more than half a dozen phrases each. Much of the meaning resides in the silent comedy of body language, his a tentative craning and ducking (he’s too tall for doorways), hers the bemused devotion of a young woman towards a man she believes literally capable of magic. Chomet is plainly a fan of the old guard, and one scene in which twin motorcycles are mistaken for a car is lifted almost entirely from Keaton. The sadness of the illusionist’s realisation that his time is up – you may hear less bitter echoes of Olivier’s Archie Rice in The Entertainer – goes deeper once Alice finds love with a man of her own age. That Tatischeff once bought her shoes and clothes suggests not so much a romantic longing as age’s quixotic indulgence of youth; even his chaste love for her is doomed to failure.

The note of elegy is unmissable in the closing scenes, the camera rising and whirling giddily above the city before descending, for the last time, on the old music-hall, its lights the last to wink out. Chomet’s own music provides an affecting accompaniment here. An era is drawing to an end, and its loss seems to inhabit poor Tatischeff as he sits in the train’s third-class carriage, his neat suitcase perched on his knees. It may not have the same power to move as Toy Story 3 – what does? – but The Illusionist finds in the story of this gentle, self-effacing fellow a resonant truth. When an art dies, it takes some of the magic of life with it.(PG) 79 mins, Sylvain Chomet

Last thursday at the BFI the newly restored Fritz Lang’s Metropolis reminded me of several movies it has influenced such as The Bride of Frankenstein, Blade Runner, and Dark City. It’s importance to later films is quite clear and all things considered I rate it well worth seeing.

From Wikipedia,

Metropolis is a 1927 German expressionist film in the science-fiction genre directed by Fritz Lang. Produced in Germany during a stable period of the Weimar Republic, Metropolis is set in a futuristic urban dystopia and makes use of this context to explore the social crisis between workers and owners in capitalism. The film was produced in the Babelsberg Studios by Universum Film A.G. (UFA). The most expensive silent film ever made, it cost approximately 5 million Reichsmark.[2]

Metropolis was cut substantially after its German premiere, and much footage was lost over the passage of successive decades. There have been several efforts to restore it, as well as discoveries of previously lost footage. A 2001 reconstruction of Metropolis, shown at the Berlin Film Festival, was inscribed on UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register in that same year.[3] In 2008, a copy of the film 30 minutes longer than any other known surviving copy was located in Argentina. After a long period of restoration in Germany, the restored film was shown publicly for the first time simultaneously at Berlin and Frankfurt on February 12, 2010.[4] The event of the Friedrichstadtpalast was shown live on a screen at the Brandenburg Gate as well as on TV on ARTE.

Metropolis features special effects and set designs that still impress modern audiences with their visual impact – the film contains cinematic and thematic links to German Expressionism, though the architecture as portrayed in the film appears based on contemporary Modernism and Art Deco. The latter, a brand-new style in Europe at the time, had not reached mass production yet and was considered an emblem of the bourgeois class, and similarly associated with the ruling class in the film.

Rotwang’s Art Deco laboratory with its lights and industrial machinery is a forerunner of the Streamline Moderne style, highly influential on the look of Frankenstein-style laboratories of “mad scientists” in pop culture. When applied to science fiction, this style is sometimes called Raygun Gothic.

The effects expert, Eugen Schüfftan, created innovative visual displays widely acclaimed in following years. Among the effects used are miniatures of the city, a camera on a swing, and most notably, the Schüfftan process,[7] in which mirrors are used to “place” actors inside miniature sets. This new technique was seen again just two years later in Alfred Hitchcock’s film Blackmail (1929).

The Maschinenmensch, the robot character played by Brigitte Helm, was created by Walter Schulze-Mittendorff. A chance discovery of a sample of “plastic wood” (a pliable substance designed as wood-filler) allowed him to sculpt the costume like a suit of armour over a plaster cast of the actress. Spraypainted a mix of silver and bronze, it helped create some of the most memorable moments on film. Helm suffered greatly during the filming of these scenes wearing this rigid and uncomfortable costume, which cut and bruised her, but Fritz Lang insisted on her playing the part, even if nobody would know it was her.[8

The thriller of the year, hands down, Mother is simply; first class cinema. I watched it this evening: Bank Holiday Monday, a  great evening’s entertainment. This movie is only on secondary release and not at Odeons etc. To be found at Renoir Curzon and other ‘Art House Cinemas’ If there’s no such cinema in your area you can reserve a DVD on this page. What ever you do don’t miss it!

Review By Jonathan Romney
Sunday, 22 August 2010

What’s truly rare is the sense of drama totally elaborated as cinema, with the storytelling making itself felt in every aspect of a film. But a few film-makers still have the secret, and one is Bong Joon-ho, a South Korean director whose meticulousness and love of confounding the viewer are altogether Hitchcockian. Bong directed the terrific monster movie The Host, about a giant fish-thing on the rampage (I haven’t touched herring since) and before that, the labyrinthine Memories of Murder, about the entanglements of an unsolvable crime.

Bong’s new feature Mother is almost a perfect film, in the sense that no image, no moment is wasted: everything plays its part in the narrative web that he spins with co-writer Park Eun-kyo.

Mother begins with a knockout opening shot: in a field of long grass, an elderly woman, mournfully starts to dance to a swaying Latin beat. Is she dancing from sorrow, or madness? The subsequent long flashback explains it all. The woman, played by Kim Hye-ja, is a small-town herbalist and acupuncturist who lives with her son Do-joon (Won Bin), a 27-year-old with learning difficulties and problematic short-term memory. When Do-joon is charged with killing a high-school girl, he can’t defend himself because he has no idea what happened on the fateful night. Determined to clear him, his mother parleys with the cynical, lazy local police; calls in a contemptuously high-handed lawyer; then sets out to play detective herself.

The plot takes a drastic turn when a clue emerges by chance, and the mother goes in search of a lost piece of evidence that apparently holds the key to everything. But what’s exceptional about Mother is that, in this film, pretty much everything holds the key to everything. There are virtually no throwaway touches: it all signifies. The smallest details play a part in elaborating and unravelling the plot, or else speak volumes about the world in which mother and son struggle to survive.

Take the moment early on where she shuffles deferentially around the police station, handing out complimentary goodies; she’s an old hand at abasing herself to keep Do-joon out of trouble. A classic “what-just-happened?” thriller, Mother constantly provides little signposts, nudging you to notice things – but as often as not misdirects you about their significance.

At two crucial points, Doon-jo remembers things out of the blue. One instance is a long-lost memory from his own past that suddenly casts his family background in a very different light. The other is the freak retrieval of a hitherto-unconscious memory, like an image that had somehow fallen between frames of the film – and, given the schoolgirl-murder premise, the eerie echo of Twin Peaks is perhaps no coincidence.

With its edge of social satire, Mother has us rooting for its working-class characters against a corrupt world. The South Korean society depicted here is one in which there’s seemingly little in the way of just legal process, not even for suspects with evident mental problems. The system of victimisation seems endemic – from playground bullying to the bitterly ironic way that a small-time hood persuades the mother that he is Doon-jo’s devoted friend, even while he’s extorting money from her.

The film features some terrific characterisations, the vivid dramatis personae including loathsomely thuggish schoolboys, spoilt bourgeois golfers and a deranged grandmother with a penchant for rice liquor. Won Bin is affectingly mercurial as the hapless Doon-jo, despite being saddled with one of those reverse-moptop hairdos that is international screen shorthand for “lovably challenged”.

As for lead Kim Hye-ja, she makes one of the most complex, unsettling mothers in cinema. Forever bustling around in torrential rain, this bastion of unconditional love is an image both of the nobility and the abjection of motherhood. As parent and detective, she’s a woman with a mission – but also unavoidably flawed as a sleuth.

A monomaniac fury beneath her stooped, uncertain self-deprecation, she’s perpetually surprising: she gets into a knock-down fight with the dead girl’s angry mourners, then delicately puts on a dab of lipstick, a lovely picture of the madness of keeping up appearances.

Apparently Kim Hye-ja is famous in South Korea for playing dignified matriarchs – which suggests not only inspired casting, but also audacity on Kim’s part in taking on a role so delicately poised on the edge of the grotesque. With its quiet visual brilliance and relishably sombre comic sensibility, Mother is poignant, compassionate and ultimately disturbing in its conclusion that perhaps a detective needs to be deluded to get to the truth.

The Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) released its much-anticipated list of guests on Aug. 24. The list includes Bruce Springsteen, Helen Mirren and Clint Eastwood.

As hundreds of celebrities head east on Sept 9-19 for the Toronto International Film Festival, Hollywood might seem like a ghost town.

The festival confirmed earlier reports that Oscar-winning actor/director Clint Eastwood will be coming to support his spooky new thriller ‘Hereafter’, making his first visit to TIFF in 20 years.

Also confirmed is Bruce Springsteen, who will chat onstage with actor Edward Norton about Thom Zimny’s ‘The Promise’, ‘The Making of Darkness on the Edge of Town’, which documents the difficulties of Springsteen’s fourth album with his E Street Band.
Other celebrities headed north include actor Bill Murray, who stars in the thriller: ‘Passion Play’, and billionaire Bill Gates, for a discussion on education for the documentary ‘Waiting for Superman.

Other notables include: Helen Mirren, Robert De Niro, Robert Redford, Woody Allen, Nicole Kidman, Danny Boyle, Marion Cotillard, Hilary Swank, Jennifer Connelly and Javier Bardem, and many others.

Rising young stars include Kat Dennings, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Ellen Page Xavier Dolan, Carey Mulligan, Freida Pinto, Emma Roberts, Emma Stone.
International talent includes Catherine Deneuve, Om Puri, Aamir Khan, Jeon Do-Yeon and Vincent Cassel, joining stars and directors from around the globe.

TIFF will also be hosting the North American premieres of the Palme d’Or winner from Cannes, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, and New Wave stalwart Jean-Luc Godard’s Film Socialism. Weerasethakul is a confirmed guest, and TIFF is still hoping to persuade Godard to make his first Toronto visit in 13 years.
www.tiff.net

Personally I can’t wait to see this: Martin Scorsese, the premier American gangster movie director of the last three decades and Terence Winter of The Sopranos making a thirteen part TV gangster thriller set in the 1920s, (prohibition and all that). Mike Flaherty’s review tells all.

Martin Scorsese and Terence Winter bring vintage thugs to
lavish, painstaking life in HBO’s Boardwalk Empire.

By Mike Flaherty

Two years ago, Terence Winter, an executive producer for The Sopranos, was invited to the home of Martin Scorsese. The time was 9:30 p.m., and he had been told it was for dinner. Winter showed up with a bottle of wine. They sat down and started to talk, and as time passed and Winter got hungrier, he realized there was going to be no dinner. But by then, it didn’t really matter. The two were well into planning HBO’s Boardwalk Empire, which Winter wrote and Scorsese helped produce (he also directed the pilot). Over the next year, the two spent hours in Scorsese’s screening room watching thirties Warner Bros. dramas like The Public Enemy, The Roaring Twenties, and Scarface, as well as fictional biopics on real gangsters like Al Capone. “The best film class I’ve ever had,” Winter says. “Martin Scorsese sitting with me watching gangster movies.”

When HBO finally unveils Boardwalk Empire—its sprawling portrait of Atlantic City in the twenties—viewers will see the results of that preparation. It’s one of the most visually sumptuous and detailed productions ever shown on the small screen, and a reaffirmation of premium cable’s indispensability when it comes to provocative, big visions. The thirteen-episode series is based on Nelson Johnson’s history, Boardwalk Empire: The Birth, High Times, and Corruption of Atlantic City, which tells the story of one Enoch “Nucky” Johnson (played by Steve Buscemi and renamed Thompson). During the months they were planning the show, Winter and Scorsese debated how much to update the story. “Should it be a literal description of the twenties, or should we do some stylized, heightened reality and make it our own version?” says Winter. They opted for verisimilitude over beauty, which in this case meant aiming for a kind of shabby elegance.

But shabby is relative: The money spent on Boardwalk Empire is lavish even by the standards of HBO, which is still struggling to replace ratings-busters The Sopranos and Sex and the City. Although the words New Jersey and organized crime initially evoke that other Garden State gangster drama, Boardwalk is in fact more reminiscent of Rome, HBO’s blood-soaked 2005–07 saga. Estimates of that series’ first-season costs ran as high as $100 million, but HBO shared the burden with its co-producer, the BBC. Like Rome, Boardwalk aspires to a top-shelf, whole-cloth re-creation of a place and time long lost, but now the network is footing the bill alone. Industry insiders peg the cost of the season at upwards of $65 million. Variety recently reported the price of the pilot alone at $18 million, though that includes constructing a 300-foot-long actual boardwalk featuring period-perfect replicas of storefronts and seaside attractions, including the then-shocking Incubator Baby.

The “benevolent despot” inspiring all this ambition was Atlantic City’s treasurer. But Nucky Johnson was so much more: In life and on the show, he was a fixer and a mob boss, mobilizing voters to keep the local Republican machine in power and running most of the town’s commercial enterprises, licit and otherwise. The series opens just before midnight on January 16, 1920, when Prohibition went into effect. Immediately after, as Atlantic City found a new, lucrative calling as the key point for contraband booze heading into New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago, Nucky becomes the supplier of choice for the likes of Lucky Luciano and Arnold Rothstein. (Capone, played by Stephen Graham, is one of Luciano’s flunkeys.)

Boardwalk’s trek from page to screen began when Stephen Levinson and Mark Wahlberg optioned the book for their production company, Leverage Management. Wahlberg then got Scorsese interested after working with him on The Departed. Winter, the show’s creator, became aware of it as he was wrapping The Sopranos. “They asked me if I thought there was a series in there,” he recalls. “Then they said, ‘By the way, Martin Scorsese is attached.’ I said, ‘Well, I guarantee you there’s a series in here. I’ll find it!’ ” Then they just had to get the damn thing made.

One massive concession to reality is that not a single frame of the show was shot in Atlantic City, where there simply wasn’t enough of the old town left. Ditto for Asbury Park, where the location team briefly considered a stretch of intact boardwalk. In the end, Boardwalk has turned out to be one of the most intensely New York–centric productions ever made. In all, there were just over 120 metro-area locations that passed for Atlantic City and Chicago, as well as the occasional New York–set scene. Among those, 50 were churches, many of them in Brooklyn. In fact, the show’s fictional Babette’s nightclub, the site of the pilot’s stroke-of-midnight Prohibition party, was created in John Wesley United Methodist Church in Bedford-Stuyvesant.

After setting up its crew and soundstages in Brooklyn’s Steiner Studios in early 2009, recalls Shaw, one of the show’s producers happened to drive past a dormant lot on the Greenpoint waterfront, which, thanks to the cresting recession, yielded a long-term lease. “[The lot] had been cleared for condos to be built, but it was not a good time to break ground.” In fact, no actual ground was ever broken. In the rush to erect the boardwalk set and avoid the delays of an environmental-impact study, the whole thing was built on a massive steel foundation that sits on the ground rather than in it. Incredibly, construction began in late April 2009 and was camera-ready by the third week of July. A strip of ersatz beach was added by trucking in tons of sand.

By Mike Flaherty. Published Aug 22, 2010

I’ve seen enough derivatives of the Seven Samurai over the years, some of which were excellent, The Wild Bunch and The Magnificent Seven are my favourites. I saw the latter two a few months ago and enjoyed them all over again. I haven’t seen the former for years, I haven’t even got a copy and I’ll put that right today! As for The Expendables, I’m going to give it a miss because I haven’t enjoyed a Sylvester Stallone movie since Rocky. Rarely did so much promise lead to so much crap.  Aaman Lamba’s review of The Expendables is all I need to know, if you see it and disagree, let me know.

Aaman Lamba. August 20, 2010.

Imagine if Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez, and Michael Bay had never made action films, and if the Hong Kong action cinema had not influenced Hollywood. The action films of the 1980s with their flash bang shock-and-awe effects and little underlying structure have long been replaced by cerebral thrillers and action fantasies. The time of the larger-than-life all-American action hero is long past.

Who else but the iconic Sylvester Stallone would continue to make movies like nothing had changed? And yet, much has changed, even in the genre he recreates almost effortlessly. There is no more the sense of American exceptionalism and triumphalism that was the hallmark and some might say, blight of the 1980s American action blockbuster. The lone hero is not the centrepiece of The Expendables, featuring an ensemble cast of mercenaries, played by the classic action heroes of times past, almost everyone except Kurt Russell and the legendary Chuck Norris.
This ’shoot-’em-up’ has all the failings of the heavy-handed genre and yet it is a fun film, with acerbic dialogue, intense action sequences and some real mean bad-asses.

The back-story gives the film some depth, with the Expendables off to save a tin-pot South American country from a dictator who is at the bidding of an ex-CIA man, growing cocaine in its fields and peddling arms, a mission apparently funded by the CIA with whom the bad guy, Eric Roberts, opening against his sister’s Eat, Pray, Love, has had some sort of falling out, never quite explained. The Expendables are a globalized bunch of tough guys, featuring Stallone, Jason Stratham, Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, and in a weakly funny cameo, Bruce Willis and the Governator himself, who’s too busy ‘wanting to be President’ to sign up for this mega-mission.

These escapees from the Sergio Leone Home for the Violently Abled have just wrapped up a mission foiling some Somali pirates, before taking on the cleansing mission in South America. The initial recon job is botched, and Stallone meets Sandra, who we discover is the evil general’s daughter. The inevitable chivalrous urges lead the Expendables back to finish the job, and all the left over whizz-bangs go up, with the typical finale, and no Expendable expended, as it were.

Films like this play an important role in recessionary times. Escapism has long been seen as appropriate fare, with the hope that the 99ers will satiate their anger and frustration through the flickers on the silver screen. This particular reel is played out, however, and the wrap-up with the geriatric hopefuls almost pitching a sequel is nauseating, but par for the course.

Aaman Lamba. August 20, 2010.

Showing right now at the BFI Film Theatre London (UK)
 Not just a good movie with great photography by Alberto Korda but historically important too. Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian wrote this review.

The Motorcycle Diaries (Los Diarios de Motocicleta)

DVD Available Now

Production year: 2004
Countries: Latin America,
Rest of the world, UK, USA
Cert (UK): 15
Runtime: 128 mins
Director: Walter Salles
Cast: Gael Garcia Bernal, Mercedes Moran, Mia Maestro, Rodrigo De La Serna

Thirty-seven years after his execution in the Bolivian jungle, Che Guevara lives on, immortalised on more T-shirts than ever. This summer, they seemed to alternate between “fcuk” and that famous image by Cuban photographer Alberto Korda, captured while Che was at a rally in 1960, protesting about counter-revolutionaries who had blown up a Belgian freighter full of Cuban armaments and killed 100 dock workers in the process. But the image is weirdly denuded of its associations: it is depoliticised and dehistoricised. Now Che is pure image, pure icon. Even Jimi Hendrix has more context.

Poster Available Now

Walter Salles’s fervent, dreamily reverent biopic of Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s legendary gap year won’t do much to change this. Here is the epic tour of Latin America he took, as a short-haired 23-year-old medical student, with his friend Alberto Granado, a cheery postgrad in biochemistry, both guys seated astride Granado’s spluttering Norton 500 motorbike. It is based partly on Che’s own memoir – originally and unsexily called Travel Notes, later renamed The Motorcycle Diaries – and Granado’s book Travels With Che Guevara.

Their ambitious route took them from Guevara’s elegant, upper-middle-class family home in Argentina, through the Andes, into Chile, then to the Peruvian Amazon and Machu Picchu, planning to arrive in Venezuela in time for Alberto’s 30th birthday. And all this in 1952: no backpackers, no tourists, nothing but the open road, with some lovely landscapes exquisitely photographed by Eric Gautier. It has the same kind of sumptuously beautiful look Salles conjured for his Brazilian revenge drama Behind the Sun.

Here is Che’s prerevolutionary existence, in its pristine state of idealism, passion and sheer vibrant youth. Just before he sets off, Che’s father takes him aside and in a man-to-man moment of intimacy gives him something for emergencies. Not extra traveller’s cheques or the Amex travel insurance hotline – but a handgun. Despite what Chekhov said about what happens when you see pistols in the first act, Che never uses this gun. In fact, we forget all about it. The question of violence is all in the future.

Guevara is played by the superbly handsome and charismatic Gael García Bernal – he actually had the role before, in a 2002 TV mini-series about Fidel Castro – and is utterly convincing as an energetic, fiercely idealistic, but formidably serious and focused young man. Rodrigo de la Serna plays the chubby and genial Granado, who provides light relief on the journey, and the heartstoppingly beautiful Mía Maestro is Che’s patrician girlfriend and semi-official fiancee Chichina, with whom Che fails to have sex on a stopover at her father’s handsome hacienda. (I had always thought, incidentally, that the nickname Che, Argentinean slang for “mate” or “buddy”, came into being on this trip, the two men calling each other “Che” Granado and “Che” Guevara. But Alberto here calls Ernesto by a nickname that has vanished from history, “Fuser”.)

On their journey, Granado and Guevara cheekily pass themselves off as doctors working on a cure for leprosy to obtain free board, lodging and motorcycle maintenance. Both have an eye for the ladies, which gets them chased out of town by furious husbands. But they also come into contact with a species they had never before properly encountered: poor people. They meet tenant farmers who have been high-handedly evicted and forced into itinerant labour – either fruit-picking or working in unspeakably grim and dangerous mines, in each case for foreign interests, often from the US. There are here and there chunks of dialogue so bleak they can only have come from real life.

“That cow is going blind,” says Che, as he rides in the back of truck with a poor, suffering beast. “So?” shrugs its peasant minder. “All it will see is shit.”

Director Walter Salles has evidently found non-professionals to play many of the agrarian proletariat, and has been able to use them in locations that have not changed appreciably in 50 years. Like a sort of photojournalist, he reprises their cameo roles in sepia-hued, black-and-white portrait shots at the end, their rugged and weather-beaten faces beaming at us, as it were, outside the narrative. These are, runs the implication, the peoples of Latin America, a geopolitical unity that Che ringingly endorses in an impromptu speech at the leprosy hospital, where he and Granado have been working.

To some, these portraits will look like glorified tourist photos, or even a sentimentalisation of poverty. It is more likely that they are a sentimentalisation of Che himself, for whom this film contrives the slightly humdrum climax of swimming heroically between two islands of the leper colony. We see our young hero struggling with his asthma, which is treated with old-fashioned glass hypodermics of adrenaline. These are said to have given Che his ferocious rages: an unlovely side of his personality, and surely a part of his revolutionary temperament, but quite absent from this film.

Che was to become an admirer of Stalin – for a time at least – and a brilliant, ruthless military leader who had no objection to punishing transgressors by sending them into battle without a weapon; that is, to their certain death. He was also a great believer in summary justice and the firing squad. As governor of the national bank in Castro’s Cuba – in which post, with considerable élan , he actually signed the banknotes “Che” – he was, arguably, the co-author of Cuba’s ruinous dependence on the Soviet Union. But then came that execution in the Bolivian jungle, cancelling the complicated side of Che’s memory. He has not grown old as Fidel has grown old, and so the motorcycle diaries, the bold and thrilling testament of youth, are growing to be the most potent part of Che’s myth. Salles does them justice.

Peter Bradshaw
Friday 27 August 2004
The Guardian (UK)

I watched this last evening for the first time in about fifteen years and was impressed all over again and I absolutely agree with the following review by Tim Dirks of Filmsite.org

High Noon (1952) is possibly the all-time best Western film ever made – a successful box-office production by Stanley Kramer and director Fred Zinnemann (who also directed From Here to Eternity (1953) and A Man For All Seasons (1966)). The Western genre was employed to tell an uncharacteristic social problem tale about civic responsibility, without much of the typical frontier violence, panoramic landscapes, or tribes of marauding Indians.

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The film’s screenplay by Carl Foreman [this was his last Hollywood film before blacklist exileto London, soon after his work on Home of the Brave (1949), Champion (1949), and The Men (1950)], written during a politically-oppressive atmosphere in the early 1950s when McCarthyism and political persecution were rampant, was loosely adapted from a Collier’s Magazine story The Tin Star (by John W. Cunningham) published in December 1947. In fact, the film’s story has often been interpreted as a morality play or parable, or as a metaphor for the threatened Hollywood blacklisted artists (one of whom was screenwriter Foreman) who faced political persecution from the HUAC during the McCarthy era due to actual or imagined connections to the Communist Party, and made life-altering decisions to stand their ground and defend moral principles according to their consciences.

It also has been interpreted as an allegory of the Cold War and US foreign policy during the Korean War. This taut, tightly-scripted, minimalist film tells the tale of a solitary, stoic, honor-bound marshal/hero, past his prime and already retired, who was left desolate and abandoned by the Hadleyville townspeople he had faithfully protected for many years (symbolically – during the World War II years).

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Due to the townspeople’s cowardice (representing cooperative witnesses before the HUAC), physical inability, self-interest, expediency, and indecisiveness, he is refused help at every turn against a revenge-seeking killer and his gang. Fearful but duty-bound, he eventually vanquishes the enemy, thereby sparing the civilized (democratic) town the encroachment of barbaristic frontier justice brought by the deadly four-man group of outlaws (symbolic of the aggressive threat in the Korean War, or the HUAC itself). Embittered by film’s end, he tosses his tin star into the dirt of the dishonorable frontier town.

One of the film posters described the theme of the deserted, lone marshal who stubbornly insisted on delaying his newly-married life with a pacifist Quaker wife (symbolic of US isolationists) in order to stay and confront his former nemesis and paroled murderer – Frank Miller:

The story of a man who was too proud to run.

Another slogan claimed: “…when the hands point up – the excitement starts!” [Director Howard Hawks and actor John Wayne both responded to the liberal preachiness of this 'un-American' film (and its cowardly townspeople) by creating a no-nonsense, right-wing rebuttal in Rio Bravo (1959). In the film, self-reliant Sheriff John T. Chance (John Wayne) refused the well-meaning assistance of Pat Wheeler's (Ward Bond) men -- "some well-meaning amateurs, most of 'em worried about their wives and kids," although all he had to help him keep a murderer from making a jailbreak was "a lame-legged old man and a drunk."]

The dramatic, tightly-compressed, austere black and white film with high-contrast images was shot in a spare 31 days, and the physically-pained, ravaged look etched on 51 year old Gary Cooper’s gaunt face was due to actual illness (a recurring hip problem, bleeding stomach ulcers, and lower back pain), and emotional stress due to his recent breakup with actress Patricia Neal after a three-year, well-publicized affair while separated from his wife. The time span of the film (about 105 minutes) approximates the actual screen length of the film – 85 minutes – accentuated by frequent images of the clock as time rapidly dissipates before the final showdown. Cameraman Floyd Crosby’s years of filming New Deal documentaries is evident in the film’s sparseness, static compositions, and authentic feel.

This simple, stark, low-budget Western classic, with a total budget of $750,000, was nominated for seven Academy Awards including Best Picture (won by Cecil B. DeMille’s circus epic The Greatest Show on Earth (1952)), Best Director, and Best Screenplay – it was awarded four awards: Best Song for “High Noon (Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darlin’)” (sung by Tex Ritter throughout the film, lyrics by Ned Washington, music by Dimitri Tiomkin), Best Scoring of a Dramatic Picture (Dimitri Tiomkin), Best Film Editing (Elmo Williams and Harry Gerstad), and Best Actor for Gary Cooper’s performance – his second Oscar after a win for Sergeant York (1941). [Cooper's win was an unusual honor, since Western films (and acting roles) are rare nominees and winners in Academy history! The film's theme song was made a popular hit by Western singer Frankie Laine.] Presumably, the Academy felt obligated to honor one of filmdom’s greatest directors (DeMille) with the Best Picture Oscar, as his career was coming to an end.

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An exciting film that gave me a good evenings entertainment a few months ago,  it had mixed reviews, I can’t imagine why and I can’t wait for the two promised sequels. This review by Wendy Ide published in The Times on 12th. March 2010 pretty well reflects my opinion. The first sequel will be released soon so if you haven’t seen this, now is the time!

A disgraced middle-aged journalist teams up with a pierced, tattooed and aggressively antisocial computer hacker to investigate a disappearance and a dark family secret — the late Stieg Larsson put a 21st-century spin on the classic crime thriller and the result was one of the publishing success stories of the decade.

It’s a book that poses a formidable challenge to film-makers. How to cram a densely plotted 500-page crime thriller that spans decades, orchestrates scores of morally dubious characters and encompasses corporate malpractice on a global scale into one feature film? Add to this that fact that the book has sold more than 10 million copies and has the sort of feverish fanbase that would go for the jugular at the slightest hint of a narrative inconsistency or casting anomaly.

It’s to their credit, then, that the director Niels Arden Oplev and screenwriters Nikolaj Arcel and Rasmus Heisterberg, employing an approach that approximates hurtling through the story on an out-of-control freight train, have succeeded in making a breathless, edgy, entertainingly pulpy genre picture. The adaptation stays true to the spirit of the novel but is not too cowed by the book’s popularity to spice up the story with the occasional high-tension setpiece.

The film fairly rattles through the story’s set-up, covering the investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist’s messy court case and subsequent public humiliation, and the bisexual hacker Lisbeth Salander’s woes with her court appointed guardian. The only time the film lingers, with a sticky-fingered salaciousness that is rather off-putting, is during a violent sexual attack on Salander. It’s one off-key note that jars in an otherwise pretty much pitch-perfect adaptation.

The film’s main asset is unquestionably Noomi Rapace, playing Lisbeth Salander. She’s a sullen, smoky-eyed goth who looks like a cross between Violet from The Incredibles and the contents of a hardware shop. The only thing steelier than her facial piercings is her glare. She’s a fascinating, enigmatic creation, a loner motivated by cold rage, disconnected sex and rifling through other people’s electronic secrets.

It’s hard to imagine an actress better suited to bringing Larsson’s abrasive, strong-minded protagonist to life. Rapace is as thin as a knife slash and attacks the role as if it challenged her to a fight. In contrast, Michael Nyqvist is suitably crumpled and careworn as the jaded idealist Blomkvist. It’s not a showy, ego-led performance, more a solid foundation of normality that counterpoints Rapace’s curious, almost reptilian sex appeal.

An American version of the book is currently in pre-production and, with Steve Zaillian (Schindler’s List) writing it, promises to be a quality project. Still, the melancholy grey-blue half-light of northern Sweden in winter and the scary savagery of Rapace are two elements that will inevitably be missing in any Hollywood remake.

Helping me to get used to the workings

This has got sharp edges and tough bits to chew but it is also a charming  love story. And if, like me, you appreciate a well crafted piece of movie art this is for you. The film has many excellent reviews of which this is one:

REVIEW BY ROGER EBERT / April 21, 2010

This commences an absorbing back and forth journey through time, between Buenos Aires in 1974 and 2000, which reopens both the crime and the unacknowledged feeling that has remained all these years between Irene and Benjamin. That’s where their personal appeal comes into play. The actress Soledad Villamil is, forgive me, my idea of a woman. Grown-up, tallish, healthy, brunette, sane and perhaps she was cast for her eyes, because the film contains a lot of closeups, and they’re required to conceal secrets. Think of Anne Archer. Playing Irene at ages 25 years apart, she is never too young or too old, but standing right there.

Ricardo Darin makes her worthy partner as Benjamin. His rank was too low, his pay too small, her presence too assured for him to trust the signals he must have known she was sending. He’s one of those men on whom a beard seems inevitable. There is a sadness about him. He has never stopped thinking about the murder case, and we understand — although the movie is indirect about this — that the investigation was mishandled at the time because of Argentina’s diseased right-wing politics.

Without being too obvious about it, the film reassembles the strands of two stories, the murder case and the unfinished emotions between Benjamin and Irene. It is filled with vivid characters. Sandoval (Guillermo Francella) is Benjamin’s alcoholic assistant in the investigation, one of those drunks who may be incompetent but is not useless. He and Benjamin, and all the legal-side workers, engage in the droll formality of addressing one another by fanciful titles. Morales (Pablo Rago) is the husband of the dead woman, still obsessed with her death. Gomez (Javier Godino) has always been Benjamin’s real suspect, and there is a scene involving him in a soccer stadium that I have no idea how it could have been filmed, special effects or not.

Juan Jose Campanella is the writer-director, and here is a man who creates a complete, engrossing, lovingly crafted film. He is filled with his stories. “The Secret in Their Eyes” is a rebuke to formula screenplays. We grow to know the characters, and the story pays due respect to their complexities and needs. There is always the sense that they exist in the now and not at some point along a predetermined continuum. Sometimes I watch a film unspool like a tape measure, and I can sense how far we are from the end. Sometimes my imagination is led to live right along with it.

“The Secret in Their Eyes” surprised many by winning the 2010 Academy Award for best foreign-language film. Michael Haneke’s “The White Ribbon,” another considerable film, was thought to be the front-runner. The academy did a good thing when it reformed the foreign-language film voting, requiring all voters to see all five finalists. In 2009, with the Japanese winner “Departures,” and again in 2010, the voters had an advantage over the rest of us. Who is to say if they were right? They voted as they felt, and in today’s unhappy distribution scene, the Oscar means your chances of seeing this film are much increased. You won’t regret it. This is a real movie, the kind they literally don’t make very much anymore.

Cast & Credits:

Benjamin: Ricardo Darin

Irene: Soledad Villamil

Sandoval: Guillermo Francella

Morales: Pablo Rago

Gomez: Javier Godino

Baez: Jose Luis Gioia

Liliana: Carla Quevedo

Written and directed by Juan Jose Campanella. Based on the novel by Eduardo Sacheri. In Spanish with English subtitles. Running time: 129 minutes. Rated R (for a rape scene, violent images, some graphic nudity and language).