"Vendetta" (Metro 22/11/13)

Vendetta (18) **

By the lowly standards of the Danny Dyer CV, this revenge thriller is semi-ambitious and actually partway watchable, boasting enough conviction to strongarm us past its plotholes, and a central turn that suggests its star isn’t solely knocking about for the paycheque: for one thing, our Dan’s pwoper bulked up to play the rogue Special Op whose pursuit of the ne’er-do-wells behind his parents’ murders sparks a national security crisis. Writer-director Stephen Reynolds makes some effort to interrogate this vigilante’s methods – pity he isn’t above the usual leering business in lapdancing clubs, a slapdash attempt to pass off this very newspaper as “London Today”, or a wildly silly, sequel-chasing finale, which repositions Dyer as Canning Town’s answer to the Dark Knight, and does its best to undermine the crude yet vaguely effective work elsewhere. Still better than Run for Your Wife, if that’s saying anything.

Vendetta opens in selected cinemas from today.

For what it's worth...

Top Ten Films at the UK Box Office            
for the weekend of November 8-10, 2013: 
             
1 (new) Gravity (12A) [above] *****
2 (1) Thor: The Dark World (12A) **
3 (4) Philomena (12A) ****
4 (3) Captain Phillips (12A) ****
5 (2) Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2 (U) ***
6 (6) Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa (15)
7 (5) Turbo (U)
8 (7) Ender's Game (12A)
9 (8) Krrish 3 (12A)
10 (9) One Chance (12A) 
 
(source: Guardian.co.uk)

My top five:            
1. Gravity  
2. How to Survive a Plague  
3. Gloria    
4. Philomena    
5. Wolf Children  

   
Top Ten DVD rentals: 
             
1 (new) Now You See Me (12A)
2 (1) Oblivion (12) *  
3 (3) World War Z (12) **
4 (new) Monsters University (U) ** 
5 (2) Behind the Candelabra (15) ***
6 (new) Snitch (12) **
7 (5) Cloud Atlas (15) ****
8 (10) Hummingbird (15) **
9 (7) Trance (15) ***
10 (9) After Earth (12)        
 
(source: lovefilm.com)
             
My top five:            
1. Blackfish  
2. Foxfire  
3. The Great Gatsby  
4. Night of Silence  
5. Easy Money
       
     
Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:              
1. American Beauty (Wednesday, BBC1, 11.35pm)
2. Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back (Saturday, ITV1, 3.45pm)
3. Once Upon a Time in Mexico (Sunday, five, 11.15pm)
4. Winchester 73 (Monday, C4, 12.20pm)
5. Radio On (Saturday, BBC2, 1.20am)

"Future My Love" (The Guardian 15/11/13)

Future My Love (12A) 97 mins ***

This distinctive, Chris Marker-like essay sees Swedish-born, Glasgow-based filmmaker Maja Borg finding a novel means of getting over heartbreak: checking herself in at the Edenic Florida retreat of social theorist Jacque Fresco, an early proponent of free culture whose most radical idea is that we should abandon money altogether – doing everything for love, not financial reward. Theories that almost certainly sounded naïve pre-2008 are returned to the table: Borg’s conversations with Floridians point up how the present system doesn’t work for them, while archival digressions contrast capitalism’s 1950s golden age with the scrapheaps piling up in its wake. If there’s something self-conscious about the framing – where the director’s often mopey internal monologues threaten to overwrite Fresco’s fleet thinking – the core is provocative and outward-looking: in searching for solutions, both for her own unhappiness and everybody else’s, Borg transforms the personal into the unmistakably political.

Future My Love opens in selected cinemas from today.

For what it's worth...

Top Ten Films at the UK Box Office          
for the weekend of November 1-3, 2013: 
           
1 (new) Thor: The Dark World (12A) **
2 (1) Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2 (U) ***
3 (2) Captain Phillips (12A) **** 
4 (new) Philomena (12A) ****
5 (4) Turbo (U)
6 (3) Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa (15)
7 (5) Ender's Game (12A)
8 (new) Krrish 3 (12A)
9 (6) One Chance (12A)
10 (7) Escape Plan (15) **
 
(source: Guardian.co.uk)

My top five:          
1. Gravity
2. How to Survive a Plague
3. Gloria  
4. Philomena  
5. Wolf Children  

 
Top Ten DVD rentals: 
           
1 (new) Oblivion (12) *  
2 (new) Behind the Candelabra (15) ***  
3 (new) World War Z (12) **  
4 (1) Jack the Giant Slayer (12) **   
5 (4) Cloud Atlas (15) ****  
6 (new) The Big Wedding (15)  
7 (new) Trance (15) ***   
8 (2) Identity Thief (12) *   
9 (new) After Earth (12)  
10 (new) Hummingbird (15) **         
 
(source: lovefilm.com)
           
My top five:          
1. Blackfish
2. Foxfire
3. The Great Gatsby
4. Night of Silence
5. Easy Money
       
   
Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:            
1. If... [above] (Wednesday, C4, 1.20am)
2. Dirty Harry (Wednesday, five, 10pm)
3. Up in the Air (Friday, BBC2, 11.10pm)
4. Notes on a Scandal (Sunday, BBC2, 10.30pm)
5. White Material (Saturday, BBC2, 1.05am)

From the archive: "Koi... Mil Gaya"

Koi... Mil Gaya is a Bollywood film where the novelty of the conceit - the novelty of seeing something as unoriginal as a Close Encounters/E.T. knock-off translated into Hindi - overcomes any shakiness in the execution. In a prologue, an astronomer who's made contact with aliens dies in a car crash that seriously injures his pregnant wife. Their child grows up to become Rohit (Hrithik Roshan), a slow young man who enjoys jumping in puddles and hanging out with his gang of cherubic of eight-year-old schoolmates. Yet when the aliens show up again, anxious to know why no-one's been returning their calls, it's Rohit who becomes the first to make contact.

What strikes you is the film's sheer simplicity, broadly on a level with that of its hero: only the heavens (and the BBFC) know why Koi... Mil Gaya has been classified 12A, as no recent Hindi film has been so obviously crying out for a universal rating. Among the building blocks co-writer/director Rakesh Roshan (Hrithik's dad) has assembled here: naivete such that perhaps the film doesn't know not to score a sweaty basketball tussle between Rohit and his male romantic rival to the Art of Noise's "Moments in Love"; product-placement such that one of the first discoveries the extra-terrestrials (who resemble Star Wars' Jawas crossed with the Smurfs) make about earthlings is that we enjoy a refreshing cola beverage at bars named after a particular variety of coffee bean.

There aren't many signs of intelligent life among the human participants: Preity Zinta has to dial down her usual screen IQ to play a girl insistent "every woman should be married", and Roshan, generally something of a pretty-boy actor, finds himself in the double bind of having to act a) geeky and b) dumber than he actually is, at least until the film can give him biceps and an excuse to take his glasses off. With its young supporting cast apparently drawn straight from a Children's Film Foundation offering circa 1974, Koi... Mil Gaya is the definition of childish entertainment, although I appreciate you could say the same thing of Independence Day, for example. It also manages to be weirdly appealing with it, sporting the widest of eyes, and songs that aspire, both musically and lyrically, to the status of stings for teatime TV shows. "This isn't meant for kids," Rohit insists at one point. It is, you know.

(February 2006)

Koi... Mil Gaya is available on DVD through Yash Raj Films. A sequel, Krrish, followed in 2005; a second sequel, rather confusingly titled Krrish 3, is now in cinemas nationwide.

From the archive: "Berlin Alexanderplatz"

Made for West German television, yet released theatrically across the U.S. and Europe, Rainer Werner Fassbinder's monumental 15-hour adaptation of Alfred Döblin's novel Berlin Alexanderplatz sits firmly and insistently at the intersection of cinema, literature and theatre. Döblin's theme was the moral and financial stagnation of the German state during the 1920s; his protagonist, the portly Franz Biberkopf (a mountainous display of screen acting from Günter Lamprecht), a wifekiller released from jail after serving four years. Corruptible and mentally unstable, Biberkopf staggers out into an especially rundown corner of a Berlin disempowered by Versailles, inhabited chiefly by drunks, wastrels and prostitutes. Early encounters characterise Biberkopf as a big baby, voiding himself of any and all responsibility. After a turnabout at the prison gates that appears to signify some desire to return to the womb, he spends much of the first episode wailing on a rabbi's floor, before clamping himself to his lover's nipple; later instalments revise this interpretation to show the character as first a vampire - a fatter Nosferatu - leeching off those around him, no matter how sour the taste of the blood, then increasingly as a victim of blind allegiance, and a history hellbent on repeating itself. 

With hindsight, we can see where all this is heading. The bread is being baked, the circuses gathering, but the Nazis don't arrive until episode nine (and, even then, remain a cursory presence), which allows whole parts to be devoted to watching Biberkopf sinking into a drunken stupor (episode four) or trading a succession of women for use as whores (the outstandingly chilly episode five, which introduces Gottfried John as a recurring face of evil). Yet Döblin's experiment was to show how the hearty, opportunistic Biberkopf - with his camaraderie, vows of reform and knowledge of the lines he must not cross - might be considered relatively heroic in a society as fatally compromised as this; the narrative keeps throwing him up against those whose souls are in a far shabbier condition than his own. 

It's not that we aren't warned - the first episode bears the ominous subtitle "The Punishment Begins" - but the process makes for a long haul in the presence of characters who are both far from sympathetic and often intended more as symbolic avatars than recognisable, flesh-and-blood creations. Marked by the specific creakiness of period TV pacing and the more general torturousness that came easily to Fassbinder as both personality and director, it might, perhaps, have only been lapped up as it was by cineastes in the decade that gave the world Shoah, Dekalog and the first Heimat; even approached broken down as a DVD box set in our post-Wire era, Berlin Alexanderplatz requires some swallowing.

What may well compel you to stick with it is a rich strain of desperate, tragic gutter poetry - a strain that actually provides a valuable, grounded corrective to Reitz's made-for-TV project, which looks at Germany from the top down rather than from the pavement up. (The Heimats are all opera and mountain tops; Fassbinder makes his home amid the country's alleyways and puddles.) From the proliferation of prison imagery, extending outwards from caged birds and monkeys to the cramped claustrophobia of the studio sets, we derive that everyone on screen is wounded and trapped, marching round and round in circles, looking for someone to promise them release, ease their pain or point them in the right direction; watching it in the middle of another Depression, it hits you as an utterly pertinent parable of the mass derangement that can occur in the absence of social mobility.

Fassbinder's pressure-cooker aesthetic, coupled to a then-unprecedented attention to sound and music, allows scenes and performances to build to a pathological fever pitch, each movement of the camera another twist of the knife, until the unremittingly brutal diptych of episodes 11 and 12, in which a series of primal screams are followed by a protracted murder. Purged of any trace of humour, it quickly assumes a very Germanic weight, and you could say that, like its anti-hero, it could do with shedding a few pounds. (An extraordinarily bold epilogue, featuring a human slaughterhouse and the never-more-desolate strains of Kraftwerk's "Radioactivity", transports us to another place entirely, and merits discussion in its own right as a two-hour stab at Fire Walk with Me-like revisionism, reviving some characters even as it trashes its sets and all that has gone before.) Yet it's precisely that gravity that gives Berlin Alexanderplatz its remarkable quality of evocation: it would, I'd suggest, be impossible to come away from it without a profound and lasting sense of this time and this place; a sense that seeps into you like the damp, and which no history book - bound up with issues of objectivity and respectability - could ever give you. Bitter as it is, if you do make it through to the end, you will find it hard to leave these characters behind.

(November 2010)

Berlin Alexanderplatz screens in its entirety at London's ICA over the next two weekends as part of Iain Sinclair's 70x70 season. Full details can be found here. 

For what it's worth...

Top Ten Films at the UK Box Office        
for the weekend of October 25-27, 2013: 
         
1 (new) Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2 (U) ***
2 (2) Captain Phillips (12A) ****
3 (new) Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa (15)
4 (1) Turbo (U)
5 (new) Ender's Game (12A)
6 (new) One Chance (12A)
7 (3) Escape Plan (15) **
8 (4) Prisoners (15)
9 (5) Sunshine on Leith (12A)
10 (6) Blue Jasmine (12A) **
 
(source: Guardian.co.uk)

My top five:        
1. Gloria
2. Philomena
3. Wolf Children  
4. Short Term 12     
5. Nosferatu the Vampyre

 
Top Ten DVD rentals: 
         
1 (new) Oblivion (12) *
2 (new) Behind the Candelabra (15) ***
3 (new) World War Z (12) **
4 (1) Jack the Giant Slayer (12) ** 
5 (4) Cloud Atlas (15) ****
6 (new) The Big Wedding (15)
7 (new) Trance (15) *** 
8 (2) Identity Thief (12) * 
9 (new) After Earth (12)
10 (new) Hummingbird (15) **         

(source: lovefilm.com)
         
My top five:        
1. Before Midnight  
2. We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks        
3. Renoir    
4. Like Someone in Love      
5. The Pervert's Guide to Ideology  
       
 
Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:          
1. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia [above] (Saturday, C4, 1.20am)
2. Grease (Sunday, C4, 5.50pm)
3. Ghost Busters (Sunday, five, 1pm)
4. Hombre (Monday, C4, 12.55pm)
5. A Cock and Bull Story (Saturday, BBC2, 11.55pm)