Films

Been shopping.

Further Degeneration

Just in case you thought I'd taken a break from being a Resident Evil fanboy, let me point out that the upcoming CG animated movie Resident Evil: Degeneration now has an offical US website. There's nothing much there at the moment except for the teaser trailer and a promise that more is to come in a week's time...

Metropolis Un-Amputated

So it turns out a museum in Buenos Aires has been in possession of a complete copy of the visually entrancing Metropolis the whole time - including the quarter of the film chopped out and believed lost forever when it was dumbed-down for American audiences. Read the full story at Zeit Online.

Hat tip: Twitch

Further Excitement

No sooner have I blogged the teaser trailer for Mamoru Oshii's upcoming Sky Crawlers, Twitch report that the full length trailer seems to have escaped onto youTube.

Leatherheads

I finally got around to seeing George Clooney's Leatherheads on Friday. I know that a lot of people seemed disappointed by it, and sure, it's no masterpiece, it doesn't push the envelope at all, and it's not as witty as the screwball comedies it emulates - but it's still a very entertaining, very well directed film - and that's all I was looking for.

Prepare to get Excited

Normally it's a bad thing to hear that a director is attempting to make a 'more popular' film, but given how much Mamoru Oshii has been in danger of disappearing up his own backside with his more recent films, it's pretty cool to see that his next project seems to be mostly about blue skies and fighter planes...

DVD Review: The Science of Sleep

Michel Gondry, who mastered surreal psychology in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind returns with this tenderly constructed portrait of an over-sensitive dreamer. Mexican Stéphane (Gael García Bernal) has moved to France, tempted by his Gallic mother's offer of a supposedly creative job at a calendar company. Staying in his childhood bedroom, he falls in love with his adorable neighbour Stéphanie (Charlotte Gainsborough) – but not before casting a pall over their relationship with a mistake he makes due to his tendency to confuse imagination and reality.


The first thing that struck me about The Science of Sleep was its immediacy. Hand-held cameras and natural sound make reality seem just like reality – while steadicams, cardboard buildings and stop-motion animation denote the world of Stéphane's dreams. There's a glorious hand-made feel to these latter sequences, as if each car, cloud and building was created by Stéphane himself from loo rolls, cellophane and glue. If nothing else, it's nice to see some real craftsmanship in a contemporary movie, in the place of the often soulless barage of CGI.

As in Eternal Sunshine, Gondry shows a keen, almost painful ability to convey the ups and downs of love, from moments of energetic creative connection, to depressive, drunken jealousy. As an added dimension, flowing from that comes a perfect depiction of dream logic – barely coherent declarations of love, peculiar causes and effects, arguments based on semantics rather than actualities. At the collision of these two planes is Stéphane, able to imagine his hopes and fears with equal vividness, self-centred, self-defeating and moody – a lot like a certain blogging space cat you may know.


The Science of Sleep had me alternating between being on the verge of tears during Stéphane's painful waking moments of heartbreak, and laughing at the sheer brilliance of his imagination. In places these dream sequences betray Gondry's background as a music video director – but so what? If destroying the world with an enormous plasticine volcano isn't sufficient cause for a rock anthem, I don't think anything is.

Given that the back of the DVD case promises a film about 'imagination vs logic' it's refreshing to see the film take an entirely positive approach to science – musing pseudo-scientifically on black holes and brain chemistry. You have to understand how things work, be able to appreciate the peculiar and surprising before you can create; have to understand a little chaos theory and electronics to make a tiny robot horse – though whether Stéphane actually does make a tiny robot horse is debatable. Stéphane's inability to distinguish reality from dreams overflows into the film itself, especially where he sucks Stéphanie into his flights of fancy – making cotton wool clouds float in the air with a resonant note played on the piano.


With its combination of everyday ambience and out-of-this-world imagination, The Science of Sleep is perhaps the film for the hopeless dreamers among us. While it may not efface Eternal Sunshine in the eyes of many, I found it to be one of the most touching films I can name.

DVD Review: The Man with the Screaming Brain

Bruce Campbell is America's most famous jobbing actor. George Clooney regularly spends his millions on developing worthy but unprofitable films. Brad Pitt sunk the relatively low-budget Fight Club by demanding a huge pay cheque. But most actors can't choose projects they like, or make demands. They take small roles in shit films, because they need to put food on the table. Although he may be something of a household name, Campbell identifies strongly with these actors, still belongs among them in many ways. He's also written, in his autobiography If Chins Could Kill, about the importance of actors understanding what happens behind the camera as well. It's no good giving the performance of your life, he argues, if you're not even in the frame.

Reflecting on this, it's hard not to have relatively high hopes for The Man with the Screaming Brain, Campbell's directorial début. The results, however, while they hint at better things to come, are not so great that I could happily recommend this film to anyone but ardent Campbellites.


In interviews, Campbell has shown a far better grasp of plot and character than your typical A-list Hollywood screenwriter, so it comes as a surprise to be faced with the peculiar lack of tension and motivation to Screaming Brain. I think figuring out why might be clearer when you consider that after years of trying to crack the mainstream, Campbell only seems to have recently noticed that he's an icon among alternative and indie film fans. Screaming Brain seems like an attempt to emulate indie films that focus on character and ambience more than plot and special effects, but by someone not all that familiar with how such movies actually work. The situations depicted may be well devised, but all too often the result is more made-for-TV than made-for-Sundance.

The film certainly doesn't work as a whole, nor in most scenes, but it still has moments – often moments that rely either on Campbell's skills as an actor or as a physical comedian. A scene in which his character – a ruthless industrialist who has the brain of a former KGB agent grafted onto his – orders at a restaurant while arguing with the voice in his head and confusing the waitress is particularly well done. Another sequence, which simply involves Campbell staggering through Bulgarian landmarks like a possessed maniac, also displays some rather striking cinematography. Other than that, things hang together pretty poorly, with no real flow to proceedings, either in plot or in tone – a problem exacerbated by the odd bit of sloppy editing.


I like the idea of The Man with the Screaming Brain, and it certainly gets an A+ for effort. I'll be back for Campbell's next effort as actor-director, but I don't expect to pass many people back-tracking to his début while on my way there.

And finally, for once I will actually review the DVD disc in question. Importantly for me, there were no subtitles, whether for the hard of hearing or otherwise. Meanwhile, lurking in the extras is a nice little feature about how Campbell and his co-writer raised the money for the film – a straightforward short that I found more entertaining than the feature itself.

Resident Evil De-Degeneration

(Warning: zombie violencing)

While the trailer above isn't all that slick, it at least gives us the gist. Yes, I bet Capcom were front of the queue when Advent Children (I reviewed it here) opened in cinemas. "You mean we can take our expertise in computer animation and make our own movies extending the storyline of our games instead of just letting Hollywood make trashy cash-in 'adaptations', pissing on our work like a less polite form of zombie dog?!"

Granted, the Final Fantasy games are a quantum leap ahead of Resident Evil in the visual storytelling stakes, but Paul W.S. Anderson has already set the bar pretty low. To be honest, I think many fans will just be happy with a faithful Resi movie, regardless of how rubbish it is.

And this trailer definitely has "For the fans!" written all over it. Resi aficionados will be quivering with excitement at the prospect of the further adventures of Leon and Claire, while I suspect those who only know the movies (or are completely innocent of the whole franchise) will be left singularly bemused.

Running Out of Year

The year is almost over. It is a time to reflect, a time when we are more likely to notice that this day is one that was preceded by another one 365 days earlier, and then to obsess about what we did in the intervening period, and about what we hope to do in the next such period.

It is a bandwagon I would like to jump on, please. Here is some cool stuff I found in 2007. Much of it actually coming from other years (but not years in the future, as I am not a time traveller - or AM I?!) because I am always behind on everything and they have been making cool stuff for billions of years, so give me a break, okay?

---Of the movies I saw:

A Scanner Darkly
Funny, moving, strange and deeply human psychedelia.

Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex: Solid State Society
Politically aware cyberpunk, demonstrates that Kenji Kamiyama can spin a decent yarn if you let him do it in a more cinematic format. Needs more colons.

The Host
Character-driven monster movie provides laughs, scares and tears.

---Of the books I read:

His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
Breathtaking imagination and heart.

A Scanner Darkly - Philip K. Dick
Because my record got stuck.

Pushing Ice - Alistair Reynolds
All this is fleeting, the most solid buildings just motes of dust.

---Comics and manga:

Lost at Sea - Bryan Lee O'Malley
So adolescent angst can be evocative and touching. Now I shall have to eat my hat. Pass the pepper.

Death Note - Tsugumi Ohba, Takeshi Obata
Teenager becomes vengeful angel. World-class detective pursues! But I only read the first volume. Why? Because I got distracted. Thus forms my first new year's resolution.

One Piece - Eiichiro Oda
Why did I read so much of this stuff? And there are like a million volumes of it! My name is Pacian, and I am addicted to dumb stories about pirates.

---TV Shows

Battlerstar Galactica
Intelligent science fiction on television? Someone should have done this before!

Primeval
It is better than Doctor Who. It is better than Doctor Who. It is better than- you get the idea.

Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex: 2nd Gig
Didn't live up to its potential, but full of cool ideas, beautiful visuals and visceral action.

---Games

Nelly Cootalot
So... cute... can't breathe...

Art of Theft
Actually, I could probably have spent all those hours doing something much more productive.

Sam and Max
They're back! And some of it is excellent! And some of it is not so excellent, but we will ignore that because these two seemed to chime more with my personality than Lost Pig or Aquaria or other - arguably better - games. Tomorrow I am probably going to think of a really stonking game I played in 2007 and kick myself.

---People

You, and you, and especially you. On which note, I wish you all a happy and creative New Year!

Friday Buster Keaton Blogging

Buster looks through the wrong window in The Goat and winds up in the mugshot of a notorious criminal. This 27-minute 1921 film is out of copyright and available for download here.

For those of you in the UK with TVs, Paul Merton's documentary on Buster is showing on BBC2, tomorrow (Saturday 10th), 6.30pm-ish.

Update: Having now seen Merton's documentary, I can heartily recommend it. I should add that the last half hour consists of a Buster Keaton short in full - its title: The Goat. Huh.

DVD Review: Russian Ark

In the 18th century, Catherine the Great purchased a considerable collection of Western European artwork, the act that would lead to the creation of the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersberg. One of the largest museums in the world, it centres on the Winter Palace, the historical home of the Russian tsars.

What am I going on about? Well, imagine someone said, “Hey, let's make the State Hermitage Museum into a movie!” Huh? Make a museum into a movie? Books, yes, plays, TV series, comics, radio shows, poems, historical events, even (no, please don't) computer games – but a museum? And yet, that is perhaps the best way to explain Russian Ark: that it is the cinematic adaptation of a museum: its history, its exhibits, its atmosphere, its purpose. Hollywood did something like that, and it was a trite kids' film starring Adam Sandler and Robin Williams. Russians did it, and it was visual poetry.


Following an accident, a contemporary Russian finds himself adrift in time and space. Outside the Hermitage in the 18th century, he wanders inside, finding each part of the museum at a different period of history. A ghostlike presence in these events, his only constant companion is a cynical marquis from Western Europe (Sergei Dontsov). Refined and reserved, the marquis is quick to put down Russian culture and its unrequited obsession with Europe, but he is also a deeply sensual man, unable to resist the delights of high culture.


Russian Ark takes the form of a continuous point-of-view shot from the, well, point-of-view of this drifting Russian, as he follows the marquis through three-hundred years of history, moving from the private moments of royals, to the silence of a communist museum, to opulent balls, to the Siege of Stalingrad. On the way, we pause to look at the paintings and sculptures, suffer the marquis' frequent distraction by 'unescorted' women, and get thrown out of a historical ceremony. I say 'we' because, although this lost (probably either dreaming or dead) Russian often shares his thoughts with us and the marquis, the style of the film unequivocally puts the audience into his shoes. I said this was a continuous POV, and boy did I mean it. Russian Ark was filmed in a single unedited take on a digital Steadicam. At no point do we cut away, spoiling the illusion of our guided tour through the history of the Hermitage Museum. As a result, a cast of two-thousand costumed actors and three live orchestras must perform perfectly, and an unfortunate German Steadicam operator (Tilman Büttner, responsible for the iconic shots of Lola running in Run, Lola, Run) is half-killed by having to lug his equipment on a journey of almost one and a half kilometres.


Russian Ark has no real story, plot or drama. It really is as if someone decided to make a film adaptation of a historical museum. The pleasure in watching, assuming you can do without the aforementioned story, plot or drama, comes from experiencing the history of the Hermitage: discussing paintings with the marquis, chasing Catherine the Great through the snow, watching an officer try to steal a dancing partner at a Winter Palace ball. Russian Ark feels as real as any dream - compelling, surreal and evocative.

Run, Fatboy, Run

Run, Fatboy, Run is a peculiar, but ultimately satisfying romantic comedy, marking the second collaboration (that I know of) between star/co-writer Simon Pegg and director David Schwimmer. Schwimmer surprises by achieving an evocative, naturalistic tone for most of the film, but still can't resist occasionally slipping in some dehumanising Hollywood gloss.

There's a point in the middle of the film where Pegg's character sits on a hill, having a quiet moment with his son. In the background is a sprawling view of London that would never make it on any postcard: grimy tower blocks, age-blackened redbrick houses, an eroded Gothic church. It's a landscape of the kind I find deeply moving in its uncompromising display of life, warts-and-all. Of course, later on Schwimmer has to treat us to an oil-painting perfect view of Tower Bridge that made me want to projectile vomit across the cinema, but I'll let it slide.

Despite the odd bit of unearned sentimentality, Run, Fatboy, Run still manages to be funny, touching, and occasionally even understated. There's a strong supporting cast in the form of Thandie Newton as Pegg's jilted bride, Hank Azaria as the slick American character who is actually the bad guy for once, and comedian Dylan Moran in typically unkempt and misanthropic form. This is also a film that acknowledges the flaws in a story about a man trying to 'win back' his ex, making this a story more about someone trying to improve himself than about any kind of macho pissing contest over a passive woman.

In a perfect world, Run, Fatboy, Run would eclipse the less-obviously but more insidiously Americanised British rom-coms with Hugh Grant (you know the ones I mean), but I won't hold my breath. Anyway, go watch it if it turns up in a cinema near you.

Keaton Collaborators

I've been meaning to do this for a while now. Watching Buster Keaton's films, I tend to spend a lot of time going, "Hey, that guy was in one of Keaton's other films, but I can't remember what his name is!" The internet is little help in this regard, there being no pages that list Buster Keaton's collaborators, regulars, favourite actors, whatever you want to call them. Wouldn't it be great, I thought, if there were somewhere on the net where you could match the faces to the names?

So here it is. Ordered by the number of Keaton films they've featured in, Buster Keaton's little gang - or at least, all the faces that I find memorable from his films. (Mouse-over the pictures to see which movie they're from.)

Joe Roberts - 18 Busters


A long-time friend of Buster's, he played menacing and/or comic characters of large stature in pretty much all of his short films. Sadly, he died of a stroke in 1923, meaning that he only had the chance to appear in two of Keaton's feature length pictures.

Virginia Fox - 10 Busters


The daughter of the man who gave the Fox studio its name, Virginia played brash, alluring women in many of Buster's short films.

Joe Keaton - 10 Busters


Joe, father of Buster, played numerous small parts in his son's films - often sporting ridiculous make-up.

Sybil Seely - 5 Busters


The other leading lady common to many of Keaton's short films, Seely was more obviously pretty than Fox, but generally played less interesting characters.

Snitz Edwards - 3 Busters


A prolific character actor of the 1920s, Keaton obviously liked the look of his versatile face, casting him in prominent roles in three of his feature length pictures.

Erwin Connelly - 3 Busters


Memorable more for his interesting face than the size of his roles, Connelly had parts in three of Keaton's feature length pictures, most notably as a villain in Sherlock Jr.

DVD Review: The Proposition

The Proposition is an almost psychedelic journey into the violent, untamed past of the outback, and probably the best film on the nature of crime and punishment that I've yet seen. As the film starts, lawman Captain Stanley (Ray Winstone) has just apprehended hardened criminal Charlie Burns (Guy Pearce) and his younger brother Mikey. As the three sit among the corpses of those who didn't survive the shoot-out, Stanley presents Charlie with the following (eponymous) proposition: if Charlie kills his dangerous older brother, Arthur, Mikey will avoid the noose.

As Stanley sees it, Mikey, a simpleton, and Charlie, mild and indecisive, are no real threat. Arthur, on the other hand is a cold, intelligent monster, completely without remorse. In his quest to, as he sees it, 'civilise this land', stopping Arthur from committing further crimes is more important to Stanley than punishing Charlie and Mikey for crimes that have already occurred. Unfortunately, everyone else in his little town has quite the opposite opinion, and although it might seem that Charlie is the one with the greatest dilemma, choosing as he is between two brothers, it is Stanley who finds himself treading the line between those actions he believes to be right, and those which cause others to despise him.


The single line which encapsulates the moral message I took from this film – not that it is, at least in any conventional sense, a morality tale – is uttered with disdain by 'fortune hunter' Jellon Lamb (a show-stealing performance by John Hurt): “We are, at bottom, one and the same.” In this specific case, Lamb is pouring scorn on Charles Darwin for claiming that white men share a common ancestry with monkeys, and -shock, horror- even aborigines. “We're Englishmen!” he rages, shortly after holding a knife to Charlie's throat, “Not beasts!” A later scene in which the people of Stanley's town are unable to watch the flogging they were so eager for Mikey to receive underscores the sentiment that Lamb is so appalled by: that Mikey is a person, just like us. Although he may have committed horrible crimes, flogging him (and the words don't convey the ordeal he is put through) is a horrible crime in itself. One does not excuse the other, as we are all the same: criminals and law abiding citizens.


Not that anyone in this movie manages to keep their hands clean – one striking example being when, to assuage his superiors, Stanley engages in the genocide of aborigines with only the weakest reluctance. In this case he is enacting the law of his era, simply doing away with 'rebel blacks'. But to a modern audience this is (hopefully) clearly as much an evil deed as anything the Burns gang has engaged in. This is a further assault on our notion of civilisation and what (if anything) separates us from animals – the reminder that our civilisations are almost all built on the vile mistreatment of people who merely happened to belong to other civilisations, but who we convinced ourselves were not the same as us.

One final thing I found to be especially conspicuous was Charlie's profound hesitancy. At one point late in the film, Lamb accuses him of being singularly useless, and the charge is definitely one that sticks. Charlie drifts quietly through the film, sent to his brother by Stanley's proposition, but unwilling to act either to help or hinder his sibling's misadventures. In a film in which violence is superbly depicted as never less than repugnant (often with a noticeable lack of explicitness – for example, blocking our view of the knife sliding in and instead leaving us only with the expression of the person being stabbed), the one act of violence that would be the most justifiable – killing Arthur Burns – is also the one which is left until the last possible moment, when Charlie is forced to act, not by any logical consequence of the plot, but purely by his humanity. I find Charlie's characterisation to be strangely compelling; he is representative of probably most of the people in the audience: the infamous good person who stands by and does nothing, even takes part if it seems like the done thing.


The Proposition is a powerful, atmospheric movie, alternating between almost surreal depictions of outback desolation and nail-biting scenes of menace. With perfect visuals, outstanding performances, and an absorbing, anachronistic soundtrack of ambient noise and quiet vocals, this is a film that can't help but make you sit up and listen, though there's no guarantee you'll like what it has to say.

DVD Review: The Prestige

Beneath the stage of a great magic act, Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman) is trapped, drowning in a tank full of water. Alfred Borden (Christian Bale, affecting a convincing working class English accent) apparently stumbles onto the scene, only to end up accused of Angier's murder. While in prison, Borden receives Angier's journal and reads about his trip to Colorado to visit Nikola Tesla (a nice turn by David Bowie). And, while he was there, Angier was also decoding Borden's own encrypted notebook. So begins the multi-layered narrative of Christopher Nolan's The Prestige, replete with untrustworthy narrators and complicated trickery.


Although I may have knocked Nolan's action scenes in Batman Begins, I do love that film, considering it to have one of the best edited, fast-paced storylines I can think of. Still, I must admit that I was glad to see Nolan returning to more familiar territory with The Prestige, covering typically Nolan-esque themes of motive, illusion and delusion. Driving the film forward is the rivalry between Angier and Borden, two magicians divided by a deadly incident. They steal one another's acts, interfere with their shows and engage in more straightforward acts of violence. In particular, Angier is obsessed with discovering the secret behind Borden's 'Transported Man' act, which he comes to believe Tesla has had a hand in designing.


Nolan continues to draw first rate actors to him. Michael Caine gives us a typically engaging performance as the man who designs Angier's acts, Scarlet Johansson is the beautiful assistant caught between the two rivals, and Andy 'Gollum' Serkis is Tesla's assistant. And as usual, it's not solely intellectual themes and dense plotting: Nolan expertly imbues scenes with atmosphere, and takes full advantage of his outstanding cast. Unsurprising really, as it's the fallibility of humanity, and our weak link to the Universe around us, that seems to fascinate Nolan most of all.


There is, of course, a trick to this film. But Nolan has also clearly learned something from the world of magic: misdirection. What seems like it is going to be the film's chief surprise – I won't even allude to it – is actually quite easy to figure out. In fact, I think that in the lead up to the revelation, the film is pretty much acting as if the audience already knows. But of course, there is another surprise as well, of the typically mind-blowing, plot-falling-into-place-all-of-a-sudden kind that we expect from Nolan, a revelation that a day later still has me exclaiming, “Oh, of course! Because of that, then also...” and “Oh! No wonder they kept going back to that! What could be better symbolism for...”

I'm going to go out on a limb here. Having only seen the film once, I feel a strong urge to proclaim that Nolan has here made another Memento, only in a completely different fashion, and with a completely different feel. Whether or not I'll feel the same way after I've seen The Prestige half a dozen times, I don't know. But the thing is, I probably am going to watch it half a dozen times either way.

DVD Review: Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children

Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children is a computer animated action-fantasy film based on a popular video game. Those three different elements (action, CGI, game adaptation) often lure me in with such promise, only to fall away at the last moment and drop me into the pit of so-bad-it's-good, or even the dreaded chasm of so-bad-it's-just-bad. Thank fuck, then, that Advent Children actually comes through, showing everyone else how it's done.

When it comes to making a video game adaptation, the brains behind Final Fantasy have obviously discovered the best route to take: don't. Advent Children is instead a cinematic sequel to a video game, bypassing all the problems of translating the story of a game to screen – the kind of mutilation that makes adapting a novel look like remaking another movie. Computer games have the potential to span simply enormous stories, wandering all over the place. While in a novel this might distract from the central premise, the central premise of a game involves user interaction. Exploration, both physically and through the plot, can be a huge part of the fun. The Final Fantasy games are profound examples of this, a typical instalment requiring a good forty or so hours to play from start to finish, often fleshing out an entire world in the process. It's a stroke of minor genius to take that as the first step, and then use it as a setting for a relatively very simple story.


This is also exactly the kind of interaction between the video game and movie industries that I can approve of. It's not a license being sold to a studio, but a group of people who, from the games they've made, have extensive experience in producing exhilarating, achingly beautiful computer animation, and want to put it on the silver screen. Of course, their first attempt, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, did away with much of what made the games so brilliant – for example, rather than a unique, highly imaginative fantasy world, the movie was set in a futuristic America. It felt like the Final Fantasy 'feel' was diluted to try and give it mass appeal (and instead was extinguished in the process). With Advent Children, it's clear that lessons have been learned. This movie is obviously intended for consumption by existing fans rather than as a means of extending the games' market, and it feels like something made by people who love the ideas they're expressing as much the people they're making it for.

Maybe I should mention that I haven't actually played Final Fantasy 7, although I am a huge fan of several other of the FF games, and like any gamer, I know little bits about it – for example how Sepiroth is carefully built up into one of the most memorable video game villains of all time, and how (most prolific spoiler on the Internet:) Aeries dies. So the simple story for Advent Children is doubly effective. We don't need to know the ins and outs of the whole FF7 world (and if the FF games I've played are any indication, there's likely to be ins and outs up the wazoo) to understand that stopping Sepiroth from coming back is probably a good idea, and maybe our hero needs to come to terms with Aeris being dead. And that's the plot. Oh but, how does it all play out? Well...


Advent Children has helped me to finally make peace with CGI. I've long been wondering just what the purpose of computer animation is, looking to see it do something different, that no other medium could quite get right. Looking at some computer animations, with their awkward-moving, weightless characters, bereft of personality, I can't help but think they would have been better off getting some artists to draw them by hand in each frame. (This isn't a blanket accusation, Toy Story 2 always, always makes me cry, and Brad Bird's The Incredibles is visually brilliant). But now, with Advent Children, I have finally seen what that something different is. It is sword fights on motorcycles.

In no other medium could you make a high-speed motorcycle chase that was also a sword fight. At least, not as convincingly and dynamically as the one in Advent Children. Yes, I called Advent Children an action-fantasy film above, because action is definitely what drives it forward. And not just any action: flawlessly choreographed, lightning fast, gravity defying, out-of-this-world action.


A lot of the time these days, I have trouble forcing myself to watch action films. Every director in the world seems to have gone down with Action-Scene Over-Direction Syndrome (ASODS for short). Christopher Nolan, I'm looking at you: an epilepsy-inducing barrage of close-ups is not exciting; it just leaves the audience with no idea of what's going on. So refreshing then, to see rapidly edited fight scenes where you can actually make out what's happening. And what's happening are things that make the most dynamic parts of the Matrix Trilogy look like pro-wrestling. 'Anything goes', was apparently director Tetsuya Nomura's motto for Advent Children. Don't worry about whether it looks realistic, worry about whether it looks cool. And it works extremely well. The images may be completely unrealistic, but they are also completely convincing. The characters have weight and substance to them, even as they leap up into the scaffold of an unfinished skyscraper, or get sent flying by a single blow.

The Final Fantasy games are part of something that is very important to me: what I often think of as 'true' fantasy – living up to the full promise of the word. Not orcs and castles and the same tired tropes, but anything you can conceive of, anything that will fit into the story. Finding a neatly crafted pearl of that stuff in Advent Children causes me to perhaps wax a bit too lyrical. Basically a soapy, slightly melodramatic story featuring prolonged and flamboyant action scenes, I'm sure that those who can't help but be cynical and/or refined will have a hard time swallowing Advent Children down. But those who are quite happy just to see sheer bravura of imagination will lap it up.

DVD Review: The Host

A touching, unsentimental family drama...

…that happens to revolve around a giant, carnivorous monster.


The Host was, from my perspective, one of the most hyped-up and positively received movies of the past year. But the question I had to ask myself was: Is it my kind of movie? I mean, come on: a monster movie? Even if it does completely reinvent the genre, even if Korea is supposedly where 'it' is at these days, even if everyone seems to love it to bits…

Then again, I thought, maybe I will check it out. And yes, okay, it is brilliant.

Now, one thing that annoys me beyond measure, and which I may write (read: rant) about in more depth in future, are those who look at the Hollywood mainstream and declare that no new ideas are possible. They've all been had already. It's not that the Hollywood mainstream has lost its courage for trying new things, no: there are no more new things. But you only have to look at the more creative fraction of the Hollywood mainstream itself to see that there are plenty of new ideas. Hell, coming up with new ideas is easy. Figuring out which new ideas are actually any good is the hard part, and also the part which those more concerned with profit than creativity are so reluctant to engage in.

So, although Hollywood now considers the monster movie ripe for nothing but parody (i.e. making fun of what all monster movies do the same), here we have a group of filmmakers elsewhere who have quite happily made their own, original and much lauded monster movie - completely free of tiresome clichés and self-perpetuating genre trappings.


In contrast to pretty much every other monster movie ever made, The Host avoids taking a grand and dehumanising perspective. The entire story focuses on a single family inadvertently caught up in events when the monster makes its appearance: causing mayhem and snatching the family's youngest member, Hyun-seo. In the face of obtuse authority figures, the dim-witted Gang-Du, his alcoholic, unemployed brother Nam-il, their father, and their archery bronze-medalist sister Nam-Joo all set out to confront the creature and save Hyun-seo. Throughout the film, we are deliberately denied the whole story - especially those parts of the plot that your typical monster movie might be expected to focus on, such as where the monster has come from, who is responsible, the full nature of the conspiracy behind it - because none of that matters. We are following events from the view of the Park family, and all they care about is getting Hyun-seo back. The rest is just academic.


This take on the monster movie is itself quite novel (and compelling), but it's the execution that really sets The Host apart. The tone segues perfectly between suspense and spectacle; tragedy and humour. Both the monster and action scenes are very well done. And, as I've come to expect from the latest and best movies from Korea, the film is quite simply visually perfect. On top of that are other unexpected treats - for example the tense, eerie side-story of how Hyun-seo survives in the monster's lair.

The Host has very pleasantly surprised me. The introduction of the monster, quite early in the film, was the first point at which I first realised that I was watching some very good stuff. As befits a film from the perspective of people caught up helplessly in a monster movie, the creature's appearance, although there is some build-up to it, is so blatant and sudden that I didn't even realise what I was looking at for a few seconds. I expect the same kind of "What am I looking at? Oh crap!" reaction probably occurs with everyone who sees this scene, and I'll avoid spoiling it with further discussion.

Although The Host has been generally very well received, I don't think it's a movie likely to be much enjoyed by those who scoff at anything that's the least bit unconventional. On the other hand, if you're looking for something strange and beautiful, you have my latest recommendation.

"Forget it, Nicholas. It's Sandford."

I've finally seen Hot Fuzz. If The Queen can be said to represent the Britons of two generations ago, then Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg are definitely the voice for my generation. Here they've made a film of two halves: the first demonstrating why no British action films are made, and the second half being a British action film.

Both parts work well. The film starts out as an alternately quirky and atmospheric murder mystery/police procedural, as model London cop Nicholas Angel is reassigned to sleepy Sandford and resolves to get to the bottom of a series of mysterious (and gory) deaths - in between capturing escaped swans and picking the winners of a raffle at the church fête. At the same time, his naive partner Danny - played by the third portion of the Wright-Pegg-Frost trinity, Nick Frost - tries to draw out his human side, apparently under the illusion that Angel is some sort of gun-toting Chow Yun-Fat figure.

Of course, in the end, Angel discovers a threat that his Metropolitan Police Vocabulary Book (it's a car collision not a car accident, as the word 'accident' implies that no-one is to blame) can't handle, and he is forced to start blowing shit up as the movie changes track to 'action movie logic', where throwing yourself around firing wildly is the solution to any problem, and even the village vicar has a pair of spring-loaded pistols hidden up his sleeves.

I don't think that Hot Fuzz quite reaches the giddy heights of Shaun of the Dead, but it is a lean, good-looking film with a strong sense of humour and some real dramatic intensity to it. I can only look forward to Wright and Pegg's next collaboration - and dream of the day that this is the kind of British movie winning Oscars.

5 Filmmakers

Five filmmakers I love. Not a comprehensive list - there are many others - but these are the ones I feel reasonably confident talking about. They are also people who seem to be on roughly the same wavelength as me. There may be others who make 'better' films, but these guys make stuff that I like.

Each image is of a selected film for each director. Mouse-over to see the title.

5. Wong Kar Wai


Wong Kar Wai pretty much flies in the face of mainstream cinema - making films without a script; shooting two films at the same time; throwing in sad endings along with the bittersweet and ambiguous. You can never tell what he's working on, or what's going to be next. But you do know that when he makes it, it will be bold, beautiful and undiluted.

4. Jean-Pierre Jeunet


Jean-Pierre Jeunet is a director that makes weird-looking films full of weird-looking actors getting into weird situations. And yet, what makes Jeunet stand out so much is that he is not a self-consciously weird or 'zany' director - instead he draws out what is peculiar about everyday life in a way that is striking, familiar and believable.

Jeunet also makes very sensitive films: we are not presented with all this strangeness to laugh at it or be shocked (well, not entirely), but instead in the hopes that we may recognise ourselves.

3. Tim Burton


Tim Burton is the quintessential outcast filmmaker, making films almost exclusively about oddballs struggling against arbitrary social standards. Given that this subject is arguably one that underpins a huge portion of human suffering and conflict, it's a relief to see Burton handle this theme with equal dollops of black humour and compassion - not to mention his unique and powerful visual style.

2. Hayao Miyazaki


Hayao Miyazaki's films perhaps embody all the various qualities that fawning Hollywood stars like to imagine you can find in those films that win Oscars. Well, one of his films did win an Oscar. But all that nonsense about making you feel a broad range of emotions - excitement, fear, hope, laughter - and taking you to strange new places in space and time, making you believe in magic...

Yes, Miyazaki's films have all of that. But more importantly, as well as producing aching moments of emotion, they are also largely subtle and understated. As well as featuring sweeping vistas and thrilling action, they have quiet, simple moments of touching humanity. Miyazaki's favourite themes of environmentalism, pacifism, and humanism are strengthened by a frank understanding of the difficulties of those paths. His dramatically strange new worlds are fleshed out with the plain, the ordinary and the everyday.

I think it's this combination of incredible vision and simple heart that makes Miyazaki so revered by all who come into contact with his work.

1. Buster Keaton


The films of Joseph Frank "Buster" Keaton Jr. are great evidence that cinema was pretty much born fully formed. Working without CGI, stunt men, ninety years of accumulated cinematic craft, or, for that matter, sound, Keaton was still able to produce films that seem startlingly comparable in technical quality to modern fare. And when you take into account the content of the films, Keaton easily stands shoulder to shoulder with the great filmmakers of any later period.

Like his contemporary (and one-time collaborator) Charles Chaplin, Keaton had his own visually distinctive cinematic personality: a clumsy, unsmiling fellow in a flat hat who, though repeatedly at the butt-end of the Universe's jokes, still dusts himself off to save the day from stampeding cows, improbable storms and hungry cannibals. Probably the chief appeal of this character, even today, is that he doesn't look like a man who should really be starring in a film. Short, expressionless, slightly embarrassed to be in this situation, would clearly much prefer it if no-one looked, uncertain what to do, but trying his best - every one of us has been this character ourselves at some point (some of us more often than others).

It's this combination of simple, unflinching humanity and Keaton's own cinematic innovation - conjuring up images that are more convincing than some of today's dodgy CGI - that allows Buster to live on today like no other filmmaker of his era.