(Click on the excerpt to see the complete chart. Cribbed from http://www.filmsourcing.com/flowchart.html.)

Cave of Forgotten Dreams

Werner Herzog is one of those film makers I’ve been aware of for a long time but whose work I’d never seen. His name triggers childhood memories of zapping into Klaus Kinski films and being weirded out by the guy, and I definitely remember hearing about the epic, ongoing on-set battles between Kinski and Herzog – but I’d never seen more than a couple of seconds of the actual films. I’d heard good things about his earlier documentary, Grizzly Man – but again, if it was ever on I missed it. Cave of Forgotten Dreams hadn’t even been shown at cinemas here when I succumbed to the post-Christmas lure of Amazon.com and went ahead and ordered the film on Blu-ray. Hey, if people praise its amazing visuals, I want all the pixels I can get, right? (No 3D, though – it’s available on the disk, but my TV don’t do three-dimensionality.)

Herzog’s a weird one, at least on the basis of this film. Much of his slow, accented voice-over is heavy on the metaphysics, and while I wouldn’t necessarily say I like it, I cannot deny that I find it compelling – right down to the surreal epilogue featuring albino alligators. It becomes even weirder when Herzog cracks a joke, in the same slow, deliberate, strangely sad voice. (Imagine a voice with a heavy German accent that’s pretty much the aural equivalent of Tommy Lee Jones’ facial expression throughout The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada.

As much as Herzog puts his stamp on the film, its real star is the cave itself and its amazing paintings dating back tens of thousands of years. Not all of the individual paintings are equally fascinating, but some show striking subtlety and artistry – and they look as if someone left them there just yesterday. Herzog’s film is highly successful at evoking both the age of the cave artworks and their immediacy – freaky amphibian reptiles with blood-red eyes are just an extra. The film is enjoyable even without smoking pot or drinking a bottle of cheap-but-nice red wine beforehand.

Mission Impossible – Ghost Protocol

… or MI:4, to its friends. In spite of my pretentious-yet-middle-of-the-road film geek credentials (with a few dozen Criterion editions on my shelves I cannot really deny it) I like a good action movie. I’ve enjoyed the Bourne series, Die Hard is one of my favourite Christmas flicks (right there with It’s A Wonderful Life and Nightmare Before Christmas) and I have fond memories of the Californian governor relieving Bill Paxton of his boots, clothes and motorbike.

In those terms, is Em-Aye Four a success? There are moments in the film that I’d consider among the most exciting action scenes of the last ten years. (It helps that we’ve arrived at a point where you can’t always tell a green-screen shot from stunt work.) I sat on the edge of the chair, I jumped, my pulse went up, my breath caught, just as the movie intended.

Apart from that, though, the film fails in one fundamental way: I didn’t care about any of the characters. Is the problem that Brad Bird’s first non-animated movie doesn’t know what to do with its human cast (nor, cheap joke alert!, with Tom Cruise)? Perhaps. It pays lip service to characterisation, but the motivations it provides for its protagonists are uninterestingly written and the actors don’t make them come to life. In fact, you care more about the characters when they’re not angsting about the partners they’ve lost to the job – they’re more relatable when they shut the hell up than when they open their mouths and pretend they’re real people.

For what it’s worth, MI:4 is better than John Woo’s MI:2 – but then, watching a burning dove fly past pooing itself in slow-motion fear is (marginally) better than that film. Is it on par with MI:3? I honestly couldn’t say, because for the most part J.J. Abrahams’ stab at the Missionary position self-destructed about five seconds after I exited the cinema… which is quite the achievement, admittedly, for a film featuring Phillip Seymour Hoffman.

Speaking of achievements, though, CGI has finally managed to conceal the fact that Thomas Cruise, Esq. does not age. The wrinkles that have begun to show on the Cruisester’s face look positively life-like. Will the Academy Award go to Make-Up or to Visual Effects? And is there any truth to the rumour that Cruise’s performance was motion-captured off Andy Serkis?

P.S.: For the record, I quite like Tom Cruise as an actor, when he’s got good material and is directed well – or when he shows that he’s got a sense of humour. (A bit of respecting this! and taming that! also seems to work quite well for him…)

And the second instalment of the January Variety Pack is to follow later this week, featuring semi-crazed German filmmakers, Paleolithic graffiti artists and impossible missions, should you choose to accept them. See you soon!

Four Lions

I have to say, when I heard about the film I was both intrigued and worried. It’s not that I think there are topics that can’t be treated by satire – but I also find the equal-opportunity-offender satire of, say, Trey Parker and Matt Stone neither particularly funny nor all that perceptive; in aiming at all targets, it rarely achieves more to my mind than a general, “Well, all positions can be a bit silly, can’t they?” Also, being offensive for its own sake is such a lazy way of satirising a subject. Which, let me hasten to say, Four Lions doesn’t do. In fact, for satire it is far from offensive in one important sense: as it opens its subjects to ridicule, it also evokes sympathy for them. It humanises its protagonists, the Muslim suicide bombers, as it shows them to be deeply flawed and silly in their motivations and reasoning. And it’s exactly this element that makes the film so funny and chilling in its strongest moments – rather than saying, “Those guys are our enemies and need to be destroyed” it asks us to see them as fellow human beings, albeit misguided ones… which may be much more subversive: love thy enemy.

But, apart from that, Four Lions is one of the funniest films I’ve seen in a while, asking the very important question: “Is a wookiee a bear, Control?”

P.S.: In terms of its darky humorous yet sympathetic tone, Four Lions reminded me of the Danish black comedy Adam’s Apples. Also highly recommended!

Never Let Me Go

Since I liked Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel a lot, I was curious about the film version by Mark Romanek of One Hour Photo semi-fame. I was also worried; would the novel’s delicate, moody tone survive the transition to the big screen, and more importantly, would it survive La Knightley? I’m not her biggest fan – I do think she’s talented, but more often than not film makers make the assumption on the part of the audience that we fancy her like mad, and they then become lazy when it comes to letting her act. Instead she ends up doing her portruding-chin shtik that signifies, “My character is feisty, passionate and won’t take crap from anyone!” All too often she doesn’t portray characters on screen so much as do a slight variation of what she’s done in other successful films. Since I don’t find her particularly sexy (I was definitely Team Parminder in Bend It Like Beckham) Keira being Keira just isn’t enough.

I wasn’t particularly fair in this fear, at least when it comes to Never Let Me Go. The adaptation isn’t perfect: it would need some more time for the implications of what’s going on to sink in and be as quietly devastating as in Ishiguro’s novel, and the writing (the script is by Alex Garland, whose work I tend to find compelling and frustrating in equal measure) is a little too on-the-nose at times, assuming that the audience is too thick to get it. But the casting, including Keira Knightley, works perfectly. Yes, both Andrew Garfield and Carey Mulligan aren’t miles from the parts they usually play, and it’s not as if Knightley is miles away from other parts she’s done, but the actors fit their parts to a T, with Garfield especially delivering a performance as poignant as that he gave in Boy A. I could imagine that my first criticism is less of an issue for those who haven’t read the novel – the film isn’t rushed by any means, it just doesn’t give its audience quite as much breathing space, which is what I missed a bit.

No, “Scandal” wasn’t perfect; it did have a couple of very cheesy moments, two of which weakened the female guest star in ways that are perhaps a bit iffy (mind you, I wouldn’t agree with the extent to which Jane Clare Jones criticises the episode), and it was perhaps too self-consciously cute with its references, punning and otherwise, to Doyle’s original stories (I groaned at the “Speckled Blonde”, though I loved the hat bit). Regardless, the episode was pretty much perfect in terms of being wonderfully entertaining – and just when you thought the humour might become self-congratulatory, Sherlock throws a scene at you that works as drama, showing that for all his brilliance, the main character is deeply flawed. The series is a fan of Sherlock-as-genius, but it doesn’t make the mistake of becoming fanboyish – or -girlish, although I gather that Benedict Cumberbatch does make for rather yummy eye candy. Then again, the testosterone brigade can hardly complain after a guest starring spot by Lara Pulver that would have made Mary Whitehouse’s head explode.

Oh, and the dialogues! If you were wondering where the sparkling repartee of a The Thin Man had gone, look no further: the Beeb’s been stockpiling it, refining it and quite possibly enriching it with steroids. This exclusive trailer from The Guardian website may be a bit weird, but it has a fantastic exchange between Holmes and Watson:

So, BBC, bring it on. Give me what you’ve got. And I’ll be willing to forgive you for the wasted potential of Exile.

For those who don’t get it, check out the plot synopsis for Gondry’s Be Kind Rewind and especially this. If you still don’t get it, well, the French are weird, y’know?

Enjoy the rest of 2011 – see you next year!

Anyway, Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror. We already had the one where the pig, ahem, and the prime minister, erm, you know. The second episode was broader in choosing its satirical targets: gamification, avatars, Nintendo WiiFit and Miis, micro-transactions, casting shows, all of those were in there. There wasn’t anything terribly original about any of the individual elements – but Brooker and his co-writer and wife Konnie Huq turned “Fifteen Million Merits” into a strangely moving, discomfiting romance with a final twist that, though again not exactly new, worked very well… and Rupert Everett makes a wonderfully hateful mirror-universe Simon Cowell.

I was very much looking forward to the third and final episode, “The Entire History of You”, as I’d been surprised to enjoy the first two as much as I did. The episode was beautifully shot and edited, and the acting was strong as well, but in the end it disappointed, more so than any of the previous ones. My biggest quibble with it is that the central conceit – in the not-too-distant future, almost everyone has an implant, the Grain, that records what people experience and allows for instant playback on any AV setup, complete with zooms and, I’d imagine, instant uploads to YouTube for all of those cute-cat/fat-kid-making-an-arse-of-himself/America’s-funniest-maulings type experiences. So far, so okay… but the entire story, centred on an insecure husband who (rightly) suspects his wife had an affair, does not really depend on the Grain. While the tech, which Black Mirror purportedly is about, may change the exact expression of the protagonist’s anxieties, the story would not have differed in any major way without it. “The National Anthem” (now with more pig!) and “Fifteen Million Merits” were about human foibles, but they depended on technology to highlight how our understanding of public vs. private, self-image, entertainment etc. are shaped by the media we use to express them. Perhaps “History”‘s point was that technology doesn’t screw up people, people screw themselves up, but after the previous episodes had made a strong point that the tech, the media, the platforms do matter, that they do shape us, that would have been a strange point to make.

Still, having watched all of Black Mirror, I’m definitely curious now about Brooker’s Big Brother-inspired, zombie-infested satire Dead Set. Apparently Davina McCall gets munched on by the undead… not that I’d wish that on any TV personality. Except perhaps Ann Coulter, but let’s face it, those brains would be a tad on the nouvelle cuisine side.

Even though I would consider myself a cinephile, I don’t hate intermissions with a vengeance. Sometimes I like having a moment to pause and think about what I’ve just seen; sometimes my bladder is grateful for them.

And sometimes they break a movie’s back, much like this:

I greatly enjoyed the first 50-60 minutes of Roman Polanski’s Carnage. The film was expertly paced, the casting near perfect (although I would’ve loved to see James Gandolfini in it), the performances strong, with just the right lightness of touch. I’m notoriously tricky when it comes to comedy, but I was laughing along with the escalating situation. And then came the break.

For all I know, without the forced interruption I would have stayed in the film. I would have enjoyed it to the end. As it was, the impetus was gone, and what remained felt clichéd, trite, predictable. Oh ho, neuroses and hypocrisy under a thin veneer of civilisation! Tee hee, the lawyer collapses when his mobile phone ends up in the vase! Giggle, snort, the wife breaks down in a sobbing wreck when her beloved handbag is thrown across the room, spilling its innards all over the floor.

Thing is, all of this – the clichés, the lack of any depth – was there in the first half… but as the film built up momentum, it felt like all of this was exactly to the point. Having had five minutes of ice cream ad projected at the screen and then to pick up where we’d left, as if nothing had happened? Carnage had turned from witty, sharp, light-of-touch comedy to leaden sitcom. The remaining 25 minutes felt longer than the almost-hour we’d already seen. Yes, it was still expertly acted, but to such obvious, hackneyed effect. Perhaps an earlier break would’ve been better, giving the film more of a chance to build up momentum again. I don’t know, but as it was I had seen two thirds of a smart, funny film, only to turn against it in the remaining half hour.

It’s difficult not to think of this piece of Zen wisdom:

P.S.: It’s difficult not to love Christoph Waltz’ performance in this, though, while disagreeing with him 99.9%.

From everything I’ve heard about the eighth (and final, right? Promise?) season, it sounds like the show remains moderately, patchily watchable, but at this point it’s difficult not to wish for the actors involved to find something better that isn’t written by an infinite number of computers programmed by monkeys (and shit-flinging ones at that) and possibly IT supported by outsourced Indian monkeys. (For the record: the computers work flawlessly, even if their output is dross.)

How do you follow up a depressingly shoddy episode of House? Why, with a Channel Four satire about the UK Prime Minister coerced into having sexual intercourse with a pig, that’s how! The first episode of Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror sounded like crass satire in a one-sentence synopsis, and the reviews I’d read were tepid at best – so I was surprised to find “The National Anthem” well written, well acted and quite thought-provoking. While the premise is satirical, the episode plays it straight and with remarkable conviction at that – which made “The National Anthem” quite a bit more unsettling than a more leering, in-your-face approach would’ve achieved.

Though the entire media satire-meets-inappropriate sexual content thing did put me in mind of one of my favourite Monty Python sketches. So, to end this post on a more amusing note: