Reviews

This film is entirely watchable if all you want is some attractive wallpaper to scroll across your television for 90 minutes. If you're looking for a smart pulpy film with a witty script and entertaining cut and paste plot, then this is not it, and you'd be best advised to avoid like the plague.

Unfortunately this is another one of those films by an underexposed director who wanted to try his hand at writing and directing just like his heroes, only without a modicum of their talent. The film achingly wants to be considered in the same vein as Tarantino for its slice of life dialogue, or Russ Meyer for its pop out technicolour scenery and underdressed girls, but can't reach beyond imitation of those particular styles into something original.

The screenplay is underwritten, which is to say, under edited (a good editor would have trashed the majority of it); it's wall to wall filler that can only echo and mangle the best junky dialogue in all those great indie films I won't bother to mention. The quotidean dialogue of those films, memorable for its sheer wit and off-kilter verisimilitude, is transposed into Women In Trouble with no sense of irony. Two women in an elevator strip off and yak about life problems, their apparent no bullshit attidude at odds with their heartfelt sob stories, intercut between leering two-shots breast-high-upwards which thoroughly undermine any hint of emotion. If you're actually listening to the dialogue it's a murky pool of run-on-sentences and non-sequiturs with no subtext. Or, the subtext of a writer-director forcing words into the mouths of babes (who should know better), words which sound every bit like the whiny insouciance of someone who wishes he understood women, men, and how to write them into a film.

A short paragraph on the directing. Every scene could and probably should be pulled from the film and taught to young film school undergraduates as a basis of how not to produce a pulpy modern film. The hyperactive cutting best left for MTV, the jarring array of angles which hinder any attempts at narrative and subtext, the aforementioned shots which exist purely to titillate, to barefacedly exploit with no sense of awareness or wit. The angles which could only be described as down-top, for example, pitch the film towards a particular market, but the director doesn't have the balls or honesty to go all out (as Meyer so famously did), and wraps them in pseudo verbose dialogue and pseudo starry casting. When Almodóvar places the camera above his leading lady, cast downwards, it is as if he is peeking, like a naughty schoolboy, unable to believe his luck. She is in on the joke, and so the audience are invited to share in his and her cheeky saucy but playful film-making. Almodóvar loves his leading ladies, as do many other filmmakers who have played the same trick. Gutierrez does not love his ladies or he would not prance around them looking for the best shot of their cleavage, or writing their characters into situations where, quelle surprise!, they just happen to get their kit off. He would not make an exploitation film which tries to pass itself off as something else. What could be more exploitative, to his cast, to his audience?! I could go on and on but I'm sure you're getting the idea by now. It's not as if this film is offensive in the strongest sense, it's just stupid, and awkwardly collegeboy-ish in its sexual ethics, and doesn't have the key characteristic of being honest with its motives. If you like intelligent films by men about women that have respect for the actresses involved and the audience at large (both male and female) then avoid this, or spend 90 minutes squirming in your seat (no pun intended).

20 Fingers strives to portray events in a realistic manner. Everything contributes to this concept. The conversations are seen in their entirety in long takes, shot in natural (practical) lighting and in real-world locations with 'stolen' footage. The sense that this is a film about a real Iran is palpable and exciting, even given Iranian cinema's usual favoured realism. Out of this, one response is to question if there is an actual narrative to the events, or whether these are simply snapshots. It is very difficult to place the conversations in an order, so this seems to obstruct an attempt at creating a 'story' out of these events. This only serves to increase the realism – after all, real life does not run to any pre-conceived plot. However, the realism means that this relationship is assumed to continue after each fade to black, so the conversations that are shown may construe some particular meaning. Even from the first conversation there is a sense of conflict between the two. This is referred to in every conversation as jokingly 'the games we play'. One criticism I think can be levelled is the familiarity of this phrase in popular culture, certainly western culture, and so in some moments its inclusion can seem a little trite – though perhaps the fault lies in a lazy translation. However, obviously the idea of the relationship being a game runs throughout, and this lies in stark contrast to the perception of Iran as a formal, strict society.

As a film made for foreign audiences, the on-screen relationship of the two actors, dynamic and amusing and often violent, is an undeniable eye-opener.

Blackboards is at its best when considered a dreamy, surreal take on real-world issues. It's a shame though that the film's style doesn't match it's content – if it had then it could have been truly affecting and memorable. As it is, it pairs the visual and conceptual silliness of men running around with blackboards strapped to them, and the visual and conceptual non-silliness of innocents meeting trouble on the hills of the Iran/Iraq border, which confuses the message. Further, shooting the otherwise farcical adventures of the blackboaders in the (ever popular) faux-documentary realism style undermines Samira Makhmalmaf's attempt to consider issues such as imprisonment, gender equality, education and communication, which are all jumbled around in the text fairly loosely, and not in the regimented way the style would have enhanced.

Not only are these issues trampled on by the blackboarders, but the characters are not exactly equipped with the faculties to make them engaging for 85 minutes. They are moronic, moribund individuals, trapped on empty endless hillsides or engulfed in smoke which might as well be a metaphor for their foresight. They are not interesting. The trouble is it's unclear whether the director is mocking them or pitying them. One assumes the former, but unfortunately the message is, like the writing on the boards, incomplete.

This simple tale is open to interpretation, which can be considered positively or otherwise – it perhaps hearkens back to folk tales which are passed down orally, and contain simple plots which are then the basis of discussion. In this way it is easily remembered and its meanings can be deciphered afterwards by those who watch it. However it also means that the film seems overlong for the most part, pre-occupied with repeating sequences and behaviour again and again, and even drawing out the fairly dramatic ending which arguably diminishes its strength. Perhaps it would have been better presented in a shorter runtime, or a more heavily stylised manner such as that of the title sequence. Nevertheless, regardless of enjoyment there are many threads of discussion that can be considered.

One of the key questions raised by the film is that of the mental stability of the protagonist, Hassan, whose loss of his animal will bring about his somewhat metamorphosis into the same creature. At the start of the film he is seen behaving extremely strangely as he leads his cow back to town, exultantly dancing around it as he washes and caresses it. This man is not behaving as the other people (such as the children) do. Hassan is mirrored somewhat by the town idiot, who is berated by the other people, and even locked up so as to keep Hassan himself from learning the secret of his cow's death. This mirroring, and Hassan's transformation, make it possible to consider the village's relationship to both Hassan and his cow – certainly throughout neither are treated with respect, and the film's end highlights this.

Perhaps Mehrjui, the film's creator, comments on the actual importance of the cow and this man's relationship, an idea that is supported by the title of the piece.

Mediocre, shambling, pointlessly gory and grotesque. It's films like this that justify some kind of hatred for the studio-bound production scene. A one-note script that could be scribbled on the back of a napkin coupled with a predictable sequence of non-scares which trundles along at the same pace as the moribund fleshbiters themselves. The score is non-existent. The tension similarly missing. There is no substance, and no subtext. And the ending is ridiculous.

This will probably entertain you if you have the mind of zombie. If you're looking for a script or actors then you'll do well to look elsewhere - 28 Days Later or even Shaun of the Dead.

'Incredibly disappointing' would be a short (if not sweet) summary. Or maybe just 'average', which is the worst thing you could possibly say about a film from a director who had previously sought to delight through imagination and vibrancy.

In Howl's Moving Castle, Miyazaki struggles to find original ground and ends up retreading now increasingly familiar ideas and motifs from his previous work, even the opening title sequence seems to reuse music from his breakout hit Spirited Away. We have a teenage girl (Sophie, the protagonist), a silent and ineffective partner (Turnip-head), a humorous sidekick (Calcifer), a collection of wishy-washy tag-alongs (Markl & co), vague enemies which are totally unexplored, and a mysterious and largely undeveloped male teenager, who here happens to be the titular Howl. All characters also suffer from abysmal phoned-in performances for the English dub (I can't comment on the original), in particular Christian Bale (Howl) who barely varies his delivery throughout, and Emily Mortimer (Sophie) who gives an appallingly flat performance for the lead. Only the ever-reliable Billy Crystal gives value for money as the fire daemon Calcifer, though it's nothing incredibly special - more accurately simply a cut-price Robin Williams.

Elsewhere there are more significant problems. The story is a mess both in terms of plotting and pacing and scripting. It begins well enough but falls into predictable buddy-buddy routines all too early, fails to head in any clear direction for a long time and then ends on a half-hearted note (which is to say ridiculously hokey) with a total non-conclusion. Whole ideas are thrown into the mix and left unexplained, like the war which is at the center of the action, the king (queen?), the other wizards. Miyazaki could arguably be even trying to say something about the Iraq war, with a myriad of none too subtle contemporary references, but even that didactic aspect is lost.

You will likely not leave the cinema satisfied, unless you are ten years old - and even the kids behind me were bored to tears long before the finishing line. A rethink is needed over at Ghibli studios..

4/10.

Kubrick was a masterful director. I personally adore both 2001 and The Shining - as close to cinematic perfection as you can come - and there is a lot to admire in the style and controversy of A Clockwork Orange, too. However, even the greatest directors make mistakes, and this was Kubrick's second (his first being Lolita). This lavish period piece telling of the exploits of 18th Century Irishman Barry Lyndon has little to recommend it beyond the helmer's name.

Technically, there is some accomplished work in terms of composition of shot and the deliberate imitation of a past style of painting. As a film, though, Barry Lyndon is a variously tortuous and unrewarding watch - there are entertaining moments here and there, and nothing stands out as obviously bad, but neither does anything stand out as obviously great. It is as mediocre an experience as you could ask for - and running at close to three hours mediocre is not exactly called for. To say that it starts well and ends less well does not very well do it much of a service.

But what do we ask of great directors? We ask for profundity, passion, insight, vision and excellence. None of these qualities are at all present in Barry Lyndon, a film without much point or energy, which is, in the end, overblown and rightly overlooked by the majority of film fans. Viewers looking for a Kubrick masterpiece would do well to avoid this one.