We Need To Talk About Kevin (2011)

I have to admit to feeling a little disappointed by Lynne Ramsay's adaptation of Shriver's novel (which, by the way, I haven't read). It is certainly fascinating, if not entirely gripping, especially after the narrative slips into a groove after the first thirty minutes or so.

Ramsay is using sound and visual imagery in a consciously masterful way here, but at times both can seem a bit meddlesome. The Hillbilly background tracks and the persistent intrusion of redness started to become more salient than my interest in the underlying emotional drama.

There's no question that the latter is inherently more likely to have greater traction with parents than non-parents such as myself, but the notion that a child can take shape as a living embodiment of one's own existential compromises —

and a vengeful one at that — is still an intriguing one, and the trajectory of an author like Michel Houellebecq suggests that there's surely something in it.

Yet I've seen enough kids come off the rails here in Guatemala to have formalised the view that it is almost always the fault of the father, however useless the mother might otherwise appear to be. John C Reilly's doomed alcahuete dad Franklin makes a series of near comic interventions, but the character is inevitably underdeveloped, because Ramsay is trying to fashion a first person narrative from inside his wife's troubled consciousness, something which never seems to quite work in the inevitably third person medium of film.

It's a brave effort, but Tilda Swinton and her various haircuts are a less convincing presence than Ezra Miller and Jasper Newell, who play Kevin between the ages of 6 and 18 in the movie. And while I could see why she might be living in a hell of self-recrimination, it bothered me that apart from one or two suggestions regarding Kevin's line of defence at trial, Ramsay is less specific as to why the community around Eva should choose to project back onto her this sense of inner culpability so forcibly. (And could she not have moved away?) For while troubled teens and even adults may well emerge from misshapen domestic environments, I think we all know that deeper psychoses such as this are both more intrinsic and indwelling.

GRADE: B++

The year so far in movies

Aware that I have had neither the time nor the inclination to review on this blog all the movies we've watched this year, here's how the scoring has gone at least, up to November 5. October was a good month. This one has started off less encouragingly...

Can't decide whether to risk sending this month's average to dangerously low levels by watching Miranda July's The Future. Will I want to chew my own nuts off or will I be charmed by the ickle kitty?

JANUARY

El Infierno (Mexico, 2010) A-

True Grit (2010) A-

Crank: High Voltage (2009) C++

Black Swan (2010) A (-)

127 Hours (2010) A--

The King's Speech (UK, 2010) A--

The Kids Are All Right (2010) A-

FEBRUARY

Due Date (2010) B

Winter's Bone (2010) A (-)

The Weather Man (2005) B (+)

Tamara Drewe (UK, 2010) B (+)

The Resident (2011) B--

A Serious Man (2010) A (-)

Never Let Me Go (UK, 2010) A-

Borderland (2007) B (-)

Crank (2006) B (-)

The Bank Job (2008) B+

The Illusionist (France, 2010) A (-)

The Mechanic (2011) B

The American (2010) B (+)

Despicable Me (2010) B++

MARCH

Tron Legacy (2010) B (+)

Little Big Soldier (China, 2010) B+

Season of The Witch (2010) C+

Hereafter (2010) B (+)

La Nana (Chile, 2009) A-

Presunto Culpable (Mexico, 2008) A-

Norwegian Wood (Japan, 2011) B

The Wolfman (2010) B

My Girlfriend's Boyfriend (2010) C

Megamind (2010) B+

APRIL

Battle Los Angeles (2011) B-

Restrepo (2010) B (+)

The Town (2010) B (+)

Cave of Forgotten Dreams (France/Germany, 2010) B+

MAY

13 Assassins (Japan, 2010) A--

Animal Kingdom (Australia, 2010) B++

United (UK, 2011) B+

Surrogates (2009) B

Limitless (2011) B+

Matando Cabos (Mexico, 2004) B (+)

Los Ojos de Julia (Spain, 2010) B (+)

JUNE

The Dark Knight (2008) A-

Unknown (2011) B+

Hanna (2011) C+

The Adjustment Bureau (2011) B+

Sucker Punch (2011) B

Biutiful (Mexico/Spain 2010) A--

Sunshine (UK/USA, 2007) A--

Paul (2011) B+

Match Point (UK, 2005) B+

JULY

Source Code (2011) A-

Chico & Rita (Spain, 2010) A--

Trust (2010) B (+)

Au Bout Portant (France, 2010) B++

My Kidnapper (2010) B -

Countdown To Zero (2010) A-

Legend Of The Fist (China, 2010) B (+)

Let The Shrink In (2001) C

AUGUST

Bad Teacher (2011) B

Brighton Rock (UK, 1947) A--

Brighton Rock (UK, 2010) B (+)

Fast Five (2011) B+

Fast and Furious 4 (2009) B

Pirates of the Caribbean, On Stranger Tides (2011) B

SEPTEMBER

Bridesmaids (2011) C

Thor (2011) B+

The Guard (Eire, 2011) A-

Friends With Benefits (2011) C

Triangle (Australia 2009) A--

Confessions/Kokuhaku (2010) A-

Aqui Me Quedo (Guatemala, 2010) C--

Horrible Bosses (2011) B (+)

Trollhunter (Norway, 2011) B+

Drive (2011) A-

Blitz (2011) B+

Confessions/Kokuhaku (Japan, 2010) A--

OCTOBER

Pour Elle (France, 2008) B++

Attack The Block (UK, 2011) B++

The Borrower Arrietty (Japan, 2010) A-

Colombiana (France, 2011) B

Midnight in Paris (2011) A (-)

Don't Be Afraid Of The Dark (2011) B+

The Yellow Sea (South Korea, 2010) A-

I Saw The Devil (South Korea, 2010) B (+)

The Housemaid/Hanyo (South Korea, 2010) A--

Retreat (UK, 2011) A--

Bedevilled (South Korea, 2010) A-

Scream 4 (2010) B++

Rio (2011) A--

Villain (Japan, 2011) B++

NOVEMBER

Kamikaze Girls (Japan, 2004) B

Perras (Mexico, 2011) B (+)

Crazy, Stupid, Love (2011) B (-)

Sleeping Beauty (Australia, 2011) C

Sleeping Beauty (2011)

If I hadn't sat through 2/3 of Aqui Me Quedo, I would have no hesitation in describing Sleeping Beauty as the worst movie I've seen so far this year. And relative to budget and intellectual aspirations it almost certainly is.

Before I really get stuck in however, let's just cast our minds back to the source material such as House of The Sleeping Beauties by Nobel Prize-winning author Yasunari Kawabata. From a nation that has staked a realistic claim to being the mecca of all things outrageously pervy, there's perhaps a surprisingly elegaic subtlety to his esoteric tale of lost potency. It has twice inspired Nobel Prize-winning author Gabriel García Márquez to explore similar scenarios, most notably in his last novel Memorias de Mis Putas Tristes, but also in the short story in which he locates himself next to a beautiful sleeping girl on a long haul flight. (The debt to Kawabata is directly acknowledged when Gabo remarks that House of Sleeping Beauties is his chosen reading material for the journey.)

Non-Nobel Prize winning author and first time film director Julia Leigh obviously thought it would be illuminating to view this conceit from the sleeper's perspective. Its origins are acknowledged obliquely via a load of bonsai trees in the background and other Japanese interior touches, yet it is movies like Kubrick's last masterpiece Eyes Wide Shut and the guilty pleasure that is Hostel, that more openly spring to mind as influences.

The result is some sort of boorish Australian pastiche of European art house cinema from the mid part of the last century. Leigh appears to have scripted her characters so that they act just short of what we would expect of human beings made of flesh and blood. All the excrutiating underlying emotional currents present in the novella have been purged, because for this director the concept and its ramifications are far more important than the individuals encapsulated by it. During the scene in which one of the old geezers delivers a po-faced monologue about a short story by Julio Cortázar before climbing into bed with 'Sara', the fourth wall broke down, and so did we, into fits of hysterics. Who needs soporific drugs when you have these guys around?

Now Eyes Wide Shut also divided critics, attracted accusation of art porn, and is not without its flaws (most notably Kidman and Cruise). But other than the changes in time and location, Kubrick was far more faithful to Schnitzler's vision than he was to say Stephen King's in The Shining. Might one suggest that this was because Kubrick knew himself to be a superior artist to King, but perhaps not to Schnitzler?

Anyway, my own view on this matter would be that whilst it is perfectly OK to add flesh-eating zombies to Jane Austen classics, it would not be a recommended career move for any budding female author to re-write the works of Hemingway as a critique of masculine power relations. In short, if there's any chance that an author might have been better than you are, resist the temptation to steal his or her basic idea and rejig it to suit your own concerns.

There's really nothing more unedifying to behold in art than mediocrity affecting a painstaking pose of profundity.

GRADE: C

Perras (2011)

Given the way Perras had been shamelessly plugged across the more shameless comedy shows on Telehit, we had both been expecting this festival reject to be both amateurish and trashy, but it turned out to be a more substantial work than either of us had anticipated. (We might have guessed this had we then known that it began life as a work for the stage scripted by debut director Guillermo Ríos.)

Now, I've recently had cause to re-flag my insight that Mexico and Japan share an occasionally creepy pop cultural fixation with adolescent schoolgirls and the similarities and cross-currents are very much to the fore again here. It's frankly hard not to smirk at the underlying intentions of an film which wishes to document the over-sexualising of teenagers whilst seeking to titilate its audience with the very same phenomenon.

Yet in truth, these kind of fourteen-year-olds do exist in some quantity down here south of the border. Part of the power of this film to disturb was the frisson of recognition. Ríos has more on his mind than prematurely misplaced innocence however, as the core scenario sees the ten girls of his ensemble cast locked away in detention, uncertain of which of their number has done the unnamed terrible thing to cause this punishment. As the collective polemic ensues, Ríos flashes us back to prior events in school, and several of the girls recount a more personal story which touch on some of Mexico's more familiar endemic difficulties.

It's a scenario that is perhaps more theatrical than cinematic, though the best of these outgrowths is a delightful animation (another borrowed Asian technique) in which a grandmother is forced to share her home with the family of her hijo patán. Ríos also goes to town a bit with a car crash sequence. The trouble is that on many levels (character, narrative etc.) the whole rather inevitably ends up being less than the sum of its parts. And yet this very unevenness is one of the factors which contributes in the end to maintaining the disguise of the terrible event and the identity of its protagonist.

Over the years I've come to realise that one can almost immediately tell if a movie about Latin America's problems has been made by outsiders or insiders. Sin Nombre and Maria Full of Grace for example, could only have been made by non-indigenous eyes looking in. This kind of ennobled, bleeding heart take on the issues is rarely found in the region's native cinema. Perras is symptomatic of the irreverent local-eye approach we've seen over the years in movies like Matando Cabos, though it lacks the satirical bite of funny yet moving works such as La Nana, Y Tu Mamá Tambien and even El Infierno.

GRADE: B (+)

Bedevilled (2010)

Town mouse visits country mouse, whereby both discover just how deeply messed up they are, setting off a chain of events involving sado-masochistic cruelty that's pretty full-on even for a South Korean revenge flick.

The delightful bleakness of this film results from its insistence that while the provinces are full of violent, petty-mined retards, the metropolis breeds soulless egotistical misanthropes. As this is not an environment in which redemptive arcs can take place, there are only one or two brief glimmers of real kindness: in the person of a boatman and a bank employee, as well as the more problematic case of a puta, whose fate on the island was one many questions we were left with.

In western stories, even when good doesn't precisely triumph over evil, some sort of stasis triumphs over chaos, but in most Korean movies of this sort, normality rarely achieves ascendency at any stage in the narrative. Chaos reigns. Revenge is usually the only thread that runs through from beginning to end, and it habitually presents a disturbingly amoral spectacle. One is never quite certain where the chain of events is heading, plot and character become detached along the way, then recombine in new forms, and the endings, are typically announced (if indeed announced at all) with a zap of very black humour.

In this particular instance we were left with a sense that the overall experience had been thoroughly satisfying, even though the story had once again failed to resolve in any of the familiar ways.

"Put bean paste on it". I will remember that one!

GRADE: A-

Triangle (2009)

Christopher Smith is an English director who specializes in postmodern indie horror movies - films that successfully strive to be a bit more than the sum of their borrowed parts.

This one, made just before Black Death, pointed strongly to his evolution as an interesting 'original' voice in the genre.

It's going to be hard to discuss without laying down a few spoilers, so in this instance I won't try all that hard to avoid it.

First let me say that no matter how bad the movies they feature in, there is something about ghostly empty liners from the 20s or 30s that has always appealed to me. There's inevitably a bit of Shining-au-mer about this particular horror trope, and in Triangle the quotations are explicit. Smith's achievement here is to take a potentially over-familiar format and keep the viewer guessing throughout.

The liner in this story, the Aeolus, becomes the core scenario (and then rather oddly un-becomes it in the third act) for a set of nested repetitions and duplications which appear to revolve around the character Jess, played by Melissa George. In perhaps the movie's most striking scene, a dying woman crawls into a corner of the deck where two dozen or so versions of her dead self lie in various states of decomposition and perforation by seagulls.

The plot is clever enough that Smith probably had to scribble it out diagrammatically before he started typing. Clearly he would have liked it to be a bit more that just structurally clever, but in this there are signs that he struggled a bit. He does after all seem to be a better director than he is a screenwriter, and whilst we had no quibbles with his ability to involve us and occasionally chill us right through to to the conclusion, the narrative has one or two weak points, at least when one pauses to consider it, in the round.

Peter Bradshaw of the Guardian suspects that the premature disappearance of a female character called Heather is a plot hole. No, not really...she just drowned. But why introduce her in the first place if she is going to be demised somewhat contingently before the main engine of the plot has kicked in? (More worrying perhaps is what happened to the character with the hole in the back of his head at the end of the initial repeat.)

The plot doesn't have obvious holes, but Smith had to make a couple of obvious compromises to keep things together. Firstly, although at one point there surely must be three Jesses in operation, we only ever see two. Secondly, the re-initiation of the cycles can only really happen if Jess goes (inexplicably) from full awareness of her predicament to a vague sense of déjà vu.

There is also an apparently throw-away splice point in the narrative, when we see Jess considering her reflection in a cracked mirror and then follow the reflection out onto the deck. If this moment had any significance, it's not something I have sorted out after a single viewing!

And as mentioned above, Jess's assumption that the recapitulations were localised to the liner was one that I think was worth hanging on to, in the name of overall mythological sense, in spite of the mild twisty moment served up by the pile of dead gulls on the beach.

The all-Aussie cast has done a fairly competent job of appearing to be American, unfortunately the same cannot be said of the Australian coast's efforts at resembling Florida.

Still, an impressive, thought-provoking if not resolving chiller flick, which shows the kind of cleverness that can be derived from the UK's stupidity tax (Lottery funding).

GRADE: B+

Thor (2011)

I have to admit I really quite enjoyed Branagh's Thor, but then I read Roger Ebert's remarks and felt not a little ashamed!

On further reflection, it occurs to me that many of his criticisms (the profound silliness of Asgard and its occupants for example) could just as readily be directed at many of Wagner's operas without them immediately shedding their status as serious works of art. Not that that is what we have here, but Branagh's sensibility has a high camp operatic quality to it and I'm sure that is why Marvel picked him for this segment of their catalogue, and not because, as Ebert suggests in his one and a half star review, someone screamed "Get Branagh, he deals with that Shakespeare crap."

And so what if the infrastructure in dire peril here consists of a bunch of New Mexico 7-Elevens? The small town, desert location has genre resonance and the silliness would surely have got out of control if larger populations and more recognisable landmarks had been drawn into this ultimately tongue-in-cheek tale of clashing celestial realms.

Grade: B(+)

Brighton Rocks

Having just finished Greene's gripping 1938 novel, I managed to watch both movie adaptations on the overnight bus up here from Lima.

Each was (obviously) made after the Second World War, which makes them, for me at least, inherently a little less interesting than later interpretations. For Brighton Rock is one of those works which, almost certainly unknowingly, delivers a snapshot of a world on the edge of the abyss. It's final words seem almost prophetic in this context, as it leaves Rose wandering off towards 'the greatest horror of all'.

My grandfather was a cine enthusiast and shot a number of otherwise trivial home movies (in colour) during a family holiday in the South of France in the same year Brighton Rock was published. I have them on a VHS conversion and naturally there is now something poignant about watching people enjoying simple pleasures in a place that would soon be off-limits to pleasure-seekers.

There's a rather droll textual forward to the 1947 film which reassures viewers that the violent Brighton underworld and the slums that acted as its incubator no longer exist. (Did the Germans bomb them to oblivion?) Meanwhile Joffe has controversially shifted the chronology of his update forwards into the 60s when social order was crumbling once again, this time as rival youth subcultures asserted their ascendency and the right to duff each other up. It's an interesting gambit, and one which forces Joffe to ditch some of the key plot set-ups from the novel, such as Fred Hale's alter ego Kolley Kibber and the newspaper treasure hunt.

The 23-year-old Dickie Attenborough is quite remarkable as the teen sociopath Pinkie in the Boulting brothers' film. It makes you wonder a bit about the ingratiating lovie he appears to have become in his dotage. The essence of this character is surely his repressed inner life, which manifests itself as an over-expressive tendency in the arena of opportunistic violence. Hard as it is to do more than suggest this turmoil on screen, Attenborough's personification seems to glow with this deadly juxtaposition of cockiness and elemental fear.

Sam Riley's Pinkie is less remarkable, rather more like a junior incarnation of paranoid gangster types we have grown accustomed to on our screens. (Note that the 1947 film reached American cinemas as Young Scarface!) The script does however give a bit more support by implication to the notion that there was something not quite right about Pinkie's relationship with the deceased leader Kite. And we do get the impression that this Pinkie is not quite sure where he falls on the line dividing sympathy and antipathy for the poor waitress, whereas Attenborough gave us very few hints of warmth to work with.

It's a rather one-note performance, but the same cannot be said of his foil here, Andrea Riseborough's Rose, as complex and nuanced as the late Carol Marsh's version was a straightforward portrait of wide-eyed innocence. (Marsh reminded me a bit of rising British starlet Carey Mulligan. A bit too pretty for the role really.)

Anyway, I didn't mind the reduced emphasis on Pinkie's sordid internal dialogue, in part because it's one part of the novel that stretched credibility for me. Greene always tests my tolerance for thickly laid-on Catholic guilt

The character which wasn't pitched right in either film, but certainly not in the 2010 remake is that of Ida Arnold. Hermione Baddeley had her as a kind of salt-of-the-earth proletarian archetype, whereas Helen Mirren plays her as a bit of a cold fish, which is oh so wrong from the point of view of Greene's take on the underlying theological message. Arnold is an ageing bad girl, not far enough past her sell-by date to stop posing a threat to other people's marriages. In the context of this story

For Ida's quest to be meaningful Fred Hale's end needs to be something we regret. It doesn't help Joffe's film at all that he has cast the bloke who plays the assassin in The Borgias as Hale and tossed aside all Greene's ambiguity about the journalist's role in the demise of Kite. Indeed, here Hale is just another gangland thug. Boulting in contrast, insisted that Hale's mistake was to write too candid an article about slot machines and Kite's intrusion into this business.

Perhaps to take our mind off his substantial alterations (Ida is now the manager of Snow's and Corkery not just her would-be lover but also the bookie that gets 'carved' by Pinkie and Dallow, while dodgy solicitor has been expunged completely) it would seem that Joffe decided to put back into his narrative all the things that Greene and Rattigan left out of their own screenplay in 1947. (Back, to good effect is the bottle of vitriol and the cliff-side denouement and less effectively perhaps, Rose's father.)

Interestingly Joffe's screenplay imitates the twist from the last scene of Boulting's film. I have to say, I do wonder whether it was Graham Greene or Terence Rattigan who thought that one up. In a sense it makes for a 'better' ending than the novel provided, but from the perspective of the author's scathing examination his faith it's a bit of a cop out, zooming in on a crucifix which, we are given to conclude, symbolises a universe where the wellbeing of the innocent is taken into consideration. Whatever happened to 'the greatest horror of all'? Unfilmable, one presumes.

PS: Having just finished tracking through the debate about the 'highest' genre in art in Public Enemies I think it worth noting that Boulting's movie (as Joffe's surely will one day quite soon) feels dated in a way that the novel itself simply doesn't.

Speaking of genres, the 1947 film clearly fits within the noir tradition. In contrast last year's rehash shows its awareness of the Hitchcockian tradition that was then still a decade away.

Rango (2011)

This film kind of freaked us both out. As the credits rolled V said that in truth she hated it, but hate is perhaps a more nuanced verb in her vocabulary than English-as-first-language-speakers might initially expect.

I was impressed by Rango, and I certainly enjoyed it on a number of levels, though whether I actually liked it is another matter. In some ways Gore Verbinski's foray into digital animation is a weird experiment in expectation mismanagement.

We've all heard how the genius of Disney-Pixar manifests itself in the way they fashion child-appealing, character-driven narratives which are nevertheless peppered with plenty of knowing references and gags, even underlying story subtexts to leave the parents wet-eyed in the aisles.

Well, here the polarity has been startlingly reversed. The jokes about prostate examinations are not here for mere decoration so to speak. They are part of its dark, disturbing, downright ugly existential fabric...and the kids get the kinetic stuff to keep them hooked to the end on sheer visual excitement. (Johnny Depp's performance is, as ever, note perfect for all audiences.)

I had assumed this must have been made for 3D, but in fact it looks as if Verbinski has deployed his digimation with a view to showing us just how unnecessary the extra dimension can be. There's an enormous beauty in all this ugliness, and I think this is very much part of the movie'a adult depth. This is a satire which stands some comparison with the classic westerns it is exhuming.

As a young teen I found High Plains Drifter a tad disconcerting...but a decade earlier it was Chuck Jones's bizarre psychedelic animation blend The Phantom Tollbooth (1970) which inserted itself immediately into my dreams, and nightmares. Rango has, I suspect, a similar power to mess with forming imaginations.

Grade: hmmm....B (++).

Animal Kingdom (2010)

David Michôd's directorial debut features an interesting narrative sleight of hand...for this is a movie about a family of bank robbers, none of whom do we ever see actually attempting to rob a bank. And frankly by the end of the film, I was beginning to doubt whether any of them would be up to it. Is this significant? Well yes. Imagine a movie about a clan of shoe-shiners in which no shoes are actually shone in 113 minutes.

But the potential at least for enforced cash withdrawals means that Michôd can locate his self-consciously naturalistic family drama in the familiar moral wilderness of the criminal underworld.

There are in fact two families (or tribes) in this landscape, the Codys led by their manipulative matriarch Janine, and the Melbourne cops, seemingly driven by similarly unpredictable and violently vindictive urges. Beneath this perennial group-level conflict, the film focuses on the individual set to between newcomer Joshua "J' Cody and the unhinged alpha male Andrew "Pope" Cody, played superbly by Ben Mendelsohn. This is another one of those dramas without much of a moral centre, but David Michôd squeezes out the inherent tension in Joshua's situation to exciting effect.

Grade: B++

My Kidnapper (2010)

There aren't many people more self-righteous than the former Colombian kidnap victim. The Queen of them all is of course Ingrid Betancourt, but not far behind in bleeting self-regard come the three Yanks who were snatched from the clutches La FARC at the same time. In comparison British TV-producer Brian Henderson and the eight tourists kidnapped in the Sierra Nevada are relatively small time, as indeed was the guerrilla organisation which took them, the ELN. And they got off lightly — just over three months in the jungle - compared to the more normal fate of local political and military captives.

I've waded through enough of this material to have garnered a sense of what most irks me about these accounts of what was clearly genuine hardship. Firstly, the former kidnapees are mostly in denial about the extent to which they were asking to be captured. Betancourt was warned not to campaign in a FARC controlled zone and the authors of Out of Captivity were ex-military civilian contractors flying interdiction missions over the guerrillas' installations, and yet repeatedly pour scorn on the FARC's tendency to regard them as enemy combatants and mercenaries. Meanwhile Henderson and the seven others the ELN picked up at La Ciudad Perdida had apparently been told the area was safe for tourists, yet we later learn somewhat indirectly that this is at best a partial truth, because one of them, the German Reini Weigel was subsequently sent the bill for her rescue by her government: relevant travel warnings were in place at the time. (The Germans do of course have the perfect word for the emotions welling up at this point in Henderson's documentary: schadenfreude.)

Secondly, their sense of their own importance is hard to square with their sense of the comparative unimportance of the conflicts that beset Colombia. Henderson's attempt to re-encounter and understand Antonio, one of his ELN guards, has a whiff of anthropological expedition about it. The committed guerrilla is exposed as a man living within a closed intellectual milieu and on at least one occasion Henderson uses the term 'the real world' to refer to the perspective of the cosmopolitan foreign outsider.

This sense that the issues that underlie the context for the kidnapping are informed by inherently myopic viewpoints and ideologies both narrow and shallow, provides an excuse for not providing any real analysis of them. And of course the kidnapped individuals are all exposed to the insurgency at grunt level, surely not the best place to comment on the wider drivers and motivations. Could one really gain an accurate understanding of Britain's strategic objectives in Afghanistan by interviewing a private on patrol in Kandahar?

So, having failed to deliver any real political interest, My Kidnapper goes on to disappoint on the level of human interest. Antonio's real identity is so camouflaged, that all Henderson gets out of what is supposed to be the emotional crux of the movie is a rather stilted and controlled apology for suffering caused.

The two Israelis who go back to the scene of the crime with Mark and Reini (but crucially are not permitted to meet up with now retired guerrilla Antonio and his partner) are superficially the least likeable of the returning victims, but there's an admirable side to their aggressive paranoia under these circumstances — and it's undoubtedly truthful, as anyone that has rubbed up against examples of the multitude of Israelis backpacking around Central America could testify to. Better their dogged hostility to their oppressors, than all that wittering about lost freedoms which often sound more like lost privileges.

GRADE: B-

Match Point (2005)

Rather like that other memorable London-based movie Closer, Woody Allen's Match Point has profound failings baked into its very fabric, and yet somehow manages to end up as a markedly satisfying experience.

As for those failings, let's start with those which have nothing to do with the location. Whilst not irritatingly 'stagey' like that of Closer, too often the dialogue here is clumsily unrealistic, with characters delivering lines too obviously scripted to convey information to the audience rather than the designated interlocutor on screen.

There's no attempt at disguise and Allen has made things harder for himself by crafting his story with such one dimensional characters out of whose mouths any sort of nuance would have seemed unrealistic in its own way. Having given this aspect of the film some consideration, I'm not so sure however that it is a failing as such. Jonathan Rys-Myers delivers and eerily empty performance as retired tennis-pro Chris Evans, inscrutable in his calculating moral detachment. If any of the other main players had been more rounded, the subtlety of this impersonation might have been drowned out. (The script does her few favours, but Johansson appears to be trying hard with Nola, especially drunk Nola.)

Anyway, the real problems here have to do with the switch from NYC to London, facilitated by a load of dosh from the BBC. Maybe there wasn't time to rethink the narrative too carefully, but the first sign of trouble shows up with Evans apparently using a knowledge of Dostoevsky and opera and presenting himself generally as "non trivial" in order to gain entry to the upper echelons of British society. Like that would work!

Back in Manhattan of course, there's a much clearer association between high society and high culture, between cosmopolitanism and support for the arts (as well as charity in general).

Only recently I was at one of London's leading arts venues with Frode. and having noted how unaffected our fellow audience-members were, he duly confided to me that the realisation had come to him rather belatedly in life that New York is a far more snobbish, class-based environment than London. This didn't come as news to me, as I recalled my father's experiences when he opened an office over there in the 80s and his future partners attempted to impress him with evenings at the sick-making University Club. And then there was my own visit to the Met last May, where the lobby's fill up with individuals one would hesitate to describe as unaffected.

Our class system is not non-existent for sure, but for outsiders it's certainly a bit of a minefield and Allen comes out of this little foray into it minus his foot. Brian Cox has been about as miscast as his namesake the TV professor of physics would have been as the country pad patrician. And the lines this bizarre family deliver are packed with jarring solecisms, bogus 'U' vocabulary and bizarre non-sequiturs; my personal favourite being "I grew up in Belgravia, so...", largely because I could say it myself, but of course wouldn't.

I suppose this may be an issue which is only going to bother us Brits. But there are subsidiary issues of verisimilitude. I mean, how likely is it that two tennis players from these islands good enough to play on the main ATP tour, would meet by chance on Old Bond Street? A location Allen reuses for yet another non-tennis related fortuitous encounter in the movie. This was surely intended to be Fifth Avenue in the original conception. I wonder whether it also had Nola penciled in as a Brit?!

GRADE: B+

Somos Lo Que Hay (2010)

Mexico DF has become the preferred global shooting location for cruel social metaphors with no moral centre. Reassurance was hard to come by in Amores Perros and La Zona, and so it is too in this tale of a family of anthropophagites struggling to come to terms with the sudden loss of their patriarch and 'bread winner'.

The poster claims that the movie does for cannibals what Let The Right One In did for vampires, which is sadly not the case, because the Swedish movie had emotional depth. It has been well shot and the performances are generally strong (especially Paulina Gaitán from Sin Nombre), but having established that the widow and her three adolescent children have a particular penchant for munching on the soft underbelly of Mexican society, this becomes one more of the movies under-explored themes, along with 'el ritual', which although greatly advertised in the dialogue, never actually materialises and as a result one experiences the last act as a rush to completion.

Grade B(+)

The Adjustment Bureau (2011)

Known rather more ominously as Der Plan in Germany, George Nolfi's directorial debut never quite shakes off its likeabilty, ultimately rooted in that of principals Matt Damon and Emily Blunt, though the more one pauses to consider its philosophical scaffolding, the more one starts to feel like Phillip K. Dick would have done on learning that one of his paranoid metaphysical mysteries had been forcibly paired up with a cookie-cut romantic comedy formula. (Who knows though, he might have appreciated the irony of coating It's a Wonderful Life in a fascist veneer!)

Every appearance of Harry Mitchell, David Norris's fedora'd expositing angel / case officer left me reeling as if from a blow to the lower gut, but one of the underlying themes — perhaps even more central than the inevitably bodged one of free will — that of the incompatibility between love and ambition, was worth more than a moment's pondering.

Doesn't poor old Adrian have a case agent?

Grade: B+

Hanna (2011)

It is said that Christopher Nolan's formula for success is in making two of the three key elements in any screenplay — plot and narrative — intelligently complex, while leaving the viewer a straightforward path through the maze via the third — character — which he invariably leaves simple, at least in terms of motivations. 

One can get a sense of just how mediocre a project Hanna was at conception by mentally stripping away its striking-looking cast, its self-indulgent direction, its intrusive score by the Chemical Brothers, its icky coating of fairy tale resonance etc. until one is left with the core trichotomy of plot, narrative and character, all of which are embarrassingly sub-standard. 

Saoirse Ronan became attached to the production first and called in her old mate Joe Wright from Atonement. Sure he could make something of this underdeveloped material? Well no, because the completed movie has the inevitable reek of directorial over-compensation. The cast are no help. Bana and Blanchett act as if told to cut back on the charisma and Ronan appears to be the result of a secret government programme to genetically engineer unsympathetic lead characters. 

It doesn't help that the three of them have an essentially pitiless approach to all the other incidental cast members. The action opens in Finland where Eric and Hanna have been lying low since she was a baby. Eric has filled her mind with facts about the outside world and taught her how to terminate with extreme prejudice, armed and unarmed. The screenwriters then serve up the dumbest of macguffins in the form of a switch and a flashing red light, the result of which is that Hanna ends up in a secret US government facility in Morocco (yes!). 

Blanchett plays Marissa, a kind of wicked witch come step-mother, but also a government spook with suggested double-agent tendencies. Once the red light flashes, Marissa will stop at nothing to kill her, Eric tells Hanna, though the rest of the plot hardly bears this out and Marissa only knows of Hanna's existence because the latter gets herself deliberately captured. Cue unlikely escape with Hanna making her way up into Spain by stowing away with an English family in a camper van, who would appear to be a rather limp attempt at satire. 

On the road Hanna befriends Sophie, played by Jesscia Barden reprising her role as the gobby teen from Tamara Drewe, though to less amusing effect. Meanwhile Hanna is being trailed by a gang of German skins led by Isaacs (Tom Hollander with a blond hairdo and banana-yellow 80s tracksuit), a sub-villain who is little more than a visual effect and whose lackadaisical attempts to take Hanna captive generate the first in a series of tension-free chase scenes. 

An indication of just how hard Wright is working to generate interest from this material is the gratuitous campside extempore Flamenco scene he inserts at this point. It's set within a completely mishandled sequence in which Hanna and Sophie set off with some lads from the Andaluz which, in more capable hands, might have provided an opportunity for character development via engaging dialogue. 

The action then jumps rather incoherently from southern Spain to Berlin, a German capital that is really only there to tick the post-Bourne thriller box, but which oddly fails to tick its own inner boxes. Where are the sex shops, the graffiti-strewn stairwells and the techno clubs and other clichés that Unknown so lovingly renewed? 

Hanna's sole USP as a character we might care about is that her isolation in the forests of the arctic circle has left her strangely unacquainted with the modern world, but the writers have only been bothered to explore her attitude to the unaccustomed sensory experience of music and Joe Wright's own contribution is a ludicrously over-egged scene involving electricity. Saoirse Ronan might have done better to leave this one in the hands of a more self-consciously commercial director...of the sort who might even have eked a franchise out of this unpromising premise. GRADE: C+

Los Ojos de Julia (2010)

This Catalan chiller which, like 2008's superior El Orfanato, stars Belen Rueda, likewise benefits from Guillermo del Toro using his name as a powerful Spanish cine brand on the poster.

Rueda plays twin sisters Julia and Sara. Both suffer from a progressive deterioration of their eyesight. Julia has 80% of her vision left at the start, but is prone to stress-related attacks which will tend to lop off further fractions.

Meanwhile Sara is already blind during the opening sequence in which we witness what the cops interpret as her suicide by hanging — but then they didn't see that foot kick the stool out from under her.

Julia suspects foul play and is determined to investigate. Husband Iván however appears to want a quiet life, partly because of Julia's known tendency to suffer seizures, and partly because he has copped off with Sara at some point in the past.

Guillem Morales starts off well enough, delivering a highly suspenseful first hour, which successfully suggests much of the mood of supernatural horror, without ever leading us to doubt that Julia's adversary is a man of flesh and blood, albeit one with an uncanny — and plot relevant, though mostly only poetically — ability not to be seen by people he walks right by.

The director might overuse the 'look who's behind you' scare a bit too readily, but there are some implementations of the visually-impaired horror trope I hadn't seen before: such as Julia's eavesdropping on the bitchy conversation of a group of blind women (played almost as undead!) at a social club for the sightless. There's also a creepy neighbour who functions a bit like Christopher Lee in The Resident, i.e. as a rather too obvious red herring.

During this opening sixty minutes Iván is kind of in the way, because he has to keep leaving Julia on her own in order for her to wander into darkened spaces where her failing vision is going to add to her (and our) growing sense of vulnerability. So — spoiler alert — Iván is removed from the scene permanently around the mid-point, yet instead of ramping up the tension, this is really the point at which the movie goes a bit awry.

Morales and co-writer Paulo have to an extent under-exploited their material early on, but have nevertheless managed to keep the tension up nicely enough. With Iván gone, they really let go and we had the sense that too many new or at least suspended narrative ideas were being crammed into the final third. For example, it's as if they suddenly decided to stop showing us the faces of everyone we're supposed to start being suspicious of, such as Julia's ophthalmologist.

And this is a pity, because they really needed to focus on their villain and his own visibility issues in order for the conclusion to be meaningful as well as more than a collection of twists and set-piece frights.

Grade: B+-

More on Limitless and Surrogates

Red wine is my NZT; a couple of glasses and things really do start becoming so much clearer. The trouble is that somewhere between glasses three and four these new powers mysteriously vanish. As noted yesterday, Limitless had me flinching a little at the notion of what I might have achieved already in this life if I had been able to maintain my lucidity levels permanently at the one glass of vino levels.

It also reminded me of another excuse I have for underachievement: I could never sign off on a concept as sloppily concretised as this one was. If an outline idea for a narrative were to occur to me, say one along the lines of Limitless or Surrogates, I'd need to think it all the way through, to make sure there weren't any obvious holes in it and to make sure as well that my story at least attempted to explore all the more interesting implications therein.

Hollywood scriptwriters seem to have collectively opted out of this sense of responsibility / accountability. What exactly does NZT do, for example? Is it improving neural connections, memory, deductive reasoning or all of these things? Eddie can learn a new language in days, but he can also deal with some subway punks simply by accessing his recollections of Bruce Lee movies. Yet no matter how good my visual memory is I'm never going to be able to play tennis like Raffa Nadal just by watching him on court. Nor indeed could Nadal practice his own serve by viewing repeated playbacks under the influence of NZT. These are physical memories, not visual ones.

I imagine that whoever wrote Surrogates might have been hanging out in SL or World of Warcraft one day and thought to himself, what if the avatars were made of metal and latex instead of 0s and 1s? It's not a bad concept, but the plot that has been built around it is so perfunctory that one finds oneself seeking scraps of entertainment behind it in the production design and in the few occasions the director has been left with to showcase the sociological ramifications of the situation.

As for me, I'd have got stuck on the thought that physical avatars would transform a city of 10m individuals into one of 20m.

Limitless (2011)

I felt much the same way about Limitless as I felt about Surrogates: here you have an intriguing TV sci-fi concept trapped within a dumb big screen format. It's hard to add much to Roger Ebert's conclusion - that here's a movie about a pill that allows you to access the 'missing' 85% of your brain, that's only really using 15% of its own - but I will add that there were parts of the film that struck me as existentially unsettling. Maybe it's my own nagging sense of under-achievement, or perhaps it was the fact that we never get proper resolution of the rather crucial issue of whether NZT has turned Eddie into a pyschotic killer as well as facilitating his ability to pre-cog the market and hold conversations in Cantonese with the waiters at his local Chinese restaurant. Bradley Cooper seems oddly well cast as Eddie Morra, a bit of a creep both on an off the medication, and emblematic of a movie that seems unsure whether its halcyon presentation of the American Dream is desirable fantasy or disturbing satire.

Grade: B

Battle:Los Angeles (2011)

I'm sure at least one person has noticed that the blogging here has been rather low-intensity of late. It's not something I feel the need to apologise for, as I've been back in Blighty for the past few weeks assisting my mother with her move, and I suppose something had to give.

Now, I have managed to catch a few flicks, and one of these was Battle: Los Angeles, described by Roger Ebert as "noisy, violent, ugly and stupid", which made it sound like just the sort of thing I could use to unwind after a frustrating afternoon in London.

The set-up is fairly simple: a bunch of warlike ETs with some powerful, yet essentially conventional armaments, have landed close to coastal cities the world over and have begun an attempt to establish multiple beachheads because, we are told, they want our water. Standing against the invasion (of Santa Monica at least) is a group of grizzled US Marines under Staff Sergeant Nantz, played by Aaron Eckhart, a man who, on a previous tour against a more low-tech enemy, led his men into a non-specifically sticky end, and was planning to head off into retirement the very day the H2O-craving aliens turned up.

So, what you have is an opportunity to see America's fighting man behaving in an almost ridiculously gung ho fashion on the burned out streets of LA, and it's alright to scream ooh-ra at the screen every time one of the characterless 'bad guys' disappears in a shower of goo, because they are covetous invaders rather than insurgents. (er..)

What are the implications of all this? Are we to assume that America no longer really cares who it's fighting as long as there's someone out there to help preserve its militarist values? Should we think that this is really how America would prefer to see its antagonists, as entirely without face, without honour and without the potential for sympathy that comes with being an underdog in relation to US might?

Anyway, this is one of those ludicrous films that entertains (a bit) through sheer absurdity, but no amount of disorientating combat action can obscure the fact that the experience of this small unit of marines is possibly the least interesting way this particular scenario could have been beheld by a cinema audience. (But then Skyline did manage to present us with another highly underwhelming group of people from whose point of view to take in the destruction of LA.)

Michelle Rodriguez is clearly not especially worried about typecasting.

Grade: B (-)