The following film I have just finished watching is possibly the worst creative exercise ever conceived, including everything you have ever watched on YouTube.

2012 Doomsday (2008)

Many of you will have never heard of this film, which came out in the US this year and hopefully will never be released over here. If you have an insatiable curiosity and a penchant for masochism, you may watch it for free here:
http://www.surfthechannel.com/info/Movies/65133/2012+Doomsday.html#
I am not normally one for copyright infringment (actually I am), but in this case it doesn't matter as this film does not deserve any money what so ever.
If you have read any of my other blog entries, you may think I am exaggerating, but I am not. The film is awful, truly, horrificly awful.

First of all the premise is ridiculous - that Christians were in Mexico (doing what I don't know) before Columbus and that they hooked up with the Mayans to make a generic, end of the world type scenario prophecy. And now the world is going to end thanks to God (who is mentioned every 3 seconds, just in case you found your belief in Him waining - which it will do if you watch this film) and "the Black Hole at the centre of our Galaxy" which thanks to less than shoddy script-writing and lazy research is all that needs to be said on THAT dubious 'fact'.
The script really is terrible. Worse than any soap opera, easily. For example:
"The world's about to end and I want to make sure you're safe."
and
[stranger with a mysterious tattoo dies (whose significance is never explained)]"Well I guess it was just his time to go."
The above might not seem that bad until I tell you that the person speaking is a Paramedic who just watched him die.
There is a lot of "I don't know why I just have a feeling" type shit going on, freeing the protagonists of any explaination of their frankly insane behaviour.
The direction is almost non-existent and the music is, well, crap. Are any of you familiar with South Park? You know how every episode becomes some sort of parody of melodrama, with sweeping vioins, thundering kettle drums and wooshing noises when a dramtic scene is revealed. That is EXACTLY how this film is done. The film is so cliche ridden there's no space for anything else.
It's also sad because it is so obviously some sort of reposte by the God-botherers in the States against the rising tide of incredulity towards Christianity and films like The Day After Tomorrow. It fails on all fronts, quite spectacularly. You're more likely to join Opus Dai after watching The Da Vinci Code than even be slightly more receptive to US Christians after watching this drivel.
I really can't put it in stronger terms. The film takes all the most annoying things from Armageddon, Deep Impact and The Core, mixes it with Apocalypto, The Ten Commandments and a primary school play. Fuck me it's terrible. I watched it while at work so I don't feel I've wasted any time, but not all of you will have to go through this.
It'd be nice to meet one other person who has seen this film so we can hate it together, but I really don't wish it on any of you. My girlfriend is forcing me to come and see Sex and The City tonight, and after this, I'm actually looking forward to it.

DomGee.

Tagline: “Between Heaven and Hell There's Always Hollywood! “

This Coen Brothers film is a fabulous black comedy with some very dark depths to be plumbed. In 1941, the serious, intellectual playwright Barton Fink, played goofily by John Turturro, has a very successful play in New York with his theatre for the common man, for everybody. He accepts an offer from Hollywood and arrives in Los Angeles to be told that he must write a wrestling movie for Wallace Beery. He sees this as beneath him and gets serious writers block.

An atmosphere of almost surreal strangeness persists from start to end: the opening shot is a slow zoom towards some fading wallpaper. I was reminded strongly of the film Delicatessen by several sequences and the overall ambience of dampness and decay. Barton’s LA hotel is dreadful. The wallpaper literally peels off the walls and when he attempts to put it back in place, he gets slime all over his hands (and this matches well the slimy Hollywood people we meet later). The bedspread is faded, the windows won‘t open and there is a mosquito buzzing round his room.

As with many of his films John Goodman steals it, playing a larger than life insurance salesman. He is in the room next to Barton’s and when they meet, Barton tells him of his writer’s block. Goodman attempts to tell him stories from real life, from a common man. 3 times he tries, but on each occasion Barton talks over him and doesn’t listen. This is one of the themes of the film: Barton thinks he can describe the life of everyday folk just by thinking about it, and he is of course wrong. “The life of the mind” as he puts it, and this phrase comes back terrifyingly from Goodman at the end of the film. But it goes deeper than that: Barton doesn’t really want to know about the common man and doesn’t want to know about the world. He’s not interested in Goodman and all that seethes beneath his surface and he never even opens the approximately head-sized box he is presented with: he is uncurious and that is no way for a writer to be. The tale takes a very dark turn towards the end, with Goodman’s character turning out to be something far worse than a simple insurance salesman.

The cinematography is excellent and the scenes inside the hotel in particular are beautifully done. Brown tones dominate and the whole has a feeling of seediness, rot and dereliction. The camera doesn’t move much, but zooms slowly giving a calm feeling to the proceedings. Every performance is note perfect.

Three types of writers come in for great criticism from this film: playwrights, film writers and authors. Authors are represented by John Mahoney brilliantly playing a constantly soused author and his lover/assistant Judy Davis who actually writes his books for him. As well as writers, Hollywood is ripped to pieces by this film. The bosses he meets are loud, brash, rude and only interested in money. They shout, badger and bully and appear to completely lack sensitivity, and they are played to perfection by those who clearly know the people they are portraying. Michael Lerner in particular is excellent.

The tagline at the top was carefully chosen, but the hellishness should be taken allegorically rather than literally. This film is really about different sorts of hell, including but not limited to these:

Fink’s personal hell inside his own mind where he wrestles with his own “inner demons“.
The hell that is Hollywood
The hell that is the lives of normal people
Nazism
The creative writing process
Socialism
Murder

It isn’t all laid out on a plate for the viewer. There are symbols galore and we can each choose what to make of them.

But this film is flawed. It drags a little in places, the characters are over-stereotyped, and if I’m being completely honest there are too many sub-themes that go nowhere, too many hints about what might be that aren’t explored and could have been left out and as a result it feels laboured. But it is funny, well-acted, surprising and always looks excellent. But if you want a straight, simple story, this is not the film for you.

Cheers, Tom.

A little jaunt to the cinema last night brought me to see Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson and Ralph Fiennes starring in In Bruges.

This is rather a testosterone-fuelled show - strong men standing up for their principles while simultaneously searching for redemption for their sins. Don't let that turn you off though, the aggression is tempered by a constant supply of hilarity - sometimes slapstick, sometimes dark, always funny.

I am huge Brendan Gleeson fan, the man is fantastically versatile and always a pleasure to watch - In Bruges, in that respect, is typical Gleeson. Colin Farrell usually just irritates me but he's impressive here, striking a nice balance between vulnerability, belligerence and idiocy.

Highly recommended.

And tonight I'm off to Indy 4...can't bloody wait!

Glorious words from Shakespeare's 'The Tempest' (Miranda's speech, Act 4, Scene 1), spoken by The Savage in Aldous Huxley's quintessential dystopian novel, Brave New World, my absolute favourite. Set in AD2540 London, it anticipates the development of reproductive technology, biological engineering and sleep-learning that combine to change society.

Hollywood has brought us Spiderman, X-Men, Iron Man, Fantastic Four, Daredevil and Hulk. And in production, Captain America, Wonder Woman and Ant-Man.

Ant-Man? Getting a big desperate, aren't we?

While good escapist fun, isn't it high time they tackled something more cerebral like a big screen remake of Brave New World?

I remember being captivated by the 1980 TV version starring Kristoffer Tabori as John Savage, Keir Dullea as Thomas Grambell and Julie Cobb as Linda Lysenko. Loved the twisted perceptions of behavioural norms and quirky language:

'Bottle of mine, it's you I've always wanted! Bottle of mine, why was I ever decanted? Skies are blue inside of you, The weather's always fine; For There ain't no Bottle in all the world Like that dear little Bottle of mine.'

'Imagine the folly of allowing people to play elaborate games which do nothing whatever to increase consumption. It’s madness. Nowadays the Controllers won’t approve of any new game unless it can be shown that it requires at least as much apparatus as the most complicated of existing games.'

'Christianity without tears — that’s what soma is. A gramme is better than a damn.'

'That is the secret of happiness and virtue - liking what you've got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their inescapable social destiny.'

'I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.'

Winced when I read in Wikipedia that they'd done a 'modernised' made-for-TV version in 1990. Loved the Queen soundtrack in the late Heath Ledger's 'A Knight's Tale', but if I hear The Savage burst into song with a jolly rendition of 'I Want to Break Free', I think I'll cry.

And the 2007 anime version? Mind-boggling.

Please, please, PLEASE, don't change it!! It's perfect the way it is. The language and concepts are as fresh and quirky today as when written 75 years ago. Genius is timeless.

Hollywood, are you listening?

Reference and credit for first edition image of book to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World

Reinette58
www.warping2gallifrey.blog.co.uk

Zerkalo (The Mirror) - My Review

This film by Andrei Tarkovsky is my favourite film of all time. I could watch it over and over again and never get bored with it, just like I can listen to my favourite music over and over again, and with every viewing something new is found. It is almost endlessly deep and powerful, a true work of film art like few others. Tarkovsky said “This is a film about you”. He made a film about everyone by making a film about himself and his own memories. It is deeply personal and simultaneously about each and every one of us.

The simplest complete explanation for this complex and many-layered film that I have ever seen is this one:

"It is about a man who had caused too much pain to the ones whom he loved and who loved him. Now he is dying and he is trying to ask them for forgiveness but he does not know how."

Whilst this is a reasonable description, it only skims the surface. Some have put it even more simply: this is a man’s dying thoughts flashing through his mind, disordered and seemingly random.

We get image after image, some apparently unrelated to the others. We get different episodes that initially don’t appear to be related but upon deeper inspection, are. In Tarkovsky’s own words: “every symbol, image, dialog, and sound was there because they belonged there”. These images and sounds accumulate in the mind as the film is watched and affect the viewer: you are stirred to emotion, even if you do not wish to be. He picks examples from his own memories and puts them together and the combined effect tells a universal tale that can have meaning for each of us, if we search for it. The poems we hear, for example, are those of his own father.

One of Tarkovsky’s recurring themes is the struggle to find meaning in life, both on a personal level and on a much wider scale. That is certainly present here as is memory, both individual and collective, and nostalgia.

David Lynch has been compared with Tarkovsky because of the dream-like nature of his films, and this is a reasonable comparison. Mirror is a sequence of dream-like images. Like a dream the images start, proceed and then end, just like the film does, but at the end we have been changed. Even if you have no inclination to concentrate on what is being shown to you, you can just sit back and watch, and appreciate the beauty of the images you are shown. The images have a beautiful simplicity and such texture that you feel as if you could reach out and touch them. Shot after shot is utterly, perfectly beautiful. Every tiny detail is under Tarkovsky’s careful control: the movement of grass in the wind, shadows, the minutiae of expression of the human face.

But there is one thing Tarkovsky could not control: You. Each of us brings to this amazing film our own memories, our own experiences and we use these to make meaning of the images from Tarkovsky’s past that we are shown. We use our own past to interpret his past, and I think this is the meaning of the title Mirror: we the viewers are reflected in the film.

This is not a conventional film and someone expecting a straight story will be disappointed. But, if you want a different cinematic experience, one that has the power to change lives, then this just might, might be the one you have been looking for. My words are deeply unsatisfactory as a description of this film, but I hope they have managed to convey why it is worthy of watching.

Cheers, Tom.