Lakeview Terrace (Neil LaBute 2008)

Chris and Lisa move into a new house, the neighbour Abel, bad-ass cop and neighbourhood watch afficionado, shows them that he does not approve of their lifestyle. A neighbourhood battle begins, washing up some hidden layers in everybody.

I don’t like that kind of film: a completely unlikeable main character, played by Samuel L. Jackson, who can be really annoying, and - as it turns out - who gets more unlikeable every minute. There is no development, no twist or turn, there is only escalation and some form of blood bath at the end. Not enough for good entertainment, just that feeling of unpleasantness. That makes the whole effort a bit boring, as it leads to those most pointless of things, a boring thriller.

What Lies Beneath (Robert Zemeckis 2000)

Claire and her husband Norman move into a new house, send their daughter off to college, work on Norman's carreer as a physicist, and try to arrange their lives. But in the new home Claire encounters strange things, hears noises, suspects it to be haunted by a ghost. Maybe by the disappeared wife's of the strange neighbour? She tries to find out.

It is great to see Michelle Pfeiffer again - how beautiful she is and how well she plays the fragile while competent manager of this family seeking to come to terms with the new set of tasks at hand. She convinces when she has her moments of sorrow about the departing daughter, and also when she realises that there is something worth being scared about.
Also good to watch is Harrison Ford, who may have a not too convincing twist of role in the script to tackle, but is doing it without too much embarassment.
It is that scrip that is the problem, and there is no acting talent in the world that can save the film from that: the daughter shows up once and is never seen again. The The neighbour fulfill their role and are dropped. Most importantly: the film is a pure cliché - or rather it is two cliches, because it does not decide whether it wants to fit the haunted house drawer (of the - say - El Orfanato http://www.information-society.de/Cine-Blog/2009/01/el-orfanato-juan-antonio-bayona-2007.html kind) or of the family member going all twisted kind (Enemy in my Bed, or whatever that one was called). Should you not mix the two genres? I say you should not, especially if on both ends you do not have anything new to add. You can be solid on either motif, and give some new twists. But here, everything is predictable from minute 5, and what is not belongs into the "You are kidding!" catgegory. The strangest thing may be to see the director's name - is it me or should Robert Zemeckis be doing other kinds of movies, more entertaining business? I kind of lost track of him and when looking it up, I saw he is still pulling off a lot of blockbusters, but the specific talent that you would need for a genre piece like this… maybe that was not what he was made for. He is making all the obvious move of a family friendly director: introducing accessories like hair-dryers at one point when he needs them later. He uses some camera tricks like a glass floor that allows some new perspectives. Maybe the direction is just to visible, too blunt? In any case not convincing for me here. But then again, the only two films of his that I really like are "Roger Rabbit" and "Back To The Future".
But Michelle Pfeiffer…wow...

Body of Lies (Ridley Scott 2008)

Roger Ferris is a CIA agent working the Middle East, plotting and killing and trying to get to the heart of the terrorist organisations on the ground directing a series of attacks on European cities. His missions are being controlled by Ed Hoffman, who is sitting in his Langley control rooms, watching the proceedings trough live high-resolution satellite feeds, moving about the troups.

There is Leonardo di Caprio and there is Russel Crowe, and the one's anger and energy and the other's slick relaxedness and business-like attitude creates the tension of the film. They work together, but they are entangled in a constant struggle about strategy and tactics, they will never become friends. Hani Salaam, the chief of the lebanese intelligence service and key cooperator on the operation, steals the show for both of the other stars, though. He is more sophisticated, more charming, and more in charge of the situation. Apart from him, the true star of the movie will be the satellite imagery, which is even more impressive to watch than the one used in that other film, was it "Enemy of the State"? It conveys the distance between the player and the gameplay, the killer and the killed, and the high-tech setting and production design of the whole movie, together with the footage of the ground, actually is done really well to show that there is life behind the control room screen.
The annoying thing for me is that in this specific genre, people are often chasing around the region so frantically that at some point you either don’t know anymore why they are where and what they are trying to achieve there, causing me to lose attention and interest, sometimes to the point of losing comprehension. After the fifth or sixth "Amman", "Baghdad", or "Damaskus" insert you just switch off the brains and wait for the next small-alley chase scene. Ridley Scott tends to lose himself in this kind of high-tech frantic, but the film still looks good, and so let him do it. Maybe he should sit down with Michael Winterbottom (http://www.information-society.de/Cine-Blog/2007/12/mighty-heart.html) at some point to re-learn some of the lessons about cinematic story-telling that he seems to have forgotten.

Borat (Larry Charles 2006)

Kazakh report Borat travels with his colleague through the USA to make a documentary about the country for his home tv channel, but reroutes in order to get to California, where he wants to marry Pamela Anderson.
What to say about it? Through the hype around the new Sasha Baron Cohen film to be released in 2009, I felt compelled to check out the previous one at last. Reading and hearing about it never got me interested enough before, as I thought this would very much not be my kind of humour. Having warched it now, I have to say that this assessment was slightly wrong: it is very very very much not my kind of humour. Showing stupid people being stupid is nothing I would have a problem with on a moral scale (let the rednecks be exposed, let the hypocrites be exposed, let everybody be exposed for what they are), but funny it ain't… there is some slapstick bit with the nude wrestling that can be considered to be provoking some laughs, but then again… not really after an initial impulse. There is a scene where Borat sits in a trailer with some dudes, drinking beer and watching the Pamela Anderson home porn movie - while pretending to expose them for the chauvinist idiots that they doubtlessly are, I kept wondering whether it is not those people who would find the Borat movie most funny. It can be appreciated how brave Cohen and his co-start Ken Davitian are. But that does not yet make anything more interesting than … well, than what Borat is. Nothing to write home about.

Breaking Bad (TV, Vince Gilligan 2008)

A chemistry teacher gets diagnosed with cancer. He decides to "break bad", grabs a young crystal meth dealer and teams up with him to do some applied chemistry. By cooking the best meth ever, he stirs up some mud in the local drug scene, and soon becomes entangled between police investigation (his brother-in-law, actually), the drug lords, and his family trying to help him through his cancer treatment.

How did I come across this: you have to read the Stephen King column at EW, that's how (http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20263453,00.html). Then you know that this was the best new show of last season (more accurately quoted: "The best scripted show on tv." wham!), and you also know that Life on Mars (BBC) is the best show of the last decade or two. Also some other stuff, but those are the important findings. There is a physical evolution of Walter White, he gets skinnier and loses his hair through therapy - and the disease hence drags him to look his new profession, a badass drug cooker and ballsy dealer, who even in the face of the big fat drug cat does not twitch, but rather throws a little chmistry toolkit bomb at him. He is a great character because he does not know he has all that in him, he is scared to hell, weakened through cancer and chemotherapy, coughs or pukes his guts out every other minute, and gets up to remove bodies, blow up druglord townhouses, break into chemisty depositories and run a big-style meth operation. In other words, he is the way everybody who suffers his fate would love to be (he was the bright guy at university, but got outsmarted in terms of patents and business by his buddy, now the rich boss looking generously down on his environment): The message is: if you want to turn bad, you can, just be dilligent with the recipe. Great acting by Walt (Bryan Cranston) and Jesse (Aaron Paul), the former student who happens to stumble into Walt at a drug raid. Jesse the cool slacker learns some lessons from the wise man, and gives some inspiration back, and maybe even some love.

One of those shows for which US cable tv should get a Nobel price of sorts.

Coraline (Henry Selick 2009)

Coraline moves with her family into a new house, and as her parents both decide to mainly ignore her and catch up with publication deadlines instead of helping her adjust to the strange new neighbours or the huge old house, she explores that house on her own. Through a small door, she finds a parallel world that at first glance looks like her own, but with nicer people - strangely, they all have buttons on their eyes and some of them seem to change character and features daily. She is tempted to stick around that jolly bunch, until she realises that she is about to step in a big honey-trap, made particularly for her.

Made in stop motion technique by Henry Selick who was also responsible for the look of "Nightmare before Christmas" and the like, the film by nature of its animantion has this somehow creepy feel to it. I never felt comfortable with these moving clay things when I was a kid, and through Selick's oeuvre, today I know why: these creatures are more eerie when they are eerie, and they are more wicked when they are wicked. The witch of the other world (or "Other Mother") reminds me of the bored kid who transforms all his family into puppets serving his entertainment in the "Twilight Zone" movie, she manipulated and creates worlds around her, and makes things worse by economizing about it, so that you can actually reach the limits of what she created, and where she could not be bothered anymore, and you walk into the "nothing", the same stuff as in the "Neverending Story", just white this time around. The vicitms of her moods, namely the creepy and talkative (one world) or silent (other world) Wybie and the boring (this world) or over-tuned and outburned (other world) Father, are evidence that you do not mess with the Other Mother, but when Coraline is not just brave enough to escape, but actually goes back into the other world on a rescue mission… very nice adventure-horrow-comic stuff, with subtle humour ("told you I don't like rats at the best of times") and stunning animation.

State of Play (BBC TV Show, Paul Abbott 2003)

The research assistant of a Westminster MP dies, as does a supposed drug dealer, and a motorbike courier gets shot at. A team of reporters from the "Herald" newpaper set out to dind the story, and when they start linking the bits and pieces, they realise many events are interlinked. Reporter Cal uses his old friendship with the MP Stephen Collins to protect him from a withchunt when it turns out that Collins had a relationship with the researcher and wanted to leave his wife. Offering shelter, at the same time he digs deeper with his team into the doings of the Engery Select Committee, the Minister, some lobbyists, and a powerful oil company. It all, however, does not turn out the way he expects it to.

If one thinks - as one should, believe me, just ask me, the rest of my family and Stephen King - that "Life on Mars" not only was one of the best tv shows ever conceived by humans (might be a slim possibility that Venus TV has come up with something more coherent, sly, intelligent, warmhearted and funny - but I cannot comment, have not been there in a while), then it is an easy guess that if two of the reasons for this quality, the actors John Simm and Philip Glenister, are in another show, it also must be at least very very good. Assumption correct? With a sample of one: yes, absolutely! The cast here is brilliant, with the mentioned John Simm up front, and the first time I saw David Morrisey in action ("Hello to David Morrisey" - at last I can understand!). Morrisey / Collins is excellently written and played - he is solid and big and tough, at the same time he has the soft side to him that his researcher no doubt found attractive, he enjoys the power of office, and he surely is haunted by something more than he admits. He only gives away the information he is confronted with, and he never enters a breakfast room without grabbing a whiskey bottle. And Polly Walker, and Kelly McDonald and Bill Nighy and and and. It is, of course, not too uncoventional a story, it is like a provincial level "All the President's Men", with the usual lot of smoking and drinking that you have to do in serious nvestigative journalism, and with the piles of old newspapers on everybody's desk (anybody ever wondered why they need to be there in 2003? You can save it from the online edition, for crying' out loud!). Slimy intermediaries (Mr Foi, did you get your name awarded by the writers to honour that instrument of hope for all researchers, the freedom of information act?), ruthloess spin doctors, haunted politicians who ever only wanted the best for country and constituency… but could not restrain from making some sacrifices on the country's behalf for a nice shag.
The format of State of Play is also just perfect - I increasingly believe that the seasonal shows the US tv offers are a misunderstanding, and that reasonable mini-seasons of a maximum of five to seven shows allow the authors to maintain a decent storyline. If you cross that line, you have to start cheating and becoming irrelevant to the main narrative - especially if you cannot decide in advance how long the story will get milked.
On all accounts: wonderful cinema? "Cinema", he said? Yes, this was one long very good thriller, that I happened to watch on tv, but that had all the qualities of good cinema.
Do I need to mention that there is no reason to remake this as a Hollywood production? There is not a single reason!

John Rabe (Florian Gallenberger 2009)

John Rabe is running Siemens' Nanjing operations for 27 years. Just when his tenure is coming to an end in 1937, and his replacement has already arrived, Nanjing gets attacked by the Japanese forces taking over China's East. Rabe realises that his staying could make a difference, and he helps the international community to establish a safety zone to protect the civilian population from the atrocities that mark the path of the Japanese army.

It is interesting to see how this experiment would work out: a German-Chinese co-production, with a young director who has not had a chance to prove that he can manage big-scale porductions. A film that tries to find the balance between blockbuster-style war scenes, and the intimate struggle of a man who never choses to be a hero, but (quite credibly) becomes one by just being the same person that was the best choice for running the factory. While the first half our or more drags along a bit, shifting the figures into position on the Nanjing chess board, checking all the boxes of a wartime drama and not providing anything unexpected or exciting narratively or visually, the film gains momentum with the actual invasion of Nanjing by the Japanese army, the establishment of the safety zone, and the dense and perilious atmosphere in there that one knows from depiction of the Warsaw ghetto. People trying to get in with their lives in impossible circumstances (the school girls keeping on doing classes while the school's attic is packed with Chinese soldiers they illegally hide), permanent crisis management on the brink of or in the face of massacre, the stunning silence of the internaational community, and through a strange twist of developments Adolf Hitler being the last hope of those despaired prisoners.
Under duress, the actors loosen up and play more freely and intensily, Ulrich Tukur as John Rabe is a very appropriate physical presence, with the right degree of Germanness around him, and the stunningly aged and worn-looking Steve Buscemi is almost too good as the cynical bonesaw in the middle of all that blood and guts.
At the end of the day, it will be the story that is more memorable than the way the film tells it, as too much conventional story-telling is not the right tool for yet another wartime story. But a solid effort at a tale that must be told.
The decision to shoot and leave the film in its "real" languages should be praised! The flavour of the period and the location gets all the more authentic this way - this is how "Valkyrie" should have been done.

Charly and the Chocolate Factory (Tim Burton 2005)

Willy Wonker, excentric owner of a chocolate and candy empire, invites five children to visit his highly secretive production facilities. At the end of the day, he will pick one of the five to be given the great and secret prize.

Funny how some stories are kind of complicated to summarise in two sentences, others aren't. This one is dead simple, and the reason may be that apart from the framework setting, nothing much happens. The production design is a splendid mix of sickeningly bright colours and psychedelic plants. The factory workers are a weird dwarfish version of a Maori tribe, including a version of their dance rituals that you would not have expected to begin with. But apart from that: the 5 kids are being decimated one by one. One is left over, he gets the prize, and the film is over. It looked nice while it lasted, but - as most Tim Burton films, sorry to say that - form strangles substance, and it is just terribly boring.

Tyson (James Toback 2008)

Mike Tyson recounts his life, from being the fat little boy victim of bullyism to being the unbeatable heavyweight boxing champion of the World. The film only has Tyson talking, with archive footage reminding the audience of the actually quite incredible things he did in the ring. I had not seen most of it, as the Tyson matches were on pay tv only, and noone in our family was interested enough to actually spend money on this. But his speed, his physical shape, his wild and seemingly untamable (though we learn that is not true, that it is part of his fighting tactis, and well designed to evoke fear and panic) attack against his opponents - stunning!
There is not much context here: Tyson calling his alleged rape vicitm a lying swine and his former wife a gold-digger, him stating that his longtime coach has saved his life by making him a professional athlete … it is all "what you hear is what you get", there is no subtext to what he tells, it is the voice of a little, not too bright boy who has been around a bit, who is star-stunned by himself and the people he shook hands with, but who still has not learned that all the humiliation and exposure to the wide gaping mouths of the hungry media is not a downside of his job, but actually its core, the essence of why stars are allowed to be stars - as the filmspotting crew called it in their podcast: you are getting so incredibly rich and famous only if you sell your soul, and once they have bought it off you, they are happy to shred it to pieces, because raping girls, divorcing women, biting off ears only make you more interesting for them. This business maybe made him survive, but he paid a high price for that.

Gone Baby, Gone (Ben Affleck 2008)

Two private Investigators get the job to follow up on the police investigation of a child abduction. The aunt has hired them, the police does not like it, the parents are useless. Investigating the case, the Pis Patrick and Angela discover that the story has reported to the police has been a fabrication, but instead of this clarifying the case, they find themselves entangled in more and more investigation thicket.

I like Casey Affleck, his face and voice have a certain fragility to them, which here - again - suits his role perfectly well. He is not the elbowy thug-like PI, he is the nice guy from next door who is just asking questions, and everybody is surprised to learn that "next door" in this neighbourhood means that he can get as rough as he needs to.

The construction of the film is a bot over-done, I think: several options are given to the audience along the way, similar to the simulations in a CSI episode. There is no way of getting involved in the riddle, you are merely observing other people's considerations. So when the case nears its resolution, it comes as yet another option, and not as a really surprising one. At that point, a certain indifference to the plot line has developed.

Acting is strong, though, and the Boston atmosphere is pleasantly blunt (is this a Boston film location renaissance: Fringe on tv, this film, what next?). Altogether a quite pleasant experience, with plot and structure flaw.

Apaloosa (Eric Harris 2008)

Virgil Cole (Eric Harris) and Everett Hitch (Viggo Mortensen) come to Apaloosa, a small town out in the wild wild west that is threatened by the thugs around Randall Bragg (Jemery Irons). After Bragg had killed the former city Marshall, all authority is given to Cole, and he actually manages with wit and ruthlesness to keep things at bay and put trouble behind bars. But things are in towns like that: women, more thugs, more mercenaries create more trouble, and in the end it is up to Hitch to clear things up and relaese everybody into their own destiny.

How often do you get Eric Harris, Viggo Mortensen, Jeremy Irons on one screen. Plus Rene Zellwegger if you like that kind of amusement? Not too often. And here it comes with that very special sense for each actor's strnegths, which happens to be similar for all three leads: a controlled calm, a touch of cruel, the ability to be uncompromising. And the stench of self-mockery hanging over their heads, allowing them frequently to fall for the nymphomaniac piano player, or to desperatly struggle for words like a kid in a spelling competition. Especially Ed Harris sits in the middle of all this like a rock with a smiley painted on his side, and the twittering and flirting girlfiend Ms French.

The movie moves along calmly, and even the more Western elements like the stand-off or the train robbery are conducted with a blunt realism that is very refreshing. These guys do not move towards a show-down, but towards the necessity to make some decisions about their lives. The finale is intelligent in this, three people being set free with only one shot.

Traitor (Jeffrey Nachmanoff, 2008)

Samir gets caught and imprisoned in Yemen when selling explosives to Islamist terroritsts. In prison and after, he gets closer to the group and gets involved in their preparations for attacks in the US. At the same time, his path crosses frequrently with FBI agent Clayton, who is trying to identify the people behind the latest series of attacks against US citizens and who thinks Samir might play an important part in this.

The main problem about the film is that it has a major plot twist near half-time, and that from minute one of the movie, everybody is aware of this. So when the twist finally comes, it stirs more like a cringing feeling than one of surprise, and that cringe comes from a feeling of insult - how stupid, Mr Scriptwriter and Casting Director, do you guys really think we are? Did you ever sit together in the prep meetings?

Apart from that, the film is pretty solid, with nice exocticism of the Yemenite terrorist scene, an interesting choice of US and Canadian locations that are not yet completely over-filmed, and a good cast of actors to support it (most prominently Don Cheadle and Saïd Taghmaoui), both the Americans and the Arab ones. And the finale really is well designed, as at some point there is no possible hope of stopping the attacks, and that situation is well processed into a preyy satisfactory final blast.

Speed Racer (Wachowsky Brothers 2008)

Speed Racer grows up adoring his brother Rex, a race car driver of outstanding talent. The whole family of racing afficionados is shattered by Rex's death in a terible accident, but Speed still grows to become the next family member to rule the race tracks in his family's self-developed car. After he rejects the offer by the Royalton corporation to join their team of high-tech trained and welathy star racers, the corporate power turns against him, seeking to destroy his carreer and family.

I did not fancy to watch this film for years, because the plot as just outlined is so terribly boring that I could not imagine to possibly survive a screening. I do not like car chases in regular movies, I do in particular not like car racing movies, because I am not interested in car races. Film-audience mismatch, huh? However: Lured by the prospect of some eye-candy that would get me through an evening that I started being very tired to begin with, I picked the most spectacular-sounding effects orgy I had available, which was Speed Racer. I had seen clips before, which in terms of production design and colouring in particular had reminded me of a strange mix between Dick Tracy and The Flintstones (Papa Racer, in particular, cannot deny his resemblance to Fred F.). The opening race sequence is impressive, artistically well done, very innovative, and strangely hesitant in its show-off qualities. I only realised later (in the final scenes) what the film is doing: preparing you over two hours for more and more spectacular, more and more disturbing visuals. The design of the race sequences, but also of the city and the corporate headquarters of Royalton is outstanding, fabulous! But if you got exposed to the final race right away, with its absolutely ferocious editing, psychedelic designs, breath-taking speed, the un-trained mind would probably shut or melt down right away.
Interestingly enough, the visuals and effect are countered with over-simplistic dialogues, humour and characters, which in the comic spirit of the film is perfectly ok. Even the in principle completely annoying little brother with his monkey friend and smart mouth seems to fit in organically in a very Stooge-ish kind of way. The martial arts caricatures are silly and pretty funny.
I hate to admit it, but not really, because I like nice surprises: this was one of the most orginal blockbuster movies I have seen in quite some time. When finished, I immediately rewatched the final minutes for their sheer stunning beauty.

The Thing (John Carpenter 1982)

An Antarctica mission gets surprised by a Norwegian team chasing a dog to the camp and almost blowing everybody up. When the Americans investigate what happened at the Norwegians' camp, they find out that a flying saucer was dug up and something inside must have gotten released. Too late fr protection, as The Thing starts working its way through the camp staff (literally), and the survivors need to find ways to identify who is still human and how to get out of this mess.

Another one in my Carpenter marathon, and another one of my favourites. The atmosphere is claustrophobic by definition and location, and the guys in the camp all have different forms of cabin fever to show. The coolest man in the room is, of course, Snake Plissken, who wins the audience's heart in minute three when he rewards the chess computers' winning streak by pouring some whiskey on the rocks onto the machine's motherboard. Even with full beard and not many lines to speak (but when does Kurt Russel ever do?), he still is on top of developments. He will try to remain his calm and cool, despite madness and physically not very nice things breaking loose around him. Some beautiful shocker moments (the re-animation efforts ending inside the guy's chest, the test of the blood samples with the glowing piece of wiring! Yiiek!).

Doubt (John Patrick Shanley 2008)

The story of a monastery / boarding school, where the slight modernisation tendencies of Father Brendan Flynn shake some of Sister Aloysius Beauvier's moral foundations. In her effort to maintain her desired high level of integrity for the school, The Good Sister is willing to follow her gut feeling when suspicions come up against the Father that his relationship to an altar boy went beyond the level of fostering. A quiet stand-off develops that must lead to the departure of one of them.

This is a very simple, naked film, without any cinematic arabesques: the Father is doing his thing and we think he is a nice and modern dude, the Sister is doing her thing and we think she is an old dried-up hag. We do not know whether the suspicions are correct, we are following the Sister's perspective mostly, and we have to make up our mind in the same way she has to. The narrative trick is just that: to allocate sympathies through choice of performance, leave out the necessary facts, and only towards the end seed the doubt by allowing some successful bluffs that reveal more about the characters' past than they had previously admitted. All this would not be sufficient to carry a film, it would call to leave the sory on a theater stage, but then again, you have Meryl Streep and Philip Seymor Hoffman, who may be too big for the confinements of a wooden stage. Their interaction is thrilling, especially with Hoffman maintaining his natural (or naturalistic) cool, and Streep building up the Wicked Witch of the East façade that she needs to perform in her role as benevolent dictator of her bees' hive of a school. It is thrilling to watch that while it goes on, and the abrupt ending allows you to continue wondering who was it that got you, and where on the way you took a moral mis-step yourself.

Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (Sydney Lumet 2007)

Two unlikely brother: Andy, the supposedly successful one, gets into some bit of trouble when his excessive drug consumption makes him reallocate some company ressources. Hank is more of the loser type, unable to sustain his daughter's desire for school excursions and the regular payments to his ex-wife. But pretty enough so that his sister-in-law appreciates the weekly shag. Brother Andy suggests drastic measures to relieve the home-grown credit crunch: a break-in into a jewellers' store to get rid of their worries once and for all. Everthing goes wrong, people are dying, and all families of everybody concerend suffer severe blows.

It is somehow frightening how Philip Seymor Hoffman establishes himself the epicentre of any movie I have seen with him over the last 10 years. There is always so much more energy and naturalness about his performances that there is always a danger of the other cast drowing next to him. "Before the devil…" takes this fact and uses it by contracsting him with Ethan Hawke, whose slightly frantic helplessness explains immediately why he is in for any suggestion his big brother comes up with - he would not be able to come up with his own.

As crazy as the initial idea is to rob their own parents' shop is, Hank's panic not to be able to pull it off makes him bring in a hopeless thug with a gun. The way the film narrates this culmination of calamity is backwards, and while I was wondering whether this editing trick is strictly necessary, it works well and is a nice effect to leapfrog beackwards in certain instances and learn more about some other characters build-up to the heist and the aftermath. How much it is a family film (a film about a family) gets clear towards the end, when the boys' father, battered by fate and (slightly illogically) arriving at the end of his quest to solve some crime riddle, gets the center stage and has to decide on behalf of both kids what the right way would be to clear up the mess. Not a nice solution he comes up with, but a very logical and plesantly non-compromising one.

Ebert's Review here.

Låt den rätte komma in (Let the right ones in, Tomas Alfredson 2008)

The little boy Oskar must be a rather lonely kid. He plays alone, suffers occassionally from school bullies and has this sad glance around his eyes that loners tend to feature. His new neighbour Eli is a girl a bit older than him, no mother, just what goes as her father, and it looks as if she would be his match. They make friends, even though it is only at night that they meet on the playground and hang out. They become closer friends, maybe they are going out with each other, and they love each other a bit. The girl's life takes a turn that forces her to go away and start somewhere else. And Oskar is willing to come along, even though she feels cold at night.

Is it a spoiler to say……. (now is your chance to get out of here if you read reviews, but cannot stand spoilers) ….. That the girl is a vampire, a niece of Vlad Dracul, Impaler of the Carpats, so to speak? It is the adverstising catchline, after all, so no big surprise here when we see that she actually is one of these night creatures, indeed confined to the night, and to some other rules we know from vampire heritage: she can only enter the house when somebody invites her, and there is a heart-breaking scene where she shows her new friend that even though he is nasty to her, she is willing to trust him a long way. She goes into his house before he invites her, and shows him that she is willing to suffer.

It is a gory film, with people getting killed, decapitated (no big diffrence here, I know), pouring acid over their faces, ripping off body parts and taking bloody vengeance. The are scenes that glorify revenge and make us cheer when the bad guys get what they had coming. Even though it is about kids, the kids their age cannot be the target group. It rather is the charme spread by kids, creating sometimes false clichée reactions among the grown-ups, with which the film confidently plays. The girl is, when it comes down to it, a compulsive killer, the boy is a ruthless collaborator, and there is no need to like the two just because they are little. We like them because they are very human and lost and in love and desperate. The fact that one is a vampire and the other factual orphan does not matter.

It was said that the film is transgressing the genre boundaries, but I think that's not true. Vampire films have always been interesting when the vampires had a strong core of humanity in them - and when their non-human nature and their human desires tore them to pieces. Ask Count Orlok, and also those lost creatures of Abel Ferrara's genre venture. If they were superhuman creatures, they would have much less to suffer. The film does, however, provide a very nice and warm-hearted story about loneliness in a violent environment, and by adding the feature that one of them has to take on this violence as a means of survival, and the other one is at liberty to do it out of love, there is a new and interesting perspective, indeed, that makes a film that is worth watching anyway for its night and snow images and its crunching snow sound carpet, also an interesting character study

Mr Ebert also loves it, as does almost everybody else.

Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation! (Mark Hartley 2008)

A documentary about the dark side of Australian movie heritage, the film show extensive footage from the subgenre of "Ozploitation", and has many of its representatives chat about the good old days when you could do everything with a movie camera, a D-cupped girl and a bit of chainsaw. Most intersting protagonist weirdly enough is Quentin Tarantino, who qualifies only by being probably the only person to have seen all those flicks, and Dennis Hopper, about whose method acting approach to playing useless alochol and cocaine addicts we learn a bit. Apart from that, it is not really clear why this genre is particularly interesting. I sat there with a pen to immediately take note of any film I must lay my hands on, but there were not really inspring recommendations to be found. Maybe re-watch Mad Max to indulge in ca. 12-year-old Mel Gibson.

See also here for a more detailed description

Cellular (David R. Ellis 2004)

It was supposed to be a normal morning, sending off the son to school and discussing dinner with the maid, when all of a sudden a group of brutes breaks into Jessica Martin's house, shoots the maid, and takes her captive. They are asking her about her husband and where he is, and threaten to kill her and her whole family. She believes there is a big misunderstanding ("You have the wrong family!"), but it increasingly seems that this husband - a mere real-estate agent - got involved in something nasty and dangerous. From her prison cell, she manages to cross some wires of a broken phone and establishes a call with a complete stranger: Ryan's interest is to chill out in the beach, gets into his girl's scantily used pants and show off his sixpack and the pretty-boy face on Venice Beach. She manages to convince him, however, to help her safe her and her family. A chase taking him all through the city starts.

The idea is very simple and hence rather good (nothing worse than a complicated setting for me): we only learn very late about the actual reasons for the kidnapping, and through this it is maifested McGuffin-style - it does not really matter for the film to be a decent thrill, because for most of the time the acting persons are completely unaware of the reasons, either. The car chases are too long (I mentioned on occasion I find car chases terribly boring, did I not? Why is nobody listening???), the characters are flat (the Porsche lawyer…), but there is Jason Statham doing his Jason Statham thing, and there is Kim Basinger doing her mature desirable woman thing (works even better for me when her face is a bit battered after a hard kidnapping, wakes my protector instincts), there is William H Macy as a cop doing his William H macy thing in a seaweed mask and with a gun. Would you ever expect Macy to jump sideways, pulling the trigger in the fall 10 times, Bruce Willis style? That was a new aspect of his screen personality for me. And there is the cute kid who is a bit scared, but then again has the time of his life playing cop and robber and being a clever hero. Quite fun, if you are in a hotel room, it's late and the concentration span is not enough for a complicated "Lost" time-warp episode.