Film Review: Michael Haneke's Amour

Michael Haneke's 2012 film Amour was the favourite at Cannes last year.  I've just reviewed it for The Hollywood News and you can read my take on it here.

The Horror...The Horror... Best Halloween Movies

There's not much I like more than a good horror film.  Well, actually, there's a lot I like more, now I come to think of it.  But I do like horror an awful lot.  For the month of October The Hollywood News did a run-down of top terrors, and I wrote about five of my favourites.

The list goes as follows:

Halloween
Suspiria
The Exorcist
Candyman
Trick 'R Treat
The Haunting
Kwaidan
Scream
Carrie
Don't Look Now
An American Werewolf in London
The Descent
[REC]
Let the Right One In
The Innocents
The Devils
The Woman
House of 1000 Corpses
Friday the 13th
The Wicker Man
Antichrist
The Blair Witch Project
Misery
Audition
Evil Dead II
The Omen
Eden Lake
Magic
The Thing
The Shining
Psycho

You can read the complete run-down here.

Incidentally my choices were Antichrist, Suspiria, Eden Lake, The Devils and Don't Look Now.

Is Hitchcock's Vertigo the Greatest Film of All Time?

Unless you've been living under a stone for the past few weeks you should have heard about this new development.  Citizen Kane is gone!

I've got an article up at The Hollywood News (here) about why Vertigo deserves its place at the top.

So movie goers ... do you agree?

Film Review: True Grit

I finally got round to watching the Coen Brothers' True Grit (2010).  You probably know there's a late '60s version with John Wayne starring as the anti-hero Rooster Cogburn.  You probably also know it's based on a novel by Charles Portis (no I haven't read it).  To be honest you've probably already seen it anyway.

Well it ticks all the appropriate Western boxes.  It has "sepia tones".  It has a grizzly boozy Marshal on the fringes of society, although I'm not really sure why he would so easily throw down his life to rescue the precocious and slightly weird Mattie Ross by the end of the film.  This may have had something to do with my only being able to understand every fifth word Jeff Bridges said.  I probably missed some important plot development there.

Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Take ‘The Notebook’, add ‘Forest Gump’ and a few sprinkles of ‘Big Fish’ and then mesh it together with bits of ‘Highlander’ (but not the cool bits) and you’ve got ‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button’.
This is not a good combination people.

Daybreakers

Daybreakers is a vampire movie which owes its heritage to The Matrix and 28 Days Later equally.  It’s not horror; it’s sci-fi with a bit of blood-sucking thrown in, before ultimately descending into action.

Ethan Hawke plays Edward (why Edward?), a vampire with the tendencies of Anne Rice’s Loius who has a real problem with the human red stuff.  Instead, just like Angel, he favours pigs’ blood. 

But Edward’s problems don’t end there.  He works for this Vampire Big Business in the haematology department, trying to create a synthetic substitute because there are like, 20 humans left or something.  I’m still not sure why they weren’t breeding the remaining few. Instead they seem to hook them up in cells: all very Matrix-y.  Anyway, Edward falls in with the Human Resistance, who have discovered a cure for growing fangs.

I admit, I quite enjoyed this film.  Sure, the plot has some yawning craters, but it looks stylish, almost neo-noir in places.  You can guess mostly where it’s going to end up, but it looks pretty along the way. 

 It’s got some great touches - the newspaper headings about the pandemic and how vampire society seems to be mainly a load of white collars.  Plus it’s got Willen Dafoe in it.  What more could you want? 

Not so hot are the almost painfully obvious parallels it’s trying to draw with current issues - genocide, oil shortages, blah blah blah.  But I’m a sucker for vampire films (BOOM BOOM) and Daybreakers does the trick without giving us the wow factor.

Stylish fangs with no bite; but who cares?

Film Review: The Human Centipede

There’s a buzz in town and it’s all about Dutch horror The Human Centipede which received a general UK release this August.  It’s directed by Tom Six, who says he got the idea from discussing what punishments should be meted out to paedophiles.  Worried yet?  You should be…

Dr Heiter is a man with a vision, a man with a dream.  ‘A cure for AIDS?’ I hear you cry.  Pah.  Our doctor has much more lofty heights to scale.  He’s going to create…O horrible! O horrible! Most horrible…the…er…well, the clue’s in the title.  And create it he does, out of two unsuspecting American gals who’ve clearly never watched a horror film and an unlucky Japanese guy.

The three segments never amount to much by themselves.  The acting is so hammy I thought I was watching a porn film for a minute.  But they get more interesting once they are, ahem, joined.  That’s joined mouth to anus in case you didn’t know.  The doctor is a demented blend of Bela Lugosi, Klaus Kinski and Sunset Beach.  I don’t know if making him German and calling him Josef Heiter was a deliberate ploy, but all I could think of was Josef Mengele and his twin studies.  The Japanese segment was also clearly thinking the same when it yells, ‘You crazy Nazi bastard!’ or some such sentiment.

But is it any good?  Well, it had a certain funny aspect to it.  Watching a human centipede being trained to fetch papers or whatever the doctor wanted it for is always going to elicit a few giggles.  But my overriding thoughts were for the segments.  Who’s got the best deal? I thought.  If I HAD to be a human centipede, which segment would I be?  Well, the front one’s got the best deal clearly.  It gets to lead the way, to eat food and it keeps its teeth.  But the middle or end?  Dr Heiter thinks the middle is the worst section and uses it as punishment.  I suppose you’d feel a trifle constricted.  But the end segment is last in everything, shuffling along behind, always the bridesmaid, never the bride.  So I guess I’d be the front segment.  If I absolutely HAD to be a human centipede.

But…is it any good?  Well I chuckled a few times, got grossed out by some scatology and mused on the life of a segment of a human centipede.

It’s a joke - right?

Film Review: Triangle

Imagine Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining mixed with Vigalondo’s Timecrimes at sea and you’ve essentially got British horror film, Triangle.  Of course, if you’re familiar with the hubbub about this film you’ll know that director Chris Smith says he came up with the idea two years before Timecrimes.  But hey, who cares?  It’s the chicken and the egg.

I can’t really say much else about the plot or I’ll give it all away, but the spoiler free basics are simple enough.  Jess (Melissa George, or Angel as I still like to call her) is a single mum with an autistic son.  She and a group of friends are caught in a freak storm while sailing and manage to board a ship that passes their capsized boat.

But there seems to be nobody aboard, apart from that sinister figure stalking them…cue lots of shots of a confused George looking over her shoulder, along long art deco style ship corridors.  She’s got deju-vu bad and there’s definitely a spooky atmosphere.

Fans of The Shining will love the references and there’s some great editing going on here, which comes to its fullest realisation in the final part of the movie.  That’s all I’m saying.  But there’s also some gaping plot holes and whilst George’s character is multi-layered, helped by a strong performance, the other characters are a bit stiff.  Try and remember all their names.  Bet you can’t.