You cannot be serious

Interesting article in the Guardian on the state of ‘serious’ non-fiction in the UK. It’s particularly good on the history of publishing and book-selling.

The Departed

I’ve never been a huge Scorsese fan. There are exceptions – Goodfellas is a masterpiece and I have a soft spot for Casino (both based on true stories which may be the reasons why they are the exception for me or it may just be a coincidence). However, by and large, me and his films have never got on. Taxi Driver has it good parts but most of it, especially the parts with Cybill Shepherd, I find tedious and I’ve never been able to sit through all of Mean Streets.

Recently I had some time to kill and because there was nothing else on I could even began to want to watch I checked out The Departed at the cinema. After all it has had almost unanimous praise from the critics.

And it’s big. Big in length, big on stars and to a certain extent it’s big on scope. The plot is high concept, based on a Korean film I’ve not seen. The cops have a guy in the mob whilst the mob have one of their guys in the cops. Unfortunately from that genius concept things develop into something a bit too complicated and there’s definitely several twists too many by the end (and the final one I saw coming a mile off).

Hidden

Spy cam

Hidden is a mystifying film that does not leave you disappointed, largely because, although it is very open in terms of plot resolution, it is a satisfyingly closed journey emotionally. Seeing this film came to me on the back of many positive reviews and a great deal of word of mouth encouragement and I can only add to that.

Daniel Auteuil plays a bourgeois intellectual with a wife (brilliantly performed by Juliette Binoche) and young son whose current satisfied life is disrupted by the arrival of a number of videos showing his apartment – it’s obvious he’s being spied on. Then the videos start arriving wrapped in disturbingly violent, childish drawings. As Auteuil tries to find out who is spying on him, the slow evolution of the plot opens up cracks in the family (Is Binoche having an affair? What’s going on with the kid?) and winds up the tension until you are not sure what’s going to happen, but whatever it is you know it’s not going to be good. This all ends up relating back both to Auteuil’s childhood plus to events in recent French history that still have relevance today. There are a few odd moments – a bit of symbolism is very heavy-handedly done – but overall it’s one of the better films of recent years.

Primer

What's in the box

I came away from Primer feeling disappointed. I had read a review for it a while back and was immediately excited. Two geeks build a time machine in their garage, and it had an intelligent plot! What’s not to like? Unfortunately it turns out to be if anything too intelligent, it’s reach far outreaching its grasp. It tries to be smart, ultra-smart in fact, but ends up being dumb. The plot is almost unbelievably complicated with multiple journeys back and forwards in time that have happened before the film starts, effecting what you see now. It’s like watching one of the final iterations of Groundhog Day the first time through with no prior knowledge of the situation. You won’t have to do much surfing on the web to find complicated timelines that explain to the plot of the movie. Now, it may be just me, but if you have to go to a web site in order to understand the plot of a film them something has gone wrong somewhere.