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Broken across two posts due to some sort of database error I don't have the wit to comprehend or resolve at this current time.
Jar City
Compact but weighty Icelandic crime drama, with a surprisingly simple, straightfoward plot. You kind of work it out at about the half way point, and the rest of the film just stolidly plods on towards a resolution you expected. Maybe no twist is the new twist? It's both satisfying and anticlimactic at the same time - we've been conditioned to expect crime dramas to have dramatic reveals, but good storytelling doesn't necessarily require them. And this has some great, minimal performances - particularly Ingvar Eggert Siguršsson, who must play the hardest man to wear a cardigan.
It's typically bleak stuff, though. Not just because the crime is horrible, humourless and pointless, but because there's a sense that it's all occuring right on the edge of the world. There's a real overbearing sense of human insignifiance and futility when contrasted by those big frigid wildernesses.
Oddly, the film also has lots of really unpleasant meat-eating scenes. Not sure what that means.
Monsters VS Aliens 3D
I like 3D. Despite the fact that it is so pathetically, so transparently the last wheezing gasp of a cinema industry desperate to retain audiences in the face of a home entertainment market which, when propped up by piracy, offers better value, comfort and timeliness than the brazen chav-harried rip-off which is a trip to the local multiplex - despite all that, I like 3D. This film? Not improved by 3D.
I am not averse to the recent Pixar efforts - Wall-E was two-thirds a really great film - but Dreamworks has proven itself incapable of recreating those charms. This film had five different writers. Going by pure percentage values of the final script, I'd say one of those guys is funny. In unison, this cabal of jobbing hacks barfed out a by-the-numbers underdogs-save-the-world-and-realise-their-value piece-meal shite-cake, with four really good lines and the exact performances by Seth Rogen and Hugh Laurie you would expect if they were killed, and you found some way of distilling the humour and intellect out of the sum total of their perfmances and reinjected what remained into their lifeless, blanched corpses.
The worst thing about the film is that it knows it's a total piece of shit, incapable of holding the attention of an adult mind. As such it occasionally tosses out references which will only baffle children - a sequence in which the president of the USA plays the tune from First Encounters for example. Sure, children may be dumb enough that they won't even notice, but somehow this is insulting to everyone - insulting to the kids whose confusion is swept aside in order to wink with painful artifice at the parents, and depressing for the parents themselves who recognise this as an admission that the rest of the film will be intellectually barren.
Oddly, Wall-E never did this. Its references were subtly handled - its themes surprisingly profound and moving; yet it was a satisfying experience for both smart-arse jaded fuckers and brain-gloop proto-humans alike. Monsters VS Humans is a forgettable and faintly contemptuous lot of toss, and even in 3D isn't an impressive enough spectacle to warrant a trip to the cinema.
In short: no.
35 Shots of Rum
Two self-obsessed people spend 80 tortuous minutes determinedly preventing anything or anyone intruding into their insular, mundane lives. Strong acting. Unfortunately the strong acting is comprised solely of banal and selfish people in a state of persistant and purposeful inaction. Someone's cat dies in its sleep - a highlight. People wash plates for longer than anyone actually speaks. Oh great. |
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