Garage

2007, Ireland, directed by Lenny Abrahamson

Now that I live overseas, I'm no longer as aware of developments in Irish film, but Lenny Abrahamson's work in both Adam and Paul and Garage strikes me as something strikingly different in my native country's cinema; I'm intrigued, too, by what I've read of his 2007 television project Prosperity, scripted, like both of his feature films, by Mark O'Halloran. While Abrahamson is by no means the first filmmaker to take on subjects like urban poverty or rural disenchantment, his filmmaking style steers carefully around sentimentality, while he prefers a careful accumulation of details over the payoff of a more conventional narrative. He's also adept at crafting rounded portraits of people on the margins, and restoring some measure of humanity to them in the process: he seems to have a persistent desire to validate the experiences of those dealt a less fortunate hand by life, particularly against a backdrop of economic triumphalism in Ireland.

Abrahamson's storytelling method allows him to give an acute sense of the repetitive daily routines of Adam and Paul or, here, Josie (Pat Shortt), the sole full-time employee of a sad-sack petrol station somewhere in the midlands. Josie's a slow-witted man, though he has an agonising sense of his own limitations, and an desperate awareness of what is missing from his life - most obviously any sense of sustained companionship. As such, he has a tendency to cling to the smallest hints of friendship or tolerance, thus revealing the deep loneliness and - not unrelated - sexual frustration that often characterises small towns with few social outlets.

Abrahamson isn't interested in cliched portrayals of Irish life, refusing to depict the pub, for instance, as a place of refuge: instead, it's the theatre for some of Josie's most intense humiliations, whether at the hands of a local bully or, even more tellingly, through the complicity of the remainder of the patrons (the pub sequence in Adam and Paul was similarly fraught with tension). It's refreshing to see someone scratch well beneath the surface in this way - there's something of the sensibility of writers like William Trevor and, especially, John McGahern at work - and I wonder if, in Abrahamson's case, his clear-eyed depiction of Ireland is linked to the fact that he spent a number of years overseas, returning with something of an outsider's eye for detail.
For that matter, it's relative outsiders who are most sympathetic to Josie, whether in the form of a teenager who appears to be a fairly recent arrival in town, or an English truck-driver now locally resident who treats Josie with something approaching genuine warmth. The teenager is a part-time summer employee at the garage - though the establishment hardly needs an extra pair of hands, with so few customers - and he opens up a small new horizon for Josie in terms of social contact of a limited kind. The character also provides the trigger for the film's biggest plot development, which unfolds with spare Bressonian logic.
Even with some new window opening in his life, communication, though, is desperately difficult for Josie, as it is for many of the characters in the film. There's a uncomfortable scene where the great stage actor Tom Hickey unburdens himself, and Mark O'Halloran's script perfectly captures the way in which social niceties mask any real connection; there's no shortage of conversation, but it's often deeply unsatisfying.
As Josie, Pat Shortt is remarkable: he's an adept comic actor and a skilled social observer himself, including in his television show Killinaskully, which examines rural Ireland through a broadly satirical lens, but nothing in his previous work prepares you for the depth of his characterisation here. Abrahamson taps into Shortt's talent for physical performance, so that even when we first see Josie in a long shot, we're aware of the unique way in which he moves. That paunchy awkwardness is of a piece with Josie's way of bumping through the world, and while the overall tone is serious Abrahamson uses Shortt's physicality to craft some wonderful comic moments that enhance our sense of Josie's worldview (one sequence where he cleans up the aftermath of a teenage party is priceless).
Abrahamson seems as comfortable in a rural register as he has previously in urban settings, capturing down-at-heel locations like the garage in pitiless detail, but he's also capable of stunning painterly compositions, such as the shot which appears at the top of this post. Similarly, there's a gorgeous shot near the end that evokes a Constable painting, while the camera occasionally focuses in on the tiniest details of the landscape, as in the opening scenes of Adam and Paul (Irish people might be put in mind of the pastoral images that used to appear on the screen back when the national anthem concluded each night of television programming). His intention, however, is not to evoke a bucolic idyll; the often captivating settings serve instead as a counterpoint to the careful dissection of flawed people that inhabit that landscape, and perhaps a reminder that there's something more enduring that human frailty.

Syndromes and a Century

2006, Thailand/France, directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Apichatong Weerasethakul's fourth feature is preoccupied, in the best sense, with exploring the same stories again. That is most obvious here in the film's two-part structure, which occasionally replays entire sequences in new settings and from new perspectives - a medical diagnosis shown once from behind the patient's back, and later from behind the doctor's seat, for instance. In addition, Weerasethakul sometimes revisits scenes from earlier in his filmography, such as in the telling of a folk tale - subtly different in its conclusion - which was recounted in Tropical Malady.

I decided at the beginning of the year to be a little more systematic in my approach to several newer filmmakers, watching all of their work in a short space of time. It's a method that has proved particularly fruitful with Weerasethakul, for it has revealed - much more clearly than I think might have been the case with long gaps between viewings - many of the themes and aesthetic choices to which he returns time and again. In addition to sharing many of his earlier formal concerns, there's also an especially rich sense of human connection in this most recent work, perhaps because it is loosely inspired by the lives of his parents, both medical professionals.

As in his previous work, the director foregrounds the careful construction of atmosphere over narrative. Even when the settings appear, on the surface, to be busy urban locations there's often a languid, enveloping tone to individual scenes: there's a hint of bustle in scenes set in a big city hospital, but Weerasethakul searches out refuges from that more frenetic rhythm, in the hospital grounds or in a basement room where the doctors gather to relax and even continue their work, hidden from prying eyes.

Similarly, the meeting of tradition and modernity in contemporary Thailand is again a key motivator in this work. The shots of a statue of Buddha by a basketball court or set against a modern hospital structure exemplify this confrontation, which is also present in the warmly humorous account of a young monk who yearns for a career as a DJ, and whose visits to a clinic are a means of staying in touch with that ambition. On one occasion, he's serenaded by his dentist, prompting him to inquire whether he's there for a checkup or a concert; the monk, saffron-robed and barefoot, sits in a dentist's chair surrounded by the paraphernalia of a modern clinic.

An older monk features in the scenes that open the film's two different segments, and those sequences, which involve long medical histories - similar scenes in the offices of doctors and veterinarians recur frequently in Weerasethakul's films - underline the fact that there is more than one way of approaching medical problems: while the Western-style doctors attempt to provide a satisfactory diagnosis for the monk, the older man makes his own silent diagnosis of the doctors' needs and hands over herbs for a healing tea near the end of each interview. The idea of two parallel methods of perceiving medical issues is similar to the way in which Weerasethakul illustrates two entirely different ways of seeing the world in both Mysterious Object at Noon and Tropical Malady, which blend realism with fantasy, blurring the line between the apparently "real" world and its mythical parallel.

Weerasethakul creates careful visual distinctions between the first and second halves of his film: while the first segment relies almost exclusively on medium shots, the second opens with an unexpected close-up, as if we're now primed to see a greater degree of detail in the scenes that we experience anew. Those repetitions are strikingly effective, compelling us to focus on the subtleties of his characters rather than simply sweeping us along in a conventional narrative. There's a tenderness to his depiction of both the patients and the young doctors, who are often endearingly tentative and shy, that has become a more important presence in his work as his career has progressed; there's a wonderful sense of watching real, fully imagined characters here, and there's a refreshing optimism in the director's generous characterisations.

The film ends with an open-air exercise session, a scene that refers back to Tropical Malady and which also recalls the conclusion of Claire Denis's Beau travail - except that Denis Lavant's solitary, improvised dancing is replaced by a collectively choreographed experience. It's as mesmerizingly strange an ending, however, as in that earlier film, apparently unrelated to what has preceded it, and yet of a piece with Weerasethakul's wonderful eye for the unexpected composition and incongruous juxtaposition.

All Through the Night

1942, US, directed by Vincent Sherman

A Bogart vehicle that was released a month after Pearl Harbor, All Through the Night is an uneasy mix of comedy and wartime murder centered on an unlikely confrontation between a cell of Nazi "fifth columnists" in New York, and a soft-hearted gangster, "Gloves" Donahue (Bogart), and his crew. The opening of the film is all breezy banter - with comics like Phil Silvers and Jackie Gleason on the fringes - but once the plot kicks into motion things get surprisingly brutal: there's a sequence where a body falls from an elevator that is startlingly blunt, the corpse thudding to an unmistakable halt at ground level.
The problem is that director Vincent Sherman doesn't know how to handle the transitions, navigating uneasily between the two different modes, which sometimes clash quite jarringly, especially in a fight sequence in Central Park where Donahue's gang pratfalls while the Nazis remain deadly serious. A more recent director like Bong Joon-ho might make something fruitful out of these tonal shifts - though he probably wouldn't have gotten the job in old-time Hollywood - but in Sherman's hands they feel awkward, as if he's never able to make up his mind how to handle his material. The same uncertainty characterises a scene near the end that's awkwardly reminiscent of the climax of Fritz Lang's M, the deadly serious "trial", but a belabored back-and-forth between Donhaue and his right-hand man in mock German undermines the drama of the setting,
It doesn't help that the script is generally weak, with little ear for dialogue; the film is filled with clanging lines like "Boys, we're on the right track" and "This might be a clue", especially as the plot becomes more obviously problematic in the second half. In the end, the film's propaganda value comes to the fore, with Yankee ingenuity continually thwarting the bad guys (minimal reference is made, of course, to the fact that the war was already several years old for some other countries), though it's perhaps worth noting that Gloves is able to call on a gang that includes Jewish and Asian members (the film's one black character gets short shrift).
Early on, Sherman stages several scenes rather well, particularly a shot through a kitchen where a slice of cheescake is being prepared, or another in a bakery where the camera moves in tight to the actors, but things quickly become much more predictable; you wonder if someone else filmed these shots, since they're out of character with the rest of the picture. Most of the film's energy stems instead from its fine Warner Brothers' cast, whether it's the starring roles featuring Bogart, Kaaren Verne and Conrad Veidt (especially good), to top-notch supporting work from actors like William Demarest, Peter Lorre, Frank McHugh and Jane Darwell (several of the cast, and others not named here, were of course refugees from the rising tide of Nazism).

Bye Bye Africa

1998, Chad/France, directed by Mahamat Saleh Haroun

Like Abderrahmane Sissako's La Vie sur terre, Mahamat Saleh Haroun's first feature narrates a journey home, from France to Chad in this case, and as in Sissako's film the line between truth and fiction is often rather blurred. Both directors play characters named after themselves, men who are reconnecting with family and the rhythms of life in their homelands, while the voiceover narration teases out some of the difficulties of life as an exile; both films even include quotations from the same writer, Aimé Césaire. Given the similarities of approach and tone, it's no surprise that Sissako ended up among the producers of Haroun's subsequent features, Abouna and Daratt.

Haroun's film has a multi-layered narrative in which he simultaneously depicts himself as a director making a film - entitled Bye Bye Africa - complete with casting calls and attempts to persuade producers to sign on to the enterprise, while also conducting apparently "real" interviews with people in Chad, with a particular focus on their experiences of cinema. Early in the film, Haroun's father comments to his son that "your films are for the whites", and that they aren't even distributed in Chad. This is a dilemma faced by almost all African filmmakers: faced with what seems the impossibility of showing their work on the African continent, they are sometimes seen to be unwilling, rather than unable, to do so, and Haroun's filmmaking efforts - in this film - seem designed to reverse that trend.

The interviews explore the destruction of the cinema exhibition industry in Chad, through a long civil war and the systematic lack of investment by overseas distributors - a lack of investment that essentially killed the theatrical business, since consumers were ultimately unwilling to suffer the dreadful projection conditions. There's a sadness around the memories of old movie theatres in N'Djamena - the Normandie, for instance - which are, these days, tumbledown or bullet-ridden, and when they operate at all show scratchy old prints of cheap action flicks.

The documentary aspects of the film succeed to a greater degree than the fictional story interwoven with the interviews. While that story serves as a means for Haroun to explore some of his own feelings about his status as a returning exile, there's a current of melodrama that proves distracting. When Haroun simply turns his camera loose, Bye Bye Africa captures, to a sometimes remarkable degree, the texture of N'Djamena life, the sounds and rhythms of the streets, while the interactions with family are understated and touching; Haroun chooses not, for instance, to depict an emotional reunion with his father, but cuts instead to a scene where the two men quietly drink tea together, the reunion enacted offscreen.

Goupi Mains Rouges

1943, France, directed by Jacques Becker

Like Henri-Georges Clouzot with Le Corbeau, Jacques Becker made his first major film in 1943 (after, in Becker's case, a long period of close collaboration with Jean Renoir). Both directors chose the claustrophobic confines of a small country settlement as a metaphor for Occupation-era France. Becker's setting is even more restricted than in Clouzot's film, since his characters are all members of the same extended clan, the Goupi family; each member has a different nickname, ranging from Goupi Tonkin, a veteran of France's Asian adventures (part of a rich vein of commentary on France's relationship to her colonies), to the eponymous Mains Rouges (wonderfully played by Fernand Ledoux, the standout in a tremendous cast).

There's nothing bucolic about this country tale, however, which reveals spectacular jealousies and a mad dash for personal gain whenever the opportunity presents itself: like Clouzot, Becker never masks his cynicism about the motivations of many of his fellow-citizens during wartime.The film undermines the notion of a peaceful country retreat from the very beginning: when one of the clan, Goupi Monsieur, makes his way from Paris to his father's home -- a place he barely knows, due to the fact that his parents separated -- the atmosphere is about as welcoming as that of the opening segment of Tod Browning's 1931 Dracula, when Harker journeys to Transylvania, a sequence that was surely in Becker's mind.

For all that Becker takes a dim view of human nature, however, his film is blackly humorous rather than dour, and there's occasionally an almost frantic tone, as family members steal from one another and desperately try to discover the location of what they believe is a hidden fortune. Despite their internecine strife, however, they're adamant about regulating their affairs themselves: at one point, the paterfamilias comments that "a gendarme will never set foot here," perhaps implying that even in occupied France there are limits to the Goupi clan's willingness to tolerate outside authority.

One of the most striking aspects of the film -- beyond, in retrospect, the fact that it was made at all in such conditions -- is Becker's sense of the French countryside. Whereas his son, also a film director, indulges in a soft-edged view of the past in films like Les Enfants du marais (1999), Becker père never romanticises the financial hardships of country life, nor the restrictions under which some of the clan's members chafe. In some senses, that desperate search for hidden treasure, unpleasant though it may appear, is a pragmatic response to the family's financial needs, as they endeavour to make ends meet. It's not hard to see the first stirrings of European neo-realism here, notwithstanding the difference in tone from the early Italian neo-realist films.

Becker confidently switches registers from deep seriousness to high comedy in several virtuoso sequences, without the transitions ever seeming abrupt: the viewer is constantly on the back foot, never quite sure what to expect either with regard to the story or the treatment of events. The final joke comes after all seems lost, and yet it simply underlines the ability of this self-contained community to regulate itself and ensure continuity in the face of adversity, either personal or political.

Eastern Promises

2007, UK/Canada/USA, directed by David Cronenberg

David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises plays out in a strange netherworld London. Set mostly in the parallel world of Russian organized crime, the London streets of the film often seem devoid of the people and action so characteristic of the metropolis. At times, the action of the film seems almost as geographically restricted as the (not so quiet) small town at the heart of Cronenberg's previous film, A History of Violence, as if to emphasize that he has little interest in a tourist version of the city (Stephen Frears's Dirty Pretty Things similarly refused to reduce the city to a series of postcard views).

Cronenberg often seems fascinated by the disconnect between appearances and reality, and he gives that theme full rein here; it's not, of course, an entirely new theme for explorations of gangland, given the simultaneous depiction of brutal violence and close-knit family life in a films like The Godfather. It's not a legacy that Cronenberg denies, it seems to me; rather he uses the diconnect to create truly multi-layered characters that confront us with complex and even unpleasant moral choices. It also allows him to play with audience expectations, and even to spring plot surprises on the viewer (well, at least this viewer); he's expert at the mechanics of genre cinema, while not allowing himself to be limited by conventions.

In this film, Cronenberg is consistently interested in those who are otherwise dismissed: the plot is set in motion by attempts to identify an unknown girl, of little consequence to most people at the hospital where she dies. Cronenberg is also insistent on finding the humanity in characters that others dismiss: a prostitute who is discarded by one of the Russian gangsters is beautifully lit, looking almost like a painter's model, as if to emphasize that this woman is as worthy of artistic attention as anyone else, and that she retains a core of dignity that few are willing to accord her. It's of a piece with the humanist spirit of many of his films, where he finds unexpected tenderness and affection in stories that often contain raw, even brutal violence - such as the memorably bone-crunching sequence here where Viggo Mortensen fights another man in a Russian bathhouse.

Tropical Malady

2004, Thailand/France/Germany/Italy, directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Apichatpong Weerasethakul revisits several of the themes of his previous films in his third feature, but it seems to me that the film marks a step in a new direction, one where he makes use of a much greater range of cinematic means - placement of actors, camera movements, even special effects. It's a little like watching a flower suddenly burst into bloom: it's the same plant but there's a striking vibrancy about the result. It's hard, for example, to imagine his earlier work including a shot as stunning as that where one of the main characters disappears into the night, his shirt visible long after the rest of him has merged with the forest. However, he pursues these new explorations without losing sight of his familiar obsessions, and without compromising his exceptional attention to atmosphere.
Like his preceding film, Blissfully Yours (and his subsequent Syndromes and a Century), the film is divided into two parts. The first segment is a richly evocative rural romance between a soldier and a young man in the town where he is posted (the affair is accepted in unruffled terms by those around the two men, perhaps enhancing the sense of a pastoral idyll). As in his first film, Mysterious Object at Noon, Weerasethakul allows his camera to linger on faces and locales that have no great narrative significance, but which contribute to the acute sense of place; you almost expect these people to reappear later in the film, but that's not really the director's purpose.
As in much of Weerasethakul's work, the confrontation between tradition and modernity is a central theme: there are abrupt intrusions from the modern world, whether it be a brightly-lit shop, or an open-air exercise routine set to dance music. These co-exist with the telling of a folk tale or a visit to a site of spiritual significance, and as the film moves into its second segment the sense that there's an entirely different world running in parallel to the "real" world of modern Thailand is brought to vivid life. This other reality is most fully expressed in the forest, far from others, just as the forest serves as a place of both almost mythic revelation and renewal in Blissfully Yours. As in that film, the prolonged sequence in the forest is intensely atmospheric, with an especially rich soundscape, and time itself seems to lose any meaning. A film that begins as a relatively realistic story becomes enmeshed with the narrative of Thai folk tales, revealing a completely different lens through which to interpret the world.
My particular enthusiasm for the film may stem from the fact that Weerasethakul makes use of one of my favourite cinematic devices: a journey through a city, by night or by day, car or motorbike, set to music. Whether it's Nanni Moretti on his Vespa exploring Rome to the sounds of Keith Jarrett in Caro diario, Maggie Cheung on the back of a motorbike in a Parisian night in Irma Vep, with Ali Farka Touré and Ry Cooder on the soundtrack, or a car driving through the streets of Barcelona accompanied by Ismaël Lô's "Tajabone" in Pedro Almodóvar's Todo sobre mi madre, I'm a sucker for them all. Weerasethakul's nighttime journey, with music by the a group calling themselves fashion show, is no exception: it's a terrifically evocative sequence, both of the Thai night and the feelings of someone newly in love.

That sequence on the motorbike has an appealing sense of being shot on the fly - I wonder if some of the moments the camera captures while moving along were fortuitous rather than planned - but I love, too, Weerasethakul's more careful compositions, like the shot, above, of a bed and a window, that recalls a shot from near the end of his first film. Or that below, where the soldier character (out of uniform) is foregrounded; the placement of his actors gives the shot a slightly unnerving feel, as though the main actor is about to burst out of the screen.

The Maltese Falcon (1941)

1941, US, directed by John Huston

I often wonder if any director - of reasonable longevity - had better career bookends than John Huston: this film began what The Dead brought to a stunning close in 1987. Admittedly, Huston had his lows, too, most notably a terrible string of films in the late 1970s and early 1980s (when I was growing up, though, it was hard not to get caught up in the footballing exploits of Escape to Victory, which played frequently on Irish and British television), but this film announced his arrival in a manner as emphatic as the same year's Citizen Kane opened the curtains on Orson Welles's directorial work.

Huston's film is the third adaptation of Dashiell Hammett's novel, after a 1931 version under the same name, and a 1936 re-write as Satan Met A Lady. As well as being more expansive - Huston adds 25 minutes to the running time of the earlier films - this version is more obviously hard-bitten from the off, rarely playing things for open laughs. A much more bitter variety of humour replaces the breezy, devil-may-care tone of the first film and the out-and-out farce of the second, in keeping with the deeply cynical view of greed and human self-interest on display.

The story of the falcon itself is efficiently dealt with by the inclusion of a quasi-historical background in an opening scroll, which lends the rather fanciful details a little more gravitas when the story is re-told later on. An opening montage - not unlike that from the 1931 film - then establishes the film's location, before Huston cuts to a shot that introduces Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart). Though Spade certainly isn't indifferent to the women around him, the director has little interest in re-creating the insistent ladies' men of previous films. Unlike those earlier versions of Spade, Bogart's detective is a far more sceptical man, led by his instincts but less likely to be dominated by them.

Huston restricts his characters to a small number of sets for a great deal of the film's running time, effectively creating tension from the constantly shifting loyalties created in such enclosed spaces, with mistrust the only constant. These pressures prompt the characters to behave in odd ways, becoming brittle with nerves. He shoots the characters from highly unusual perspectives, too, displaying the influence of German Expressionism: sometimes his camera is just below waist level, looking slightly up, whereas at other times the camera is almost on the floor, most obviously when shooting the rotund Sydney Greenstreet, an affable but unmistakeably ruthless leader. There's a fascination with shadows, too, whether in the early, night-time sequences but also in the play of letters across a carpet as the light shines through Sam's office window.

There's a wonderful sequence early on where Spade is informed of the death of his partner which underlines the fresh approach Huston brings to the material: Spade's voice is heard offscreen as the camera focuses on his nightstand and the window beyond, the still life contrasting with the tragic news being relayed, and the tension enhanced by the mysterious absence of the leading character. Less subtle is the portrayal of Joel Cairo (Peter Lorre); it's hard to believe the censors were entirely taken in by Huston's "downplaying" of the character's sexuality, since there's little mistaking the fact that Cairo is homosexual, signalled primarily through his emotional overreactions to slights both minor and significant, as well as the unambiguous manner in which he fondles his cane when speaking with Spade. There's a campiness to Lorre's portrayal that recalls his work in Hitchcock's 1936 Secret Agent, a less memorable tale of international mystery and rapidly shifting loyalties.

Atonement

2007, UK/France, directed by Joe Wright

Several of the reviews of Ian McEwan's source novel - I haven't read the novel itself yet - suggest that McEwan references Evelyn Waugh's most celebrated novel Brideshead Revisited; both books take place across different time periods, and use the Second World War in crucial ways to mark the end of a particular period in English life. Joe Wright's film adaptation makes the connection much more explicit, evoking the English country house of the 1930s as a place of almost prelapsarian innocence, emphasized by the lushly coloured visuals (gorgeously shot by Seamus McGarvey), in much the same splendid manner that Waugh later confessed he had mixed feelings about.

As in his previous adaptation of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, Wright's camera is extremely mobile, yet despite what seems occasionally to be a whirl of movement there's an forceful sense of the languid English summer enjoyed by those of means; scenes filmed by a pond, or a pivotal sequence by a fountain, use light and sound to conjure up a headily sensuous atmosphere that foreshadows later events.

Throughout the film, Wright is concerned to get inside the heads of his characters - whose perceptions of events often differ in crucial ways from the realities they are observing - and it's refreshing that he avoids reliance on the voiceover, often used in more respectful period adaptations, in favour of visual methods of evoking his characters' psychology. Thus, the much-discussed long take on the beach at Dunkerque seems to me not so much a distractingly virtuoso bit of filmmaking - though it's certainly virtuoso - but rather of a piece with the extraordinary strangeness of the setting, taking us into the mind of Robbie (James McAvoy) as he encounters the unimaginable, an experience further intensified by the fever under which he's labouring at the time. It's as convincing an insight into the workings of his mind at that point as the more obviously surreal sequence, shortly afterwards, when Robbie finds himself behind the screen in a movie theatre playing Marcel Carné's Quai des brumes, itself a film about the end of illusions.

The film also provides interesting depth to the cherished mythology of Dunkerque: while the heroism of the episode isn't called into question - as attested by the newsreel footage of the actual soldiers involved - the events are supplemented with a layer of grit, blood and drunkenness that gives a sense of the chaos and disillusionment of the withdrawal, a reality check for the legend.

[As a footnote, it's interesting how many reviews categorize Atonement in disparaging terms as "Oscar bait"; if that's the filmmakers' aspiration, they're on the wrong track, since rough-edged - or aspirationally rough-edged - films with American settings have dominated for the past few years.]

Gettysburg

1993, US, directed by Ron Maxwell
With its emphatic title (in contrast to director Ron Maxwell's subsequent Gods and Generals), expansive running time, actual location shoot and impeccable attention to period detail, Gettysburg first appears as an attempt to provide an authentic account of the great Civil War battle. As an actual historical account, however, the film makes extensive use of the techniques of fiction rather than of the documentary, particularly in its use of subsidiary characters who act as a means to enter the story; this is especially true on the Confederate side, where an actor-turned-spy and a British observer have a disproportionate amount of screen time, functioning as tools to enable the key Southern military leaders to explain the action to the viewer (they are sometimes assigned speeches which seem unlikely to have been delivered in such measured tones in the realities of battle). In telling the story from the Northern side's perspective, Maxwell relies instead on the more genuinely central figure of Joshua Chamberlain, a colonel who led a particularly brave action using many soldiers who had previously been prisoners; his inspirational leadership makes him a natural choice for one of the film's narrative threads.

Such choices are necessary to try to capture the humanity of individual people involved in the battle, though Maxwell generally chooses to focus on men with a clearly defined role: either senior officers or a spy, with only one NCO getting a prominent role (it seems almost predictable, then, that he's a salt-of-the-earth, no-nonsense type: the class distinctions seem to belong as much to British as to American life, though in 1863 the distance between the two may have been that much narrower, and certainly the officers hint at their shared gentlemanly background, across the political divide). The ordinary soldiers are rarely seen as anything more than a churning mass, either stalking across open fields or engaged in pitched battles. Even so, the film succeeds well in conveying the idea that the battle was experienced as a series of often unconnected engagements from the perspective of those involved: they had little sense of what was going on elsewhere in the field, at least not until after the fact.

Although released on the big screen, the film still feels as though it belongs on television: there are long, discrete sequences that were clearly conceived as individual episodes of a mini-series, and which have not been radically restitched for the four-hour cinema version. The events often have a small-scale feel, and on the rare occasions when Maxwell indulges a flourish such as the use of a helicopter shot to run down a line of marching soldiers, he draws attention to what is otherwise a very restricted field of vision, with little of the expansive visual sense of American filmmakers like Steven Spielberg, who makes full use of the big-screen canvas when shooting battle sequences in a film like Saving Private Ryan. There's nothing wrong with a work conceived for television in and of itself, but the decision to release Gettysburg in this format perhaps ultimately does the material a disservice.

Save the Last Dance

2001, US, directed by Thomas Carter

Thomas Carter’s third feature constantly threatens to go somewhere interesting, particularly with regard to black-white relations, but at almost every turn the film backs away from the tough stories of the neighborhood where it is set in favour of the tale of a white girl getting her groove back. That story isn’t irrelevant – and it certainly makes for emotional highlights – but the choice of focus seems like a missed opportunity when there are bigger issues in the background.

It’s a shame, because the film has a fine young cast (Julia Stiles, Sean Patrick Thomas and Kerry Washington, the latter bringing some real fire to proceedings), and there’s great chemistry between Stiles and Thomas, especially in the warm, well-played scenes where he coaxes her into being just a little less uptight. The film feels as though it’s still something of a draft: while some sequences are expertly constructed, at other moments the film doesn't entirely cohere, while it makes poor use of the character of Roy (Terry Kinney), who plays Stiles’s father, and who might actually have something to teach her about the world in which she finds herself.

Never Been Kissed

1999, US, directed by Raja Gosnell

I've always found Drew Barrymore to be charming performer, capable of giving a lift to sub-par fare (there are plenty of examples in her cinematic CV), but given her executive producer credit she has only herself to blame for the extremely weak script here, rendering her energy pretty ineffective. The story is padded out to inexcusable length: there's really no reason for this kind of thing to come in over the 90-minute mark unless the wit quotient is much higher.

Barrymore plays a woman whose first journalistic assignment is to go undercover in a high school - to expose the seamy side of modern education, and not incidentally give her own high school memories a makeover. A decent Hollywood movie takes the time to invent a vaguely credible world that at least makes sense on its own terms, whereas Never Been Kissed doesn't care to patch the absurd plot holes, even drawing attention to them (there's a scene that makes much of the security scanners at the school entrance, and yet this long-in-the-tooth high schooler has no apparent trouble enrolling in the first place). I know that realism is not the primary object here, but the filmmakers seem to have little sense of the kind of craftsmanship that would lend their film a little more cohesiveness. The usual high school cliches are trotted out with little conviction, and the film fudges its central romantic problem - Drew can either date a kid or a teacher who thinks she's a kid - by essentially ignoring it aside from one line delivered with little conviction. Even the supporting cast - usually the saviours of this kind of film - are rather lacklustre, except for Leelee Sobieski, who deserved better.

No Country For Old Men

2007, US, directed by Joel and Ethan Coen

When No Country For Old Men was first released in November 2007, I found the deluge of media coverage overwhelming - so much so that my desire to see the film leached away (it didn't help that I found the most recent Coen brothers' films to be among their weakest, even though I've generally enjoyed their work). I turn to writing on the Internet more and more when thinking about film, but in this case much of the passionate coverage on blogs was especially off-putting, being both divisive and dismissive (of the film itself, or of dissenting views).
I was struck, too, by the contrast between the ubiquity of a film that benefits from the mainstream publicity machine - and the Internet coattails that develop from this - and those films which have quietly made their way into my consciousness, becoming the more intriguing as a consequence. Just was I was avoiding No Country For Old Men, I was finally discovering the work of Thailand's Apichatong Weersaethakul, for instance, mostly through scattered references across blogs. In the end, it was a recommendation from the best of sources, my parents, that sent us off to the one nearby theatre where the film was still playing, but the experience made me think over how I make decisions about selecting the 100-150 new films I see each year. That's less than many other cinephiles, but it's a rhythm that works with my life, and still allows for a reasonable amount of new discovery, of both new and older films (and good and bad).

The film itself marked what for me was a major return to form - or even advancement - for the Coen brothers, after several recent misfires. While there were intermittent pleasures in both Intolerable Cruelty and their bizarre remake of The Ladykillers, those films feel like out-and-out pastiches of their source materials, whereas No Country For Old Men deconstructs and reassembles the genre elements that inspire it in ways that make them seem surprisingly fresh. That this story of violence is set against the backdrop of the American West seems no surprise, for the landscape itself has a force that often seems to belittle the human attempts to control it; if the conclusion has any allegorical value, it seems to me that it's in this idea that the land endures implacably whatever is thrown at it, while the men and women that inhabit that land inevitably wither. It's a theme explored in much Australian cinema, which makes such strong use of the malevolence of the outback.

Though it's punctuated by brutal episodes of violence - none more so than the chilling first death - there's a paradoxical calm in the Coen brothers' treatment of their material: many of the shots linger much longer than is the current norm in American cinema. This languid rhythm extends to the narrative itself, which, as Stéphane Delorme points out in Cahiers du cinéma, doesn't introduce one of its key characters until almost a quarter of the running time has elapsed. The story advances in unexpected jumps, eliding scenes we might have expected to see, then stopping again for moments that seem equally unexpected - Tommy Lee Jones holding a glass of milk, his silhouette reflected in a television, or pouring a cup of coffee for an uncle on an isolated farm (an abode that wouldn't have been out of place in the harsh rural settings of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford a century earlier). Most of all, it feels as though we're in hands that are in supreme control of their material this time around; the film is beautifully edited and carefully framed, so that even scenes of devastation have an unsettling painterly quality, albeit married with a brutal streak.

Tasuma

2004, Burkina Faso/France, directed by Kollo Sanou

The shadow of Ousmane Sembène is never far from Kollo Sanou's Tasuma, which deals with an elderly man's attempts to get the military pension to which he is entitled by virtue of his long service in the French military. Where Sembène's Camp de Thiaroye examined a bloody event at the end of the Second World War, the culmination of a series of protests by West African veterans of that conflict, Sanou opts, however, for a contemporary setting, and the gentler style of a village comedy.

Despite the pastoral background (and the fact that much of the film's funding comes from France) Sanou is unequivocal about the injustices suffered by his protagonist, Sogo (Mamadou Zerbo), and many of his fellow-soldiers - who've not only been denied their pensions but have suffered the ignominy of being paid far less than their French counterparts for equal service. Whereas the theme may relate to that of Camp de Thiaroye, the plot hews closer to that of Sembène's much earlier Mandabi, chronicling the bureaucratic absurdities of the quest to be paid a pension, with one office after another turning the old soldier away. There's an echo of Sembène, too, in the role of women in the film: they protest when Sogo finds himself cornered by the lack of action on his pension and his own desire to improve life in his village (he's a relative progressive, staunchly opposed to forced marriage, for instance).

The near-constant echoes of Sembène's films have the unfortunate consequence, however, of reminding the viewer that Sanou is a far less assured filmmaker. Where Sembène poses open-ended questions, Sanou simply seems unable to resolve his plotting, and introduces contradictions particularly with the treatment of the Arab trader who has a major role in the action. At times, the film portrays him in a positive light but at other moments he's seen to be unsympathetic, with no great logic to the changes; the film gives no particularly convincing motivation, for example, for the trader's ultimate act of generosity (in some ways, Sogo and his friends are as cavalier with the rules as the French authorities who are the source of so much ire, and the trader pays the price on this occasion). Less excusable than such narrative infelicities - which some might view as evidence of a grounding in the tangential style of oral narrative - are often awkward framings, and what seems to be careless camerawork, in which characters are sliced down the middle or cut off halfway up their faces when they lean forward, unusual in a film from a country with a history of producing strong visual storytellers.

Fame and Fortune (It's All Relative)

I was surprised to see my site stats go through the roof today, and when I looked into it I discovered that my university's web-newspaper had published a piece on me; I did the interview a year ago when I won a little blogging prize and it only appeared today, unbeknowst to me.

Now I feel like a bad blogger who needs to (a) get working on recent entries and (b) make good on my 2008 resolution to expand beyond the movie diary format (while preserving that as the core). I think that will be more likely to spark a dialogue in response to posts, which is the really fun part of the blogging game.

I really enjoy the websites of bloggers like girish, the siren and cinebeats - quite different from one another, and thankfully not always in perfect step with my own tastes - who prompt vigorous debate, and who are great about responding to and nourishing that debate. Those are, of course, just three examples among many, but all three have a great sense of community that I think is very valuable - and worth emulating.

Bride and Prejudice

2004, UK/US, directed by Gurinder Chadha

Gurinder Chadha's Bride and Prejudice is ultimately a rather unfortunate dilution of the Bollywood style, designed to appeal to the multiplex audience. The idea of using the template of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice isn't a bad one - after all, Amy Heckerling's 1995 film Clueless made good use of Austen's Emma in a California high school setting - but the film sticks too closely to the original blueprint and has to cram far too much incident into its running time. The final 20 minutes are particularly compressed as a consequence, but earlier scenes also seem to run disjointedly together (at the more standard Bollywood running time, this probably wouldn't be an issue...).

Things begin brightly enough, with an Indian family in a social whirl, trying to marry off four daughters, and the initial musical segments are lush and often amusing. The opening promise isn't sustained for long, though: the songs quickly become insipid, and are few and far between by the second half of the film, as if a producer somewhere simply ordered them to be snipped. It's also hard to become too involved in such a terribly upwardly-mobile world, which seems to take wealth - even great wealth - entirely for granted, while it's impossible to take the characters' protests about the failure to discover the "real India" too seriously when the film itself whips up such a fairytale version of the country for our consumption - failing, in the process, to understand much of the point of Austen's novel, which made a virtue of its setting among the landed classes.

Call of the Wild

2007, US, directed by Ron Lamothe

Ron Lamothe's documentary traces the path followed by Christopher McCandless, the young man who died in the Alaskan wilderness after a peripatetic journey across America in 1990-1992. McCandless became the subject of Jon Krakauer's book Into the Wild (filmed by Sean Penn in 2007), but this is a much more personal version of the story. Lamothe follows essentially the same route that McCandless took, in summer 2006, only Lamothe has a video camera in hand for his journey. He occasionally links up with friends for part of the route before he plunges completely into McCandless's world and resolves to hitch his way across a large section of the US.

Lamothe's film aims to illuminate McCandless's specific journey but also the ideas that inspired him and other members of what Lamothe views as the restless Generation X (Lamothe, a contemporary of McCandless's, sees his own itchy feet against this background, and his film interweaves his own experiences - travelling across Africa as a 22-year-old, or his home life in Massachusetts - with those of his subject).

Lamothe's a trained historian, and to his credit he doesn't simply take his thesis and run with it: he gives time to those with contrary views, including a college friend who thinks the whole "Generation X" designation is bunk, before arriving at his conclusions. He also probes the details of the McCandless story to form a more nuanced picture of the end of McCandless's life, one that contradicts the conclusions of the Krakauer book (and Penn film), while he exposes an extraordinary gap in the original investigation (by both police and journalists) that casts McCandless in a subtly different light, whether you view him as a fool or a romantic hero (the Alaskans interviewed seem to uniformly take the former view, often expressed in pugnacious terms).

Lamothe runs into some of the same people McCandless encountered, but also forms brief on-the-road friendships of his own (he has a knack for hitching rides from some extraordinary characters). This blend of McCandless's tale with that of the teller is generally very effective: it draws the viewer right into the story, giving a vivid sense of the charms of life on the road, and the exceptional diversity of the American population's preoccupations. The film doesn't quite master the arguments about Generation X - Lamothe perhaps isn't quite sure what they are, beyond having a sense that something was different - but his film is an important counterpoint to the more mainstream telling of the McCandless tale, which was overdue for a corrective.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

2007, UK/USA, directed by David Yates

While J.K. Rowling's source novels have gotten significantly longer as the series progresses, overflowing with plot, the fifth of the Harry Potter films is twenty minutes shorter than its predecessor. It's a welcome development: as the filmmakers become more comfortable with the material, they seem less beholden to Rowling's work, and more concerned to craft a version of the books that works onscreen.

Inevitably, this means that large swathes of incident from the book are abandoned - Harry's romance is relegated to a footnote - and many smaller set-pieces are entirely omitted. The film feels much more coherent as a consequence, even if it loses perhaps some of the observational character that director Mike Newell brought to the fourth installment. Near the end, the events do seem a little overly compressed - it's hard to understand how the young wizards break in to an apparently well-guarded place so easily, for instance - but for the most part the action moves on coherently.

The key new face this time around is Imelda Staunton, as a new teacher and Ministry of Magic plant; she does a remarkable job of straddling a fine line between menace and high-pitched ridicule, taking what seems like an entirely light-hearted assignment and giving it considerable depth. As the oddball Luna Lovegood, the Irish newcomer Evanna Lynch is excellent, while Helena Bonham-Carter energetically channels the work of her offscreen partner Tim Burton as the blood-curdling Bellatrix Lestrange.

Director David Yates does a particularly good job of marrying the effects work to the live action: while that's presumably also a testament to advances in film technology since the first film, he uses effects in a way that enhances the action rather than distracting from it, and for the most part the effects work seems to belong to the same plane as the real actors, making it that much more convincing.

Serenity

2005, US, directed by Joss Whedon

There can't be too many other films in the same category as Serenity, that is, the subset of movies based on TV shows that were cancelled after less than a dozen episodes were screened. If the special features on the DVD are to be believed, the existence of Serenity is testament, among other things, to the development of an extremely passionate online fanbase after Firefly, the original TV show, was released on DVD (complete with the episodes that were completed but never broadcast) - too late for the show, but evidence of enough interest to justify greenlighting a motion picture.

Like most of Joss Whedon's projects, Serenity is a genre-blend, mixing the spaceship drama with the further fringes of the wild West, although the western themes are more obvious in the TV series (signalled both by the choice of episode plots and the opening song, which isn't used in the film). The film simply picks up from the end of the final episode of the show, which means it has to do some nifty plot contortions at times, but has the nice advantage of treating its audience like informed consumers (first-timers may be confused by some of the jokes, and perhaps some of the back-story, which is inevitably given more depth on the small screen).

Whedon steers towards the darker edges of the TV plotlines, eliding some of the week-to-week character humour in favour of a confrontation with some of his bigger themes - the central discovery of the film's plot is grim indeed - but he's careful to ensure that each of his main characters (there are nine in all) has at least a scene or two to shine. Given the restrictions imposed by his own decision not to re-tread the TV series' plot in condensed form, he does a fine job of creating a narrative line, tying up loose ends in generally satisfying fashion, and ensuring that the characters remain true to themselves (one advantage, perhaps, of an early TV death). The fine TV cast all return for the film, and their chemistry together is tremendous: despite the characters' frequent differences of opinion, there's a strong sense of a shared bond, while the spaceship itself becomes an important inanimate cast member, a surprisingly cosy refuge from a universe that's often brutal.

White Lightning

1973, US, directed by Joseph Sargent

In my local movie theatre, the eye-catching original poster for White Lightning hangs in a glass case, mostly surrounded by theatre memorabilia; I've no idea why that particular poster has survived, since there are no others of similar vintage. I've often thought that I should check out the original film, without ever following through, but Larry Aydlette's mammoth and hugely entertaining February 2008 Burt-a-Thon finally prodded me into action.

The White Lightning poster promises plenty of action: cars, guns, and wild women. It's unexpected, then, when the film opens on a somber note on an Arkansas lake, the tone far more Deliverance than Smokey and the Bandit, in terms of Burt Reynolds's other movies. Out on that lake, a dreadful crime sets the plot in motion. The crime carries an echo of the violence explored, however contentiously, in Mississippi Burning: while there's not an explicit racial element at work in these atmospheric early scenes, we subsequently learn that the local sheriff, who rules the county as his fiefdom, isn't too impressed by college kids (variously dismissed as "protestors" and "hippies") coming into town to "give our coloreds" the vote. Though the civil rights backdrop is explicitly evoked in such references, black characters are rarely present onscreen; there's only one meaningful exchange with a black character, though it does serve to underline the fact that Gator McKlusky (Burt Reynolds), hasn't been soured by the prejudices of those around him.

In that, Gator seems to have inherited the tolerance of his father, who is pre-occupied not with issues of race but those of class, beset as he is with the crushing weight of work on his small farm. The scenes where Gator returns home are among the strongest in the film, his elderly parents fanning themselves in the punishing Arkansas summer as they try to pick up the pieces of their lives in the aftermath of their younger son, Donnie. These characters - like many of the down-at-heel moonshiners we subsequently encounter - are all subject to the whim of someone like the sheriff, in cahoots with the worst of the local criminal fraternity, and determined to preserve the status quo.

As the film unspools, this vein of social commentary isn't always sustained, given the need to provide the kind of thrills and spills promised by that poster, with the tone occasionally wobbling between sober drama and good-old-boy backroad tyre-squealing spectacle. To its credit, though, when dealing with Sheriff J.C. Connors (superbly played by Ned Beatty), director Joseph Sargent never yields to the temptation to caricature a man who behaves as though he himself is subject to no law, and the film is blunt about the tactics Connors either employs or condones.

Sargent is exceptionally good at capturing the details of the film's broiling environment, before the ubiquity of air conditioning; clothes are stained, brows are sweat-beaded, and there's a glaze of heat exhaustion on many of the characters. It's no wonder such films were so successful with Southern drive-in audiences in particular, since they actually provide an exerience with which the audience can directly identify, unlike the often sanitized spectacle of backlot Hollywood movie-making. As Gator McKlusky - my favourite character name from his car crash years - Reynolds delivers an excellent performance, credible both behind the wheel or throwing a punch, but also in conveying the complex motivations of a man whose options have been restricted by poverty and powerlessness. There's a poignant scene where Gator makes smalltalk with a group of college kids - from the same school as his dead brother - that feels like a man yearning for a different outcome for his own life, and that perfectly underlines the surprising depth of the film.