Well I let down this site again last year but I plan to keep up with things in 2012 once I’ve tidied up a bit, but that won’t stop me having fun with the awards shows as usual (I’ll make sure I get my usual Oscar predictions page up and running for next year in good time this year, too – promise).

Best Motion Picture – Drama – Moneyball – anything but Snore Horse will do me here, though I’ve seen nothing but that. I just have a gut feeling they’ll go with Moneyball here.

Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama – Tilda Swinton – We Need To Talk About Kevin – I don’t like the obvious so no Meryl Streep for me. I like seeing Tilda Swinton winning anything.

Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture – Drama – Brad Pitt – Moneyball – Again, just a feeling I have about the Globes and Brad Pitt here.

Best Motion Picture – Comedy Or Musical – Midnight In Paris – The only one I’ve seen. I know, The Artist, The Artist – but I freakin’ loved this movie and have a feeling it has an attitude to nostalgia that, even once I’ve seen The Artist, I’ll favour.

Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture – Comedy Or Musical – Charlize Theron – Young Adult – Seen none of these, I love Jodie Foster, but Young Adult looks fantastic.

Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture – Comedy Or Musical – Owen Wilson – Midnight In Paris – Again, I just loved this movie, and Owen Wilson was particularly impressive.

Best Animated Feature Film – Rango – Just caught this the other day and loved it. Stunning animation and genuinely moving in places.

Best Foreign Language Film – The Skin I Live In – Oh, I was gonna go with the Angelina Jolie one for the same reasons as my Moneyball ones above, but I just saw this one this week, too, and, OMG… hope this one wins, the Oscar too (though it’ll probably somehow not even be on the shortlist there or something).

Best Performance by an Actress In A Supporting Role in a Motion Picture – Janet McTeer – Albert Nobbs – I have absolutely no clue here… but I’ve liked Janet McTeer in other things…

Best Performance by an Actor In A Supporting Role in a Motion Picture – Albert Brooks – Drive – hmm, torn between him and Plummer, but this is the only one I’ve seen and he was one of the best things in it.

Best Director – Motion Picture – Woody Allen – Midnight In Paris – I may as well stick with Midnight as my one to root for. It really is his best in years (though I haven’t seen a bunch of ‘em lol). As I think I usually say at the Globes (I hope I’ll be more up to speed, as I said, this time next year, though) – I know I’ll be wrong.

Best Screenplay – Motion Picture – Woody Allen – Midnight In Paris – Well, I hope he wins one or the other, directing/writing, hehe…

Best Original Score – Motion Picture – Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross – The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo – Again anything but Snore Horse here for me… haven’t seen any except that. Loved the Reznor/Ross Social Network music tho.

Best Original Song – Motion Picture – “Masterpiece” – W.E. – Hmm, sad there’s no Rango here… but I’ll go with Madonna for the same reason stated above for Brangelina. It’s the HFPA.

And now the interesting stuff I don’t normally do! TV! lol… genuinely, more excited about this portion than the cinema side this year.

Best Television Series – Drama – Game Of Thrones – I don’t know if Boardwalk is up for season 1 or 2? I preferred season 1, anyway. In any case, Game of Thrones held my interest more consistently.

Best Performance by an Actress In A Television Series – Drama – Claire Danes – Homeland – yikes, haven’t seen any of these… but I love Claire Danes.

Best Performance by an Actor In A Television Series – Drama – Steve Buscemi – Boardwalk Empire – duh of the night?

Best Television Series – Comedy Or Musical – Enlightened – haven’t started watching this yet but I believe this is what I would pick if I had.

Best Performance by an Actress In A Television Series – Comedy Or Musical – Laura Dern – Enlightened – ditto.

Best Performance by an Actor In A Television Series – Comedy Or Musical – Matt LeBlanc – Episodes – something tells me “they” won’t be able to resist this, as explained for other things above… plus it’s the only one I’ve seen. And I liked.

Best Mini-Series Or Motion Picture Made for Television – Mildred Pierce – Just please not f-ing Downton… but I absolutely LOVED this series, this is my favourite thing up for anything tonight.

Best Performance by an Actress In A Mini-series or Motion Picture Made for Television – Kate Winslet – Mildred Pierce

Best Performance by an Actor in a Mini-Series or Motion Picture Made for Television – William Hurt – Too Big To Fail – oy… no clue in this category lol.

Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in a Series, Mini-Series or Motion Picture Made for Television – Evan Rachel Wood – Mildred Pierce – my MEGA root for the night. Have loved Evan Rachel Wood for years and not only was she brilliant overall in this, she was so brilliant she made me not regret her being swapped in for the equally amazing Morgan Turner who played the young Veda.

Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Series, Mini-Series or Motion Picture Made for Television – Peter Dinklage – Game Of Thrones – tough category but Dinklage was easily the best thing in Game of Thrones next to Maisie Williams

“Simple just shit itself…”

If my reviews are ever helpful to anyone but myself, I can guarantee this won’t be one of them, as it’s one of the kind I pretty much already had written in my head the minute I heard about the film, and it’s only developed as the past year or so has gone onwards. From the spark of “Kevin Smith is gonna do a horror movie” to the whole rush of the SModcast network and his radio station – even a whole podcast series of Q&As about this very film – it’s sort of a miracle that I still came to this movie not really knowing exactly what to expect.

As high as my expectations were, they were matched a massive fear of disappointment, in which case I would have written much here about the fact that after listening to Smith, his family and friends for the last 6 months (I still haven’t missed a single episode of Per Diem or Get Jobs, and I listen to all but a couple of the podcasts as avidly), the movie feels something like a home movie, with Ralph Garman as a mute bad guy, Smith’s wife Jen in a small role, and the likes of Michael Parks, John Goodman, and Kevin Pollak, whose performances Smith has barely been able to contain himself over (they’re the reason behind the recent Academy qualifying theatrical run of the movie in LA).

So the main part of this review is this: I’m overjoyed to say that with my frankly unfair expectations for this project after Cop Out and Zack and Miri failed to turn me on (tho, again, having listened to Smith I understand the part those films played in his grand scheme), it didn’t disappoint me at all. This film isn’t just a gargantuan leap over Smith’s last two films, it’s a complete departure from anything he’s ever done.

I reserve one heart in my rating this first viewing because quite honestly, by the time the credits rolled, I still didn’t know what to think. I sat through the whole of this movie with my mouth slightly agape, simply a slave to the wonderful fact that despite having been exposed to so much talk about it over the past year, I had no f-ing clue where it was headed next. John Goodman and Michael Parks’ performances steal the show completely, it’d be a great film if was just theirs, but Smith handles his action sequences with a confidence I don’t think anybody would’ve seen previously in his abilities as a film maker. The gore is minimal but thrillingly inventive, with even the stuff you may see coming a mile away coming from just enough of another angle to tickle the senses. This is a movie I look forward to seeing again and again, and if Kevin Smith fulfils his promise that his final movie, the 2-part Hit Somebody, will be even better, than I’m honestly frightened about how much that one will blow me away. I’ll be honest, I don’t care how silly it sounds: I feel oddly proud of the dude about this one… he pulled off what he set out to do beyond anyone’s doubts or expectations… that’s literally all there is to say…

I’ve reviewed a bunch of horror documentaries here and though I might just be leaping at the opportunity for a short review (trying to get back into writing more regularly here), this one should really be no exception as it’s among the most notorious. Coincidentally it finally hits blu-ray this Halloween as an extra on a new release of Halloween II; I only just heard about it very recently (despite its seeming notoriety lol) and was surprised I knew nothing about it.

There’s very little of social or historical commentary as you find in other horror docs here – at only 80 minutes with the list of films it shows clips from (let’s just say too many to list here; and just about any horror movie you can name that had been made before the film came out in 1984). What you get is Donald Pleasence and Nancy Allen sitting in a movie theatre talking solemnly about how horror movies (or terror movies, as they’re called here; a great move allowing the inclusion of such nightmarish movies as Marathon Man and Midnight Express) make us feel.

What strikes one most about this one is not just the array of movies included but the slickness of the whole thing. The editing is top notch – cutting together, say, door slams or something, a dozen or more at once from different movies. The whole opening sequence is a relentless montage of “alone in the house” scenes. We see this kind of thing all the time now but it’s strangely impressive to see it in a production so old.

Suddenly, after describing the movie, I realise it doesn’t sound like much, but it’s one of very few of these horror documentaries that I’ll likely watch again and again, just for the sheer assault of content it provides. It’d be something great to have on in the background on a scary movie night, or on an iPod to watch a little of on a long journey, etc when you want that atmospheric je ne sais quoi that all these movies provide but you either haven’t the time for a full movie or can’t decide what movie to watch. If you love horror, chances are you don’t need me to tell you all this; but if you love horror, really, drop everything if you haven’t seen this yet.

I wanna start this review with a sort of morbid thought that occurred to me while watching this movie. Much has been said of the Spielberg influence here: there are elements of films he directed and produced here, and he himself is in the producer’s chair. What this knowledge sort of spoils for me is not knowing how much additional influence Spielberg exercised onset. Super 8 is a movie that has been talked about (at least it seems so) for many years now. The morbid thought that occurred to me is, how much better if this movie – like Stanley Kubrick’s Artificial Intelligence, ultimately made by Spielberg – had languished in development hell that much longer and only been rushed into production in the event of its inspiration’s passing? (hopefully, I stress, many years from now…) There is even a strong underlying message in the movie about letting go of the departed – profoundly if heavy-handedly (but that’s how I like my emotion) illustrated in the very last scene. Anyway, as I said, just a thought that occurred to me.

I never know how vague or full I’m going to be about plot details when I start writing a review so I should warn now, there may be spoilers. I was lucky enough to avoid just about any details about this movie before seeing it and I’m glad I did, so I’d strongly advise not reading any reviews, mine included, until you’ve seen it. If you need a short review: trust me, it’s worth seeing.

At its heart, as already mentioned, this movie exists as a nostalgic trip. As such, its biggest star is arguably its production design, which to my eye seemed flawless, even dizzying in places as I grew up in the time (if not the place) the story takes place. I always used to say when it came to period movies that I preferred the older ones, in particular those of the 1970s, as they always seemed to have a hazy look to them that added to the experience; as time moved on film production techniques got too clean and slick leading to inappropriately clean and slick historical visions. We’re fortunate today to have moved past this hurdle and – as seems to have been done here – digital technology in addition to increased access to reference materials (and, in this case of course, a more recent past) can be used to give the film the appropriate look …to the degree where really only prior knowledge of the actors and the quality of the visual effects give any hint at all that the movie wasn’t made in the late 70s or early 1980s. I spent at least the first half hour just smiling at how much it truly felt like a movie from my childhood that I’d somehow missed – the kids, of whom only Elle Fanning was I sure I’d enjoy watching, are without exception wonderful.

If I recall correctly, one of the massive things related to this movie I successfully avoided prior to seeing it was the train crash scene, most of which I believe was released on the internet a while ago. This might seem like a great triumph of the will for a self-professed movie fan but consider that I still rarely listen to singles, even from my most favourite artists, preferring to wait to hear them in the context of the full album they appear on. I’m strange that way.

Anyway, the train crash is as phenomenal as I’d heard. It’s a long time since an action sequence has made me physically gasp the way this one did.

There was, I won’t deny, a short period somewhere in the middle act where the movie slightly lost my rapt attention – perhaps, now I think about it, when the modern visual effects broke the otherwise authentic feel of the movie (notwithstanding the crash, I guess) – and I feared the movie would struggle to pull me back to the transfixed state it got me in initially. Luckily, the movie has two enormous, connected emotionally punches up its sleeve – one scene featuring Elle Fanning (who, I’ll say again, continues to completely walk all over her older sister making far more interesting choices than any Dakota has made in years) and a revelation about the tension between her father and the father of the young protagonist in front of a super-8 projection of his home movies; and the climax, so beautifully resolving this tension, which is threaded throughout and reflected in the overarching universal plot (“Bad things happen: but you can still live…”), it simply knocked me down emotionally. Truly, that moment – the “letting go” is all I’ll say – is as simple and powerful as anything in Spielberg’s old classics. This movie utterly achieves what it sets out to do, and then some.

Stick around in the end credits for a wonderful treat, by the way; I hope there’s more of that when the movie hits blu-ray.

“I’m sick.”
“Yeh, but the question is: do you wanna get better?”

From Jerry Maguire’s breakdown-turned-success through the double whammy of American Beauty and Fight Club in 1999 – both of which made almost irresistible the notion of self-destruction as a way to truly live – to the wonderful scene in The Hours where Julianne Moore’s character explains away the seemingly inhuman decision to desert her family with the line, “It was death. I chose life,” and the most recent cut-throat, “If you guys were the inventors of Facebook, you would have invented Facebook,” of The Social Network, something of an attitude has been rising in the most daring of 90s/00s Hollywood output which I’ll admit I was quite taken with at first as a young 20-something but am not too stupid to have been slightly wary of for quite a long time.

There’s a clue in the opening titles of The Beaver that hints slightly at where it will ultimately side on the profoundly pertinent ideas it sets out through the course of its overwhelmingly unique story. The letters of the production companies and the title (I don’t think any of the cast or crew’s names are shown in these opening credits) fade in on the screen and then fade out, leaving one or two letters behind that appear in the subsequent title. I mightn’t have noticed and mightn’t even be writing about it here were it not repeated during the end credits where its connection to the overarching message here really leapt at me.

I admit however with great pleasure, midway through The Beaver, I was blissfully unaware of where it was headed; of what, indeed, it was “really” trying to say – because it says everything that it says (and it says a lot) so overpoweringly well. I have heard about this movie it seems for years initially as a screenplay that everyone in Hollywood thought was brilliant but that nobody in Hollywood would ever make. With Jodie Foster’s involvement, my interest was truly hooked, especially with her not only starring but directing. On the strength of Home for the Holidays alone she became one of my favourite film makers and I’ve been desperate for her to return behind the camera ever since. I saw one of the more “serious” clips from the movie recently when Foster was on a chat show, and that was when I realised I didn’t just want to see this movie, I had to. Let me just say, I still didn’t know how badly I needed it.

You’ll know the story from the trailer – Mel Gibson plays (brilliantly) Walter, a man at the end of his rope (“His depression is an ink that stains all who touch him. A black hole that swallows all who get near,”) who is “rescued” by a personality he creates in the form of a beaver hand puppet (“You want things to change – really change… forget about home improvement… you have to blow up the whole goddamned building.”).

Even if you sense the darkness inherent in this set-up, I suspect nothing will prepare you for just how seriously screenwriter Kyle Killen and director Foster take this story. There are a few laughs along the way, but they’re either the plain uncomfortable kind or just fleetingly inevitable touches. No farting aunt Gladys here (see Home for the Holidays). Actually, Killen himself puts it best in a sliver of action in an early draft of his screenplay I read before finishing this review, in a late scene as Walter actually fights his own hand:

“If this plays with any humor at the start it very quickly disappears. This isn’t Liar Liar. Walter is truly self destructive and the damage he does is real.”

This could easily apply to the whole tone of the movie, which Foster (I might say this more than once) handles impeccably.

The Beaver himself (called, simply, The Beaver) is the most difficult character here. He is ultimately that perfect villain to me. I like to talk about two particular villains of the past 10 years when I encounter characters as unsettling as this – Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader in Revenge of the Sith and Agent Smith in The Matrix Revolutions. Both these movies left me with a very strange feeling – that these manifestations of evil kinda made too good of a point. You’ll either know what I mean or not there (I might explain it better in those reviews so click on through and come back, I’ll be waiting). The Beaver is such a character. “Eventually, what seemed strange becomes common. What seemed impossible becomes real,” he explains in voiceover at one stage, as, against all odds, for a short time at least, people really kind of accept The Beaver. He’s very persuasive. But he goes too far.

(Yes, I am talking about a hand puppet who you can clearly see Gibson providing the voice for as if he’s a separate entity – believe me, if this movie touches you like it did me… it’s really hard not to…)

I read an interview with Jodie Foster recently in Total Film which, again, should maybe have tipped me off about just how off the wall this movie was gonna be. In one answer, she talked about the “revolution” that’s going on in cinema with digital distribution in such a way that frankly reminded me of Kevin Smith‘s recent bridge-burning attitude with Red State, “Indie Film 2.0” as he calls it. There’s a sequence here where The Beaver takes over Walter’s toy company and leads it seemingly to massive success by risking everything on a single new product. In a voiceover, he makes the kind of point many such as Smith have been making recently:

“Do we want to continue [doing whatever it takes to survive], or do we break with the past and embrace something new, something different, something better?”

It was at this stage when I realised I truly had no idea where the movie was headed. It’s followed by a heartbreakingly complex scene in which the newly successful Walter is interviewed on The Today Show and delivers a monologue with all his family watching. This single scene simultaneously makes the notion that Walter embraces – that notion of those other movies I mentioned at the beginning here… to dump your baggage if it’s what it takes to survive and pursue that higher dream – seem like a perfectly admirable goal (“We start to see who we are as a box that we’re trapped inside, and however we try to escape; resolutions, therapy, drugs, classes, it simply reels us back in. And I believe the only way to truly break out is to get rid of that box all together.”); yet also asks the question this movie really wants to ask… how does this approach to life affect our humanity? How can we abandon those who we’ve invested so much love, time, energy in… our family, our friends… no matter what they’ve done? It’s this, I think, that makes The Beaver so arrestingly timely, in such a hollow, emotionless age as this, despite its interminable development time. It’s what the style of those credits is saying: we are all connected to someone, perhaps more than one someone, somehow; whether we like it or not.

The screenplay is every bit as flawless as its reputation – as I said I’ve read an early draft before polishing this review just to remember some lines (so, incidentally, some of them might be slightly off the way the ended up on screen) and it really is just astonishingly tight – there’s a whole subplot involving Walter’s son that reflects and enforces the main story with its ideas of identity (Walter’s son fears he’s becoming like his father – he makes lists of the similarities – his only skill in life seems to be pretending to be other people, a skill he harnesses at school charging fellow students to write their papers for them), chasing a self-annihilating dream (he gets to know a school cheerleader in order to write her graduation speech for her – only to find the “real her” that she’s buried under the veneer of academic popularity and success), and the ultimate need to put a stop to the bullshit (in an even further level of connection: the way in which his son intends to shake the similarities? Visiting the places where “things really changed” – the assassination spot of Martin Luther King, eg… I damn near lost it when he explained this, so closely does it echo recent thoughts I’ve had of such instances of, as I call it, “Futricide”). It ties together so beautifully I can’t wait to see how well this movie stands up to multiple repeat viewings.

I’ve talked about Jodie Foster’s film making skill but not her acting yet. Do I even need to say how great she is? I think I do. I’m a huge Jodie Foster fan, and I truly thought I’d seen the best of her by now. But I can think of just one moment here where she killed me all over again, in the kitchen when she and Walter’s eldest son comes home and sees The Beaver for the first time. “Have you completely lost your mind? …It takes you years to finally get rid of him and you let him come back the next night with a talking puppet?” he yells at her. Her face is a work of art in response, the depth so indescribable. That’s just one moment of a performance that is as consistently gripping as the whole movie. Jennifer Lawrence and the rest of the cast are just as worthy of praise. (If you haven’t noticed yet… god, did I love this movie…)

I agree for the most part with those whose only criticism of the movie is its disjointedness, or at least see where they’re coming from – in that subplot, sure, if you don’t immediately recognise the connections, but most jarringly perhaps with Walter’s final solution to his problem. But I’d argue I guess that the flaws (if they’re flaws) only serve to make the whole thing even more human. I can honestly say that no other movie this year (nor indeed, in a long time) has made me feel so emotionally alive as The Beaver did for every single one of its admirably short 90 minutes, and that’s why I love movies in the first place.

On a side note I’d like to add a somewhat random note on another way I connected to this movie. I’ve had a Second Life avatar for 5 years, and though it’s hard to explain in brief, I recognised a lot here as pertains to creating a kind of alter-ego that is in some ways the best of oneself but kind of takes on a life of its own… mostly for the better but I’ll admit, even in my case, I’ve had my share of the worst – and I’ve even had to come to that dilemma of coming 100% clean or “blowing up the goddamned building”. As I explained above, this movie goes to a dark place in the end, but I think it’s interesting that anybody watching it will find a different place at which they feel Walter’s self-therapy goes “too far” and I won’t say where that is for me (hopefully you can make a good guess) but I will say it’s something we should all think about. There is a good to Walter’s madness and The Beaver’s idea here… it’s just a question of how far they lose themselves in it. Or, to go back to the movie that inspired the name of this site, and yet another that came to mind while watching this one, as is said in Girl, Interrupted and echoes the quote I opened with:

“Quis hic locus?, quae regio?, quae mundi plaga? What world is this?… What kingdom?… What shores of what world? It’s a very big question you’re faced with, Susanna. The choice of your life. How much will you indulge in your flaws? What are your flaws? Are they flaws?… If you embrace them, will you commit yourself to hospital?… for life?”

“We have to have pieces of paper and computers so we don’t have to ask anybody’s name or look each other in the face…”

I first heard about this very shortly after I first saw the infamous redband trailer for Kick-Ass featuring Hit Girl’s most notorious line. I was already excited about the prospect of this tiny terror upsetting the morally self-righteous and couldn’t believe when I read some small snippet of text about Saoirse Ronan also working on a movie which at the time was titled “Hanna the Hitgirl”.

The important thing to note about Hanna is… the movies people are still mentioning as it being similar to – mostly the aforementioned Kick-Ass and Leon: The Professional (that one actually in one of the TV spots – Hanna described as a “modern” take on Luc Besson’s movie… way to make me feel old!) – are really false comparison points, as she’s neither a hit girl nor is this a love story or comic book. Even within Luc Besson’s filmography, actually the movie Hanna most resembles of his (and I didn’t make this connection till it was mentioned on the Slashfilm podcast) is The Fifth Element.

I don’t like the way the word “fairytale” has been thrown around to describe this movie either. It turns out it was director Joe Wright who started it, so who am I to argue I guess… but really aside from the “girl in the woods” opening and the set design of the finale all other comparisons (Cate Blanchett as a “wicked stepmother”, eg) seem really shoehorned in by the beholders who insist on “fairytale” as some kind of key to what the movie’s “about”.

The way I saw this story in the end is as a Frankenstein story. Hanna, it transpires, is essentially an engineered human being who deeply resents her inability to connect to the real world once she’s let loose upon it… and she ends up destroying her creators. On the way, she meets a travelling family which has been talked about a lot in other reviews. Mark Millar, creator of Kick-Ass, seems to have mistaken this family as the real heart of the movie as he tweeted it seemed to have been written by Guardian readers – but what they offer is a view of what Hanna will never really have even after the credits roll. It’s scattered through the script in (occasionally forced) exposition… she’s essentially afflicted with a kind of autism that “aids” her supersoldier body, she’s virtually incapable of the fundamental flaws that make the rest of us human. There’s a hollow sadness to this realisation that was only amplified for me by the fairly empty ending Wright gives us. (incidentally, isn’t it curious that this movie questions the morality of this engineered being’s upbringing more than those other two movies? I just stick that massive thought here ‘cos I couldn’t fit it anywhere else…)

Of Joe Wright’s previous work I’ve only seen the other that featured Saoirse Ronan, Atonement, which I hated on first seeing it but has grown on me to the point where, put simply, it blew me away when I saw it again I think some time last year. I imagine Hanna may grow on me in the same way, so considering how much I got out of it on this first viewing, I can’t wait to see how it reveals itself as time goes on. It’s so different from what I’d been led to expect that I wasn’t sure I’d post this review so soon – and even having written this much, I feel compelled to say it’s just the tip of the iceberg of the interpretations I’ll have of it in years to come. “Frankenstein with a Moroccan travelogue in the middle,” is just the closest I can come for now (I won’t even say “Girl Frankenstein”, by the way, because I really don’t think Hanna’s sex or gender is significant here due to her nature…). I haven’t even touched on the superb action set-pieces – the long-take subway fight and chase amidst the freight cars stand out – and the perfect Chemical Brothers score, slicker even than Daft Punk’s TRON score last year. I hope to see this again before the year is out, because it’s sure to deserve high ranking among this year’s movies once the dust has settled and I’ve made up my mind about it more.

(aka, it seems, many other things lol…)

As I unfairly stated to Sarah just before putting this on, “It’s an evil child movie, looks rubbish, but I have to see every evil child movie…” I forget exactly how this originally drifted into my field of view, perhaps an Amazon or IMDb recommendation when looking up other films in that subgenre, but I don’t think you can deny that this is how it’s being sold. Its Irish setting led me to expect perhaps something between The Daisy Chain and Orphan …this is all just to explain how I came to this movie… it might be a little unfair but I don’t think I can be blamed…

All I can really say of this movie is that it’s unfortunate how convoluted the film makers felt it necessary to make the story. Anyone coming to this expecting anything like the movies it seems to be inspired by will spend at least the first half hour and possibly longer wondering if they got the right movie. Midway the girl starts flailing around on a bed and cursing in another voice and you think, “OK, here we go,” but moments later the movie seems to turn into Sybil, with this voice and several others turning out to be other personalities. The strange island community has a definite Wicker Man vibe to it… the list of classics it seems to aspire to is endless…

In the end, Dorothy turns out to be none of them. The concept underneath this storytelling disaster is actually fairly interesting – spirits of the dead possessing a girl to expose the truth about their deaths (honestly, not a spoiler – it might actually help you enjoy the movie, and I’ve still hidden the real twist…) – but the film makers choose to treat the whole damn thing as a twist. They basically have so little faith in the originality of their story that they’ve dolled it up as all these other things – and the marketing department has followed, dressing it up as a contemporary Exorcist (I’ve even seen it titled “The Exorcism of Dorothy Mills” in some places…) – and it’s a real shame. I’d go so far as to say that the movie cries out to be remade… the concept, now I’ve got it, will haunt me… but I can’t say it enough, there’s a total lack of clarity in the storytelling…

Anyway, it gets points for interestingness, and the performances are pretty interesting too (though, great as Jenn Murray is, I’d suggest casting someone far younger would improve the whole thing; slight lookalike Evanna Lynch might’ve been good…). As a fan of the “evil child” subgenre, I don’t regret watching it… though it really doesn’t belong in there at all…

“Don’t be offended but you look like a bit of a…”
“…Dickhead.”
“…Exactly.”
“…I feel good with you too…”

I feel a little guilty for not watching this sooner… if you know me at all you should know by now I’m a devout Vanessa Paradis fan and will always watch anything she’s in eventually, but the marketing for this that I saw didn’t really make out her role to be much at all; made the movie out to be a romantic comedy of the likes that I frankly feared could even turn me off her; and the Facebook page was the worst offender, reaching out to Vanessa Paradis fans (who hadn’t yet “liked” the film’s page) with competitions aimed directly at (I can’t think of a better way of saying this; either you know me and it won’t matter or you don’t, in which case, trust me, I mean well) tragically girly girls… y’know, the kind that think no men are capable of liking a movie like this so don’t even give them a chance? (I point to one of the more recent posts on that page: “This movie comes out on DVD in the US, on my birthday!!! I have already alerted my husband…”) (ugh… and since I first drafted this review months ago, the wall is now full of promo for the William and Kate movie… who the f**k is running that sh*t?)

Then there was Mark Kermode’s review… he somehow between watching the movie and talking about it managed to turn it in his memory into a typically xenophobic “French man: romantic; Englishman: evil” tale which it simply isn’t. Andrew Lincoln is in no way made out here to be a bad guy… an infuriatingly good guy, sure, and simply not the right guy in the end. He plays Vanessa Paradis’ fiancé. Romain Duris plays a guy who splits couples up for a living. Don’t let that concept put you off though – like Léon in The Professional, this guy has rules. He only goes to work if the woman is truly unhappy. We can tell when we meet Paradis and Lincoln that she’s not necessarily unhappy, and he’s certainly not the monster we’ve seen Duris work on in the prologue (looking for cracks, at one point Duris is disguised as a homeless man, staking out the couple at a restaurant – Lincoln gets a doggie bag to take his food home in – “Aha! a Cheapskate!” Duris happily proclaims, before Lincoln brings the doggie bag out to give the homeless people…). He usually wouldn’t take this job. But it turns out he likes the girl and he needs the money.

This movie made me laugh tons more than I expected, in fact I feel pretty safe saying it’s the most unashamedly enjoyable movie of 2010. With the Vanessa and the story and the comedy, this movie was already good enough even before the Dirty Dancing stuff came in. At first it’s little nods (Vanessa’s character is a big fan of the movie, Duris tries to acquaint himself with it to win her over)… but it builds to a sequence where they really do the full “I’ve Had the Time of My Life” dance. This would’ve thrilled me any time, but I’ve been really quite particularly into that movie lately and I’m not ashamed to say that this moment I damn near wet my pants with glee. Of course, not everyone will have this response to the movie… but sometimes a movie just comes along where that kind of thing just doesn’t matter, and for me this was that movie.