I guess a minor apology might be in order here, ‘cos I think I may have kinda sniggered at the “For Your Consideration” posters that came out for this movie, asking consideration not just in categories such as visual effects and such but right up to Best Picture. Now I’ve seen it, not only can’t I understand its exclusion from a bunch of categories (most particularly yet another great song – this one by Kate Bush, can’t believe I hadn’t heard about it – bashed out by the triple nod to “Enchanted”), but also the ridiculously whiny critical response from pros and ams alike. This movie is beautiful!

Yes – if you haven’t read the books and manage to miss the first few minutes of it (in which case, serves you right – learn to watch movies from start to finish and come back, mmkay?), you might have problems figuring out the minutia of the the plot. Myself, I’ve not yet read the books, though I’ll be plowing through them in the coming months, that’s for sure – weird thing is, it occurred to me as the story unfolded that one reason I wasn’t too keen on the books (in addition to the slightly shameful, “ugh, they just copied Harry Potter” knee-jerk reaction) was that, kind of like with the Lemony Snicket books, it just seemed so familiar to me already … like, everyone else seemed to be wowed by this set-up, for example with the daemons, while my response was like, “okay got it,” lol. I love that the explanation of things like this don’t bog down the entire movie as some people seem to have required. It reminded me of the subtlety of exposition in The Last Mimzy. I can’t express how much I envy kids last year, seeing all the great movies including this one; they’ll have learned more in around 10 hours than they’ll learn all year in the classroom. People didn’t think the movie conveyed the depth of the books enough? How deeper do you want in a kids’ movie than a child’s soul being ripped from their body? As I said to someone straight after the end credits rolled – compare it to the first two Harry Potter movies? And just wow.

Two paragraphs and I haven’t even mentioned Dakota Blue Richards. Again, a minor apology … stupid knee-jerk reaction to her casting was something along the lines of, “how dare she steal Dakota’s name and be blonde!?!?” lol. Well, because she’s wonderful, that’s why. She has to do more in terms of physical, emotional, interacting with visual effects, than I think it’s safe to say any young actress has had to deal with in their first role (and not just first big screen role, it’s her first role ever) and she pulls it all off practically flawlessly. When she spits on the army and says, “Go on, then. Go on …” ... God, goosebumps city. If you read my reviews you might’ve noticed I have a thing for young, precocious and forward heroines, and they really don’t come much more forceful than Lyra, and Richards is Lyra. There’s a moment where she rides the polar bear, and I mentioned a few times before here how I love “girl and horse” movies, and that moment is like a “girl riding horse” moment except the horse is a polar bear, lol. I just realised how dumb that sounds now I’ve said it, but that moment gave me such a rush, I wish the shot were longer.

The visual effects certainly give Transformers a run for their money (ha, which probably means Pirates will win :() ... one drawback being that though the effects, the animals etc are fantastic – particularly the polar bears and as already mentioned, thanks to the jawdroppingly convincing way Richards “interacts” with them – I could really feel a change in the fluidity of the camerawork when the effects came on strong. It kind of revolves around the set-pieces in a dreary mechanical way that I found distancing.

Anyway, long story short, I pretty much adored it. Going by the vast majority’s response, it seems to me the movie is a lot like the compass itself. I was just talking earlier tonight to someone about how beautiful the thing is in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix about them not being able to see the Thestrals unless you’ve known death. Maybe it’s something like that going on here. Anyway, I certainly saw everything here. This movie tells the truth – if only you know how to read it. And I certainly can’t wait to read the books if there’s even more of the same in them.

It’s of course even harder to write a level-headed review of this movie following Heath Ledger’s death than it was in the fog of Oscar buzz on its original release, and these are the only two ways I’ve yet seen it, so time will still tell as to whether it’s as good as I’ve found it both times around. Sky Movies had it scheduled to screen the night following Heath’s death, I think purely out of coincidence – they did a triple bill of his movies on Saturday in a specific tribute – and I kinda felt like I wanted to do something, like anything, as the news just hit me in a way I’d never have expected and it seems it hit a lot of people the same way too.

The first time I saw the movie, I kind of missed the 1963 date at the start and it took me until the late 70s/early 80s styles came in to actual realise exactly when it was all set, and it seems to me this kind of highlights why it’s so much better than the surface story would suggest. So many movies do the whole society against the minority thing, and this could’ve easily gone exactly the same way. What makes this one special is the deep-seated conflict at the very heart of the relationship – Ennis’ absolute conviction that what they’re doing is just abhorrent, and where that notion comes from. This story could happen right now – though society has just about changed for the better when it comes to accepting sexuality, it doesn’t make it any easier for those with a certain upbringing to accept who they are let alone act on it. The sixties setting here really only heightens an already tough piece of drama.

I was upset at the time when Ledger didn’t get the Oscar – though I was glad to see checking the IMDb while watching that he was nominated … I’d forgotten if it was he or Jake Gyllenhaal who got recognised (they both did – Gyllenhaal in the supporting category) – of course, I’m even more upset now. It’s probably been said all over the place especially in the past week, I’ve read it myself a dozen times, but it’s one of those things that deserves to be said so often – it’s an amazing performance. The key scene in the tent, from his half-pushing Gyllenhaal away, half-pulling him back; his long-coming emotional outburst after Gyllenhaal’s “I wish I knew how to quit you!” line; to that last line, “Jack I swear”; the one word that comes to mind about every second of this character is “beauty”. And it’s a beautiful film he lives in.

24th January, 2006:

I was one of the first people to snigger at the gay cowboy thing, I confess … I’m a South Park fan, I watch Letterman, what can I say? Add to that, I really didn’t like the hype that this movie was getting. Much as I respect Ang Lee as a film maker – even in the recent shadow of Hulk, The Ice Storm at least was a masterpiece – and good as the movie looked, it still felt a little to me like all the last remaining homophobes on the planet were finally coming out to beg redemption by praising it. I mean, didn’t Far From Heaven kinda tread this territory before without such a hue and cry?

So I began the movie looking for reasons to hate it – it’s a little obvious here, a little clichéd there, etc, etc. But, I’m glad (relieved?) to report, my prejudices are not set in stone. This movie is even more beautiful and deep than I’d been led to expect. And when I say deep, I mean I’m seriously, as Cartman would say :p The photography is gorgeous, the pacing precise and never dull, the performances, eek, I’m gonna say it, braver than anything in recent memory. Heath Ledger is going to get the Oscar, I hope Michelle Williams too. As movies go, 2005 just looks better and better the more I see – why couldn’t all these movies be scattered throughout instead of all clumped in the end???

It’s just impossible to describe this movie so I’m not even going to try, except to say that though it took a while to get started, longer to even come close to comprehending (I’m still working on it, as is probably annoyingly evident), there wasn’t a moment where I wasn’t completely absorbed in it.

It might be the “something even better” from 2007 I wondered about in my Oscars post last week. It might just be a load of claptrap – the thought certainly crossed my mind more than once over the 100 minutes. But going by the feeling it left me with … a heady mix of sadness, worthlessness, joy that just felt like a warm blanket when I was 2 or something … this movie goes further out there even than Vanilla Sky yet what it comes down to in the end is so real and right and wholesome … for now I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt. A second viewing is a must … but whatever the case, it’s certainly a mindblowingly original piece, and a far cry from anything I could’ve expected from my occasional dips into writer-director John August’s blogs about it, that’s for sure. It honestly felt almost like a religious experience, and I know how corny that sounds but I just don’t know how else to describe it. A lot more Elle Fanning than expected (well – I didn’t actually know she was in it, lol, so that wasn’t gonna be hard) didn’t hurt either

There isn’t much to add on seeing the Theatrical Cut of this to what I wrote below of the Director’s Cut except that, to my surprise, this (only slightly shorter: about 8 minutes as opposed to 30 I expected below) cut makes what I already found to be a fantastic movie even better. All the daughter stuff is there. I’ve read some comments about pacing being altered here and there but overall I didn’t notice any differences except in the ending, which is just infinitely more satisfying, creepy and thought-provoking. Apparently neither this cut nor even just the alternate ending are available on DVD in the UK which sucks. So it goes without saying, pay the little extra – and another little extra (a whole £1 on PlayUsa) for both cuts – watch the director’s cut as a curiosity, by all means but personally I’ll be coming back to the Theatrical Cut from now on.

10th October, 2007:

Addendum: Just realised, for the record so all the talk about running times etc below makes sense lol, yet again I’ve accidentally managed to see the Director’s Cut first.

Wow I kind of knew that this would be good, as most Stephen King short story adaptations are, as most John Cusack movies are … but I have to say my excitement was dulled a little by what looked like an overlong running time for such a movie, at almost 2 hours rather than the expected 90 minutes.

What I found was that the extra 30 minutes were the most pleasantly surprising, heartbreaking backstory of Cusack’s character that at once makes us plain care a little more about his plight, but at the same time bridges the gap between two halves vastly varied in tone, all the while making the movie infinitely more powerful than it has any real right to be. While the first half of this movie is almost pure comedy, all the jumps and scares done very knowingly with one-line snarky responses from Cusack, who wholeheartedly revels in it, the second half is chill, nightmarish, and quite honestly the scariest thing I’ve seen in quite some time (I’m inclined to say since The Sixth Sense but looking back over old reviews I’m reminded of The Skeleton Key and the original Saw).

1408 is certainly up there with Secret Window, The Green Mile, Misery, if not quite rubbing shoulders with Carrie and The Shining. The visuals are stunning, Gabriel Yared’s score alternates perfectly between Elfman-esque thrill-enhancement and his usual dreamlike emotional stuff. But those aren’t the things that really made the movie for me. I’ve always loved John Cusack … like, really loved, he’s one of the great Js, Johnny, Josh, Jared, Joseph, mm-hm but I digress … but here, I’m not exaggerating when I say it’s by far his greatest performance. In a world post-Johnny being nominated for Jack Sparrow, I swear – okay, I believe – Cusack should get a nomination for this role, it’s just sucks you in to every twitch he makes. That the movie also manages to successfully work its way past a bone fide “Then he woke up and it was all a dream,” scene (incidentally, just about around the 80-90 minute mark where I originally thought the movie should’ve ended), and my stomach only sank for a nano-second before I was sucked into the nightmare again, is pure icing on the cake. Definitely one I’ll watch again and again.

I wasn’t sure this weekend whether to watch this acknowledged silent classic version of the Joan of Arc story or Luc Besson’s lavish 1999 production first. I might’ve better understood what I wrote about the manic style of Milla Jovovich’s performance in The Messenger had I watched them the other way around – she was clearly trying to bring something of Maria Falconetti’s performance here in, in the same way there are some visual references I noticed like the cut between Jeanne’s burning face and the cross in the sky etc – but certainly watching that English language version first helped me understand the odd bits of the French interstitials here that I couldn’t quite translate (the DVD player’s still having problems with subtitles, lol – I was pretty impressed with myself how well I coped though :))

The difference between Jovovich and Falconetti’s performances is hard to put into words that don’t include, simply, “Falconetti’s is just better” – where Jovovich, like I said, came off mostly as plain crazy, Falconetti’s wide-eyed gazing comes across more like a superhuman degree of conviction obstructed by a mind too young and human to quite comprehend it; ie, simply closer to “the truth”. A sizable portion of the movie consists of simple headshots of her reacting to the men around her. It shouldn’t be anywhere near as compelling and hypnotic as it is … but it really is the greatest performance, male or female, I’ve ever seen and I don’t think I’ll ever tire of it on any number of repeat viewings.

This is before you even touch upon the aspects of the film outside of her performance. Though, like I said, it’s full of a lot of plain headshots, there are some camera moves that perhaps by sheer contrast blew my mind a little, like the rolling move that follows soldiers from an aerial angle to one level with the ground; one that tracks the spikes of a torture device down to the ground; another weird almost queasy motion while Jeanne burns, following maces thrown down to guards from a tower, up and back again, up and back again.

It’s not often I’m so immediately impressed by movies as old as this – though I consider myself to have a wider knowledge of cinema than most, it never really struck me as a given that older productions should necessarily be somehow better than modern stuff by default. Then you get exceptions like this – it is one of those movies, as François Truffaut has said, that simply “vibrates”, in this case sometimes so violently that it threatens to burst out of the screen. It amazes me that there are people who dismiss it so quickly as “just headshots” ... it’s the person who’s in those headshots. For the performance alone it’s a masterpiece. But it’s so much more besides.

I feel the need to clarify something I’ve whined about recently and here seems like the perfect place to do it, and it regards those movies that are nothing but technically impressive. The ones where the first thing you find yourself mentioning is how “beautifully shot” they are or how marvelous the visual effects were or how great the music was etc. I said that if you find yourself mentioning things like this before anything else, it’s probably not really a great movie. I guess that was a little harsh. What I should’ve said is, if you’re gonna make a movie like that, your name had better be Julie Taymor.

This is actually a lot more like Across the Universe than I remembered it, obviously not in story or anything, but inasmuch as its noble failings. The one shot I remembered from the first (and last) time I watched was of course that of Lavinia in the open plain following her disfigurement, the sticks on the end of her arms reaching out for her uncle as blood issues from her mouth over the camera. It’s still one of the most extraordinary images I’ve ever seen, and it’s not the only one to behold in these few hours.

After I’d first seen it, this scene and what follows made me think Laura Fraser’s performance was a lot better than it really is. In fact, it’s only as the mute that she really impresses me now – in the first half of the movie, her performance kind of collapses each time she opens her mouth, something in the way she delivers the Shakespeare lines that just gives away how lost she is amongst heavyweights like Hopkins and Lang.

And that’s kind of the movie’s problem too – luckily, the wobbly stuff here is mostly confined to the first half of the movie, prior to the scene where Lavinia is brought back to Titus. It’s also, it must be said, never quite as wobbly as the stuff in Across the Universe. The “everyplace, everytime” set-up jars about as often as it works – it’s at its best when the 20s jazz-style score sets up the travelling circus-like reveal of the heads of Titus’ sons, a moment that just about makes the many times it falls flat worth it. Alan Cumming jars almost every time he’s onscreen – but he’s Alan Cumming, so that too can be forgiven.

Ultimately, this is absolutely the movie to show disinterested kids to show them that Shakespeare’s anything but boring. Even I still now have to stop in places during this and ask myself, is this really Shakespeare, lol? Really? Reaaalllly?!?? The casting of Anthony Hopkins is almost cheeky; he of course is pretty much just Lecter again in the movie’s last hour or so. Do I care? Not a bit. This is one of the greatest revenge stories ever told – of course, I’d almost entirely forgotten the Sweeney Todd connection here, too, which extends far beyond meat pies – and Julie Taymor turned it into one of the greatest Shakespeare adaptations ever put onscreen. Right now, I think it’s second only to Branagh’s Hamlet in my mind.

“If only we were among friends! Or … sane persons!”

What a way to start the year this is (okay I watched Hot Fuzz again before it, but didn’t have much to add to the old review, though it did rise significantly up the 2007 list). I don’t think it had ever really occurred to me before, so thanks I guess to ITV for putting it on early yesterday morning

The lyrics are even more incredible than I remember – this is a guy really loving words, like it’s more often than not the sound of the words taking precedence way over any meaning – “I’ll tell you once, I’ll tell you twice / You better wise up, Janet Weiss.” “You’re as sensual as a pencil.” It almost reminds of Tim Rice at his most fun (I know, different people might take that comparison differently; for the record, I love Tim Rice, this is a positive thing I’m saying).

What struck me too on this viewing is how surprisingly clean the movie is. On the sex front it’s as tame as a pantomime, it’s all implied though if you’ve got any hormones whatsoever I’d be shocked if you weren’t turned on at some point – I personally find it just about the sexiest film ever, like, even Tim Curry is somehow a turn-on lol. There’s the fairly shockingly gruesome killing of Eddie but even that’s more in the sound mix than anything else. I guess if you’re offended by words like “transvestite” and “transexual” it might hurt a bit, but really it’s not even as crazy as I thought it was. It only really strikes one as so utterly subversive etc when you’re able to recognise all the symbolism in it like the rainbow colours and the triangle on Frank N Furter’s medical tunic etc.

“It’s not easy having a good time. Even smiling makes my face ache.”

Ultimately it’s how the ridiculousness of it all just builds and builds (I still remember how much I lost it the first time I watched it that moment when Riff-Raff and Magenta burst in in their alien regalia, lol) only to be cut through by the key line of the whole thing, “Don’t dream it, be it,” and then to cap it all the King Kong reference with Rocky climbing the RKO tower.

I don’t know, sometimes I think I take these things a little too serious considering they are at their core just a little kind of homage or spoof, but, y’know, I always let my heart make the final decision when it comes to movies, and the “Don’t dream it, be it,” and the RKO thing … they really make this movie for me, it’s not just a weird cult entertainment for me, it actually means something. I watched it for the first time almost 10 years ago and if I said it wasn’t at least partly responsible for the things I’ve gradually learned to accept about myself in the years since, may I be struck down for such a giant lie. You can take that last sentence however you want ‘cos I’m still a little averse to being specific. This movie just says how wonderful it is to be yourself and though it almost sounds ridiculous, to not be afraid of things that are pleasing to you. There is simply no better message for a movie to have. If it feels good, why knock it? We badly need another movie like this for today, pronto. I’ll keep my personal detailed ideas on that notion to myself for now

“The harder you hit me, the more I know you love me.”

This might be a movie that only gets better the older it gets. I still remember seeing it on the big screen when it first came out, like I vividly remember the stupidest details of the screening like the sound cutting out in the opening credits and my cousin refusing to sit down for practically the whole movie lol. It really made an impression on me and Alisan Porter was one of my first ever movie crushes (I was eleven … it’s kinda ok … that I still find her adorable can be discussed another time lol) It would’ve been the simple slapsticky things that got me there – the finger licking, the second car hit (“Now you really killed him!”), the singing of the national anthem – but I still remember getting severely choked up at the end (that must’ve been an emotional year for me, I just realised – My Girl was also released then).

Watching now, it’s like a whole different movie. There’s stuff in here that I’d never really noticed before, a lot about parenting and responsibility and a girl’s need for a mother no matter how good the father is. Kevin Smith certainly took a lot of cues from it when he made another favourite of mine, Jersey Girl, and I noticed immediately as the film began another thing I always forget, that it was Smith fave John Hughes’ last movie as director. It’s full of massive early-90s clichés (a triple screaming punch scene, thousands of cellphones ringing in a restaurant … “it’s mine!” ... even a shopping montage) but they all now work if anything better than they did back then. Even the Looney Tunes sound effects worked for me this time around. I don’t know, maybe I’m just biased, lol.

The other thing that I really noticed this time around is how perfectly cast either Jim Belushi or Alisan Porter is – I don’t know which was cast first, but they actually look more like father and daughter than any similar onscreen partnership I can think of (thinking of Hayley Mills after the past week’s viewing, even more than The Truth About Spring, say, where John Mills actually played her dad, lol). George Delerue’s score has some scarily immense sadness in it too, even at the joyful end. Also keep an eye out for an early appearance by Steve Carell – I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw him, lol.