6th January 2002

I have to begin by saying that my expectations of this movie were ultimately non-existent. I heard word-of-mouth in spits and spats, mostly relating to the ‘annoyance’ of a cliff-hanger ending, of which I’ll write more later, and I saw the obligatory hype, and I chose my path in supporting the rival, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. I should also begin with the pointless but popular comparison to that movie: the only, repeat only, similarity between the two being their adaptation from extremely popular novels.

The differences abound. For while Chris Columbus’ more mainstream family flick was an almost page-by-page visual transcript of JK Rowling’s novel, and firmly followed the classical hero’s journey, Peter Jackson’s Fellowship, and I’ll quickly admit I have no intention of ever trying to read Tolkien’s novels again, completely redefines the very term “hero”.

Several rings of power were created thousands of years before the story begins, distributed about Middle Earth, the world of the story. An evil presence created a counter-ring, a single ring that could enslave all. A battle destroyed the evil, but not the ring, and instead of being destroyed, the ring fell into the hands of man. The story follows Frodo and a gathered “fellowship” as they run from remaining dutiful evil forces and try to protect the ring from ever being used.

The classical hero’s journey has a single hero, who is offered a quest to save his people – he rejects the quest, meets a mentor who gives him powers, finally accepts the quest, the mentor leaves him, and he goes to confront the usually physical evil presence to retrieve the object of the quest. For the mentor, consider Yoda the ever-wise creature of the Star wars movie, or even Obi-Wan Kenobi, the equally-wise Jedi. We never doubted these characters. But almost instantly the moment Jackson introduces the wizard Gandalf (played brilliantly by Ian McKellen – and I don’t usually like his work), we are shown that he is just as weak as the other characters. The ultimate nemisis for our heroes (note the plural, for each and every member of the fellowship is displayed as an individual here) is not evil itself, not a physical presence, but man’s innate capacity for the evil within themselves – the ring as an evil catalyst. It is truly extraordinary for me to see such complicated characters in the kind of world usually home to archetypes – those who have read the novels, perhaps, might not be so surprised. But still I believe that this movie has redefined what it means to be a hero, and especially in these times (I hate to say it), boy do we need a movie like that.

The only thing wrong with the film, in fact, is the editing. It seems like someone lost faith in the cutting room and decided to make it a normal 2 hours, and then they previewed and decided it was marvellous, so a producer or other brainless wonder told the editors to pad it out with montages made from bits and pieces from piles A and B. I imagine the film’s rough cut was around 5 hours.. the finished product is neither too short nor too long, more just plain wrong. The ending – despite what you may have heard (and I heard plenty) – is not jarring, there is closure and resolution and emotional peaking as expected in any ‘epic’. But the editing is genuinely what I think they call ‘choppy’.

To grudgingly return to the Potter Comparison, I pick Potter. This film, while proving that Jackson is as frightening and unique directing event pictures as he was making video nasties in his back garden, seems somehow late and sticky-taped together – there’s a slew of production errors, and some pretty shoddy ADR work. But, and a huge but at that (“and no mistakin’”), it is a perfect construction – the effects are bigger and scarier than ever seen, the ring’s power is as fully conveyed as possible, and the themes are surprisingly disturbing (instead of having friends there as a failsafe fallback, Frodo has to earn and learn those – that – friend, and is even told early on “yes, you are alone,” a brutally honest statement rarely heard in the movies). As a complete trilogy, I’m convinced it will go down in cinema history and it deserves to; as I’m convinced that it deserves any of the Oscar nominations and wins I’m certain it will achieve; but, in the end, my reaction was still a solid, “coulda, shoulda, been better…”

I don’t know what exactly happened to change things, but for the past few years I’ve always intended to get to the movies more and see things ASAP but it just never really worked out. This year I’ve kind of attacked that goal with a passion and it seems to be a good year for it, with “must-see” movies like this coming out each week now for the foreseeable future. It’s likely that if I’d waited more than a few weeks to see this one, I would’ve approached it with far more apprehension and cynicism than I did today. I’m pretty good at avoiding spoilers and I managed to do so in this case – aside from the poster featuring said cabin revolving in layers like a giant impossible rubik’s cube and the buzz all over about spoilers in itself really threatening to spoil the experience (recalling the episode of The IT Crowd, “Moss and the German” – Roy’s “don’t tell me there’s a twist, I’ll be guessing what it is all the way through!”), I had very little idea what was coming as the movie began. I have to be honest: I don’t know what difference it really would’ve made if I had known everything. The spoilability of this movie has been grossly overstated, possibly to its detriment. But I’ll try my best here not to say too much.

Cabin in the Woods is a movie unmistakably made by people who love horror movies and want desperately to do something new with the genre. Comparisons to Scream are inevitable and its reference points unending (I wrote down a bunch of titles but decided not to list any of them here because they’re all a bit of a giveaway). From the off, and for a good chunk of its running time, it plays with one of horror’s most worn out situations, succinctly put by the very title, The Cabin in the Woods. It retreads this trope so well, in fact, that it kind of gets boring. There’s an intercut mysterious subplot (which contains some very subtle and well played exposition that pays off at the end) but I have to admit, I spent most of the first hour thinking, “really? this is it?”

But Cabin in the Woods is not about the setup. Cabin in the Woods is about the pay off: the less about which you know, the better.

One poster in the UK has a gigantic quote on it calling it a “game changer”, a phrase I hate almost as much as the word “canon”. Unless you actually take the last shot of Cabin in the Woods to signify this as the last word in the horror genre as we know it, ushering in a whole new era (spoiler: it isn’t), there’s no sense in which this film is a game changer. Trust me, for all its creators’ knowledge of the game (which isn’t all that impressive – we’ve all known all of this since Scream whether we saw it or not – it’s mostly basic storytelling anyway), it is more than happy to play by the rules. Until the genuinely “well I haven’t seen that before” finale (you’ll know it when you see it), this movie is really no better than the genre clichés it purports to being “above”. Some will argue that this is partly the point, but I mostly found it lacking.

So on the one hand the more you like horror movies – the more you really like horror movies – and the more you know horror movies, the more you are likely to enjoy Cabin in the Woods. On the other, the more you really like and know horror movies, the more likely you are to have seen everything it does (except that one shot – where the elevators open, that’s all I’ll say) done better. If I was 17, the age I was when I first saw Scream, and had as limited (though ample) experience of the past 10 years of horror as I had then of 70s and 80s horror, I’d likely be gushing over this as much as I did then over Scream, and I imagine that’s the audience which will embrace the “game change” moniker and love this movie the most. And because it does that one shot so well, I’m frankly able to let that slide.

The one thing I do hope the final shot signifies is that Whedon and Goddard have no intention of turning Cabin in the Woods into a franchise – it’d be easy, yes, just run through all the other possibilities – but dull as dishwater now we’ve seen the elevators open. (Addendum: immediately after I posted this I saw the word “prequel” on Twitter. I didn’t think of that. Gagh.)

I was taking a risk seeing this in its first screening at the multiplex – a risk I’d long forgotten, usually going to smaller movies at graveyard times, till the noisy, chatty, snack munching, packet rustling, nuclear phone screen brigade came into the screening. It was astonishing to hear how fast this audience went silent as the film began. It seemed to surprise them with its directness, to grab them with its dreamlike (or rather, nightmarish) cinematography and subtle use of visual effects, just as quickly as it got me, and never let go.

I love dystopian visions like this. But they’re never so powerful as when they find their way into something that will actually be widely seen – by audiences who will react just like the audience I saw it with… people genuinely not expecting something so unsettling… people, perhaps, expecting Twilight. By that token, I found its scathing commentary on reality TV culture and its logical conclusion – even if it is, as some have written, not quite as pointed and thorough as we’ve seen elsewhere – all the more powerful than those movies mentioned at the start of this review. This isn’t a bargain bin 80s memory or Asian art house (not meaning to dismiss those movies, but that’s how they are seen at this level) – it’s apparently the movie Hollywood hopes will take up the Twilight mantle and keep the money rolling in. That it even suggests the ideas that it does had me walking out of the cinema simply wondering how it got made in this world. (It’s worth remembering that director Gary Ross made his debut with Pleasantville, another relatively large production that was startlingly provocative in its way).

I didn’t know till very recently (as I polished this review, in fact) that the violence had been cut a little to get a UK 12A certificate – this is something that actually prevented me from seeing The Woman in Black recently (I’d rather wait and see if there’s an “unrated” cut on the blu-ray, thank you). But thinking about it, this is almost exactly what the movie is about. If we come out of the movie wishing we’d seen more of the bloodshed, then we’re dangerously close to the monstrous people portrayed in the movie itself. As it is, the violence is so powerfully suggested that I barely thought about how little I actually saw.

Likewise, I’ve seen some criticism of how little we get to know of the other contenders in the games. Though I understand the book does this too, focussing almost exclusively on Katniss’ perspective, what this did for me in the movie was induce pure anger. The ruling classes of this world, dressed in garish pinks and purples, their very appearance flaunting injustice – the audience of the hunger games TV show – give no thought to the interior lives of these pawns either. When we do see the other kids, they too seem to have a strange detachment from the matter at hand – Isabelle Fuhrman’s vicious Clove displays outright glee as they descend to their (23:1 odds against) inevitable deaths. In another film I’d probably share the objection to the cold emotional detachment that’s rife here – but in this case I found the portrayal of desensitisation, the feeling of “this is just how things are and there’s no use trying to change it” as terrifying and unexpected as it was an upsettingly believable speculation on where we’re headed.

When I fawn over a movie as popular as this I start to feel a little dirty at this stage of the review and scrape around for something negative to say. I will say that the movie could maybe lose 10 or 20 minutes somewhere at the end of the second act/beginning of the third act. When the control room brings the sun down prematurely Truman Show -style, Jennifer Lawrence even says something along the lines of “They can’t wait to end it,” by way of explanation. The CGI dogs in the finale kind of do a disservice to the wonderfully subtle (if slightly cheap-looking in longer shots) effects of the first hour, and some of the “shaky cam” of that dreamlike cinematography I mentioned sometimes had me a little worried, effective though it ultimately is at suggesting the extent of the violence.

One of the movie’s most powerful lines is spoken by Donald Sutherland explaining why they bother having a survivor in this show. “Hope is stronger than fear,” he says. A cynical voice inside me whispers that arguably this is exactly the kind of hope a movie like this delivers. We come out of the movie enraged and inspired but we’re probably still not going to do anything about it. Also, Roger Ebert burst my bubble of excitement a little by writing that as a parable, everybody sees what they want in the movie – mentioning the fact that some Tea Party folks in America relate to the kids… These are points I have no answer to but felt I should also slip in here somewhere. I think in the end my optimism reigns – the fact that so many will see this movie means simply by the law of averages that many young people will see what I saw, and perhaps one of them will do something about it. I don’t know.

There is also the hint of the beginning of a Twilight-y love triangle towards the end and I’ve already seen hashtags like #teampeeta and #teamgale on Twitter but, y’know what? I’m as surprised by how little this bugs me as I was that those initial Twilight comparisons didn’t put me off going to see it in the first place. I’ve put all 3 books on my iPad/iPhone and intend to read them at the soonest opportunity. I can’t wait to the next movie to see where this goes, and I look forward to reading the original book from whence it came.

Best Picture : Midnight in Paris – this is my favourite by far of the bunch. I know The Artist is more likely and though I didn’t find that movie as amazing as some, I’m fine with that – but I think Midnight addresses the nostalgia so prevalent in this year’s list of nominees perfectly. The Help is the only one I haven’t seen.

Best Director : Terrence Malick, The Tree of Life – I’m too torn between all the others. Tree wasn’t flawless but it had some of the most memorable moments of this year, and let’s face it, he’s long overdue.

Best Actor : Gary Oldman, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy – I actually thought he was up for supporting till just now lol! I guess Clooney or any of the others are more likely but I wasn’t particularly wowed by any of them. I wasn’t particularly wowed by Oldman either, but I’ve been wowed plenty of times before and he deserves this. The award Tinker, Tailor most deserves is for Art Direction, which it isn’t up for.

Best Actress : Meryl Streep, The Iron Lady – I might be one of the few people who actually think that the film here was almost better than the performance, which for me was far too distracting to be truly great. But this seems to be a cert and I’m fine with it. As I said I haven’t seen The Help tho.

Best Supporting Actor : I would really love to see Max Von Sydow win here for Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close which I actually quite liked, but it’s not gonna happen.

Best Supporting Actress : I’ve only seen Bérénice Bejo (The Artist), so I’ll go with that. She was one of the best things in it.

Best Original Screenplay : Woody Allen, Midnight in Paris – probably the most likely to actually win of those I actually want to win.

Best Adapted Screenplay : let’s go with Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (Bridget O’Connor/Peter Straughan) as I’d like to see it win something.

Best Editing : let’s give this one to The Artist

Best Cinematography : The Tree of Life – I’ll be a bit peeved if War Horse wins anything tonight, but if it wins this one over Tree it will be my most peeved moment…

Best Art Direction : Like I said Tinker, Tailor deserves this one, but in its absence I have to go Harry Potter because it deserves something tonight…

Best Costume Design : Sandy Powell’s one of the few costume designers whose work I always recognise and she’s lost too many times, so Hugo.

Best Original Score : I think Tinker, Tailor was the one here that stood out most for me. Slick. Alberto Iglesias.

Best Original Song : Duh. The Muppets

Best Make-Up : Harry Potter again. Iron Lady again was too distracting to be great. Albert Nobbs I don’t know.

Best Animated Feature : It’s the only one I’ve seen, so Rango. Some surprisingly powerful sequences in that movie.

Best Sound Editing : Drive because it deserves something.

Best Sound : No clue. Hugo

Best Visual Effects : Wow, tricky category. I’ve gotta go Rise of the Planet of the Apes ‘cos, again, it deserves something (if not Andy Serkis for Best Supporting Actor as some suggested)… but if Harry Potter gets nothing else, that’s my second choice…

I’m gonna leave documentary and foreign out because I’ve seen none of them and apparently they’re as rubbish as usual lol.

Anyway, the show will be great whatever

So the occasion here is the first of these post-converted 3D re-releases. Some were angry that George Lucas wished to tinker with these movies yet again at all; some were angry that he chose to start with the “inferior” prequels; some just don’t like 3D at all. I have to admit, I’ve been slow to come around to the new 3D stuff in general. I’ve written often of my love for Mark Kermode’s weekly film show/podcast on BBC Radio 5 Live and respect his opinions on the matter greatly, at the same time as spending (just looking at last year) a good quarter-to-a-third of my time in the cinema wearing those silly glasses. There are some things I just want to see in 3D. Even if it’s just so I can be allowed a valid opinion on how it looks (especially where post-conversion, as here, is concerned).

Since I’d already watched the whole Star Wars saga mere months ago, I wasn’t sure how bothered I’d be to see this one – which, however you look at it, is easily the worst in the series (this doesn’t mean I don’t still like it) – again. But when I saw the trailer before A Monster in Paris on Monday, I knew I had to. The 3D, simply put, looked fantastic, and it even looked like they may have tweaked the visual effects even more than the blu-ray release (the final battle on Naboo here has always bugged me – looking as it does like an unfinished animatic taking place literally on a Windows XP desktop).

At the time of this writing, my opinion on the whole Star Was saga is thus: it is one long story, the best and worst parts of which are scattered throughout. The prequels as a whole were not necessary, sure; the original trilogy stands alone perfectly fine, just as the very first movie (sans “Episode IV” title) stood fairly well alone. HOWEVER… The last hour of Revenge of the Sith – and I realise this will upset some people – is for me as powerful as anything in much grander cinematic sagas – I’ll even invoke The Godfather – and places it far and away as the best film in the whole series. Everything in Revenge of the Sith after Anakin kills Mace Windu makes everything else in the prequels absolutely essential, and makes even the original trilogy, if I’m honest, a little pale to my eyes.

The Phantom Menace is a necessary beginning to all this. It’s overly verbose politically, relatively humourless, and yes – even here, surely the best it will ever look – some of the effects look frankly unfinished (that last battle? I guess it’s just the total absence of human figures… I just don’t know…). But it’s worth it, if for nothing else, for the two key set pieces: the pod race (simply stunning in 3D) and the “Duel of the Fates” (the three way – four way, if you count Darth Maul’s double ender? – light sabre duel between Qui-Gon, Obi-Wan and Maul). For me personally, I’d add Padme/Amidala’s wardrobe – some of the most beautiful dresses I’ve ever seen in movies. I’d even add fragments of Jar-Jar which honestly do make me laugh – his whole Buster Keaton act in the final battle on Naboo is fantastic fun. And then there are the few fragments of story that resonate later on in the series (just one, for example, I noticed this time around, Anakin’s telling Padme “I can fix anything,” echoed later in Attack of the Clones after his mother’s murder) making the best of what’s to come just that bit better.

Is the 3D necessary here? No more necessary than it has been in any 3D movie I’ve ever seen. I will say that, as with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part II (eep, I really ought to review that soon I guess!), I was more than impressed by the post-conversion… I don’t know how they do it but the technology is certainly getting better. Most of all, provided your eyes can physically “do” 3D, it’s a great excuse for seeing what I find to be at the least an interesting movie again on the big screen looking fresh as the day it was made.

I find it so easy to look past this movie’s flaws because some people simply get so laughably venomous in regurgitating them and being blind to the many good things in it. At one stage Qui-Gon tells Anakin, like the Neil Diamond song, “Feel: don’t think.” And while The Phantom Menace might not have the emotional weight it aspires to, I’m convinced if the audience is just as empty as they think the movie is, they’re only adding to the problem.

Older review: October 10th, 2006:

This one always surprises me by being so perfectly watchable as it is – moreso, in fact, each time I sit down to it. It’s true that it has its flaws – slightly flaky visual effects, acting at its lowest ebb for the series (and, considering the series, that’s pretty damn bad), and a general absence of energy, spark, je ne sais quoi … and, of course, Jar Jar. But I’m of the opinion that the whole Star Wars series has just as many, similar flaws, that it’s real value in cinema comes mostly from the combo of the powerful story and John Williams’ score, both of which are present enough here. I really view all six movies as one work, and the more I watch it, the more I see that this sixth is just as valid as the rest.

Star Wars: Episode II | Episode III

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

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…

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 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.

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?”

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.

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…

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.

There have been many movies made about relationships between older men and younger girls – going way back to the French Sundays & Cybele (and I’m sure even further back), through Digging to China, The Professional, to Lawn Dogs and of course the two adaptations of Lolita – and they’ve rarely been unworthy of note, so I’ve been meaning to watch this one – ostensibly about an elderly British man who befriends a little girl, ultimately to the suspicion of the neighbourhood – ever since I first heard about it. This is a subject that’s never not worth revisiting – because it’s a problem that not only won’t go away but seems to get ever worse. As far as I’m aware this is the first of these kinds of movies to be set in modern Britain, with positive intentions toward the subject matter – and that in itself for now actually makes it more pressing than any of the other titles previously mentioned.

The movie doesn’t rush into its story at all, feeling more like Gran Torino or, closer to home, Harry Brown, as it starts than any of those more romantic, poetic movies. Bob Hoskins plays what initially amounts to a grumpy old man who, as the movie opens, sees his wife die as an ambulance is too busy dealing with drunks in the city. Hoodies and youths seem to be on every corner and Hoskins doesn’t hold back from telling them what he thinks of their loitering, littering, etc. He keeps racing pigeons and it’s while he’s tending to them that 8 year old Florrie runs into his back garden.

It’s impressive how the movie builds to its drama from here. Nobody bats an eye at first at this old man looking after a little girl who only recently moved into the neighbourhood for an hour or two. Her mother actually directly invokes the P-word on their first meeting, joking, after he objects to being left with her (“I don’t know what to do with kids!” etc), “Oh come on, you’re not a peedie, are ya?” In this way the movie sort of serves as a microcosm of a much longer timescale, with this initial phase going back to the early 90s or even late 80s when people did trust more this way. I hope this doesn’t make me sound like I have a bleak view of the world – I’m sure there are still communities where every stranger (particularly of the male persuasion) isn’t regarded with suspicion, but they’re certainly few and far between… the picture painted later in the movie, something resembling Salem in the 1600s, feels much more familiar…

As Hoskins’ character lets himself go hygienically, devoid of wife (I won’t go off on one about this typically male portrayal; it’s believable in this case), another new neighbour, a French woman, begins to insinuate herself into his life, bringing him home-cooked food and company but really just desperate for the company herself. Hoskins befriends one of the neighbourhood teenagers, too, seeing a spark of humanity in the boy that he can nurture if only he can keep him away from his drunken friends. Soon his whole house and garden is buzzing with these disparate characters, a picture of community in action, prompting bewilderment from Hoskins estranged son – who knows him only as the grumpy recluse we first saw – when he pops home to collect the last of his things (wanting nothing more to do with his grumpy dad since mother died).

You can probably guess what happens from here – such happiness never holding up when strangers and children are involved. The P word begins to be uttered less jokingly and people start to believe what even characters on the sidelines imply. It’s finally when Florrie herself asks her mother what that word means, having heard it all over the shop, that even this rare, smart, parent – suddenly stricken with that awful fear face we see wherever there are mothers, children, and strange men – says, “I think I’ve been a very silly mummy…” I don’t think I’ve seen the power that word has in today’s society represented so perfectly as it is here. I didn’t mention Salem before to be funny – it does seem that once the P word is used to describe an already even slightly suspicious person it has as little chance of being taken back today as an accusation of witchcraft back then. Once the word is spray-painted on the front of Hoskins’ house, once the pack mentality of the neighbourhood sees it, it’s just so many dominoes waiting to fall…

The final act of the movie is as admirable as it is awkward. It impressively doesn’t go down some of the more obvious paths, say, a TV movie with the same subject matter might go. One of the friends of the boy Hoskins befriends plants what we can only assume is child pornography on his computer and tips the police off about it. I don’t know how accurate the scene of his arrest is as far as what would actually happen in the same situation in real life, but they actually let him go to the pub while they search the house… they take the computer away, and, seeing when the material was downloaded combined with the information that Hoskins was in France with his pigeons at that time, don’t even make the slightest suggestion that he had anything to do with it. Another scene has them interview the rowdy mother of Florrie’s best friend. She has that dramatic way with language implying all manner of untruths about Hoskins but using those words that one usually sees have the police arrest the first creepy looking man they see, but they flatly tell her, “sorry, but that doesn’t give us anything to go on…”

There is one moment towards the end which is (if you’ll pardon the spoiler-ish pun) so ballsy and frankly absurd that it almost threatens to take down the movie entirely. It relates to the French neighbour who Hoskins ultimately falls in love with, and I’ll say no more than that. It is startling how an initially wtf reveal in this storyline actually turns into something quite wonderful (not to mention garnering one of the movie’s biggest laughs – yes, bizarrely, there are laughs in this movie… an awkward, yet again admirable, number and variety of them…) as it resolves itself. As I said, the bare bones of this story – the man/little girl relationship – has been done many times and it’s to this movie’s credit how much flavour it adds, with bursts of French music, the pigeon keeping, and this random little storyline.

I was surprised to find mostly positive reviews among the few I could find when I searched after the credits rolled on this one. It’s a subject matter most people have firmly made up their minds about and the approach here is frequently so awkward it’s easy to label as plain ridiculous – most particularly in that wtf reveal of the French neighbour’s subplot. There are many lovely good characters with great actors behind them but the bad characters tend to be sort of embarrassingly two dimensional – hoodies and chavs plain and true. But the movie has some seriously good intentions that I can’t ignore because they’re something I care deeply about. There is a massive problem when it comes to friendships between adults and children that is not talked about nearly enough and it ruins lives constantly and increasingly. This movie like so many doesn’t really offer a solution but it does show perfectly exactly how and where the misunderstandings happen… I recommend it completely.

It perhaps goes without saying that I didn’t expect much from this… but I’m not going to deny, I still really wanted to see it, even after the worst of the reviews came in. I don’t know what made certain moviegoers expect anything else from this than what it delivers. One of my favourites, Mark Kermode, went so far as to suggest that director Zack Snyder might think he’s made another Inception, which is about the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard him say. Yes, y’know what, I think I’ll invoke that most awful of recent phrases that get flung around at times like this – some people I’m afraid don’t “get” this movie at all. Not because it’s smart, clever, “game-changing”, but because it’s so insanely simple that people are looking for something that was never meant to be there.

If I described The Ward as “Girl, Interrupted with a bodycount” (which I didn’t – not here at least, not yet lol, one of the reviews that got away – but I would’ve…) then Sucker Punch is The Ward plus The Fall with all the visual insanity Snyder is known for (with the difference being here that I dug it). I can’t stress that enough – this movie is perhaps the most insane I’ve seen – I won’t even try to describe it – and I loved it.

There’s an objection to the movie that concerns itself with the exploitation of women surpassing any message of empowerment the movie purports to – or something to that effect. I’m loathe to get involved with an argument like this because to me it just seems so warped and depressing a way to approach a movie like this that I think it’s best ignored, but I’ll just say that surely such an argument is suggesting that women need some kind of special protection against being portrayed in a ridiculous popcorn movie that is not afforded men, and is hence a little patronising itself? In an equal and reasonable world, surely, violence against women in cinema would be just as unsurprising and unworthy of note (other than how awesomely it’s executed cinematically) as that against men? And given the fact that its director, Zack Snyder, gave us men dressed just as scantily ridiculous in his last two movies (Doctor Manhattan in Watchmen and, err, everyone in 300) doesn’t that even shoot down the “zomg they’re dressed like strippers!” argument?

Anyway that’s pretty much all I have to say on that – to use that as your sole reason to dismiss the movie wholesale (as many have – clearly trying to impress someone) is about as dumb as Mark Kermode’s calling Inception the best film of last year purely because “it proves that blockbusters don’t have to be dumb” (for the record: there are actually reasons I’ll accept for Inception being the best film of last year – they include “I just loved it…” – but not that one… sorry but, to cite just one example, Pixar have been making intelligent blockbusters for _years_…)

That out of the way, I’ll just say this – I don’t know where some reviewers get off comparing this to Inception because they’re clearly entirely different movies, but since you mentioned it, I’d rather watch this than that any day because it knows it’s not trying for greatness and succeeds completely at what it does where Inception (in my opinion) falls far short of its lofty goals (or the ones that fans have assigned it). The movie’s frenetic nature reminded me a little of Scott Pilgrim, not that I’d really normally make that comparison either – but I’d rather watch this than that, even, because it doesn’t have a constant tone of hatred masked with false irony. It has beautiful young girls in awesome costumes which, yeh, I’ll call sexy – nothing I can do about that, it’s ludicrous to apologise for what turns you on. The action sequences are fantastically overblown. And at the end of the day, much to my surprise, it actually has something to say – something akin to Tideland‘s message, it just occurred to me: that we have inside our brains the capacity to deal with anything outside it. It’s vague and perhaps a bit cheesy, but true – certainly no less powerful than Inception‘s (yes I’ll go there again – I didn’t start it) “this sentence is false, but you gotta believe something” joyless, hollow perfection.

Bottom line is, it’s just a movie. I recently linked to this, far better, explanation of (at least) why the movie isn’t the end of the world with the comment, despite still recommending people read it, that I’m not sure if it deserves that much thought but since the naysayers were overthinking it so much it seemed only fair for somebody to do likewise in its favour. Maybe it’s because I watched it just an hour or so after Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams which so perfectly, simultaneously, made our individual artistic cries into the abyss of time seem both important as a whole yet worthless in their isolation. Sucker Punch is just one movie, and one that mainly sets out to simply be eye candy at that. If you think such a movie has the ability, in just 2 hours, to destroy 50 years of progress for women and society, I’m sorry but it’s you who are underestimating women. It’s a movie that clearly has more interest in having fun than saying anything important. I make no apologies for loving it.