“If it’s not on camera, it’s like it never happened …. right?”

It sounded a little dodgy and I certainly didn’t want to be too hasty about being excited about this latest “official” installment in the Romero Dead series after Land (which I’ve watched most of again recently … in short, it really didn’t warrant a new review, it’s pretty unremarkable) ... but at the same time I kind of couldn’t help myself. Even though this mockumentary horror thing has been done almost to death now since Blair Witch leading through to Cloverfield, bringing the technique to the Dead series sounded pretty fascinating, and any time Romero returns to this series it’s exciting, as they’re always among the most important horror movies, if not always quite the best.

Overall, it works. While it’s not quite the “zombies in a mall” of the masterful Dawn, the social commentary here (though perhaps a little obvious: just about anyone who documents the dreary details of their life in a blog or who has neglected to truly experience a vacation because they were behind a camera the whole time will understand what it’s saying well enough) is certainly more pointed than that in Land.

It gets a little dull towards the end, the whole thing just isn’t as awash with the message as Dawn was, and it frequently becomes “just another teen horror movie”. But the end (“Are we really worth saving? You tell me.”) sends you out with genuine chills running down your spine. It’s in your face and feels like a hammer on the head, but it does the job of “implicating the audience” a million times better than, for example, Funny Games U.S.. There is some humour to counter this depressing stuff, however: I don’t think I’ve laughed more this year than I did over the “Hello, I’m Samuel” sign

Again, I’m guilty of not having seen the original here which probably makes me a bad film lover, though it seems to be the right way to approach the thing as the director really made it almost exclusively because he felt too few people had seen the non-English-speaking production … which is kinda sad in itself to begin with.

I guess I want to start before I go “off on one” so to speak (it’s not guaranteed but it’s possible … oh it’s always possible lol …) by saying, I get what the director is trying to do and say with this film (and, presumably, the original) – if only because his self-confessed intentions have been so well-documented. Again, I find this kind of sad – like the saying goes, if you could put it into words, well, what’s the point in painting it? And a lot of the more positive reviews of this movie seem to go in one direction against the criticism, amounting to, “You don’t get it. THIS is what it means,” which to me really says it all.

I didn’t personally get the intention in the end. By which I mean – I get it, but it didn’t work for me as apparently was intended. Though none of the horrors are actually shown onscreen, I felt as the end credits rolled that I’d seen them anyway – that I’d got my kicks, as it were, despite the approach. I saw Naomi Watts in her underwear and tied up, I heard her screams, and those screams were so terrifying that I looked away even though I knew there was nothing to see. So I won’t deny its incredible use of cinema … but, honestly, I never really felt like it was any different from what has come before – Texas Chainsaw, Last House, Clockwork Orange, Straw Dogs. Frankly, Cannibal Holocaust did a much better job of making me feel “involved” in the horror; in this whole department, there’s really only one short sequence here that lived up to what I expected.

Haneke is a fine film maker – you can feel a lot of Kubrickian influence here and I’m interested in seeing his other work. Naomi Watts and Tim Roth are fantastic. All the technical stuff is top notch. It takes a long time to get going, though, and even once it does it’s far from gripping; and in the end, personally I feel it fails miserably in its aspirations. I think those who think the naysayers are missing the point on this one need to go back and look at how intelligent a lot of the old nasties really were.

This movie is basically a giant nauseous leap into the cesspool that was the burgeoning media-driven culture of the Nineties that has by no means yet been flushed away. I watched the “Chaos Rising” mini-doc on the DVD for the umpteenth time after this viewing and in it Oliver Stone says how it’s the product of 2 years in which he was simply “disgusted” by what was happening in the world and really, that’s the best summation of the movie that you could ask for. It’s a movie that just boils with bile at a world that is, it’s so often hard to deny, going to hell. Even 14 years on it still feels perfectly relevant, not least because there are still hoards of people who think of it as just a piece of ultraviolent cinema.

The tone of that first “I Love Mallory” sitcom flashback still astonishes me – it feels so much like any sitcom, but the presence of Woody Harrelsson and Rodney Dangerfield, almost comedy icons in themselves, yet with those evil looks in their eyes, the words coming out of their mouths and the crucial intercutting with the “real” black and white stuff like Dangerfield fondling Juliette Lewis’ butt, it’s just simultaneously horrible yet fascinating to have the world laid bare in such a way.

It’s photographed by Robert Richardson. Whenever I see his name on a movie now it’s this movie that immediately springs to mind and the one I most associate with him – the horses, wolves, dust, clouds, and of course, the multiple film stocks … never used as a gimmick, always perfectly relevant to the scene in question.

On top of all this is Trent Reznor’s soundtrack. I still remember the day when my family were on the proper cliché family holiday in Orlando in 1997 and we went to the Florida Mall and my eyes were peeled specifically for this movie and The Exorcist on VHS (they still hadn’t been released here yet – I’m sure Clockwork Orange, Straw Dogs, Texas Chain Saw, Pretty Baby and even Kubrick’s Lolita were in the back of my mind too though), yet my heart first leapt on finding the mere soundtrack to the movie, and I’ll never forget the guy at the counter who sold it to me ‘cos it was like one of those first times a random adult (sue me, I personally feel blessed that I still felt like a kid at 17 lol) had spoken to me like I was just a regular person, and he said something along the lines of, “This CD rocks, I have it in my car all the time, it’s just like watching the movie,” which of course I didn’t know what he meant at the time because I hadn’t seen the movie yet, but it’s absolutely true, that soundtrack is one of the greatest of all time – both standalone and in the context of the movie, from the 50s “Back in Baby’s Arms” through Bob Dylan’s “You Belong to Me” right up to Reznor’s own “Burn” and “Something I Can Never Have”, the dialogue frequently cut into it almost rhythmically, my favourite of those moments being the Nixon, “As I leave,” during the Leonard Cohen “Waiting for a Miracle” opening (“There are lots of invitations …” “As I leave …”).

It’s just a brilliant, blistering assault that really defies any attempt to summarise as I’d like to do here. But I would just say, I should probably watch it more as the very world it portrays disgusts me more as time goes by. Those closing moments, the flicking between the channels, really caught me off guard this time around and they’re about the most crushing moments in a whole 2 hours of horrific acts. That this was so long before the rolling news that covered things like 9/11 (which Stone himself arguably overly sanitized in World Trade Center) is nothing short of a terrifying marvel.

“There are just so many stupid, annoying, worthless people on the planet. They just like, get in the way of what you want.”

The first thing this movie reminded me of was my most shameless personal fave, Slap Her … She’s French (especially considering that movie’s alternate title “She Gets What She Wants”) ... but it’s a lot more subtle, extreme and subversive than that. It’s funny I found myself watching it during the BBC’s “White” week, in a way. The moment Evan Rachel Wood starts her speech about how wonderful it is to be white being as she wants to be an actress, all of this told to a Muslim student, listing Asian as her second choice, then Afro-American, and finally Arab … it certainly makes you gasp if anything more than I remembered “Slap Her” did – and where that race line goes in the end … I still don’t know quite what to think of it except to compare it to the other stereotypes in the movie, like, yes, the male and female ones, and say that it is one of those movies where the stereotypes really never bother me quite as much as they should, basically because the script just oozes smarts and Wood delivers those smarts in a way I really think nobody else could. It seems like she gets better with every film I see her in, and the final shot of her here is just phenomenal. James Woods, Jane Krakowski and Selma Blair are the icing on the cake.

Like Duel, I have meant to watch this movie so many times it’s ridiculous. I stand there with the disc in my hand – I go online and read reviews which never really contain any info that makes me desperate to watch it – finally this time I just found myself saying to myself, “What the f*ck are you doing? It’s Spielberg, you’re a film nerd, and you’ve not seen it yet!” LOL. Well, that worked – and putting it in a double bill with Duel didn’t hurt either, it’s certainly recommended.

And Spielberg it really is. On the technical side of things, this film is nothing short of flawless. Though Billy Goldenberg did a fine job with the score for Duel, it’s here finally that the John Williams relationship began, and boy, it’s there if anywhere, when those strings come in over the main title, that you hear an artist who started as brilliant as he has continued. The film is also lovingly, beautifully shot by Vilmos Zsigmond.

But while I really wanted to love this movie, in the end I felt it dragged far too much. It’s very scattered in what it’s trying to say – the public adulation of the couple, Hawn in particular, resembling Bonnie and Clyde among many others, the fleeting digs at the media done better in Natural Born Killers (public adulation of the criminals there too of course), the baby storyline and other things resembling the Coen Brothers’ Raising Arizona. In other words, it’s all very much been done better elsewhere before and since. You can’t deny the perfect blending of skill and fun though, and it is a large enough part of any understanding of Spielberg to again make me ashamed I didn’t see it sooner.

I can’t for the life of me explain why I loved this but I did. Had I time to watch it again before the year is out (not that I’ve much of an excuse – at 88 minutes it’s astounding how much it covers), it’s likely it’d be topping my end of year list, and along with Away From Her it’s one of two films I really think should be up for Best Picture at the Oscars in February though I know there’s not a cat’s chance in hell with either (not to say I might not get ballsy and switch them into my predix at the last minute).

It’s ultimately the work of a liberal smart and world-wearied enough to know that a lot of the politics he once fought for have today gone too far just like the politics of the “enemy” – to the point where there are a lot of people like the student here who are supremely intelligent but so jaded by cynicism they feel not only that the world is beyond saving but also that they’re “above” saving it … that the world doesn’t “deserve” their help because of the way it’s beaten them down.

It’s been said many times that one doesn’t need sex, violence, and coarse language if you actually have something to say. It’s amazing that this movie manages to be just as scathingly political a film as Brian De Palma’s Redacted while being resolutely, humblingly mature about it and giving time to the other side too. It kind of made me feel ashamed for having praised the starkly crude De Palma movie so much. This one leaves you really thinking twice over the cynicism about politics so many of us have not so much taken for granted as absorbed into a status quo. I think this is that rare thing of a movie that could change people – or at least make them think about changing … or indeed, just having an opinion to begin with.