Reviews

i went to see "occupation: dreamland" not because i'm interested in iraq or US foreign policy but because i'm interested in the psychology of soldiers & people at war - in particular, what allows someone to hurt, damage & kill someone else - and i really enjoyed getting up close & personal with the soldiers of the 82nd airborne. their candid reflections on what they're doing there & what the war is about are equally charming & terrifying ("i have confidence the government wouldn't send us just to protect oil"; "it's all about adding another OPEC country") and some of the footage detailing army practices (the reenlistment scene, for example) are just plain terrifying. the film is also a useful companion piece to the fresh-faced army press officer of "control room". quite frankly, these guys seemed a lot more clued up, despite being (as one review puts it), "21-28 year-old high school dropouts and failed junior college liberal arts majors whose enlistment stems more from a lack of options than patriotism or ideology."

speaking of reviews, one of the most interesting things for me, as a non-American, were comments like the following from the reviews: "In this sense, then, the greatest accomplishment of 'Occupation: Dreamland' is showing those of us on the home front that it really is possible, Republican howling to the contrary aside, to support our troops without supporting the war itself." um, sorry? sure, you don't need to spit on them from a great height, but you either support one country invading another or you don't. the soldiers conscientiously carried out their instructions to spread a little good pr, but no one was fooled, least of all the soldiers themselves. shame, really, that they weren't being used on true peace-keeping missions in places that could use a little first-world intervention. darfur or the ivory coast, anyone?

(they're frighteningly skinny, anyway) - london the metropolis looks fab in Blow-up, from the south London streets lurching past at speed, to the mazes of brick and mews and alleyways, to the haunts of the young & serious about their rock and roll (hello Yardbirds). Alert viewers might notice that the spaces get more and more enclosed as the film progresses, as Thomas spends more time in his studio working out just what it is he has photographed. Even the open spaces of the park end up signalling interiority--as Thomas watches and, eventually, listens to the mimed game of tennis. Yes, the mimes are silly, but their presence is an effective and elegant visual way of wrapping up a film that is, after all, about the look of surfaces.

samantha morton is utterly believable in this 'every-girl' part and the camera-work is outstanding. the range of cinematography--from red-washed flickering dark to the white and yellow saturated hills of spain and everything in between--shapes the mood of each scene to perfection. it doesn't need a script (isn't the retrograde level of morvern and lana's conversation a comment on the dead boyfriend's literacy?) and is in fact the closest thing i've seen to a silent movie in some time. but for those viewers who were unable to understand the accents, watch it again and listen closely, and maybe you'll get it. if not, i recommend watching more non-american cinema. there's some good stuff out there.

mmmm, interesting. saw this & battale royale at a festival, and of the two, this was the more disturbing by far. it doesn't really matter that you don't actually see a student's groinal area getting tenderised with a baseball bat, or another student having a drink can wedged into his mouth before the gang leader stomps on his head - the screaming and the scattered teeth are enough. battale royale's camp qualities & tomato sauce (ketchup for US readers) undercut any identification with real, actual, terrorising highschool-type terror... i gather from this site that battale royale has not been released in the states. where are your priorities, o america fair?

anyway, this is supposedly a rant on blue spring. this girl is very, very glad she's not a student at a japanese highschool, it all seems awfully bleak and graffiti-covered. but fabulous to watch (and the failed baseball player is delicious, for those of you who like school uniforms.) it's occasionally emotive and over-played, but blue spring makes its points about adolescent (and adult) despair with economy and nice lighting. & i particularly liked the way the thrash japanese rock score sometimes plays in the characters' heads & drowns out any attempt at communication...

Life is complicated. So is goodness. So, often, is evil. "Divided we fall" (one of the comments on this film points out that the Czech title translates as "Divided we stand", which illustrates the point better) demonstrates this simple yet surprisingly-rare-in-movieland concept with mordant, slapstick wit, painstakingly intelligent drama, and suspense.

This is only incidentally a Holocaust drama (which, normally, I boycott). It's more of a 'what if?' movie. What if you or I were faced with the situations and choices of the characters in this movie - even Horst's or Herr Klepke's choices? What would we do? Would we proceed with as much humanity, courage, and forgiveness? I hope so.

I saw these three films as a triple bill at the NFT in London. Margaret Tait was an experimental film-maker who spent most of her life in the Scottish highlands and the Orkneys, where she was born, and as a result shot her idiosyncratic films largely in isolation. She died in 1999 and the NFT has recently shown a retrospective of her short films, documentaries and feature.

"Aerial" is a 4 minute silent film, telling the seasons over in a variety of colour washes. Pretty, but not as potentially absorbing as "Land Makar". In this film, Tait followed the daily farming routine of her neighbour (Mary Sinclair, from memory) from spring to autumn. The camera reproduces very accurately the infinite shift of variations on a theme of the farming life, never going beyond the fields around the house, the pond, and the house itself. It is beautiful, in the sense that the known object, painfully laboured over, is beautiful, and Tait's achievement is in putting this across. But I couldn't understand a word of the accompanying monologue by the farmer (in her native Orcadian accent). I was so frustrated by what I was missing on the soundtrack that I found it hard to concentrate on the screen alone.

"The Big Sheep" was the most accessible of the three. Part historical curiosity (for me, antipodean child of the late 20th century) and part elegy, it's a wordless account of the drifting away of the rural population of Sunderland in the late 60's. Tait's technique is to linger on a place or an activity - a stretch of road solely populated by tourist coaches on their way to John o' Groats; a succession of cabers tossed; sheep wandering through roofless stone bothies - until the desired impression has settled into the layers of the subject's brain, at which point she moves on to the next set of images. Timing is all. Tait's timing here suggests the gentle swaying of seaweed in the current, or the careful self-contained stream splashing down its bed from the highlands to the sea, the image which closes the film: film-making that is so richly endowed with a sense of the particular that it asks the big questions.

Clumsy melodrama or pure tragedy? Shite or triumph? Opinions and reviewers are polarized on this one: I found it one of the most powerful films I've ever seen. In a series of jerky cuts Von Trier's freely-edited Dogme camera appears to eavesdrop on Selma's life, while the loose & compelling musical scenes with their crane shots and saturated light whip the viewer off into Selma's soul, establishing the gap between 'reality' and 'fantasy' and (therefore) the artifice of the whole enterprise. Here art does not conceal art but reveal it. In other words, you know you're watching a movie. But as a result, Von Trier has tapped into something simple & deeply distressing. It's an extraordinary means of exposing the mechanics & the seams of film-making in a film that turns out to have a seamless heart.

Perhaps a little too much, in fact. It's fun, it's sweet, it's sometimes inspired, the bleached, golden landscapes owe a lot to a nostalgia that for a non-American audience is instantly recognizable and therefore (I assume) pays a debt to fiction than historical reality, the music is great (clocking both Alan Lomax recordings from the period & intelligent country greats like Gillian Welch, Alison Krauss & Emmy-Lou Harris in the sirens' song) and the performances are fine: Holly Hunter is never less than a delight. But 'O Brother, Where Art Thou' displays very little of the sardonic humour of 'Fargo' or 'Raising Arizona', or the technical perfection of the comedy in 'The Big Lebowski' (surely one of the absolute best comedies of the last decade). This film is a lift, but it's a purely temporary one.

Go see, though, it might not be up to their previous standard but it's still a Coen brothers movie.

Kaurismaki is nothing if not an efficient director. The stylistic elements of 'The Match Factory Girl' are distilled, like the vodka that is drunk throughout, to produce an intense and disturbing effect. Much of the action goes on outside the characteristically static camera frame, and Kati Outinen's deadpan face conveys a correspondingly broad range of expressions (she is excellent at signalling imminent vomiting without appearing to twitch a muscle). It's a film that moves on and out with the minimum of movement and dialogue, and its downwards pull is mesmerising. It's also bitterly funny. Late in the film the main character, Iris, approaches the shop counter and asks for a bottle of rat poison, to which the reply is: 'Small or large?'

I was fairly low when I saw this film. I came out feeling marvellous. Another triumph for the relief to be found in misery, a paradox which Kaurismaki cheerfully exploits in his dark, tragic & hilarious films.