drive (d nicolas refn, w hossein amini)

It's been almost a week since I saw Drive and the predominant memory is not the violence or Gosling's assured performance or the beautifully rendered love story or even the eurotrash score. It's the shocking pink font used for the titles and credits.

This pinkness lends a neon brashness to proceedings from the start. It has the feel of a directorial flourish. As though to suggest that nothing we see needs to be taken too seriously. It also has the feeling of a foreigner's take on LA: bright party colours and recklessness. There's a moment in the film when Albert Brooks' gangster says that he used to be in the film business years ago. He describes the films he made, films which sound suitably commercial for a gangster boss, and at the end he says: they used to call them European. It feels as though Refn's Drive is fulfilling that same brief: a Hollywood notion of what a European film might be, in their dreams. (Not the Europeans).

Refn, with his flair for mood and violence, feels like the kind of European who'd fit in well in Hollywood. Which isn't an insult. If Drive is essentially 'noir' it's easy to forget now that that style, later re-appropriated by the Europeans, was developed in the US by exiles, the likes of Fritz Lang, Wilder, Siodmak etc. The city is reduced to a grid wherein human passions are worked out with all their dramatic implications. LA, with its lack of recognisable landmarks, is the perfect laboratory. Gosling spends his time driving through anonymous streets. There's no hint of where he comes from. He's a perfectly alienated twenty first century being. The first thing that appears to give any meaning to his life is the appearance in it of the gamine Irene, another apparent drifter.

On many levels therefore, Drive might be seen as a cynical movie. The throwaway violence, the rootlessness, the pink font: it's as though the hyper-smart Refn is both showing off with his technical acumen and also suggesting that this is basically a Hollywood B-movie and we shouldn't take it too seriously. (I'd even include the way he directs Gosling in this, for all the plaudits the pair have received: to my mind it's almost a tongue-in-cheek performance, an homage rather than something rooted in any genuine feeling.) However, there's one aspect of the film which transcends everything else. Which is the love affair: not so much in that it happens, as it's a necessary plot requirement, but in the way in which it is portrayed. It's not often that you'll see a director pinpoint the mechanics of love as beautifully as Refn does in Drive. All of a sudden, his taciturn style pays dividends. Mulligan and Gosling barely speak to one another. Yet it's evident that each has transformed the other's life utterly. It's all in the not-said, even the not-done. There's one moment where she places her hand on his, and this tells you all you need to know.

So, underneath the cynicism, there lurks a romantic sensibility. I got the feeling throughout the film that Refn's directing was like watching a sportsman playing at half-pace. In his depiction of the love affair, it suddenly feels like he's moving up through the gears. The rest is functional and assured. You can't help wondering what kind of film Refn will make when he's really going for it; as well as wondering if he's so good at playing the system that he'll never really have to stretch himself.

kill list (d ben wheatley, w. wheatley & amy jump)

Kill List has received a fair amount of hype for a low budget brit-flick. There have been suggestions that this is the film to rescue UK cinema from its creative mediocrity. At one point, when our two heroes visit their employers looking to get out of their ill-fated contract, they ask what the job is really about. Someone tells them, that it's about "reconstruction". The word is carefully chosen, and would appear to suggest an echo of the British missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Jay and Gal were together in Iraq. Is this film a veiled political critique? What is its real agenda?

The film opens strongly. Jay is trying to adjust to life in suburbia with his wife and child. His best mate, Gal (a homage to Sexy Beast?) comes round for supper with his new girlfriend, the disarming Fiona. Wheatley's camera does a good job of capturing the dynamics of a long, boozy night. The evening is allowed to play itself out, with Jay losing his cool and then coming round, Gal comforting Jay's kid and wife and Fiona unphased by anything she sees. By the end of the night we know these characters inside out. We understand the off-beat but believable dynamics of their relationships. The film's restless editing style and floating camera keep the pace moving and lend the film a slightly documentary feel. (The scene reminded me a little of the opening to Trapero's Born and Bred.)

This doesn't feel like a film whose title is Kill List: it feels more subtle, more intricate and more ambitious. But this is the high water mark of the movie. The next stage moves towards more standard UK fare as Jay and Gal take on a new job. They're hitmen and they've been given a list of people: a priest, a librarian, an MP. The film mutates into McDonagh's In Bruges. Gal and Jay enjoy some lively repartee as they go about their violent and increasingly unhinged business. It's all a bit strange and slightly creepy, but with Jay's family out of the picture the dramatic tension diminishes. Then comes the last of the three movies within a movie. The denouement suddenly goes all Wicker Man. There's a lot of running around in tunnels. The people who've hired our heroes turn out to be leaders of a cult. Who do exactly what you'd expect from cult leaders: they make their followers wear funny art-designed straw masks and walk around in the nude in the middle of the night, as well as carrying out random executions for their and our entertainment. It's not going to end well for Jay, and whilst the filmmakers might have thought that the final reveal would be a shock, it feels about as surprising as the fact that Tony Blair turns out to be Murdoch's child's godfather.

In a way, Kill List seems to contain the good, the bad and the ugly of British cinema. Like so much of the cinema we make, it ultimately feels as though it's aspiring to cult status, rather than trying to tell a truthful story. This inevitably means that the film starts to feel like a video game, which is exactly what happens in the last 15 minutes. Somewhere along the line it seems as though someone lost their nerve. Perhaps the filmmakers, perhaps the financiers. The opening of Kill List suggests a film that might have the capacity to be genuinely unsettling. But it can't sustain this. Instead, it ends up trying too hard and resorting to too many clichés. There is considerable skill in the editing, the sound design, and the dialogue (some of which is credited to the actors themselves). It may even be that Kill List garners the cult following it so desperately seeks. But in the end it feels like it's seeking points for effort and ticking boxes. There may be a filmmaker of real vision at work there somewhere, but this isn't the film that proves his case.

inglorious basterds (w&d tarantino)

Tarantino's latest has received mixed reviews. A lot of critics have suggested that the film is some kind of nadir. I haven't seen Death Proof, nor the second part of Kill Bill, so I can't claim to have been following his career that closely. However I recently watched Reservoir Dogs again, and it's immediately evident from the film's opening scene what all the fuss was about; a fuss which was provoked primarily by one thing, which was dialogue, and another, which was the juxtaposition of dialogue with context.

Which might be another way of saying theatricality. Inglorious Basterds reminds us that Tarantino is the director who put theatre back into film. Even more than committing acts of seemingly gratuituous violence, a Tarantino character loves to talk. None more so than Pitt's Aldo Raine, who, in spite of talking about his love of Nazi killing, only finally does something violent in the very final scene of the film. The rest of the time he pouts and talks about the violence he intends or has intended to perpetrate. He's not much of a character, and Pitt seems a little lost in his skin, perhaps realising that a funny accent doesn't give him much to work with.

Instead, a couple of characters from the plot's secondary strand, Christoph Waltz and Melanie Laurent, steal the acting honours. Waltz, in particular, is given three stagey scenes in which he demonstrates his mastery of the Tarantino argot. Not many Hollywood directors can get away with a fifteen minute dialogue scene wherein nothing happens, but seeing as this is how the maestro's career was kick started, in the Reservoir diner, he's given leeway. What this produces is a very old fashioned kind of drama, of nuance, expression, and theatrical menace. It has its weaknesses, but probably because this sort of thing is so rare in Hollywood, its the strengths that shine through, and for people who've never seen a play, it's like he's inventing the wheel.

If the dialogue is as sharp as ever, the violence in Basterds feels even more laborious than usual. Like a signature the director is cursed to append to his work, ever since the ear went missing. The contrast between the verbosity of his scripts and viscerality of their violence has served him well, but in this instance it doesn't really feel like his heart's in it. The baseball bat scene, and Pitt's closing knife-wielding moment lack bravura or wit. Tarantino has always understood that violence is part of the language of drama, just as much as words, but the moments where it's employed in Basterds have little dramatic impact, and perhaps that's why they feel so hollow, bringing the film down rather than heightening it's effectiveness.

Most of these moments are reserved for the Pitt strands of the narrative. The other Shosanna strand has more weight, and it would appear that in the doomed relationship with Marcel, the director is hoping for some kind of pathos. It doesn't quite come off. Just as the two storylines never integrate effectively. Nevertheless, Tarantino's dialogue, and flair for a dramatic scenario, ensure that, even if it's only stuttering from set piece to set piece, the film is never dull, and is always ready to engage with its audience's intelligence. It also feels like, in the film within a film, there's an inherent critique of a crasser, action based cinema, the one the Nazi high command lap up as they watch the priggish Zoller pick off enemy after enemy in the film of his own deeds.

So, for my money, the film didn't deserve the brickbats of the critics. Nevertheless, in spite of its moments, it still left me with a slightly empty feeling. In particular the neurotically tacked on violence, which lends the overall project, with its hubristic reworking of history, the feel of being created by a child that just can't help showing off. One whose talent can seduce you for a while, but later leaves you wanting to send it to bed. Thinking that when it grows it up it might achieve remarkable things, but first it needs to get over the need to constantly remind its audience of its cleverness.

burn after reading (d. joel & ethan coen)

You can sort of see what they were trying to achieve. And if they'd pulled it off, it would have been great. A comedy thriller about paranoia set in Washington DC. Almost, as the poster suggests, Hitchcockian, and ripe for paranoid times. When Malkovich storms out of the meeting after being informed of his dismissal from the CIA Balkan office, he hollers, 'this is political' and for a fleeting moment I thought this was going to be a biting satire on Plamegate. Which someone should be making, and who better than the Coen brothers?

On second thoughts... There are various problems with Burn, which basically, to use the kind of language Malkovich and Swinton relish, fuck it up. Completely. Firstly the narrative isn't as clever as it thinks it is. The fact that Pitt (let's not even bother with the character names) blackmails Malkovich who's married to Swinton who's sleeping with Clooney who shoots Pitt has more of the feel of a Washington after dinner drinking game than a movie narrative. It would be more surprising if all these stars weren't going to be connected than that they are. At the end, the CIA chief meets the CIA underling and they talk about the mess that's been made, and how complicated it's become, and you can't help thinking: Nice try, chicos, but the truth is it's not that complex. To paraphrase their last movie, if this is the mess it won't really do until the next one comes along, you need to make it messier, now! The second problem is that the plot hinges on a notion of paranoia - everyone's paranoid and if they're not they should be. You can't see a black car without someone thinking it's an agent of Hades come to whisk them away. Except that, when there aren't any cars around, no-one seems very paranoid at all. Most of all Mr Clooney, who attempts to veer between laid-back, bearded George and eye-rolling, crazy George in the bat of an eyelid. The conclusion to be drawn from all this is that Clooney isn't and never will be Nicholson. Which is fair enough, as there's only room for one Nicholson in film-land, and George has other attributes. The last problem with the film, as the previous one implies, is the casting. Everyone's a star, they all seem to want to try to outshine one another. Which presumably made the film great fun to make, but a series of turns does not make for an integrated movie; it makes for something rather closer to panto. Something which one senses Malkovich has come to believe he was born for, ever since those people started running around his head and warping his actor-ego completely out of shape.

There's probably more problems. Not least of which that, once again, this doesn't really feel like a Coen brothers movie. It's neither strange enough nor dark enough, and doesn't have a charismatic performance from Badem to compensate. You know this because there's an exception that proves the rule - the moment when Malkovich takes an axe to the guy from Six Feet Under. It's shot from a distance, no close-ups, and for a brief moment Malkovich's psychosis seems completely believable. Not because of his performance, but because of the way the moment's filmed, with a cold terror lurking behind the everyday normality of a pretty suburban street in the capital of the Western world.

cloverfield (d. matt reeves)

When I was still a nipper at boarding school in Cheltenham, there was a fortnightly film screening in a big hall with plastic bucket seats. I have recollections of Oh! Mr Porter and Reach for The Sky. But the film that really sticks in my mind was The Omega Man. It affected many of the pre-teen audience so much they ran crying from the hall. It remained the most impactful Charlton Heston performance until his appearance in Bowling for Columbine.

The brains behind Cloverfield, JJ Abrams, is two weeks younger than me. He might have similar disturbed memories of the dystopian world of Omega Man. Even if he doesn't, he's smart enough to know that a well-made disaster flick is the apple of the commercial eye. The thing is, it has to be done differently. It needs a catch.

The star of Cloverfield is not an actor. It is the cinematographer, Michael Bonnevillain. The artfulness lurking behind the seeming artlessness of a gauche young man videoing the collapse of a city is highly skilled. If it really looked like something you or I might have filmed, it would have been unwatchable. As it is, the camera flirts with its audience, implying a banality which is deceptive.

Beyond the historical disaster flicks, Cloverfield's other source of inspiration is more pressing, and more scary. It's the jerky footage of dust storms billowing through Manhattan on the day the Towers came down. That footage has an immediacy which has helped to enbed 911 in popular consciousness, and there's no doubt that the filmmakers of Cloverfield have studied it carefully. The film is at its most compelling in the immediate, confused aftermath of the first 'attack', when pandemonium reigns and no-one knows what's going on. This is what we're viscerally reliving as we watch confused affluence running blindly for the Brooklyn Bridge. It's a vision of the potential hell which 911 showed the world, a time when mobile phones grind to a halt and looters steal televisions which will soon have nothing left to show.

As the reference to The Omega Man (or The War of the Worlds or Escape from New York, etc etc) indicates, dystopian fantasies are nothing new. We want to see the world brought to its knees, knowing that when we leave the cinema normality will cocoon us with its charms. There has been criticism of Cloverfield for the way it shows a slightly ludicrous King Kong-meets-Alien monster pottering around midtown. However, by the time the monster appears, the movie is already almost over. It's now about camerawork and denouement. The filmmakers wisely keep it as a short sharp rollercoaster and don't innundate the audience with plot or explanation. The hard work has already been done, the audience is hooked and will stay on for the ride. The neo-jerky camera work is ever-ready to spring a surprise should the tension flag.

Cloverfield is a brilliant but cynical piece of filmmaking. It reassures more than it disturbs, thrills more than it reveals. It's a film for the post-Playstation era, but it's sassy enough to tap into older cinematic myths, whilst riffing off contemporary phobias. It will fit into many a post-modern thesis and it might just scare the life out of a generation of ten to twelve year olds.

eastern promises (dir. cronenberg)

The film opens with a scene of dramatic violence. A barber tries to convince his son to cut his customer's throat. The son doesn't want to. The barber does it. The director shows the blood emanating from the great tear in the throat. The victim convulses and the audience flinches.

Cronenberg opens his movie with a scene of high drama. By the end, the drama has been extinguished. A child plays with its adopted family. A man sits in the restaurant he now controls. Their stories are far from over, but the film is moving on, and the credits roll.

This contrast between the implied dramatic weight of the film and the actual dramatic weight is curious. It could be interpreted as the director running out of steam, editing together a short cut ending because he wasn't sure how to finish it. However, the pace and the tone feel in keeping with the rest of the film, so it may be something else.

Increasingly, Cronenberg's films come to feel like fables. He has lost interest, if he ever had it, in the mechanics of plot. He creates characters who have a timlessness, belonging to timeless societies. The villains who arrive at the beginning of History of Violence could be from any stage of US history. They arrive like something out of a Western. The Russians from Eastern Promises belong to a secret criminal society that has a mythical, preternatural aura.

Cronenberg doesn't seem interested in the details of the drug smuggling the criminals are involved with. The revelation that Mortensen's character, Nikolai, is an undercover cop, seems incidental. He doesn't even seem interested in the brewing love affair between Mortensen and the fragrant Naomi Watts. What seems to fascinate him nowadays is the notion of how close the forces of anti-sociality, the secret codes of violence, are to our own society. How they are closer than we think, and when they arrive, they have no connection with the world as we see it, and their destructive power is incalculable.

Eastern Promises consciously pulls its punches. The audience knows this because we know how hard it can punch. The scenes of violence establish this - the throat cutting and the bath-house bloodbath. But just as we're anticipating the mother of all finales - it doesn't happen. The child survives and Naomi Watts sits in the garden wearing a pretty dress. Nickolai's takeover of his wing of the Russian mafia is painless, his mentor, Semyon, simply vanishes. It's like the Godfather with the ruthlessness implied but not demonstrated.

Cronenberg's movies no longer have the snap, crackle and pop of his earlier frightners. They are meditative works, where the violence has become a part of the scenery, rather than a means to a dramatic end. London is a grey, damp world in his movie, a land of no promise, and the forces of darkness are lurking, just around the corner.

control (dir. Anton Corbijn)

Control is a great title. It hits all the right buttons. The name of the film, also the name of a Joy Division song, encapsulates all that their music was about. Joy Division’s songs are pressure cookers. Ruled by a relentless rhythm, they contain seething emotion, the lid on the constant point of being blown off.

Control, the film, intimates that it’s aware of this. The beautiful, constrained cinematography buttons down the Mancunian gloom in black and white. The street Curtis lives in with his wife looks like something out of Coronation Street before colour TV. Sam Riley’s performance, as Curtis, is smouldering, restrained, hinting at something going on beneath the amiable blankness. Riley does everything asked of him, and does it with charisma, crucial for the role of an iconic pop star. His problem is that, in the end, not enough is asked of him, neither by script, nor, it would appear, director.

In order to understand why we’re watching a movie about this particular icon, it’s necessary for the script and film to scrape beneath the surface of the music’s sculptural rhythms. To understand the extent of Curtis’ suicidal distress, we need to see something of his power. One scene alone gives a glimpse, when he refuses to go on stage, is replaced for a song by a pale substitute, and then steps in, his performance alone capable of giving meaning to the music and making the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end. For a brief moment Curtis’s music, his weakness, his presence, and his epilepsy are welded into a fierce dramatic whole.

But that’s as close as we get. In the following scenes it’s back to the grindstone, his Belgian girlfriend cradling his head before his wife calls and he commits another lie. Rather than elucidating the hero’s mental instability, the protracted mess of his private life is turned into melodrama. Will he go with the winsome Belgian or stick with the homely Samantha Morton? By the end it seems even the writer is past caring; a pivotal scene of supposed significance within the affair (‘What’s your favourite colour?’ ‘Man City blue’) is tacked on long after it’s dramatic momentum should have kicked in, and Morton, his wife, on whose book the film is based, becomes a mumsy purveyor of stock lines. Neither character is fleshed out, and the film’s failure to explore their complexity short-changes Curtis’s dilemma and the true nature of his tragedy.

Finally, back to the music. In taking the decision to portray Curtis as an anthem to doomed youth, Control tends to ignore the thing that made him stand out. His music. Control makes little attempt to investigate the creative process of the song writing; how his ideas were melded into those barbed wire songs. Hook’s dry wit and Sumner’s quiet neuroticism are local colour for his love life, like the grey northern skies.

In the end the music on Control’s soundtrack, which is the reason the film has been made in the first place, has a depth of feeling which indicts the film for presuming to offer a rounded portrait of the singer, a portrait it doesn’t begin to pull off as well as the songs do themselves. The film shows the skin of the man, but it never manages to get underneath it.