Two films in one night. What a rebel.

Last night, I saw two films – one at the cinema (it’s been a while) and one at home (it really hasn’t been a while). The first was Gran Torino, and I’m in two minds as to whether it was any good or not. It’s the sort of film that produces a sort of schizophrenia – one persona shakes its head, brow furrowed, wagging a finger at Clint Eastwood for becoming a bit self-parodying and artistically invalid, and the other is the hedonistic side that basically accepts that it is an absolute stonker of a film.

If you’re not familiar, Eastwood plays an old racist man, alienated from his family who care more about the next paycheck than they do their own flesh and blood. A bunch of ‘gooks’ (or naturalised immigrants from Vietnam, for the sake of political correctness) move in next door, and Eastwood really doesn’t like them – to begin with. After he accidentally saves a boy named Thao’s life by forcing his attackers at gunpoint off his lawn (delivered with the trademark Eastwood lip-curling hatred, just a bit more ghoulish given his age) he and his whole extended family basically fall in love with him, giving him food and other crap that stops him from opening his front door. Initially, he hates them for this, as old racists do, but eventually warms to them and realises he has more in common with “these goddamn gooks” than he does his own family. In his old, embittered cynical way, he begins to love them with his cracked ex-cowboy Korean war hero heart. Meanwhile, being old and all that, he’s dying of cancer, providing a perfect existentialist backdrop to his heroic suicide mission to out the bad guys once and for all (by standing outside their house and pretending, in some Alzheimer’s-induced hallucination, that his hand is a rifle, only to be shot by the whole lot in front of a load of testifying witnesses). The problem with this film is that there are elements that are obviously meant to be heartwarming and sad (like the messianic, “ooh, I just sacrificed meself” pose he strikes when he dies) but the rest of the film is just so obvious that you can’t take it seriously. It’s basically Clint Eastwood’s last chance to do anything close to a cowboy film, and he’s done that superbly. Just don’t expect any element of catharsis, because there just isn’t any.

The other, wildly contrasting film was Into The Wild, which I’ve been raving about for a while but only got round to seeing last night. If you flick down below this post, you can see the trailer, and perhaps you’ll begin to see why I loved it so much – the character (played adorably by Emile Hirsch) Christopher McCandless, up until the point where he dies of starvation in the middle of Alaska (silly boy) has such a strong, outdoorsy spirit that I’d hope to aspire to. I’ve said it before, but this film basically encapsulates tragedy and absolute fulfilment of one’s desires, especially given it’s told from a dual perspective – that of McCandless himself, and his sister, Carine. It’s based on a true story, but that’s to an extent irrelevant, as it’s a masterwork in filmmaking by itself – Sean Penn was the director (and writer of the screenplay, if I remember rightly), and while his acting career may have taken a bit of a dip before Milk (excellent, but I’ve raved about that before) he proves to be just as good behind the camera as in front of it.

All in all, two very good films – one because it’s a subtle yet magnificent riot, and the other because it’s fantastic to watch in that hazy, no-end-to-ambition mood I usually reach at about one in the morning.

Tomorrow, I’m up early so I can get tickets for three plays at the Royal Exchange Theatre (in Manchester): Widowers’ Houses, Eat Me and The Pianist. The first one’s just part of the theatre season and I know nothing about it (but it’s £4 so who gives a toss), the second is a one-man show at The Studio (their little mini theatre in the same building) as part of the Queer Up North… thing, and the latter is part of the Manchester International Festival, and looks to be brilliant – at least, it’d better be, given that it’s costing as a whole £10.50 more.

I might buy a book this weekend, too. I’ve got a bit more disposable income than usual, which is nice. Either that or alcohol, but it doesn’t look like I’m going to have much time for that, given that my main opportunity for socialising this weekend involves two extreme cynics and a depressive. I may pass it up.

Back to the Future Part III - a note/review

In addition to Aladdin, tonight I watched Back to the Future Part III, a film that I last saw at the age of eight, when I hadn’t seen the first two, with the volume on impossibly low, from the back of a hall while a load of kids at the after-school club bickered and acted like twats. As you can imagine, despite my total concentration on the film, it made no sense to me whatsoever - it’s the sort of film that needs the dialogue to make sense.

When I started the film, I got three minutes in before realising I’d forgotten the entire plot up to now. I stopped it, waited to see if anything would come to me, nothing did, I carried on. It took a while before I realised that the Emmett Brown in 1955 was the Emmett Brown of 1955, and that the Emmett Brown that’d been travelling all over the place and taking up the second movie was back in the 1800’s. This, if you’ve watched the film, is a pretty crucial thing to realise.

Once that was resolved, though, it’s a bloody good film. I’ve got a thing about Westerns - they’re fun, but film can’t get away with something so ridiculous nowadays. For a film made in the nineties, then, this definitely does. It’s definitely part of a trilogy - the references to Parts I and II are pretty abundant - but at the same time, it stands out - perhaps because the second film prepared us to be zipping about all over the place (it spends the time about half and half in both the future and the alternate present, not to mention the ordinary present), and then we’re given a film that is, no matter how it’s set up, a Western. Start to finish, with a little bit of fifties preamble.

So, like apparently a fair few others, I’ll concede that this is probably my favourite Back to the Future movie, having now finally seen all three.

So that’s the original Star Wars trilogy and the Back to the Future films done. What next? Ah yes, The Godfather….

Things are going to get dark from here on in.

Note: if you’re wondering if I’m getting a little bit obsessed with films, and if I might be watching them at the expense of having a life, then you’re absolutely right. Fuck you.

I ♥ I ♥ Huckabees

Just seen it, and I’m impressed. It also made me wonder if I should be doing something with this tumblelog, something more than just writing about my daily worries.

Any film where Jude Law actually pulls off an accent is impressive by itself, but the theme of the film in general - how romanticism and nihilism are both too pure to be right, and how there are facets of both that actually make sense in reality. And the fact that the film did this while restraining itself from being utterly pretentious impressed me. Even Jason Schwartzman wasn’t aggressively annoying as the protagonist.

I don’t know why exactly, but that film’s made me feel good. And that, in itself is good - not that I’m content, but that I’m feeling something. Everything’s been a bit monochrome lately.

Paranormal Lack of Activity

Paranormal Activity, contrary to the 83% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, is a really shitty film.

I’ll be absolutely honest - when we were walking along, in the rain, to see this film, I was more than a little apprehensive. This is a film that people have come out of saying they’re terrified. Steven Spielberg famously returned the disc of the fillm to Dreamworks in a binbag, not because he thought it was crap, but because he thought it was haunted. And I think there, we’ve hit the nail on the head.

If you believe in ghosts, demons, psychics, “the other side”, or anything spooky like that, Paranormal Activity will probably scare you, just as The Blair Witch Project probably did. In fact, in terms of character development, realism and boob size, Paranormal Activity supercedes its obvious relation. It’s a pretty cool storyline. But it’s not scary. It’s silly. Whether it’s the powdered footprints of the “demon” (which look like the footprints of Big Bird from Sesame Street, or the ridiculous scene where “Katie” (the one who ends up possessed by aforementioned demon) is dragged out of bed by an invisible presence, it’s more funny than scary. Perhaps it’s because I refuse to let myself get involved with horror films. Even with Drag Me To Hell, which is easily this year’s best horror film (if there is one), I was laughing in the build-up to each shock, just because it’s all so silly. It’s the curse of being a sceptic - even terrible, mutilating acts in film are made ridiculous as soon as you introduce an “other”, as it loses all sense of feasibility.

So perhaps it’s not shitty, as I opened by saying. It is funny, and it is a little silly. But it tries to pass itself off as something it isn’t - a genuine, creepy horror film - and in that respect, from my perspective and probably many of the British public’s perspective, it fails to meet the mark. In America, where 40% of the public still believe that a magic space-daddy built the Earth in seven literal days, put two naked people in who had no biological urge to fuck until a snake fed them an apple and then they discovered Victorian modesty, there’s probably a bigger scope for what people see as “possible” in this film. It’s just not quite right for a sceptic - in the end, the tedious bedtime scenes end up dulling the actual “scary” events.