Unfinished Business, Part I

I'm running about 120 films behind schedule, so it's time to get back on track. I'll start in this post, with the worst of the bunch.

Big Nothing (Jean-Baptiste Andrea, 2006)
Uninspired crime caper in which the talents of Simon Pegg and David Schwimmer resoundlingly fail to shine forth.

Casino Royale (Martin Cambell, 2006)
Dreary mess of a film in which the makers of Bond desperately attempt (a) to keep pace with the two more recently successful J.B.s (Jack Bauer and Jason Bourne); and (b) to cash in on the recent boom in the popularity of Texas Hold 'Em, which results in a massively inaccurate representation of the game itself, along with lashings of ridiculous "let's-talk-explicitly-about-what's-happening-so-that-the-audience-understands" dialogue.

The Constant Gardener (Fernando Meirelles, 2005)
Run-of-the-mill political thriller.

Crash (Paul Haggis, 2004)
Strange film in which everyone seems to be completely obsessed by racial issues (see also Munich, discussed below). Watchable, but hard to see the point (assuming that the point is supposed to be more than simply: "Wouldn't it be nice if everyone wasn't racist?"). Earnest, maybe, but ultimately just plain silly.

Date Movie (Aaron Seltzer, 2006)
Perhaps I chuckled once or twice, but this scrapes the very bottom of the 'spoof movie' barrel.

Epic Movie (Jason Friedberg & Aaron Seltzer, 2007)
The bottom of the barrel having been scraped clean away, we're now just digging down into the dirt and shit beneath.

Expiry Date (Karen Bird, 2006)
It's not every day that you see a Welsh comedy-horror film. If this puerile piece of shit is anything to go by, then we should all be thankful for that.

The Family Stone (Thomas Bezucha, 2005)
To be honest, nothing much about this film has stuck in my memory, other than the fact that the characters are all smackable twats whose conception of the logical space of possible political stances is primitive, dogmatic, and parochially American.

Gadkie Lebedi (aka Ugly Swans) (Konstantin Lopushansky, 2006)
Overly pretentious Russian sci-fi with plenty of atmosphere but nothing substantial to offer beyond vaguely sketched metaphors. (The book on which it's based may be better, but I honestly don't know.)

Heart of America (Uwe Boll, 2003)
I've seen three different post-Columbine high-school massacre films, and two of them were superb (Elephant and Zero Day). As Meat Loaf said, two out of three ain't bad; unlike this film, which was very bad indeed.

Inosensu: Kōkaku Kidōtai (aka Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence) (Mamoru Oshii, 2004)
Boring anime sequel about robots, or something.

The Lives of the Saints (Chris Cottam & Rankin, 2006)
There's no story here at all, just a vague idea for one. For the first 60 minutes, it seems like it might go somewhere; but this is merely an illusion which dissipates over the final 30 minutes, leaving only the cold realisation that people actually fund pointless shit like this.

La Marche de L'Empereur (aka March of the Penguins) (Luc Jacquet, 2005)
I disliked this for two reasons: first, the subject matter has already been covered with greater competence (by, e.g., Attenborough's Life in the Freezer); second, the interpretation and explanation of the penguins' behaviour is naively anthropomorphic and shockingly non-scientific. The tagline says it all, really: In the harshest place on Earth, love finds a way.

Munich (Steven Spielberg, 2005)
I don't feel qualified to comment on the relationship between this film and the historical events on which it's based. And I don't have anything to say about the politics of it all; then or now. I disliked it because of the characters, who are depressingly obsessed with issues of race, and whose self-conceptions are defined entirely by their own racial origin.* A set of cunts, the lot of them. The only thing that kept me going - throughout the excruciating two and three-quarter hours duration - was the hope that I might get to see a few of them die horribly (no joy there either, unfortunately; a few of them do indeed die, but not sufficiently horribly).

[*I suppose that this comment on the characters could be interpretable as a comment on the history or politics of the situation. Either way, that's not my intention. My reaction to the characters would have been the same had it been a work of pure fiction.]

Point Break (Kathryn Bigelow, 1991)
This was shown on TV a while ago, and I watched it out of curiosity, since it was so heavily referenced in Hot Fuzz. Prior to this, I'd had no inclination to watch it, because I'd assumed it would be shit. And I was right.

Rescue Dawn (Werner Herzog, 2006)
Considering that this is the work of a world-renowned director, it's very disappointing. It's a plain, simple, straightforward Vietnam POW escape story. It's neither badly directed nor badly acted; it's just dull, and rather old-fashioned (I mean, seriously, who makes Vietnam films these days?). If you edited in a couple of scenes featuring the main character's family, and coloured the credits in yellow, then you could easily mistake it for a made-for-daytime-TV melodrama with a housewife-heartstring-tugging title along the lines of Mommy, When Is Daddy Coming Home?

Serenity (Joss Whedon, 2005)
God-awful rip-off of various aspects of the Star Wars films in conjunction with several other well-worn sci-fi elements, to be duly fawned over by Joss Whedon's fuck-witted Buffy-loving army of inexplicably existent fans.

Syriana (Stephen Gaghan, 2005)
So tedious I can't remember a god-damned thing about it. Even after reading a few online synopses, my memory remains steadfastly blank. Apart from Clooney's beard. That, I do remember. Unfortunately, a well-remembered beard doth not a memorable movie make.

Thank You For Smoking (Jason Reitman, 2005)
Some films based on books seem to scream: THIS IS A SCREENPLAY ADAPTED FROM A NOVEL! I'm not always exactly sure why this is, but I guess it often has to do with the presence of narration-heavy sequences of fast-edited no-dialogue shots. You can almost feel the hand of the screenwriter at work, struggling to transform a story told in an essentially linguistic medium into a story told in a principally visual medium. As far as I'm concerned, this is a mark of cinematic failure. It's a shame, because this film does feature a few very funny scenes, especially one where tobacco industry spin-doctor Nick Naylor discusses with movie producer Jeff Megall a possible product-placement deal:

Megall: Sony has a futuristic sci-fi movie they're looking to make.
Naylor: Cigarettes in space?
Megall: It's the final frontier, Nick.
Naylor: But wouldn't they blow up in an all oxygen environment?
Megall: Probably. But it's an easy fix. One line of dialogue. 'Thank God we invented the ... you know, whatever device.'

36 Quai des Orfèvres (aka Department 36) (Olivier Marchal, 2004) I'd heard that this was like a French version of Heat but, as we all know, you shouldn't believe everything you hear. Heat is one of the best films ever made. This isn't.

Unrest (Jason Todd Ipson, 2006)
Stupid story about a cursed cadaver ending up in a medical school. Not in the least bit scary. I've felt more tension waiting to hear a valuation on the Antiques Roadshow.

V for Vendetta (James McTeigue, 2005)
Sort of like The Crow crossed with Equilibrium, but not as good as either. The main character is thoroughly annoying, and the politics are too facile to be worthy of serious discussion.

Volver (Pedro Almodovar, 2006)
This could have been interesting, but it all added up to nothing much in particular. I've had it with Almodovar. All his films are disappointing slices of nothingness. Verdict: do NOT vote for Pedro.