Coastal (2024): review 2/10

 *

Documentary following Neil Young on tour.

He sits on a bus, as do members of his crew, and some of whom give interviews which are of no interest whatsoever. 

There is some likeable concert footage. Young`s songs are very good, of course. It is in black and white (oh so arty).

Uninspired and lazy film, for fans only. I give 2/10 because I am a fan, and can`t bear to accept that anything with Neil Young  it should deserve less.

Winners (2022): review: 2/10

 *

Iranian/British (Scottish) film  about recovering a lost Oscar statue near a dump and scrap merchants.

The film meanders, losing focus: boring. The child actors, as is typical, are tiresome. The characters have no relationships. It is impossible to care abut them or their dilemmas. 

Through sentimental devices the film attempts to be a celebration of cinema, but this is merely irksome.

The landscapes, however, are enjoyable to see, and for this the film gets a 2 stars.

 Reviewers often give these flabby, overlong Iranian films a free pass, and f you look online it is very generously treated. If it were a Hollywood film it would be ripped to shreds, or not reviewed at all.

The Departed (2006): review: 2/10

Men, of Irish descent and various ages, behave unspeakably in Boston. The  focus is on two new police recruits: one is commissioned to act as a mole withing a criminal organisation lead by a particularly nasty hoodlum. His bosses are no cute kittens either. In contrast, the only notable woman in the film, a police psychiatrist, is all quite nice however. It`s a pity we couldn't spend more time with her instead of those Mick brutes!

The film is very long but despite this length the characters hardly develop at all, and remain completely two-dimensional. There is a good deal of violence, using guns, fists and shoes and pieces of metal.

The film plot is not especially complex, but nonetheless it is hard to follow. The film is not elegantly paced.

The  violence is relentless and boring. Are we supposed to enjoy or endorse the violence? It`s hard to care either way.

I don't sense that Scorcese has the feel for Irish culture, that he has for Italian. There are none of the poetic aspects that can be seen in other Scorcese films which, if also violent, have considerably more artistic and emotional complexity. I don`t understand why the Rolling Stones are playing in much of the film.  The acting is not interesting. This is partly due to the uninterestingness of Wahlberg and Damon, though Nicholson`s character also lacks richness. Moreover, relations within the film are characterised by obviousness.

Wicker Park (2004): review 2/10

Chicago: a man sees a former partner in a cafe and, intrigued, delays an important business trip to China to investigate.


The piece begins well enough, successfully creating suspense, but, gosh!, after that the plot becomes so convoluted it would be quite impossible for any sane person follow it for the rest of the film.

Skyfall (2012): review: 2/10

A list of M15 Agents has been stolen: the thief is publishing the names online. Bond returns from a failed mission in Istanbul and is charged with stopping further publication of the names on the list.

The film includes scenes in Istanbul, Shanghai, Macao, London and the Scottish Highlands. The scenes in Istanbul are exciting, the others less so.

There is no new car but there are two attractive women, one Turkish the other English: neither reveal a great deal of flesh. I am not sure why not.

 Bond himself is quite good, gaunt and serious.

Sadly, however, at the centre of the film is an old  fat grey clucking hen, known as Judi Dench. The director, who has preachy inclinations, plainly wanted to turn the picture into a serious film: hence he attempts to cover such themes as remorse, aging, Britain's role in the world; additionally, Bond's character is implicitly psycho-analysed as that of a orphan. It is implied that he may have had homosexual experiences too. Also his enjoyment of alchohol is tut-tutted.

All this sententiousness would be intolerable even if the the film were competently written. It isn't, and moreover it misses the point about Bond totally, notably that we love Bond not because he as touchy-feely liberal values, but because he doesn't.

To Rome With Love (2012): review 2/10

The stories of various characters in Rome, including a young architect and his older correspondent, a music producer and and opera singer played by Benigni.

It feels as if Allen made up this film as he went along, trusting to fate or depending on cliche to guide him. The pacing is awful, the jokes sink.  Allen himself is irritating, as is Benigni and one leaves the film grateful for the end.

The film fails to celebrate Rome, or even American presumptions about it, as Allen's previous Parisian film managed to do.

Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (2009): review: 2/10

A journalist decides to pursue a District Attorney, whom he believes has been falsifying evidence to win convictions. He has a personality-free girlfriend whose happens to work for the DA too.

A film that plods helplessly along, failing to entrance at all, featuring implausable characters and zero wit.

It is also lacking in atmosphere and has an annoying glossiness about it.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998): review: 2/10

A journalist and a lawyer drive to Las Vegas where they stay in a hotel which is hosting a police conference.

Other people's drug experiences are never interesting or funny: this film spends spends two hours hammering this point home.

An Englishman in New York (2010): review: 2/10

Quentin Crisp is in New York where his individualism and wit make him popular, until he upsets people by describing AIDS as a "fad". His editor friend, for whom he writes reviews, tries to persuade him to retract his remark.

The film also traces Crisp's friendship with a young painter.

The film is not unenjoyable, but it is not good either: Hurt's performance is heavy going, arch and unsubtle, as if translated from the stage to the screen without consideration of the differences in the two media, and the other actors, especially Cynthia Nixon (of "Sex and the City"), are are two dimensional.
 

Choke (2008): review: 2/10

An actor on a colonial heritage visitor centre is addicted to sex. He attempts to find out who his real father is by visiting his demented mother in a mental institution: she is relucatant to help him.

Although the film has flashes of comic excellence, it lacks a core and meanders hopelessly.

Eat, Pray, Love (2010): review: 2/10

A narcissistic woman, played by Julia Roberts (whose mouth is incredibly wide) leaves her husband, then proceeds to Italy to eat, to India to pray and to Bali to discover love.

Stange, overlong offering which illustrates the self-obsession of contemporary western women without analysing it, and which features pretty, if obvious, touristic imagery of various places and a pleasant soundtrack.

The Infidel (2010): review- 2/10

A Muslim London Taxi driver discovers that his birth parents are Jewish: meanwhile his son intends to marry the daughter of an extremist Islamic cleric.

There is enough material here for a very fast, funny short film, but instead we get a lengthy one in which cultural cliche after cultural cliche is labouriously worked through.

This is simply too narrow, and unsurprising a basis for comedy, which should at some point has to touch more closely on observed experience.

Omid Djalili does his best but even his energetic performances cannot save the film from tedium.

Dogfight (1991): review- 2/10

Marines on leave in San Francisco, prior to leaving for Vietnam, invite girls they find unattrarctive to a party for an "ugliness contest".

The main protagonist, however, decides that he actually likes the girl he invited.

The protagonist is callow and his change in attitude to his invitee is not really explained, and the film seems mostly to be a justification of nastiness.

Hot Tub Time Machine (2010): review- 2/10

*

Four friends mysteriously return to the 80s and a winter holiday resort and festival they attended as teens.

The film raises, and fails to resolve, various issues about the disappointments of life, instead seeking to divert through rapid pacing and gross humour.

Half Nelson (2006): review- 2/10; Misery porn

The film portrays the relationship between a school history teacher with a drug problem and a pupil at the black school where he works.

The self destructive teacher, who regards himself as a great philospher, is generally unlikable; his charges are not especially interesting either. There isn't much of a plot.

Moreover, everyone dresses badly and speaks a debased form of English. The teacher's apartment and lifestyle are squalid. We aren't offered any explanation for this, so it's hard to forgive.

The film is pretentious, and aims at profundity by intersplicing images of footage from the Civil Rights movement, but really it is nothing more than "misery porn".

"Misery porn" is largely a wickedness of the British, who took great delight in filming scenes of proletarian nastiness in their Kitchen Sink dramas of the 50s and 60s. More recently, Mike Leigh has attempted, dismally, to add a comic twist to these; Ken Loach has added extra "authenticity" by filming ordinary people in roles instead of trained actors.

Recently, Americans have managed to master the genre, most entertainingly in Precious (2009) in which an mountainous black girl steals chicken McNuggets and is raped by her father. She turns out to have a sepcial gift for Maths: highly reccomended.

Postcards from the Edge (1990): review - 2/10

A cocaine-snorting actress is given a role on a film on condition that she lives with her alchoholic and domineering mother, who is also given to melodrama and self-pity.

There are far too few good jokes and cameo performances in this film to relieve the irritatingness of the main charaters- who are extremely shallow- and it drags on and on, rudderless, displaying that self-indulgence that often afflicts films about actors or film-making.

Great Expectations (1998): review- 2/10

2/10 (one star for Gwyneth's bottom)

A Floridan painter, of low social origins, is romantically fixated by a snooty rich girl he met as a child.

He goes to New York to succeed as an artist, and where he tries to get her to have sex with him. Apart from being snooty she has no personality whatsoever but that doesn't bother him because she is good-looking in that insipid way that seems to entrance some people...

A contemporary US take on Dicken's novel, laboured in all scenes.

WARNING: some scenes in this film feature Francisco Clemente's paintings.

The Cider House Rules (1999): review- 2/10

In Maine: an orphanage, an abortionist and his assistant. The assistant decides to leave the orphange to "make himelf useful": he picks apples.

This is a dawdling, pretentious film that fails to deal with the issues it raises about abortion and identity.

It is also extremely boring.

Smoke (1995): review- 2/10

Talk based picture centred round Keitel's cigar shop in New York and the characters who pass through there.

The film is in-necessarily slow, and becomes boring. This is for various reasons but:

1. The plot does not contain sufficient tension; indeed it just seems to be made up arbitrarily as it goes along. Ergo, it's boring. This is not the same as slow.

2. Harvey Keitel is the only one who can really hold the screen, and the characters are too blank to sustain sympathy.

3. Lighting and scenography aren't used with any imagination- thie film has the washed out look of a cheap tv soap and lacks atmosphere. Where is the use of music also? We want more than a few bars of Tom Waits.

4. The interlacing of lives is too contrived and it's hard to sense that the young black man is really in danger.

5. Lacks the sense of existential revelation which, I think , must play a part in all good art- certainly the existential art Noir-esque of Auster. That is to ask, where is the sense of magic, or the question, what lies beneath it all?

It's peculiar that these difficulties should have arisen from a Paul Auster penned film, given how very well he does atmosphere and narrative and existential questions in his books.

Il y a longtemps que je t'aime / I've loved you so long (2008): review- 2/10

A murderess returns from prison to live with her sister and become rehabilllitated into French middle-class provincial life.

It features all the cliches of "serious" cinema and is ponderous and dull beyond words.