Everybody to Kenmure Road (2026): review: 3/10

 *

Documentary tracing events in a Glasgow street when the Home Office attempt to arrest two foreign men, presumably for not having appropriate visas.

Neighbours and locals protest, successfully preventing their removal in a van. The crowds are joined by local politicians.

The documentary attempts to contextualise these events withing Glasgow`s history as a radical city.

The presentation of events is entirely celebratory. No effort is made to question the legitimacy of the collective action, or the reasons for the arrest of the two men: sentimentality prevails. 

The film is watchable, however, reminiscent somehow of Ealing films such as Passport to Pimlico.

Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939): review: 3/10

 *

Mr Smith is become a senator in a rural place in the USA. Naïve, he wants to use his mandate to set up camps for boys, failing to understand the depth of corruption and cynicism in Washington.

Very long, sentimental and only occasionally amusing, the film dawdles, utterly dated. 

It is only interesting because it is used as an occasional reference to aspects of American culture and society, usually political corruption, folksiness, popular heroism and the enduring Washington / provinces standoff.

Perks of Being a WallFlower (2012): review: 3/10

A young man with literary interests starts high school where, after a humiliating start, he makes some friends and begins his first romantic relationship with a bossy girl, despite a strong attraction to a more charming female member of his set who, alas, seems more interested in men who maltreat her- much like his sister.

The film begins sympathetically enough, but rapidly turns routinous with  stock characters, such as a standard issue flamboyant homosexual and various jocks. The direction is unimaginative and the soundtrack is obvious.

It compares badly to Donnie Darko.

Darling Companion (2012): review: 3/10

Mountainous middle class Colorado: two couples and the daughter of one sand a a missing dog. The search for the dog provides a vehicle for portraying their relationships.

All the characters in this film are tedious, the women especially so (the film might usefully be shown to young men as a warning of the perils of marriage) and the film takes itself very seriously indeed.  There is one promising scene featuring a goat, but alas this leads nowhere interesting.

2 Days in New York (2012): review: 3/10

A French photographer lives in New York with her black journalist and radio presenter boyfriend. Her relatives come to visit. There are various farcical culture clashes.

This is a Wood Allen style picture, but one lacking the necessary generosity: Delpy is more shrill than witty, and though there are occasional good individual set pieces overall the film stumbles.

The Break-up Artist (2009): review: 3/10

A girl runs an agency which helps young couples seperate. It suffers from competition from a rival agency and, losing clients, the heroine accepts a commission to re-connect a man with his ex. The man is an art teacher and is quite sensitive.

All this is narrated by a girl with one of those very squeaky nasal American accents.


Slick, somewhat charmless film, lacking the freshness of real life about it, and featuring many smug women: however I found it just about watchable.

Letters to Juliet (2010): review: 3/10

A girl with unusually large eyes, but who is otherwise quite insipid, works as a fact checker for the New Yorker (she is also a writer but she is too dull to send any of her work out). She has a fiancee whose lips are always oddly shiny, as if permenantly coated in vaseline. He is going to open a restaurant, and is plainly a little obsessed about this. He certainly isn't much interested in his blonde fact-checker, which isn't surprising given her utter dreariness.

They proceed to Tuscany for a sort of pre-maritial holiday where he spends his time in pursuit of fancy food-stuffs, while she meets an elderly woman who is in pursuit of an old flame from the fifties, and whom she decides to assist. She also meets the grandson of the old woman, who is an ill-mannered twerp (he is supposed to be from the snob-British classes but actually he sounds and looks like a German- quite badly cast). Nonetheless, perhaps predictably, they fancy each other though they are too straight and dull to exchange body fluids except for a little saliva on a lawn.

And so on and so forth...

For reasons which I cannot explain, this drivel is somehow watchable despite its manifest absurdity. I guess it's partly just because it doesn't take itself too seriously.

You Might as Well Live (2009): review: 3/10

*

Dissuaded from suicide, Robert R. Mutt is encouraged by his baseball hero to get money, a special ring, and a girl.

The film fails to create a sympathetic hero, Mutt having really no redeeming qualities other than a desperate persistence. Black comedy as relentless as this becomes is two dimensional, and seems to be driven by a desire to mock unfortunate people.

 However, the film works reasonably as a critique of provincial society (specifically Hamilton, Ontario) with it's low level drug dealers, low culture, lack of ambition, anti-paedophile protests and atmosphere of weariness.

*

Suddenly, Last Summer (1959): review: 3/10

A doctor is sent to meet an excentric rich widower, whose son recently was killed in Italy, in the hope that she endow a hospital with much needed funds. She wishes, however, that the doctor urgently perform a lobotomy on her niece, whom she argues is insane. It transpires that the niece knows a good deal about the events of her son's death than her aunt desires.

Playing the role of docotor-psychologist-detective, the surgeon investigates.

The film dates very badly in all respects: the psychological "theories" underpinning the work, the melodrama, and the florid speeches are all uncomfortable and often boring.

The actors all seem to have adopted different styles, from a sort of camp melodrama on the part of Hepburn, to Clift's much more naturalistic approach. The theatrical staging, including the denouement, is laughably corney, and it's unclear what the film is really for.

Elizabeth Taylor's waist is extraordinarily thin. For this, 3 points.

Everybody's Fine (2009): review: 3/10; table manners in American films

A retired widower attempts to visit his grown children, travelling across the USA, to discover that he has been given a false immpression of their lives.

The films contains elements of the road movie, and is a sort of right of passage film, showing shifts in attitude and expectation  taken by different generations.  The film is also, I suspect, about American decline and disappointment, as Americans learn to live with diminished world status and reduced  individual chances of achieving the American Dream.

The film offers glimpses of these themes, but does little to grapple with them, instead washing us over with sentimentality, providing lazy solutions to the various relationship crises described. All this is underscored by syrupy music.

 *

As so often in American films, the characters have terrible table manners, speaking with their mouths full and biting food off the prongs of their forks with their moths open, leaning over their plates or slouching with their elbows on the table (Julia Robets is particularly guilty of these offences). In "Everybody's Fine" the dismal manners of a brattish child become a focus for one of the conflicts in the film.

These atrocious table manners can be seen in films showing Americans of all social classes, but seem most striking among their middle classes. It's a form of arrogance: they think that because they are wealthy they are above regarding the feelings of others and has a sartorial equivelent in the way they inisistantly dress casually even in formal situations. However, they haven't yet started, I think, to swear as is now common among the British upper middle classes (see the Guardian Newspaper)- or maybe they have, but it is censored from films.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007): review: 3/10

The last days of Jesse James and his gang, which largely focusses on the behavious of his young follower Robert Ford.
The story is told through a series of mumbling encounters in wintry Missouri.


The film can be judged a failure for the following reasons:


1. Pacing painfully slow.
2. Lack of examination of character and motive, with the exception of Robert Ford's, which is dwelt on to the point of exhaustion.
3. Few exciting moments: remarkable given that this is a gangster film.
4.  Pitt's silly hamster smirk throughout.
5. The cinematography is beautiful, especially in the train robbery scene but this is not, in itself, enough to justify such a long film.

The Seventh Seal (1957): review- 3/10

A knight, returns to Plague-ridden Sweden with his squire, where he plays chess with Death.

Beautifully filmed but very dull: like walking in quicksand.

The reason it is boring is that the characters are merely symbolic, they seem not to have real relations with each other, so identifying with any of them is well-nigh impossible.

Moreover, the film is structured as a run of very staged theatrical set-pieces, a style of filmaking certain to induce extreme tedium.

Some of these set-pieces are supposedly humourous- but it is the sort of "humour" one gets in the theatre and which never induces any spontaneous laughter.

All the Pretty Horses (2000): review- 3/10

Two Texan youths ride to Mexico to seek work. On the way they are joined by a third, a fugitive.

They work on a horse ranch: one of the Texans makes the mistake of falling for the wealthy ranch-owner's daughter, played by tiresome Penelope pucker-lips Cruz.

If the film has central themes, they are "friendship" or "foreignness": however, it is too blandly directed to excite.

Land and Freedom (1995): review- 3/10

A girl discovers letters and clippings among the posessions of her recently deceased grandfather. These tell the story of his involvement, as a young communist, with the fight against Fascist forces in the Spanish Civil War and his increasing sense of disillusion.

At the heart of the film is a lengthy political debate among villagers and combatants: this is little more than an exchange of slogans. Indeed, the whole film suffers from naivity and fails to examine the issues behind the Spanish Civil War or to show why a young working-class Liverpudlian with no Spanish or combat experience would take the extraordinary step of going to fight in the Spanish Civil War.

As so often in Loach films, the acting is often weak, and the film fails as a simple character study.

Funny Girl (1968): review- 3/10

A langourous Cinderalla fantasy, albeit without the ugly sisters, and therefore twee. Contains some memorable songs.

Streisland plays a woman who is, in turns, exasperating, rude, irritating, uneducated, materialistic and absurd . She meets an effete, occasionally successful, gambler of uncertain European origins and they have a relationship, later a marriage.

It illustrates the fantasy of every egotistical female of average looks that, despite themselves, they might be feted.

Jesus Camp (2006): review- 3/10

3/10

Children from Indiana are sent to a North Dakota where they are bullied by two obese women, both cropped blondes, into Christian devotion.

Footage from the camp is spliced with shots from a radio host who is attempting on his talk show to challenge the beliefs of religious right Christians, who have three main concerns: abortion, creationism, and American-ness.

Unfortunately, what the filmmakers did not consider, apparantly, is that spending an hour and a half in the company of unintelligent people is not very interesting.

Moreover, the film is plainly not an even handed survey of the Jesus Camp, but has been made with the preconception that Jesus Camp would be a bad bad place: it therefore has the ring of propoganda.

The Golden Compass (2007): review- 3/10

An orphan is given responsibility for a magical compass which tells the truth.

Extraordinary imagery and animation does not compensate for a lack of emotional connection.

It is impossible to become emotionally involved in the character's dilemmas because the plot is so fussy and their dilemmas so obscurely related.

It's hard to know who this film is really for. From the cast, one presumes it's made for children of about 10-14 years, but the story is surely much too convoluted for them- and the themes of the film hard to relate to (freedom of academics to conduct research is one of them).

Thus, despite the amazing photography and animation, the film is boring.

Precious (2009): review- 3/10

Obese, black Precious is abused in various ways by her poor, morally cretinous family until she is saved by a pretty social worker.

Along the way she steals a huge bucket of fried chicken and fantasises about a male nurse. Oh, and of course she has a baby too... from her own father, who raped her!

Ethically dubious poverty exploitation porn for those who enjoy feeling pity, horror and disgust.