miscellaneous factZ

6.5/10. Engaging first-feature from Lebanese director and actress Nadine Lebaki.

7/10. A good story and an excellent performance in the leading role combine to make this recent Italian drama a very watchable piece.

5.5/10. Not uninteresting and really quite funny in places. However, while certainly better than some of Leigh’s other recent outings, it was rather intermittent and never became more than a mildly diverting ramble around Poppy’s life.

6.5/10. Interesting and unusual, though slightly conventionalized in its last 15 minutes. At last we have Ralph Fiennes playing an appropriately nasty character — I can never understand why he ends up in so many ‘romantic’ roles for his froideur and general demeanour make him entirely unsuited.

7/10. Very skilfully put together and acted. Affecting.

5/10. After the excellence of Gondry’s last outing (The Science of Sleep) this was a real disappointment.

6/10. This latest outing from Sidney Lumet is an unusual combination of family melodrama and crime-gone-wrong Greek tragedy. Unfortunately, though ticking all the boxes (acting, script etc) it left one rather cold, largely due to the absence of any character who merited the audience’s sympathy. After all, for tragedy to work must care about the character whom it befalls — even if their downfall is principally the result of their own actions or their own failings.

6.5/10. The latest Coen brothers outing is well-made and as dark as one would expect a film derived from a Cormac McCarthy novel to be. However this darkness presents difficulties: in a film in which the only main surviving characters are a sheriff losing hope in humanity and a psychopath[^1] who are we left to care for?

[^1]: A psychopath whose resemblance to Death in his fundamental amorality is so striking that it must surely be intentional. The character provides yet another opportunity for a standout performance by Javier Bardem.

7.5/10. A worthy (Rumanian) winner of the Palme D’or at Cannes. This film records with washed out hues and hand-held cinema verite style camerawork the travails of two students on the day that one of them is to obtain an illegal abortion in 1987 Rumania. Compelling throughout, with powerful central performances, this isn’t exactly an easy film to watch at the best of times — quite apart from the subject matter the behaviour of most of the ‘peripheral’ characters, from desk clerks to the abortionist, varies from the unhelpful to the downright unpleasant. The final shot (again beautifully composed), situates the two friends in an isolated restaurant late at night, the scene perfectly echoing their emotional isolation and exhaustion (”Let’s never talk about this again” says one, in the final line of the film).

6.5/10. Gus Van Sant’s latest outing into the disaffected and disconnected world of modern American teendom is not as engaging as it might be but has much of interest, particularly when read in the wider perspective of his other recent work especially films such as Elephant.

Similar, in many ways, to the work of contemporary US novelists such as David Foster Wallace, Van Sant is attempting to convey something about the fundamental disconnection and alienation of modern (US) society — which is most sharply manifested among its youth. Here, for example, it is noteworthy that Van Sant almost never shows the faces of the Alex’s parents — Alex being the middle-class teen skateboarder protagonist. Instead he chooses only to have the mother seen from the back or out of focus in the distance, or to have the one scene containing Alex farther commence with a long shot of Alex while his father talks to him off-screen and unseen.

Furthermore, at a crucial moment, in Alex’s hour of need he thinks of calling his father (and uncle) but hangs up before they answer and subsequently brushes off his mother’s hesitant enquiries. Alex is equally removed from his girlfriend, who in one telling scene, after having sex for the first time with Alex (at her insistence) immediately phones her friend to share the information — the implication being that, as Alex perceives more generally, he is a means to an end rather than an end in himself (the player of the role of boyfriend rather than a person in his own right).

The one exception to this basic pattern is the relationship between Alex and Macy. From her first appearance Macy differentiates herself by a sharp insightful empathy. As the film develops her budding friendship with Alex moves to centre stage, providing the means for Alex to redeem himself via the one genuine connection he has in a lonely world.