CONTRABAND

CONTRABAND is about as perfect as a caper movie gets - fast, fun, thrilling, intelligent.  To be sure, it's basic plot components are pretty conventional, but it has a tricksy enough story, and enough good humour to be the perfect Friday night-forget work-have some fun movie!

Mark Wahlberg plays a former smuggler turned straight, drawn back into "one last job" to save his idiot brother-in-law from the local drug dealer (a typically over-the-top Giovanni Ribisi).  He assembles a crew that's going to smuggle in forged currency from Panama in J K Simmons freighter. Of course, "one last job" movies are never simple.  And this one involves a double-cross back home; getting caught up in a Panamian armed robbery; an art heist; and a superbly choreographed fit-up job.  A few plot twists are predictable but there are enough genuine surprises, and I love that no plot thread is left untied.

The movie is directed by the Icelandic actor-writer-producer-director Baltasar Kormakur (JAR CITY) who wrote and starred in the original.  Together with DP Barry Ackroyd (GREEN ZONE) he directs the movie with real style and pace, and a surprisingly light touch!  There are many scenes and lines where it's clear that the smugglers are having a great time, despite or even because of the high stakes - more young kids up to some japes than Michael-Mann style existential angst.  I also really liked the casting (ex Ribisi) - being particularly impressed by Kate Beckinsale, of all people!, actually doing some proper acting as Wahlberg's wife. 

Flicking through the IMDB review page it becomes clear that CONTRABAND has taken a bad rap for being too genre-cliche-ridden.  Whatever. I had a bunch of fun watching it, and it's in my Best Of list for the year. Not every film has to be a heart-wrenching, life-changing Iranian art-house flick. There will always be room on this blog for good honest popcorn entertainment.

CONTRABAND is on release in the USA, Kazakhstan, Russia, Singapore, Bulgaria, Canada, Pakistan, Israel, Kuwait, Estonia, Iceland, Romania, the Philippines, India, Syria and Poland. It goes on release in Hong Kong on February 9th; in Australia and New Zealand on February 23rd; in Portugal on March 1st; in the Netherlands on March 8th and in Germany, Finland, Ireland, Norway, Spain, Turkey and the UK on March 16th. It opens on March 22nd in Belgium, Denmark and Hungary; on April 19th in Argentina; on April 27th in Brazil and Lithuania; on May 4th in Sweden and on May 16th in France and Italy.

Bina007's most spine-tinglingly awesome moments of 2008 - or why I still enter every movie theatre in joyful hope!

To quote last year's post: "It may be hard to believe when you read an excoriating review, but every time I sit down to watch a movie I do so in joyful hope. I can't explain how much I love cinema. Ever since I was a little girl there seemed to be something magical about a beam of light that transformed a negative into a living and breathing story. So in a rare annual moment of warmth and optimism, here follow those flashes of brilliance that reminded me - amidst the sequels, threequels and hopeless failures - just how wonderful cinema can be. Note that this list is significantly different from my Best Films of 2008 list (found in a drop-down box in the side-bar). Even piss-poor flicks can have moments of inspiration - which is a faintly hopeful thought."

1. When Rambo Strangles The Guy So Hard He Breaks Through His Skin and Blood And Veins and Shit Start Spurting Out. The long-awaited RAMBO flick was clearly piss-poor but among all that irony-free absurdity there was one moment so transcendentally ridiculous it gave me one of the biggest belly-laughs of the year!

2. The Sound-track and Cinematography as Daniel Plainview Rushes to the Oil Platform to Save His Son. A breathtaking moment of pure cinema in THERE WILL BE BLOOD - stunning cinematography, unbearable tension, intense orchestral score. This was cinema at its most visceral and inescapable and audacious. I'm still sore that the soundtrack was disqualified from the Oscars on a technicality. 

3. Michael Pitt Scares the Bejesus Out of the Middle Classes in the Final Frame of FUNNY GAMES. A movie so brilliant Michael Haneke had the arrogance to make it twice, this time with the angelic looking Pitt holding the audience's eyes in the final frame. Are we being warned that we're next or indicted for sado-masochistic voyeurism? Genius.

4. Hrithik Roshan's Dance Routine to Main Aisa Kyun Hoon Establishes Him As the Best Song and Dance Man in Cinema since Gene Kelly. Hrithik Roshan is a hoofer. He knows dance and not in the over-choreographed Michael Jackson c.Thriller style that most Bollywood movies adopt. Pure talent. Pure entertainment. The best traditions of Hindi cinema.

5. When Dawn Slices Off Tobey's Cock With Her Vagina Dentata. Seriously funny. (Probably not if you're a bloke, admittedly). And by far the best reason to watch the teen horror cum political satire, TEETH. 

6. When The Joker Slams The Droog's Face Into the Pencil. Great horror is not what you're shown but what you imagine. A lightening bolt of pure fright energises an over-long and over-worked Batman sequel.

7. When The Joker Rides Through Gotham Triumphant, His Head Out The Window Of a Moving Car. One of the most spine-chilling images of 2008. Shame Nolan didn't have the balls to end THE DARK KNIGHT on that image, creating a second part finale as powerful as EMPIRE.

8. When The Thief Chases The Cop In JAR CITY. I can't escape why this scene is funny. It doesn't sound funny when I try. Just please try and seek out this superb Icelandic comic thriller. Please.

9. Hellboy and Abe Listening to Barry Manilow's "Can't Cry Without You" closely tied with Johan Krauss kicking Hellboy's ass in the Locker Room. Pure Comedy Gold.

10. JAAACK!!!! The not unattractive and yet infinitely goofy Jean Dujardin as pre-Bond spoof Agent OSS-117. At times, this actor's facility for physical comedy almost touches Sellars in the Clousseau movies. Perhaps the most unexpected belly-laugh of the year - given that Professor007 and I were in an art cinema famed for showing turgid self-righteous foreign language flicks. 

JAR CITY / MYRIN - no gaucamole bullshit here!

JAR CITY is a hysterically funny, visually arresting, tricksy little police procedural set in Iceland. The movie is among the most funny I have seen all year, and yet works equally well as a carefully told character-driven drama.

The movie is written and directed by Baltasar Kormákur, but based on the successful crime novel, "Mýrin" by Arnaldur Indriðason. The source novel is a linear crime thriller. Kormákur has added a rich seam of humour - both verbal and bordering on slapstick as well as an insistent desire to show the rest of the world how tasty sheep's heads are. More seriously, this is a film that lovingly shows us how strange life can be in a small, rather isolated country, where half the population are essentially still country folk, and the other half are embracing the fake-cosmpolitanism of the Starbucks culture. Much of the humour comes from the sheeps-head brigade mocking the latte-drinkers, and in a pivotal chase scene, the latte drinker is quite brilliantly ineffectual.

Kormákur also takes an interesting approach to the contruction of the narrative arc that adds a certain intellectual challenge to the film. It also changes the emphasis from a conventional "whodunnit" to a "whydunnit". In other words, this is no CSI Rekjavik but a proper drama.

The hero of the movie is a quiet, tough, loner called Erlendur. He's a detective investigating the death of a local sleazebag. Erlendur is the kind of guy who buys the same take-out every night. He's also the kind of guy who'll kick you out of his house and throw you down the stairs, but then bring you a cushion for your leg and call an ambulance. He is, in short, a decent but flawed man. This is most painfully shown in his relationship with his daughter - a drug addict. He is strict in not giving her money to feed her habit - on the other hand he'll offer her a home and try to protect her. And by the end of the film, he'll even tell her how deeply he has been affected by his work - a small opening to a real relationship.

The murder Erlendur is investigating is also about relationships between the generations. Thirty years ago, a nasty piece of work with a rare hereditary disease raped (or did he really?) two women and sired two children, both of whom passed on the weakness to their children. This rare genetic thumb-print will allow Erlendur and his sidekcik Sigurður to track down the murderer of the original rapist, thanks to the new, controversial, Icelandic DNA database. Without being overtly political, Kormákur carefully shows the dangers of absolute knowledge of this kind.

Despite the fact our Gmunden correspondent and I watched JAR CITY subtitled into English, we walked out of the cinema quoting lines, still laughing, convincing Nikolai that he simply had to see it. It's one of the best films I've seen all year.

JAR CITY was released in Iceland and was the most successful Icelandic film in history and won 5 Edda awards. It played Toronto and London 2007 and was released in Norway last year. JAR CITY was released in the US in February, and will be released in France and the UK on September 12th 2008.