TENET (some spoilers but they won't deter your fun)

Try to feel it!

TENET is a return to form  for Christopher Nolan after the technically brilliant but narratively simplistic and arguably jingoistic, DUNKIRK.  He is far safer in his home territory of cerebral sci-fi and kinetic action sequences.  In TENET, the big concept is that a future scientist created a technology to reverse an object's entropy. So it's not technically time travel but it does involve people and objects (cars/guns) going backwards from our present-day perspective.  None of it really makes sense, and there's a funny early sequence where poor Clemence Poesy has to do her best Basil Exposition impression, both explaining the concept AND telling us not to think too much about it.  

Realising the danger of this tech, the future scientist splits the algorithm into nine parts - like Horcruxes or Infinity Stones -  and hides them in our present. (Why doesn't the scientist just destroy it? Who the frack knows.) This naturally pisses off vague future people, who want to find and re-assemble the algorithm and use it to wage war on the present. 

It's not a very original plot is it?!

Why does the Future hate us, mummy? They hate us for the same reasons Greta Thunburg hates us.  Moreover, they are making a massive gamble that by wiping us out they won't also make their own existence void. And so they enable a present-day Russian oligarch called Sator to re-assemble the Infinity Glove, sorry The Algorithm, starting with a piece that was hidden in the closed Soviet city where he grew up.  

Is this a spoiler? Well yes, but not in any way that should detract from your enjoyment of the film.  The real fun is in seeing how Nolan takes us and his Protagonist through his world where the action is happening simultaneously in linear and reverse time. It’s a lot of fun of seeing events replay themselves from different time perspectives, and recognising little Easter eggs laid early in the film pay off later on.  This involves hand-to-hand combat scenes and car chases where people are fighting in dual times. It's all just enormous fun and technically an absolute marvel. No other film-maker is going to literally crash a 747 into an airport hangar for you.  And the delightful insouciance of Himesh Patel's Mahir explaining this plan is presumably a meta-comment on Nolan's own audacity.  

Another reason why this film is fun is its knowing humour.  First off, we have John David Washington playing against the very notion of suave sophisticated Bond - throwing barbs about snobbery back at Michael Caine's knighted fixer.  But mostly, it's all about Robert Pattinson's Neil, who starts the film as a kind of crumpled linen-suited alcohol soaked minor diplomat but ends as something of a hero.  I couldn't resist his rakish charm, perhaps modelled on a younger Jeremy Irons?  Let's see more of this! Every time he wasn't on screen - for example a deathly dull interlude on a yacht in the middle of the movie - I wanted to press the fast forward button.

Tailoring goals.

Another reason to love the film is its intelligence and its absolute refusal to dumb down for a mass audience. And to all the reviewers out there who claimed they couldn't understand what was happening, my retort is to DO BETTER.  Nolan takes great pains to colour code the timelines and to play back scenes so that we really understand what is happening from each angle. If you don't get it, that really is on you.

That said, there are limits.  Nolan's refuses to give the protagonist a name. He's called The Protagonist. He even has a conversation with Dimple Kapadia's arms dealer about who really is the protagonist. This is the sort of pretentious wank that only literary theory students should be allowed to indulge in.

The plot is also - sci-fi concept aside - pretty hackneyed. The idea of protagonist and antagonist in a race to assemble a MacGuffin that can - da da daaaaaah - end the world - is fairly common. And even at the micro-level, the idea of a protagonist falling for a waif-like blonde abused by her evil oligarch husband is pretty well-worn. Indeed it's something straight out of a B-list Bond movie like NEVER SAY NEVER AGAIN. 

I am a waif-like blonde on my abusive lover's yacht, please help!

As is Kenneth Branagh's awful Russian acc-yent.  Could they really have not found a Russian actor to play Sator? Not to mention poor Elizabeth Debicki basically just reprising her role from THE NIGHT MANAGER here.  Every time Nolan tries to make us care about the fate of her and her son, I thought, I just don't care at all. Also, if you marry a very rich old Russian dude, are you not somewhat suspicious about what he did, and what kind of man he was and is, to get all that money?  My sympathy is thin. Let's get back to cool action sequences!

Please save me from my luxury yacht - again!

Anyway, B-grade Bond plot and silly Russian accents aside, TENET is a superbly fun and twisty, technically marvellous ride. And for the first time since THE PRESTIGE, I actually CARED about the characters. Not the stupid woman and her pointless son, but the evident bromance between Neil and The Protagonist. Now there's a sequel I wish Nolan would break his no sequel rule for.

TENET has a running time of 130 minutes and is rated 12A in the UK and PG-13 in the USA. It is on release in the UK and wherever the pandemic is allowing cinemas to be open.

YOUTH - BFI London Film Festival 2015 - Day Nine

Oh man. Paolo Sorrentino’s IL DIVO is arguably the best movie I’ve ever watched at a film festival, and it’s the only one I loved so much I watched it twice. And his last movie, THE GREAT BEAUTY, was a work of magical visual beauty and deep melancholic investigation into ageing and art. So I came to his first ever English language film with great expectations. Expectations that were, with the exception of a few flashes of brilliance, disappointed. There are two over-riding reasons for this: first a chronic lack of narrative drive and energy; second, uneven tone that undermines rather than enhances the whole.

KINGSMAN: THE SECRET SERVICE

You can listen to a podcast review of KINGSMAN here or subscribe to Bina007 Movie Reviews in iTunes:



What exactly is it that Michael Vaughn wants to do with KINGSMAN?  Is he trying to make a didactic film about class and style?  Is he trying to remake the vintage bonds for a new audience? Or is he spoofing them?  The difficulty of working out what's going on makes KINGSMAN sporadically entertaining but ultimately dis-satisfying and occasionally baffling.

The conceit of the movie is that the Kingsman are an elite spy organisation run in the interests of the public good, above and beyond corrupt governments. A Kingsman agent Harry Hart (Colin Firth) sponsors a young kid called Eggsy (Taron Egerton) into a competitive entry test to become a Kingsman.  He isn't as posh as the other entrants, but Harry reassures him that to be a gentleman is about manners rather than breeding.  In the process, Eggsy becomes an active spy trying to bring down the evil super villain slash internet billionaire Valentine (Samuel L Jackson) with the help of the Kingsman's tech specialist Merlin (Mark Strong).

A ruminative essay on THE DARK KNIGHT RISES - Spoilers replete

I respect Christopher Nolan as a film-maker. He applies an unusual degree of intelligence to genre films and he is not unafraid of radically rethinking a franchise.   At a technical level, I admire Nolan's unabashed commitment to delivering the highest quality, most immersive images to the movie-going audience.  That means that Nolan still shoots on film rather than digitally, with a preference for IMAX.  He does not shoot 3D movies because he understands that 3D technology, as it currently stands, cannot rationalise the point of convergence and the point of focus, and that this subconsciously brings us out of the movie.  Nolan is thus a man of integrity when it comes to his technical approach to film-making and is to be applauded.

All of which is pre-amble to the fact that despite going into this film with high hopes (though not over-hyped), I left disappointed.  It's by no means a bad movie - I loved the thematic material.  But as entertainment goes, the set piece action sequences were impressive technically but didn't set my pulse racing.  There were too many characters and story arcs - too many plot developments that felt unearned.  Ultimately I just didn't care.  

THEMATIC MATERIAL

To begin with the thematic material - which I found to be insightful and thought-provoking - the first major discussion was about the MORAL AMBIGUITY OF BENEVOLENT INTERVENTION.

The Gotham of THE DARK KNIGHT RISES is a peaceful, almost banal place, in which the peace has been bought with a lie and repression.  Batman has taken the fall for Harvey Dent's death, allowing Commissioner Gordon to create support for the repressive Dent Act.  Running through the film is an intelligent discussion about how far with-holding choice from ordinary people can ever be a good thing.  Even if born of benevolence, were Batman and Gordon right to assume that they had to manufacture a "White Knight" to corral public opinion toward crime-fighting?  Shouldn't they have had faith in the public? And even if that faith were misplaced, what right did they have to distort the truth?  They certainly pay a harsh price for their machinations.  In the first hour of the movie we see that Gordon has driven away his family, is about to be sacked, and is lying severely wounded in hospital.  Batman's body has also failed him - his joints wrecked by ill-use and  prior injury.  Their bodies are symbols of moral decay - the literal manifestation of the corrosive impact of living a lie. Ultimately, their lie will be exposed by Bane, but it is welcomed as a liberation.  In a sense, Bane, Gordon and Batman are in agreement.  Founding a repressive peace on a lie was patronising and condescending.  The people deserved more respect.  Gordon and Wayne, agents of a standard patrician comic book world in which an elite makes interventions for the "ordinaries" do not have sufficient radical courage to say it out loud. But once the truth is out, they are all the more liberated for it. 

The theme of questioning the morality of benevolent intervention is further echoed in the use of weaponry in the film.  Wayne/Lucius Fox have developed an array of high spec machines to protect Gotham, as well as buying up inventions that could be harmful, such as the Clean Slate programme that Selina Kyle covets.  They've even mothballed a potential clean energy source because it could be used for military purposes at great cost to their company, and to the horror of do-gooding entrepreneur/militant terrorist Miranda Tate.  But it's those very machines that are used by Bane/Talia to wreak havoc on Gotham, with a particularly superb scene in which Bane literally blasts through into Lucius Fox's so-called secret R&D warehouse from his own under-ground lair.  

A radical question raised by this is whether Batman is himself the true antihero of this movie.  If Wayne/Batman hadn't developed/amassed these tools, would Gotham have been put in such danger?  In other words, just as its better for Wayne to leave his Batman identity behind (whether through death or through a daring autopilot assisted escape to Tuscany), is it also better for Gotham that Batman has left? To paraphrase Monty Python, what have superheroes ever done for us?  This, of course, brings us back to the plot arc that sees Batman ultimately confront the new head of The League of Shadows, Talia al Ghul. The League is basically an elite force of warriors who assume that their elite status gives them the right to direct history so as to "restore balance".  We do well to remember that Wayne was also a member of the League, and while he rejected it, he has kept many of their assumptions about the strong intervening in the lives of the ordinary to put them back on the right track.  The only difference is that he is benevolent rather than malevolent.  The discussion reminds me a bit of A CLOCKWORK ORANGE.  Maybe it's just bad to intervene whether with good or bad intentions.  Maybe freedom from crime - whether organised in the case of Gotham and the Dent Act - or individual in the case of Alex - is only legitimate if it is engineered by legitimate democratic means. 

The second major theme in the movie is ECONOMIC INEQUALITY. That theme is refracted in different ways by each of the three purported villians.  The trio of villains begins with Daggett - a caricature greedy capitalist bastard who wants to take over Wayne Enterprises.  He is utterly conventional in his view of society and inequality.  He takes it for granted that capitalism distributes material wealth unequally and will play whatever game is necessary to make sure he comes out on top.He never questions the ultimately sustainability of the social order in Gotham, even as he disrupts the social order in minor African nations. Daggett hires the catburgler, Selina Kyle, to steal Bruce Wayne's fingerprints so that he can place fictitious trades that bankrupt Wayne and force him from the board.  He also hires Bane - a super-strong mercenary associated with African coups and mythical stories of having escaped a hellish prison - to make the trades in at attack on the stock market. Of course, as history proves, capitalists who think they can control political zealots always lose control to them, and Bane quickly dispatches Daggett as casually as Daggett might initiate a mass lay-off.  

But Daggett's most significant hire, as far as I'm concerned, is his sidekick Stryver, played by the marvelous Burn Gorman (just watch him as Guppy in the BBC's recent Bleak House).  Stryver is to me the most authentic character in the whole movie - symbolic of most City workers I know, who do their jobs well, fulfil their briefs, never once questioning the morality of the entire system they are part of. They're the aggressively upwardly mobile investment banking analysts who perform their tasks with absolute efficiency and dexterity in bonus maximisation - meanwhile the economy is crashing down around their ears.  Stryver, clumsily named, symbolises that faith in the capitalist system, where if we all work that bit harder, get a better degree, kiss-ass for promotion, we too can ascend to the elite. 

Selina Kyle is a more conflicted villain. She portrays herself as a kind of Robin Hood, only robbing the rich to feed herself - never taking from people who can't afford it.  She is seen to have the most insight into the corrosive nature of extreme material inequality and is also, on a tangent, insightful about the impossibility of getting a clean slate in a digital world. There's a lot to like about her character, not least that the Nolan's have not written her as a typical quasi-comedic fetishistic sex-kitten.  She has clear purpose, no self-delusion, and provides the only "zingers" in the film.  And in a three-hour film that often feels ponderous, ill-paced, and ill-plotted, Selina's wit is a valuable commodity indeed. 

In the middle section of the film it is Bane who emerges as the true match for Batman and Wayne - with his militant anti-capitalist forced "liberation" of the masses inside their new prison-Gotham.  Wayne becomes financially, as well as physically crippled: Batman is intellectually and physically broken by Bane - the broken mask and broken back.  In that sense, Bane is (in this middle section at least) the complete inverse of The Joker.  The Joker was petrifying because had no back story, no motivation, no logic. How was one to negotiate with such a man? How was one to out-think him, when his every action was seemingly anarchic, random, impossible to predict?  By contrast, Bane is a rather conventional, if particularly well-armed left-wing militant, complete with almost anarchic redistribution of wealth and kangaroo courts trying the former elite.  A lot of the footage reminded me of documentaries and history books about the Russia after the 1917, with luxurious houses occupied by multiple families, arbitrary judgments - the revenge of the oppressed. Only Selina voices the fact that these are people too - these apartments used to belong to people.* 

The only thing that doesn't make since, given Bane's stated anti-capitalist popular protest, is the fact that he arms a device that will explode in five months no matter what.  There is a contradiction in his liberating the people only to destroy them which is unsatisfactorily resolved when we realise that he is really a stooge for Talia's nihilistic destruction. To that end, I felt that Bane's project, character and force as a super-villain had been blunted by turning him into, essentially, a pussy-whipped patsy.  All of which brings us nicely to what I perceive to be the major problems with the films narrative arcs, character development, plot twists and pacing.

NARRATIVE PROBLEMS

So here's my problem with THE DARK KNIGHT RISES: I didn't care. And I didn't care because there were too many characters doing too much stuff that was either illogical or unearned.  Let's start with Bruce Wayne.  Wayne starts as a broken man, mourning for the future he could have had with Rachel Dawes.  He meets earnest entrepreneur Miranda Tate at a charity ball, then she comes to his house, and within about three lines of dialogue he tumbles into bed with her, despite the whole Rachel-brooding-thing.  I didn't buy it.  And then Selina Kyle is suddenly magically in love with Bruce, just because he "believes in her", kissing him passionately before he flies off with a bomb.  We're meant to be massively moved by this but come on - when did this love triangle have time to be established?  When did we, as an audience, get time to buy into this? And when did Selina  and Bruce fall sufficiently in love to end up together in Tuscany?!  

I came to the end of the film with the strong impression that this would've been a far better movie if Miranda/Talia simply hadn't been a character. This would've prevented the inclusion of a forced rom-com cheesy, unearned love triangle. It would also not have undermined the logical purity of Bane's mission as well as cutting of his metaphorical balls. It just didn't sit right with me that this hulking intellect - the first real match for Wayne/Batman - would basically be a love-sick pup, although I acknowledge that his tears at the end could've been because his pain meds were cut off as the mask was ripped, rather than an emotional response to Talia/Miranda rehearsing her back story.

Next problem - why are we introduced to so many small characters who have no bearing on the plot, distract attention and bloat the run-time?  Do we really need to see Stryver pushed out onto the ice? Do we really need to see the Scarecrow sitting in judgment?  Do we really need to see Matthew Modine's incompetent cop turn coward?  Do we really need the little orphan Robin story - and what a completely obvious and facile plot twist THAT was -  for any reason other than as franchise-fodder for Warner Brothers? All of these digressions took time away from Gordon and Fox. I wanted to see more of Gordon suffering for his part in the Dent lie. I wanted to see more establishment of the Love Triangle storyline if that was indeed the direction they were going in.

Final problem, so many micro choices didn't make sense.  If you invent a massively powerful energy source you have to be an idiot not to realise that any power source can be used for good and evil.  Why act all surprised when some scientist creates the trigger?  And if you have all this stuff that's dangerous why not just destroy it. Why keep it hanging around just in case you might at some unspecified future date be able to use it safely.  How come Bruce Wayne can strap on a super knee brace and suddenly run around like everything's all okay? (As I'm recovering from a fractured ankle right now - that really rubbed me up the wrong way).  How come Bruce can reach peak physical fitness in one training montage and then hop, skip and jump back from Jodhpur to North America and penetrate a locked down island, all the while secretly plotting to fake his own death (and falling in love with Selina)?  You get my drift....

TECHNICAL PROBLEMS

Perhaps the best thing about THE DARK KNIGHT RISES is that it is technically accomplished.  Wally Pfister's IMAX photography is superb.  But there are still two problems. I hated Hans Zimmer's over-bearing score.  And I found Bane's mask problematic.  His speech was too indistinct and it unfairly turned Tom Hardy into a Vader parody.  Poor chap.

THE DARK KNIGHT RISES is on global release.

*Of course, many commentators have drawn the obvious contemporary analogy between Bane's radical condemnation of capitalism and the Occupy Movement.  All I can say to that is that I respect the logic of Bane's argument, but I've  never seen anything like such a cogent programme from Occupy. 

INCEPTION - It'll be just like in the movies. Pretending to be somebody else.

INCEPTION combines the elegant structure and intelligence of Christopher Nolan’s breakthrough indie hit, MEMENTO, with the stunning in-camera visual effects of BATMAN BEGINS and THE DARK KNIGHT. More than that, INCEPTION demonstrates for the first time that Nolan can do more than “just” create intelligent mainstream blockbusters. Finally, he moves beyond the assured technique and shining surfaces to deliver a convincing and emotionally engaging love story. All of this is a great achievement. But it does not compensate for the over-use of exposition, weak characterization of the supporting roles, and the fact the questions raised by the central conceit have been explored in many films before this one.

The plot is neither as complicated nor as impenetrable as the critics would have you believe, nor as liable to be ruined by too much information before you watch the film. That’s because, while this movie is a heist movie in the classic tradition of RAFIFI or LE CERCLE ROUGE, the real substance of the film has nothing to do with the heist at all. Still, for what it’s worth, let’s explore the set-up. In the near future, corporate espionage isn’t about stealing files from an executive’s laptop but about stealing ideas straight from his subconscious when he’s in a drug-induced dream. To steal the idea, the thieves also have to drug themselves and enter into the subconscious of the victim – thus becoming vulnerable to any nasties the victim might be hiding down there. In this film, the thieves are paid to not to steal an idea, but to plant an idea in the victim’s mind so subtly than when he wakes up he thinks it’s his own. And this is precisely the engine of the film. Leonardo diCaprio’s Cobb is hired by Saito (Ken Watanabe) to plant an idea in the mind of his business rival Fisher (Cillian Murply), prompting Murphy to break up the massive corporate entity that he inherited from his father (Pete Postlethwaite). To pull off this reverse-heist, Cobb has to assemble a crack-team, made up of all-round side-kick, Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt); dream architect, Ariadne (Ellen Page); impersonator, Eames (Tom Hardy) and chemist, Yousuf (Dileep Rao). Together they engineer a situation in which they can sedate themselves and Fisher, engineer a dream within a dream within a dream, and plant an idea so deeply that they can achieve genuine inception.

There are, of course, plenty of rules about how this all works and the early parts of the film, and the characters played by Page, Levitt and Rao, do have a touch of the Basil Exposition about them. Even Pete Postlethwaite and Cillian Murphy, as dying father and grieving son, are similarly wasted. Once again, they exist merely as a sort of superbly tailored MacGuffin - the victims of the heist plot that propels the narrative. Only the superb Tom Hardy, through sheer force of personality, manages to carve out a memorable role for himself, stealing every scene that he’s in.

Still, I suppose that one shouldn’t begrudge Nolan the time setting up the intricate mechanics of Inception. There is something satisfying about the fact that, from what I can tell, the mechanics all hang together without any obvious holes in the logic. But for all the veneer of a sci-fi heist, let’s be honest, what we really care about – what drives our interest in the movie – is the central question of how someone so far steeped in the dream-world - in a dream within a dream within a dream – can tell the difference between the dream and reality. And, further, even if you could tell the difference, would you choose to live in the dream? In short, as my cousin Danny, conscious of this movie’s indebtedness to films like THE MATRIX put it, can you tell you’re living in a Matrix, and even if you could, would you choose to take the blue pill?

So, if the issues that Christopher Nolan is exploring aren’t particularly original, what makes this film worth watching? DP Wall Pfister’s beautiful cinematography; the elegant in-camera visual effects, so much more convincing that CGI; the wise-cracking Tom Hardy; and the intellectual puzzle at the heart of the film. All these things make it worth the price of entry. But to my mind, there are two genuine achievements. First, this is the first Nolan film where I feel he moved beyond being clever and technically accomplished to actually creating a relationship I cared about – that between Cobb and his wife Mal (Marion Cotillard). I completely bought into their difficult relationship and felt that diCaprio had given one of his most convincing performances in a decade – Cotillard was typically brilliant. Her central dilemma and his reaction to it are heart-breaking. Second, and most importantly, Nolan manages to involve the audience in exactly the same paranoia that infects Cobb and Mal. He doesn’t so much show us how a mind can get lost in the narrow margins between dream and reality but take us there with his ambiguous and cleverly constructed final act.

Additional tags: Tom Berenger, Talulah Riley, Hans Zimmer, Wally Pfister, Lee Smith

INCEPTION is on release in the UK, Egypt, Kuwait, Malaysia, the Philippines, Russia, Singapore, Ukraine, Canada, India, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Taiwan and Japan. It opens next week in Belgium, France, Norway, South Korea, Switzerland, Austrlia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Georgia, Hungary, Israel, the Netherlands, Portugal, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Lithuania, Mexico and Sweden. It opens on July 29th in Argentina, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Germany, Hong Kong, Austria, Poland, Romania and South Africa. It opens on August 6th in Brazil and Spain; on August 13th in Venezuela; and on August 24th in Greece. It opens in Italy on September 24th.

HARRY BROWN - the only permissable bigotry

These days you can't hate people on the grounds of their race, sexual orientation, religion or political views. The only permissable form of bigotry in the UK is the hatred of the white working class, and in particular, white working class kids. The right-wing middle-class media make a living from depicting chav kids as feral, dope-addled, knife-wielding granny botherers and social menaces. English society is in decay! Suburbia is lawless! And it's all because a bunch of uneducated kids have taken to drinking cans of Super-tenants outside Burger King at 11 at night while wearing fake Burberry caps, and driving modified Novas. It says a lot about how insecure post-modern, recession-bound Britain is that the only new cinema we seem to be capable of producing is either lauding the "glory" days of 1980s soccer hooliganism (punching people IS our proud heritage) or decrying working class violence. Whether the films are glorifying or condemning chav-violence, they are still making the lethal assumption that this is the way life is. And you think to yourself, does Mike Leigh work in vain?

HARRY BROWN is a good film. It's technically well-made, visually impressive, suspenseful, and features a great central performance from Michael Caine as a pensioner who turns violent on the teenage drug-pushers terrorising his estate. There's a satisfyingly slow-build to a pretty convincing revenge thriller. Caine has some nice Tarantino-style one-liners while dispatching a dope-peddler. There's even some astute critiquing of how the police are riven by spin and politicking. Emily Mortimer gives a nuanced performance and Iain Glenn is absolutely menacing. There's no denying it - this is a good film. I would have really loved it had I not been continually wary of the fact that I was watching a sort of middle-class angst-porn, designed to push all my buttons as a tax-paying constructive member of society meant to be living in fear of being knifed on the Central Line.

I don't buy the Daily Mail and I'm not buying this. I don't care how nice the packaging and how gritty the performances.

HARRY BROWN played Toronto 2009 and is on release in the UK. It opens in the Netherlands on February 25th 2010.

THE DARK KNIGHT - The Emperor's New Clothes

This review is replete with spoilers.

THE DARK KNIGHT opens with a suitably moody image of the Batman icon but soon cuts to a very modern, bright picture of the top of a skyscraper in a contemporary US city. It's as though Nolan wants to separate himself completely from Burton's urban gothic. Or maybe he just wants to show that a year after BATMAN BEGINS, Gotham has been cleaned up. So instead of the beautifully designed grunge, overland metros and grafitti of BEGINS, THE DARK KNIGHT looks like a sleek thriller. Indeed, the opening bank heist reminded me of INSIDE MAN more than BEGINS or the Burton movies. It was all very anonymous and rather disappointing.

Half an hour into the movie we get our first scene of The Joker having fun with emasculated Gotham mafiosi. Heath Ledger is captivating: a scene with a pencil is shockingly funny. Finally, I feel like I'm being entertained. I even overlook all his precious lip-smacking.

We then wander around for another twenty minutes. The familiar characters are introduced. Michael Caine and Lucius Fox are wise-cracking and wise respectively as Alfred and Lucius Fox. There's a lot of time-wasting in Hong Kong and some really rather nasty off-hand comments about buying American rather than Chinese. I really don't like the inference. Batman forcefully extradites a mafiosi money-launderer from Hong Kong and dumps him at the gate of Lieutenant Gordon. Gary Oldman - now there's a subtle performance! If anyone deserves praise it's Oldman. Just look at the flicker of a cheeky smile as he appraises Batman's gift. Later, look at him plead for the lives of his loved ones. Now there's real emotion. Contrast it with Maggie Gyllenhaal (an actress I have much respect for.) She never convinces as a lawyer or as a woman torn between two men. She has no chemistry with Aaron Eckhart's clean-cut crusading DA, Harvey Dent. She's even less convincing in her scenes with Bruce Wayne. Watch her tell him she'll be there for him. Could she be more non-chalant? She plays it like she's trying to remember where she put her keys.

Fifty minutes in and The Joker's back on the scene with a truly frightening window scene. We're back to the excitement. He's an anarchist and he wants us to play his game. He even teases us with shifting versions of his origins story. (A little rich from a director who just spent a whole film giving us Batman's!) Note that in my humble opinion you could have cut into this film at minute forty-five and not have missed a thing.

Then we're on again with all the crime-thriller shenanigans. Gordon and the Batman want to bring down the mafia via its money launderer so they take their eyes off The Joker. Bruce Wayne goes all CSI. Blah blah blah. The director attempts to pull the rug from underneath the audience a couple of times. We all figure out what's going on immediately. Like they'd let Gordon die. Of course, once we know he didn't die we know Rachel really has died. They couldn't pull it off twice. Let's stop dancing round each other and get to the action!

One hour and thirty minutes into this film we finally get a proper showdown with the only truly spectacular action sequence involving a truck flipping over.

One hour and forty five minutes into this film and we reach a natural end. It's truly brilliant. Dark, unresolved, nihilistic, The Joker's head out of the car window, laughing at us all. This is like THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK only meaner.

Then we get another interminable forty-five minutes in which we basically get the origin story of Twoface, and a terribly rushed unwinding of his story. By this point, I'm fidgeting in my seat. I'm frustrated because Two-face's story should be more interesting than The Joker or BATMAN. After all, THE JOKER is an anarchist. There's no character development. Batman starts off conflicted and ends conflicted. He gets precious little screen time and he's just not that interesting here. But Harvey Dent could've been played like the fall of Michael Corleone. Except, Nolan shoe-horns his character arc into an unwanted epilogue rather than making it the strong start to the next movie. I esepcially disliked Two-face's make-up. The whole point about Batman is that the characters are normal people who are mentally disturbed. So Batman is just a man in a suit. The Joker is just a man with freakish scars and make-up. But Two-face looks so deformed he breaks through my willing suspension of disbelief. Less would've been more.

And, finally, what's with the crude attempt to get into the politics of The Patriot Act and the Ethics 101 practical philosophy class? The conversation between Batman and Lucius Fox about the ethics of wire-tapping to catch a terrorist is ham-fisted. It's as though Nolan is desperately trying to be political and of his time. But these sorts of political allegories are important and require a more profound treatment than a tacked on five minute scene.

Similarly, the philosophical dilemma with the two boats struck me as ridiculous. One boat is full of convicts: the other is full of ordinary citizens. Each boat has five minutes to blow the other one up or they both blow up. Nolan decides to have both the criminals and the citizens act with superlative integrity, despite a bit of whining from some of the people. How unrealistic is that? More to the point, it's completely out of keeping with the dark, subversive tone that he's trying to go for with the rest of the film. In fact, it's pure sentimental schmaltz. The Joker comes to spread anarchy and fear. But we good citizens won't play dice because, at heart, we love our fellow man. Please. The whole point of this film is that "with a few sticks of dynamite" The Joker can turn the most moral man in Gotham, Harvey Dent, into a pychopathic killer. Come on Nolan: make up your mind.

THE DARK KNIGHT isn't a terrible film but it is flawed. I didn't enjoy it except in brief flashes. It's overlong, and yet feels rushed. It has a brilliant cast, and yet feels poorly-acted. It's a comic book film but it films like a cliched movie thriller. Yes, Ledger is one of the highlights, but I've seen better performances this year. Indeed, I've seen arguably better performances in this film, not least that of Gary Oldman.

So, in the immortal words of PUBLIC ENEMY, Don't Believe The Hype.

THE DARK KNIGHT opened in Iceland, Argentina, Australia, Greece, Taiwan, Brazil, the US and Venezuela on the weekend of July 18th. It opens in Egypt, Italy, Nroway, Israel, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Estonia, Finland, Sweden, Turkey and the UK the weekend of July 25th. It opens in August in Belgiu,, Japan, France, Spain and Germany and opens in Russia on September 11th.

SLEUTH (2007) - an alpha gamma movie

Kenneth Branagh's new adaptation of SLEUTH stands on the shoulders of a giant and boxes his ears. It is an adaptation that aggressively throws off the look, feel and subject matter of its original and fails and succeeds in large measures.

The original movie was adapted by Anthony Shaffer from his own play and featured an elegant, enjoyable battle of wits between an arrogant aristo crime writer called Wyke (Olivier) and a "jumped up pantry boy" who is sleeping with Wyke's wife (Caine.) Makiewicz' direction was simple and stagey - allowing the actors and the script to do their work.

In Branagh's version, the script has been written by Harold Pinter. It looses all lightness and malovolent wit and becomes a heavy-handed obvious clunking sort of thing. There is no needling - just a sort of simple play-ground bragging of the "my car is bigger than your car" kind. Highly unedifying. Michael Caine moves from the up-start to the older man character and replaces Olivier's bumptious arrogance with a sort of heavy brooding. It's not a lot of fun to watch. Jude Law takes over the Caine character and in that character is stiff and self-conscious and highly unconvincing. Which leaves the direction. Branagh has decided to gut out the tudor interior and replace it with an aggressively modern interior design powered by hi-tech CCTV. Unlike Mankiewicz, he is going to use the power that the medium of cinema gives him with odd camera angles. Much as the conch symbolised authority in Lord of the Flies, the iPod remote symbolises power here. I found the use of CCTV visuals and the extreme production design incredibly distracting and heavy-handed. It took me a good hour of this film's short run-time to actually focus on the action. I also disliked Branagh's cheap insider jokes. Do we really need Jude Law to ask Michael Caine, "what's it all about?" Do we really need him to appropriate the manic laugh of the wind-up toy in the 1972 film? And is Law in that black leather coat meant to be referencing Gigolo Joe from A.I.?

So, for the most part, this movie is an admirably grand failure. In other words, it fails because of too much ambition and too many new ideas, rather than because of laziness and indifference. (See GOOD LUCK CHUCK). But I did like two things very much. First, I thought Law, in a small section near the end of the movie, known to all those who've seen the original, was very convincing. Second, I very much liked the final twenty minutes. The sexual tension was palpable and for the first time I was genuinely intrigued and thrilled by the script and performances. So, an alpha gamma movie overall.

SLEUTH played Venice and Toronto 2007 and was released earlier this year in Spain, the US, Israel, Italy, Norway and Sweden. It is currently on release in the UK and opens this Friday in Denmark. SLEUTH opens in December in Turkey, Germany and Hungary and in January in Finland and the Netherlands. It opens in Australia on February 7th 2008.

SLEUTH (1972) - Superlative British class satire

The original 1972 version of SLEUTH is regarded by many as a cinematic masterpiece. It simply oozes quality. It's the last film of director Joseph L Mankiewicz, who also directed the undoubted pantheon flicks CLEOPATRA and ALL ABOUT EVE. It stars Laurence Olivier at the height of his game and the then upcoming actor Michael Caine - both of whom were nominated for Oscars, along with Mankiewicz for direction and John Addison for the score. The razor-sharp script was adapted by Anthony Shaffer from his own award-winning play. The set-up is simplicity itself. We are in a lush tudor country house crammed with tricksy toys and games and inhabited by a deeply prejudiced, arrogant old duffer called Andrew Wyke (Olivier.) He is meeting a young, handsome working-class-boy-made-good called Milo (Caine.) Wyke's wife is about to leave him for Milo and they are meeting to have a civilised discussion about the divorce. Wyke taunts Milo about his lower class origins and goads Milo into a robbery that will help finance Wyke's soon to be ex-wife's expensive lifestyle. As far as Wyke is concerned, Milo is another toy to play with and ultimately stitch up. The joy of Shaffer's play is watching the resilient working-class boy battle psychologically and intellectually with his self-appointed better. It's a wonderful indictment of class snobbery - a genuine tease and brilliantly acted and directed to boot.

I hesitate to call this a pantheon movie, though, because it always feels a little artificial. There is no attempt to soften the stagey-ness. The cast is small, the dialogue intense and artificial, and we are obviously on a set. I suppose in a way this could be seen a strength of this adaptation. Mankiewicz has the confidence to let the words and the actors do their job without too many forced visual whistles and bells. Indeed, the very crux of the plot twist relies upon the audience willingly suspending its disbelief and forgiving the production its inability to pull off a certain visual gag.

Despite this minor quibble, SLEUTH remains a social satire that is, to quote RED DWARF, Swiftian in its rapier-like subtlety. The battle of wits it embodies is thrilling to watch and has penetrated British culture to the extent that "you're a jumped up pantry boy who never knew his place" will be familiar to pop music fans who were born years after the flick was released. Definitely one to watch.

The original cinematic adaptation of SLEUTH was released in 1972 and is widely available on DVD.

Overlooked DVD of the month - THE WEATHER MAN

This month's overlooked DVD is a small-budget indie-type pic written by the guy who wrote the Will Smith schmaltz-fest THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS and directed by the man responsible for PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN. Despite this, it's a rather wonderful, mournful, seditious film featuring a pitifully brilliant performance by Nic Cage.

Cage plays a financially successful Chicago weatherman who hates his life. He's not a qualified meteorologist; he resents the public's identification of him with the weather (not least because they keep throwing fast food at him); his ex-wife is seeing another man; his daughter is obese and self-hating; his junkie son is being sleazed on by a pederast therapist; and to cap it all off, he feels he does not have the respect of his fatally ill father. Unsurprisingly, then, this movie is downbeat. It's like a blue-grey tone poem of middle-aged angst; brilliantly and brutally well-observed.

The movie is so relentlessly down-beat that some have complained that it's dull to the point of frustration. But that, I think, overlooks the thin but rich stream of black humour contained within the script. There's an interior monologue as Cage's weather man has to go to the grocery store and pick up some tartar sauce for his wife that's absolutely hysterical, for example. A more valid criticism is that Michael Caine once again fails to pin down the American accent, but frankly his performance is otherwise so good I can overlook this. Hope Davis is similarly good as Cage's wife, as is Nicholas Hoult as the son.

But the real reason I think this movie deserves a look is that the ending is about as seditious as I can imagine. The fact that some critics have accused it of being schmaltzy staggers me. Because what the movie tells us is that all this stuff is blowing in the Weather Man's face, but he will be okay and his life be judged a success. Why? Because he takes a job as Weather Man on a nationwide breakfast show, pulling in a million two a year. The final scene has Cage standing on a parade float waving and smiling blandly at the crowds lining the streets - behind the fire brigade but ahead of Sponge-Bob. He is rich. "The ultimate American accomplishment" and a damning indictment of American society from the screen-writer and film-maker. I can't remember the last time I saw such a daring, materialistic, seditious ending. And watching this film close on the heels of THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS, I keep wondering if critics missed a trick with just how materialistic and seditious that movie also is.

THE WEATHER MAN was originally released in the US in October 2005 and in the UK in March 2006. It is now out on DVD.

THE PRESTIGE - Christian Bale is ENGLISH!

This review is posted by guest reviewer, Nik, who can usually be found here.

Some people have accused me of being gay for Christian Bale in the past, and chief amongst the accusers myself. And yes, it's true, I am bent for Bale - but there's a jolly good reason. This man simply doesn't get himself involved in anything less that a great movie - his acting performances are always superlative - and the dynamic range of his skills is nothing short of breathtaking. And he has a fucking great body.

That said, I cannot claim that any of these things attracted me to see THE PRESTIGE. In fact, not a single factor in the film's favour weighed on my mind as I collected my ticket from Bina007 at the Odeon West End, since the screening I attended was the "surprise film" of the 2006 London Film Festival, and no-one knew the film title until the opening credits. Before the film, an organiser of the Festival came on stage and asked for suggestions as to what the film might be. A few people did shout "The Prestige". I shouted "Debbie Does Dallas - or am I in the wrong cinema?" That anecdote has nothing to do with this review, I just thought I'd tell you it so that you could fully appreciate my gutter comedy, and how I added to the audience's cultural experience that evening.

But back to the point, it came as no real surprise to me that the surprise film was THE PRESTIGE, and that it turned out to be as good as I'd hoped. After all, a surprise film has to meet the highest standards of excellence so as not to disappoint or alienate a broad cross-section of the audience. And I can assure you, no-one was disappointed.

THE PRESTIGE was, as the magic and illusions it portrayed, captivating from the get-go. The all-star cast including Scarlett Johansson, Michael Caine, Hugh Jackman, and even David Bowie wove a magic spell around a talented script - and had the audience on tenterhooks awaiting the next twist, turn, and pitfall of the plot. The musical score, often overused in such dark and sexy thrillers, was subtle as it added to the tension - barely noticeable but used with great impact just as any good accompaniment is.

The plot itself was tense and thick and thrilling - allowing you to suspend disbelief over those aspects that were genuinely counter-historical or a-scientific - because such aspects were genuinely incidental next to the personal tragedy of the two main characters. Two magicians, played by Bale and Jackman respectively - the former twisted by and prisoner to his art - the other equally twisted and darkly obsessed with a past tragedy in his life, and by the jealous rage and anger at his illusionist counterpart whom he blamed for causing it. There is a tangible homoerotic tension between the two - as their obsessions with their art and with each other tear them and their families and their relationships with women apart. One has the impression of an almost Shakespearian pair of star-crossed lovers taking their lives. The passage of their death marked love being the two hour traffic of the film.

And it is the power of the performances of these two, Bale in particular, that makes the movie. It is astounding, looking back at the movie once the final twist has happened, just how incredibly hard Bale's character was to play to make the scenes believeable. His relationship with his wife was characterised by a struggle between loving his art more than her some days - and loving her more his art on others. Imagine the task for an actor to have to say "I love you" and mean it in some scenes, and the same line but not mean it in others - and each time communicate emotionally which it is to the audience. The subtley of that insincerity - and the finesse with which it is portrayed in THE PRESTIGE - is awesome.

This is a very dark movie. It is a world where obsessive love and obsessive hatred meet in equal quantities - a world of illusion where we are constantly left wondering what is real and what is not. Such a world will not be to everyone's tastes - and if you're looking for comedy or a light touch entertainment, go and see BORAT instead. But if you're looking for superlative acting performances - drama, plot, production values and score that is second to none - and a movie experience that will make you want to come back for more - then this is the only show in town. I cannot recommend it any more highly than that, my friends.

Oh, and there's something I should add. Christian Bale is English!!! It's amazing, he speaks like a bloody cockney in this movie! I think it may have been that that finally exorcised the ghost of Patrick Bateman, a ghost that haunted me when I saw BATMAN BEGINS.

THE PRESTIGE played Rome and London 2006. It opened in Singapore, the US, Hong Kong and Malaysia earlier this month. It opens in Brazil, Serbia, South Korea, Thailand and Venezuala on November 2nd, the UK on November 10th, and in France and Australia on Nov 16th. It opens in Finland and Italy on December 22nd and in Estonia, Belgium, Germany, Iceland, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Russia and in the Netherlands in January 2007. Finally, it rolls into Japan on April 21st.

Bina007 adds: Christian Bale has, to my mind, made some shocking movies, not least SHAFT and some mediocre ones, most recently - Harsh Times. But for every mis-step there are a handful of absolute diamonds. THE PRESTIGE is definitely one of them.

CHILDREN OF MEN - dystopia is now

There's a road about five minutes walk from where I live in Central London. I worked there for around four years and I still walk down it most days. In the opening scene of CHILDREN OF MEN, a crumpled, aggrieved Clive Owen walks out onto that street with a cup of coffee in his hand. A bomb goes off shattering the shop front. Clive Owen ducks for cover and then continues on his journey, haltingly. Because in the London of 2027 our fears (and memories, those of us who remember the IRA) are realised: terrorist attacks are commonplace. It is a world where humans have become infertile and the youngest person alive is eighteen. Civil order has broken down around the world and Britain is the last nation still standing. Or rather crouching with its hands over its face as a fascist policeman brings down the boot.

It's amazing just how easy it is to make contemporary London on a wet November afternoon look like P.D. James dystopian future. The crumbling Victorian infrastructure, the half-light and perpetual drizzle, the uncollected rubbish and weary indifference to increasing numbers of armed rozzers. The genius of this movie is not to over-do the differences but insist on the similarities. The incidental cultural references are the same as now - the 2012 Olympics is an icon of the past not the future, but the music, dress and language are the same. When the world's youngest boy is killed, people still have lunatic outpouring of grief, Diana-stylee, and the English sense of humour is still alive and kicking. In fact, this movie, while intelligent and frightening, is also really rather funny. Reassuringly, "Britishly" funny. Now and then though, we are caught off guard by an image that is horrifying because it comes straight from our tele-visual memory. From news footage and documentaries of the Holocaust or the Bosnian war.

In a movie like CHILDREN OF MEN the key task for the film-maker is to create a world which is at once alien and believable. Director, Alfonso Cuarón and cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki succeed by a long chalk. But the movie really works because it creates a series of memorable and believable characters thanks to some brilliant writing and top-notch performances from all the cast. The plot hinges on Clive Owen's character - Theo. He is kidnapped by his ex-wife, Julian, played by Julianne Moore, and asked to help take a miraculously pregnant woman (Claire Hope-Ashitey) out of England and to safety. In this, he is aided by two ageing hippies, played by Michael Caine and Pam Ferris - arguably their best performances on film. The supporting cast is also first class, featuring the ubiquitous Chiwetel Ejiofor as a terrorist and an intense cameo performance from an unrecognisable Charlie Hunnam (that's the blonde teen from QUEER AS FOLK to you and me.) Danny Huston is absolutely chilling as the pragmatic aesthete who sits among his art drinking fine wine while England burns. Among such an accomplished cast it is hard to single out the scene stealer, but it is probably Peter Mullan who takes the biscuit with his darkly comic portrayal of the weed-dealing bent copper, Syd.

I could go on about how superb I think this film is - visually, intellectually, comedically (of all things!) Of course, there are some quibbles. The religious imagery is laid on sporadically thick - especially with the naming of characters and one rather cloying scene near the end. But I think this is a small price to pay for a rare piece of film-making that gets the brain whirring and the pulse racing.

CHILDREN OF MEN is on release in Ireland and the UK. It opens in Japan, Belgium, France, Australia, New Zealand, Russia, Iceland, Latvia, Norway, Spain, the Netherlands, Portugal and Finland in October. It opens in Switzerland, the Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Slovakia, Austria, Brazil, Estonia, Chile, Croatia, Italy, Romania, Turkey, Singapore and Mexico in November. It finally rolls into Sweden and the US in December.

BEWITCHED - just not funny

I am not the first to say it and I won't be the last. There is only thing wrong with the re-make of the classic TV comedy, BEWITCHED: It's not funny. Everything else is fabulous: costumes, photography, Rat-pack soundtrack. The writer/director is Nora Ephron who wrote When Harry Met Sally. It stars comedy heavyweights, Will Ferrel and Shirley Maclaine as well as Nicole Kidman. It has cameos from the wonderful Jason Schwartzman, Steve Carrell and Michael Caine......

BEWITCHED is available on DVD, replete with extras, but still isn't funny.

THE IPCRESS FILE - Classic Michael Caine Cold War spy flick

Back in the days before I started bitching about Hollywood biting its own style with a slew of uninspired remakes, legendary producer, Harry Saltzmanm was already in on the act. Saltzman had already created one mega-bucks franchise in the James Bond movies, but, as a shrewd man, he knew that there was some opposition to this glamorous, sexy, gentleman's club view of Cold War espionage. The backlash manifested itself in a number of spy novels that deliberately painted a far more bleak, bureaucratic and fallible picture of British intelligence. Chief among these were the novels of Len Deighton and John le Carre. Saltzman, shrewdly realising that someone would bite his style, did it himself, by shifting the whole Bond production team into producing "alternative" spy thrillers based on the Deighton novels - effectively monopolising British spy franchises and coining in the proverbial phat cash.

Cineastes will tell you how "significant" IPCRESS is. It's the first thriller to feature a hero who (shock! horror!) wears glasses. Worse still, he is a working class guy who gets recruited to spying in a supermarket (!) and never gets to shag hot chicks. Moreover, the whole feel of the movie is more art-house than cineplex. Instead of sleek, luxurious production design, we get the grime and grit of '60s London. The movie is photographed by Otto Heller using off-whack camera angles, distorting lenses and other tricks that serve to undermine the viewer. The hero, Harry Palmer, is definitely not in control in the way that James Bond (in the movies, if not the books) always is.

Granted, THE IPCRESS FILE is significant, but more to the point for the modern viewer, is it entertaining cinema? The answer is a qualified yes. This is a great plot, well shot. Harry Palmer is a retired copper who falls into spying by accident. Top British scientists are getting kidnapped, brainwashed, and then returned and the top brass want to know why and by whom. The story still has great tension and the pacing does not feel too slow to a modern audience. The only slight obstacle is that, while we get great acting from Michael Caine in his break-out performance, this sort of "British hard man" role has become something of a cinematic cliche. With Caine parodying himself in the Austin Powers flicks, it is sometimes hard to take the original seriously. Still, given the lack of decent flicks released this week, you could do a lot worse than check out the movie that inspired a slew of imitators.

THE IPCRESS FILE was originally released in 1965. It is currently on re-release in the UK.

BATMAN BEGINS - a greatful cinema-going universe breathes a sigh of relief

After the crime against cinema that was BATMAN AND ROBIN, the cinema-going universe feared that the Warner Brothers Batman franchise was dead. At the London premiere of his flick GOOD NIGHT AND GOOD LUCK, George Clooney was still apologising for the debacle, and it has been eight years! So it was with heart-felt thanks that the world received Christopher Nolan's Batman prequel, BATMAN BEGINS. Admittedly, you can never completely get rid of the camp under-tones - this is a full-grown man dressed up in a rubber suit after all - but Nolan has managed to create an authentic, multi-dimensional superhero. Here we have, brilliantly acted, superbly scripted, all the back story you ever need and told with all the psychological authenticity you would expect from the director who gave us the wonderful thriller, MEMENTO.

Christopher Nolan gets so much right, and it is so great to have Batman back on his feet, that it is tempting for viewers and critics alike to forgive the movie its flaws. But, there is no denying that while this is a massive improvement on BATMAN AND ROBIN, it is still not up to the "original" Tim Burton 1989 BATMAN. While the key cast members do a great job, especially Gary Oldman as the future Commissioner Gordon, Cillian Murphy as The Scarecrow and Christan Bale as Bruce Wayne, you get the feeling that Michael Caine is on autopilot as Alfred the Butler. Katie Holmes is also rather anaemic as the love interest and has reportedly been off'ed for the next movie in the franchise. However, the fatal flaw for me was Christopher Nolan's complete inability to direct action sequences. The mangled, over-edited car chases gave me motion sickness and entirely failed to thrill. In this post-Matrix world, shoddy action sequences are simply unforgiveable. So, while I am hugely indebted to Nolan for resuscitating the bat, Burton's BATMAN remains the high water mark of the franchise.

BATMAN BEGINS is available on region 1 DVD and was released on region 2 DVD this week.