I'd heard of L.I.E. for quite a few years (it won Brian Cox some obscure acting awards back in 2001) and despite being on Film Four before I never managed to catch it. So I slapped a video in the other night as it was on in the small hours and watched it. It's about a 15 year old boy (Paul Dano) whose mother is dead and his father is distant. He becomes friendly with a lad who exposes himself for cash on the side of the road and breaks into people's houses for laughs. The bulk of the story comes when after the homosexual hints between the two (nothing happens though) one of the victims of thier thefts, Brian Cox, befriends Dano whilst trying to recover his property. Cox's "Big John" though is seen looking at dodgy images on his computer, has a young guy living with him and is one of the kind of guys Dano's friend gets money from.

So a very delicate subject to bring to the screen. This is the only time I've ever seen Dano give a performance where he didn't make me want to kick the tv in, such a shame that this person who has degenerated into giving some of the least competent performances in recent memory actually has some natural talent. Cox is good but I really don't see the fuss - he makes you feel sympathetic towards a guy who's tempted by underage boys, fine, but I need more than that to say he gave a really fantastic performance. The film utilises some music video techniques in linking the film together and I don't think it works as it's at odds with the rest of the film stylistically and also I think the systematic stripping of everything Dano's character holds dear in order to get him into the situation with Cox that he gets in is Trier-esque in its lack of subtlety and too neat to ring true. It does have some entertaining dialogue and fine performances though.

The Belgian film, Someone Else's Happiness, is an annoying film because it had such potential. The basic premise is very interesting - we hear a car screech by and see that the result is a boy has been knocked over. We then cut to a man who pulls up to his house with his wife and children inside, but his car has a dent on the front bumper. Later that night a woman thinks she sees a child in the water-filled ditch but is disbelieved by a policeman who she calls out as there's nothing there by the time he arrives. This sounds like a good chance to do character studies seeing how guilt effects them all but the writer/director kills this in two ways - firstly she skirts around that issue (by the direction she chooses to go with the story, but then ... she skirts around that too) and secondly she murders any semblance of believably by not only contriving that the prime suspect and the woman live next door to each other, that would be tolerable, but also makes the mother of the dead child the woman's maid and then to top it all off she makes the policeman the child's father . She makes Crash look like Chungking Express .

It's very well made, it's nicely shot, smoothly edited, music is used effectively ... but the writing is just so lazy, the end descends into a series of cop-outs and the point becoming that it doesn't matter whether the guy ran over the kid or not entirely defeats the purpose because that means you've wasted too much time playing cat and mouse with the audience and not explored the point you want to make to anything approaching a satisfactory level. An intriguing possibility gloriously missed in a film which could have been a modern classic but ended up being not even up to the standard of Yella.

Finally The Bothersome Man, a Norwegian effort was on BBC Four last night and I watched it this morning. We see a guy throw himself in front of a train and then become "welcomed" at an apocalyptic looking gas station. Thereafter he is driven into colour-muted town and given a cushy job where everyone is nice to him and says yes to whatever he suggests. Only one dissenting voice is heard where someone complains that there's no taste to things and alcohol doesn't work. It's one of those really weird, really quirky pseudo-comedies that the scandanavians seem to go for but it didn't work for me on that level apart from the odd scene or two. It's gorgeously shot and the performances are fine (but admittedly nothing out of the ordinary) but the deliberate ambiguity feels a tired rather than inspired attempt to give the film more gravitas than it merits.