Well, I've seen a bunch of very mediocre films and I postponed talking about them until I'd seen one that was of different quality - obviously that eventually happened, but only just. Whilst waiting for the 3rd episode of Tess of the D'Urbervilles (which I'll talk about in depth after I've seen the final one on Sunday) I had an hour to kill and watched Blades of Glory on Sky (I saw the final 25 mins later online). The 3-Act structure tends to cut off most American comedies at the knees and it takes a full half an hour for the basic set up of the plot (two male skaters fight and get banned from individual competition before discovering a loophole allowing them to pair together) to be executed. When it does there are quite a few laughs, it is an amusing film. It goes in fits and starts though. Will Ferrell is his usual self, Jon Heder is okay, but Jenna Fischer steals most of the scenes she's in and is the best on show. It's predictable, juvenile, but not a bad effort, it's just very average.
Next up was a French film I've wanted to see for years because it won one of the biggest American film critics' awards in the late 70s (turns out it won the foreign language Oscar too) - Préparez vos mouchoirs. It stars a young Gérard Depardieu who intent on his depressed wife's happiness invites a stranger in a restaurant to become her lover. A ménage à trois ensues, but problems arise when it becomes clear only getting pregnant will make her happy. This is such a weird film (especially where they go with it in the final third - I feel compelled to say it involves her seducing a 13 year old boy because that will put people off) and it's not very funny at all - the odd chuckle here and there, no belly laughs in sight. It's slow, it drags, there's no real payoff emotionally, dramatically or entertainment wise - it's got some decent acting in there and it's watchable, there's just not much to recommend it.
Soldiering on I approached Sling Blade, knowing Billy-Bob Thornton got a lot of praise for his performance a little over a decade ago. While I would never have recognised him in the role of the "retarded" Karl Childers who is released into the community decades after killing his mother as a child, the level of praise doesn't sit well with me. This is a role which recalls Tom Hanks in Forrest Gump or Javier Bardem in No Country for Old Men - all Thornton has to do is choose how dumb/scary/weird he wants to make Karl then ensure he doesn't forget. He's the same in every scene and the character has no development. That aside, this is a very morally questionable film, it's the same thought-process (justifying homicide through pre-emptive actions of what might happen) which have caused this planet so many problems in this new century. The film is incredibly predictable, it's ponderous, overlong and unravels the longer it goes. There's some very good acting on show from a fine ensemble but that's about the only thing this very distasteful film has to offer.
Breaking the run of average films (only just) is Kurosawa's High and Low. This is the 12th film I've seen from him and last really big name film of his I hadn't seen, but along with Dreams it's probably the one I've got the least from. The story is that a member of the board in a shoe company is secretly attempting a takeover after setting up a 50 million yen purchase of the necessary shares through borrowed money. The night his assistant is set to go to Osaka to conclude the deal the phone rings and a kidnapper claims to have taken his son and wants 30 million in ransom. Our man agrees but it soon becomes clear the kidnapper took the wrong boy (the chauffeur's lad), but still demands the same ransom.
So it starts out as a very interesting morality tale with Mifune Toshirô forced to weigh up his finanical future and the life of a boy not his own, but sadly it doesn't last and before the halfway point it degenerates into a fairly bog-standard examination of police procedure in bringing those involved to justice. The acting is fine but nothing to write home about, the cinematography is occasionally interesting (the shots of the cars at the end) but the final third lacks the entrancing seduction of Hitchcock's scenes of Jimmy Stewart following Kim Novak in Vertigo because the audience is not put in a character's point of view, we're just following a bevy of cops with the pace and involvement slowing the longer it goes. An interesting opening, but this film actually has a lot less to say than it promises. It misses a chance and remains a decent film, but could have been a lot more.