Tony Gilroy's follow-up to Michael Clayton sees Julia Roberts and Clive Owen playing ex-CIA/MI6 agents, who have combined forces to take on jobs in the private sector in an attempt to fleece the companies involved. The narrative is rather broken, there are flashbacks every now and again to reveal more about Roberts and Owen's past and how it fits into what they're doing now. Essentially they met whilst still spies when Roberts seduced him then stole information, so that added to the nature of their professions means neither can trust each other.

Owen is the reason to see this film, he's charming and gets most of the amusing lines. Therein lies the problem though, if you go in expecting a comedy then you won't think it's that amusing, but if you go expecting a spy thriller then you'll think it's very funny. It's a mix and not a very successful one. Roberts is fine but sleepwalks through her role and Paul Giamatti just shouts a lot whilst Tom Wilkinson doesn't (they're the bosses of the two companies Roberts and Owen work for).

The biggest let down with this film is just how broadly predictable it is. It's very obvious in general what's going on so the only intrigue is in the specifics, but such minute details are afterthoughts. The structure doesn't really add much to the film, it breaks up the flow and tries to keep you guessing but doesn't really succeed in that.

Overall though it's a decent film, the acting's fine, it's very nice to look at and there's the occasional bit of split-screen or interesting editing which has a retro-vibe to it. It's just, like Michael Clayton, not that special though. Not bad, not good, if anything it's almost offensively watchable, in that if they can make a decent film without any particular area of excellence, then imagine what might have been possible had they pushed above and beyond. So an alright way to spend a couple of hours, but that's all it is.

... through the tv/internet stuff I've watched, I was putting it off then assumed I'd already done one of them so it's bigger than I thought and I have another cinema entry to do so I'll just push on with it because it's stacked up so much. First up I found a film called Mindwalk while searching for Liv Ullmann films online. This is about a former US Presidential candidate who, in wanting to get away from it all, goes to visit his poet friend in France. While out walking one day they (Sam Waterston & John Heard) come across a reclusive scientist (Ullmann) and they become embroiled in an intellectual discussion (or rather, a lecture from Ullmann) about philosophy and quantum mechanics and life in general. The film was made, by career-production designer Bernt Amadeus Capra, as a means to get his physicist brother Fritjof Capra's ideas on systems theory across. It is interesting, but it is not very cinematic as the actors recite line after line of discussion throughout the film (although that is no bad thing when you have as beautiful a voice as Ullmann). If you are already informed on the subject, this won't be anything new and might be considered condescending. If you have no interest in the subjects there's nothing on offer here. For those curious enough to give it a blast, it is a very intriguing topic, but much more of a lecture than a story.

Three and Out is something I solely watched because I enjoyed Gemma Arterton so much in Tess of the D'Urbervilles and she was in this film. It's a low budget, british comedy indie about a train driver, who having had 2 people throw themselves in front of his train in a matter of weeks, is informed that if he gets three suicides in a month he'll be paid off for 10 years. The set up is our man (Mackenzie Crook) trying to find someone suicidal to help him out. This isn't a great film and it's not even very good, but it's not a bad one either as it is occasionally quite funny. Colm Meaney gives the best performance as the prospective jumper, but the film wastes Imelda Staunton as his estranged wife and Arterton has very little to do other than get her tits out for an unneccessarily exploitative sex scene. Crook does a decent job but doesn't have much of a role. It was on tv, it was an alright watch but I'd neither recommend it nor suggest it be completely ignored.

After being surprised by how much Olga Kurylenko actually acted for a Bond Girl in Quantum of Solace, in a fit of boredom I watched Hitman on sky. It's about (obviously) a hitman who has been trained since birth by an unknown organisation in all the ways possible to be good at killing people. He is only known as Agent 47 and has a bar code tattooed onto the back of his shaven head. He is ordered to kill a "witness" to a botched job but when he finds her he realises it is a set up and they go on the run and try to get to the bottom of what's going on. Lots of action, lots of violence, lots of naked Kurylenko (although rather hilariously most of the nudity advances characterisation so it's less exploitative than the silly British comedy I watched before it), it's an average entry in the genre which does exactly what it says on the tin.

After seeing Wendy and Lucy at the cinema I inadvertantly turned my evening into a doggie-double bill as I followed up that with watching I am Legend on sky. The set up of the plot is that Will Smith is the only man in New York, with a virus having taken out everyone as a potential cure for cancer went horribly wrong after human trials. Smith is a military scientist who is immune and spends his time hunting with his dog, trying to find a cure and searching for other survivors, all before having to get home before dark. It's a decent film, Smith is Smith and has an incredible screen presence but he holds the movie together very well, it's an extremely good performance. The shocks and tension isn't a tremendous amount to write home about though, but on balance this is a very watchable film even if it's not that engaging.

I also watched Zemanovaload (or Perfect 10, which was the title on the version I watched), which is another British comedy indie. Stand-up comedian Ed Byrne stars in a film where a writer suffering from OCD is dumped by his model girlfriend and in the aftermath instead of doing the rewrites to a script he's promised to do, he becomes obsessed with nude model Veronika Zemanova on the internet. It is a bit rough around the edges plot wise and certain things come across as ideas from a first draft that should have been axed, but it is quite amusing and Byrne is a surprisingly good actor who holds the film together well. Rushed ending, but a sweet one, this went straight to video and it's not hard to see why, but it's better than a lot of awful british indie comedies that actually get released.

Continuing TCM's completely random new selection of films they've added to their rotation I found a film I'd never heard of starring Gene Hackman and Liv Ullmann: the Jan Troell directed Zandy's Bride. I missed the first 10 or 15 minutes but it's about a rancher who gets a mail order bride and things not going too smoothly after she arrives. Hackman is always a reliable and interesting performer and Liv is her usual excellent self. This is a good little film, nicely shot, very well acted, but it's not without flaws. It is a tad predictable and the ending a bit rushed, but it's easily the best of the films I've talked about today.

Breaking with tradition I'm going to take three new movies at once here purely because I have a back-log and I'm going to the cinema again in a little over an hour. If I'm bored enough I'll re-edit this later to separate them but I can't be bothered and don't have the time to do three separate posts right now.

Wendy and Lucy

Michelle Williams has one of the more interesting careers going of actresses under 30, transitioning from tv performer to decorated film actress through a conveyerbelt of indie films. She's worked with name directors (Wim Wenders, Todd Haynes, Lukas Moodysson and Ang Lee), famous new directors (Ethan Hawke and Charlie Kaufman) and on uber-obscure projects resulting in one of the most laudable and intriguing anti-commercial careers since Kate Winslet post-Titanic

Her latest film to be released here is Wendy and Lucy which is a very simple story about a young drifter named Wendy (Williams) heading up to Alaska to find work. She sleeps in her car and has her dog Lucy for company. Not too long into the film a set of circumstances arises where Wendy loses Lucy and the film follows her attempts to find her despite her car having broken down.

Williams received a lot of praise online for this performance and even though it is a tiny indie film the production company did try to get her an oscar nomination (they sent dvds out to the acting branch of AMPAS). In a way I can see why, but given the reputation of the performance it's a little underwhelming. It's a very restrained performance, which is good, and there are a couple of emotional scenes she does very well indeed. Most of the time though she isn't given the opportunity to really do much and that is down to the nature of the film.

Every aspect of the story is given as much room to breathe as possible but what that results in is a rather ponderous, sparse film without much characterisation. There are some nice little turns from the supporting cast and Williams' anchor of a performance means it's fairly watchable but it's not a very satisfying film and amazingly, even though the runtime is a paltry 80 minutes if anything it drags a touch and is overlong. This would have been a really good 30-40 minute short, but they drag it out and pad it out and dwell on everything, by the time the end arises it's questionable whether it was all really worth it for that. So just about worth it for Williams, but only just and if there was a film from 2008 to see just for her performance then it would be Incendiary, not this one.

 

Two Lovers

Two Lovers premiered at the Cannes Film Festival last year and received a fairly good reception. At the beginning we see Leonard (played by Joaquin Phoenix) deliberately jump off a pier into the bay, walking off sharply after being rescued. Attention seeking? A cry for help? A genuine attempt on his life? Writer/Director James Gray isn't interested in such things and it's a shame because the lack of details between characters, the fleshing out of their motivations and relationships is the only major thing that prevents this film being a truly great one.

Leonard lives with his parents, fighting a dual-edged battle against an overbearing mother and an overbearing past. He works for his father's local dry-cleaning business, which a local businessman wants to buy. Upon the two families coming together for a friendly dinner it turns out the attractive daughter Sandra (Vinessa Shaw) saw Leonard at work and took a liking to him, engineering the meal as a pretext for a meeting. Soon afterwards Leonard meets new neighbour Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow) who lives opposite him. What then plays out is a drama about Leonard yearning for Michelle, who is not interested romantically, but finding himself falling into a relationship with Sandra, who absolutely is interested.

The acting is the first thing that really elevates this film, Phoenix is very fine as the mumbling, weird loner and he portrays Leonard's desire for Michelle extremely believably. Paltrow's Michelle is a depressed mess and if there's one character-trait Paltrow can play in her sleep then it's depression, she's excellent. Shaw has the most sketchy character in Sandra, but she adds a lot of natural warmth and light to it, giving a very sympathetic turn which adds far more than is there on paper. The ensemble is nice too, Isabella Rossellini is always a welcome sight and she plays the concerned mother well, who pushes too far at times but it is coming from a good place. Elias Koteas only has a couple of scenes but he always registers.

It's rather saddening that this film misses a trick or two because aside from the acting it's very smoothly put together. The cinematography is first rate and the editing so fluid it goes unnoticed. The photography of the film mirrors Leonard's struggle, the colour palette is drained but the old fashioned style of his environment is sumptously captured. It simultaneously shows how beautiful the nostalgia of the past is but also saps all the life out of it, shows what a shell of itself it has become. These are the halls where the ghosts that haunt Leonard reside and he cannot escape them. He is treated like a teenager and accordingly acts like one, the viscious circle repeating like an ouroboros.

In the end the film gets a touch too predictable and given where they take it, had they done simple things like flesh out the character of Sandra and her relationship with Leonard more, or somehow highlighted the parallels that essentially what Leonard is offering Michelle is so similar to what Sandra can give Leonard, then the decisions taken and direction of the piece would have a lot more emotion and meaning. As it is despite the lovely visual style this remains a rather cold, distant film by Gray, which works mainly because it shows Leonard's position in society but does not entirely match up with the relationships with these women or the passions within him. A very good film which flies by and is very engaging but with just a little effort it could have been something very special indeed.

 

Entre les Murs (The Class)

This film won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival last year and even managed an oscar nomination due to the new set up of their foreign language branch to include films of international acclaim. Usually the rotating juries at Cannes make puzzling choices with divisive films that a lot of the time aren't even good, let alone great, but this is one of their best choices in the last ten years.

We follow Mr. Marin, a young teacher, and his class of 14 and 15 year olds for the school year. The first thing about this film is just how consistently amusing it is. It's shot in a very simple way which is reminiscent of, if not an actual documentary. We are shown the teachers melting down at the frustration of it all, the difficulty in trying to engage the kids without getting sidetracked as well as the problems pupils and teachers face just in seeing each other every day. It doesn't sound very entertaining but seeing one teacher go through another's new class list saying "nice, nice, not nice at all...", the kids arguing about whether Morocco or Mali are better at football or a teacher impersonating the more annoying children it's extremely entertaining.

It also has a lot to say about the education system in France, particularly to do with discipline and how teachers and parents can easily miss the signs of truly disruptive children and how the structures they have in place to deal with this are almost guaranteed to fail the students in the most dire need of help. François Bégaudeau wrote the book this is based on, the screenplay and stars in it too and he is exceptional, his Marin is both charming and frustrated, but the key to his character and the interest in the film is that he's not perfect and he does make incredibly stupid mistakes. This makes for a fascinating exploration of mutual respect and how teacher's actions effect the pupils, particularly the bad ones.

Overall there isn't a focus to the film, there's no central plot, but every aspect of it rings so true it's more of a slice of life and in that respect it's perfectly realised. All the children create distinctive and memorable characters but never look like they're "giving a performance", it's incredibly natural and the bulk of the credit for that must go to director Laurent Cantet for extracting such a genuine group dynamic. This is one of the finest films of 2008 and more than recommended, capturing the truth of school life in the way no documentary could because with a camera in the room the kids would not act this way, like in the disciplinary hearings the film criticises, they'd be more submissive. The key to The Class is that they're not, and this film gets that across superbly.

Christophe Barratier is a complete throwback. Having gained a great deal of acclaim with his nostalgic music-based debut The Chorus, he has followed it up four years later with a similarly old fashioned ode to the music hall in pre-war Paris. The film begins with Gérard Jugnot (who was also Barratier's lead in his previous film) in a police station. The interviewing officer, who is just hours away from his vacation, notes that Jugnot doesn't look like the killer type. He asks our man's name and where he lives, to which he replies by saying the Faubourg (suburb). After the officer asks which one, the answer is simply "there's only one" and we're taken into the flashback which provides almost the entirity of the story, beginning on new year's eve 1936 at the music hall called the Chansonia, in the "Faubourg" area of Paris.

The plot set up is rather lengthy, then it changes completely after the opening so the best way to describe what the film is about is simply that after the Chansonia has been closed for months, a group of former employees "occupy" it in order to make ends meet. The vain owner in a desire to be loved as well as powerful agrees giving them a month to make it a success, but there's one problem - they're all terrible and they're even forced into giving a girl the owner has taken a fancy to a job as an announcer. Unsurprisingly she actually has talent and it all goes from there.

This is a lovingly made film, the technical aspects of which are fantastic. The sets, costumes, the whole feel of the setting is very lush, which adds to the extremely fluid visual style. There are a lot of crane shots and swooping camera movements, it's almost Hitchcockian and nods to the impressive technical visual storytelling of the Hollywood studio system (when you had a director who decided to show off enough). Thankfully the style is consistent and it beds down rather nicely and doesn't draw attention to itself.

The ensemble are all rather lovely, Jugnot is a very nice presence, Nora Arnezeder is a real find as the announcer-turned-star and object of a lot of people's desire, but there are cracking little turns from the rest too, especially Kad Merad as the unbearably bad impersonator who becomes the owner's stooge. A subplot about Jugnot and his son after the slutty mother leaves (then comes back to take the boy away) provides the bulk of the emotion in the piece and there are lots of musical moments on stage interspersed in the narrative.

Overall if anything it feels a tad longer than its two hour runtime and certain parts of the plot are not as engaging as others and it is fairly predictable stuff. That said though, it's consistently entertaining and there is a musical number towards the end which is absolutely delightful, combining a ridiculously catchy song with an incredibly quirky presentation that is out of the blue stylistically but wonderfully so. This is just one of those films they don't really make any more, the closest recent thing to it would be something like Mrs. Henderson Presents, but this is significantly better than that film as it is a complete crowd-pleaser with much more heart.

A glossary of Italian terms appears at the beginning of Paolo Sorrentino's new film, Il Divo, a film about the 3-time Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti and the downfall of his 7th Government. It's a necessary inclusion because anyone not familiar with the landscape of Italian politics will have no idea what is happening and who is who. Most biopics live and die on the central performance and here it is Toni Servillo (who was superb in the film that made Sorrentino's name internationally, The Consequences of Love) who gives a very physical performance reminiscent of Marion Cotillard's in La Môme, except minus the tantrums.

Servillo gets better the longer the film goes, it is a very good performance provided that physical transformation is your preference in acting. He has to totally underplay Andreotti and walks around in an almost Dracula-fashion, it's more about what he's not doing than what he is, but it's such a visual thing with the downturned ears and the posture that it's very much physical transformation and mannerism first, character work second. Sorrentino manages to completely waste Fanny Ardant in a glorified cameo and there are a few interesting supporting turns. His stylistic choices trump everything though, as we are introduced to people (be they assassination victims or members of Andreotti's "faction") with their names and jobs (and in the case of the cabinet, nicknames) which move along with the camera - it's rather like Man on Wire portraying it like a heist movie, but unlike that film it doesn't really fit here.

Sorrentino does his usual schtick of throwing in music montages every ten or fifteen minutes (which worked so well in The Consequences of Love but was so pathetic in The Family Friend) - for this kind of film his style doesn't really work. It's a case of the wrong director for the material because it's so MTVish for those with no attention span, when this is a film that demands intellectual involvement (especially for an outsider looking in trying to understand what on earth is going on) and being taken out of it continually breaks everything up.

The bonus of the way its told is that it never drags for a second and it feels closer to 90 mins than its 110 minute runtime. The long title of this film is Il Divo: The Extraordinary Life of Giulio Andreotti, and sadly the film is not an extraordinary one, a more fitting title would be Downfall. It is an interesting look at Italian politics and Servillo anchors the film with a very committed and watchable performance. The narrative is a bit clunky though and without specific knowledge of the intricacies of what happened it won't necessarily all come together at the end (which is a little underwhelming and flat given what's preceeded it). What remains is simply the right subject for a biopic in the wrong hands to execute it.

There have been quite a few occasions where I've seen a performance that an actor or actress has given and I've subsequently found out they died young. It's always a bit of a shock when you see something like A Letter to Three Wives and really like Linda Darnell in it and then find out she died in her forties. I can safely say though that if there is one of these situations that has continually stayed with me after every film I've seen the person in, then it is with Elizabeth Hartman.

I first saw her a couple of years ago when I set my video to record A Patch of Blue on TCM in the middle of the night. My initial motivation for doing that was that it starred Sidney Poitier, but it's become one of my favourite films. That is almost solely down to Elizabeth's performance as a lonely blind girl who lives with her abusive family and is befriended by Poitier in the park, neither knowing nor caring about the colour of his skin. Her performance, like the film, is perfect in its own little way: she had a combination of effortless naturalism coupled with a simultaneous sweetness and vulnerability which I found impossible to resist. As always when I discover someone new (to me) I went on IMDB and immediately wanted to find out more about her and discover what else I could see her in. That's when I found out that this person I'd enjoyed so much died at the age of 43, falling to her death from the window of her apartment: a suicide five years to the day after relocating from Hollywood after her final job.

It didn't take me long to see her in other films as both The Beguiled and The Fixer are occasionally on television here on the movie channels. She has supporting roles in both and stands out in both. The Beguiled is a very strange film, it's rather psychedelic and has Clint Eastwood's wounded soldier holed up in a school for girls. Elizabeth is the virginal assistant who Clint "chooses" over the older headmistress played by Geraldine Page and she gave a very delicate, vulnerable performance. In The Fixer she was rather different as she was a woman who had her advances towards Alan Bates rejected, then accused him of rape out of revenge. It was a rather turgid film but Elizabeth was the best part of it and it was nice to see some vengeful steel to go with the loneliness she so seemingly effortlessly conveys.

Until this week that was all I'd seen of her as her filmography is very small. Her psychological problems had been around for years and it contributed to her turning down parts. What is the most frustrating thing for me is the lack of resources about her on the internet: fansites, groups and even interviews all are rather scarce. This week You're A Big Boy Now was on TCM and that prompted me to delve back into her again and I found two of her last films on youtube. I also found this article ("Elizabeth Hartman - A Lifetime Trapped Between the Demon and the Muse" http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20097064,00.html) in People magazine which was written after her death and it's far and away the best thing I can find about her online. There's one other lengthy piece about her (http://www.robert-temple.com/nostalgia/ElizabethHartman.html) but it seems more to revel in backstage stories than focus on her. There's some interesting stuff buried in there though.

Which leads me on to the films. First up as mentioned was You're a Big Boy Now, which was an early Francis Ford Coppola film and it's unbelievable that after *this* he was doing The Godfather five years later. It's an extremely dated comedy about a teenage geek (Peter Kastner) who works at his father's library and is left to fend for himself. He has a girl (Karen Black) who's throwing herself at him and another (Hartman) who is the object of his desire. This isn't a very amusing film, the oscars must have been on a serious volume of drugs to nominate Geraldine Page as our boy's mother and it's frankly a bit of a mess both in terms of character and narrative. Elizabeth plays against type as much as she could have done in the wake of A Patch of Blue and it's intriguing for that alone, but curiosity value (for fans of Hartman and Coppola) aside there's very little to recommend this - it has aged horribly.

I saw Elizabeth's final film, The Secret of NIMH, which was an animated film in the early 80s and was the biggest non-Disney animation up to that point. It's a rather dark story of a mouse (Mrs. Brisby - voiced by Hartman) who is doing all she can to save her son, who has pneumonia and has to stay in bed even though the humans are harvesting and the mice have to move. There's an underworld of rats coupled with an evil cat, some comic relief from a crow and very cute young mice who Mrs. Brisby is mother to. I think this would be pretty scary and complex for young children (it's pretty much half-way between Disney and Watership Down) but it's a very interesting film visually and thematically. Hartman's voice perfectly suits her timid, shy heroine pushed into brave situations and it's a bit of a shame this film isn't more known. Damn that cartel known as Disney .

Lastly I caught Walking Tall, which was a big hit at the time and was remade with The Rock and Johnny Knoxville a few years ago. It's one of those "based on real events" kind of films that takes the real life story of former wrestler and marine Buford Pusser and his problems faced when elected Sheriff of his local county. It's one of the worst films I've ever seen for goofs, there are at least half a dozen scenes where the boom mikes are clearly visible, sometimes throughout entire shots - it's very unprofessional. The filmmakers make it as full of violence as possible and take liberties with the truth, but that works as it is usually for a better dramatic reason. This was Elizabeth's final large on-screen movie role and she doesn't have anything really to do, she's simply Joe Don Baker's wife. Baker was good at this kind of thing (he did a similarly low-budget and kick-ass themed The Outfit with Robert Duvall the same year) and he does everything you'd expect of him, it's a more than solid performance. So a sloppily made, exploitative but strangely compelling and always watchable film.

I realise how strange a post this has been for my blog but there's so little about her on the internet I thought I'd take advantage of my talking about the films of hers I would have anyway and expand a little on that. I'll leave with a video which is absolutely heartbreaking when you know what ended up happening to her, which was a promotion vid for A Patch of Blue - if you haven't seen the film then you'll get a glimpse of what the performance is like and you get a small look at what she was like outside of character as well. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8d8SL-QCPWw. Now for me to hopefully find that Sidney Lumet film she did one day and I'll be a very happy bunny.

Okay, I'm having a lot of problems with the blog, my PC seemingly is letting me on any website *apart* from blog.co.uk (and my connections are fine and I've done everything the help sites suggest) so this is a little overdue and being done on the laptop, which I detest so hopefully this will sort itself out soon. On to the films, which sadly, none of which I thought were particularly good (and I'm holding off on one of them until my next entry as I want to devote it entirely to Elizabeth Hartman).

First up is 12, which was nominated in the Foreign Language category at the oscars last year. It's a remake of 12 Angry Men with a Russian setting and in almost every area that it diverts away from the original, it is to the detriment of the film. This is such a bloated film, we are given monologue after monologue as seemingly every juror has a random story from their life which they have to recount before obliquely saying why it has to do with the case at hand. This makes the film drag ad nauseum, but adding the Chechen backdrop to all of this only muddies the water as we needlessly see the accused's history in flashbacks which the jurors have no access to. They make astonishing leaps without actually analysing the evidence and the way they come to be increasingly sure of the boy's innocence is extremely unconvincing. Finally at the end we have a twist on the original which is mildly interesting but by that point the film has been so ponderous, plodding and overcooked it's far too little, far too late.

The next film I saw was also involved with the Foreign Language category at the oscars last year, but this was only submitted - by Estonia. The film is Klass (the English title is The Class but it should be distinguished from the Palme d'Or winner last year with the same name which I'll be seeing this month) and it follows a boy who is being bullied by his entire class and the one lad who sees it as a matter of honour to defend him. The problem with this film (aside from 2D characterisation and messy motivation) is that it covers similar ground to Elephant, and while it does engage the incredibly sensitive subject matter (whereas that film merely hinted at then skirted the issue of "why") it does so too far as it continually makes these boys the victims thus the only way the finale is dramatically interesting is if you are on their side. If anything this probably shows how futile it is to do a film on this subject - here they show what pushes the boys to it but they a/ skate over them coming to the truly momentous decision to take the action they do and b/ only succeed in portraying the victims as 2D people who deserved what they got and I don't think either is a worthy or satisfactory exploration of such a topic. I give it points for at least trying but it misses the heart of it and is just so questionable in its message it cuts itself off at the knees.

Coming across it purely by chance on Sky, I saw the 50s film on the story of Titanic starring the divine Barbara Stanwyck and the delicious Clifton Webb. Of course the ship inevitably goes down but the story at the centre of it is that Stanwyck is running away from her husband, who we see paying an obscene amount to get a ticket at the begining of the film. There's a subplot of a love story between a young Robert Wagner and the daughter of the main couple, played by Audrey Dalton and Thelma Ritter is able to be completely wasted in support. The final half an hour or so is melancholic and lyrical, there's no score, just the sound of the siren going completely and the culmination of the story between Webb and Stanwyck's son is genuinely moving. Prior to that though it's fairly simple stuff and not especially compelling. It's a decent film, very old fashioned but fairly affecting in spite of its low key nature.

A few films I found online recently. Firstly I saw The Goddess of 1967, which won Rose Byrne the Best Actress prize at the Venice film festival in 2000. All that says in retrospect is how chronically weak the films were that year because any of the major Cannes performances that year (Lena Endre in Faithless, Maggie Cheung in In the Mood For Love and Björk in Dancer in the Dark) would have walked it in a heartbeat. The film is absolutely atrocious, it's such a vapid, soulless tale of a blind woman and a Japanese man who go on a road trip in a car (the eponymous goddess). It clumsily exploits a touchy subject matter (incest) and shows such a lack of insight it beggars belief. The acting is adequate but nothing dozens of others couldn't have done (the guy sounds like he's reading his lines phonetically and Byrne's blindness doesn't fully convince), it's a very obscure film and deservedly so, I couldn't recommend seeking it out to anyone.

So from that to the real goddess of 1967, Catherine Deneuve (who was at her most iconic having Belle de Jour and The Young Girls of Rochefort released that year). I found three films of hers online and I'll take them in the order I saw them. First up I saw Mayerling, which I'd never heard of but it was available and one look at the cast (Omar Sharif, Deneuve and Ava Gardner) and I had to see it. It's based on the true story of the Mayerling incident, which involved the Crown Prince of Austria and his mistress. The film is a romanticised version of their love story and it reminds me of The Abdication, which I talked about this month. It's not *that* historically accurate but is a very watchable film. The difference between this film and that one is the Liv Ullmann one relied on the acting whereas this is a period drama which has all the positives that genre affords. Gardner's scene with Deneuve was the only part that stood out on the acting front but it got better the longer it went.

After seeing that I continued searching and found a film that isn't available here which I've wanted to see for years, My Favourite Season, directed by André Téchiné and starring Deneuve and Daniel Auteuil. They play estranged siblings who come together for christmas after Deneuve has had to take their mother into her house following recent illnesses. What plays out is a family drama which for the first 90 minutes is truly first rate. There are a couple of slips in tone and content which are at odds with everything else and slightly derail it at this point, but after that they get it back on track. Deneuve truly excels as the wife, sister and mother giving a restrained but soulful performance similar to that which she got oscar nominated for in Indochine. Auteuil doesn't have a tremendous amount to do but he does everything he's required to and on occasion goes above and beyond. Like Claude Sautet, Téchiné makes very clean films visually and it's just a shame this has got no distribution here because it's one of the better French films from the 90s I've seen.

Back to 1967 and the aforementioned The Young Girls of Rochefort. I expected this (being another Jacques Demy film starring Deneuve) that it would be completely sung like The Umbrellas of Cherbourg was, but it's a normal musical with dialogue followed by musical numbers. This stars Catherine Deneuve and her sister Françoise Dorléac as twins who are trying to move to Paris all the while searching for their "dream man". The choreography is generally very nice and the direction is superb as while having technically challenging shots Demy never draws attention to his technique. The best songs are those involving the sisters as they as performers have the most charm and the songs are better written. Not much to character, they try to keep everyone apart from who they're supposed to be with a little too transparantly but it's a very stylish film, and they really don't make them like this any more. That's it for now, but I may have another Deneuve one in my next entry if I can find the subtitles for it.

... I will try and talk about as many as possible before giving in to the demands of slumber - 8 films have mounted up and I'll try to blast through them and I'm already knackered now so I'll see how far I get. Right. Hjemve, a film by Lone Scherfig (who did Italian for Beginners) - I went to download it then discovered it online. This was one of my most anticipated films of 2006 but due to a luke-warm reception in Denmark it hasn't got international distribution. It's about a little community who are being pulled apart by rumours and suspicion over a man seen naked in the streets. Lovely cast (including several faces from Italian for Beginners), the tone's a little strange and some of it feels a tad forced but in the main it's an inoffensive watch.

Having seen that one which I'd wanted to for a while, I dug up one of Emmanuelle Béart's recent, obscure films - A Crime, which also stars Harvey Keitel (and is in English). It's a solid enough thriller about a man whose wife has been murdered. 3 years later he's still searching for the cab-driver who did it and Béart is convinced once he's got over it they will be together. Enter Keitel's loser cabbie who becomes drawn into Béart's charms. It really is the Emmanuelle show, it's such a fine performance from her. She can do two things very well, crazed and depressed, and that is exactly what she's asked to do here. It's a morally complex, interesting situation, but ruined through the writer lazily falling for the temptation of coincidence. A must for fans of Béart, and Keitel is his most intriguing in years, this one's on youtube in very good quality.

After that I caught Coal Miner's Daughter, which won Sissy Spacek an oscar. The first problem with this film (which is a biopic of country star Loretta Lynn) is that the opening third of the movie is watching Tommy Lee Jones trying to marry a 13 year old (shyeah right ) Sissy and ... it's frankly disturbing. Secondly, having done that groundwork and portrayed him as a lying, abusive, cheating sod ... they skip over far too much and it makes the relationship unbelievable. This is a consequence of the film having no sense of time at all, you find out afterwards "when" these scenes are going on. Thirdly ... not that much interesting actually happened to her once she made it to the top so the only real interest is the "love story", which has such questionable groundwork and lack of insight it doesn't work on that level. The acting is very good and elevates the material, but this is a biopic (unlike say, Walk the Line)  that probably demands an interest in the music/person to get anything meaningful out of it.

Pushing on, I saw The More the Merrier, which is a comedy from the early 40s that I wanted to see because it contains Jean Arthur (an actress I enjoy greatly)'s sole oscar nomination. The set up is that in Washington during the war everything is overcrowded. Jean Arthur rents half of her apartment to Charles Coburn (who has come 2 days before his hotel is booked for), who then for no apparant reason rents half of his half to Joel McCrea. The opening is full of slapstick and it falls disappointingly flat - it's cute but not really funny. When the meat and bones of trying to get the engaged Arthur and the eminently eligible McCrea together it picks up steam but this is not one of the better examples of comedy from the period. It's decent, but could have been so much more.

Okay, big yawn I just did there, I also saw Ironweed which shocked me, in the best of ways, because it has one of those Jack Nicholson performances where he is absolutely determined not to be "Jack". He plays a bum who left his family after an accident which killed his baby son, and is scraping by with Meryl Streep in tow. He works odd jobs to get a few bucks but starts seeing "ghosts" of people he's killed in the past. His schizofrenic, alcoholic drifter could so easily have been over the top by any actor (and all the name actors of the period wanted the part) but Nicholson is simply amazing in his restraint and subtlety, it's a wonderful turn. Streep is fine, but bland in comparison, but then again she does have a thankless role. Some very soulful support from Carroll Baker as Nicholson's estranged wife is a very welcome addition to the film which is at its most interesting when doing a character study of Nicholson's character, rather than seeing him and Streep together. So an uneven film, but more than worth it for one of the few times in last 25 years where Jack remembered that deep at heart he's a character actor rather than a movie star. Still three more , I'll pick this up in the morning.

Right, refreshed and with the obligatory cup of coffee I shall continue . Found a film I've wanted to see for YEARS, which is the 1960s Russian version of Hamlet. I saw the Mel Gibson version as a kid, then saw the Kenneth Branagh version and have proceeded to forget so much about it I actually forgot I saw it (until reminded I had by stills from the film), but it was the Olivier version which I was wowed by (coming at the end of my seeing all his Shakespearian output). This one is hardly the film noirish thing Olivier's was, but it is extremely stylish in its own way. Innokenti Smoktunovsky brings a very impressive naturalism to his Hamlet and while I don't think he's as mad as he could have been, it's very refreshing to see someone underplay it and give a truly cinematic performance. The film is a bit too bloated in the middle and ends far too quickly, but the Shostakovich score and the unendingly beautiful shots of nature and the elements give it all a very worldly feel.

Moving on to yesterday I saw a couple of films that could not be more different. I saw Jean Cocteau's Orphée on SkyArts and was very impressed. It's a modern take on the of Orpheus myth, with our man being a poet who goes into the underworld to retrieve his dead wife Eurydice. Here it is Death herself (Death is portrayed as a woman) who is the cause of Eurydice's death because Death is in love with Orpheus. It is quite interesting but when the visual effects of moving through the mirrors or walking against the wind in the underworld kick in, it's breathtaking stuff. There are techniques here that were being pilfered in music videos in the 90s (and one of the mirror tricks was stolen in La Haine), this is so far ahead of its time it defies belief. The acting was fine but this is very much a "more than the sum of its parts" film and I'd recommend seeing it if it comes on tv again (it should, I've already missed it once and it was on again).

Lastly I saw one of the very few oscar best picture nominees from the 1990s that I hadn't, namely The Prince of Tides. The film is about a man (Nick Nolte) whose sister has tried to kill herself so in order to help he tells her therapist (Barbra Streisand) the family secrets to fill in the blanks about her past. Of course his marriage is breaking up and ... well it goes from there. In the main this is very watchable stuff, but it doesn't go anywhere revelatory and the end is just horrendously cheesy. Nolte is the reason to watch though (even if he can't fully convince me that he's calling Streisand's character beautiful for any other reason than to satisfy Streisand's vanity ), it's a very good role and he does well with it. Not worth going out of your way to see and watch out for that lethal overdose of schmaltz in the final voiceover but it was a decent way to spend a couple of hours.

Lovely bunch of films I've been watching . Continuing on from the last post, having seen Lemon Tree I was in the mood for more Hiam Abbass so I checked out her other film with the same director (Eran Riklis) called The Syrian Bride. It's a very interesting set up where there is going to be a Druze wedding between a Syrian actor and a Druze woman in the Israeli-annexed Golan Heights. Her nationality is "undefined" and when she goes through with it she won't be able to see her family again as the border is closed because the two countries are still officially at war. Lovely cast, Abbass as the bride's sister is the clear standout and it gets better when it moves away from the family quarrels and into the meat and bones of the bureaucratic nightmare to get the bride across.

How I found this next film should give you an insight into how finding films works for me - I'd seen a film on youtube and was linking someone online to the person's profile. There I see that person has also put up a couple of Kate Hepburn films I want to see. The next day instead of going to those Hepburn films, I type in Alice Adams to see if anyone put *that* up because it's the one of Kate's I've not seen that I want to the most. Someone did and that pleased me, but before I got around to pressing play I checked what else that person had put up and found Z, which I want to see even more so I ended up not watching ANY of the Hepburn films and settling down with Costa-Gavras .

Z has one of those delightful disclaimers at the beginning of the film that claims that any similarity to persons living or dead is completely deliberate . It's a not-very-thinly veiled account of the assassination of Greek politician Gregoris Lambrakis (who with a name like that really sounds like he should be playing Centre-Back for Olympiacos  - he was the MP for Piraeus after all ), who was a pacifist, doctor and former olympian. This is very like his later film Missing in that it takes a tragic event and shows the build up to it plus examines how the powers that be were involved. What this lacks that Missing has is the great performances, the cast are fine but they don't have a tremendous amount to do. It's also a lot more thick on the politics than Missing was (that had two people with completely different ideals searching for the same truth). This is very one-sided and again deliberately so because the Junta were still in control of Greece at the time and it's very much a protest-film. For a while it gets a tad bogged down with the repeated lies and cover ups but the final 15 minutes or so really give the film a boost. Very worth seeing but given what he went on to do plus the film's reputation I'd be lying if I said I wasn't a little bit disappointed.

Okay it's taking an unusually long time to write this entry so I'll try to push on quickly. In anticipation of Wendy and Lucy (which comes to an arthouse near me in three weeks time) I found Incendiary and gave it a watch. It's basically Michelle Williams having an affair with Ewan McGregor when her Arsenal-mad husband and child are killed in a terrorist attack on the Emirates Stadium. Michelle is simply superb in the role, giving as good a regional English accent as you'll get from a foreign actress and showing a remarkable amount of soul and restraint in a knockout performance.

I found out afterwards the film got widely panned on release (and said release was a complete joke, why spend $10m on a film if you're going to release it on 16 screens for one week? Really, why bother at all?) and the film is indeed not without flaws. It's very ambitious and goes for too much, a 21 Grams-style stalking/befriending, a love triangle and a psychological examination. Two of the three in combination is probably the most this story could have held. That said though, despite the abundant cliches, too much being packed into it and some general implausibility I did enjoy the film. It's moving in parts and Williams holds everything together nicely - a film that's easy to be cynical about but I would think this is one audiences would be a lot more patient with than critics, hence its woeful distribution is rather sad. It's out on dvd now.

Polishing this entry off, I saw A Soldier's Story last night on Sky, I almost missed it but am very glad I caught it because I liked it a lot. It's 1944 Louisiana and an NCO in a "colored" regiment (commanded solely by white officers) has been murdered and to everyone's surprise Captain Davenport is sent to investigate the crime. Why the surprise? He's black too and the first black officer everyone there has seen, received in delight by the men but despair from the white Captain who is convinced Davenport will never be able to arrest a white man for the crime. It tells the background through flashbacks as the Captain gets closer and closer to the truth. This really rattles along, is frequently amusing, but is at its best when examining the attitude of a man who realises how people from a different race see his ethnic group then rallies against people who fit into the stereotype. A very accomplished ensemble (including a young Denzel Washington), this is a not-unpredictable film, but with Norman Jewison you always get solidly made, watchable stuff. A very pleasant surprise.