... as I realised that I'd completely forgotten about a couple of films I saw a couple of weekends ago so I'll hold off on the new (ish) stuff until I've got these out of the way (although I've seen another new one online so I'm still undecided whether to lump them all together or what - we'll see).
Right, first up is Mephisto, which is a film that I've wanted to see for years as it has quite the reputation (it won Best Foreign Language Film at the oscars and was a prize-winner at Cannes). It's always been high on online-rental queues of mine but for whatever reason it's never been sent out, I've looked for it online too but to no avail. The story is an updating of Faust, set in Nazi Germany with the idea of selling your soul to the devil taking the form of collaberating with the government in order to advance your career.
What to say ... it's a good film but given the weight of expectation very underwhelming. Klaus Maria Brandauer plays the main character and again, given how good he was in Colonel Redl (also by director István Szabó), disappointing. At times he's quite wonderful and in particular his performances as Mephisto onstage are exceptional but ironically when the character stops acting, that is the part of the film where I occasionally saw the actor "acting" rather than the character (rather like Annette Bening in Being Julia, which is a Szabó film too). So well acted up to a point, interesting as far as it goes but it's a distance from being a classic because it never fully hooks the audience in.
Earlier that night, whilst waiting for Mepshito to start, I caught the opening third of Possession because I'll watch anything with Jennifer Ehle in it. It's a story of modern scholars Aaron Eckhart and Gwyneth Paltrow unearthing the secret affair between their 19th century literary subjects of study, played by Ehle and Jeremy Northam. I caught the latter part of it online. This is one of those films which is fine up until the last 10-15 minutes where the writers (and this probably comes from the source material) take such a lazy, cheap way out of things. Most of the cast are fine, even if Northam is rather limp and the chemistry between both couples is non-existant: it's watchable though. That is until the end where the pay off isn't anywhere near as interesting or inspired enough to justify sitting through it all.
Moving on, a couple of years ago, before I started using online rental, I once joked that I wished Ingmar Bergman (who was in his mid-80s) would hurry up and die because that was the only way I could envision being able to see some of his films. Of course when he eventually did die BBCFour did a weekend and on the anniversary of his death Film Four a week of films in "celebration" of his work. Sadly, exactly the same thing has happened now that Natasha Richardson died - I'd wanted to see Asylum for a couple of years (and had tried, unsuccessfully, to find it) and in that grand tradition of British television, now that she's dead Film Four put it on last night 
.
The basic story is that the wife of a psychiatrist becomes involved in an affair with one of the patients at the asylum where her husband works. The film, sadly, is nowhere near as good as Richardson's performance. Ian McKellen sleepwalks through his role, Hugh Bonneville just shouts intermittantly and Marton Csokas is fairly uninspired as the wife-murdering psycho our woman falls for. Cue lots of sex scenes (and on occasion some, frankly, unneccessarily exploitative nudity from Richardson) and it's all rather uninteresting. Richardson elevates the material to make it a decent enough watch but it's such a cold film. I can see why she was interested because it's a very good role, but it is the kind of thing that if Angelina Jolie or Nicole Kidman did then people would call it oscar-begging. So not entirely convincing, a rather dull, at times trashy film with a very good central performance which is the only thing to recommend it.