Okay, another batch to get through, firstly I'll just briefly mention a couple of things I tried to watch on tv but didn't see all of. Speed Racer is doing the rounds on Sky at the moment and I love Christina Ricci enough to at least give it a look but sadly couldn't find anything of value. Garish, very fake film, stupid beyond measure with an unbearable tone, sorry to see such talented people as Ricci and Susan Sarandon waste themselves in this dreck. Also caught a bit of All the Real Girls, had missed the beginning but wanted to check it out because Paul Schneider is an interesting actor and to see what all the fuss is about Zooey Deschanel. As with the other David Gordon Green film I've seen the script is the cause of all the problems, and it features characters spouting inanities at each other ("I just want to make sure that a million years from now I can still see you up close and we'll still have amazing things to say" - still? 
) as well as performances which are nothing special and can't elevate the material.
So on to better things, on Saturday night there were a couple of films on tv at the same time (11pm) which looked interesting for a variety of reasons - Clue (which I've had pimped to me as kind of a cult classic) was on ITV3 and Facing Window was on Sky Arts. I videoed the former and watched the latter, which is an Italian film about an unhappily married couple who take in an elderly gentleman who can't remember his name. It's one of those films, and a lot of modern Italian ones are like this, which are almost depressingly competent. The cinematography is filtered and sheened, the direction as smooth as possible, but it all masks a lack of depth and insight both in character and story. I found the (sub?)plot about the man's past to be simply using the subject matter (oooh Holocaust, oooh homosexuality) to provide an interest in and of itself rather than creating something dramatic and the main story about the wife (the lovely Giovanna Mezzogiorno) and the neighbour who spy on each other via their "facing window"s rather limp. What remains is an inherently watchable film (although that score is far too overdone) but at-best perfunctory and at-worst pretentious as it takes these touchy issues to give the film a weight of importance and intrigue which just isn't there, as it's all about as deep as a puddle.
After seeing that, Giovanna (her name is so long, it's ridiculous 
) was good enough to prompt me to see what else she'd been in (I knew she'd been in the flop that was Love in the Time of Cholera, which I was actually considering watching purely because Ron Harwood adapted it) and it turns out she was in a film I'd wanted to see for a while, the oscar nominated (but completely unavailable here) La bestia nel cuore (Don't Tell). So having waited for years and never found it I downloaded it and watched it the next day. This is heavy, heavy stuff, in the first 20 minutes everything is introduced (death of parents, subplot of lesbian desires, history of sexual abuse) but despite having broadly similar stylistic tendencies to Facing Window, here director Christina Comencini has the heft as a dramatist to provide the depth beneath the sheened surface.
The cinematography is very nice and the camera movement gliding, the score is also beautiful, it adds to the mood and atmosphere greatly. Mezzogiornoquattroformaggiowithcheese (hell, if it's that long I'm going to have some fun with it 
) is absolutely first rate here, she has a very difficult role as a woman dicovering her abuse-ridden past and they surround her with uninspired casting choices (let's get both guys from The Best of Youth 
) who do solid but uninteresting work. For the most part this is a very fine film, the dream sequence revealing the abuse (less than 20 mins in, it's not a spoiler) is one of the most cinematic depictions of such a thing since that insanely artful "rape" in Talk to Her. It's the character study after that that provides the interest though and the central performance coupled with the direction takes everyone along for the extraordinarily depressing ride. The subplots are acted well enough, but do seem a bit tacked on and superfluous and lack the arresting nature and vitality of the main arc. I can see why enough people at the oscars who saw this were moved enough to nominate it, but equally it's even more clear such a downer of a film wouldn't beat a crowd pleaser like Tsotsi. Well worth seeing, if only they'd release the damn thing here 
.
On to Clue then, which I enjoyed much more than I thought I would. Based on the board came, it's a film about a group of people who are assembled at a mansion by a mystery person and after discovering all of them are being blackmailed by the same person the blackmailer is killed. How, where and by who is then the basis of the film. This is a very silly, entertaining film, there are the occasion eye-rollingly cheesy lines but in the main it hits far more than it misses. The cast are clearly having a lot of fun and Tim Curry and Lesley Ann Warren in particular make the most of what they're given. There are three endings and while conceptually that works as it's like the game, on the other hand dramatically it does weaken it a touch as for the final half hour or so you're watching stuff that is obviously smoke and mirrors. This is on tv quite often, but after being so depressed following Tom Watson not winning the Open and England conspiring to make life as difficult for themselves as possible in the ashes, coupled with the joy that was Don't Tell, this was the perfect pick-me-up.