The Coen brothers’ follow up to the dark and nihilistic No Country for Old Men may be hilarious and almost farcical but it is no less determined to present a vew of humans as subject to the destructive and meaningless whims of fate and their own vanity and ignorance. All of the screwball characters may be charming and funny but they are all caught in their own lack of self-knowledge and personal ambitions. The marriages are shot through with deceit, the CIA is full of the most unintellegent men and Hardbodies Gym is staffed by losers (one of whom reveals he used to be a Greek Orthodox priest for 15 years). Right at the end the Chief of Intellegence looks to the camera and asks ‘Well, what have we learnt here?’ ‘Not to do it again, I suppose – but what did we do?’ Clearly nothing has been learnt from this almost Jacobean catastrophe of subterfuge and mass death at the end. So the vision is bleak but really the film is hilarious with a fantastic centre-stage performance from John Malkovitch, charicature coldness from Tilda Swinton and beatuifully crazed stupidity from Frances McDormand. The film starts and ends with majestic zooms in and out from and back to space, as if the events of this bunch of idiots is just one of the many stories that could be told of humanity all probably equally as vain and meaningless – at least on the continent that we see from our high vantage point. Burn After Readig on IMDB

This film has been around for about a year I think but was shown at the 2008 Cambridge Film Festival recently. The brochure said it would be slow moving, in fact ‘glacial’ was the word used and yes, this was an incredibly (and beautifully) slowed down film, from the very slow pan from the water upto to the bridge of a ship docked in a dark and misty small harbour in an unnamed French port town, through to the slow and mannered declarations of the old old detective from London, sent to solve what in reality is a rather minor crime. This is black and white at its best, as has been said before, a homage to noir. What struck me was how mannered all of the acting is. It is deeply unnatural but very arresting and much, refreshingly, is left unexplained at the end. I wonder what the Simenon novel was like, and how much of the mood has been devised by the director. The cast includes Tilda Swinton in a rather strange minor(ish) role. This is definitely worth seeing.

made by Wim Wenders in 1974. Its one of his ‘road movies’ featuring a rather luckless but charming German writer/reporter and his reluctant custody of a 9 year old girl that her mother (a stranger) foists onto him in New York. He flies with her to Amsterdam and they search across Holland and northern Germany (where my mum is from) for her relatives. Its black and white and from the shape looks like it was shot on 16mm. The shots of German towns in the 70s are fascinating. It feels as if somethings haven’t changed in 30 years while others are (people smoking on a 747 for a start, looks so strange now). At last a film without blood, violence and constant swearing. I feel like its the first good film I have seen in an age. And how a 9 year old plays the role of this rather grumpy child is beyond me. Its acting without a trace of self-consciousness, and she and Rudiger Vogler enact their relationship so well. In a coupleof weeks they show the ‘next’ film Kings of the road, made a year or so later.

This is just the second Coen brothers film I’ve seen (the first was The Big Lebowski which is hilarious).
‘No Country’ is much more violent, though interestingly, like the Big Lebowski, starts and (kind of) ends with a voice-over from an old-timer reflecting on how things have changed. No Country seems firmly set in Texas, with some impresive vistas
early on in the film. I found its topic puzzling as there are clearly strong themes; violence, hunting, Texas culture
weapons, principles, changing times, buying shirts to cover up wounds and random acts, but random acts kept
decentring the narrative as the characters we assume are the main people exit from the film in unexpected
and kind of undeserved ways, often without us even seeing the act of violence that effects their exit. The film
seems to have a number of centres of gravity. One is the psychopathic killer played by Javier Bardem. He is like a
1960s ethnomethodologist in his refusal to tolerate and participate in casual idiomatic conversation. He goes to
the heart of things, in many senses. Scarey certainly, but almost likable by the end. One review of this film
claims that its concern is with ‘bad luck’ that organises the plot as well as the number of narratives that
we hear recounted within the film, including the brief story of the cattleman who aimed a shot at a steer in order
to slaughter it as it hung upside down in the slaughterhouse. The shot missed the animal’s brain and bounced off
two walls before landing in the cowboy’s left shoulder. As the film draws to a close, we get closer to the jaded
and eventually retired cop who reflects on violence and ponders whether life – or maybe Texas life – has always
been unpredictable and violent. In the very last frame he is telling about his dream of his dead father who is
calling him. Finally, there is a huge amount of blood in this film.

Hmmm. Here’s a strongly plot and issue driven movie that I know has proved very popular. The story is complex and the film does this justice, the dishonesty and ambiguity and shame of Amir’s father has an effect down through the generations that is, we see, finally overcome with the grown up Amir’s revelation to his overbearing father-in-law at the dinner table back in the US near the end of the film. The location scenes are impressive as is some of the acting though I found the children’s lines stilted and not quite fitting their chronological age (it reminded me of that car ads where children are given conversation you would expect their fathers to have). However, the children were played in a very sympathetic way. Its insight into the Taliban convinced me that, probably like all extreme groups, it relied, on the ground, on the participation of bullies and people of sadistic disposition, rather than idealists burning for their cause. There’s a little more at http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0419887/

Not quite as harrowing as a Michael Haneke film but an uncomprmising view of two women, well of one woman mainly, and the night of an abortion for one of them. If we thought the East Germany of The Lives of Others was grim, pre-revolution Romania was worse, certainly poorer with, apparently, endemic grumpiness and nosiness. Men come off pretty badly, so do the middle class family we witness having a birthday meal with a clamped down camera at table level, reminding me of Haneke. The main woman Otilia (Anamaria Marinca) lives a kind of sensitivity and integrity that no-one else in the film seems to, even her friend who has the abortion. Toilets and bathrooms are particularly grim in this film. Apparently the screenplay is based on a true story that the director had heard and was deeply affected by. The film ends rather suddenly.