2000: Fail-Safe

The black-and-white remake of the 1960s classic (which I've never seen) about an impeding nuclear war between the US and the USSR is sort of outdated, but manages to entertain throughout with a tight screenplay and good visuals. (7)

2006: Un printemps à Paris

A gangster film with the standard ingredients heist, hustlers, homicide. Plus a sick "love story", just because we're French. Not a bad screenplay, and a master would have made this a really good movie, but Jacques Bral isn't one of them, so instead you get what feels like a made-for-TV movie. (6)

2005: Red Eye

Highly conventional thriller about a young woman who's forced to assist a stranger in killing a celebrity, or else. Nothing wrong with it, nothing impressive about it. (6)

1971: Confessione di un commissario di polizia al procuratore della repubblica

Though somewhat trashy in an Italian-film-from-the-1970s kind of way, the movie about a policeman and a DA with different approaches to fighting crime entertains throughout. (7)

1965: The War Game

Fiction-documentary about what it might look like if Britain suffers a nuclear attack. Given that the outcome is rather dreadful anyway, I felt that the film might have been more effective if it had tried less hard. (6)

1954: Ordet

Much like Vreden's dag, another sparse Dreyer film set in the Danish countryside. Generally a nice unspectacular offering, but the young man who thinks he's Jesus's appearances border on the unintentionally comic (at least in the dubbed-into-German version I saw) and the ending is, um, unconventional. (6.5)

1909: A Corner in Wheat

Evil capitalist gains control of the wheat market, as a consequence of which poor people can't buy bread anymore in Griffith's early short which, despite running for a little over 14 minutes, is too long. A must-see if you're writing a history of anti-market films. (4)

1963: L'aîné des Ferchaux (Magnet of Doom or An Honorable Young Man)

Melville's road movie about an industrialist fleeing France for the USA and a failed boxer accompanying him as his "secretary" is typically slow and melancholic and untypically unstylized. Certainly not for everybody, but for me. (7)

1945: Mildred Pierce

The story itself - about how a man came to be murdered - isn't all that interesting, but it is told at quite a pace, and the frames show this was directed by Michael Curtiz, the man responsible for Casablanca. Why this is often classified as a noir escapes me, though. (7)

1962: The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner

The film about a deviant youth's time in a reformatory and how he got there is generally done well, and I especially like the use of music in the running scenes. Could have done without the grandstanding in the final scene. (6.5)

2005: A Cock and Bull Story

Winterbottom's postmodern mashup of a film version of Tristram Shandy and the behind-the-scenes story of the actors involved in this film is excellently structured and a lot of fun. (7.5)

1951: Ace in the Hole

The story of a reporter putting a man's life in danger in order to have a better story and hence enhance his carreer is sort of pointless: You learn he's an egocentric arsehole in the first five minutes, and then the film spells it out. Still, the script is tightly written in an old Hollywood kind of way, so it's a decent 100 minutes. (6)

2004: Enduring Love

You can't expect any movie to be as gripping as Ian McEwan's masterful novel Enduring Love, about a well-off man who gets stalked by a not-so-well-off one. The screenplay does, in fact, do a decent job - with the notable exception of its attempts to bring the evolutionary psychology of love onto the screen, a feature of the film which pulls off the trick of being trivial and wrong at the same time. But the quality of the movie that really sucks is its piss-poor "modern" visual style. The whole thing looks like a fucking Ikea catalogue! (5)

1991: Homicide

Starts out as a cool cop flick, then devolves into a drama about Jewish identity. Shame. (6.5)

1983: Zelig

Woody Allen's mockumentary on the "chameleon man" whose looks change in response to his surroundings pretty much takes the format of a standard History Channel documentary and is about as entertaining - but a little more so for the occasional typical Allen joke ("I worked with Freud in Vienna. We broke over the concept of penis envy. Freud felt that it should be limited to women."). (6.5)

1964: The Killers

A couple of killers wonder why a victim they killed just stood there and took the hit, and soon they're tracing the million from a robbery he was involved in. When they line up accomplice after accomplice, the victim's story is told in a series of flashbacks. - No-nonsense, hardboiled and well-photographed movie of the kind that one imagines Tarantino enjoys. (7)

1989: Thrash Altenessen: Ein Film aus dem Ruhrgebiet

Watching the late-80s documentary about Essen's then-not-yet-famous metal band Kreator and their social and architectural surroundings was an all-around weird experience. That is all.

1966: Masculin feminin

Another loosely structured black and white film about young French people from Godard. In this one, both the naive main character and the filmmaker himself (via all-caps intertitles) get on one's nerves with simplistic messages from the far left, but it doesn't really matter: Like previous pics, Masculin feminin has that hard-to-pin-down nervous energy that they don't teach at film school. (7.5)

1959: Plan 9 from Outer Space

Yes, this film features some terrible acting and a number of technical blunders that may, indeed, make the movie a valuable teaching example for film school, but on a more general level it is no more trashy than the widely-acclaimed 1951 The Day the Earth Stood Still, and certainly more entertaining.

2009: Me and Orson Welles

The theatre's an attractive backdrop for movies anyway, and the setup here is nice, too: Young wannabe actor lucks into a job with pre-Citizen Kane, but already famous, Orson Welles, who is directing Julius Caesar and falls for a fellow employee, whom everyone else, including the boss, also finds attractive. It could be a great film, but was apparently streamlined according to screenwriting 101, which is rarely a good thing. I'm looking at you in particular, canned stupid foreseeable ending. (6.5)

2010: The American

The title character is a killer, played by Clooney, hiding out in a village and getting to know a number of people. But there are films in which the plot is not important, and this is one of them. Anton Corbijn, who previously directed the masterpiece Control, again is in no hurry, and lets the film breathe slowly like an old animal. Naturally, many people find this boring. Which is fine, as long as they don't express their boredom in pseudo-conoisseurish phrases like "that's badly narrated cinema". (7.5)

1966: Alfie

You can read this film about a womanizer with a small conscience as either a statement about the advantages of conventional monogamy or a celebration of alpha maleness with a tacked-on ending to set the church's mind at ease. Either way, a bad basic idea. (5)

1966: What's up, Tiger Lily?

I though it was a joke when it said on the back of the DVD case that they took a Japanese action movie and added a new soundtrack. Not so! Quite silly. I wouldn't want to see a hundred movies like that, but one was quite entertaining. (7)

1980: Stardust Memories

This almost plotless picture is Woody Allen's Otto e mezzo, a film about a famous director (Allen) who gets pestered by half of the people about how brilliant they are and the other half about how his old films were funnier. But it's better than Fellini's movie, or at least the 25 minutes I managed to sit through, merging Allen's usual humour with some shots of real beauty. And aliens. (7.5)

2009: Antichrist

Lars von Trier is a director that has nothing on his mind but to deliver extreme emotional experiences to his audiences. That's fine with me, though in this shocker - about a couple retreating to the woods after their son's death - at times he's trying a little too hard. Even so, the somewhat Lynchesque film, which features the usual imagery like imposing trees, insects, talking foxes and a woman cutting her clit off - is a coherent and attractive audiovisual system. (7)

1961: Experiment in Terror

The thriller about a bank clerk blackmailed into stealing 100,000 dollars is shot in pristine black and white and all-around well made. Not much else to say about it. A weak 7.

1971: Straw Dogs

Goodness gracious! If you are looking for a film to make you really, really aggressive, I recommend this one featuring Dustin Hoffman as a nerdy American mathematician whom the locals in his new, English home village dislike. Of course, things get out of hand. Everybody involved certainly did a very effective job on this one - the screenplay in particular is well-constructed - but an enjoyable experience this is not. (unrated)

The Best of August 2010

1. Synecdoche, New York (2008) - 8.5
2. Muriel ou Le temps d'un retour (1963) - 8.0
   
3. Le petit soldat (1963) - 7.5
   
4. Rocco e i suoi fratelli (1960) - 7.5
   
5. Vanilla Sky (2001) - 7

Films Not Finished: August 2010

Gertrud, Repulsion, Storm, Toni Takitani