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)

2010: Salt

Pointless film in which a proper plot is eschewed in favour of almost constant, but not particularly spectacular, action. Even genius cinematographer Robert Elswit apparently could not be bothered. (5.5)

2010: Inception

Reviewed here (6.5).

2010: Sex and the City 2

I understand every bit of criticism in Roger Ebert's one-star review, but I can't say I hated the film. Yes, we made fun of it and it's certainly no Some Like It Hot, but at times I laughed with the movie and, never having seen an episode of Sex and the City, found it an interesting sociocultural experience overall. (unrated)

2010: Shutter Island

The first half or so of Scorsese's film about two agents investigating on a kind of Alcatraz for the criminally insane has an extremely well-crafted plot, but the ending is extremely poor - indeed, my enjoyment of the film was heightened because I discounted early hints about the ending thinking that they couldn't possibly go for something that lame. Also, Scorsese generally doesn't seem at the top of his game, the music's poor and the back projections' quality made me wonder whether they were intended as a deliberate hommage to Hitchcock. Having said all that, of course if Martin Scorsese directs a thriller based on a Dennis Lehane book it's going to be a good film. (7)

2009: An Education

Nick Hornby's script, set in 1961 England, about a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl and her petty bourgeois parents falling for a rich, good-looking and cultured man in his late twenties (I think) is somewhat predictable, as are the characters, but makes up for it with humour, a sense of place and time and an excellent performance by Carey Mulligan in the female lead, so I can recommend it overall. (7)

2009: Logorama

The Oscar-nominated short, packed with as many corporate logos as would fit into a quarter of an hour, isn't just visually attractive in a brightly-coloured, in-your-face way, but also a nicely structured police-and-thieves story. Just overlook the sixth-graders style social criticizm. (7)

2009: Up in the Air

George Clooney, radiating his usual charisma, plays a not very realistic outplacement specialist whose passion for living on plaes, in airports and hotels is threatened when a college graduate (the very funny Anna Kendrick) is hired by his firm and suggests that hencetoforth all firing is done via video conferences. After a pacey first hour, the film turns into a standard RomCom between, roughly, minutes 60 and 90, only to redeem itself in the end. Those 30 minutes make the film poorer than it could have been, but, on the upside, much of it is set inside airports and planes, which I just happen to like. A classic 7.

2009: Sherlock Holmes

The CGI/Action approach to Sherlock Holmes uses quite a few stock elements of this line of production and is conventional to the point of indulgence, but this it does really well; the comic partnership between Holmes and an invigorated and de-nerded Watson is a lot of fun with its sharp dialogue and after I'd seen the film I couldn't imagine anyone but the fabulous Robert Downey jr. in the role. Simple minds, simple pleasures, I guess. (7.5)

2009: The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus

Terry Gilliam's film about an old carnie who made a deal with the devil suffers a little from banana-peel type humour and underuses the plot device of the imaginarium, a world created by the imagination of the person inside - when a posh elder lady enters the imaginarium, we see shoes, shoes, shoes, ha, ha, ha. Even so, it's nice enough while it lasts, but entirely forgettable. (6)

2009: Where the Wild Things Are

Spike Jonze's film about the mildly unruly boy Max's adventures in a land of benevolent monsters manages some moments of beauty and is otherwise professionally done (although Jonze should have cut down on the shaky camera in my view), but my enjoyment of the film was marred by observing how right down to the last stain on Max's face the product was painstakingly geared towards the target audience - not young boys, mind you, but the kinds of parents that don't allow plastic toys in their homes and will no doubt reach the conclusion that this is the kind of film young boys ought to like. The boys themselves, one imagines, would rather watch Transformers 2. (6)

2009: Avatar (in 3-D)

The main thing most people are going to watch this for is the new 3-D technology and this works really well. I didn't find it as impressive as I thought I would (presumably because I've seen a lot of 3-D in the real world), but it looks realistic and is quite a bit of fun to behold.

Apart from that it is really not a good movie. Early on, we learn that the humans/Americans (often the same thing in this kind of movies) are on that planet because there's a precious resource to harvest (some stone). If in the process of getting it you have to kill some of the natives, so be it. But throwing bombs on their heads is maybe not the most clever way of making the natives voluntarily letting us harvest their planet, someone opines. Hmm, is it just me or is the screenwriter trying to make a comment on recent US foreign policy? (In general, the dialogues all sound like they were written by a fourteen-year-old boy, which may or may not be a deliberate choice by Cameron.)

The natives, however, aren't all that much like Afghans. Burqas? No, sir! Just think of the first five clichés that come to mind when I say "noble savage" and you know everything about them. They are so in touch with nature that while an animal the throat of which they've just slashed is bleeding to death, they inform it that its life-energy will be preserved. They keep a straight face, too. And their trees? They're not just trees; under the surface, all of their roots are interconnected and the memories of dead natives are stored there. (Regrettably, this is not referred to as the greenternet.) Cameron has really taken this whole Gaia idea in. And he lets it out!

But at least he has taken something in from the nonscreen world. A rare case. Almost all of the scenes seem second-hand. She at first wants to kill him and is furious when she is ordered to spend time with him. Hmmm, wonder whether they'll end up together? Like that. All of the time.

The screenplay also has structural problems, or, to put it differently, it doesn't have a single twist in it - you can predict the way the story will go after about ten minutes. Come to think of it, I thought that there would be a twist (concerning one specific character) that did not happen. On the other hand, between the two of us Heidi and I exactly predicted what would happen to the Sigourney Weaver character.

But let's not be picky about such things: Where the movie's really got to shine is the visuals. Well, I already mentioned the 3-D and the film's got some really nice shots of valleys, etc. But: The natives (and hence the avatars, which or who are designed to resemble them) look crap. So do the sort-of-horses. So do the sort-of-dinosaurs. In fact, every nonhuman animal in this film looks shite. (The plants look o.k.) What's worse: The film is basically set in two places; the military base and the forests. The military base is shot is shot in grey and blue. The forest is shot in green and blue. After half an hour I found myself longing for red, yellow and brown. And it's a long film.

I'm giving the movie 5/10 because the 3-D thing, as I may have mentioned, works really well. I strongly advise you, however, to see it in 2-D, irrespective of the size of the screen.