The Black Dahlia

What started off being slightly confusing soon settled into an interesting film that reminded me of L.A. Confidential in it's setting, period, storytelling and style. A high compliment indeed. The cast (Aaron Eckhart, Josh Hartnett and Scarlett Johansonn) were great throughout and the plot quite intriguing. I believe it was even loosely based on a real murder case from the early days of Hollywood.

I really enjoyed it, buy sadly only for about the first three quarters of the movie. There came a point, when the mystery began to unravel and things started getting 'explained', at which point I somehow lost all hope for a satisfactory ending. I think it was because they tried to make everything just a bit cleverer and more intricate than was really credible and this broke my attachment to the characters. By the end I found it hard to care what they would come up with next.

There was a fairly memorable head smash that reminded me of some kind of reverse Hot Fuzz. I also wonder if the love triangle was only really interesting because one corner was Scarlett Johansson.

The Black Dahlia

The Bucket List

Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman are two fantastically experienced Hollywood actors who have played in genuinely powerful films over the years. Some of the highest rated movies of all time come with one of these two greats on the credits, yet more recently their success has also led them both down the road of occasional mediocrity.

Between them they've played God, Satan, presidents, psychos, wise old men and wanton womanisers, but in The Bucket List, they're just a couple of old guys dying of cancer. Based on that alone, I was already prepared for this to be a gigantic cheese-fest, laden with sentiment and dripping with tears. I didn't expect to be reaching for the tissues myself, moved to dab away a little at my moistened peepers, more I thought the snivelling would be on screen with the audience only cringing.

It just goes to show what I know, I suppose.

The Bucket List turned out to be an entirely watchable affair. Nicholson's role as billionaire suits him eminently and Morgan's down to earth mechanic fit him like an old glove. The two of them went through the buddy movie motions, as an unlikely couple (I can't bring myself to say 'Odd Couple' here - it wasn't that good) brought together by circumstances to discover a friendship they wouldn't have suspected. They write a list of things they want to do before they die and luckily money's no object, so they go around ticking them off. Even cancer doesn't seem that bad if you can still climb pyramids, so don't expect an unutterably horrific, gut wrenchingly painful, realistic portrayal of the effects of the disease. This is a movie about watching the guys doing fun stuff together and discovering a little bit about themselves along the way.

Where it lacks depth it manages warmth and where it lacks invention the leads supply charisma. By the end I wasn't moved, but I was entertained and that in itself was more than I had bargained for.

Worth a look.

The Bucket List

Viking: Battle For Asgard

Imagine a game like Fable 2, then strip away the finesse, the charm and the production values. Remove the attention to detail in the graphics and the subtlety of the sound-scape. Throw out the obvious time spent on the magical effects and send the decent voice talent home. Then fire the QA team. In other words, try to picture how Fable 2 may have looked if it had been developed by a team who had no passion, no budget and no resources.

Viking: Battle for Asgard gives the impression of having aimed for that level and run out of time before they got there.

Viking: Battle For Asgard

The Orphanage "El Orfanato"

I almost don't know what to say about The Orphanage, but I'll give it a go.

This Spanish movie, more of a chiller than a horror film, tells the story of a woman who brings her young family to live in the orphanage she grew up in. Her plan is to re-open the place with the hope of providing a loving environment for a new generation of orphans. All seems to be going well for them as they prepare the place, but their adopted son begins to suffer as he's left to compete for their attention. He starts to spend more and more time playing with his invisible friends and his seriousness about them starts to worry the adults.

So far, so good. The adults, played by Belén Rueda and Fernando Cayo, are both convincing enough and their son Simón, played by Roger Príncep, is credible. The scene is set for a decent bit of spooky cinema...

...and that's when it all gets so bog standard that you want to sigh. Let's have a little list of horror clichés that they manage to fit in:

• Child with sack over head - check
  
• Child that seems a bit too serious - check
  
• Playground roundabout that turns on its own - check
  
• Nobody taking the main character's concerns seriously - check
  
• Nasty old lady who keeps turning up - check
  
• Empty old house with plenty of dark corners - check
  
• Paranormal investigators - check
  
• Creepy dolls that no child would ever want to play with - check
  
• Things that go bump in the night - check
  

I could go on all day, but I am sure the point's been made. The Orphanage doesn't shy away from re-using any tired old tricks or symbolism so over-used that it's become boring. OK, the story keeps going and events that seemed pointless during the film are tidied up neatly by the end. In fact, it did have some good twists and turns, but they were swamped by the clichés and when the credits rolled I couldn't help thinking the plot had gone on for about ten minutes too long or that I wouldn't be recommending it to anyone I liked.

Overall: meh.

The Orphanage

A Good Year

Here you can find Russell Crowe in his least demanding role ever. His character is a banker in The City, but he spent many a summer in his uncle's Provence château and vineyard, as a nipper. When his uncle dies, our lead inherits them and heads off to oversee their sale.

I would normally avoid risking spoiling the plot, but here there really isn't much of one. Let's just say that if you can't guess what happens from what I have already mentioned, then you've probably never seen a film and you will love the experience. For everyone else, you just need to know that while there's not really anything wrong with A Good Year, there's nothing particularly profound about it either. In fact, I think it's fair to say its best aspect is the beautiful location, which would be much more enjoyable to visit than to watch.

A Good Year. A pleasant, yet forgettable film.

A Good Year

10,000 B.C.

This film gets terrible reviews from all angles and it's easy to see why, although I believe some of the criticism is unfair in it's approach. For example, when our rag tag team of mountain folk cross the desert and find a people harnessing wooly mammoths to build pyramids, you shouldn't complain that it's historically inaccurate, you should realise that the film is a work of fantasy fiction.

Don't criticise it for portraying an unrealistic placement of tundra-dwelling behemoths on a continent they never inhabited, alongside an apparently Ancient Egyptian civilisation pottering around in the sand seven thousand years too early.

Instead, criticise it for its awful script, its pedestrian acting, its cheesy narration from Omar Sharif or its feeble story. Criticise it for its schoolboy narrative, its patronizing prejudices and its useless cast. There's so much more wrong about this film than it's inclusion of scientific and historical flaws.

It's definitely one to miss, but let's at least be fair and agree that this is because they made a terrible mess of an appealing idea. Let's admit we like the concept of returning to a theme that cinema has left alone for decades, with the hope of seeing modern techniques breath new life into the genre.

Let's just admit that the reason this film fails is because the people who made it screwed it all up. Not because there weren't many giant, man-eating, dodo-like predators knocking around in Ancient Egypt.

10,000 B.C.

The Holiday

This rom-com struggles with both the romance and the comedy, managing to remain dull and predictable from the first scene right through the to schmaltzy finale. The only unexpected aspect of which was that I managed to stick with it that far.

The plot sees Kate Winslet, struggling with an unhappy relationship, swap homes with Cameron Diaz, struggling with an unhappy relationship. Diaz finds herself in Winslet's cute little country cottage and Winslet ends up in Diaz's stylish LA pad. Throw in Jude Law and Jack Black as potential love interests and you've pretty much got the whole sorry picture.

It's not that it's bad on paper, so much as that the execution lacks merit. Where is the warmth and charm? Where's the chemistry? It's just such a tired piece that it's actually hard to understand how it got made and I can imagine the cast are still struggling to figure out how they let themselves get involved.

A by the numbers rom-com that adds up to less than the sum of its parts, this is one to avoid.

The Holiday

Ninja Gaiden II

This game crashed on loading the first level and I had to reboot my 360 to try again.

I played the first level and it felt alright. Graphically, it was interesting to look at, but the character movement felt a bit twitchy and it gave me the impression it was going to be a button basher.

It crashed again at the start of level two, so I rebooted to give it another try and it crashed again in the same place.

I sent it back.

Ninja Gaiden II

The Good German

The Good German is set at the end of the second world war, at the time of the Potsdam Conference. Berlin is divided into sections, the black market thrives and people are starting to think about what to do next. All of this is cleverly introduced by starting the film with old news reel footage, setting the scene, but also setting up the photographic style that the rest of the movie draws on. The whole film is shot in black and white to look reminiscent of the genuine footage of the era and that combined with lighting and framing choices give it a great film noir feel.

Blanchett and Clooney are excellent in their roles and Tobey Maguire gets a rare chance to play a vile, thug of a man. His effort is not lacking, but compared to the performances of the others he does feel like the weaker actor this time.

The story was interesting, with every character having a past and different motivations and plans. The general feeling is that it's time to get out of Berlin before these pasts catch up with each of them, but the film reveals more about each person as the plot thickens. This makes for some good suspense and powerful revelations, let down only by them maybe trying to go a little bit far and include one or two strands too many.

When the credits rolled, I was left thinking that it was a film I wouldn't soon forget. It had an impact on me. It's just a shame that marinating on it led me to realise there were one or two events that didn't seem quite right. Why did that one thing have to happen a certain location? What would that character have been there for if not just to provide an easy clue later on? It didn't all add up satisfactorily, in hindsight.

A good film overall, but with an impact diminished by the odd loose end.

The Good German

Tell No One (Ne le dis à personne)

This French language thriller, based on the novel by Harlan Coben, is driven by an exemplary performance from François Cluzet. He looks amazingly like a young Dustin Hoffman and his acting also stands up to the comparison.

The film begins with the fatal interruption of a young couple's blissful existence and then jumps forward almost a decade to find our star still struggling to get his life back on track. A cryptic email stirs up unanswered questions about his wife's death and the rest of the movie is about solving the mystery of what really happened.

The plot takes our lead through a string of detective work, while the police approach the matter from their own direction, but before long there are other parties involved and people start getting hurt. As an audience, we're kept on our toes as the plot twists and turns and we learn more about the life of the murdered wife. Every step makes sense in retrospect, even if the whole seems hard to grasp at times. It was one of those films where you want to pause it and confirm that what you think is going on really is.

It's definitely a story that makes you want to figure out what's happening and keeps you working right to the end, but Tell No One is also a masterpiece of pacing and action. There's a fantastic chase sequence in the middle that feels really exciting and tense, but stays well within the bounds of realism. You can believe it, in contrast to scenes from Bourne or Bond that may look similar on paper.

I think that's the genius of this movie. It's completely believable, yet the experiences of the main character are just extraordinary enough to be thrilling. Then there are compelling characters in the secondary roles that supply humour, fear and intrigue without succumbing to overly stereotypical forms.

In short, you should watch this film. It's brilliant.

Tell No One

Devil May Cry 4

I got some enjoyment out of this game, but it was with a certain amount of effort on my part. I think I may not really be in the target audience, but unfortunately I'm not far enough out of it to avoid feeling slightly complicit.

Being part four in a series, it's arguable that players should already know what to expect and that any discomfort with the style is their own responsibility. I had that in mind both when playing through the game and now, when I'm writing about it.

The presentation appears to be aimed at Japanese and American teenage boys. Like the lead character, it's all irritating confusion and angst behind a mask of irritating nonchalance and ego. You're left having to be this guy through about twenty or so levels of hack and slash, interspersed with technically accomplished cut scenes that sometimes got so cringe worthy that I was almost embarrassed to be playing the game, even without witnesses.

If the male characters are irritating, the female ones are either helpless or overtly sexualised beyond being able to support any other traits. The enemies were quite a mixture. The lowest common denominator are demons that you take out by the dozen. These strange creatures look like the game engine has managed to load in a model file that's in completely the wrong format. Both structure and texture looked so bizarre it was often hard to comprehend how they'd got into a finished game. In contrast some of the boss level enemies were so well designed and realised that I played right through the game just to see what would appear next.

Gameplay failed for me. You're presented with a system where you buy gradually more effective moves for your character and then trigger them using combos. Sadly, there's no help for learning these combos and I found I couldn't trigger any but the absolute basic ones. I was playing a game where I could buy new moves, but not use them. It didn't make it any more compelling. As if this wasn't enough to wind me up, a couple of levels before the end I realised there was an option to make the game do the combos for me. All you have to do in this mode, is bash any button and your character pulls off all the most difficult combos. So you have the option of not being able to do them or being able to do them all without any sense of achievement whatsoever.

The other flaws can be summed up with a simple list:

- Areas that arbitrarily lock you in until you defeat the enemies.
- A camera that frequently swings around while you're making a tricky jump.
- Inconsistent collision on gaps. Sometimes you're safe and can't fall off edges, whereas other times you will think it's safe, but fall to a part of the level that's ten minutes walk back.
- Every. Single. Fight. Triggers some awful American angry rock with some idiot singing, "The time has come and so have I."
- Menu systems from the 8-bit version where, eg. cancelling saving your game drops you to the main menu.
- Ten levels of progress, ten levels of backtracking.
- Once complete, you're expected to play the entire game again.

I've run out of steam on this one. If you have played earlier versions and enjoyed them, this is probably more of the same. If you're just curious, give it a miss.

Devil May Cry 4

The Counterfeiters (Die Fälscher)

The Counterfeiters is loosely based on the first hand account of a Jewish counterfeiter, Salomon "Sally" Sorowitsch in the second world war. It tells of the experiences of this expert in the forgery of money who is put into a concentration camp by the Nazis. In the camp, he's recognised and moved onto a secret team that the Nazis are using to produce fake English currency that they plan to use to disrupt the British economy.

The film then follows their progress as they grapple with the ethics of helping the Nazi war effort, in return for preserving their own lives.

This German language film may present more of a challenge to native German speakers than to the subtitle reading likes of myself. The characters of the story come from many different nations and they've been faithfully cast with actors from those same places. This creates a mishmash of accents from people who are definitely giving us German as a second language.

Subtitle reading can often disguise a lot of bad acting as well, but in this film it was still easy for me to spot a couple of great performances; those of our lead and of the camp guard in charge of the outfit, Friedrich Herzog, played by Devid Striesow.

Overall, this is an interesting film that tells a fascinating story in a simple way and it's a very powerful one for it.

The Counterfeiters

Alien Vs Predator 2: Requiem

It's hard to express how badly this film does in almost any respect you might care about. It tramples all over anything that made the original movies good and it adds nothing of any value to either franchise.

OK, most viewers of AVPR, as it styles itself, will be watching because they remember how good the original ideas were. Alien gave us tense, fearsome horror, which turned into gung-ho action spectacle in the sequel, while Predator turned even our highest trained, toughest warriors into prey and then added depth and honour in its sequel.

I'm sure we can agree that the Alien films dropped off, even if there will be differences of opinion as to whether this came in film three or four. Predator also lost its way in the second outing, but even Danny Glover didn't outright ruin it. Either way, by the time the first AVP was released, I think we all knew to protect our excitement with a shield of caution.

We were not wrong. AVP was poor. There was practically no suspense and rules went out of the window. There was no room for science in this fiction. Yet the basic idea was pretty cool. It was credible that the Predators might hunt the Aliens for sport, even if the location was a tad daft. In the end, we had to put our memories of the good times behind us and accept that, while AVP was rubbish, at least they tried.

Now take AVPR and AVP feels like a masterpiece. This is movie making by checklist. Face huggers? Check. Acid burns? Check. Faces getting bitten off? Check. Alien queen? Nope. Eggs? Nope. Motion detectors? Nope.

Wait. What's going on here? Put simply, AVPR uses all the nasty concepts. What it doesn't do is use all the suspense building gambits and then make the nasty bit into a shocking climax that relieves the tension and lets us move on. Instead it just lays on more and more of the gore without any of the point. It eliminates the power of the horror through over exposure and in doing so it manages to turn the scariest xenomorphs in movie history into guys running around in Halloween costumes.

It's just such a terrible film that it's hard to know how to describe it without sounding petulant. To give you an idea, this is a film that includes a protracted boxing match between a Predator and an Alien/Predator hybrid. Seriously.

I despair.

Alien Vs Predator 2: Requiem

The Dark Knight

This one's been hyped all over the place as a film that will make the most of any hi-def system, so I was quite excited to use it to test mine. Thankfully, the image quality was excellent. I watched the blu-ray version via a PS3 and 1080p projector. The visuals were detailed, vibrant and clear.

I did have a couple of technical gripes, though. Firstly, the audio range was annoyingly high with explosions so loud in comparison to the speech that I had to put the subtitles on or get evicted. Secondly, the normal pause control on the PS3 didn't work, so you had to bring up the in-movie menu and then pause. It's a fairly minor gripe, but a major bad omen for the future of blu-ray.

Those points aside, the movie had everything you would expect from a Batman film. There were Bat-vehicles, Bat-gadgets, Bat-stunts and Bat-villains. The budget financed an all-star cast that even included the nerd from The Breakfast Club and as you know, included Heath Ledger's Joker. This was a very well played example of criminal insanity that even managed to stand out despite great performances all round. Oh, and both Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman delivered the exact same performances they have done for years. Old, wise, kindly, understanding men who you'd better realise are not to be made fools of.

The plot basically said that people of Gotham City have had their Dark Knight who did things his own way, but got the gosh darned job done when nobody else knew how. Now it's time for a return to law and order and they need a hero who will play by the rules, asserting some moral authority. Add the Joker to the scene, a force operating without a moral code, throwing up tough ethical decisions for our hero and the people and you've got the whole film set up.

I found the plot to be both complex and shallow, which may sound contradictory, but basically, they could have chopped about thirty minutes out of the middle of the movie without it really mattering. The story was weak, but I suppose that's actually ok here because The Dark Knight works really well on every other level. The action scenes are well executed, the photography is excellent, the spectacle is all there and if you really want a film with a stronger story, you probably know this is not where you're going to find it.

Not bad.

The Dark Knight

Atonement

I'd read mixed things about this film and wasn't expecting to enjoy it, but there are some films you just want to have seen. People will talk about this one, so I was up for watching it despite not really being a fan of Keira Knightley.

Luckily, the first 150 tedious pages of the book are condensed into around ten minutes at the start of the movie. The first real hurdle is removed without leaving you wondering what's going on. So that's a good start.

The plot quickly grows deeper and would be easy to spoil, so let's just say it's really about the younger of two sisters, living a privileged, yet boring childhood in pre-war England. She's well educated, but naive, and lacks company of her own age. As she predominantly spends her time with adults, she convinces herself she's grown up too and this affects her behaviour when confronted with an extraordinary event and primes us for the rest of the movie.

The main characters all feel believable and the acting stands up well. The film moves around in time and location in what I initially found a confusing way, but once I understood the motivation, it made good sense. The story lost pace in places, but is strong overall and by the end I felt quite moved by it. I was genuinely touched and felt glad to have given it a chance.

Finally, I'd like to mention the music. The film repeatedly touches on a theme of writing, particularly typing on old fashioned, mechanical typewriters and this is carried through into the music with great effect. The tap, tap, tapping really made an impression on me.

Overall, a better experience than I expected and well worth a try even for those that feel it might not be for them.

Atonement

The Other Boleyn Girl

Based on the novel by Philippa Gregory, which was based on historical events, The Other Boleyn Girl is a dramatised account of the relationships of Anne and Mary Boleyn with Henry VIII (played by Eric Bana.)

Now, I should probably point out that this film was not one of my own choices, but when I heard it starred both Natalie Portman (as Anne) and Scarlet Johansson (as Mary), I figured it would at least have visual appeal. In that respect the film was a moderate success. The costumes and sets were also acceptably convincing, although I always thought that people were supposed to be a lot less healthy in those days, even the aristocracy. In fact, the book makes a significant point about the state of the king's hygiene after a hunting accident leaves him with a long term injury. This is something the film entirely leaves out, along with several years in the middle.

It's never easy to condense a novel into a couple of hours, but if you've read the book then you may find this adaptation falls significantly short. Major events are missed out or even presented in a different order. It all conspired to make me feel like I was watching the film on fast forward. This leaves a movie with an unfortunate lack of depth, which is disappointing when you consider the subject matter and the amount of acting talent on set.

I reckon this is one you can safely avoid.

The Other Boleyn Girl