Life is Beautiful

“Buongiorno principessa!” Two simple words that bought a huge smile to my face during a film which has more emotional peaks and troughs than a very emotionally peaky troughy thing. Life is Beautiful or La vita è bella in its original Italian is a passionate and multi award winning comedy-drama set in Italy during The Second World War. Its dark themes are counterbalanced with some delightful comedy and a sweet story about a man trying to protect his young son from the harsh realities of the war. Italian Jew Guido (Roberto Benigni – also director) is a wildly imaginative and romantic soul who woos a local woman in amusing and inventive ways. Fast forward a few years and Guido and his wife Dora (Nicoletta Braschi) have a cute little boy called Joshua (Giorgio Cantarini). When Guido and Joshua are taken to a work camp by the Germans, Guido puts in tireless effort to hide the truth from his son, telling him that they are playing a game for points in which the winning team will win a real life tank.

Life is Beautiful really is beautiful in of itself. It’s one of the sweetest films I’ve seen and is amongst many people’s (including my Dad’s and girlfriend’s) favourite films of all time. Not only is it a good-natured story but it’s also very bold. Upon its initial release it faced some criticism for making light of the Holocaust but personally I don’t think it does anything to mock that horrific event or undermine the suffering of the millions who had to endure abysmal treatment under the Nazis and their collaborators. Instead it displays the triumph of human spirit and the deep love of a father for going to great lengths to protect his son.

Grosse Pointe Blank

Professional assassin Martin Blank (John Cusack) discovers that his next job is in his home town on the same weekend as his ten year high school reunion and to kill the proverbial birds, decides to head back to the Detroit suburb of Grosse Pointe from which he fled a decade earlier. He tracks down his high school sweetheart Debi (Minnie Driver) who now works as a local radio host and attempts to undo the damage caused by standing her up on prom night. While in town Martin finds himself under the watch of several assassins as well as two NSA Agents but despite the danger is desperate to win back his girl.

Grosse Pointe Blank was a better film than I expected it to be. I’m not a huge fan of John Cusack and would never seek out a film because Minnie Driver was in it. I knew nothing about the story but the most 90s poster in I’ve ever seen did little to wet my appetite. The film is rarely funny and the plot is fairly inconsequential but I enjoyed the chemistry of the two leads as well as the 80s soundtrack and overall was charmed by the movie.

Nil by Mouth

Nil by Mouth is acclaimed actor Gary Oldman’s debut as writer/director and is set in deepest, darkest, scariest South London. The film follows a single family and various friends as they struggle with drugs, alcohol, poverty and violence. Never an easy watch, Nil by Mouth features a grounded and gritty script and some accomplished directing and won numerous awards on its release in 1997.

Raymond (Ray Winstone) is a wheeler-dealer type who gets by with various scams and small time crimes. His wife Valerie (Kathy Burke) is pregnant with their second child and her brother Billy (Charlie Creed-Miles) scrounges off the pair and his mother Janet (Laila Morse) to feed his heroin habit. During the two hour, ten minute run time the various family members are attacked, beaten and arrested in what is a thoroughly depressing tale of abuse; both the abuse of substances and of each other.

About three minutes into Nil by Mouth my girlfriend, who was only half watching, turned to me and said “This is a naughty film, isn’t it?” That is putting it incredibly mildly. According to IMDb the film holds the record for the most uses of the word “cunt” which is uttered 82 times in total, mostly by Ray Winstone. The language itself is terrifying but is nothing compared with the violence. In the film’s most shocking scene a pregnant woman is beaten senseless by her husband. It makes for excruciating viewing and isn’t easy to watch. The film brings to the screen a side of London which is never seen by tourists or indeed the vast majority of its eight million residents but it remains recognisable due to its recognisable setting and naturalistic acting.

Jackie Brown

Quentin Tarantino’s third feature and his homage to the blaxploitation and heist films of the 1970s, Jackie Brown has been for a long time the Tarantino film I’ve told people was my favourite. On my first round of watching his oeuvre when I was in my mid to late teens, something about Jackie Brown made it my favourite Tarantino to date. Recently I’ve re-watched Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction as well as the Director’s latest Django Unchained and the film is no longer at the top of my list but it remains perhaps Tarantino’s most restrained and focussed film to date and features a great story and top cast on fine form.

When middle aged air stewardess Jackie Brown (Pam Grier) is caught smuggling $10,000 and a couple of ounces of cocaine through customs she is picked up and charged. Facing a stretch in jail or a bullet to the head from her arms dealing employer Ordell Robbie (Samuel L. Jackson), Brown attempts to play one side off against the other and pull of an epic but dangerous heist.

Boogie Nights

Written and Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson (The Master, Punch Drunk Love) Boogie Nights is a story of talent, fame, success and excess set in and around the San Fernando Valley during the late 1970s and early 1980s. The script focuses on the rise and fall of Dirk Diggler (Mark Wahlberg) a young porn star known for his physical similarities to Michael Fassbender. Diggler is spotted while working at a nightclub by famed porn Director Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds) and soon becomes a star of the adult entertainment world. With the help of a select crew and actors, Horner attempts to go beyond making pornography and tries to create movies which people will stay to watch when they’ve ‘completed the task in hand’. With the aid of his adept crew (William H. Macy, Philip Seymour Hoffman) and on screen talent (Julianne Moore, Heather Graham, John C. Reilly, Don Cheadle) Horner’s films become actual movies and the stars get rich.

This is the forth of Director Paul Thomas Anderson’s six feature films I’ve seen and unsurprisingly it is excellent. Anderson creates a wonderfully vivid and detailed world which changes gradually with the story. The characters are well written and the soundtrack is perfectly chosen. Anderson’s films have a tendency to attract awards recognition and even this story of sex, drugs and moustaches picked up three Oscar nominations including nods for Anderson (screenplay) as well as Julianne Moore and Burt Reynolds. In fact Anderson’s six films have thus far picked up seven acting nominations at the Oscars. Here the acting is superb from the top to the bottom of the cast.

L.A. Confidential

Intertwining the stories and cases of three LA Cops while also managing to focus on both the glamour and seedier side of 1950s L.A., L.A. Confidential is a fantastic and gripping neo-Noir thriller set towards the end of Hollywood’s Golden Age. With Micky Cohen in jail, L.A. finds itself free of Organised Crime and the LAPD wants to keep it that way. On the front line are three very different Detectives; the brutish Bud White (Russell Crowe), book smart and career orientated Ed Exley (Guy Pearce) and Jack ‘Hollywood Jack’ Vincennes (Kevin Spacey). The three inhabit different worlds within the same department and a run in between White and Exley causes mass tension amongst the whole of the force. A murder at the Night Owl Café one evening sparks an investigation which involves all three officers, corruption, racism, organised crime, prostitution, glitz, glamour and grime.

I saw L.A. Confidential several years ago and it didn’t really have an impact on me. I can only assume I saw it too young because yesterday I saw it again and thought it was spectacular. Director Curtis Hansen and Cinematographer Dante Spinotti create a realistic version of L.A. full of bright, soft light and period detail but the film avoids going for an all out Noir feel and incorporates more of a modern feel in amongst its 50s setting. The setting and fantastic design are a mere backdrop however for what is essentially a character study. The film may look beautiful but it is in its characters where it truly shines.

The Lost World: Jurassic Park

As soon as I hear the opening notes of John Williams’ iconic Jurassic Park score I can’t help but smile and be transported back to the mid 1990s and to a time when Jurassic Park was pretty much all the boys my age would talk and think about. I experienced the Jurassic Park smile recently when I re-watched the sequel to the 1993 film for what must be at least the eighth time. The smile stuck with me for the opening hour and a half as I reminisced about when I’d first seen the film and remembered what was coming next. Some of the things that made this sequel good are still evident but unfortunately so are the aspects that made it bad.

Four years on from the Jurassic Park Incident as it is now know, John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) is assembling a team to explore, catalogue and protect the Dinosaur inhabitants of a second island, close to the original known as Site B. For this mission he recruits a reluctant Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum), a man who has been publicly and academically chastised for talking about the Jurassic Park Incident. Malcolm is understandably hesitant about mixing with Dinosaurs again until he learns that his girlfriend Sarah Harding (Julianne Moore) is already on the island. So, he travels to the island along with equipment specialist Eddie (Richard Schiff), photographer Nick (Vince Vaughn) and a stowaway to rescue Sarah but not only come up against Dinosaurs but the InGen Corporation who want to further exploit the animals for profit.  

Alien Resurrection

"What's inside me? What's inside me?!!"

Two hundred years after the events of Alien 3 military scientists create a clone of Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) complete with alien embryo growing inside her. After separating the two, the Ripley clone is kept alive for further study. One of the side effects of the cloning is that Ripley’s DNA has been crossed with that of her alien baby and she now possesses super human strength and acidic blood as well as a kind of telepathic link with the aliens. Meanwhile a group of mercenaries arrive aboard the ship carrying a cargo of kidnapped humans which the scientists implant with alien embryos. Unsurprisingly these aliens escape and run amok on the ship causing its remaining crew to run for their lives.

I was massively disappointed with Alien 3 (although FilmsRruss tells me that the Director’s Cut is much better than the theatrical version I saw) and Alien Resurrection seemed to be going in the same direction. I found the first half really boring and actually fell asleep after about 40 minutes. After I resumed viewing however, I really enjoyed the second half.