“I’m guessing this isn’t the future you had planned for yourself when you first clapped eyes on that money.”

The Coen Brothers are the strangest film-makers working in the business today, and definitely have a fighting chance at the title of strangest film makers of all time.  They are masters of suspense, thrill, and making films that both excite and question audiences around the world.  But for every award-winning masterpiece that they put out, they also make a whole lot of films that don’t just miss the mark, but miss it by several miles.

Thankfully, No Country For Old Men fits into the former category.  It is a delight of a film.  An action film that is comfortable with burning along slowly, following a simple plot with a lot of strong messages.  It is refreshing -in an age of hectic, explosion ridden action movies with no heart- to see an action film with surprisingly little action.  It revels in the thrill of build-up.  We regularly bear witness to ten minutes of suspense for only ten seconds of action, and sometimes see all tension with no actual pay off.  This could potentially be frustrating, but is executed so well that it becomes a delightful and involving experience.

The film follows the story of several men chasing, fighting, and killing in order to get their hands on a suitcase of cash.  But No Country For Old Men doesn’t really concern itself with anything as trivial as who gets the case.  Instead, the Coens focus on peoples desires and longing for the box, and most of all the lengths they are willing to go to in order to obtain it.

The performances are uniformly strong - Javier Bardem deservedly won an Academy Award for his portrayal, but frankly every actor featured puts on an Oscar-worthy show.  The dialogue is snappy, witty and quite often terrifying.  Every single shot is beautifully framed, and the pacing is perfect.  Had it been a hurried, high-action piece then it would have been frankly boring and unconvincing.  Instead, the slow, deliberating and reflective speed in which the story plays out is gripping.

This isn’t a film about drug-peddling, guns, or violence.  It is about sacrifice, chance, free-will, circumstance and pessimism.  And these themes are explored wonderfully.  No Country For Old Men is a strange film.  It is one of the greatest films of today, and definitely has a fighting chance at the title of one of the greatest films of all time.

★★★★★

“Thank God for the rain to wash the trash off the sidewalk.”

Taxi Driver is the fifth film by Martin Scorsese, and heralded as his best film by many critics and viewers.  A triumph in film-making as an art, and one of the greatest character studies ever captured on camera.  It is a film that summarised a decade of life in America post-Vietnam, cemented De Niros place as the best actor of the time and even inspired an assassination attempt on Regans life.

The film centres around Travis, a Vietnam war veteran who struggles to settle into the seemingly mundane life of New York City after the adrenaline of the war.  He becomes an insomniac, taking on a job as a Taxi Driver just to fill his time.  Scorsese beautifully captured his frustration, boredom, and deteriorating sanity.  The repetitive feeling mirrors the psyche of the character, with recurring musical motifs and silent shots of driving through dark and dangerous streets used to fill the gaps between interactions.

Travis spends the majority of the film in complete isolation, riding around, watching cheap pornos, watching television and people watching.  As his obsessive pursuit of excitement to fill his hours slowly intensifies, the audience is taken on an ever increasingly disturbing journey through obsessions with girls, to political figures, and eventually to a child prostitute.  The film deals with very dark subject matter, but the fact that Travis starts off as a fully believable character makes it all the more effective for the audience.

We come to know him, and even sympathise with his slow descent into madness.  I found myself trying to explain, excuse and even defend his actions.  We spend so much time with him, we almost feel a close personal attachment to the Taxi Driver.

 There are brilliant performances all around, and the way Scorsese frames the film is not only involving, but always keeps you on the edge of your seat.  It is a largely quiet, subtle film that slowly falls into a sort of tragedy.  Once again, I am impressed by the use of silence, unconventional shots and even mundane, almost irrelevant scenes to fully complete a film primarily about loneliness.

There has been some debate about whether the ending of the film is real, or takes place within a dream.  It is always testament to a film makers skill when viewers can debate and discuss the plot and meaning of their films.  I do not personally believe that the ending is a dream, but I am fascinated by the extra layer of depth that the theory adds.

Taxi Driver is a film that will stay with me for a long time after watching, its use of everyday situations means that it will be recalled to memory when doing any number of things.  And along with that recollection comes disturbing images, somehow beautifully juxtaposed with the mundane.

★★★★★

“NO! NO! That is Bullshit.”

Cirque du Freak is not a film I would have set out to watch when making this blog.  But, if I want it to become a reference guide for me in the future, then I should stick to my intentions and review every film that I watch.  I happened across watching this while trying to entertain my younger sister.  It is the type of thing that would have totally appealed to me six or so years ago.  And I suppose that age group is the target market for the film.  But there is one problem with it.  It is boring.

It has its occasional charms, every now and then the cinematography is beautiful, and the background details are by far the most entertaining part.  But they are few and far between, and largely the plot seems both convoluted and moronic.  There are a few awkward performances from actors who seem to think that they are being incredibly funny, cookie and witty.

The direction is clunky, the writing is embarrassing and in general the movie seems to a bit too much film-making-by-numbers.

★

“Good and evil, right and wrong were invented for the ordinary average man, the inferior man, because he needs them.”

Rope is not the first Hitchcock film I have seen, but it is by far my favourite.  And I believe that is largely because of the interesting filming technique.  Rope is made with just ten takes, and is designed to play out in “real time”, although it is worth noting that the action is slightly “hurried up”.  Not literally, but a dinner party is held and lasts just twenty minutes, and over the course of 80 minutes we see it go from mid-afternoon until night.  However, we see literally everything that happens throughout this time, and that makes the experience all the more engrossing.  The fact that you are seeing everything and not just highlights of an overarching story mean you really come to know the characters - notice their quirks, when they are lying, their interactions with eachother.

But the most interesting, absorbing, and easily the greatest thing about Rope is the sub-text.  Although owing a lot to the play on which the screenplay is based on, Rope really is such a clever film.  One of my teachers at College told me that in drama, what characters say is only a third of what they mean.  To me, this was reasonably obvious but it is never more applicable than in films like Rope.  The subject isn’t just utilised beautifully -and I am not just referring to the homosexual connotations, although those are dealt with very tastefully and subtlety- but consciously challenged.

Rupert, who acts as an investigative character is constantly challenging the meaning behind the protagonists -or rather antagonists- vague statements, and the last ten minutes or so of the film falls into an almost war of sub-text.  This is something I haven’t seen before in film.  The fact that a character can make a very ambiguous sentence early in the film, which will then be picked up on by someone else, trying to pick apart their subtext, by using a lot of vague statements themselves.  It is brilliant, subtle, and so engrossing.  The way the characters seem to have a conversation through a conversation leaves the meaning to the interpretation of the viewer.

Was it perferct?  No.  It does suffer a bit from being an adaptation of a play, it is all very static and you can imagine that the wordiness and a few of the more dramatic moments have a greater effect when performed with the slightly more loud theatrical environment.  However, Hitchcock works incredibly hard to make the film cinematic - and his trademark signs are littered throughout the piece, making it a very tense experience.  Indeed, there is one shot aimed entirely at an inanimate object for nearly two minutes, where the only action we can see is one woman going about some chores.  It sounds mundane, but Hitchcock makes it one of the most suspenseful things I have ever seen on film.  I was more on edge at this moment than anything I felt while watching Psycho, or any other films made by “the master of suspense”.

A near perfect film that suffers from a bad bit of pacing mid-way through, but that doesn’t last very long and the rest of the film is nothing but amazing.

★★★★

“Is a man who chooses to be bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him?”

Okay, I feel like I should preface this blog with a small reminder to myself - I did like this film.  I found it to be intelligent, interesting, and grotesquely absorbing.  And I need to remind myself of this because I am about to launch into a little bit of a rant.  Not so much about the film itself, but the style and approach it takes - from a film-making perspective, not a thematic one.  I should also say that is the first Stanley Kubrick film I have watched, and so I am in no way judging his creativity or talent as a film maker.  I am just criticizing his approach to one film.

I think adaptations are a dangerous concept in the world of film-making.  There are certainly many that are done well.  But there are also many that are done very badly.  This is because we are effectively bearing witness to plots, characters, themes and ideas through a filter of another’s perception of them.  Essentially, the film maker takes parts of the story and tampers with them - focusing more on those that are relevant to the message that they want to get across.  I haven’t read the novel A Clockwork Orange, but watching the film you get the impression that it is a very complicated story with many different concepts and messages.

Kubrick seemed to have developed a fascination with Alex, the stories main character.  And he allows this infatuation to infest the whole film.  Something that should be a storytelling device essentially becomes the actual plot of the story.  Because of this, you cant help but feel that all of the brilliant, profound, and hard hitting statements that could be made are simply brushed over.  They are there, there is no doubt about that.  But they are simply used as window dressing to what is essentially a fictional biopic.

And that, is why I don’t think I would ever make a film adaptation.  By using someone else material to tell your own story, you are distorting its original messages.

My second complaint with the film is its excessive use of narration.  I have never been a fan of the narrators in film.  There are exceptions, but in general they are a lazy way of telling a part of the story that would be difficult to portray without obvious exposition.  The biggest thing I seemed to learn from watching silent films is that you can often say things best without words.  And this is true for A Clockwork Orange - the film is at its best when no one is talking.

The music is used spectacularly well, and the relatively frequent silent scenes are mind-blowing in many ways - tense, exhilarating, shocking, disturbing.  The film is at its best when it is silent, perhaps because these are the moments that are left up to interpretation, and not Kubrick forcing themes down our throats.

A Clockwork Orange is a well-directed, intelligent and moving film that is hindered by being too narrow in its storytelling method.  An exciting yet slightly disappointing film that never truly reaches its full potential.

★★★

“A picture with a smile and perhaps a tear,”

The Kid was Charlie Chaplins first film, in which he writes, directs, produces, composes music for and stars in. And it is nothing short of amazing. For some reason, I had always put off watching Charlie Chaplin films. Which is strange, because I always wanted to watch one. I am so glad that I picked The Kid as my first, because it is testament to everything I love about film. This is a film made when Cinema was still young - when Hollywood hadn’t created formulas for successful movies, and when film studios didn’t assume that all of their audience were idiots. It is a sweet film that gives a large section of its -admittedly short- running time to the development of the relationship between Charlie Chaplins “Tramp” and the young orphan he adopts.

As you might expect, there is a lot of slapstick humour in “The Kid”, and although it is now often seen as cheap and easy comedy, it works.  The slapstick here is less punching brick walls and howling in pain -although that does happen- and more intelligently interwoven comedy that contains elements that keep cropping back up.  If you aren’t laughing out loud at the gags, you will at least be grinning at the wit and mischievous comedy found here. 

Of course, the character development is there for a reason.  Before long, the hilarious antics and touching moments are pulled from under your feet - replaced by a series of scenes that are heart wrenching.  I can honestly say that I was close to tears at one point.

The success of The Kid isn’t just in its wit, humour, and ability to move you.  The techniques it uses are amazing.  As I found with the Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari, the music, characterization, set and editing are all used to their full effect, and you see very few speech cards at all.  If I could take only one lesson from this film, it would be mindset that you don’t need snappy, clever and thought-provoking dialogue to make your audience feel something.  And more often then not, if you can say something without words, then you can say it more effectively without words.

The Kid seems to be consistently referred to as Cinemas first masterpiece.  Big words, indeed.  But when you look at the film, the way it makes you feel, the way it keeps you involved and the way it never allows the story line to interfere with its heart, you can only really come to one conclusion.  In my opinion, it is a masterpiece.  I haven’t seen every single film made before this, so I cant really comment on whether or not it was the first.  But masterpiece it is.  And while that phrase gets thrown around too often, it is in this case warranted.

This is what cinema should be about.

★★★★★

“We who are of noble blood may not follow the wishes of our hearts.” 

It took me a long time to choose the first film I was going to watch, but quite early on I decided I was going to start towards the beginning.  After all, it is a very good place to start.  I trawled through several forums, magazines, and lists in pursuit of my first film.  And eventually I stumbled across The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari, a German silent expressionistic horror film.

I will admit that when I first started watching, I had to take a little while to adjust.  The captions seemed to linger for just a little too long, and the frame story almost seemed cliched to me.  But this is of course, unavoidable when watching films that are over ninety years old.  Culture has changed, and so has movie styles.  We have grown accustomed to snappy cuts, designed to hold short attention spans.  It wasn’t long before I got sucked into the film though, and none of that mattered to me anymore.  This film is said to be the ancestor to all conventional horror films - and what started out as original and brilliant ideas have since been copied so many times that they have become cliche.  

The way The Cabinets director, Robert Wiene has told the story is mesmerizing.  The characters, plots, and themes don’t just appear on the screen - they infest every single part of it.  The music, sets, camera angles and even editing have a very frantic and sporadic sense about them.  From very early on you get the sense that all isn’t as it seems, and as the plot slowly unravels in frantic twists and turns, you find yourself being terrified by everybody and everything.

Without the advantage of speaking characters, and with surprisingly scarce dialogue cards, the film relies on an atmospheric violin soundtrack, as well as twisted and angular sets to help the audience understand what is going on.  Obviously, these kind of techniques are found consistently throughout silent films.  But the films use of them is notable purely because it makes use of these mediums so well.  Of particular note to me is the set design.  It is used to illustrate the characters mindset to amazing effect, with sharp points and otherworldly background scenery giving you a constant sense of madness.  In fact, everywhere except the courtyard of the asylum appears slightly false and invented - something that is very interesting when you know how the film ends.

It is easy to see the influence that The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari has had on cinema.  You can see its sets adopted in Tim Burton films, the plot almost mirrored exactly in Shutter Island and countless other thrillers.  Also argued is the theory that this is the worlds first zombie movie, and while that depends on your definition of the word zombie, it is true that the films “monster” and the plots and themes surrounding it are undoubtedly very profound - making you both feel for the monster and fear it.

Overall, I found this movie incredibly enjoyable, moving and informative.  A film that takes time to dwell on the emotions of characters where necessary, but frantically twists and turns with terror to keep the viewers suspicions about them.  The film is beautiful, terrifying, and it is undoubtedly the influence of many great -and some terrible- horror films that followed it.

★★★★

“A human act, once set in motion, flows on forever to the great account.
Our deathlessness is in what we do, not in what we are.”

- George Meredith

This blog is my attempt at setting in motion the series of events that will lead to a career in Writing and Directing films.  If I get to that point, this blog will be my personal reference guide to every film I have seen, and my original first impressions of them all - what I liked, what I didn’t, interesting techniques, notable directors, camera angles, impressive dialogue, and anything else that may come in handy to me in the future.

But this blog itself was set in motion a couple of nights ago, by a stranger who I had never met before, and probably never will again.  She was an elderly woman, with a muted sense of elegance about her, reminding me of a “classic movie-star”.  She came up to me while I was at work and asked, quite casually,  ”What is it you want to do in life?”  After taking a second or so to compose myself, I decided to answer her honestly.  ”I want to write and direct films,” I told her.

“I thought so,” she replied.  ”I can somehow always tell when I am talking to someone with a passion for the arts.”  She went on to tell me about her life as a young lady - how she had always wanted to be a dancer.  She even managed to perform in a show with The Royal Ballet, and was intent on doing more.  But her father had order her to leave and “get a real job”.  And so she had dropped out of the company.

With this, she gave me some advice.  Stick to your dreams, and don’t let anyone or anything get in the way, or else you will be stuck doing the same mundane 9-til-5 job for the rest of your life.  She had a gleam of sadness in her eye at this point, and left me with the instructions to write “I want to write and direct films” in a place where I would see it every day, and constantly be reminded of my ambitions, so I would work until I had achieved them.

And with that in my mind, I decided to start this blog, motivating me to watch the films that were, and still are, a gaping hole in the knowledge I needed to reach this dream.  I tend to spend most of my time on the internet, and so I know if I had taken her up on her advice literally and written it down on a piece of paper, it would become crinkled and creased, be left in a drawer and eventually thrown away in a hurried clean-out of my bedroom.  And so, I decided to follow the womans instructions in a different way, by making that statement the sub-title of my blog, where I will see it several times a day, as a constant reminder of my dreams, my hopes, my ambitions.

“I want to write and direct films.”