Films

I suddenly realised that I haven't been keeping up with my film writing.

The first film I'm going to talk about is "The Darkest Hour", about an invasion of invisible aliens, with the main story taking place in Moscow.  As usual I'll try to avoid giving things away.  First of all the main character is Emile Hirsch, who I've been looking out for as a future great ever since I saw him in Speed Racer.

To put it in a nutshell, The Darkest Hour is quite entertaining - but only once you've accepted that it is lovable as one of those myriad films that fit the B-movie horror genre (as in lovable in a slightly absurd kind of way).  The story flows well enough but the script is questionable, and so is much of the acting - especially the Australian girl that makes up one of the lead foursome (one half of whom predictably ends up dead!)
If you're into this slightly silly sub-genre of cheesy horror, you'll love this.  I wasn't sure what to expect and I still enjoyed it reasonably well - accepting, finally, that its cheesiness is a kind of charm.



Next, there's the much talked-of "War Horse".  Even before I went to see it, I had my doubts and worries about the wisdom of allowing any film about the First World War to be rated as a 12A, no matter how many legs or how much hair the main character has!  Sadly, on this occasion my fears were well-founded.  For the first part of the story, we are safely far away from the battlefields of France, and the story is progressing along the lines of "Babe" but with a horse.  But as soon as the focus shifts to the war, the first images that confirm my fears begin to emerge: men being struck down by machine gun fire and the bodies of both men and horses littering foreign fields.  Then we see part of the 'enslavement' of horses as transports of war machinery until they literally drop dead.  So far, so bad...the clincher for me was a scene wherein the horse is tearing across an open battlefield until he is literally wrapped from tail to tooth in ream after ream of barbed wire.

At that point I got up and left the screen and made my disgust known to cinema staff, who assured me warnings would be posted.  And the BBFC is not going to hear the end of this in a hurry.



Then there's "The Artist".  This film is what it is touted to be, believe me: every aspect of it is a sublime work of art, from the black and white film overall and the old-fashioned credit style, to the makeup, costumes and the deliciously underplayed soundtrack.
In theory the lack of spoken dialogue is a serious sticking point, but I found it beautifully refreshing to watch a film where there isn't the constant aural assault of voices to deal with.  And the use of fullscreen subtitles is very delicately and infrequently used.  It gives the whole film the feeling of harking back to a time where words were used with deliberation and care - a far cry from what they have become!
Quite simply, The Artist views like a wonderfully stylised realisation of a short story, and the obligatory twist in the tale is so delicately played out that for once it feels like a resolution, not like a slap in the face that necessitates seeing the whole film again.
The Artist is a return to an old top form of film-making that has been sorely missed I suspect.  There is a wondrous integrity to everything about the film, the more so because of silence over dialogue.

Even I will admit that the 'threats' of an Oscar for the dog are pushing things a little!