No Country For Old Men

Despite first impressions, this is not the slogan for a Swiss euthanasia clinic. Instead we swap the death valley of the Alps for the death valley of rural Texas, where there are more ways to die than there are toothpicks in a roadside saloon. Visionary directors, Joel and Ethan Cohen, capture just a few of these untimely demises with impeccable timing of their own. To be honest, a small part of me longed for a cameo from former president and resident Texan, George W Bush. He wouldn’t have had to appear in it long. Just long enough to cause a mess on American soil one more time.

The first time Tommy Lee Jones appeared on screen I thought these prayers had been answered. Surely I’m not the only one who sees the resemblance between him and Bush? Tommy is like a poorly drawn caricature of George; one scribbled by a child or, just as likely, a self-portrait by the great ass clown himself. Thank God, there’s more artistry in Tommy’s performance. His role as the aging Sheriff, Ed Bell, is far more assured than anything his doppelganger has put his name to and all without fluffing a single line.

Sheriff Bell is on the hunt for a man, but that’s not to say he’s unlucky in love. In this particular circumstance, the man in question is elusive sociopath, Anton Chigurh (Bardem) and he certainly isn’t the type to bring home to your mother. In fact, you’re better off not answering the door to him at all…not that this is always enough to stop him. In what becomes a Rio Grande Theft Auto, Chigurh draws the attention of the police, by leaving a bloody trail of breadcrumbs behind him. Every town he visits is left with a brand new crime scene, as if it’s no longer enough to simply write your name in the hotel guest book. I guess this would be too conspicuous or perhaps the real motivation behind this maniac’s behaviour is a fear of listed names. No one mention the Yellow Pages.

Chigurh finally seems to have met his match in Llewelyn Moss (Brolin) though – a deer hunting, mustache sporting, all-american export, with a dress sense more rooted in the Lone Star State than drunken gun fights or drinking sweet tea like it’s going out of fashion. It seems the Milky Bar Kid has grown up to be stronger and tougher than he’d ever dreamed he could be. Sadly, he has done nothing to melt Chigurh’s heart, after taking off with a briefcase full of the madman’s money. Now, I’ve done my fair share of inadvisable things in the past  – for example I once tried to drain my spaghetti with a tennis racket – but, if I was to wander into the aftermath of a failed drugs raid, I’d at least stop to think about the consequences of taking a million dollars from a truck laden with heroin. Or perhaps I’m just being too cautious; perhaps the next time I’m out having coffee in Starbucks I should just take the money from the tip jar and leave my obviously named cup in its place.

As in every great Western, a shootout is inevitable and in NCFOM Stetson’s are brutally ruffled at every opportunity. Armed with a weaponised air tank, Chigurh begins his vengeful pursuit of Moss, gambling with the lives of a few civilians along the way. At first, he is outwitted by some intuitive thinking from his target, but, alas, Moss must eventually find somewhere to bunk down and rest his weary mustache for the night. From then on it is only a matter of time before Chigurh catches up with him. After all, how hard can it be to find one man in the USA’s second largest state?

With guns, neckerchiefs and men whose accents are thicker than the hair on their chests, NCFOM is certainly a deadly homage to the spaghetti westerns of old. Add in plot elements borrowed from the Big Lebowski and the Cohen brothers have once again created something worthy of its Oscar winning credentials. It just breaks my achy breaky heart that Billy Rae Cyrus was overlooked for a role he was so surely born to play.

Position in IMDb 250: 164

Position in My 250: 120. Also the number of Texans who weren’t offended by this review. 

(in)Glorious Bar-scene

Inglorious Basterds

Brad Pitt’s a Basterd. Michael Fassbender’s a Basterd. And Tarantino is the biggest bastard of them all. So it shouldn’t really come as a surprise to hear that the movie industry’s biggest ego has decided to alter the history of the biggest war the Earth has ever fallen victim to. In fact it’s a mystery how our planet manages to contain the sheer bulk of his inflated head. If he wasn’t such a genius, he’d be mocked in the streets and kids would use his skull as a tether ball.

My first impressions of Inglorious were as follows: Why did Mike Myers not stick to doing more cameos like these? Is that Quentin’s head peeking from behind the bell tower in the final chapter? And why do so many films seem to depict milk as the drink of the devil? This last point deserves particular attention. From Alex DeLarge in Clockwork Orange to Ron Burgundy in Anchorman and now Lando (Waltz) the Jew Hunter – each one of them is flawed with the same predilection for larceny and lactates.

But can this delicious fatty liquid truly be the reason for some of film’s most notorious villainy? The evidence appears to cry yes. In all honesty, I think we should start banning it from our primary schools now. For all we know we’re the width of a cow’s teet away from the next Genghis Kahn. If that’s not enough to convince you, you simply have to sit through a Cravendale ad. The cats are coming; and when they get here it won’t just be Jews they’re after. I imagine the mouse-lims should worry too. I guess we should all just be glad they’ll spend most of the time fighting their own reflections in the hub caps of parked cars.

Anyway, back to Nazi occupied France (which I hope is something I never have to say out loud). Lando came here to do two things: drink milk and hunt Jews… and he’s just finished his milk. Personally, I’d never follow milk with Jews – it tends to lead to curdling in your stomach. But, this man is unsettled at the best of times and he exacts his misguided righteous tyranny on the family of stowaways living under the floorboards of an Alpine farm house. Unfortunately, the hills are only alive with the sounds of gunshots and all but one member is brutally murdered. This rather sets the tone for the rest of the film and, most likely, all of Tarantino’s dinner parties to date. More fortuitously, the survivor, a young girl, is able to flee from the scene, just thankful to be alive with anything.

In France puberty passes in the blink of an eye and before we can say ‘outdated scene change’, our young survivor, now going by the assumed name Emmanuelle, reappears 5 years on, clearly having run into some luck along the way. In circumstances that are never fully explained, Emmanuelle finds herself at the helm of a small town cinema. Now, I imagine either Emmanuelle really does have relatives in the film business or she ended up making a risky investment on Gumtree – either way she is stuck with her great shining ode to German culture.

And soon she finds herself saddled with the great shining oaf of German culture too: Basterd number 4, Fredrick Zoller (Bruhl). Freddie is the guy you meet on a night out who insists on getting your number even after his exaggerated stories about spear fishing fall flat. Whatsmore, he’s a nazi, a damn good one in fact, and is therefore worth less to Emmanuelle than the mould on her morning croissant. Long story short (and believe me, this story is biblical) Freddie does not beddie his girl.

Meanwhile, in another area of war torn France, Lt. Aldo Raine is doing everything in his power to cut the fascists down to size – namely by taking a big knife and sawing off their scalps. With a collection boasting over a 100 Nazi head tops, it’s clear who’s taking this war a little too seriously. Come on, Aldo. Why don’t you take up something useful like sports, rather than itemising your scalps all day? I hear the Bear Jew has a baseball bat you could use.

The rest of the film drags on a bit. It drags beautifully may I add, but to save us some time I’ll end on a quick summary:

Freddie continues to flirt aggressively with Emmanuelle; Aldo continues to flirt aggressively with Nazis; both plot to end the war for good; Michael Fassbender, a British German, plays a Brit playing a German; Lando spills more than just his milk. What a bunch of utter Basterds. I’m almost glad the war is over.

NB: Freddie never convinces Aldo to join him spear fishing.

Position in IMDb 250: 103

Position in My 250: 73 – but is that the German or the British 3?

Shutter Skank

Shutter Island

If you’re looking to embark on a mad overseas romp with the lads, then Shutter Island might just be the ideal destination for your debauched needs. Sure, the weather is temperamental, but the girls are wild and you’re guaranteed to lose your shit before the day is out. Maga’s dead, Ibiza is on it’s way out, Shutter Island is about to shut them all down.

For Sergeant Teddy Daniels (Di Caprio) the island’s pull is too strong to ignore. What occurs in the following 138 minutes is carnage on a whole new scale. Daniels is a mess before the ferry even docks, spewing over the deck on arrival. Usually this would be greeted by a large, guttural cheer from Fat Jez and the boys, but this is the 50s and only the sergeant’s partner Chuck Aule (Ruffalo) is on hand to pick him up and redundantly ask if he’s okay. Daniels choked reply of ‘I can’t stomach the water’ probably doesn’t bode well for the hours of binging the pair had planned. Looks like Chuck will be finishing those final flaming sambuccas on his own. I guess since prohibition only ended 20 years earlier, the guy’s got a lot of catching up to do.

It’s around noon that things really start to kick off though. One islander strays from the complex and in the drunken haze of the party everyone assumes she’s thrown herself from the cliffs. To be fair, it’s not an implausible conclusion – I once saw a man get stuck in a revolving door for days after one sniff of communion wine. Drink makes monsters of us all and YouTube stars of many.

‘One drink’ Daniels is determined to get to the bottom of both the incident and his pint. Chuck believes their victim might have just gone for a cheeky Nando’s on the mainland, but Daniels believes there is more than spiced chicken at the heart of this. Under the careful supervision of the resort manager (Kingsley), the duo begin to pull apart the bare bones. And with their chicken platter finished, there’s the less tasty task of rounding up the Island’s population and using them to solve a problem everyone only seems to be half interested in.

It’s only about an hour into the film, when the second bottle of wine slips from your grasp, that you realise maybe you were the one who was drunk the entire time. Suddenly, what seemed like a documentary on Shutter island’s club scene turns into a eery depiction of human sanity. As Daniels delves deeper into the island’s methods and practises it is clear something is off. Who in their right mind orders macho peas as their main side?!

Position in IMDb 250: 195

Position in My 250: 77 – the number of units you’ll consume on the Island in one evening

Language lessons

Amelie

Si vous ne lisez pas mon blog, je vais chier travers ta chatière!

Everything sounds better in French. Thierry is a connoisseur of fine wines and fine women. His English equivalent, Terry, is a coinnoisseur of Newcastle Brown Ale and ailing attempts to find his wife’s sweet spot. All in all, the continental charm of Parisian culture is much more suited to a film about rekindled values than the beer garden at the Black Dog. That being said, there is often a certain romance to the piss soaked bins at the back of your local. Perhaps it’s just the memories that accompany them.

Amelie Poulain (Tautou) is also attracted to the finer details in life. Whether she’s running her hands through other people’s groceries or listening to the population orgasm from her balcony window (Terry take note), Amelie is determined to make the most from every experience. She’s like that girl on Facebook who insists on chronicling her happiness for 100 days straight. This kind of person is so wrapped up in framing the perfect moment that they seem unable to function in reality. If you’re out on an all-day bike ride 3 times a week, when are you finding time to feed your 4 illegitimate children? Or are they forced to choke down your bullshit too.

Childhood for Amelie was hardly a walk in the park either. You’d figure the moment you saw your mother crushed beneath the body of a rooftop jumper you’d no longer remain satisfied by the prospect of extra dessert. But for Amelie it is merely a pavement stain on the path to true happiness, as she continues to wolf down her second helping of life. Only Batman has bounced back from a family bereavement with more heroism and he had the millions of inherited dollar bills for company.

Left alone with her fast withdrawing father, Amelie decides to move on to bigger and better things. Whilst Bruce Wayne paces through Wayne Manor, our young heroin lounges in the third floor squalor of an inner city apartment building and waits for the city to call her. Trained only as a part-time waitress, the chances of a wide scale cry for help is small, but Amelie is the barista Paris deserves, not the one it needs right now. In fact, there is rather a long list of far more competent employees before her. In 90 minutes of film not one single table is waited on.

Instead Amelie insists on surreptitiously manipulating the lives of others. Forget that cup of coffee you ordered 20 minutes ago, now you’re dining on a whole new change of perspective. Tastes sweet doesn’t it? Almost like you’re chewing on the fluffy bit at the end of a fairytale. Do you have bones as brittle as Rolf Harris’s defense case? Then Amelie will set you up with videos of everything in the outside world you’ll never be able to come into contact with. Saintly.

Unfortunately, there is one thing Amelie can’t control. Who falls in love with her. Oh wait, she has a convoluted plan for that too. First snare the ideal man – he’ll be the one working split shifts in a sex shop. Then, do everything you can to fuck things up. Putty in your hands. He’ll have no reason not to move into your pokey little crap hole. As ever, love in Paris is as inevitable as a boner the minute before your big school performance.

In a nutshell, Amelie is France’s answer to The Wombles (stay with me on this). A warm, fuzzy character, reveling in the things that ordinary folk take for granted, is content to live in cramped conditions, while keeping her existence in society to an almost inconspicuous level. Pretty sure Uncle Bulgaria wouldn’t look quite as flawless with that bodacious bob cut though.

Position in IMDb’s 250: 73

Position in My 250: Cinquante (translation – a number higher than 251)

Aliens

Ripley returns, only this time there’s a few more parasites, a lot more alien destruction and a little pinch of the unbelievable. Ridley Scott hands the baton over to James Cameron and thankfully, for the sake of the franchise, he doesn’t drop it into that zone called ‘straight to DVD release’. Instead, Cameron reinstates Weaver in her pro-feminist role and she even gets a little female sidekick – Newt. Newt is neither amphibious nor slimy, though she is a little dirty and feral at first. But what can you expect from a kid whose forced to live alone after the horrific death of her parents? Harry Potter lives in a cupboard under the stairs; if you’re an orphan in cinema, this is how you’ll end up. Better start watching the Ray Mears back catalogue now. 

Aliens is set 57 years after the finale of the first film. In this time computers have failed to become touch screen and Sigourney’s choice in underwear hasn’t become any fancier. It’s as if they’re still living in the 80s. Ripley learns that her daughter back on Earth has passed away. Perhaps she should search for Marty Mcfly in the yellow pages – he seems to deal fairly chirpily with the aging of family members. 

And then the inevitable happens. Ripley ends up on a marine mission in search of not one alien, but many. Suddenly the title of this film isn’t so indecipherable. A couple of marines who make the trip, don’t make it past the first action sequence. The aliens pack them up efficiently and store them for later. If the aliens ever get their claws on Tupperware, we’re screwed. Let’s hope a salesman doesn’t meander that way anytime soon. Imagine if they were visited by Jehovah’s Witnesses. Aliens refusing to transfuse their acid blood and eating Christmas trees with their little mouths. 

Once more it falls to Ripley to save the day. There’s no talk of peace negotiations with the enemy, so Ripley arms herself to the teeth and dives back into a swimming pool of alien madness. She hasn’t banked on one thing. The big alien has mastered the art of elevator-control. It sees her enter her lift, it waits casually until she thinks she’s on the brink of escape, then it saunters over to the second lift and enjoys a bit of the mandatory country tunes you find in all elevators. It probably shazamed the track on its Iphone and saved that for later too. They are advanced beings after all and you don’t get much more advanced than app software. 

Aliens is as viciously exciting as its older sister, only multiplied by the number of aliens that get their milky insides dissipated everywhere. The only oversight is the omission of Jones the cat, minus his little skit in the opener. The feline must be cursing his agent for bagging him such peripheral roles. He’d been hailed as the next Arnie. You’d think Cameron would have taken to him. 

IMDb 250 position: 58

Possible Position in my 250: 

34. How can lots of Aliens been worse than one? If there’d been twenty E.Ts, I’d have cried twenty times more

 

Alien

The defining movie of the sci-fi genre, the simple title and similarly simple plot of Alien make it one of the most intelligent pieces of film-making since Hitchcock decided directing might be a path he should pursue. Ridley Scott demonstrates how easy it can be to construct a classic; especially if you have a generous effects budget to hand. So the decisive explosion might look like the beginning credits to a bad techno-talk programme on the BBC, but what do you expect from a film produced at the end of the decade of free love. Watch those incendiary colours whilst high and you’ll discover a message from Scott himself, warning you of the alien lurking below the milky water-line of your bowl of frosted flakes. Coincidentally it seems that future robots will be run by milk, which spews out of them like a dairy fountain.  

Sigourney Weaver plays the heroic female, Ripley. Ripley has more hair than an 80s porno, which stays immaculately positioned throughout her entire spacey charade. Her adversaries: running out of hairspray and also a little alien fella. This tiny chap finds the right combination to open John Hurt’s stomach (1-2-3-propel out of it violently) and disappears off into the under-belly of the ship. Ian Holm describes the creature as ‘the perfect organism’, which probably means we should keep an eye on Kelly Brooks and Lucy Pinder, in case of any inhuman activity. 

The miniature alien doesn’t take his extra-terrestrial time in becoming a colossal alien – a rapid change in size that mirrors Charlie Sheen’s massive change in ego, post-stardom. Both Charlie and the alien possess blood that is inhumanly resistant, and I believe Sheen’s half-coke, half-tiger solution could probably burn through metal too. 

Speaking of tigers, the real star of the flick is a cat called Jones. Jones isn’t phased once by the alien. He keeps calm and carries on. Then Ripley shoves him in a box and his role becomes limited. Perhaps if Ripley hadn’t been so keen to remain the heroin animal-saver, the crisis could have been resolved much quicker, via a face-off between Jones and the beast. He’d have nine attempts at it. 

However the final showdown is planted firmly on the shoulders of Weaver, due to the fact everyone else is a little bit dead. She first begins by exposing as much skin as possible, stripping down to her underwear, because aliens, like a lot of men, have no idea how to deal with a smoking hot babe. The plan fails though when it’s revealed the alien is a seasoned lady-killer (literally) and Ripley opts for a spacesuit instead. This is more practical considering the environment she finds herself in. 

Jaws in space. Alien is supremely successful because of a narrative that never falters in momentum. Unlike Jack and Jill, it makes it up the hill without any flaw, reaches the pale-of-water climax, and then hurtles you back down to a dramatic and satisfying conclusion. And who doesn’t love a bit of Weaver-on-Alien action? No-one, that’s why they brought out a sequel. 

IMDb 250 position: 40

Possible Position in my 250: Jones + semi-naked Weaver + alien = 35