David Hackl | 91 mins | TV | 18 / R
And so the never-ending Saw franchise trundles on to its fifth part. Indeed, Saw Part 5 might be a more apt moniker for this film: it picks up directly from the end of Saw IV — which, you may remember, took place concurrently with Saw III, ultimately appending about 30 seconds to that film’s climax. Even if you wanted to start your Saw viewing here, you wouldn’t have a hope of following what’s going on.
For a large part, Saw V’s plot is an exercise in retconning. For the uninitiated, “retcon” is short for “retroactive continuity”, essentially the act of adding something to a previous story in a series that changes its meaning or one’s perspective on it or what have you. I believe the term was coined in relation to comics, a medium that commonly has to explain why a dead character’s sudden resurrection really made sense all along, honest. Saw V’s retcon, then, is to demonstrate that Detective Hoffman was Jigsaw’s accomplice throughout all the previous Saw movies, not just the ones that actually featured him. This means yet more flashbacks, which as you may remember were the blight of Saws III and IV.
But what Saw V suffers in backstory it makes up for with simplicity. Whereas IV was convoluted to the point of dullness, Hoffman’s involvement is quite easily depicted. A working knowledge of the preceding films is essential, true, but with that in hand one can actually follow the story easily this time. Indeed, one might even argue it’s too easy: Hoffman’s involvement is so straightforward that the amount of time devoted to it pushes into the realms of the pointless, while the present-time ‘thriller’ thread (where Special Agent Strahm figures it all out) serves barely any function. The film includes the usual standalone game alongside this, but I’ll come back to that in a moment.
One of the franchise’s Big Things has always been the last-minute twist. Signalled by the Saw theme beginning to play and emphasised with an explosion of very brief flashbacks to earlier in the film, the twist shows us what we’ve missed all along and turns the story on its head. The first film had a great one, the second’s was pretty clever, the third had a mixture of good and bad, while the fourth’s got muddled by the rest of the film. Here, we get the music, and the flashbacks, but I swear there wasn’t a single twist among them. Most of the plot was as obvious as it appeared, while what I suppose was meant as a twist in the final room just seemed obvious — I’m sure the viewer is too familiar with Jigsaw’s methods by now to fall for something as simple as that (unlike Strahm, it would seem).
And even after all that retconning and whatnot, it’s clear that the series’ ongoing story is far from over. It’s not just the existence of (at least) two more films that tells us this, nor even a proper cliffhanger (this time, there isn’t one), but a handful of blatantly unresolved plot points. It’s an annoying habit of perennial Saw screenwriters Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan to drop in an element that they have no intention of using in this film, but exists purely to pay off something in the next. This time it’s a box delivered to Jigsaw’s ex-wife. Goodness knows what’s in it; hopefully Saw VI reveals all.
Alongside the incessant arc there’s the usual standalone ‘game’, presumably retained to both guarantee the gore content and hold the interest of anyone dragged along to see the film who hadn’t bothered with preceding instalments. This one isn’t bad but, relegated to a subplot alongside the Hoffman palaver, it’s little more than a sketchily-drawn short film. Some of the traps are inventive, dodging the torture porn levels of gore displayed in III and the gratuitous medical gore of both III and IV without skimping on the blood and guts (literally. Twice.) 
In fact, it’s this side of the film that holds a bigger and better twist than the highlighted arc plot one, though some viewers may miss its significance as it goes so unheralded. (Arguably this ease with which it might be missed says something about how significant it is; equally, perhaps I’m assuming a lack of intelligence on the part of Saw’s regular audience by implying they would miss it.)
And so Saw lives to fight another day. In some respects this entry is an up-tick in form after the convoluted fourth entry; conversely, it’s perhaps over-simplified, definitely over-reliant on its prequels, and lacks any meat on its plot’s bones — Hoffman assisted Jigsaw, this is how, and that’s all the film has to say. And you know, I can be a bit of wuss when it comes to horror films, but this one isn’t scary in the slightest; gory, unquestionably, but even the jump-scares didn’t make me jump.
Sometimes I feel the Saw series deserves congratulating for trying to be as much a thriller as a gore-fest, for having an on-going plot across all the films rather than just providing standalone identikit Jigsaw-games each entry. Other times, I think I’d quite like the latter, as both the third and fifth films have left me wishing for more of the original story and less of the arc plot. And still other times, it seems a waste of time to be thinking so much about Saw.
Once again I watched the Unrated/Extreme extended cut of Saw V, and once again the differences are numerous but minimal. A thorough list of additions and alterations can be found here, though there’s a briefer overview here.
Saturday Night Fever couldn’t be more ’70s if it were made today as a period piece (if you can see how that isn’t a contradiction). From the posters on Tony’s walls, to the fashions, to how it’s shot, it seems to have been designed specifically to exude seventies-ness in a way few other things seem to. It feels natural, then, that some of its original elements have become shorthand definitions for the era: the Bee Gees music, the dancing, and in particular that pose.
with dead-end jobs, late-night fights, turn-taking back-of-the-car sex, and other unsavoury pursuits. It’s no wonder Tony wants to escape.
Despite the numerous film versions of the Faust story, this is the only one that adapts Christopher Marlowe’s A-level-favourite 1588 play. It’s a shame, then, that it’s heavily edited from the original text and, despite also being a filmed version of the Oxford University Dramatic Society’s 1966 stage production, has clearly been inappropriately chosen as a vehicle for then-couple Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor.
Elsewhere, Burton and Coghill’s vision of Faustus is stylistically reminiscent of a Gothic Hammer Horror, which is either wholly inappropriate or an ingenious genre mash-up — after all, such a genre-mashing trick has been pulled many a time with Shakespeare over the years. There are repulsively horrific corpses, a harem of naked ladies, an array of special effects, plus a medieval-styled gothic atmosphere to all the sets and costumes, though the scene where Faustus mucks about with the Pope feels more Carry On. Using inanimate objects in the roles of the Good and Evil Angels — respectively, a statue of Christ and a skull — is a small but inspired touch.
perhaps just to heighten the presence of Helen by losing scenes she couldn’t have been shoehorned into; but in the process it both loses some of the best material and destroys any hope the film had of being a definitive filmed version of the play. Ultimately, such oversights proved to be the final straw for the film’s already-tenuous grip on a three-star rating.
Million Dollar Baby currently places 143rd on the 
and it goes some way to make up for all the tedium that’s gone before. That it’s a grim and downbeat finale, however, serves an anti-boxing message I already get but does nothing to redeem the tale.
and Frankie’s lost his daughter, gets screwed over by his protégé, and ultimately loses Meg too. In no way is this a cheery depiction of boxing.
Pre-release hype pegged Lesbian Vampire Killers as the next 
Unfortunately, even with corrected expectations, the film fails to deliver on its twin promises of raunch and horror. Aside from a couple of brief surgically-enhanced medieval boobs, a flash of knickers and the odd girl-on-girl kiss, the film’s sexy content is non-existent. Said Nuts audience would certainly get more from their weekly wank mag; this is mostly 12A-level. The horror, meanwhile, is reduced to well-signposted jump scares — and even then few enough to count on one hand — and the odd bit of comical decapitation/melting with holy water/axes in the head. To be fair, this is meant to be more comedy than horror, and in this sense a few such moments succeed passably.
Indeed, consistency is not the film’s strong point. Everyone makes a big fuss about the vampires and how hard they are to kill, yet every one is dispatched with ease, the level of threat never allowed to even attempt an increase before there’s white goo splurting everywhere (that’s what happens when they die, incidentally, not someone’s reaction to the lesbianism). The climax is a mere extension of this, substituting a rising scale of action for running around avoiding the easy killing bit. Any good will amassed in the middle — and there may be a tiny bit — is dismissed in boredom.
shot for the lowest-common-denominator lad’s-mag-buying audience, though quite what they made of the classic horror reference points that do remain is anyone’s guess. If we’re talking about expectations (and, clearly, I am), Lesbian Vampire Killers did somewhat defy mine — though as I was expecting it to be one of the worst comedies I’d ever seen, that might not be saying much.
What About Bob is a comedy about mental health. As such, it feels primed for misunderstanding and inappropriateness. And it is indeed a little worrying early on: Bill Murray’s performance is, from the off, superbly believable, but it’s undercut by bad ‘this is a comedy’ music that suggests we’re meant to laugh at his impairments rather than feel sympathy. And maybe that’s what the screenplay, direction and performance were actually aiming at, but, personally, I don’t find laughing at the mentally disabled all that funny, even in a film nearly 20 years old. At one point, people clap as Bob gets off a bus he struggled to even get on — perhaps this is meant to indicate “thank God he got off!”, but I choose to take it as them celebrating his achievement, because, if not, it’s just attacking the disabled again.
The film hinges entirely on Murray and Dreyfuss, and both are excellent in their respective roles. Murray portrays Bob’s mental health struggles early on in a way that would garner wider praise for accuracy if this were a drama, showing the potential he’s only unleashed in more recent years to play straight roles. But he’s equally good as the film becomes a clear-cut comedy: Bob doesn’t suddenly become a caricature, but is revealed as a good-natured, child-like, fun-loving person who, perhaps, just needs some care and love from others to help his conditions. Dreyfuss, meanwhile, is slickly believable as the uncaring fame-minded therapist, whose true nature — and problems — begin to unravel the more he’s confronted with Bob.
more about you as a person than it does about the film, the characters or the performances. It seems starkly obvious to me that Bob is the ‘good guy’, a nice but troubled chap who just wants to get by and have a good time, while Dr Marvin is a control freak with a raft of suppressed problems that are gradually unveiled throughout the film until they ultimately overwhelm him. He’s not a bad chap per se, but he is in the wrong.
Anatomy of a Murder is a courtroom drama, adapted from a novel by a real-life defence attorney (“defense attorney”, I suppose), who in turn based his fiction on a real case. This background not only adds to the veracity of what we see, but likely explains the film’s style and structure.
A lot of this support is down to Stewart’s performance — it feels wrong to be cheering the defence counsel of a murderer, even if he had a justifiable motive (which, remember, he may not have) — but we’d probably cheer Stewart on if he was the murderer. His Biegler is always in control, from investigation to courtroom, even when by rights he should be completely out of it. He manipulates the judge, the prosecution, the jury and the crowd to perfection; the viewer sits by his side — we know he’s playing them so we can revel in it — but, in turn, he manipulates us too, tempting us to his team — to laugh at his jokes, to support his case, to loathe the prosecution, even though they might be right. It’s a stellar lead performance.
I could just as well go on to praise Ben Gazzara, Arthur O’Connell, Eve Arden, Brooks West, even the smaller roles occupied by Kathryn Grant, Orson Bean, Murray Hamilton and others. Some criticise Joseph N. Welch’s judge, and it’s perhaps true that his performance is a little less refined than the others, but as a slightly eccentric judge he comes off fine. And to round things off, there’s an incredibly cute dog. Mayes’ screenplay is a gift to them all, finding room for character even within the ceaselessly procedural structure, using small dashes of dialogue or passing moments to reveal and deepen each one.
You may’ve noticed that it’s the 2010 Oscars this Sunday (technically Monday over here), finally bringing an end to the tale of movies from 2009 (Empire have their awards a while later, which is pushing into the pointless — OK, they’re never going to become an Oscar-predictor by moving up in the schedule, like the BAFTAs aimed for with their pre-Oscar move; but how many people still care about last year by the time we’re a quarter through the next?)
“There’s underage sex, swearing, numerous displays of teen independence, divorce, love of rock music and horror films… All that’s missing from a Middle American Mom’s worst nightmare is drugs (there’s no violence either, but we know them there yankees love a bit of that).” – 
“The obvious point of comparison is Damages, the excellent TV series that also concerns such high-profile big-business lawsuits, but… Damages sustains it for over 9 hours, replete with cliffhangers and plot twists so far beyond what Clayton’s straightforward story has to offer that Gilroy isn’t even dreaming of being that good.” – 
“not to say it’s a bad film, but it is at times a baffling one… I can’t help but wonder if I missed something crucial along the way because, even after two and a half hours, I had no real idea what the film was about.” – 
“it’s really about Fate, randomness, chance. Some clearly think this brilliant; I remain unconvinced. It lacks satisfaction. Maybe that’s real life — no, that is real life: random and lacking closure and satisfaction. But this isn’t real life, it’s a movie” – 
Of the five Best Picture nominees from 2007, the only one I gave five stars was 
Juno followed in the footsteps of films like 
I always assumed this was British, probably because it stars Billy Connolly and has a suitably quirky premise — one can see it fitting in with the school of British comedy that’s brought us 
100Films.co.uk 