Blade Runner: The Final Cut (1982/2007)

Posted on December 19, 2009 by badblokebob

2009 #58
Ridley Scott | 118 mins | Blu-ray | 15 / R

You don’t need me to tell you about Blade Runner. It’s one of the most popular movies ever, if not with a mass audience then with a significantly-sized cult following and even wider-spread respect. Still, I’m going to go on about it for a bit anyway.

First off let me say that I have seen it before, in the guise of its 1992 Director’s Cut, the only cut available on Home Entertainment/TV since I’ve been old enough to know the film exists, and which is surely to blame for almost every blockbuster getting a Director’s/Extended/Unrated/Ultimate/Complete/etc Cut on DVD these days. Ironic, really, considering it’s a slight misnomer as Ridley Scott wasn’t properly involved with its creation. The Final Cut isn’t fundamentally different to that Director’s Cut, however. Yes, there are an array of editing tweaks and myriad effects fixes, but the meat-and-bones of the story and the content of the scenes — including the removal of the voiceover and the foreshortened ending — remain the same as the Director’s Cut. (If you’re interested in a blow-by-blow account of all the differences between the five cuts now available, try here.)

Normally such minor surface changes wouldn’t warrant a new number on this blog. But this is Blade Runner — or should that be Blade Runner, undeniably one of the most significant films of the last quarter-century thanks to its enduring influence. Yes, it is heavily influenced itself — by the likes of Metropolis and the whole of film noir, primarily — but its dystopian future — all constant night-and-rain, busy streets, neon advertising, canyon-like decrepit skyscrapers towering over dirty streets, high technology rubbing with the everyday detritus of humanity — has been copied everywhere. Without this there’d probably be no Ghost in the Shell, no Dark City, no Matrix, no re-imagined Battlestar Galactica, no thousand other things that have nothing close to the brains but do have the look, the style, the feel. Not to mention Red Dwarf: Back to Earth, of course (he says, as if that has greater significance than the rest!), which sits somewhere between homage and rip-off, surprisingly large chunks of it making almost no sense without at least a passing familiarity with Blade Runner. And the whole thing’s cyclical, because look how The Matrix has gone on to influence countless other lesser efforts. But that discussion is for another time.

In fact, the film can also be seen all over the real world, in what is doubtless the skill of those who predicted its future rather than a genuine influence on Real Life (though you can never be sure). It’s not all true, obviously, but for all the outdated technology (look at the computer displays!) or never-likely technology (flying cars!) there’s an example of the way the world’s headed or already gone. Video phones? Look at Skype, or video inboxes on the iPhone. LA’s skyscrapers, gaudy neon signs, huge video-screen advertisements, rundown areas of the city that are so unrestored they seem to be from decades ago (because they are), the increasingly widespread integration of Eastern culture, photo manipulation available in the home to anyone… it, and more, is all already here, or just around the corner.

But being Surprisingly Accurate does not a popular film make (well, not necessarily), and so of course Blade Runner has a lot more to offer than “ooh, I can do that too!” Putting the future setting aside for a moment, it’s plain to see that the film is as shaped by film noir as by other sci-fi, if not more so. The dark cinematography is perhaps the most obvious area of influence: shafts of light breaking up shadows; imposing cityscapes; constant rain, constant night (with any daytime scenes stuck indoors, often with blinds drawn and/or the light made hazy by smoke). There’s the plot too: it’s packed to bursting with sci-fi concepts underpinned by metaphysical discussions (who is God? what does it mean to be human?), but these are driven by a pure noir narrative, complete with beaten-down reluctant detective (who even loses the final fight), a femme fatale, a questionable moral perspective and a storyline that is predicated on an investigation/manhunt.

That this tale unfurls at a relatively slow pace is surely not to everyone’s taste, but it suits the film’s somewhat intellectual bent. The pacing renders it majestic, stately, both thoughtful and thought-provoking. Even the action sequences tend toward this. This overall languidness frequently allows moments of beauty to leap out, from the visuals, the ideas, the dialogue — Batty’s dying words, for example, are beguiling, elegant and meaningful, mixing the fantastical with an identifiable reality to memorable effect.

The image that most stands out is, appropriately, eyes: the V.K. test, the occasional orange glint in Replicants’ pupils, Batty squeezing out Tyrell’s eyes, the latter’s huge glasses, Pris’ spray-painted eyeliner, Gaff’s odd-looking eyes, and so on. It succinctly reflects the themes of what things seem to be and what they actually are — “seeing is believing”, if you will, although in Blade Runner’s world that clearly isn’t true. The famous photo manipulation scene also feeds into this. One of the great things about the eye motif is that you can’t exactly miss it — the very first thing seen is an extreme close-up of an eye — but it’s obvious not in a batter-you-round-the-head-so-even-the-most-simple-simpleton-will-notice way, but the if-you’re-an-intelligent-viewer-you-shouldn’t-fail-to-spot-it-on-a-repeat-viewing kind of way.

Elsewhere in the filmmaking pantheon, the specials effects are astounding. They look brilliant today, easily besting most of the still-obvious CGI we’re bombarded with. Yes, they’re now aided by some digital clean-up, wire removal and that kind of thing, but the basic models and composites remain untouched and are beautiful. Similarly, Vangelis’ score should by all rights sound dated and discordant, filled as it is with early-80s synths. Fortunately, it has a kind of unusual beauty that matches the visuals it drifts over, complementing as it should rather than providing an uncomfortable reminder of exactly which decade produced the film.

Blade Runner is by any count an incredible piece of work (something the extensive making-of documentary on The Final Cut DVD/BD only emphasises, incidentally). Not everyone will (or does) like it, but I should imagine even they find it hard not to admire (an altogether different thing to “like”). Either way, I think it’s safe to say it can lay claim to a place on the relatively select list of films everyone really must see.

BBC Two are showing Blade Runner: The Final Cut tonight at 9pm.
Blade Runner: The Final Cut is on BBC Four tonight, 26th September 2013, at 10pm.

I covered the 1992 Director’s Cut as part of my 100 Favourites series, here.

Fatal Instinct (1993)

Posted on December 14, 2009 by badblokebob

2009 #86
Carl Reiner | 90 mins | download | 15 / PG-13

Having just recently laid into High Anxiety, a spoof in a broadly similar style that also took on thrillers, it seems a little hypocritical to praise this, which flopped so badly in the US it went straight to video over here. Unfortunately, life isn’t that simple, and where Mel Brooks’ effort failed to amuse me this succeeded.

The plot, such as it is, doesn’t bear much discussion, being a loose amalgamation of half a dozen other films in the name of spoofery. So too the performances — no one distinguishes themselves as a comedic genius, but none let the side down. Reiner’s direction is equally fine, setting up and paying off the visual, verbal and aural jokes perfectly well. He drops the ball in a couple of instances however, allowing several jokes to run on well past their natural conclusion, and indulging in a few well-worn staples of the genre — the on-screen-musicians-playing-the-score turn up, for example, although at least there’s a nice variation at one point involving a tape player.

It’s a little difficult to understand exactly why it flopped so badly in the US as it followed in the wake of the similarly-styled Hot Shots!, which was successful enough to spawn a sequel. But then perhaps exactly that hindered it — Fatal Instinct’s release came just a few months after Hot Shots! Part Deux.

Or perhaps its targets were just too broad to attract a mass audience. While it ostensibly tackles then-recent thrillers like Basic Instinct, Cape Fear and Fatal Attraction (though the latter was already six years old at this point), it also has a lot of time devoted to the tropes of film noir, in particular Double Indemnity. Relying so heavily on a 50-year-old film isn’t likely to earn you much favour among the masses.

I’ve not seen any of those ’80s/’90s thrillers it targets, but Fatal Instinct seems to stick to the most famous bits, making the references easy to appreciate even for those with just a passing knowledge. Conversely, it seemed to me that having seen Double Indemnity would be a major advantage. But then again, perhaps that’s simply because I spotted the references to it and missed references to the films I hadn’t seen without, er, missing them, and anyone who hadn’t seen Double Indemnity would survive in much the same way. At the very least I’m sure it’s easier to follow than this paragraph…

Fatal Instinct may not be terribly original in and of itself — though, obviously, the films it chooses to spoof set it apart from its kin — and some of the gags are very much old hat (a roving camera bumps into something and breaks the lens, for instance), while others go on too long — as does the film itself, actually — but anyone who enjoyed all the films mentioned in this review may find it’s capable of raising a few smiles.

Seance on a Wet Afternoon (1964)

Posted on December 10, 2009 by badblokebob

2009 #64
Bryan Forbes | 111 mins | TV | PG

Despite being an early-60s British domestic drama, Seance on a Wet Afternoon has a plot that one might describe as high-concept: a medium kidnaps a little girl so she can prove her abilities by revealing where the girl is. But, unsurprisingly, the execution is more in line with its roots: more drama than overblown thriller, not so much about the kidnap plot as the psychological state of Kim Stanley’s medium, Myra Savage, and her downtrodden husband, played by Richard Attenborough.

It certainly doesn’t start high-concept either, beginning with a near-15-minute dialogue-driven enigmatically expository two-hander. Some would consider the whole film too slow, I’m sure, but once it gets past this (to be frank, over-long) opening it maintains an appropriate pace. It never threatens to become a thrill-a-minute rollercoaster ride, but what it does do is build tension and gradually unveil the true natures of the two leads. In this regard it becomes something of a showcase for Stanley and Attenborough.

In a word, Stanley’s performance is stunning. Initially just a Hyacinth Bucket-esque overbearing wife, as the film continues we learn more about her almost solely from what Stanley brings to the role. By the final scene, when the truth of her character is laid bare, there’s little doubt that she’s given an extraordinary performance. She was Oscar-nominated for her role, losing out to Julie Andrews in Mary Poppins. I love Mary Poppins as much as the next well-adjusted human being, but Andrews’ relatively simple role isn’t a patch on the complexity Stanley has to offer.

In the face of this stiff acting competition, Attenborough holds his own throughout. His transformation is more understated perhaps — the ‘revelation’ here being that he is not downtrodden but in fact incredibly supportive, something that will only dawn on the viewer late on but shed a subtly different light on what has gone before — plus there is a degree of skill in portraying a character doing reprehensible things but who remains the audience’s surrogate ’til the last.

Bryan Forbes’ direction is also first-rate. He keeps things clear and simple during dialogue scenes, but adds scale with location work in busy London streets, and flair during a few tense sequences. The best of these is the second seance, where the kidnapped girl sleeps in a room next door. As she begins to stir, the viewer is torn between wanting the Savage’s plan to succeed and wanting the girl to be rescued from their misguided scheme. Such a dichotomy of feeling is entirely reliant on the skill displayed by Stanley, Attenborough and Forbes up to that point, building our allegiance to these characters in spite of what they’ve done.

Unfortunately, the film isn’t without its flaws. The story doesn’t always hold up — some of the police procedure is dubious at best, while the Savages’ scheme comes off as much through chance and luck as planning. In fairness, our ability to spot the former is probably in part thanks to decades of police procedurals filling the TV schedules, while the latter actually fits the under-confident, ill-prepared, dubiously-sane protagonists, and coincidence is mostly confined to the plot’s early stages. Some elements of the plan make you wonder how they ever thought they’d get away with it, though at the same time you have to allow that maybe they just weren’t that self-aware.

The real key to the film, however, is what’s slowly revealed over its course: Myra Savage’s mentality, as well as the truth about the history of her abilities and marital situation. To reveal any details would ruin the carefully controlled slow explanation of who these people are and what background they come from, all of which builds to a beautifully performed final few scenes. Seance on a Wet Afternoon may have a high concept driving its plot, but the true delights are to be found in its characters and the actors’ performances of them.

The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974)

Posted on December 5, 2009 by badblokebob

2009 #43
Joseph Sargent | 104 mins | download | 15 / R

Movies have taught us many things, and here’s another: don’t take the train from Pelham Bay Park at 1:23. In the past thirty-five years said train has been taken hostage three times, and while once every 11⅔ years may not sound a particularly high average, I’d wager it’s higher than for most trains.

The most recent was this summer, in a Tony Scott-directed remake which unfortunately replaced the titular numbers with, well, numbers in a re-titling move just waiting for reviewers to accuse it of illiteracy. It was criticised for more than just that of course, but one positive is that the original ’70s film cropped up in plenty of places at the time. By which I mean it was on TV once and offered as iTunes’ 99p Film of the Week. But don’t knock shameless tying-in — it means I’ve seen it.

Having not seen either remake (the second was a 1998 TV movie) I can’t compare, but the original is a taught, well-paced thriller. It takes place in something startling close to real-time — a pacing trick I always find pleasing for no explicable reason — but still doesn’t rush things, without ever being slow. Much like the criminals at its heart, then.

Their leader is Robert Shaw, who makes a terrific villain: calm, uncompromising, and British, the primary prerequisite of a perfect Hollywood bad guy. As the unlikely hero, Garber, Walter Matthau is a terrific foil at the other end of the phone, dryly sardonic as he attempts to effectually organise a dozen services. There are also the occasional injections of humour; never inappropriate, instead making the situation feel all the more real.

Unfortunately, for almost every great element there’s a flawed one. The ending is a bit dubious, with the much-hyped escape plan nothing exciting — they simply override the one plot device that stands between them and the most obvious plan. Equally, Shaw’s death, while quite a neat ending for a villain, doesn’t seem to make a whole lot of sense for his character. Mr Green’s sneezing is a handy device, though for my money its ultimate use became obvious the moment Garber first heard it.

And though the credits snappily define all 18 of the hostages (The Homosexual, The Pimp, etc), for the most part it doesn’t really matter — most of them never even speak; at best, only one or two are really characterised. It’s a shame, because having such clear types could be put to good use in all sorts of ways, be it just for laughs, subverting stereotypes, or something as deep as social commentary.

The original Taking of Pelham One Two Three is still an excellent film, but these little niggles take the edge off its quality.

Brute Force (1947)

Posted on December 2, 2009 by badblokebob

2009 #73
Jules Dassin | 94 mins | TV | 12

Jules Dassin’s prison-set noir concerns a group of inmates trying to escape from the cruel regime of a vicious warden, allowed free reign by an ineffectual governor and target-driven bureaucrats (nothing changes, eh?)

Tonally, it’s varied. Early on it’s quite humourous, with a weak warden, jaunty calypso-singing inmate (who occasionally threatens to tip the whole thing over into a musical) and amusingly drunk doctor. Then there are the flashbacks to the outside world, laden with undercooked romance and awkward dialogue. In the final act it turns decidedly grim: warden Munsey lives up to his lowly reputation, goading one prisoner to suicide and beating another close to death, while the other wardens listen on from outside; one of the good guys betrays his mates, ultimately leading to wholesale slaughter as the escape plan goes awry. A balanced, varied tone is not necessarily a problem, but the flashbacks are almost uniformly unwelcome asides and, by separating the distinctly comical from the resolutely grim by placing them firmly at either end of the film, they don’t quite gel as a whole.

Still, the climactic prison break — including the build-up — is a brilliant extended sequence. Tense, epic and exciting, it concludes with a fantastic action sequence. It also delivers a powerful moral message, underlined by its direct delivery from a prison staff member rather than an inmate. It goes some way to make up for the earlier flaws, like the dialogue that’s occasionally typical of the period’s worst — “I’m just a guy who… explained his entire backstory in one slightly long and unwieldy sentence to someone who already knew it”.

What gets forgotten in all this, perhaps most depressingly, is the fate of those on the outside. We’re told early on that Collins’ love is refusing treatment for her cancer until she sees him again. This seems ready-made to provide justification for a prisoner to escape; indeed, the whole film is skewed this way, as we never discover many of the inmates’ crimes, and those we do hear are either done for good reason or not that bad. But it toes the more obvious moral line by having no one escape, and while the cancer isn’t mentioned again after the slaughter, it leaves what might otherwise seem a morally justifiable cheat (the prisoners are the good guys here — we expect and want them to triumph — but that they don’t is ‘correct’) with a bitter taste.

Transporter 3 (2008)

Posted on December 1, 2009 by badblokebob

2009 #27
Olivier Megaton | 100 mins | DVD | 15 / PG-13

I very much enjoyed the first Transporter film. No, it wasn’t high art, but it did what it did very well — even managing a few outstanding moments — and in a pleasantly efficient running time too. 2005’s sequel kept the latter but sadly lost the former, pushing things too far into the realm of CG-aided silliness. With sequel director Louis Leterrier off bringing some of his much-needed CG silliness to the Hulk franchise, it falls to the amusingly-monikered Olivier Megaton to try to navigate this cars-and-kung-fu series back onto the right road.

Film credits sometimes baffle me. As you may guess, Transporter 3 has a perfect example: “Written by Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen. Based on characters created by Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen.” I honestly can’t comprehend the need for that second credit. Some may not even comprehend the need for the first one in a film like this, and usually they’d be right. Here, however, Besson and Kamen seem to have decided the presence of writers should be remembered and so stuck in an awful lot of character development. Not only is it not wanted — one of the best things about the first two films was their efficient 80-something minute running times, while this sprawls out to a full hundred — but it’s not very well done either.

Equally, the plot really makes very little sense for much of the film. Worse, when someone eventually explains it, it turns out to be no great shakes, especially as by that point the viewer’s just about pieced it together. I can’t compare it to the first two because, to be honest, I can’t really remember what their plots were, but I don’t remember thinking they were quite so ill conceived. It’s almost a shame, because it isn’t wholly a rehash of the first two — it’s still little more than an excuse to string together some fights and chases, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be different. There’s also a weak villain — never much of a threat, with an attempt at character development that is (of course) misplaced — who’s granted a logic-defying death (albeit with a nice surround sound mix). Overall, the film lacks both the humour and excitement of earlier instalments.

Megaton over-directs and over-edits the action (and a lot else besides) too often — it would be nice to tell what’s going on. Someone also needs to tell him that speeding up footage of two cars racing doesn’t make it more exciting, it just makes it look silly. And he misses apparently-obvious things that would improve sequences. For example, we know Frank’s bracelet flashes between yellow, orange and red as he gets too far away from the car — a conveniently visual warning system — so when someone takes the car and Frank has to run (and cycle) after it to avoid his wrist-bomb going off, we expect a fairly tense chase where the light on Frank’s bracelet-bomb constantly changes colour. But there’s just one half-glimpsed shot of the bracelet in the entire sequence. It’s a glaring omission that robs the setpiece of much of its ingenuity, rendering it a bog-standard chase.

After all the criticism of Transporter 2’s reliance on CGI, most of this sequel features no significant use of it — and that, of course, is a good thing. A car driving at high speed on two wheels between two articulated lorries is just silly if it’s all done with computers; done for real, as it is here, it’s somewhat impressive — exactly as it should be. (By ‘for real’ I mean a real car, real lorries, etc. I’m sure rigs of some kind must’ve been used to actually pull it off.) Unfortunately, after almost an hour and a half of keeping it real, Megaton mucks it all up again by resorting to CGI to pull off the ludicrous climax. Personally, I’d find it pleasantly ludicrous if they’d managed to film a real car doing that stuff on a real train, but the CGI just compounds the silliness.

When a film that exists solely to provide some nice action sequences can’t even do those well, you know you’re in trouble. Transporter 3 should be a mildly diverting piece of action fluff; just a bit of violent fun. I’m not sure if it’s trying to be something more with its added character development, or just generally failing in its primary aims. Either way, it’s still fluffy, but not actually much fun.

Ripley’s Game (2002)

Posted on November 20, 2009 by badblokebob

2009 #67
Liliana Cavani | 106 mins | TV | 15 / R

Matt Damon is back as… Oh, wait, no he isn’t — he’s turned into John Malkovich.

Not quite — there’s no reasonable way Ripley’s Game can be considered a sequel to Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mr Ripley. Though it’s adapted from a later novel in Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley series (previously filmed as the Dennis Hopper-starring The American Friend, incidentally), the action is relocated to the present day, and it’d be a pretty hard sell to believe Matt Damon would grow up to be John Malkovich.

Despite the acclaim of Minghella’s effort just three years earlier, and a cast that includes recognisable faces such as a Ray Winstone, Dougray Scott and Lena Headey alongside Malkovich, Ripley’s Game snuck out with barely anyone noticing, including going straight to TV in the US. There are surely reasons for this, reports of a problematic shoot probably among them, but the neglect is undeserved. In 2006, Roger Ebert saw fit to include it in his Great Movies list, though other critics are less favourable (the Radio Times, for one handy example, rate it just three out of five). While Ebert is in my opinion overselling the film by including it in a list of the best films ever made ever, it’s certainly an above average, consummately made, and constantly entertaining Euro-thriller.

Perhaps the difference in opinion about the film stems from one, arguably crucial, sticking point: the Radio Times criticises the humour included in the murders and thriller sections, viewing it as a failure of director Liliana Cavani; conversely, Ebert approves of it, praising them as appearing somewhere “between a massacre and the Marx Brothers”. There’s undoubtedly more to the diverging opinions than this, but it’s at least emblematic. I’m inclined to agree with Ebert: these sequences do have tension — not the most one’s ever experienced in a thriller, but enough — but they marry the humour to it, leaving you chuckling on the edge of your seat.

For the most part the story keeps moving, twisting and turning in sometimes unexpected directions. Other films would happily take the first half-hour or so of this and stretch it to a whole feature, but screenwriters Charles McKeown and Cavani — adapting from Highsmith’s novel, of course, so the credit lies with her — take the premise further and in new directions. It’s not flawless, with the climax by far the biggest let down: Ripley and Trevanny hole up in the former’s villa, preparing for a veritable war as Ripley anticipates goodness-knows how many men to turn up. When it’s only two, it seems more believable than a whole army of mafia goons descending on the relatively insignificant pair, but it’s also distinctly anticlimactic after the hype. Still, at least the story has a final twist up its sleeve.

Malkovich may be a fairly respected actor, but to me he’s always seemed detached, flat, or mannered — often all three. Here, he’s still all three, but it suits Ripley’s unusual character down to the ground. His dry wit and incessant matter-of-fact delivery craft a quietly sinister, stalking nature, aiding the character’s believable unpredictability — that is to say, you’re never certain what he’s going to do next, but when he does it’s not surprising. I’ve never read a Ripley novel (there are five) nor seen another Ripley film (there are four), but Malkovich’s performance fits so perfectly I have little doubt this is precisely how Ripley should be played.

Among the rest of the cast, Ray Winstone is landed with a role he could play in his sleep, Lena Headey is perfectly fine as an unremarkable wife, and Scot Dougray Scott plays a none-more-plummy Brit. Unfortunately this accent sometimes seems to be the main focus of his performance, and it occasionally falters when he gets highly emotional, but it’s not really a problem… though it is rather odd to hear if you’re familiar with how he normally sounds. His character, Trevanny, is primarily a pawn in Ripley’s titular amusement, leaving Scott with only a passing hint of the character arc with which the role could have been gifted.

As noted earlier, there are numerous tales of problems on set, not least the multinational cast coping with a multinational crew in multiple nations, culminating in Cavani leaving towards the end of shooting and directorial duties being fulfilled by Malkovich. But as many have noted before, happy sets can produce dreadful movies and unhappy sets masterpieces, and while I don’t quite share the view that Ripley’s Game is entirely the latter, it certainly errs more in that direction than the other.

Wallander: Before the Frost (2005)

Posted on November 18, 2009 by badblokebob

aka Mankell’s Wallander: Innan Frosten

2009 #74
Kjell-Åke Andersson | 93 mins | TV | 15

You’re likely familiar with Swedish police detective Kurt Wallander — in passing if not in detail — from the Kenneth Branagh-starring BBC series broadcast at the end of last year (a second series has just finished filming). For the sake of omitting excusatory clauses from the next paragraph, I’ll assume that’s all you know (not that I mean to sound like an expert, because, well, I’m not).

Wallander is adapted from a series of novels by Swedish author Henning Mankell, previously filmed in their original language, between 1994 and 2007, as a series of TV movies starring Rolf Lassgård. A different series of Swedish Wallander films began in 2005 — so, concurrent with the TV adaptations — featuring Krister Henriksson as the titular detective in original stories based on plots by Mankell. Three of these thirteen films received a theatrical release, the remainder going direct to DVD. It’s this latter series that BBC Four are currently halfway through showing, and it’s their theatrical releases that will see three of them reviewed as part of 100 Films 2009.

Before the Frost is the first of this series, and is actually an exception: where the others are original stories, this is adapted from a spin-off novel starring Wallander’s daughter, newly-qualified policewoman Linda Wallander. This leaves Kurt as something of a guest star in the first episode of his own series, but we still see enough of Henriksson to get a feel for his Wallander. Where Branagh is soul-searching, constantly staring silently into the distance, occasionally with a few tears for company, Henriksson is just a guy trying to do his job; struggling to be a good dad and maybe struggling with his health, but still a regular guy. Maybe the introspection and crying come later.

As the de facto lead, Johanna Sällström gets the best of the material. Linda’s troubled relationship with her father, including her decision to work in the same station as him when she could’ve gone anywhere but, are major threads. Sällström plays this central contradiction well, only occasionally (and, thankfully, briefly) slipping down into stroppy teenager histrionics, such as when she storms away from a crime scene early on. As Linda’s friend Anna, Ellen Mattsson also has daddy issues to contend with, though sadly they’re underwritten by comparison. Nonetheless, her significant role is finely portrayed.

Sadly, the majority of the detective story isn’t up to the personal relationships. The villains turn out to be Evil Christians — always a good enemy in my book — with a variety of nefarious plans that lead the story to touch (briefly) on hot-topic issues like abortion, single-parent artificial insemination, and same-sex marriage. While a British or American drama might feel the need to include more of a debate about the morals of such acts, here they seem accepted as a right that the Evil Christians want to steal. Though this arguably leaves them under-considered, it’s a refreshing change of pace.

More problematic is that the villains are never properly introduced or explored. Some events are undersold — a woman is murdered for no decent reason, a case of wrong-place-wrong-time, but once her body is discovered no thought or mention is given to her unfortunate luck or her family’s grief. Obvious deductions stare Wallander and his team in the face yet they fail to make them — the length of time it takes anyone to twig that the fundamental Christians might intend to attack the high-profile gay wedding is astounding. All of these faults rob a few plot twists of their full potential, though at least one still left me surprised and feeling like I should have spotted it (which, of course, is what a competent twist ought to do). Arguably, however, there’s too great a reliance on coincidence to connect all the dots.

Visually this Wallander is as different from the BBC’s as Henriksson is from Branagh. Where the British one seems to attempt an emulation of what our idea of Sweden might be — all cold, desaturated blues and greys, lingering shots of vast empty countryside, and so on — the Swedish version is more, well, normal. (That said, early on it contains a perversely beautiful shot of two swans in flight while engulfed in flames.) No doubt the differences between series are the product of the British version trying to create a Foreign Culture while the Swedish one is just content with filming it as-is, much the same as British-set British dramas do with Britain. On a broadly related note (in that they’re visual), the subtitles are mostly fine, though some jokes and language tricks are unfortunately lost in translation.

Before the Frost is, sadly, not all it could be. Whether this is the fault of Mankell’s novel or Stefan Ahnhem and Pelle Berglund’s adaptation I don’t know (I’ve never read a Mankell), but while it seems fine as it goes along a bit of reflection reveals all these niggling gaps. That might be a little harsh though, as there’s still much to admire and enjoy in the first of what could be a fine series.

The second theatrical release, Mastermind, was on BBC Four last week and is available on iPlayer for another 24 hours. The third, The Secret (aka Hemligheten), is episode thirteen and will air later this year.

High Anxiety (1977)

Posted on November 11, 2009 by badblokebob

2009 #65
Mel Brooks | 94 mins | TV | 15 / PG

Mel Brooks pays comedic tribute to Alfred Hitchcock — in case you can’t tell, the second credit is a prominent dedication — but those unfamiliar with the Master of Suspense’s output need not apply.

Brooks presents a largely Hitchcockian plot, though the clearest references come in a couple of sketches and one-liners. To be fair, there are several significant Hitchcock films I’ve still not seen, leaving the nagging sensation that some allusions and gags simply passed me by. On the other hand, maybe they just weren’t funny — I can’t remember many laughs that didn’t spring from a Hitchcock reference of some kind.

Indeed, whole chunks pass by without a laugh. At other times, bits that are clearly meant to be funny just don’t hit home (though I’m aware that, inevitably, they will for some people), while some gags are almost reassuringly familiar: a dramatic piece of music kicks in, causing characters to look around until they see a band in full swing has appeared nearby, for just one example.

Things pick up considerably in the second half, which is also more obviously Hitchcockian to my mind. Some scenes offer very good, though specific, riffs on famous Hitchcock moments — a version of Psycho’s shower scene is particularly memorable, though a scatological take on The Birds will please some — but these are almost exclusively asides to the story, little sketches inserted wherever Brooks can find space to squeeze them in. They provide welcome amusement, but are far from integrated into the plot.

At this point I’m beginning to suspect Brooks’ humour just doesn’t gel with me. I enjoyed Spaceballs when I was younger, but watching it a couple of years ago I found it more embarrassing than entertaining. Even the widely praised Blazing Saddles raised little more than the occasional smile. High Anxiety, unfortunately, now joins this line-up.

Stranger on the Third Floor (1940)

Posted on November 6, 2009 by badblokebob

2009 #55
Boris Ingster | 64 mins | TV

Despite being “released the same month as Raoul Walsh’s They Drive By Night, and four months after Alfred Hitchcock’s Gothic Noir Rebecca,” says Paul Duncan in The Pocket Essential Film Noir, “this is often listed as the first Film Noir”. Not often enough to earn the treatment you’d expect such an accolade to afford, it would seem, as I hear it’s rarely screened and only available on DVD in Spain. That’s a shame, because it’s an entertaining — if brief — example of the genre.

The story is a morality tale of sorts. A journalist is the key witness to convict a man of murder, albeit on fairly circumstantial evidence; the journalist’s fiancee disagrees with what he did, though he tries to persuade her round to his way of thinking; but then the journalist finds himself in virtually the same situation, and it’s up to the fiancee to prove his innocence. And that’s most of the plot I’m afraid, though to be frank it’s fairly ancillary anyway.

The screenplay is a little slight and stretches its credibility — would a man really be convicted on such circumstantial evidence, for example? It plays structural tricks too: at one point the lead character is arrested off screen and the focus switches to his fiancee for the remainder of the film. Perhaps they didn’t have the money left for a cell set. Such leaps suggest an underdeveloped story, but on the bright side it certainly keeps things moving.

Despite these faults, many individual scenes are rather good. The journalist spends half the film pacing his room, for example, contemplating whether his irritating neighbour is dead or not, but it remains gripping. When he sleeps he has a nightmare, a showcase not only for the expressionist-influenced cinematography, but also the writing: the opening trial scene features a humourously inattentive judge and sleepy jury, but the exact same elements return to haunt our hero when he dreams he’s in the dock.

The climax is virtually the only scene to feature top-billed Peter Lorre to any significant degree, here fulfilling a couple of days left on his RKO contract with a small role. Nonetheless, in this one scene he out-acts the rest of the cast put together, using just a few lines of backstory to really flesh out his underwritten character. The sequence where the fiancee tries to escape him is suitably sinister. Still, the scene is over quickly and without the fullest logic in its execution — much like the film as a whole.

Stranger on the Third Floor is so imbued with the recognisable calling cards of noir in its cinematography, characters and plot points that it feels more like an entry in a well-established genre than a formative inclusion. At only just over an hour it is, on the one hand, too brief to dig into its characters or complicate its story, but on the other, it rattles past quickly enough that the good bits impress, the weak bits are only briefly registered, and it’s over long before anyone might even consider considering it a waste of time.

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