PAYCHECK, DIRECTOR: JOHN WOO

Watching Paycheck made me want to give up reviewing films altogether. This inept, silly and annoying movie should have never left the pre-production stage.

It features career-low performances from blandly handsome Ben Affleck, toothsome and vapid Uma Thurman and John Woo, who should be thoroughly ashamed of himself.

Paycheck sees his soul, brought, signed, sealed and delivered to Hollywood and his sellout mentality is now well and truly complete.

If you thought Gigli was bad, Paycheck is just as awful, if not worse.

It's a rip-off of Minority Report and Total Recall, even though Phillp K. Dick loosely bases it on an original short story.

Affleck plays Michael Jennings, a "reverse-engineer" who steals other people's technology, sells it to the highest bidder and then, conveniently, has his memory erased.

He's approached by an old friend, Jimmy Rethrick (Aaron Eckhart) to committ himself to a three-year project , which, if completed, will secure the biggest payout of his career.

But Jenning's colleague Shorty (Paul Giamatti) has reservations about this job, citing the old adage that, if it's too good to be true, it probably is- as Jennings discovers to his cost.

Jennings wakes up to fins that it's three years into the future and his only help in piecing together what has happened is in an envelope filled with a wristwatch, a diamond ring and a matchbox.

In all this confusion, time is running out for him to find out what happened. Making matters worse, people are trying to find and kill him.

With a script that either states the obvious at every turn or repeats things such as character motivation long after the audience has established it for themselves. Paycheck is an essay in stupidity.

With more holes than Swiss cheese, its artless and graceless action sequences are poor payoff for a plot that is either very silly or needlessly complicated.

Affleck has never been more wooden or more smug. Thurman, as a biologist must be the most airheaded and vacuous doctor that I have seen on film.

Woo manages to make the action set-pieces incredibly conventional and very unexciting. His reputation, gained from Hong Kong action flicks, has been lifelessly drained away and he's been forced to cover up a feeble plot, rubbish acting and script that does nothing but slither along.

Paycheck is a desperate effort by all concerned and should be avoided by audiences like the plague.

TOKYO STORY, DIRECTOR: YASUJRIO OZU

It says a lot that the best film of the week is 51 years old, but then Tokyo Story is a special film, a life-changing experience that has stood the test of time for over haf a century.

In the renowned film magazine Sight and Sound, Tokyo Story ranked as number five on the 2002 critics' poll, adding testament to a well-deserved legacy.

Tokyo Story is a universal tale of estrangement between parents and their adult children, a story that never seems to date and has emotional resonance for any mother, father and offspring.

It's a very simple film, in the sense that it builds its emotional power from nuances, in terms of camera placement and characters' expressions and from a story that reflects reality, showing how people deal with a range of situations.

The story is of an aging married couple who travel from a provincial town to visit their various grown-up children.

But the children have moved on, leading busy lives as professionals, seemingly only taking them out to see the city because they feel obliged to.

But the don't seem to have time to show them around properly, eat a meal or just chat, hamstrug as they are by their jobs and their seperate, hectic lives.

The parents come to terms with this turn of events and turn their attention to their widowed daughter-in-law, someone who seems to have time for the couple and shows human kindness.

However, on their trip, the mother dies and the scene is set for a funeral at the ancestral home, where the siblings face up to their priorities and try to absolve some of their guilt.

Recriminations are kept to a minimum, as is the apportioning of blame. The widowed daughter-in-law comes off as showing the most compassion, which the father remembers even if she is nothing less than modest about what she has done.

The greatest sorrow is reserved for the widowed husband. His resignation to loneliness is heartbreaking and there is little he can do but face his fate without the woman that he loved.

This simplicity is also the brilliance of a director like Yasujrio Ozu. He is able to make big emotional strides by expression real human emotion and this is why the film exudes a power that is rarely seen in cinema.

Ozu's sublime trademark style of little camera movement, setting up the scene and playing lt long after the narrative necessitates is cinematic poetry.

Ozu knows more than most directors about exploring off-screen space and enhancing it for emotional heft. However, this is the least conventional or emotionally manipulative film that you are ever likely to see.

Characters are framed with utmost relevance to their surroundings, making a relationship between person and environment. The idea of loneliness being conveyed in terms of film space is something that Ozu understands.

He also expresses beautifully the images of a character in the middle of a frame surrounded by huge gulfs of space as a metaphor for helplessness and isolation in scene after scene.

It's the unobtrusive camera placement, usually only a foot or so higher than the floor, which puts you at the heart of the drama and the heart of the characters. It's as if you are an invisible member of the family, absorbing the humanity surrounding you.

Ozu was one of the greatest directors of the 20th century and most of his film are inbued with the kind of humanism that makes him a great film-maker.

The film manages, simply and in an unfussy manner, to explain more about the complexities of life than many so-called epics.

Tokyo Story is epic, not in terms of its canvas, but in terms of its ambition, its depth and its perception of human values and feelings.

If there were only seven wonders of the cinematic world, Tokyo Story would surely be one of them.

This is absolutely unmissable cinema that will stand the test of time for the next 50 years and way beyond that.

BIG APPLE LIMEY

It was just after I got my visa to start a film course at Point Park College (now university) and the embassy official told me that Point Park wasn’t a very good university and I should think about going somewhere else or abandon my plans altogether. I took her comments under advisement and still hoped that a film course in Pittsburgh would prove interesting, enlightening and lead me to some sort of long-term stay in the U.S or some film-related job back in London, where I’m from. I came back to my apartment in Central London to find a huge package with the logo of New York University (NYU) emblazoned on the top right hand corner. I opened the package, which revealed a red folder, and opened that, which showed a letter of acceptance to the most prestigious film-related university in the world. I was shocked; numbed. I couldn’t believe my luck. It was a long shot that NYU would accept me. After all, University of Miami, University of Iowa and University of California at Los Angeles had all turned me down I had predictedA’ Level passes in English, Sociology & Psychology and the offer at NYU was conditional on securing those grades. NYU’s acceptance came with some conditions, which gave me trepidation: namely, being on academic probation my first year and having to maintain a Grade Point Average of 2.5 on a 4.0 scale.

TAXI DRIVER (1976) NOW ON REGION A (U.S) BLU RAY: SOME THOUGHTS

"Taxi Driver" must rank as one of the greatest films ever made. A study of the pathology of loneliness in and around the mean streets of 1970s New York City, it's now released on blu-ray and has a timeless status and quality that has never been matched. Not an easy watch by any means, it's still a compelling, engrossing, downright gritty piece of cinema, which I've seen several times,. The following are some observations of the movie I've had over the years, having seen it many times over the years, since I first watched it on a big-box red VHS back in 1986.

Travis suffers and his “mission” at the end is catharsis, a release. He’s looking back in the mirror- nothing has changed. His loneliness is his pathology, his need to save Iris is a little more than focusing his mind away from his terrifying emptiness, which he embraces through his pathology of eating crap food, going to porno cinemas, making a hash of the date he’s on with Betsy and, even worse, trying to get Betsy to embrace his loneliness too. Understandably, Travis is hurt, but he can’t see the normality of just going on a date. He even makes grand judgements to Betsy at the coffee shop. He’s unable to stop the pain he feels because of the trauma of his past, post Vietnam. The taxi is a yellow coffin. He’s suffering. But he’s also dead inside. The nearest he gets to being a hero is that he’s a loner, an outsider. If anything, he’s an anti-hero. He’s also not bitter; he’s pathetic and sad and deserves our pity. His aborted date with Betsy is little more than a self fufilling prophecy, where he thinks that she would be interested in his sad little life. She’s rejects him in the cinema, he rejects her at the end, refusing to charge her for the fare. He remains a sufferer, not an unhinged beast.

He’s bitter when rejected by Betsy, but subsequent attempts to ask her out again are conveyed in a pathetic hoplessness- especially when the camera pans down the empty hallway. He’s pissed off with Betsy’s co-worker and wants to kick the shit out of him, but he doesn’t. He doesn’t raise his voice anywhere during the film. He’s always desperate. He talks to Iris in desperate tones “you should be in school”. His robotic march of death at the end is devoid of emotion- he’s expressing his true force, every muscle must be tight. It’s all about the mission. Bitter people don’t have the energy to do what he’s doing. He’s lonely and suffering passively. The killing of pimps and dealers is an agressive sense of purpose, the only one he’s had since he got back from 'Nam. He must be depressed, because he has no fear of working long hours, driving his coffin through black ghettos, begging to get hurt. He hates black people- that’s for sure. But NY was fairly diverse even in 1975/76, so he had time to come to terms with migration. He probably had black squad members fighting with him? He can’t expect to pick up women in a porno cinema, either by taking them or chatting them up whilst they’re working there. He doesn’t have any skills to jump back for a minute before he pathalogically heads further into the abyss. Whist he maintains his outsider status, he’s also revelling in it, happy to be that loner and for the viewer to empathise him, if only because he can’t see how unhappy he is.

and he wanted to and expects to die at the end. The media label him a hero because he’s diametrically rid NY of some bad anti-social dudes, but the media don’t see how unstable he is, so he’s happy to have the attention. But wait, he looks back in the mirror, and it’s back to the same old misery, if untreated, will cause his death by his own hand, not by the guns of the sleaze merchants of Manhattan.

But he expected to die, which is why he wrote the letter to Iris. I don’t take the idea that society adores him- they would only be doing that on the level of the fact that he got rid of cliched “scumbags”. As an audience we’ve been following Travis from his perspective for the whole time, so we know that what he did isn’t something to be championed. As an Idea of transcendence, this must be a very extreme form of it. He nearly dies after rescuing Iris and fully expects to, but doesn’t. He manages to reject Betsy, but to what end? He’s not happy, despite managing a smirk. He looks in the mirror, is alarmed, the mirror is blurred, which must be a visual representation of Travis’ warped mind. The last images are of scummy 1970s New York, and he’s back in his yellow coffin, wandering the streets, waiting to die again. It’s a hopeless moment. He’s accepted his loneliness, and he will die again again because of it because he has no connection to society. He couldn’t even connect with his cabby colleagues. He can’t live with Iris or her family… It was a one off moment. He got clarity, but only for a moment. He’s still trivial and he’s dead inside.

Regarding the mowhawk- this is just part of his whole ritual. He’s been burning his arm to enhance his muscles, he’s doing pull ups, press ups, but it makes him stand out like a sore thumb. He could have been killed or arrested when he tries to kill Palantine, but, unrealistically manages to evade arrest. Travis means "journeyman", and his cab is a metaphor for his mental journey into suicide and transcendence into another world, where he doesn’t have to feel, so acutely, the pain of rejection and loneliness. The only acceptance he feels are the positive media opinions and the letter from Iris’ parents, who unrealistically, say they can’t come to NY because they’re too poor. Well, if Travis wanted to, on his large salary, could surely head up to Philly for a welcome. A welcome that would be more accepting given that it wouldn’t be in a hospital ward, with Travis in a coma. But he’s not going to take up the offer. He’ll die sooner or later, but for moment, he feels that he’s made an accomplishment, even though it’s in the most extreme form of mass homicide. Did it have to be so extreme, no? But it makes for a classic piece of 70s cinema.

REVIVAL AFTER A 15 MONTHS ABSENCE.

Not sure why I put the pen down, so to speak, and stopped this bog, but I thought I'd return to it. Perhaps, I was inspired by my friend, Darren, whose set up his own blog/website? Maybe my job was getting to me and I withdrew into myself? I'm not sure, but I'm back to burn, so to speak (again) and hopefully, this will be a more constant affair; cathartic, if nothing else.

Anyway, after a long three-weeks, I have my monthly long-weekend. I spent most of Friday just gone at the cinema. It's what I enjoy doing most in life. After all, everyone has their passions, and this keeps me off the streets and out of trouble.

Anyway, whilst I'd seen "True Grit," the Coen Brothers' remake already, I went to see it again at the Cineworld Haymarket and enjoyed it just as much second time around. "Brighton Rock" at Cineworld Shaftsbury Avenue was up next. Didn't like this much. Changing it from the 1940s to the mid 1960s didn't make much sense. Sam Riley as "Pinky" wasn't really that credible as a sociopath. The atmosphere of the picture was rendered quite successfully- scuzzy, badly lit under passes creating an air of menace. But the film felt wrong and didn't need a remake. Last on the billing on Friday was "Gnomeo and Juliet"- decent enough animated take on Romeo and Juliet produced by Elton John and his husband. Some decent jokes in the mix, but it ran out of ideas pretty quickly, with the last thirty minutes your basic run-of-the-mill chase, crash and burn sequence, with pathos lifted from a hundred Pixar movies. A whole movie of Elton John songs got annoying too. As did the chavvy mother that came in thirty minutes late with her two brats. I passed comment. She tutted. We had a few "words" at the end of the film. A credit to humanity she wasn't. Ho hum, I guess it takes all sorts to make a world. Unfortunately, that kind of negative diversity can turn good people into bad or recluses.

Well, that's it for the moment. Did absence make the writing better? Who knows?