Picturenose

Towering triumph

Superb. Just out-and-out superb. If you came for a scene-by-scene deconstruction and to hear how utterly pretentious it is, look away now. Regular readers will know that I have the attention span of a not-too-bright goldfish when it comes to films over ninety minutes long, but this one is two and a half hours or thereabouts and I don’t believe there was a single foot of film wasted. I am in serious danger of sounding like a union representative for the Spanish Film Council, having recently given The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005) such a blinding review, but the writing and direction are so tight and fresh that I believe we should hand the film industry to Spain for a few years.

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Sweets for the sweet? Er, no…

If I live to be 107, I don’t think I’ll ever come across a film that has divided popular opinion to the point where the two sides are so far apart they can barely make each other out in the distance. This is definitely not a film you’re going to love or hate, though - love would be totally misplaced in the context of the film’s subject matter. Hate? Well, there are quite a few haters out there.

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Comic-book history

I took my 10-year-old son to see this last week. He’s a fairly astute and mature boy, so I wasn’t too worried about some of the battle scenes that depict violent death and bloody retribution, but if you’re a parent, you may want to do a little research first. There really isn’t a huge amount of gratuitous violence; this is just a friendly heads-up, just in case. He loved the film and the story is a well-paced and visually exciting romp through days of yore.

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Not to be missed

As someone who has read Stephen King since I was around 11 years old, who has grown up loving (and loving being scared by) the man’s work, from Carrie, through The Shining via his Dark Tower cycle (and around 40 more novels and short-story collections, all told) to his most recent, Lisey’s Story, my reaction to the prospect of another King big-screen adaptation has, over the years, largely moved from child-like excitement to confused disappointment to weary boredom and, often, outright anger.

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Grave business

Having missed this at the cinema I was pleasantly surprised to find a DVD copy nestling in the ‘three DVDs for whatever’ section of one of my local outlets. I have no idea why it was consigned to nestle alongside Eddie Murphy’s Norbit (2007) and Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals (1977) (no, really). This is a film I would have happily paid full price for, and still have thought I’d got a bargain.

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Myth-building

“Myth,” the French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss wrote, “is language.” Insofar as that language develops exponentially over time, so do components of a story, and can be individualized as ‘mythemes’. But, what Levi-Strauss only hints at, is that at the kernel of myth is – however murkily, and however mediated – a truth. It becomes a primal means of language to describe history and the present and the human condition.

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Adrift

I tried, I really did. I was prepared to embrace and champion the plucky little independent production company battling it out against the big boys of Tinsel Town. That dying breed of film makers who can produce a movie for less than the cost of a regular Hollywood star’s allowance for fresh fruit and flowers in their dressing room. The only problem I had with it was that Chris Kentis’s Open Water (2003) is, well, a bit dull.

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