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dir: Mike Nichols
Probably the most famous image of an outstretched leg in cinema history
1967

What a remarkably good film. I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to see it. Seeing it for the first time just recently (29//8/2007), I was struck by just how good this ‘classic’ flick from the 1960s really is. For once the link between reputation and quality actually coincides.

Certain phrases have become pop culture stalwarts like “Mrs Robinson, you’re trying to seduce me,” “Do you want me to seduce you?” and “Plastics!” said in that conspiratorial voice. And the soundtrack by undead folk troubadours Simon and Garfunkle is as well known and much lamented part of greatest hits commercial radio package played out daily across the globe.

dir: Gavin Hood
Come with me please, you look a bit terroristy
Rendition is, yes, another one of those recent films tagged “political” by those reluctant to be drawn into the culture wars (which is, usually, most people) but eager to dismiss something with the least amount of effort required.

Just in case you thought movies don’t mean squat unless they’re based on something true, Rendition is based on the ordeal of Khaled el-Masri, a German national of Kuwaiti descent, who was taken from the Serbian-Macedonian border and held and beaten in prison in Afghanistan for five months in 2004.

And then released when they figured out that it was Khaled AL-Masri that they were looking for in the first place. Because if they’d beaten that guy for five months, it would have been all right.

The title refers to the use of the term rendition, or extreme rendition, as applied to the manner in which the CIA can decide some people with potential information or contacts in the terrorist community can be snatched up and disappeared as if they never existed. Then, once they’re wearing a headbag, they’re whisked away to a country where foreigners can torture them for information. See, America doesn’t do torture. But if someone else wants to do it for them, well, why the hell not? It would be the height of ingratitude to not take advantage of their hospitality and flexible positions on human rights.

When the person who’s kidnapped and tortured is just a stinking foreigner goatherding their way through their family-less and friendless lives, then it’s not an issue worthy of being brought to our notice. But when the guy is a fully fledged America lover with a pregnant blonde wife (Reese Witherspoon) and a son called Jeremy, then it’s really a crying shame and a travesty when the guy is kidnapped and tortured for his suspected terrorist links.

I’m not sure exactly where most of this story transpires apart from the Washington and Chicago bits, but it’s North Africa at the very least. Morocco, Tunisia, probably not Algeria, but it hardly matters. It’s a place where there are lots of Arab speakers and Muslims living in hot and dusty climes. Which are, as we know, a recipe for two things: fundamentalist terrorists and forbidden love.

dir: Michel Gondry
The ice is cracking underneath, now, as always, young lovers
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a rarity in this day and age: a film that has elements of romance, drama and comedy without being hampered or paralysed by any of those aspects. In truth this film is beyond a rarity: it's a gem that stars, inexplicably, Jim ‘Ham on Rye' Carrey and Kate 'Let Me Get The Twins Out' Winslet playing two oddball characters that don't pander, don't beg us to love how cute they are and therefore circumvent the natural expectations that an audience member might have of a scriptwriter having to create a story we could possibly care about. One that doesn't ploddingly, predictably, stagger from point A to point B to point Zzzzz.

Let's face it romantic comedies are about as popular as syphilis to those of us that don't think Maid in Manhattan, the Wedding Singer and Pretty Woman are the pinnacle of the cinematic experience. Sure, I understand, we're ungrateful, but some of us aspire to something more out of film and of life. With that in mind when something comes along that's clever and sweet it seems fuckstruckingly out of place. What? It's funny AND romantic? Are the seas boiling? Is that sky falling? Isn't this one of the signs of the forthcoming Apocalypse?

It's a bittersweet story inventively told and engagingly realised that succeeds despite Carrey's best attempts to fuck things up. It's Jim Carrey after all, a guy that probably has to be tranquilised for roles like this in order to keep him under control. Like many of the scripts that idiot / savant Charlie Kaufman has thus far been responsible for, the entire story seems to hinge on only one kooky idea: what if the technology existed to allow people to have their painful memories erased? Would people use it to stop being paralysed by the past, by their bad choices, their missteps and their mistakes? If people did go down this path, would their identity, their sense of self remain the same?

dir: Guillermo Del Toro
You horny old goat, you
So many film reviewers and other shmendricks called this film one of their favourites, if not their favourite film for 2006, that I started wondering if it was possible for me to enjoy it under the weight of so much expectation. The truth is, the film is even better than I expected.

It’s cliché time as people fall all over themselves to come up with superlatives to describe how good this flick is, but the one that I’ll happily use is that Del Toro’s career up until now has been solely in preparation for making Pan’s Labyrinth.

The thing is, directors have got to eat, too. And Mexican director Del Toro is a big guy. So some of the stuff he’s made which has been less than tolerable (Blade II, Mimic, Hellboy), kept him fed, built his profile and gave him the skills to pay the bills so that he could one day pursue a project like this.

It would be a falsehood to assert that, though. The first film of his that got noticed, Cronos, was pretty good right from the start, and The Devil’s Backbone, also set around the time of the Spanish Civil War in the 1940s, also showed promise. In fact, it was pretty damn good. And as much as I was nonplussed by Hellboy, it was one of his pet / dream projects.

In tone and setting, Labyrinth is closest to Devil’s Backbone, though it is not really a sequel or connected that strongly. Some of the advertising for this film may have given people the impression that it is some kind of Tim Burtonesque gothic fantasy. Let’s just say that the trailer and the marketing are fairly deceptive.