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dir: Alejandro Amenabar
Excuse me, sirs, have you seen my puppy?
It’s about time there was a biopic about the life, loves and times of Hypatia. You know, the famous 4th century mathematician and philosopher? One of the most renowned and virtually unknown women of antiquity?

Okay, unless you were a desperate and insecure teenage boy who struck upon the brilliant strategy of reading up on feminist icons believing that it would somehow result in some girl with low standards throwing you a pity grope every now and then, you might not have heard of her. But I had, and so when I heard that the director of Open Your Eyes, The Others and the superb The Sea Inside was making a biopic about this Hottie from History, I thought, “meh…”

Still, it’s turned up in our cinemas this week, and in a choice between watching something enjoyable, and watching something edifying, I chose Agora over, let’s say Monsters, or The Town.

More fool me.

Agora is the rare case of a biopic that works despite being about a person who’s not that interesting, and with not one but two ‘wrong’ performances from two of the main characters, but which still gets enough of the feel right and the depiction of the setting looks impressive enough to make you feel like it wasn’t a complete waste of time.

Sure, Rachel Weisz’s performance as Hypatia is not good, in fact it was downright painful, but she doesn’t even feel like the main character of her own story.

The real story being told is the early years of the Christian Church. After centuries of persecution, Christians in this part of the world were of sufficient number and inclination to start threatening the status quo. The story is set in Alexandria, Egypt, when it was one of the last bastions of the post-Hellenic world. They still had the Lighthouse and the Library and all! Sure, the Romans are still in charge, but Alexandria is depicted as being a mishmash of Greek and Egyptian enlightenment, with the dirty Christian hordes howling at the gates.

dir: Vincenzo Natali
Polly shouldn't be
Ah, Canadians. They make different films from the rest of the world, don’t they? Even though almost every single Hollywood flick that gets made seems to get made in Canada, there is a world of difference in style and sensibility between the two rival North American empires.

Vincenzo Natali came to prominence when he made a flick called Cube oh so long ago now. Whatever its merits, a lot of people talked about the flick for long enough that it established a career for what I’m sure is a sweet, sweet man (for all I know he stabs puppies in his spare time).

He has a reputation for make relatively low-budget high concept science fiction flicks that are ultimately, in my humble opinion, thoroughly ridiculous. The ridiculousness doesn’t completely detract from the interesting elements of his flicks, because he knows how to put them together in a competent fashion. Yet something always happens to make you doubt your commitment to his singular lunacy at some stage of his flicks. Like night following day, like hangover following binge, his flicks always, always go wrong at some point. It’s a lovely kind of wrongness, however.

Cube seemed to be going okay until a last minute decision was made to have a character go bugfuckingly insane for no reason and start killing people for no reason. Cypher seemed to be going okay until Lucy Liu’s character started talking. Nothing, well, his film called Nothing was nuts from the start, but at least it was enjoyable for what it was: a completely nuts story about two loser guys who accidentally destroy the entire universe. Don’t think that I didn’t notice one of the main characters here wearing a Nothing t-shirt for most of the film, Vincenzo, you self-promoting shill.

The moment where Splice goes wrong is arguable. What isn’t arguable is that it does go wrong, and irredeemably so, but there’s going wrong and then there’s going wrong in such a spectacular fashion that it becomes more memorable than if you’d done it right. It’s like the difference between crashing your car into a wall at 15 kilometres an hour, versus drunk driving an aircraft carrier carrying a thousand sports stars and celebrities on fire into a thousand orphanages.

There’s jumping the shark, there’s screwing the pooch, and, thanks to Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Please Gods Make It Stop Crystal Skull, there’s nuking the fridge. I hesitate to try to attain a future consensus that the phrase “fucked the mutant” should be added to that illustrious line-up of immortal phrases for fucking up royally, but I do humbly submit it for your consideration.

dir: Tom Ford
Uh, hey, it's the end of the financial year, and I need help with my tax return. You up for it, Poindexter?
You may not know who Christopher Isherwood was, or care, or know who Tom Ford is, or care. If you’re a woman, then odds are you know who Colin Firth is, and, depending on your age, you’ve thought he was dreamy ever since he played Darcy in thirteen or fourteen different variations on the role from Pride and Prejudice.

After watching this flick I’d wonder if you care any more about anything anywhere, since it plays out like the longest, tamest, gayest cologne commercial you’ve ever seen. Every scene is set designed and framed to within an inch of its life, and the performances, especially by Colin Firth, and Matthew Goode, as the central couple, are note-perfect.

But I’m sorry to say I walked away from this with barely anything having registered.

The love that dare not speak its name, but these days proclaims itself from the rooftops would seem to be the central premise, since the flick is set in 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, but really, it’s just about love. It’s about loving someone, and losing them after 16 blissful years together, and not being sure how to or whether to carry on.

The love that not only heals and elevates us, but that also hollows us out with its loss.

George (Firth) is a meticulous, and incredibly fussy, college professor who lives in the fussiest goddamn house in California, in the early sixties. His life partner has recently died, and George no longer seems to be able to care enough about maintaining the façade that life is worth living. We watch as he fussily goes about preparing all the kinds of things overly considerate and compulsive obsessive individuals would (we presume) when they plan to end their own lives.

Suicide is a very horrifying and serious topic to me, having lost a few people to its siren call, so it’s something I take seriously even when watching films and such. There’s a wrenching quality to it for me, usually, but the way this film treats it is probably right, with a very light touch. It even goes so far as to try to extract laughs out of the premise, perhaps ill-advisedly.

Even though we spend the day with George as he takes care of his preparations, we get to see reasons why he feels he has to (the flashbacks to his domestic bliss), we see why he feels compelled to (much of the world as he sees it, or when we view him, is drained of its colour, as if his depression is bleeding his world of life), and why he shouldn’t (practically everyone he knows or meets adores him). And when he starts meeting particularly hot boys the world itself seems to bloom.

dir: Drew Barrymore
You go, Grrls
I never really thought I’d be writing a review of a film that has Drew Barrymore listed up top as the director. It’s not because she often acts, depending on the circumstance, so bubbly that you’d think she’d never be able to get it together long enough to call action, sitting not in a director’s chair, but in a bubble bath.

No, it’s because there’s a disconnect between her public persona (super girly and bubbly), her film personae (super girly and bubbly), and what she’s apparently like behind the scenes in the turbulent world of film production (a don’t-fuck-with-me-or-I’ll-destroy-you player).

More power to you, sister. She’s got money and sway, so surely nothing can stop Drew if that’s what she wants to do?

I guess making a flick about women’s roller derby manages to satisfy two of her main criteria for what she wants to project to the world about herself: being girly and tough at the same time. There’s nothing wrong with that, in fact I find it very endearing, the way people find virtually everything this woman does endearing, and have done so ever since she was an adorable little moppet who started abusing cocaine at age 12.

Whip It is a coming-of-age story, shoe-horned into the safe dimensions of the sports drama, complete with unsupportive parents whose approval has to be earned by the final reel, a vicious rival (Juliette Lewis, who looks like she’s been hanging out with Courtney Love a bit too much), and montage after montage of training. Even better, from the sports movie perspective, it features a sport virtually incomprehensible in its arcane, though probably basic, rules. I have less of an understanding, after having watched this flick, of how the sport works than I do about the rules of Quidditch, that curiously made up and nonsensical game from the Harry Potter world of junior wizards.

Unlike quidditch, however, this is about real girls skating hard and beating the crap out of each other. An average teenager called Bliss (Ellen Page) finds solace and meaning in the company of some very rough and very gorgeous roller girls competing in the most made up of made up sports. Despite being tiny, and looking like my three-year-old daughter could knock her over, Bliss feels an affinity for the sport, where her speed is apparently an advantage against women three times her weight and double her height and age.

dir: Pou Soi Cheang
Look both ways when crossing the street, and then kiss your ass goodbye
There’s this thing about Hong Kong films: most of them aren’t good, and most of them are the same. The rare good ones, to people who don’t watch a lot of Hong Kong flicks, could be indistinguishable from the bad ones.

Actually, that’s probably not entirely true. The really bad ones usually have lots of annoying screaming, people eating snot and Stephen Chow pretending to laugh until food falls out of his mouth.

But good goddamn do they get it right when they get it right. The last of the contemporary HK directors that I considered worthy of following each and every project that came down the chute was Johnnie To, with his atmospheric and contemplative crime dramas. Now I have to look out for this chap, Soi Cheang, as well, because I haven’t seen something this good in a while.

The problem is that it won’t be easy to translate the ineffable ways in which this very slight, very moody, and virtually silent flick gets everything so right into a worthwhile film review. Of course, it’s never stopped me before, so it’s not going to stop me now, is it?

There’s this crew of people, four of them, and their job is to carry out contracts on selected targets. Yes, they’re assassins, but their job is not only to kill people, but to make it all look entirely like an accident, happenstance, a random and unfortunate occurrence.

Everyone knows their job, and more so they know how to look at a particular environment meticulously in order to figure out a sometimes incredibly complicated way to take someone out with what’s available to them, or the innocuous stuff they can inject into the environment to have the cumulative affect of snuffing out some poor triad boss’s lights.

They are led by Kwok-Fai, or Brain, as his team call him (Louis Koo), who is a very uptight but effective leader. He clinically observes every location until he can feel comfortable that he’s taken every variable into account. And then, after exhaustive reconnaissance and theorising, and only then, do they put their complicated plan into action.

Being meticulous, and with their objective being not only the ending of the target’s life, but the overarching requirement to make the deaths look like accidents, it’s not anywhere near as easy as just finding the right place to pull a trigger. These deaths are intricate works of art.

dirs: Alan Mak and Felix Chong
A little birdie told me...
For most of this flick’s running length, I thought I was watching a pretty good movie. It had a certain momentum, and tension, and even if the characters were somewhat unbelievable, I didn’t mind that too much because I found their actions, and the repercussions arising from those actions, to be both believable and interesting.

Of course, then they had to fuck the ending up.

Oh, man, do they fuck the ending up. It’s an ending so bad it undoes almost all the good work of the preceding 90 minutes. It’s so trite, preposterous and contrived that it made me feel actively angry.

But I shouldn’t let that completely obscure the goodwill I’d previously been experiencing while watching the flick. Sure, shitty endings can leave a poisonous aftertaste, but they don’t always justify ripping the absolute guts out of a flick.

Overheard is a taut, mostly fascinating crime story about a group of surveillance expert cops who are trying to figure out what white collar crimes are being committed at, by or to a Hang Seng stock exchange-listed company.

Most of the time, the vast majority of the time, it’s a crime movie about white collar crime. White collar crime generally sounds like a fucking boring time at the movies, but done properly, it’s as interesting as any other kind of espionage / heist flick.

Though that’s not really applicable in this instance. The real problems, excluding the way the flick ends, arise within the team of cops tasked with the surveillance night shift.

Surveillance cops Johnny (Ching Wan Lau), Gene (Louis Koo) and Max (Daniel Wu) work very well together, so well that they consider each other blood brothers. Right there, what we already know, if you’ve watched enough Chinese / Hong Kong flicks, is that when these kinds of guys say things like “I’ll die before I betray my brothers” their word is almost always going to be put to the test.

So even a seemingly innocuous and non-violent plot regarding insider trading and industrial espionage is going to necessarily devolve into bloody carnage. This is Hong Kong, after all.

dir: Werner Herzog
Give me your drugs, ladies, please
Herzog has long been acclaimed as one of the nuttiest directors of all time, so it makes a kind of deranged sense that he would be the one that picked up the mantle no-one else wanted. The Abel Ferrara directed Bad Lieutenant, at least the one starring Harvey Keitel and his penis, is one of my all time favourite films, of that have no doubt. When I watch it even today I marvel at just how demented and heart-rending it all is. How harrowing and still funny.

This is in no way a remake, but I guess there is some kind of thematic connection. That’s being too kind – there’s no goddamn connection. The only connection is that the main cop character is at the rank of lieutenant, and he uses a lot of drugs and probably commits / ignores as many crimes as he solves or pursues.

Keitel’s character was trapped in a hideous (and sometimes darkly comic) downward spiral because of, considering the heavy dose of Catholicism permeating the flick, either his abandonment of God, or his abandonment by God. The bleeding saviour himself appears in front of Keitel, who lets loose with the most disturbing keening / primal howling you’ll ever hear or laugh at in that or any other film.

Here, I think the sometimes great, more often terrible actor Nicolas Cage, is doing whatever nutbag nuttiness pops into his or Herzog’s head, and most of the time it doesn’t make any sense, but then this isn’t supposed to make complete sense. There are long sequences where the camera focuses on alligators and iguanas that make no sense in this or any other movie, including documentaries on how the lizards of New Orleans were worst affected by Hurricane Katrina. It’s just fucking nutty.

Katrina plays its obligatory part in such a story by being the cause of Terrence McDonagh’s (Cage) promotion to the rank of lieutenant after he saves a prisoner from the rising waters, but also the source of his drug problems. He screwed his back up in some way during the rescue which means his original addiction was to prescription painkillers. Now he does coke, crack cocaine and heroin by the handful as well, and barely anyone notices.

dir: James McTeigue
The promo poster is better than the flick itself
Wow. I haven’t seen a flick with as many meaty chunks flying around since the last time I took a trip to a slaughterhouse, or perhaps Easter Sunday lunch at my parent’s place. There’s substantially less mooing going on here, but all the same, the majority of the people who appear onscreen are here only to end up as chunks of meat on the floor for our entertainment.

That is what we are, after all. Maybe there’s something depressing about seeing visual (and entirely computer generated) representations of the essential meatiness of our bodies. Rendered down into our component parts, everything we were and ever will be, annihilated like that, well, it’s pretty confronting.

At least for a while. This decidedly substandard action movie opens with a bunch of yakuza thugs exploding into discrete piles o’chunks, at the hands, blades and shurikens of unseen, shadowy assassins. In other words, there must be murderous ninjas afoot!

The heyday of the ninja flick was definitely the 80s. At no other time has there been as much of a market for the endless permutations of the magically murderous character, which is why we had, for an all too brief, halcyon period, a stream of ninja related action flicks. For reasons I haven’t expended and won’t expend brain power on, the ninja sub-genre appealed to American audiences, leading to this procession of flicks starring obviously non-Japanese people as experts in ninjitsu, and the art of assassination and deception. Not for nothing did men like Franco Nero and Michael Dudikoff become household names.

What do you mean, they didn’t? Surely almost everyone in Christendom and Buddhisdom, for that matter, watched everything from Enter the Ninja to Silent Assassin to American Ninja 5: The Re-ninja-ing? They didn’t? Well, what were they busy doing, building treehouses, setting off bottle rockets or building crystal meth labs instead?

dir: Johnnie To
Vengeance is good for getting back at people
I have to admit, I find this flick pretty… strange. Much as I love Johnnie To’s flicks, and as much as I consider him one of the last Hong Kong directors making movies of any worth, style or significance, that doesn’t always mean I get where he’s coming from.

See, it’s a Hong Kong flick that mostly transpires in Macau, with an aged French actor as the lead, who doesn’t speak Cantonese, who wants revenge. Revenge! Or vengeance, as the case may be, on those who brutally attacked his daughter and murdered his grand children.

Why Costello (Johnny Halliday) wants revenge is almost irrelevant, because the sad fact is as well that, mixing in an element from Memento, Costello has short term memory problems, making his stated intention to seek Vengeance that much harder.

He accidentally stumbles across a team of hitmen, who he enlists in his righteous cause. They haltingly speak English, and he haltingly understands it, but they bond with each other, for reasons not obvious to me.

To’s films always, always, almost always centre around the idea of the brotherhood of man, and the bonds between men that can spring up through mutual criminality or happenstance, and yet prove stronger than love or death. To’s comfort with using the same stable of actors, or the union/triad gangster requirement to use the same actors in every single Hong Kong flick mean there’s a certain degree of shorthand involved.

dir: Marc Webb
Too busy, just like this flick
There aren’t that many good romantic flicks. I don’t think it’s the boring case of “They just don’t make ‘em like they used to, and get off my lawn, you deadbeats” beyond the heyday of the Golden blah blah of Hollywood. Romantic flicks invariably suck because they’re invariably crappy, inhuman and lazy.

And yet romance infects its way into almost any other flick and genre you can think of. Romance on its own, though, without the ‘comedy’ support of being at least a romantic comedy? Oh, it’s fucking awful, almost 99 per cent of the time.

That figure is empirical fact, based on years of meticulous research, forensic testing and cross-matching with the FBI’s crime database.

I don’t think this flick is anywhere near up the top of the genre with the few decent romantic flicks of the last couple of decades or so, but it doesn’t completely and utterly suck.

We are told right from the start that though this is a story about love, that it is not a love story, and that it is more about the misery a failed relationship can bring rather than the sheer scope and magnitude of wonderfulness that can occur when everything goes right.

Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), who was just sooooo great in that last GI Joe movie, wears a lot of sweater vests and ties in this flick. That alone almost made me gouge my eyes out. He is a fairly happy-go-lucky chappie who meets a girl at work and tentatively ends up having sex with her.

Summer (Zooey Deschanel), is the kooky and wide-eyed bundle of affectations that Tom inevitably falls in love with. But right from the start she makes it clear to Tom that she has no ability for or interest in pursuing a relationship, because she’s either unwilling or incapable of falling in love.

Right there, that’s part of your whole problem right there, as anyone who’s ever had a relationship or two knows: Difference of expectations.

You want love, they just want sex; you want sex, they want money; they want bondage, you want puppies; they want head, you just want to sleep; they want to move in, you want to move to Antarctica; you want them, they want anyone but you.

dir: Jason Reitman
Grow up, Clooney, and stop grade-grubbing for Oscars
This flick has garnered an incredible amount of positive reviews, awards, nominations, probably women kissing posters of George Clooney in public, dreamily smearing their cheap lipstick all over the glass failing to protect his poster within.

And for what? A guy flies around the States firing people. The end.

That’s it? That’s everything wrapped up in a neat little fucking package?

Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.

Ryan Bingham (oh, you’re soooo dreamy, George Clooney) is a charming and empty man who spends almost all of his time in the air, flying from downsizing opportunity to downsizing opportunity, and he loves it that way. He hates having to go back to the company headquarters, because it means he’s not in perpetual motion. Like some form of even more soulless shark, he needs to keep moving or he gets frantic.

He has reduced the elements of travelling, like dealing with the customs people, the torments of rental car hire, hotel reservations and those little bottles of booze all to both a fine art and also the stuff of his own life.

Bingham even has the temerity to try to peddle his fancifully ‘happy’ life into the stuff of get-rich-quick / self-help seminars, asking prospective sheep “What’s In Your Backpack?” as if it’s a question of any worth. He starts off, in his presentations to ever-increasing groups of morons, representing to them how all the stuff they care about in their lives, including their families, are pretty much worthless.

I’m all for praising the individual, but honestly, that level of isolation is priceless.

dir: Guy Ritchie
You devil, you
I should probably be ashamed of myself for having enjoyed this flick so much, but there it is. I’ve put it out there. I heartily enjoyed a Guy Ritchie movie, and, even worse, one based on the much beloved works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

When I heard Ritchie was making a version of Sherlock Holmes, and that it would be an action fest, I felt like I’d been punched in the nuts so hard that I was bleeding out of my mouth. Ritchie hasn’t made an enjoyable flick with a coherent plot or even vaguely coherent editing since Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. Since then there’s been this dire swirling of the same characters, the same over-stuffed plots based on Cockney slang, criminal doings and painful coincidence down a drain of creative bankruptcy, whereby the only decent moments for the viewer seem to occur almost by accident.

Well, someone must have forced Ritchie to calm the fuck down and produce something half-watchable, and I don’t think it was the vengeful ghost of Arthur Conan Doyle threatening to rip his nuts off. Even as tenuous and complicated as this story manages to be, with many a confusing scene that has to be explained in detail later on, it still manages to be far more coherent and easy to follow than anything else he’s ever had his name attached to.

Now, the world has recently rediscovered its extreme love of Robert Downey Jnr, and that’s a great thing. The man is wonderful, a delight, and often the only good thing in most of the flicks that he’s been in for the last thirty years. Iron Man raised him to iconic A-list status again, and in fact most of his roles in the 2000s seemed to be focussed on undoing the evil he’d perpetrated back in the 1990s, both in terms of cinema and his numerous criminal convictions.

I don’t know if he’s genuinely in any better a place that he was back when judge after judge kept sending him to jail and rehab, but at the very least, he’s getting decent roles and is at least getting better quality drugs so that he’s not wandering the streets all fucked up and breaking into stranger’s houses in order to pass out in their children’s beds.