Category: Films

Saw [2004]

Director: James Wan
Actor: Danny Glover, Ken Leung, Cary Elwes, Tobin Bell

This movie got a lot of hype on this website before it came out in the United States, and I was very eager to see it. Having seen it, I was satisfied for what it was, though not as satisfied as I expected I would be. Don’t get me wrong, good film, and definitely worth the price of admission, but it’s no Se7en, although it does have that very same atmosphere.

I used to watch anything with a serial killer in it. Millenium, Profiler, Kiss the Girls (also starring Elwes, by the way), and more of the sort. This film fits really well; serial killer mastermind sets up an elaborate way for his victims to kill themselves, presenting them with death or a horrible alternatives to death, from which they can pick themselves (much like Se7en). Two men find themselves locked in a dirty public bathroom, chained to rusted pipes, with one assignment; kill the other before the clock strikes n, or be killed.

I thought the cinematography was really very good – especially for a relatively inexperienced director – and the mood was set very well. Acting-wise it wasn’t the best performance I’ve seen, but not terrible.

Blade: Trinity [2004]

Director: David S. Goyer
Actor: Wesley Snipes, Kris Kristofferson, Dominic Purcell, Ryan Reynolds, Jessica Biel, Parker Posey, James Remar

Let me start out that I’m a big fan of the Blade films, so far. I loved the first one, I dug the second one, and the third and most recent one, Blade: Trinity, was very enjoyable. There’s a definite downward trend in the storylines and atmosphere of the movies, but each film has something unique. The first film had that desolate bleakness, the second film had Guillermo Del Toro ( read: oodles of style ) and this last one had…Ryan Reynolds and Parker Posey – a porneaux name, if ever I heard one.

Parker Posey played the evil mastermind behind the entire plot, and was fantastically silly, and Ryan Reynolds was just fantastic. I don’t know who he is, or what he’s done so far, but he’s a good looking, wise-cracking vampire hunter that brought a much needed dose of comedy and some talent to a film overrun with overactors.

The story is simple; a couple of vampires manage to find the tomb of Dracula, the first vampire to ever exist. They awaken him in order to take it up with Blade, the vampire’s nemesis. Meanwhile, Blade is having some trouble with the Feds ( enter James Remar, w00t! ) because they finally found out about him and his clandestine vampire hunting operations. Whistler gets geeked by the feds in a nightly raid on Blade’s pad, and Blade is captured. He is then rescued by the Nightstalkers, a anti-vampire guerilla cell made up of young people under the leadership of Hannibal King ( Ryan Reynolds ) and Abigail Whistler ( Jessica Biel ), Whistler’s daughter. Reluctant at first, Blade decides to team up in order to defeat Dracula.

Oh, and Dracula is a ruggedly handsome vampire with the ability to elongate his fingers. Ladies…spot the potential.

Ladder 49 [2004]

Director: Jay Russell
Actor: Joaquin Phoenix, Jacinda Barrett, John Travolta, Robert Patrick

Whenever I find myself at home alone, having shamelessly downloaded a film, watching it on the sneak, hoping the RIAA (or whatever the cinema-equivalent is) doesn’t come busting down my door, I always get what I have over the years called the coach-class effect. Whenever I fly, you see, and I’m watching a film on the little screen mounted in the seat in front of me, that’s all I focus on. It’s all I hear, it’s all I see. I find I can concentrate quite well when I’m in an aeroplane. The same goes for when I’m at home watching something on my computer screen. I sit so close that I get completely immersed in whatever I’m watching, be it a television show, feature film, documentary or a music video.

And it usually leaves me incredibly emotional, and this time was no exception.

I’ve heard this film described by some of my friends who’ve seen it in the cinema, as a festering piece of escrement. Perhaps it was the coach-effect, but I have to disagree. While it certainly wasn’t a milestone in cinematic history, nor was depth or realism very pervasive elements in Jay Russell’s rather rookie attempt at cinematics, but the film left me with something else; an monumental feeling of worthlessness.

You see, I’ve helped my fair share of people with advice, services, favours, money, or whatever else I was able to afford them, but I’ve never really done anything selfless, courageous and brave. And it seems that this little superhero-wannabe ( read: me ) is convinced that all of that is what it takes to become a truly good human being.

Coffee and Cigarettes [2003]

Director: Jim Jarmusch

What. A. Waste. Of. Time

Der Untergang [2004]

Director: Oliver Hirschbiegel
Actor: Bruno Ganz

Der Untergang, or “The Downfall,” tells the story of the last days of Adolf Hitler as he slowly slips further down into his insanity, plagued by defeat, betrayal as well as the almost undying loyalty of most of his people. Everything weighed down heavily on Adolf Hitler the last few days in the bunker underneath Berlin.

The movie, heavily critised for showing Hitler’s humanity, shows a side of the war that very few people have ever seen, mostly because of lack of interest. When thinking of the second world war, people don’t want to think of the Germans as people, but rather as the enemy. People don’t want to think of Hitler the man, but rather as Hitler the monster.

After the war Germany slowly came to grips with the scope of the war, the attrocities and the wide spread genocide. Many simply couldn’t believe it, and so the Germans started the first of four phases of WWII education. The first phase was to educate the people about the war. The second phase to educate about the events behind the war that few had any knowledge of. (Read: the attrocities.) These two phases were hardly emotional and information was delivered with a certain amount of dispassionatism, in order for the Germans to get used to certain concepts without immediately feeling guilty and defensive.

This film is from the fourth and final phase; with all the emotional content necessary for the full weight of the war to come crashing down on a well-prepared nation of Germans.

The film starts with a small audio-clip from an interview with Traudl, Hitler’s personal secretary during the war and main character from the film, from 2002, the year she passed away. The film also ends with a small part of the interview, video this time, in which she realises that while she didn’t know about the genocide, she could’ve known, had she wanted to, and the guilt she felt for being so naive.

In between, the film is a tale of the almost surreal moments in Berlin, right before the Russians marched in and cleaned house. Hitler, surrounded by his generals and Feldmarschalls, convinced that the fall of Berlin is not a given, while most of his generals have accepted what he has not; that the war is over and that capitulation is the only option for the German people’s survival. Hitler, wracked by feelings of betrayal at such heresy, refuses to believe it. What struck me was how many of the generals said; “We capitulated in 1918. We will never do that again,” indicating clearly how the Treaty of Versailles – known among many Germans as the Versailles Diktat, which shows just how they experienced it – was considered a humiliation of the highest order.

From the Hitler Jugend getting rewarded the Iron Cross for successfully operating the anti-tank cannons, to the drunken debauchery of the mid-level officers who had already given up on the war, to the massive loyalty to an insane leader, to the scene in which everyone seems to be discussing the best ways to commit suicide, this film is full of surreal moments, in which you can’t quite believe, though fully realise, that this is the way it must’ve been near the end of the war.

The film ends, as I said, with a small clip from the interview with Traudl, followed up with a summary of what happened with most of the men and women in the film after the capitulation. What struck me, most of all, and which made me incredibly emotional, was that the SS officer who went into Hitler’s room, to confirm that he and Eva Braun had commited suicide is still alive today, living in Hamburg. It’s the thought that in another few years the generation that had first hand accounts of a war that was so detrimental to the formation of our society today will no longer be there to tell us about it.

History gets written by the victor, or so the saying goes. But I think that in recent years, unless a people have been wiped out or surpressed in the aftermath of a war, they have had a chance to tell their tale. To make sure that historical accounts didn’t get muddled up. The German survivors of the second world war are probably one of the first generations of war-survivors to be able to do that, and it took them nearly 60 years to do it.