Home movie palace

Since C has had flu she has felt like watching DVDs so we sit down together and watch them. That's in between work. Here they are, our Grand Entertainments, with comments.

1. No Country For Old Men Absolutely riveting, I think, and so did C. I had seen it before on a plane heading somewhere and it grabbed me then. It is really a very dark metaphysical piece about death arising, as it were, out of the soil itself in a pretty unforgiving landscape. A very neat touch putting the worst violence right up front, since ever after we are waiting to be faced with it again and by the end we don't need to see it at all to feel it. This being Coen Brothers there is throughout a kind of dangerous droll quality. It is not just entertainment: it is a proper work of movie art, not in the pretentious sense, but through sheer power of vision. Five stars *****

2. Michael Clayton. Very superior piece of film, we thought. Another I first saw as in-flight entertainment on the way to somewhere sufficiently far to show films, but it looked better this time round. Nothing looks very good in flight. Drum-tight pace and subtly folded narrative with the main film told from a point quite late on in the story, so we have to work our way forward to it. A general low-lit crippledness to the whole suits it well. It is a finely-pitched moral dilemma. Big agrochemicals versus one crazy enlightened lawyer, mediated by Clooney's Clayton. Clooney is excellent, as is Tom Wilkinson, and so is Tilda Swinton. Growlier and quieter than a thriller like LA Confidential, not really a thriller as such, but damn authoritative. Four stars ****

3. The Orphanage. This comes heralded and garlanded but is nowhere near as good as the film with which it is compared, The Others. An orphaned woman, now grown up, returns to the long empty orphanage with her doctor husband to help other misfit children. They themselves have an adopted child with HIV. The ghosts of earlier children, her long lost childhood friends, appear. Murder, bones, staircases, darkness, lightning flashes, cellars... All the apparatus is there without any particular freshness. Everyone walks about in the dark as it is scarier that way. Husband is clearly an idiot. The whole thing felt like a clumsy set up for the sake of a few faintly arty-gothic moments. One star *

4. The Man Who Wasn't There. Coen Brothers again, 2001. It is the third time we have watched this, the first time being when it came out on big screen and I am still trying to squeeze something extra out of it. I am not sure it's there to be squeezed though. Insignifcant people find themselves doing terrible things. The banality of evil. Droll evil. Heavy on film noir devices so everything comes at you in inverted commas. The performances are very good, it is beautifully shot, the atmosphere is dark. Billy Bob Thornton mumbles and dozes his way through it, James Gandolfini is nicely unctuous and Frances McDormand, as always, is terrific. Scarlett Johansson appears as a very average schoolgirl pianist. There is nothing really wrong with it at all. It's just that I suspect the tongue is in the wrong cheek. Hmm. Three stars ***

5. The Man Who Knew Too Much, Hitchcock 1934. Now this appears fresh throughout, full of surprises. It is period, of a period roughly with the brilliant The Thirty-Nine Steps which was to follow a year later. It is not artily sophisticated like the The Man Who Wasn't There, it just goes ahead and does what it does, which is tell the story of an abduction ahead of a coming war. The characters are constantly surprising and disconcerting from the first scene onwards. Character is a wilder, freer concept here. Plot mechanics are more the issue. Leslie Banks is a proto Richard Hannay figure, Edna Best is his flirtatious, clay-pigeon shooting, liberated wife, and Peter Lorre is as transparently Peter Lorre as only Peter Lorre can be. It all feels a little too short perhaps, a little jerky, but it's a real live tidbit of genius. Not a major Hitchcock but four stars. And a bit. ****+

6. The Italian Job. The original 1969 version. Not sure why we chose to put it on. Wanted something light, facetious, fast and undemanding. I have never ever been as keen on the late 1960s post-imperial presentation of Cool Britannia as others seem to have been. Yes, it's camp and knowing and Michael Caine is a joy in the first flush of youth. Really it's a cartoon acted, if that's the word, by a bunch of lay figures, possibly including Rodney Marsh, Bobby Keetch, Charlie George and Alan Hudson. What do you mean they're not in the film? Oh yes, but there's a nice car chase. Did I mention the car chase? There is a car chase. On the whole I far prefer The Blues Brothers. I feel like a traitor saying that but it is very very true. Very well then. Two stars **