Dogs and sons of bitches

The Go-Between: Takes two hours to tell a plot which could be summarised in one line: Noblewoman has affair with farmer, is found out, farmer shoots self, noblewoman has trouble telling the offspring of the union about it. Harold Pinter wrote the screenplay, which just goes to show that even genius surrealists can have off days. Between this and "Darling," I'm beginning to think that anything that stars Julie Christie and won a BAFTA is guaranteed to be terrible.

Heaven's Fall: Telemovie about the Scottsboro trials. Ok but straightforward; my own understanding of the situation was that the lawyer knew there was no way he was going to get his black client acquitted of the charge of raping two white women, not in 1930s Alabama, and was consequently going for the Saddam Hussein option of making it so utterly obvious that the trial was a trumped-up sham that at the very least the government would be embarrassed about it, but unfortunately the director has the cast play it as if they think they really can get an acquittal. There are worse ways to spend an evening but there are also a lot of better ones.

Crimson Tide: The opening scenes were worryingly contrived and simplistic (I suspect the movie had spent a while in development hell, and "Russians attack us! Bush Sr. calls out the army!" had to be hastily rejigged as "Post-Soviets attack us! Clinton is forced to bow to the wisdom of the neocons and call out the army!"). Once you get past those and into the story, though, it's a great drama about the sort of tensions which emerge under pressure. The crew of a nuclear sub get an order to fire missiles, followed by what might be an order to stand down, but the latter is cut off in transmission: Gene Hackman, a Commander Cain-style eccentric wardog whose instincts never let him down, wants to fire, Denzel Washington, his strait-laced by-the-book XO who has never seen a battle but knows right from wrong, wants to hold off till they get confirmation. The situation deteriorates as the crew take sides in a complicated mutiny and counter-mutiny. The ending, not to spoiler it, concludes that both men acted rightly, but one more rightly than the other. Hugely influential on the reimagined Battlestar Galactica.

Hachi, A Dog's Story: Based on the Japanese movie Hatchiko Monogatori. Massively cute and massively sad; you have to be totally insensitive not to find the titular dog irresistably darling and not to cry at the ending. Richard Gere is officially forgiven for "The Cotton Club" for this, and I'm now deeply tempted to look into owning an akita.

Movie count for 2010: 27