Life lessons

Le Diner des Cons: The diner in question is a supper party where the participants are all supposed to bring along an idiot; the amoral protagonist finds a prize one, who turns out to be a sort of demented and less-likeable Monsieur Hulot. The escalating series of resulting hilarious disasters teaches him some painful but true lessons about compassion, and very possibly gets him a tax audit.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan: Still the best of the Star Trek films, wisely eschewing the Enterprise-fetishism of last outing in favour of a story about learning to accept bitter truths. Kirk is portrayed as a man perpetually afraid of confronting his own aging and death, and having to do so over the course of the film, ending up sadder but wiser. Khan, meanwhile, has a contrasting story as a man unable to let go of his insane desire for revenge on Kirk, and as such winds up wasting his own and his followers' lives.

Hoax: Based-on-a-true-story film about Clifford Irving's famous faked "autobiography" of Howard Hughes. Although played for comedy-drama and disowned by Irving himself, the film does raise the question of what is truth: if one can write a fiction indistinguishable from reality, does this make it true? Worth watching in a double bill with F for Fake.

Movie Count for 2011: 15

Of Dogs and Men

Old Boy: Man locked in hotel room for 15 years then mysteriously released seeks out the person/persons responsible. Result is sort of like The Prisoner, only with martial arts and some gleefully Jacobean incest, mutilation and ironic vengeance schemes.

My Life as a Dog: An earlier you-will-cry-buckets dog story by Lasse Hallstrom, about a young Swedish boy separated from his beloved pet and sent to live with small-town relatives when his mother develops a fatal illness. Suffused with guilt and grief, as well as burgeoning feelings of sexuality which confuse his relationship with his tomboy friend Saga, he conflates his own identity with that of his dog, his mother, and the then-recently-deceased Laika, eventually coming to accept his situation despite all its unfairnesses, leaving the viewer to carry on the anger and grief on his behalf.

10 Things I Hate About You: After my last foray into the post-Lurman Shakespeare-for-teens genre, I was not expecting too much from this, but it proved surprisingly good, being The Taming of the Shrew redone as a Whedonesque high-school comedy, full of zingy one-liners and humourous stereotypes of teenage cliques and with the misogynous treatment of Kate in the original play considerably mitigated (as the focus is less on Kate's brainwashing at the hands of Petruchio, as on the Kate- and Petruchio-equivalents both unbending and becoming less hostile to each other and the world). The one real complaint is that the start of the film seems to set up a subplot involving Alison Janney's randy school guidance counsellor which gets abandoned about one-third of the way in.

Movie count for 2010: 93

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

Rules OK

The Cider House Rules: The titular "rules" come in when the film's protagonist (Tobey McGuire) is working as an apple-picker; the establishment in question has a set of arbitrary rules of conduct for the apple-pickers, which the pickers reject, saying that they were made by people who aren't pickers and don't understand their situation, and that they will instead make their own rules and live by these. The entire film revolves around the damage done by arbitrary social rules made up by people who haven't experienced a particular situation and don't understand what it's like. The protagonist, a young man raised at an orphanage and trained in medicine by the institution's resident doctor-cum-abortionist, has strong anti-abortion feelings until confronted with a situation in which abortion is the only way of resolving it happily; the doctor who raised him (played by Michael Caine) is continually constrained in his running of a successful orphanage by the social-conservative moralising of its board of directors; his on-and-off girlfriend is faced with a terribly ironic situation at the end of the film which, not to spoiler it too much, is also caused by arbitrary social rules about sex, marriage and childbearing. There's lots of other aspects of it to talk about, of course-- it's a complex movie, and surprisingly pro-choice for a mainstream American film-- but it's worth seeing for the rules alone.

Movie count for 2009: 93