Three Thousand Versts of Loneliness

I review the Gulag escape movie over at The Dabbler .

It’s been a while since ‘Three Thousand Versts’ attempted a movie review, but it isn’t every weekend I attend the 'World Premiere' of an Irish flick. Belfast Film Festival’s ’Gala Screening’ of ’ Five Day Shelter ’ got off to an inauspicious start, when the star, John Lynch, introduced it with a cheery reference to Manchester United. With reluctance I decided to set my prejudice aside. I needn’t have bothered. ‘Five Day Shelter’ is an epically dreary and boring film. Imagine a fifteen minute short by film students at the local tech, extended to feature length. It starts wilfully slowly and remains stubbornly one-paced for eighty odd minutes. The characters may as well be cut out of card. There’s no trace of humanity or anything to empathise with here. Yes, it’s grim and urban, but to what end? The film introduces a couple of themes which could be interesting, but they aren’t developed at all. The main characters all have dogs and cats in their lives. They show some f...

Neo-Nazism has frequently provided gritty material for film-makers. Russell Crowe starred in ‘Romper Stomper’, an Australian take on the subject matter. ‘American History X’ cast Ed Norton as a bright young man who embraced violent racism before undergoing a transformation in prison and returning to his community full of remorse. Shane Meadows’ ‘This is England’ explored the interaction of fascist politics and youth subcultures in Thatcher’s Britain. Social turmoil in post-Soviet Russia has contributed to its unenviable reputation as a hotbed of racism and extreme nationalism. Albeit that the febrile political scene has calmed down a little since the 1990s. A figure like Eduard Limonov is now known primarily as an accomplice of Garry Kasparov in opposing Putin’s government. But the eccentric writer’s ‘National Bolshevik’ grouping blends racialist theory with Stalinist nostalgia and Eurasianism in a potent red-brown mix. Limonov’s periods in prison are frequently presented...

I assume that I’m not the only man, who when he pushes his choice of film for a prospective cinema visit, ends up squirming in his seat with an uncomfortable sense of personal responsibility when the movie turns out to be crap? Having expressed meaningful ambivalence toward ‘Easy Virtue’ and some manner of psychological examination of Kristin Scott Thomas in French, I particularly didn’t want Oliver Stone’s ‘W.’ to be as poor as it was. Quite honestly, Stone’s film is not a substantial biopic of the most controversial American president since Nixon. It is lightsome, simplistic, unconvincing and occasionally brutally poorly acted. The director never quite seems to decide whether he is attempting a serious examination or playing it for laughs. There is little sense here of what animates Bush as a politician. Instead he is portrayed as an innocent abroad, bumbling along through a series of ‘gut decisions’ (graphically illustrated by Josh Brolin who occasionally gives his belly a dem...

No value added whatsoever, but in case anyone missed it, you must read this post from Dave (or d@\/e as he prefers) at Another Bloody Blawg. Whilst the whys and wherefores of the film ‘Hunger’ have been discussed elsewhere , Dave reminds us of the criminal (and murderous) acts, for which the Hunger Strikers were incarcerated. It is a beautifully simple exercise which speaks for itself.

The new Batman film, ‘The Dark Knight’, has won critical plaudits to go with the hype incumbent on its status as the summer’s biggest blockbuster. I watched it on Thursday and whilst it is certainly overrated and blatantly over hyped, it does provide a high impact cinematic experience with enough heave and heft to engage an audience, rather than simply slapping its forehead with incessant action. The portentous interpretations which some critics have invested in this film perhaps owe more to Heath Ledger’s death than anything remarkable about the movie itself. Ledger undoubtedly plays the Joker in memorable fashion, endowing the character with a range of creepy idiosyncrasies. His villain steals the show. However, like Brandon Lee’s performance in ‘The Crow’, the actor’s portrayal has acquired a dark lustre from his subsequent demise which inflames reviewers’ imaginations and makes subjective viewing less likely. Christopher Nolan’s film is pleasingly dark and brooding, deliverin...

I watched the Kazakh film ‘Mongol’ on Friday night and it offered two hours of arrestingly ‘epic’ film making. A mythical interpretation of the history of Genghis Khan’s rise to prominence form the subject matter for the movie. Headstrong son of a tribal leader, Temudjin survives being repeatedly imprisoned, and fuelled by a combination of pride, tradition, love and faith, progresses to unite the various warring Mongol tribes. Aul' Genghis, as depicted in Russian director Sergei Bodrov’s film, is a cracking chap and an exponent of law, fair wages for his employees and the progression of women’s role in society. He is a dutiful husband and father, only compromised by his frequent absences and an inability to impregnate his wife (although he happily accepts all her offspring from other liaisons). I rather got the impression that if Genghis were around today, he’d take a dim view of 42 day pre-charge detention.

After 45 minutes watching the animated film ‘Persepolis’ last night, I imagined that I would be blogging unadulterated praise this morning and urging all Three Thousand Versts readers to get tickets ASAP. Actually it began to ramble a little after the hour mark, either that or the pre-show coffee had reached my bladder enough to make me restive, or perhaps it was a combination of the two. Nevertheless, this charcoal animation, examining the experience of liberal Iranians following the 1979 revolution, was still arresting enough to deserve some plaudits. I gather that the film is adapted from a graphic novel by Marjane Satrapi on whom the protagonist of this coming of age fable, ‘Marji’, is presumably based. Marji is a little girl when we join her secular, left leaning family and revolution flares against the Shah. Initially they welcome these events and even the emergence of fanatical Islamists in government is dismissed as a passing phase. Soon, however, the oppression and sexism...

A word about the Duke Special concert which I attended last night at the Studio in the Waterfront. Duke Special is an artist whose performances reward repeated attendance because two gigs are rarely similar. Last night’s show was part of the B elfast Film Festival and as such it was punctuated by a series of cinema shorts. In addition a puppeteer and a suspended acrobat provided quirky entertainment. The short films the Duke and his team had chosen were predictably visually arresting. A Czech animation, ‘Songs from the Prairie’, provided something of a recurrent motif for the evening. The movies which accompanied songs were chosen for appropriate atmospherics. The music was as subtle and textured as ever, overlaid last night with the classical intonations of a harpist. In this show the more established tunes took a back seat to new material, although the pounding anthem ‘Salvation Tambourine’ was a highlight. ‘Monsters in the Dust’ is a stand out new song which beautifully revi...

It is six days since I watched There Will Be Blood and the film is still rumbling restlessly in my head, like an oil well about to explode skywards. This movie is one of the most singular pieces of film-making that I have ever seen. It is unsettling, arresting and at times even rather funny. And a note to the Coen Brothers – Paul Dano’s greasy young preacher is a much more disturbing character than Javier Bardem’s lumbering, taciturn killer in No Country for Old Men. Watching his depiction of a charlatan evangelical exercising power over a small community was rather like chewing tin foil, so viscerally did it manage to set the teeth on edge. Eli Sunday, Dano’s character, is part of the twin axes on which the film turns. Little Boston, where Daniel Day Lewis’ character Daniel Plainview begins to drill oil, is in the grip of two of America’s chief preoccupations – money and religion. Both the struggle between these powerful motivators and the grubby accommodations which they reach ...

I was somewhat dubious about spending my Saturday night watching a film about a man who emerged from a coma to find himself completely paralysed barring an ability to blink his left eye. Strange then that The Diving Bell and the Butterfly proved to be as uplifting a piece of cinema as it was sad and that Julian Schnabel’s movie actually justifies using the much misapplied superlative ‘life-affirming’. The film is an adaptation of Jean Dominique Bauby’s book. It charts the author’s emergence from a coma after suffering a massive stroke which left him with “locked-in syndrome”. Impressionistic camerawork with cloudy and sporadic images recreate the impression of Bauby coming out of the coma. Indeed for the majority of the film the camera remains behind the protagonist’s good eye, evoking the claustrophobia of Bauby’s ‘diving bell’. A sense exacerbated by the audience sharing an inner monologue of the ill man’s thoughts and perceiving the rest of the dialogue through his hearing, ini...

Some time ago I confessed to finding Cormac McCarthy’s ‘The Road’ one of the most over-hyped novels that I had read for some time. Having watched No Country for Old Men on Friday evening, I’m bound to say that the adaptation of a McCarthy novel now becomes one of the most over-hyped films I have seen for a very long time. The film basically unfolds a great deal of violence centring on 3 men which ensues from a botched drug deal. A Vietnam vet played by Josh Brolin stumbles upon the aftermath of a shoot-out between border drug-smugglers and makes off with a bag full of money. A big man with strange hair and an undecipherable name has been dispatched to recover the money and the final member of the triumvirate is Tommy Lee Jones’ sheriff. The film alludes to a symbiosis between the harsh Texan landscape and violence. It hints at being concerned with fate and compulsion. Ultimately however the film comprises a great deal of extremely stylised, artfully filmed violence, a few wise c...

I couldn't help noticing amongst the tumult of publicity which Liam Neeson attracted on his return to Belfast to see off the Lyric Theatre, that Ballymena's most celebrated export is currently sporting a hair do that would look more at home on an Russian babushka. I'm no great expert, but this is either a terrible toupee or an ill-advised dye job! Fair play to Liam, he's obviously not expending much of his Hollywood millions on hair stylists!

On Friday night I went to see the film of Kite Runner with a degree of scepticism. I had not, you see, bought into the universal acclaim accorded Hosseini’s 2003 novel. My opinion was that the depiction of an Afghan childhood was strong and that the book evoked late 1970s Afghanistan with a great deal of atmosphere, that the American section of the novel was somewhat weaker and that the crowd-pleasing orphan recovering thriller tacked unto the end was unnecessary, rather silly and cheapened the whole. The Kite Runner could have formed a good novella, but then it wouldn’t have sold millions of copies. In actual fact the elements which I objected to most strongly in the book, make an odd type of sense on the big screen. The story retained the same problems, but the format of Holywood blockbuster somehow sustains unlikely and contrived occurrences much more readily than a novel which in its opening sections had aspired to literary fiction. Whether it was because I knew what to expec...

“The film you are about to see is a very long film. And in its length it acquires, I think, a sort of lyricism.” This isn’t what I want to hear before I watch a film. But despite the initial scepticism engendered by QFT’s extremely nervous expert and his rambling introduction, I expect The Murder of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford to require some beating for the title of best film I see in 2008. And we’ve reached what ……. January the 7th? The film is a subtle retelling of one of the American west’s most enduring tales. Andrew Dominik’s movie portrays a waning James and deals with the ambivalence of hero worship as well as the complex relationship between assassins and their victims. The besotted assassin Robert Ford’s admiration is tempered with jealousy and he hopes to acquire, in his murder of the Brad Pitt character, some of his fame and notoriety. His infatuation with James is inextricably linked with parallel feelings of hatred and resentment. For his part James is s...

Last night I watched an overblown and silly film about Elizabeth I, Elizabeth the Golden Years. Now I acknowledge that artistic licence is the prerogative of historical drama and that the various shenanigans made for a rather entertaining film, but some aspects of this stylized movie deserve particular mention for being so draw-droppingly daft! The movie was a brief skite over events leading up to and surrounding the 1588 Spanish Armada, climaxing with the defeat of Phillip II’s fleet. Historically this was masterminded by Lord High Admiral Charles Howard aided by inclement weather, although from the film it was tempting to conclude that victory was mainly attributable to Sir Walter Raleigh. Some of the most extraordinary scenes accompanied this battle, particularly the moment when Raleigh (Clive Owen) unaccountably executed a graceful dive from his ship and spent several minutes swimming purposefully under the tumultuous battle above. I believe that Raleigh was responsible for the ...

The only Ian McEwan novel I have read in full is Saturday and I found his prose rather tortuous and off putting. I consequently went to see Atonement last night with no more knowledge of the book than that furnished by a brief glance through the opening pages and a read of the synopsis. Without being able to make a comparative analysis of the film and the text, I cannot comment on whether McEwan’s intentions were being followed, particularly as I understand the author declined to adapt the novel himself. Whether the rather post-apocalyptic rendering of Dunkirk was McEwan’s therefore, somebody may wish to clarify for me. The anarchic dystopia the film presented, which to my mind was almost reminiscent of Apocalypse Now, hardly rang true as a portrayal of one of the greatest episodes of discipline and national unity in the history of World War 2. I acknowledge that these historical niceties may not have been paramount in the mind of the director. My girlfriend, who has a much more astute...