Sadako!

Ring 0: Birthday

Chosen by Victoria Charvill who had this to say: 'If you enjoyed Ring, this is a must-see. After the disappointment of 2, this was a return to form. Nakamo does a wonderful job of portraying Sadako's attempt at a normal life in this poignant doomed love story.'

Going to have to disagree with Victoria a great deal here. I found this to be an incredibly dull pointless prequel  that has nothing to match the power of Sadako crawling out of the teevee and instead almost seems a parody the Japanese horror cycle. Can we retire the tinkle-tinkle music used to denote something is creepy yet? (I always think of it as an X-Files thing for some reason but it was certainly used earlier like the bit with the spiders in Raiders of the Lost Ark). Sadako is a blank (with good, if confusing - it's been years since I saw the original, what was all the nonsense with the swimmers?- reason I guess) so it's difficult to care over her and Toyama's relationship (he's not much deeper of a character either) and it's hard to get worked up over anything here.

Worth waiting for.

Ice Cold In Alex (1958)

Chosen by Darron Bowley who had this to say: 'A true British film, wherein the making of tea is a key plot point! beautifully cinematography, brilliant acting and tense plotting all comes together in a very famous pay off. I found this film so engrossing, I genuinely forgot it was in black and white while I was watching it'

Absolutely splendid. And possibly the greatest advert for Carlsberg ever (I'm teetotal and even I fancied a sip of that very badly poured beer in the films famous climax - spoilerphobes must hate that dvd cover).
It plays with the cliches of this kind of tale (a trip through mine infested sand, a potential traitor) extremely well with only a little repetition (but not so much as to be dull) and manages to find it's focus in complex, interesting characters, well performed by all the cast.
There's great humanism displayed here both from German Soldiers (including Walter Gotell) and the main cast, with an especially touching moment at the end that doesn't fully ring true but feels right.

Either I'm dead right, or I'm crazy!

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939)

Chosen by Victoria Charvill who had this to say: 'I'm a big fan of both James Stewart and Frank Capra, and this partnership doesn't disappoint. Stewart is brilliant as the awestruck, naive yet stubborn Jefferson Smith and I love the filibuster scenes. Jean Arthur is also fab as the savvy assistant. A classic film in which, as the story itself is a rather stylised statement concerning US politics, the characters really make the difference.'

I find the myth of the wholesome simple everyman a little annoying. As if being a gee whizz by golly naif makes you better at being a politician (we see this played out in American politics all the time - where signs of intelligence are frowned upon) but that aside this is a fun film and as fantasy works (though it's ending is very abrupt).
The cast are terrific (if not for Stewart I'm not sure I could have found Mr. Smith palatable at all, he's just not very interesting), Claude Rains and Jean Arthur especially (it's no accident, I dare say, that we end the film with Rains' tortured, corrupted idealist rather than the bland Smith).

Will you take a picture of me? Silly, people take pictures of me all the time but I don't know how to take one of myself...

The Notorious Bettie Page (2005)

Chosen by Matt McGowan who had this to say about it: 'The legacy of Bettie Page is well known. Her impact on the world of pin-up photography was unheard of at the time, going from bigger and better things as the years went by, but then leaving the spotlight at her height and disappearing off the modelling scene map completely. Since then her look has been imitated and copied, but never bettered. This movie explores the life and times of this icon, an amazing performance by Gretchen Mol as Bettie Page. This movie offers as much insight into Bettie's life, as it does America through the 40s and 50s.'

There's a fair bit to like about this film. Mol is terrific and it has a bunch of great actors popping up in small roles. It does a good job of bringing across a playful Page but fails to dig beneath that.
It is frustratingly vague in the details skipping over important events to give time to recreations of famous photo-shoots (which is possibly what you want from a film about a pin-up star).
Page comes across as wilfully naive at times. It skirts the ground at making her rather a simpleton. At one point a character is surprised Page is 32, presumably because she looks so young but possibly because she acts so juvenile about things. It's refreshing and part of Page's mystique that she was so unaffected and casual about her work but it becomes hard to take that she seems to have no understanding of the effect of what she is doing.
Like Page herself, Harron can't quite get to grips with the film. It skirts occasionally close to parody with a 'noirish' sax score coming from nowhere and a Miami church service offering a salvation that doesn't seem warrented.
The film takes too much of a distance, it's clearly sympathetic with Page and pornography but doesn't seem to much care what happens, so why should the viewer?

For those who fight for it, life has a flavor the sheltered will never know

Sucker Punch (2011)

Chosen by me as I like to go to the cinema a lot and this has dragons and robots and clockwork zombies. And blimps, I love blimps.

'You will be unprepared' says the poster's, rather boring, tagline. There was, to be fair despite all the cool things listed above, small chance of me liking this film. Snyder is a director who just makes films that are like a nail down a blackboard to me.

The first half of this wasn't bad

But the tagline was correct. I was unprepared. For just how angry it made me.
Much has been made of how like Inception it is. And indeed with it's multiple levels of reality (4 by my count; the 'real' world, the brothel and the 'action' world are the ones on screen, the 4th I will get to as it solves and causes a whole load of problems) but actually I find it more like Pan's Labyrinth in which a young girl retreats into a fantasy world that is as abusive and lacking in cathartic escapism as the real one. Of course that film works because it spends much more time in the 'real' world, so you have a sense of who everybody is and makes the fantasy have an actual connection to the character imagining it.

A film whose fantasy sections actually have
resonance with character and plot

Taken on a surface level Sucker Punch makes no sense. Leaving aside the anachronistic fantasy elements (even the cast have referred to the villains as Nazis in one section despite it being based on World War One) why would she imagine worlds like this? There is no connective tissue that makes it all work on an emotional or intellectual level.
'So what?' Some people will say 'I just want to see some cool shit' and yeah that's fine. But Snyder's visual style is so mind numbingly dull. All desaturated colours and extremely bad slow motion (it's hard to call something slow motion when the whole film is basically at that speed but still). His action scenes have no verve to them, she spins in the air a lot to little effect and because there is no inherent dramatic backbone the movie undoes itself at every turn. Most shots seem designed to look cool as a still, or a frame in a storyboard or comic but don't hang together as film.

But man, some of these ideas would have
made awesome album covers yeah?

Now all of that would have made for a bad film but one I would have been bored by rather than angered. It get's into some real problems in it's portrayal of woman and how it thinks of a way to excuse that.
Leaving aside the whole peadophile's wet dream look to it (the film makes care to mention the main character is 20 but dresses her up as a schoolgirl and calls her Babydoll, even the only woman with a modicum of authority is referred to as a girl) it trades in the rather annoying trope that empowering women means abusing them first (there's no reason why this film couldn't have just been a bunch of kick-ass women fighting cool shit without having to defend from multiple rape attempts - as the backbone to why they fight matters so little anyway) but this goes one horrid step further by suggesting that the woman want it to be that way.

A kick-ass female who didn't need to be
sexually abused to become strong

Over the opening of a wicked stepfather salaciously clawing his way at two young woman the film has The Eurythmics Sweet Dreams (are made of this) scoring the scene (in the first of some really good songs being appropriated for this dreck, later we get Army of Me, Tomorrow Never Knows, White Rabbit and Search and Destroy), the buttons of her dress ripped off whilst the music is telling us 'some of them want to be abused' and then we get a bit of dialogue from Jon Hamm at the end that had me wanting to throw something at the screen.
It even builds up to this moment, delaying the line itself, but I felt a mounting dread that I knew what he was going to say which basically amounts to - 'she wanted it to happen'. Not just a male wish as his doctor is positioned sympathetically at the end and the fantasy sequence confirms this view. Unbelievably offensive.

A film with a much better use of
Search and Destroy (and music in general)

The mental gymnastics Snyder goes through to defend this worldview are troubling. It is here that he really tries to be clever and the 4th level of reality comes in. We are the 4th level. The film starts with the Warner Bros logo projected on a red theatre curtain, the whole film is a fantasy (we are constantly reminded - which of course removes any dramatic thrust and leaves me time to think of shit like this). Snyder genuinely believes he is commentating on genre fiction as a whole. But where is the critique, the satire? He doesn't so much comment as just regurgitate it's worst excesses. Is he trying to blame the viewer for projecting this fantasy? That doesn't really work because it's set up as something artificial we are watching, the fantasy is his even if we have chosen to look at it. So where is the ironic level he claims? The hidden 5th level of reality.
Well, at least that is more interesting a mystery than whether a spinning top falls over or not.

It's the same train but it's different

Source Code (2011)

Chosen by me because I like to go to the cinema a lot. And Duncan Jones' Moon was awesome.

A lot has been made over Source Code being a smart science-fiction movie, and it is for the most part but not from being especially clever over the science part (details are thankfully kept to a minimum) but by sticking to strong character work delivered by fine actors (Vera Farmiga once again delights bringing a lot to a rather simple role).
And by far it's smartest move is to be only an hour and a half long, managing to get a great variety over the stories repeated eight minutes without overstaying it's welcome.
A terrific movie, not quite as strong as Moon (which gets a small in joke here) but still marking Jones as a director to keep an eye on.

He should've died up on that windmill

S. Darko (2009)

Chosen by me from my pile of unwatched DVDs but here's what the brilliant avclub.com had to say about it in an article about undemanded sequels: 'the screenwriters try to recreate the mystical energy and strangeness of the original film without any of the smarts or chops'

Yes, I know what you were thinking at the end of Donnie Darko - 'wait did he just let a pedophile get away with his crimes?' But also you may have been thinking 'hmm I wonder what the young sister will be doing in 8 years time?'
Well at least that's what the makers of this film were hoping.
It mostly just goes through the motions of the first film but with none of it's charm or (much more importantly) humour. It just drags on for an hour and a half, throwing one idea after another at the screen without developing anything or creating characters to care about.
Utterly, utterly pointless.