My Name is Joe.
Glasgow. Joe is an unemployed recovering alcoholic. His only family is the hopeless football team he manages. Sarah is a community healthcare worker. She regularly makes home visits to one of Joe’s friends, Liam, to check up on his son, Scott. Scott’s mum, Sabine, is a heroine addict. Liam is a former dealer who, since returning from prison, has promised to live on the straight and narrow. Joe and Sarah become romantically involved, while Liam and Sabine are in debt to a local ganglord due to Sabine’s addiction. Ken Loach directs what can only be described as a dark, gritty romcom, in a way only he can. The dialogue between the characters is so natural and the acting so real, it feels at times that My Name is Joe is a documentary. The simple plot is executed brilliantly in a film that is heartwarming one scene, heartbreaking the next. An underappreciated gem.
Dark City.
A hotel room. A grim, dark city. A man wakes up in the bath, with no memory. A woman lies dead on the floor, covered in blood. The phone rings. The voice on the other end tells him that he’s part of an experiment and he needs to get out immediately. As the man escapes, three pale men dressed all in black investigate the scene. This is the opening to Dark City, a film that starts at a frantic pace and never truly slows down for it’s entire run time. We, as the audience, identify with the man, as we too are confused to begin with, but as the film progresses we learn about the city and the man together. Dark City is a sci-fi, noir thriller that poses some intriguing philosophical questions that will leave you pondering well after the film has finished. Director Alex Proyas does a fantastic job in creating a unsettling, claustrophobic, eerie atmosphere throughout, with a dirty colour palette so effective you may need a shower once the credits have rolled. Don’t let the sub-par CGI or Keifer Sutherland’s jarring speech pattern distract you from what is a darkly brilliant, original sci-fi film.
Funny Games.
Warning. Funny Games is as far from a comedy as you can possibly get. A family are visiting their holiday home, when they realise their neighbours are acting strangely. Two men claiming to be friends of their neighbours impose themselves on the family and refuse to leave. The two men then play their “games” with the family as the audience is forced to watch (and imagine) the scenes unfold in one of the most unnerving psychological thrillers in recent memory. Director Michael Haneke does an excellent job in creating a film brimming with uneasiness; the long take, for instance, has become an overly used cliche of filmmakers wanting to impress, but Haneke uses it to perfection to unsettle the audience in a way few other films have. Throughout Funny Games, we feel as though the events are occurring in real time, as though the whole production lasted a few hours, which is further evidence of the fantastic work done by the cast and crew. Highly recommend, but watch without distraction and possibly leave yourself a few hours after the end credits to mentally recover.
Titanic.
No I hadn’t seen Titanic before, however it’s impossible not to know everything about it. Everybody knows the plot but here it is anyway. Rose is a wealthy, upper class girl who is unhappy in her life. All her decisions are made for her, either by her mother or her fiancee, Cal, whom she is due to marry once the Titanic arrives in America. Rose’s passion is fine art, a passion not shared by Cal (“Picasso? He won’t amount to a thing”). Jack is a working class artist without a job or a home. He takes each day as it comes, and loves the sense of adventure in his way of life. Rose, fed up, flees a dinner party and contemplates jumping into the ocean. Jack rescues Rose from the brink and is invited to dinner with the aristocrats the following evening. The rest of the ill-fated voyage focuses on Jack and Rose’s blossoming romance, commenting on social class as well as inspecting the human condition and how we behave in the face of certain death. Titanic has since become the quintessential love story; class, background, wealth, everything is irrelevant in the presence of true love. Watching Titanic for the first time, much of the dialogue and story is cliched and even cheesy; this is not the fault of the film however but more due to the culture we live in, where pop culture itself has become the culture. Jack, Rose, My Heart Will Gone On, “I’m the king of the world!”, “draw me like one of your French girls”, “it’s been 84 years”, “I’m flying Jack”, the band playing as the ship sinks, Rose’s hand on the car window, they are forever ingrained in the cultural zeitgeist and as such have become stereotyped. Titanic is the ultimate disaster movie, with an enduring love story that will continue to be imitated and parodied for decades to come. You’ve already seen this, but why not go onboard one more time.
Boogie Nights.
According to Eddie Adams, “everyone’s blessed with a special thing”, and for Eddie it’s his thirteen inch cock. Boogie Nights begins with Mark Wahlberg’s Eddie being discovered by porn director Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds in a part he seemed to be born to play) in late 70s California. We, along with Eddie, are introduced to the pornography family Jack has created, as Eddie pursues his career as Dirk Diggler, the greatest porn star in the world. Dirk’s meteoric rise in the booming porn industry is paired with an incredible 70s soundtrack, with the characters enjoying their lives of creating porn by day and boogying disco by night. That is until the 80s come around. The porn industry is on the decline and the entire tone of the film shifts into a tense drama with the character’s lives seemingly on a downward spiral with no end in sight. An ensemble cast (Wahlberg, Reynolds, Julianne Moore, John C. Reilly, Don Cheadle, Heather Graham, William H. Macy, Phillip Seymour Hoffman) directed by the terrific Paul Thomas Anderson, create a film that is a joy to watch. Anderson’s beautiful camerawork combined with his brilliantly quotable screenplay give us as an audience a portal through which to see the people behind an industry that is kept secret by society, and who are unfairly oppressed due to their work. A special mention to Alfred Molina’s cameo in one of the tensest scenes in film history.
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