Stardust

I'm going to be completely honest with you here; I didn't want to see this. I wasn't really that fussed, to be perfectly frank with you. But my mum and my sister were staying with me for the weekend and they quite fancied going to see it, and I couldn't think of a persuasive argument to see The Kingdom instead.

I am so, so glad I saw this. It's excellent. In fact, it's really raised the bar for any future fairytale movies. IN FACT, I hereby declare all future fairytale movies obsolete as the genre has already achieved perfection. Literally this is the movie against which all other movies of this genre will be measured.

It's got romance and magic and sword fights and horses and quests and betrayals and derring-do and more magic and jokes and transformations and true love and enchanted items and candles and flying boats and explosions and pirates and fairytale makeovers and stuff about fate and chivalry and potatoes and some of the blackest humour I've ever seen in a fairytale and I'm not telling you any more about it.

Direction: Excellent.
Special effects: Superb, neither subtle nor over the top, but nicely balanced and very good looking.
Story: Compelling.
Humour: A strange mix of black humour, slapstick and witty banter, but it hangs together fantastically well.

Score: A+++++ (if not higher).

OQ: '...and then I was hit by a magical flying MORON!"

OOQ: I'm sorry Mr De Niro and Mr Gervais, but we do have a screenplay here and we paid rather a lot of money for it, and it'd be super if you could stick to it or at least stay in its general vicinity..... (That one's from the director)

Stardust

I'm going to be completely honest with you here; I didn't want to see this. I wasn't really that fussed, to be perfectly frank with you. But my mum and my sister were staying with me for the weekend and they quite fancied going to see it, and I couldn't think of a persuasive argument to see The Kingdom instead.

I am so, so glad I saw this. It's excellent. In fact, it's really raised the bar for any future fairytale movies. IN FACT, I hereby declare all future fairytale movies obsolete as the genre has already achieved perfection. Literally this is the movie against which all other movies of this genre will be measured.

It's got romance and magic and sword fights and horses and quests and betrayals and derring-do and more magic and jokes and transformations and true love and enchanted items and candles and flying boats and explosions and pirates and fairytale makeovers and stuff about fate and chivalry and potatoes and some of the blackest humour I've ever seen in a fairytale and I'm not telling you any more about it.

Direction: Excellent.
Special effects: Superb, neither subtle nor over the top, but nicely balanced and very good looking.
Story: Compelling.
Humour: A strange mix of black humour, slapstick and witty banter, but it hangs together fantastically well.

Score: A+++++ (if not higher).

OQ: '...and then I was hit by a magical flying MORON!"

OOQ: I'm sorry Mr De Niro and Mr Gervais, but we do have a screenplay here and we paid rather a lot of money for it, and it'd be super if you could stick to it or at least stay in its general vicinity..... (That one's from the director)

Rendition

For a film about so controversial a subject, I found this rather light. It skips over many aspects of the issue, and the narrative technique jumps about quite a lot more than it really needs to.

However, if it does get people talking about this then all the better. The film touches on the blind eye too many people turn to this, and deals with both courage and cowardice. There's an echo of the issues from 'Good Night and Good Luck', particularly the McCarthy attitude so many people in power have. They don't want to take a stand about this issue, because then the government/media will come after them.

Let's make no bones about it, this issue is about state sanctioned torture of suspected terrorists, and the luckily film doesn't shy away from this aspect. It also touches on the whole cycle of violence, but I felt it could have gone into this in more depth.

Rendition also uses a narrative technique that it uses to try to add a twist at the end. Unfortunately, I spotted the technique early on, so the twist was well signposted for me.

Score: C+ I was expecting something more dramatic, but the film shows too many easy answers and completely cops out at one point.

OQ: We have a saying. Beat your wife at least once a day. If you don't know why, then she does.

Rendition

For a film about so controversial a subject, I found this rather light. It skips over many aspects of the issue, and the narrative technique jumps about quite a lot more than it really needs to.

However, if it does get people talking about this then all the better. The film touches on the blind eye too many people turn to this, and deals with both courage and cowardice. There's an echo of the issues from 'Good Night and Good Luck', particularly the McCarthy attitude so many people in power have. They don't want to take a stand about this issue, because then the government/media will come after them.

Let's make no bones about it, this issue is about state sanctioned torture of suspected terrorists, and the luckily film doesn't shy away from this aspect. It also touches on the whole cycle of violence, but I felt it could have gone into this in more depth.

Rendition also uses a narrative technique that it uses to try to add a twist at the end. Unfortunately, I spotted the technique early on, so the twist was well signposted for me.

Score: C+ I was expecting something more dramatic, but the film shows too many easy answers and completely cops out at one point.

OQ: We have a saying. Beat your wife at least once a day. If you don't know why, then she does.

SiCKO

Yesterday I learnt one of the most horrible phrases ever invented by a civilised nation¹, and saw the most horrifying CCTV footage² I am ever likely to see, short of seeing someone die on television.

Michael Moore's latest documentary is yet again another "must see" film. Admittedly the issues at stake do not affect any of us directly, since it is solely about the state of the US medical system and the healthcare medical organisations (HMOs), but it is none the less shocking for that. Patients denied treatment that could have saved them, or had treatment delayed by red tape until it was too late. Patients left with huge medical bills, or had their insurance retroactively cancelled because they failed to mention they had a bad case of flu ten years ago. One twenty-five year old woman who was denied treatment for cervical cancer because, according to her HMO, she was too young to get cervical cancer. I wish that was a joke.

It's not just the medical professionals that come under fire. Politicians are targeted too, particularly because of a campaign to prevent socialised healthcare for all (ie like the NHS) by associating it with communism. Then came the prescription reform bill, which had a tagline from a prominent senator of "I love my momma. And I want her to have affordable healthcare." The bill, which passed in 2004, pretty much allowed pharmaceutical companies to charge whatever they wanted for prescriptions. That senator then quit and got a job at an HMO, by the way.

The film is very moving (you will need tissues) and some of the small details are almost as interesting as the big points he's making, like the woman he takes to Cuba for treatment. The doctor takes her off five of the eleven drugs she has been on (and paying for) for ten years because they don't do anything for her. Because her HMO wouldn't pay for a full set of diagnostic tests, she was taking drugs she didn't need.

And who do we have to blame for this situation?
Surprisingly (or not depending on your cynicism level), the answer is Richard Nixon.

Moore isn't proposing a solution to the problem. He's simply saying that the current system in America is broken and needs urgent reform, and that reform will probably need to dismantle and rebuild it from the ground up.

Possibly the worst thing I found out is that only the rescue workers paid to be at the world trade centre got government healthcare to take care of their respiratory problems. Volunteers got nothing. Even the government healthcare fund set up to help the volunteers was run like an HMO, designed to avoid paying for treatment. For example, people had to prove how much time they'd spent on the site and you only got the healthcare after so many hours. As one woman put it; how do you prove how long you spent as a volunteer?

Score: A

OQ: These people aren't falling through the cracks. These companies are making the cracks and sweeping these people towards them.

¹ The phrase is "Prudent Person Pre-Existing Condition Symptom Clause". Basically it means that if you had a symptom that would make a normal prudent person seek medical advice, and you failed to do so, it's the equivalent of not disclosing a medical condition to the HMO, regardless of whether that condition is related to your current condition that you're seeking medical help for. In essence, if you had a headache and didn't seek a doctor's opinion, then developed back problems, the HMO could claim that the headache was an early symptom of the back problem and deny you care for failing to mention you had a back problem when you applied for insurance.

² The footage is of a patient called Carol, dumped on the street by the hospital once she could no longer afford the hospital bills, wearing nothing but a hospital gown. The day before Michael Moore turned up to film the mission she was dumped next to, another woman was pushed out of a taxi there. She had a broken collar bone, three broken ribs and was hypertensive (which basically means the experience could have killed her). The district attorney was there collecting information to mount a criminal investigation into the matter.

Ratatouille

There's a certain appeal of the animated movie these days. We get far more of them, and no longer are they solely the domain of children and dragged along parents. Complex plots and multi-layered jokes are added to keep the adults entertained, such as in the Shrek films, and some animation is made exclusively for adults, such as South Park or Family Guy.

At least, that's my excuse for seeing Ratatouille, and I'm sticking to it.

This is the latest film made by Brad Bird, the man, the genius who brought us The Incredibles, a film which showed what every comic book fan already knew; that only animation can properly portray superpowers on the big screen. With Ratatouille, Bird has set himself a different challenge. Can an animated film convey the complete experience of good food?

Since the audience cannot experience the smells or tastes of the food, Bird has gone all out on the visuals and the sound. The water in the sewers is phenomenal in looks and sound. The kitchen scenes are filled with detail, which doesn't diminish once you get outside into Paris. There's far too much to take in, including the pizza truck from Toy Story, which I missed (it's in almost every Pixar film) and Bomb Voyage, a villain from The Incredibles, as a street mime. There's a great perspective change between the humans and the rats, which is echoed in the final scene.

The story is fairly basic fare, an almost off the shelf plot if I'm honest, but I don't think that I cared. The film is very good at drawing the audience in, and creating believable characters. The children in the audience were fidgeting about half way through this, and I'm not sure if that was simply the running time or the more complex parts of the plot, but it certainly put a crimper in my enjoyment and I wished that I'd brought by power yo-yo to sling at the kid on the end of my row, as he mashed his feet up and down making that horrible sticky noise that only a cinema floor can accomplish. Perhaps I should go easy on him, he may have been inspired by this film to experiment with sound effects. On the other hand, he was bloody annoying.

And as usual, there's a brilliant short film at the start of the movie. It's fantastic. I had forgotten to expect this in Pixar films, so it was a pleasant surprise.

Score: B-

Not as good as The Incredibles (which I didn't expect it to be), but an excellent film, well made and fun to watch.

OQ: Welcome to hell! Trivia: To find out how to animate the scene where the chef is wet, they actually dressed someone in a chef suit, and put him in a swimming pool to see which parts of the suit stuck to his body, and which parts you could see through.

Michael Clayton

Michael Clayton is Erin Brockovich with George Clooney instead of Julia Roberts. It has taken me from the time I watched this (12.10pm on Sunday) until now to figure that out. This either means the film is very good, or my brain has slipped a gear again.

I don't think I've sat through a slower film in my life. And yet, I didn't get bored or restless once. The film holds your attention the whole way through. It's good, and gets you to use your brain the whole way through. Nothing is handed to you on a plate, you need to work certain elements out for yourself. Not that it is a thinking film, it's just a film where you need to pay attention to the details. I'm not explaining this well, am I?

OK, let's start again. Clooney is described as giving the performance of his career in this film, which I can understand (although I preferred him in "Good Night, and Good Luck"). He's playing Michael Clayton, a sort of trouble shooter for a law firm who's fed up with his life that seems to be falling out of his control. Certain things happen that make him question if he's even in the right job, and then he spends most of the movie trying to solve his own problems at the same time as solving his company's problems, which often have mutually exclusive results.

It's got a great ending to the film, because you think it's going one way, then it goes another and when you leave, you realise it actually went a third way that you didn't see on screen.

If you want to know what the hell I'm talking about, click here. (Warning: Massive Plot Spoilers!)

It does resort to a rather sloppy, in my opinion, narrative technique of showing you events happening, and then fades to "Four Days Earlier", which I've never liked as a method of storytelling.

I'm not going to give you any of the plot, because even if I did, it still wouldn't spoil the film for you. There's more going on in the film than I could ever describe in a review of it.

Look, if you liked Erin Brocovich, you'll like this. Oh god, now Duncan is going to kill me for using a comparison.

Score: Ummm.....B-? really I don't know how to score it. I enjoyed watching it, but couldn't really recommend it to a friend as it's a very personal taste kind of thing.

OQ: I am Shiva, goddess of death!