The Last Exorcism (2010)

Far from being the catastrophically bad, vomit-filled, cheap-tricks exorcism film that I was expecting from something with only two stars on Love Film, The Last Exorcism actually managed to entertain me throughout its entire length and I’d possibly even go so far as to say I actually enjoyed it. This is not my preferred genre of film so maybe it benefitted from me not being able to compare it with other, better, examples of the exorcism theme. It was a novelty, a temporary venture into demon-based horror, and novelties are always fun.

The Last Exorcism takes the form of a mock-documentary about the life of the Reverend Cotton Marcus – an evangelical priest who has been performing exorcisms for years. He doesn’t actually believe in demons though, so comes equipped with various gadgets and tricks to provide the right atmosphere and generally scare the shit out of everyone. What a nice man. This documentary is for him to show everyone that exorcisms are scams, to educate the extreme Christian mentalists and stop things getting out of control.

After picking a begging letter at random, he travels with the film crew to a house in the middle of nowhere in Louisiana. Here he meets Louis Sweetzer, who is convinced his daughter Nell is possessed. One fake exorcism later and the problem doesn’t seem to be solved, in fact it probably gets worse. And it all goes wrong from there really – Nell’s behaviour gets progressively more erratic and disturbing and the scary eyes come out. Cue forty-five minutes of odd noises, sinister prophesies, strange behaviour from everybody involved and an emerging back-story that many or may not explain everything without the need to involve the Devil.

There’s always a danger with hand-held cameras of it all going a bit Blair Witch. This unfortunately does happen towards the end what with the running and the trees and the heavy breathing but it’s mostly fine – this is a ‘professional’ film-crew after all and the documentary feel does hold through most of the film.

This being a horror and everything and an 18 certificate, I assume you’re supposed to find it scary. Perhaps if it was night-time and I was paying proper attention it would have been, but as it was it just wasn’t good enough. During the scary bits I was usually laughing at something rubbish a couple of minutes before and that does detract from the atmosphere and suspense somewhat. The girl is scary-looking enough though and that’s all you need to be called a horror. She has good scary-eyes and sufficiently lank hair, but she’s no match for the girl from the Ring. That was one kid you do not want to find in the corner of your (unnecessarily dark) room.

There’s also a strange brother that I think was under-used. He managed a very impressive balance of red-neck, religious zeal and social-ineptitude that was really rather unnerving. He added a lot to the feel of the film and I would have liked to see more of him.

We were looking for a shit film when we decided to watch this, and a shit film is what we found. Some parts are really quite laughable and we never did find out what was actually going on behind all the drama. Overall though it was very acceptable and it served its purpose very nicely. 

Toast (2010)

As far as I'm concerned Freddie Highmore is still a little boy. He’s Charlie from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and the boy in Finding Neverland. A few years have gone by and now, suddenly, his voice has broken, he’s shot up several feet and he’s playing sexually confused teenagers. That was a shock.

Toast is based on the memoir of Nigel Slater – chef and restaurant critic. More specifically it centres on Nigel’s relationship with his father and his step-mother and the use of food and cooking to gain attention and power within those relationships.

Also starring the amazing Helena Bonham Carter, as well as Victoria Hamilton and Ken Stott (see him soon in the Hobbit!), this film is genuinely pleasant to watch. It’s not trying to be something it’s not and seems happy being a nice little British film with a happy ending. Lovely.

The Skin I Live In (2011)

I love this film so much. I first saw it about nine months ago and it amazed me. It was the first real film I’d seen Antonio Banderas in (I don’t think Shrek 2 really counts), and I love him. His acting in this as a creepy twisted scientist/surgeon is superb and it both scares and fascinates you.

I didn’t know all that much about the plot when I first saw this – the trailer is spectacularly useless in terms of giving you a feel for the story and pace – and online synopses don’t give you much to go on either. 

After the death of his wife in a fire several years previously, the creepy twisted surgeon has devoted his time to creating a magic skin – resistant to burns and insect bites and has been testing it on a human subject – Vera – whom he keeps locked in a room in his house. In between experiments and treatments, Vera (played by the ridiculously beautiful Elena Anaya) spends her time doing yoga and creating pieces of art from scraps of material. As you do. Her frustration with being locked up soon becomes apparent though and you begin to wonder how long she’s been there, and how she got to be there in the first place.

All becomes clear as the film progresses – we’re given the full story little bit by little bit. There’s a limit to what can be said without spoiling it all but suffice to say this film has the best “Oh my God!” moment I’ve ever seen. That point in the story when all these little scraps of knowledge all come together and leaves you with your mouth hanging open in shock, horror, and complete awe. That’s what it did to me anyway.

The only negative thing I can say about this (apart from a slight raised eyebrow at some of the weirder moments) is a scene in the middle of the film. They introduce some flashbacks to give us some of the history of the characters and they’ve chosen to do so through dreams. It seemed a bit lazy and I’m sure there’s a better way of doing it.

The skin I live in is shocking, it’s disturbing, and it’s completely engrossing. It’s reasonably slowly paced which shows excellent restraint by the writer/director Pedro Almodóvar who has directed some other quality films (Volver for example) and I’m definitely going to try to see many more of them. Having said that he also wrote and directed Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! – again starring Banderas. That was just weird. His next film, I’m So Excited, stars Penelope Cruz and Banderas yet again and I look forward to seeing it. I’ve got no idea what it’s about but its Spanish title – Los Amantes Pasajeros – translates as The Passing Lovers. I suppose that’s some clue.

God Bless America (2011)

I have a new hero. Joel Murray is not someone I’ve ever paid much attention to before, although looking back, he’s cropped up in a couple of things I’ve seen (Mad Men, Desperate Housewives) and he’s also in The Artist, which I have yet to bother to see. When Love Film finally gets around to sending it to me, I’ll look out for him – because he’s an impressive man. I’m reasonably sure his performance in this film borders on flawless and I was very pleasantly surprised to see such quality acting in a film that’s remained reasonably under the radar, for all its popularity.

In God Bless America Murray plays Frank – a tired, middle aged, divorced, recently fired, possibly terminally ill man with a growing hatred for the pile of celebrity gossip, prejudice, scare-mongering, and general crap that he believes America has become. Alone (again) one evening he retrieves his gun from a box on top of the bookshelf (why are they always in a box on top of a bookshelf?) and contemplates killing himself. Then he sees Chloe. Chloe is a rich, bratty, American teenager with her own reality TV show. With Frank, we see a quick flash of the programme – Chloe declaring boastfully that she rules her high school and screaming at her obnoxious parents for buying her the wrong car. After this, Frank rethinks his suicide plans. Why should he kill himself when there are so many better people to kill? Like Chloe for example.

Murray’s co-star in God Bless America, Tara Lynne Barr, is a new face for me. She’s been in a fair few things but usually single episodes of American TV series that I’ve never heard of. After a couple of shaky over-acted moments near the beginning, I really warmed to her in that comforting way of her reminding me of someone – but I can’t think who. She’s another person to keep an eye on in the future. Barr plays Roxy, a sixteen-year-old girl who meets Frank when he arrives at her school to kill the awful Chloe. Sympathising with his aims, she becomes his accomplis and they travel around America together imparting justice on those who ‘don’t deserve to live’.

There’s an extensive list of people in this category. I was doing well until they added ‘the givers and receivers of physical high-fives’. Well that’s me dead then.

For all their lack of care in their killings, they manage to get away with it for a ridiculously long time. You have to suspend your disbelief here for a while – I would like to think the police are a little more efficient than that at catching serial killers. It’s a detail I was quite happy to let go though for the sake of a better story.

While it doesn’t give you all that much to really think about or leave much of a lasting impression other than ‘well that was cool’, God Bless America might well end up on my list of classics – one of those that I’ll actually buy a physical copy of.

Skyfall (2012)

You cannot review James Bond. It is awesome and unreviewable.

Instead I will list some things that are awesome about James Bond (Skyfall in particular):
- It's British
- Daniel Craig
- Judi Dench
- Javier Bardem (I'd forgotten how much I like him and he's very cool in Skyfall!)
- The Bond-girls
- The chases
- The martinis
- The music
- It's Bond

The End.

Looper (2012)

The basic idea of Looper is reasonably easy to grasp. Time-travel is invented at some point in the future and then immediately outlawed. It’s used by gangsters of the future to dispose of their unwanted bodies, by sending people back in time to be killed by loopers – men hand-picked to be hit-men. Being a looper is well-paid and seemingly quite glamorous, but it comes with the rather large caveat that the loopers themselves will be killed off in 30 years’ time. But that apparently appeals to the live fast – die young type, and they don’t seem short of recruits.

The problem is, when in 30 years you’re sent back in time to be killed, you’re killed by yourself. The killing of your future self is known as ‘closing your loop’ and comes with a lot of money and freedom to live the rest of your life as you see fit. As long as you actually kill your future self, and don’t let them go – it all goes wrong for you if you do that!

And that’s where it gets complicated. Suddenly we end up with multiple versions of the same character, and multiple versions of events in time running in parallel. Even after serious thought and lots of discussion, these different strands still don’t seem to link together very well. I’m still not properly sure what happened or how certain people know certain things or even what order things happen in.

So if you want to watch this film I can only recommend one thing – don’t think too much! If you don’t think too much, and you just accept what’s going on as it's presented to you, Looper really is a very enjoyable film. Some bits are better than others, for example there’s a rather shabby time-sequence-montage-thing in the middle, but there is a fantastic, horrifying, amazing part reasonably early on where a future person’s body is changing in front of their eyes to reflect what’s currently happening to their younger self. A bit of a head fuck but oh so fascinating.

Another impressive thing about the film is how they managed to get Joseph Gordon-Levitt to look like a young Bruce Willis. The two men are completely different in every possible visual characteristic, but with a little bit of prosthetic make-up and a very good side-ways smirk by Gordon-Levitt it works – its magic!

The first third of this film is brilliant, and sets itself up to be an epic, but it all just falls away after that. From the first time you go ‘hang on – what?’ it gradually loses your interest, and instead of just being able to absorb it, too much of your brain is trying to un-pick problems and reorganise time. Reorganising time is exhausting.

Watch it, definitely watch it. But don’t think too much!

Hereafter (2010)

Everyone knows the name Clint Eastwood. It’s impossible not to – the guy’s been in God knows how many films and directed God knows how many more. Apparently though, this is the first film of his on either side of the camera that I’ve actually seen. I’m not proud of that – it shows a gaping hole in my film knowledge – but most of them aren’t really my thing so it’s a hole not likely to improve all that much. I might give some of the more recent ones a go – Million Dollar Baby, Gran Torino, Changling – ones like that.

Anyway, as you can imagine, I didn’t pick this film because of its director. Or because of its cast. Yes Matt Damon’s in it and he’s very good and everything but I have no special love for the guy. He’s the cause of me having to sit through The Bourne Identity and I harbour a little resentment for that (no, I didn’t like it).

The only reason I felt drawn to this film was because I remember the trailer being quite promising. A guy that can genuinely speak to the dead – it could be ok if it’s done well (OK maybe the names Eastwood and Damon helped me trust it a bit), but I never imagined it would contain any great depth or complexity. So I was quite surprised when the film opens to a scene containing some random couple speaking French. That’s good though, not being scared to include a few subtitles. It gives the audience more credit than a lot of other films do.

Unfortunately, for all its French subtitles, Hereafter not only lacks depth, it also lacks any real complexity. It’s three films in one, following three people and their experiences with death and the deceased. While initially promising, I lost interest in all three stories (and the people in them) reasonably quickly, and so gained very little satisfaction from their progress and subsequent acceptance of their various trials and troubles.

It would have done well to tug at the heartstrings a little more. Not quite sure whether to make a moving film about loss and grief, or a Hollywood blockbuster with bombs and magic powers, Eastwood seems to have created something that’s half way in-between. And so is neither. It manages to pack in two of the major disasters of the last 10 years in a dramatic showy way that shouts “Blockbuster” very loudly in our ears, but it also tries to slow things down to showing us the subtlety of the loyalty of two brothers to their drug-addicted mother.

There’s also a half-heated attempt at a romance. Just to complete things.

There wasn't really any conclusion either thinking about it. The three stories converged as they do tend to do but we didn’t get all that much closure to the stories. Not that I noticed anyway – perhaps I’d stopped concentrating by that point. I did try though.

So no, I didn’t particularly enjoy this and no, I wouldn't really recommend it to anyone. Even as a lazy Sunday night film it failed to keep me entertained.  Perhaps I’ll still give Eastwood’s other films a go but mostly because it seems blasphemous not to.  At the moment though, as far as I’m concerned, the best thing about Clint Eastwood is the song by Gorrilaz.