Midnight Run (1988)

On paper, Midnight Run is a film I should stay away from. Comic thriller? DeNiro playing an ex-cop, bounty hunter chased by the mafia and chasing some accountant blamed of having stolen 15 million dollars? Sounds very, VERY terrible. But somehow, I just let go and let myself be entertained by this trashy tale about ... well, forget about it. The film is driven by a sort of energetic madness that just won't stop. Basically, what we have here is an endless row of scenes of two guys being chased or chasing each other (if they are chased by mobsters of the CIA makes very little difference in this universe). At heart, this is a good-natured - even cute - film film about the relationship between two renegade guys who love each other even though they don't know it most of the time. (And yeah, I am deeply embarrassed that I like a movie by the same guy, Martin Brest, who made Beverly Hills Cops.)

The World (2004)

A theme park in Beijing is the central location of The World, Jia Zhangke's playful and sad story about - well, let's see - loneliness and a sense of placelessness. The theme park contains miniatures of famous symbols for different parts of the world. There's a big ben, an eifel tower, a taj mahal, a st. peter's cathedral. The location is at once cheesy and mesmerizing. The film seems to track relations situated in a globalized world where people long to be somewhere else, with somebody else. Globalization, and the dream of endless possibilities, is contrasted with a feeling of being trapped. The theme park may be too obvious a symbol for dislocalized or disoriented desires, but the film makes all of this work because it induces the place itself, the shabby theme park, with an eerie shabbiness. The theme park represents dreams (dreams about going to France, for example) but is also a very concrete place immersed in gritty working conditions and seedy human drama.

The leading characters are a couple who both work in the theme park. He is a security guard. She is a performer in a voluptuous musical group. The performer's ex comes to visit and the relationship grows increasingly hollow. The security guard tries to help migrants from his home province. The two drift apart from each other, get involved with new people, start to lead new kinds of lives - and start to nurse new dreams and new hopes. We are introduced to the dress-maker whose husband migrate to Europe and a Russian woman who seems to have been forced into prostitution. All this lends the theme park - THE WORLD - where they work with a claustrophobic atmosphere. There they are, surrounded by the world, desiring to be some place else. The world: a surrogate, a cruel joke, a miserable job. A depressing, yet still yearning, simulation.

Jia Zhangke made the very fine and dynamic Still life. He is a bold director who does not seem to fear cinematic leaps: he can go from lush romantic scenes to brutal documentary-style images in a minutes. And these leaps do not feel like cheap effect. He succeeds in telling us multi-layered stories about where we are, about our disconcerting and beautiful world. Zhangke's films - the two that I've seen - are here & now in a way that I find impressing: they are not seeking to hunt for emblematic images for our times as much as they are trying to excavate several ways of interpreting the present. The World is a slow and elusive film - I recommend it!

Platoon (1986)

I re-watched Oliver Stone's Platoon an was not overwhelmingly impressed with it - I have a vague memory of having thought it to be a rather good movie (I saw it as a teenager. Of course, the merit of Platoon is its anti-war point of view. This anti-war perspective is introduced via a young volunteer, played by Charlie Sheen. He's in a platoon close to the Cambodian border. The war is seen through his eyes - they are outsider eyes, we learn rather quickly. He is treated as somebody who shouldn't be in the war, a college kid who drops out of college to volunteer - how crazy isn't that? Later he comes to have regrets. The war is all (viscerally conveyed) dirt, exhaustion, bugs and injuries. The volunteer is hospitalized, but is soon released again. Many of the characters feel like the standard gallery of Vientam war film types: there is the grizzled sergeant and the guy who does lots of drugs to numb the pain. The most successful role is perhaps that of Bunny, a kid who is very, very scared. He is not reduced to a coward. Instead, the senselessness of war comes across through his vulnerability and fear. Platoon is a tactile movie: the combats are chaotic, dirty and the film does not seduce us into a neat, disengaged eagle-eye perspective. The film has been praised - partly, rightly so - for sticking to the gritty level of the infantrymen. And yes: fear and fatigue are treated as primary emotional responses. Amid this fear and fatigue, the enemy is enemy, gunfire from the depth of woods. One weakness - or is it a weakness? - is that this "enemy" is very rarely seen, and when they are, the film does not stray from film formulae about how to present "elusive" Vietnamese people. Who is the enemy? When I watch Platoon there is something about Stone's kill/get killed-point of view that strikes me as somehow, for all the anti-war attitude, disconcerting in its US-centric presentation of the war. That it becomes so, so self-evident who are subjects with existentially resonating emotions in the war. As I said, Platoon is in many ways not a typical war movie. But, still, it chooses the most literary, contemplative guy - the guy who takes the role of observer - as its main character. His voice is used as a voice-over that describes the horror of war in letters to his grandma.

Some moments stand out. In one scene, we see the platoon entering a village. There is confrontation, and murders. The soldiers do as they are told, out of loyalty, even though they act in shock, and are horrified at what they are about to do. A women is raped. The atrocity of this is evident. What bothers me (I'm trying to articulate it): this kind of immense horror is put into a general framework whose main emphasis lies on "the outsider", the innocent guy who knows nothing about war, but who then comes to learn about killed/being killed. Is there a risk that films like Platoon end up  embracing a tragic view according to which we as human being are thrown into a nihilistic world in which there may be kind people, and where the only task left is to fight for a small patch of decent values? The central conflict of the film is that between two sergeants. One is good-willed, humane. The other one represents brutality and "sheer survival". What kind of moral conflict is this really, and is it really as anti-war as it mostly appears? The humane is placed against the brutal - the leading character survives as the mature man who has reached some kind of adulthood without being brutalized by war. The good point is that war changes people in very different ways, and that it is impossible to know about this change beforehand. Stone's film certainly evokes a very strong sense of moral ambiguity. My hunch is, however, that there is something strange going on in how he evokes the central moral conflict and how he choses to present the main character's transformation.

Love Crime (2010)

Business is business. There are some very good films about the cruelty of competition, the monsters people can become when they turn themselves (or are turned into) competitors. Sadly, Love crime is not one of these, even though it offers a few moments of sleazy entertainment. Alain Corneu goes for the excessive, the violent and the ... well, sleazy. The acting is not exactly top-notch and many of the twists and turns are overwrought. The story examines the relation between a senior exec and a junior exec. Manipulation turns into revenge. Skullduggery at the office, competition between women. Schemes: everywhere. There are erotic bonds, some of which are quite obvious, while some are harder to get one's head around (the relation between the two women). One of the trite plot solutions is to introduce a man to whom both are attracted. And then there's the murder, executed together with a score of schmaltzy dinner jazz.

All that glitters (2010)

If you want, you can say that All that glitters is a film about the conquer&divide-mentality of patriarchy. Patriarchy as male and class-based. The two main characters, Lila & Ely, live in the suburbs. They are bored. They want to try something new. One of them comes from a working-class district, while the other is a little bit more well off. The nightlife of Paris introduces them to a few upper-class types. Their friendship is under threat. What matters: to blend in, to act the part of saucy, attractive female. Lila hooks up with a rich boy, while Ely starts babysitting for an equally wealthy lesbian couple. All that glitters (directed by Geraldine Makache & Herve Mimram) is not an earth-shaking film, but its portrayal of deceit and friendship is energetic and evocative. Daniel Cohen is good as the cab-driving, kind-hearted father.

Insomnia (1997)

I have no clue what the point of the American version of Insomnia was. The Norwegian original is far superior in every sense. The starkly penetrating, white light of the far north makes the film truly memorable. Stellan Skarsgård acts the part of the sleepless cop who is placed in a small town up north where the sun never sets. He's there to solve a murder case: a 17-year old girl has been killed. The suspect is a shy author. The sleepless cop tries to hook up with the concierge at the hotel. Erik Skjoldbjaerg directs with a steady hand. Even though the film takes us to the familiar territory of grizzled cop who is haunted by inner demons the result still manages to add a new touch to the genre that explore the darkness of men who are bogged down in trouble. The location plays a conclusive role. This version of Northern Norways is far from cute postcards. This is dirty backstreets and dangerous-looking nature.

Paisan (1946)

I have mixed feelings about Roberto Rossellini. He has produced some of the most shattering images of post-war trauma in the history of film (Germany Year Zero), but he can also be a sentimental director enamored with convetional storytelling and film archetypes. Paisan is also a movie about war. The film has a rushed style and I get the sense that the material is assembled in a sort of panic. This might seem a clear weakness, but there is also the historical aspect of this. The film was made in 1946, one year after the war. The events of the war were still part of the present in many ways. Paisan comes out as a restless, frenzied document, a form of testimony. Instead of a neat narrative with a start and a resolution, this film delves into six different incidents. They are connected by one theme: people's lives are torn apart during the events of WWII. All incidents are set in Italy, but some of the characters are soldiers from the US. Many of the stories chronicle cruel and incomprehensible encounters between soldiers and civilians. In one of these, an American black soldier meets a small boy. The boy steals the soldier's shoes, and later on, the meet again. The tragedies on display are not heroic; the many killings we see in the film are rendered with a sense of hopelessness and even absurdity. The last segment of the film is bloody and merciless. The pictures are raw and no diversions are offered: we are forced to watch. Even though this film can seem cluttered and disorganized, its chaos can be said to have a purpose: it teaches us something about different aspects of war without taking a recourse to familiar plots about heroes or villains. The effect of these incidents: war is portrayed without a hint of glorification or romanticism.

Still life (2013)

John is a civial servants whose job it is to track down the relatives of recently deceased people. In his job, he learns about loneliness. People who have been so lonely that there are nobody who attend their funerals. John - played gracefully by Eddie Marsan - is a lonely guy himself. He has no family, no friends. His bosses thinks that he is doing an unnecessary job, but he is engaged in what he does, in finding family members of the dead. His way of going about his often rather dreary and sad business exudes a sense of vocation. John is made redundant, and is allowed to solve one last case. He goes on a journey which is dangerously close to drowning the film in sugarcoated resolutions. But these clichés are warded off. Uberto Pasolini's Still life may not be a masterpiece, but is is a haunting portrait of loneliness and unexpected encounters between people. The pure, unhurried style of the film serves the material well. It turns out that Pasolini also directed The Full Monty. Rugged realism may connect the two films, but in every other way, they are miles apart.

Metropolitan (1990)

It would make very little difference if the story of Metropolitan would take place in 1880, rather than 1980. This is Edith Wharton territory: the life of the 'aristocrats', their boredom and their social, claustrophobic circles in which slander and back-stabbing abound. And - debutante balls! Whit Stillman's film is wittily engrossing. Rather than being driven by plot, the film ambles through a specific social milieu. The central characters are all membors of a New York clique. They are young, terribly rich and well, quite repulsive types. Then there's one guy from a not-so-wealthy background who is drawn into their world of partying and plotting. They are kids who seem to occupy a juvenile universe of there own, largely abandoned by the older folks.  They seem to be extremely far from the rest of society as well. These kids, dressed in tuxedos and evening dresses, sit in parlors gossiping about the lastest scandals and the much-told legends about naughty boys and troubled girls. For this reason, the outsider, a guy who talks about French socialists and does not live on Park Avenue, offers some fresh blood. Like in a Wharton book, its all about the value system and who is socially recognized as complying with the rules. Part F Scott Fitzgerald, part Brett Easton Ellis, Metropolitan is a study of juvenile cruelty and a ghost-like class system.

In the name of (2013)

Despite some terrible clichés, In the name of is an engaging film about being closeted. The cliché: the main character is a tormented priest. He's gay and he lives in a rural community where he works with delinquent kids. He falls in love with a boy and their relationship must remain secret. The cliché: sexual temptation and self-destructive behavior. For all this, Malgoska Szymowska is a good storyteller in the sense that she builds a tight world around the priest - a world of macho performance among the teenagers he is assigned to tend to. Most of all, In the name of is a film about self-denial. The relation between religious rumination and suffering, a quest for selflessness, is of course no less clichéd, but at least at times, Szymowska makes us believe in the character and his anxiety. Some of the scenes depicting the priests' unhappiness turn into grim comedy: we see the priest in a severely intoxicated state, alone in his barren apartment, taking a waltz with a portait of pope Benedict. I have mixed feelings about this film: the portrayal of self-loathing gays tends to become an easy path to make a film about Misery, World-weariness and Decay in general. When directors walk this path, the representation of sexuality is often reduced to a pattern of bodily temptations, so that the logic of the film is a subject and then there is an object of desire, a manifestation of this "temptation". In this film: taciturn guy with Jesus-looks. In most cases, this pattern is both boring and repulsive (a miserabilist distortion) and gives rise to many suspect images of homosexuality. However, the film has some strength in how it conjures up the closed world inhabited by the priest.