Category: films (Page 3 of 4)

Well, I loved it. Coming out of the cinema last night, I couldn’t stop laughing for at least ten minutes because I’d enjoyed myself so much. The last time I had that kind of very hyperactive physical reaction to a movie was when I saw Sam Raimi’s Drag Me to Hell on its London opening night back in 2009. DMTH left me with the similar impulse to head right back inside the auditorium for an immediate second viewing, although I happen to think that Fury Road is infinitely the better, the more meaningful film, more lasting as art than the hugely entertaining but ultimately disposable DMTH will ever be.

A great deal of perceptive, insightful, enthusiastic, original, and thought-provoking criticism of Fury Road has already been produced, with critics working hard to get inside the (generously distributed) meat and bones of this movie. That’s not what I want to do here – this is a personal reaction only – but just for the record, I do want to say that I loved what this movie did with male-female interaction in the context of the Hollywood action movie. In her truly excellent review, Abigail Nussbaum has some words of caution on this subject:

“A lot of what Fury Road does with regards to women–making the prime mover of the story a woman who is not sexualized or treated as the hero’s prize, featuring multiple female characters, not all of whom are young and beautiful, passing the Bechdel test–is not so much revolutionary as the very baseline of what we should expect from most movies–what we would expect, if we hadn’t become so accustomed to the toxic sludge of misogyny that Hollywood blockbusters have been serving up for twenty years.  In fact, the more I think about it, the more Fury Road seems not like a revolution, but like a throwback to the action films of the 80s, before the genre gained the respectability that comes from being Hollywood’s primary source of revenue, back when it was still possible to put women and people of color front and center, to be weird and grotesque, and not have to worry about courting an audience made up of thirteen-year-old boys.”

Whilst I applaud what Abigail is saying here and agree wholeheartedly, neither can I deny the sheer joy I did experience in seeing what we should be seeing up there on the screen… up there on the screen.  I loved the ‘passing the gun’ moment – because it was so understated, because it happened so naturally, and without even a flicker of resentment or attitude on Max’s part. I didn’t find anything male-gaze-y about the ‘women bathing’ scene. There is no hint of ogling in Max’s expression – just shock, incredulity at the sight of something so massively at odds with the horror and violence he’s just been experiencing. And the sight of water, of course – indeed, it’s almost as if he’s looking right past the women, at the water.  Neither did I feel that Furiosa’s autonomy was compromised by her reliance on Max. What I saw was Furiosa making deft use of the opportunities that came her way – Max turns up, he clearly shares some of our aims, let’s go with it. It’s not Max showing Furiosa what to do, getting her out of a tight spot – it’s two people, working together because they choose to and because it benefits them both.  What I saw was mutual respect, not timely rescue.

For those who felt that Max almost gets sidelined in the movie, I’d say no way does he. I felt my attention drawn by both characters equally. I think the difference here is that people are so used to seeing the action guy take the lead they don’t quite know where to look (the same as that thing you get when there are three women out of ten in a boardroom and the men start muttering about women ‘taking over’).

What I want to focus on mainly though – perhaps because in the main people have not talked so much about this aspect of Fury Road – is the movie’s supreme confidence, coherence and staggering beauty as a work of art. I don’t normally give a toss about special effects or CGI. If a film doesn’t have a good script to back it up, I’m just not interested. In Fury Road I have found my exception that proves the rule. I don’t think I have ever seen a movie in which the special effects were more exquisitely tailored to the action onscreen. People made a lot of noise about the visual spectacle of Gravity and Interstellar. I found the former to be completely empty – I can’t stand George Clooney anyway, and whilst watching the film I was never able to forget even for a second that Apollo 13 was far more exciting and much better written. The latter was a typical piece of ego-bigger-than-the-idea Hollywood bullshittery with a ludicrous script, heavily derivative storyline and not even as good in terms of its editing and cinematography as was inception. With Fury Road, on the other hand, I felt that perhaps in this instance the almost total lack of a script was a good thing. The power of the visual imagery told its own story, was demonstrative in a way that, dare I say it, opera or ballet is demonstrative. And what a relief to be spared the inane backchat, macho wisecracks and by-the-numbers, relentless wank that normally characterises what passes for the script of a Hollywood action movie. The worldbuilding, similarly, was superbly outrageous – never laboured, never explained, just there.

But simply as a piece of choreography, Fury Road is a stunningly beautiful thing, an exercise in skill and wild abandon that feels more like a piece of modern dance (by Pina Bausch, say) than anything else. The visual coherence, the gleeful relentlessness of pacing, the effortlessly logical segue from one set piece into another, the colours – the thing left me breathless with delight, not just at what was happening onscreen but at the obvious dedication, skill and commitment expended by those who put it there. In its visual audacity and visceral wantonness, Fury Road often reminded me of Jodorowski – only a lot less up itself and one hell of a lot more entertaining.

I never thought I’d be saying this, but Mad Max: Fury Road should win all the awards. It’s the kind of film I’d hesitate to watch again, in case that second viewing cast any kind of a backward shadow upon the heart-pounding, seat-jumping exhilaration of the unrepeatable first.

I came here to post something about last night’s Doctor Who, only to find that my previous post had disappeared. Entirely. It wasn’t in the trash, it was nowhere. It was as if it had been sucked through that crack in the known universe people keep spreading rumours about.

I don’t know what I can read into this, other than that it might be some kind of retribution for the fact that I didn’t much care for The Time of the Doctor. For having the sneaking feeling, in fact, that it was a lazy piece of fan-service, something that was cobbled together in a hurry while everyone was still high on the success of the 50th anniversary episode The Day of the Doctor.

Yes, Doctor Who is a show that has come to be defined by its mythos and its season-long story arcs, and as a fan of intricate narratives I don’t have a problem with that, at all. But when an individual episode has no intrinsic worth as story, indeed when it makes no sense as story when taken in isolation, then what we have is lazy, lazy writing, and that’s what we were dished up with yesterday. The only ‘present tense’ narrative strand in The Time of the Doctor had to do with time travel as a novel method for getting your turkey roasted and I know it’s Christmas, but for goodness’ sake, surely there are better story ideas out there?

A sorry end to Matt Smith’s term as the Doctor, in my opinion, and further proof if any were needed that the programme is badly in need of some new blood in the showrunning department.

Still, all was not lost. Mark Gatiss’s documentary on M. R. James was a delight, as was his adaptation of ‘The Tractate Middoth’ immediately before it. A simple story, but effective, and beautifully retold. Perhaps Moffat needs to reacquaint himself with the masters…

I’ve now reinstated my post on what I read in 2013 – let’s hope it stays in place this time. I’ll be watching with interest to see if anything odd happens with this one.

In the meantime, I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas. Heartfelt thanks and good wishes to all those who stop by this blog every once in a while, and looking forward to more musings, rants and meanderings in the coming twelve months.

I made a momentous and rather sad decision this weekend: I’m giving up on generic horror films, for good.

It’s been some years now since I’ve been able to derive any pleasure from generic horror on the page, but I’ve continued to enjoy it on screen, as a guilty pleasure perhaps, but a pleasure nonetheless. If this weekend’s FrightFest has proved anything to me it’s that I can no longer do so.

Perhaps I’m just too old for this shit now. I don’t know.

I went to five films at FrightFest this year, each as glutinous and lacking in flavour as warm rice pudding. The horror community frequently bemoans the fact that the mainstream cinema audience just ‘doesn’t get’ horror, that they reject horror as a genre on principle, because of the gore, the violence, the disturbing psychologies of the protagonists, and in rejecting it they miss its subversiveness, its social awareness, its time-honoured position in the vanguard of underground cinema. Well, I ain’t buying it. I’ve seen more horror movies than I care to remember, and I can state with some authority that the only terrifying thing about generic horror cinema at the present moment in time is how derivative, burned out and tame it now is. Virtually every Anglo-American film currently being produced and sold as horror is actually cinematic comfort food. Tragically, the European horror film seems to be heading in the same direction.

OK, so let’s get specific. Here’s a brief run-down of the movies I saw at FF this weekend and what I thought was wrong with them:

Dementamania dir. Kit Ryan. Corporate executive Edward Arkham (geddit?) is having a bad day. Recently split from his girffriend Laura, he is finding it increasingly difficult to deal with the frustrating monotony and professional backstabbing that plague his work life. He’s also off his meds. Fortunately, a mysterious stranger named Nicholas Lemarchand (geddit? Geddit?) is on hand to give some sage advice: break free, Edward, exercise your will, you owe these wankers nothing, do what needs to be done…

Everything about this film was a cliche, from the ominous-sounding opening title music to the elevator ride to hell near the end. The script clearly thought it was being original and, God help us, deep. In fact it was so hackneyed and stilted it veered perilously close to the comedic on several occasions. What actually annoyed me most about this movie though was its attitude to women. I’m pretty certain that the team involved in making this film would be surprised to learn that their vision might have caused offence in this respect – and yet how could it not, when the women in this movie are reduced to choosing their roles from among the following: crazy stalker neighbour, duplicitous girlfriend, demon temptress with tentacles, office siren, or Eddie’s little lunchtime lesbian porn fantasy. For one crazy moment I thought the balance was about to be redressed during the by-the-numbers ‘back to reality – or am I?’ sequence towards the end when the medic attending Ed was shown to be female. But no, wait a minute, she’s just a NURSE! No worries though, because she loses no time in calling in a male doctor, along with a psychiatrist, also male. So that’s… just… fine.

I often find myself going overboard to prove how inclusive the horror community really is – but you know what guys, this was pants. Stupid bloody title, too.

Haunter dir Vincenzo Natali. Fifteen-year-old Lisa is also having a bad day. Or should we say, she keeps on having the same bad day. Waking repeatedly to the same routine, the worst aspect of Lisa’s nightmare is that her parents and younger brother don’t seem to realise that anything is wrong. Following her discovery of a mysterious scrapbook, Lisa begins to piece together the drama and horror of what has happened to her, and what she must do next. For although it’s already too late for her, there’s another terrified young girl who desperately needs her help.

I had high hopes for this one as I found plenty to enjoy in Natali’s earlier speculative movies Cube and Cypher. A bemused half an hour in, however, I remembered that the director’s most recent outing was the risibly generic Splice, and those hopes took a nose-dive. Billed as Groundhog Day meets The Others, Haunter has neither the originality, the sharply ironic script or brilliant acting performances of the former, nor the poetry and cinematic beauty of the latter. Rather, it is a tediously disappointing mish-mash of derivative tropes and yet another outing for the increasinly popular Hollywood ‘all ghosts go to heaven’ trope. Here’s a story – just like the Del Toro-produced remake of Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark – that would have benefited enormously from being recast in a more contemporary style. (The original DBAOTD was placed in a more ordinary domestic setting and was all the better for it.) Mists? Mansions? Cellars? Daddy possessed by a serial child murderer? As if all that garbage weren’t enough, the script’s awful. This is ghosts for grannies, a popcorn haunting dressed up to look like The Innocents and failing miserably. One giant yawn for mankind.

Dark Touch dir. Marina de Van. Just when I thought things couldn’t get any more banal, along comes this Orphanage/Orphan/Mama rehash to prove me wrong. Honestly, this film is so embarrassingly bad it’s almost funny. A new and totally superfluous addition to the ‘demon seed’ subgenre, there’s nothing new about it apart from the depths it plumbs in its quest for the title of Possibly the Most Overcooked and Derivative Film You’ll See this Year. Traumatised by a mysterious and violent incident in early childhood, Niamh begins to show all the psychological characteristics of an abuse victim – characteristics that can only become more exaggerated when her parents and young brother die in a bloody massacre at their Irish home. Adopted by ubiquitous do-gooders Nat and Lucas, Niamh continues to insist that there were no murderers, that it was the House that did it (where have we heard that before?) and that the evil is likely to strike again at any time. As indeed it does. Only it’s at this point that the script writer seems to get really confused. Does she mean Niamh to be a protector and rescuer of abused children (cue violent death of Overweight, Abusive, Badly Dressed Village Mother) or a dangerous monster that will, if left unchecked, bring destruction and anarchy upon the whole valley?

Apparently Marina de Van just couldn’t bring herself to make up her mind between these two equally tempting possibilities.

Comparisons have already been made between Dark Touch and Carrie. Again, this is arrant nonsense. Brian de Palma’s film (as Stephen King’s novel before it) is a classic because of its incisive and brutal portrayal of high school bullying. The horror gets lathered on a bit after the bucket-of-pig’s-blood scene, this is true, and the bloody demise of Piper Laurie is just for the kids. But all the same, there is so much about Carrie (a decent screenplay, for a start, alongside marvellous performances by Amy Irving and John Travolta and of course Sissy Spacek herself) that remains resonant and affecting. Dark Touch is just stupid, period.

Banshee Chapter dir. Blair Erickson. Of the five films I saw, this was the only one that contained some discernably interesting ideas, that could actually have been a decent film if it had been imagined better. As it is, every spark of life in this movie is killed off more or less immediately by an unthinking and unnecessary reliance on overused horror tropes.

The film is inspired by the CIA-backed ‘MK-Ultra‘ project of the 50s and 60s, under whose auspices many hundreds of ordinary American civilians were subjected to voluntary and involuntary experiments in mind control, many of them involving dangerous hallucinogens. So far, so genuinely disturbing – similar stuff was going on here in the UK at Porton Down and is probably still going on (Gulf War Syndrome, anyone?) There are a multiplicity of crimes here that need exposing, not to mention a gold mine of conspiracy theories. Erickson’s movie presents us with the story of one James Hirsch, a young writer who decides to take one of the ‘Ultra’ drugs and record what happens. A scrap of surviving film footage shows James swiftly become paranoid and then terrified and then… absent. His college friend Anne, now a journalist for a successful online news outlet, is determined to find out what happened to him. She makes contact with the Burroughs-esque Thomas Blackburn, a counter-culture guru who, it would seem, procured the drug for James in the first place. And that’s where things begin to get silly.

There’s nothing new about Lovecraftian mystery stories, but there’s mileage in the mythos yet. My beef here is not with the concept as such, but with the hash that’s been made of it. Why are directors still pissing about with found footage horror? Blair Witch is fifteen years old now and enough already. And if they do have to use it, why oh why oh why do they have to succumb so readily to its most obvious cliches (jerky, static-infested camerawork, the main action occurring off to the side somewhere and the sequence cut short at the very moment something actually goes down)? Why does everything have to happen in the dark? (You’re in a top secret government bunker, not a garden shed – just turn on the light, for God’s sake.) Why does every film like this have to end up in a basement with someone going ‘no, no!’ and then shooting themselves? (This made me laugh in Chernobyl Diaries because the film makers were clearly revelling in the ridiculousness of it all – Erickson went for Woo this is Serious Shit and I was too annoyed to even raise a smile.)

If the director had taken the trouble to stop and think about his material and what might be made of it, he might have had a decent film on his hands. Instead he just reached for the obvious, the ready-made, the expected, and what we have as a result is another instantly forgettable found footage fiasco with no discernable merit whatsoever. Inaudible dialogue did nothing to salvage the situation, either.

Odd Thomas dir. Stephen Sommers. It’s a point of principle with me never to leave a film before the end, but I have to confess I only made it half way through this. The trains were dodgy because of the Bank Holiday, and I didn’t fancy being late home because of a film that could only ever play out as a cross between a rip-off of Stephen King’s Insomnia and an epiisode of Supernatural. CGI psychopomps. Time, waste of.

I’d love to be able to write these failures off as follies of youth – but you only have to consider the superior talents of Brit Marling, Sofia Coppola (The Virgin Suicides was made when she was not yet thirty) Ben Wheatley and Tom Kingsley (Black Pond was one of my favourite films of 2011) to see that youth is no bar to subtlety, originality or artistic flair. Anyway, many of the FF directors are mature film makers with a sizeable roster of movies to their name. So what’s the problem?

The problem, as I see it, lies not so much with individual directors as with the idea that there is an accepted way of ‘doing’ horror, that horror can be created simply by throwing a bunch of staple ingredients into a mixing pot, that a horror film is not so much a story as a series of effects, designed primarily to manipulate the audience into jumping in their seats when someone shouts boo.

This unthinkingly generic approach is killing horror. Rather than seeking out their own source material, or expanding on themes that properly excite their creativity, new and upcoming directors are turning instead to other horror films as their core inspiration. It’s no wonder that the results feel second hand. It’s difficult to fully appreciate now the impact that Texas Chainsaw and Night of the Living Dead had, on both audiences and other film directors, when they were originally released. But it doesn’t use up a great deal of research time to discover that these movies were made thirty-nine and forty-five years ago respectively.

I for one think it’s time we had some new iconography. It doesn’t take anything away from the classics. In fact it helps us appreciate them more for what they were.

And just as there is innovative and wonderful horror fiction still out there if you care to look for it, there is still exciting and original horror cinema. In the past year alone I have seen films that have delighted me and impressed me and would definitely withstand multiple viewings. Just off the top of my head:

Sightseers, dir. Ben Wheatley. An inimitably British offering, insanely inventive and bizarrely appealing. One of a kind. I loved it.

Stoker, dir. Chan-wook Park. A stunning film visually, intense, visceral, surreal. Amazing use of music. I’m anxious to see it again.

Agnosia, dir. Eugenio Mira. This was amazing – an off-the-wall high gothic drama of mistaken identity, false imprisonment, dastardly goings-on below stairs. I’m not sure it even had a theatrical release in the UK, which is a criminal shame. The cinematography alone makes it a must-see for anyone with a genuine interest in dark fantasy.

The Monk, dir. Dominik Moll. Sounds like it’s going to be just another horror movie, but it really isn’t. It’s weird, and unsettling, and beautiful, with a denouement that is as brilliant as it is unexpected. Bravo.

Byzantium, dir. Neil Jordan. Heartfelt commitment and genuine creative vision, plus a beautiful script, made a mini-masterpiece of this otherwise fairly conventional vampire story. I have such fond memories of seeing this, and look forward to adding the DVD to our collection.

Only God Forgives, dir. Nicolas Winding Refn. I loved Drive, and so was eager to see Refn’s follow-up and in fact I defected from FrightFest for a couple of hours on Friday to do just that. More horrifying than anything the FF programme had to offer, this is a total one-off. It’s terrifyingly tense, amazing to look at, reminded me a little of Gaspar Noe’s Enter the Void, but you can see it all in one go without losing consciousness. Makes Lynchian use of karaoke music. Ryan Gosling is brilliant. Kristin Scott Thomas is worth the price of entry all by herself.

So – the films are out there, but as with the best speculative fiction they tend to lurk in the borderlands. Often they’re not advertised as horror at all – because the concerns they express extend further and wider than can be expressed in a single word. These films are about characters, not effects. They tell stories, and they put the needs of the story before the demands of a label. They have nothing in common with the Hollywood idea of horror, nothing to do with the horror boom of the 1980s, nothing to do with anything but the original and passionate vision of their creators.

This is the kind of horror cinema I want to support, and from now on, as with the books I read, I’m going to make sure that this is where my money goes. I have no further interest in feeding the machine that is commercial horror. Machines are great at producing industrial quantities of identical product. Which kind of says it all really, doesn’t it?

There’s only so much you can do with the vampire subgenre, and you can bet that most everything you can do has already been done before. But at least in Neil Jordan’s new film Byzantium there is the satisfaction of seeing those things done beautifully, and very well.

Byzantium tells the story of two vampires on the run from their past, seeking sanctuary in an obscure town and knocking ordinary lives off kilter as they play out the latest round in a personal vendetta that has already been going on for a couple of centuries. It’s a familiar set-up – horror fans will have no trouble in catching echoes of Interview With the Vampire, Let the Right One In, The Hunger, even. What’s less familiar is the sheer haunting intensity of this film, the atmosphere it creates through its striking combination of opulence and understatement, the curious and (for me) utterly compelling interaction between the blandly prosaic and high gothic.

The cinematography is scintillating. The way the script grounds itself in the commonplace and moves in a stately progression towards the more grandiose abstractions of poetry is an act of daring that the screenwriter, Moira Buffini, pulls off rather marvellously.

Everyone in this movie plays their part with commitment and appropriate intensity. Saoirse Ronan is outstanding.

Horror cinema has never been more popular, it seems, than it is today. Barely a week goes by without a new horror movie being released – but with the predominance of the over-produced, shoddily conceived and lamely scripted kind of Hollywood product still in the ascendant, there are precious few genuinely decent ones around. It’s all the more satisfying, then, when a film as gorgeous and thoughtful and lovingly crafted as Byzantium arrives on our screens. I came away from it excited and moved – it has a killer ending – and all the more so because Byzantium was filmed in Hastings. Our town looks perfect in her role – mysterious and end-of-summer and faintly spooky – and the familiar locations have been utilized with the same appropriate and effective understatement as everything else in the film. It was lovely to see local people turning out in force to see it – there was a real sense of anticipation and the excited chatter as the audience left the cinema told its own success story. This movie is good for Hastings, and good for horror.

Byzantium is vamptastic. Go and see it.

A number of reviews of Park Chan-wook’s new film Stoker have talked a lot about Hitchcock, but for me the movie owes more – so much more – to Park’s own earlier and inimitable ‘Vengeance’ trilogy.

There have been some miserable and pointless remakes of Asian horror movies. While Gore Verbinski’s 2002 remake of Hideo Nakata’s classic 1998 film Ring was not a bad effort, the Guard brothers’ 2009 The Uninvited, the Hollywood reboot of Kim Jee-woon’s deliciously haunting and strange 2003 film A Tale of Two Sisters, was so bland it was an insult, and you don’t have to go a million miles to find other examples. Park’s insistently compelling new movie provides the perfect antidote; for Stoker, the surface glamour of Hollywood is just so much camouflage. Stoker has not so much the feel of a remake as a rethink: what would happen if you took the characterlessly opulent interiors, vapidly beautiful people and self-indulgent first-world ennui that is the staple background to so much Hollywood horror, and forcibly injected it with some of the cinematic elegance, narrative ambiguity and edge-of-the-seat dramatic tension that has characterised much of the recent speculative cinema coming out of Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong and South Korea? The answer to that question is Stoker.

I adore Park’s films. I admire his ‘Vengeance’ trilogy as one of the most strongly argued cinematic achievements of recent times, and I thought his 2009 foray into the vampire genre, Thirst, was stunning. (I mean, come on, a vampire movie based on Therese Raquin? Genius!) Stoker is Park’s first English-language movie, and it concerns itself with vampires of a different kind. There’s no blood-sucking here, but in homage to the movie’s title there’s plenty of emotional vampirism, with Matthew Goode’s smoothly sinister Uncle Charlie mad as one of the Mantle twins, and Nicole Kidman – as Evelyn Stoker, a disappointed and jealous heiress sleepwalking her way through mid-life – hasn’t played anyone this demented since Eyes Wide Shut. And if it’s blood-letting you’re looking for, Park, here as everywhere, isn’t one to leave you disappointed.

The film’s surfaces are luscious, velvety, dripping with menace and double meaning and gorgeous hyper-realism, and Park’s use of music – as in the ‘Vengeance’ films – is outstanding (Clint Mansell’s Philip-Glass-like score, in the piano stool scene particularly, brings to mind Tony Scott’s delirious use of Schubert’s piano trios in The Hunger). Indeed there is something of the ballet about this film, a slow choreography of disaster that mounts towards a noisily inevitable – and almost joyous – finale of violence.

For those who like their horror wild and weird, this film is a must.

I like books and films about people who fly aeroplanes for a living. William Langewiesche’s books Fly by Wire and Aloft both proved heart-poundingly exciting for me, the very best kind of serious, elegantly written, passionate investigative writing, and with enough dramatic tension to sink a dozen more conventional thrillers. Last year I finally sat down to watch Philip Kaufman’s The Right Stuff, with mixed expectations (at 193 minutes a film better have a reason for existing or you’d walk out in protest) and even now some many months later I’m still a little in love with Sam Shepard’s Chuck Yeager, and the movie seems unlikely to be dislodged from its joint pole position (with Tarkovsky’s Solaris) at the top of my personal pantheon of cinema any time soon.

I could go on about how weird this all is, given that I am a very nervous flyer to say the least, but we’ll save that for another day. But from what I’ve written above you’d probably have no trouble in guessing that I was very much looking forward to Robert Zemeckis’s new movie Flight, starring Denzel Washington as a maverick airline captain, fighting to save his reputation after an investigation into a fatal air accident proves that he was drunk at the controls. Even the trailer had my pulse racing. I couldn’t wait.

We went to see it on Saturday night. It’s not as long as The Right Stuff, but it’s 138 minutes, which doesn’t exactly make it a short. The opening thirty of those minutes, which deal with the air accident itself, created an atmosphere of what I can only describe as rapt tension – it felt as if everyone in the cinema was holding their breath, so much so that when the plane finally hit the ground I felt a noticeable shift in air pressure as the audience collectively exhaled. And for the following hour and a half, that sense of drama and involvement continued. Washington was just great – wholly believable in his role, dignified yet tragic, brilliant yet dangerously flawed, his Captain ‘Whip’ Whitaker seemed likely to go down as a 9 carat portrayal of the kind of addictive personality that is so often the burden of the highly gifted. Kelly Reilly gave a powerful performance as Nicole, the recovering drug user who befriends Whitaker, only to leave him when it becomes clear that their relationship is likely to push her back over the edge into dependency.

But bugger me those last fifteen minutes. If you ever want to know what it feels like, watching a decent script being strapped to a gurney and having its throat cut, I would urge you to go and see Flight, whose numbingly sententious, tritely simplistic and just generally godawful final act made me so physically and mentally uncomfortable I couldn’t sit still in my seat. What Flight finally and sadly reminded me of was that spate of bizarre films from the late seventies and early eighties (Run Baby Run was one, The Hiding Place was another) which cast themselves as gritty dramas with serious themes but turn out to be little more than propaganda, the peddling of a particular brand of judgemental morality. Just who was responsible for this appalling blunder, which in a matter of moments reduces a credible and creditable exploration of human fallability to a mawkish mess? Whether it was the scriptwriter himself or a Hollywood committee, they ought to be rounded up and made to watch Zemeckis’s earlier outing, What Lies Beneath, which similarly falls apart disastrously in its final half hour. Only that didn’t matter so much, because it was just a stupid ghost story with Michelle Pfeiffer in it. Flight could actually have been a serious movie.

But if Flight seemed an apt demonstration of that old adage about a leopard never changing its spots, the other film I saw this week, Quentin Tarantino’s latest offering Django Unchained, appeared to prove that it is after all possible to come back from the grave. Tarantino’s 2009 film Inglourious Basterds, which I looked forward to loudly and at every opportunity, turned out to be so crass and so embarrasingly bad it still makes me squirm to think about it. (I’ve actually sat through it twice to date – and God it’s long – because Chris, who’s not QT’s biggest fan anyway, refused to believe just how awful it was, and so I watched it again with him just to prove the point. Turned out I was right the first time.) But Tarantino is one of those directors I enjoy so much that just as I forgave Woody Allen for Whatever Works, so I was looking forward to Django more or less as if Basterds had never happened.

What a movie. Fellow director Spike Lee has criticised Django for being ‘disrespectful’, but as the film’s star Jamie Foxx asserts, Lee’s position is considerably weakened by him not having seen it. Foxx is a passionate defender of the movie, and he should be proud of his role in it. If he ever gives a better performance than he does in Django I look forward to seeing it.

Django effortlessly achieves what Basterds so memorably failed to do: it combines drama with brio, furious seriousness with QT’s unique brand of deadpan, pitch black humour. Oh yes, it’s daring, controversial even – it treads close to the edge of madness on so many levels. But somehow – miraculously – it keeps its balance. What Django is not is a documentary about the American slave trade. What it is is a grand fantasia, a Wagnerian behemoth of insane brilliance. If it proves something that I was crying during some parts of this film and laughing with delight in others, then there it is.

And bloody hell, that QT man can write. His timing, his feel for dramatic irony and structure, his love of narrative gamesmanship, above all the skilful construction and effortless power of his sentences, is a thrill to experience, every time. That, more than anything else, is why I love him.

It’s worth paying the ticket price of Django Unchained just for the soundtrack. And me? I don’t mind admitting I paid it twice.