Brevity is the new black.

2012

I enjoyed this film. It’s far too long, but it has no pretentions about its true nature. There’s no environmental message to chide the audience, so you can just sit back and enjoy the millions of dollars of CGI that makes up a majority of the film. Also John Cusack is cool and the fake Russian accents are hilarious. Not a particularly intelligent response, but this is not a particularly intelligent film.

The Informant

Have a guess how many people walked out of the screening of this film I went to see? Answer is at the bottom*. A chubby Matt Damon was on rather good form as the bipolar businessman working with the FBI to bring down corporate corruption in the corn industry. It’s better than the second two Ocean’s films, and it’s quite funny, but The Informant will be quickly forgotten.

Harry Brown

A film which many labelled as the British Gran Torino, but which is in fact nothing like Eastwood’s masterpiece†. For one thing Gran Torino revealed the pointlessness of vigilantism, and ultimately it was the rule of law and the police that put right the social injustices of a relatively realistic multicultural suburban America. Harry Brown, on the other hand, is a far more fantastic, with its exaggerated youthful gangsters, over the top drug addicts, saintly and not-at-all-bigoted Harry Brown and completely incompetent/impotent police officers. Having said that‡ I did quite enjoy the bouts of violence and uninformed social comment which were jarringly at odds with each other, but did a lot to illicit a morbid curiosity which kept things interesting. I couldn’t help picturing Harry as a kind of Jigsaw figure§, and if you’ve seen HB I think you’ll know what I mean. Misguided as a protest film, but moderately effective as a thriller.

*About 7. I have no idea why.

†I have an unhealthy admiration of Gran Torino. It was one of the funniest films of last year, as well as one of the most progressive in terms of message.

‡Watch the latest episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm for a critique of this phrase.

§From the Saw series of horror movies