Thursday 30 June 2011

Paul (Mottola, 2011)

What you will make of ‘Paul’, the Simon Pegg and Nick Frost sci-fi film really depends on how you view it. If you go in expecting the third part in the ‘Blood and Ice Cream’ trilogy (‘Shaun of the Dead’ & ‘Hot Fuzz’ being the first two parts), you are likely to be disappointed, ‘Paul’ lacks the distinctly British feel of the other two and that does affect the kind of jokes involved. However watch it expecting a film full of Pegg and Frost’s typical sense of humour mixed with the style of Rogen and Wiig then you are much more likely to see ‘Paul’ for what it is, and that’s a damn funny film.

‘Paul’ offers Pegg and Frost to fully let loose their inner geeks, the film starts at comic-con and involves aliens, Area 51 and several discussions about probing. It’s the story two British comic book geeks, Clive Gollings (Frost) and Graeme Willy (Pegg), who set off from comic-con in San Diego intending to visit a number of the most famous extraterrestrial sites in the U.S but who find their trip interrupted by a seriously close encounter with a Seth Rogen voiced alien called Paul.

The film is packed with references to all things alien, both real world conspiracy theories and the sci-fi of films and television and though you definitely don’t need to be a geek to enjoy this film, if you are one, you’ll be laughing more often at all the little touches; a personal favourite of mine being the choice of actress for one particular cameo, which I won’t spoil for those who haven’t seen the film yet.

The whole cast is superb, starting with the central duo, but also including Jason Bateman as a shady men-in-black-esque government agent and the always delightful Kristen Wiig as a creationist Christian thrown completely outside of her comfort zone by the events of the film; there is a scene involving her experimenting with swear words which rivals the equivalent moment in ‘The King’s Speech’ for proving that if the actor is charismatic enough, swear words can still be funny in their own right. Thanks to some really strong animation Paul never seems out of place and Rogen’s voice perfectly fits with the character; despite being a skinny grey alien, Paul is also unmistakably Rogen in so many ways.

‘Paul’ also works as a road movie, full of stunning American scenery and eccentric examples of national stereotypes, where the characters learn things about themselves and each other as they travel around, but it knows just when to throw in a crude gag or bit of slapstick to ensure the tone never becomes too twee.

It will never win awards for being the cleverest comedy in the world, but it is a really enjoyable, wonderfully geeky and joyously idiotic film full of engaging characters and tongue in cheek references.

What lets it down ever so slightly is that the heart of the film, Pegg and Frost, just aren’t quite as likeable, or for large chunks as funny, as they are in ‘Shaun’ or ‘Hot Fuzz’. There is almost a hint of them trying too hard and I wonder if perhaps that is the result of ‘Paul’ being directed by Greg Mottola rather than their friend and usual director Edgar Wright; this isn’t a criticism of Mottola who does a great job, merely Wright knows exactly how to get the most out of the pair and that certain little spark to the writing and acting is missing here.

It wouldn’t surprise me at all if ‘Paul’ ends up actually being more popular over in America than the previously mentioned pair of films, the reference points are American and the jokes are aimed at them, so it is only natural that I, despite enjoying the film a lot, feel like it merely wetted my appetite for part three in their own trilogy.

4/5

Wednesday 29 June 2011

A Classic Comeback

I’ve said before that I’m not naturally a big fan of tennis and this remains true, but I’ve watched quite a lot of this Wimbledon competition and today there was one of the finest tennis games I’ve ever seen and that includes the final between Nadal and Federer a couple of years ago which seems to be considered the greatest Wimbledon final of my lifetime.

It wasn’t the match between Murray and Lopez which was a boringly straightforward win for the British player; he never looked particularly challenged by Lopez, satisfied to simply break his service once a set and rely on his serve to do the rest. Like most people I’m not a big fan of Murray as a person, he’s nowhere near as likable Henman, but he definitely seems to be a much more talented player than Tim, capable of the moments of flair and skill that set apart good players from potential champions.

No the great match was the one between Federer and Tsonga. Now Tsonga is 12th seed for this tournament, so hardly a poor player by any standard, but unless you are Rafael Nadal, when you play Federer you play him as the clear underdog. Tsonga looked done for when he lost the second set tie break, leaving him 2-0 down, a deficit no one had overturned at a Grand Slam against the Swiss supremo; somehow though he summoned up the confidence and determination to play the game of his life and fought back to win three sets to two. Tsonga is a quality player, powerful and skilful in equal measures and he fully deserved his win. It was a comeback to rival some of the classic football matches; Liverpool v AC Milan in the Champions League final being my all time favourite.

In the last set the crowd in Centre Court were treated to a very rare sight indeed, Roger Federer fully out of ideas and resigned to defeat. He is a player not used to losing but he took it with good grace, accepting that he had lost to a player who had shown real bravery and ability. I’d back Tsonga to give Djokovic a good game in the semi finals and I really think we could be seeing the Frenchman in the final, against Nadal would be my guess.

Sadly I think Murray is just far too British to actually be successful in the end, doomed to experience the same sporting disappointment that seems to befall any Brit who gets highly tipped for success.

Tuesday 28 June 2011

The King's Speech (Hooper, 2010)

Having arrived a little late at the ‘King’s Speech’ party I have to admit I was a little underwhelmed; it’s a very good movie, but as with anything that receives the level of praise or hype that it did, it was always likely to disappoint a little when viewed through that skewed perspective. You spend several months being told a film is one of the great British films of all time, a triumph of cinema and the rightful champion of every awards show imaginable, and then you sit down to watch 2 hours of film which are simply never going to match up to the level of expectation created. I felt that way straight after the first time i saw it, a few weeks ago, and i was left with the same feeling this evening when i watched it again.

That’s what happened here and I say this as much out of frustration that I didn’t see it at the cinema before the praise reached saturation point (around the build up to the Oscars) as it any criticism of the film itself. It is a really enjoyable and uplifting film, with two brilliant central performances and some great directing by Tom Hooper, I just wish I could have seen it at a point when it would have been more possible to make my own judgement of the film rather than compare it to the hype.

Colin Firth is rightfully considered a national institution; he’s a brilliant actor who embodies a lot of the stereotypes of being British, that British people are actually quite proud of, rather than the ones we’d rather didn’t exist.

I have been trying to think of another actor who could have done his roles in ‘The King’s Speech’ and ‘A Single Man’ as well as him and I’m coming up blank and that surely is the mark of a great actor, when two wildly different roles both seem to have been made for him. He has a special skill for showing proud men with vulnerability and some fairly serious emotional traumas in their life and though for me he never quite reaches the heights of that phone call in ‘A Single Man’, his performance here is top draw, full of all the complexity, subtlety, humour and charm we’ve come to expect from one of the finest British actors around.

His performance is perhaps topped though by Geoffrey Rush as the Australian speech therapist who helps Firth overcome his stammer and address the nation just when it needed its leader most. In fact it seems almost unfair to try and judge one actor against the other when what makes the film work is the way the two interact with each other, the relationship that develops between them seeming so believable and natural in both its high points and its low ones that to judge them individually seems to miss the point.

It would also be unfair to ignore the work Helena Bonham Carter does in one of the most reserved roles I can remember seeing her in; she proves that she can do prim and proper just as well as she can play the slightly unhinged characters she has made her own over her career.

It is not a perfect film, nor necessarily the uncontested Best Picture of the 2011 Oscar nominees; ‘The Fighter’ and ‘The Social Network’ I would argue are both at least as good in their own way, and I’m yet to see ‘Black Swan’ or ‘True Grit’ but I’m led to believe that any other year they’d have stood a deserved chance of winning the statue themselves.

However it is enjoyable, even on repeat viewings, and includes some great central performances, so I’d advise anyone to watch it, just try your hardest to forget about the hype and experience it as what it really is, a damn good and wonderfully British two hours of entertainment.

This is a song from another artist who did an excellent set at Glastonbury (A good half hour of which is available on the BBC site and well worth checking out).

Monday 27 June 2011

X-Men: First Class (Vaughan, 2011)

Cinema is loved for the escapism it offers and today it offered a physical form of escape as well as the emotional and imaginative one all good films should provide; the air conditioned screen was almost heavenly after a journey across the city in the sticky and humid heat.

It also helped that the film I was seeing turned out to be good, really good in fact, and a lot better than I was really expecting. I went to see ‘X-Men: First Class’ with the same amount of enthusiasm and expectation I go to see any super-hero movie with; I expect to be reasonably entertained but left feeling a little empty, with only the Nolan directed Batman movies bucking that particular trend.

Now ‘First Class’ never quite reaches the heights of ‘Batman Begins’ or ‘The Dark Knight’ for two main reasons.

Firstly it is limited by its source material; the Batman films are about one man’s efforts to clean up one city, giving the stories focus and appropriate scale, but the X-Men comics are over-flowing with characters with diverse and fantastical abilities and plots that take them all over America and the world. This has the effect of meaning that any film, no matter how well done, is going to struggle to avoid the pitfall of it being a film of powers attached to random people rather than a film full of characters who happen to have powers. In the first 3 X-Men films, and the ‘Wolverine’ focussed Origins movie, characterisation for anyone outside of two or three key characters is minimal at best, leaving their heroics or betrayals to go barely noticed; we’re aware it was probably important but we don’t understand why they did what they did or who it will matter to. ‘First Class’ actually does a better job of developing some of the minor characters than any of the previous films, with a number of the supporting mutants, including Mystique and The Beast getting back story sections that explain a lot in the earlier films.

It is an origins movie and does, to a fan who has never read the comics but loves the concept, a pretty great job of setting up who everyone is and why they do the things they do, incidentally a much better job than the film with ‘origins’ in the title managed.

However at its core, ‘X-Men: First Class’ is a film that is telling the story of the two key players in the X-Men universe, the telepathic and compassionate Professor Xavier, at this point not yet in his customary wheel-chair, and the calculating and powerful Magneto, whose ability to manipulate metal offers him the ability to enact his revenge on a world he believes will always manipulate, mistrust and abuse mutants like himself and Professor X.

It is set with the Cuban Missile Crisis and the 60s as a backdrop, with Xavier (James McAvoy), initially helped by the C.I.A, attempting to locate and contact other mutants, so as to let them know they are not alone. At this point he and Eric Lensherr/Magneto (Michael Fassbender) are friends, brought together by their mutations and a shared aim of stopping Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon), a mutant intent on bringing about nuclear apocalypse so as to kick start a new age where mutants rule the world. Their motives are shown to be quite different, through an excellent opening half an hour which takes us from the concentration camps of Nazi Germany to a New York bar where Xavier uses his ability to charm women.

McAvoy and Fassbender are both superb as the charismatic leaders who begin to rally round fellow mutants, giving the impression of genuine friendship and respect while always hinting that their views of the world around them are radically different. There are even little elements of bromance that creep in until the plot moves towards its dramatic finale and the light hearted moments which had characterised the opening hour or so disappear completely.

The film attempts to include an awful lot of different plot events, with the pacing quick throughout but, and this is one of the true achievements of the film, never frantically or confusingly so. So much happens that there are points where you wouldn’t object to a couple of the slower, gentler scenes being given a few more minutes running time, but the fact that you are never left wondering what just happened or who the last person introduced was, is a testament to the control exhibited by Vaughan throughout.

‘First Class’ doesn’t quite match Vaughan’s previous film, ‘Kick Ass’ either for comic moments of darkness, it is a straighter super-hero movie aimed at a much wider potential audience, so if you go hoping that one of the younger mutants might call an enemy the C-word you will be left disappointed.

That brings me to the second reason why ‘First Class’ is, despite being a very good film, left trailing in the wake of the latest instalments of the caped crusader, it isn’t dark enough. There are dark moments, a couple of which are, respectively harrowing and shocking, but they are few and far between, considering this is a film about a group of humans whose evolutionary mutations mean they have been bullied, have hidden and are going to be ostracized and hunted down by a society that doesn’t understand them. This is probably a deliberate move considering the target audience and the sheer range of characters and events involved, but it does take away from the film for me. It is partly just that the X-Men are people with super powers while Batman is a rich, tough guy, so the scope for dark, gritty realism will always be limited, but I would love, if the film does start off a new trilogy as Fox Studios apparently hope it will, for the series to go in a darker direction, managing to capture the fear, resentment and anger experienced by the mutants, more successfully than has been done so far.

‘X-Men: First Class’ is an excellent film, by far the best from this particular source material, with good acting, scripting and direction, but for me it suffered a little too much from the summer blockbuster limitations. That’s the reality though for all films, and especially superhero films based on comics, no matter how good a job you do; you can never keep everyone happy.

4/5

Sunday 26 June 2011

Easy A (Gluck, 2010)

Your virginity in High School can be a risky status symbol in the world of Hollywood films; losing it can be your main aim, something to pursue to great comedic and personal effect (‘American Pie’), you can fear it for the deadly consequences (pretty much any American horror movie from the 80s), you can avoid mentioning it in an effort to avoid the social stigma (Anthony Michael Hall’s character Brian Johnson in the ‘Breakfast Club’) or just cross your fingers and hope for the best because you’re too damn confused by weird goings and/or time travel(‘Donnie Darko’, ‘Brick’ or ‘Back To The Future’).

This review is going to focus on the damage your sexual status can do to your standing in that most temperamental of hierarchies, the High School pecking order, specifically what unfolds when Olive claims to, as one character describes, have “thrown her cat” at someone (incidentally one of my favourite euphemisms since Monica referred to her “flower” in ‘Friends’).

The film in question is ‘Easy A’ and Olive is played by the superb Emma Stone. I doubt I was the only guy who fell more than a little in love with Ms Stone while watching ‘Zombieland’ and she continues to combine incredible comedic timing, stunning looks and a love for slightly odd roles in this film which riffs off ‘The Scarlet Letter’ and it’s themes of adultery and the social ostracism that can follow.

Olive’s story is one that highlights just how quickly a lie can move from rumour to widely believed truth in a school setting and just how impossible it is to reverse that process. A little lie about the loss of her virginity to get a friend off her back rapidly expands to the point where she is the school slut despite still being a virgin, a misconception she deliberately sends up by stitching a capital ‘A’ on a number of the revealing corsets she takes to wearing.

She’s determined not to back down to social pressure or stigma but as with the majority of people who’ve ever told a fib to change one small part of their life, lies have a habit of spiralling out of control with little concern for your original intentions. Soon she’s granting completely imaginary status shags to the outcasts of her school and earning a reputation she can’t hope to control.

Stone is superb throughout, backed up by a supporting cast including ‘Gossip Girl’s’ Penn Badgely, and genuine contenders for the crown of coolest parents in film history, Patricia Clarkson and Stanley Tucci. In the end though it is the 22 year old actress from Arizona that makes this film tick, injecting every scene with comedic value and a stubborn indifference to conventions that puts her in the same category as Ellen Page in ‘Juno’.

‘Easy A’ is a great film precisely because it is aware of its 80s predecessors; the final scene is sound tracked by ‘Don’t You Forget About Me’, a song immortalised in ‘The Breakfast Club’ and there is a scene that deliberately references one of the classic romantic moments from 80s cinema, which I don’t want to spoil here.

It is a film which understands its place in the grand scheme of Hollywood High School movies and brings a brilliantly late 2000s atmosphere to the genre, capturing the timeless themes of trying to fit in at school, wanting to find someone worthy of taking that big decision for and the reality that if you were to remove social cliques most students would have a remarkable amount in common.

For a high school comedy there’s very little focus paid to the jocks, that staple of cinema and school, with the main antagonists instead being from the evangelical Christians who take offence to the rumours about Olive, and this makes for a pleasant change from the standard themes, though I’d make an uninformed guess and say that it’s just as accurate a representation of the social perils of American High School, considering my understanding of the influence of the Christian right in America currently.

As with the majority of the 80s movies it referenced, whether directly or not, this film has a superb soundtrack, full of the kind of euphoric indie songs that make you want to despite your better instincts.

The 80s was full of a lot of political and cultural concepts that the world would have been better off without, but it was the decade that mastered the High School movie and ‘Easy A’ has proved, as ‘Mean Girls’ did almost 7 years ago, that the themes are timeless and just require a little update for the post Millennium generation.

4/5

Today's song is one from the same band I wrote about yesterday, something I normally avoid doing, but I gave the first two Elbow albums another listen today and I felt this song deserved posting, especially as a lot of people probably don't know it anywhere near as well as they should.

Saturday 25 June 2011

A Very British Summertime

I experienced two moments today that felt like the perfect embodiments of British summertime, or at least what I want it to be like.

Moment one came while watching Wimbledon and a match between the 2nd seed Djokovic and the 32nd seed Baghdatis. The match took place on Centre Court in clear sunshine and, in front of a passionate crowd a classic example of the British affection for the underdog unfolded. Djokovic is a great player, perhaps one of the only real challengers to the Nadal/Federer dominance of the past 8 years, and I’m sure if or when he comes up against either of them he will get a much more favourable response from the crowd, but by the 4th set of this afternoons match it was abundantly clear where their affection lay, and it wasn’t with the Serb.

Baghdatis, the 26 year old Cypriot, always looked likely to lose the match, his opponent was that little bit sharper and more assured, as you’d expect from someone rated as highly as he is, but especially in the 4th set he put up such a spirited fight that the crowd warmed to him to a degree usually reserved for the plucky but doomed British players at this tournament.

At 4 games to 2 down in that set, with the overall score at 2 sets to 1 in Djokovic’s favour, it seemed almost a foregone conclusion that the Serbian ace would see the rest of the set out with a minimum of effort but Baghdatis battled on and it reached the point where every point he won was cheered to the rafters and calls of “Come on Marcos” rang out.

Djokovic eventually won 6-4 and though he looked a little frustrated with the crowd’s reaction, he’s experienced enough to know that it was affection for the Cypriot rather than any negative opinion of him or his performance.

It’s a British stereotype, but I suspect it actually extends to most nationalities, the affection for the underdog, stories of someone battling to try and beat a far superior foe, often regardless of whether they eventually win or not. I’m not a massive tennis fan, nor do I have any particularly strong feelings of any kind for Baghdatis, but I really enjoyed this particular game and found the way the crowd got behind the player kind of inspirational.

Moment two came while watching footage from Glastonbury, specifically watching Elbow’s set on the Pyramid Stage. I love Elbow, especially the previous two albums, and a number of their songs seem to have been written almost with this particular moment in mind. They were playing just as the sun began to set, in front of a crowd which stretched out as far as the eye could see. It was one of those perfect festival moments, the kind that when you see them on TV fill you with an intense longing to be actually in that field. It doesn’t hurt that Guy Garvey has to be one of the most likable people making music at the moment, his charisma and charm was clear to see as he interacted with the crowd and likewise their affection for him was displayed through passionate sing-a-longs and some entertaining crowd stunts. The performance of ‘One Day Like This’ was suitably euphoric, ‘Lippy Kids’ was incredible and ‘Open Arms’ provided the very definition of a feel-good moment as the entire crowd sang the chorus at the top of their lungs while the sun began to sank behind the Somerset hills. However the song of theirs I want to finish this blog with is the studio version of the one which I believe was the strongest performance of the lot, a fantastic rendition of ‘Grounds for Divorce’.

Friday 24 June 2011

A Festival On My Laptop

Sadly I’ve never been to a big weekend festival, though I am a big supporter of ‘Tramlines Festival’ the free summer festival held in Sheffield which has been excellent the past two years and is looking promising this one. Despite never attending, I do however always look forward to the weekends of the Glastonbury and Leeds festivals as they guarantee a whole host of entertaining live footage from my favourite bands.

The BBC tend to devote BBC3 to showing a mixture of live sets and highlights while also streaming them online and uploading them to view over the next week or so in an archive; it’s an opportunity I always try to take full advantage of. It won’t ever be the same as being at the festival and experiencing the atmosphere, but enjoying the sets of some great artists in the comfort of my own home is a luxury I’m incredibly grateful for. As a general rule I manage to see a good 20 or 30 sets via the TV and Internet and that's a remarkable opportunity as well as an argument in favour of the license fee and the value of the BBC.

Tonight’s highlight from the opening day of Glastonbury for me was Mumford and Sons set. I’m a big fan of those guys and their debut album is one of my most played CDs from the last couple of years; they offer folksy indie full of banjo riffs and the kind of cheesy, melodramatic romantic lyrics that I can’t help but love and they make me want to dance, or perhaps the better verb would be to jig.

Despite the rain, the mud and the facilities which I am sure are in a pretty terrible state already, watching that set made me incredibly jealous of the people in those Somerset fields; Mumford seemed on great form and the crowd really seemed to be enjoying it, both the well known favourites off of the first album and the new tracks off of the album they claim will be recorded very soon ('Lover's Eyes' stood out in particular and there are decent live versions on Youtube if you missed the Glastonbury set). If those performances were anything to go by I will definitely be looking forward to hearing the 2nd album and I’ll be keeping an eye out for any tour dates I can make.

I’m going to be spending the rest of this weekend alternating between coverage of Glastonbury, coverage of Wimbledon and finishing off Battlestar Galactica and I’ll probably write a review of the best sets I’ve watched from the festival on either Monday or Tuesday.

Today's song had to be a Mumford and Sons one, so i thought i'd go for one that's slightly less well known than 'Little Lion Man' and 'White Blank Page', despite my love for those two tracks.

Thursday 23 June 2011

Too Big To Sue?

Regular readers may have noticed that recently my blog has been heavy on the film posts with very little mention of football or politics. The football side is easier to explain, there’s not a whole lot happening right now at Forest and other than the on-going corruption at FIFA, not all that much more happening elsewhere that I know enough about to comment on. The new Chelsea managerial appointment is big news, but I know next to nothing about him so I’ll leave it to others to comment. A summer without football is always a slightly dull time for me; I get tired of the endless transfer speculation as papers try to fill their sports pages.

As for politics I think I’m suffering from burnout after a year of university, a kind of frustrated cynicism with it all which makes me unwilling to keep writing and thinking about it now that I’m on holiday. However there’s a story from across the pond that I feel deserves a bit of attention just because of how important a civil rights case it is and how worrying a development it could prove to be in the battle between workers rights and big business in the United States.

On Monday the US Supreme Court dismissed, by a 5-4 majority, the plaintiff’s case in one of the biggest potential gender equality cases in American history. The case was against Walmart, one of the biggest employers in the US and could potentially have involved up to 1.6m female employees. Starting almost 10 years ago the plaintiffs hoped to bring a class-action lawsuit against the company for widespread discrimination and inequality.

The case relates to female staff being passed over for promotions, deliberately pushed into dead end sections of the company and generally receiving lower pay with fewer opportunities than male employees across the 3,400 stores nationwide.

However the Supreme Court ruled that despite their being plenty of evidence for illegal practices all over the country, there wasn’t anything sufficiently resembling evidence of a company wide policy of discrimination. They’ve said that any individual plaintiffs are still welcome to pursue legal action against their specific branches, but there will be no class-action lawsuit. So now Walmart only have to fear a few individual, ‘David V Goliath’ court cases where they’ll be under little or no pressure to settle rather than a high profile court case involving staff from 3,400 different stores.

The Court voted along ideological lines, with the 5 conservative justices voting against the action, arguing that it would not be appropriate to bring a lawsuit against the company on the whole for practices that are down to individual stores. It suggests that barring a company-wide memo telling all managers to discriminate against women, or changing the company slogan to ‘Men Are Just Better’, big companies are immune from the kind of legal action on equality issues which could really damage them and force change.

The last two 36 months have been the years of ‘Too Big To Fail’, could this be a sign of a new trend, ‘Too Big To Sue’? The precedent has now been set and any future class action lawsuits against equivalent companies are going to have to work even harder just to get the case to court. It’s another victory for big corporations over the rights of the staff they employ, it makes it clear that employees are going to struggle to band together in order to ensure their employment rights when dealing with major corporations.

Today's song is by an artist i saw supporting Lisa Mitchell in Leeds over a year ago now and i was blown away, despite the fact i'd never heard of him before he started playing.

Wednesday 22 June 2011

Seven (Fincher, 1995)

I’m not a big murder mystery fan, straight forward crime procedurals leave me a little cold, so for a film or TV show in this genre to impress me it’s going to require one or more of three things; a fantastic concept, a brilliant script or great central performances.

‘Seven’, the 1995 film from David Fincher qualifies on all counts. The concept is superb; an insane but incredibly intelligent killer is carrying out killings based on the 7 deadly sins and the way those murders are realised are as clever as they are gruesome. The script is strong; drawing on the traditional relationship between the old cop and his younger partner the dialogue is great between the two, with Morgan Freeman’s aging detective William Somerset laconic and cynical compared to Brad Pitt’s enthusiastic and fast talking David Mills. What makes this film the fantastic piece of cinema that it undoubtedly is however, are the performances of Pitt, Freeman and the actor who plays ‘John Doe’, the murderer who believes he is delivering a message about society and it’s tolerance for sinning.

I’m deliberately not saying the actors name because if you haven’t seen the film already, the revelation is all part of the cocktail that builds up throughout the film, making you feel permanently uncomfortable and unsure.

Freeman and Pitt are brilliant, they give fairly standard genre roles charisma, passion and believability and I would argue are perhaps the absolute ideal actors to play those two roles, especially at that point in their careers. Pitt especially fits the role; he was just making his move towards being a name a film could be launched on, just as Mills is making the step up to being a lead homicide detective.

The identity of Doe isn’t revealed until a long way into the film, ensuring that we never know any more than the two detectives, yet the character is so utterly chilling and calculated that you end up forgetting that he’s barely in the film; it feels like he was there watching all the way through.

It’s a grim film overall, set in a generic American city where it never seems to stop raining, and the film is shot with a palette of varying shades of grey, helping to create the unrelenting sense that this, as Somerset argues around the halfway mark, can’t possibly end well.

Fincher creates an intensely uncomfortable atmosphere throughout, ‘Seven’ takes place in a world of seemingly unrelenting melancholy and cruelty and it is against that backdrop that he gives the audience the scope to use their imaginations; he goes for the psychological horror rather than the slasher, never showing the actual murders but merely the hideous aftermath as the detectives investigate. The audience are asked to think how a person could do such things, to try and picture it themselves, rather than shown and I’m a big advocate for a person’s imagination always being a more effective tool for delivering powerful horror than playing it all out in front of them.

It’s not an easy watch, nor a happy one, but often the best cinema isn’t the films that give us nice straightforward plots, good guys in shining armour and bad men wrapped in shadow or endings where everything is wrapped up in a neat little bow. Sometimes the best film endings come in more disturbing packaging.

5/5

Today's song is off of the new Bon Iver album, which on the first listen is a marginally more upbeat offering after the haunting, beautiful and melancholic sounds of their debut album, 'For Emma, Forever Ago' but still relies on delicate, gentle vocals to carry the songs.