streams of unconsciousness

Strictly from a personal point of view, this has been an interesting challenge.

And ‘challenge’ has certainly been the right word.

In the writing, I have enjoyed experimenting with the narrative ‘voice’, and using cross-styles.

Reviewing films that were unwatchable rubbish alongside films that would be on the Top Hundred list of most people, has been interesting.

Finding the time, and originality needed, to make a review worth reading has been another part of the challenge.

And poor old Barry Norman dying, part-way through, almost seemed like an omen.

No, not Barry Cryer, as the Daily Fail put it:

Daily Mail getting it wrong again

This one. The real one:

Barry Norman

I got a couple of tips from Young Masher, that have been added to my ‘watchlist’.

And Kennamatic gave us his view of the view of a couple of films worth looking at.

But it was a challenge.

And no, I wouldn’t do it again.

Thank you to my two co-conspirators for their support along the way.

But I’m out.

Because we are going to see Despicable Me 3 tomorrow, I felt I needed to step away from the cartoon genre…

Synopsis: A hit man befriends, and takes in to his life, a 12-year old orphan, and trains her as his apprentice

Leon is, essentially, a French art-house film that successfully muscles in on Hollywood turf.

A couple of the components for this Luc Besson vehicle are, in themselves, quite excellent.

The outstanding Eric Serra score, coupled with very contrasting performances from Besson regulars, Gary Oldman and Jean Reno, are just two components that lift this film above the average.

The characterisation is juxtapositional.

Reno, as the plant-obsessed, Gene Kelly-fan hitman is an interesting study.

Gary Oldman chews the scenery up as the drug-taking gangster who has nothing else to give us.

Nothing else to give us, apart from being a pivotal mechanism of wryness in the way the film is fashioned.

The script is a deft construction painted in humour, with a light finish of wit and irony.

Leon has the potential to shun style and go straight for the softer parts of the human audience, and yet it doesn’t.

The film plays on the burgeoning relationship between Jean Reno and the young Natalie Portman, whilst at the same time surprising the audience, through a couple of deft misdirections.

Leon is a clever film, but because of the genre, and the art-house feel, I wonder if it will ever get the audience it truly deserves.

A long time ago (in film terms), and let’s be honest, seventeen years is a long time ago, Kenta Fukasaku wrote a screenplay based on Koushun Takami’s novel, and the film Battle Royale was born.

The irony that this independent Japanese film indirectly gave birth to the sprawling 2008 monstrosity that was The Hunger Games trilogy is not lost on me.

However, setting corporate greed, together with the need for the US film industry to ‘own’/invent everything, including stories that have actually been developed elsewhere aside, let’s look at the film.

Synopsis: In the near future, Japan institutes a programme to cope with rising youth crime. The solution is to make the youth of Japan toe the line of behaviour, by selecting a random class of 14 and 15 year-old children and packing them off to an island, where they are given weapons and three days to eliminate each other until a sole survivor remains. Look at what could happen to you if you don’t behave, kids.

So that’s totally The Hunger Games, yes?

Anyway.

The saddest thing about this very good film is that the certification, because of the violence depicted onscreen, restricts the viewing audience.

The brutal horror of man’s inhumanity to man is a lesson that should be widely taught, not shunned.

And this film could be a vehicle to convey that lesson.

For three days, 42 children are isolated on a remote island.

Their numbers steadily dwindle as they are killed in sometimes brief scenes that often ring uncomfortably true.

By the time you could have worked out who the children are, and how much you liked them, most of them have died.

And died in a succession of surprising, disturbing, touching, horribly funny or deeply upsetting ways.

It’s impossible to guess which of these neatly-uniformed youngsters is secretly a serial killer, a self-sacrificing hero, a born victim or simply another body count statistic.

Battle Royale is a film that never lets you settle down.

It sidesteps so rapidly between satire and splatter, and it offers the screen moments that will make the most hardened viewer cringe, as well as showing snatches of quiet melancholy that will haunt you for a long time.

And if you’re a hardened cynic, Battle Royale is worth watching because it gives you a real glimpse of what The Hunger Games could have been, if it hadn’t pandered to the massively superficial US audience.