Pick of the Week: Memento, Thurs 19th July, 21:00, Film4
Director Christopher Nolan’s breakthrough film is a dazzling piece that not only jumps back and forth narratively, but also messes with the very direction of time itself. Guy Pearce plays Leonard Shelby, a man who can no longer form short term memories due to brain damage he suffered whilst trying to defend his wife from a brutal attack. He is now trying to find and kill the man he believes to be responsible for the death of his wife. The action alternates between black and white scenes of Leonard discussing his quest on the phone with an unknown figure and the action itself, as Leonard is aided by various shady figures in his hunt for the killer. The kick is that these scenes are delivered in reverse order, so we get to share Leonard’s sense of disorientation and confusion as he struggles to construct a reality from unreliable clues and leads. Every time he discovers something important, he tattoos it onto himself so that he can’t forget it. Nolan is a brilliantly gifted writer/director but his work can, like Kubrick and Spike Jonze, sometimes be clever and precise at the expense of emotional depth (the conceit of multiple-layered dreams in Inception is gripping, but the marital relationship between DiCaprio and Marion Cotillard never really convinced). Here however, form and content are perfectly aligned as the backwards narrative and Guy Pearce’s superb central performance combine to allow the audience right inside Leonard’s head for the duration of this gripping tale. And the film speaks truths about how unreliable all our memories are and the way is which everyone can create their own truth through oft repeated lies.
Girl With The Pearl Earring, Wed 18th July, 21:00, BBC4
Based on a novel by Tracy Chevalier, this film invents a story around the painting of Vermeer’s famous The Girl With The Pearl Earring. It’s a subtle understated piece that explores the ideas of art, patronage and desire. The man who commissions the painting from Vermeer makes it clear that he expects not only to possess an image of the girl, but also the girl herself. Vermeer walks the fine line between art and commerce as he accepts the commission, but also seeks to protect the girl who works as a servant in his house. Colin Firth exudes a quiet dignity as Vermeer in an understated performance and Scarlett Johansson, as the servant girl, utterly convinces as a very self-possessed young woman who is all too aware of how little power she has in this world. She has to negotiate a tricky path past the powerful men who desire her, her master’s wife, who distrusts her and other servants, who resent her. And, if for nothing else, it’s worth watching just for the scene where Vermeer asks the girl to moisten her lips whilst posing. Johansson’s demure method of lip dampening is more erotically charged than a thousand Hollywood gratuitous sex scenes.
Casino Royale, Fri 20th July, 23:25 & Sat 21st July, 21:00, ITV2
The film that thankfully saved Bond from floundering along as the moribund sexist dinosaur he had become. Unfortunately it was also the film that, along with Batman Begins, convinced Hollywood of the charms of the reboot, so now we have a new Spider-Man with last one hardly having time to swing out of view, with a new Total Recall, a new Robocop and a new Mad Max on the way and there’s even talk of a new Twilight (Christ, give us a chance – the first one hasn’t even finished yet). Oh well, we shouldn’t bear a grudge against just one film, especially one that manages to make something so familiar as Bond feel so fresh and new. By chucking out the silly gadgets, the ludicrous bond girl names and the knowing winks to camera, Bond is reborn as a character we can actually care about. It’s also helped enormously by catching Daniel Craig at the moment when he leaps from accomplished actor to fully-fledged movie star. His Bond, fresh out of spy school with not even one kill to his name as the film begins, harks back to the character from the novels – tough, unemotional and driven. When this Bond suffers (and he does suffer, like no Bond has before him) the audience suffers with him. Not everything has been abandoned of course – Mads Mikkelsen thoroughly enjoys himself as creepy Bond villain, Le Chiffre, and, although the silly names have been dropped, the Bond girls are still impossibly gorgeous. However Eva Green manages to make her character Vesper Lynd much more than just eye candy and this time it’s Bond himself who delivers the cheesecake shot as a very buff Daniel Craig emerges from the surf in a rather fetching pair of blue trunks. And finally, despite giving almost everything a thorough overhaul, they had the good sense to hang on to Judi Dench as the unflappable M. You can’t reboot our Judi.
Battle Royale, Fri 20th July, 00:05, Film4
“Do you know what they call The Hunger Games in France?”, “What?”, “A Battle Royale with cheese.” So went the joke doing the rounds on the internet about recent hit The Hunger Games. Seen as a dig at the latest teen sensation, the joke actually just reveals the collective amnesia of the modern movie audience, as thinking that The Hunger Games is a rip-off of Battle Royale just reveals a lack of understanding of how both films slot into a fine tradition of movies about people being hunted. A tradition that stretches all the way back to 1932 with The Most Dangerous Game. And Battle Royale is a gloriously dark addition to the genre. In a grim future Japanese school children are forced to partake in Battle Royale, a game where a whole class is shipped to an island, given arms and then let loose on each other until only one survives. It’s an excellent examination of what teenagers are capable of when the rules are abandoned and they’re packing heat. They’re mean, vindictive and, in some cases, dangerously psychotic – so not that different from regular teenagers then.