Disappointing... yet brilliant

The Dark Knight Rises

Director Christopher Nolan

Stars Christian Bale, Tom Hardy, Anne Hathaway, Marion Cotillard, Gary Oldman

USA 2012

Language English

2hr 48mins

Colour

Conclusion of Nolan’s Bat trilogy

[NB: This was largely written before the terrible murders in a Colorado cinema. I’ve left them largely as they were. For a bit of perspective on events (not always welcome in the immediate aftermath, I realise), here’s a piece I wrote about the impact of the Columbine massacre on the entertainment industry one year on].

Christopher Nolan’s bloated Bat saga comes to a climax with another film that is ridiculously and unnecessarily long, although not actually painful to sit through. Like Batman Begins, it is both enjoyable and heavily flawed. The difference is that this one is almost scuppered by a messy closing race against time with too many storylines.

Several years after the events of The Dark Knight, the Batman has vanished, millionaire Bruce Wayne is a Howard Hughes-like recluse. Crime is down, but the tough laws brought in to clean up Gotham after the events of The Dark Knight are about to expire. Obscure foreign superbaddy Bane, muscle-bound and with a weird face mask, has arrived and is assembling a (literal) underground army. And the safe in Wayne Manor is broken into by a slinky jewel thief…

 So:

 1. Having thought about it for several days, I believe the fact it is impossible to make out most of what Bane (Tom Hardy) says has to be deliberate. As to why, I’m none the wiser. But whatever the reason, it’s bloody annoying – although the dialogue is consistently terrible, so it maybe a small mercy.

2. And it’s not just that the script is so wretched, but there is so much talking. Just shut up and punch someone, please.

3. I don’t want to see Michael Caine cry, or keep saying ‘Master Wayne…’ in a despairing manner. It’s not touching, it’s ugly.

4. There’s far too much of Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a tediously idealistic young(ish) cop.

5. Despite/because of its stone-faced self-importance and lack of humour, this version of Batman is every bit as camp as the Adam West TV series. And considerably less clever. I think Christian Bale does a good job, but West is still my favourite of the (non-animated) Caped Crusaders.

6. What I guess is meant to be the big twist is one of the oldest in the history of storytelling, and a great favourite with directors of Agatha Christie TV adaptations.

7. The film essentially offers us a choice between two competing forms of fascism – one offering the silent brutal promise of Bat justice, the other the Occupy movement as read through right-wing paranoia - demagogic, pretending to be anarchism but actually a form of societal death wish. Neither is terribly appealing.

8. The Daily Telegraph has hailed Batman as a conservative hero, which is true. But it also describes him as a good capitalist, which is far less accurate. In fact, Bruce Wayne is the classic neglectful heir, discarding the profit motive to pursue utopian schemes that not only put his family’s company at risk, but the whole city.

9. Over the trilogy as a whole, Bruce Wayne spends a lot of time before being Batman, then retired as Batman, then out of service as Batman. Is Nolan afraid of having too much of a man in a cape and silly mask on screen? Then he shouldn’t be directing this movie.

10. For some strange reason, the richly imagined Gotham of Batman Begins has now been traded for in for a city that often seems to be a fairly undisguised New York City. This is a big backwards step.

11. A mostly decent cast is packed with familiar faces, with a terrific cameo from a villain from earlier in the series. And Anne Hathaway looks like she’s properly grateful for the chance to play Catwoman. 

12. The Rocky montage is much mocked, but also an excellent device in the right hands. Here, Nolan demonstrates how excruciatingly slowly time can pass if you don’t use it. 

13. This year, it seems, superheroes are allowed to have sex lives. Presumably to make the whole men in tights thing seem less sad/creepy.

Panic In The Streets

Director Elia Kazan

Stars Richard Widmark, Jack Palance, Barbara Bel Geddes

USA 1950

Language English

1hr 33mins

Black and white

Plodding plague thriller

Oh, this film has so much going for it. Made in 1950, it was shot on tangibly real locations in New Orleans, taking us right into the docks, the bars with unpainted walls, a sprawling banana warehouse, lonely streets. It’s a historical document, if nothing else. And what a cast: Richard Widmark, in the same year he starred in the electrifying London noir Night And The City, as our hero. Zero Mostel (Max Bialystock in the original Producers), fat, sweaty and sad as the bad guy’s sidekick. And the bad guy himself, a young Jack Palance, whose unearthly bone structure rendered in stark black and white is almost worth the price of admission alone. Doesn’t that picture above promise something great?

The set-up demands urgency: an unknown man who has been murdered and dumped by the docks turns out to have brought the pneumonic plague to the port. Clint Reed, a doctor from the Department of Public Health, needs to track down the killers, not to bring them to justice but to stop them from spreading the disease. In order to find them, Reed will have to descend from the tidy suburbs into the dirty streets, squalid tenements, restaurants where nobody speaks much English.

But oh, Panic In The Streets is a drag. Director Elia Kazan seems far more interested in discussions between Reed (Widmark) and his wife (Barbara Bel Geddes) about the dry cleaning bill and whether they can afford to have another kid than the (incredibly) desperate business of the day. It takes a particular skill to combine calm, casual chat with the frantic business of the detective work – Homicide: Life On The Streets was genius at it – but it’s one totally lacking here. Making Widmark play a man with a taste for comfy sweaters who feels insecure because his son doesn’t look up to him enough is all wrong. Palance and Mostel – a great contrasting pairing of pudgy and skeletal – don’t get nearly enough screen time. Kazan has no instinct for how to handle a police procedural, and although the locations for the climax are amazing, the chase itself never gripping.

In the hands of Sam Fuller or Robert Aldrich say, this could have a great film. Instead, it shows that you can give all the right elements to the wrong director and end up with a dud.  

(Poster ©Marvel/Columbia Pictures)

The Amazing Spider-Man

Director Marc Webb

Stars Andrew Garfield, Emma Stone, Rhys Ifans, Dennis Leary

USA 2012

Language English

2hr 16mins

Colour

Rip it up and start again…

So here’s what you need to know: yes, they have begun the whole Spider-Man saga again for the second time in a decade. No, the story isn’t exactly the same, although core elements (orphan Peter Parker/Uncle Ben and Aunt May/the spider bite/the trauma that prompts Peter’s mix of guilt and need for vengeance) remain.

But with the change of star comes a new tone. Out goes Tobey Maguire with that nervous half smile and the slightly creepy coyness. In comes Andrew Garfield, still occasionally teary and generally moody, still bullied. But taller, skateboard-riding, less eager to please, unlikely to say ‘gee’. In this film, Peter’s ineffectual yearning for the girl lasts about three minutes – within the proprieties of a kids’ movie, Emma Stone’s Gwen seems ready to haul him behind the bike sheds. Because, yes, Parker is still meant to be in school* despite Garfield – who looks bears at least a passing resemblance to Dick Nixon – being a not particularly fresh-faced 28.

The film takes its time getting to Parker’s transformation into the webslinger. That’s just as well – the appropriately named director Marc Webb is more comfortable with people talking than them swinging off major Manhattan landmarks. The plot starts off with Peter belatedly trying to find out about his late parents, which leads him to blag his way into the genetic modification labs of the sinister Oscorp…

As a learner superhero, new Spidey gets a fairly minor bad guy to tangle with. The action is mostly remarkably unremarkable. There are no great fight scenes. There is a lot of CGI, some of it quite good, some (as is usually the case) awful. And there’s a big set piece that is corny but pretty effective, as well as being blatantly – as my friend Jess pointed out – post 9/11. A lot, in theory, is at stake, but the film never makes you feel that.

Still, the casting is good: Stone plays Gwen as strong and smart, a relief after Kirsten Dunst’s wearying wide-eyedness in the earlier films. After all those years on The West Wing, Uncle Ben’s folky wisdom comes naturally to Martin Sheen. Dennis Leary does good hard-assed but essentially decent Irish cop.

The Amazing Spider-Man is nowhere near as good as the bulk of the recent Marvel movies (the two Iron Man films, Captain America, Avengers Assemble), not least because it’s not very funny. But it’s enjoyable enough, and – especially towards the end – shows a promising tendency to play around with the Spider-Man clichés.

(Oh, yeah, before you ask, that guy with the grey hair is C. Thomas Howell).

*In keeping with current educational trends in the US (and the UK), Parker goes to a specialist science high school. He somehow still manages to get bullied by jocks at this institution, but the switch to much smaller schools whose students are all either arty/sporty/sciencey seems to pose a threat to the great traditions of American movies and TV.

Picnic

Director Joshua Logan

Stars William Holden, Kim Novak, Rosalind Russell

USA 1955

Language English

1hr 55mins

Colour

Surprising satisfying mid-West, mid-century drama

It’s 1955, and small-town America is rich with simmering generational and sexual tension, or at least that is how Hollywood saw it. And unlike the pushy newcomer television, the movies could take everyday problems and render them gloriously epic with Technicolor and CinemaScope.

Like Bye Bye Birdie, Picnic is about the effect of the arrival of untamed masculinity in the heartlands. We’re in Kansas, where Mrs Owens has been bringing up her girls alone since her feckless husband cleared off. Since Picnic was adapted from a play, the daughters are emblematic opposites – big, beautiful, popular Madge (Kim Novak) and small, intellectual, tomboy, dark Millie* (Susan Strasberg). Completing the xx- chromosome household is the lodger, spinster schoolteacher Rosemary (Rosalind Russell), carrying around a lifetime’s disappointment. As someone says later in the movie, ‘I’m telling you, Benson, the women are getting desperate.’

Enter the wild stranger, just hopped off a freight train, bare-chested – as he will frequently be in the movie – and sweaty. This is Hal (William Holden), a man of primal appetites and no fixed abode, the kind Kerouac might have admired, although he is completely devoid of any bohemian tendencies. The movie offers up the suggestion that he might be either (or both) the last free man in an emasculated, hopelessly suburban American and a creature of pure lust and anger unfit to live among civilised beings. Hal is looking for Alan Benson (Cliff Robertson), his old college roommate and the son of the man who owns most of the hulking grain elevators that tower over the town. He’s hoping for a job, something beyond the basic manual labour people are happy to give him but he secretly feels is below him. To connect the dots, Alan, the most eligible man around, is dating Madge, the prettiest girl in town, but not of the expected social caste.

The story takes place over 24 hours, a fair chunk of which is at the town’s Labor Day picnic, a vast community rite to mark the end of summer. This is where the film casts off its theatrical origins and comes to life, plunging us into the unabashed Americana of the day, from the pie-eating contest to a rough-and-tumble three-legged race and finally the arrival down the river, in the paper-lantern lit evening, of the newly elected Queen of Neewollah**. All during which, under the pressure of Hal’s presence, alcohol and the dark shadow of autumn, everything falls apart. As a detailed account of an Americans at play on a very loaded occasion, at times it’s strangely reminiscent of (or rather, anticipates) Richard Linklater’s awesome Dazed And Confused.

Under the obvious theme, there’s a deeper, more telling one. This is a film about aging, from Madge – at 19, warned by her mother to cash in on her beauty fast – to Hal, still in his thirties able to thrill old women and girls but aware that time is running out for him, too. Watching Rosalind Russell play seemingly tough but brittle Rosemary, I’m aware that only 15 years earlier she was trading zingers with Cary Grant in His Girl Friday (in 1955 Grant, of course, was playing opposite 26-year-old Grace Kelly in To Catch A Thief. That’s Hollywood).

Although early on, Picnic threatens to collapse under the weight of its stereotypes and overblown speeches – Rosemary could be on loan from Tennessee Williams – but slowly the characters start to breathe. As the film trundles on, Rosemary’s situation becomes heartbreaking before she reaches a strange sort of triumph, I guess. I don’t fully get why the writers have such a downer on poor steady Alan – seemingly sharing his father’s preference for football hero Hal, no matter how irresponsible he is. And what at the time were the film’s shocking selling points – the risqué locker room scene, for instance – are laughable now. But it’s an involving and sometimes moving film. The ending surprised me, too – and I’m entirely not sure what it means. That’s a good thing.

*Having no knowledge of the source play, I half-wondered if a couple of characters have been fused to make Millie – she is burdened with so many character signifiers. It’s hard walking around with a basketball, a sly cig and a copy of The Ballad Of The Sad Café all at once.

**Reread the word carefully.

Old Joy

Director Kelly Reichert

Stars Daniel London, Will Oldham, Tanya Smith

USA 2006

Language English

1hr 13mins

Colour

Gently compelling walk in the forest with shades of Kerouac/Cassady

   

The movies don’t trust nature. When we see characters heading into the woods, something bad seems likely to happen. Even in old-fashioned Disney animal pics, the hills are full of peril. All of which can make Old Joy hard to watch in the appropriate frame of mind. Years of cinema-going training lend the film what I presume is an unintentional menacing edge, the fear of the Deliverance moment.

We start off with a bit of meditation followed by a phone call, which leads to one of those arguments deep in mutual passive aggression. Mark (Daniel London) wants to go on a hike with an old friend. Tanya (Tanya Smith), who is pregnant, would rather he didn’t, but refuses to play the nagging wife. He claims he won’t go if she isn’t happy, she says he’ll go anyway… which he does.

What comes next could be described as Sideways without the jokes. Kurt (Will Oldham) is the Kerouacian free spirit, the kind who talks about the power of silence but who mostly won’t shut up, and who has been doing the rounds whatever post-hippy fun is available in modern America. He wants to get out there and feel nature, but not without a joint and a can of beer to keep him company. He’s clearly scared that the more grounded Mark has been slipping away from him, something the birth of the baby will complete.

The opening scene apart, this is almost entirely a two-hander - three if you count Lucy the dog*. But it’s a very one-sided business, emphasised by the way Mark is often on the phone to Tanya. Kurt is struggling with both the emptiness of life, and what could be more than just a buddy’s love for an old pal.

There’s a lot of driving, superbly shot and hypnotically set to a terrific score by indie rock perennials Yo La Tengo**. And there’s a lot of walking through the beautiful – if hardly pristine – Oregon hills. If you can slow yourself down to its pace, there is a lot to enjoy here. If I was being picky, I’d say maybe the two leads could have been a bit more engaging – the Griffin Dunne-like London doesn’t have much to do other than look a bit uncomfortable, while Oldham – whose speaking voice sadly isn’t as distinctive as his singing – does what I’ll take as a good job playing an annoying character. But if you don’t mind films in which very little happens, this drifts by very nicely indeed, and then sticks in the memory.

 

*The same Lucy from Reichert’s next, and better-known, film Wendy & Lucy. Dog fans should be assured that there are no distressing scenes involving her in this one.

**And also, left-wing talk radio!

[NB: Discussion of Little Dieter Needs To Fly probably gives away a few things that you might not want to know if you were to watch Rescue Dawn first, or on its own with no prior knowledge of the story)

Little Dieter Needs To Fly

Director Werner Herzog

Stars Dieter Dengler

Germany/UK/France 1998

Language English (with some German and what I guess is Laotian)

1hr 20mins

Colour

Classic Herzog portrait of a true outsider

Rescue Dawn

Director Werner Herzog

Stars Christian Bale, Steve Zahn, Jeremy Davies

USA/Luxembourg 2006

Language English (with some Laotian and a tiny bit of German)

2hrs 6mins

Colour

Stallone-free POW escape movie 

Given an amazing true story, what would you like done with it? Do you think it’s better told as a documentary, so that you’re constantly brought back to the astonishing fact that this really happened, or a drama, so you can see it all played out before you? Here’s an opportunity to come to some sort of opinion, given the rare chance to see a great director having non-fiction and fiction bites at the same subject matter.

It’s easy to see what drew Herzog to the life of Dieter Dengler. On one level, this is a classic tale of survival against the odds, the story of a US Navy pilot shot down over Laos during the Vietnam War and enduring brutal imprisonment before making a dramatic escape. But Dengler wasn’t some sturdy, all-American hero – he was an eccentric German who (understandably) became weirder still after his experiences. When Herzog visited him in the late 1990s (he died in 2001), he found Dieter still obsessed with flying, but also compulsively ritualistic about opening doors and with a sizeable emergency storage of food carefully hidden under the floorboards. You know, just in case. In an unforgettable scene, Dengler is filmed in an aquarium and describes his sense that dying is something like the translucent jellyfish pulsing behind them. I have no idea what he means, but it’s strange and beautiful.

Dengler had grown up in Germany during the war and fell in love with planes while they were flattening his hometown. As soon as he was old enough, he set off to America to become a pilot – not easy for an immigrant with little formal education, but after a long struggle he made it, only to be shot down on his first mission in 1965.

In the documentary, he proves the perfect Herzog subject – willing, for instance, to allow himself to be trussed up to recreate his brutal forced march through the jungle, and happy to show how easy it is to get out of handcuffs. It’s a terrific work – so good, in fact, it’s that unusual thing – a film feel could have easily been longer.

Herzog clearly didn’t feel done with the story, either, and went back to it once he had a big star who was willing to throw himself without reservation into the part of a starving prisoner of war. What’s curious about Rescue Dawn – once you get past the off-putting Chuck Norris-esque title – is how close to the documentary it is. Herzog uses the same stock footage of a bombing raid and the same absurd survival guide film for US flyers (although it wasn’t made until a couple of years after Dengler’s crash). Bale even says the line ‘Little Dieter needs to fly’.

Rescue Dawn is not a film for those who prefer their acting subtle and low-key. Bale’s fellow US prisoners in the jungle camp are played by Jeremy Davies and Steve Zahn, two men who can never resist a twitch, squint or unnatural angle for holding their head. But in the context of both the characters’ circumstances and the fact this is a Werner Herzog film, their behaviour seems acceptable. As for Bale, that’s him getting (genuinely) thinner by the scene, not to mentioned being dragged along behind a water buffalo and bobbing along in a tropical river beside a raft (a trademark Herzog moment). He gets some way towards capturing Dengler’s persona – a dark perkiness – although he seems a bit too cocky and sounds too American.

Still, by sticking to Dengler’s time in Laos, the film constricts his story, making him something like a conventional war movie hero. And yet the film is still too odd and too cheap (the crash scene is laughable) to truly work as mainstream entertainment. It’s enjoyable, but something of an uncomfortable hybrid. Rescue Dawn is good, but Little Dieter Needs To Fly is extraordinary.

Damsels In Distress

Director Whit Stillman

Stars Greta Gerwig, Analeigh Tipton, Megalyn Echikunwoke

USA 2011

Language English

1hr 39mins

Colour

Utterly charming return from upper-class chronicler Whit Stillman

Deciding who to talk to your first day of college can be a life-changing call. Lily (Analeigh Tipton) doesn’t have much choice in the matter, being descended upon at her first day at pretty, posh Seven Oaks by Violet (Greta Gerwig), Rose (Megalyn Echikunwoke) and Heather (Carrie MacLemore). They make up a clique of eccentric, patronising but well-meaning girls who favour cardis and A-line skirts, believe in the positive power of good hygiene, purposely chose to date men others consider losers and volunteer at a campus Suicide Prevention Center offering doughnuts and dancing as balms for troubled souls.

Damsels In Distress is a campus comedy complete with frat houses under threat and togas. But it also marks the return of one of America’s most distinctive filmmakers, Whit Stillman. He turned up in the indie wave of the late ’80s and early ’90s, but he was already middle-aged and his characters weren’t dope-smoking slackers or downtown hipsters – they were anxious debutantes and their even more anxious dates. His first film, Metropolitan, was funny and fresh; his second, Barcelona, a grumpy misstep; his third, The Last Days Of Disco, was terrific – but that was in 1998. Since then, nothing on the film front. Now, rather surprisingly, he’s back.

Since he was never seemed very contemporary – his 1990s films are set in a backwards-looking corners of the ’80s – this doesn’t matter as much as it would do for many directors. Damsels In Distress is out of time (in a good way) – often it could be set in the ’30s or the ’50s or the ’80s. It takes the stuff that made up Stillman’s earlier films – chapter headings, the obsessive characters, their taste for long-forgotten intellectual theories, his belief in the transformative power of dancing for otherwise uptight people – and gives it a lighter, warmer touch. In places, this is a wonderfully silly film. And it has the best running gag using euphemisms for a particular sex act since Mallrats.

Greta Gerwig, the reigning queen of US low-budget movies may be a bit past college age but she’s absolutely perfect as fragrantly crusading Violet, who is suddenly beset by doubt. The rest of the cast are mostly unknown to me – apart from Seth from The OC and Dukie from The Wire – but they all do a splendid job.

A most delightful movie. 

Moneyball

Director Bennett Miller

Stars Brad Pitt, Jonah Hill, Phillip Seymour Hoffman

USA 2011

Language English

2hrs 13mins

Colour

Sturdy attempt to turn baseball’s stats revolution into a watchable drama

Bull Durham

Director Ron Shelton

Stars Susan Sarandon, Kevin Costner, Tim Robbins

USA 1988

Language English

1hr 48mins

Colour

Entertainingly overheated and overwritten romance set in the minor leagues

Most people in Britain know nothing about baseball, but are pretty sure it’s boring. A few people here know a little more about the game, but even most of those think the best thing about it is the huge hotdogs you eat while trying to distract yourself from the mystifying proceedings on the field during a ‘here for the local colour’ visit to Yankee Stadium or Fenway Park. Me, I love baseball deeply, but I’m not here to make the case for it. But Hollywood has, over the years, tried to capture the power this stop-start game has for many Americans (not to mention Mexicans, Dominicans, Cubans, Japanese, Koreans…)

Of course, neither Moneyball nor Bull Durham is in essence about baseball per se – they just use the game as a backdrop. In his story of a groupie (Susan Sarandon) who picks one player a season from the local minor league team on whom to bestow her favours, Bull Durham’s writer-director Ron Shelton is aiming to tell us something about men and women and the tussle between innocence and experience (this being a sports movie that quotes William Blake, among a hefty bagful of writers). The adaptation of financial journalist Michael Lewis’ massively influential book Moneyball, meanwhile, is broadly concerned with the idiocies of conventional wisdom and how learning to ignore them can give you the edge in the market (‘We are card counters at the blackjack table’), as shown by one season in the career of (real-life) unconventional Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) and his (fictional) stats-crunching sidekick Peter Brand (Jonah Hill).

Both films are also about how heartbreaking it is to be able to play a sport better than 99.9 per cent of people who ever try – well enough to get you briefly in to the game’s elite (often referred to as ‘The Show’) – but not well enough to sustain a career at the top level. It’s the almost that kills you.

Moneyball, which spent long years into development with Steven Soderbergh due to direct it, is a movie that doesn’t quite know what it wants to be. It’s co-written by Aaron Sorkin, who did the script for the The Social Network, but it lacks that film’s snap and excitement and ability to show an idea taking hold and spreading. Moneyball starts off as a rather morose picture about Beane’s attempts to remodel the A’s according to the radical ideas of mathematically minded fans, comes to life in the battles between Beane and the team’s scouts (played by real baseball men, a wonderful choice that brings characterful faces and voices of the kind you don’t see enough of on screen), and then settles into conventional sports movie mode during the team’s big winning streak. There’s also some nonsense about Beane trying to reconnect with his daughter. It’s slow, looks gloomy and misses a lot of the good stuff and the thrust of ideas (however questionable they may be) from Lewis’ book, but at least Pitt is good and Hill is better.*

If you applied the basic theories in Moneyball to the two main ball players in Bull Durham, it would seem that the team (and Annie, at the start of the movie) are making a serious mistake in putting their faith in the untamed raw talent of Nuke LaLoosh (Tim Robbins) rather than wiley veteran Crash Davis (Kevin Costner). Both Annie and Crash devote their time to trying to help LaLoosh learn to throw at 95 miles in the right direction, rather than hitting innocent members of the crowd. He is, in baseball terms, a flake and phenom**. What Crash, meanwhile, possesses as a batter (and, by implication, in the bedroom) is the gift of patience.

Unlikely Moneyball, there is no doubt what kind of film Bull Durham is. Shelton starts off with screeds of narration from Sarandon’s Annie that indicates a) he fully intends to make the most quotable sports film ever and b) he’s under the delusion that he’s the reincarnation of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Turned out he was near right on point a), creating the wording of many future personal ads. And ridiculously off the mark on b), of course, but lines like ‘There’s never been a ballplayer slept with me who didn’t have the best year of his career’ and ‘A guy will listen to anything if he thinks it’s foreplay’ are at least memorable, if it corny. And that’s sums up Bull Durham as a whole – it gets close to ridiculous at times, but ends up being pretty enjoyable. Tim Robbins is miscast – he doesn’t look or feel like a ballplayer – but Sarandon is just right and this is probably the high point of Costner’s often-ropey career. All that’s required of the audience is a willingness to believe in a professional ballplayer with passionate opinions regarding the merits of the novels (the novels, mind, not just the assorted works) of Susan Sontag…

*A couple of people – not sports fans – who have seen the movie have told me they don’t understand why Billy Beane is the hero of the piece, when he’s not the guy who comes up with big new idea. If Moneyball the movie fails to make it clear, here it is: as an ex-ballplayer turned executive, the jock who promotes the nerds, Billy Beane’s crucial role is as the insider who lets the outsiders in, the Gorbachev or the FW De Klerk, the enlightened traitor to his party. Plus, of course, it takes his wheeling and dealing to assemble the new-style team.

**A type recently personified by New York Yankees cult hero Joba Chamberlain, likely to miss much of the new season having damaged his ankle trampolining with his son. Chamberlain weighs 18 stone.

Ride The High Country

Director Sam Peckinpah

Stars Joel McCrea, Randolph Scott, Mariette Hartley

USA 1961

Language English

1hr 33mins

Colour

Elegiac Western with both traditionalist and revisionist leanings

There’s a Randolph Scott Western on TV at least one afternoon a week, or at least that’s how it’s always seemed to me. And yet I never watched one, having developed the feeling – I don’t know precisely how – that there was something boring about Scott as an actor and the movies he was in. I suspect his films would involve plenty of riding, and not much else. Scott was a big star in his day, and he made an awful lot of films, but he doesn’t have anything like the enduring resonance of his contemporaries such as Henry Fonda or James Stewart.

Ride The High Country is the last film Scott made, even though he would live another quarter of a century. It’s also the second movie directed by Sam Peckinpah, the man who would later become legendary for his epic slow-motion shootouts. Like Peckinpah’s masterpiece The Wild Bunch, it’s about men of the West who have outlived their time. We’re in the early days of the 20th century and Scott plays Gil Westrum, who is working in a Wild West show when his old partner Steve Judd (Joel McCrea) rides into town. Judd talks Westrum and his young sidekick Heck (Ron Starr) into joining him transporting gold from a mining claim for the bank. Westrum’s plan is to take off with the gold – preferably with Judd’s help. Along the way they pick up Elsa (Mariette Hartley), who is fleeing from her religious maniac father.

It’s Elsa who brings them into contact with the grubby Hammond brothers, and with them comes trouble. Sadistic and weird, the Hammonds are a foreshadowing of Peckinpah’s latter movies, and are played by some of his favourites, including LQ Jones and Warren Oates. The whole mining camp sequence switches the tone of the film into something darker and more modern.

But much of what’s enjoyable about Ride The High Country comes from the interplay of the old timers. Joel McCrea, terrific in Preston Sturges’ 1940s comedies Sullivan’s Travels and The Palm Beach Story, is superb as the decent but never dull Judd, a man who goes to great lengths to hide the fact that he needs reading glasses.

‘We were expecting a younger man,’ say the bank owners.

‘Well, I used to be,’ Judd replies, reasonably.

And Scott is almost as good playing Westrum, trying to build himself up to a point where he is ready to commit treachery. Scott’s got a real ease in the role, the authority of the great old-fashioned movie stars. Maybe I’ve been unfair to him all these years – it turns out he made at least one cracking film. 

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

Director David Fincher

Stars Daniel Craig, Rooney Mara, Christopher Plummer

USA/Germany/Sweden/UK 2011

Language English (and a little bit of Swedish)

2hrs 38mins

Colour

Part one of the Hollywood version of Stieg Larsson’s moody trilogy

At heart, this is a film about a middle-aged man having sex with a severely damaged Nine Inch Nails fan in her early twenties. So the bloke is James Bond and the girl is pretty nifty at industrial espionage, but still, the only reasonably response is: ‘Ew.’

David Fincher’s take on the opening act of the monstrously successful Swedish thriller franchise is insanely long but fairly simple. He isn’t interested in author Stieg Larsson’s tiresome belief that seemingly social-democratic Sweden is in fact run by a cabal of closet Nazis (fair enough: Larsson was a Trotskyite crank as well as a dirty old man). He’s also can’t work up any energy for the mechanics of the mystery – this film probably has a quarter of the investigative work you get in an average episode of NCIS or Cold Case.

So if most of the plot and all the ideology have been left by the wayside, what’s left? It turns out Fincher has decided its all about the goth girl. What makes it awkward is that since Lisbeth (Rooney Mara) doesn’t meet conspiracy-theory bore journalist Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) until what feels like hours into the film, there’s a constant energy dip as we return to his plodding investigation of the family history of tycoon Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer). Fincher, meanwhile, is desperate to get back to showing us Lisbeth playing with computers, Lisbeth riding her motorbike to a police station, getting back on her bike, riding to the next police station, getting back on her bike (it’s not even excitingly filmed bike riding, at that)… And, of course, Lisbeth in a large number of scenes of consensual and non-consensual sexual activity. There’s not much in the way of action-movie action; there is, however, a fair bit of torture. The grisly nature of the story links the film to earlier Fincher films such as Seven and Fight Club, but the style here – apart from the ridiculous Bond-style credit sequence – is much less flashy.

Most of the cast members have a go at speaking their lines in some sort of Swedish accent – the results aren’t horrible, but they are pointless. Either a film goes the whole subtitled hog, or it doesn’t. In any case, none of the foreigners in the cast sound anything like actual Swede Stellan Skarsgård.

This isn’t a particularly good film, but it’s not a bad one either. Watching it on DVD or download, when you can you fast-forward through the bike riding and the equally drawn-out bit where Lisbeth goes to some banks (a thirty-second montage in any competently directed film),  would probably make it quite enjoyable. And, of course, it’s a fairly obvious scene-setting one of three – presumably part two will get going a bit quicker.