Urban Landfill

Film: The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (Dir: Terry Gilliam)

I'm going to put my cards on the table straight away. I'm a bit of a pompous arse, a little bit verbose, vague and over-dramatic. Anyone who regularly reads Urban Landfill would probably agree This naturally has a knock-on effect when it comes to to the type of art I like – I'm generally a fan of the pretentious, the overblown and the smart-arsed (my affection for the likes of Frédéric Beigbeder, David Lynch and the Brian Jonestown Massacre all being cases in point).

You'd have thought that Terry Gilliam's latest film, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, would be bang up my street. It sounds like it should be – it critiques contemporary consumer culture, it deals with a fantastical world of unbridled imagination that transports people out of their humdrum lives, and it's directed/co-written by Terry Gilliam, the ex-Python genius behind such wonders as The Fisher King, Time Bandits, Brazil and the filmed version of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. On paper, it ticks a lot of my boxes. What a shame, then, that this time Gilliam seems to have got it spectacularly wrong.

It's often mentioned that Gilliam is an unlucky film director, and this production clearly wasn't helped by the untimely death of Heath Ledger during the film's production. That said, you have to take the final product on it's own terms and Doctor Parnassus is, quite frankly, a shoddy, even flabby piece of film-making. It seems messy, disorganised and chaotic – not in a charming way but in a manner that makes the final product unfocussed, shambolic and difficult to follow. The movie's central symbol, the Imaginarium, a faded fairground sideshow, that gives passersby the chance to be 'cleansed' by the imagination of Dr Parnassus (played by Christopher Plummer) could have been a rich metaphor for the movie industry, for an examination of Gilliam's own position as a director, but it is poorly defined, even confusing.

Much has been made in the build-up to the films release about how the movie was 'saved' by Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell to complete Ledger's parts after he passed away. Now, I'm not a huge fan of the four of them (Depp has been brilliant, Law can't act, and Farrell is a joke), but they all manage to out-act the late Antipodean heartthrob. It's, quite frankly, a half-baked, shambolic, and even slightly embarrassingly unconvincing performance from Ledger as Tony Shepherd, one that almost comes over as under-rehearsed (his English accent keeps slipping ferchrissakes...) 

It's not just Ledger (God bless his little self), though. The majority of the cast of Imaginarium get it wrong – it's one of the most poorly acted films I've seen in a long while. Plummer comes over as a poor man's Ian McKellan, Lily Cole just isn't an actress, Andrew Garfield (Anton) is like something out of a sixth form drama production and Tom Waits (I can't actually believe I'm writing this) is a less than convincing Devil. The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus is a frustrating, ultimately disappointing, film. We know Terry Gilliam is capable of greatness, but this number just doesn't deliver. Should it have even have been completed? It's too self-indulgent, too pompous. Urban Landfill has taken note...

Film: Antichrist (Dir Lars von Trier)

Some people really do enjoy getting their knickers in a twist when it comes to works of art. Sure, the usual suspects just can't stop themselves from getting hot under the collar about anything a little salacious, but its not just the Mail that's been getting all worked up about Lars von Trier's Antichrist.

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When I mentioned to friends, colleagues, and the Twitterverse that I was planning to use a day off work to see the film, I was surprised at the response. Some people rolled their eyes, some groaned, some regaled me with third-hand stories about friends of friends walking of the cinema in disgust, fainting or even vomiting uncontrollably in the aisles. Even Paul Morley (who I've got a huge amount of time for) went very silly on Newsnight Review, accosting the director at a Cannes press conference.

It used to be books that got people in a cultural flap Lady Chatterley's Lover and the Satanic Verses are two that most immediately spring to mind. Then, we all got culturally lazy, stopped reading books, and got angry about films instead. We could all just sit back, relax and let get worked up from the comfort of the local multiplex – Reservoir Dogs, The Blair Witch Project and 9 Songs nearly saw protests on Middle Enland street corners.

Von Trier, himself, is no stranger to scandal. He's got form, particularly in the guise of The Idiots, and his whole Dogme 95 collective, which seems deliberately constructed to outrage. Hence it was no surprise when Antichrist received such an outpouring of bile in response to its release.

In short, Antichrist tells the story of an unnamed man and woman, played by Willem Defoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg and their attempts to grieve, and eventually come to terms with the death of their infant child. Defoe's character, a psychoanalyst, starts treating Gainsbourg before they retreat to Eden, a log cabin, withdrawn from reality. That's when things really start going apeshit.

Yes, the film is uncomfortable to watch (and from someone who sat through Pasolini’s Salo, that's saying something), and I found my self resisting the urge to look away on more than one occasion. What a lot of the critics who have so far tackled Antichrist seem to have missed, is that von Trier hasn't produced a realist film. An audience who takes a talking fox, a penis spurting blood or a woman turned witch (they are all there) on face value is missing the point entirely. If you take the Daily Mail approach and get caught up in the first sight of gore, the first piece of sexual contact, then Antichrist really isn't for you.

Von Trier has produced something that we see all too rarely, a masterpiece of poetic cinema – one that functions as poetically on the visual level as it does on the narrative. To that end, it reminds me visually of Steve McQueen's recent Hunger. Time and again, von Trier presents with what seem like visual clues or motifs to be decoded – acorns, injured animals, a hidden room. These would actually seem to encourage a psychoanalytic reading of the film, perhaps encouraged by von Trier's own apparent treatment whilst making the film.

Such an interpretation of the film is, however, thrown into disarray by loads of other factors that von Trier has thrown into the mix. The film has all the conventional trappings of a horror movie (a couple trapped in a dark wood, lots of sexual activity, lots of screaming and bloody gore) as well as having lots of hints that you feel are in jokes, on film buff-only references (the shooting of the much talked-about female circumcision can only be  a nod to Bunuel's eye slashing scene in Un Chien Adalou).

In short, the film is an artistic masterpiece, one that can't be 'read' in any conventional sense of the word, one that will continually disappoint and offend anyone that tries to look for a straightforward meaning. May Lars von Trier long continue to wind up the Daily Mail. If you don’t like that, go and see the Bourne fucking Identity.

Film: The Baader Meinhof Complex (Dir: Udi Edel)

I have to admit it. I'm a sucker for movies about romantic, well-dressed and just plain fucking cool revolutionary groups. The Black Panthers, the Weather Underground, the Situationists, Patty Hearst and the Symbionese Liberation army; wherever you stand on their politics and the morality of their actions, you have to admit there's a Robin Hood-esque attractiveness to all of them. Some of them also wore some very cool clothes.

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The Baader Meinhof Complex isn't the first film I've seen recently about a terrorist group - I reviewed Steve Macqueen's Hunger a couple of weeks ago (some I'm probably on a Government watch list somewhere) - but where Macqueen's film is a profound, sombre picture of a men pushed to the edge, the Baader Meinhof Complex is as much about the sex and the style of the terrorists concerned as it is analysing their substance and their actions.

The film, directed by Udi Edel who also masterminded the controversial, but critically acclaimed Last Exit to Brooklyn movie and Madonna's woeful Body of Evidence, and produced and written by Bernd Eichinger who last brought us Downfall basically tells the story of the life of the group officially called the Red Army Faction, but became more popularly known as the Baader Meinhof group, after two of the Faction's leading personalities (Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof).

The RAF (no, not them) saw themselves as a politicial group. History views them as extreme left-wingers - they used the Marx as a starting point and were influenced by, Rudi Dutschke - but really saw themselves as sitting outside the conventional ideological framework, so were inevitably described lazily as anarchists. They saw themselves as kicking against authoritarianism - they'd grown up with the Nazi legacy and were determined to do everything in their power to prevent Germany again falling foul of a similar police state nightmare. They did this through a series of revolutionary actions, mostly bomings of what they selected as 'legitimate targets'.

The Baader Meinhof Complex only pays lip service to the rights and wrongs of the Red Army Faction's campaign. Frankly, Eichinger and Edel don't need to, its been dealt with previously by countless documentaries including this fairly recent one from BBC4. This film is instead about the RAF's actions, its impulsiveness, its vanity, its glamour - what it did, rather than what it thought. In that sense, its an action movie in the truest sense of the word.

It's the group's fundamental vanity, that led to its eventual downfall - something defined in the film as the Baader Meinhof Complex and personnified in it by Ulrike Meinhof's breakdown. The group became less a band of revolutionaries than a killing machine - jettisonning Meinhof's theory for the guns and bullets and a love of live on the edge of society.

The Baader Meinhof Complex isn't as great a piece of art as Hunger, but that's not the point. It doesn't offer a critique of the RAF, but an intensely entertaining film. It is slightly longer than it should be, and suffers from some horrendous musical choices (Blowin' In The Wind over the ednd credits and My Generation earlier on - how cheesy can you get?!), but is definitely worth a couple of hours of anyone's time.

An interesting article from the Guardian on the cultural legacy of the Red Army Faction, here.

A useful Baader Meinhof resource.

Film: Gomorrah

You can't walk down the street, open a paper or a view a web page without being confronted with Daniel Craig's smug face at the moment. I've never been a fan of the Bond films, or come to think of it the supposedly edgier Bourne ones, prefering my movies a little bit more cerebral and, well, gritty.

Saturday's movie choice has certainly got grit by the bucketload. It's an Italian movie, set in Napoli, directed by Matteo Garrone and based on the book by Roberto Saviano, and tells the story of the Camorra (basically the local mafia). This isn't a Godfather-style glamoratisation of the mafioso lifestyle - far from it. It tells the stories of a success of men (some young, some not so young) and the implications of being permanently 'at war'.

Its not just about shootings and drug deals (those are there in their unbridled glory if you want them), but it also looks at the much more unsexy side of the mobster life - toxic waste disposal, and the involvement in haute couture.

Gomorrah is a powerful movie that really demands an emotional response. More so when you realise that a large proportion of the film's cast aren't actually actors, but residents of the mean streets where the film was shot - a lot of the people you actually see on screen have lived life as part of or under the shadow of the Camorra. The Guardian ran a piece about this the other day.

With its grainy (often documentary style) camerawork, the film has a certain naked honesty that brings to mind Man Bites Dog (without the dark humour), City of God (minus the banana) and La Haine.

For me, the film too often seems to lack a focus and a real sense of narrative, and so falls a little short of La Haine in that regard. That said. Gomorrah is still a blinding - if a bleakly blinding - piece of work..

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