Friday

Two things you may not have known about Joaquin Phoenix: this week he announced that he will not act again. Two Lovers, also directed by James Gray of We Own the Night, will be his last movie. Apparently he has in the past retired from acting for a period only to return. Perhaps he will do the same again, but for now we can say that it is a great loss to the film world.

The second thing you may not know is that in 2006 he was involved in a bad accident that flipped his car over. Lying in the wreck, he heard someone tapping on his window and a voice say 'Just relax'. Unable to see the man, he replied, 'I'm fine. I am relaxed'. Then he managed to see who it was: the director Werner Herzog, who replied, 'No, you're not'. After helping Phoenix out of the wreckage, Herzog phoned in an ambulance and disappeared.

Thursday

We Own the Night came out late last year. It stars Joaquin Phoenix and Mark Wahlberg as brothers, and Robert Duvall as their father, in a New York of the late 1980s. Phoenix runs a night club, whilst his brother and father both work as policemen. They begin investigating his club as a place where Russian mafia are dealing drugs from. Tension inevitably rises in the family, and violence soon erupts as a drug war develops. I imagine parallels were drawn by critics between this movie and The Departed, but this film in no sense copies or imitates that one. The beginning is a little confusing and slow, but afterwards this soon picks up into a powerful drama. It's a well-made, well-performed and well-written movie. Phoenix, especially, is excellent. The director, James Gray, lets things happen without overstating them. The gunfight/car chase in the rain, with little or not music, and the rain obscuring the windscreens, was brilliant. Perhaps overall the film tried to include too much, and should have kept its scale small, but I have very little to complain about really. This is a very good movie.

Wednesday

I was surprised by how quickly the Coen brothers produced Burn After Reading after No Country for Old Men. Perhaps this was exaggerated by a late and prolonged release of the latter, and an early release of the former, in order to gain more publicity. They took three years to make a movie after Ladykillers, but before that made four films in four years. Anyway, in looking up screening times on the Odeon website, I decided to start reading user reviews of the movie, and became fascinated by them. The reviewers either hated or loved the film. Many said it was the worst film they had ever seen, whilst some said it was the funniest. I have a feeling that those who hated it were drawn into the cinema by mis-advertising. They were expecting a comedy with Brad Pitt and George Clooney. They did, of course, get one, but it was a very, very dark comedy, with its two stars playing unconventional, bizarre roles. I loved it. The Coen brothers return to the territory of Fargo, but this is much darker, and Carter Burwell's epic music seems even more brilliantly out of place. I am a little uncertain about John Malkovich, but he does get better as the film goes on. Certain scenes did seem that enough time hadn't been spent on them. There were good jokes there, but the actors didn't deliver them well enough, and there were pauses in dialogue when there shouldn't have been. Nonetheless, this is a good movie. I wonder, however, how far such a script would have got without the Coen name attached to it.

Wednesday

Vantage Point came out earlier this year. I remember wanting to see it, then reading a negative review and deciding not to. The film shows you several different viewpoints, or vantages, of the assassination of a US president. I believe the review said that seeing the same events repeated several times becomes tiring. I can say that this is almost true. I was about to get tired of seeing the same events, but then the movie changed. Every time you return to the beginning you learn something new. You are kept on the edge of your seat throughout. Things are revealed in perfectly arranged sequences. Although on reflection you might think that certain things are rather artificially hidden from you, in the moment of the movie you don't notice them. I think this would've been great to see in the cinema. It drags you along, surprising you every few minutes. Its lack of success owes more to a lack of big name star rather than anything else. If Tom Cruise had been in Dennis Quaid's role, this film might have been huge. I, however, prefer it as it is: a great fun, intriguing and entertaining movie.

Friday

There are perhaps too many things to say about Top Gun. I'll restrict myself to just one element that I noticed upon watching the film again recently. When I was a young lad, joyfully frolicking in the fields of Sussex, I remember loving especially the bit at the end of the film when the pilots finally go to war and fight the Russians. Yet, the other day, I found this was exactly the bit that could've been dropped from the movie entirely. To recap for you, Goose dies and Maverick loses his nerve. He doesn't feel like he wants to be a pilot anymore. However, his superior tells him he has enough credits to graduate from the academy anyway. The ceremony takes place the next day. Maverick isn't there, and everyone worries that he has given up. Suddenly, of course, he appears, receives his award (or whatever it was) and congratulates Iceman (his nemesis) on being the best pilot. Everything has been settled, there is no longer anything else to prove. I would've ended the film there, perhaps the movie would've been better, but less successful, if it had. However, the pilots are then called to war, Maverick once again loses his nerves briefly, but then recovers them. We're shown that he's learnt his lesson, but still keeps a bit of his personality that makes him the best. Perhaps we do need to see this, but perhaps we don't. I felt it was slightly unnecessary and gratuitous, pandering to the boy rather than the man, but then that is who this film was made for.