Tuesday

I worry about the character of Joey in Friends. Yes, this is a sitcom, and he is a comedy character, but there is something troubling about him. He is a baby, an overgrown child, yet (highly) sexually active and aggressive. He is constantly hitting on his closest friends, and this is accepted. It is to be laughed at. He is also extremely possessive, to the extent that he will take things away from babies, and be suspicious of anyone new entering his closed group, and he is fixated with being young. A particularly disturbing episode is 'The One Where Joey Doesn't Share Food'. On a date he is annoyed by a woman who wants to eat some of his food. However, when she orders a nicer desert than him, he eats it all whilst she is taking a phone call. When she returns he says 'I'm not even sorry'. Indeed, he is obsessed with food, and is aggressively stupid. He is a worrying figure when you start to consider these issues seriously. And what character did they choose to have their own series? Joey. Although we should remember that the really successful 'Joey' series is actually Two and a Half Men. The hard thing for you is to figure out if I'm joking or not.

Sunday

Some may have already noticed, or I might have even said in my previous review of the film, that Borat is essentially a documentary. I don't mean this literally, or that the fictional documentary style of the movie is to be taken seriously. Rather, the project of the film is to expose what people think, and whilst the methods it uses to achieve this are different to a conventional documentary, it has to be said that they are not unrelated. The presenter pretends that he is innocent and naive to their customs in order to let them open up and reveal their true feelings (this is essentially the style of Louis Theroux). Borat holds himself up as a mirror for Americans to express their feelings on foreigners and on themselves. One might say that the film is a perfect document of the United States under the Bush administration - its insular, self-involved isolationism. Is the country really any different now under Obama? This is perhaps the object of Bruno, which I haven't yet seen, but it makes a neat parallel. Bush is represented by Borat, the misogynistic, sex-obsessed patriot; and Obama is represented by Bruno, the gay, artistic idealist. Stop me when I go too far.

Friday

An important line in A Serious Man, or perhaps just for the experience of the main character, seemed to come about halfway through. Gopnik (who is a university lecturer) is approached by the father of one of his students who has tried to bribe him to get a good grade. The father says he will sue for defamation if he tells anyone, or will say he accepts bribes if he rejects the money (or something like this). The confusion over the issue is crucial, as Gopnik is puzzled over what exactly the right course of action should be. The father simply tells him: 'Accept the mystery'. This line seems to apply not just to this issue in Gopnik's life, but everything else that is going on around him. He cannot accept the mystery of the events, mainly of other people's strange behaviour, and is thus tormented. When, or if, you see the film, it might be worth keeping in mind, and it might go some way to explaining both the puzzling beginning and ending of the movie.

Thursday

A Serious Man is the Coen Brothers' second film since No Country for Old Men. For some reason, that movie serves as a new landmark in their career, and their films are now often billed as 'from the directors of No Country for Old Men'. This is strange since that movie is atypical to their career, and the two that have followed are more obviously Coenesc (I may have invented this word). A Serious Man is not as funny as Burn After Reading, but this is perhaps because its humour is subtler and darker. There is definitely more substance here, but it is a harder film to like immediately. Both the beginning sequence and the ending left me confused, but whilst the latter was intriguing, the former seemed irrelevant. They also relied on the trick dream sequence a bit too much throughout (where what is happening you think real until the character wakes up screaming). Nonetheless, the small touches were so brilliantly conceived and carried out, loaded with innuendo and the possibility of violence, that I couldn't help but like this film. I have one quibble which I always do with period films - why does everything look so new? Were people in the past a lot cleaner and tidier than us? I can't believe so.

Monday

Sugar is difficult viewing. It's the second film from writer-directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck (the first being Half Nelson). It follows the story of Sugar, a baseball pitcher from the Dominican Republic who trains at one of the Major League academies in his own country, before being signed to play for several Minor League teams in America. He takes this as his big break, and initially is very impressive, before injury, language and cultural problems start to intrude, and he soon realises he doesn't have the ability or the perseverance to make it to the top. This is the difficult aspect I mentioned. It's hard to see someone fail. We are used to seeing people succeed in movies, especially sport's ones. The film portrays this sensitively and intelligently, but it does inevitably rely on some sport's movie cliches (the commentator telling us what's happening etc), which is a bit disappointing. However, I found another issue interesting. The directors say (in an interview accompanying the DVD) that they tried to highlight how Major League teams take these young men from the Dominican Republic, exploit them for their talent, and then dump them if they're no good. Yet isn't this exactly what the directors have done with their lead actor, Algenis Perez Soto, an otherwise unknown baseball player from the country? I don't know.

Monday

I've been watching lots of films but failing to write about them. It may take time, or be impossible, to catch up. I saw Six Degrees of Separation last night. It's a movie based on a play, which popularised the notion of how all of us might be separated by only six degrees. It is without doubt still a play, not making the successful leap to cinema: it's preoccupied with dialogue, and visually and musically uninteresting. It is noticeable, however, as the first serious role for Will Smith. As a play, then, it is thought-provoking, even if its issues are a little out of date by now. It has a tweeness (I'm guessing that's not a real word) that is a bit annoying as well. I don't think I'd watch it again. Looking up the film, though, I did find a bizarre movie connection. J. J. Abrams played the role of Doug in this film, and then went on to produce two TV series connected to the idea: Lost and Six Degrees.

Thursday

I hadn't been particularly keen to see Watchmen, until I was offered the chance to watch it at the IMAX - London's largest cinema screen. It is an impressive size, but once you begin watching the film, you quickly forget. It is not a huge step beyond most cinema screens, and as such seems a bit over-hyped. Perhaps a 3-D film would be more interesting. As for Watchmen itself, I have to say the plot was fairly lame. I'm not sure how much we were supposed to take seriously, the characters took themselves very seriously, but it was comical, and there was a rather adolescent philosophy. The character of Dr Manhattan was rather absurd, and seemed like he belonged in the Blue Man group. The film's plot was more complicated than it needed to be, and it built to a slight, morally ambiguous, anti-climax. Nonetheless, I am seduced by the style of these movies - the great soundtrack, the slow-motion, the perfectly framed photography - although there is something motionless about them, as if by capturing the exact picture as it appears in the graphic novel they somehow remove it from the movement that is inherent to movies. This is a very strange film, I found, quite had to get your head around, and definitely only for fans of the genre.