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Original title: Der Baader Meinhof Komplex
Germany/France/Czech Republic: Uli Edel, 2008; IMDB

I knew a little about the Red Army Faction (RAF), a terrorist group which was active in Germany from the 1970s through to the late 90s, but I had no knowledge of the people behind it and never heard the name "Baader-Meinhof" until I saw the Andrzej Zulawski interview that my brother edited for the Mondo Vision DVD release of LA FEMME PUBLIQUE. Zulawski described them as "dangerously horrible", and at least on the basis of Uli Edel's film about the group, THE BAADER MEINHOF COMPLEX, I'm inclined to feel that this is an entirely accurate summary. I don't doubt that the film takes considerable liberties with the truth - what film based on real events doesn't? - but if it stands for anything, the son of one of the group's victims has praised it for showing the RAF for what it really was: a mismatched, disorganised bunch of posers and nutcases whose love of violence ultimately overshadowed any ideals they might originally have had.

What the film does extremely well, especially in the early stages, is to capture the mood which gave rise to extreme left wing groups like the RAF in the second half of the 20th century. As the American theatrical trailer (viewable here) succinctly sums it up, "The children of the Nazi generation have grown up in the ruin their parents created. They vowed fascism would never rule their country again." In his blog, Amm Sam takes exception to this description, pointing out that the trailer provides a rather warped view of these individuals (try applying a similarly romanticised description to Al'Qaeda and see how far it gets you). He's right, and in terms of the personalities of the people behind the RAF, it's disingenuous to claim that they were simply people who were trying to avoid a repeat of the horrors of the past. However, it gives the viewer something approaching an appreciation of why so many ordinary Germans, saddled with the collective guilt of the atrocities the previous generation had committed, felt compelled to side with and condone the actions of a group of indiscriminate murderers. The gang itself consists of a diverse gaggle of idealists, juvenile delinquents and plain old lovers of violence, and any claim to having a single unified goal quickly crumbles as naive idealism gives way to in-fighting, betrayal and self-preservation. (To say nothing of their unlikely alliances with other terrorist movements whose ideologies were so thoroughly removed from their own it's a wonder they didn't blow each other up.)

It may be called THE BAADER MEINHOF COMPLEX, but Andreas Baader (Moritz Bleibrteu) actually doesn't make much of an impression. The strongest impact comes from the two female leads: young radical Gudrun Ensslin (Johanna Wokalek) and left-wing journalist Ulrike Meinhof (Martina Gedeck). The latter, who in many ways serves as our "way in" to the gang, starts off talking about "the revolution" only in theoretical terms but ultimately finds herself wilfully participating in the gang's violent exploits. Gedeck is excellent in the role, which serves as an admirable attempt to humanise the woman without condoning her behaviour, even if the script (by THE DOWNFALL producer Bernd Eichinger) doesn't quite manage to pull off her change of heart in a meaningful way. The breakneck pace at which the film moves (it's a two and a half hour rollercoaster) means that there's little time for introspection, and in the space of a few minutes of screen time Meinhof goes from saying she could never leave her two young daughters to willingly abandoning them to a Palestinian refugee camp. Moments like these, and the seemingly endless parade of different but ultimately interchangeable faces, make you realise just what a massive undertaking the filmmakers have saddled themselves with, and it's not entirely surprising that the human story does ultimately become a little lost.

In a number of ways, I'm reminded of Martin Scorsese's GANGS OF NEW YORK. That might seem like an odd comparison, but bear with me. Like this, GANGS OF NEW YORK was extremely ambitious in its scope and scale, attempting to capture the mood of a specific place during a specific period and weaving multiple narratives about a diverse and often only distantly connected set of characters. Both films threaten at any moment to collapse under their own weight and both are, I'll be the first to admit, flawed pieces, but at the same time quite breathtaking in what they set out to achieve and just how much of that they succeed in accomplishing. THE BAADER MEINHOF COMPLEX is a thrilling, eye-opening and at times shocking look at a group that, despite the carnage they caused in Europe in the latter half of the 20th century, has been subjected to surprisingly little attention by the film industry. Dangerously horrible indeed.

By the way, Christopher Hitchens wrote an excellent review of the film in VANITY FAIR. It's well worth reading.

Original title: Los abrazos rotos
Spain: Pedro Almodóvar, 2009; IMDB

I loved VOLVER, director Pedro Almodóvar's previous collaboration of Penélope Cruz. In fact, I ranked it number 9 in my Top 10 Films of the Decade list. It was the only Almodóvar I had ever seen, which remained the case until watching BROKEN EMBRACES, which reunites him with Cruz to tell another strange, offbeat tale about love and death. VOLVER was a weird little film, and on the surface of it BROKEN EMBRACES seems weirder still, although once the fractured timeline and the relationships of the various characters reveal themselves, it ultimately turns out to be a somewhat more conventional narrative about a filmmaker who falls for a struggling actress.

It's often said that Cruz is a far better actress when speaking her native Spanish rather than English, and based on the evidence, I'm inclined to agree (watch her in Alejandro Amenábar's excellent OPEN YOUR EYES/ABRE LOS OJOS and then playing the same role in the Hollywood remake, VANILLA SKY - there's no comparison). She was excellent in VOLVER and is very good in this, although the film really belongs to Lluís Homar as director/writer Mateo Blanco/Harry Caine (the latter being the pseudonym he adopted after a serious accident left him blinded), who portrays the character at two different stages in his life, before and after a tragedy that has major ramifications for his outlook on life. That said, neither he nor Cruz can quite make the romance that develops between their two characters seem entirely plausible. Perhaps it's down to the fractured nature of the narrative, which jumps back and forth between different time periods, but it just seems to come out of nowhere, and while the pair do have chemistry, something seems to be lacking. I was ultimately left with a sense that Mateo/Harry's relationship with Cruz's charater, Lena, wasn't all that far removed from that of the wealthy industrialist with whom she lives due, we are invited to assume, to his paying for life-saving medical treatment for her father.

BROKEN EMBRACES is an eclectic film. Part romance, part whodunit, part exposé of the film business, it has its finger in several different pies and the various elements don't always come together satisfyingly: when the final scene came around, I was left with a feeling that only part of the narrative was being wrapped up in a meaningful way. It's worth it, though, for the sumptuous photography, the slick sense of pace, and of course Penélope Cruz.

UK: Daniel Barber, 2009; IMDB

Generally speaking I try to avoid politics on this site, since I think it's fairly safe to assume that people come here for my latest impressions on films and BD transfers, not who I'm going to vote for in the upcoming election (although, in case you're wondering: the Liberal Democrats). However, with a film like HARRY BROWN, politics are pretty much impossible to avoid, as the plot seems to have been culled from the pages of the Conservative Party manifesto. The world portrayed in HARRY BROWN is, I suspect, what the Conservatives would like us to believe the whole of the UK looks like, in spite of the country's murder rate last year being the lowest in 20 years, with a drop of 5% in overall reported crime compared to the previous year. We are repeatedly told, on rather slim evidence, that this country has lost its way, and while I won't for a moment pretend that crime isn't a problem, the notion that we've fallen into anarchy and that things were infinitely better in the "good old days" (whatever THOSE were) strikes me as nothing more than fantasy.

(Incidentally, the film's star, Michael Caine, recently came out an openly backed the Conservatives, which I can't say was much of a surprise to me given the film's leanings.)

HARRY BROWN is often described as a British GRAN TORINO, and the similarities are readily apparent. Both revolve around an elderly former soldier living in a crime-infested area who, fed up with the situation, decides to take matters into his own hands. The differences lie in the ideology. Whereas GRAN TORINO effectively undercut Clint Eastwood's DIRTY HARRY image by ultimately refusing to have the character pick up a weapon and go around blasting away his neighbourhood's problems, Harry Brown is more than happy to torch a drug den (after killing the two resident dealers), threaten to kneecap one youth and shoot at least three others to death. I get the impression we're meant to see him as a man pushed to the edge and driven to commit actions he would normally abhor, but something about the ease with which he slips into the role of ultra-violent vigilante undermines this.

Morally, I find it all rather suspect, but at the same time there's a lot to admire in the film. It's very nicely shot and manages to maintain a palpable atmosphere of foreboding from beginning to end, and when all said and done there IS something rather compelling about watching a pensioner taking on some of the most disreputable examples of humanity. Michael Caine is terrific as the eponymous Harry Brown, and the supporting cast is comprised of a number of very capable performers, including Iain Glen, Liam Cunningham and Emily Mortimer, although the former two are playing characters that are too thinly written to make much of an impact, while Mortimer is stuck with the most thankless role in the movie: a buttoned-down detective who must simultaneously serve as Harry's foil and represent the counter-argument that the filmmakers seem to have little interest in airing.

So which film did I prefer? On the one hand, HARRY BROWN provides a sense of catharsis that GRAN TORINO, for obvious thematic reasons, denies the viewer. On the other, GRAN TORINO is a far more optimistic film. The moral of HARRY BROWN, fundamentally, is that the world is filled with scumbags and the best of dealing with them is with a bullet in the head, while GRAN TORINO is considerably more egalitarian. Divorced from its underlying message, HARRY BROWN is a rather effective piece of work, but eh... it all seems a bit mean-spirited. Maybe I'm guilty of over-analysing it, but I suspect HARRY BROWN is aimed less at the sort of people who actually live on estates such as the one depicted in the film and more at the sort of Tory-voting Daily Mail readers who lament how society has gone to pot while tucking into the Sunday roast.

USA: Ben Sharpsteen, 1941; IMDB

I like all the Walt Disney classics (by which I mean the ones produced while Walt himself was still around) to one degree or another, but I can't help wishing he'd made more like DUMBO. Whereas the likes of FANTASIA and BAMBI threaten to buckle under their own pretensions, DUMBO, sandwiched between those two more ambitious projects, succeeds precisely because of its lack of pomp. To paraphrase Disney animator Eric Goldberg, they didn't set out to make great art, but in the process succeeded in doing precisely that. At a brisk 64 minutes, DUMBO doesn't outstay its welcome for even a second, and there is not a single frame of this simple but deeply satisfying movie that is not a joy to behold on every level. Whether it's the straightforward clown slapstick, the hilarious dialogue of the crows, the tugging at the heartstrings of Dumbo's separation from his mother or the "Oh my god, what the hell IS this?" of the Pink Elephants sequence, DUMBO is absolutely captivating and one of THE most enduring films of all time.

USA: Ruben Fleischer, 2009; IMDB

It's good to be back; to be back is good. After nearly a month with no way of watching movies on the big screen, I'm glad we picked ZOMBIELAND as the first film to watch via my brother's newly repaired AV receiver. Neither of us were particularly massive fans of SHAUN OF THE DEAD - I didn't dislike it or anything, but I didn't consider it the masterpiece that everyone else seemed to, vastly preferring Edgar Wright's follow-up, HOT FUZZ - but it did give birth to the (ugh) "zom-com", and as such ZOMBIELAND owes a massive debt to it. However, while SHAUN OF THE DEAD knowingly referenced the conventions of the zombie movie sub-genre, ZOMBIELAND's humour is derived more from the characters themselves than from name-checking clichés. Don't get me wrong, that's not to say that it isn't funny - it IS, often gut-bustlingly so. In particular, there's one extended sequence which I absolutely refuse to spoil for you... although if you've heard anything about the film, you probably know what it is already, because nearly every viewer and reviewer seems to find it necessary to spell out precisely what it is. I myself went in already spoiled, thanks to a wise-ass (who shall remain nameless) on one of the forums I frequent telling every man and his dog just what that sequence consisted of and just what a surprise it was to him. Yeah, thanks for nothing.

That said, even though perhaps the biggest laugh of the movie was spoiled for me, I still had an absolute blast with ZOMBIELAND. I was particularly impressed by the performances of the four leads, who essentially carry the movie for its duration (there are only a couple of other speaking parts). Woody Harrelson is always a hoot, and while Jesse Eisenberg inhabits the same awkward dweeb role as in ADVENTURELAND, it's not a bad role for him. He certainly seems less self-conscious about it than, say, Michael Cera, whom one tends to associate with these parts. Of the two leading ladies, Emma Stone gets the most to do, but twelve-year-old Abigail Breslin, probably best known for her role in LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE, continues to impress with a performance that belies her age... and I refuse to believe that the sight of a pre-pubescent child running around with a shotgun blowing the heads of zombies can ever get old.