Light in the Dark

I'd thought that I'd fallen off watching Almodovar when I saw La piel que habito
(The Skin I Live In (2011)) in Sheffield, but I caught up with Los abrazos rotos
(Broken Embraces (2009)) late last year on DVD and I did actually see Volver in the cinema. My favourite Almodovar films have always been the ones with Carmen Maura - the Johnny Depp to Almodovar's Tim Burton - and it is great to see her back here, I think for the first time since Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios (1988) (which Los abrazos rotos borrowed from). In twenty years, she's graduated from the strong woman spinning plates to the crazy grandmother, but she is a luminous as ever. I recognise a few other bit players, too.

The Almodovar universe is consistent - here we have the strong central female (Raimunda (Penélope Cruz)) with a waster and abusive husband Paco (Antonio de la Torre), odd sister Soledad (Lola Dueñas) and impressionable daughter Paula (Yohana Cobo). The death of Raimunda and Soledad's aunt Paula (Chus Lampreave) in the village where they grew up coincides with Paco's murder in Madrid, and the need for Raimunda to hide his brother. Meanwhile, their mother, Irene (Carmen Maura), presumed dead in a fire with their father some years earlier, starts appearing to Soledad. Raimunda is dealing with ghosts of one kind or another. It's perhaps not as melodramatic as it would have been in 1988 - there are prostitutes but fewer random drug taking incidents, and Raimunda avoids a potential for an affair when a film crew visits her suburb. This is the mature Almodovar, and perhaps I prefer the early comedies. But it is shot beautifully, and Maura I could watch in anything.

I watched this on the recommendation of a friend - well to be accurate the mother of a friend, or pedantic the mother in law of a friend - who has kept asking me if I've watched a film called The Kid yet. Now I have - I could have been put off it by the director being Nick Moran, from that mockney masterpiece Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, but that would have been a shame.

It's an adaptation of a true story, told in two books by Kevin Lewis, who grew up in an abusive and neglectful family, escaped into a bar and boxing, and finally made it after he found someone to believe when he hit rock bottom. On paper it really shouldn't work - it is grim stuff to be heart warming, and daily headlines tell us about the ones who did make it. And the climax is botched.

The film begins with the young adult Lewis dumped on the street outside the house where he used to live, and him breaking in to his old bedroom, and making an attempt at suicide. Of course, as he's narrating we have a fair idea how this will turn out, but first we get young Kevin and then we get teen Kevin and finally back to adult Kevin. The early scenes are genuinely harrowing - not so much the alcoholic, neglectful father (Con O'Neill), but the violent and remarkably uglified mother, Gloria (Natascha McElhone, unrecognisable from The Truman Show), and apparently the abuse is toned down from the real story. There are saviours - a diligent teacher (Ioan Gruffudd), a smart fosterer (Bernard Hill) and a kindly couple (James Fox and Shirley Anne Field), but bad luck and poor choices dog Kevin. It could have ended a lot worse.

Moran gets pretty convincing performances out of his inexperienced cast members, although you miss the star cameos once their roles are over. There are some good flourishes to show the passage of time, but it suffers from what I call the tin bath syndrome - you interrupt your viewing of a harrowing scene to be nostalgic about that tin bath, just like one you used to have... Well, in this case it's Rubick's Cube and other ephemera of the 1980s and so forth, the fetish for period details sometimes too likely to shock you out of the film.

But it works as a post-Loach film, and its heart's in the right place, even if it is perhaps a little too in love with bare knuckle boxing in junk yards.

I liked Moon (2009), Jones's feature debut, and plan to write on it soon, but I suspect it isn't as clever as it thinks it is, and the mug and Post-It notes on WALL-E GERTY kept appearing and vanishing in annoying continuity glitches. It was clearly heavily influenced by Silent Running (Douglas Trumbull, 1972) and was essentially a two-hander. The trailer for Source Code didn't look promising, and so I ended up waiting for the DVD. I'm glad I waited, although it's a film whose discussion clearly risks spoilers. You may wish to look away now. If you haven't seen the film, this might not make sense. (It might not make sense anyway.)

Here the influences are Groundhog Day (Harold Raimis, 1993) and filmed Philip K. Dick, such as Paycheck (John Woo, 2003) and Next (Lee Tamahori, 2007), and Quantum Leap, thanks to Scott Bukula's cameo. Plus Jones has cast Jake Gyllenhaal from Donnie Darko (Richard Kelly, 2001), another film with lots of timey-wimey stuff. This one seems to be an exercise in how many unbelievable premises can be fitted into a single movie.

So there's a bomb attack on a train, which is the dry run for a dirty bomb attack on Chicago. Ex-porn star Afghanistan War vet Colter Stevens happens to be the right size of a passenger on the train, and can be projected into the passenger's body to find the bomb and stop it from detonating, hence preventing the second terrorist act. There's a woman, Christina Warren (Michelle Monaghan) who is travelling with the person he has piggy-back on, who he must avoid chatting up, and a military officer, Captain Colleen Goodwin (Vera Farmiga), who is doing the sending and who isn't telling him everything.He seems to be able to go back and try multiple times, until he succeeds, even penetrating the terrorists' cunning Plan B. At which point we can start objecting about the time paradoxes - if he succeeds, then they don't know there's been a train explosion (because there hasn't been a train explosion), so even though he's passed on information about the suspect, they don't know to send him back in time.

Ah... let's wave our hands, and go for the many-worlds interpretation and think back to Gregory Benford's Timescape (1980), a superior piece of work, and figure that Stevens's missions create alternate possibilities in which the train doesn't crash or Chicago isn't destroyed. But then if every time an event can happen differently a parallel universe is created, then there are plenty of universes where the world is saved without his intervention.

(I have a strong memory of a radio comedy by Cliffhanger, "The Assassination of Karl Marx": "Remember, you can only travel through time twice. Travel a third time, and a sausage will stick to the end of your nose.")

But this is one of the many things you are not meant to think about. Presumably the train bomb is meant to divert resources from Chicago city centre. Why can the contact with the dead person only be for eight minutes before their death? How do they know that someone of the size and weight of the veteran they just happen to have hanging around was on the train? Presumably they've found evidence that such a person was on the train - or may be it's that they were able to find someone of the right range to piggyback on. Perhaps he's not been told the truth about what's going on - in fact we know he isn't.

And the ending - well, talk about Hollywood bolt on. It is clear that the bomber did not work alone, so it is equally clear that there is someone else around. (The film assumes the bombers only had one plan b.) Does the bomber spill the beans? Did they have time to before the bomb didn't go off after all? I think not. In fact it's pretty clear whom the second bomber ought to be, although I'm not quite sure that works anyway, with someone else as a possible other candidate. That's the sucker punch ending. (Or are we meant to think that's who it is, and the plot's loss of this point is just careless?) Instead we get a cake and eat it ending, a eucatastrophe of all eucatastrophes, where Stevens gets to tie up loose ends, someone ties up his loose ends, and yet we are left with a gooey, bless...

I really enjoyed Moon. That too had plot holes, but I don't think it insulted my intelligence as this film did. Or perhaps I'm not smart enough to realise it.

Or, rather, Heat Wave, a title that sounds rather more like a Fritz Lang film than a Hammer production which, oddly has two surprises in it. Firstly, Sidney James is pretty good in a straight role (but then again, at this point he hadn't had the decade of Carry Ons), and secondly this is the noir version of The Great Gatsby. Or at least the set up reminded me of parts Gatsby, which I haven't seen or read for twenty years. But surely the British title offers an echo of it?

This is one of the Hammer attempts at noir - directed by Kenneth Hughes rather than Terrence Fisher - with two American import actors, Alex Nicol as writer Mark Kendrick and Hillary Brooke as the femme fatale, Carol Forrest. Kendrick, struggling to finish a novel, becomes friends with Beverly Forrest (Sidney James), who is clearly already disillusioned with his second wife, Carol. Mark and Carol have an awkward relationship which heads towards an affair, as she decides that it's time to murder her hubby to guarantee her inheritance. As in so many of these films, we have a screwed on over character (Mark) telling the story in retrospect.

James's performance is great - the man who has made it and is not comfortable, who has punched above his weight. It's a story that must exist in a hundred American variants (The Postman Always Rings Twice, to some extent Double Indemnity, but here we have a British version - I'd not heard of High Wray, Ken Hughes's own novel, named for a real place in the Lake District where this film (and presumably novel) is set. Mark clearly allows himself to be led astray - his lust for women and drink, or at least one woman, is what gets him into trouble.