Blue Valentine

Don’t take your girlfriend, they said. Depressing but like real life, they said. Oscar-worthy performances, they said. While all of the above are true, and my girlfriend did leave slightly red-eyed, it was, above all, a superb, transcendentally brilliant film. Intriguing, gripping and heartbreaking in equal measure, it brilliantly walks the line between indie romance and dirty realism.

Blue Valentine tells the outwardly simple story of Dean and Cindy, their relationship and its seemingly terminal decline; it starts with a scream and ends in a firework display. But this is certainly not the stuff of the Hollywood rom-com. For one, it has a quite controversial past as the American board of censors took umbrage at its graphic descriptions of sex – and particularly oral sex – and slapped it with an NC-17 rating, precluding TV advertising. Although it was rescinded on following an appeal, the anecdote certainly serves to show the sort of feathers the film has and will ruffle.

Through a series of flashbacks, the sparse storyline is leant a tragic poignancy as events slide inexorably towards the cathartic conclusion. There we see Dean and Cindy’s background, when they first meet, their wedding; here Gosling’s natural charm and attractiveness shine through. He and Michelle Williams are coruscating as the two leads and inhabit the characters with 70s De Niro brilliance. Their dealings with their daughter, the way they go about their lives and, above all, the way they are with each other contain a seldom-seen realistic quality. The writing and the seemingly haphazard accretion of details, causes, reasons and recriminations only add to this feeling. The fact that Gosling looking around a stone and half a head of hair lighter is meant to signify the nadir of early middle-age loserdom would be my only complaint.

Any film with a (fitting and excellent) soundtrack by Grizzly Bear is going to be leant a stately melancholy, at least in my eyes, and this is no different. Its powerful examination of romance, love, sexuality and the ageing process lingers long in the mind. I am certainly still thinking of it forty-eight hours later. A must-see.

127 Hours

Danny Boyle’s new film doesn’t need much introduction. After the supernova success of Slumdog Millionaire, culminating in the Best Director and Best Picture Oscars, the director is very much hot property. Add respected rising star James Franco, a host of great reviews and smattering of Golden Globe nominations to the mix and you start to see why it has been such a talking point. I can, however, safely report that all the talk is justified. As is the praise.

The film does, of course, tell the story of American thrill-seeker Aron Rolston, who, after a freak accident in 2003, got his arm trapped under a boulder in the desert where, after almost five days, he was forced to cut his own arm off with a blunt knife. One has to ask himself how a story that everyone has heard, with an ending that everyone knows, which essentially takes place in a giant crack can 1) be entertaining, or 2) have any dramatic tension. But somehow, miracle worker that he is, Boyle manages it. The film is both engaging, gripping, fun and, above all, incredibly well-made.

It starts in a caffeine-induced frenzy, frantic action appearing in split-screen, accompanied by the infectious, thumping 'Never Hear Surf Music Again', by Free Blood. The action does not let up from there as we see Aron preparing for his trip, not telling anyone where he is going and forgetting his pen-knife. We then see him drive to the wilderness, leave his car and then cycle (intermittently punctuated by jumps and wheelies – natch) the 17-odd miles to the fateful Blue John Canyon. There he meets two young, female hikers, proceeds to show them a secret drop into a hidden pool, before leaving them as quickly as he has met them. There is the faintest hint of attraction between Aron and the two girls but, for the most part, he is in his own self-absorbed bubble. And then comes the accident.

It is here that Franco comes into his own, as we spend at least 90% of the rest of the movie in his capable company. Where others might o played Aron as a self-satisfied bore, Franco finds a novel humanity and empathy. Claustrophobically  and inventively (not to mention brilliantly) shot by cinematographers Anthony Dod Mantle and Enrique Chediak, the closeness never once gets tiring. The action is interlaced with various fantasies, memories and remeniscences of Aron’s that bring his desperate, dehydrated plight into clear focus. Family, friends and a vague failed romance bring a gentle poignancy to the events.

When the time comes for the ‘hero’ to amputate his own arm I was engrossed. Then I was grossed out, as the bone-cracking, tendon-snapping, flesh-carving spectacle brutally played out before my eyes. If there was any message to be had, it seemed to revolve around Ralston not forgetting his nearest-and-dearest and needing this personal tragedy to paradoxically bring him closer to them and make him a better person. But all that is an irrelevance – go and see it; I can’t think of many better or more fun ways to spend ninety minutes.

Blood Meridian

First published in 1985, Cormac McCarthy’s masterpiece remains as unsettling today as it was on publication. Its infrequently brutal, crude and unemotional depictions of atrocities linger long in the memory. Nonetheless it is an essential novel that aspires to greatness and deals with the weightiest of themes: man’s primordial need for violence.

It tells the story of a young Tennessean known only as the ‘kid’, who is first orphaned and then drawn into a nightmarish world of savagery. He is initially recruited by a gang of filibusters on the U.S.–Mexico border in the 1850s at the time of the Texas-Mexico war. Later, out of luck he then joins the Glanton Gang, a now-infamous band of mercenary scalp-hunters employed by the state of Chihuahua to protect its citizens from rampaging hordes of Apache Indians. Although readily apparent before, it is with Glanton that the primeval lawlessness of the time comes into sharp focus; massacres, rape and pillaging are as common as in the time of the Vikings. As both the whites and the Indians equally partake in the maelstrom, we become aware that this is no ordinary Cowboys and Indians tale.

Among Glanton’s men is the massive, menacing Judge Holden, a hairless, seven-feet tall, twenty-one stone giant who is the apotheosis of bloodthirsty evil. Apparently a historical figure, he is a fine fiddle player, balletic dancer and a polymath capable of holding court on topics as wide-ranging as astrology, philosophy and draughtsmanship. He is also one of the most sinister and memorable characters I have ever encountered; recently voted one of the hundred best characters in all American fiction, he is almost a reason in himself to read the book.

However, one of the things that most impresses throughout the novel is the prose. For, as in all of McCarthy’s books, the type is shorn of any extraneous marks, such as inverted commas or semicolons, and the text is left to speak for itself. And speak it does: the rhythmical, lyrical prose at once evoking Milton and the Bible, the extended descriptions of the sky and landscape evoking Homer’s Greek epics. This allusiveness and ambition never comes over as bombastic, it merely lends the events an importance and grandeur that makes one sit up and take notice.

Indeed, McCarthy does have much to say about the vagaries and violence of our species. Thus, his interweaving of fact and fiction, peppered with a web of allusions, is his own way of lending credence to his views, whilst striving for immortality through fiction. For fans of McCarthy, attracted by his brilliant, The Road: this is an impeccable next stop; for people new to his oeuvre: this is an enchanting, beguiling, hypnotic read. For firm fans of McCarthy: why not have a re-read?