My Rating: 

About my rating system

Judi Dench plays Barbara Covett, a battle-axe teacher nearing retirement in a London inner-city school, who befriends the new teacher, Sheba Hart (played by Cate Blanchet). When Barbara accidentally discovers that Sheba is having an affair with one of the students, she decides to take advantage of Sheba’s situation to get close to her.

As the plot unfolded I wasn’t quite sure where it was going. It seemed to me that there was more to Barbara’s motives than appeared. Was it just a case of a lonely old Lesbian wanting to take advantage of the situation to get some action, or could it be something else?

Unfortunately, what started as a highly intriguing story tapered off towards the end leaving me feeling that it should have been so much more. At least the superb writing and acting by the two former Queens and Bill Nighy compensated slightly for the underwhelming plot.

I found the most engaging aspect of the film to be Barbara Covett’s first-person narration. It reminded me a lot of the narration by Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale) in American Psycho. Not to say that Barbara is a serial killer.

In some movies narration is essentially a cop-out by the Director who doesn’t know how to properly tell the story. In Notes on A Scandal the narration is crucial. It immediately allows us access to Barbara’s bitter, twisted personality; the mask of a lonely old spinster hiding her contempt for ‘modern’ families, the education system, and the superficiality of today’s Britain.

The narration also gives us some of the best lines. Barbara is clearly a frustrated writer. When she’s not writing in her diary her thoughts are expressed to us as if she’s writing fine literature. An example of this is when she’s sitting on the stairs listening to the argument between Sheba and her husband – “I sat in the gods while the aria unfolded before me”. Sheba sums this up towards the end of the film with a put-down to Barbara “you think you’re fucking Virginia Woolf!”.

Another problem for me was the relationship between Sheba and the 15 year-old student. It seems slightly implausible, as does her marriage to the older husband. But of course, these things happen. Women marry older men, even older men that aren’t rich. Affairs between teachers and schoolboys do occur. Although I’m sure not as often as your average 15 year old schoolboys might purport.

In summary, an interesting enough story, above average writing and acting, but let down by an unfulfilling finale.

I’ve decided to start writing some short movie reviews on here. I’ve got quite a large DVD collection, most of of which I’ve now copied on to my Apple TV set-up. In my geekness, I’ve got movies stored on a couple of external hard disks connected to my wireless router so that I can stream them wirelessly to any of the Apple TVs. We’ve somehow ended up with 3 in our house. Surely that’s more than is healthy for any small family?

My ratings will be based on the 5 stars system. Half stars are allowed so it’s effectively a score out of ten.

Unlike ‘proper’ critical reviews from bona-fide film critics, my ratings aren’t based on the quality of the film as judged by the usual standards. I simply rate films based on how much I enjoyed them or otherwise appreciated them. For instance, there’s certain comedies that may get a slating by the film critics and have a low rating on IMDB, but if they make me laugh I’m going to give them a higher rating, simple as.

There’s quite a few oscar winners and so-called ‘classics’ that I’ve seen which have bored me to tears. When that’s the case it gets a low rating. I don’t care if it was considered ground-breaking in its time, with beautiful cinematography and a narrative which captures the zeitgeist of the moment. If I yawned, it gets a low rating. An example which I saw for the first time recently is The Third Man (1949). There’s my invitation to join the British Film Institute out of the window!

I’ll very rarely review the latest releases as I generally wait until they’re out on DVD/Blueray. In fact, I’ve now boycotted the cinema after my experience during the last 2 visits. I took the family to see both Super 8 and the final Harry Potter, and on both occasions the experience was ruined by inconsiderate twats; munching, coughing, talking, slurping and causing light pollution from their mobile phones for the entire length of the film. They obviously have no appreciation for the Wittertainment Code of Conduct…

I’ve currently got a patent lawyer looking into whether or not anyone else has patented my invention of wireless audio streaming in cinemas to surround-sound headphones that they can hand out like they do 3-D glasses. Not really. You can have that idea for free.

Talking about 3-D. I’m certainly over that gimmick. I actually like to see a sharp, bright picture, not the slightly blurred, dim experience you get through 3-D glasses, for which you have to pay a premium through the ticket price.

If I do visit the cinema again it will be to see a film nobody else wants to see. On a Sunday morning. Alternatively, it will be during the Summer to catch one of the Movies in the Park.

Then again, open-air cinema isn’t really the place to appreciate a film first time round. Not when you’re surrounded by heavy-petting teenagers and the dulcet tones of the generator for a burger van whirring away in the background.

Being a rather geeky James Bond fan I was very much looking forward to the Quantum of Solace.

After the re-incarnation of James Bond in Casino Royale, which kept pretty much authentic to the original plot and character in Ian Fleming’s novel, I had high hopes for QoS.

What a disappointment.

Unlike the edgy, exhilarating and well-shot action scenes in Casino Royale, the action scenes in QoS were a bit far fetched at best, and for most parts, completely unwatchable at worst. Unfortunately, it seems the Director and Editor had taken the comparison with the Jason Bourne films to heart and decided to follow this latest ridiculous trend of shooting scenes with a shaky hand-held camera and over-editing the scenes so much that the angle of shot changes with nearly every frame. The result is you can’t make out what’s going on.

I can imagine that in 10 years time we’ll look back at this period in film-making and think ‘what was that all about? Who on earth thought it was a good idea to shoot big blockbuster action scenes with a hand-held camera and switch between cameras angles so fast that it gives the viewer motion sickness?’. I think Paul Greengrass is a good British directory, and both the last 2 Bourne films which he directed and United 93 are great films, but they’d be even better if we could actually make out what’s going on in the action scenes! Please, please, stop it. There’s a time and a place. For instance, it kind of works in films like Cloverfield. In Cloverfield there’s a reason it’s shot with a hand-held camera. It’s part of the plot, and, it does add something to the reality of the scenes.

Besides the bad editing, QoS also suffers from a rather thin plot. The film is based on a short story written by Fleming, and fleshing a short story out into a feature movie was always going to be difficult. But this just feels like treading water. Bond travels from one exotic location to another with very little rationale for why he’s going there, except to chase down baddies. It was as if the producers picked a few nice locations they wanted to visit in advance of making the film, and then wrote the script to fit around the locations.

One of the best things for me in Casino Royale was the quick and witty dialogue, especially between Bond and the love interest – Vesper Lynd. There’s hardly any of that in QoS. The non-stop action leaves very little time for character building. There’s not much of a love interest either – not a classic one for bond girls! Bond does get his end away with one civil servant, who incidentally meets a sticky end covered in oil, reminiscent of that famous scene in Goldfinger. Her death is obviously a reference to Goldfinger where the character ‘Jill Masterson’ is killed and covered in gold paint. The bond franchise seems to be trying to send a message – the currency of power in the early Bonds was gold and diamonds, whereas in 2008 the currency of power is oil. QoS is that un-memorable that I can’t even remember if he kisses the bond girl who survives to the end.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s not a complete disaster. QoS is still better than the average action film. Daniel Craig makes a great James Bond and Judie Dench continues to do a good job as ‘M’. The action scenes where the camera stays still for a few seconds are really good. It’s certainly better than the later Pierce Brosnan bond films where some of the action got preposterously far-fetched. Mind you, surviving a fall out of an airplane where his parachute only opened 10 metres off the ground, and running through a building engulfed in flames without getting even his eyebrows singed, was pushing it a little in QoS.

In summary, watchable, but not a classic.

I’ve just returned from watching Rambo at our local flicks.

Growing up with the Rambo films I was looking forward to seeing this final revisit, particularly after seeing, and enjoying, Rocky Balboa, Sly’s other throw back to the eighties.

Whereas Rocky Balboa worked well as mainly a character drama; taking a nostalgic trip down memory lane yet at the same time re-generating the excitement of the early Rocky franchise; disappointingly, I found Rambo to be just an over-the-top gore fest with absolutely nothing interesting to say.

Like Rocky Balboa, this film did have a flash-back sequence to try and help explain why Rambo is who he is and why he hasn’t returned to America. But any attempt to delve into the character of John Rambo was entirely superficial.

Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t expecting Citizen Kane. You know what you’re going to get when you see a Rambo film. However, if I hadn’t have already known that Sly himself had directed this I may have thought that Quentin Tarantino had got his hands on the film, such was the level of sad-masochistic violence. Was there really any need for the camera to linger on scenes of beheadings and mutilation? Funnily enough, I’ve just had a look on IMDB.com and it actually says if you liked this film you may also enjoy Kill Bill: Vol 1.

The main thing you expect to see in a Rambo film is Rambo himself killing lots of baddies in a hundred different inventive ways – utilising his special forces training. While the body count that he racks up his large, a good proportion of this is down to him spraying the baddies with a large calibre machine gun. Boring! I was hoping to see a lot more hand-to-hand combat and the use of special techniques.

At 91 minutes the film is short. Even though I didn’t particularly enjoy it I did feel the film was missing a good 30 minutes of plot. Everything seemed really rushed. When the final credits came up it was a case of ‘is that it?’.

If you want to see Rambo my advice is don’t. Rent out Tears of the Sun with Bruce Willis instead. It’s basically the same film except Tears of the Sun is much better.