DufusPsychic

Given the material, I was really looking forward to watching this film. However, the ultimate effect was more mixed than I expected. I found it's attempts to link cinema and sport rather laboured and instead of allowing me to make my own connections, it had a terrible habit of telling me what to think. By the time it had gotten round to covering the effect of the cameras on the player (admittedly more interesting) and then onto a particular game, I had pretty much lost interest. One minute I'm being told the films contains the feeling of McEnroe in his immediacy, but the filmmaker's method means I'm always stepping back from the material. It's then much less involving than say 'Amy' (about Amy Winehouse) where the visual material and audio recordings do the heavy lifting. For me, that is cinema, not a heavy-handed film essay about film about a tennisplayer. The aforementioned immediacy is clobbered out of existence. Disappointing.

Amusing black comedy that paints in broad strokes and requires suspension of disbelief about the details. The tone of the film is often surprising, initially combining brutality and violence before turning into a savage revenge film. As the body count accumulates, it's obvious the film is a parody. Stellan Skarsgård plays the successful and well-integrated immigrant who manages to out-punch or out-smart everyone. In his apparent simplicity and practical modesty, the film functions as a platform to parody the Norwegian mega-rich -the gangsters and drug runners- who live in designer apartments, drink smoothies but would never let artificial additives pass their lips. They present themselves as wholesome, if insane, gangsters cut-off from their children through broken relationships and their own wealth (parallels with Norwegian society abound). The least satisfying sub-plot is the sudden inter-ganster war with the Serbians (who at one point they mix up with the Albanians). They seem to provide the foreigner viewpoint on Norwegians, but somehow it isn't effective - notably because of troublesome Eastern European clichés. However, it doesn't take itself too seriously, also taking a pot shot at Norwegians who take Thai wives. It's major fascinations are the funny things Norwegians do and the hilarious idea of a Norwegian mafia. The ensuing farce doesn't quite come together, but the use of a logging machine as a weapon is amusing enough. The only major fail of the film is Skarsgård's wife, who appears to disappear at one point. They could have done more with her and perhaps made her unaware of what he was doing, providing domestic normality or a 'heart' for the film. Nonetheless, it's raucous, surprising and fun to watch and often laugh-out-loud funny, particularly if you get the Norwegian references.

After JJ Abram's solid if uninspired start, Rian Johnson's sequel fails both to develop its main characters or inject the story with enough interest or emotional heft to drum up much enthusiasm for the final act. The result is a surprisingly ponderous outing - more like Lost in Space than Star Wars. The way characters seem to talk at each other rather than to each other is both frustrating and unengaging. Better summarised elsewhere as a sort of 'galactic wheel-spin', none of the array of often irrelevant sub-plots ever lead anywhere, playing the 'it isn't what you thought' card again and again, but crucially without bringing anything truly new to the table. Because of this, its extremely glib treatment of the material often falls flat and its self-aware humour tends to undermine what dramatic tension remains. While the film is at pains to 'throw away' and 'kill' the past mythology built up by George Lucas, what there is leans heavily on its tropes and imagery. The final image of dreaming youth almost suggests that what we have here is a multi-million dollar fan film - but one that forgets to inspire the same dreams and feelings in its audience. Since the film leaves you not knowing what the resistance or the first order are for and really not caring anyway, the story just seems to fade and patter out (just like one of its principle characters), rather than leave you wanting more.

Extremely mediocre and often ponderous film that tries to trade one set of clichés about Africa for another. Somehow it's being talked about as 'important', but for all its well-intended and rather limited redress of colonialism, it's really more of the same in another form. For some reason, all the actors are forced to use an exaggerated 'nowhere we know in Africa' accent, that makes it about as progressive as an episode of 'Allo 'Allo. It's a curious Western fantasy of high-technology, magic weapons, and mag-lev trains, but also of people who are ruled just as much by violence, monarchy and tradition (while maintaining an abiding love of ceremony, mask-wearing, totemic animals, dancing, patterned fabrics and riding armour plated Rhinos). Therefore it's assumptions are largely shaped by the very colonialism it apparently sets out to critique. What it probably does reveal is a confusion around attitudes to Africa at the border of US identity politics. The resulting mess is interesting to think about, but as a film is over-long and crawls to a somewhat predictable end. However, by playing the game of positing a mythical technically superior African nation, it both reshapes Africa to be like the West, while revealing that it is the only standard it thinks anything is worth measuring something by. Even the idea of Africa bringing 'aid' to America was wasted in sincerity, rather than rye satire. Again this is because it honours the foreign saviour myth it really should have done a job of demystifying.