Lizards that just don't quit ............

I finally got around to seeing Cloverfield last night. I wanted to see it last Monday but the whole day-off fizzled following a death in the congregation and a series of phone calls and other obligations. My fiancee doesn't like films like this. My future stepson would have loved it but wouldn't have slept afterwards so it was strictly a solo affair. Once I'm married to his mother I'll take him to films like this when he's being a little sod. I'll put him to bed afterwards, shut off the light and close the door. Periodically I'll walk by the door and make this sound.



Any of you who were watching B-movies in the fifties and sixties will have to explain to me how on earth the original Godzilla movies inspired anything more than a chuckle. One is taught to treat past generations with a measure of patience. You did endure the War after all - the Blitz, Mock Apple Pie, Glenn Miller - and, yes, you may now be incontinent, dribbling and forever accusing the orderlies of stealing your teeth. But how lame is the idea of people screaming and covering their eyes at what is clearly an out-of-work circus midget stumping around a baptistry in a rubber suit kicking over a three foot model of a bridge. And the Atomic Breath? Yet another even smaller midget with a paintbrush colouring in the squares of film.

Which is a long way of saying hats off to anybody who can resurrect the Godzilla/Gojira tradition and have the film end up being really quite scary.

The film begins with the theft of an idea from the Blair Witch Project about a bit of video data being found by accident. In this case the data is contained in a castoff video camera found in "what was" Central Park in New York City. Special effects abound throughout the movie - money was spent in copious amounts but the point of view is that of a rather stupid boy named Hudd who's been given a cam-corder and told to record the evening's festivities - a surprise party for his best friend's brother who's leaving the next day to take up a junior management job in Japan.

The entire movie is filmed in Not-Too-Steady-Cam, then, with quite thrilling results. The first twenty minutes are difficult to endure. Pouty young women, vacuuous youths trading gossip and scandal. We knew we'd come to see a scary movie. Oh for God's sake send the Creature in! Don't force us to endure the late-teen, early-twenty crowd with their up-talk and their petty scandals. Stock characters do abound - a stupid boy who manages to be charmingly naive, a protagonist caught between two choices, a grumpy sister, the female Object of Desire, the mysterious stranger-girl. You're trying to figure out all the connections and you're not quite bored yet when the first earthquake hits and reports of explosions come in over the television. The giant lizard starts wreaking havoc in the city.

The original Godzilla movies didn't arise, like the monster, from a submarine trench. They reflect the anxiety felt by most in the early years of the Nuclear age. It was, as I remember, the testing of the Hydrogen Bomb which was alleged to have released the creature into the world. In the long run, though, the movies were a lot more fun than they were therapeutic. Cloverfield has woven within its plot all sorts of markers of post-911 anxiety as well. One scene of people cowering inside a convenience store as the monster passes is very nearly an exact replica of the famous bit of footage from September 11th in New York. There is, however, no real therapeutic task to the film and it ends up being a good ride.

All of the stock preamble at this point both begins to make sense and to (mercifully) disappear when the monster begins its rampage. This is a good film which eats its own schlock and demonstrates what another age might have been so scared about in its day. Go see the film if it's still around. Don't wait for the video!

Without a false note

I was tremendously taken with the adaptation of Ian McEwan's novel 'Atonement' which I saw in Glasgow the other night. Even taking into consideration the denouement at the end of the film, the story remains a simple one. I read the novel a year or so ago and I am usually hesitant to see a film where I've enjoyed the book and cultivated a set of visual images to go with it. In this case the film adapts the novel well - I even found myself thinking I had seen certain parts of the film before.

The movie opens with words being typed on an old Corona and it is the power of uttered and written words which is at the centre of the film: Words spoken or written which can never be taken back.

We never simply record events. We inject ourselves into the story we are relating. The desire of a budding young writer - Briony Tallis - to have the world conform to her hopes and, ultimately, to her anger and jealousy forms the core of the plot. A community of men and women reel from the effect of a young girl's testimony and attempt, over time, to reestablish what has been broken by her words.

The film has been well crafted. I cannot think of a single regrettable image or badly crafted scene - not one false note. This was a very satisfying film.

If you've not yet seen The Lives of Others (Das Leben Der Anderen) then this is the week to see it. Not because the film will be withdrawn any time soon - it's playing in a large number of movie houses and I doubt there's any risk of it being suddenly withdrawn. No, it was the juxtaposition of Sunday's first reading - the story of the conversion of St Paul in the 9th chapter of the Acts of the Apostles - with the theme of the film which prompted me to suggest that you see it this week.

The main character, Gerd Weisler, is a senior Stasi agent in search of subversives within the artistic community in East Germany. The film is set in the year 1984. Mikhail Gorbachev has yet to come to power in the Soviet Union and there is, as yet, no respite from the normality of well-supported surveillance of potential dissidents within the artistic community. Weisler is shown at work during interrogations and while teaching students at a Stasi training school. A true zealot, his orthodoxy allows for none of the personal lapses and retreats into humour sometimes seen among his colleagues.

He is presented with the case of Georg Dreyman - 'one of our best playwrights' - and told that here is an individual above reproach - creative and popular but still a true believer in Socialism and the GDR. Weisler is dubious and takes on the project of finding out the truth - believing that there must be some chink in his armour somewhere.

As the surveillance progresses, it is the interrogator himself who finds himself vulnerable. His fellow officers of the The Ministry for State Security who claim that they are the 'sword and shield' of the people prove to be craven and sloppy individuals attempting to preserve their own niche in the bureaucracy. It becomes clear that Dreyman has been targeted by a government minister with romantic designs on the playwright's girlfriend. Weisler is offended by this intrusion of personal jealousy into the work of the State and so commits his first lapse in discipline, allowing Dreyman to become aware of the minister's interest. His own orthodoxy proves a fragile thing, however, and this first lapse ends up opening up the floodgates. Weisler begins to hear the words being spoken in the apartment he has wired with microphones rather than merely listening to them. His zealotry is exposed for what it is - fear and insecurity - and a better man begins begins to emerge within Gerd Weisler.

Those who are proud to be our 'sword and shield' and who spend their time inspecting the belief and practise of others for signs of weakness or impurity should wonder whether such a divided vocation has its origin in love or in fear.