Film Screening 1st July, 2006

Poster for Sandy Claws

Sandy Claws 

8:00 PM, 1st July, 2006

  • G
  • 7 mins
  • 1954
  • Friz Freleng
  • Arthur Davis, Warren Foster
  • Mel Blanc

Looney Tunes cartoon. Sylvester the Cat makes his usual series of attempts to get at Tweety Birds cage, this time at the beach. Nominated for an Oscar.

Poster for V for Vendetta

V for Vendetta 

10:12 PM, 1st July, 2006

  • MA
  • 132 mins
  • 2006
  • James McTeigue
  • Andy Wachowski, Larry Wachowski
  • Natalie Portman, Hugo Weaving, Stephen Rea, John Hurt

Were the Wachowski brothers really trying when they wrote the script for the second and third Matrix films? Anyone else get the impression they were simply bored of the whole thing by then? Its a pity, because it's all too easy to forget how good they were, how fired, when they had a reasonably fresh idea and were in the process of creating a new world.

They've been given that opportunity again. As with The Matrix, the future world has been thoroughly transformed: the UK has been ruined by World War Three and is now run by an iron-fisted totalitarian regime... and a shadowy figure called V (Weaving) is responsible for a series of terrorist attacks on London. Everyone's heard the saying "One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter." That quip has always bugged me, because surely it's obvious the categories cross-cut: it's possible to be a terrorist and a freedom fighter, or neither, or one but not the other. They're not two different ways of describing the same thing at all.

Real terrorist attacks on the actual London held back the release of this film - kind of ironic, since if it's anything like The Matrix it will completely ignore anything resembling real-world moral dilemmas in order to focus on conceptual truths. And of course one or two spectacular fights.

Henry Fitzgerald

Poster for Aguirre, Wrath of God (Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes)

Aguirre, Wrath of God (Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes) 

10:35 PM, 1st July, 2006

  • M
  • 95 mins
  • 1972
  • Klaus Kinski, Helena Rojo, Del Negro, Ruy Guerra

And of course his quest is doomed. Its so ludicrously doomed that we could be watching a comedy, except that it's not funny (not that the film is trying to be funny and failing, you understand). And the disturbing thing is, Herzog was such a stickler for realism you can never be sure if any of what you're seeing is fake. If the characters appear to be going insane then perhaps you're watching actors who really are going insane (no "perhaps" about it, some say) - and while Herzog was probably unable to take his camera back in time to find precisely the right godforsaken jungle for them to go insane in, perhaps that's exactly what he did.

Henry Fitzgerald