Finsterworld. Ah, Finsterworld.

When the Edinburgh International Film Festival closed for another year a couple of months ago, I thought my experiences there would make a fairly decent new post for this blog (god knows I needed something). I volunteered for the festival in the role of Young Programmer, one of a bunch of young people who chose a bunch of films to be shown as part of the youth-oriented 'Teen Spirit' strand of the festival. It was a fantastic few weeks, choosing great films that deserve a wider audience, and then watching them being shown on the big screen at Cineworld or the Filmhouse. I got access to the opening and closing premieres and parties, as well as a small place round the back of the Filmhouse called the 'videotheque', where the press and people associated with the festival could watch any film that was screening as part of the festival on a personal computer. It was great.

My problem was, I didn't actually go and see many films. All this opportunity, and I was at home doing other things most of the time. In retrospect, it was a bit of a waste. I went to see one dreadful Finnish arthouse film, which I couldn't walk out of because I had just done the introduction for it; a bunch of short films, including a terrific German one called Moritz and the Woodwose; and a German comedy-tragedy called Finsterworld. When I was thinking about writing this post about the EIFF, I soon realised that all I really wanted to write about was Finsterworld. So, I have abandoned the rest of the post in order for it to take centre stage.

Part of the job of the Young Programmers was getting together on a Monday afternoon to watch some films, then deciding whether they deserved a place in the festival. It was towards the end of this cycle, when we were beginning to run out of places, that we sat down in a tiny cinema to watch Finsterworld. Once the credits were over and I was standing up again, I couldn't stop talking about it to everyone else. I volunteered to write a short paragraph about it for the festival brochure because that meant I could take home a DVD. I did, and I watched it again. Once again, I was blown away. I started talking about it with friends at school who didn't know what it was. Eventually, when the festival came round, I gathered up a group of friends to come with me to the cinema and see it. I've never been in such an excited flurry over a film.

Its style is the first thing that noticeably sets it apart. Finsterworld seems to take place, as the title perhaps suggests, in a universe slightly removed from our own. It is inhabited by quirky characters, all as fascinating and allegorical as each other, and the colour palette is bright, with blue skies and pastel tints even as the film corkscrews into darker and darker territory. The film itself follows five loosely connected storylines, each with its own message about the modern world and the general state of humanity. It tackles such awkward subjects as German guilt over the Holocaust with intelligence and humour, which makes it surprisingly easy to follow and enjoy.

I really don't want to say too much about it, because I believe one of the reasons I was so excited by it was because I didn't expect it to be that great. We'd watched pretty good films together before, but none I would count among my favourite films. If you ever get the chance to watch it, I don't want to be the one who spoiled any of the surprises for you. Hopefully you will soon be more likely to get a chance to see Finsterworld, as it was recently announced on the official Facebook page that the film is on the shortlist for Germany's Best Foreign Film Oscar nomination. I had the pleasure of conducting a Skype interview with the director, Frauke Finsterwalder, after the screening. She came across as very smart, patient and eloquent, answering the audience's questions, as well as my own, with much enthusiasm. The movie deserves all the attention and awards it's getting. Find Finsterworld and watch it, any which way you can.

NOAH (2014)

With biopics, there is a tendency to use a title with a single, evocative word, usually the name of the protagonist.* If you're famous, it'll be your surname. If you're really famous, it'll be your first name. If you're really, really famous, you'll only have had one name to choose from in the first place. Such is the case with Darren Aronofsky's new movie Noah, about a man whose story is one of the most famous in the best-selling book of all time. So yes, really really famous. But it would be a mistake to call this a biopic. Even if you're one of the folks who believe in the biblical tale of Noah and the Ark, the liberties Aronofsky has taken with what it says in the Bible is similar to if Richard Attenborough had made Gandhi fight off a wormhole invasion of intergalactic velociraptors with a rusty machete.

I'd like to establish that I was never planning to go and see Noah. I didn't really see myself as the target audience, seeing as I don't particularly believe most of the stories in the Old or the New Testaments, and I wouldn't be particularly shocked if one day it turned out God isn't real. That doesn't mean I don't find the whole idea fascinating, and I was interested in how Aronofsky would put his trademark dark twist on a story that ends with the invention of the rainbow, but it never quite intrigued me enough to make me get off the seat in my living room to sit down in one with a popcorn holder to the side. What happened was I got the opportunity to attend the Scottish premiere of the film at the Filmhouse in Edinburgh. Russell Crowe was going to be there, as was Douglas Booth, and they would both be strutting about outside in front of the peanut-crunching crowd, all straining to have a look at their well-known facial layouts and have them scribble on a sheet of paper. I'd never experienced a premiere before, and I was curious enough to let that persuade me.

So I met up in town with my filmy friend Bronwyn who had got a hold of the tickets, and we waited outside in a queue for the arrival of the Kiwi Beard. After a while, he turned up with an entourage of kilted Scots with facial hair to rival his, and we all sighed gratefully and went inside to the cinema, where it was warmer. Russell stepped up on stage and delivered a short introduction to the film before running out to catch a plane to Cardiff for the Welsh premiere, happening the same day. The place went dark and we got comfortable.

We start with a quick recounting of the story of creation from Genesis, and how mankind came to be such a bunch of total arseholes through their ancestry, leading all the way back through the centuries to the very first arsehole, Adam's. I spent a lot of the film imagining how mind-blowing all this would be if Aronofsky had come up with the original idea himself. However, in retrospect, it probably seems as though he relied heavily on the fact that most people know the story of Noah. If most of the folk watching didn't already have the preconception that Noah was altogether a decent guy, they would have gone off him pretty quick. Aronofsky's Noah just doesn't quite work as a protagonist people can like, especially at the point where he is lurching around the ark with a knife, searching for his newborn twin granddaughters so he can kill them both, like an Iron Age Jack Torrance. This is amplified for folk who don't believe in a God, who will see his homocidal rampage as the result of his own choice rather than a challenge of faith from the creator. This isn't a guy we want kids to draw and stick on the walls in Sunday School.

So Noah isn't that great a guy, and the rest of the characters are either the intended villains of the movie (the folk who don't interpret the word of God correctly) or the folk who are constantly yelling at Noah to stop ruining everyone's lives over his (apparently correct) interpretation of the word of God. I don't know where I should be. And using Anthony Hopkins' Methuselah as the comic relief of the film is just bad. I suppose I've learnt my lesson now: biblical epics are not my sort of film. And don't go for biopics of folk without a bio.

*See: Alexander, Ali, Amadeus, Bugsy, Capote, Casanova, Chaplin, Cleopatra, Diana, Elizabeth, Evita, Frida, Gandhi, Hamlet, Hitchcock, Iris, Jobs, Lincoln, Macbeth, Milk, Nixon, Patton, Pocahontas, Ray, Spartacus, Sylvia and Wilde

Post script - Need someone to build an ark? I Noah guy. Haha.

Follow me on Twitter - @crunro

Crap Film Night

The other night, me and my friends Chris and Lewis, who joined me for Inside Llewyn Davis on Monday, came together at Chris' house for a wee film night. Our intentions were to watch the very worst films we could find, for the laugh factor more than anything. Terrible films reach a section of the funny bone intentional comedy films often miss, and I often watch them for the sheer joy of picking apart every individual calamity of continuity, plot, accuracy and production (see Plan 9 From Outer Space).

The movies we had chosen concerned two of the most dangerous organisations in recent history: al-Qaeda and the Nazis. When a studio or director doesn't want precious running time to be taken up by crafting a back story for their villain rather than action, they'll often resort to using an established baddie who people already hate for reasons that don't need to be explained in the film, so they can get around to shooting their limbs off as quickly as possible. These two films actually do this doubly, the first by having a zombie al-Qaeda and the second by having Nazi alien invaders from the dark side of the moon. Scary stuff. Our night started with Chris' DVD of John Lyde's 2012 horror Osombie.

Osombie (2012)

This gritty documentary recounts the events following the US Navy Seals' killing of Osama bin Laden in May 2011. The world knows all too well the story of bin Laden's zombie insurgent army who rose to avenge him in the years following his death, and the story of the crack team of NATO special forces (here played by lookalikes of Colin Farrell, Amanda Seyfried, Jamie Hyneman from Mythbusters and Keanu Reeves in 47 Ronin) who were sent to Afghanistan-on-Sea to fight back. The director and funders clearly, correctly, thought that there was no better way to honour the memory of the hundreds of thousands of people who have died in 9/11 and the subsequent, ongoing War on Terror than to tell this tale. Good on them, that's what I say.

Osombie follows what happened when this crack team, given as much ammo as they could ever need, the most ridiculously unsuitable weapons they could think of, and orders to show off as much as they possibly can when killing their targets, stumbled across Hilary Swank in the desert (here played by a lookalike, of course) and joined her on her search for her conspiracy theorist brother Derek (here played by Crocodile Dundee with a beard), who holds the apparently outlandish belief that bin Laden has returned from the dead, and who wishes to kill him himself. I found myself close to tears when, completely unexpectedly, Derek turns out to be the one to kill Osama at the end, finally realising his dream (I decided it wasn't even worth putting a spoiler warning in there).

And if you, like myself, are a massive fan of cliches, Osombie is your dream movie. Colin Farrell rips his shirt off if he ever gets the opportunity; Amanda Seyfried is a supposed tomboy nicknamed 'Tomboy' who actually has a crush on, over the course of the film, just about every other member of the group; and 47 Ronin is a joker nicknamed 'Joker', who poignantly tells a final shite joke in his dying moments. Who would have thought that a film with such a ridiculous premise could be so outstandingly predictable?

So well done, Osombie, for actually managing to insult the memory of one of the most hated human beings who has ever lived.

Iron Sky (2012)

Lewis had been mentioning this movie all evening, as he had a DVD of it at home. After searching Netflix and finding no genuinely bad movies (as in fun bad, not just bad bad; see Queer Duck below), we decided it was worth walking round the corner to his house in order to grab it and have a watch. The premise is simple enough. In 1945, the defeated Nazis fled to the moon and have spent their time educating Aryan children in all their nasty Nazi ways. Their careful hiding place is discovered by a pair of American astronauts, and *havoc ensues* when they decide to revisit Earth to spread their Nazi message.

What sets Iron Sky apart from a film like Osombie is its implicit self-awareness. It knows exactly how preposterous it is, and actually employs that preposterousness to its own advantage, using it to emphasise a surprisingly potent political subtext. Obviously, there are some parts to it that are plain stupid, such as the black astronaut who the Nazis turn Aryan using an 'albinism serum' in order to make him palatable. But then you've got the US president (a clear parody of Sarah Palin) listening intently to a Nazi ambassador's description of their one-world ideology, before reeling it off to her cheering, adoring nation... ouch. By the end, it's clear that the film is even more anti-USA than it is anti-Nazi Germany, which is interesting. Does raise a few valid points, and there's a fantastic shot-by-shot throwback to 'that' scene in Downfall.

Nevertheless, nobody has ever bought Iron Sky on DVD for its political message. On the cover, it's a Nazi bashing science fiction movie riddled with explosions, ironic humour and careless offensiveness. On those points, it could be argued that it's not the film most people set out to watch. What it is is one of the more surreal viewing experiences in my life.

(As a sidenote, it turns out that the original idea of Nazis from the moon isn't as original as you'd hope, too. Read this.)

Queer Duck: The Movie (2006)

This was one we came across during our search through Netflix to find the worst films we could. Chris typed in the letter Q into 'Search', and this is what popped up. We all glanced at each other and immediately put it on. The title sequence was hysterical. It was the hardest any of us had laughed for ages, out of sheer disbelief and wonder. Then, when that ended, we lasted for about a minute before turning it off. The basic premise is, there's this gay duck, and he has gay friends. Jokes are squeezed out of this premise like a puppy going through a mangle, and the results are just as funny. It's the epitome of a one-joke idea, and yet they run with it for the full feature-length. Nae gid.

Crimson Tide (1995)

Well, okay. By midnight we had got tired of bad movies, and decided to try out one of the many incredibly brilliant films on Netflix. When we scrolled past Crimson Tide, I piped up, since I saw wee clips of it a couple of years ago and I'd been wanting to see the full thing ever since. It has Denzel Washington and Gene Hackman in it, and it's a Cold War thriller about the battle for leadership aboard (within?) a nuclear submarine.

We found ourselves sitting on the edges of our seats for half the film. It's sweaty, cramped and fantastically intense, with the responsibility for a nuclear war between the USA and Russia as the stake. When a broken message comes through to the sub that could either be ordering the immediate launch of nuclear missiles or the retraction of them. The sharply logical and cautionary Hunter (Denzel) presumes the latter, and refuses to allow his impulsive superior Captain Ramsey's orders to fire. As the crew decide who to trust, things get more claustrophobic, more intense and even sweatier. It's concerning, suggesting that the fate of millions of people could rest on whether one person blindly makes the right decision, or blindly makes the wrong one. And it's hardly far from possible. As the opening title card chillingly reminds us:

"The three most powerful men in the world:
The President of the United States of America
The President of the Russian Republic
And the captain of a United States ballistic missile submarine."

Luckily, all the uncertainty and fear of the Cold War is over now. Well, is it? As Tony Scott shows us here, as long as there are short-sighted warmongers, the possibility for disaster is always on the doorstep, and god knows we don't have a shortage of them in the world. Just thank your lucky stars that bin Laden's finally been taken out for good.

Follow me on Twitter: @crunro

A Week of Coen

As those who know me well know well, I have quite a large soft spot for the Minnesotan film makers the Coen brothers. The dark, idiosyncratic humour the brothers share just appeals to me, and in their more serious turns their sharp focus on deeply complex characters is compelling. Anyway, a week or so I decided to watch my DVD of Raising Arizona, their second feature, for no other reason than I'd never watched it before and I suddenly had time. As it turned out, this was the first of three Coen films I'd end up watching that week, with The Big Lebowski and Inside Llewyn Davis, their newest, following not long after.

Raising Arizona (1987)

As the brothers' second feature, the fast-paced comedy Raising Arizona is a fun opportunity to try and catch the beginnings of the many hallmarks that appear in their films. The Coens are more devoted to a certain number of hallmarks than your average directors, as if they have a few lucky charms they can rely on to make the film a success. These include the actors John Goodman, John Turturro and Frances MacDormand (Joel Coen's wife), as well as their use of quirky characters, southern accents, recorded music and long speeches (such as the one that opens The Big Lebowski, or the ones that end No Country For Old Men and Fargo). Raising Arizona ticks five of these boxes.

Nicolas Cage, the man who does mental like nobody else, stars as Hi McDunnough, a small-time criminal who, after being caught and released many times, falls in love with Ed, the police photographer who takes his mugshot after every arrest. They end up getting married and, after discovering Ed is unable to have kids and being turned down at every adoption agency in town, Hi manages to steal a baby from a local unpainted furniture magnate. It's never going to end well, and it doesn't. As wacko after wacko enters their lives, Hi and Ed struggle to keep the child in their undeserved possession. It's a yarn with such ridiculous imagination it's difficult to not get swept away with it. When it comes round to one of the strangest chases in cinema history, it's clear that the Coens must have had a whale of a time creating it.

And it is the Coens' film. In a well-known anecdote, Cage said he would constantly suggest new ideas for the character of Hi or for the movie, only for them to be smashed down by Joel or Ethan. They have a very clear idea of what the movie's going to look like, and you can't blame them for not wanting interference when the story's this complicated and winding. It's the sort of thing I wish I could write, the cinematic equivalent of taking a line for a walk. You just come up with the original premise, then run with any ideas that come into your head, no matter how ridiculous they get, until you reach a satisfying conclusion. It's something they do incredibly well, and it's just as much fun to watch as it would be to write.

The Big Lebowski (1998)

I know, I have written a full post about this one before, but the fact remains that every time I come back to it, which is not as often as I'd like, I'll stumble across something new or notice something I hadn't before which reveals a little more about the supremely unique plot of The Big Lebowski. I came back to it this week for the saddest of reasons: the shocking and untimely death of the great Philip Seymour Hoffman, who plays The Big Jeffrey Lebowski's assistant Brandt in the movie. The best tribute to the man's huge talent I could think of was to watch and enjoy his performance in this, one of my very favourite movies.

Like Raising Arizona but better, The Big Lebowski takes an even more trivial thing, namely an intruder relieving himself over the rug of a man called The Dude, and uses it as a catalyst to set in motion a Rube Goldberg machine of unconventional madness. There is a spark that lights in the opening scenes and continues until the closing credits roll. The imagination of it is startling, and I'd be hard pressed to think of a film I've ever enjoyed more. Anyway, if you want to read more about what I think of The Big Lebowski, check out the post I wrote a few months back. There, that's saved some time.

Inside Llewyn Davis (2013)

This was the third time I tried to see this film. The first Saturday, my friend Michael couldn't find the time to come with me. A week later, my friend Chris came along as well. We first checked the Vue, but the times were too late. We then checked the Filmhouse, but the ideal times I found turned out to be for two week's time. We visited the Cameo, but they had sold out, and the Odeon weren't showing it at all. So, we ran across Edinburgh to the Dominion cinema at Morningside, where they told us that the film reel of Llewyn Davis hadn't arrived on time, so they had to push back the showing of it another week. At this point, we had run out of cinemas, so we retired to a pizza place and tried again on Monday, when two more friends, Lewis and Connor, came along to see the film at the Cameo again, where they let us in because we'd ordered the tickets. I was glad I did, because the Cameo has incredibly comfortable seating.

And, of course, Inside Llewyn Davis did not disappoint. The film opens with Oscar Isaac's pitch-perfect Davis performing to a packed bar in Greenwich Village, New York. As with every other song in the movie, the Coens just let it run for the entire length, allowing the cinema audience to become the crowd listening. The soundtrack is the movie, the movie is the soundtrack. Every tune is given the directors', and the audience's, full attention, and there is no other music that isn't performed in front of the camera. It may just prove to be one of my favourite soundtracks of all, in fact. Michael went home and bought the album immediately.

As vital as the music is to the story of folk musicians and the fickle world of the music industry, the tale of Llewyn Davis remains compelling independently. It's a melancholy picture, emphasised by the dark-green, brown and wet cinematography of Bruno Delbonnin, following the singer's journey around the Eastern United States over the course of a week. As the people around him win recording contracts and fame, Davis refuses to comply to the advice of others when they suggest he finds someone to perform with. He sleeps on the couches of people he is barely friends with, he is temperamental and blunt, and yet your heart breaks when a record producer responds to his soulful and pained performance with, 'I don't see any money here'.

Success is a reward which is seldom earned without compromise. As Davis walks around the wintry city, guitar case in one hand and symbolic cat in the other, he sees compromise as an insult to his former singing partner, who jumped off the George Washington Bridge. He doesn't enjoy the folk singing life, he sees it as the only career choice he can make that stops him from the horror of merely 'existing'. His problem is, the music world doesn't like him either, and so he is destined to keep moving between friends' apartments forever. Like a rolling stone. He will only ever achieve if he lets go of his old life, but perhaps he's missing all these opportunities on purpose, punishing himself and constantly reminding himself of how useless he is alone now his only partner is gone forever.

It really is an incredible and beautiful film. Make a point of going to see it if you haven't yet. It serves as another reminder of the genius and skill of the Coen brothers, and I can't wait to see what comes next from the two filmmakers who never seem to come down from the top of their game.

Please, Mr Kennedy, follow me on Twitter: @crunro

American Hustle (2013)

Hello again, tiny but loyal readership. It's been a good few months since I last put anything on Rewatchableness, and this is my written apology to all four of you. When I started this little blog o'mine back in December 2012, I said I'd make an effort to write about every single film I saw from then on. Bollocks. I'm surprised I kept that promise for the ten months I did, to be honest, but eventually I just found myself in the pitiable state of just not being arsed. It could have been permanent, had a couple of people not brought up the blog and made me feel guilty about abandoning the poor thing.

Anyway, a bunch of things have happened since I did abandon it. The night before I published my last post before the hiatus (which was about The Raid), my friend Connor, who has been mentioned a few times on here, put a link to this website on Reddit. In the 24 hours that followed, I went from roughly 6 or 7 views a day to over 2000. The people working the blogger server must done a double take. Inevitably, though, not many people looked at anything other than the first post they were confronted with, and the next day the viewer count plummeted back down to 20. It might have been that gentle nudge to the face reminding me of how mediocre the blog was that discouraged me from writing on it for a while, but I'm not sure. I'm happy with the casualness of it.

It certainly wasn't that I just didn't see any films. Quite the opposite. For example, I've seen both Filth and Sunshine On Leith, and I probably could have enjoyed writing something comparing their very different views of my home town of Edinburgh (the closeness of the setting meant that in one sweeping shot at the start of Sunshine On Leith, I could clearly see the cinema that I was sitting in at the time, quite an odd sensation). I saw Hitchcock's seminal 1960s horror The Birds for the first time on Halloween night. I saw Gravity twice, with one of those times being in IMAX, and massively enjoyed it both times. I saw the Danish drama The Hunt, which is outstanding and everyone should see, and the touching, shocking and desperately needed Palestinian documentary Five Broken Cameras, both over Netflix. And while I was over in Sweden seeing Swedish Charlotta for New Year, I went to see Steve McQueen's jaw-dropping slavery film 12 Years A Slave and Peter Jackson's passable Middle Earth 3D romp The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug.

I can't say I didn't appreciate the freedom of watching these films without having to make the effort to write about them afterwards, but I've come to realise that I actually enjoy writing just as much as I love watching movies, and I wasn't such an idiot 14 months ago when I decided to merge these two passions to produce a hideous, mutated and confused baby blog. So that's why I've grabbed the iPad with both hands and thrown myself back into it.

But the top of the post says American Hustle. That's the last film I saw, last Saturday, and that's the film I'm going to use to defibrillate this thing. My good friend Paul had texted me earlier on in the week, asking if I wanted to go and see Martin Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street that weekend with him and Michael, another friend. However, this plan went to mush after we realised it was an 18, and while I could possibly have got in using Paul's passport (as I did with Filth), baby-faced Michael wasn't going to find a way in in a hurry. So we plumped for American Hustle which, it was announced last week, has tied with Gravity for the most 2014 Oscar nominations. Sounded like a fair swap, I thought, and I went in the cinema knowing next to nothing about the story or anything else.

The first thing that slaps you in the face about American Hustle is Christian Bale. Director David O'Russell has clearly heard the old Hollywood adage that if you want to hook your audience from the very start, get your main star to put on 43 pounds in weight, shave his head for a hideous combover, slouch until he gets a herniated disc in his back, then open with him topless. It works. With an image more than reminiscent of Tom Cruise in Tropic Thunder, Bale's repugnant Irving Rosenfeld walks into a scene right from the middle of the storyline, that shows us exactly what we're dealing with: we have three people: Bale, Amy Adams and Bradley Cooper. Wee bit of a love triangle going on between them. They're attempting to capture a politician (Jeremy Renner with a quiff) taking a bribe on film, but the politician takes it badly and walks out.

Naturally, once Irving takes us back to the start and shows us how he got to that point, things prove to be a bit more complicated. The whole story of conmen conning and conning some more, then being conned themselves and being offered retribution through helping to stage another massive con is entertaining, and the great script makes it power along. It's enjoyable to see such a terrific cast loving every line they're reciting.

It's just a shame that as the cons get more and more numerous and intricate, it's incredibly easy to slip away for a second and end up not having a clue what's going on. Both Michael and the aforementioned Connor said that they thought the acting was brilliant, but they didn't like the movie because everything had just become gibberish by the end. And when I tried to explain it to Michael during the credits, I realised I hardly had a grip on what was happening either.

American Hustle is a film that begs for a second viewing for all the wrong reasons: you're so confused at the end that you feel you have to go back and find out where you lost it. That isn't to say I didn't just like the feeling of it. Even if I was lost, the performances, the soundtrack and the intentionally tacky, kitsch style of it made it good fun to watch, and I wouldn't be sad if I ended up revisiting it. It's certainly never boring to watch.

There, I'm done.

Follow me on Twitter: @crunro

The Raid (2011)

For weeks we'd been planning this event: during the October holidays, myself, the two Michaels, Connor, Nick and Chris would romp along to Chris' house in order to eat pizza and marathon the Star Wars original trilogy (do three films count as a marathon? No, almost certainly not, but hopefully no one will notice). However, as it usually goes, these great nights rarely go as planned. Michael H ended up in St Andrews, unable to make it down in time. What with their recently found jobs, Connor and Nick could only make it along after nine, and Haile Gebrselassie himself wouldn't have the endurance to watch nothing but Star Wars until after three in the morning. My parents had made it clear that I was walking home, too, so the 'cannae be arsed' factor also came into play.

And so it came to be that we were sitting on Chris' sofa at half past nine, scrolling through Netflix to find a possibly accompaniment for the pizza we'd just ordered. We scrolled past a low-budget British movie named Tower Block, with Sheridan Smith and Russell Tovey in it, amongst others. I stopped Chris there, saying I had heard it was 'like a British version of The Raid'. Everyone liked the sound of this, so we watched it for a good ten minutes before we realised that The actual Raid was also on Netflix. We stopped wasting our time and switched on the genuine product.

The Raid is an Indonesian film, set in Jakarta and directed by Welsh-born-but-currently-Indonesian Gareth Evans. Both Connor and Chris had come across it on Netflix before, and both said it was one of the best action films they had ever seen, a sentiment agreed with by Empire magazine. This is the basic premise: a SWAT team have to muscle their way to the top of a Jakarta tower block in order to find and arrest the notorious drug baron who lives on the final floor. If you're hoping for much more than that, you'll probably be disappointed. Aside from a couple of neat twists towards the end, your main draw is the violence: violence that I have never seen more beautifully and graphically co-ordinated in a film.

Honestly, if you're not too squeamish, these fights are awe-inspiring. There are moments where I couldn't understand how the shots were filmed without actually killing actors. Axes are slammed into people's shoulders as they run; bullets are fired through their heads as their eyes are still darting back and forth. It's CGI, sure, but it's CGI so convincing you can't help wincing when a man is decapitated by a door frame. One sequence in particular, set in the corridors of the seventh floor, is directed by Evans as if he was conducting a symphony. As each new assailant attacks Iko Uwais' Rama, the tempo shifts and the camera spins to showcase the incredibly impressive martial arts skills the man actually possesses. As unlikely as it is that his moves would actually stop and disarm a madman with a machete, you let it pass because it's so bloody cool. The Raid has style.

What with this and Kil, the Malaysian film I watched and loved at the start of the summer, I really believe that South-East Asia is a gold mine for stylish, modern independent movies. The Raid both pays homage to and is a part of the martial arts film culture that originally put the area on the cinema map, the sort that never really pushes its premise story-wise, but captivates you with action until you come round during the credits and have to pick your jaw up from the floor. This is the type of movie that reminds people why world cinema is worth having a look at.

Follow me on Twitter: @crunro

Amadeus (1984)

It was the September Weekend holiday last week, in which Scottish state school kids get both their Friday and their Monday off for a four-day weekend in the middle of September. Late on the Thursday evening, I noticed that Amadeus, the 1985 Best Picture winner, was on BBC Two at quarter to midnight. I took the split-second decision to give it a watch, regardless of how early I was supposed to get up the following morning and how tired I would be by the end. I would commit myself to this film. It was only as the title card appeared:

AMADEUS

DIRECTOR'S CUT

...that I sank back in my seat and put my head in my hands. It would be a long night.

But what a director. Miloš Forman is my second-favourite Czech, and his 'other film', One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, is undoubtably one of the best films I've ever seen. Forman won the best director Academy Award for both One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest and Amadeus (two out of his three nominations), and both won best picture. His movies craft extraordinary characters and tells their story with exceptional skill. If there's anyone I'd trust to re-edit a film up to three hours long to take me late into the night, it's Forman.

The extraordinary character at the centre of Amadeus is Antonio Salieri. He's an Italian composer with a gig writing music for the Holy Roman Emperor in Vienna. We join him as an elderly man in a mental institution, where he retells the story of his glory years to a young priest; glory years which were largely eclipsed by the meteoric of a ridiculously talented former child prodigy named Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Where Salieri can write the occasional march for a royal event, Mozart is in another league. As Salieri recounts, he wrote his first entire symphony at the age of eight. When he composes, he writes out the exact complexities he is hearing in his head in one go, making no mistakes in any of the multitude of parts.

Salieri's problem is that Mozart is a conceited, arrogant, moronic arsehole. He doesn't nearly deserve the divine talent that has been bestowed upon him. This drives Salieri's jealousy beyond reasonable bounds, and he fantasises about murdering the young man so he can play his own compositions at his funeral. It only intensifies as Mozart has success after success, writing great symphonies and operas, the beauty of which Salieri can only awe at (Amadeus' soundtrack is immense). His narcissism and immaturity is toe-curling to watch. It's a situation that the best of us can relate to: the mind-melting irritation that comes as a result of being bettered by a seemingly undeserving contemporary, one who achieves so much more with far less effort.

With this story, Amadeus speaks to a vast majority of us. Those of us who have ever been made to doubt that hard work will get you anywhere. Those of us who have ever been driven to rage by the taunting of our superiors. However, the message behind Amadeus, so vividly demonstrated by Forman, is that these attitudes have deep consequences. They will destroy you as well as the target of your spite, and no one comes out clean. It's a truth that everyone will learn over the course of their lives. Save yourself the time and the bother, and bathe in the magnificence of the incredible Amadeus.

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