Once is a small, perfectly formed film about some very big themes. Most obviously, it is about the power of music to connect - after all, it is a film about an Irish busker meeting a Czech immigrant in Dublin, and them making (very beautiful) music together. But it is also about the possibility of a brief, intense connection reverberating throughout one’s life, something that is probably true for many people, but rarely depicted well in films - perhaps only the Before Sunrise / Before Sunset diptych do it properly.

Musicians Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova play the unnamed Guy and the Girl respectively, and their relationship, shot through a long lens, feels appropriately real rather than the stuff of film: lots of faltering words, awkward pauses, and missteps. There’s no meet cute. No fireworks. Just the natural progression of two people coming together, trying to figure out the boundaries of their relationship, falling slowly.

And natural is the right word. Once is probably the least forced “musical” (if you can call it that), and one of the least forced films around. The songs come in precisely at points that musicians should be singing, rather than any unnatural burst into song; the long tracking shots are a nice, realistic counterpoint to the staccato cuts of rom-coms; and Dublin itself is presented in all its dear, dirty glory - while there’s clearly the more upscale pedestrianised shopping areas of the Celtic Tiger’s capital, it’s also a city of bedsits and migrants crowding around to share TVs.

And the bittersweet ending (which, in a way, is the opposite of the famous ending to The Graduate) is a just-right moment of perfect joy and sadness mixed into one. It lingers, just like the relationship continues to reverberate for the Guy and the Girl, just like the Hansard/Irglova songs stay emblazoned into the mind. You fall slowly for Once, but by the time you get to its end, it has taken your heart.

Less a real review of Away From Her, more a rave: Julie Christie is brilliant in the film. Not just brilliant in her acting - which she is - but brilliant as in luminiscent. Full of the vitality and life that makes you understand why her husband (played by Gordon Pinsent, in an excellent turn) never wants to be away from her, and that makes her decline from Alzheimer’s all the more sad - and all the more puzzling. Sarah Polley directs with a spare touch that seems perfectly Canadian, and imperfectly wise beyond her years.

Come to think of it, between Dr Zhivago, McCabe and Mrs Miller, Shampoo, Afterglow, and this, I’ve seen over 4 decades of Christie’s work, and it is a fantastic, devastating combination of acting chops, beauty, and, well, brilliance.

Barnyard was a perfectly serviceable kid’s movie - made by Steve Oedekerk of “Kung Pow: Enter the Fist”, with about the same lack of subtlety and nuance, and the same sense that Oedekerk finds the material much funnier than you do. The story’s straightforward enough - cow (Otis, voiced by Kevin James) loses Dad to coyotes, cow needs to step up to prove his leadership. It’s Lion King lite, if you will. But it tries to hard to be cool, runs through animated movie cliches (a donkey as a sidekick? Does Shrek know about this?), and frankly, it’s bizarre that the lead is a male cow. Such udder disregard for biology.

Dir. Bill Condon
Jamie Foxx, Beyonce Knowles, Jennifer Hudson, Eddie Murphy

Dreamgirls is shot Bill Condon style - lots that reminded me of Chicago. Or is that just because there are so few movie musicals these days? In any case, for an avid, avowed Motown fan such as myself, Dreamgirls was a great exercise in spot-the-parallels (ooh, and just as I typed that, the Supremes’ “Where Did Our Love Go?” came on): the Dreamgirls = the Supremes, Curtis Taylor Jr. = Berry Gordy etc. etc. (although obviously it isn’t a direct adaptation, and Paramount has been careful to make clear that it’s a fictionalised account).

But enough rambling. The fact is, Dreamgirls, like the musical it was based on, is a show of two acts, and the first act, which belongs to Effie White (Jennifer Hudson), is bang on in terms of that early Motown infectiousness (it must be really hard to write songs for a musical based on Motown, but Henry Krieger has the chops). And it’s not news, but good lord, “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going” is a showstopper. Jennifer Hudson’s performance is electric - her voice is defiant and vulnerable at the same time - and it made me want to get out of my seat and just whoop in applause (it’s up there with the version Jennifer Holliday did at the ‘82 Tonys). It’s the kind of moment that show what musicals are capable of, that show how music can take a film to places that ordinary dialogue can’t.

Incidentally, random trivia bit on “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going”: Jim Carrey sang it on the last episode of The Garry Shandling Show. I’m not kidding. It was amazing. Sammy Davis did it on The Tonight Show in 1982, but didn’t do it as well as Jim Carrey. (Link) Man, would love to see the Carrey take.

Back to Dreamgirls: the second act, while solid, is more focused on Curtis Taylor (Jamie Foxx) and Deena Jones (Beyonce Knowles) and the trouble is, Effie is a character of such vim and emotion that the rest of the film post-”And I Am Telling You” pales in comparison. But perhaps that was Motown for you: after its 1960s heyday, where was there to go?

Dir. Stephen Frears
Helen Mirren, Michael Sheen

I remember when I first heard that Princess Diana had died: I was on a flight from Singapore to the US, about to begin college, and sometime during the flight a cryptic piece of news came onto the Singapore Airlines news screen: “Princess Di hurt in car accident in Paris”. In those days you couldn’t get much more than a little snippet of news, so you only had a sense that something vaguely terrible had happened. Even after landing in San Francisco, there wasn’t much more word: as I recall, the headlines of the papers at the newsstand were of the previous day’s, before the crash; it was only in landing in transit in Pennsylvania, coming upon a bank of newspaper boxes, that it was clear that what had happened was a major event the whole world over.

In Stephen Frears’ The Queen, the royal family is similarly removed from the impact of the death of Diana. Helen Mirren as the titular character (and titular head of state) gives a superb, justifiably lauded performance of a woman caught between her sense of appropriate duty and a country whose values have shifted around her.

This may be The Queen, but the ghost of Princess Di (or, an “ex-HRH” as Prince Philip (James Cromwell) so bluntly puts it) haunts the palace. And in her death what was once celebrated as stoicism became seen as cold remove; Queen Elizabeth II’s certainty that the British public would shun public expressions of grief was undercut by waves upon waves of flowers outside Buckingham Palace, by footage of grown men crying, by news headlines effectively questioning

Frears’ film, a sober reflection on the events of one crazed week in 1997, doesn’t show us anything new about most of the principal characters involved (well, unless your view of the royals comes strictly from Hello magazine): Prince Philip still comes across as a blowhard toff, Alistair Campbell as a brilliant but smug speechwriter. Perhaps the only new aspect of character that comes across is Charles as the first royal to grasp the significance of Diana’s death to the public, and his worry about being targeted - or even shot - by an angry public.

But we are not here for revelation, but illustration. And what this film sharly illustrates is the development of the relationship between the Queen and the “modernising” government of Tony Blair (Michael Sheen). Blair starts off awkward, gawky, but quickly gains ascendancy and surefootedness as he responds to the death of Diana in politically savvy manner (his “People’s Princess” speech was surely one of his rhetorical high points), and soon Blair finds himself in the role of advising the Queen, rather than the other way around. For all her instinctive disdain for Blair’s upstart ways, the Queen grows to realise the quality of his advice; Blair on his part develops a surprising fealty to the Queen (to the republican Cherie Blair’s teasing amusement).

Sheen does a pitch-perfect Tony Blair, down to the sound of his voice, although an outburst at Alistair Campbell in support of the Queen comes across as over the top, and overly tells the audience what is apparent from the rest of the film. It is perhaps the only false note in the film.

In the end, this is a film about commoners as much as royalty: about the leader of the Commons teaching royalty how to act; about the significant role of the commoners who advise the Queen behind the scenes (and in that regard give far better advice on the British public’s mood than either Philip or the Queen Mum, both who come across as clinging on to outmoded ideas of the British public); and about the importance of the British public not just to the politicians, but also to the legitimacy of the Queen’s existence. And in Mirren’s finely nuanced portrait of the Queen, we see a woman more keenly aware of that last point than the rabid tabloid headlines of 1997 would have had us believe.

On the heels of Happy Feet, I caught George Miller’s previous work, Babe: Pig in the City, and realised why it’s so loved by critics (Roger Ebert: “lolling in its enchanting images–original, delightful and funny.”; David Edelstein: “my candidate for the most overlooked big budget film of the decade, maybe of the century.”), even though it was a commercial flop.

Babe: Pig in the City has none of the bucolic charm of its predecessor. Its plotline is darker - Farmer Hoggett (James Cromwell) has fallen down the well and broken his leg, and the farm’s about to go under. Which leaves his wife Esme (Magda Szubanski) to bring Babe into the city to attend a state fair to get the appearance fee.

If only it were that simple. Esme’s flight is delayed (the sniffer dog spots drugs), which means they miss the fair. And that means they have to find somewhere to stay, and finally chance upon a hotel that illicitly hosts all manner of animals. Chaos ensues, as Babe is first taken advantage of by his fellow animal denizens and after that becomes their leader with the help of a pit bull terrier that he rescues out of the sheer goodness of his little piggy heart, even after the terrier takes the trotter on a truly terrifying chase.

It’s the heart of Babe that is the heart of the movie: his genial goodness (and pink cuteness) carries the film, although all the animals have a stunning amount of charm. But oh, the plot is beyond the point. This is visually a stunning, gorgeous film - the action takes place in a fictitious city, part Venice with its canals, part New York with its bridges, and the sets are fantastic. Miller keeps action busy constantly, and fills in lovely little details. And the scene where Babe, separated from Esme, is finally rescued is almost Cremaster-like in its surreal spectacle, with Esme bouncing about in an inflated bungee suit trying to rescue Babe, while chandeliers fall, champagne glasses tremble, and hundreds of blue balloons tumble down.

It’s a dark world, this city, and very far removed from the farm of its predecessor, but oh, what a treat for the eyes.

Random factoid: the orang-utan that played Thelonius was Mitra from the Singapore Zoo.

Watched Casino Royale yesterday. Daniel Craig is an awesome Bond. There’s a certain unease in his smile that seems right for the part of the proto-Bond, a not-quite-all-there double-0 in the making. And I liked the simultaneous nods to tradition - the 1964 Aston Martin, Bond making up the ridiculous “Stephanie Broadchester” name - with the debunking of it (Bartender: “Shaken or stirred?” Bond: “Do I look like I give a damn?”).

Paul Haggis wrote the dialogue between Bond and Vesper Lynd (Eva Green), and their scene on a train, each one second-guessing the other’s background, was a great sign that this Bond has moved beyond just wink-wink silly innuendo. And Bond does seem really more passionate in this film: whereas Brosnan was shiny and slick, Craig brings out the rougher, animal side - the film imbues him with a sexual charge, a tender side (there’s a shower scene that strips Bond of his traditional detachment, and it’s a powerful one), and even homoerotic overtones, as a dark torture scene shows.

And mad, mad props for the chase scene with Sebastien Foucan - I totally had not realised it was Foucan (hey, who expects a traceur to show up in a Bond film?), but employing that beautiful fluid free-running style on the construction site made for a great chase scene. Which contrasts nicely with the slick Texas hold’em game that shows off Bond’s debonair, intellectual side. Parlour games and parkour games - this installment of the Bond franchise is both cerebral and physical, and earns its (renewed) licence.

One of the chief aspects of The Prestige is, well, the prestige - the point in the magic show where the magician shows the audience something they’ve never seen before. And, as Alfred Borden (Christian Bale) warns, a good magician should never reveal his secrets, for without his secrets he is nothing. And yet the best part of this show - just as in Memento, the first film written by the Nolan brothers - is the revelation of all its secrets, the part where the audience figures out how everything is pieced together…

A full review will follow when I have the time, but just wanted to note that this was a great film, some fine, solid acting by Hugh Jackman (one does feel sorry for his character in the end) and Christian Bale…

The Aristocrats is the collective unleashed id of dozens of big-name comedians (George Carlin, Eddie Izzard, Paul Reiser, Sarah Silverman, Jon Stewart, and dozens more) as they all tell the same joke: family walks into a talent agent’s office, and proceeds to show their act.

The underlying joke, of which the title is the punchlinem is a kind of oral tradition of standup (and Penn Jilette notes this when it comes to Penn and Teller’s turn, as he describes their role as semi-outsiders to comedy and how this joke is like a secret handshake), an experiment in seeing how far you can take something. In essence it’s a shaggy dog story. Well, if that story involved shagging the dog. The goal here is to tell the crudest, most vulgar tale possible (see the Aristocrats database for examples of the joke), and the comedians in this documentary clearly relish it - Bob Saget, widely acknowledged as possibly one of the filthiest comics around, does justice (and gives heart attacks to those who only know him from “America’s Funniest Home Videos” or “Full House), but even seemingly mild-mannered comedians such as Paul Reiser sink their teeth into the Aristocrats’ every orifice. The jokes usually span the full range of taboos: scatology, every sexual taboo from bestiality to incest, obscenity profanity and blasphemy.

So as you might expect from an all-star grouping that’s clearly playing the joke for an in crwod, the laughs come fast, furious, and filthy. Taking it to another level for me at least were Sarah Silverman, whose riff on Joe Franklin crossed into some dark, disturbing places, and Hank Azaria, whose telling of the joke involved musing on the possibility of how long the joke could go. And perhaps I’d liked to have seen more black comedians do the joke - Chris Rock talks about the chitlin circuit

But the revelation here is Gilbert Gottfried, whose telling of the joke at Hugh Hefner’s roast in 2001 a short while after Sept 11 shows the cathartic power of all that taboo-smashing. Gottfried in my mind has always been that annoying-voiced comic, but this was genius: he just goes balls to the wall for the joke, gloriously delving into the details even as his fellow comedians are doubling over in laughter (literally, it seemed, in Rob Schneider’s case). It’s a perfect palliative for fear, utter, reckless disregard, and the awe other comedians give Gottfried is well-deserved.

Dir. Harold Ramis
John Cusack, Billy Bob Thornton, Connie Nielsen

While Harold Ramis will probably never top the virtuosity that is Groundhog Day, this black comedy of dishonour among thieves shows that he still retains the ability to capture the bleak side of a holiday.

The Ice Harvest features John Cusack in a bad-guy role that’s more Grosse Point Blank than, say, Say Anything. In this case he’s Wichita mob lawyer Charlie Arglist, who’s teamed up with Vic Cavanaugh (Billy Bob Thornton) to steal a couple million bucks from his boss on Christmas Eve. After he and Vic get away with the money, they have to act cool for a few hours, but Charlie dithers, not out of any goodness (he’s amoral enough that he runs a strip joint) but because he’s not exactly the picture of steely-eyed resolve. And women, of course, complicate the matter: in this case, Renata (Connie Nielsen), who runs the Sweet Cage strip club and whom Charlie hopes to slip out of town with.

The bitter cold and the ice storm that hits holiday-eve Wichita thus form the backdrop for the betrayals, double and triple crosses of The Ice Harvest - in its moody atmosphere,, it’s not far off from L.A. Confidential or indeed any other noir film in its depiction of a town in which every character is racked with sleaze. Alcoholism, lust, murder - they proceed apace, sins building on sins.

But in the gloom Ramis puts in a few great comedic moments - the unsinkable mob boss Bill (Randy Quaid) trying to shoot his way out of a trunk, for one, and Charlie and Vic’s attempts to fit the trunk into various cars - and these touches give the film its distinct tone of bleak, bleak humour. And Cusack’s baby face is perfect for his character: it allows him to blend Charlie’s goodhearted nature (Charlie cares for his spectacularly drunk friend Pete (Oliver Platt), even though Pete’s now married to his ex-wife) with his weary procession in the inexorable logic of noir, with the necessary dealings and killings. There may be no honour among thieves, no bad women with a heart of gold, but ice storms do, eventually, melt.

Dir. Lasse Hallström
Heath Ledger, Sienna Miller

Casanova is Lasse Hallström’s version of the tale of the famous libertine. The famed Venetian lover Casanova (Heath Ledger) is beset with woes: financially, he’s short on lira; romantically, his consquistador position looks endangered when he is forced to marry by his protector, the Doge (Tim McInnerny, who comes across as reprising a “Blackadder” role), in order to avoid being punished for heresy. And then he meets Francesca Bruni (Sienna Miller), swashbuckling proto-feminist, who teaches him how to truly love.

The reformation of bad boys who are essentially good at heart is always popular, of course, from Tom Jones to Hugh Grant sheepishly apologising on the Tonight Show. And Casanova captures that lightness of spirit well, proving to be smart about sex and love. It’s a joyful romp filled with assumed and mistaken identities and the comic potential therein: Francesca publishes her feminist tracts under her illiterate servant’s name; Casanova pretends to be Francesca’s betrothed to Francesca and to be the very author of those tracts to her betrothed - and we’re only getting started on the various guises.

Meanwhile, Jeremy Irons does a turn as the Inquisitor Pucci, sent from Rome to capture Casanova for his heresy of fornication, and the essential generosity of spirit of the lovers in the film compared to Irons’ quivering puritan serves as a lighthearted rebuke at those sermonising men who assume fire and brimstone in order to ‘protect women’s morals’. Casanova may be no grand statement on 18th-century Venetian society, and certainly it doesn’t have the comedic wit of a Moliere play, but it exudes the silliness and fun that its titular character celebrates, and that is enough to carry the movie.

I just heard the Nina Persson cover of R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion”, and it brought me back to 1991, me as a 13 year old, a freshly minted teenager. I can’t say I grew up immediately loving indie rock music: the first album I bought, really, was Paula Abdul’s Forever Your Girl.

But then I entered secondary school, and nicely timed with my entry into adolescence was the coming of two albums that changed my musical tastes: R.E.M.’s Out of Time, and Nirvana’s Nevermind. And slowly it came to me, that music could be multi-layered, could be lyrically challenging, could be about despair and the whole range of human emotions.

Which is not to say that good disposable pop like the Sugababes doesn’t have a place on my iTunes list. But some songs of angst will always be the songs of my youth.

As for Persson’s version of the song itself? Persson is capable of much better singing, I think - obviously, her work with the Cardigans is excellent, and I’ve been a fan of some of the stuff she did with A Camp. But this take doesn’t have the end-of-one’s-rope hope/despair mix that the R.E.M. original does, and it’s much the poorer for it.

Dir. Terrence Malick

Not really a full review, but some disjoint thoughts:

The central lesson of The New World seems to be something anyone who’s read People knows: don’t ever fall for Colin Farrell. It’ll screw up your life, cause your family village to be burnt to the ground, that sort of thing. (Or you might get $3 million. Hey, life’s weird like that.)

I’m used to the menace of open spaces in Malick films - Badlands, The Thin Red Line - and it was odd to see this take on land as a source of abundance.

Good Lord, Q’Orianka Kilcher is only 16 years old? She certainly looked a lot older.

The whole Pocahontas story is so problematic - submission to the colonisers, ingratitude, the complete renunciation of one’s culture and absorption into another one - and it’s tough viewing its depiction. And yet I don’t doubt there could be love.

Watched Chungking Express for the umpteenth time today - the first time in a year, though. Had forgotten that that very brief scene between Tony Leung and Valerie Chow was so sexy.

Ah, the swaying blur of memory. Which leads me to my main point. The Jan-Feb issue of the 2nd Rule that I guest-edited is out (here’s the permanent link for people who stumble on this post by the time the next issue is out). It’s the memory issue: on how we are remembered, and on the trails we leave behind. Oh, and it has a little fragment of fiction from yours truly.

Dir. Ang Lee
Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Williams, Anne Hathaway

To begin with: Brokeback Mountain isn’t a gay cowboy movie. The lead characters herd sheep, ergo it’s perhaps more accurately termed a gay shepherd movie. But that common shorthand for the movie says a lot about our icons of masculinity and the extent to which we start off viewing Brokeback through that specific lens, before the film engrosses you in its great tragic love story.

The plot, for those as yet unaware, involves Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal), a pair of young men - the former a ranch hand, the latter a rodeo cowboy - who work one summer on Brokeback Mountain in Wyoming, and end up falling in love. But this being 1963 and this being backwoods America, neither of them know what to do with this profound love; instead, they return to their lives and settle into marriages, but carry on meeting back at Brokeback on ‘fishing trips’. It’s not so much that there is overt homophobia (although their erstwhile boss does make some snide remarks) as that plausible options remain seemingly completely beyond their ken. Even after over 20 years of their long-term affair, even after divorce, Ennis, the more cautious of the two, finds it impossible to conceive of spending a life together, and it is the start of an unending procession towards regret.

Restraint in the face of society’s strictures, and the competing demands of the heart and propriety: these are fields Ang Lee has patrolled before in The Ice Storm and Sense and Sensibility (not to mention his earlier Taiwanese ones), even if the landscape and timeframe are very different. Lee directs with a sure hand: each of Jack and Ennis’s movements at the start are precise and restrained, embodying caution and wariness both against the wild outside and the wild inside. When the restraint breaks, in the rough and tumble of their first sex scene, it comes across as a fury of release, only to turn the next morning back into a controlled escape, with Ennis riding off.

This dichotomy of restraint and release plays throughout Brokeback: it is only with each other that Ennis and Jack allow themselves to be unrestrained - and thus happy. (Admittedly, though, while the restraint is intended, the movie can come across occasionally as too mannered as a result.) And Jack’s “I wish I knew how to quit you” at their last meeting is the movie’s iconic line, summarising the tragedy of limitations that underpins the movie. The two clearly miss each other, clearly are in pain at separation, and yet that critical push never comes, and they retreat back to their respective lives - the hardscrabble ranch life for Ennis, the successful but cold marriage for Jack.

Perhaps it is apposite, then, that Jack is a rodeo cowboy, clinging on for 8 seconds in the hope that staying through a period of madness brings glory, brings salvation. What do we make of chances unseized? How do we go about a life when the heart is elsewhere? Or conversely, should we go about a life knowing that the heart is elsewhere? Brokeback Mountain has no easy answers. All it can do is show what it knows: there were these two men, and they fell in love, and their love was true, profound, and unshakeable, even upon death.