lowfield

Safe. Secure. Knowing.

From the opening shot of Travolta maligning Hollywood for always having a happy ending and always being the morality tale (to the unsurprising ending where one of these two doesn't actually occur), we are presented with Hollywood's third crime - safety.

There's nothing new here. Just a re-hash of everything that Hollywood knows it can do competently: car chases, slo-mo explosions, British bad guys, beautiful women, fast cars (the oh-so-wonderful TVR Tuscan - which means that they'll be harder than ever to get hold of now :( ...), ludicrous computer hacking sequences, "access denied" in 100pt red, dubious graphical compilers (since when did a PDP-10 have any sort of GUI?)

Two hours of nonsense. Entertaining without thrilling, entertaining without stimulating, entertaining without *thinking*.

I don't begrudge it the ticket price but in two weeks I'll be hard pressed to remember much about this movie - and neither of those facts particularly worry me.

It's the story that the whole world (well, the 99.99% of us who aren't famous) dream about. "Normal" people spend their lives reading about the lives of the famous, on posters, in magazines, knowing more about the lovelives of celebrities than their families.

Wanting to be famous, wanting to be with someone famous. The self-referential irony is delivered with a deft touch, Hugh Grant playing what he does so well, the diffident, slightly awkward, but immaculately enunciated and perfectly quiffed English upper-middle class gent. Stuttery, self-effacing, but don't Americans just love that.

And that's the key here. Four Weddings, part II. England for an American market, neatly packaged. It couldn't be anywhere, it had to be England. It couldn't be anyone, it had to be Hugh. (Again.)

That's not to say it's not a very well produced movie. It is. A great ensemble of British comic actors. Plenty of well known London landmarks for the locals to point at and empathise with. And a tight script that carries you through the two hours rather than dragging. Two hours is brave in this day an age, but why rush?

Julia Roberts continues to be a revelation. She isn't just a pretty face. She plays the part to its fullest - I did want to be William Thacker. I want to go buy a bookshop and have her visit.

Isn't that what movies are about? Showing you the world as it could be, not how it is. Sometimes that's dark and scary, sometimes it's light and happy.

I want to live in the movie W8 - you can keep the real world!

You think you know movie flashbacks? Nah.

Interesting editing, interesting performances and an interesting story ... although I gave it a nine, I've no doubt that this was in part because of the editing, the backwards linearity of the storytelling. When the DVD is out and I can watch the chapters in the "correct" order I'm sure that gaping holes will appear and the story won't seem half as curious.

As we left the cinema and walked home we couldn't work the story out. Had we been given enough information after the apparently abrupt ending? Was Leonard's wife diabetic? Had he already avenged her death (having unwittingly killed her)? Had we really seen him, with tattoos, with her? Were the occasional flashes of memory (like remembering that the licence plate was fact six) down to his sometime failing or the scriptwriter's fallibility.

Or was that the point? That we spent time after the film trying to recreate the story proved the fallibility of our memories - a meta-level, interactive display of what we'd just seen.

Inventive, exhausting, provoking, gripping - a splendid film.