Unlike great wartime British films like In Which We Serve, made by David Lean and Noel Coward, or A Matter of Life and Death by Powell and Pressburger, Went the Day Well was directed not by a prestigious English talent but by Alberto Cavalcanti, a Brazilian born filmmaker who never developed a great reputation later in life. He is solely credit by his surname Cavalcanti in the film, in much the same way foreign film professionals often were in those days. Hats by Cervantes, etc. I have to admit that unlike David Lean and Noel Coward, I know very little about Alberto Cavalcanti and his work. The only other film of his I’ve seen is the very well known British horror film Dead of Night. This is the one in which Michael Redgrave plays a ventriloquist tortured by the whims of his evil, sentient dummy. But despite never becoming a David Lean, Cavalcanti’s wartime film is just as effective.

Part of my interest in British wartime films is how they reflect the surroundings at the time. This is the same reason I have such an interest in Japanese films of the immediate post-war. You can learn a lot from watching how events are portrayed in a movie, and notice the fears and pressures acting on society at the time. Of course you can in any other time as well, but there’s something about the British wartime films. A cinematic stiff upper lip perhaps. Despite, or perhaps because of, the traditional methods being strained under the war, the industry managed to make a wonderful series of socially and historically relevant, elegant yet exciting films.

In terms of Went The Day Well’s historical significance, the situation at the time was really quite dire. The film was released in December 1942, but (from titles) we can tell it was written and set quite a bit before in the spring. At the time, the UK was still under the tremendous daily bombing of the Blitz and the constant threat of invasion. The Home Guard, a 1 million strong army of irregulars and those too old or unfit to serve, had been assembled, and were designed to help stall Churchill’s greatest fear : an assault on England by the Fallschrimjager, elite German paratroopers, who could capture a southern port to France and thus open the entire UK up to a large scale invasion by the German army. In essence, D-Day in reverse, several years previous.

While Went The Day Well is certainly far from an historical record of what happened, naturally such events never took place, it’s a fantastic record of the feeling of the time. The government was worried about the strength of German paratroopers, especially after their actions in the Battle of Crete. They were also worried about the training of the Home Guard and the vigilance of civilians after the UK’s air success in the Battle of Britain. Went The Day Then is something of a nightmare scenario, designed to both frighten, rouse and even compliment the British people.

The plot focuses on the small village of Bramley End. I assumed this was a fictional place, and indeed it is, but it’s quite hard to tell with English village names. Bramley End is an incredibly quaint little English village with stone walls, wide fields, cobbled streets and an ancient church. They’ve only one shop, and barely 8 children, some of whom are evacuees. An unlikely place for an assault by German paratroopers? Exactly the point, of course.

The way the Germans come into town is quite clever though, and begins to split the film up into a number of separate, interesting developments. The Germans are initially disguised as British soldiers, and as such the villages, caught up in taking care of the guests, offer them lodgings in all the important places in town. It’s interesting that English speaking German paratroopers used for misdirection became a reality in 1944-45 in the Battle of the Bulge, though the danger of this tactic was explored in this film two years before. Anyway, naturally the ruse is eventually discovered, and the locals start trying to organise a resistance.

An interesting element of the film I remembered from childhood (although I watched it again more recently of course) was the framing device. The film starts with a slow trek to the town, whereupon a local villager near the graveyard speaks directly to the audience about the Battle of Bramley End (which we don’t see for so  long but always expect in the film) and a gravestone with German names. Though the film was filmed in 1942, he looks back on the year as if it were the distant past. The opening of the film gives a rather grim impression, in a graveyard, as the villager starts to relate the tale. While regarding the stone he says “They wanted England, and this is the only part they got”. The man returns at the end of the film for a closing statement, of course, although much too briefly.

I just like the idea that the film starts and ends in the future to the main story. It’s not quite The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, but it’s much more interesting than many of the others. Notice all the great wartime British films, In Which We Serve, Colonel Blimp, A Matter of Life and Death, Went The Day Well and plenty more all play around with time. Somebody, and I’m sorry I can’t remember who although I want to say it was Andre Bazin, said that essentially there were two different kinds of films. Films about time and films about action*. And strangely it seems most good films do in fact involve time in some considerable way.

Another interesting part about the introduction is that it reveals the name. I had always mistakenly remembered that Went The Day Well was one of the things the German soldiers say that gives them away as German. In fact, I remembered that completely wrong, they do a number of things that give them away but that is not one of them. In fact the title comes from an anonymous poem which the RAF have adopted. A section of it comes onto the screen before the film begins :

Went the day well?
We died and never knew
But, well or ill
Freedom, we died for you

From here we get into the film proper, and jump back to the first of the fateful days in which the fictional battle took place. Though not directed by Michael Bay, the movie does make frequent use of day and date stamps on the screen, to let you know when everything is taken place, as though these made up manoeuvres were of great historical significance. Almost immediately the faux Tommys are on the scene and the plot is afoot. I’ve always had a half-chuckle at the accents of the Germans. Almost all of them speak in a posh London accent, the idea that RP English is easiest to copy by Germans is probably quite true and funny to see played out.

The first act or so of the film is quite Columbo-esque. We know within a few minutes that the soldiers are in fact Germans, the jig is up for the audience almost as soon as it began. Doing away with whodunnit make the rest so much more interesting to watch. Of course the villagers give the soldiers the benefit of the doubt over almost everything, but it’s funny to see how what catches the Germans out is not someone finding a Nazi identification card on them but a series of very small cultural differences.

For instance, in the interests of drama, one soldier cannot speak English very well. When his landlady mentions that  it’s “not very comfortable for you here, is it?” the man responds flatly “No”, coming across as very rude, although really just confused by the way the question was formed. In another scene, a vital clue is a piece of paper on which the Germans were keeping score of their card game. One lady notices that the men have been writing their numbers in the European fashion such as “continental 7s”, that is a 7 with a dash across it as they do in Germany and France. This scene leads to one of my favourite lines in the whole film, when the haughty Margaret Dumont type in the village exclaims :

“I refuse to see anything sinister in an elongated five!”

Naturally there is a fifth column at work, and in the nicest man in town is the head of it. I like that it shows the rich are the most susceptible to infiltration by the Nazis. Movies like Hitchcock’s Saboteur and to some extent Notorious make the same assertion and I’m sure it’s true. The character of this traitor, Mr. Wilson, is nicely contrasted (though never directly so) with the presence of the working class boy George who has been evacuated to this country down from London thanks to the Blitz. Naturally the boy is down to earth and daring, taking people as he finds them, where as Mr. Wilson is a stuck up cad of the highest order. Eventually, it is the boy who manages to bring help to the town.

The evacuated boy also leads to one of the other lines of the un-PC times that made me burst out laughing. When asked by the Dumont impostor “Do you know what morale is?” the boy responds “Yeah, it’s what the wops ain’t got!” so cheerfully. And don’t expect anything even handed in this propaganda picture. All the Nazis are animals. They eat by tearing things to pieces with their hands and stuffing their over full mouths until things fall out. They beat children to the horror of the British and their final desperate plan is to execute a bunch of kids at sunrise (once again, a great use of a limited elite force, I must say).

So naturally this is to excuse the brutality of their murders, which in the mid point of the film are quite shocking. It’s no wonder the director went into horror. Perhaps the best is when the kindly old lady we’ve followed through much of the film chats to a German guard, then blinds him with pepper and hacks him to death with a hand axe! Certainly no murder is shown to be easy and it’s always interesting how much more vibrant the violence in an old picture like this can be when it’s stored up and released like this, even without a drop of blood. Likewise the ambush of the Home Guard by the Germans seems particularly brutal because they are on bicycles and singing or whistling. Cavalcanti understands this, if they were marching or in a truck it wouldn’t have been the same.

 The last act, when the largest stretch of action breaks out, is actually a bit of a hodge podge. Cavalcanti doesn’t have as good an idea for this kind of material as he does for individual murders, and the fact that the two sides are dressed alike makes some of it a bit confusing. The lack of the final act plan by the Germans beyond killing the children somewhat hurts the finale. As does the epilogue, over all too soon, as the villager who welcomed us to look at the grave barely gets time to half repeat himself before a giant The End smacks him in the face.

So it is a bit scrappy toward the end, and you can’t help but feel what it might have been had Cavalcanti gone all the way in any of his directions, in mystery, horror film or action picture. But as it stands, it’s undeniably a classic of British wartime cinema. I’ve read some criticisms on the internet (I’ve never heard any such as this in real life) that the film did not go far enough in its grim picture of a small occupied town. But I think these commentators aren’t quite taking in the circumstances. 1944 or 1945 was a wonderful time to explore just how bad things might have been, when things surely would not get there. 1942 could not afford to be unrelentingly dark, when times at home were so grim.

I usually speak here about the availability of the picture, but I’m not entirely sure of it in North America. In the UK, there is a DVD available and it’s of average quality. Alternatively, you can search your listings next year around VE Day and hope it comes up. I heard that it was recently made public domain, but I’m not sure if that’s true at all. Any roads, it is thankfully available for cheap on DVD, unlike some of the other films I’ve spoken about here, so please do check it out if you get the chance.

*This quote is not mine of course, in fact it’s not even a quote it’s a badly remembered paraphrase, but I always took it to mean that films generally fall into two types. Films in which you start, and something is happening, and you get excited and it keeps happening until it’s over. And films in which the now is not as important as looking at a range of times or experiences, and then coming to some conclusion or final emotion about what you’ve watched. I can’t say for everyone which is better, but for example I could understand it’s partly why Godfather Part II stands out above The Godfather, or why anyone interested in films can’t not watch Alain Renais or Wong Kar Wai, as annoying as they might get. It’s not a certainty though, it’s just a film theory you might hear batted around if you sit in a lecture and stay awake.

And generally, the same is true of North American television. Randomly flicking will probably land you Maid in Manhattan or Lethal Weapon 2, or skimming between channels like TCM will net you a bounty of pictures you've already seen. While I'm glad that The Searchers is being shown in heavy rotation (it's a good film and gives people less of an excuse not to have seen it) if you have seen it, on a screen even, your options narrow.

But there's something to be said about 24 cable television. Movie channels can excel for the same reason that news channels suffer. They need material to fill a 24 hour schedule. As such, a whole fistful of movies, that many years ago in the UK might have been several weeks of Sunday programming for BBC2 and Channel 4, can get cycled through in a a night.

And so it was that I caught Hotel Berlin, a film I'd never heard of before. I'm not sure why I starting watching, perhaps because the film was just beginning, but I'm glad I did. Hotel Berlin is interesting for a number of reasons, despite the fact it is a B-movie by anyone's criteria. My first hint was the cast. There are very few familiar names, and those that are come from Warner Bros dungeons.

I mean people like Raymond Massey, who I remember from appearing in pictures like Arsenic and Old Lace and East of Eden, but whose stern face was far from a regular sight. Arsenic and Old Lace "co-star" Peter Lorre also appears in the film. And George Coulouris, who played Mr "I thought it would be fun to run a newspaper!" Thatcher in Citizen Kane, also takes an important role as a Gestapo chief. If you did not know this was a B-picture before you saw it, the confidence of Warners casting ought to convince you.

Hotel Berlin has an interesting premise. It looks back at two other films and tries to lift two fistfuls out of them. The first, and largest, influence is Grand Hotel. The title almost suggests it. Grand Hotel was set in Berlin (pre-war), and followed a handful of guests, from all different backgrounds, and how their stories play out and interconnect during their stay. Grand Hotel has been aped a million times since then, from contemporary knock offs to modern time winks like the Japanese film The Uchoten Hotel.

Hotel Berlin definitely has Grand Hotel in its sights, but that's part of what makes it so entertaining. Where as Grand Hotel, 13 years previous, featured a star studded cast (Garbo, Crawford, Barrymore and Barrymore) Hotel Berlin has a bargain basement line-up. Where as Grand Hotel followed the Barons and Vons of a growing new Germany, Hotel Berlin follows the Barons and Vons of the Nazi party, all but defeated.

The overall story of Hotel Berlin is very simple. Nazi Germany is about to collapse. The hours are being counted. A wide variety of German people can be found at Hotel Berlin, where we follow a day or so of their lives. High ranking generals and even the Gestapo are now aware that the war is over. The main point of concern is who is on the Allied list of war criminals. Various political figures are now caught between the wrath of a drowning Nazi evil and the (imagined) revenge of the Allies.

At the same time the plot concerns Martin Richter (Helmut Dantine, the gambling young groom from Casablanca) a resistance member who has recently escaped from a concentration camp. A huge reward goes out for his capture, and of course he ends up at the Hotel, where friendly parties try to arrange his escape from the country. The characters such as a famous actress and a prostitute seem at first just a retread of Grand Hotel.

The plot is quite clever on it's own. But the timing, to me, makes it especially interesting. This picture, which almost fully concerns the Nazis and the fall of the Nazi empire, was not made in 1948 or 1950, but in 1945. And was released in March, 1945. I have watched a number of wartime pictures, but it is very rare for a picture of this time to focus on quite the same specific issues this picture does.

First of all, Hotel Berlin focuses mostly on Germans. I quite expected this to soon change, but it doesn't so much. The trails of Martin Richter, as a home-grown provocateur, does inject an interesting element but he never becomes the star of this film. The star is the story, which in a more gentle way, links hands with Downfall. This is a movie about the Nazi regime strangling itself to death, but with military matters all on the fringes.

It's about failure in the face of horrible pride, but it's all about the people who did this and why they did. When Richter confronts his mentor, Peter Lorre, the scene (thanks to Lorre) is hazy, awful, understandable and surreal. Nazis are run through so many filters. High society Nazis, looking for the advancement of German glory. Scientific Germans, seduced by the evil freedom of Nazi rule. Military circles and military families getting their 'brave' chance. And the working class, at the end of it, forced to pay for all the above successes and failures at a level the bosses will never understand.

That this film was released, and therefore completed well before, March 1945, long before the fall of Nazi Germany, was great insight on the part of Vicki Baum who wrote the original novel, or Alvah Bessie and Jo Pagano who made the screenplay. Together they show the bottom of the Nazi system. It turning on itself. I'm sure Raymond Massey thought his honourable general was the best character, but I love Welles' friend George Coulouris as Helm, the Gestapo man. His poisonous attitude and quiet suspicion is marvellous.

Another very important point about this film is the Holocaust. I don't think I've ever seen a film made during the war that dealt with the Holocaust to quite the extent of this film. They don't quite tackle the thing head on, but this film talks about the anti-Jew agenda. It talks about camps. A German officer tells a girl her boyfriend looks like a Jew and beats her because of it. A characters mother skirts the corner for a while because she is a secret Jew and the shame is something a modern audience feels very strong.

Now, I'm not saying this film is a huge watermark for anti-Nazi film, but Hotel Berlin ought to be recognised for it's small successes. Director Peter Godfrey never made another movie worth watching and I don't think he made this one with any sympathy of the plight of the Jewish people or the evil and complexity of Nazi Germany. However, by purpose or accident, he's made a very interesting film that touches on all these issues long before they became the fodder of common weekend cinema.

I suppose if you've grown up in Los Angeles or New York, you're quite used to seeing your neck of the woods depicted in film and television. This probably extends to the people of any major American city, Chicago, Seattle and so on. Perhaps you've even laughed at shoddy stand ins, like a street in Toronto having some trash thrown at it to look like New York. Living now in Vancouver I'm aware of the city attempting to be just about anywhere on the continental United States and even, in the case of Battlestar Galactica, outer space.

If you've grown up in Northern Ireland, it's less likely that you've had the privilege of seeing anywhere familiar turn up as the setting in a film. Occasionally they threw us a ball in the 90s when they wanted to do something about terrorism, and make some rubbish like The Devil's Own with Brad Pitt. I love the hilarious near-Matrix double fisted Uzi attack near the start of that film set in Belfast. But generally there was never too many moments when I was sat watching something like Speed and it was all set in Belfast or a moment in Stargate where a character said 'I've just realised, we've all got to get to Northern Ireland, right now!'

But this is exactly, much to my surprise, what happens in Hellboy II: The Golden Army. Toward the end of the film, a trail of magical evidence leads a German-accented ectoplasmic middle-manager in a diving suit to tell our heroes that all signs point to "County Antrim, Northern Ireland". There they meet a disabled goblin who somewhat looks like a man I once saw sitting outside the Empire bar. And he does speak with a Northern Ireland accent! And he is a rather poor actor, just like a lot of them in Northern Ireland!

Now, they do mention the Giant's Causeway and then never show it (unless I missed it, that seemed like a real wasted opportunity, especially given they do have a giant rockman in the film) and they are the most artificially green hills and blue skies of Antrim I've ever seen in my life. And it was therefore probably all shot on a green screen in Hollywood and mashed together with computers. But I must admit to having got a kick out of this rare and unexpected change in setting.

Perhaps the feeling isn't akin to Americans who are so used to seeing their cities reproduced in big budget films. Maybe it's closer to those people who's country once served as a setting in a Bond film. People in places like Azerbaijan or Kazakhstan or Montenegro, who get a few establishing shots in a blockbuster and then an extended action sequence that supposedly takes place in the same location, but was really shot on a soundstage in Pinewood Studios.

Well whatever it's like, I really enjoyed the hearty laugh I got when this element was introduced, and especially so the second time when the location and time was written up on the screen Michael Bay style, so Mr. Del Toro, thank you for that.

Hiroyuki Nakano is probably best known as the director of Samurai Fiction, Red Shadow and Stereo Future*. Red Shadow was a bit of a mess  and Nakano deserved a rap on the knuckles, but Samurai Fiction and  Stereo Future were both very good. It was clear from his films, Samurai Fiction in particular, that Nakano greatly admired the work of  Akira Kurosawa and also, to a point, Seijun Suzuki. By Stereo Future, he seemed to be on a nice trajectory to cementing his own style and  was certainly in the minds of all of those interested in modern Japanese cinema.

He then seemed to promptly disappear, filming a couple of shorts and  returning to the world of music videos and advertisements from which he'd come. So perhaps, in a way, his new project is a summation of his feature film efforts, his Kurosawa worship and his commercial/marketing sensibilities. Because Nakano has directed a remake of Kurosawa's Seven Samurai. And it's going to be released on a pachinko machine!

For those of you not familiar with pachinko, it's a simple gambling  game immensely popular in Japan, particularly with men, usually of a  certain age. It's somewhat like pinball, if you removed most of the limited interaction that game provides. If you've been to a seaside  town (certainly in Britain) you might have played something similar that involved dropping pennies into the top of a case, hoping they'll bounce off pegs and land in the winning slots. In more recent years, pachinko machines have become more and more fancy, involving slot machine elements and built in cartoons or sub-games that require your input at a certain time.

On this grand stage Nakano's Seven Samurai will be debuted, on a screen about four inches high and six inches long. I had to actually hunt out a picture of the machine itself before I'd believe it, but it didn't take me long to find it.

http://www.pachinkovista.com/pfactory/model.php?nid=17271

The film itself actually looks very close to the original. Nakano's own style only really seems to have manifested itself in his soundtrack selection, in this case it's all Rolling Stones hits all the time. Most of the shots you can see from the website trailers (of which the first and longest one is best) come from the original film, but not quite pulled off as well. Standing out in particular is Kanbei standing on the mound in the rain firing his arrows at the horsemen. Other moments you'll remember are Kikuchiyo and the banner or Heihachi chopping wood. There are a few small changes. The samurai test that Kikuchiyo fails (being hit on the head with a stick) takes place outside now entirely rather than in a doorway, and the banner the samurai use somewhat amusingly looks a little like a pachinko board now.

It's no wonder that so many of the shots seem so close to the original as the production uses a great number of staff that had previously worked with Kurosawa, people like famous Ran/Dreams costume designer Emi Wada and Masaharu Ueda, the cinematographer on Kurosawa's final five pictures. The movie stars Sonny Chiba as Kanbei, the Takashi Shimura role in the original, and Masatoshi Nagase as Kikuchiyo, Toshiro Mifune's part. A number of others such as Miike standby Yoji Tanaka fill out the samurai and annoyingly visaged Kumiko Aso plays the girl love interest to the youngest, Katsushiro.

What all of those people are doing in a movie to be played on a pachinko game, I have no idea, but there they are. Certainly some of them, such as Aso and Nagase, are being reigned in by virtue of having previously appeared in Nakano's films, for better or worse. Others must quite fancy the idea. Certainly it's an eyecatcher of a headlind. From the footage you can see the film does not look horrible, though it is simply a straight, totally unnecessary remake of Seven Samurai in color, with less charismatic actors and a Rolling Stones soundtrack.

But the whole method of release, while strange, is really quite canny. The project is well aimed at the age group who play pachinko. Most are men in their fifties, probably quite fond of 'chambara' samurai movies and hell, maybe even The Rolling Stones. Since pachinko parlours are so jam packed, there's probably no better way of getting a product in front of the faces of middle aged men. They can watch the pretty pictures as they play, but the deafening din of the parlour will mean they'll be unable to follow it all. Then, when the inevitable DVD release comes around, there is a much higher chance that they'll rent of buy it.

As a business plan, it's clever, but as an artistic effort, it's certainly a waste of time. If only Nakano had come back from obscurity with something amazing and original for all his old supporters to get behind, rather than a hilariously money-minded retreat such as this. Also, can the Japanese entertainment industry please stop funding these things? In the past 8 months we've this remake of Seven Samurai, the Yuji Oda remake of Tsubake Sanjuro and a soon to be released female take on Zatoichi. It's only a matter of months before a remake of Tokyo Story featuring some former bikini model in the Setsuko Hara part.

You can find the official website for this film/game and the trailers right here : http://www.7-samurai.jp/

*He's also directed the video for Deeelite's hit "Groove Is In The  Heart", but that's not particularly well known.

It often seems like with these big films you know the whole thing before it comes out. I've mentioned the pros and cons of this a couple of times before. It certainly seemed to be the case with The Dark Knight, probably the most hyped film of this year, but actually I was surprised by the way it is pulled off and how much it lives up to expectations.

The basics you'll probably be aware of if you've seen any of the now oppressive coverage on TV. The Dark Knight is a movie about Batman, or at least it purports to be. It actually focuses quite a lot on a quartet of characters. First, Batman, who's war on crime really seems to be working one year after the events of the first film. This is thanks in part to his close partnership with Lt. Gordon, the head of the Major Crimes Unit. New on the scene is the recently elected district attorney, Harvey Dent, who’s charismatic appeal and forthright values are inspiring people to take a stand against crime and corruption. Everything is going swimmingly until the mob, now on the run, turn to an odd character for help, an anarchic psychopath known as The Joker.

Perhaps the largest surprise was to what extent this movie focuses on these other characters, without really being to the detriment of the main character. I was especially shocked at how much of the movie surrounds Aaron Eckhart (who has been somewhat elbowed out of the hype preceding the film) and he does a good job with almost everything he's given, his character running quite a range. It's also nice for Gary Oldman to get more attention, being more of a bystander and even shuddering 'comic' relief in Batman Begins. You get the feeling this relationship is what Nolan would have liked to try with the first picture. The Dark Knight supposes that Oldman and Bale trust each other and have been working together as close partners for a while, which is a logical jump to make a year into the future after Begins, but it's a shame we didn't see more of that in Begins before we leap head on into the heavy stuff here. In fairness a more realistic approach would probably not have taken as well in Batman Begins, which still kept a little too much of the campy tone of the previous series, probably the crime of hack screenwriter David Goyer.

Ledger is also excellent as the Joker, you'll have heard this by now, by far the most interesting performance of the year. I must say, rather than the tortured soul described in tabloid headlines, Heath Ledger looked like he was having an absolute ball in this part. He's funny and scary, strangely lucid with a flash of genius intelligence, and rather pathetic but dangerously squirrely. The screenplay is a big present with a bow on it for the actor who got this part. He's set up to be the life of the picture, tearing through with a great burst of energy anytime a situation would threaten to get stale. Part of the praise for his performance has certainly gotten mixed up with fondness for the character, with his clever little plans. Nevertheless he's wonderful and the picture would be nowhere near as entertaining without him. It's quite likely that another actor might have made a horrible fudge out of it, and I hope they don't bother with recasting for the next film.

This is a film with a remarkable amount of things going on in its two and a half hour running time. You've got maniacs with a number of targets, crisis of identity, crisis of morals, mob trials, crooked accountants, car chases, double-crosses and dogs getting a kicking to say only the half of it. However I didn't think it's particularly obnoxiously flabby. The fact that it's jam packed with little events and side stories is what keeps it moving forward so successfully, and the film doesn't drag, apart from one sequence that takes place in Hong Kong which was probably unnecessary.

It's funny that characters in this sequence keep saying that "this could be handled with a phone call" as if they themselves know all this is fairly ancillary. The action sequence which caps this Asian jaunt is quite cool, but I'm sure they could have worked a similar thing in at home without going all the way to Hong Kong just so Edison Chen can show his face for a few seconds in something other than a sex tape. I'd believe the production got some kind of payoff from the HK tourist agency, except they don't really make the most of the location at all (from the angles they show, it looks a lot like Gotham) and the filmmakers have spoken of the rotten time they had working there.

There's a few other niggling points to be made about the picture. It feels that Harvey is dealt with a little too soon. Certainly I'm not implying that the film should have gone on even longer, but that he perhaps could have had a bit more space in a film of his own, finishing this movie with his fall from grace and expanding on the rest next time. As is, his transformation and his rampage are cut a little short and don't all entirely add up quite as well as they ought to.

Nolan's direction is generally good but he still can't grab hold of a fight scene. I know he wants to shoot every part of every scene himself, but this is somewhere where he maybe could use a second unit. The fight with the dogs near the beginning is particularly bad for telling what is going on, but the final tussle is also a bit of a smudge collection in parts. He's fine with big showy situations, an 18 wheeler going end over end on a highway, or someone leaping off a building, but he seems to have no idea what to do in a fist fight. I thought perhaps this approach is done for the rating, but considering this film got a PG-13 with all the disturbing things in it already, I don't think a few clearer punches in the stomach or slapping a dog would put it over the top, but I could be wrong. Whatever it is he's going for, it has to stop. It seemed at the beginning, when Batman starts to take down his first few goons, that he had learnt his karate lesson but don't hold out any hope, it soon goes back to Begins level.

I know a lot of people are more worked up over this movie than I am, and are more likely to have much stronger reactions for and against various elements. For instance, I've read no end of comments about the voice Bale uses as Batman. Personally I think it's fine, it didn't bother me in either film, but it does sound a little odd when he's making longer speeches with it. It certainly didn't have anymore effect on me than Gary Oldman's American accent slipping for a bit on the roof of the police station. Likewise replacing empty headed Xenu vase Katie Holmes with acclaimed basset hound actress Maggie Gyllenhaal doesn't do anything for the by the numbers character they both played, no more interesting here than in Begins.

Despite all the hype, I can't imagine anyone who wants to watch this will be too disappointed. For Batman fans, it's surely the best movie featuring that character ever made. For those curious about Ledger's final performance, they can rest assured he went out on a high note. The general audience just looking for a good time with a summer blockbuster will most certainly get it. A remarkable amount of things blow up, are crashed into, are flung about, etc. Even though they've done away with all the goofy gothic sets in favour of real locations, this is a movie where all of the money seems to be on the screen.

There's a lot of praise for the film working as a crime drama, which it does. It's a rather curious policer, in which one of the cops wears a cape, and that's probably how it should always have been played anyway. At the same time, I wouldn't go over the top with how well it functions with it's foot in another genre, as some have with the dropping of other titles like Heat or The Godfather, which is simply ridiculous. If you ask someone to recommend you a great crime film and they say The Dark Knight, sigh and walk away.

But in general, the picture is a huge achievement. It feels as larger and more thoughtful than anything Hollywood has produced in quite some time. The question isn't really if it's successful as a comic book picture, or a crime picture, but how is it for a huge tent pole picture that probably cost 180 million dollars? In that regard, it's a massive success for common sense, in that a studio has hired a creative team and given them a load of money, and then backed off to let them create. I've no doubt they'll be significantly rewarded and repaid many, many, many times over by the time this film comes to DVD.

It was very wise of Warner Brothers to tie the debut of the Watchmen trailer into the release of The Dark Knight, melding the two together in the minds of audiences as straight faced peas in the pod. Anyone who enjoys The Dark Knight will certainly be looking for more of the same, and I'm sure Zack Snyder won't be too angry at his film being positioned as such. These are both movies trying desperately to say, for better or worse, "It may look a little silly, but this is serious business!"

People who have read the Watchmen story, either during the big hubbub about in the 80s or long after from its reputation, know that it's a startlingly excellent exploration of a medium that is usually reserved for absolute rubbish. They would know the skewed history the story takes place in, and the reasons behind some of the more fantastic elements. But audiences in cinemas to see The Dark Knight are in danger of just seeing a giant blue man and someone who looks like a rip off of the character they have just paid to watch.

So one of the reasons I think the trailer is quite successful is that it tries to give some context to the big blue, Dr. Manhattan. The filmmakers obviously realised that he was probably their toughest sell, and astutely set about structuring the trailer around him. We open with Jon being vaporised, and the science fiction surrounding him keeps getting dropped in, literally larger each time. Also his iridescent skin is quite a pretty effect.

As for the slow-fast motion, like Devin in his preview, I'm not surprised to see it and perhaps a little glad. There's no way to totally keep the pace of the original or the style of (very scanty) action told there. This is Zack Snyder's shtick from 300 at work, it was only to be expected he should want to do it a little bit here. I trust he won't go hog wild with it, judging by some of the other clips. In the shot where Ozymandias hits an assassin with an ashtray, they've wisely kept the speed up.

In a film packed with a number of curious looking characters, they did a good job of sticking many of them in for the fans. General audiences are going to be a bit baffled when they watch this, hopefully curiously so, but there really isn't much hint as to what the hell it's all about. That approach isn't wrong either. This film is not going to be released for another 8 months, it's probably better to cut together a trailer that doesn't give it all away quite yet. That said, the ad doesn't baffle by cutting the whole thing into a hyperactive split second mess. You can apprehend every shot, you just can't form it together into a narrative on your own, unlike the trailer for, say, Iron Man. Rorschach, one of the most memorable characters, barely gets a look in compared to Daniel or Jon, hopefully because they don't want to blow it all too early.

That's not to say there are no disappointments with this ad. None of the characters look very old, which is a bit of a shame. Part of the plot regards (or did regard) the fact that some of these characters are a bit pudgy and middle aged. Most of the cast looks like they are from The Hills, never mind over the hill. When the younger actors were cast, I assumed there would be some kind of make up aging being done and some Raging Bull style weight put on, but there doesn't appear to be so or not so much as you'd notice.* Laurie and in particular Ozymandias look a little ridiculous, although Ozymandias' get up doesn't help. I still haven't come around on that design, they'd have been better just putting him in a Savile Row suit and having some kind of costume in a display case in his office.

I'm still a suspect of the project in general, the advert hasn't removed all my doubts. The running time of film seems like such a crippling factor, the length of the material seemed like it would better fit a 12 episode TV series, perhaps a co-production between HBO and the BBC, like Band of Brothers. It seems once you become a prohibitively expensive movie subject to a single studio, there are certain demands on you that can't be ignored. And of course the material is best suited to the medium it was already in, one of the points of Alan Moore's exercise in the first places, but the draw of trying to film it is understandable.

Indeed over the years, that draw has brought in a number of interesting directors to the project, all of whom have failed. Darren Aronofsky, Terry Gilliam and most recently Paul Greengrass have all got within a few steps of pulling it off, only to trip up right at the end and for the whole thing to come crashing down, particularly hard with Greengrass. So Snyder deserves some respect for managing what the others found so difficult. While I'd love to have seen what Aronofsky might have made out of it, Snyder still seems to have kept some of the feel, and it was no doubt his commercial sensibilities that allowed him to negotiate this project to the finish line, whilst doing it in such a way that probably won't see him torn limb to limb at the next convention.

The trailer for Watchmen was first broken on the website of Empire (three stars) Magazine. You can see it everywhere tomorrow before prints of The Dark Knight.

*What's happened with this stuff by the way? Sixty seven years ago when Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten put on make up to look 50 years older, the effect was amazing. Now all this time later, when Eddie Murphy does it, it looks terrible. The decline of Eddie Murphy aside, why is this effect so bad now?

So, that aside, I'd like to share some thoughts on L: Change The World which came out recently on DVD in Asia. It was also shown at the New York Asian Film Festival, though I have no idea why, as it's not deserving of so much attention. The film is a spin off from the Death Note movie series, themselves adaptations of a comic book. The movies have been hugely popular in Japan, leaving the filmmakers in a bit of a tight spot. On one hand, making another sequel would be a guaranteed money maker. But at the end of the second film, almost all the main characters are dead. The solution that props up L is clever, if perhaps the only clever thing in the whole film, and ties in well with the previous movie.

The story of this spin off focuses entirely on the master detective known only by the code letter L. A hunched eccentric with an incredible knack for crime solving, the events of the previous Death Note films have left L victorious but with only 23 days to live. Meanwhile in Thailand, a deadly man-made virus has destroyed a small village and soon ends up in the hands of ecological terrorists who plan to wipe out mankind and rebalance the ecosystem. Naturally, it's only a matter of time (about 20 minutes) before L is on the case, using his final days to try and stop the terrorists.

It's not essential to have seen the previous Death Note films to understand the plot of  this picture, and I can't really recommend them, but it does add a little to the experience. If you haven't seen them, the first ten minutes will be randomly annoying, with a big demon appearing, a magic book being burnt, people appearing for a single scene and then never being seen again and a character central to the plot dying in the first couple of minutes. After that though the film is so by the numbers that so long as you've watched any movie before, never mind a Death Note one, you'll not have any problem guessing what will happen next.

The movie is filled with overacting daytime TV style performances save for the one that matters, Kenichi Matsuyama's interesting turn as L. Though Tatsuya Fujiwara probably got more screen time in the first two films, Matsuyama's performance was hilariously absurd and a lot of fun to watch. Matsuyama plays L as a cat controlling a human robot. He perches on chairs, holds mobile phones by the aerial and consumes nothing but various cakes and sweets held on skewers. Matsuyama's act is still funny in this film, but too much screen time dilutes the effect somewhat, plus he can't do anything with the script that he's given.

Another blip in Death Note that is less excusable here is L's amazing power of deduction. We are told he is a detective genius but where aren't really shown any justification for this. We don't really see his thought process. He just looks a case file and solves it like Nancy Grace, by immediately declaring who did it. They seem to miss the point, that detective stories are not much fun is nothing is being worked out. L:Change The World doesn't have a bunch of clever twists and discoveries, it just has plot developments which unfold in tedious sequence.

It's also strange that since the main appeal of the film is the star character, that they would change him quite profoundly, due to the horrible script. For instance, when in a dangerous face-off, I was curious to see how the usually moping L would handle this physical situation, how he would outwit the enemy, but he actually just throws a cup at someone. Likewise toward the end of the film, it seems as though L will miss the plane that the terrorists are on. I assumed there would be some kind of trick going on that L had worked out in advance. But no, he just suddenly breaks into a dash and leaps at the open airplane door like something out of Die Hard 2.

The worst has to be angling so much of the film around two new kid characters. This almost turns big swathes of the film into some kind of Daddy Day Care, with him trailing about two child actors for at least half of the running time. One kid sidekick can spell the end of even the best franchises, a ropey one like this certainly can't support two kid sidekicks.

This modern Japanese movie features something I thought had died out in early 90s Hong Kong, that is extended sequences of people speaking English even though they seem to be doing it entirely phonetically and awkwardly, reading lines that were put there by the screenwriter and weren't checked with a native speaker. It also features another early 90s Hong Kong staple, the horrible foreign "actor" who is just some guy they found on the street. If someone told me this film was a one off that had been made by Wong Jing in 1991 with no explanation for the demon or death sentence parts, I might have believed it, and looked on the shoddy writing and incongruent plot development as proof.

Alas this film isn't the work of Wong Jing, but Hideo Nakata, a man on an incredible slide who keeps landing on his feet financially. After breaking through into mainstream recognition with Ring, he has made a remarkable amount of total rubbish, probably hitting rock bottom artistically by directing the unrepentantly awful The Ring Two, the sequel to the American remake of his own film. I can't muster any fondness for his original, tedious Dark Water but it seems like Don't Look Now compared to The Ring Two.

L: Change The World is Hideo Nakata at his safest and most lazy as a director. There is nothing remarkable about how this picture is put together. Anything that's interesting it takes from the first two films which were shot by a journeyman director, Shusuke Kaneko. He didn't have too many bright visual ideas either (although I liked the brief glimpse of the stop-motion realm) but but he did have a good grasp of pacing which helped the first film in particular. Nakata, despite being a more recognisable name, can't even muster that much.

In the end it's hard to recommend L: Change The World to anyone but die-hard fans of the series who will no doubt watch it anyway. Fans of detective stories will be disappointed and Kenichi Matsuyama's humorous performance is much more enjoyable in the previous pictures. L mostly reminds me of another Japanese spin off film, Negotiator Mashita Masayoshi, another movie which tried to coast on affection for the main character and somewhere along the way forgot to come up with either a mystery, a solution or anything interesting for those involved to do.

As you probably know, Hancock is a picture in which Will Smith plays a drunk superhero. Of those two qualities, the most unbelievable is certainly that he's a drunk. During his acts of super heroics such as catching a bunch of bad guys in a freeway chase, Hancock inevitably causes incredible levels of collateral damage to infrastructure. As such the people of Los Angeles seem to hate him, even though he's saving their lives, on a daily basis. That is until Hancock rescues Ray, played by internet love affair Jason Bateman, a PR man / simpleton who wants to turn Hancock's public image around.

So, in response to a number of savage reviews I read the previous week, I think it is actually possible to have a decent time with this film, but there are a great number of faults to get through first and you may have to leave before the end. The premise of a drunken unwelcome superhero teaming with a PR man could actually be funny, and it is in the moments they let this element play out. One of the few moments that deals with Ray's attempts to clean up Hancock was one of my favourites in the film. After telling Hancock that he should say 'Good job' to encourage police officers, he walks around a crime scene insincerely repeating 'good job' to everyone he meets. The problem is that the film does not hold on to any one tone, never mind this one, for any length of time, and actually seems to want to fearfully do away with the central concept as quickly as possible.

The opening action sequence makes the film look unbearably broad and eye-rolling. Another review I read mentioned the use of a radio edited Ludacris song in the opening, something which seemed to herald the kind of embarrassingly squeaky clean version of the concept we were going to see and the out of date humour it was likely to contain. Luckily the film recovers for a while and spends forty minutes being intermittently broadly funny before plunging head first in a nonsensical, unnecessary, ugly car crash of a plot twist in the last half hour. For all three of you who wanted a bit of daft melodrama in your movie about Will Smith throwing cheeky kids into the stratosphere, congratulations.

This kind of film simply cannot stand up to a tone shift like that, and it sucks most of the casual entertainment out of a film that has already been mysteriously struggling to grind the laughs from an idea that seems like it would write itself. Don't get me wrong, the film is still gently amusing though not hilarious for most of it's running time, but the final misstep is fatal. Once you place a cooler eye on the world of the film, such as the filmmakers invite when they start to have characters crying, dying and discussing their histories, you can't excuse to quite the same extent how little of this world makes any sense.

For instance, why do most kids hate Hancock? Surely they would love him, a real life superhero. What difference does it make to kids if he destroys a highway signpost? Why does this world have superhero comics with characters who are nothing like Hancock, if he has been the world's only hero for 80 years? In the world of Watchmen, where heroes exist, children read comics about pirates instead. Half a thought has not even been given to ripping this off. How does Bateman not know how old Hancock is, has he only been active for the past few of his 80 years? How can you try to hide the fact you have superpowers by getting into a huge fight in the middle of L.A and hitting someone with a cement mixer?

Other possibly interesting character traits are not explored in favour of the terrible twist the film does take. If you really must move into slightly more serious territory, why not take a look at why Hancock does what he does? According to the film, his first appearance predates most comic book superheroes so he is not copying them. The movie is partly about how everyone hates him. So why does Hancock keep trying to save people, even though he's not welcome, and even though he's too drunk to do it properly? The film offers the briefest of hints in a throw away line toward the end, but it's not really an explanation so much as a reiteration of what we've already seen.

Director Peter Berg has been getting quite a lot of benefit of the doubt over this film, suggesting that he might have shot something better, and this released version is the result of an unholy alliance between the studio and the MPAA to cut the movie to ribbons. Well, based on the released version of this film and his previous output, I don't think I'm quite ready to put him alongside Orson Welles on the frustrated cinematic genius. Putting Hancock aside, he's made Very Bad Things which I thought was rubbish, another movie where Stifler plays Shia LeBeouf from Crystal Skull, an American football movie that was safely average enough to be made into an American TV show, and finally The Kingdom, a Middle East detective film where nobody works anything out and don't worry because of course they won't kill Jason Bateman.

I'm very glad to keep reading in various articles that Berg is friends with Michael Mann, I wish I was myself, but I don't see much in his work that inspires me with much confidence and Hancock does nothing to change that. Unless I hear that he was entirely ejected from the film and the last half hour was directed by someone else, I'll have to say he did a rather bad job, and even giving him credit for the more amusing middle section, he ought to have known better than to have run with the rest of it as is. Apparently this script has been in development hell for 12 years now, moving from drama to comedy to whatever you might call it now, an amusing curiosity I suppose. It seems a shame that after all that time, and with the potential to be funny throughout if not classic, in the end it slumped over the finish line, sweating, shaking and trying to hold itself together, albeit to the tune of 100 million dollars.

*A small point, this film features one of those annoying sequences where radio call-ins are played over helicopter shots of a city. Not only is the dialogue always over-obvious in these sections in almost any picture, and never sounds like any comment you’ve ever heard an average person make on a radio show, but the actors they get to do them are usually horrible. I think it must be assistants and girlfriends getting in on the movie as a favour. Whatever it is, please stop it.

In The Happening, the most recent effort from M. Night Shyamalan, Mark Wahlberg plays a science teacher. So there we have a problem already. Apparently Shyamalan wrote this part specifically for Wahlberg. I'm not sure if that's a compliment or an insult. Obviously Mark Wahlberg does not scream science teacher to me. Gym teacher, maybe. Personal trainer, sure. Enthusiastic scholar of biology, not so much.

Wahlberg's attempt of a teacher would make you believe he'd never been to school in his life. Sometimes his performance seems to echo his character from I Heart Huckabees, in an over-earnest delivery that was hilarious in that picture when I thought it was done on purpose. Now I'm not so sure. Like in I Heart Huckabees where he'd assert his right to speak and interfere in all matters by proclaiming "I'm a fire fighter" (to a round of applause), here Wahlburg says "I'm a teacher" in a similar manner.

His way of speaking in the film, fully pronouncing every word and phrase, makes you think he's guesting on a children's programme from the 70s. Zooey Deschanel, as Wahlberg's wife, appears to be playing her character as if she's off her face on prescription medication, but nobody seems to notice. John Leguizamo is passable playing sweaty and hyper, but seems to be biting his cheeks and doing a kind of nasally cartoon version of his own voice. I'd say these performances were some kind of sabotage, a deliberate attempt to undermine the film, but something about the way the actors hold themselves (and the genuine fear in their eyes sometimes) suggests that they are being aggressively directed to act this way.

The worst offender has to be the terrible script by Shyamalan. The most shocking thing about this horror thriller is the dialogue. This is a film in which Mark Wahlberg calls everyone "sir" and "madam". Characters don’t speak so much as they just blurt out character traits and foreshadowing at the most stunningly inappropriate times. There are what I suppose are attempts at humour to break the non-existent tension, but since the rest of the movie is so unintentionally funny, these parts are more awkward than anything. At one point a soldier, upon being told of dead bodies lining the road, says "Cheese and crackers" as an expletive. That last one almost convinced me this film is meant to be a joke. In fact I heard that more recently, Shyamalan has been giving some kind of "deliberately bad" defence for this film, but I find it hard to swallow, not least of all because all his films are B-movie concepts anyway, why single this one out?

Obviously the idea of a mysterious natural compound nerve agent causing people to kill themselves is not from the real world, but this is clearly taking place in another universe or dimension entirely. I'm not sure any of the main characters are supposed to be humans, because they don't act like any I've met. I was waiting for a last act twist that revealed all of this was taking place on some type of intergalactic version of a daytime soap opera shot on a distant space ship for the amusement of some rather stupid aliens.

The world of The Happening is one where you can snatch a phone off a woman who's daughter is in the process of killing herself. It's one where 60 year old women have iPhones, and their sisters send them graphic footage of a man being lazily torn apart by bored looking lions. Here, it makes sense if everyone is stranded in a small town they came to by train but they all somehow manage to leave by car. And it's not strange to leave your daughter with a woman you don't like or trust rather than have her sit on your knee. In this world Alan Ruck from Ferris Bueller can (briefly) be the principal of a school, and the eyes of Dante from Clerks will drive you to Princeton. Also, when answering a question about where your wife has gone, you say "She's gone to the town of Princeton, New Jersey". The whole thing! I thought only titles in Quentin Tarantino movies and lyrics in Tupac Shakur songs said things like "The Town of Princeton" or "The City of Compton".

Without a doubt, The Happening is the worst film I've seen in quite some time. I haven't even talked about Mark Wahlberg, a science teacher mind you, trying to outrun the wind or many other things I'm sure you've heard elsewhere. With Lady in the Water and now this, I think it's safe to say that Shyamalan has become a bit detached from reality. Hilariously at the end, he throws in a backpack for that kid's movie he is doing next, as if anyone who has sat through this would want to see anything from this man again. I've seen a great number of silly films in recent years but it's been a long time since I saw one that I felt violated my protection against cruel and unusual punishment quite like this one. My thoughts are with the family of Mark Wahlberg, who I hope can escape an untimely career death from this howler.