A bunch of recent films with no connection

I've really been letting this slip of late, haven't I? Right, just for the sake of posting something, here's a brief round-up of the recent cinema releases I've seen. You know the story, it's another of those random posts where I write a little bit about a bunch of unrelated films and then you get to the end expecting a witty punchline that connects them all, only to be disappointed when you discover that actually there really is no direction to this at all.

I saw the Brit-based post-apocalyptic thriller CHILDREN OF MEN when I was in Dublin. If you're not familiar, it's set in the near future when the human race has not given birth for more than 18 years. Clive Owen is the man charged with rescuing a pregnant young African girl and taking her to a possibly mythical scientific project off the coast of England. It's had great reviews but I've been unable to fathom out why.

Granted, there are one or two examples of shining technical accomplishment (people will righly point to a bombing early on in the film or more likely a siege by the military on a block of flats towards the end), but the history of film is littered with movies that managed spectacle without any worth and there's little to set this apart from the rest.

While the acting is not the best, the cast do what they can with some really awful writing. That said, God knows what made Michael Caine want to do this film but it's the most embarrassing role I've ever seen him in.

The story is full of cliches - the child as humanity's last hope and the mythical destination where everything will be fine are both mainstays of the post-apocalyptic genre that were tired long before this film appeared. On top of that, there are moments of sheer stupidity (Owen's actions during Caine's final scene) that just had me rolling my eyes in disbelief. As for the idea of portraying a future Britain that was a lot like today only worse, V FOR VENDETTA did it better earlier in the year.

LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE on the other hand is brilliant. This tells the story of an eccentric family taking their little girl on a road trip across the US to enter her in one of those disturbing child beauty pageants that only the Americans seem to manage.

The cast are perfect - Greg Kinnear, one of the most underrated actors working today, is the father who is obsessed with being a winner despite clearly being one of the biggest losers for much of the film; Toni Colette is the caring mother and the closest thing to normal in the family; Paul Dano is the adolescent son who has taken a vow of silence until he can join the air force; Abigail Breslin is the titular girl who not only manages to not be the typically annoying child actor but instead steals most of the scenes she's in. They're joined by the coke-snorting, filthy-minded grandad Alan Arkin and a subdued Steve Carrell as a gay, suicidal genius. Bet he's not been offered many parts like that.

All the cast shine but they're given plenty of ammunition with a script that is by turns touching and hilarious. It's perhaps the latest in a long line of these quirky comedies in which most of the humour stems from the fact that the characters are a bit weird (see NAPOLEON DYNAMITE or anything directed by Wes Anderson) but it's also one of the best.

I also checked out the concert movie NEIL YOUNG: HEART OF GOLD, featuring the legendary Canadian rocker recorded over a couple of nights before he went in for his recent surgery. It's unusual among concert movies in only having the briefest of interviews at the outset before focussing solely on the performance for the rest of the movie (even excluding the audience from appearing anywhere in the film).

If you don't like Neil Young's music, it'll be chore. If you do like it, then this film is a testament to his immense talent and you're sure to love it.

Finally, I checked out Brian DePalma's THE BLACK DAHLIA, a noir-flavoured thriller based on a combination of a James Elroy fictional work and a real-life murder in the early days of Hollywood.

Josh Hartnett and Aaron Eckhart are the cops investigating the case, Scarlett Johannsen is the wife of the latter and Hilary Swank is the woman with a dark secret connected to the murder victim.

Hartnett and Eckhart struggle to make a lot of the dialogue convincing (it's the sort of stuff that worked when Fred MacMurray or Edmund O'Brien said it in the 40s, but not now) and Swank's accent seems to fluctuate between a generic English accent and something along the lines of Katherine Hepburn. Johannsen's great though, as always. And I've probably spelled her name wrongly, as always.

DePalma certainly delivers on the suspense (and peppers the film with moments of truly gruesome violence, including a Fulci-style scene with a water fountain that saw most people in the cinema gasp) but unfortunately there are so many twists that by the end you're given hardly any time for one event to sink in before another two come along to confuse you further.

It's a decent suspense thriller and works well against the convincing recreation of old Hollywood, but I couldn't help thinking it would all have seemed a lot newer if LA CONFIDENTIAL hadn't covered similar ground several years earlier.

That's all for now, but I should be back with more soon. I do after all still have a whole bunch of festivals to cover before the year is out. Hey, I have to use my holidays for something.