Savage Popcorn

Under discussion:

The Notorious Bettie Page  (2006)

In telling the story of pin-up icon, Bettie Page, The Notorious bettie page necessarily skips over much bit  does a great job of capturing both Bettie's exhuberance and her sense of fun. Gretchen Mol is perfectly cast in the lead role and really dos bring her character to life, so much so that many of the scenes manage to raise a warm smile and a feeling of genuine fondness for the chararcters.

The film focusses primarily on the perfiod of Bettie's modelling career and, inevitably, the senate investigation that brought it to an end. The coverage of this investigation is both accurate and really does bring home the venal idiocy of those behind it.

Bettie Page is still an icon today and the revealing portrait of the paranoia that can be whipped up over a collection of photos is still relevant today.

Under discussion:

The Fountain  (2006)

The Fountain is certainly very pretty to look at but a collection of nicely shot scenes do not, on their own, amount to a film, or make a film worth watching. The problem here is that Aranofsky is so busy beating you around the head with all of his New Age inspired symbolism that he seems to have forgotten that a film needs a script.

Although the Conquistador storyline was (for the most part) reasonably well done, I couldn’t make myself believe in the modern day versions of Tom and Izzy and I simply didn’t care about the future Tom.

Maybe Aranofsky could have got away with this if the film had had something interesting to say. But it doesn’t. What we have instead is a collection of rather uninspired platitudes about life, death, and so on being endlessly repeated without ever being expanded, extended or properly explored.

The Fountain is a slickly made, painfully self-important film, and ultimately vacuous waste of celluloid.

Under discussion:

Dance with the Devil  (1999)

On the face of it, this film has no likeable characters and a black humour that is often sick. But the lead characters, Durango and Dolorossa, are treated sympathetically and their characters do develop as the film progresses so that you find yourself really caring what happens and, at the end of the day, that's what matters.