A family is like a gun, you point it in the wrong direction you're gonna kill someone...

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Maria: Did you mean it? Would you marry me?
Matthew: Yes.
Maria: Why?
Matthew: Because I want to.
Maria: Not because you love me or anything like that, huh?
Matthew: I respect and admire you.
Maria: Isn't that love?
Matthew: No, that's respect and admiration. I think that's better than love.
Maria: How?
Matthew: When people are in love they do all sorts of crazy things. They get jealous, they lie, they cheat. They kill themselves. They kill each other.
Maria: It doesn't have to be that way.
Matthew: Maybe.
Maria: You'd be the father of a child you know isn't yours.
Matthew: Kids are kids, what does it matter?
Maria: Do you trust me?
Matthew: Do you trust me first?
Maria: I trust you.
Matthew: You sure?
Maria: Yes.
Matthew: Then marry me.
Maria: I'll marry you if you admit that respect, admiration, and trust equals love.
Matthew: OK. They equal love.
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Hal Hartley has made some pretty great films and I love all of them, even the more 'experimental' shorts. But this film is one of his best. Released in 1990, 'Trust' was his second feature, made quickly after the relative success of 'The Unbelievable Truth' the year before. The film works largely because of a fairly stylized but utterly flawless script (as witnessed above) and the sheer chemistry and poetry between Maria (the late Adrienne Shelly) and Matthew (Martin Donovan). Not a word is wasted between characters and where words are redundant, pauses are required here, the camera tells us what we need to know. The skilled use of images, music and words are as natural as breathing for Hartley, he just makes it seem so effortless. Themes occur and repeat in his work, as do the names of the actors he works with. Family dysfunction, suburban alienation, simmering rebellion, strangers bonding in the most awkward and bizarre of circumstances. For in Maria, Matthew can see an anchor to some kind of reality, a potential route to escape his demons, both inner (he is literally a hand grenade of anti-emotion) and external (his controlling, abusive father) whilst in Matthew, Maria can see someone she can learn from, someone who will respect and admire her... and trust will be mutual, perhaps. The music score, by Phil Reed alongside Hal Hartley himself, is also important to making this film work, giving space and movement to the parts where words don't seem to matter. Likewise, in cinematographer Michael Spiller (a long-term collaborator with Hartley) each frame is captured to look like a 50s picture postcard, a moment in time preserved before the actors enter the scene of their angst-filled crimes. This film matters because you want to believe, in the face of everything saying otherwise, that there is a happy-ever-after for Maria and Matthew. Though arrested and abandoned, you want to believe they make it. They have respect, admiration and trust, and that's as close to love as you can sometimes get, even though we all know - contrary to what Matthew agrees to - that it does not equal love. Or does it?
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Hal Hartley & Justin Kawashima - 'Trust' (end credits) MP3 (3.00)
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Trust / Buy / Possible Films
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Something Unseen: Ringu

Cinema is about experience. Films are designed to be seen on towering cinema screens, surrounded by living, physical sound. The images are meant to saturate your vision, fill your vision until you are part of the image, and the image is everything. It's fair to assume then that I don't own many Film DVD's, I'd rather watch episodes of TV shows on DVD as that is the medium they were designed for, Seinfeld, The Wire, NYPD Blue, Buffy-all great small screen entertainment.....but rules are made to be broken and "Ringu" is designed for the small screen.
Now for some scene setting....I used to live in an isolated school house in the middle of nowhere, and one cold frost stricken february weekend our central heating packed in, so hiring a handful of DVD's we took fully dressed to bed as our breath kicked out little patterns in the air. In this dark, cold night I first experienced "Ringu". As my face reddened with a creeping chill the tale of a cursed video tape unfolded, now without getting all "meta" on you what first struck me is by watching it on DVD/Video you almost feel complicit/cursed with our heroes, as they watch the grey grainy images you do too. The film is like a jigsaw, it gives you bits of information but you're unsure about how they fit together-an outcast woman in an isolated community, suggestions of the supernatural but nothing is an explanation, just shadowy shapes in the mist. Nothing is concrete, nothing is explained. American films can't do this, there has to be an explanation. Ringu does explain, but only as far as saying "Goblins", there's an acceptance that the supernatural is an explanation in itself. Now I saw Cloverfield recently and for a while it did attempt to maintain a tension, a kind of "instinctive terror" of the unknown, but it felt the need to reveal far to early. Ringu never succumbs, it builds tension upon tension, building the rising instinctive terror whilst hinting at older folkloric, eldritch terrors and as the cold, snow bitten wind slid through the trees in my garden I understood exactly the terror of the characters. When there is a final reveal of the true nature of the curse (and I've kept it vague deliberately, the power of this film is the power of the unknown, the unseen) it's a release, the tension that has been tightened throughout the film finally overcomes you and escapes in fear, terror, panic: This is no American happy ending, it's like opening the door to find out what the strange sound is and finding something terrifying and unwordly there-No explanations, no heroes just 6000 years of human fear of the unknown in no more than 30 seconds of film. As the film ended it felt like the temperature had dropped even further, that the cold creeping terror of the characters had saturated the room, and as our breath crystallised in the air, we watched the TV break into snow, a cold fearsome presence in the corner of the room. Film has to be an experience, Ringu is an experience you will never forget.

No Country For Old Men (Or How I Learned To Stop Reading Internet Forum Opinions)

I went to see 'No Country For Old Men', last night, and I first offer an apology to those Coen afficienados amongst you: I have never really watched many of their more highly - regarded films. My limited contact with their work comes through 'Ladykillers' and 'Intolerable Cruelty', although I have seen 'Fargo'. Maybe the advantage is that I brought to the experience less baggage than the average fanatical Coen fan, who seem (in my limited opinion - of which more shortly) to live their lives in the grip of wild mood swings.

My (short) tale begins yesterday afternoon, when I was trying to decide whether the film would make appropriate 'date' viewing material for my beloved and I. I thought I would briefly venture into the 'Comments' section of the film's imdb.com entry to see whether it contained all of the elements that would lead to a cheerful Saturday night out. "Brutal violence". Check. "Unconvential narrative structure". Check. "Psychotic killer". Check. "No real ending". Check. So, I was catered for, but what about her? Deciding to play down to some of these more disturbing elements, I mumbled something about the main character's wife being Colin Firth's love interest in 'Nanny McPhee'. Looking suitably unconvinced, she acquiesed.

The point of the parenthesised portion of my title? Well, this disturbing descent into the Coen Internet community provided me with a cautionary tale about reading too much about a film before going to see it. The opinions on the website differed wildly, with the Coens being ordained and castrated from post to post, and many of the same features of the film being lambasted and praised in equal measure by members of the dissenting factions. It all added up to a rather confusing experience, and one that I fear may have coloured my reaction to the film before I entered the cinema. What I think I am trying to say is that I will endeavour to approach films with as clean a slate as possible in the future. Lesson learned.

On to the film, which I will not ruin for those of you who still want to see it.

Javier Bardem was great. Believe the hype.
Tommy Lee Jones was a relatively effective 'wise old hand' narrator. Two good monologues bookend the film.
James Brolin was an everyman that you could identify with, at times.
Woody Harrelson was slightly misplaced.

I really enjoyed the film, despite the odd nature of its close. Some of the film's detractors pointed to the lack of a final, on-camera confrontation between the two main antagonists as a weakness (even a "travesty"), but it didn't lessen the impact for me. The first half is definitely better than the second, with the peak (for me) arriving with a particularly nail - biting encounter between Bardem and Brolin in and around a hotel room. It is MASSIVELY tense, and there is one good reason for this, which is the one thing that I will always remember about the film, even after the plot and performances have faded from memory.

The most striking feature of the film is the total lack of music, at any stage, including even the end credits. As if the cat and mouse chase between Bardem's convincing killer and Brolin's fish-out-of-water welder was not arresting enough, the Coens' decision to do without any aural accompaniment allows them to keep your nerves jangling throughout, with Bardem sliding slowly and silently into range of his victims almost imperceptibly. It took about 20 minutes for me to decide what was missing, and the realisation created a suitably claustrophobic feeling, as the sonic indicators from which our reactions often take their lead were absent. I can honestly say that I have never seen a film that has used silence more effectively, with one gorgeous early moment showing us an extreme close - up shot of an unfurling, crackling chocolate bar wrapper while Bardem deliberates over whether to dispense with an innocent gas station clerk.

I heartily recommend going to see it, if only for this alone. The ending is a little anti - climatic, but the potency of the cinematography festers, or at least it is for me. Go and make your own mind up, and don't listen to what other people are thinking. Although for the people I know that read and post here, I doubt there'll be an issue there.

F-Master out.