tonybaggot

Definitely one of the stranger films I have seen, and the weirdest from Graham Jones, this is basically a surrealist piece of work. If you are not put off by that or like me you revel in it, you are in for quite the roller-coaster ride.

The film is set in Tokyo, Japan and starts as a kind of detective story. It seems that people have been seeing strange things. They report little men, but dressed differently and culturally different from each other. It slowly becomes clear there were six little men or creatures or puppets who were up to no good in the local area.

The reason for all of this becomes clear and we get very sucked into the story. I thought it was excellent.

Pulp Fiction is good, but it's not as good as Reservoir Dogs. The reason for this is that after his debut with Dogs, Tarantino no longer felt obliged to make his films in any way realistic. I know Dogs is derivative and probably not even realistic, but there is a certain suspension of disbelief - a humbleness in terms of realism - that Tarantino never felt obliged to observe again.

I love The Bonny Situation especially. I love many aspects of the film. But it's too retro and silly. Dogs is more real and shocking.

Jackie Brown I feel he tried again to get the realism, but since then has simply not bothered. It's like he's said to himself: to hell with it... this is the way I am...

This is one of the scariest films I have ever seen. It's about a pedophile ring, but like in a very old movie everything is done by suggestion. The shadow is scarier than the monster and all that. It starts of setting up the mystery in the first few scenes. Noreen's dad is dying from a two car collision and just before he does, he whispers to her that it was murder. If it was murder, she surmises, the chief suspect would be the person he crashed into. She sneaks next door to the room of the other driver and the story begins...

In a way, I think Noreen is fashioned after the kind of 'girl detective' genre or character. She is walking around like Nancy Drew. The finds out interesting things that she didn't know about her own town and strange stuff that is happening with locals. She recruits the help of a high school drop out type called Cian, who encourages her not to worry. But she presses on and what she discovers will haunt you. Like I say, they don't show much, but what they do hint at is far scarier than most of the crap in horror movies today. Don't miss this.

Don't believe any of the stuff people are saying about the film being bad. It's not bad, it's extremely bloody good! It's David O. Russell who made I Heart Huckabees and The Fighter and Flirting With Disaster (great adoption comedy with Ben Stiller) and it's really insightful and hilarious.

It's about a couple who have big plans, but when she gets a nail in her head and half the time starts acting cray, he loses his attraction towards her. It's ends up in our nation's capital with the characters trying to change the system. There are many moments of great wisdom and humour. I don't understand what happened with David O. Russell and the production and the problems, but it's still a very strong movie.

Jake Gyllenhall is very good, as are many of the cast. It was actually shot some years ago but shelved and the director had his name removed.

This is a really nice piece of Irish crime filmmaking, albeit that the criminals are really school students. I once spoke with a woman on a train in Italy who was from Ireland about the Leaving Certificate and she said it was one of the most horrific experiences of her life, as this film attests.

The movie tells the story of a bunch of disillusioned students who think the system is wrong and some of them really have a point because their friend committed suicide under the pressure. They hope their efforts will appease his soul, or something. They hope to highlight what is wrong with the grading system and, as we watch the film, it becomes clear in Ireland they have it quite wrong. Screenwriters Graham Jones and Tadhg O'Higgins are to be credited for making this point - and with a lot of wit at that.

I really loved the fact that it was shot in black and white on old fashioned film by the looks of it and so is very much the gangster picture. It has a strange sense of irony running through it too. I guess it's a sense of irony or humour the creators developed while going through the Irish school system. Top marks!