What I Liked the Most About... Carnival of Souls (1962)

What I liked the most about 1962 horror masterpiece in miniature Carnival of Souls, a film about which I essentially like everything, was the moment when a dirty, lost and, for want of a better term, haunted mattress comes inexplicably hurtling down a seaside slide of its own accord. It's in the scene where Candace Hilligoss is vapidly wandering around the end-of-pier (un)amusements in her oblivious state of spectral, somnambulant bliss.

There's silence, tainted only with the merest hint of ghostly white background noise. Then the darn grotty thing appears as a shock to the system: both Hilligoss' and ours. It's a minor moment, sure, but a beautiful moment. One that significantly adds to the rich and uneasy tone of the film. Herk Harvey's direction was inspired in such instances as this – just as it was with the rest of the film. It's a true one-off scare in a true one-off film; quite literally, Harvey never made another feature. A singularly solid, creepy delight and perfect viewing for Halloween night... or day.

I enjoy every one of Carnival's wonderfully unsettling images. Here are a few stills from some of my favourite moments:

What I Liked the Most About...The Baby (1973)

There's a lot to like about Ted Post's unusual family horror-drama The Baby from 1973. There's a lot to look downright perplexed about too. But then that's part of why it's a true one-off gem of wrongness. (Click the linked title for plot etc.) But what I liked the most about it was the brilliance of Ruth Roman. She gives one of the most wicked, snarling, all-consuming performances of the '70s as Mrs. Wadsworth, a matriarch so maniacally warped as to make the idea of Divine playing Mrs. Bates seem like cosy casting. Roman's simply superb here. She gives the role her all. She works wonders with crazy hair, blue roll-neck jumpers and a permanent scowl. In fact the movie has eye-popping performances from all the women: the two demented sisters, Germaine and Alba (Marianna Hill, Susanne Zenor), and Anjanette Comer as social worker Ann. They're all ably backed up by a great score by Gerald Fried, which is all sinister, abrupt cellos with a few '70s pop hits peppered throughout.

Ruth Roman as Mrs Wadsworth in The Baby (1973)

But another surprising and well-considered aspect to Post's cult curio is its ending: it has one of the best twist endings I've seen. It puts the likes of M.Night Shyamalan and The Usual Suspects to shame. I didn't see it coming at all, despite it actually being – in hindsight – blindingly obvious throughout as to what will happen. It's not even careful misdirection on Post's behalf, as we're essentially told everything we need to know, yet somehow I just didn't notice it. Good work from everyone involved.

Watch this genuinely oddball flick if you're interested in seriously bonkers '70s cinema of the most scurrilous kind. It also has some barking mad, corking dialogue, too: "Whada' you mean nothing happened?! I come home and you got your damn tit in his mouth!!" says Roman at her batshit-crazy best. Clever, funky, tawdry and so so good at being bad. It deserves a lot of overdue praise and an indecent amount of fresh adoration.

 More Ruth Roman wrongness in The Baby

What I Liked the Most About... Saw (2004)

In the run-up to Halloween I thought I'd post up a series of entries briefly looking at What I Like the Most about certain horror films. I'm nearly done on my London Film Festival duties, and other film-based malarkey, and will be back to normal posting here at Dark Eye Socket. But in the meantime, a few brief words about some aspects of some (randomly chosen) horror films for the interim, regardless of whether I had a good time or a bad time watching them. This first post, on Saw, firmly fits the latter.

To be honest, there isn't much that I like about these Saw films. (Having accidentally caught five minutes of Saw III on TV the other evening this was more than reconfirmed for me – and this is despite having seen all previous six Saw films at the cinema.) But what I do enjoy about seeing them are the unexpected comical highlights. During the first Saw (2004) I was quite content sitting there for ninety-or-so minutes knowing I was having a horrible time, but that the horrible time would end in a little under ten more minutes and I could go and watch a proper horror film. But then along came Cary Elwes' weird old lady impersonation.

Elwes' performance was a joy to behold – and certainly painful to watch. By the end he was in a battered condition; his leg looked sore, but it was the acting that really smarted. Suddenly he goes from wholly unconvincing Everyday Doctor Guy (albeit trapped in a basement with half a leg off) to wholly convincing Feeble Old Lady (during the bit where he's crawling around on the floor: "Huuh, huuh, I've dohne it!" he says in an odd wobbly voice, after hacking the limb off). His not-at-all-meant-to-be-funny and ill-placed moans and screams were so out-of-sync with everything he conveyed beforehand as to be hysterically funny and plain baffling at the same time. Well, at least that was what I thought back in 2004. Either way, I was hooting like a demented owl. And having just rewatched him again in a clip now, it's still as funny as ever. (As funny as the couple competing to 'shed the pounds' in Saw 6, anyway.)

Having briefly checked out the credentials for this upcoming, and reputedly final, Saw installment ('The Traps Come Alive' – because, er, it's in 3D), a smile of wicked glee spread across my face: Cary Elwes is back! I always hoped Elwes would crop up again. And now he does. I sincerely hope he gets to crawl across a dirty bathroom floor, dragging his (lopped off) heels behind him. Roll on Saw 7. Or, um, Saw 3D. And then let them please put an end to the series for good. It was unintentional fun while it lasted. Kind of.

Driven to distraction...

This is kind of my expression right now, and has been for a fair while:

Baffled, perplexed, surprised, anxious to get to wherever it is I'm going – the please-don't-dress-as-your-dead-mum-then-kill-me-in-the-shower look. (And I haven't even stolen $40,000!)

Well, it's either that or it's this:

Self explanatory, surely.

I recently watched Johan Grimonprez's excellent collage documentary Double Take and it got me thinking about one of my all-time favourite film characters, poor old Marion Crane, again – as well as just how insanely pleasurable everything Hitchcock is. It also reminded me that it's about this time of year that I break out the Psycho DVD and pay the Bates Motel another visit. Although, a rewatch of one of my very favourite Hitchcocks will have to wait...

Right now I'm trying to hurtle back and forth to London as much as possible in the attempt to cram in as many London Film Festival press screenings as possible. I'm also chiseling away on the two other Fulci pieces – The Beyond and The House by the Cemetery – for here; plus there's the regular weekly Take Three column over at Nathaniel's The Film Experience blog, which is on ongoing pleasure. There are many other posts and pieces in the pipeline too – and a print article for the Hub magazine's launch issue due soon – so normal Dark Eye Service will resume as soon as possible.

Anyway, we're now in October, which means Halloween. And, indeed, John Carpenter's Halloween – another film I always like to watch around this time of year. (Although I'm likely to say this any time of any year.) This month means there's usually wall-to-wall horror, so there will be more regular updates, big and small, incoming on here. That is if time permits. And I'll try darn hard to make sure it does.

Fulci #1: Mood means the most in City of the Living Dead

 1 of 3 posts looking at Lucio Fulci's early '80s death trilogy

"The air in Dunwich is getting awful thick," moans a doomed barfly in Lucio Fulci's City of the Living Dead (Paura nella città dei morti viventi, aka The Gates of Hell), the first part in his loose death trilogy (followed by The Beyond and The House by the Cemetery, both in 1981). He's not wrong: swathes of ungodly fog deliver more than just poor visibility for the town's locals. After a priest hangs himself the Gates of Hell open up, ushering in the arrival of the living dead who start ripping seven shades out of the small New England town. At the same time, psychic Mary Woodhouse (the always wonderful Catriona MacColl, who appears in all three films in Fulci's trilogy) seemingly dies during a seance; reporter Peter Bell (Christopher George) digs her up to help him investigate just what in gory hell is going on in the town. Along with doctor Gerry (Carlo De Mejo) and painter Sandra (Janet Agren), they have to put a stop to the mass zombie slaughter before All Saint's Day ushers in an almighty undead shitstorm of unfathomable proportions.

Father William Thomas (Fabrizio Jovine) hangs around

One of the many evocative exterior establishing shots in City of the Living Dead

Fulci plots are never to be scrutinised thoroughly, or indeed at all: City is no exception. Narrative complexity was never top of his directorial in-tray and neither would I have wanted it to be. In City mood is paramount. How Fulci sustains atmosphere is the chief reason I keep coming back to him. It's the main draw, and - in my view - an integral part of his appeal to horror fans. He was a master of invoking unnerving, off-kilter moods. In particular the weird levels of urgency he instilled into his films through intercutting instances of interior and exterior tension. (Although, of course, some of the oddness may well have come about through a general budgetary raggedness: City was filmed in four weeks). The control he asserted throughout was as assured as many a director working with thrice his budget. The guy had style: many mood-driven moments in City stand as best testament to that.

The eyes have it: Catriona MacColl (as Mary) is afraid to blink in City of the Living Dead

Early on Fulci cuts between Mary alive in her coffin and Peter walking around the tombstones; he barely hears her screams. The sunny exterior is strikingly juxtaposed with the cold blue inside the coffin; the two spaces are edited together in such a way to create a weird unbalance. (The muffled screams audible outside the coffin create the feeling of dislocated suffocation.) It's a minor yet crucial sequence, impressive for its evocation of both immediate tension and eerie calm. In fact, the eldritch mood (pure unfettered unheimlich!) aroused within just about every one of Fulci's many external shots of houses or familiar buildings - of which there are plenty in City - is purveyed wondrously, and with great care. Those familiar buildings are made oh-so unfamiliar on account of Fulci's deft directorial decision making. (More on this in the next Fulci post, regarding The Beyond.)

The way Fulci's camera often foreground a light source entering into, or stationary within, the frame
  conjures a specific feeling of dread; he often evokes vast disquiet through simple technical means...
 


...and his exterior shots are always strangely memorably vivid

Fulci was also a whizz in conjuring up truly disquieting aural atmospheres to accompany his assured visuals, often to pre-empt his celebrated moments of gore. (Not just in City, or in the trilogy, but over his entire career.)  He often uses the elements to further mystify the feeling of mounting fear extremely well. He purposefully arouses exterior audio effects for establishing shots of buildings, then foregrounds them in subsequent interior scenes through expressive use of sound: wind, distant moans, or simply the weird white noise of night seeping into the relative safety of a domestic dwellings; the volume unnaturally heightened.

Luca Venantini (as John-John) wishes he was starring in Driller Killer

It's subtle, consistent filmmaking and maintains a curiously off-balance tempo from exterior to interior shots: the undead threat lurks everywhere, it suggests. Indeed, Fulci's City ghouls often appear without warning, literally embodying the dread built up through audio means (they teleport wherever and whenever they choose, it seems - as when one turns up in Sandra's house as she's painting a disembodied rhino's head hovering above an ocean!).

An impromptu storm of maggots in the drawing room 

- something that most films sadly neglect to provide.

Of course the prime ingredient in a Fulci film is the gore. Often slow motion, always prolonged - it's rigged to gush all over the screen at a moment's notice. Fulci's plots are almost superfluous conduits through which he channels his signature instances of bloodshed. The moments of gore are junctures of the most gruesome kind - standout set-pieces which pertain to the baggy narrative build-up, but jut out, and  launch off, seemingly embodying their own absurd reason for existing (i.e. Fulci knew his audience wanted it; he provided it). But maybe it's actually the loose narrative that's one long, frequently interrupted intervention - a frame on which to hang his ideas, to be wrapped around the gore more than to be logical storylines.

 Father Thomas eyes up his victims

The scene where a courting couple park up by the cemetery (the location of the entrance to one of the Seven Doors to Hell) sees some of Fulci's best moments of gore trauma. A girl and a guy make out, but that dead priest who insists on hanging around pops up so abruptly that just the sight of him alone makes the woman's eyes bleed and mouth foam; she promptly vomits up her innards (actually sheep entrails which Fulci apparently asked actress Antonella Interlenghi to swallow and regurgitate for realistic effect in the scene).

Tears run red: Daniela Doria (as Rosie) cries blood in City of the Living Dead

The guy, played by director Michele Soavi, watches on aghast before getting the back of his head ripped off. Par for the course with Fulci, yes, but what makes it memorable is the scene's duration (as always) and the way attention is paid to sense-specific horror - eyes slowly bleeding, intestines gradually oozing from the mouth - as well as the frequent imposing cuts back to the face of the priest. The focus on the drawn-out trauma, and its viscerally-detailed particulars, marks Fulci's gore out as a truly singularly sick vision, but always uniquely his own.

The undead are a pain in the neck for Christopher George (as Peter Bell)

There's something rigorously, indefinably reverberant about the way in which Fulci conjures up certain moods in his work, particularly in this death trilogy. His camera often returns again and again to empty sites of deceptively calm and mundane environments, pregnant with potential menace (more often than not wind-blown streets in City), as if he's forthrightly reiterating their importance within the overall effectiveness of the film, and, by extension, the crazed, slapdash - but no less intriguing for it - mythology surrounding the Seven Doors of Hell. Whether through maintaining a consistency of style and atmosphere, or through budgetary necessity, these are the moments which make a Fulci film really fly. Logic be damned.

Next: Fulci #2 The Beyond

RIP Claude Chabrol

RIP Claude Chabrol. The Cahiers du Cinéma critic, French New Wave innovator and influential French director died yesterday aged 80.

I've seen a fair few Chabrol films and still look forward to many more from his career. But out of the ones I've seen so far the very best was La cérémonie (1995), with Isabelle Huppert and Sandrine Bonnaire. As soon as I saw how he'd twisted a Ruth Rendell potboiler into a scorching comment on class and violence I knew it would be a film with a lasting impact, and one for the all-time best list. I've seen it a few times now, and it remains shocking, riveting and surprising with each watch; and contains excellent performances and, of course, smooth, wonderful direction. Its position among my very favourite French films from first viewing was, and still is, secured. Yesterday was a sad day for world cinema, but Chabrol leaves behind a body of impeccable work. Not least this engrossing masterpiece.

Isabelle Huppert and Sandrine Bonnaire in La cérémonie

Buon compleanno! Argento

Today is Dario Argento's 70th birthday, so I send many happy hearty returns and a few killer kisses to one of my all-time favourite Italian filmmakers.

Giallo Maestro Argento

Each Argento film I've seen (and I still have several more left to go, including the latest Giallo) has given me something different; there hasn't been one single time whilst watching one of his films where I've ever been bored, uninvolved or not excited to see what turn a scene would take next. His films keep me on the tensest of tenterhooks.

I had a mini Dario-fest last year, where I caught up with several key key titles I'd previously missed, and revisited a few old favourites. It provided me with many evenings of gory giallo greatness; unmatchable horror cinema of a premiere order. Even if the temperature on his career has cooled off in recent years (and sadly it has in many folks' eyes), I still await each new project with the eagerness I have every one so far. I'm hoping the next few years provide more delicious Dario darkness.

Poster for Inferno (1980)

My Argento roll call of personal hits looks something like this, in no order (I've yet to compile a definite and/or definitive list of top Argentos): Deep Red/Profondo rosso (1975), The Bird with the Crystal Plumage/L'uccello dalle piume di cristallo(1970), Jenifer (2005), Phenomena (1985), The Stendhal Syndrome/La sindrome di Stendhal (1996), Tenebre (1982), Suspiria (1977), Trauma (1993) and - the latest, and one of the very best - Inferno (1980). It's a list of some of the most distinctive, individual and memorable horror films of the last 40 years. So far, Mr Argento, a mighty good haul.

I hope you're spending the day in the best way possible: happy birthday giallo maestro.

At the Cinema: White Material

White Material (Claire Denis/2009) France, Cameroon/106mins *****

One of the many highlights of Claire Denis' latest, White Material, is studying the multiple variations of frazzled emotion which emanate from Isabelle Huppert's endlessly watchable face as she frets and contemplates her future. Huppert can always be relied upon to give good visage in a film, and her first collaboration with Denis allows her plenty of valuable face time. (Although she's as often frenetically shot in motion, from behind or in profile.) Her character, coffee plantation manager Maria, struggles to retain her grip on business and family relations as an unspecified civil war breaks out in her region; militia patrol and rebel soldiers advance on the plantation as things rapidly fall apart. Never one for a typically linear approach, Denis shows events from Maria's perspective as she later returns to the plantation via bus; her flashbacks are shown as fractured and piecemeal. Denis' intricately diced-up narrative - co-written with French playwright Marie NDiaye - makes restrained and allusive comment on the complex arrangement of white populations within African countries. Denis drops the occasional concrete hint as to the social and political observations she wants to arouse - through half-heard dialogue or background detail - but the overall tone is suggestive. As ever, her indistinct, high-fevered and rhythmic imagery leads us to consider what deeper resonances the story contains.

It's a heady, visually irrational and at times perplexing film; with Denis I wouldn't want it any other way. The abstractions of her film worlds somehow make apt sense by the time they reach their destinations. But just don't ask me why or how; I like to let her films remain wide open, stay as endlessly hazy memories. White Material wondrously falls in line with disjointed, less cohesive work such as The Intruder (2004) and Trouble Every Day (2002) more than it does with last year's equally excellent, though arguably more fluid and relaxed, 35 Shots of Rum. But it also has a torrid atmosphere, a thick with off-kilter dread, that even surpasses 1999's white-hot Beau travail. (And the setting of course recalls her 1988 debut, Chocolat.) Many of the plot strands waywardly veer from the main focus on Maria to bring forward periphery characters and events - such as Isaach de Bankolé's injured revolutionary 'The Boxer', or her son Manuel's (Nicolas Duvauchelle) disturbing, revelatory sea change in the desert - but wind their way back toward Maria and the plantation for closure. But Denis is never not in control of her haywire directorial compass. The day I see an easily fathomable Denis film will be a disappointing one for sure. This is not to say that she's merely serving up another dose of predictably "difficult" art-filmmaking, however. She mines a singular path, but is never slipshod with her material, and still find ways to mess with the limits of what she can make the film frame do for her. Every one of her films is markedly different from the next; each new one contains the zest and openness of a first-time director.

The acting is uniformly good: Huppert, obstinate, strong-willed as Maria, is superb (I've rarely seen her less than). Watching her buzz distressingly from scene to scene, like someone constantly trying to shut off a raw nerve, is one of White Material's innumerable pleasures. Excellent, too, are Duvauchelle (whose desert epiphany is all the more dark for the way Denis silently tracks it and the manner in which Duvauchelle underplays it) and Christopher Lambert as Maria's ex-husband. Regular Denis cinematographer Agnès Godard is missing in action, but Yves Cape replaces her, and makes the warmth of the African setting (White Material was filmed in Cameroon) unimaginably chilly. And the music, by another Denis mainstay, Stuart Staples of the Tindersticks, is as good and as haunting as ever. Good work, yet again, Denis.

I Don't Get 'You Don't Get It'

Crash, bang, geddit

Just recently, when Scott Pilgrim vs the World was released and the largely positive reviews started coming in, a few irritated responses began filtering through whenever there was a less-than positive or shrugging verdict of the film. It's certainly not the first time I've read this kind of thing: I remember hearing (usually online) similar cries on perusing reviews of the likes of Donnie Darko, The Dark Knight, Irreversible and (500) Days of Summer (and, barely a month ago, Inception) but some reactions to Scott Pilgrim have proven to be the most visible recent examples of folk rebutting a less-favourable review with: 'You don't get it.'

The critics less impressed than most have seen their Pilgrim observations met with that much-loved, though increasingly shopworn, phrase - occasionally with 'if you're over thirty' tagged on the end of it. Why thirty? What has that age in particular got to do with it? Is the cut off point for Pilgrim enjoyment twenty-nine? Surely there are many folks both under and over thirty who the film will and won't appeal to. Whatever it is, I'm not sold on any of that 'You (just) don't get it' malarkey when someone is talking about someone else's (yours, mine, anybody's) reactions to a film.

I'm guessing that it's an off-the-cuff and defensively reactionary remark, but why do some folk feel the need to be defensive in the first place. If you liked it, be happy about that. Don't worry if the next guy or girl didn't like it. (Although maybe it's anger at the higher-profile critics getting to see films first, and delivering their tuppence-worth earlier than most, that doesn't keep in line with fans' high expectations.) But saying it is pretty useless, and actually suggests a juvenile superiority complex to go alongside that defensiveness on the behalf of those that do. What it really means is: 'I am better than you because I "get" this film.'

"Oh, the woe of not 'getting it' is no joke"

People - critics or audience members - 'not getting' a film doesn't necessarily mean they're wrong. (This is another, more significant, implied denotation of this phrase). Maybe they just didn't like it. Some people perhaps just don't want what Scott Pilgrim has to offer - could that be what it is? But it's all just reaction and counter-reaction anyway. If someone does 'get' a film - and they truly feel they understand that it's speaking directly to them (and in some cases they may feel it's speaking to them alone) - all it says is that they've been cleverly aimed at, nicely ensnared in the filmmakers' cross hairs; they match the most likely target viewer squarely. It's worked for them; they 'got it'. That's great. But it doesn't mean that those not 'getting it' are way off the mark. It's not concrete proof that the film was genuinely any good because of a single-line rebuttal to a response.

The phrase also implies, 'it's not for you: it's mine/ours - not yours.' It's a derivation of that old redundantly groan-worthy 'I claimed it first' tack. Oh, how dare a thirty- or even forty-, fifty- or sixty-something - even consider watching a film clearly aimed below their age bracket. Keep to your age zones, people. And good lord! you'd better tell all those critics who are paid to review the latest Pixar and Disney releases that they're sadly unqualified to do so, too. How does one decide that a film generally, loosely aimed at a twenty-something should only be written about by someone of an equivalent age to its generally, loosely intended audience? And how does one work that out anyway?

The whole thing is baffling, needless and beside the point in the act of film watching. It's far from a good enough reaction to someone's observations on a film. I know many sixty-year-olds who may very likely adore what Scott Pilgrim has to offer. Maybe a couple of, oh no, seventy-year-olds, too. If the over-thirty lot won't 'get it' then the septuagenarians are royally buggered. Stick to watching Ladies in Lavender Gran, and don't let me catch you putting The Dark Knight into your DVD player either! Older audiences may not totally relate to the game-heavy nostalgia - I don't either, and I'm a year younger than Scott Pilgrim's director, Edgar Wright - but that doesn't prevent anyone enjoying sharp comedy, engaging performances and directorial flair.

"Do you "get" it, red-haired girl?"

I've never thought whether I 'get' a film or not. How does one 'get' a film anyway? There's been many films which have contained passages or sequences that I may have not fully understood, but whether I 'get' it or not doesn't enter into it. I've never really cared if someone else didn't think the same way I did about a film I liked. It's a pleasurable feeling if and/or when somebody does, but no big deal if not. It's, of course, all merely preference and taste anyway. Like. Dislike. Yes. No. (And occasionally Hmm and Maybe.) It's that, and all the tricky complexities of unravelling a film's particular resonances and mysteries contained within the liking or disliking of a film. There are a thousand undecided feelings hidden beneath those nos and yeses which a 'you don't get it' could never verbally illustrate. The proof's in the watching, anyhow; and if further proof is needed, well, that's in the glorious variety of responses on offer from critics and audiences alike.

The whole 'you don't get it' thing surrounding Scott Pilgrim certainly does lose all credibility and reason faced with the knowledge that Edgar Wright is 36 years old. Surely if someone 'got' Scott Pilgrim it's him. Other than that, I don't get it.

(Belated) At the Cinema: Inception

Inception (Christopher Nolan/2010) USA, UK/148mins *****

I've been slow on this one: unfashionably late to the Inception table. Although perhaps not too tardy: I foresee folk reviewing, re-reviewing and then re-reviewing the re-reviews well into the new year - it's had that kind of effect. One of the reasons I didn't bother to add my tuppence-worth, my drop in the Inception commentary ocean, was because I got rather sick of hearing about it. When you stumble upon a fifth over-excitable interpretation of what the spinning top really represents in the course of a day, I think even director Christopher Nolan himself would want to switch off. But it was to be expected. Nolan's on a golden run - he's a much-fervoured fanboy favourite - and little will slacken the mass excitement of a new film from him. And outside of the more hardcore devotees' obsessive ruminations, I'm genuinely enthused that there have been several films recently (this, Toy Story 3, Scott Pilgrim vs the World, etc) that have garnered a great amount of fevered eagerness from both critics and audiences. When you avoid all the hyperbole and resulting backlash (and - groan - backlash to the backlash) and revel in the high anticipation of a new release, it's indicative of the joy and surprise inherent in cinema-going. But in saying all this, Inception didn't bowl me over quite like I thought it might. It was an enjoyable ride, but not perhaps the world beater it's been touted as.

As all and sundry know by now, Leonardo DiCaprio plays an ideas man, literally: Dom Cobb and his dream team (count me as the 1001st person to use that little nugget in a review) are hired by a corporate bigwig (Ken Watanabe) to plant an allusive but persuasive idea into the dreaming mind of his business rival's son (Cillian Murphy) in the hope that it will eventually upend said rival's powerful business hold and send soaring Watanabe's stock. Or something. (The narrative's main thrust gets a little lost amid the layers upon layers of dream-state espionage undertaken by DiCaprio and crew. It gets tricky, but Nolan's editor Lee Smith works overtime, assisting in grasping the plot's particular ins and outs. I didn't drift far off course.) Plus, Cobb has his own dream demons to contend with - in the form of his mysterious wife Mal (Marion Cotillard), who materialises - often in tears, but still looking stunning - due to some possible past bad deed on his part.

Everything about Inception is expertly mapped out and immaculately designed. It looks visually stunning; it's appropriately classy, very 'high end'. Everyone is impossibly good looking; the clothes and hair are expertly slick. It oozes style. But for a story which takes place in a multitude of intricately-constructed environments - crumbling cities, snowy mountain-tops, opulent hotel rooms, rain-drenched streets - the overall visual treatment is, paradoxically, two-dimensional: fashionable, but flat. Whether this is to do with the hazy impenetrability of the imagined dream projections of whichever character's subconscious we're traipsing through, or simply a way for Nolan to express finesse on an enormous budget, it's hard to say. But the world's created are largely uninvolving. The scene where an entire street rises up and folds over itself, spectacular as it looked, suggested a page of a glossy magazine being turned over: set design as expanded sci-fi fashion supplement; dream plains suggested by Philip K. Dick, styling by Gucci.

I wouldn't ordinarily moan about too much style overload in current cinema, especially when there's often not enough in big summer movies - and it didn't occur to me to single out for scrutiny the often ostentatious visuals in films such as I Am Love, Shutter Island or A Single Man for their abundance of arty splendour - but it feels like the streamlined visual slickness, though embedded with plenty of clever ideas, was the utmost thing Nolan brought to the table. He knows how his film should look, and he adds plenty of pertinent details that may very well mean something to someone somewhere (names like Ariadne, Page's character, referencing Greek mythology, 'Mal' being a French negative for bad/evil, etc)). But he mistakes stylistic posing for emotional depth: when the whole film's about entering, then probing, the farthest recesses of people's minds some exploration of profundity is surely required, however lightly integrated it is - DiCaprio and Cottilard's elegant, surface-entry suffering doesn't entirely provide it.

DiCaprio carries the film with less heaviness than he did his similar-ish role in Shutter Island earlier in the year, but he's also duller to watch here, relying on too much furrowed-brow performing for my tastes. His core incepting team - Ellen Page (miscast as a genius dream architect who doesn't get to do much dream architecting, save for folding a mirrored underpass in two), Tom Hardy (funny, and the only actor showing personality, as a face-shifting weapons enthusiast), Joseph Gordon Levitt (who does a lot of lone acting whilst weightless - very good, if humourless, he is too) - all get second dibs on the best scenes; Cotillard occasionally pops up like a Bond Girl-gone-bad to well and truly mess up DiCaprio's sleepytime; but Pete Postlethwaite, Michael Caine, Dileep Rao and Lukas Haas barely get a look in. And however nice it is to see Tom Berenger - an old, largely-forgotten actor not resurrected by Tarantino for once - he wasn't given a great deal to do.

I guess I was expecting something a bit more explorative from a film which feels evidently set up as the very touchstone of integral complex exploration. There has to be the discovery of something more substantial than the repetition of further unanswered questions come the end, right? I wasn't expecting to be hit over the head with obvious conclusions and the simplistic tying up of plot knots (I require far from straightforward explication from a summer film that rests its case on being intelligently different), but as intermittently exciting as it often was, the "ooh and ahh" final build and resulting denouement of Nolan's ambiguous style puzzle barely justifies its means. And whatever it means becomes more and more lost, wrapped up in the enigmatic folds of Nolan's lithe yet characterless vision itself.

Inception prides itself on displaying its grey brain cells but it's rarely witty or sustainably engrossing over many of its long stretches. I perhaps wouldn't have been as unimpressed had I not seen many other - more concise, less self-important - films (directly about dreams or no: alternate worlds, game worlds, future and past worlds, movie-movie worlds) that have essentially aroused the same ideas, in some cases with a bit more fun, grit and exertion. There's more than a sniff of David Cronenberg's eXistenZ (yes games, but still), and a whiff of 1984's sci-fi adventure Dreamscape. Kathryn Bigelow skirted with dream-dealers in her 1995 film Strange Days (which had better "sleeper" agents in its crew, too, with a frazzled Ralph Fiennes and a kick-ass Angela Bassett in the mix); and of course staunch Matrix fans will see Inception as follow-on fuel. In some ways it's even oddly similar to the daft J-Lo movie The Cell, which at least prided itself on being all style and nothing else. But I guess we'll sit happy knowing that it's Nolan's latest all-encompassing opus, and his film will surpass all those on sheer evocation of high-end imagery and stored credit alone. Still, that gravity-defying hotel sequence was awe-inspiring - Nolan certainly knows how to draw us in with the odd extraordinary and perplexing image now and again.

At the Cinema: The A-Team & The Expendables

The A-Team (Joe Carnahan/2010) USA/117 mins. ***** 
The Expendables (Sylvester Stallone/2010) USA/103 mins. *****

Take two collections of 1980s mercenary rogues, dust them off, tell them 2010 wants them, and plonk them in front of the cameras once again. In the case of one group (Saturday night telly staples) re-cast the wily old rapscallions with brand new actors to make The A-Team version 2.0; with the other collection (near-retirement-age action stars), observe the same battle-scarred hard bodies, but see how the faces have changed: The Expendables are ready for their close-ups, Mr Stallone. Their many close-ups. Their many, many close-ups.

Director Sly lovingly allows his grim-faced, yet still-rock-hard, action mates so many extreme facial shots that The Expendables at times looks like Abstract Expressionist portraiture; all nine resurrected action-cinema behemoths - many of whom have apparently surgically, or through years of battery (or both), re-arranged their visages once, twice, or thrice times since their heyday - are given ample opportunities to gurn up the limelight whilst they burn up the scenery. (I think Jason Statham was the only expendable still operating with his original face.) Top (old) action dogs Arnie and Bruce Willis drop by for a spell, but the're both clearly too wussy to commit to proper roles.

The faces are fresh in The A-Team but the wise-cracks are still older than the hills. There's plenty of back-slapping camaraderie though. Too much, you might say; smug in-jokes and meaningless banter mostly replace any decent one-liners or things like, oh, excitement. The only half-decent one-liner in The A-Team ("You know she's D.O.D.?" - "I don't care if she's G.O.D.!") is only actually funny for about three seconds after it's uttered. But as long as a few risible laughs get wedged as often as possible into the whole shebang these soldiers of (mis)fortune are quite content. At least some dialogue hits the mark - Sly proves that he really shouldn't write one-liners if no one is on hand to properly deliver them (Randy Couture and Jason Statham, I'm looking at both of you).

There should have been a bit of creative role swap across the the two films: Statham should have defected over to The A-Team and played Hannibal, for all the good Liam Neeson was - allowing Bradley Cooper, who would've fared better being expendable (in more ways then one), to hop sides and get pummelled by Dolph Lundgren. Although actually Sly could've done a bit of downsizing himself, for all the heart-pounding action some of his gang neglect to provide - particularly Jet Li and Randy Couture, who do plenty of... sitting around; they should have split off to create The Dispensables.

The A-Team quartet essentially ape their predecessors' tics and mannerisms, adding neither fresh charm nor cheer in the process. But then, that's by-and-large all they needed to do - nostalgic fanship is bargained on to do the rest of the work for them. But the surgically-realigned Expendables, despite, or because of, appearances, are perhaps a shade too much on the equable side (Terry Crews aside, who - it's crystal clear from his maniacal one-man-one-gun assault late in the film - certainly doesn't mess around when it comes to besting the opposition).

But how do The A-Team and The E-Team compare in the blowin'-shit-up stakes? Because - if truth be told - that's all anyone who goes to see either film is interested in. (The plots of both could easily be boiled down to: rough good guys get revenge on sneaky bad guys). Joe Carnahan has tongue firmly wedged in cheek on the former: he aims for the sublime and hits the ridiculous - a parachuting tank stunt is so Over the Top that Stallone could've arm wrestled it to the ground, and a game of 'which cup is the ball under', only played with shipping containers and humans, was a silly highlight. Sly tries to add a bit of gritty by attempting to place his near-pornographically-pitched explosion showcase within the perimeter of the enclosure within the bounds of the general area of believability by having his team fight political meglomaniacs of one kind or another. But indeed the all-out action scenes are the better moments in both films; Hannibal and crew's are high in green screen plasticity, Sly's less so - it's surely gotta be the real deal wherever possible with Stallone and co., after all.

Sly was surely betting on the easy appeal in re-grouping his stalwarts of kick-ass, but maybe he could have gone one better and cast a few stunt men and women in lead roles - thereby making a choicely cheeky allusion to his title and celebrating the true underdogs of action at the same time. If Tarantino managed it - with Zoe Bell in Death Proof - then surely Sly could've rustled up a few stunt friends. Many folk wondered where Steven Seagal and Jean-Claude Van Damme were in Sly's line-up of usual suspects, but where, too, were the likes of Keith David, Cynthia Rothrock, Rowdy Piper, and even Grace Jones? An '80s foursome who, for my money, would have made The Expendables truly dependable.

At the Cinema: The Killer Inside Me

The Killer Inside Me (Michael Winterbottom/2009) USA/109 mins *****

The hubbub surrounding The Killer Inside Me was to be expected - and to be duly taken with a hefty dose of deliberation. Although, in effect, the uproar over the film is part and parcel of its interest. A film like this shouldn't slip by unnoticed - and in today's net-savvy world a film like this never could. Films that portray brutal violence on screen should sear a visible mark on our screens and leave a socially-dubious skid mark on our brains.

Michael Winterbottom’s adaptation of one of Jim Thompson’s darker, clammier novels follows small-town sheriff Lou Ford (Casey Affleck) as he weasels around 1950s dead-end Texas. He divides time between uber-violently mishandling both his girlfriend Amy Stanton (Kate Hudson) and hooker-mistress Joyce Lakeland (Jessica Alba), and mismanaging various shady comings-and-goings with other local authority figures; all the time becoming more and more haunted - via some handy flashbacks - by a traumatic event from his boyhood.

Thoughtful attention from various external sources (audience and festival reactions, press coverage, film-industry responses etc) assists in bringing a film to our attention and help to find it a bigger audience. But it's dividing the intelligent or worthwhile responses (looking at a film with good measure, placing it in a wider cinematic or social context) from the alarmist or knee-jerk responses (Oh-my-god-this-film-is-sick! - I therefore shall never see it!) that’s the tricky part of the equation.

The more level-thinking, reasonable adults who see this latest succès de scandale, the better. The debate around cinematic violence can then widen to take in fresh voices - some of them will undoubtedly be crucial, constructive and, hopefully, progressive. (Though of course some will certainly be Daily Mail ‘up-in-arms’ reactions over it all). The Killer Inside Me's frequent violent scenes are questionable, troubling and horrible; it’s compulsive, often difficult viewing. It is, to be blunt, just as it should be.

The extended scenes of brutality - most often aimed at the two women in the protagonist's life - don't leave much space for drawing clear breath over their arduous durations; they're queasily prolonged, upsetting and the kind of scene no-one really likes to have to think about, let alone watch, over many agonising minutes of screen time. (Several minutes last much longer than we often assume in the cinema).

Much of the film’s tone is ungraspable and strives to be putrid. One reading of the film could suggest that it all occurs within Lou Ford’s warped psyche; all - or at least most - crucial events could be filtered through his unreliable perspective, skewed as such by his psychotic fallibility. Another reading could infer that it's simply the way Winterbottom lays it out, that he’s simply umpiring a clever game of Shock the Audience. Either idea points to why the film is both intriguing and infuriating in (roughly) equal measure.

That tone wavers plenty, but there's perhaps no distinct purpose to much of the film. But then violence itself never really has a distinct purpose - it just happens. Those that inflict it may have their own reasons, however misguided or ill judged, but those who feel it see no justifiable reason. But by the end I was left only with a hazy impression of a sickened mind, nothing concretely compelling or solidly conveyed.

On more than one occasion I pondered the notion that it was notorious genre-hopper Winterbottom’s “go” at Film Noir: guns and girls go with the territory, and Thompson’s the go-to guy for questionable violence; mix the two together and - voilà! - an instant polemic for our consideration. (Thinking back to how rounded other less flashy, more naturalistic explorations of murderous men like, say, Vengeance Is Mine or Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer were, The Killer Inside Me feels like too much stylistic posing, without interest in truly mining the ickiest recesses of a blackened mind.)

There's not much middle ground. What there is of it is narratively shaky, unstable; away from the shock scenes or moments of limpid exposition, very little happens that nudges things forward. Winterbottom’s attention to detail, and how he propels the plot along in the scenes not impregnated by the imminent possibility of eroticised menace, isn’t perhaps as assured as it is within the ones that are. But he is savvy enough to position his beacon scenes of high violence few and far between, therefore maximising their potential shock impact on the audience; we get due time to stew in our afterthoughts.

There’s scant interest in the character’s lives. How they practically and emotionally exist outside of Winterbottom’s need to see them either inflict pain, or react to it being inflicted, is largely absent. Merely positing that the violence is justified because it’s aroused via the sickest perspective in the room (as he has suggested in interviews), and therefore unable to be disentangled from his main character's particular viewpoint, sounds as if he’s setting a blaze and then leaping for the fire escape.

The reasoning (and explanation?) for all the murky visualisations of violence may reside somewhere between Ford’s and Winterbottom's gazes; character or interpreter, there’s a curious chasm for eisegesis between the two. I wasn't entirely sure whether the narrative's elusive tone was a clever device to nudge for critical responses or simply a whole lot of smoke to cover the fact that no one here may have had a concrete perspective.

Either way, it's the most intriguing stab at opening up the onscreen debate on film violence for at least a few years - and it’s one hornet’s nest that the media and the cinema-going public alike should have hit on a bit harder. (I seem to remember a bigger kerfuffle on the 2000 re-release of Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange; I was hoping for multiferous levels of Crash-like controversy.) For a polemic to really dig its nails into society, you want it front and centre, on everyone’s lips. The splash Killer has so far made hasn’t been as sizeable as it should have been. Whether it’s due to Winterbottom’s indetermination or a lack of interest in the problem it poses, it’s a film that at least invites us to ask hard questions.

On the acting side of things, Affleck was good - all lazy-eyed ugliness and contemptuous line delivery, as if he viewed everyone he met as scarcely worth wasting more than the bare essential of words on - but it’s very much an extension of his Robert Ford character from The Assassination of Jesse James... (In the world of fictive movie connectivity they might even be distantly related.) Alba and Hudson’s previously untapped willingness to branch out (both are more widely known for lighter rom-com fluff) means we get commendably intense work from them; both give generous performances for little in return. Although only Hudson is the right fit for ‘50s small-town noir.

The muggy atmosphere and lushly-detailed period trappings are a visual treat nonetheless. (DoP Marcel Zyskind lights the dank interiors and the wide-open landscapes with the same sweaty zeal; the grab bag of songs are cues of the creepiest kind.) But for my money The Grifters is still the best Jim Thompson adaptation, with a nod toward Maggie Greenwald's underrated The Kill-Off and Thompson's own dialogue work on The Killing.