LOOK, I'M WOODY. HOWDY, HOWDY, HOWDY.

Who’s Woody Allen? What? Nobody watches Woody Allen films.

Let’s watch some Woody Allen films.

WHATEVER WORKS

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Starring Larry David

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I don’t like that. So far, off to a bad start.

BROADCAST NEWS

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Starring Holly Hunter

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Something for everyone, assuming you love love and/or hate the gradual disintegration of TV news into a gurning nightmare of primary colours and dogs balancing tat on their ears. One the one hand Broadcast News is a perfectly pitched, scripted and acted love triangle, all identifiable emotions and quip-happy characters; on the other claw it’s the documented beginning of the television going insane in a desperate attempt to keep a monopoly on telling us things. Asking big questions of surface over substance and integrity over success it answers them with a resounding shrug and a humanity that’s sorely lacking in most films of its dilapidated genre, being a rom com that’s both huggable and laughable. Remember The Simpsons? It was this amazing show back in the early nineties that had an almost uncanny grasp of how society scrambled to function, the little foibles and tics between people that made modern life cheerily grim, but all done with yellow people who only had three fingers. Three fingers! Genius. Anyway, Broadcast News is made by one of those long lost creators of Simpthing, James L. Brooks, and as such it covers the same sort of ground that that short-lived, masterful show covered, be it genuinely touching relationships between men and women or careful, considered satire against a world that’s getting indelibly out of touch with itself. If you’re interested in either of these, you’re probably a human being and should watch it, it’s good. If you’re not, there’s always punching people in the face and eating jelly to get your rocks off. Ah Simpsons…A good thing the show was cancelled really, if it had continued it’d have gotten OH GOD THERE’S A RADIOACTIVE APE IN MY CAR GET IT OFF GET IT OFF THIS IS RIDICULOUS AND INCREDIBLY DANGEROUS

BLACK SWAN

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Starring Natalie Portman

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Perfection. It’s not just an ironically titled new hell-quiz from the BBC, it’s an unobtainable fantasy-transfiguration of reality itself! Art longs for perfection because it’s one more twist up the spout from walking down the high street and crying fat, grey tears. Life can’t be perfect. Life doesn’t have perfection in the brochure, and so it looks to art to provide it. But perfection, bless, is impossible. As Noel Gallagher sang, possibly as an excuse for his whole nasty career, ‘True perfection has to be imperfect… I know that that sounds foolish but it’s true.’ The song’s forgotten, Oasis are rubbish. But the sentiment stands tall amongst humankind’s monuments to its own inadequacy. Here lies the ideal of perfectionism. It’s perfectly ridiculous.

A twisting, chasseing nightmare of artistic aspiration, Black Swan goal-slams the tricky hat trick of being watchable, making ballet interesting, and delivering a credible essay on imperfection, all the while giving Natalie Portman a new reason for existing besides her face. In her best performance since being thirteen years old, P-Man gives a show-stopper that slaps her up to the a-list of people pretending to do things, amazing and terrifying in equal measures as a dedicated perfectionist with a peeling grasp on humanity and reality. Doe-eyed and sinew-flexed, she’s constantly on edge, digging at bits of her imperfect chassis and gulping down nitrous levels of paranoia and sexual insanity whilst twirling around pretending to be a bird. A mental and physical swan-fuck of a lead show isn’t the only game in town, with Aronofsky’s direction keeping just the right side of sublime over ridiculous and excellent supporting players occasionally drifting into view to facilitate another attack of the Wiggins. The horror’s splashed with some of the most restrained CGI ever seen on film, the subtle use of digital effects sculpting a sensuous mood of prickly unease rather than blowing up everything in a fifty foot radius and giving animals the power to wink; between this and other recent maestro work Scott Pilgrim it seems that 2011 might actually deliver on 1999’s promise of CGI being worth a damn, and for that it should be commended.

Beautiful, disturbing, full of dancing…and for a film about perfection, it’s reliably imperfect. Over the top, demented, not ambivalent enough, it just falls short of the artistic merits it showcases, making the film itself a meta-fictional document of humanity’s inability to be Gods. But then if anything can make a room full of teenagers watch ballet for two hours in total silence, it’s doing EVERYTHING right. Perfect.

FERRIS BUELLER'S DAY OFF

dMYD DVD

Starring Matthew Broderick

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Like any great piece of gibberish, Ferris Bueller is a weird flickering prism of a movie, almost begging to be watched in eighty-seven different ways. Here’s five of them, watch it five times.

1. THE SLOW DEATH OF WESTERN CAPITALISM

It’s a film about a boy who gets given a computer instead of a car, and acts up regarding this megaton-level injustice by ruining the lives of several of his elders and contemporaries. Three spoilt cumbags race around Chicago in a stolen car and philosophize about how brief life is whilst hoovering daddy’s money into their pampered nostrils and laughing at poor people. Watch it, and formulate your own endless demises for the accused including prostitution (Ferris), head-in-an-oven-marriage-break-up (Sloane) and auto-erotic-asphyxiation (Cameron). Death to Reaganism!

2. A MID-80s SEQUEL TO ‘THE BELLJAR’

Ah, Cameron. It’s a film about a boy who is so lonely and insular that he makes up an entirely fictional best-friend who he proceeds to follow around Chicago for a day with a bemused look on his face. Ferris isn’t real. Sloane isn’t real. Cameron is a squealing, demented fantasist with a face like Rodney Trotter overdosing on Vicodin, his only friend a puckish imaginary man-child who is thirty-six thousand times more confident and at home with the real world than he is. Honestly, watch it back, it’s all there; the heightened sense of reality, the dream-like coincidences, the fact that Cameron never really interacts with anyone other than Sloane or Ferris. IT’S NOT REAL.

3. THOMAS JEFFERSON’S POST-DEATH FREEDOM REPORT

Life is a series of intricate boxes that everyone places themselves into, knowingly or not. You’re a Democrat, you’re a Republican, you play games, you’re a school kid, a teacher, a son, an American, a boy, a girl. Ferris is pretty bored of this, so he’s taking a day off, taking his friends with him. And he has fun, and you watch and think… why don’t I do that? Oh, well, maybe not. Because…

4. LOONEY TUNES

It’s a fantasy film. Not in the sense of sweaty pale creatures beating each other with mystical lengths, but like a Capra movie or life when caned. Everything’s depicted as only slightly more askew than reality, more than Sixteen Candles but less than Top Gun, subtly getting more questionable and wonderful as the film goes on and being all the more enjoyable for it. IT’S NOT REAL.

5. PERVERT’S LENS VIII: THE LENGTHENING

Yes, he was a nearly-genius, but as anyone who’s seen Molly Ringwald’s teenage diary confessions will attest, John Hughes was a grimy, dirty old man who loved to cast girls less than half his age as idealistic love-puppets. Sloane’s the least developed character here but still stands as a doe-eyed beacon of boy-teen lust, a perfect girlfriend whose wonderfulness makes you forget that the actress is now over 40 and categorically not the fictional perfect you’ve fallen in love with. But it’s worse for girls; even The Breakfast Club had a pre-failure Judd Nelson to long for, but here you have the aforementioned stretch-faced freak Cameron and Matthew ‘Foot-Lover’ Broderick to goggle over. So, on a base level it’s a film for lonely teenage boys. From the 1980s.

But of course, the base level is only the base level. Funny, clever, light-hearted and endearing, Ferris Bueller’s Imaginary Fourth Wall Destruction Mia Sara Festival is a brilliant movie, one that’ll last forever barring the enslavement and cultural destruction of Western Society. It’s better than The Godfather. Oh go on, it is.

THE GODFATHER

dMYD DVD

Starring Marlon Brando

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Great expectations. It’s not the masterpiece, not really; it’s overlong, Pacino’s journey from conscience to demon is simplistic, it’s essentially a series of killings interspersed with domestic issues… But then again… the acting’s incredible across the board, so believable and affecting that you want to reach out and comfort Robert Duvall as he facilitates death, pat James Caan on the head when he beats his brother in law to liquid or tut quietly as Al has a man shot in the eye. As an exercise in humanizing evil it’s largely faultless, at the time it was written a stark and fresh example of the coldness we feel every day when emphasizing with something we should despise. But, whoops, since then culture’s popped out The Sopranos, and The Godfather took a flying leap. It’s not the movie’s fault, but the whole thing feels like a taster course for the issues that David Chase’s uberwork would later examine in pin-point genius, with the luxury of six series and a big fat cable budget. There’s a joke about the show being the new Godfather there somewhere, but it’d be an insult to both pieces to make it. Just whip out Coppola’s proto-epic if you only fancy wallowing in the hell of the Italian-American experience for one hundred and seventy five minutes rather than three thousand, eight hundred and seventy. Oh yeah, and Sopranos is funnier.

… And then there’s Brando. Presumably because he fucked or ate anyone who disagreed with him, he’s once again allowed to stomp all over the movie with a Godzilla performance so unhinged that you half expect him to stare at the camera for the whole run time whilst beating Pacino with his own gnawed off leg. The accent, cadence and timing are now so ingrained in pop culture that its impossible to forget them, but think for a second how lilting, bizarre and out of place everything he says and does is and then swallow your brain entirely when you realize that it completely works. It’s a mark of the sheer willpower and genius-level balls that Brando could bring to a film when he could be bothered, no better showcased than in the hazy, sun-blessed beauty of the tomato garden scene. A lumbering, orange-grinned giant of enjoyment for his adoring, perplexed grandson, Corleone here stands as a microcosm of Brando’s life; frightening, funny, inspiring, wonderful. The Godfather may be bettered, but few are ever going to come close to the fat-fuck genius of Mighty-Man-Marlon.

SPACE JAM

dMYD DVD

Starring Michael Jordan and Bugs Bunny

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Yeah, it’s all fun and elasticity as a child but come adultaggedon and here come the knives of critical acumen, stabbing bluntly at the grimacing corpse of Porky Pig as he squeals and stutters his last. Just think for a second; Space Jam is a biographical account of the latter-days of Michael Jordan’s professional career – with the Looney Tunes. In the cold light of the future the concept’s a mind-squeezingly demented fountain of Dadaism, like John Prescott writing his memoirs with the aid of Rocket Raccoon or Winona Ryder getting engaged to The Great Gonzo. Nostalgia runs a long way with this one, the Looney Tunes themselves being an unlikeable troupe of dated pop-references and annoying tics, whilst Jordan himself is a psychological dead-weight, as adept at reading lines as he was hitting a home run. Billy Murray arrives late-game to confuse matters, everything sags with a scarcity of animation and verve that Walt could scratch out of his left fingernail, and the whole thing is far less entertaining than it should be. Disney and Pixar are the only ones who’ve mastered the art of not relying on celebrities and quotations, and as such they’re a timeless evocation of childhood wonder and beauty. Warner Brothers were always a bunch of sarky, sulky lightweights smoking in the corner, ripping the piss but delivering little, and as such they don’t pass the timeless test. But hell… that concept. Michael Jordan in space, shooting hoops with Elmer Fudd. Stick it in the Congress Library, mount it on the walls; it’s a triumph of God-Only-Knows, with an execution that can’t possibly live up to the giddy heights of its own insanity.

THE BOONDOCK SAINTS

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Starring Willem Dafoe

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A singular vision is a wonderful thing, obstructed and hidden from the unrelenting march of popular opinion as it is. It’s cowering in the corner and mumbling its views to itself in a Scots accent because it can do whatever the hell it wants, it answers to itself and the kilt isn’t for fucking show. However, give that vision some money, a camera and the streets of New York City and it can break out from its lonely hovel, forcing itself upon an unsuspecting world like a prick in an eye: it can be as nightmarish as that sounds. Cinema-nineties kicked off with an indie revolution led by Citizens Tarentino and Soderbergh and gurgled off into the 2000s with a slew of copycat gangster crap that regurgitated the tropes of six years earlier; The Boondock Saints splashes lightly into this violent slurry with its stylistic lunges at gang punching and quip-talking but performs the whole thing with the daring curveballs of being Irish and slightly batshit. Thus we have Willem Dafoe as a cross-dressing detective, Billy Connelly as a mute psychopath and a lot of people you’ve never heard of attempting accents they’ve never heard. It’s original, it’s odd, it’s so off kilter it’s drowning in the North Sea and very little of it makes sense. That doesn’t make it good, but it does make it special. It’s always a pleasure to see something so defiantly inept that it’s an island of its own; all the tropes and treats of the action movie are here somewhere, they’re just being buggered by classical music and ham-fisted explorations into Catholic guilt, as well as the bizarre physics and leaps of logic last seen in X-Men rather than Pulp Fiction. You won’t believe your eyes! Now dig them out.