Wild at Heart (1990)

“Too bad he couldn't visit that old Wizard of Oz and get some good advice."

This is a David Lynch film, so you just know there's going to be weirdness, symbolism and ambiguous subtext. We get all this in Wild at Heart, yet it simultaneously is and isn't what one might expect from Lynch.

Interestingly, despite the arty directorial flashes, dreamy atmosphere, eschewal of nturalism in both directorial and acting styles and Lynchian blurring of what is and is not real, on the surface this is quite a straightforward film, to the extent of being cheesy. After all, it's a road movie, a romance with a happy ending, and interestingly the kind of action movie based on American  grotesques that looks ahead to Tarantino.

And yet there's so much going on beneath the surface- playful irony, yes, but much more. There's a loving relationship between two flawed but decent people, lots and lots of good sex, and the soppiest ending ever- but there's also a lot of darkness, particularly sexual darkness. We learn of Lula being sexually abused as a teenager, and Bobby sexually assaults her in a very uncomfortable scene. Yet, although this film doesn't flinch from the fact that this is a sometimes dark world, where good people suffer and die needlessly, it's also a film that holds out the hope of eventual happiness.

It's also, interestingly, a film full of characters reminiscing to one another, but these memories are unclear, frangmentary and inconsistent: all the characters, and indeed the narrative itself, are unreliable narrators. Memory, and thus the past, is a fragile, vague thing. There is only now. There's a melancholy to this, but also hope: we don't have to be prisoners of our past, as Sailor ultimately learns from the Good Witch.

And no, I've no idea what those Wizard of Oz references are all about, beyond the obvious rarallel of a journey. But this is a film that can be enjoued at a much deeper level while also being a weirdly straightforward melodrama. Fascinating.

Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (1984)

"What happens if a psycho wanders in?"

Sigh. That was boring. It may have had a slightly more famous cast than usual, with Corey Feldman and the always bizarre sight of a hound Crispin Glover not playing George McFly, and have been helmed by Chuck Norris’ favourite director to boot, but this dragged more than any other film in the franchise.

Oh, it starts well, with Jason apparently dead until he comes to life for no apparent reason, and the first deaths are rather amusing. But then the rest of the film goes on to spend too much time following some rather dull teenagers with their romantic escapades punctuated with a series of random deaths which are gory, yes, but have no build-up, no tension. The film isn’t even trying to be scary, and comes across like a half-arsed romantic comedy for far too long. The gory killings, many of them visually impressive, are brief and followed by cuts to more teenage japery.

For the fourth film in the series- with a massive “previously on”- thus offers nothing different to the format except for not even trying to be scary. And I have no idea what they’re trying to do with little Tommy at the end- set him up as another killer? Disappointing, and not helping with my determination to finish them all.

Back to the Future (1985)

"You space bastard! You killed my pine!"

Two points before I start, ok? One: 1985 is further ago for us than 1955 was when this film was made. Two: look, this is Back to the Future. I realise that reviews are supposed to express an opinion as to the quality of the film or whatever, yes, but can we just cut the crap, acknowledge that this is a bloody great film, and talk about things that are more interesting?

I've seen this film many, many times but, barring the odd snippet, not for twenty years or so. That makes this reviewing an odd experience, with odd memories unexpectedly returning, and I'm finally getting the pop culture references such as Doc's "Devo suit" and Chuck Berry hearing Marty playing "Johnny B. Goode" over the phone, proving that I . The intricacies of the timey-wimey plot are truly to be admired, although, if I were to be churlish, I'd have to question the treatment of the butterfly effect. Marty has inadvertently changed the circumstances of his parents' meeting, and made his dad much more confident. Surely, then, history has changed in all sorts of chaotic and unpredictable ways so that the same sperm would not have fertilised the same egg at the same time  and Marty would not have been born? Still, I'm no churl.

There are so many clever little things to admire- Marty's straitlaced mum being a rather normal teenager, jailbird Joey in the playpen, the little riffs on '50s sci-fi magazines. And then we have the Libyan terrorists in their, er, camper van. And Doc, just prior to being shot, intending to visit the distant future of, er, 2010. And how the film blatantly compares 1955 favourably to the Reaganite 1985, but not in a reactionary way; the first thing we see when Marty returns to 1985 is a homeless man.

The script is brilliant. Michael J. Fox is brilliant. Christopher Lloyd is brilliant. And James Tolkan (Mr. Strickland) is a cinematic legend. This is an awesome film.

Alice in Wonderland (2010)

“I’ve been shrunk, stretched, scratched and stuffed into a teapot!”

Well, it was only a matter of time until Tim Burton had a go at Alice in Wonderland, wasn’t it? Three things were pretty much inevitable: it was going to feature Helena Bonham Carter, it was going to feature Johnny Depp, and it was going to be good. Lo, all three of these things come to pass.

Of course, Tim Burton, being Tim Burton, doesn’t actually make an adaptation of Alice in Wonderland; he jumps straight to Through the Looking Glass, but still calls it Alice in Wonderland anyway. It all looks amazing, and as trippy as all versions made since Jefferson Airplane did White Rabbit have to be by default. The early flashback scenes to Alice’s childhood have a very stylised, uber-Victorian look, while the present day scenes have a very un-Burton realism to be contrasted with the, er, wonders of Wonderland. I only saw this film in 2-D, and I’m gutted; lots of shots were quite clearly composed to look amazing in 3-D, and I’d imagine that the contrast with what I assume would be a 2-D “real” world would be even more effective.

The cast is, obviously, brilliant, and Helena Bonham Carter as the Red Queen and Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter are both as extraordinary as you’d expect. (Depp effortlessly switches between RP and Scottish; is there any accent he can’t do?) But there are far too many gloriously whimsical performances to. I ought to mention, though, that this is the last ever screen credit for Michael Gough, who was ninety-four years old when he voiced this role.

There’s obviously a moral behind the story: as the White Queen says, “You cannot live to please others. Alice arrives down the rabbit this time in the midst of a very public marriage proposal from an absolute drip of a man, a proposal she’s under huge pressure to accept, and the film shows her gradually coming to realise that she doesn’t need to. In this sense, Wonderland is the “looking glass” of the original title, although the plot is very different. There is also a nice philosophical conversation at the end between Alice and the Hatter in which Alice comes to realise that this world is real, and not a figment of her imagination, subjective though this is; which one of them is real and which dreaming. It’s nice to see the Jabberwocky poem crowbarred in, too; the mosyer itself is a magnificent bit of CGI.

Of course, there’s a heavy dose of feminism in here that was lacking in the novel. There is only a Red Queen and White Queen; kings are absent. The moral of the film presents what would in Victorian times have been a rather shocking message about the role of women. And, of course, the conclusion, in which Alice becomes an apprentice in a huge trading company, is not exactly realistic for the period but is necessary for our modern, and rather more enlightened, sensibilities.

One day I’ll probably give a bad review to a Tim Burton film. But I don’t see that day coming any day soon.