Mmmm…sleepy.

‘Scuse me, sorry, just having a wee stretch and a yawn here…

Just back from Paranormal Activity, a film that spends an inordinate amount of time in the bedroom of a haunted house (although, actually, it’s one of the house’s inhabitants who is haunted) and, I have to say, I’m feeling a little snoozy.

The current low budget/big box office smash hit, all filmed – of course it was – for $15,000 and being touted as the ’scariest movie of all time’ (don’t start sighing, you’ll set me off yawning again), arrives in the UK with a mighty reputation and a lot of serious business behind it. It comes over all Blair Witch-y but only really has the handheld aspect in common with that much better movie.

This time, we’re in a suburban house in San Diego, with irritating young couple Katie (Katie Featherstone) and Micah (Micah Sloat), owners of the largest television on the Western seaboard. No, seriously. It’s huge. Anyway, Katie has been having sleepless nights since she was 8 due to bad dreams and indistinct manifestations of, well, let’s say it, paranormal activity, stuff that affects her wherever she lives.

When these events seem to increase in frequency, her significant other decides to video them. This means not only a static camera in the bedroom, which I guess is fair enough, but also, as with Cloverfield, that same camera picked up and run with, even at moments where everyone else in the world would simply not give a stuff about getting this shit down on tape.

So, despite (or is it because of, in horror movies?) protestations and warnings to the contrary, Micah decides to up the ante with the ‘presence’ and cajoles and provokes it via ouija boards and exorcism threats. Things escalate and, hey ho, a conclusion, mostly seen in the trailer, occurs.

All of this, all of it, even the very very very end, is pretty tedious, and at no point do you have any of the tension or unpredicatbility of The Blair Witch Project, or the sheer pandemonium and horrified chaos of, say, [●REC]. Our protagonists don’t really help, although Katie Featherstone is jolly convincing, simply because it’s actually pretty difficult to care; the shocks aren’t particularly shocking, and the pay-off, if you’ve seen any Japanese or Korean ghost stories, is fairly standard fayre.

Although quite a nice idea in many ways, Paranormal Activity shows its hand way too early and the it-could-all-be-in-Katie’s-mind psychological theory is frustratingly sent packing with quite a long stretch still left on the clock. The bedroom scenes are OK, but too similar, and there are way too many unintentional giggles – and one great guffaw – to label this anything but an interesting failure.

Trawling around for info, I came across a review by Chicago Now where the correspondent observed that afterwards some people were “physically shaking”. It may have been laughter. And were folks really, “looking to each other for therapy”? I can’t imagine so. If this is the film that scared America, then I need to check the provenance of a lot of movies that are way, way more frightening.

Now. Bed. Who stole all the covers?

In 1961, the year in which An Education is for the most part set, Philip Larkin wrote that in cobble-close families / In mill-towns on dark mornings / Life is slow dying.

Like Larkin, An Education concerns itself with Autumns and Winters spent drawing the curtains against the dark and mysterious world, suburban lives running carefully down trammeled lines, the ‘cut-price crowd’ hiding away in their living rooms and dining rooms. Part of this crowd is Jenny (Carey Mulligan), a 16 year old school girl, fiercely bright and sparky, but moulded with fear and dedication by her kindly despotic father (Alfred Molina), as he attempts to provide her with the means to escape to an Oxbridge education.

It is symbolic then, that while queuing for a bus in the pouring rain, she is charmed into the car of David (Peter Sarsgaard), a worldly playboy figure whom she sees as living forever in sunshine. David represents everything that her life is not, fun; carefree adventure, Paris, jazz, drinks parties and frivolity. And he comes into her life at a time when she is stalling in her studies and eager for distraction (“Studying is hard and boring, teaching is hard and boring, so what you’re telling me is to be bored, and then bored, and finally bored again but this time for the rest of my life?”).

An Education follows Jenny’s infatuation with David, watches her skip over the danger signs that he’s a bit of a bad ‘un, and then finally sits back and takes in her inevitable fall from grace as he lets her down in the worst possible way.

It would be wrong to say that this is painful to watch, but there are spikes of real emotion. In her memoir upon which the film is based, Lynn Barber is very candid about her relationship with the older man. “Was [he] a con-man? Well, he was a liar and a thief who used charm as his jemmy to break into my parents’ house and steal their most treasured possession, which was me.” This theft is most arrestingly felt by Molina who, apologising to his daughter through a slammed-shut bedroom door, evokes, with the tiniest changes in tone, a man whose heart is breaking wide open.

The acting all around is exemplary. Sarsgaard plays David two or three steps removed from being knowable (we might like to think we know enough about his sort any way) but that’s because he’s a clever actor who’s aware that David doesn’t even know himself. But it’s not about him, or Molina, as good as they are; it’s about Carey Mulligan, and she is nothing short of wonderful. There is a heartbreaking vulnerability to her, and yet there are no pyrotechnics here, no thrown teacups or huge crying fits. She plays everything with a deft and light touch, but crucially, she is wonderfully likable, and has you on her side straight away. At no point, regardless of the decisions she makes do you want to judge or criticise, you just want to watch her and watch her and watch her and hope that eventually she will come to rest somewhere that deserves all she has to offer.

I’ve been looking forward to 9 for a while now. The terrific high res trailer seems to have been around forever and the simple “what’s that all about?” intrigue of it’s central premise (a post apocalyptic world inhabited by oddly mechanised ragdolls) fascinating enough to keep me eyeing the release date eagerly.

What a shame, then, that the entire enterprise is suffused with an almost overwhelming sense of disappointment.

Well, maybe not in the first few moments, which do rather pin you down, shut you up and insist you take notice. In that opening, we see the close-up creation of the dolls, hand-sized automata, seemingly made of hessian, but filled with magically vitalised wood and metal, lovingly assembled by a mysterious Geppetto-like inventor. This gentle and enigmatic sequence is the highlight of the movie; it’s quiet care and simply beauty really hold you. Unfortunately, it is over way too soon and afterward we are thrown into an unsatisfying mess.

At less than 80 minutes, 9 seems indecently hasty in its pace, and after introducing its world (a wasted landscape redolent of war-torn Northern France), we are soon learning of the ravages of a recent conflict where man has lost a war to a fascistic machine-driven foe. Only the dolls are left as a reminder of what went before to, er, well, I don’t know what they’re expected to achieve exactly. The purposes of any of the creatures in this ruined set-up seem elusive and unknowable. They don’t know why they’re there, and we don’t either.

They only really define themselves by battling The Beast, a vast many-tentacled mechanical creature who, if it manages to catch the dolls, sucks out a green lifeforce from their bodies. Encounters with the monster are spectacularly choreographed and soullessly boring. And they are almost entirely constant. This is a bang bang bang movie with very little let up.

At one point we get to a breather, where the dolls discover a recording of Judy Garland singing Somewhere Over The Rainbow, and the reflective sequence we have craved is thus undermined by the niggling feeling that this Universe, surely then, isn’t as smartly Alternative as we had been led to believe.

I feel churlish criticising 9 this much. It is clearly a visual treat in many ways, and in every way a labour of great love (it is adapted and expanded from director Shane Acker’s 2004 Oscar-nominated short of the same name) but I’d feel much happier channeling you towards that earlier work, which is pretty wonderful. Does expanding a smaller piece ever really work? They have added big names into the process (Timur Bekmambetov and Tim Burton as producers) and, I’m afraid, have managed to lose a lot along the way.

And the loss comes by adding; too much action. Go back to that beginning. The inventor with his invention. It is fabulous.

I like dark, I like bleak, I am all for a grimly determinist sense of the weight of prior actions composing your fate, and that’s all here…but it is drowned in pyrotechnics and absurd set-pieces.

In any other year, too, 9 may have grabbed the attention effortlessly, but I saw this in an empty 600 seater screen. Next door, the crowd for Up was jostling for space, and therein lies a huge problem. Pixar’s triumph says more about our humanity, about personal resilience, and is darker and yet also more vibrant than anything 9 manages, and so why would you want to see one when the other delivers so much and so consistently?

Two further bugbears of mine are included that I mention simply as a personal irritation; and that is that menace is defined by a horde of scuttling robotic spiders (no more of this, ever again, please), and – in a rather mawkish touch – that returning souls offer a chance for a sentimental valediction. Stop, stop, stop, stop, stop. Please.

Thanks.

There is a scene in Act 2 of Bach’s St Matthew Passion where Peter is describing his betrayal of Jesus (the “before the cock crows, you will have denied me three times” story). This culminates in the aria Erbarme dich, mein Gott (Have mercy, Lord). Peter remembers that Jesus told him he would betray Him, and he weeps:

Have mercy, Lord, for my tears’ sake
Look at me, my heart and eyes weep to Thee bitterly

The piece should begin with a violin solo, growing with the steady introduction of lower strings to conjure up the idea of a weeping Peter, the symbol of all penitent believers.

In Park Chan-Wook’s fabulous new film, Thirst, the aria is played much more simply, ascetically even, by a priest on a wooden flute. This is Sang-hyun (Korean superstar Song Kang-ho) a deeply troubled young man about to come face to face with his doubts and fears in the most horrific way imaginable. Sang-hyun has taken part in a medical trail to find a cure for a particularly nasty leprotic-style disease. After infection he appears to die, but is restored to life and seemingly cured of the ailment.

But he is not cured, not really. A blood unit given to him during his treatment has driven the disease away but at the price of vampirism. As he hides away in his priest’s cell, he wrestles with this new and horrendous spiritual dilemma. He plays the flute, and this most significant of pieces, clearly an expression of how deeply he is feeling, and he coughs…vomiting down the instrument a great gush of blood, pouring through the holes, purging the music. Is this a symbol of his body kicking out the sacrement, that the holy blood is no longer required, and that only the blood of innocent victims will now be taken?

It is a uniquely troubling, thoughtful and memorable image, perfectly at home in a nasty but brilliant take on the vampire story.

Cinéastes aware of Park’s work will not be surprised. For years now the darkest and smartest movies from Korea have been Park’s Vengeance trilogy, most notoriously the wonderful Oldboy. Thirst continues the tradition that those extraordinary pieces began, steadily developing a marvelously black and cynical world hanging off a simple idea.

Here, we have our priest’s struggle, around which grows a story of new lusts and desires; Sang-hyun is compelled to begin a relationship he doesn’t understand with a scheming and manipulative young woman (Tae-joo, played with an alarming feline sensuality by Kim Ok-bin) who needs him to help free her from her marriage.

Deftly, Thirst picks up the strands of Zola’s Thérèse Raquin and Park has great fun turning up the tension to full-on noir gloom and destruction. Be warned, this is a seriously grown up affair, with shockingly intense sex and, once Sang-hyun’s secret is out, some very gruesome and upsetting scenes of face to face violence. There is a scene where the two lovers need to deal with a family group, and it is executed with chilling assurance and sang froid. And amid all the mayhem and choreographed chaos, Sang-hyun in an immaculate white shirt, cuts the image of a perfectly conflicted character.

Thirst is impeccably framed; it looks great from scene one. As with much Asian cinema, there are images and concepts here that are fresh and vital to our eyes, and which leave you thrilled to witness them. Let The Right One In was, and remains, this year’s vampire masterpiece, but Thirst pushes it all the way; despite the horror and the grim commentary on skewed love, they provide forceful and authoritative arguments for what we could have when Art meets Horror, if only we had the nerve to entertain it. The really terrifying thing that’s on show with both films is simple, it’s how bloody good they are; the sad thing, how rare.

Zombieland is fucking huge. All event movies would like to be this big; it has done fabulous business and continues to do so, and it seems to be everywhere. Twitter, for instance, waxes in and out of trending it (“zombieland was awesome you will like it lol” says @jackcity64, and who could resist @dreloc94’s “LOL… ZOMBIELAND WAS THE SHYT HAHAHA” recommendation?).

It is, not that you need telling, the comic tale of a bunch of plucky survivors adrift in an America devastated by a Dead apocalypse. And it starts off at a hundred miles an hour.

With the backdrop of a burning Capitol building, and with Hendrix’s still-striking mushed-up Star-Spangled Banner setting the tone, a disfigured goo-spewing zombie starts to come at you and this sense of in-your-face confusion blasts us through the inventive credits and then into the cautious life of Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg), a geeky survivor.

Columbus has managed to stay ahead of the game because he adheres to his raft of OCD rules for dealing with the Dead. Fitness, or Cardio, for example, being Rule No.1 (“The fatties were the first to go.”).

These Rules form a neat little motif throughout, appearing, first because of his voice-over, and then when we’re all complicit with his mindset, as physical 3D obstacles on the screen, items to be bumped into or knocked over. They’re smart and a bit Fourth Wall-y, and they give Zombieland a stylistic edge you might not otherwise have expected. They also start to get a little irritating. And, if anyone’s seen Warner Brothers’ TV series Fringe, they’re not entirely original. Still, it wouldn’t be quite so quirkily entertaining a movie without them, I just wish it had been toned down a tad. Just a tad.

Anyhoo. Columbus meets Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson) and then Wichita (Emma Stone) and finally Little Rock (Little Miss Sunshine’s Abigail Breslin) along the way and without really letting on to the audience – who are still reeling from the excellent opening – we’ve somehow become a road movie. Not a bad road movie, but a road movie nevertheless. In fact, the opening and the climax aside, Zombieland is fairly zombie-lite.

Don’t all shout at once, it is. 300 million+ people but the landscape isn’t exactly crawling with horrors. I could have done with a lot more dread (or some, I should say) but that might have encroached on the vibe of the whole affair. It is a funny movie, and there is much capering about and happy abandon to be had twatting the re-animated, but for a movie called Zombieland, it’s not really a land filled with zombies. All I’m saying.

That noted, we eventually get to California and it’s there I sort of switched off. I was with it. It was fine. No real complaints at all. It passed the laugh test, a handful of the horror tests, and I was pretty happy. Not up there with Mr Dreloc94, above, I’ll admit, but I was doing OK. And then along comes The Cameo. A lot has been written about Bill Murray’s cameo (as Bill Murray), so it’s not exactly letting the cat out of the bag to say that Bill Murray’s in it. People in the audience enjoyed it, I just thought it was indulgent and pointless and indicated that they’d essentially run out of all their good ideas in the first half, figured they needed a boost in the flagging second Act, and so on comes Bill Murray. As Bill Murray. I preferred the Amber Heard cameo, personally. But, hey.

As the movie walked up to it’s rather lacklustre finale, I couldn’t help but think that I’d been entertained, but not quite as royally as I initially expected.

Rule No.1, let’s not get carried away.