SoulBoy

Joe McCain (Martin Compston) is a young man in the slump of his life - not educated enough to escape from his rural village in Nowheresville up North, and has found nothing in his life to stir passion, other than girls. A gorgeous hairdresser, Jane (Nicola Burley) catches his eye, as does her collection of Northern Soul badges and records and in a weak attempt to impress her, attempts to bluff his way into the scene. Before long, Soul music becomes his life, with weekly trips to the Wigan Casino to manage. Drugs are a natural extension to this life style.

Compston is an affable, engaging actor, easily the most interesting performance in the movie - mixing swagger and vulnerability well. Initially dancing with the grace of a pig stuck with a cattle-prod, he convinces as a man who's just found his creative outlet. Felicity Jones as Mandy - Joe's art-school wannabe friend - is also impressive, with an affable mix of Zooey Deschanel cuteness and girl-next-door amiability. They are excellent at bouncing off one another.

The rest of the cast are a mixed bag: the record shop owner Dee Dee is a funny caricature of aging hippy and daft businessman. Nicola Burley as Jane is as cool and lifeless as an iceberg, with far less under the surface. The one-note pantomime villainy also disappoints, Joe's wifebeating customer is a sneering nitwit, and the chief preening peacock on the dancefloor has nothing going on, other than being a twat.

Ultimately, SoulBoy is a strange, lifeless work. Its script is crammed with cliche, stock characters, crummy gags and screenwriting formula (one can almost hear Robert McKee bellowing in the background!) to such an extent, not even an excellent lead performance can save it. If you think of the obvious stories of romance, coming of age, overcoming adversity, the usual stuff, and dress it into a script without the wit to back it up - you're on the right track.

It has a good go at getting the period right. The details are there, the costumes are just the right shade of cool and crap: the bright red tank top leading the girls to dub him "a right little Soul Boy" and the startlingly awful suits. The set-design is great, capturing the late 70s Northern Soul movement very well, and the Wigan Casino has been rejuvenated superbly.

The movie is competently made, but the script stifles and sinks the otherwise good work. Billy Elliot on uppers, this ain't.

Outcast

Outcast is a strange concoction of occult fantasy and social drama - think Ken Loach meets Angel Heart and you're on the right track. An Irish woman, Mary (Kate Dickie) and her teenage son, Fergal (Niall Bruton) move to a lower-class council estate somewhere in "Bonnie Scotland, Lothian" and try to settle down. They are being chased by a pair of hunters, Cathal (James Nesbitt) and Liam (Ciarán McMenamin) - sworn to rid the world of a beast which is following Mary and Fergal. Their next door neighbour Petronella - a Scottish/Romanian girl saddled with a mentally-challenged tank of a brother and an alcoholic mother - catches Fergal off-guard and they start a too-good-to-be-true relationship. In the sidelines, very bad things are happening to innocent people (Doctor Who's current assistant - Karen Gillan turns up as Dead Teenager #1), and pain-in-the-backside social workers.

Performances in Outcast are almost uniformly very strong. The magnificent Kate Dickie is quite simply incapable of giving a bad performance and her Mary is a screen-commanding creation: an intense, stony and full-on sorceress, unrepentantly vicious when her back is in the corner. James Nesbitt as Cathal is a crawling, brutally insane nightmare of a man, both blessed and doubly drunk with booze and supernatural powers, sporting a "shiny new skin". Hanna Stanbridge as Petronella, is less impressive, the various fast and tough choices that she must make within the story are mishandled. It's a fine debut, however, and the camera loves her. The main cast make a marvellous ensemble - every quality performance illuminating a world beyond the one portrayed in the there and then. Sadly, most of the rest of the cast has been drawn from central casting, and let the side down - even if it's just for a few minutes.

Director Colm McCarthy knows his genre - and how to provide a fresh sting in the tale. The script astutely blends Celtic folklore, creepy occult sorcery and strong social drama into a strange, and rather original fusion. All of this clever worldbuilding nonsense is given good shift by the excellent - Sylvain Chomet (The Illusionist) knows how to make Edinburgh look achingly beautiful? McCarthy and his excellent director of photography Darran Tiernan make it look like a great gothic dungeon. Additionally, the sound design is superior and adds immeasurably to the atmosphere.

McCarthy divines his strongest suit in the movie early on, the unrepentant vein of voracious carnality that drives the chased and the hunters. Two of the film's best scenes are quite simply well-edited sequence of bodies. Fergal and Petronella's bodies are cross-cut, dreaming of one another in the dead of night, and in tender solo masturbation. The other is Mary and Cathal locked in a naked psychic conflict - heavy breathing and howling for enraged one-upmanship.

For much of its runtime, Outcast may be the best British horror film since The Descent, and keeps hearts in the right place - our throats. Occasional breaks in its verisimilitude (such as the aforementioned crummy side-cast) and a rather bog-standard monster movie finale keep it from top marks. That being said, it's a wonderful calling card for a feature debut, and I look forward to more in the future.

The Last Rites of Ransom Pride

"We killed every man, we killed every child, we killed every goddamn dog! And we rode all the women, and when they couldn't ride no more, we killed them!"

Set in Glory, Texas and the Mexican border - The Last Rites of Ransom Pride is a rather dull action Western. The story deals with prostitute Juliette Flowers (Lizzie Caplan) and her quest to claim the body of her murdered lover, the titular scoundrel Ransom Pride (Scott Speedman). However, the body is being held by Bruja (Cote de Pablo) a mysterious, disfigured leader of a town in Mexico with an axe to grind against Ransom. So, Flowers proposes a deal - she will bring Ransom's younger living brother, Champ (Jon Foster) and trade him for Ransom. Champ's father, Preacher (Dwight Yoakam) doesn't take this lying down - and sends bounty hunters after them. Each side gathers a somewhat bizarre motley crew, and the movie cues up the gunfights.

It sounds like a reasonably cool springboard for a plot. It could be, in the right hands. The cast of extended cameos are excellent, Kris Kristofferson as chief baddie, Peter Dinklage as a dual-doublebarrel wielding, and somewhat philosophical Dwarf. The cast acquit themselves nicely with the anorexic material, especially Caplan - obvious leading lady material. The characters and the story are thinly sketched, with precious little meat on their bones, the scripting is perfunctory - although it boasts a few nice one-liners and visual gags (3D Porn - What will they think of next...? Oh, wait). It interleaves the quest with a series of black and white flashback scenes, leading to a rather steamy - if lacking in skin - sex scene.

Technically, the film is good, the costume and set designs are sparse but effective - leading to a Deadwood-lite funky feel and a slick, well-realised pulp comic-book style, which is only partially ruined by a barrel of cinematographic and editorial tricks in an attempt to manufacture a raw and edgy energy. It doesn't quite work that way. First up is the strange and brief recaps, where each scene is summarised into a handful of its constituent frames, and blasted back at the audience. It's akin to writing using exclamation points for every sentence. It's tiresome, and not particularly clever.

Many off details - not limited to anachronistic petrol-powered vehicles and a semiautomatic pistol that looks decidedly modern, poorly staged action sequences and messy plotting stack up against the film. The stop-start repetitive road-movie feel and insipid script will likely consign this to the inhospitable direct to video market than as the cult favourite as was doubtlessly intended.

Evil In The Time Of Heroes

Ancient Greeks and modern life meets zombies in a timeywimey action horror. Sounds like a laugh, right? Wrong.

An ancient evil is released (don't ask how - the movie doesn't say), and a handful of survivors must hole up against a gargantuan zombie horde. The streets are deserted, other than the pockets of very fast-on-their-feet zombies. It's like 28 Days Later, but with better gore effects and an even weaker story.
 
This is almost certainly the goriest film you will see this year. Each of our main characters is introduced by a swift dousing in stage blood - think Noel Edmonds and the gunge tank in slow-motion. Start as you mean to go on, I guess. The messiness doesn't stop at the ceaselessly inventive Savini-shaming effects - the script is shockingly incoherent.

Evil In The Time Of Heroes feels like a manic storyteller who won't shut the hell up when he's whizzing off on a tangent, and knows nothing about storytelling ebbs and flows. Characterisation is minimal, the storytelling rushed and undercooked, dishing out (actual) Deus Ex Machinas - spouting "WTFs" when it should be inspiring "Woah!" There's a couple of good giggles - the before/after shots of a football stadium zombie attack have the rhythm of a well-told joke.

In definitely the coolest cameo of the year, Billy Zane does his best Time Lord meets warrior monk impression - "Like a Jedi? You know, Luke Skywalker". And admittedly, the filmmakers do their best to make him look awesomely cool. His scenes don't make a lick of sense, and often take on the appearance of a really bad LSD trip.

There's a dozen reasonable ideas, none of which are developed into fruition - especially the time-travel stuff. A bit of a waste, really. The script is a collection of a movie-loving fool's mad ravings. The movie is highly competent in the technical aspects, and is well-shot. It falls down towards the end, where shakycam upturned what was left of my stomach.

There's a strange lack of emotion in the affair. No fear, no big laughs, no social satire - if it had held on a couple of months, perhaps the story could have leached some timeliness from the economic situation in Greece's near-bankrupt government. You know, zombies being used for what they usually are - a satirical infection to be purged, preferably with fire.

A wasted chance, but hopefully it'll lead to more interesting and coherent things for all involved.

Blank City

I'm a sucker for documentary films that show me an outlet for unadulterated and exuberant passion. In and among the poverty of Seventies and Eighties New York, Celene Danhier's remarkable film Blank City gives us a compelling and well worked out cinematic essay on the politics and artistry of the place and time. Ultimately, it is your basic talking heads documentary, interspersed with footage that redefines cinematic cool. The speakers are far too numerous to list - choice cuts include: Eric Mitchell, John Waters, John Lurie, Amos Poe, Steve Buscemi and Jim Jarmusch - and most of them are fascinating to hear.

The city was in massive debt, and without a government handout, most of the occupants of the Lower East Side were fearful to leave their urban dungeon homes. This melting pot of poor, struggling artists - christened "freaks and crazy people" - lead to a cultural revolution. "An explosive movement - a meeting of minds." A richly cut explosion of iconographic imagery opens the film, and we find it hard to argue with these "Iterian kings"; certainly with the raw, explosive and risk-taking results of their artistry.

These directors shot anywhere, borrowed their friends and jumped into abandoned houses for sets, scavenged for equipment and scrounged materials. Ultimately, their picobudget concerns did not stop them from obtaining the money and equipment - by any and all means necessary. They openly confess to committing "crimes to pay for films - that is what we did." Setting fire to their property and scamming for insurance money was a particularly popular hustle. Amos Poe is first up in the roughly chronological story. His anecdotes about the gestation of first Super8 picture Blank Generation are amusing and very much of the time, describing the editing process in the Maysles' Brothers suite while they were off their tits on amphetamines. Also, breaking and entering was not beyond these grunge poets - James Nares' hilariously high-camp Rome '78 was largely achieved by madmen in bedsheets, crafty camera angles, and sneaking inside buildings which look like architect's wet dreams.

Richly observed urban fairytales like Downtown 81, starring Jean-Michel Basquiat, are equally contemporaneous and take the breath away. Blank City also charts the rise of the musical revolution, and shows how it links with the downtown NY film scene; how filmmakers and musicians kept feeding off one another for their next creation. Almost anyone who was anyone was roped into being a punk rocker, the sound aptly described as "trying to make music as though no-one had ever made it".

Lizzie Borden is another participant who made politically radical films - most potently a strongly left-wing picture featuring the destruction of the World Trade Center, using large minatures and and glitter. Her films included G-Man and the audacious Black Box, sharp satires on the reactions to the threat of terrorism.

Many, many more anecdotes and wild stories await you. (I tried keeping notes, but was swiftly beaten down by the sheer volume.) And yet, Danhier's film feels organic in its construction, leading effortlessly from one story to the next with very little dead-time between them. It is an outstanding achievement - and for those of us not part of the movement, a deliriously fun ride.