Cast: Luis Buñuel

Director: Luis Buñuel

Screenplay: Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dali

Running time: 16 mins

Genre: Short Film/Surreal



CRITIQUE:


Un Chien Andalou holds no punches. Now renowned to be the quintessential manifesto of the late 1920s surrealist movement, it generates provocative images of disconcerting power that even until today they still permeate discourses in film cliques. Surreal artists-collaborators, the then-debutante filmmaker Luis Buñuel and painter Salvador Dali, construct a 16-minute silent short film that a) irreverent, b) viscerally shocking, and c) doesn’t make sense. Yet the film’s pure, undiffused strength lies in its incomprehensibility, challenging conventional narrative tropes and dared to flout Hollywood rules of chronological continuity. The opening convention of “Once upon a time” is immediately broken by years’ worth of flashforward, and later on, a bold flashback. It is obvious that this film is not supposed to “make sense”, and this surreal work is built up on dream sequences and visions, elements that later populates the oeuvre of more contemporary surrealists such as David Lynch, Terry Gilliam and Peter Greenaway. Its title, transcribed as “The Andalusian Dog” in English, doesn’t even contribute to any coherence available. But to anyone who has a deep appreciation on filmic techniques will find an editing genius here: the notoriously scandalous opener of Buñuel himself slicing a woman’s eye with a razor, cutting to a moon with a thin silver cloud passing by over it, and back to the actual slicing in an unapologetic close-up is a landmark in the status of Hitchcock’s shower scene in Psycho. And there are more images to marvel at; ants crawling out a hole in a hand, dead cows over the piano, a severed hand on a pavement, the death moth, and two dead lovers half-buried into the sand. Buñuel and Dali themselves piece these all together without a scintilla of intention to make sense, and rather uses Freudian complexities to draw interpretations from the projected “truth” of the duo’s imaginings. For all we can observe, it is a comic farce of romantic relationships (as it involves a vindictive husband, a wife and a lover), the irony of death and decay, and most of all, a sticking of two big fat fingers to the expectations of cinema.


VERDICT:

The most diabolical 16-minute short film of all-time. Hugely important, and for what it’s worth, almost a century on, Buñuel and Dali’s descent into madness ironically represents as a shining beacon in a dark cinematic path only traversed by the bold.



RATING: A

Cast: Nicholas Cage, Rose Byrne

Director: Alex Proyas

Screenplay: Ryne Douglas Pearson

Running time: 2 hrs 1 min

Genre: Action/Thriller



CRITIQUE:


Another year, another attempt to destroy the world. M. Night Shyamalan has failed with The Happening. It turned out that we, humans, could not be fooled into thinking about plants exterminating mankind. I, Robot helmer Alex Proyas lands a directing gig to sabotage Earth, falling into a list of the many Hollywood directors in the likes of Bay and Emmerich (both of whom have careers that sprung out from cinematic destruction), and once again barely emits a magnitude that can shake grounds. Knowing has a chilling premise, and it works best as a paranoid thriller: little Goth girl scribbles ominous arithmetic into paper whilst the rest of the class doodles futuristic cartoons, and fifty years later, incoherent numbers turned out to be Nostradamus-esque codified omens that predicts global disasters. There are scenes that could render one speechless; the airplane crash over a motorway, the derailment of a subway train – but so far, so Final Destination. These sequences rely heavily on CGI that at times, the visual effects look like they come out straight from a video game.


Then because it doesn’t know how to settle in one genre, it literally leaps into that ill-advised space between sci-fi and religious horror flick, crossing from Spielberg to Donner and the Shyamalan territory, with Nicholas Cage harbouring a monotonous expression all throughout. This uninspired character is dismally lifted off from many other contemporary protagonists – an alcoholic single parent, non-believer, child issues, and in the end, finds redemption whilst the rest of the world turns to ashes to the tune of Beethoven’s Allegretto. Sounds like Mel Gibson from Signs. And if a doomsday solar flare was to take place, what was the use of a mumbo-jumbo numerology compared to scientists trying to accurately predict the sun’s activity? What have they been doing, sitting on a beach?


VERDICT:

Overwrought, derivative, awfully clichéd and clumsily plotted. Knowing doesn’t make us think – it makes us scratch out heads with disbelief.



RATING: C

Cast: Ray Romano, John Leguizamo, Queen Latifah

Director: Carlos Saldanha

Screenplay: Michael Berg

Running time: 1 hr 34 mins

Genre: Animation/Action/Adventure



CRITIQUE:


Forget accuracy, this is not National Geographic. The sight of Pleistocene mammals co-existing alongside dinosaurs is enough to make palaeontologists and historians faint. Also forget about geographical locations. An underworld Eden hidden beneath the frozen terra firma would make geologists smash their heads against a brick wall. This is a kids’ film, for Chrissake! So we have the prehistoric gang back again for a third outing, even though in the second film the ice has already melted. But to keep the tots happy and bouncing, we are treated to a barrage of a rollicking adventure from the mountainous icy slopes down to the dinosaur abyss-cum-paradise, the paternalistic Manny the mammoth, pregnant mammoth wife Ellie and grumpy sabretooth Diego off to save sloth parent-wannabe (actually child abductor) Sid from angry Mama Dinosaur who so wants her three eggs back. It’s all good fun, but when the dust settles – the realisation takes place that there isn’t really much packed in the plot: this is a rescue mission of animals with parental issues thrown in, sidestepping both of the predecessors’ ecological thrust and rather prefer to touch on parent-child affairs. 20th Century Fox thinks they can do a Pixar. That leaves us to wonder why they had to do sequels, when Pixar doesn’t even need one.


VERDICT:

Good-natured fun, if not juvenile. But this prehistoric excursion seems like a rehash of an already-done concept from its previous efforts. And that blasted squirrel should just really get his nut, and this franchise be done with. No more sequel, please.



RATING: B-

Cast: Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford

Director: Irvin Kirschner

Screenplay: Leigh Brackett

Running time: 2 hrs 7 mins

Genre: Sci-Fi/Action/Adventure



CRITIQUE:


Let’s admit, the Star Wars series is not exactly cerebral cinema. Of the science-fiction genre, it is built up on light entertainment with big, loud explosions in a post-Kubrickian intellectual prodding of 2001: A Space Odyssey. It is conceived in an era when Hollywood was moving towards another age, the blockbuster syndrome with the movie brats as the then-deities, when the reversal of counterculture was frenziedly needed, hijacking Saturday matinee concepts and slapped on silverscreens. Call it postmodernist pastiche. Star Wars is really the Arthurian opera in space, with lightsabers instead of swords. And it doesn’t need rocket-science intellect to be able to enjoy these films. Honestly, even Yoda speaks a lot of grammatically irreverent language and a load of twaddle. But for all its cynic comments, there is absolutely no denying that they are visually exhilarating, with astounding effects that broke many grounds, and we have George Lucas to thank for that. And there’s also no refuting that Empire Strikes Back is easily the best in the franchise.


Before your Alien and Terminator sequels, Star Wars had pretty much set the template that franchise sequels should be darker. Now an established sequel truism, if follow-ups turn out to be weightless and thematically fluffy, or just plain nosedive into bonkers territory, they flop. Ask the Wachowski brothers or Michael Bay, as they seem to specialise in shoddy sequel-making. However, this second-part of this undisputedly legendary space saga remains an icon in the halls of sequels. Empire Strikes Back tops its predecessor by a meatier, meaner, darker storyline whilst not ignoring the adventure aspects that made the first one a hit. This is where all backstories are laid out and the characters are given full rein to their interactions, the visual wizardry more astonishing and polished (see the opener’s Hoth’s battle sequence in an ice landscape). Irvin Kirschner, replacing Lucas in directing duties, is also able to polarise the action sequences with character moments, Luke’s apprenticeship with Yoda in Dagobah, and the final revelatory sparring of Darth Vader and Luke in a visually rich tone, moody, menacing and dramatic. There are probably five people left in the world who doesn’t know about the revelation, but Vader’s declaration of his paternalism is still one of cinema’s most memorable moments.


VERDICT:

A massive step-up from its predecessor and arguably more sophisticated. Although still ridden with clunky dialogues, Empire Strikes Back is remarkable for setting the yardstick for the now-clichéd “dark sequel”. This is technically groundbreaking stuff, with characters that has deeply imbedded the pop culture.



RATING: A-

Cast: Gene Kelly, Debbie Reynolds

Director: Stanley Donen, Gene Kelly

Screenplay: Adolph Green

Running time: 1 hr 31 mins

Genre: Musical



CRITIQUE:


Ask any pundit to handpick three of the best musicals ever made in moviemaking history, and you’ll likely get The Sound of Music, West Side Story and Singin’ in the Rain pigeonholed at the top (or in your grandmother’s opinion, Mary Poppins and My Fair Lady might just straddle the list). There is no denying that the musical sequence of the tap-dancing, pole-twirling, puddle-jumping Gene Kelly under the rain in a glorious feeling has greatness written, or in this case splashed, all over it. This is perhaps the single most exuberant musical sequence in film form that could challenge the energy content of a Duracell bunny. Whilst exquisitely performed by the sheer talent of Kelly, an innocuous performance that could break any cynic, we should all realise that this sequence is actually a MacGuffin – and this film is not really about a man singing in the rain but about a stuntman-turned-screen-actor of the silent era and a satire about the preposterousness of showmaking during Hollywood’s shift to sound. In its aim to satirise studio industries, it is an accomplished work with several genuinely hilarious sequences, especially Jean Hagen’s banshee-voiced diva Lina Lamont who is just so good in a comedic role she’d fill an entire film of her own. There is a moment when the studio boss declares the new tagline of an upcoming talkie, she pipes back “Well, of course we talk!”


Comedy aside, this is a reminder to its audience that this was made during an era when Hollywood was infatuated with musicals, spearheaded by MGM, and that everything can be extremely vivacious without a single harrumph from its viewers, all for the sake of entertainment. However, the music teeters from the inventive, fanciful, mediocre to just plain jarring with songs feeling forced and contrived as with “Moses Supposes”. There is even a sequence that seemed like a burst of the Smarties factory, ending up resembling like a running-time filler rather than adding up to the general plotline.


VERDICT:

Whilst disarmingly vibrant and occasionally amusing, this is overrated. One standout sequence that has achieved classic status doesn’t make an entire film, and Singin’ in the Rain is undeniably joyous, but its musical histrionics sporadically feels forced and contrived instead of natural.



RATING: B+

Cast: Daniel Radcliffe, Michael Gambon, Emma Watson, Rupert Grint

Director: David Yates

Screenplay: Steve Kloves

Running time: 2 hrs 31 mins

Genre: Fantasy/Drama



CRITIQUE:


You have to hand it to the Harry Potter franchise. Currently sitting at the throne as the most bankable series of all-time, bigger than what Star Wars or Bonds can bang their bucks, it preserves its workmanship level and promises to deliver with each cinematic outing. Ever since Alfonso Cúaron stepped up to helm the brilliant Azkaban, things have changed for this saga; a relegated promise to steer this fantasy tale into darker territories. In fact, the promise is mostly driven by the cliché that sequels should be darker and darker – that by the time we get to Part 7, it will all be shades of black and we wouldn’t see anything anymore on the screen.


Which leads us to Half-Blood Prince. If there’s one thing director David Yates and screenwriter Steve Kloves learned for this one, it’s the knowing that books (especially as thick as Harry Potter doorstoppers) can never be made into fully-fledged films. Cinema works differently than literature. You wouldn’t want to see prose on your screen or being told a hefty amount of exposition. The collaboration adroitly took liberties to dispense Rowling’s descriptions down the drain and craft a sinuous storyline that veers between light and dark, humour and foreboding, romance and tragedy, all without sacrificing balance. The result is deliberately measured, unhurried and well-paced compared to the jaggedness of its predecessor. This one does not scuttle just to get to the climax.


From the very start of this chapter, the film opens right after the furore in the Order of the Phoenix, with Harry and Dumbledore slowly moving through the photographic flashes of a press junket. Amidst the crowd, Harry is in solitude. Dumbledore puts his arm around the adolescent wizard like some patriarchal protection, and this sets the scene for this chapter. The relationship between mentor and student become more complex; more in the lines between commander and soldier, wizard and apprentice. This is really Harry and Dumbledore’s film as they uncover Voldemort’s deepest secrets, through a series of revisiting memories courtesy of the Pensive. And it is between the excellent Gambon and Radcliffe that both nail gravitas in their scenes together. Prince establishes this partnership earlier on, right before a stunningly staged Millennium Bridge attack, that when we get to the dazzling cave scene and a finale at the Astronomy Tower – the tragic momentum is felt with emotional force.


Yet there is also a bludgeoning romance to be dealt with, with hormones rampaging providing the film’s lightness. Grint’s Ron has become the centre of so much unfortunate potion episodes and a bothersome Lavender Brown. Whilst occasionally comic, it also finds subtlety in Watson’s beautifully portrayed Hermione, whose yearning for her bestfriend makes for the pangs of adolescent love in this series. That staircase scene is poignant and observed with tactful grace, providing only a few lines that say an awful lot about the characters involved. Even Ginny and Harry’s developing romance is rendered with quiet, intimate moments.


This even manages to draw fine performances from its supporting players from a stellar British cast which one couldn’t really complain about: Rickman, a hissy fit as ever, as Snape drawling with sinister one-liners like death sentences; Bonham-Carter’s deranged witch Bellatrix; but the surprising turns come from Broadbent’s fame-hoarding Professor Slughorn, this episode’s new Potions Master butting out Snape, providing both gentility and remorsefulness beneath the flabby layers of pretence, and Felton’s sneering Malfoy, who saves this character from being a two-dimensional bully and gives him human depth, a pawn pushed by bigger forces, who fears the failure of an assassination.


Longevity aside, the leanness of the script is executed with Amelie and A Very Long Engagement lenser Bruno Delbonnel’s stunning cinematography, with muted colours, sepia-toned scenes for warmth, and washed-out for ominous sequences. Watch the Burrow attack with a dynamic camera running through a field, the terrifying cave scene with the cursed Inferis, Dumbledore pulling off a Moses-parting-the-Red-Sea stunt with flames, and Bellatrix's gleeful, sadistic demolition of the Hogwarts’ Great Hall – three truly standout action sequences with visual vigour. By the time the death of a major character and a moving tribute happen, we all realise the immediacy of the unfolding war, and we step back and look at the bigger picture – this is a film where nothing seems to happen (as Radcliffe’s Harry opines that the pursuit of Horcruxes has all been “a waste”), little do they know that the lines had been drawn in this story, and every single character's choice has a momentous impact of a bigger battle to come, that is in Deathly Hallows, chopped into two parts.


VERDICT:

Call this the film noir of the Potter franchise – perhaps the most human, most character-driven of them all. There is an emotional complexity and a quite dignified power to this technically penultimate outing, largely coming from Yates' beautifully restrained direction. In the tentpole of summer blockbusters, Prince is guaranteed to triumph the crown because things like character motivations, robust storytelling and a heart are nowhere to be found in Michael Bay robots or McG’s machines.



RATING: A-

Cast: Ruth Gordon, Bud Cort

Director: Hal Ashby

Screenplay: Colin Higgins

Running time: 1 hr 31 mins

Genre: Comedy/Drama



CRITIQUE:


Just how creditable a film could be when a) it’s been gushingly praised by Cameron Diaz in There’s Something About Mary as “the greatest love story of our time”, b) indefatigably referenced in the Wes Anderson canon and c) had its soundtrack hijacked by Ricky Gervais for his sitcom Extras? The impacts are wide-ranging, but perhaps nobody expected such waves of influence back in 1971 when Harold and Maude was strictly a film about a peculiar relationship between a suicidal twenty-year-old male and a happy-go-lucky seventy-nine-year-old female, a striking, if not shocking, pair that – in the movie’s disgruntled Reverend – makes one “vomit”. Sure, Hollywood had seen a horny Bonnie and an impotent Clyde in a lunchtime tryst, fresh graduate Benjamin Braddock sexing bored, rich, suburban wife Mrs Robinson – but never had a scene so deliberately manifested onscreen a boy blowing bubbles into the camera with an elderly spinster on his side, both naked on a bed in a post-coital bliss. Irreverent as the central premise may be, it fittingly embodied the counter-culture of the pre-Godfather Hollywood era, liberalising taboo subject matters, unleashing exploitation materials in this period of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. Where Bonnie and Clyde and Easy Riders legitimised violence and spitting against authority, Harold and Maude along with its chum The Graduate portrayed youth alienation and mockery against the expectations of society. Only that the former sticks two bigger fingers to the triviality of relationships.


But sex isn’t really the major linking factor between two lovelorn individuals. It’s more sophisticated than that. For a material that could easily swerve into disastrous territory, the script possesses a surprising knowing and poignancy that it actually cares for the development of its two major leads. Bud Cort’s Harold harbours a deep existential angst physicalized through his faked suicide attempts, a desperate plea for his flamboyant couture-dressed mother, whilst Ruth Gordon’s Maude is half girlish, half veteran and a total force of nature, living every day without limits – both personifies the opposite ends of character hues yet sharing a subtle understanding of death, as the pair’s meeting happens in funerals, of all places. The dark, demented humour (Cat Stevens’ Tea for the Tillerman plays in a graveyard scene) is wonderfully tailored into its storytelling fabric without being off-putting, and scenes of quirky charm and light-hearted moments pull this one from slimy sentimentalism. If you doubt this film’s directing skill, see the finale which ingeniously employs cross-cutting between two temporal events and closing with an offbeat yet delightful coda, Harold walking away playing his banjo. There couldn’t possibly be a more perfect ending. And perhaps Diaz might just be right.


VERDICT:

A pitch-perfect little gem that, even three decades from its release, remains refreshing for its portrayal of youth alienation, loneliness and defiance against expectations of society. Harold and Maude brims with dark humour, wit, perceptiveness and poignancy. A winning, life-affirming comedy that certainly knows no age.



RATING: A+

Cast: Johnny Depp, Christian Bale, Marion Cotillard

Director: Michael Mann

Screenplay: Michael Mann, Ronan Bennett

Running time: 2 hrs 19 mins

Genre: Gangster/Crime/Drama



CRITIQUE:


Social scallywags of the Great Depression era in America were like rock stars, irreverent individuals who defy the morals of society by a hedonistic, no-holds-barred overload of violence, yet despite of such dissident behaviour they become national idols, icons who dared to stick out not only two fingers but also Tommy guns against authority. Cinema, specially, loves rebels. What is cinema without the pantheon of fallen gods, without the figures of Bonnie and Clyde, Butch and Sundance, Travis Bickle and Don Corleone?


Michael Mann’s latest outlaw/gangster picture seems intent to put John Dillinger, Depression era’s ultimate crook in a Jesse James status, up there with the cinematic lineup of malcontents. Public Enemies is dark, brooding, intensely furrow-browed that shuns any live-fast-and-die-young whimsy or any raindrops-keep-falling-on-my-head muck-about, and rather seriously plunges us straight into a very damned tale of Dillinger’s uninhibited existence. For all its ominous worth, this gangster flick flirts with greatness; a riveting cat-and-mouse chase of two formidable forces, Christian Bale’s no-bullshit agent Melvin Purvis and Johnny Depp’s grim-faced John Dillinger, set in birth of J Edgar Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Investigation, a fascinating period of America’s lawmaking history.


Nevertheless, there’s one thing this film cannot escape – overfamiliarity. Two polar opposites, two ferociously talented actors of their generation, stalled in gut-churning shoot-outs, one cannot help to feel Mann’s Heat over again, with De Niro and Pacino battling it out. Even Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight shares the similarities: Purvis as the Crusading Night, Dillinger as the extremist, sharing the Joker’s force of nature. Pitted between these glowerers is the cloak-girl Billie Frechette (a wonderful Marion Cotillard), Dillinger’s moll, who puts a human face and a human heart to this gloomy tragedy, the beating pulse that could swerve Dillinger’s fate from downfall.


Gripes in the storytelling aside, as it bogs down in many places inbetween, this is a visceral, skilfully shot picture with Mann employing high-definition, ultra-pin-sharp precision in the camerawork of Dante Spinotti. The jerky frames spits at the flourishes of many ostentatiously choreographed gangster/crime movies and rather punches a gritty realism, as though Lars von Trier with his Dogme 95 decided to shoot a gangster flick. There is a documentary feel to this, bringing immediacy, an astonishing closeness to the period of 1930s, and the details of trilby, cars, costumes and glitzy rooms never feel mounted but natural to the environs.


VERDICT:

Hampered by its indecision whether it wanted to be an outlaw movie, a prison-break thriller, a courtroom drama, a law force critique, or a rise-and-fall gangster flick, Public Enemies might just be worth your dosh for being many pictures at once in this financial climate. Although technically accomplished with a searing cinematography, it has a serious lack of narrative momentum.



RATING: B+

Cast: Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline, Peter MacNicol

Director: Alan Pakula

Screenplay: William Styron

Running time: 2 hrs 30 mins

Genre: Drama



CRITIQUE:


Meryl Streep’s name has now penetrated the pop colloquialism as the epitome of just about anything e.g. Rolls Royce for cars, Häagen-Dazs for ice cream. That sums up pretty much for an actress nominated for fifteen times, showcasing probably Earth’s most impressive acting CV, whose performances boast a more comprehensive array of shades than a Dulux paint colour chart – she’s entirely a league of her own. In her first and only Oscar for Best Actress (she won Best Supporting Actress for Kramer vs. Kramer), Streep is genuinely exceptional in the shoes of the tormented Polish immigrant Sophie Zawistowski, a complex, morally distraught woman who survived the Auschwitz nightmare and lived another day in 1940s Brooklyn with a mentally-challenged lover. It is a diamond of a performance, hard-cut, sparkling yet one that could withstand the test of time and will break your hearts. She spends almost half of the movie with red-rimmed eyes and recollecting excruciating memories, but that she does not make it descend to mawkishness. Her Sophie is a guilt-ridden human being who does not beg for audience sympathy, and the film, instead of providing a straightforward narrative, unravels her past in flashback fashion, peeling character layers upto the very last revelation of the titular ‘choice’ she made.


Sophie’s Choice is temptingly vague for its social and political mores, but it’s all better for that. It’s a Holocaust film, but unlike archetypal Holocaust films like Spielberg’s Schindler’s List or Lanzmann’s Shoah, it doesn’t centre on either the Jews or the Nazis and rather binds the point-of-view from a Polish. It actually follows a two-hander narrative strand, Peter MacNicol’s Stingo, a Southern writer who becomes a witness to the turbulent affair of Sophie and her feverish, dysfunctional lover (a brilliant Kevin Kline), and then Sophie’s. The latter’s flashback, although undeniably harrowing, appears conventional and even distracting at some points but they are excellently staged with washed-out, sepia cinematography with a grief-stricken, pallid and frail-looking Streep braving the horror of a concentration camp. The relationship between the trio reminds us of a ménage-a-trois in Jules et Jim brio. But all in all, this is Streep’s show. It is her emotionally contorted face when she sees her child being wrenched away from her that painfully wrenches us. It is also her face at the final fading scenes that reminds us about human fallibility, and that the Holocaust wasn’t only about the Jews or the Nazis but also about people who make the cruellest of choices in the most cruel of times.


VERDICT:

At first, this seems like a Jules et Jim ménage-à-trois caper in what appears to be a Holocaust film, a tad uneven at middle-point but ultimately heart-wrenching. Sophie’s Choice makes for a hard, cruel viewing – but once watched, its moral and emotional complexity will haunt you. Streep delivers a fine-cut, exceptionally observed performance.

Hold your (dark) horses, this is not an advanced rating for the Oscars. The awards hoopla is not until eons away. The race, however, has just been made bigger. The Academy Of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences has unveiled that the traditional Big Five Best Picture nominees will be upped to a hefty ten. Isn't the usual show excruciatingly long enough already? We need some more pillows, people! So, by next year, we can expect counting down like we all do with Ten Little Indians, but with those shiny, naked, bald-headed golden statuettes for bashing. 

Cast: Winona Ryder, Christian Slater

Director: Michale Lehmann

Screenplay: Daniel Waters

Running time: 1 hr 59 mins

Genre: Comedy/Drama



CRITIQUE:


Late 1980s, the American high school genre was reigned supreme by John Hughes and every teenage film either starred Matthew Broderick or Molly Ringwald, and the teen archetypes were set in iron-cast mould: the cheerleader, the geek, the jock, the rebel and so on. See The Breakfast Club or Pretty in Pink if you’re quite dubious. Barely anything broke the trend. Kudos, then, for Heathers for primarily having the balls to smash the conventions. In a time when teenagers were pigeonholed to the various strata of social hierarchy in high school, Heathers turned the entire sweet and sugary genre around on its head and crafted a lean, mean satire that viciously whips school-ass with biting dialogue and surreal sequences. In Westerburg High School, reality is heightened; even the opening sequence nails this, three ultra-privileged girlie clique (read: queen bitches) dressed up in day-glo blazers, playing croquet with Winona Ryder’s head as the goal. It is also quite notable for completely redressing the stereotyping of the nerdy, social-outcast girl, as Ryder’s Veronica is easily the lowest rung in the ladder of the queen command but definitely a rebel-with-a-cause, despising her social clique with ferocious intelligence, sharp wit, a diary and a monocle. Even Christian Slater’s JD is certainly less a jock figure than a James Dean malcontent, pulling off a character arc of literally blowing up an entire school just because no one loves him. The characters shine here, but sadly many other sequences don’t live up to expectations. The hyper-violent Bonnie and Clyde undertones are present, dismantling the neat and tidy morals of high school life (which this film had apparently faced an appalling reaction by the public) – and it’s rather a jagged, grim affair. The suicide theme was just pushing the boundary and the murder scenes truly disturbing, except for Veronica’s faked suicide (genius!). One could wonder where Mean Girls, Clueless and Juno would be without Heathers.


VERDICT:

Heathers is at its best when satirising the now-stereotyped high school hierarchy, most vicious with its cynical and biting dialogues, but weakest when it’s trying to put a message forward. Still, a devilish watch.



RATING: B