Film: January Round-up

Here's a little round-up of all the new films I saw this January, with links to the full review over at 100 Films.

The Simpsons Movie
"it made me laugh, and often; at least as much as any other recent comedy, if not more so. That makes it a success in my book."

Dark City
"probably the most underrated film I've ever seen. It is, to my mind, absolutely brilliant."

Easy Riders, Raging Bulls
"short on great insight, but does provide an overview of what went on in this period -- that is, the story of how Hollywood made the transition from the old studio system to the era of the blockbuster"

Churchill: The Hollywood Years
"most of the best bits are of sketch length, and so wind up spread out among the padding."

The Mirror Crack'd
"the direction is flat and lacks suspense, half the cast phone in their performances, and Angela Lansbury, lumbered with a sprained ankle and premature aging, seems to be in a dry run for Murder, She Wrote."

Keep an eye on the regular 100 Films in a Year blog for full length reviews of all the films that are new to me as I see them.

TV: The People Watchers - Episode 4

BBC Two's new daytime pop-psychology series sees a group of psychologists use hidden camera experiments to demonstrate human behaviour, in the process explaining why we do the things we do, what tricks are sometimes used to influence us, and how or why we should avoid them. It's a little bit of Derren Brown mixed with The Real Hustle mixed with Dragons' Den mixed with Trigger Happy TV (or any other hidden camera show you care to mention). Sometimes it works and there's something to be learnt, other times it seems to be an excuse to pull off hidden camera stunts -- not necessarily a bad thing, but not quite what was advertised. At its worst, however, it's utterly misleading -- some of the experiments are very obviously being rigged.

Today's fourth episode saw two of the worst examples of this. In one, they asked mothers to predict if their child was lying (all of them were), to see if mums could really tell when they were being lied to. Their extensive survey covered three mothers, two of whom guessed correctly. Apparently this showed an "almost even split" between mothers who could tell and mothers who couldn't. Except you could equally (and almost more accurately) say that these results prove that twice as many mums can tell their child is lying as cannot -- a very different implication. Occasionally the show admits that its test samples are too small to really demonstrate the point, but in this case it was just glossed over.

But far worse was to come. In an experiment to demonstrate reverse psychology (or something along those lines), one of the team held two seminars on healthy eating. With the first group -- the Nice group -- he behaved in a friendly manner, and took an "everything in moderation" approach to what they should eat. With the second group -- the Naughty group -- he was sterner, more patronising, and took a "bad foods should never be eaten" approach. To see the effect on their behaviour, when the group members left the seminar they were confronted around the corner by two other team members giving away free food, apparently as part of some marketing thing. Would one group be more tempted than the other? Allegedly, yes -- the Nice group all resisted temptation with ease, while two of the Naughty group actively took something and the other member seriously considered it.

All well and good. Well, no. Because as the members of the Nice group passed by the two team members with the food simply stood around and let them go, but when it came to the Naughty group they actively sought them out and offered them something! It doesn't take a genius to tell that this completely skews the results of the experiment. I wouldn't be surprised if this kind of result is supported by more extensive properly conducted research, but when the demonstration we're shown is so blatantly flawed it does rather undermine the point.

It's a bit of a shame, as a populist show about human psychology presented in a broadly entertaining way is no bad idea, it could just do with a little more integrity in its execution.

TV: Wonderland - Virtual Adultery and Cyberspace Love

What if your partner spent anything up to 16 hours a day living in a virtual reality world on the Internet, spending all her time with someone from the other side of the world, and neglecting you, your kids, and all other duties in the process? That's one of the fundamental questions behind this documentary in the BBC's new Wonderland series, which is apparently something to do with the weirdnesses of modern life but seems more like an excuse to lump together a collection of unrelated documentaries under a heading that isn't Horizon.

Anyway, this particular episode is about Second Life, which most people have heard of by now; more specifically, it's about relationships in Second Life. Far from being the vitriolic criticism of such things that you may have expected from the programme's blurb -- or, indeed, it's first ten minutes -- it winds up showing a fairly balanced portrait of the effects of such things. Yes, there's the American couple whose life is being destroyed by the wife's obsession with the game and relationship on it with a British man, but there's also the pair from Nuneaton who are now happily married and expecting a child, after having met on Second Life.

This latter couple are the Positive Side: the game allowed the woman to escape an oppressive relationship, the man left his former partner as soon as he realised what he had in the game was actually something serious. They may be a subplot beside the Negative Side of the main 'love triangle', but the unreserved success of their pairing goes a long way to combat any accusation of bias. As for that American-Brit thing, after ruining their lives for 10 months the American finally meets the Brit, they don't get on as well, and that's that. She returns to America intending to give her marriage another go. It's not as happy an ending, but considering how poorly she's been treating her husband for nearly a year it's hard to feel any sympathy for her.

It's a wonder he stuck by her for so long -- and, in this case, there's the answer to the question. In a modern age where divorce can be all too easy, it's almost miraculous to see a partner prepared to stick by their spouse for so long and through so much. Whether she deserves such care is another matter.

TV: My Fake Baby

Channel 4's recent documentary about Reborns, a product that's not widely known about (until now, anyway) but which has a surprisingly large and dedicated community around it. Reborns are essentially dolls that look and feel (when done well) exactly like a young baby. Don't go calling them "dolls" or "fake babies" to those who make and enjoy them, though, as they don't take especially kindly to it.

It's a tricky area to cover. It would be all too easy for the filmmakers to paint the women who buy these reborns as mad or weird, but instead they take a more hands-off approach, showing them in a balanced and sensitive way and allowing us to draw our own conclusions. The film takes a fairly broad view of why people choose to get these reborns too, from a woman who has several that she likes to dress and take out, to another who wants a replacement (for want of a better word) for her grandson who now lives in New Zealand, via a woman who makes them and another who has a collection of dozens. There's also their partners, who invariably take a fairly dim view of such things.

The film doesn't go into much detail on the wider scope of the reborn community -- there are dozens of people who make them, mostly selling on eBay as either pre-made or made to order; there's even a guild of reborn creators. But rather than tackle the intricacies of this the film focuses on the more interesting human aspect -- what leads these women to want a reborn, and what is the pleasure they derive from it? Despite C4's usual shock-doc titling, it's an appropriately made look at an interesting emerging phenomenon.

TV: Louis Theroux Behind Bars

Louis Theroux visits the infamous San Quentin prison, in this documentary shown about two weeks ago on BBC Two. It's a hard place, full to bursting with something like 3000 murderers, rapists, paedophiles, other serious criminals, and plenty of relatively minor ones too. The segregate themselves into gangs, often along race lines; many are in 23-hours-a-day total confinement; attacks on other inmates and guards seem to be rife... and yet there is a bizarrely genial, almost co-conspiratorial, relationship between the wardens and inmates.

I've never watched a Theroux documentary before, despite some of the interesting topics he's covered -- at first I just thought he was into pointlessly weird things, so ignored him, and then even as the areas he was investigating become more interesting the scheduling was quite poor (i.e. it clashed with something better). His style is not hard-hitting or furiously investigative -- to be honest, who can blame him not wanting to push these men with hard questions? Instead he seems to have a series of pleasant conversations with a variety of prisoners and wardens, but in the process learns a lot about what it's like to live in San Quentin.

This isn't a technical exercise in how the prison works -- there are a few details about solitary confinement, the amount of yard time they get, how meals work, etc, but these are the bare minimum, almost window dressing, around the stories of the people. Nor does it really delve into the issues of why these people are here, if they deserve their punishments, and why it is so many of them come back within months, if not weeks. Instead Theroux is more interested in 'prison society' -- how the gangs function, how new inmates survive, what happens to those who drop out of gangs, how relationships can flourish and how they're treated. Through his gentle probing, a surprising amount of information is revealed.

Yet there's always a sense that he hasn't quite got to the heart of things. When gang members and guards appear to speak candidly about the inter-inmate violence, the racism-that-isn't-(honest) between gangs, or various other potentially shocking facts of prison life, there's a feeling that there's something more, just beyond that -- something that they won't, or can't, talk about. I'd wager no documentarian could get at the stuff. Theroux succeeds in getting closer than most.