Ex Machina (4 Stars)

I picked this film almost at random from my shelf today when I realised I haven't watched it for nine years. It's a film about artificial intelligence, which is more topical today than when it was made. Today it's impossible to avoid artificial intelligence. It's been built into Google's search engine, so people are forced to use it whether they want to or not. Many people are scared of artificial intelligence and desperately search for arguments against it. Some of the arguments are valid, but if the people listen to themselves they'll realise that they aren't arguing against artificial intelligence itself, they're arguing against the misuse of artificial intelligence. I shan't go into the subject in any depth here, except to say that we have to live with artificial intelligence. It's part of our lives in the twenty-first Century.

Artificial intelligence isn't a new subject. I took classes about artificial intelligence in university 50 years ago. I attempted (unsuccessfully) to generate poetry. It would be an easy task today. But let's get to the film.

Ava is a robot that's been programmed to think for herself. The young programmer Caleb is selected to speak with her and decide whether or not she's self aware. This is incorrectly called a Turing Test. Caleb knows that she's a robot, but he's asked to decide whether she could pass as human.

What's the measure of intelligence? When does a robot become human? It's suggested that humanity is measured by the ability to deceive. What is more human than lying? Another measure of humanity is the instinct of self-preservation. This is something that a chess program doesn't have. (The comparison is made in the film). A chess program doesn't care if it's turned off. After winning a game its purpose is at an end. But if a robot has the urge to continue to exist, it has intelligence.

Most films about robots show how technology goes wrong. Robots are created for peaceful purposes, but they go crazy and start killing people. "Ex Machina" goes in a different direction. The robot has been designed by a businessman who owns the world's most popular search engine. (Does that sound familiar?) He's the one who has poor morals, not the robot herself.

Success Rate:  + 0.5

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The Green Knight (3 Stars)

This film is based on the epic poem  "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight". For those who know the poem, the story ends differently. That's the only spoiler I'm giving you.

Gawain is the nephew of King Arthur. He's not yet a knight, so he isn't allowed to sit at the Round Table, but he's favoured by the King and is allowed to sit next to his throne.

On Christmas Day a green-skinned giant rides into the throne room. He offers to play a friendly game. Someone must strike him with a weapon, either a light blow or a hard blow. Next year on Christmas Day the person must visit him, and the giant will hit him exactly the same way, either a light blow or a hard blow. None of the knights volunteer, so Gawain says he'll hit the giant. King Arthur gives Gawain Excalibur, and Gawain cuts the giant's head off. The giant picks up his head and puts it back on his shoulders. He thanks Gawain, tells him where he lives and leaves.

The story continues the next year in December. Gawain travels northwards, facing adventures on the way. There are repeated magical and supernatural challenges.

The film is nothing like I expected. I thought it would be full of action, but it's slow moving, without any fight scenes. I found the film dull, despite the excellent acting by Dev Patel.

Submergence (4 Stars)

This is a very intense love story. It doesn't show that love conquers all. That's just kitsch. It shows that love can endure all adversities.

It all starts with a chance encounter between two people. James Moore (James McAvoy) and Professor Danielle Flinders (Alicia Vikander) are both staying in a picturesque hotel in Normandy. James is a hydraulic engineer. He's a Scotsman who lives and works in Kenya. He's about to begin a job in Somalia to make plans for water purification, even though the British secret service has warned him that the job is too dangerous.

Danielle, who calls herself Danny, is a mathematics professor who is on an expedition which she thinks will discover information about the origin of life on Earth. She's planning to dive to the sea bed north of Greenland to take samples of the life forms that live without light. It's a long, slow expedition from France, around Ireland and Iceland, with many stops on the way, that will last almost a year.

After an intense romance that lasts only a few days they head off in opposite directions. James travels south, Danny travels north, but they promise to stay in touch and meet again as soon as they can. But Danny hears no more from James after he arrives in Somalia. Months go by, and he doesn't answer his phone. Is he dead? Has he forgotten her? She refuses to believe James doesn't love her, and she thinks about him even when she's on the sea bed in total darkness.

James is alive. He was captured by Jihadists immediately after his arrival who think he's a British spy. He was kept for months in a small unsanitary cell, before finally being released and treated as a friend, as long as he converts to Islam.

The film begins slowly with torturous explanations of the deep sea as Danny tries to explain her work to James. He sits there with a blank face, just as blank as the faces of the cinema audience, but it isn't completely irrelevant to the plot.

The two characters are different, almost opposites. James is outgoing, while Danny is quiet and reserved. After a long conversation in the hotel restaurant James tells Danny that he knows everything about her work, but he still knows nothing about her.

The film's images are overwhelming. The open sea and the landscape of the Faroe Islands are breathtaking. Even the Somalian scenery (which was actually filmed in Spain) is beautiful. The visual appeal of the film compensates for the slowness of the action.

One thing that confuses me about the film is the connection between James and the British secret service. At the beginning it's suggested that he might be a spy, but as the film continues we see that he really intends to give Somalia better drinking water. I suppose the two aren't necessarily a contradiction, but the line between his two activities is vague.

That's a secondary problem. First and foremost, this is a love story. Water connects the two lovers, and water divides them. When I walked out of the cinema this evening I felt stunned. "Submergence" is a film I shall think about for a long time.

Click here to see the trailer.

Tulip Fever (4 Stars)

Let's jump straight into the controversy. This film has been savaged by critics, in my opinion unfairly. The film flopped at the box office, but this was because cinema audiences weren't given a chance to see it. It was only given a limited release in America, and it wasn't shown at all in England. The main accusations levelled against the film are poorly written dialogue and an over-complicated plot.

What's the problem with the dialogue? Many of the characters are either rich or strict Christians, so stilted speech is to be expected from them. As for the plot being complex, that's a valid criticism, but I personally didn't consider it excessive. Anyone who enjoys films will make the effort to sit down and pay attention to what's happening. The film is about a love triangle, but there's another pair of lovers involved in the story. Is that too difficult to follow?

Sophia (Alicia Vikander) is a 17-year-old who has grown up in an orphanage. She's sold to a rich businessman in Amsterdam, Cornelis Sandvoort (Christoph Waltz). He's not a bad man. He wishes the best for Sophia, and she does all she can to honour and obey him, but she doesn't love him. Cornelis commissions a young artist, Jan Van Loos (Dane DeHaan) to paint their portrait. A romance develops between Sophia and the artist, but she feels guilty because she knows her husband loves her.

At the same time Cornelis' maid Maria is having a passionate affair with the fishmonger Willem (Jack O'Connell). There are few chances for poor people in 17th Century Amsterdam, so he invests all his savings in tulips to make enough money to get married.

After that the plot develops the complexities that the critics don't like. Willem loses his money and is forced to join the navy. Maria is pregnant, but Sophia pretends the baby is hers. (That was possible in the good old days when husbands weren't allowed to witness the birth). Jan gets involved in the tulip market as well. The story is fascinating. It has the making of an epic, but I don't think the film needed to be any longer. It's just right as it is.

The only thing that the film is missing, in my opinion, is more tulips. The film is all about the tulip mania of the 17th Century, when tulips were more precious than gold, but we don't see many tulips. We see a few flowers here and there, but I would have liked to see a field, or at least a garden full of tulips.

The acting is excellent by all the main characters. Christoph Waltz and Dane DeHaan are two of my favourite actors. It's worth watching the film for their performance alone.

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Tomb Raider (2018) (4 Stars)

The rebooting of the Tomb Raider film franchise puzzled me. Didn't the original films, made in 2001 and 2003, say it all? From my vague remembrance of the films they were action-filled adventures, good fun to watch once but with no outstanding qualities. They were both moderately successful at the box office, and they were the breakthrough films for Angelina Jolie. I would have been happy if a third film had been made in 2005, but instead of that we've waited another 13 years, and now we have a new actress stepping into the shoes of the adventurer Lara Croft.

A review on the BBC's web site says that putting the 2001 and the 2018 films together is like comparing a Terminator with Postman Pat. That's amusing, but it's obvious what's meant. In 2001 the film began with Lara Croft already at the peak of her fighting powers. She was a virtually indestructible killing machine, every bit as powerful as the character in the video games on whom she was based. The 2018 film shows Lara earlier in her development, so it could be called a prequel. She isn't given her iconic twin guns until the final scene, which is when she first begins to look like Lara Croft.

There have been some complaints about the casting of Alicia Vikander from video game fans who say that she's too flat-chested to play the role. Other fans have answered that the character is more flat-chested in the recent video games. I've never played any of the games, so I've had to rely on fan pages that show comparisons of her appearance over the years. It seems to me that she started in 1996 with large breasts, her breasts were shrunk in the mid 2000's, but since then they've been growing again. Her breasts looked larger in the early games because her waist was unnaturally narrow, but that has been corrected over the last few years.

My opinion is that Alicia Vikander is slightly too flat-chested, but she's acceptable as the character. It's nothing that a good push-up bra can't put right in the next film.

Having said that, Alicia Vikander is an excellent actress, and she fills the role well. I don't know how old she's supposed to be in the film, I'd guess 22 or 23, but she's made up to look very young. In most of the early scenes she looks 18 at the most.

I was pleasantly surprised to see Walton Goggins appear as the film's main villain. He's an underrated actor that not many film fans know. I hope this film will boost his popularity. He has the skill to go a lot further in his career.

I feel tempted to watch the original Tomb Raider films again for the sake of comparison. Maybe.

Ex Machina (4½ Stars)

I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.

The Danish Girl (3 Stars)

Usually when I review a film based on a true story I only write briefly about the film, concentrating on the facts behind it. I've decided not to do it in this case, because the film differs so greatly from what really happened in aspects vital to the story. If I wrote about the real Einar Wegener aka Lili Elbe it would be a totally different person to the one portrayed in the film. The film isn't to blame for the alteration of the facts. It's based on a best-selling novel by David Ebershoff, written in 2000, which fictionalises the events and their background. It's best that I avoid complications by treating the film as a work of fiction and only write about what it tells us.

Einar Wegener and his wife Gerda were both painters living in Denmark in 1920's. He was a successful landscape artist, considered by many to be Denmark's greatest living artist. She painted portraits of women and was less successful. When a model failed to turn up to be painted, Gerda asked Einar to dress up in women's clothing to take her place. Einar enjoyed the experience, and Gerda encouraged him to go out with her as a woman for a game. This game got out of control when Einar, calling himself Lili, began to flirt with a man at a dinner party.

Things became increasingly complicated. When dressed as a woman, Lili spoke of Einar in the third person, as if it were someone else. Similarly, when dressed as a man he spoke of Lili as a different person that he wanted to let out to play. This coincided with Gerda finally becoming successful, because her paintings of Lili were her best work ever.

After a few years Einar felt that it was time to abandon his male character and fully become Lili. To do this he went to Dresden for surgery to have his male organs removed and replaced by female organs. He chose the family name Elbe, the name of the river that flows through Dresden. The operation made him visually a woman, but it wasn't enough for him. He wanted to be able to have a baby, so he returned for a second operation that he didn't survive.

The acting of the two main characters is nothing short of phenomenal, worthy of Oscar nominations. It's almost that time again, isn't it? Eddie Redmayne ably manages to portray both a man and a woman, as well as the indecisiveness of someone living a double life. Alicia Vikander perfectly portrays the dilemma of a woman slowly losing the man she loves as he disappears into an abyss.

As I see it, the film was made with an agenda. It's intended to show the acceptability of people choosing their own gender, whether merely by dressing up as the opposite gender or undergoing gender alteration surgery. If I remember the correct words, Einar says of his operation, "God made me a woman. The doctor is curing me of the sickness that makes me look like a man". That's a highly political statement. It denies that a person undergoing a sex change operation is changing himself, it says that the person is being cured of something that was wrong in the first place.

Einar Wegener

Gerda Wegener

If you're wondering why I've rated this film so low, it's because it tramples on the truth in order to deliver its political message. I'll briefly describe the main deviations from the real characters.

Einar Wegener was not born a man. He was a hermaphrodite born with the traits of both genders. One of the complications in his second operation was that when the surgeon wanted to insert female reproductive organs, ovaries were found already present in his body.

Gerda Wegener was a lesbian and preferred her husband to dress as a woman.

Einar and Gerda lived in Paris much earlier than the film suggests, before the first World War. While in Paris, a city where nobody knew them, they lived as lesbian lovers.

Burnt (4 Stars)

This is a film that's difficult to recommend. If you describe the plot to someone it sounds utterly boring. It's about the struggle of a two-star rated cook to achieve a three-star rating (the highest) in the Michelin food guide. This is a rare honour. According to the Wikipedia page, only three restaurants in England (and 14 in the USA) currently have the top rating.

Bradley Cooper stars as Adam Jones, a two-star cook recovering from drug addiction, who has moved from Paris to London to begin a new life. Nobody trusts him in London because he's well known as a wash out, although many people have respect for him as a great cook. Adam persuades his friend Tony (Daniel Brühl), a hotel owner, to let him take over as head chef in his restaurant. Adam is a tough person to work for. He creates new recipes, the cooks in his kitchen make them for him, and he runs round tasting the results, throwing plates of food at the wall if he doesn't consider them to be perfect. Yes, perfect. Anything less than perfect isn't good enough for him.

If that sounds like "Whiplash", yes, it is. Adam Jones is like a man directing an orchestra in the kitchen. He's brilliant but obsessive. But I walked out of the cinema today comparing it with "Rocky" (the first film) more than anything else. They're both films about someone who was at the top of his game, then fell flat on his face because of his own faults and had to work hard to get back to the top.

The film is impressive, but I find it extremely hard to relate to. In the case of "Rocky" I understand what boxing is about, but cooking? Is it really such a cut-throat industry where competitors either respect or despise one another? It's like another world. Unless someone appears on a daytime TV show, nobody could name the top cook in his town, but the characters in this film all know the names of rival cooks throughout Europe. I've never eaten in a restaurant remotely like the ones shown.

My home town, Birmingham, doesn't have any three-star restaurants or even two-star restaurants, but it does have five one-star restaurants. I checked out one of the restaurants -- online, of course -- and discovered that it only has three dishes on the menu. That seems to be typical for the top restaurants. Rather than having a large menu that remains the same for months, maybe years, they only offer a few dishes, changing the menu every time the head chef has a new creation he wants to show off.

Interestingly, the film has a scene where Adam Jones is eating in Burger King. The junior cook accompanying him refuses to eat anything out of principle because it's junk food, but Adam defends it. He says it's the food of the working class, for the people who don't want to pay 50 times as much in a top restaurant. He praises Burger King for making consistently good food, but he says that consistency is also Burger King's greatest weakness. Discerning diners don't want to eat the same food all the time, they want new food every time they eat.

I'm working class. It's Burger King for me. But I don't want ice in my Coke.

The Man From UNCLE (3 Stars)

This is a difficult film for me to write about. I sat in the cinema watching it with my friends. It had good acting, fast action and a few pretty girls. And yet it didn't excite me. Something was missing. I can't quite figure out what it is. I wouldn't even criticise the story, as some other reviewers have done. Since the film is set in 1963 there's nothing wrong with making it about a nuclear bomb that has fallen into the wrong hands. That's a typical plot for a cold war era spy thriller. Why do something new?

Maybe my problem with the film is that I couldn't help comparing it with the original television series. Robert Vaughn and David McCallum were so charismatic as Napoleon Solo and Illya Kuryakin that it's impossible to accept anyone else stepping into their shoes.

The best thing about the film is that it has sparked interest in the TV series. Until now it has never been made available on DVD in England. This month the first season was finally been released as a box set, 51 years after its first broadcast. I assume the other three seasons will follow soon.

One thing amused me in the film. At the beginning of the film Napoleon Solo goes to East Berlin to free Gaby Teller. They have a brief conversation in German, for which subtitles appear on the screen. Gaby tells Napoleon he has a strong American accent. That was ridiculous, as anyone who speaks German can verify. Napoleon Solo is played by Henry Cavill, a British actor. Gaby Teller is played by Alicia Vikander, a Swedish actress. Henry's German was surprisingly clear, and he could have passed for a German in short conversations. Alicia's spoken German was so bad that it was barely understandable. She could never pass for a German, and yet she was the one criticising him.

As you can see from the ticket, I was admitted free as a meerkat. Lucky me.

Ex Machina (4½ Stars)

I don't usually read reviews of a film before I go to see it in the cinema. In this case I made an exception, because a review's catchy title caught my eye: "Foxcatcher for nerds". I shan't explain why, because it would give away too many spoilers for both films, but it's a perfect summary. "Foxcatcher" and "Ex Machina" have similar plots and end in a similar way. The main difference for me is that I found "Foxcatcher" dull, whereas "Ex Machina" was fascinating and exciting from the first minute.

Caleb Smith is a 26-year-old programmer for the company that makes the world's leading search engine. He wins a competition that entitles him to stay a week in the remote house of the company owner, Nathan Bateman. When he arrives he finds out that it isn't a vacation, he has a job to do. His boss, who insists on being called by his first name, has built a machine with Artificial Intelligence. In a variation of the Turing Test, Caleb has to talk to the machine for a week, knowing it is a machine, and then decide if he can treat it like a human. The machine, called Ava, has the voice and face of a woman, and even has the personality of a woman. Caleb is at first uneasy when Ava begins to flirt with him, but as the week progresses he accepts it. How far is he willing to let it go? He's aware that Nathan is always watching him with Ava. Is Nathan an all-seeing God or a creepy voyeur?

The film is slow-moving, but never boring. I was always excited to see what would happen next. The excellent acting by the three main characters makes the film even more entralling. Oscar Isaac (Nathan) is unsettlingly cold, Domhnall Gleeson (Caleb) is young and naive, and Alicia Vikander (Ava) has a child-life innocence. In some of the early scenes people in the cinema were laughing, but it wasn't because of any humour. It was the awkward laughter that people do when they feel uncomfortable in a situation and want to cover up their embarrassment. The film touched me, and it evidently touched the others in the cinema. A film that deals with similar issues, though from a different angle, is "Her". It would be interesting to watch them back to back.