Review: Live Flesh (1997)

Victor Plaza (Liberto Rabal), a prostitute’s son born in a Madrid bus -- and on the very day in 1970 that Franco cracked down on personal liberties in Spain -- gets in serious trouble as a young man, goes to prison, and emerges while still in his twenties, eager to claim his personal freedom in a newly energized country. Franco is dead, and the reborn Victor -- the hero of Pedro Almodóvar’s Live Flesh -- has a galvanizing effect on everyone he meets. A lover with dark eyes and a small goatee, Victor is neither evil nor violent, but he’s an inexperienced, hungry young man, and things go out of control when he’s around (Rabal has rough edges that his predecessor in such roles, the handsomer, more skilled but more predictable Antonio Banderas, did not have). Live Flesh, the best movie from Almodóvar since that Iberian screwball classic Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, turns into a happy joke about passion as destiny, eros as the dominating force in life. Apart from eros, of course, there isn’t much life in Almodóvar -- the world of work and family hardly exists. But this Spanish bad-boy writer-director does the comedy of sexual passion better than anyone else. The entire history of Spanish repression and guilt seems to gather inside the heads of his men and women; they are naturally explosive in ways that Americans, with their lesser sense of sin, their hygienic attitude toward sex, could never be.



The story, which has been freely adapted from a Ruth Rendell novel, teases symmetry into an Almodóvarian pretzel. Eager to become the world’s greatest lover, Victor sleeps with the wives of the two Madrid policemen who put him in jail -- first Clara (the great Angela Molina, of the tragic mask), who is much adored by her murderously obsessive husband, Sancho (Pepe Sancho), who loves a woman by trying to dominate her and, if necessary, kill her. Clara cheats on her husband in order to survive him, in both body and soul. Taking Victor in hand, she teaches him some of the more essential points of lovemaking, and under Clara’s tutelage, he becomes a saner and gentler fellow -- a better man, in every sense. You might say he is healed by sex. Live Flesh, which begins and ends on Christmas, is about salvation; Almodóvar is eros’s last true worshiper.



Bored with Clara, Victor pursues the exquisite Elena (Francesca Neri), the woman who lured him into trouble some years earlier. It was at Elena’s house that the 20-year-old Victor accidentally shot Sancho’s partner, a promising young police detective named David (Javier Bardem). After the shooting, Elena, the daughter of the Italian consul, a rich girl dabbling in drugs, was so guilty over her own role in the affair that she married David, who had taken a bullet in the spine and was confined to a wheelchair. He’s a dynamite wheelchair basketball player and a thoroughly virile man in every sense but the literal one. So the adulterous joining of Victor and Elena is charged with the many varieties of desire, guilt, and ambivalence. It’s a scene worth waiting for -- certainly the most sensual of Almodóvar’s heterosexual love scenes.



Almodóvar’s electric, brightly colored hyperbolic style has always teetered on the edge of camp and pornography. When he’s going well, he achieves a delirious freedom of tone; when not so well, he horses his way into silliness. In Live Flesh, Almodóvar has stabilized his manner somewhat. The movie is not as startling and fantastic as Law of Desire or Matador, but it doesn’t settle into commonplace realism either. For Almodóvar, sexual passion is part of the cruel joke of Spanish guilt and fatalism. Sex is a matter of life and death that drives people into absurd situations; Almodóvar’s most tragic scenes slide into farce (and vice-versa). These men and women seem not to possess “psychology” but only desire; that’s all the psychology Almodóvar needs. It’s a view of character that dissolves social reality. Would an elegant woman like Elena, the daughter of a foreign diplomat, marry a young policeman? Would she leave him for a young nobody? In this movie, such questions are beside the point. Almodóvar embraces the Mediterranean, or celebratory, view of sex, familiar from Boccaccio’s stories, in which eros is a democracy of matching bodies and temperaments. Society, money, status all shrink to nothing. Despite his erotic fixations, Pedro Almodóvar is the cinema’s last true innocent.

Review: Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (1990)

Who hasn’t felt, when in the throes of passionate love, just a little unbalanced, maybe even not-so-slightly lunatic? And who hasn’t felt a little spiritually strangled, mentally manacled by the obsessive love of another? And which of us hasn’t done something dreadful from which we’ve spent significant psychic energy trying to escape in an aimless journey down the river of denial, perhaps eventually committing to a series of actions aimed at expatiating this perceived sin, all the while secretly convinced of a personal unworthiness of complete catharsis?

Hmmm… okay, maybe not. Still, hang with me for a while on this, okay?

I guess the reason that Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, Spanish director-farceur Pedro Almodovar’s dark sex farce, remains a constant source of delight throughout its 100 minutes, and in the years since its 1990 release is its consistently relevant, deliriously provocative and giddily perverse exploration of the off-kilter and cruel-to-be-kind world of obsessive love.

This movie’s focus is almost entirely on the disturbing relationship that develops between recently released mental patient Ricky (Antonio Banderas) and drug addict/one time porno star with “legit” thespian ambitions Marina (Victoria Abril). Indeed, a big part of the film’s appeal is the nature of Almodovar’s fearlessness; he tackles clichés, like those implicit in this Madonna-whore treatment of Marina, in order to turn them on their collective heads and force us to face our own comfortable preconceptions. Ricky, a slightly lunatic Lothario, has become obsessed with Marina, and decides that the best way to convince her to return his love is to kidnap her in her own home then tie her to her bed. “I’ll never love you, ever,” she quite plausibly asserts. “We’ll see,” retorts Ricky.

And man, do we ever. See, that is. The “evolution” of their relationship, which challenges the audience’s comfortable middle-class comfort zones with regard to love and sexuality, is as visually exciting as it is intellectually and emotionally brave. The film is explicit, not just in its sex scenes, but its emotional honesty, as we struggle to understand these fragile, remarkable characters caught in an extraordinary love story, whose bonds of love are the ties that bind. Central to this film’s success is not only Almodovar’s uncompromising adherence to this tightrope vision, where he treads delicately between moments of giddy farce and then challenges us with dark scenes that threaten emotional and intellectual revulsion, but also a pair of no-holds-barred bravura performances in the lead roles. The charismatic Banderas, whose Ricky is the definition of dangerous and alluring Latino sexuality, and the pouty and sensuous Abril, whose Marina is both alluring and dangerous, deliver performances that are almost unsettlingly unselfconscious.

Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! is a film that won’t sit easily with a lot of people whose comfortable lives are built around Hallmark-like assumptions about the “niceness” of love. But for the rest of us, the film offers a delightfully twisted romp through the darkness visible in the recesses of our libido.

Review: Bonnie & Clyde (1968)

Freed from the production code that drove most of the old Warner Brothers gangster films of the 1930s and 40s, Arthur Penn gave Bonnie and Clyde a new kind of thrilling glee. When Warren Beatty, as Clyde Barrow, utters his famous line, "We rob banks," it's like a badge of fun, as if he were boasting of bungee jumping. The presence of a young, worrying Gene Wilder, an Oscar-winning Estelle Parsons and Michael J. Pollard add to the lightness. But Penn has a few tricks up his sleeve, and carefully layers the movie with little time bombs, such as the subtle references to Clyde's impotence and his violent reactions to Bonnie's attempts at lovemaking, all the way up to the celebrated, and still devastating, final violence. Faye Dunaway plays Bonnie with as much sensuality and nerve as the movie requires, perfectly matching her powerful co-star. Gene Hackman rounds out the cast in one of his earliest and greatest performances.

Bonnie and Clyde (1967) was one of the most famous, and groundbreaking, films in cinematic history. This was the retelling of the infamous Depression-era bank robbers who became folk heroes, containing classic performances from Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, as well as one of the most controversial endings ever in film.
The film certainly gives an air of romanticism, at least at first, with its portrayal of the two people. Bonnie is persuaded by both Clyde`s charm and his threatening aura. She has the sort of personality which easily falls for Clyde`s comment that she is the best girl in the state, and in no time flat she is swept into the risky business of bank-robbing. Along the way, they pick up a young gas station attendant named Moss, and later, Clyde`s brother (Gene Hackman) and sister-in-law are part of the bunch. A combination of Bonnie and Clyde`s rebellious youth, and their numerous run-ins with the law ensure their notoriety in a time in which people were in need of something to free their minds of the miseries of poverty and hardship. Yet all good things must come to end, and they do here, as well, -- and most violently.

One major theme in the movie is the idea of celebrity. As Bonnie and Clyde make their way across America, everyone wants to be part of the story, to say that they saw (or in some cases were robbed by) Bonnie and Clyde, celebrity criminals. The newspapers in the country saw fit to fabricate the number of robberies committed, in order to sell more papers and to perpetuate the mystique. The movie makes the claim that these crimianals were not out to harm the common folk, and in fact there is one scene in a bank in which Clyde kindly tells an elderly customer that he is not out to take his money away. This anti-authoriatian attitude certainly didn`t harm the heroic image they had aqquried. I certainly did not excatly find these characters endearing. For me they seemed more like white trash than radical socialists; foolish kids more than heroes. But that tension between what they really are, and what people (those following their story, the criminal gang itself, and even the film`s audience) want them to be is strong stuff, especially as it soon becomes clear it will not be a happy ending.

The actual relationship of Bonnie and Clyde is also interesting. Warren Beatty, in playing this character, has a little joke on himself and his notorious womanizing image, when Clyde tells Bonnie clumsily that "I ain`t no loverboy." While this may seem to be modesty on his part, it is later clear there is more to it. Clyde suffers from impotence, as all his energies are focussed on crime. Bonnie, on the other hand, is the sexual aggressor, equally comfortable in her own body, and in handling a gun. (The parallels between sex and violence are fairly clear.) Faye Dunaway successfully plays the character for her toughness, and, later on, for her fear that her fantastical lifestyle will start crumbling down on her.

The infamous ending is no doubt known to many, in a bloody, utterly final shootout which broke taboos for both violence and grim endings. Despite the more bloodly (and senseless) violence in current films, those situations could never match up to the ending of this film, as it is so final, so cold, so wrenching, that it will stick to you for at least a few minites. Basically, a number of thoughts should come to your head -- Do they deserve punishment? Should the audience have been rooting for these characters?

Review: Pulp Fiction (1994)

Pulp Fiction is the volcanic eruption of Quentin Tarantino's mind. What erupts is so original, so funny, obscene, violent, outrageous and clever that the film will be remembered as one that added a new dimension to the already zany world of movie making. That's it for the adjectives. The movie is to be seen, not described. It's devilishly hard to capture an explosion.

The new dimension is the mind of a 31-year-old ex-video clerk from southern California. The image is inescapable: Tarantino watching hundreds of hours of videotape, absorbing the B-movie subculture until he had to write about it. Does this mean that television, the country's demondrug of choice, may have an unexpected side-effect? Have all those hours in front of the box produced in Generation-X the ability to catch the world in fast-frame images so evocative and confusing and entertaining that we will have to learn the new language of image?

Can a movie that puts a hammer, baseball bat, chain saw and sword in the hands of thugs be funny? You bet it can, when the background is a running stream of hilarity. It's full of wacky juxtapositions: blood and civility, violence and compassion.

The movie is a twisted cat's cradle of three intersecting stories set in the underbelly of contemporary Los Angeles and inspired by the pulp fiction magazines that were newsstand staples in the 1930s, the kind printed on paper so cheap you could use it to soak up spilled milk.

Amanda Plummer's Honey Bunny and Tim Roth's Pumpkin are discussing career options in a coffee shop. Vincent (John Travolta) and Jules (Samuel L. Jackson) are carrying out orders from their boss, Marsellus (Ving Rhames), who tells Vincent to baby-sit his wife Mia (Uma Thurman) while he's away. Butch (Bruce Willis) has been ordered by Marcellus to take a dive in a fight. Instead, he takes the money and runs. With a dead body in a blood-soaked car, Jules and Vincent turn to "The Wolf" (Harvey Keitel). Those are the bare bones of the thing.

Now, add a superb rhythmic score, vivid cartoon colors, a wealth of underworld detail and a cast of good actors who have somehow stepped perfectly into Tarantino's head. They run with his vision, but never too far. You will remember the barrage of electric images, Butch's moment of truth and Vincent's solution to his baby-sitting dilemma.

The actors all seem to understand they are interpreting ludicrous ideas from a wickedly original imagination. Carrying the film along at three levels beyond reality, they execute perfectly the images conjured up by an ex-video clerk who watched only so long before his mind spilled over. May we all be around for the next spill, and may Tarantino be lucky enough, always, to have such actors.

Teardrops Of Ice

I stare at my face in the mirror
Yet I cannot see the lies
Or the pain within my heart
Blinded by memories of the past
I gaze into the void of nothingness
Hidden within these deep brown eyes of mine
Staring back at me from it's reflection

My hatred is gone
All that is left is emptiness and sorrow
Now flowing through my veins, poisoning my mind
Teardrops of ice are blurring my reflection
Drowning it in silent greif

Lost behind the lies, never to return
Can't you hear my cries?
My soul was left to burn
I'm falling through the mirror
To a world beyond

I open up my window
Welcoming the cold moonlit night
I reach for the pale reflection of the sun
It's taking me forth on a journey
A journey to the world of twilight

Nightfall, take my hand
Guide me away to the stars
I fall into oblivion
Frozen tears are in my eyes
As I now close them to dream away
Slowly drifting forth into the shadows.

Review: Kate & Leopold (2001)

I feel bad for women. They apparently have so little to look forward to in modern men that they'll attend films like "Kate and Leopold" so they can rediscover chivalry. Chivalry, of course, was that male behavior practiced at the turn of the 20th century where men of means stood when a woman left the table, opened the doors for them and regarded them as princesses 24/7.

In this time-travel movie, Stuart (Liev Schreiber) travels back to 1898 New York and brings the aristocratic Leopold (Hugh Jackman) back with him to modern day New York. This turns out to be great for his ex-girlfriend, Kate McKay (Meg Ryan), because Kate has terrible luck with men and is looking for somebody exactly like Leopold, a man with manners. Most of the men in her life are boorish slobs. There's Stuart, of course. Then there's her brother, Charlie (Breckin Meyer), and her boss, J.J. (Bradley Whitford), who's hitting on her as a condition of her promotion. Until Leopold comes along, Kate is all about her career and simply doesn't have time for love.

Indeed, all of Kate and Leopold's interactions are predictably wonderful. Leopold says beautiful things to her, cooks for her, pulls her chair out, and acts the gentleman every second of every day. After all, this was exactly what being a guy in 1898 was all about, right? Fortunately for Kate, Stuart didn't drag back a factory laborer who slaved away 12 hours a day, was missing most of his teeth, and had an expected life span of about 45 years. Apparently director James Mangold cut the scene where Leopold tries to squeeze Kate into a corset and accidentally breaks a few of her ribs. Oh, and then there was the scene where Kate tries to go vote in a local election and Leopold beats her in the middle of the street for attempting to violate the law.

Once again, nostalgia emerges victorious over the actual facts. Ultimately, this movie suggests that women would be happier if they fled the business world and dropped out of sight into the arms of a big, strong man. After all, if Kate were to go back to 1898 New York, isn't that exactly what would happen?

The Raunchy Origins Of Valentine’s Day

If you thought that Valentine's Day was all about innocent romance, then think again. St Valentine may be the patron saint of lovers, but according to a professor at Roanoke College in Virginia, the symbols and imagery of Valentine's Day have much raunchier origins. Psychologist Galdino Pranzarone says that the real meaning of Valentine's Day has been lost over the ages, and the sexy significance of Valentine's symbols has been toned down.

Consider the love heart symbol, suggests Pranzarone, who believes the origin of the heart symbol was probably the shape of human female buttocks seen from the rear. "The Greek goddess of beauty, Aphrodite, was beautiful all over, but was unique in that her buttocks were especially beautiful," he explained. "Her shapely, rounded hemispheres were so appreciated by the Greeks that they built a special temple to Aphrodite Kallipygos, which literally meant, 'Goddess with the Beautiful Buttocks'."

So if the heart symbol is really a female butt, what does Cupid's arrow through the heart symbolize? Cupid - the son of Venus and the Roman god of love - is no innocent little angel, said Pranzarone. "Even though he was a cute cherub, he flew about naked shooting people in the heart with arrows. His relationship with his mother was not particularly wholesome, either. Paintings from the Renaissance show a rather incestuous relationship existing between Cupid and Venus." And what about Cupid's arrow? "Do I really have to explain the obvious symbolism inherent in Cupid's arrow?" asks Pranzarone, clearly wishing to avoid talk about erect phallic symbols. Cupid exists in other cultures as well. In India, Cupid is known as Kama, where he represents passionate, lusty desire. "The famous sex manual of India, the Kama Sutra, was named after him," explains Pranzarone.

Phallic symbols and women's buttocks are probably not what greeting card manufacturers think they're putting on their cards, but Valentines cards have their own interesting history, dating back to the Roman Empire. Pranzarone explains that during the festival of Lupercalia in Rome, "young men chose their sexual partners by a drawing of 'billets', small paper cards, with women's names on them. Christians later denounced the use of these cards as a lewd and pagan custom. The Church tried to substitute the exchange of prayer and sermon cards at this time of year, but the people reverted to hand-made love notes. The commercialization of the Valentine card occurred in recent history at the end of the Victorian Era," he said.

The Lupercalia celebrations, when lovers met through a public raffle, were conducted in February, which Pranzarone said was a decidedly sexy time of the year, representing spring, new life and reproductive activity. "The Romans held love and fertility celebrations in February… a time of love, eroticism and sexual license, [where] enthusiastic revelers were paired up by public raffle."

Popular gifts for Valentine's Day also have their own erotic symbolism, according to Pranzarone, who says that the heart shaped box chocolates usually come in is symbolic of the female genitalia. And as for flowers; "There's no escaping that flowers are the genitalia of plants," he says. "So what are we saying when we present our beloved with a dozen, beautiful red, long-stemmed genitalia?"

Review - Unforgiven (1992)

It comes late in the movie and, coming from Clint Eastwood's steel-trap mouth, it's sweet music. "Any man don't wanna get killed," he warns a saloon full of armed varmints, "better clear on out the back." In "Unforgiven," his trembling opponents don't need a second push. They stampede through the door.

This is Big Whiskey, Wyoming, 1880, and these men (including Gene Hackman, Morgan Freeman and Richard Harris) are living in a Western just like they used to make. But the movie's fitted for the '90s too. In this modish world of blow-dried drug dealers, Uzi weaponry and odd-couple cop partners, a six-gun yarn set in the last century better hold its own. Thanks to Eastwood's relaxed direction and David Webb Peoples's savvy script, it does.
In Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven, the winner of four 1992 Academy Awards, including best picture and best director, people die just as they have in dozens upon dozens of westerns but with one difference: whereas even the most minor characters killed off in westerns of the past were permitted to die with some dignity, in Unforgiven, Clint Eastwood, directing from an original screenplay by David Webb Peoples, is not concerned with appearances. People die wherever their killer finds them.
In one scene, a man is plugged full of bullets in an outhouse. He spews blood while defecating, his arteries emptying along with his bowels. John Ford, and even Sam Peckinpah, would have let their characters make more graceful exits, at least letting them pull up their pants, but Eastwood makes no concessions to decorum. If the scene was choreographed, it was only to insure that it did not appear rehearsed. One does not watch the scene and express admiration for the "cool" or dramatic way in which the victim stumbles to the ground. In Unforgiven, being killed is an ugly, painful humiliation, almost as much for the killer as it is for the victim.
The plot of Unforgiven is a simple one: a prostitute’s face is slashed by a cowboy who takes offense at the woman’s having laughed at his "small pecker." When the sheriff (Gene Hackman) refuses to punish the crime in a manner that the women consider appropriate (he merely demands that the cowboy repay the saloon owner for the loss of income that will result from the slashed hooker’s diminished appeal to customers), they band together to offer a reward to anyone who will administer a more violent and permanent punishment.

Soon, a young arrogant figure calling himself the "Schofield Kid" (Jaimz Woolvetz) rides onto the Kansas farm of William Munny (Eastwood), a once sadistic killer now reformed through the love of a wife whose grave Munny is seen digging during the opening credits. "I’m not like that no more," Munny tells the Kid, but with two small children and a failing farm to support, Munny eventually accepts the Kid’s offer to join him in pursuit of the "whore’s gold," but only after enticing his former partner, Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman), to share the journey into Big Whiskey, Wyoming, and, of course, sharing the reward.

As they make their way to the town where Sheriff Little Bill Daggett rules in an especially brutal manner when not building a house, on the porch of which he dreams of "drinking my coffee and watching the sunset," Munny and Logan remember their wild and unconscionably violent days which they now regret and believe are safely behind them. Munny is not convinced, however, and continually expresses shame and horror at his past cruelties. He is a haunted man, not at all eager to feed the Kid’s hunger for details about the art of killing.

W.W. Beuchchamp (Saul Rubinek), a writer "of books," as he repeatedly tells those who ask, is as eager as the Kid to hear of the exploits of such merchants of death as Munny, as well as English Bob (Richard Harris), a cold-blooded killer whose romanticized biography Beuchchamp is writing. The elegant Bob arrives in Big Whiskey with Beuchchamp in tow, eager to collect the bounty, but instead of living up to the title that Beuchchamp has given him, "The Duke of Death," Bob gets a severe dressing down from Daggett who exposes the fraud behind English Bob’s legend, in addition to beating the fanciful gunfighter senseless. As Bob lies defeated in Daggett’s jail cell, the cruel yet affable sheriff debunks the myths of the West’s quick-draw and short-tempered killers, including one of Bob’s victims, a man called "two-gun," not, as Beuchchamp believes, because he carried two pistols, but because he had an especially large penis which he once placed in the wrong woman’s holster, leading to his demise at the hands of the jealous Englishman.

With Unforgiven, Clint Eastwood casts a cold objective eye on the realities of the West after the gunsmoke from decades worth of Hollywood westerns has cleared. There are no heroes in Eastwood’s vision, only men and women whose flawed spirits take their toll on the flesh, their own and others. There’s good and bad evident in the best and the worst of the people in Big Whiskey, but it’s the ugly--the ugliness of vanity, revenge, money and death--that Unforgiven emphasizes.

The performances are impeccable. As Munny, Eastwood, often dismissed as a "star" who gets by on his charismatic presence in lieu of acting, offers the finest performance of his long career. Twenty-eight years after A Fistful of Dollars launched him on the road to superstardom, Eastwood’s William Munny could be the laconic and mercenary Man With No Name, now aged and mellow, and mournfully looking back, finally feeling the pain his recklessness had caused others. Gene Hackman’s Oscar winning Little Bill is a man who exploits his sheriff’s badge to maintain an egotistical control over the town, rather than to keep the peace. Morgan Freeman provides the compassionate balance that keeps Munny from drowning in his self-pitying nightmares, and, as the Schoefield Kid, Jaimz Woolveet embodies the youthfully ignorant bravado that Munny and Logan dropped before the Kid was born. There is also an outstanding understated turn by Richard Harris whose marvelous portrait of English Bob compensates for the shameless mugging he has engaged in through a string of unworthy, career killing projects in the two decades preceding this deserved comeback. The rest of the cast, including Frances Fisher as Strawberry Alice, the hooker who proposes that the women seek revenge, and Anna Thompson, the "cut whore," are also excellent.

And then there’s long, lean Anthony James as Skinny, the saloon keeper. Twenty five years earlier, James made his film debut as Ralph, the man behind the counter of the diner where Warren Oates liked to sip Coke and eat pie in another Oscar winner for best picture, In the Heat of the Night. James is one of the great unheralded character actors of our time, and his presence is always welcome.

The cinematography by Jack Green, editing by Oscar winner Joel Cox, sets by Harry Bumstead, and music score by Lennie Niehous (centered on "Claudia’s Theme" written by Eastwood) are all first-rate. The personnel behind the scenes are all regulars in Eastwood’s Malpaso company, and it is interesting to note that Eastwood is the only major director--in fact, the only director currently working--to shun the possessive credit ("A film by...") that was once reserved for the absolute giants of the craft--Hitchcock, Ford, Hawks--but is now claimed by every traffic cop who steps behind a camera. Eastwood recognizes the art of filmmaking as a collaborative effort, one which a director leads but surely cannot do alone. Perhaps Eastwood’s generosity is what makes his team continually strive to deliver their absolute best. With Unforgiven, they have.

Review: The Bourne Ultimatum (2007)

Runtime: 111 Director: Paul Greengrass Starring: Matt Damon, Julia Stiles, David Strathairn

Jason Bourne (Damon) continues his search for his unknown past. After tracking a possible lead to Spain, he joins up with former enemy and government agent Nicky Parsons (Stiles), and has to contend with the continual might of the CIA and the US government on his trail. Meanwhile, agent Pamela Landy (Joan Allen), who has tried to stop Bourne before, has joined forces with CIA Deputy Director Noah Vosen (Strathairn) in a final attempt to kill or capture the renegade assassin.

The Borune Ultimatum is something of a cinematic rarity - a third installment in a trilogy that's actually superior to its predecessors. I wouldn't say it's perfect by any means, and there are some things about it that I genuinely didn't like. But for the most part it's a thrilling ride, and one packed with a calibre of acting you so rarely see in films of this nature.

I confess that five years ago I wouldn't have pegged Matt Damon as an action star, but he really has turned Bourne into a memorable character. Bourne is lethal, efficient and relentless, but the character is also tinged with a hint of desperation and sadness. Damon has always been able to convey the complexities of Bourne, and his performance here is certainly no exception. However, I would say that the vulnerable and almost repressed human side of Bourne has been diminished here, until the final third of the film anyway. In many ways he's almost too deadly and powerful in Ultimatum, hacking through enemies like an SAS-Ninja-Jedi. The result of this is a brilliantly intense character, but one we never think for a second is in any form of danger.

Elsewhere, Strathairn and Allen really do make the most of roles that would have crumbled in lesser hands. Landy and Vosen aren't complicated characters at all, though Landy has her doubts about the intentions of those around her. But the two actors transform scenes that could just look like a couple of grown adults squabbling into something a lot more than that. They might just be standing in rooms talking, but they hook you onto every word. Stiles has a bit more to do here than in the previous films, though Nicky's introduction is a bit too convenient for my liking. That said, there's an unusual chemistry between Stiles and Damon, and the character provides opportunities for the pace to quieten down a bit.

Three films in, and there isn't much plot to talk about anymore since we know what all the characters are up to. So that affords the film more time for action sequences, and there are plenty of them. There's a brutal intensity to them that suits Greengrass's directorial preferences well, and a climatic car case in particular is absolutely electrifying. That said, I do wish someone would buy Greengrass a tripod for his camera. The frantic shaking and zooming is forgivable during the action sequences, though on occasion it does distract from the proceedings. But Greengrass shoots the whole film like this - we really don't need a wobbly camera and quick zooms up actors' noses when they're just sitting down and talking on the phone. His style can sometimes make the film hard to watch; by comparison, even Michael Bay is normally far more restrained in interpersonal scenes.

Whether there will be anymore Bourne films is hard so say, as the film ends on an appropriate point with which to conclude the series. But as a trilogy closer The Bourne Ultimatum is a crackingly good ride, packed full of exhilarating action and engrossing performances.

Nothing But Nothing

Black
Black as night
Black as the dark shadows in my black mind
Black as a blind man's hatred of his vision
Who hates nothing more than blackness.
Who sees little else
Black
Black as death.
Putrefied, abysmal, repungently repulsive, vile death.
Black as my horror of knowing
Who and What I am.
Of knowing what I have done.
Of what I must do and why
Black as the detached loneliness and solitude
Of being unique in my understanding of myself.
Of being solely responsible for myself and my pain
Black as my heart when I reflect on my bitter life.
Total, utter darkness
There are no lights, no tunnels. No hope.
All is lost. Gone. There is nothing there at all.
Only the complete, overwhelming blackness of emptiness & silence.
Silence is my blackest friend.
I have but one friend.

No Pity For The Weak

The blows rained down upon her
As she cried No Stop Don't
The fists smashed into her
Again Again Again
And she sobbed as she described to me
The pain, terror, humiliation
Of this the first of countless beatings
Four years ago.

I looked at her with pitiless eyes
And struggled to mask the disgust I felt
For her the weak pathetic waif
Who will not repel what is killing her
She wants it
Sickly craves it
She needs to be needed
For something, by someone
She deserves her pain
Earned through inaction
And rationalizing that he will change
Her unjustified hope
Gained her four years
Of unmitigated hell.

All around her saw the truth
And knew what she should do
But she dismissed wise advice
Ignored the intelligent path
And chose her fate
With downcast eyes
She deserves her pain
Whether fists or words or apathy
And so will you
So do you.

Cloud Formations Over Jamshedpur

Camera: Panasonic Lumix DMC FX7 Lens: 35-105mm Exposure: 1/4s at f/3

Camera: Panasonic Lumix DMC FX7 Lens: 35-105mm Exposure: 1/8s at f/3

Camera: Panasonic Lumix DMC FX7 Lens: 35-105mm Exposure: 1/4s at f/3

Camera: Panasonic Lumix DMC FX7 Lens: 35-105mm Exposure: 1/4s at f/3

These pictures were taken on 1st September 2007 at various locations in and around Jamshedpur. The cloud formations varied at different times of the day and I captured whatever was possible with the little time I got with my travelling restrictions.

Secret Depression

There's a secret depression in my soul
Welling deep and simmering quietly
Chipping away methodically
At my fire
My ambition
My will to survive
I keep smiling defiantly
Attitude is everything
And no one will know the truth
Of my pain in the dark
Of my really deep thoughts
Of the secret dead
At the base of my heart
That inevitably wins in the end.