True Grit is the 3^rd Matt Damon film I’ve seen so far this week & it’s another outstanding cinematic achievement for the Coen Brothers, enjoyable & all consuming for the full two hours running time.  We enjoyed it so much we went to see it twice on Christmas day – the western drawl of the quick fire dialogue’s difficult to follow straight out of the blocks, at least to the untuned ear.

The story is about a confident & fast talking teenage girl (Mattie Ross) who embarks upon an epic quest to bring to justice the man who the week before has killed her father.  She engages Rooster (Reuben) Cogburn, Jeff Bridges’ US Marshal, to help her & along the way they pick up (and drop, and pick up again) Matt Damon’s Texas Ranger character, Le Boeuf.  The film is scattered with the Coen Bros quirkiness in observation & especially dialogue that we’ve come to expect and there are some noteworthy scenes right throughout the movie.  I especially enjoyed:

·         the interaction between Mattie & the Oirish undertaker, in the presence of her father’s coffined corpse

·         a scene where three men are synchronise-hanged after first being permitted to make an address as to the whys & wherefores of how they got to be there to the large gathered crowd – or two of them got to at least

·         Mattie’s skilled negotiations with the auctioneer, Col Stonehill – which contains a classic quote – “I don’t entertain hypotheticals, I find real life vexing enough” (I know how he feels!)

·         the court scene where Cogburn is giving evidence & his uncomfortable squirming when he eventually has to admit how many men he has shot, a number of them from a single family

·         the shoot outs in the wide open spaces.

Dialogue throughout is intricate & lively with all three main characters in possession of quick wit & lashings of sarcasm.  The acting is faultless, the criminals & lawmen alike are all believably dirty with clothes convincingly tatty & soiled and their morals are for the most part low or non-existent.

The film gave me a real feeling of how close most people probably were at all times to death or at least maiming in the Wild West of the 1870s – either from crossing the wrong person, being found guilty of a crime they did not commit, being in the wrong place at the wrong time or just through interaction with nature.

It was an extra pleasure to watch the film as part of a Californian audience.  Everyone here goes to see all the new releases – good & bad – and cinema is a big part of everyone’s daily life – as it should be given that it’s the local industry.

True Grit is the 7^th film I’ve seen on holiday so far and is my favourite to date, although all seven have had their moments including the rather surreal “Black Swan”, a sister movie to “The Wrestler” & of a similar ilk.  I’ll be seeing Jeff Bridges again later today in Tron at the IMAX so between him & Matt Damon they seem to have the entire hip movie scene sewn up for Xmas 2010.  The new “Focker” movie grossed higher box office takings over the holiday weekend but I for one won’t be going to see it.

Watch out in the future for Hailee Steinfeld – she holds her own in True Grit against those two movie heavyweights and never puts a foot or a gun wrong.

Unfortunately, True Grit doesn’t open in the UK until Feb 2011 so getting away from the awful weather hasn’t been the only benefit of holidaying in December.

I’m on holiday in (rainy) Palm Springs over Christmas so my blogs are taking on a slightly different flavour.  One of my (many) holiday objectives is to go & see 15 new movies.  I’m not doing too bad as I’ve already seen five in the past week.  The one I’ve chosen to review for you today is a documentary directed by Charles Ferguson and narrated by Matt Damon called “Inside Job”.  It’s a film about the role played by political systems and academia in causing the recent banking collapse the rest of us have had to stand by and witness.  In truth, I probably wouldn’t have gone to see this film if I’d known it was a documentary – but I’m very glad I did go as I now fully realise what trouble we’re in – although I appreciate the time to know about this is way past as the music has long stopped, as George Soros so eloquently puts it in the film.  [Interesting fact about philanthropist & savagely successful currency speculator, George Soros.  In 2003 he declared that he would sacrifice his entire $14 billion fortune to defeat George Bush].

The film uses a mix of interviews, archive film and images and even diagrams for the more complex economic explanations and it conveys in layman’s language the journey whereby influential investment bankers through political lobbying encouraged deregulation of the subprime mortgage and derivatives markets.  It shows how the senior people in the financial and academic worlds are the same people that sit on & influence government boards to make laws & policy that in turn benefit them & their associates & friends.

Basically, the world that these guys inhabit isn’t the same one as the rest of us are familiar with – we’re used to poachers and gamekeepers.  These guys are all legalised poachers that over the last 10 years have been allowed by successive governments to mark their own homework, apply untruthful ratings to financial instruments and then encourage people to buy & invest in those products that were bound by their very nature to fail & plummet in value – but hey – the bankers didn’t care as they were all gambling heavily on that outcome anyway – so they won either way.

Get this – former CEO of Goldman Sachs, Hank Paulson (pictured with Bush), was made Treasury Secretary by George Bush.  So, as Goldman Sachs’ CEO he lobbied heavily for deregulation and then, when things went wrong & Lehman Bros was the first to fall, he was able to recommend to George Bush that the taxpayers bail out the failed banks to the tune of $700bn instead of leaving them to accept offers from other banks, including Barclays – and benefiting massively himself along the way.  The culprits were allowed to keep their obscene bonuses (honestly, there were audible gasps of shock from the cinema audience as the bonus sums were revealed) and the same boy remains as an advisor to President Obama.

However, I guess that sort of behaviour is what we expect from the gang of alpha males that head up the banks and City establishments.  Sadder were the prominent academics “encouraged” by large consultancy fees to write economic papers & studies that would give the “right” recommendations to government committees and others.  I have no idea how the film makers managed to get them captured on film in the way that they did although I guess they used the same techniques as the politicians – appeal to their ridiculous academic vanity, stroke their pathetic egos & pay them a huge fee.  Glenn Hubbard of Columbia University, a strong supporter of financial deregulation over the years, was comical as he eventually realised he’d been had and invited the interviewer to “give it your best shot in the 3 minutes before I throw you out of my office”.  More pathetic still was Frederic Mishkin, Prof of Economics at Columbia Business School.  He was commissioned in 2006 by the Icelandic Chamber of Commerce to write a paper entitled “Financial Stability in Iceland”.  He was paid $124,000 for writing it.  When the interviewer asked him why that paper now appeared on his cv as “Financial Instability in Iceland” he said he was unaware of that & “it must be a typo”.  The interviewer then asked him why he’d resigned so suddenly from the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve on 31 August 2008, way before the end of his allotted term and he said he’d realised he needed to make some amendments to a text book!!!

The film left me feeling angry that politicians and high flying businessmen are allowed to collude in this way and continue to get away with it and empty that there’s so little that we can do about it as they are all as bad as each other and disappointed in Barack Obama for changing so little since coming into power.  I’m grateful to Charles Ferguson for making the film and to Matt Damon for being brave enough to narrate – good on you guys.  The film was refreshingly honest in a way that so many things aren’t because of fear of offending a sponsor or supporter.  I’d recommend a viewing if you’re interested in knowing how these things work and do please add comments below if you’ve seen the film already.

What’ve I got coming up next on my viewing schedule? – the new Coen Bros film – “True Grit” – of course.  Also starring Matt Damon but hopefully in a lighter mood this time around.