Bad Behaviour

Crime is hard to capture in the movies, I think. Crime is basically very dull, grimy, grimly repetitive, tedious, predictable.  So film makers try to do something with it, to give us a reason to watch beyond the quickly-tiring fact of transgression.

I'd been reading about Jennifer Jason Leigh after being reminded of her deathly-chilly brilliance in Dolores Claiborne and Mrs Parker and the Vicious Circle, and heard "Rush" described in glowing terms: a forgotten gem saved from Greg Allman-guest star hell by stellar performances and compelling trajectories of hard-boiled cop to burnt-out-case. What I saw was a parade of cheesy rock'n'blues bars, good ol'boys, sets and styles that woudn't be out of place in an uninspired episode of the Dukes of Hazzard, and sequences in which Leigh and waxy co-star Jason Patric were gasping in incredulity at their own responses to their own dialogue

The fatuous faux blues soundtrack by Eric Clapton, and wincingly pointless anal rape scene only served to reinforce the sense that this was a film hopelessly out of control of its reason for being, at a very early stage.

In thankfully stark contrast, "Bad Guy" is a film whose central character is simply too priapic, convulsed with rage and robotically motivated to be captured well with the scenes and encounters of a traditionally-appearing Korean gangster flick. However that there is a period in which the mute, controlling, dumbstruck, volcanic presence of Han-Gi, staring down from his container overlooking the street where the girls are working, powerfully conjures the very specific moment in the male psyche in which the libidinal satisfactions of total control and the recoiling horror of intimacy coincide.

Han-Gi's sidekicks are more than just shellsuited goons; their sudden infatuations, impulsive stabs at honourable acting-out, and fearful loyalty have an almost religious tone of observancy.

All of which goes to show that the more precise the central psychological moment, the more robust the rest of the film will be.

A Field In England

This is a limpidly brilliant hallucinatory black-and-white cinema-poem, telling the story of the arrival of 4 soldiers at a field during the dog-end of an English Civil War battle; their prosaic, pungent wrangling and traipsing, and their encounter with O'Neill, or The Devil. Magi

mushrooms are gorged on, muskets are discharged, a couple of genuinely horrifying, macabre, blackly comic sequences follow our band of brothers as they attempt to dig up the treasure that O'Neill insists is there somewhere. The exchanges between O'Neill and the Lacemaker are brutal encounters between a priapic, unswerving libidinal drive and a vacillating dutiful everyman and the strongest moments in the film.