Matt Elton writes words.

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127 Hours

So the film where the guy hacks his arm off, that apparently caused people to faint when it was shown in the cinemas back in 2010, got a terrestrial airing last night. Whether it was because I was tired after an excellent weekend in the country, or whether it was due to being in the countryside itself, but the bits that had the most impact were the flashbacks — and hallucination-based flashforwards — that lead up to the arm-hacking.

I think what both this film and Into the Wild do really well is highlight the tension between the desire to get away from everything, 'back' to a 'natural' state, and the fact that this inevitably leads to severing ties with the people that love you most.

As for my rural weekend, well, that involved more cake and hot-tubs than the severing of limbs. More on that later.

Inception is a film

Following my usual timelapse of being about four months behind the rest of the universe, I finally got round to watching Inception just after Christmas. You know, Inception? It's a film. You may have heard of it.

The surprising thing, I thought, was how very confusing I didn't find it. After all the 1991-esque talk of 'Whoa, it'll blow your TINY HUMAN MIND!" and that, it was essentially a fairly linear film. Okay, so it was a linear film in which the guy from Third Rock from the Sun goes spinning about a corridor in a magical dream world, but who hasn't done that? (Seriously, though: if it was my dreams they were tapping into, there'd be plenty less hotel corridors and snowbases and many more unicorn chases. Unicorn chases are brilliant.)

About the lack of those unicorns: Inception was, as I should have guessed from the quarters that the most effusive praise came from, very much A Boy's Film For Boys. The female characters were either underwritten (Ellen Page) or annoying and underwritten (Leonardo DiCaprio's wife, but in the film). And I did end up finding the relentless huge-ness of everything slightly wearying: dreams are pretty stupid, when you come down to it. They're supposed to be. Again, if you tapped into my subconscious you wouldn't end up with an IMPORTANT FILM OF SYMBOLIC SIGNIFICANCE, but then you wouldn't end up with many people in the audience either. (Except that one guy, but I wish he'd just give it a rest.)

Anyway, boyliness and lack of confusing unicorns aside, I award Inception a score of 82%. I'm confident that everyone is relieved that I have now added my considered thoughts to the scant commentary about this film available elsewhere on the internet.

Lots to say about this film, which I had the pleasure of seeing in excellent company down on Cardiff's waterfront at the weekend. It's been a while since I've seen something that felt as high-quality as this, which I suppose isn't surprising given the combined efforts of Aaron Sorkin and David Fincher. More specifically, though:

One
I really liked how difficult it was to accurately categorise the film. The nearest we managed, both in describing it to somebody who had heard nothing about it and then again, afterwards, was 'a drama about Facebook'. As big a fan as I am of genre movies, it was great to just be told a story, in a darkened room, for two hours. And one in which you couldn't entirely predict what the ending was going to be, too.

Two
Wow, the film's portrayal of Mark Zuckerberg made me want to not use Facebook. But then, as we were saying on the way out: you can't exactly just stop using Facebook now, can you? As loyal as I do feel to Andrew Garfield and his excellent hair.

Three
Oh, the score was excellent. From the contrast between the floaty, momentum-building opener (complete with excellent submarine bass notes) to the driving, 'Look! Some boys are typing code!" second track, it was probably my favourite part of the whole film. In The Hall of the Mountain King for the rowing scene, also? Brilliant.

All of David Fincher's films may be thematically different, but they all have the ability to stay with you for a surprisingly long time after you've seen them. My Pitchfork-aping final mark, then? Ooh, 8.6.

After a bit of a movie-watching drought, I've been making up for lost time: over the past few weeks I've managed to fit in loads of films (and yes, I know, some are really old). For my benefit as much as anything, with arbitrary Pitchfork-style ratings:

Milk (8.4)
It's about some curly-haired activists from the 1970s and features James Franco, so I was always going to love it. But it's also one of the most inspirational things I've seen in a really, really long time.

Cloverfield (6.9)
Some irritating beautiful people get killed in twitch-making nausea-o-vision. The bit in the tunnels was creepy, though.

Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs (7.2)
Any longer and I'd have tired of the fact it was basically a lot of giant food, but it still managed to possess some of the 1990s anarchic animation spirit that I've missed in, for example, Pixar stuff. Having said that...

Toy Story 3 (8.1)
Was very good.

Shutter Island (7.0)
Reminded me of that sudden glut of films in the early part of last decade with a sudden and not entirely welcome twist. I didn't hate the exciting conclusionary revelation in this one, although I could have done without some of the melodrama. (Mad people! Rats! Nazis! Oh, The Daily Mail.)

Kick-Ass (7.9)
Despite being more violent, and less funny, than I was expecting, I still enjoyed it muchly. Nicolas Cage update: he still manages to irritate me with his very presence.

So Scott Pilgrim wasn't perfect. Although I'd read some of the books before watching the film, I went to see it with friends who were less familiar with it and, therefore, what it would be like. (Mind you, I always find suggesting films to people a faintly traumatic experience.) But much as I love Edgar Wright — of which more, I suspect, later — I'm not sure that I don't agree with David Cox's assertion, over on Guardian.co.uk, that "After the second fight, the knowledge that there are five more to come induces mild panic". There was a lot of fighting.

And fighting, particularly as fighting as woosh-y and pretty as this, is not in itself a bad thing. All of the fighting, though, crammed from six books into one film, did sometimes feel like it had squeezed out some of the character development. Yes, Scott Pilgrim's ability to have a string of relationships with incredibly attractive and cool people while continuing to be something of an idiot is remarkable. But the secondary characters, in particular, are ones that I'd have liked to have spent more time with.

But... but... So much of it worked, and worked in a characteristically Edgar Wright way, that it does feel a little churlish to be too negative. The cinematography was as inventive and as, well, as animated as you'd expect. The bits where the scene changed, mid-conversation, were inspired. There was a bit with a giant hammer.

Maybe it's just that, in a film featuring contributions from Wright, Beck and Nigel Godrich, I expected to be completely won over. And I was, nearly. But not quite.