MikePadgett.com

• Director: Bong Joon Ho
• Korea, 2003
• 

Korean cinema is alive and kicking, emboldened and naive like a headstrong teenager with something to prove. One driver is undoubtedly a gutsy brew of high melodrama and truthful acting. Another might be that uniquely Korean gift for all things epic: simple, emotive storytelling with a keen directing wit.

Song Kang Ho runs the whole gamut as a twitchy detective who finds a sort of nobility in Memories of Murder, elevated by the soul searching investigation of a series of killings. Together with out-of-towner Kim Sang Kyung, Song grinds painfully through crime scenes and suspect interviews, finding few clues yet finding himself. Based on a true story, the film plays it humble with excellent humour and fine performances but classic status seems assured within minutes.

Bong Joon Ho here deserves a place on the growing list of talented directors to emerge from the peninsula during the last decade. He deals sensitively with provocative content and provocatively with scenes of rural Korea: it’s a subtle, successful contrast like the perfect balance embodied in the national flag. This is a beautiful film about the preservation of humanity in the face of inhumanity and it’s a triumph of style and substance.

• Directors: José Padilha, Felipe Lacerda
• Brazil, 2002
• 

José Padilha’s enthralling documentary seems much shorter than its two and a half hours’ length. This is the direct result of presenting the material with artful care, without judgement, bias or resort to the artificial dramatisation of events.

Those events need little spin anyway, consisting of the tragic life and death of Sandro do Nascimento, a Rio de Janeiro street youth whose attempt to rob the passengers of a bus in June 2000 escalated into a high-profile hostage situation.

Interspersed with the electric allure of live television footage is the story of Sandro’s life, from witnessing his mother’s brutal murder at five years old to surviving from day to day as a forgotten child on the streets of Rio. The pace of the documentary never slackens, ensuring that we form our own opinions only when we reach the conclusion.

• Director: Martin Scorsese
• United States, 2006
• 

Scorsese has finally won a Best Director Oscar for The Departed. What a shame he didn’t win for one of his earlier and better efforts, because this one just doesn’t compare.

Look past Michael Ballhaus’ superb cinematography and Scorsese’s rich scenemaking and the big problem is the generation gap. The elders in support - Jack Nicholson, Alec Baldwin, Martin Sheen and Ray Winstone - are excellent; it’s the youthful leads that don’t cut it: Leonardo Di Caprio, Matt Damon and Mark Wahlberg. And sadly the movie is all about them.

Wahlberg is foulmouthed but irrelevant and Damon is one-dimensional (Will Hunting being a much better Southie specimen), but I’m still sitting on the fence about Di Caprio. His performances exhibit occasional flashes of magnificence, but there’s still something of that awkward youth in him and The Departed is supposed to be a movie for grown-ups.

• Director: Edgar Wright
• United Kingdom, 2007
• 

As far as genre parodies go, any British attempt to do a buddy cop movie would have to make do with American material. That’s what makes Hot Fuzz pleasantly off-kilter, but it’s also what makes the lengthy running time drag horribly as the movie draws to its noisy conclusion.

On his promotion to the rank of sergeant, Nicholas Angel is packed off to police a sleepy country town because his shining record in the Met is making his colleagues look daft. Angel arrives to find everything dismally backward but soon after, a string of murders begins. It really is as simple as that.

There are some genuinely funny moments and Timothy Dalton’s performance is noteworthy, but overall the comedy - squeezed out of the contrast between American cop movies and reserved Englishness - isn’t particularly arresting.

• Director: Joel Coen
• United States, 1996
• 

Despite the Coen Brothers’ claim as the movie opens, Fargo is not a true story. That’s just as well, because this savage, bleak and ugly little tale is surely far too clever, funny and heartwarming to be true.

Jerry Lundergaard (William H Macy) can’t keep his debts secret for much longer, so he arranges to have his wife kidnapped and returned for a ransom paid by his father-in-law, which he intends to split with the kidnappers. Unfortunately, the plan goes horribly wrong and police officer Marge Gunderson (an Oscar-winning Frances McDormand) steadily tracks down the culprits.

For me, this movie is the Coens’ best to date. Their scripts are often sharp (another Oscar here), the direction is usually tight and the acting is always good, but on Fargo it all dovetails nicely.

About eight years ago when I was still a student, I visited New York and Washington DC. Washington is home to many of the United States’ government agencies including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, whose headquarters I toured like a good little tourist.

As well as the historical and scientific elements and the obligatory firearms display, at the end of one corridor there was an inocuous-looking wall display. It turned out to be a kind of leaderboard for the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted.

Yes, it’s a lengthy preamble, but I was eventually going to come around to a couple of United Kingdom equivalents [1],[2], [3].

The Crimestoppers site is relatively new. According to a BBC news article, it received 350,000 hits in its first day live. Even the fervently archantitech amongst the mandarins in Whitehall must have noted that.

However, it seems that our nation’s leaders have a bit further to go before they truly appreciate the scope of the Internet. It seems today that the Home Office, ever confident of the infinite wisdom of its management cadres, has announced that sex offenders may be forced to register their email addresses and chatroom handles.

Presumably this glorious concept will allow those who run websites to sort the fiddlers from the tiddlers, so to speak.

The internet child safety expert of children’s charity NCH applauds the idea. Well, perhaps the expert needs to be retrained, because whilst a Most Wanted mugshot is fairly hard to fake, an internet identity is not.