Liz suggests

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Popcorn at twelve paces

Tuesday, 15th May 2007

It's just as well Stephen and I didn't see the film together - we'd have ended up having a fist-fight in the aisle. All I can say is that I really didn't think The Lives of Others was half as powerful as the critics made it out to be. No, I didn't want documentary truth, but as Timothy Garton Ash points out elsewhere in the piece that Stephen mentions, the transformation of the Stasi official "seems implausibly rapid". That seems to be to be a pretty central weakness. There are certainly some very good moments: I was transfixed by the lecture theatre scenes at the very beginning, for instance. But, I'm sorry, the script still seemed fatally undernourished to me.

What really annoyed me, as a matter of fact, was not so much the flaws - it's a debut film, after all - but the way the reviewers all seemed desperate to throw superlatives around. I've come across this time and again lately, which is one reason I'm wary of venturing out to see the latest, much-hyped releases. I can remember being dumbfounded when the Quentin Tarantino bandwagon was set in motion all those years ago. Er, yes, he was a promising film-maker, but why was everyone so desperate to crown him as a genius quite so soon?

I once spent a morning interviewing him, his producer and John Travolta in an extremely posh Manhattan hotel around the time of Pulp Fiction, and I still remember the sense of wondering if I was just dim, or the only sane person in an expensively furnished asylum. At the screening in Times Square the night before, the PR man actually had the nerve to tell us how we should watch it: "It's all in the screenplay. You gotta pay attention to the screenplay."

Oh dear, now I've upset Mr T's fans too. OK, it's a good film, but it's not Citizen Kane. Just out of interest, If you asked me to name the best debut movie I've seen in the last twenty-odd years, it would be She's Gotta Have It. I enjoyed the press preview so much, I actually paid money - shock, horror - to see it again in a real cinema. (Along with my best friends, who hated it) It's still the only Spike Lee film I've every sat through with any great pleasure.