Another translated title...

And again it's nothing like the original! For some reason "37°2 le matin" was released in the UK as Betty Blue. Which is a pretty awful title really.

The film certainly opens in pretty explicit fashion (and carried strident warnings when first shown on Channel 4!), and at first the viewer could be forgiven for thinking this is one of those typical foreign films where you are pretty much guaranteed nudity.

It changes, though. As the film progresses, it becomes clearer how the title character does have some "issues", and I suppose in today's parlance this would be described as manic depressive - going from extreme highs to plunging lows.

It's one of those lows that prompts one of the most shocking events in the film, and the ultimate act that her anguished partner has to carry out, much in line with the ending of another favourite of mine, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest.

Funny that Beatrice Dalle should go from this to doing ads on British TV with Robert Lindsay though - sure that's not what she saw this as being a springboard for!

28 Days Later .... and a sequel?!!

The main criticism of this film is the way that - in any attack sequence (and there are plenty) - the texture of the film changes to being more grainy and - more importantly - almost sped up. It's very off-putting, though if you're not a blood and gore afficionado, it acts as a useful warning.

The opening scenes with deserted streets in London are great (although Cillian Murphy's character does seem to walk a very strange route from St Thomas' Hospital, over to Bank and then back to the City), and the feel of the film is good too.

I'm curious how a sequel can be done, bearing in mind that those infected all seem to be dead at the end, but maybe there's a twist I didn't anticipate....

2001 - not quite like that, was it?

A remarkably slim book adapted to a pretty lengthy film. A very famous scene with a bone flying through the air merged into a spaceship. A computer that develops a not particularly friendly personality. That just happens to have a name whose initials are in each case one less than IBM. An unexplained black slab that keeps cropping up

And a year that was passed six years ago (and counting).

The book is able to flesh out some of the mystery, seeing as the film is not narrated. But it's still quite oblique.

The ending of the film is - to me - extremely moving. Though I don't understand why!

And the turning off of HAL is sampled by New Order in their song Murder (along with a section from Caligula).