Adrian Horrocks

The Artist - film review

2012-02-01T05:50:00.000-08:00

In 'National and Postnational French Cinema', Martine Danan says that the French state is now "openly encouraging the making of English language super productions in the hope of capturing a larger share of the global market" (172). She looks at how French cinema of the 1920's sought to differentiate itself by its country of origin in order to receive State protection, when faced with American imports, before arguing that we are now entering a postnational era of globalised cinema. She concludes by asking how French cinema can remain distinctive, whilst also seeking to appeal to a international capitalist market.

The answer, in part, at least for now, would seem to be The Artist.

On the surface, this seems far from being a superproduction, although it is a French film with several English language stars. It is not actually in English, as, through being a silent film, it avoids the need for language altogether. As such, it is a step forward from the kind of Luc Besson style films most commonly associated with French films in English.

The Artist is actually a simple, highly entertaining tale about a silent movie star in Hollywood in the late 1920's, whose popular career is effectively ended with the arrival of the talkie.However, it is notable that the star's films all seem to be American re-stagings of European stories - we first see him playing what appears to be the French master criminal Fantomas, as immortalised in Louis Feullade's silent serials, complete with distinctive top hat, cape and domino mask combo. We later see him playing a Three Musketeers type hero, with a guest appearance by Napoleon, whose name is pointed out and clarified by a set worker. Only when his star has fallen do we see him depart from this - in his self financed film, he plays a jungle explorer. This film flops, sealing his doom.

Meanwhile, the star accidentally helps a young female ingenue to talkie stardom, replacing him as the movie favourite. Where he was physical, she is depicted as being popular because of her witty dialogue, which makes audiences roll in the aisles. We do not hear this, as the film itself remains a silent one, even after talkies arrive, but we see the effect. Her films are very modern, which means they are American, and set in America, and use English, rather than his, which look back to Europe, are international, and silent.

The silent era meant that film was truly international - films were not judged on their country of origin, but by their genre only. Stories were told purely visually, and character revealed through physical movement of bodies, rather than dialogue, and by visual juxtaposition. The Artist uses many of these devices, and they do feel refreshing, exciting, in their visual economy. Who would trade this for the latest unfunny dialogue of Adam Sandler's latest hit?

The coming of the talkies installs a language barrier, which can only partially be solved through dubbing or subtitles. As a result, and coupled with the American cinema's dominance of the mainstream genres, European cinema retreats to the commercial margins of the arthouse, at least internationally, with mainstream genre fare kept mostly for home audiences.

The Artist is a reminder of the contribution that Europe has made to American cinema's place as chief purveyor of mainstream entertainment, and also a plea for America to let other cinemas have a chance to make mainstream films again. It goes back to what Danan calls the 'prenational', in order to speak to our current post national era, in which we are again in a capitalist depression.

Rather than simply a crowd pleasing genre piece, The Artist is also a very Gallic film, its message one of French pride in their contribution to mainstream cinema. As such, it appears to solve Danan's questions about what a French cinema able to take a place in the global mainstream might look like. Or not, becuase this is really merely a staking of a claim, not a copyable template for further French films. It will be interesting to see what kind of French films follow the success of The Artist, and if any find a way to consolidate its success.

The song from Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror 2 - 15 Million Merits is Irma Thomas's

2011-12-22T15:09:00.000-08:00

The song featured in Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror 2 - 15 Million Merits

Irma Thomas - Anyone Who Knows What Love Is (Will Understand)

There you are kids. Here's some other great Irma Thomas tracks, which have a similar feel:

Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror #3 - The Entire History of You

2011-12-21T00:04:00.000-08:00

The third entry in this dark science fiction series was the first without Brooker's name amongst the writing credits, being scripted by Jesse Armstrong, writer of the comedy series Peep Show and Fresh Meat.

It tells of a middle class British couple, and how the husband's jealously is inflamed by being represented onscreen, via a technology called a 'grain.' This is a small, red pulsing bit of tech, which is inserted in the neck, and which then records everything the person hosting it sees, as if through their eyes. Quite how it links from neck to eyes was not explained, but apparently simply yanking the 'grain' from the neck disconnected the whole thing. The visual recordings made by the grain can then shown on a TV. The footage is endless, unedited, and can be rewound or fast forwarded. It can also be watched privately, which makes a person's eyes go opaque, while their face goes blank, caught up in private memories. This doesn't so much look creepy and techno-disconnected, as utterly gormless.

The technology of the 'grain' is obviously very close to the SQUID recording device in Kathryn Bigelow's Strange Days (1995), whilst the use of it solely to illuminate a relationship will inevitably remind us of Michel Gondry's Eternal Sunshine of theSpotless Mind (2004). While Black Mirror lifted some images direct from Starnge Days (such as the scene where the husband walks through his now empty house, replaying memories of his wife, when she was in the room with him), it is Eternal Sunshine that has the greater influence, as both focus on one couple, and tech as a metaphor for a man's self-destructive anguish.

Of course, Black Mirror was nowhere near as good as either of those films, and nor did I expcect it to be. But I must admit that, for me, this was by far the weakest episode of the series. For the most part, the show was simply about a marriage breakdown due to infidelity, a story that does not need science fiction trappings. The grain aspect was poorly thought through, perhaps becuase it was not really needed to tell the story, and, in fact, couldn't be more widely applied, becuase of how that would change the story.

Wouldn't the grain technology would have far more extensive effects on society? While characters often tell each other to put grain recorded images onto TV screens, there is no mention of a web link, but wouldn't this tech inevitably lead to endless subjective recordings on Youtube? A security guard scrolls through a charcter's mind recordings from the last 24 hours on fast forward, while a queue of people waits to presumably have their own memories looked through. But why be so low tech? How about a central governenment agency which could back up everyone's grain recordings while they slept?

In the realm of relationships that make up the story's focus, it seems likely that much more advanced uses would quickly become apparent. Wouldn't couples factor in that their new partner had a backlog of old realtionships on record? Perhaps it would become normal for them to review each other's recordings before starting a serious relationship? Or perhaps couples would make joint agreements to blank everything recorded with previous partners?

What seems very unlikely is that a husband would suddenly one day think about the possiblity that one of his wife's ex's might have recordings of sex with her. This is obvious, and would have been thought about early in the realtionship. There was also no reason why she would not have deleted the images. I wondered if we would discover that she had been obsessively watching the footage herself, but the wife's relatiosnhip to the device was not really of interest. It was all about the husband.

The big shock scene where the husband forced the wife to show him the recording of her with her lover could have been done with videotape, and although the self-laceration of it was strong, it didn't justify the hour long story that led to it. Given that the characters are supposedly very relaxed about grain use, the premise was unconvincing. Nor was it perverse enough. I did think at one point that husband, wife and lover were going to have a 3 some, and the husband would find he couldn't stop reviewing the footage, even though he couldn't bear it.

After last week's appropriation of Irma Thomas's Anyone Who Knows What Love Is (Will Understand), I half expcted a techno-remix-blank-eyed version of Steve Goodman's old country song Video Tape. That would actually have been cool, - but sadly it was not to be.

Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror #2: 15 Million Merits

2011-12-14T02:18:00.000-08:00

The second of three one hour dramas, this second episode was written by Brooker with his wife, ex-Blue Peter presenter, Konnie Huq.

It was immediately far superior to the first episode. Where I found that childish and ill- thought through, this story held together in a much more satisfying way, although this may have been because it fit securely, and I might say very comfortably, within the science fiction dystopia sub-genre. In fact, it drew so heavily on previous dystopias - 1984, obviously, with its plot of an alienated man finding brief, but doomed contact with a female, but also Brave New World, The Prisoner, Philip K Dick, the intrusive ads of Arnie's Total Recall and Cruise's Minority Report, not to mention Ray Bradbury's Illustrated Man story The Veldt, that watching it was like relaxing into an old pair of slippers - it was actually reassuring to find that the same fears still haunt us, rather than frightening.

Personally, I think this vision of the future is much too fluffy - in a year many of us could well be on the way to a very dull and very low-tech version of Victorian poverty. Those in charge, who this show never even tries to depict, won't do us the kindness of this sort of setup. Even so, the reality show elements, and bits of the rant from Network added something different, and the show was savvy enough to point the finger at itself, too.

Obviously battling a low budget, 15 Million Merits successfully, and very stylishly, evoked a future/ alternate world using just a handful of actors, three or four small rooms, and some screens. As such, it reminded me of The Twilight Zone at its finest, and is worthy to rank alongside the best of that show's output. Also like many Twilight Zone episodes, 15 Million Merits's focus was on a single character, and one actor's performance. The central character of Bing, and Daniel Kaluuya's performance were both highly engaging - even when (or especially when) his supposed moment of honesty looked (intentionally?) fake.

The story starts when Bing, a young black man, wakes in his cubicle, whose walls are TV screens. He is immediately bombarded with ads that flow around the walls. The idea that the bathroom mirror would be a TV screen, able to interrupt Bing's ablutions with a ad for ubiquitous porno channel Wraith Babes was very amusing, and also believable.

This also set up the theme that unremitting, and unavoidable porn images could be used as a method of control and alienation. Bing leaves his cubicle and goes to a sort of gym, where everyone (about 10 people, standing in for a whole society) pump exercise bikes all day. This supposedly powers the electricity for the country, while they simultaneously use energy by watching the screens in front of them. These offer a choice of inane, cruel game shows, violent video games, more porn, or a plain bicycling simulation. Quite why this last would be allowed is open to question, but the biggest plot hole, for me, was why there would be this communal area at all. Wouldn't it make more sense for the private cubicle to be a bit bigger, with an exercise bike in it, and do away with that communal gym altogether? Especially as everyone has a virtual Second-Life style Sim of themselves, known as a Doppel, which can look exotic, and wear wild clothes, while the people of this world wear only grey sweat pants and sweatshirts.

Bing sees a X Factor style tv show, which costs 15 Million Merits to enter, merits being what a bicycler earns by pedaling, and which can be used to skip the oppressive ads, which given that these seem apt to explode across screens at any time of day and night, is quite a benefit. Bing spends his merits on a young, attractive girl called Abi, (Jessica Brown Findlay, appropriately blank) who he overhears singing in the toilets. She is fast tracked onto the show, mostly because she is good looking, but once there - oh twist! - she is offered not a singing career, but a porno slot on Wraith Babes. I didn't see this twist -ahem- coming - and it was good. The episode could well have ended there, but went for a final act in which Bing becomes a Brooker analogue, getting onto the show himself, only to deliver a stinging rant against the system, while all the while being co-opted by it.

This 'I'm mad as hell and I'm not gonna take it' rant was splendidly delivered by Kaluuya in vein popping style, but also looked like acting, and as such was totally fake. The final joke of the show comes with the end credits, and the reveal that it was made by Endemol, the company that poisoned our culture for a decade with the dreck known as Big Brother. Brooker and Huq's point becomes crystal clear at this point.

Finally, for me, the thing that I hate most about X Factor is not that it takes the mentally ill, makes them feel they might be the Next Big Thing, before holding them up to public ridicule (although of course, that is pretty noxious), but rather, how it takes songs that I loved, LOVE, and gets someone talentless but with the right 'look' to sqwark out an appallingly shite cover version. Cohen's Hallelujah is but the most obvious example, but the show relentlessly tries to put a generation off Motown and classic 60's soul, with its rank appropriations and befouling of once great songs.

Which is by way of lead in to saying that Black Mirror DID THE SAME THING!! By taking a sublime, and sublimely obscure song and repeating it through the episode - supposedly as a symbol of authenticity! - it co-opted something great in just the same way as the real X Factor. I'm not sure that 'fessing up to that, however cleverly, really excused it. The comment on Youtube that Brooker is trying to get the song to be the Xmas #1 is beyond parody, and as sickening as anything Cowell has ever done.

But that's by the by. No one else will care, and overall, this was great stuff.

Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror #1 - The National Anthem

2011-12-04T14:31:00.000-08:00

The first of three stand alone, one hour dramas, written by Guardian columnist Charlie Brooker, The National Anthem told the story of an imaginary young royal, Princess Suzanne, who is kidnapped by a terrorist. The equally imaginary Prime Minster is alerted after the Princess makes a youtube video from captivity, relaying her captor's one demand - the PM fuck a pig live on TV. If he fails to comply, the Princess will be killed.

This pig sex demand immediately shows the programme is not going to look into any reasons for terrorism, nor any real problems with British politics. Instead, it is a look at the media, Brooker's specialist subject due to his long tenure as TV critic, and then media commentator on TV. The terrorist has no agenda, is really just a cypher - is, I suspect, a sadistic version of Brooker himself. How he has kidnapped a Princess is not explained, and remains unconvincing.

But then the demand is surreal and is obviously simply intended to raise a guffaw or two. Which it does, but I was disappointed to find that the programme's premise was more Sixth Form joke than Chris Morris style attack. Or rather, Chris Morris's cruelty without his cold, extreme morality. The fantasy Princess and non-real PM removed much of the power of the idea, to make it merely a bit nasty, rather than full on confrontational. They couldn't have used the names and likenesses of the real PM, and a real princess? J G Ballard's Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan says otherwise. So does The Queen, for that matter. Make it with David Cameron and The Duchess of Cambridge, or just don't make it. The National Anthem shies away from going that far - it's a drama that wants to be edgy, but not too much. Very British in other words.

Much of the story is based on how the Prime Minister's advisors keep track of public opinion on the story, which is perhaps the real heart of the story. That the PM will not have to fuck the pig if public opinion says so, but will have to, if the public mood takes a turn the other way - which, of course, it does. This seemed a little naive to me, as it rests on the idea that the public controls the agenda, and sets it, via new technology. In fact, looking at the current government's successfully repeated pieces of propaganda, we see that the majority seem to go along with what they are given - that of course, we must have austerity, and yes, it's all Gordon Brown's fault. Are the political class really so at the mercy of the Net? They might be at the mercy of journalists, but the ones seen here are quite obedient, apart from one idiotic female reporter, who nearly gets herself killed.

Another strand looks at how twitter, facebook and foreign news outlets break the story and run with it, despite British government attempts to hush it up. This is obviously meant to illuminate how our current world is filled with instant media, and the powers that be have to trail behind. Again, I found this quite a naive view of the world, as it assumes that our current technology, which seems to me to be a momentary flux, will persist, rather than being stopped at some point. The announcement that it will be illegal to own footage of the PM doing the pig fucking seemed a bit more likely, but there was nothing of a more likely scenario - that the pig fuck incident would be used to clamp down on the net altogether. That couldn't be imagined here, though, because the whole thesis of the programme is that the net has changed things. It has, but not irreversibly - they can still be changed back, or alter for the worse.

The pig sex scene itself was perhaps the best moment of the show. Brooker is now forced to see through his rather silly and sick idea. The empty studio, with the pig munching away, and the Prime Minister approaching, removing his trousers, is both hilarious and nasty. But then we cut away to the people watching - a group of nurses in a hospital, a young Asian guy in bed, and a pub filled with customers. The crowd are amused and laugh, but are then sickened by what they see. Again, this is a bit cowardly. Obviously, there's not going to be some kind of hardcore bestiality scene, but it seems to me the camera should stay in the room, make us watch as if we are that audience, and leave us to work out how we feel for watching. It's what Michael Haneke would have done. Should he ever make a pig sex torture comedy featuring an imaginary British Prime Minister.

Inland Empire review

2011-12-01T09:39:00.000-08:00

Inland empire

I had heard that the first hour makes sense, then the rest doesn’t. That didn’t scare me, and on watching the film, I found it was true. The first hour lays out a conventional asian horror Ring like scenario – actors find themselves in a cursed film, the stars of the previous version were murdered. Add to this, Laura Dern plays an actress who has a husband who is insanely jealous, while her co-star Justin Theroux is an archetypal ladies man and player. In Lynch’s retro universe, this is signified by him wearing 50’s biker gear.

But back up. Before that, we see Dern at home in a mansion that looks like a hotel lobby. Grace Zabriski, Laura Palmer’s mum from Twin Peaks (and if cast now, wouold have to play her granny) comes to visit, supposedly to welcome her to the neighbourhood. Zabriskie has a east European accent, and soon conversation turns weird, with Zabriskie saying she lives in a small house in the woods, and coming across as a female version of that scary white-faced weirdo the Mystery Man from Lost Highway. She shows Dern the future, where in the room she will be in 24 hours time, and Dern sees herself there, receiving news that she has got the part in the cursed film, and rejoicing with her friends. But Dern then becomes this future version of herself. This is where the weird rot sets in, because there’s now two Derns, and occasionally she sees herself again.

There’s an script-reading scene which is like the audition scene in Mulholland, but not as good. There’s also lots of shots of her walking down a dark corridor that leads to a bedroom, much like in Lost highway. Lynch has said that he is glad that video allows him to film as much footage as he likes, and there’s the feeling that the film is 3 hours long because that’s the absolute most he could get away with. The idea of a full exploration of the Lost Highway/Mulholland idea is enticing, but this – Inland Empire, it’s Lost Highway taken further, too far, for too long, and using the characters from Mulholland Dr. It's also re-treading old ground, with lots of signature images – flashing white light that makes that scary electric crackling sound, red and blue lights in Bava fashion, a scary red lamp, mobster men in suits that sit silently, dancing grinning teenagers.

There’s a really great scene near the start (by which I eman around one hour in, the point where the film crumbles in terms of making sense) where Dern worrdiedly tells Theroux they have to be careful – that her husband suspects and he will kill them both, before she laughs, and says "that sounds like something from our script!” only for the director’s voice to break in, ‘cut!’. I thought that was genius, a really nice melding of reality and fiction. The rest of the film doesn’t get near that, and it is disappointing that Lynch doesn't have the discipline to make the weird setpieces meld into any kind of reality, but instead just goes off the deep end into out and out weird.

The second best scene appears two and a half hours in, after lots of scenes with Dern running around, or seeing herself, or going through a number of scenes, and then coming back round to the first one again, a bit like Back to the Future 2 if it had been written by a genuine loony. Then comes the second best scene. Dern is stabbed by a woman we previously saw being stabbed. Dern staggers and crashes down with some dossers, who ignore her, and listens while one of them describes her whore friend who has a hole in her vaginal wall, leading to her intestine, which is killing her. The lack of will to call help for Dern is both shocking and intense, and the story this Japanese girl tells is sick, yet compelling.

So is Dern’s southern drawl account to a silent man in glasses in a dark room about her life as a tough whore.

She blinded a man who tried to rape her, and, most interestingly, knew someone from a town where there was a chemical factory which made the people living there see ghosts, and go insane. One little girl saw a vision of the apocalypse. This idea would have made a great little film, I thought, I’d certainly like to have seen it. Although maybe that’s what Inland Empuire really was. This girl’s vision. It might as well be.

The film ends with a twist on the Twin Peaks movie, with the suffering woman getting release from an angelic visitiation. There's the Julee Cruise-type music, the red room, the tear streaked faces, the whole bit. Love it.

Fur film review

2011-12-01T09:24:00.000-08:00

Fur

Subtitled an imaginary portrait, this sets itself up clearly as metaphor from the beginning, and has as much to do with the real Diane Arbus, photgrpaher of freaks and oddments, as Quills has to do with the real Marquis de Sade, which is to say - nothing.

Diane Arbus, the film character, is an uptight 1950’s housewife, who helps out her successful fashion and portrait photographer husband in his studio, all the while aware of his voyeuristic attraction to the models. After prompting, Arbus decides to finally try photography herself.

Her husband has an exhibition in their well appointed New York apartment, and there is thudding from upstairs throughout,a new neighbour is moving in. This is actually the first stirring of Arbus’ subconscious, as we discover later when she is moved to tears when asked what exactly she does. Finding that she does notihng of worth as she answers the question, ‘giving the models straws so they don’t ruin their lipstick’ or some such, she goes out on their balcony and strips off, but no one seems to care.

She gets a glimpse of a weird man with a wrestlers mask on, the man moving in. he sees her.

She later goes up and peers into his ornate door lock, it has a circle of holes drilled in it. Later still, he inviotes her in. he is covered in hair we eventually discover. While she lives in a very clean, mainstream 1950’s, he dwells in a baroque never-never land of sensual furnishings and lighting that is muted and dark. His apartment is all very haptic, you can almost touch the soft furnishings, and there is a big swimming pool, filled with darkish water, in which they quickly share a bath. Almost as soon as she goes into his room, he asks her personal, sexual questions, and this really reveals he is not real. This is all in her head, her imaginary world. He shows her swingers, and circus freaks, all of which fires her imagination. The freaks are shot in the same haptic, sensual way, and they all look not so much normal as glamourous. It’s easy to think that a film shot like this could make stars of anyone. Its shot by Bill Pope, who has directed a film or two – a rage in harlem springs to mind, which was also shot like this, with lots of dark, rich colours, and sensual bodies and fabrics.

But the thing is, that arbus real pictures took the opposite approiach. They weren’t lovely and colourful, they were harsh black and white, and were the seamy, nasty underbelly of the 50’s world we see here, rather than a flight into a completely different world.

At first I wondered if this was going to be another one of those films, like the harispray musical, where its set in the 50’s/early 60’s simply so that the film can say that everyone in the 50’s was waiting for the 60’s to arrive. But no, its more a personal metaphor for her. The hairy man is clearly her imagination. Her infatutation with him leads her to introduce him to her family. Her husband hates him, but grows a beard. She is revealing her inner weirdness, and he’s trying to keep up. The kids love it, but she goes out more as a result. Her family are embarrassed. This is the price an artist pays for delving deep into their subconcious.

After awhile, Arbus discovers a trap door into the apartment above, and the hairy man and all his various freak freidns come down the stairs into her clean world. It’s a great visual mataphor for someone just giving in to their inner freak, to their suboconcious, letting their imagination take over.

It all goes wrong of course. In real life, Arbus killed herself, and hairy man is found to be about to die of lung failure. He tells her just after she’s shaved him and had sex with him, i.e. she's totally dug into the heart of her obsession and committed herself completely to it. And now she finds it is negative. That taking pictures of weird people actually means that she is weird, or lacking. The impulse to create comes from a negative place. She wonders if he lured her in, so she could see him die. He kills himself by throwing himself into the sea. She has a last party with the freaks, and then kisses her kids when they are asleep. Next we see her in nudist colony. We saw her checking in at the start, but now we know that this is actually heaven, and that she has killed herself.

If Arbus's pictures tell us that we are all freaks, all of us, we all have bodies, and those bodies look odd to everyone else, then Fur tries to have Arbus do the opposite, to make freaks normal, beautiful, we are all normal really. It’s a more comforting message, and a more trite one.

Sarah's Key film review

2011-10-18T15:08:00.000-07:00

Sarah's Key is in both in English and French, and set in the past and the near present. It is set in France and America. It looks at the deaths of Jews in Paris, who were rounded up by French police, and imprisoned in the Velodrome. After several days there, with no toilets or food, they were shipped, now weak and cowed, to the concentration camps.

Kristin Scott Thomas plays a female journalist in the present. She is bilingual, married to a French man, and grew up in France. She now lives in America, in New York. The scenes in the present feature her as a journalist investigating the story of a Jewish girl, Sarah, who lived in the flat that Scott Thomas's French in-laws later take over (once Sarah and her family have gone to the camps.) When the police come for them, Sarah locks her little brother in a hidden wall cupboard. Her actions seem unlikely, but this is probably not meant to be realistic – the Jewish boy in the wall is a symbol of the hidden guilt in the walls of France itself.

The scenes set in the Velodrome and the camps are very well staged, and are very moving. The portrayal of how the police remained calm and businesslike, even as they were ushering children towards a slow and painful death is truly chilling more so for being shown through the eyes of Sarah, and the feeling of incomprehension works very well – it is the feeling that best fits these events.

However, the film cuts back to the present regularly. In fact, it seems to cut back to avoid events becoming too powerful. It doesn't work, because the story of Kristin Scott Thomas in the present is, by comparison, almost wholly lacking in interest.

Thomas is our guide, and she is seen to be innocent of blame. We can side with her, and not feel complicit or accused. That she is now living in America seems not co incidental. It is her status as American which allows her to put the events of the past behind her, to be able to condemn them, without feeling any guilt.

The film explores a forgotten tragedy, one which France has been keen to ignore. De Gaulle’s post war speech 'Paris liberated' proclaimed every French man and woman part of the resistance, part of the liberation. France liberated, by itself. It was necessary to believe this fiction, in the interest of moving forward, and not lingering over blame and recriminations for what happened during the occupation. This was an attempt to create a national cohesiveness, although women who slept with Germans were singled for abuse, such as having their heads shaved.

The appearance of the film this year, along with The Round-Up, another film about the Velodrome, coming after a long period where French cinema has mostly been quiet about the events of the occupation, may be seen to suggest that France is now able to come to terms with what happened during the war. It may also suggest that the film has come out now because of right wing policies such as the banning of the burkha, and that this film is therefore a warning against demonising a minority.

However, there is no suggestion that the film is intended to illuminate current French debates. It dramatises a low moment in French history, and is content to accuse both the French people of the time, and the French people of today, of anti-Semitism. It doesn't go all out – there are good French charcters too. Even good French police and guards. The good French help save victims, but the bad ones, who delight in giving the cops information.

It is tempting to compare this film with Michael Haneke's Hidden, which makes a guilty character the focus, allies the viewer to him, and then accuses the viewer along with the character, suggesting that we are all guilty. Sarah's key consciously avoids such a conclusion, despite ham fisted mentions of Iraq and Afghanistan and a clunking question to a young woman, by Thomas, asking if she was sure what she would do in such a situation.

Wrapped up with this, in the present, is a very American anti abortion sub plot. Thomas becomes pregnant, and her French husband wants her to have an abortion. This link of child deaths in the camps, and an attempt to set up a parallel with abortion is clumsy.

In the past, Sarah escapes from the camp, and is taken in by two very nice French people – a couple. She grows up, and the war ends, and we hear that she is thinking of going away. She leaves for America, is very beautiful, but kills herself. We understand that she has a kind of survivor's guilt, and guilt for what happened to her brother.

But we never really get to know Sarah. The story is really hers, and the film would be much stronger if it simply followed her, without the cuts to the present, or the inclusion of Thomas' character. Sarah is an enigma, though, when we should perhaps be understanding her best of all. She is the most interesting character, but remains a puzzle. We know she is very tough, and has had to be to survive. But she has no happy ending, even in America. Perhaps because she cannot shake off Europe.

In the present, we follow Thomas trogging round, and tracing Sarah's family, but no one ever tells her to fuck off and mind her own business. When she thinks she has finally found Sarah, I wanted Sarah to come in and tell her to go away, but its a different woman, the second wife, and she doesn't. Only the grandson does tell her to go away, but only because he cannot bear the truth of his own Jewishness – and then he falls in love with her, anyway. Thomas actually seems very weird, tracking a family she has no link to, simply for her (and our) voyeuristic pleasure – our desire to know what happened, which is greater, and more deserving, than their any desire for privacy which the characters might have.

Hanna film review

2011-10-18T14:44:00.000-07:00

Hanna is a thriller about a teenage girl who has been bought up in the snowy wastes of a desolate forest, trained by her ex CIA agent Dad to be a super efficient killer. Growing up, she wants to explore the world she has never seen. Her Dad warns her that the Agency will try and seize her if she does, but eventually Hanna decides to go anyway.

Most of the rest of the film is a chase, with the CIA, led by Cate Blanchett, obsessively chasing the young woman, as she struggles across countries, to try and meet up with her Dad at a German rendezvous.

After setting itself up as a standard thriller in the Bourne mould, Hanna goes totally off the rails in the second act, turning into a romance/comedy, as Hanna meets up with a holidaying hippie family, and kind of falls in love with all of them, but especially their oldest daughter, who despite thinking herself cool and street tough, is actually the kind of innocent teen Hanna has never been allowed to be. Meanwhile, the Agency are shown to be totally ruthless, and Blanchett employs a couple of 80's skinheads and their bizarre camp hitman boss to search, find and kill Hanna. They track her down to the Morroccan campsite she is staying at with the family, and we fear that they will hurt the family, that they will force Hanna to reveal her violent side.

Once the whole film has been watched, it can be said that it's actually quite straight forward as a genre piece, but while watching it, it does seem to go to weird and wild places.

It does do some things differently – the use of americans as the villians, for example, and throughout, there are choices made which diffentiate the film from american genre pics. Not least the use of locations. Peter Bradshaw's Guardian review finds these locations boring, but I thought quite the opposite – they are interesting for being something totally different, and are shot in an interesting, imaginaitve way, and lit for maximum drama.

I particularly liked the way that, when Hanna escapes from the CIA base, to find that a hatch leads up to a desert, that we share Hanna's surprise that this is not America – the desert is seems to be – but is in fact Morocco. The discovery o this via ancient castles is very nicely done. It shows the film is not doing just the usual, but gives something not only different, but better.

The film sometimes seems like a video game, with different 'levels' – the locations that Hanna finds herself in. One scene, where she jumps across a series of containers at a docks, even includes videogame like action, too.

The use of the chemical brothers music, which mixes flat out techno with more child like musical box themes, works very well, especially for the extended dialogue less scenes, where Hanna goes into action. The only pop song used is David Bowie's Kooks, which works in terms of the kind of song that hippie family really would enjoy singing along to in their camper van, and also as a comment on Hanna's desire to be accepted and move in with them – even as she knows that she doesn't really fit. It's a clever, appropriate choice.

The story obviously goes for a fairytale feeling,and it is violent, and also suffers a little from what I think of as Nightbreed syndrome, where an interesting world is set up, only for it to be immediately destroyed by a hateful baddie crashing in. But here, there is always another, interesting new world for Hanna to go into.

The ending brings things full circle, and while Hanna is not in the same leauge as something like Leon, in terms of story, it is too gewneric finally for that – despite being an attempt to be about a young woman breaking away from her parents – and it is at least much better than the TV show Alias – and is a very exciting, odd and fun movie, and well worth a watch.

Pedro Almodovar's The Skin I Live In Review

2011-09-20T15:10:00.000-07:00

Judged by the film poster,Pedro Almodovar's new film looks like something of a departure for him. The image explicitly evokes Franju's Eyes Without a Face, with its picture of a presumably mad surgeon, with a young woman's face next to him, her features covered by a mask.

Could this be Pedro's horror film? In some ways, yes, it is, but maybe only becuase it is structured as a thriller, with a central 'twist', or 'shock' scene, which greatly changes the course of the plot. The publicity then goes the Hitchock - Psycho route of asking people not to reveal the twist to others.

But there was no need to structure this story in this way, other than to create a talking point around its 'shock' twist. And essentially, the twist is that this is an Almodovar film, and it has more in common with his earlier Bad Education than with anything in the horror genre.

I was going to recount a full synopsis, but the flashbacks and the big twist, which you're not meant to ever say, mean that I can't face it. So I'll imagine you've seen the film, and you imagine a synopsis here...

Spoilers follow of course...

There's lots of ways you could intrpret this film – that, like Lisbeth Salander, the aggressive revenger in the Girl Who Kicked... trilogy, this is a story of a woman (the daughter) who becomes masculine inside after being raped – literally internalises her rapist. Or you could muse on how societal norms make men and women act differently, that your body decides how you are perceived and treated.

Or you could note how the woman looks just like every other Almodovar female, in just the same way. She is almost identical to the stars of his other films – like time has stood still for her, while poor old Banderas now resembles a sleazy old Euro cult actor. Of course this is a new protegee, a replacement. But aren't all these young women just playing Almodovar anyway?

That seems more like it – becuase of course, this is not a genre film, its an auteur film. Almodovar is the auteur, and he is known for being a gay man who uses women as his central characters. So this young actress, working for Almodovar, is playing a man anyway – him. All his films have this transvestite figure at their centre, this one just calls attention to it.

The main aspect of the young woman's feminity in the film is her to be looked-at-ness, and her penetrability – by looks, by camera, by penises. The first section of the film is almost laughable in its blatant and over the top use of a voyeuristic camera, with the woman constantly displayed for the doctor's, and our gaze. It seems like Almodovar has just read Laura Mulvey.

The characters have no emotional weight, and we engage not at all with any of them. Is this a problem? It seemed to me that the film was moving towards its 'twist' scene, and it really hoped we would be shocked and outraged by it. Becuase if we weren't - if we just shrugged, and kind of wished the film had been more extreme, and a bit less Almodovar business as usual - well, there's nothing else there for us, then.

Kate Bush - Director's Cut - Review

2011-09-20T14:38:00.000-07:00

Kate Bush was never cool. As a teenager, a friend who assuredly was cool, told me off for sitting with a vinyl copy of The Dreaming next to me, while waiting for him, one lunchtime. 'Put it in a bag' he adivsed. 'Why?' 'Kate Bush's not cool'.

I never had a problem with this, becuase instead of cool, she had something else. She was weird, off centre, an artiste, and excluding those who didn't 'get her' wasn't a problem. She wasn't cool, she was her own voice, bold, proud, odd.

That was my feeling, anyway. Until I heard The Red Shoes. I think my intense dislike of that album wasn't becuase of the songs, it was because, for the first trime, Bush didn't just sound uncool, she sounded naff. Let me put that another way - the album sounded like all the other MOR AOR adult soft rock singers out there, where all the previous albums, good or bad, sounded different, sounded distinct from that mainstream sound. With The Red Shoes, Bush became part of the true mainstream. The album used the tricks that Annie Lennox, or even worse, Celine Dion use. Soft rock and power ballads. It didn't surprise me that people who had never bought a Kate Bush album, liked The Red Shoes. It fitted in, it did just what other adult popular albums do, in the same way.

The Red Shoes is often described as a sad album, the evidence being that Bush's mother had recently died, and the songs are inflected with this sadness. For her part, Bush has always claimed that the songs were all written before her mother's death. This seems believable. The Red Shoes doesn't sound like an album of sad songs, so much as an album where a previously idisyncratic artist has simply relinqished control during recording. The production, performances, and arrangements are all of the most generic, uninspired kind.

I was amazed that Bush was able to return some years later with Aerial, an album that reaffirmed my enjoyment of her music - like her strongest album, The Hounds of Love, it had an ambitious suite of songs, in the prog rock mould. It had songs about weird subjects, like the numbers that make up Pi, or washing machines. Aerial underlined where The Red Shoes went wrong.

So, I felt gratified immediately when the news came that Bush was re-recording songs from The Red Shoes. It seemed that she felt just the same as I did, that I had correctly read The Red Shoes as a misstep. I was less enthused that she was also including songs from The Sensual World, an album I rated highly, although its muddy, cloudy production obscured some of its impact. The only song on The Sensual World that really needed re-recording was plainly Rocket's Tail, a fantstic song for its first part, where Bush sings acapella with The Trio Bulgarka, but rather ruined by the intrusion of Dave Gilmour in full guitar wank mode, halfway through. A female world smashed by a big guitar shaped cock. That wasn't one of the songs to be included.

Instead, This Womans Work, a flawless piece, and The Sensual World itself, now with the James Joyce lyrics reinstated, and called Flower of the Mountain, were to feature.

For me, this last track alone makes Director's Cut worthwhile. Bush does not sounds as she did in the early 90's, and so Flower of the Mountain will never be what it would have been, and the Sensual World recording cannot therefore be fully retired. However, the new version is infinteily stronger than the old, the additon of Joyce's lyrics taking the song into places that could not be imagined simply be listgening to the first version. It's very tempting to imagine what this would have felt like had it come out at the time. After my obsession with The Hounds of Love, I found The Sensual World, in its guise as firs tsingle, a little underwhelming. Would I have preferred Flower of the Mountain? Defintiely.

After this, Director's Cut revisits one of my least liked tracks from The Red Shoes - Song of Solomon.Well, perhaps not least liked, so much as container of some of my least liked Bush lyrics. 'don't want your bullshit/Just want your sexuality' sounded laughably poor in its bluntness. Especially for a song named after such a poetic Biblical book. It felt like defeat, a failure to create poetry that instead went for the brutally unsubtle. After the words of Joyce for Flower of the Mountain, Song should sound even worse. But it doesn't.

It's part of a little grouping of three songs at the start of Director's Cut that each explore female sexuality, and the new backing and vocal make it slide past much more agreeably. It doesn't sound dozy and crass any more. It sounds flirty, funny. Lily, the following song, was always a good tune, and removed from the endlessly long Red Shoes, it gets to shine, a great album track, although to be honest, both of these tracks are bolstered by the opening brilliance of Flower of the Mountain.

For me, the biggest improvement on the whole disc is Moments of Pleasure. In its original version, it was ghastly, a power ballad with a big obvious awful, dumb chorus. 'Just being alive, it can really hurt', she told us. Just listening to the song certainly did, anyway. The new version slows it right down, lets us hear the lyrics that the first recording hid in its haste, and yes they are good, before, brilliantly, removing the chorus.

Up to here, it's pretty good, but the aforementioned This Woman's Work wasn't in need of a redo. Thought of as a live version, or a TV special recording, it's fine, though.

That's the end of the good stuff, though. Becuase then the Red Shoes reasserts itself, and the rest, for me, is almost as long and flavourless as the first version. Except for Rubberband Girl, tucked away at the end, which is a nice little pub rock reimaging, with a great spontaeous feel. It'll never be more than a fun throwaay, but now it really is fun, and - a rarity in the Bush canon this - it actually rocks. A bit, anyway. Where the original was not up to the job of album opener, and a bad sign for what followed, the bonus track status here is about right.

Was this album worth doing? Not really. I'm glad to have Flower of the Mountain, and it's nice to have some of the better Red Shoes in better versions. The best thing is their removal from the whole long slog of the original album, although this album is hardly short, and it all gets a bit much towards the end.

Review of Joann Safar's Gainsbourg - Vie héroïque

2011-08-19T04:53:00.000-07:00

Probably greatly indebted to I'm Not There, Todd Haynes' fractured look at the life of Bob Dylan, first time director Joann Safar gives us a similarily allusive look at the life of Serge Gainsbourg. Gainsbourg, Vie Heroique, starts with the young Serge, born Lucien Ginsburg, displaying chutzpah in the face of the Nazi occupation. He volunteers to wear the first Jewish star, and takes art clases alongside members of the SS.

Despite trying to slide along in life, Lucien is bothered by a Nazi poster showing a demonic caricature of Jewish features. The image in the poster comes to life, and becomes a man-sized puppet creature, called The Mug. The Mug seems to contain both negative and positve associations. At first it seems to be his Jewish ancestry, which is debased in his own eyes, and which has to be hidden. Then it seems more to be the Mr Hyde, the dark side that the singer himself dubbed 'Gainsbarre', the one responsible for all the boozing and womanizing that follows. But the creature as often looks on, as it incites the antics that follow. And it also has a positive influence - it is The Mug that suggests Lucien change from art to music, then forcefully insists on it, burning all of Lucien's art. But when the now-successful singer finds happiness with Jane Birkin, the creature is expelled, and forced to sit on the roof, sobbing. He is able to get back inside, but only once Gainsbourg has suffered a heart attack.

The effects of the war are shown as long lasting, even reposnsible for Gainsbourg's entire world view, the presnetation of these formative events feels too short. As an adult, he never really mentions how he felt about this, until finally, at the film's close, we see him recoridng hisa own version of The Marseillaise, the French national anthem, in a reggae style, with lyrics changed from 'to arms, citizens', to the more ambivalent, if not mocking, 'to arms...etc'. The resulting furore, with right wing nationalists trying to bundle him as he arrives, outraged crowds, and scathing columns in the French newspapers accusing Gainsbourg of stirring up anti-semitism, feel like the other part of the story we saw at the start, and works well.

The middle section is more problematic. It feels much less cinematic than the early and later scenes, with major events in Gainsbourg's life reported second-hand in dialogue, rather than dramatised. This section feels more theatrical, and most scenes are set in rooms, or on the street, with two characters talking. It's all very attractively designed and lit, and gives a real feel of 70's decadence, but it is still just mostly a succession of rooms. Gainsbourg's encounters with Bridget Bardot, where the two work together on songs, and then sleep together, mostly in one room, are effective. But the film elides the reaction of the outside world. Even the release of Je Taime is shown only be a record exec predicting trouble. These choices feel possibly forced on the film by inadequate budget, but given the director's obvious interest in the early and final scenes, which is to say, in Gainsbourg's Jewishness, and how it both benefited and hindered his rise to French stardom, this may not be the case.

The allusive style will also probably confuse many non-French viewers, or at least non-fans - the baby Charlotte is shown in her crib, while the Mug creature leans in from the skylight and asks, 'What is your name?' The reply comes: 'Melody...Melody Nelson'. This is a reference to Gainsbourg's most successful album, released at around this time, and the birth of baby and album are linked to emphasise this was Serge's happiest and most productive phase. But it won't be surprising if viewers unfamiliar with Gainsbourg think that he had a kid called Melody.

Overall, Gainsbourg: Vie Heroique is itself a heroique failure, the kind of risk taking seen pretty much only in French cinema - giving the biopic of a much loved national instituion to a first time film director, and letting him bring moments both inspired and awkward to the project. While the device of Mug lets Safar explore what it meant to be a Jewish star in a country that both loves and hates him works well, there are also many problems of tone and staging here that a more expereicned director, even a director making his second film, would have avoided. That said, the central performance by Eric Elmosnino is perfection throughout, whether as gangly young artist, or ancient drunk embarrassment.

Black Swan film review

2011-08-10T07:16:00.000-07:00

Black Swan most clearly evokes various late 60's and 1970's horror films, the ones that had a young, female character at their centre, who encounters a bizarre, malevolent world of adults, bent on using her for their own ends. Rosemary's Baby, Suspiria and The Sentinel.

This marks it out as different to the current, hyper-masculine torture porn films, or the overly feminine, and toothless vampire romances of the Twilight cycle. It is an attempt to put the female presence back to the centre of the horror film, and to do so, it also draws on the kind of creeping unease seen in recent japanese J- Horror films, which also often feature women in central roles.

Black Swan also evokes subjective films about insanity, such as Jacob's Ladder, Lost Highway and Videodrome, but with a female central character. Like those films, Black Swan's supposed protagonist is really mostly a spectator in her own story, encountering weird people and situations that get worse and worse as she goes along the way. The root influence is most likely Alice in Wonderland, and Black Swan makes for a great dark Alice tale.

The film starts with a dream, in which Nina, a young ballet dancer imagines herself dancing Swan Lake with a shadowy beast man. Waking, she sees a double of herself, who she passes on the Tube, and also sees in a tunnel. Where Nina is dressed all in white, with her hair in a tight bun, the double is in black, with long dark hair. These early moments, with their obvious message - that white Nina is virginal, uptight, while Black Nina is sexual, loose, possibly evil - make it immediately obvious that Black Swan is not in any way a realistic film. Despite the use of documentary style handheld camera to add a patina of 'reality', we are clearly in the world of archetypes, myths and fairy tales.

In symbolic terms, the film is basically about a young woman emerging into adulthood. She lives with her controlling mother, and has a bedroom which is still full of childish toys, and pink ballerinas. The arrival of the ballet director heralds the beginnings of her awareness of men, and a conciousness of her sexuality. He flirts and orders her to mastubate, insistent that this will make her better in her role. As dancer, as woman. Both are there to be displayed, of course.

The film also evokes Paul Verhoeven, though, when it adds a lesbian sex scene, which is gratituitous and voyeuristic, and the film often makes the viewer aware that is a female story being told through an overtly male script and camera. Towards the end, the film goes into dodgy CGI overdrive, and becomes quite ugly to look at. However Black Swan for the most part handles similar material to Showgirls, in a far superior way. Both films have dancers, bitchy girls, sex and violence. But going highbrow to ballet is much better than going downmarket to strippers. And of course, getting Natalie Portman is a much better actress than Elizabeth Berkeley.

Review of Debra Granik's Winter's Bone (2010)

2011-07-11T08:05:00.000-07:00

I grew up in a small East Anglian village, with a large US Air base not far away. Some young women from the village often went to discos at the air base, dolled up, and eager to find American airmen to marry. Of the two that succeeded, we heard back via friends that the brides found themselves not in Hollywood, but in rural communities similar to our own, but even more desolate, much poorer.

There always seemed a certain poetic justice to this, and I remembered those girls when I watched Winter's Bone, an American film set in Ozark, Missouri, a desperately poor rural community, that seems a little like Deliverance without the towny characters. There are no jobs, the police are simply another gang, cooking up methamphtemine seems to be the only industry, and a hard bitten macho culture rules. In many ways, the problems of this all-white community resemble that of urban black ones, although there are hardly any young people in this place, with tough, craggy faced older men being in charge.

It's hard to know whether the poverty shown in this small settlement is a hold over from the past, rooted in the hardscrabble origins of the Old West, or if, conversely, they are the future - a post industrial vision of things to come - as grim as Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Certainly there is no State help to speak of, and the central character of Ree, a 17 year old girl, left to care for her two siblings and mentally ill mother without any meaningful assistance, other than the charity of neighbours, could just as easily be living in a post apocalyptic landscape as an ancient one. There is a kind of Care in the Community working, but it's built on the model of the vengeful God of the Old Testament. It's a world familiar from the brutal, archetypal songs of banjo singers like Dock Boggs, and a party scene shows the central place that music has to the people here, and the comfort it can bring.

Like many European films, Winter's Bone shows us a world outside the one depicted by Hollywood, but also uses a form of Hollywood plot, in order to broaden its appeal. The photography is stylised, attractive even, despite showing us the poor - this is not a realist docu-drama. The pace is slow for an American film. The story is a basic quest, with the girl obliged to find her absent father in order to avoid her fmaily being thrown out of their home, once he is classed as having skipped bail. The Father has clearly upset a lot of shady characters, although we never really find out exactly why. During the film, we see his girl politely ask for help, and the grim, quiet outrage that this request causes. This tells us all we need to know. The acting is deeply convincing, especially Jennifer Lawrence as Ree.

While the plot is perhaps too pat, this is probably deliberate, to make the film more accessible, and overall Winter's Bone is an unusually thoughtful and subtle film. Throughout, the film makes points about the poor in the US, but does so in a very undertstated way, letting us pick them up, or not. When the girl tries to join the army, her decision makes little sense in plot terms, but allows the film to highlight that the Government offers 40,000 dollars to anyone who signs up. This must be an astronomical sum to these people, and both seems a kind of bribe, and an explanation for why the poor join up for military service, in peacetime ending up in places like Iraq in wartime, or, in peace, East Anglia.

Flaming Lips live at Alexandra Palace London, 1 July 2011

2011-07-06T04:04:00.000-07:00

The Flaming Lips played their album The Soft Bulletin in its entireity tonight. This was part of the All Tomorrow's Parties 'Don't Look Back' series, and in the free booklet/programme, the organisers presented this series as being radical, by valuing the album in a time of track downloads. This seems a little disingenous, but the result tonight was fantastic.

The previous time I saw the Flaming Lips was 2006, at Hammersmith Apollo, it seemed to me that their set climaxed immediately, with the first song, Run For The Prize, where they literally threw everytrghing at the audience at once: glitter, smoke, giant bouncing balloons, people in animal costumes, big projections of flashing solarised eyes, the lot.

Tonight, it seemed that the imposed structure of playing an album made the set a lot stronger. It still started out with Race for The Prize, and Coyne immediately got into a giant hamster ball, and rolled his way out across the audience, while giant balloons bounced everywhere, but after this opening highlight, the following songs forced the group to calm down a bit, rather than trying to top themselves over and over. This all feels very american, a mix of the sentimental the sexual, contrivance and tastless excess that echoes both disneyland and las vegas, the pentecostal mega church and the porno industry, the beach boys and Kiss.

Throughout the gig, Coyne gave sometimes quite long introductions to songs, andrepeatedly asked for encourgament from the crowd, and said words along the lines of 'if it's bad, just scream louder, as if it's even better.' He says that the effects are all cheap, and fake, but he loves that the crowd treat them as real. This goes to the heart of the Lips live experience, that, as with organised religion, the elements of worship are fake, theatrical and contrived, but people repsond to the cues, and take them seriously. The Flaming Lips have pushed these buttons, and people respond accordingly.

Coyne also often apologised in advance for not having played some of the songs very often live before, or even ever. These turned out to be the highlights. The instumental The Observer, even though it followed an admittedly great rendition of What Is the Light, beat it by being obviously less well practised, and therefore more in the moment. The lights dimmed, leaving group in silhouette, while red lasers zapped out in lines above our heads, and it was easy to go into the kind of transported trance state that the Lips often seem to aspire to inducing in their audience. Feeling Yourself Disintegrate was another highlight, a song I had undervalued before, but which now was revealed as the equal of such bitter sweet crowd pleasers as Do You Realize. Coyne's introduction of the song showed he thought so too, citing it as one of the reasons he feels the group can pile on the glitter and showmanship in good faith, becuase they have some great, thoughtful songs to back it all up with .

In other words, he was affirming that there is a truth under the glitz, a seeking for transcendence despite, or more correctly, through the use of, the tawdry. Footage of a topless go go dancer, edited to make her a goddess symbol is both powerful and problematic. Powerful when she stops, with arms aloft, echoing the devotional body postures of both audience and singer, more problematic when she resembles an image of cheap rock titillation.

The contradiction between uses images of a stripper as a goddess, glitter and disco balls as devotional props, and presenting a message that is in many ways shallow and undefined, is actually at the heart of the Flaming Lips appeal.

Blue Valentine film review

2011-07-05T01:27:00.000-07:00

For the most part a two hander starring Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling, this American independent film tells the story of a blue collar couple, and their disintegration of their marriage. Through flashbacks, we learn that the relationship was happier in its earlier stages, but also come to appreciate that it was always built on shaky foundations.

Blue Valentine features superb acting from its central couple, especially from Gosling, who is particularly impressive as Ray, a working class man who is both victimized and victimizer, and makes us understand that. The trouble is, especially in the early part of the film, that both actors present a very believable portrait of their characters, but both of these characters are annoying. It's easy to understand why Williams's character Cindy wants Dean gone, and just as easy to understand why Dean is so frustrated with Cindy, when he's only trying to make her happy. The result is like being a marriage counsellor - not really a fun night out at the movies. This probably explains why the film's performance at the box office was so poor - the kind of couples who want to see a movie would run a mile from this.

That said, the couple, while in some ways realistic, are in many other ways overly melodramatic. You probably won't identify with them, as they are quite extreme caricatures. They're just as much cyphers as those seen in the ghastly (500) Days of Summer. In fact, there's more than a few resemblances between the two films. True, here Cindy gets to be a character, and we see her own view, something Summer never got. But Dean resembles Tom, the hero of (500), in that both are besotted with a physically attractive girl at first sight, and both then devote their lives to chasing and attaining her, no matter that she might not be actually compatible, or even likable, as a person. It's all about having sex with a good looking girl, even if the price is madness (Dean) or slight indigestion (Tom).

Both films use the device of cutting between a scene from the end of the relationship, to a parallel scene from the relationship's beginning. In Blue Valentine, we see a bad sex scene where Williams basically invites Gosling to rape her, just to get it over with, followed by a super-happy and loving encounter from earlier. This device does work, but it is too pat, and too contrived. Deliberately so in the case of the totally contrived (500), seemingly more accidentally so here.

Blue Valentine really shines when it goes for raw emotion over editing tricks. In the scene where Dean finally loses it big time and causes a scene at the hospital where Cindy works as a nurse. He loses it, punches the Doctor who has been attempting to chat Williams up, and we see now how Gosling is channeling the rage of Dean's earlier beating at the hands of Cindy's previous boyfriend. The scene, as written, is a fairly typical 'have a row in public' thing, but Gosling pushes it far further. This scene has a genuine, universal passion and rage to it, that for me eclipsed the rest of the film.

I can't say I enjoyed watching Blue Valentine, but didn't really expect to. I was disappointed that it didn't have much connection with real characters, despite its working class setting, it remains all too Hollywood. The acting is fine, sometimes great, but it does all feel very self indulgent, with the flashy neuroses of the central duo added just to give the two stars something to bite on.

There wasn't even any Tom Waits on the soundtrack...

Danny Boyle's 127 Hours - Film Review

2011-07-04T15:46:00.000-07:00

127 Hours is based on the true story of Aron Ralston, a twenty- something engineer and all round cool dude, who likes to spend his weekend exploring the great desolate American desert. He meets a couple of young women, and impresses them by helping find their way through the mountainous gorges and outcrops. He then shows them how plunge into a secret pool, hidden deep in the rocks. This is a guy who knows how to defeat nature, how to find the pleasures that Joe Public would never find. Except, the film is about how nature seems to take exception to Aron's cavlier attitude, and punish him for it.

The girls invite Aron to a party they are throwing the next day, which can be spotted by its giant Scooby Doo inflatable. which will be outside. He never makes it, becuase shortly after he has whizzed off on his own way, he falls into a crack in the rocks, and a boulder tumbles down onto him, and pins one arm, trapping him. This moment, where the film suddenly lurches in tone, from cool, adventurous, exicting, into a scenario where the same indiviidual is now almost toally helpless, at the non-existent mercy of the elements, is incredibly scary and effective.

The remainder of the film is spent with Aron, excellently played by James Franco, as he tries to free himself, trying first brute strength against the boudler, then a system of pulleys, before finally accepting that amputating the crushed arm might be the only way to escape.

Despite staying with Aron for the bulk of the film, Boyle's film ranges far and wide visually, incorporating Aron's dreams and thoughts, which are depicted as brightly coloured visions. The style of the film is therefore far closer to Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers than to a mostly quietly respectful wilderness survival drama like Alive.The use of blatant product placement, and Aron's range of unhelpful electronic gizmos, all underline that he will only survive once he has stripped away the dietrus of modern American society, and discovered something stronger within himself.

At heart, the film seems to me to be a war on terror film, and I would not be surprised if it is read this way in the future, linked with Hostel rather than Castaway, given 127 Hours story of an unprepared American enduring a long slow torture in the ancient desert. Of course, it is nature, not Islamist extremists that torture him, but it seems possible that the film has been made now becuase of its thematic links to to the experiences of young American males in Iraq and Afghanistan. Not least the harsh desert landscape, which at first seems easy to overcome with superior technology, but which cruelly punishes this lack of respect.

That Aron finally escapes through self mutilation, and loses an arm, but is able to carry on, and is shown happily swimming at the film's end, would seem to suggest that although America will be damaged by its adventures in the Middle East, if it were to simply lop off the trapped limb, it could escape, wounded, but still very much alive. Whether this limb represents consumerism, and in the larger sense the capitallist system, or simply the over-reliance of America on oil, is open to question.

Drew Barrymore's Whip It (2009) review

2011-06-09T07:20:00.000-07:00

The first film directed by actress Drew Barrymore, Whip It is the story of Bliss (Ellen Page), a 17 year old, bespectacled, working class girl who lives in a small Texas town. Her mother is deeply into beauty pageants, an enthusiasm Bliss's much younger sister shares, but Bliss herself detests. Visting the cool town of Austin, Bliss sees a flyer for a female roller derby match. Later, her friend Pash (Alia Shawkat), who works with her at the pig-flesh-centred diner, The Oink Joint, drives them both to the event. Bliss is inspired, and, attempting to heroine-worship the girls afterwards, is told by one player to come and join in, using the punk-style credo of : 'be your own hero.' Bliss joins the try outs, immediately shows apittude, and is taken on by the manager. Pash is neither invited, nor seems to want to be in, and is sidelined in favour of the cool indie band boy Bliss sets eyes on, and soon ends up with.

The main problem with Whip It is that it fails to make the central roller derby matches visually exciting. We see that Bliss is exicted by it, but the cinematography and editing do not communicate this excitement effectively.. The matches are repetitively filmed, switching between pov shots, and wider shots of the girls whizzing around. The crowds appear small, not so much suggestive of an underground subculture, so much as indicating the film's low budget, and while there is some shoving, pushing and the occasional punch from the palyers, there is no real sense of involvement or danger.

The film also struggles to make female roller derby seem empowering. The girls do not even have agency over their own sport, as the managers are all male. We also see male incidental characters obtaining voyeuristic pleasure from the girls, who are unaware of this, suggesting that while the fearsome stage names the players give each other are intended to be aggressive, they are read by males in primarily sexual terms. There is also no solidarity amongst the team, and Bliss is bullyed by them, just as she victimised by the stuck-up girl at school.

Bliss's goal of going out with the handsome indie rocker boy shows that the alternative world is essentially the same as the mainstream one, and the film does finally admit that there is little difference between the conservative, religious, blue-collar community, and the supposedly alternative subculture of the roller derby. Once aware of Bliss's mother, they advise Bliss not to be disrespectful of her, and it is revealed that one of the suppoedly weird, tattooed girls is actually a mother herself.

The charcters in the film are all working class - Bliss's mother works for the postal service, and we hear that the roller girls, when not rolling, are waitresses, or other similar unfulfillling jobs, and that this is their outlet. The beauty pageants are one outlet for working class frustration, the roller derby is another. Neither activity leads to anything, or offers anything outside the dominant ideology. Both present female bodies to be looked at by males, while offering a fantasy of female power, which also sets women against each other, in search of male approval. This shows that both activities are mere sideshows, ways to temporarily forget the alienation of capitalism.

The only chaarcter who actually achives any tangible success in the film is Pash, who is casually abandoned by Bliss, when the latter goes off with her new boyfriend. Finally snapping after being arrested, Pash turns against Bliss, later forgives her, but then tells her that she has channeled her rebellion against the conservative small town into studying hard, and has been accepted to study in New York.This makes her, while uncool, a more effective rebel, finding a more productive escape route.

The Walking Dead season one, epsiode 2 review - 'Guts'

2011-04-25T01:14:00.000-07:00

Episode two of this new zombie TV series was 80 per cent based on one scene in George Romero's 1979 movie Dawn of the Dead - the one where the survivors use a truck to smash their way through the zombies, and into the shopping mall. I think this scene was reversed in the Zack Snyder remake, with the truck used as a way out of the mall. That's the way it went here.

Rick, our hero cop, played by Andrew Lincoln, meets up with a group of survivors, who are holed up in a tower block, which has shops on the ground floor. The zombies are alerted to the group when Rick shoots his way in to the block, and start to do the classic moaning and scraping at the windows. Hence, the survivors have to leave, before the zombies break in.This sets up a ticking clock, which leads to the mechanics of the main plot, lifted pretty much verbatim from Dawn, but drawn out somewhat.

Seeing this scene played out again, by new characters, and with modern effects, was certainly enjoyable enough, but the real interest came from seeing where the show departs from its template. One difference comes with the idea of the characters covering themselves with rotting zombie guts, in order to be able to walk unnoticed amongst the living dead. While unconvincing, this allows for an effective tension scene, when rain washes the splattered guts off the intruders. However, the most interesting difference was perhaps how the episode talks about race, with a nasty redneck character, Merle Dixon, used as a gateway to this discussion.

While on the roof of the building, Dixon proclaims himself leader, and attacks a big black man, T-Dog. Dixon racially insults T Dog, overpowers him, and holds a gun to his head. Rick, initially punched out by Dixon, comes back and gets the better of him, cuffing him to a pipe. Dixon calls Rick a 'pig', and threatens him. When the group leave, Dixon is abandoned on the roof, after T-Dog goes back to free him, but trips and drops the key. T-Dog locks the door to the roof, presumably so the incoming zombies won't be able to eat Dixon, but it's debatable whether slow starvation would be preferable. As a bag with a hacksaw is on the roof too, albeit supposedly out of reach, it won't be surprising if Dixon effects an escape.

There are several things of interest about the use of Dixon as antagonist. The first is that he is the only character to have any problem with Rick being a cop. No black character has been anything but respectful to Rick so far. The second is that Romero's Dawn of the Dead features a black character, Peter, who is a SWAT team member, and able to defend himself without undue help from white characters. In fact, the white male characters are mostly much less able than Peter, and neither of the two white males survive to the end of the film. Snyder's Dawn remake has Kenneth, a tough and capable black police sergeant, played by Ving Rhames, who also survives to the end of the film.

While The Walking Dead equates racism with stupidity and aggression, and condemns it, it also denies T-Dog the ability to be a capable character in his own right. Rick is needed as a white intercessor/protector figure. This is clearly a step backwards from either version of Dawn, both of which have black men as police officers, with the authority to take charge, be level headed in crisis, and to legitimately and effectively hold a gun.

In The Walking Dead, white Rick is the character with authority, and it is left to him to decide which side he will include, and who exclude. It is interesting to imagine the scenario if the aggressive character had been the black T Dog, rather than white Dixon. Would Rick have been able to cuff T Dog to a pipe, and abandon him, without losing the sympathy of the audience? Is Dixon simply a personification of fears about police racism, externalized and projected onto a working class, civilian character? Is Dixon's real function to detoxify Rick as a white cop, from suggestions that he might be racist, whilst still allowing him the position of being the strongest, most moral character?

It is also notable that the group is more racially mixed than the one in either Dawn, and includes both Asian and Latino characters, and black and white characters of both genders. As such, they form an ad hoc representation of the racial plurality of America, but Rick's battle with Dixon suggests that the traditional order of power concentrated in white male hands will continue in the new, post-apocalyptic world. That Rick is a benign authority means that this is seen as acceptable, even perhaps desirable. It refutes Romero's view that the collapse of society will offer the opportunity for minorities such as women and black men to assume authority previously denied them.

Arguably, the presence of Kenneth as a strong, black character in the Dawn remake indicates that, while re-iterating Romero's rules and situations, such as the need to shoot zombies in the head, their cannibalism, and so on, the remake treats Romero's inclusion of strong black characters as part of the genre, and so includes it. The Walking Dead still includes black characters, but downgrades them to supporting roles, either helping the central character of Rick (as in episode one), or requiring help from him.

Of course, the pre-Romero zombie film centred on black workers in Haiti, who are bought back to life by voodoo magic, and who continue their work after death as unpaid labour. Romero widened the zombie plague out from this group, into the wider America. Dawn starts with in a tenement block in a black neighbourhood, and the first zombies we see are black. They conform to the previous movie image of the undead as black. Subsequent scenes set the next day, in daylight, and in the American fields, show white zombies, and, by the time the group arrive at the shopping mall, the camera reveals that zombies come from all races and religious beliefs (including Hari Krishnas). This broadening means that the black characters are able to take on a wider range of roles, including hero. Why Romero consistently casts black men as lead characters is open to question - as a reaction against the racism in the American South during the 1960's, could be one possible answer, and links to The Walking Dead's racist white man Dixon, whose name evokes the Southern states below the Mason-Dixon line. The difference, of course, is that the Walking Dead, in this episode, does not allow black characters to take centre stage.

Black characters are also used by Romero to espouse a religious view - in Dawn, Peter relates how his grandfather warned him that 'when there is no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth', the line used on the film's poster, as its tagline. In Day, the black character of John explains that the zombies are 'punishment from the Creator'. Black characters do not appear in such prominent roles in Romero's later, pre-Day films.

Despite including a central black character, the Dawn remake departs from Romero in its intolerance of looting from abandoned shops, which is prevented by two security guard characters. This contrasts with Romero's depiction of large scale looting by the central group as their joyful wish fulfillment of acquiring capitalist goods previously unaffordable to them. In The Walking Dead, Rick allows a white female character to take a mermaid brooch from a store, after the woman has explained the sentimental reasons for wanting it, and disavowed looting. Rick accepts that 'the rules have changed', and allows the woman to take the item. This again shows Rick as a benign force, but still very much the dominant, controlling character of the group, able to decide what constitutes 'acceptable' and 'unacceptable' behaviour. It is interesting to note that the situations presented emphasise Rick's liberal side, showing his opposition to racist violence, and his willingness to allow small scale theft.

It is interesting to speculate whether he would have allowed T Dog to loot, given the associations of young black males and looting during riots. It is also debatable what Rick's view of the unrestrained stealing seen in Romero's Dawn would be. Rick is not put into these situations, because the show wishes him to remain heroic. Showing him making decisions which do not coincide with the political world-view of the majority of viewers would alienate Rick from them.

The Channel 5 TV announcer dubbed the episode 'fantastic', and while it was entertaining, 'fantastic' would be more properly applied to Romero's original film of Dawn, which, coming so many years before, includes the source material for much of the images used in the Walking Dead episode. As one of the first modern zombie films, Dawn was independently financed, and faced opposition from film censorship bodies in both the US, where Dawn was released unrated, and the UK, where it was heavily cut by British censors.

During the years since Dawn's release, the zombie genre has become accepted as part of the horror genre, to the point it can now be a TV show on a mainstream channel. Although this may seem like straight appropriation by a large media outlet of ideas and images created by the independent genre film sector, it may also be that Rick's central presence as a dominant white male policeman, may be the crucial reason for the show's success. That it is the seemingly minor diversions from Romero's template, (at least in horror imagery and plot terms), that ultimately are responsible for its positive reception. Which is to ask, would The Walking Dead be such a mainstream hit if its main character was black?

The Walking Dead - Season one, episode 1 review

2011-04-14T12:15:00.000-07:00

As more and more people help themselves to the imagery of George Romero's zombie films, so the conventions accrue like layers of sediment. The Walking Dead is a TV show, based on a comic, and very much based on the work of George Romero. The rules are Romero's: zombies shuffle, don't run. You shoot 'em in the head maan. You get bit, you get sick and then you get zom. The zombies are based on Tom Savini's make ups for Romero's Day of the Dead, but with more budget, and the sunny, dusty American small town mise-en-scene all seems lifted straight from the opening scene of Day. The one where zombies shuffle along while a crocodile slithers around them, while an old newspaper headlines screams – guess what? – 'The Dead Walk!'

But if Romero is the bedrock influence, there's also 28 Days Later in there. Its contribution is that our hero, a Deputy Sheriff, who, in a bizarre casting choice is played by Andrew Lincoln, the one-time Egg from This Life, gets wounded on duty, and wakes up in hospital. The place is deserted, yeah yeah. Something's very wrong. We get it. This was once the opening of Day of the Triffids, but it's found itself added to the zombie genre.

Once outside, our hero meets up with a black guy (thanks George again), and his son. They are holed up in a house, and every night they are visited by what used to be the guy's wife, his son's mother. Or 'the mother of my son', as she's described. She looks in, all gormless and zombified, and the man and the boy want rid of her, but can't quite do it.

This idea reminds me of Richard Matheson's I Am Legend, the vampire novel that was surely the biggest single influence on Romero's original Night of the Living Dead. In fact, it seemed to me that this scene in The Walking Dead, with the zombie wife moaning from outside to be let in, was far closer to the novel of I Am Legend than anything in the most recent film version of the book. Closer than anything in The Omega Man, too. Because what I remember most about the book, is that our hero sat inside a boarded up house every night, while outside, vampires tried to get him to come out. And that their most evil tactic was to get a female vampire to expose herself sexually, and beg him to come out and have sex with her. Written in the 1950's, this equation of sexual liberty with death always seemed very much of its time: 50's sexual repression breaking under its own strain.

Strangely, The Walking Dead draws on this dated, misogynistic strand of I Am Legend, but adapts it. The zombie mother is not the sexually loose temptress who will ensnare and infect you. No, she's more the archetypal problem for a divorced father who has custody of his son – she seemed nice, she gave me a son, but then she went strange, became monstrous, and had to be cast out. Now the problem is, can't live with her, can't blow her brains out. The other female character, the Sheriff's wife, we see has shacked up with his best friend already. Faithless or what! Where Romero mostly has strong female characters, The Walking Dead is set in a macho world where women are absent, monstrous, and betrayers. It reaches right back from the twenty first century and 28 Days Later, back through the 1980's and 70's of Romero's best zombie films, til it reaches Matheson's 1950's. Then it takes his attitudes to women, and makes them a bit worse! Even so, this sexism and macho manliness aspect is the most interesting thing (most original influence to use, anyway) about the show, at least judged on episode one.

The rest has some good zombie action, and, for the youngster who has never seen a zombie film before, this show will probably seem amazing. It is pretty good. It offers nothing new at all, but it chooses the right stuff to take, for the most part. It's not just a gung-ho blast-fest. The only thing it really has going for it, is its open ended structure. It will be interesting to see where the show takes this, whether it will rise to the challenge of a Survivors-like narrative, if it will become just a soap opera with a few zombies in the background, whether it will just be a cowboy series, or…if it can become something more than any of those. I'd expect to see a military base and a Bub like trained zombie at some point, but it depends what the show does with such stock images. Can it really be a zombie story with interesting, human characters?

Review of la Horde

2011-03-21T13:36:00.000-07:00

La Horde is a French zombie film, in which the living dead attack a tower block. Said block is in a nasty Parisian hood, or banlieu, if you prefer. At the time the zombies suddenly arise, the drug dealing, cop killing gang who run the place are in the midst of a bloody shoot out with a group of French police officers, who are seeking vengeance for the slaying of one of their own...

As seems to be usual in French genre films, the cops are utterly, totally, foolishly incompetent. The crooks, in contrast, are badass Staggolee type anti-heroes, led by a super cool Shaft-like African dude. When a corpse arises and starts a munching on both parties, the Crims and Cops form an uneasy alliance, united by their quest to send the undead back to hell, baby...

La Horde follows the Romero model pretty closely, with bits of Night of the Living Dead and Day of the Dead plain to see. The female cop and the black gangsta being the toughest characters is no surprise either, Romero has a black guy survive to the end of Night, Dawn and Day of the Dead, and a tough woman survives to the conclusion of Dawn and Day. In addition to Romero, 28 Days Later (itself a Romero hommage, of course) is obviously another influence, what with the super fast zombies who don't so much run as careen around the place.

What is different is that there is a liking for characters to not so much shoot, as beat up the zombies. Where your USA zombie film likes to have characters gun down zombies, here, the characters tend to put down their guns and wade in with fists and feet. The girl cop versus a female zombie is perhaps the highlight, with the zombie female suffering repeated head bashings. The low point is the dumb henchman who tries to do an OldBoy style fight with a group of zombies, rather than either (a) shoot 'em in the head maan, or (b) open the door he's standing near, make like a tree, and get outta there.

While the undead still get up after being shot, here their bodies can be damaged, causing them to be incapacitated. A very sick scene has male characters wounding, humiliating and considering raping a female zombie. It both goes too far, and not far enough. It's the only moment of real nasty inspiration, but the film backs off from going all the way, something it needed to do, if it was to justify including such a scene at all. Just trying to go for a cheap, quick laugh doesn't work. We needed to be confronted by how depraved certain of our heroes have become - something Romero never stints on, of course.

An older, very French comical character appears part way through. He's convinced he is fighting some left over colonial war. His attempt to insist that a bitten dealer have his leg chopped off, Day of the Dead style, leads to a very funny argument, capped only by his comments at a subsequent dinner scene, in which he makes fun of the usual zombie film plotlines. This idea of having a nice dinner seems quintessentially French - never mind if zombies are everywhere, there should still be time for a nice meal, some wine, a nice chat...it's convivial, is what it is.

The remainder of the film is all out action, including a nice scene where a cop is utterly surrounded by baying undead hordes - La Horde itself, you might say. Even the use of CGI blood doesn't quite spoil this bundle. Apart from this scene, most of the rest of the action is badly edited, with attacks reduced to incoherent flashes. I suspect, from spotting some quite rubbish-looking zombie action in amongst the quick cuts, that the film-makers didn't shoot what they needed, and attempted to cover this up in the edit. It doesn't work! That said, some scenes do work - especially the first zombie, a recently murdered hostage, who goes on a nice biting fest.

A blend of comedy, action and horror, La Horde is a fun enough film on its own merits, but never approaches the quality of the best non-American zombies films, Shaun of the Dead, and Peter Jackson's epic Braindead. That said, those were absolute classics, and this is merely a reasonably fun watch.,

Review of Roman Polanski's The Ghost (2010)

2011-02-24T06:37:00.000-08:00

It's interesting that the poster for this thriller from Polish director Roman Polanski hails the film as "a brilliantly crafted Hollywood thriller". It includes all the generic elements to be seen as such, but is actually a European production, funded by France, Germany and the UK, and (unusually for a Hollywood film, although it is not unknown) the true villain of the piece is America herself.

The plot initially satisfies expectations of a Hollywood political thriller – a youngish British ghostwriter; Ewan MacGregor, billed only as 'The Ghost'; is engaged to write the memoirs of a recently resigned Prime Minister, Adam Lang. Lang is obviously based on Tony Blair. Lang has lashings of charisma, and we hear that he was initially voted for by 'everybody'. However, his popularity plunges after leading the country into an illegal war. He is now hated by much of the population of his home country, and has fled to the US. Lang is played by Pierce Brosnan with lots of evil-laced charm.

Despite this apparent engagement with recent politics, it soon becomes apparent that the story is more a Gothic tale. Lang can be seen as a version of Dracula, and the apparent desire of the film to portray Blair as similar to a vampire, his seductive charm hiding a nature that is corrupt and evil, is by far the most interesting thing about The Ghost. Like Dracula, Lang only appears in the film sparsely. In order to meet Lang, The Ghost must travel to a desolate island, where Lang resides in a mansion that is more a concrete bunker, but can be seen as equating to Castle Dracula. He meets Lang's staff, including Kim Cattrall as Amelia, a posh British assistant, and the former Prime Minister's wife, Ruth. Ruth is played by Olivia Williams with her usual mix of chilly beauty and the suggestion of intelligence so great as to be both threatening and attractive. These women are arguably similar to Lucy and Mina, although they could also be the Vampire Brides. Only after passing through these protective circles, does the Ghost finally come face to face with Lang.

The scenes of the Ghost and Lang working on the actual book are very short, and largely irrelevant. In any case, they are soon disrupted when Lang leaves for Washington, leaving The Ghost free to wander around the mansion uncovering clues of dodgy events in the past. Not the least of these relates to the film's opening scene – the discovery of the dead body of Lang's previous Ghostwriter, washed up ashore in mysterious circumstances.

The subsequent plot twists clearly establish that the villains of the film are America, and Britain, with both countries' elite levels of academia implicated of traitorous behaviour (the use of Cambridge university is surely not accidental, known as it is for traitorous, well-bred spies).

The last act revelations regarding the previous draft of the memoirs are so contrived and silly they could have been written by Joe Ezterhaus in his Jagged Edge (Richard Marquand, 1985) pomp. However, these generic machinations allow the film to simultaneously resemble a mainstream Hollywood thriller and to place the CIA in a villainous role.The film's paranoid worldview of America is finally resolved in its flippant, 'Alfred Hitchcock Presents'-style conclusion, although the recent real-world moves to extradite Polanski over long-standing statutory rape charges, almost seem as if they belong in the film proper.

Review of Aaron Sorkin's The Social Network.

2011-02-21T14:12:00.000-08:00

In the late 80's, a number of science fiction writers presented themselves under the grouping called 'Cyberpunk'. This group, of whom the most famous remains William Gibson, wrote about a tough, streetwise, future world, peopled by cool low-lifes.

In recent years, Gibson has moved his novels back from this Bladerunner styled world, into a more recent almost-future. The tech is more real, but the people who inhabit it are still too cool for school.

The Social Network, the film about Mark Zuckerberg, founder of the website Facebook, is what Gibson should be aiming for. The tech is today's, but instead of the leather jacketed hipsters, our central character is a nerd. Not just a nerd, a borderline autistic weirdo who can barely function in any social setting.

Solution – he sets up a so-called social network online. It's not social at all, of course. It's virtual social. You do it alone.

And, this is the kicker, the whole world wants in. The glamorous, the well connected, the rich winners at Harvard, where Zuckerberg is studying, all want to join him in his gated world. Because as soon as enough 'cool' early adopting people join, all the others all have to as well. Or else they will be wondering what they are missing. It's a negative way of incentivising people, but one that certainly works.

When I first joined Facebook, I was astounded to see that the site asked me, without any shame at its own cheeky intrusiveness, whether I was in a relationship. The reason for this is here explained – male students wanted to know if the hot girls were seeing anyone. Zuckerberg essentially just asked them. Not in real life, he wouldn't dare do that. But online. And they answered eagerly.

Zuckerberg is the true cyberpunk. He destroys our established world, and through tech, creates a new one, more suited to himself. He meets up with Shaun Parker (not Fanning), the co-creator of Napster, who befriends him, and seduces him to the power of technology to destroy the old world. He jokes about how if Napster lost its battle with the music biz, then try buying a CD today at the once mighty but now defunct Tower Records chain.

It is beautifully played – Jesse Eisenberg, that most irritating of actors, is perfect here. Perfectly unbearable, just as he should be. Justin Timberlake is a Hollywood icon playing a new icon. The script, by Aaron Sorkin, is intelligent and graceful. It has the motor mouth whiz of a screwball comedy, and the techno flash of, yes, Gibson again. The only dispensible talent here is director David Fincher, who has directed great performances from the principals, but puts no real visual stamp on things.

The film tells this story of how our world is being deeply changed, made more friendly to the autistic, with beautiful clarity. It mythologises many elements – did they really have hot girlfriends? It doesn't matter. In Hollywood terms, this shows where they are in our culture. Does the co-creator of Napster really get feted at expensive restaurants IRL? Probably not, but he should do, becuase he's that important. This is a way of making us understand how influential these people are, by translating their geek world successes into Hollywood style success. It helps us to understand their pivotal role in our culture.

He even got to exclude some, such as the Winklevoss twins. Rich, tall, handsome, they had an idea similar to Facebook. Zuckerberg improved it, and cut them out of the action. Why not just let them fund it, a character asks. Because Zuckerberg says, he didn't want to be in business with them. He would rather fight an expensive law suit than let the rich kids get a piece of the geek cyber world. This makes perfect sense, when you realise that the internet is the new America, an empty land ready for seizing. Or at least, it was then. Now, corporate eyes are on it, and when they have taken it fully, we will find ourselves truly in Huxley's Brave New World, totally cut off, totally mediated from each other. A situation I boldly predict will occur in the next 20 years.

If William Gibson doesn't wish he wrote this film, I would be amazed, because this is one of the few American films that looks at our world as it is now, and tries to understand what it might mean, where it might be going, and then lets us decide for ourselves how we might feel about that.

King of the Flies Graphic Novel review

2011-01-30T12:41:00.000-08:00

At first, this oversize, hardback comic seems to be made up of a collection of short stories. Soon, you find out that the stories all feature the same little gang of characters, shifting perspective from story to story.

The art is very Charles Burns influenced, and mostly told in a series of small, rectangular panels. It stays with this, doesn't go for the big splash page, despite the dramatic things that happen. I particularly liked the fancy dress costumes that the characters wear in the first story, as, once they are wearing them, they 'become' those characters. They aren't simply people wearing costumes, they are the costumes. This is playing unfair somewhat, as it's using our indulgence of the comic medium to have things both ways - we accept that the characters look 'real' in their normal state, and so the costumes are just as 'real'. This sleight of hand pays off, and the image of the cat, the fly and the skeleton walking together is a powerful one.

The stories are bleak, in a kind of cool-weird way. Although the characters are portrayed as desolate, sad, losers, and there is much sex and violence, the story is always a little over-the-top, and is never realistic. These are cool characters, and they perform in a cool way for us, talking to us in voice over, aware that we're watching them, they never really drop their guard.

Neither does the book. It's easy and fun to read, but also seems quite calculating. It's going for the weirdo market. The influence of David Lynch, especially Blue Velvet, and Twin Peaks, is very obvious. There's a voyeuristic young man, and a sexy girl, and a psycho older guy, although they don't interact as expected.

Although the setting is France, that's not obvious in most of the stories, which look like America. There are also British musical references, as the main 'hero' Eric loves The Stones and Pulp, who appear as physical characters, albeit coloured pink, to show they're not 'real'.

It's good, definitely great fun, but always feels less than its inspirations. You won't get the thrill of a new, unexpected voice, like you do with Burns and Lynch. It's still good for all that, though. There's two more parts to come, and part two is already out. I will pick it up, as this is worth following.

Review of Banksy's Exit Through The Gift Shop

2011-01-11T09:18:00.000-08:00

Street stencil artist turned million dollar art world sensation, Banksy has now made a film, the sarkily-named Exit Through the Gift Shop. It's documentary, or possibly a mockumentary, about a Frenchman, Thierry Guetta, who lives in LA, and who wants to make a film about Banksy, but Banksy, supoedly, turns the tables, and makes a film about him. Guetta makes camcorder films of local street artists as they deface public property around California. Cue some pretty amusing footage of street artists plying their trade, getting away with it, being audacious in their choice of art locations, or being chased by the police, Keystone cops meets Jackass style.

Thierry's brother, known as the Invader, sticks little mosaics of space invaders and pac man ghosts around cities. Thierry films him, but soon moves up a bit, and gets to roll with Shepard Fairey, who, as you may well know, is the inventor of the Obey poster, the Andre the Giant has a Posse sticker, and also the Obama 'Hope' image.

Finally, our camcorder hero moves up in the world even further, and gets to meet Banksy. This structure, which leads our hero higher and higher up the echelons of street art, until finally, he meets the Big Man, is of course, flattering to Banksy, even as it spoofs itself becuase of it.

After Banksy installs a blow up Guantamo prisoner in Disneyland, Thierry is grilled by Disneyland staff, and fails to buckle. This is a turning point. He gains the full trust of Banksy, who says, in a series of interviews were his face is shadowed, that Thierry is now his friend. This despite the fact that the Frenchman appears to be incredibly thick. But it seems kinda believable. He's a nice guy after all.

This takes us to one hour in, and the storyline is finished. Cue an abrupt turn of events, as Thierry suddenly decides to become an artist himself. He takes on the nom-d'art of Mister Brainwash, hires people to actually make his art (Damien Hirst style), and produces work that is a parody of Banksy's, but which is also obviously devoid of talent. It uses Banksy's techniques, but has nothing to say. Where Banksy puts a Marilyn haircut on Kate Moss, and it looks....cool? Subversive maybe...a hip Warhol parody, if you like...Brainwash puts the same haircut on Jacko, and it just looks dumb. Becuase it is.

Brainwash puts on a guerilla style show, just as Banksy did earlier in the film, and it is pushed as the new, cool thing to go and see. Accordingly, a long queue of hipsters forms outside the venue. We see various rich, stupid Americans praise him to the skies. Unless they are actors, pretending to be rich, stupid Americans, of course. By now, we suspect that Mister Brainwash is a front for Banksy. That Banksy is trying to tell us that street art is not just easy stencilling. You need to be talented, to be a superior individual, in order to produce work of quality. But by attacking that very world which has praised Banksy to the skies, is Banksy also saying that his own work may command high prices, but those buying are fools?

Is Mr Brainwash then a cynical, Borat-style stunt, aimed at exposing the bankrupt nature of the art world?
Well, we know that Brainwash really did do a Madonna album cover, but then Madonna grabs at whatever seems to be hip, in a thoughtless, grabbing way, so that's no real surprise. Plus, 'his' design for that is far better
than everything else of 'his' that we see. What occured to me is that it's no surprise if Mr Brainwash really is a real-world success, becuase people often prefer a bad copy with nothing to say, over an original voice that might them uncomfortable. And of course, Banksy himself is the Mr Brainwash to Gee Vaucher and Peter Kennard.

I do like Banksy, and this film is much better than Borat, becuase it doesn't force anyone to go and see Brainwash's art, much less to like it. It simply presents a pile of shit, hypes it up as being cool, and then lets the tasteless damn themselves.

But it also taps into something I don't really like about Banksy, which is that very English, and somehow very macho, form of cynicism, which is apparent in much of his work, and which seems to be a race to the bottom in terms of who can care less, who can be most cyncial, who can be the most jaded and seen it all. This side of him is very evident in the Brainwash part of the film.

The end credits reveal that the supposedly Thierry shot footage of street artistes comes from a variety of sources, the final proof that it was all bullshit. Fun though.

Leonard Cohen: Bird on a Wire and Songs from the Road

2010-12-31T13:19:00.000-08:00

Bird on a Wire is a documentary film of Leonard Cohen's 1972 European tour. For many years, it was presumed lost, and has now been reassembled from recovered fragments by its director, Tony Palmer.

It is not surprising that this film has now 'suddenly' reappeared. The record companies are now aware, after Cohen's successful recent, lengthy, tour, that there is still an audience for his music. I suspect that this film could have been released years ago, but the will to do it wasn't there until now. It follows not only the recent tour, but the DVD Live in London, recorded in 2007 at the 02 centre, the success of Cohen's Hallelujah as an X Factor winners' song, and also the 2009 DVD of the Isle of Wight gig. It appears alongside a new DVD, Songs from the Road, filmed during the current tour.

From having spent many years with little available to watch at home, other than the somewhat Cohen-less tribute concert, I'm Your Man, the Cohen fan can now spend many hours watching the Man sing.

Tonight, I watched Bird on a Wire, and followed it immediately with Songs from the Road. The contrast was very marked.

In Bird on a Wire, the filmmakers have complete access, and they often abuse it, getting very close in on their subjects. The quest seems to be, to catch musicians in an unguarded moment of emotion. The film succeeds often in this goal. We see Cohen as a singer who is older than his entourage, and who dresses in an uncool sweater-with-shirt-collar-visible and slacks combo, but who is also far more intelligent than those around him. He smiles often, but we see his eyes remain cold, or wary. One candid shot shows us the mask slipping, Cohen turning away from someone he has just smiled at, and his face slumping into a far more honest expression - something between tiredness and despair.

The singer holds himself to an impossible standard - to complete an extensive tour without succumbing to false emotion, to just phoning it in. We see him berate the audience for the entire rock tour setup. How, he wonders, can he sing songs that he wrote for himself, or for one specific woman, over and over, like a parrot chained in its cage? He tries to stop the audience clapping at the start of songs, claiming to be flattered that they know the songs, but making it clear that he finds the applause a distraction capable of wrecking the spell he is trying so hard to cast. When the PA breaks, Cohen struggles on, only for two ill mannered male fans to come up after the show and start moaning at him for not just giving up. Cohen's reply to them is amazingly courteous, but still, almost despairingly, faces them down.

We see how the rock lifestyle around him sits ill with Cohen's intentions. Trying to explain to someone the origins of the word Jerusalem, the supposed listener starts a quest for a bottle of wine while Cohen is mid sentence. When his two female backing singers embrace after the last show, a male crew member tries to join in, with less pure motives.

The songs are often only partially shown, but what we see is very effective. Cohen is fully engaged, often making sure that lines convey the emotion he wants, rather than just flow past. Often this means self laceration. In Chelsea Hotel #2, the line 'I was running for the money and the flesh' is singled out, stripped of romance, and revealed as an admission of failure.

Things come to a head with the final show, at the aforementioned Jerusalem. Cohen clearly wants his Israeli fans to get a great show, but feels he has let them down, and tries to give up. The promoter nags him out of this, and Cohen continues, ending up in tears backstage.

Throughout this DVD, this comes across clearly - Leonard Cohen, at this time in his life, was vigourous, humourous, intelligent, very self critical, and critical of his audience, too. Most of all, perhaps, we learn that Cohen wants to connect with his audience, to meet with them through song, at the same time that he really doesn't want to be anywhere near them at all. Bird on a Wire is the facinating account of that contradiction.

Moving onto Songs from the Road, the shock of what the years have done to that vigourous man is heartbreaking. For him, and for all of us. He is no longer fiery eyed, no longer striving to reach his audience, no longer raging at his parrot cage status. He has made his peace.

His band are now clearly extremely adept musicians, but all too often their sound is adult rock akin to Dire Straits biggest sellers, or Roxy Music's blandest period. They often take solos,a nd many of these are genuinely beautiful, but the reason for their inclusion often seems so that the singer can take a break. Understandably, as he is now in his mid seventies, and committed to a seemingly endless schedule. Cohen now sings with his eyes shut for much of the songs. He seems lost in the songs, to an extent, but more, he is in his own little bubble. He sings may of the same songs heard on Bird on a Wire. Songs which he then described as being basically too old for him to invenst much emotion into them easily. They are obviously much much older now, but Cohen does what the audience wants, he sings them as best as he can, without the agonising of before. The audience are at a greater remove.

This is true physically - these venues are much larger than those seen in Bird on a Wire, but crucially, the front row is kept much further away. At the Jerusalem gig, the fans were spilling onto the stage, they drilled their fierce eyes into Cohen's head, they swayed and shook and made their presence felt. Now, in Songs from the Road, they are kept in the darkness, far beyond the lip of the much larger stage.

Cohen now wears a suit and fedora hat. The hat seems a move intended to shield his eyes, and so hide. He also strikes several poses while singing, he hunches over, he twists, he stretches up. All these moves are performed slowly, and they repeat. It is easy to find yourself wondering if he was taught these moves pre-tour, a strategy for getting through the songs. Audience applause greets the start of each song, and if this still bugs Cohen, he doesn't say anything about it. Instead, he speaks in scripted comments, which fans have noted, remain the same every night. Still, he sounds genuinely appreciative of the applause, perhaps due to the circumstances that prompted this latter day tour, forced upon him when his manager helped herself to his savings, while the singer mediated at a Buddist retreat on Mount Baldy.

Watching Songs From the Road, I am occasionally inclined to see the whole thing as something of a sleight of hand. A Leonard cohen concert, where Leonard Cohen is present, but never there. Except, sometimes he is. Occasionally, something does move him, or impress him, about the crowds who have flocked to see him in the soulless enormo-domes of the world, but strangely, after watching both films, it is the younger Cohen of Bird on a Wire who seems the more current, the more real.

(Re) View of (500) Days of Summer

2010-12-07T05:19:00.000-08:00

Turns out that the title (500) Days of Summer does not refer to an overly long Season in the Sun. Instead, it means a young woman with the hippyish name of Summer (Zooey Deschanel) , and Tom Hansen (Joseph Gordon Levitt) the young man who adores her.

Although adore might be too weak a word for it. He is obsessed with her. We hear his voice, and the voice of a Godly narrator, and they both tell us over and over how utterly beautiful was that loveliest of lovely Summers, her smile, her hair, and perhaps most importantly, her indie hipster credentials. Becuase, oh my, Summer quotes Belle and Sebastian in her High School Yearbook, when she sings karoake, she chooses Nancy Sinatra's Sugar Town as her tune, she plays French ye-ye in her car, and dresses like an early 1960's schoolgirl. The only trick she has missed is having her lustrous, lovely, oh so beautiful and kissable black hair in a ponytail, rather than the classic indie girl Louise Brooks bob.

The central relationship is played out as a series of numbered days. At first, it seems these will be presented randomly, but mostly, they are chronological, as obviously, the story wouldn't work otherwise. There is some paralleling employed, to good effect - a joke he cracks early in the relationship is enjoyed by Summer. An attempt to revisit said jape later in their relationship just gets him some eye rolling disdain. We've all been there, I'm sure.

Other gambits, such as the whole world joining in for a big sing-a-long are too twee to look at, although a more bitter scene where our heroe's expectations of a date with Summer are split-screened with the 'reality' of said date works extremely well.

For much of its running time, this is simply a Hollywood romance with better music and clothes, although there are a few naff product placements for the likes of (sigh) the Nintendo (R) Wii computer games console, and an obsessive interest in Ikea, to the point where I wondered if cheap Swedish furniture reallyis super hip in the US.

The character of Summer is hardly sketched in, she is simply a love object, an idol, an unnatainable goddess, an indie manga idea of a woman. She barely exists in the real world. When she joins the greetings card comapny where our hero and his geeky friends work, she doesn't make any female friends, doesn't even try. She just sits alone, a goddess, waiting for our man. When they start seeing each other, she insists, insists mind, that he watch porno with her, and then that they act out said movies together. When, after it goes wrong, he dates another girl, he insults and humilates her. She deserves this, for not being Summer, but mostly for being blonde and tall, and not elfin and cute and black haired and ohhhhhhhh...Summmmmerrrrr!!!!

Although Zooey Deschanel is certainly attractive, her onscreen persona fails to match up to the obsession of our protagonist, or rather, the film does not make us share, or even understand it. Unlike, say, Endless Love, a silly overwrought film about teenage lust which does succeed in making us feel those hormones a-raging. Tom never debases himself in that awful embarrassing torment of his supposed lurve. If only he done something like uploading a sex tape with them in onto the net, or something equally debasing and destructive. But perhaps the indie scene is one that is too cool for such matters. It could also be, that athough Tom tells us that basically, he has grabbed himself a lovely who is out of his league, the evidence onscreen is that they are both equally attractive. As most actors are, but it makes his insistence to the contrary hard to fathom.

Towards the end of the film, I began to suspect that the film wants us to, if not actually dislike its hero, then to understand this this story is very much told from his point of view, and that he is a very unreliable narrator indeed. The key scene comes towards the end, where Summer tells him she does not love him, never did actually, and for a moment, she seems to have some depth, some wants and desires of her own, beyond being his lust/love object.

However, the following scene, where he meets a new girl, called - wait for it - Autumn!! - somewhat undermines this reading, as his supposed new learning of what ladies like is swept away in another idealised crush. Or so it seems.

I'm sure it will be a great indie date movie, however.

Review of Bruce McDonald's Pontypool (2008)

2010-12-07T04:16:00.000-08:00

Pontypool is a Canadian horror film which foregrounds its nationality, and whose story finally turns on issues of bilingualism, to mixed effect.

The story takes place in a radio station, and keeps the camera focused on ageing talk radio DJ Grant Mazzy (Stephen McHattie, who played Hollis Mason in Watchmen) who receives phone calls from the outside, which start strange, and become increasingly disturbing. Finally, it becomes clear that zombies (or actually the infected)are at large in the town of Pontypool. Producer Sydney Briar (Lisa Houle) and young female assistant Laurel-Ann Drummond (Georgina Reilly) manage to stay hidden with Grant in the basement studio, but the loudspeaker attached to the outside of the studio, broadcasting the show, is also calling the undead (or infected) to them.

The first part of the film works very well, with McHattie giving a convincing performance, and the calls coming, especially from the supposed helicopter weather man, add much in the way of creepiness. The film reaches its high point towards the middle, with the infection reaching one of the three protagonists, and the other two having to cower in the studio in the dark, while the hordes gather outside.

After this, instead of the expected last act, Pontypool either becomes highly ambitious, or goes badly off the rails, depending on your point of view. It's certainly ambitious. We discover that the zombie-like virus oly affects speakers of English, that the virus is carried in English. As the film is Candian, the chaarcters are obliged to speak uninfected French, although their lack of fluency is now revealed as a potential fatal drawback.

This is all clever stuff, obviously, but it is played a bit too broad, and goes for comedy after the focus on creepiness in the first half. Of course, compared with almost all other contemporay horrors, this is great fun, and an enjoyable watch, especially for its acting. If it stumbles somewhat at the end, then many low budget films of its ilk do too, but not many do so becuase of having too intelligent an idea behind them.

review of 44 inch chest (2009)

2010-10-19T15:10:00.000-07:00

Sexy Beast was a British gangster film more than several cuts above the expected quality level for films of its often shoddy genre. For one thing, its script, by Louis Mellis and David Scinto, was far superior to most British films of any type.

That was a decade ago. A film that was universally lauded. The writers only returned to cinema last year, and with a film which looks like it has a much smaller budget, being almost completely set in one room. Tragic, but not untypical of how the British film industry lets talent die on the vine for lack of production money.

44 Inch Chest has very little actual story. Ray Winstone's Colin finds out his wife, Joanna Whalley, is having an affair. He beats her up, then has his henchmen take her lover captive. That's it. The rest of the film is Colin and the others debating when to start torturing the lover, how long to take over it.

The acting is very good, in theatrical terms. Ian MacShane, John Hurt and Ray Winstone all give great performances. But they are very stagey ones. Hurt does a good rat fink guy, but will even one viewer believe in his working class accent? Each character has a turn to deliver a lengthy monologue, but although too long for cinema, ironically, they aren't long enough for theatre. They are also ruined by the decision to cut away from the actor giving the monologue, in order to dramatise events the character is talking about. This is supposed to make things more cinematic, but just results in a mess. A theatrical film that doesn't even go all out to be totally theatrical. It weakens the film, and denys us the theatrical pleasure of just watching the acting.

The writing is clever. It's very sweary in a Derek and Clive way. But it's overwritten for cinema. There's no space for anything visual. The director is an ad man, he puts no visual style on it. He admits in the extras that he only did the film becuase it 'looked like it was gonna get made.' A sad reflection on British filmmaking, and on our directors.

44 Inch Chest draws heavily on Mamet, and very noticeably, on the warehouse scene from Reservoir Dogs. For almost all its running time, 44 inch chest is several sweary gangster men standing around, and one tied in a chair, about to be tortured. This is old news now. Dated American content, delivered in a stagey British style. The worst of all worlds.

There's also a lack of imagination with genre tropes. 44 Inch Chest clearly does not want to give us what we want, or expect. It does not want us to see the guy in the chair being tortured. But the film has no idea what to give us instead. Unlike, say, Michael Haneke, the writers are not able to deny genre pleasure and replace it with something equally strong, equally big. Instead, they wander off into fantasy, then simply let the film fizzle out. The result feels small, pointless.

review of Terry Gilliam's The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus

2010-10-14T03:23:00.000-07:00

Monty Python animator turned director returns with his latest film, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, production of which was marred by the sudden death of star Heath Ledger.

The story centres on the titular Doctor Parnassus (Christpher Plummer), an elderly sideshow owner, who, with his daughter (Lily Cole) and a young Cockney bloke, Anton (Andrew Garfiled), drags an ornate stage around in a weird horsedrawn wagon. They stop in odd non-places in contemporary Britain, such as a Homebase car park, or in more recognisable spots, such as the fair by the London Eye, and there they ply their trade. Quite what their trade is seems obscure at first. They don't put on a show a such, although Parnassus seems to be dressed as a Swami, Cole as a mermaid or Boudicea, and the young man as Mercury.

It seems they are more a come-on for what is round the back, hidden through a fake mirror onstage. Patrons are not exactly invited through, but those who blunder through, crash through, fall through, find themselves in an infintiely large CGI dream world, which changes to tailor itself to the indidvual visitor. These imaginary worlds are truly incredible, highly imaginative, and made me wish Gilliam could not only have directed his own version of Lord of the Rings, but also that he could go on to make a big budget Gormanghast as soon as possible.

On the start of the Blu Ray, Gilliam explains that he wanted to make a happy (but presumably arthouse-lite) film, along the lines of Bergman's Fanny and Alexander, or Fellini's Amarcord. Parnassus (Christopher Plummer) is a monastic reciter of stories, who is challenged by the Hades like devil Mr Nick (Tom Waits) to a battle to see who can recruit more souls to their opposing sides of storytelling and death. To aid him, Parnassus takes in a supposed criminal, the boringly named Tony, played by Ledger, who they find apparently dead, and hanging under a London bridge.

It's easy to see the Doctor as being a Gilliam stand-in, and the Imaginarium as an analogue of cinema. The sideshow setting harks back to the carny origins of cinema, and the Lumiere Brothers. The way that the magical area behind the mirror is just a blank, boring space when the Doctor is not doing his thing, but filled with incredible visions when he is, suggests that the Imaginarium is the seventh art itself. Ledger's role seems to be conciously that of a Film Star, and is an acknowledgment that a star is needed by the director. Ledger is able to bring in the female audience. He wears a mask with a long, phallic nose in acknowledgment othat his sex appeal is his major sellng point.

It's odd that Gilliam chose to place storytelling as the thing that holds back the Devil, given that storytelling is not the director's strongest suit. Often, the stories in his films are overlong and badly structured, but saved by his incredible, original visual imagination. The film gives some of the best imagery to the least relevant characters, story-wise. A kid and a middle aged woman who are basically walk-on parts trigger amazing flights of fancy which stun the eyes, but lead nowhere in plot terms. And as an aray of art books can be seen behind Gilliam in an interview on the extras, maybe art, rather than stories should have been what saves humans.

Apparently, Ledger had completed all the real-world scenes, leaving only the through-the-mirror ones to finish. For these, three actors stepped in - Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell. While watching the early part of the film, I began to think that Ledger was very similar to Depp. Physically similar, but also in his choice of more offbeat roles, despite his good looks. Depp, for me, is what Ledger was aiming for, and so it makes sense that in the idealised dream world, he should actually become him. If Depp had taken over all the remaining scenes, it would have been very effective. Having Depp do a double take, to say 'oh, my face has changed' is unnecessary, and spoils what would have been a quite effective, even moving moment, if Gilliam had just trusted the audience to notice for themselves, and, given how Ledger's death is now part of the story of the film, to realise what this meant. Jude Law, I found elss effective than Depp, and Colin Farrell somewhat worse than Law. So, the feeling for me was of Tony first ascending, and then descending in power as he filters through different bodies.

The change of actors also works becuase the characters here are all non-realistic, intentionally one dimensional, symbolic entities. The non-realist nature of the characters benefits a non-actor like Lily Cole, a model who is cast for how she looks, beautiful in a quirky way, and then not asked to act, but to use her physical presence. This she does well, but it's a Eisenstein-like piece of casting, rather than actual acting. Unlike Eisenstein, Gilliam uses working class characters as symbols of stupidity - the Imaginarium is shown as being wasted on the yobs and Essex families at the start. Tony suggests they seek richer patrons, an approach which has success.

It is spooky that death intervened during production, almost as a rebuke to the positive story Gilliam is trying to tell, especially as Ledger's character cheats death. The abolition of the Film Council (which funded this film), also seems like evidence of destruction asserting its power over art. But whatever his intentions to make a happy film, Gilliam simply seems unable to offer a strong, joyous image without undercutting it with something equally memorable, but unpleasant. So, a sunny gondola love trip is ruined when the prow hits the distended belly of a floating dead cow. The gondola itself has the head of Annbis, Egyptian god of death, as a figurehead. This balance is respected throughout - Parnassus versus Mr Nick, sunshine versus darkness, life versus death. One amazing scene shows an infinite landscape cut in half by shadow - one side, bright and gloriously sunny, the other wrapped in endless dark. Despite the real world sadnesses the film went through, and the effect knowledge of these has on the exeperience of viewing the film, the Imaginarium of cinema does conquer death, the star continues to be seen after death, at least as long as people value art, and want to watch films, and as long as we live in a society that values the power of the imagination.

review of George A Romero's Survival of the Dead

2010-10-10T14:59:00.000-07:00

After a long gap following Day of the Dead, George Romero's return to the zombie film with the studio made, and very formulaic Land of the Dead, has been followed in reasonably quick succession by two further films, both featuring the zombies that made his name. Unlike Land, the low budget follow up, Diary of the Dead, despite using camcorder footage, felt to me, at least, like a 'real' Romero zombie film: it placed religion at its centre, and used its breakdown of society to insist that such an event would simply lead to stupid people with guns shooting each other. This in contrast to many recent mainstream zombie films, which take the side of those same stupid people. While the mainstream seeks to avoid the moral problems of zombie killing in favour of the thrill of sanctioned slaughter, Romero always tries to problematise killing, with loved ones and friends inevitably having to be killed.

Survival of the Dead revisits many of these same comcerns. The film begins on the desolate, windswept Plum Island, and is supposedly set six days after the dead began to walk. An Irish patriarch, Patrick O'Flynn (the excellent Kenneth Welsh) leads his armed posse around the island, shooting any zombies they find. They come to a cottage, and find that the couple inside are sheilding zombie children. About to kill them, the posse are cnfronted by a rival group, lead by another Irish patriarch, Seamus Muldoon (Richard Fitzpatrick), but this group believes that the zombies should be allowed to survive, that a cure will be found, or that they can be taught to behave. This is a debate which Romero has played out already, in Day of the Dead. Here, O'Flynn seems heartless but right, while Muldoon just seems deluded. The next day, zombie killer O'Flynn is exiled from the island on a boat, with his few supporters. The rest, including his daughter Janet (Kathleen Munroe), choose to remain with Muldoon.

This opening section is the most effective part of Survival of the Dead, as a conflict is established between the two men. The remainder of the film tries to keep this battle, and indeed this debate about whether zombies can be humanised, going, but it suffers from a script which seems to be missing many key scenes, editing which tries to cover up the lack of such scenes without success, and some frankly terrible special effects. These effects are displayed in a series of set pieces 'showstopping' zombie destruction scenes, which literally halt the film so they can take place. Using very poor CGI, these look silly and annoying, and seem seperate from the surrounding film.

There are many times when, after its quite clearly plotted opening, the rest of the story seems to take the least obvious, most convoluted way to show a simple series of events. So, after being expelled from his Edenic Plum Island, O'Flynn then advertises on the internet for people to come to the island, billing it as a zombie free paradise. In reality, he is seeking to build up an army to help him retake the place. That seems clear, but the film tells this by shifting to a group of army deserters, minor, and quite annoying, characters left over from Diary of the Dead, here unwisely bumped up to full protagonist status.

But when the army group meet with O'Flynn's men at the docks, there is a needless and inexplicable battle between the two groups And of course, after a long, violent set piece, where the two groups attack each other, and then the zoms wade in too, what is left of the two groups team up, and they set sail for the island. Just as they should have done in the first place. It's gratuitous plotting, something Romero's films never seemed to indulge in before, despite their many violent scenes. There was always a grim logic to how things happened. Not so here.

Once on the island, the revelation that zombies are chained up, and successfully managing to do a version of the jobs they did in life, reopens the debate Romero wants the film to have - whether zombies can be 'saved'. The trouble with this, is that whilst some zombies seem docile, and willing to simply perform repetitive tasks over and over, the majority behave as usual. There's the seed of something interesting here, some nascent satire about modern life. But it never gels in anything like a coherent way, and the result just seems contradictory through error, rather an exploration of the different facets of the zombies, and hence humanity.

The revelation that the O'Flynn's daughter is a zombie who rides her horse endlessly around the island is an idea that is both silly, and yet spooky and evocative, an interesting step towards the terroritory of Val Lewton's I Walk With a Zombie, a film which prefigured Romero's restyling of the zombie film, and which also featured a ghostly undead woman.

Sadly, the seemingly bold plot revelation that the daughter of a main character has become a zombie, despite being previously set-up as a strong, saviour type, is quickly followed by a second revelation - that she is also alive. Or rather, her twin sister is alive. The fact that no one ever mentioned that O'Flynn had twin daughters before seems to be a crucial error, not least when he was expelled from Plum Island and said goodbye to his daughter, never once enquiring where her sister was. This is a huge error of plotting, one from which the film never recovers. Additionally, the nascent subplot between Muldoon and his right hand man never develops. There is a brief indication of antipathy, then the latter simply betrays his master. This leads to the final release of teh zombies, but it lacks any kind of emotional credibility, becuase the character relationships are not established. These and other errors create the feeling that Romero is shooting his film from an unfinished first draft. As a result. Survival of the Dead is a scrappy, badly thought-through film. It is by far Romero's worst, exasperating and very disapointing.

Miyazaki's Ponyo Film Review

2010-09-28T02:24:00.000-07:00

After oscar winning success with Spirited Away, veteran Japanese animation master Miyzaki seemed to make a few missteps - filleting and mangling the story of Howl's Moving Castle in the kind of faulty way usually reserved for Tim Burton, whilst letting his son direct the frankly unimpressive Cat's Return.

So it's good to see Miyazaki back on form for Ponyo. It's not the equal of Spirited Away - that film was a masterpiece, one which arguably only Wall-E has equalled in recent times. But Ponyo is up there with Miyazaki's earlier kid's films, such as Kiki's Delivery Service, and the excellent My Neighbour Totoro.
The film fits in snugly and warmly with those previous films. It all feels part of a familiar, friendly and fun fictional landscape, one it's good to be allowed back into again. Miyazaki makes it all seem so easy.

As with those films, the story is set in a mythical small town, which initially resembles reality. Stock characters from the earlier films recur, too - a baby's father here looks like both the father in Totoro, and Kiki's dad.

The story centres on Ponyo, and a young boy. Ponyo starts as a little fish creature called Brunhilde, but, after escaping from her father, a weird human who lives under the sea, she gets stuck in a jar, and is found by a young boy playing on the sea's edge. He takes her home, and puts her in a bucket. The trailer shows the Hollywood way the story would have then progressed - being a two-hander between fish-girl and boy, with the girl finally turning into a human child. Instead, the film plays things rather more back and forth, with Ponyo being taken back to the sea by her father, before escaping for a second time. This does feel slightly off kilter, to a viewer expecting a Hollywood style plot which keeps moving forward.

The set piece scenes come late, once Ponyo and the boy are living together. Her father tries to get her again, leading to an amazingly inventive and visually stunning storm sequence, in which Ponyo, in quasi human form, races over waves and giant fish, while the little town is completely submerged.

The people escape to boats and a hotel on a hill, but the following sunny morning finds the once realistic town has become surreal, with giant sea creatures swimming along what were once streets. This imagery is so intense, and well relased, that it brought gasps from the audience. The film never reaches those heights again, but becomes ever more bizarre, as it attempts to include an eco friendly message which rests on an eastern idea of sea spirits which should be respected.

An attractive, fun film, Miyazaki has successfully gone back to the kind of films he does best, and there's no fault i can really find with this as a result. it's lovely.

Review of Inside aka À l'intérieur (2007)

2010-09-21T02:08:00.000-07:00

Yuuuuccccckkkkkk!! That one (non) word may in fact suffice as a review of this film. Yuck! It is yucky. I don't mind telling you I cringed a bit watching this. It is incredibly gory, and it's gory in a latex 80's kind of way, too. CGI gore, I find totally unconvincing. It elicits no reaction from me. Latex gore is different. It still looks unreal, but it is physically present in the scene, rather than being added on later. Somehow its artificiality makes it worse, becuase someone has actually created this revolting thing deliberately. It is a blunt, brutish, nasty way to show the body in crisis.

You'd never guess the film was going to get so gory when it starts. The set up is superb, and promises a subtle, truly terrifying film to come.

Sarah, a young pregnant woman loses her husband in a car crash. Some months later, she is alone at home, due to give birth very soon. It's Christmas Eve. Suddenly, there is a knock at the door. Someone first cajoling, then begging, then finally trying to threaten their way in. The person knows Sarah's name, and that her husband is dead. Sarah calls the police, and then peers out through her French windows.

The person is out there, it's a woman, very spookily played by Beatrice Dalle, who since Betty Blue, has cultivated a screen persona which suggests that extreme sexiness runs close to extreme madness. She is initally seen only in silhouette, lit from behind. There is a close up of her black gloved hands. This is very Mario Bava, very nice. She disappears when the police come, but later, when we Sarah asleep in front of the TV, the camera pulls back to reveal that the woman, known as La Femme in the credits, is in the house, standing behind Sarah.

No logical reason for this is given, but none is needed, La Femme is clearly some kind of malign spirit.

But shortly after this bruvaura beginning, La Femme chases Sarah into barricading herself into the bathroom, where she remains for almost the rest of the film. Meanwhile, various visitors start to arrive, and it soon becomes clear that the only reason for them to come, is to be killed. And not just killed, but hacked up, slashed up, gored up and left lying in pools of vomit and blood. The whole of act two is devoted to the arrival, seduction, chasing, and killing of the visitors, before the plot proper resumes for the final act.

The effect of this wholly gratituious section of the film is that Inside seems to suddenly plunge from the artistic, classy heights of Bava, right down into the depths of the scuzzy cinematic scum barrel inhabited by the likes of Lucio Fulci. Strangely, this unexpected, sudden and all consuming emphasis on plastic gore, which is rendered in highly a sadistic, gloating, but almost naively offensive way, is actually pretty good on its own terms. Its just that the set up was so much better. And the sheer predictibility of it becomes a terribly grinding to sit through. It's so clear that the only characters who really matter are Sarah and La Femme, that everyone else is just a distraction.

Not to mention the unlikely sheer stupidity of the victims, who, in order to get them into place so that some sharp implement can be suddenly shoved through their soft parts, do some very daft things. Kudos to the makers of Inside for letting the police actually appear, usually such films elide them. But points away for said police having no clue, no proceedure, no training, which will let them safely arrest a single, unarmed woman. Its going for terror, but such catalogues of idiotic contrivance owe more to Mr Bean.

The final showdown between Sarah and La Femme gives us what we we knew we would see, ever since the early scene where a pair of scissors were held over Sarah's very pregnant, very plastic looking belly. The final image is truly creepy, but I wished it could have been arrived at with more wit, more skill, more character work, more subtlety, dammit more class!!

Review of Kick Ass

2010-09-19T13:24:00.000-07:00

Kick Ass is partially the tale of a geeky teen who wonders why no one has ever tried to be a superhero for real, and then decides to try it. He dons a scuba outfit and calls himself 'Kick Ass'. He fails to rescue a cat from a high ledge ('fuck you Mr. Bitey!'), then tries to protect a fleeing criminal from a group of simarily criminal attackers. His bloody grit in the face of failure makes the clip a You Tube hit, and attracts the attention of a father and daughter combo of 'real' superheroes, Big Daddy and Hit Girl, who reveal themselves to him. Meanwhile, a highly generic gangster is after Kick Ass to punish him for attacking his henchmen. Despite the fact it isn't him, it's the other two.

Kick Ass the character isn't really very interesting, he's outshone in his own film by Big Daddy and especially Hit Girl, the eleven year old foul mouthed killer superheroine who steals every scene.

As a pair, Big Daddy and Hit Girl are very similar to the aged Batman and girl Robin seen in Frank Miller's superb The Dark Knight Returns graphic novel, with the male character turning to violence to solve crime, before succumbing to the inevitable. Hit Girl is a departure from the girl Robin, though. That character actually learns that casual violence is traumatic, while Hit Girl just keeps doling out the pain in a flashy, John Woo meets Shogun Assassin way. She is meant to thrill - the cartoony, CGI-heavy scenes where she attacks henchmen and slices off limbs, or blows them away while leaping around the walls, are set to blasting punk metal, and use quick cuts and multiple angles to exicite the viewer. That she is a child complicates the pleasure a little, but the film doesn't want us to dwell overly on this, only becoming realy disturbing when the full grown adult gangster gets the drop on her and starts pummeling her face in. But of course, she soon bounces back. More typical is the scene where Hit Girl enters and confronts the baddies with the hilarious, shocking line: 'all right you cunts, let's see what you've got' . Surely if Quentin Tarantino saw this, that line would have him yelling with pleasure. It's truly funny in a just jokin', but aren't-we- sick? sort of way. It certainly ranks high in my fave ever superhero screen moments.

There could have been something deeper to be gleaned from a father who deliberately trains his daughter to be a mass killer, and by extension an indictment of how every parent is to some degree trying to warp their kid's perceptions to fit their own. But by having Big Daddy and Hit Girl as supporting players, rather than the central attractions they so clearly are, the film lacks any time to go into this, more's the pity.

Instead, we have to keep returning to boring old Kick Ass. He retains some scant credibility by remaining crap at fighting throughout, but he's a reactive, non-involving character, and his main plot moment is when he accidentally betrays our real heroes to the gangsters. His scenes with the undercover child gangster superhero Red Mist are as tiresomely plotted out as anything in mainstream American cinema. When his unttainable love object suddenly falls for him, all credibility is lost. As such, if Kick Ass is clearly as unreal as Big Daddy and Hit Girl, why can't he be a bit more interesting? He does edge towards being a Mad Magazine parody of Spiderman here and there, but it's too muted. Too half real.

By contrast, and ironically, given that the film started from a premise of trying to be a superhero 'for real', Big Daddy and Hit Girl are very unreal indeed, and all the better for it.

Review of Pixar's Toy Story 3 (2010)

2010-08-31T00:30:00.000-07:00

There's always lots of debate over which sequels are better than their first films. Bride of Frankenstein, Emipre Strikes Back, Godfather II, you know the drill. Who ever argues for the third film in any series, ever? Scream 3, X Men 3, Spiderman 3, Return of the Jedi, Godfather III. They are always dreck.

Toy Story 3 isn't dreck, but it's nowhere near the first two. That lots of it is about rubbish, rubbish dumps, and discarded rubbish toys suggests that Pixar subconciously undertsand that this is redundant, although these recurring themes are dressed up as being musings about life and death, rather than the pointlessness of second sequels.

The plot has that weird convouted setup which Pixar often seem to do in order to avoid blaming anyone. In Toy Story, Woody had to be accidentally put in the garage sale, whilst trying to save the squeaky penguin. Andy couldn't just chuck Woody out in favour of Buzz. Watching the sucker-punch misery-fest that is the opening of Up, I felt sure that the couple couldn't have kids simply becuase if they could, their grown-up kids would be the ones sending Grandpa off to the rest home, which would offend the parents watching who had done that very same thang. So, plot change. Blame the Governmental Men In Black, everyone hates THEM!

Here, in Toy Story 3, it would be obvious that the newly grown-up and ready for college Andy would chuck his toys out. But we can't have that, so we have to witness a convoluted excuse for how some black rubbish bins got mixed up, and the toys find themselves in a 'day care center' (which appears to be an Americanism for a nursery). This day care center initially seems like a nice place, but by night it turns into a rather over extended parody of a prison movie, with toys 'caged' in plastic storage boxes, and patrolled by evil toys, the better to safeguard their prime position as toys the good (here defined as older) kids play with. Again, equivocation. Some kids smash the toys up, but they are simply too young to properly play. Not good-bad, definitely not evil. The out and out nasty little git Spike of TS1 is a distant memory.

The bad toys are led by Lotso, a big pink teddy who smells of strawbs, and who seems like a good father at first, before revealing his abusive,side. He and his gang can read, and use the instruction manual to reset Buzz, which leads to him talking Spanish - a funny idea. Lotso's nastiness is given a rationale by a flashback which shows him being abandoned and then replaced by his little girl owner. This replays the tear-jerking story of Jessie's abandonment from TS 2, but as a joke. Seems Pixar can laugh at their mawkish tendencies, too.

The prison scenario wears out its welcome, and while Lotso is basically farcical, his sidekicks are actually scary. A cymbal-smashing monkey has real malevolence in its eyes, while Lotso's best buddy Big Baby is a hellishly nasty thing - a giant Tiny Tears doll with a lazy eye, who shamblingly resembles a cross between Frankenstein's monster and a mentally retarded skinhead. Ken, of Ken and Barbie fame, is there too, but of course, has to turn good before the end. As indeed they all do, to avoid causing nightmares, perhaps. Even Big Baby is redefined as a gormless sap rather than a creature of hell. Bit like how Bride of Frankenstein made the monster sympathetic, when you think about it.

To try and balance this dark setting, we also see a perfect little girl, who manages to get Woody. She is depicted as highly imaginative, and her toys see themselves as players in improv theatre. The girl feels a bit like a representation of the new generation that Pixar want to buy Buzz and Woody toy. E, but is a great character for all that, and much more appealing than Andy ever was. There is too little of her, and the obvious crowd-pleasing scenes involving her and her toys all appear as bonuses during the end credits, rather than as part of the film proper.

After finally escaping the prison/ Day Care, the toys have to avoid the landfill, a climax which is exciting, but also visually a bit drab, depicting, as it does, a million beautifully rendered bits of rubbish going into a computer generated dump. Pity the poor animators who spend years of their lives making heaps of realistic-looking rubbish.

Given that most of the film is about action, the tear-jerking finale with Andy seems a bit tacked on, but will still get 'em sobbing in the aisles. Whether we will get Toy Story: The Next Generation (or TS: TNG if you will) is open to question, but I wouldn't be at all surprised.

Review of Christopher Nolan's Inception

2010-08-12T01:33:00.000-07:00

I wasn't much looking forward to this. I didn't really like Dark Knight, it dragged on far too long, and Inception is 2 1/2 hours, and looked to be some kind of belated Matrix film, set in a bland world of skyscrapers and business suits.

Actually, it wasn't half bad. The long running time never feels too long, becuase (unlike the Dark Knight), the film is very clearly structured, so that you always know where you are in the story. The story builds, reaches its climax, and then ends. Mentally, this helps get through it, and it doesn't feel like a slog at all! High praise, or what?

Is Inception as good as a real classic action chase film like North by Northwest? No, it's nowhere near. Its set pieces are not as inventive, and the characters are bland. Is it even as good as The Bourne Identity? Again, no, Bourne reinvigorated its genre, whilst Inception merely papers over the cliches with some sci-fi stuff.

Inception's story is about a group of industrial espionage types who use technology to hack into people's dreams. They target the son of a overly wealthy energy oligarch, and try to make him want to split up his late father's empire. This is supposedly innovative, this implanting of an idea - it's the legendary dream hacker's goal known as, yep, 'inception'. It's all very cyberpunk, very 1990's science fiction.

Much criticism has pointed out that Inception's dream worlds are bland and cliched. They lack the random weirdness of real dreams. And it's true, everything here is very very familiar and generic, and not convincing as the inside of someone's head. That's becuase they are not actually dreams, but just a space-where-certain-kinds-of-movie-action-can-happen. Inception is firstly an action film, and the 'dream' idea is there simply to get us from one set piece to the next. What Inception calls 'dreams' are really what William Gibson calls cyberspace, what The Matrix calls 'the real world', what Strange Days calls 'clips', what Existenz calls 'games', what Total Recall and Bladerunner call 'memory implants.' It's virtual reality, or an interstatial world. The skyscrapers and suits do seem to have come from the Matrix, and yes, they are visually dull. This is, basically, a very standard Bond/Bourne movie, with very standard issue set pieces, and some sci fi bits to get us there.

Inception is very basic and overly clear in its plotting, despite a premise that initally sounds like its going to be confusing. That it is so clear is probably why it got made, and also why it has been such a hit. It tells you, then it tells you, and in case you were munching popcorn / at the toilet / snogging / texting your gran / talking aimlessly into your mobile* (*delete as appropriate) it tells you again. It really really REALLY doesn't want anyone slurring 'I durrrnnntt get itttttttt' into their bucket of Coke. Compare it to the 'in at the deep end' nature of Synechdoche New York, and the supposedly smart Inception looks utterly cretinous. But it's not an art film, it's an action film designed to appeal to an audience who love those, but also to those who have become bored with them. On those terms, it works.

The gang are to plumb three levels of dreams. Like doing an 'inception' on someone, this is another innovative thing for them. They need to do the latter, to pull off the former, is how it works. The gang will go into this guy's dreams, and then descend to a dream inside the dream, and finally to a dream inside a dream inside a dream. At each level, time runs slower.

Whoaaaaaaa trippy, you say? Well, hold that whoaaaaaa my friend, becuase none of it is as mindbending and trippy as you might expect, or even hope. Level one is a shootout in New York, like in Heat. Level two is a skiing attack on a snowbound moutain baddies lair, like in The Spy Who Loved Me, or Where Eagles Dare. Level three is a deserted city of skyscrapers like in AI, or The Day After Tomorrow. In fact, level three is perfunctory, its not really a level at all, its just a bit of stray character flashback stuff presented as one, which pits Bond/Bourne against Lady 3Jane from William Gibson's Neuromancer, but in a True Lies meets War of the Roses kind of way.

The three REAL levels in terms of the film's structure equate to the three acts of the script (as defined by scriptwriting guru Syd Field) like so-

Act one - setup.
Level one - the real world, the gang is assembled, the world overexplained, the plot started

Act two - confrontation
Level two - New York and bank vault. Shoot outs, meeting with the target, fights with him.
.
Act three - resolution
Level three - snow lair attack, the ending.

Simple as that kids.

And of course, once you think of it like that, its clear that level one, the 'real world' is just as likely to be a dream too. Which it kind of is, becuase its part of a film, a fiction, and so can never truly be reality. Existenz, of course, made that clear in its final scene. Even dear old Total Recall hinted that Arnie was really only playing out his Rekall fantasy, and not really saving Mars at all. Inception leaves it vague. Is the happy ending just a dream, too? It seems pretty likely it is, but the way its presented lets the viewer feel smug and clever for thinking that, rather than a bit of dupe for not getting it before.

That's that. Inception is a somewhat cliched action film, with a bit of quite played-out science fiction thrown in. It's not the greatest, most mind bending thing ever. It's just a genre film which will prove acceptable viewing for a very wide range of people. In a world where dreck like Transformers 2 exists, this is a large step forward. Just not THAT large.

Review of Alexandre Aja's Haute Tension aka High Tension aka Switchblade Romance (2003)

2010-07-15T03:55:00.000-07:00

Spoilers galore!
Switchblade Romance is a French slasher/home invasion horror film, which replays many American genre tropes without irony or criticism, but instead with a kind of adoring fidelity. Camera angles familiar from many other American films are reused, and the heroine drives an American car, while the killer wears a baseball cap. The surrounding cornfields are very American in appearance. The film is therefore, not a French version of a slasher film, so much as it is an attempt to revisit American slashers of the past, those with high levels of gore and tension. The presence of Phillipe Nahon, however, suggests that the film can also be seen as an attempt to wrest the confrontational violence of the French New Extremity into a more tradtional genre format.

It successfully does this, but the generic, convoluted plot makes the need for such uncomrtable violence queastionable. The viewer is deliberately trauamtised by a film which has no insight, intelligence or point of view to share, nor is there much in the way of thrills here. The film does not experiment with structure as with The Texas Chainsaw Masscare, nor does it have even a truism to impart. It is merely, and quite purely violence for its own sake, and the failure of the plot to make even basic sense is less to do with a desire for surrealism, and more caused by a lazy approach to anything but the impactful set pieces.
The film starts with two young women, Alex and Marie, travelling to Alex's isolated family home in the countryside. In the middle of the night, a psycho-yokel turns up, kills the family, abducts Marie, and starts a prolonged cat-and-mouse chase of Marie, who initially tries to catch up with him to rescue Alex, only to become the quarry herself. The two women are barely introduced to us before the mayhem begins, but in the one conversation they do have, we hear that Alex is sexually free, whilst Marie is virginal.

Once the killer breaks in, the murders are very intense and graphic. Marie manages to hide in various places in the house, and avoids capture, but never tries to escape to sound an alarm, nor to help fight off the killer, nor help the victims, whom she helplessly watches being despatched. Prosthetics are used, rather than CGI, and these are very effective, especially the killing of the mother, who is bloodily sliced up and dismembered, all while Marie watches from a closet, a Hitchcockian/Lynchian voyeuristic moment which is both nasty and scary.

As a heroine, Marie is hard to identify with, or care about. She is given no character initially, then comes across as self serving in letting the family die. The only person she is interested in saving is Alex, and obsessively so. The reason for Marie's unlikeable, hard-to-root-for character is revealed two thirds of the way in: the police finally arrive at the gas station where the killer axed an attendant, and where Marie phoned for help. They watch the CCTV footage, to discover - shock! - Marie is the killer, with a lesbian obession with Alex!

Right on cue, Marie 'kills' the imaginary male killer she is fighting against, and goes to rescue Alex. Alex naturally goes berzerk, and accuses Marie of being a killer, and then stabs her, before escaping. Marie gets herself a big power tool, and starts a psycho chase through the woods. But, weirdly, she then changes in appearance, back to being the male killer, even when Alex is looking at 'her'. This suggests that the 'twist' is only superficial, for a shock effect. The film is unwilling to actually let Marie take on the mantel of killer.

When I reviewed US slasher, All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, I wished that Mandy Lane had simply been the killer, rather than one of a duo. Here, that does happen, but again, the Final Girl is not allowed to fully become the killer. The plot of the film works reasonably well without the twist, but not at all with it, as questions such as where the truck full of power tools came from arise, given that the male killer is a fantasy, and Marie is seen in a car with Alex when the truck first arrives. The problem of having a blank, unengaging central character, to avoid giving away that the Final Girl is actually the killer, is one common to both films. Between the two movies, there is perhaps one really good one. Of course, Haute Tension is superior to Mandy Lane - it's gory, and actually scary. But the idea still doesn't quite work.

The most likely explanation is that the film really does not care about logic. It wants to have it both ways, to terrorise us with a hyper-mascuine killer, then shock us by having a reveal that 'he' is really female. An inverse of Psycho and Dressed to Kill. But the film cannot be bothered to present a worked out, logical way this might happen, and so relies on its pace being fast enough to dispel doubts, and the violent attacks beig forceful enough to provide the necessary genre thrills, so that any problems with the story's utter lack of logic will be dismissed as irrelevant.

Aja is now working in America, and directing US horrors as noteworthy (or not) as a remake of Wes Craven's Hills Have Eyes and Joe Dante's Pirhana (the latter in 3D). This is what Haute tension is really about - not characters, not story, not anything but establishing that Aja can present some good, effective scare scenes. Well done, Mr Aja, you've made it!!

review of Fabrice du Welz's Calvaire aka The Ordeal (2004)

2010-06-29T02:45:00.000-07:00

A Belgian horror film, The Ordeal starts counter-intuitively, with 30-something lounge singer Marc Stevens (Laurent Lucas) crooning chansons to an audience of old women. After singing, he is propositioned by two of the ladies, one of whom is a geriatric, the other French horror and porn legend Brigitte LaHaie. Star of Jean Rollin's La Raisins du Mort (1978), she looks only slightly older than she did in that 70's French zombie classic, but she also looks like a lot of effort has gone into making her look as she did. LaHaie's cameo signals that director Fabrice du Welz knows the tradition of Francophone horror, and wishes to work within in it.

After the singer refuses La Haie (surely the mistake that seals his fate), he sets off in his van for another gig, and it initally seems impossible the film will divert from this realist beginning into horror. It soon does, though, as the driver finds himself on a desolate coutnry road in heavy fog, and then the van breaks down. He is accosted by a strange young man called Boris, whose name genuflects to Karloff, but who is closer to Lugosi's Igor.

Boris guides the singer to an isolated country inn, all run down and swimming in mud. Stevens abandons his vehicle, and meets the owner, Paul Bartel, who offers him a bed for the night. The set up is obviously a horror genre staple, and recalls an infnite number of other films, from James Whale's The Old Dark House (1932) onwards. That Du Welz can use such a cliche straight-faced, even after parodies such as The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Jim Sharman, 1975) have done their best to make it untenable for scares, shows that he is on a mission to reinvigorate horror as a film genre, to take it back to an earlier point of genre evolution.

Of course, like the presence of La Haie, the inn owners name is another little wink to the 'real' horror fan, the one whose knowledge extends back beyond the Saw franchise. The film director Paul Bartel, of course, worked for Roger Corman, and helmed Death Race 2000 (1975) and the cannibal black-comedy Eating Raoul (1981), in which he also starred, alongside Warhol acolyte Mary Woronov. It is this film which has the greater influence on Du Welz, as The Ordeal also has an initially funny older male character who turns out to be not only eccentric, but murderous. Jackie Berroyer is excellent as Bartel, able to move the character through stages, from being iniitally pitiful, to insane, to killer, without losing credibilty.

The central part of the film is basically a two-hander betwen the Stevens and Bartel, as the singer's attempts to escape the inn are foiled by circumstances which at first seem reasonable, then suspicious, and finally plainly dodgy. The singer remains essentially blank through this, an audience stand-in, whilst Bartel gets to reveal his goofy, pitiful, then scary self bit by bit.

We know full well that we are in Stephen King's Misery territory, and it's only a matter of time before Bartel attacks the singer, but the script takes its time getting there, and swerves away from expectations several times, skilfully increasing the tension, then releasing it with humour, before finally springing a surprise which is both scary and very funny.

Once Bartel is fully insane, The Ordeal goes into Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974) mode, even reprising that film's classic close up of twitching, scared eyeballs in extreme close up. Bartel literally makes the singer his bitch, and its not surprising that attempts to escape go badly wrong, nor that the local villagers turn out to be even more twisted than the innkeeper.The late introduction of a second madman, played by Gaspar Noe's fetish star Phillippe Nahon, pushes things too far into comedy, however.

But the inital scene with the old ladies now makes sense - the singer has rejected the female world, and has found himself trapped in an all-masculine one as a result. Here, women are sought after obsessively, insanely, and the constant fear they will escape drives every character.

The film deliberately includes several scenes which approach surrealism. A bar full of scary looking yokel men, whose pianist starts cranking out horror movie music on the piano is one, as is the sudden appearance of a group of children standing silently in the woods, all in red anoraks. These scenes would never appear in a more mainstream horror, and Du Welz makes a point of including them becuase of that. They are also among the film's best moments.

The ending is fairy tale, and works well enough, without equalling the grab-you-by-the-throat denouement of Texas Chainsaw. The Ordeal is perhaps not a classic, but it is a very good, very tense, and enjoyable film, and Du Welz's love of the horror genre remains clear throughout, an attempt to take us back to when horror was scary, fun, surreal and imaginative, and then tries to use the tropes of those old films in the present. That Du Welz gets away with refreshing so many seemingly stock scenes is what makes The Ordeal such a frightening pleasure.

Third thoughts: Laserdisc and Betamax

2010-06-29T01:31:00.000-07:00

Throughout my blog post on VHS, its positives and negatives, I now realise I omitted the existence of rival video format Betamax. As is well known, Sony invented and backed Beta, which had superior picture quality to VHS. VHS ended up winning that format war, becuase more films were available to rent on VHS than on Beta. It's surely no cinicnidence that Blu Ray "won" its format war by persuding Hollywood studios to bring their films out on Blu Ray, and not HD-DVD.

But, of course, times are now very different. At the time of the video format war, customers were eager to find films to watch on their new machines. It was not possible to buy tapes, which were all priced for rental only at around the £100 mark. So, there was a brief period when the video shop owner weilded some power. Most video shops I remember initally having a VHS and a Beta section of approximately the same size. But soon, the lack of titles on Beta, and the excess of titles on VHS skewed the sections one way. New customers could then immediately see from the phyisca lack of shelf space given to Beta that beta was dying. This then became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

My grandfather and my paternal uncle both bought Beta machines, and both would expound on the superior picture quality. Neither had any interest in renting films.My grandfather archived endless episodes of TV variety shows, whilst my uncle recorded opera and classical music concerts from BBC2. However, my father took me to a rental shop before we acquired a machine, solely due to my already obsessive interest in movies. The obvious skew to VHS led him to choose that format. Family mockery soon turned to bitterness as the Sony format bit the dust, although as Beta tapes continued to be freely available for a long time after, the format's failure should not have really troubled my grandafather and uncle, as it did not affect their sole use of their machines, recording off-air.

Although, I must say that it did trouble them. They had invested themselves into the technology, and wanted it to succeed. This phenomeon of consumers aligning themselves with the corporation from whom they have purchased goods is something that companies now seem to encourage, positively through producing a product which is actively desired, negatively through crippling said product to make it incompatible with rivals' products, even when the difference between the two products is marginal, and the Chinese microchips inside are essentially identical.

It seems likely that Beta's failure also affected Sony. They bought Columbia pictures some time after, the sugestion being that whatever format came next, Sony would always have Columbia to release its films on that format.

The manufactuers agreed on DVD as a common format, but disagreed over its HD upgrade. Sony has seemed to have previaled by getting the Studios to support Blu-Ray, but has it really? Consumers have a wide range of alternative means to see films now, whether the easiest option of sticking with the perfectly good DVD, to downloading films, to subscriptions to cable and satellite movie channels. If you don't upgrade to Blu Ray, you are not really missing out. As a result, uptake is slow.

It has been predicted that Blu-Ray might be the new Laserdisc, and this seems very likely. Laserdisc was a system based on 12" video discs, which had to be turned over part way through a film. Most films neede two discs to contain their full running time. Although reasonably successful in the US, were the NTSC TV standard meant that picture quality was often of low quality. Laserdisc caught on with film buffs and collectors, who like the much imporved quality over NTSC VHS tapes. That said, the format was never mainstream, who were happy to put up with grotty tapes. But it did have its niche.

Unlike in the UK, where the lack of choice, and high cost of discs meant it was never going to take on, especially as PAL standard VHS was much clearer than NTSC. Tower Records in Piccadilly Square did stock Laserdiscs for awhile, and many of their titles were American in origin. News soon travelled around the film fan ciommunity that Tower were selling Lasers of then-banned titles such as the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The interest that this increased choice stimulated was soon quashed, when the police raided Tower, and seized their stock. Arguably, laserdisc was dead as a format in the UK after this raid. Early adopters who wanted increased film choice no longer had a reason to choose laserdisc, as the format now only had 'somewhat' improved picture quality to recommend it. This wasn't enough, and rumuors of the dreaded 'laser rot', discs becoming unplayable due to moisture damage, didn't help.

I would guess that for Blu to achieve dominance, it needs to replicate the wide choice of titles that DVD allowed, by abandoning region coding. Even with this, it may be that the format will nevr truly win, unless customers are given no other option.

This is the approach which music stores took with regard to CD of course, physically removing vinyl as an option from the shelves, and giving customers the choice of either moving to CD, or not buying music any longer. Thjis tactic worked, as opitions such as downloading did not then exist. Given the options available today, it is doubtful that even forcing the format on customers would work.

So why have Sony bothered? Can it really be becuase they wanted some sort of 'revenge' for Beta, or is putting such human moitvations onto a corporation silly?

Second thoughts on Blu Ray and Streaming Movies

2010-06-17T02:36:00.000-07:00

According to John Ellis, author of TV theory classic Visible Fictions, quality of image will never be a driver. A driver is something people MUST have, even if they can't afford it. For Ellis, football and films are drivers, and convenience can often be a driver, too.

By Ellis's criteria, Blu Ray will fail, becuase it is exclusively concerend with picture quality. It offers nothing new in terms of convenience, unlike streaming, which allows you to watch films immediately.

The main drawback with streaming, as I experienced it via Blinkbox over the last week, is that the choice is very large but also very limited. While scrolling through seemingly endless lists of films I didn't want to see, I realised that Blinkbox was providing an electronic version of the video shop. Where once I would stand for endless hours, weighing up which second rate horror film to rent, now I could revisit that experience from my own armchair. Is this an advance? I don't even get the video shop cashier saying, 'hey, choosing videos is meant to be FUN, y'know' at me now.

Where Blu Ray is all about picture quality, the quality of Blinkbox's streaming movies is frankly terrible. Or maybe it just looks that way by comparison. It claims its highest setting is DVD quality. I'd say its VHS standard - soft, lacking in detail, with blacks indistinct from each other. Acceptable for TV shows, definitely, but not able to do films like Jane Campion's Bright Star justice at all. A comparison of that film streamed and on DVD revealed disc as the easy winner. Why there is no Blu Ray release for this very visual film is open to question. Presumably becuase it's not going to shift Avatar like numbers.

Blu Ray seems to me to be an elitist medium by design. With impending cuts and probable depression coming, most people won't be able to afford such a luxury anyway. The days of the masses simply picking up a cheaply priced DVD at the supermarket will not carry over to Blu Ray. They're not meant to.

Some thoughts on Blu Ray

2010-06-16T14:32:00.000-07:00

VHS was great. Before video, there was no way of seeing films, except going to the cinema, or managing to catch them on TV. Now you could go to the video shop, and rent what you wanted to watch, when you wanted. It represented freedom.

But I had a lot of issues with VHS, too. The generally horrible picture quality. Stretched tapes, rolling image, tapes getting chewed by the player, tapes snapping, bars of white noise that marched slowly down the screen, terrible shaky pause...Yours to keep forever, they said, but on first play, many of these tapes were already halfway to the landfill...I became expert at taking a videotape apart, and reassembling it. How to wind its spindles, to keep the tape tight. How to press the little button on its side, to allow me to lift its top, and look at the tape directly.

Trying to watch a widescreen film, like Kurosawa's Ran , or Greenaway's Cook Thief...was incredibly frustrating. Videos that started off in letterbox, only to go fullscreen once the titles were finished caused great anger. Pan and scanning of mainstream Hollywood fare destroyed the rhythmn of the films completely, imposing TV style cuts back and forth from one character to another. Eventually, the studios seemed to stop making widescreen films, and were composing more for video than the cinema! Talk about the tail wagging the dog...but video had caught on, and was making good money...never mind that it looked terrible, that subtitles weren't readily available, that it often wasn't much like the original film at all...

Bad quality videos of highly visual animated films were a particular annoyance. I sent Jan Svankmeyer Volume 1 back to the BFI mail order shop three times,a nd never got a copy I could live with. I remember returning Fantasia to HMV multiple times over a number of weeks. Each copy had lines, or noise, somewhere, which threw me out of the movie.Often, when the molten lava poured out of the volcano in the dinosaur sequence, there was terrible blue noise and white lines visible on that pure red gloop. It looked terrible. How could Disney charge a premium price for that?? I think the staff thought I was insane. I became more crazed and obsessive with each new copy. I think I was going a bit insane - I realised then that I hated VHS.

I never bought another tape after Fantasia (although I did end up keeping three copies of it, and playing only certain sequences from each tape). It was obvious, with CD and expensive laserdisc, and that Asian favourite, the VCD, that it was only a matter of time before there would be a movie disc that was the size of a CD. CDs were a step backwards compared with vinyl, but a movie CD HAD to be better than video, didn't it?

Luckily, yes it did. Although on first view, they looked too bright, a bit processed, DVDs were still much much betetr than videos. The DVD format brought calm to my movie collecting. Now there was pretty much perfect quality. If you treated VHS well, it could still let you down, twist, roll, snap. With DVD, none of that. My many, many videos, collected becuase they represented the only way of owning those films - they went in the bin. The obscure titles were coming out on DVD, and guess what? You could import them from the USA, becuase the region coding that the machines came with, that was meant to stop you bying anything other than local discs? That could easily be avoided! Just type in a few numbers on your DVD player, and hey presto!

DVD intersected beautifully with the Internet, and lots of American and Candian DVD stores were only too happy to ship their discs around the world. This was what I'd always wanted! Choice! Comparison websites spring up, to let custmers now which DVD edition of a particular film was best. This was bad news for a lot of British companies. They were revealed as the worst. Using video prints on DVD! Burnt on subtitles! Flipper discs you had to turn half way through! But now you could avoid them. Just order the US disc. Lo and behold, British releases began to get better, faced with this consumer choice!

The name Criterion began to loom large in my conciousness. They put out classic arthouse films, and the products of Classical Hollywood at its best. their extras were superb, and made with the true film buff in mind - Laura Mulvey doing a commetary for Peeping Tom, who could refuse that?

A few years of bliss. Nothing to worry about. DVD was the ultimate format. THEN - began the rumble about High Definition. You must have it. It makes DVD look rubbish. Well, DVD looked okay to me. But - the nagging carried on. Soon, two formats emerged - HD DVD and Blu ray.

HD DVD sounded like it was the best choice for me. It didn't have any region coding at all, a nice admission that that idea was dumb, the discs cost about the same as DVD, and often had a DVD copy in there, too. The players were much cheaper. Blu Ray, on the other hand, had unbreakable region coding, the players were top price, and the discs didn't have a DVD copy. It also had a silly, misspelt name. "Blu"? What was that about? Video Watchdog announced they wouldn't even review Blu ray.

Then, something happened. Sony, makers of Blu ray were successful in persuading the Hollywood film companies to back Blu. HD DVD was called a loser, and promptly gave up from shame.

That was that. I'd not bought a player, so why did I care? I didn't, until we were given a Playstation 3 last Xmas. It had a Blu ray in. I have no interest in games, but after awhile I began to be curious about that Blu Ray player. I rented a Blu ray title. It looked great. Really nice. Given the choice, I would prefer this to DVD, for sure. I bought second hand copies of Coraline and Bladerunner the next day. They both looked incredible. Then I got a few more Blu's for my birthday - Watchmen, Across the Universe, and the BFI Kenneth Anger collection.

Then the problems began. I saw that Criterion were releasing many titles on Blu Ray. Many titles I liked the look of. Problem 1: they're all region coded A. My machine is region coded B. Chungking Express came out as a Criterion. I wanted it, but couldn't have it. A British release came out. Guess what? According to DVD Beaver, the picture quality of the British release was nowhere near the Criterion. We were back to the bad old days, the VHS days, the-before-DVD-liberated-us-all days. I didn't buy it at all. Problem 2: the Blu Criterions cost a lot of money. They're over the customs limit. So waiting for a sale would be the only way to get them. If they were playable. Which they're not.

Looking for other titles, I found a significant minority that are not released on Blu in Europe, but are in the US. With DVD, no problem. With Blu? Well, many discs have no region coding, but some do. Some titles are being announced for European release on Blu, then cancelled, DVD only. This suggests to me that Blu isn't doing it for the people over here. And why would it? What exactly does it offer? Yes, better quality, and I admit I do love that. But the price it tries to exert - locking you into your little region, charging top price for discs of films we've all already bought on VHS and DVD, well, I have no time for that. They have now started including DVD copies with Blu's, but that seems too little too late.

I thought for awhile about buying a second player. An American region A-only player. The old quest to get the best quality had kicked in again. Finally, I decided not to bother. There's still nothing wrong with DVD. I'm inclined to move to HD, but Blu Ray isn't giving me any reason to. I don't think I will, until Blu ray region coding is scrapped.

It probably never will be, and the next thing we have will be streaming movies. I tried that last week, a free trial on BlinkBox.com, and saw quite a few titles that had 'not avilable in your country' written across their little images. One of them was 500 Days of Summer. I never much wanted to see that film, but that little legend saying that I couldn't really made me desperate to see it. Luckily, I could rent it on DVD. (It was shit). But when discs are gone, and streaming is all we have, then what? Will I have to trog around lots of different streaming services to see which one has certain films? And as for seeing films uncensored? Forget that! Once the BBFC get wise, they will be able to ban films effectively again. Just make sure the law stops streaming services from showing a title, and it will disappear. 'Not available in your country' will be the VHS of the new millenium. DVD? It might just be the best format they ever let us have...

Review of Oren Peli's Paranormal Activity (2007)

2010-06-15T04:35:00.000-07:00

Oren Peli's Paranormal Acvitity is a supernatural horror film made in what is now a familiar style - it is shot through a camcorder, and presents itself as real found footage. The horror-in-the-woods camcorder film Blair Witch Project started the current fashion for this, although it was prefigured by the use of a similar device in Deodato's Cannibal Holocaust. The science fiction monster film Cloverfield uses camcorder images reminiscent of the September 11th terorrist attack on New York to tell a Godzilla-like story. The Spanish [Rec] is a camcorder version of Lamberto Bava's Demons. George Romero's Diary of the Dead at least partially spoofs the conventions of the camcorder-horror, by having the cameraman miss a zombie attack while his camera battery is recharging (something which would never happen in more conventional films).

It is noticable that most of the camcorder films use an established horror story as their basis, but seek to renew it through the use of point-of-view camerawork. It seems the likely goal of such films is to overcome jaded viewer disbelief by presenting events which are nominally 'real.' The illuision depends on taking something of a slow-burn approach, beginning in a recognisable, contemporary, realist world, with everyday, unremarakble characters, before introducing small genre elements. These are followed by increasingly large disruptions to the real world shown onscreen. Throughout, the reactions of the characters are key - how they react dictates how the viewer reacts. If characters established as being 'like us' suddenly do the kind of suicidal, dumb things a horror movie teen habitually does, the film collapses.

These unspoken, unwritten contraints do seem to operate across many of the more successful camcorder films, and in some ways resemble Lars Von Trier's Vow of Chastity, when creating the Dogme 95 movement. Dogme 95 also made use of camcorder footage. The first Dognme 95 film, The Idiots, came out in 1998, while Blair Witch followed in 1999. Whether one influenced the other, both seem to draw from a similar desire to replace the expensive, special-effects laden Hollywood blockbuster with something smaller, less show-offy. As with Von Trier's films, the camcorder movies are independently made.

For Paranormal Activity, Universal apparently toyed with the idea of remaking Peli's original low budget film, but then decided to distribute it, albeit after a reshot ending had been added. The story owes much to William Friedkin's The Exorcist, with a young adult woman, Katie, (Katie Featherstone) standing in for the child Regan, as the site of a demonic possession.

Katie and partner Micah (Micah Sloat - note the chaarcter names are the same as the actors' own names, another bid for audience credulity) have recently moved into a suburban house. The film ebgins with Micah turning on his new video camera, and recording Katie's arrival. Some slightly on-the-nose dialogue reveals he wishes to record some strange nocturnal distubances, which have been upsetting their sleep. The possilbity that these may have everyday, non-supernatural origins is not discounted, although thje viewer knows, from the film's title, and from the extravagant marketing campaign which Universal put behind the film, that something supernatural is happening.

During the day, the filmed conversations are banal, and almost totally filmed by Micah, looking at Katie. By night, the camera is placed on a tripod in a corner of the couple's bedroom, looking at the bed on the right hand side of the screen, and an open door out onto the landing on the left. This open door is often the focus of the incidents. At first, we simply hear footsteps outside on the stairs. Later, crashes from below startle and wake the sleeping couple. Micah always rushes to the camera, and carries it downstairs with him after these sounds, an action which would make it difficult to defend himself, should he encounter a human burglar.

But, of course, there is no one there. The title of the film lets us know that some kind of supernatural entity is repsonsible, and the camera ust be taken, in order to reveal that the apparently real noises have no rational source. These simple scenes prey on fears of criminals, more than of demons, but are very effective all the same.

A psychic visits the couple, and he is a middle aged, white male authority figure. He resembles a lecturer, or medical Doctor, and seems utterly rational when he tells them that there is a demon in the house, and it is fixated on Katie. Katie then reveals she was stalked by a ghostly figure in her childhood years. Apparently, both her, and her sister saw a ghostly figure standing at the foot of Katie's bed. The psychic in unable to help, instead suggesting a demonoligist, whose number he provides. This demonologist never appears, being vetoed for unknown reasons by Micah, and then being away and unavailable.

The story grows more and more like The Exorcist, but the story removes the special effects elements, wuch as the shaking bed, spinning head, and bile spewing, the very elements which the audience laughed at, when I saw a revival showing of Fredkin's film. Instead, the move between daytime shooting of Katie by Micah, and night time shooting of them both, the bed and the door, continues. An unseen editor fast forwards footage of teh couple asleep, dropping back into normal play mode when something is about to happen. But not excatly when, a short while before, to allow for suspenseful build up. This fast forwarding is an effective way of lettign the audience know when something is going to happen. The landing light is turned off and on, and cloven footprints seen on the floor. Often, the viewer strains to see through the open door, to penetrate what is moving on the other side of it, obscured in the dark, or half light.

Finally, Katie starts to get up and stand over Micah, before finally, leaving through the open door. She is to all purposes raped by the demon, and afterwards, eitehr possessed, or inclined to side with it. It is clear by this point that the story is one which is akin to that of an ex-boyfriend stalker following a woman, the stalker raping the woman, and her falling in love with her rapist.

The camera is in Micah's hands for most of the daytime scenes, becuase he is visually investigating Katie for signs of guilt, evidence that she is complicit with what is happening. The emphasis on displaying her body is is obsessive. She seemingly wears everyday clothes, but her large breasts are continually ephasised, displaying her sexuality to Micah and the camera's gaze. In the night time scenes, Micah is displayed to the camera too, and this passivity makes these scene horrific. But it is the open door which is the real site of interest for the viewer. This is Katie's symbolic vagina, through which the demon must enter, in order to claim her. By making the viewer look intently into the open door, the film is positioning the viewer as complicit with Micah in the scopic investigation of Katie.

As with The Exorcist, Paranormal Activity equates the female with the monstrous, and concludes that the male will be sacrificed for the female. The demon represents the only lover who could satisfy the nymphomaniac female sexuality, the rapist who is desired by the woman. Paranormal Activity therefore uses the modern trope of the camcorder in order to restage the anti-female imagery of the Exircist, which itself drew from the more repressive, anti-feminist aspects of religion, in order to portray female sexuality as abberational.

Review of Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr Fox

2010-06-10T13:34:00.000-07:00

Wes Anderson. Wow, it seems like a million years since I fell in love with Rushmore, that quirky quirk fest of an indie comedy, that Anderson made back in 1998. The use of music like The Creation's Makin' Time, the indiekid nods to The Graduate, and to the films of Bill Forsyth, all made it feel so fresh. The whole thing of the manchild hero herd, was just so appealing after a decade of Arnie and Bruce and Chuck. But just the other day, I was looking at my Criterion DVD, wondering whether to sell it or not.

Why? Well, the follow up to Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) left me utterly cold. Where Rushmore had Bill Murray, and a cast of pretty much new faces, success meant that the stars wanted in. So instead of casting stars according to their type, Anderson cast them against type, to fit his quirky quirkfest roles. And they didn't fit. Gwyneth Paltrow will never be an outsider, no matter how she's dressed. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004) I didn't even bother with. Nor the subsequent films.

So it's bizarre that I liked The Fantastic Mr Fox as much as I did. I loved it. Although nominally a kid's animated film, Anderson hasn't really changed anything much of his style, but the repositioning really helps. Instead of making a film for adults which feels too childish, he's made a film for kids that is in some ways too adult. It's a better way round to be.

There's none of the usual kid's film product placement, or patronising attitude, or big pop song Happy meal tie-ins, here. No smeary CGI animals. I found it a relief to hear The Beach Boys' Smile classic Heroes and Villians blasting out on the soundtrack. It felt like an alternative world to the usual kid's film.

And the relationships between the fox family all feel real, too. True, Mr Fox's mid-life crisis isn't of interest to kids, but his disappointed relationship with his son, and his preference for the more sports- competent cousin Kristofferson works very well. Played by real life 30-somethings, dressed as teenagers, it would be obnoxious. Played by stop motion foxes, whose animation style is deliberately low-tech and hokey, it feels charming, again. The Rushmore magic is recaptured. He has his fetish stars Bill Murray and Jason Schwartzman and Owen Wilson in there again. But we can't see them, so they do not irritate.

All the more weirdly, the film often plays like an anti-British work of propaganda. Or a restaging of the War of Independence, with furry animals. Anderson has chosen to voice all the heroic animals with American accents, all the evil, violent human characters with British ones. More, he presses home that Mr Fox is American through the use of music. He is introduced to the quintessential American hero song, Ballad of Davy Crockett. The aforementioned Heroes and Villains follows, and what was Smile if not a hymn to America? And, of course, we know who the Heroes are, and who the Villains. Later, the Beach Boys sing Ol Man River. In this film, the countryside is America, the village England. Freedom is America, while repression, and (strangely) guns are British. Most importantly, only the animals love their children. So what we have is an inversion - animals are more human than humans. Or more properly, the animals are a mix of civilized and animal traits. They occasionally revert to full animal actions, but these lapses in cotnrol paradoxically makes them feel more human. The humans, the British, are just small minded, aggressive and hateful.

The animals attack the humans, using so-called 'bandit masks' as disgiuse. These resemble IRA balaclavas, and their attack on the village looks like some kind of terrorist attack. There's some weird mismatched road names, which fuse British and American conventions. Having British villains and American heroes isn't new. But pushing it to such extremes is. And, funny thing, it feels utterly without malice, without thought. It's naivete and its excessive channeling of American prejudices excuses it, like a little kid brought up not knowing any better.

It should be an irritatingly unholy mess. It is. And it's not, becuase it's better than the book, and hardly faithful to the book, despite showing a library copy of it at the start (and how indie twee is that?) But somehow, I enjoyed it. A lot.

Into The Archive: Interview With Tom Dewe Mathews

2010-06-09T02:20:00.000-07:00

The following interview was originally published in shorter form in Dark Star magazine, around the time Tom Dewe Mathews' book Censored, was published - 1994/5. The Conservative government had introduced the 1984 Video Recordings Act, which led to the banning of any uncertificated films. This was followed by several tabloid witch hunts against films such as Reservoir Dogs. Chief censor James Ferman was very much against relaxing film censorship, which was by far the strictest in the democratic world.

Tom Dewe Mathews Interview by Adrian Horrocks

Tom Dewe Mathews’ book _Censored_ was published in 1994. Not an academic book, it is a populist, heavily illustrated account of the history of film censorship in Britain. Ignoring the liberal press’ equivocation over whether freedom of artistic expression is worth defending, Dewe Mathews’ takes the principled position that adult viewers should be permitted to make their own viewing choices. He also advances the view that censors have no greater insight into films than any other viewer. To support this, the author cites a number of examples of classic films that have been cut or banned in the past, before moving to the present to highlight worthwhile films that have recently been banned. Dewe Mathews persuasively argued that censors are liable to misunderstand great films, because what is groundbreaking can also be disturbing. If a censor is disturbed by a film, it becomes more likely that he or she will take action against it.

I decided to interview Tom Dewe Mathews after attending a discussion on censorship, at which he spoke. Tall, with a shock of thick gray hair, Dewe Mathews’ laid back manner, and slow, relaxed drawl lent him the air of a University lecturer. Possessed of a nicely ironic sense of humour, he nevertheless came over as deeply serious in his belief that the censorship of films does not benefit society.

WHAT MADE YOU WANT TO WRITE THE BOOK, _CENSORED_?

I couldn’t find any information out about how films were censored in Britain. I’d lived in America for about seven, eight years, up until about 1986. I was used to living in America, and when I came back, I was surprised by the amount of censorship. And I noticed that some films had been cut, when I went to see them.

And I was a film journalist. I couldn’t seem to find out…I picked up scraps, little scraps, here and there, in magazines, saying such and such had been cut, *but* there didn’t seem to be any systematic means of finding out. So, I thought, well, maybe I’ll do it myself.

DO YOU THINK PEOPLE ARE INTERESTED IN FILM CENSORSHIP IN BRITAIN? DID ANYONE YOU KNOW EXPRESS INTEREST?

Not particularly. Some film people did. I did it pre-Bulger, so there’d been a long fallow period in censorship terms, it was very quiet. In fact, the head censor, James Ferman, asked me why I was doing the book, because nothing was happening.

And I said to him, just from a quick study, I can tell that something happens roughly every decade. Something *will* happen. Sure enough, the next year, it did.

I knew enough to know fairly quickly, that film censorship in this country was largely political, and it was something that was rather like a feather in the political wind, that could be gusted up. I knew that that could happen at any time.

I was curious about it.

DID YOU HAVE A LOT OF OPPOSITION FROM THE BBFC?

I had opposition from the censor himself, because he wouldn’t allow me access to any BBFC files dated after 1975. He suddenly arbitrarily imposed this twenty rule. He said the civil service had a thirty year rule, and ‘we need a state of confidentiality’, as he put it.

And [that date] happened to coincide with when he became Chief Censor.

And so then I said, ‘Well, look, if you won’t give me access to the files, can I talk to the censors?’ And he said no. He said that ‘they needed space within which to make their decisions.’ So, I wasn’t getting that much joy from *him*. And so: yes, there was. The short answer to your question is yes, there was opposition to it.

DO YOU THINK THAT FILM IS BEING MADE A SCAPEGOAT?

Yeah, I do. I think the BBFC, in its history, has relied on that fear factor. On the other hand, you could say, why do people allow it? That’s really the question. Why does the public allow itself to be sold this *pill?* It undoubtedly happens. It happens, as I said before, about every decade. This comes along. I really do think it’s a sign of political immaturity.

IS FILM CENSORSHIP IN ENGLAND MUCH STRICTER THAN IN OTHER WESTERN COUNTRIES?

It’s probably the strictest in the western world, amongst so-called developed countries. With maybe the possible exception of Ireland. Which I think tells us a lot about ourselves. It tells us a lot about the British.

DO YOU THINK THE BBFC ENJOYS POPULAR SUPPORT OR APPROVAL?

It depends what you mean by popular. Sometimes people write into the BBFC, but a lot of times these are co-ordinated responses, i.e.: these groups all write in. Moral rearmament groups, that sort of thing. It’s difficult to know what the public at large believes about censorship in Britain, because there’s so few arenas for that public opinion to be heard.

I find that when I do censorship lectures to the general public, that they’re generally disgusted by film censorship. They feel that they’re patronised, that they’re being treated like children. But that’s only when they’re *informed*. I don’t think [most people] know much about the subject, and therefore, on a visceral, emotional level, probably quite a few people do believe in censorship, and really do believe that juvenile violence, and the murder of children, will be solved by banning a particular film. I also think that is a state of ignorance that is encouraged, and exacerbated, by politicians, and the newspapers.

YOU MENTIONED THE NEWSPAPERS. THERE’S A DISTINCT LACK OF ANY NEWSPAPERS CAMPAIGNING AGAINST CENSORSHIP. EVEN THE MORE LIBERAL PAPERS DON’T TAKE A CRUSADING LINE. FOR EXAMPLE, MELANIE PHILIPS, IN THE OBSERVER, WROTE THAT BRITAIN NEEDS SOMEONE WHO WILL STOP FILMS LIKE _DRILLER KILLER_, BUT ALLOW FILMS LIKE _PULP FICTION_.

Yes. There’s a remarkable state of ignorance amongst the newspapers. Not only the tabloids, but also the broadsheets, as you point out, about films. There’s very little knowledge, even amongst the film critics, about the horror genre. So people can shout out the titles from rooftops, and people fall for it. Newspapers fall for it, politicians fall for it, and the censor is able to exploit that. Whereas I think that the people who actually go to see these films, have far more knowledge about them, as a genre. They know what to expect, they enjoy them, they follow the work of a particular director. They follow the tricks of the trade, they understand the visual triggers, and all this sort of thing. And they’re amused by it. I think that the politicians, and the censors, disapprove of that amusement. They tend to be appalled by the horror fans’ love of black humour, because of course, that is an ambiguous moral response to movies. And the one thing that politicians and censors hate is ambiguous morality.

WHAT WOULD YOU REPLACE THE BBFC WITH?

Well, in the book, I did say that I thought the censorship system should be abolished, and that we should rely upon other existing laws. I don’t think it’s a totally satisfactory solution, because it would mean that we were reliant upon the Obscene Publications Act. The problem with that is, barristers are going to over-defend a film. They’re going to suggest to a distributor that they cut such and such and such, to be on the right side of the law. That they are going to be overly defensive about the movies they’re defending. So I don’t think it’s good in that way, which is what history has told us has happened. But at the same time, it would be far more satisfactory than the current system. I don’t think we should have classification.

NO GUIDELINES AT ALL?

I think there should be *guidelines*. I mean, it should be like *books*. [Films] should be treated like every other medium. Buying or renting a video, or going to the cinema; should be a matter of choice, and that choice should be dependent upon consumer knowledge.

ARE THERE ANY FILMS THAT YOU’VE SEEN THAT HAVE MADE YOU FEEL UNEASY?

It’s funny, I was talking about one the other day…_Salo_. _Salo_ makes me feel a bit queasy. There’s very few films that…the trouble is, I *like* being made to feel queasy! I especially like to be made to feel morally queasy. I feel that that’s a good challenge. So a film like _Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer_ interests me in that way. It didn’t make me feel queasy, it made me feel that much more aware of violence.

HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT THE RAPE/REVENGE SUB-GENRE, TYPIFIED BY _I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE_?

This is the trouble! You see, a lot of the films that have been banned on video; there were one or two that were good; but mostly there were pretty crappy films! But that’s not the point to me. I personally didn’t like _I Spit On Your Grave_, I didn’t think it was a very good film, I just thought it was tacky. And also I find the whole presumption of women taking revenge for rape unrealistic. It’s been the subject matter of endless movies, but it doesn’t seem to happen in real life very much. The same applies to _Boy Meets Girl_, the film that was banned last year, which is also about a female serial killer. But on the other hand, I don’t think these films should be *banned*. Guatemala used to ban films if they were “aesthetically bad”, in quotes. But we all have our different tastes.

DO YOU THINK THAT THINGS LIKE THE INTERNET, SATELLITE TV, FILMS VIA TELEPHONE, WILL EVENTUALLY MEAN THE END OF CENSORSHIP IN BRITAIN?

I hope it does, but I’m not sure it will. I think the British are so good at regulating media and culture, that they won’t give up easily. They’ll fight tooth and nail to try and co-opt and adapt any new technology. But quite how they will manage it with the Internet, and dial a video, it’s difficult to see how they’ll do it at the moment. But I’m sure they’ll try.

The thing you have to remember about censors is, it’s not so much the educated, or the middle class that they’re worried about, it’s the great unwashed masses, that they’re concerned about. They’re concerned about the mob. And they’re very, very concerned that these sort of people will suddenly go whacko, and start destroying middle class property. If there’s a possibility that the mass audience has direct access to whatever they want to see, then I think that will really, really worry the political establishment, and the institutions that serve it. So I think there will be a real battle ahead. I think these tentative moves by the police recently against the Internet, are a foretaste of what’s to come.

HAVE YOU HAD ANY RESPONSE TO YOUR BOOK FROM THE BBFC?

No, I haven’t had anything like that, no. I haven’t had any direct response from anybody in authority. I was very careful with the book, though. It was checked very thoroughly for libel, because the BBFC is quite capable of taking an author to court if he gets his facts wrong. Which is a double bind situation, because of course, you don’t have access to the facts. Because the BBFC is surrounded by so much secrecy. It’s difficult to get one’s facts right, that’s the difficulty with writing about censorship. So, it’s very easy to be ridiculed by the censor.

I SAW A LETTER IN _SIGHT AND SOUND_ FROM DEPUTY CENSOR MARGARET FORD, DECRYING YOUR BOOK, AND ADVISING PEOPLE TO READ GUY PHELPS’ BOOK INSTEAD.

(laughter) Well, yes, Guy Phelps wrote [his] book, and was given access to the BBFC, under the previous chief censor, Stephen Murphy, who was probably the best censor of modern times. I mean best: most liberal. Quite a courageous man, in that at least he was prepared to stand up to the press, unlike James Ferman. But when Phelps wrote his book, he was then offered a job, within the BBFC, which he took.

HAVE THEY ASKED YOU TO JOIN THEM?

Well, that’s exactly what I was hoping. I was hoping that they would then offer me a nice little shadow job, or something, whereby I could be paid thirty grand a year. But so far, no luck.

IF THEY DID SERIOUSLY OFFER YOU A JOB, WOULD YOU TAKE IT?

No. Maybe if I was starving, I might consider it. But no, I don’t think I would do it, even then. I wouldn’t *want* to do it, I just think it’s such a compromised job. I can never put myself in the position where I was deciding what other people should see. I don’t understand what would give me the right to do that. To me a censor is just a film critic with a pair of scissors in his hand. It all comes down to a matter of taste.

DO WHAT EXTENT DO FILMS INFLUENCE PEOPLE?

I can’t believe that people will go and see a film, and it will cause them to murder people. I just don’t think anybody is that susceptible. I think there has to be something going on in their minds, before they saw the film. I don’t even believe that film can act as a trigger for a psychopath. I think maybe they might adapt their technique, or something like that. But to make a film responsible for social ills, is such a quantum leap, that it defies any rationality.

SOME DIRECTORS ARE DISMISSED BY CRITICS AS EXPLOITATIVE, ONLY FOR THAT JUDGEMENT TO BE REVISED LATER ON.

The censor always has a problem with that. They hate it when somebody like Abel Ferrara comes along. They can consign him to the ‘sin bin’ with a film like _Driller Killer_, and then he comes up and makes a really great movie like _Bad Lieutenant_. And it makes them look stupid. They really hate that. Because it makes them look like bad critics, which is what they really are anyway. Their only raison d’être for censoring films is their aesthetics, is their criticism. So, if they’re proved to be bad film critics, then they shouldn’t be censors. If they can’t recognise a filmmaker’s talent, then why are they in the job? George Bernard Shaw said, ‘The only theatre censor should be the greatest playwright in the world.’ Well, they are not the greatest filmmakers in the world.

Always be on the lookout for films that cause trouble to the censor, because it usually means they’ve got something to say. It’s a pretty good guide. Because of course that’s what the censor does. An old GLC censor said that: ‘This film asks too many questions and doesn’t provide enough answers.’ That’s what the censor’s on the lookout for.

HAVE YOU SEEN DAVID CRONENBERG’S FILM _CRASH_?

Yeah. I didn’t like it much as a film, I was a bit bored by it. I found it a bit cold. It just didn’t work for me. I don’t think it’s one of his best, I much prefer _Dead Ringers._

IT SEEMED TO ME THAT THE TABLOID OUTRAGE ABOUT _CRASH_ HAD LITTLE TO DO WITH THE ACTUAL FILM.

I think usually these sort of censorship cases, it’s a mixture of things. I mean the brush fire can’t start until it’s been lit by ‘The Daily Mail’ or some other newspaper like that. So it took (‘Evening Standard’ film critic) Alexander Walker writing about the movie from Cannes last year to ignite this particular fire. I don’t think any of this fuss had much to do with the film. These sort of furores very rarely do. They’re everything to do with circumstance, to do with the newspaper’s agenda. To do with newspapers’ echo chambers in the House of Commons. And that’s what stokes it up.

WHY DO YOU THINK THAT _CRASH_ WAS SINGLED OUT BY THE PRESS, WHEN OTHER, MORE VIOLENT, AND MORE SEXUALLY EXPLICIT FILMS ARE IGNORED?

I think it’s partly the title. Partly that you can sum it up in an easy sentence, of saying that the film is about people who are turned on by car crashes, so that made it easy for tabloid readers to understand. I don’t think it had quite the right ingredients for a really good ‘cause celebre’. The trouble was, he [Alexander Walker] called the film pornographic, and he must have seen porn films, and it bears no relation to porn films. _Crash_ is about people *not* achieving a satisfactory sex life, whereas porn films are the opposite, they’re all about reaching orgasm. Porn films supposedly celebrate sexuality, _Crash_ does the opposite.

WHAT DO YOU THINK OF WESTMINSTER COUNCIL’S DECISION TO BAN _CRASH_ FROM THEIR DISTRICT, THUS PREVENTING THE FILM BEING SHOWN IN THE WEST END?

I think it’s just a *farce* that they’ve banned it in Westminster. But there is a sort of silver lining, in as much as it makes it possible for independent cinemas to show the film. *Because* it’s been banned, people want to watch it. It makes their [independent cinemas] economic survival that little bit easier. But I mean this whole system of one council banning a film, another cutting it, another one showing it, is mad. They did this with _Last Tango,_ where I think about fifty councils banned it, so people set up bus services, that went from one council district to another. I mean, some councils in the past have even banned films when they didn’t even have a cinema in their district! So it’s these would-be censors, who crawl out of the woodwork, whenever they see an opportunity to exploit a controversial film.

DO YOU TIHNK PEOPLE WHO SEE _CRASH_ WILL BE AFFECTED BY IT?

No, I don’t think it’s going to effect anybody. I don’t even think Alex Walker or (‘The Daily Mail’ film critic) Christopher Tookey is naïve enough to think that someone’s going to watch _Crash_, and then get in a car, and go, ‘Ooh great, I’m going to go wham bam into that brick wall.’ I think people’s survival instinct will somehow overcome watching _Crash._ Crash is supposedly about achieving sex through car crashes, but most of us know that you don’t actually have an orgasm in a car crash! (laughter)

THE DAILY MAIL SEEMED TO BE USING TO _CRASH_ AS AN EXCUSE TO CALL FOR THE BBFC TO BE SCRAPPED AND REPLACED WITH A GOVERNMENT FILM CENSOR.

Well, in a way that would be quite good you see. Because then you would have this sort of farcical situation of Home Office Ministers having to explain why they were banning a film. That could be quite amusing.

WOULD A GOVERNMENT CENSOR GIVE REASONS FOR THEIR CUTS?

Well, they would in particular cases. If they were banning a film, they’d have to say why. And at least one would get an explanation. At the moment, we don’t even get an explanation of why films are cut, or banned for that matter. But at the same time, we already have a State film censorship system, so this would just be a turn of the screw. Ultimately, I think it’d be a terrible thing to do. The BBFC is ignorant enough as it is, but I mean, MPs *never* go to see films. For instance, ninety two MPs wanted to have _Natural Born Killers_ banned, but only two of those ninety two had actually seen it. So it would be ignorance being replaced by even more extreme ignorance.

DOES IT MATTER IF FILMS ARE CUT OR BANNED? AREN’T THERE MORE IMPORTANT THINGS TO WORRY ABOUT IN ENGLAND, LIKE B.S.E, PRIVATISATION OF NUCLEAR POWER, THINGS LIKE THAT?

I remember Stephen Frears saying to me, when I told him I was writing the book, ‘Well you know it’s an interesting subject, but it’s not something the film industry is gonna fall down on.’ I think that was probably true two or three years ago, but *now*, film censorship has become so politicised in Britain. It’s become such a quick solution to complicated problems , that it has become more important. It is worthwhile defending films. Because I think we’re moving into a situation where film’s being scapegoated, and if films can be easily scapegoated, then *other* things will be scapegoated, like the Internet. And that could become very serious. If one’s means of expression are open to censorship, then anything challenging one has to say *will* be censored.

So it *is* dangerous. It is the thin end of the wedge at the moment, which is rapidly becoming thicker. We have a history in this country of dampening down uncomfortable voices. And I think it’s had a very bad effect. And I think if we allow it to go on, a lot of options, and a lot of possibilities will be closed down. So I think to some extent [you’re] right. It is symbolic, yes there are more important issues: clothing one’s children is more important than films being banned. But if freedom of expression goes on being curtailed at the present [rate] it is being closed down in this country, then in the long term, it *could* affect more important questions. It could affect more important decisions in one’s life.

Review of Michael Winterbottom's The Killer Inside Me (2010)

2010-06-08T10:25:00.000-07:00

Michael Winterbottom's violent, silly film of Jim Thompson's pulp novel The Killer Inside Me plays as if Michael Haneke chose to remake John Waters' Serial Mom (1994).

It tells the 1957-set story of a young small town Texas Deputy, Lou Ford (Casey Affleck) and how, beneath his seemingly polite and calm demeanour, he is a killer. Supposedly out to avenge the murder of his brother by a local bigwig, he achieves this is goal in a convoluted, dangerously bungled, way which makes it seem 'inevitable' he must kill the women close to him.

Two long scenes show the abuse of the female characters by Ford. The first evokes the beating-by-fire-extinguisher in Gaspar Noe's Irrerversible (2002), in that both show the disintegration of a human face at length, and in graphic detail. The scene does not go as far as Noe, though, being constained somewhat by an American R rating.The scene is actually closer to Hitchock's Psycho (1960) shower murder - the scene feels harrowing to watch, but in place of graphic violence, most of the violence is implied in the edit, and through use of sound.

This is not to say The Killer Inside Me is anything like as radical as Psycho, although the plot has several similarities to that film. Nor is it as radical as Irrerversible. Both of those films subverted audience expectations - Hitchcock by despatching Janet Leigh's character halfway through, Noe by refusing to allow any sort of linear plot to develop, requiring viewers to make sense of it afterwards. By contrast, Winterbottom's film feels very predictable, plot-wise. It may be trying to subvert its genre by being unrealistic, and somewhat silly, but this plays out as if thew film is excessive through incompetence, or by error, (neither of which it is) as much as design. As such it reminds us of Luc Besson's The Fifth Element, another European take on the American genre film which is easy to read as simply getting its genre rules 'wrong'.

By presenting the prostitute Joyce (Jessica Alba) as enjoying her abuse, and using the most voyeuristic soft-porn camera angles to show off her beaten backside, Winterbottom is clearly signalling that the film is showing events through Ford's insane perception. But the film seems more like it is showing the fantasy, not of Ford, or even of Thompson, but of the pulpy trashy, hardboiled crime genre he wrote for. These plot events must happen, the violence must be sexualised, however lacking in logic the result, because certain expliotative elements must be included.

Winterbottom has defended the violence by saying that violence in films should be painful to watch, as it is in real life. However, nothing in the rest of the film has any bearing to reality at all, something the over the top, illogical ending makes blatantly clear.

There remains the suspicion that (as with 9 Songs, 2004) Winterbottom is trying to bring the European 'New Extremity' typified by the films of Gaspar Noe, Catherine Breilliat, and others, to the Anglophone mainstream, and again, failing by simply restaging some controversial 'moments' from those films, but containing them within the structure and ideology of classical Hollywood filmmaking. This results in films which are simply a bit more graphic than the mainstream is used to, rather than a comprehensive challenge to that mainstream

The Fire Dept

2010-05-13T13:43:00.000-07:00

Just heard that ace 1980's/90's beat combo The Fire Dept, most of whom were previously part of that great Cambridge band The Killdares, are to have a retrospective of their top garage rockin tunes reissued by Damaged Goods!

If you like Nuggets style original punk, you'll not go far wrong with this slab of scuzzy raunch n roll!

Do yerself a favour kids, and click the link on the left!

Review of Wong Kar Wai's Ashes of Time Redux

2010-05-13T13:33:00.000-07:00

Good old Wong Kar Wai. Back in the day, Chungking Express (1994) and Fallen Angels (1995) were as cool as cinema could get. Young Asian hip dressing indie actors and actresses, smeary neon cinematography from Christopher Doyle, and a sci-fi-is-now approach that looked how William Gibson's books read. (and how adaptations of his books should have looked, but didn't.)

After Chungking, and before Fallen Angels, Wong Kar Wai made Ashes of Time (1994), a kind of martial arts film, which was messed about by Asian distributors, due to it not being the kind of mainstream kung fu sock em up they had hoped for.

Now the director has produced this redux version, and it's clear that this is not really a martial arts film at all. Rather, it takes a familiar genre character - the lone asssassin, and it decides that actually he's not cool and aloof after all. He's just a miserable, lonely misanthrope.

The plot is slender, and generically familiar. The assassin Ou Yang Feng (Leslie Cheung) lives alone, and is visited by a succession of people wanting him to mete out vengance on theri behalf. A Blind Swordsman (Tony Leung) appears and he reminds us of the famous blind movie swordsman Zatochi. The Swordsman's death is also familar, as he goes out like the son of the Emperor in Shogun Assassin (Robert Huston, 1980), with his throat slit, and marvelling at finally hearing the perfect slash that makes a sound like the wind through the bamboo, but only when he himself is the victim of such a slash.

The fight scenes are not shot in anything like the accepted manner. There's lots of blurry close ups, and weird angles that powerfully evoke what the characters are feeling in the moment (panic, fear, calm acceptance of impending doom), but never allow the viewer a clear master shot from which to enjoy the action as spectacle. It goes without saying that this runs counter to every other martial arts film ever made.

Between the fights, most of the film is made up of conversations between the assassin and his visitors. These are shot in a very artistic way, too, by Christopher Doyle. A giant hanging basket may take the centre of the screen, with characters pushed to either side, looking into it as they talk, rather than each other. That kind of thing.

The final part of the film sees the assassin reflect on what now seems like a wasted life. This transcends genre, and while the assassin character remains a genre staple, we begin to see his lonely, violent existence as a metaphor for someone unable to connect with his fellow humans. When he says he feared rejection, and so rejected first, but now knows his life has been wasted as a result, I found it more moving than I expected.

Ashes of Time is available on a UK single layer Blu Ray from Artifical Eye. The picture is good, but never great.

Sight and Sound Film Book Poll

2010-05-06T07:57:00.000-07:00

I see that Sight and Sound this month has asked various academics, writers and journos to list their fave films books, and the results written up in the style of the S&S best films list. Kim Newman included Philip Strick's Science Fiction Movies, published by Octopus Books, a good fanboy's choice.

Anyway, it made think about my own favourite film books.
In case you're eager to know, here they are:

1. Hard Core by Linda Williams.
What a revelation this book was when it came out. Firstly, for focussing on hard porn in an academic way it showed that just about anything could be treated in a rigourous manner. This probably upset those who subscribe to the high-low culture divide, but Williams's disocvery of the ideology of porn had definite links to that of the cinematic mainstream, and made obvious the inherent bias of the masculine camera. The book underlined just how censorious Britian under the Conservaties was. Where Williams spoke of censorship as a thing of the distant past, it was very much of the present in the UK.

2. Men, Women and Chainsaws by Carol J Clover
As with Hard Core, this book took a neglected/reviled genre, and gave it serious scrutiny. Again, films which were banned in the UK under the Conservaties were the basis of a groundbreaking study. The attention paid off, Clover's theory of the 'Final Girl' (the female survivor of many slasher films, who often is virginal, and has a masculine name) has been hugely influential. Even Quentin Tarantino has finally caught up with it, basing his character Butterfly in Death Proof on Clover's definitions.

Barbara Creed's equally fine The Monstrous-Feminine is a considered and interesting response to Clover's ideas. The US horror film genre seems to have suffered from Clover's pulling back the curtain, however, sinking into a torpor of remakes and torture porn from which it shows little sign of ever emerging.

3. Halliwell's Film Guide 1st - 6th Editions.
Lesley Halliwell used to manage a cinema in Cambridge, called the Kinema, on Mill Road. He also programmed seasons of films on the BBC, and it was probably thanks to him that I got to see War of the Worlds, the Day the Earth Stood Still and Forbidden Planet at an early age, during the BBC's SF films season.
In the days before the Internet, films guides like this were crucial for gaining knowledge of obscure and old films. This was the biggest, the most exhaustive. On receiving it one Xmas, I was initally disapointed that Halliwell didn't rate my faves much : one star a piece for Bladerunner and Suspiria. But reading further, I began to appreciate the author's baises, and see how consistent he was. I began to realsie that this was crucial in a critic - a rock solid worldview, which provides a lens for evaluating any film. The reader might not agree, but can understand where the writer is coming from.

Halliwell opened my eyes to stacks of older films I would never otherwise have seen. He was firstly a fan of the Golden Age, and as I began to watch his highest rated films, the world of classic horror, Hitchcock, and screwball comedy opened up to me.

The 7th Edition came out shortly after Halliwell's death. Bladerunner was now elevated to four stars, but the same caustic comment about it remained. The mark was closer to my own feeling about the film, but I regretted the lack of the consistency

4. Fantastic Cinema by Peter Nicholls.
I'd like to say Nightmare Movies by Kim Newman, and I have learned a great deal from Newman's writing over the years. But Fantastic Cinema was the most important genre book for me. Suppoedly just a bi format coffee table book from the times before VCRs, it turned out to be one of the last of its kind, and also far better than it had to be. With sections on important directors, including Cronenberg and Speilberg, it made me think in terms of the auteur theory for the first time. The section on video nasties, although pitched for comedy, was the first time I'd seen such films mentioned in print - they were definitely below the radar before that. The historical chapters also intrigued - especially the emphasis on 1968 as a year of change, politically, but also cinematically. This was a book that was name dropped a lot - it proved the person you were talking to knew their stuff if they loved it as much as you did.

5. 5001 Nights at the Movies by Pauline Kael.
Yes, another big film guide. This one is the flip side to Halliwell, lauding all those great, violent, edgy films of the American New Wave. She covered less films, but took more space on each. You got the feeling she'd selected the crucial ones, and viewing them bore her judgment out. She was obsessed with Citizen Kane, but it was her reviews of Nashville, Last Tango in Paris, the Wild Bunch and Bonnie and Clyde which held my attention most. Kael's language matched the films in its hipness, wildness, joi de vivre. As with Halliwell's this clued me in to whole areas of cinema. She superceded Halliwell, took me to the next step, from classical to new.

Review of Jon Favreau's Iron Man (2008)

2010-05-05T02:12:00.000-07:00

I must admit, Iron Man was never a favourite childhood superhero comic of mine. He was definitely second division, when compared to Spiderman or Batman. He was far better than Green Lantern and Ghost Rider, yes, but nowhere near Silver Surfer or Doctor Strange, much less the FF, Hulk or X men.

But given that most of those comic heroes have been turned into celluloid, it's no surprise that the movie division of Marvel comics has got around to making Iron Man into a movie.

Thing is, it's not much like the comic I vaugely recall reading. It's much more like RoboCop (with shots echoing the earlier film to an extent where it seems likely Fevreau watched Verhoeven's film more than once), but with the satire removed, and the climax from Robocop 2 tacked on at the end, plus some dodgy right wing pro-War on Terror stuff chucked in for good measure. It's also fearsomely boring during its second half, so generic that you can almost hear the gears of the Hollywood scriptwriting machine grinding dully as it goes about its uninspired work.

The story starts off with famous playboy weapons maufacturer Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jnr) visting Afghanistan to show off a new super-destructive rocket called the Jericho. (*As in Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho perhaps?) We see said rocket in action, and it seems to be a kind of super-cluster bomb, shedding fragments everywhere as it comes towards its point of impact. It blows up a mountain, destroying it.

Really, only Robert Downey Jnr, with his endlessly likeable bad boy persona could make this hero arms dealer character work. Even so, it seems a tad err...morally suspect? But not for long, becuase Stark is kidnapped a terrorist group, and made to assume the newsreel stance of kneeling with hooded jihadis behind him.

Reasonably probable. But this is where Iron Man leaves any kind of reality behind. Becuase Stark's captors insist he rebuild the Jericho weapon in his cave prison, out of a ancient computer, and a few bits and bobs of metal. The terrorist leader waxes lyrical about how essential technology is, and gives the example of the bow and arrow as a piece of tech which allowed Genkhis Khan to rule large parts of the world.

But, of course, tech is not really helping the Americans and British in Afghanistan. As we know, the Taliban are using very low tech roadside bombs, coupled with their knowledge of the local area. In fact, just a few minutes before this speech, the terrorist leader tells Stark that no one will ever find him, not up in the mountain caves where they have gone. Although obviously having a mega-cluster bomb with a Biblical moniker is also desirable.

Old Stark betrays his captors anyway - he makes a Ted Hughes-tastic Iron man outfit and clunks and blasts his way to victory. The flame thrower attachment seemed a little sadistic to me, but then c'est la guerre? Back in the States, Stark pledges to stop profiting from weapons, and instead works on a refined, souped up, gold and candy apple red, hot rod version of his Iron Man cossie.

Around one hour in, we finally get an exicting bit of flying in said costume. The sequence lasts about five minutes, and is great. The film promptly plunges back to earth, and into tedium. There's an attempt to be funny with the superhero stuff, but it didn't work for me. Is it really likely Stark would park gleamingly expensive sports cars in his test lab? And then be upset when they get accidentally trashed?

We discover that the terrorists are not Islamists, they are rather mercenaries (like Blackwater?), working for an evil American. Who is building his own Iron Man costume, ready for the climax. Becuase, let's face it, once a superhero has arrived, a supervillain is needed, otherwise it's not really very fair, is it?

The new Iron Man goes back to Afghanistan, where he stops a massacre of civilians by the mercenaries. Again, we see that superior technology is presented as being inherently superior. And again, it's hard not to think of the real situation, or the notorious Wikileaks footage of US warplanes accidentally killing civilians mistaken for Taliban. Iron Man also meets the American air force, and they try to shoot him down, but we see that their technology and their reasons for wanting to do so are sound - Stark refuses to identify himself. It's just a misunderstanding. It's also the only other great action scene here.

The rest of the film is eaxcatly what is expected. A big fight, between two big hard metal men. It's like Robocop 2, and just as rubbish. It ends with Black Sabbath's metal anthem Iron Man.

Iron Man the movie is aimed at teenage boys who know something is happening in Afghanistan, but who are not much bothered what, and its intersection with reality seems to have made it quite dour. I expected a bit of silly superhero fun, but this is much more War on Terror moping.

Charlie Kaufman's Synedoche, New York film review

2010-04-12T08:39:00.000-07:00

Charlie Kaufman is that rare screenwriter who has managed to become an auteur. He has achieved this by writing scripts which are extremely idiosyncratic, structurally adventurous, and also seemingly revealing of his personal feelings. Each of his films revolves around a disappointed male character, and the voice of this character tends to stay the same between the films. it is easy to assume that this persona is actually Kaufman.

Woody Allen and Philip K Dick would seem to be Kaufman's biggest influences - both also feature the same kind of nerdy, luckless losers. Kaufman's third film, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004), fused Allen and Dick with great beauty, creating a kind of Total Recall (Paul Verhoeven, 1990) meets Annie Hall, (Woody Allen, 1977)- a love story which plays out solely through the lens of its lead male character's perception, and therefore presents an unreliable narration of the story's central love affair, and has a female character who lives only through the subjective memory of the male mind. The film doesn't draw too much attention to this, though, and mostly lets the viewer believe they are watching 'reality', with the problems of its narrator's trustworthiness left to be picked up, or ignored.

With Synedoche, New York, (2009) Kaufman directs as well as writes for the first time, and, as with David Lynch's Inland Empire, (2006) there is the feeling that an auteur has been left alone to go as far as he wants - Lynch because he shot his film on low cost digital video, Kaufman because he has convinced the studio execs to give him a lot of money. Kaufman has chosen to create something which feels very European, obviously akin to 8 1/2,(Federico Fellini, 1963) but which also has thematic links to Haneke, Breilliat, Von Trier and Gaspar Noe. As such, whilst the film is definitely not the most enjoyable American film of recent times, it's clearly the best one.

The story centres on Caden Cotard, a theatre director who puts on a successful revival of Arthur Miller's 'Death of a Salesman.' Caden lives with his artist wife Adele and their young daughter, Olive. The first scenes mix realistic detail with what seem likely to be visual externalisations of Caden's fears. We learn he is scared of disease and death, and the amount of portents of doom that occur in his erveyday world stretch realistic credibility.

This is again a story told through the perspective of an unreliable narrator. Synedoche takes the idea much further than Eternal Sunshine..., by removing the Phil Dickian science fiction rationale that appeared in the earlier film. Instead, the viewer is left to sort out what is 'real', which is to say what objectively happened, and what exists only in Caden's imagination.

Although lacking SF trappings, the film still resembles Dick's work, most clearly his early novel 'Eye in the Sky', published in 1956, in which a group of people caught in the beam of a faulty particle accelerator, are forced to live inside a succession of subjective worlds, as they travel through the mindscapes of one another. Kaufman's films limits us to one mindscape - his usual nerdy loser - and begins without any explanation, but shares Dick's interest in how strange, distorted and paranoid a subjective world looks to outsiders. That it plunges the viewer into this subjective world, whilst still using conventional 'objective' filmic grammar means the film may annoy and confuse viewers. This lack of respect for film conventions makes the film disjointed, but also exciting and original. It also allows the film to approach the interiority of a novel, but using visual means.

When Caden's wife goes to an exhibition of her art in Germany, she takes Olive with her. They don't return, and it becomes clear his wife has left him. Time passes in a fractured way, without the usual cinematic techniques to show that an ellipsis has occurred. Instead, nothing changes but the dates on Caden's daily newspapers change, apparently from one day to the next, from 2005 to 2008. This is clearly an attempt to visualise the ways in which the passage of time 'feels' to Caden.

A note arrives telling Caden not to read Olive's diary, left under her pillow. He does so, and the entries change over time, becoming more adult, taking on a German accent, and expressing sexual awakening. This is clearly impossible, and seems it must be Caden's imagining of how his daughter is probably changing, the ways in which she is growing away from him. It works extremely well, an artifice which illuminates emotion. It is affecting to realise that, for Caden, this imaginary tattooed presence is at least a presence, and therefore easier to bear than a reality where she is just no longer there at all.

Caden starts an affair with box office worker Hazel, and then with actress Claire. He receives a Genius Grant, and what he spends the money on takes the film into its final third, which is both a grand summation, and utterly indulgent, and occasionally boring and frustrating.

Renting a giant warehouse, Caden has a theatrical set of his life in New York created. Like the apartments in Hitchcock's Rear Window, (1954) this New York is both fake and hyper-real. Caden casts actors as himself and his lovers. To portray this, he then has to hire more actors, to play the actors playing himself and his lovers. Scenes of the hiring of these people takes quite a chunk of screen time. This idea also seems to be a message to Sony Pictures, who paid for this massive folly of a film, a kind of apology and explanation - this attempt to enfold life in art must necessarily be unwieldy, difficult and doomed to failure.

Finally, after doodling around with this idea in rapt fascination for awhile, the film pulls a final, genius conclusion, with Caden withdrawing from his role as director, and hiring a female actor to take over as him instead. He then takes over playing the role of Adele, moving into the stage set of her room. The director speaks to him via an earpiece, and gives him instructions. These turn him into a simulacra of a human, but also visually resemble the actions of a real human. Like a image from the Sims computer game, he no longer 'lives', but to an observer, he seems to.

Difficult, obtuse and overlong, with a difficult title, and a self indulgent hero, Syndedoche, New York is a difficult sell. It is also a great film, possibly one of the greats.

Niels Arden Opley's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo film review

2010-03-15T06:11:00.001-07:00

Although I have credited The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was being Niel Arden Opley's, it is, of course, best known as an adpatation of the bestselling book by Stieg Larsson.

The film is shot in a literal-feeling, realist way, and the actors are most unremarkable, everyday types. Despite this realistic mise en scene, the story is generic, owing much to the cycle of downbeat police proceedurals which began in the 1990's with Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme,1991) and Se7en (David Fincher,1995).

The story starts with leftist journalist Mikael Blomqvist (Michael Nyqvist) sentenced to prison, for libelling a powerful Murdoch-esque media baron. Of course, the writer has been set up. He does not have to begin his sentence immediately, and while out on bail, is appraoched by a rich, elderly man, who asks him to investigate the disapparance of his then 16 year old daughter, back in 1966. Blomqvist agrees, and moves to a desolate island in the country, where the family mansion is located. living in a small house in the grounds, Blomqvist starts to discover clues, but is baffled by a list of names and phone numbers in one of the girl's old diaries.

Meanwhile, in a parallel story, we follow punk girl hacker and investigator Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), who has been working for the elderly man, and following Blomqvist, and hacking his emails. A tough cookie, we see her deal violently with men who try to exploit her, and it is made clear that she has a history of being abused, which prompts her to revenge. Salander is convinced of Blomqvists' innocence, and intrigued by his new case, cannot resist sending him an email, communicating her deductions about the phone numbers. Both angry, and interested, Blomqvist gets Salander to join him in the investigation. They soon find that the killer is still on the island, and wishes first to scare, then to kill them...

Most interesting about the film to me is the relationship between Blomqvist and Salander, as it inverts the usual gender relations in crime genre films. Whereas the conventional gender film or TV series has the young girl blunder into trouble, and then having to be rescued by her male collegaue (a trope the X Files TV show played out again and again, with female Agent Scully falling into the clutches of various killers, and having to be rescued by the male Agent Mulder), here Blomqvist is the silly one unable to resist telling the wrong person about the damning evidence he has found, and Salander is the one who rushes to the rescue at the climax.

To avoid Blomqvist being too passive, the long first section sets him up as his own man, and also suggests that Salander's strength is the result of abuse, and as such a perversion of the person she would otherwise be. This complicates and over-rationalises what would otehrwise be a simple reversal of genre gender roles, and is not wholly convincing.

Once together, Blomqvist is allowed moments when he resists Salander - refusing to let her turn his music off in the car, for example, and challenging her over her hacking of his account. Nevertheless, the main impression is that Blomqvist would not be able to solve the case, or even survive, without Salander, while Salander needs Blomqvist's ability to engage with the wider normal world, enabling him to bring in the assignment, and more importantly on a personal level, his acceptance of Salander's hot and cold moods.

This role reversal may make the film resist easy Hollywood adapatation, not least becuase it is Blomqvist's liberal world view enables him to accept Salander, and take a more secondary role. It is easy to imagine a version of this story in which Salander is presented in a cartoonish way - as it is, Rapace's downbeat, sullen portrayal mainstains the reality of the character.

The ending of the film reveals a further influence from Silence of the Lambs, and hints that Salander occupies the Dr Lecter role in this story- violent, unpredictable, intelligent, while Blomqvist is the naive Agent Starling.

Although merely swapping gender roles does not truly challege genre conventions, the Swedish setting and political worldview of the film adds great interest to what could have been (and probably will be, in its US remake), a simple genre tale.

The Vampire Diaries episode one review

2010-02-08T07:26:00.000-08:00

Given my dislike of Twilight, it was perhaps a mistake to watch the new TV show The Vampire Diaries. Becuase it's more of the same. In some ways, slightly better than Twilight, but so similar that it seems like a copy, despite being (like Twilight) based on a novel aimed at teenage girls.

Given the preponderence of these novels, it seems that once Buffy had finished, every author in the US started cranking out vampire romances which took the sappiest parts of Anne Rice, and the most romantic moments of Buffy, and then (due to the Jungian collective unconcious, or the 1000 Monkeys theory, or more likely plain old lack of ideas) created stories which are remarkably similar to each other.

So, as with Twilight, The Vampire Diaries gives us a sexy young vampire boy who has just moved into a new town, and who then goes to High School. Sorry, but I really find this immediately unforgivable - you're immortal, yet still you want to go and sit in class and learn the same stuff over and over? Not to mention that school attendance is hard if you can't go out in daylight - so why not just break that pesky genre rule eh?

You can almost hear these writers whining 'ooh how can we get the boy and the girl to meet if he can't go out in day light?' Well, that's the thing about genre rules - they're there to force you to come up with something different. To just give up, and break the rules is sad.

The other key thing about a vampire is not to overuse him. Have the girl pining away at school, hoping to see him that night. Don't have him sat there with her all day long. It removes any kind of magic about him.

I suppose the attachment of Kevin Williamson's name to the Vampire Diaries made me want to watch, if I'm honest. Dawson's Creek was great guilty pleasure TV, and I couldn't help enjoy the film refs, even as I got honestly caught up in the very hokey Dawson-Joey-Pacey triangle. I even liked Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer!

Needless to say, none of the character appeal of Dawson's was evident in the first episode of Vampire Diaries. Maybe it will come, in time. Or not. Becuase the lead girl was utterly terrible. The dialogue clunking beyond belief - the girl's (whose character name I simply cannot be bothered to look up, but I may as well call her BELLA and have done with it) backstory blurted out again and again.

Best of all was the use of 'mist'. Its appearance supposedly signals scary things about to happen. Instead it just looks like someone has turned a dry ice machine on, the 'mist' spuming out in a pipe like shape, before floating around a bit. It's Ed Wood quality. It's insulting.

And that's the nub of it - I feel insulted on behalf of all those teen girls that this is aimed at. Not that they care, they're perfectly happy with this garbage.

Here's some of the latest 'tweets' from Twitter:
Vampire Diaries tonight <3 My life is complete.

i love vampire diaries!

and...

watching Vampire Diaries. Anybody else thinks this guy who plays stefan is a rip-off edward?

Film Review - Nicolas Winding Refn's Bronson

2010-01-18T14:44:00.000-08:00

Bronson is based on the true story of Britan's most dangerous prisoner - Michael Peterson (Tom Hardy), who takes the 'fighting name' of Charles Bronson. The story is told in a stylised fashion - we see Bronson standing on a theatre stage, giving a one man show devoted to himself. The rich theatre crowd adore him. He often looks straight out at us, too, and we are invited to side with him.

Hardy's portryal of Bronson is often convincing, but somehow less so during these theatrical moments. There's something about his eyes, a softness, perhaps, or maybe an intelligence, which undermines his credibility as a hard man, despite his muscled appearance (which he aquired in a De Niro-like burst of training, prior to, and during, filming). Perhaps the use of the stage also reminds us too clearly that we are watching an actor.

But although the stylised presentation occasionally undermines the central performer, it also makes the film far more interesting than if it had been a straight biopic. The story is extraordinary and compelling, although often similar to A Clockwork Orange, but as the bulk of the real Bronson's life has been spent doing nothing - surviving, on a day to day basis, with most of his time inside spent in solitary, there is little scope for expanding the story out to film length.

Despite the lopsided nature of the story, with the long years of nothing outweighing the short moments of freedom, the film in some ways aims for a British version of Noe's Seul Contre Tous - Bronson doesn't stand for the thwarted ambitions of the working classes, as much as for a certain punk worldview which pushes beyond rebellion into pure nihilism. The prison years are the years every compliant person wastes obeying, the scenes where Bronson takes on the police, the only moments where he is truly alive.

The more resistance the police, or guards, give to Bronson, the harder and more violently he resists. Eventually he incites the prison guards by taking hostages, simply in order to have another violent confrontation. Bronson's character has one facet - he will never take orders, refuses to surrender his individuality, and would clearly rather be destroyed than ever accept any kind of authority.

His rages are presented not just sympathetically, but heroically. They are scored with classical music, distancing them from reality, and making them symbolic. Showing a single naked man fighting against against endless armies of faceless uniformed officers, ensures Bronson his heroism. Instead of using cunning, Bronson just charges bull-like at the systems of control. They contain him, but at great cost to themselves, both in terms of physical injuries sustained, and also becuase Bronson's behaviour forces the system to drop its facade of fairness and caring.

Of course, he is only able to take revenge on people like himself - memebers of the working class. When he does face someone of a higher station in life - such as the prison governor, Bronson comes off looking silly, as the governor uses his guards to protect him, and can then use his intelligence to run rings around Bronson.

Overall, the film feels far slighter than its wants to be, like a second division punk song, rather than a classic rebel anthem. But the scenes of Bronson's raging attacks on the forces of the State linger in the mind as potent, and deliberately enjoyable, symbols of rebellion at British conformity.

Film review - Sam Raimi's Drag Me to Hell

2010-01-18T08:43:00.000-08:00

Sam Raimi's Drag Me to Hell marks the Spiderman director's welcome return to the horror genre. The Evil Dead kicked off his career at just 22 years of age, and the story of how the fledgling writer/director marshalled his scant resources to create a funny, scary, and all around classic rollercoaster of a horror movie has been told many times. Raimi's later, self-created superhero franchise, Darkman,and his rushing camera and signature comic-book-like angles made him a good choice for the Spiderman trilogy, the first two of which were amongst the best ever comic adaptations ever.

But good as his mainstream films might be, the news that the now 50 year old Raimi was downscaling from Hollywood mega projects to a low budget horror flick was great news.

Firstly, becuase although the British censor never liked them, the Evil Dead films actually acheived something very special - being both fun to watch, and incredibly scary. If it's true that the American horror genre favours jolly, light hearted horror over true terror, then Raimi is the archetypal American horror director.

Secondly, American horror seems to have forgotten how to be entertaining. Or, indeed, how to be scary. Or good. Instead, we get bad remakes, or else torture porn, that sad little subgenre which promises to be extreme and excessive, but never truly can be, becuase it needs to have an R rating. The resulting films look childish and silly compared with the truly extreme movies made in France, where they know how to do grim and serious. And in place of that great US humour (or humor), torture porn is infused with the grim spirit of Guantanamo Bay and the Bush administration.

Although Raimi is known as a supporter of the Republican party, Drag Me To Hell seems like an indictment of the W.Bush years, the perfect Obama movie. It's also, and more importantly, everything a Sam Raimi horror film should be, which is to say, everything an American horror film should be. It's really scary, but also very funny. Silly, but with a grimly serious horror undertow. It'll offend no one (at least under the Tories get back in), but it never softpedals on the horror.

The story harks back to the Tales from the Crypt comic, in which some selfish fool wrongs a helpless old git or poor person, and directly or indirectly causes their demise, after which the culprit pays the price when said victim comes back from the dead to wreak revenge, rotting zombie-style.

In Drag Me to Hell, after a prologue in which a Mexican kid who stole from a gypsy gets, yes, Dragged To Hell, we meet Christine Brown (Alison Lohman) a pretty young bank assistant, who craves the vacant position of assistant manager. Asking the oily, incompetent Manager how she can beat her male rival for the job, she's advised to be tough with defaulting customers. After all, the bank makes lots of cash when they get to repossess someone's house. Cue the arrival of an old gypsy woman, asking for an extension on her loan. Of course, Christine says no. The old woman begs, but Christine holds firm. After an emabrrassing scene with the security guards, the old woman is hauled off, but not before cursing Christine for her hard-heartedness.

Things begin to go wrong for the young bank worker after that, as she hallucinates the old woman at every turn, before the woman actually turns up in the back seat of Christine's car. A ludicrously comic book fight ensues, which later leads to the old woman's death. And the curse only ramps up from there, and a visit to a medium only confirms the wrost - Christine will be Dragged To Hell, too.

Some critics have complained that the depiction of the gypsys in the film is racist. The thing is, the depiction of gypsys in the film in no way resembles real people. They are a symbolic, comic book presence, and what they signify here is the poor, the ignored, the old, the dying. Those who have falen through the cracks of America. They are portrayed as revolting, creepy, yucky not becuase Raimi is racist, but becuase he wants us to recognise our own fear of joining the underclass, ageing, sickening.

Raimi has it both ways with the old woman - first showing us her rotted ancient teeth, only to then reveal that she has false teeth. Quite why anyone would have such imperfect plastic teeth made is open to question. The point is more that your teeth will rot, your teeth will fall out.

Against this, Christine stands for consumerism. She hopes that more money, a better job, buying nice clothes, looking young and pretty and nice - that those things will save her. Again and again, the film plunges her down into rot and decay and muck, befouling her with embarrassing public displays of her own humanity. It's a bizarre mash-up of American Pie and Final Destination, but far better than either.

And Drag Me to Hell doesn't invite you to enjoy someone else's bizarre death as pure spectacle. Neither does it simply want you to snigger at the inherent grunginess of sex. Nope. Instead, it just wants to tell you that you will age and die. But wants you to have fun with that - to be able to laugh at it, to seize the day becuase of it, to grasp what is really important, rather than getting caught up in day selfishness.

At the end, it seems Christine has won, that she will get it all - the job, the boy, money, status. Of course, Raimi springs a trap on her, and we leave the film laughing at the silliness of it all, but the joke's on us. It's far more satisfying than Hostel 2's denouement, wth the heroine literally buying her way out of trouble. Where Hostel 2 thought that being rich could save you from anything, in Drag me to Hell, it saves you from nothing at all.

This is what American horror should be about - a riotous rollercoaster, but also a medieval woodcut warning, the skeleton with his hand aloft, holding the hour glass. Drag Me to Hell is not quite as unhinged and daring as the Evil Dead films, the camerawork and lighting are more classically Hollywood. Lohman is also quite a bland presence, perhaps necessarily, as she plays the feed character for the gypsy woman, the medium, and the other assorted weirdoes in the film. That's perhaps a fault, but overall, this is great.

TRAILER

Rage Against the Machine Christmas Number one!

2009-12-21T07:25:00.000-08:00

Great news that Rage Against the Machine's Killing in the Name Of has become the Christmas number one, pushing out the latest assine X Factor song.

As Richard Dyer says in his book Stars (p135), adverstising and the mass media promotes the individudal, but reduces the individual to buying choices. It reduces art to something to buy, rather than an expression of a feeling. This is the case with the X Factor, and even though Rage Against the Machine are also on Sony Music, theirs is a genre in which genuine emotion is tolerated. As such, they can be used to highlight the lack of emotion in other parts of Sony's music empire.

Of course, of course, the Facebook campaign to prevent X Factor's dominance of the number one spot by supplanting it with a shouty swearfest instead is a dumb thing to do. But a necessary thing. And a brilliant thing, too. Becuase real popular culture comes from the bottom up, while music industry produced mass culture is dictated from above. This is what the X Factor/Rage battle is really about. Popular culture, via Facebook, supports the Rage song being pushed up, while X Factor music comes from the top down, pushed onto us, whether we like it or not. And increasingly, we don't.

Of course, The X Factor (and other similar shows) deviously pretend to be popular culture, something which is for the people, and chosen by the people, through letting viewers spend money to vote for their favourite singer. However, the choice is extremely limited, all choices pre-vetted by the judges, to ensure they conform to the overall tone of the show. Music like that made by groups like Rage Against the Machine is never part of the available choices.

Simon Cowell has said that, if he is removed from the equation, what is happening is the equivalent of a mob ganging up on a teenage boy. This is a false comparison, as the teenage boy depends not only on Simon Cowell, but also on Cowel''s company SyCo, and on ITV Television and Sony BMG Music, and the many people employed by them both in front of and behind the camera, including makeup, editing, cameramen, the director, and many others, who groom him for stardom, and construct what the public perceive to be him.

Like the kid, or yob, or yob-kid who swore at Five Star on Saturday Superstore, the campaign against X Factor is an attempt to talk back, to complain about, the paucity of alternative voices in the mass culture. Whether that can be used to create a chart where more idiosyncratic voices can break through, remains to be seen. But this is surely a positive first step.

Review of Val Lewton's I Walked With A Zombie (1943)

2009-12-21T07:23:00.000-08:00

This atmospheric 1943 supernatural chiller, directed by Jacques Tourneur, is avilable in the Val Lewton Horror Collection DVD Box Set. Lewton is a producer who worked for David O Selznick, the epitome of the producer-auteur, and who Lewton emulated, but in the horror genre, and at much lower budgets.

Nevertheless, Lewton's films are highly influential, due, in part to the contraints he found himself under. A lack of money, together with the censorship of the Hays Code, meant that Lewton's film imply rather than show. His most famous films, Cat People, Curse of the Cat People, and the present film, share an interest in the supernatural, and have key characters who are female. These female characters are not always good, are sometimes reactive rather than active, and it may be that their sexuality makes them monstrous, but even so, they are not the one dimensional victims of slasher films.

As such, his films have current progeny in the J Horror genre, and in recent supernatural and haunted house films such as The Orphanage and Paranormal Activity.
I Walk With A Zombie has a wistful, romantic feel to it, and although the island is represented through sets, the use of lighting is exemplary, and there is a real feeling of a sultry night heat in the air. Judging from the look of the place, and the song sung at one point, st sabastian is along the lines of Trinidad - a British colony, with calypso music, and clean, gernally happy servants.

The protagonist is Betsy (Frances Dee), a recently arrived Canadian nurse who finds herself in the pay of a strange family - a widowed mother, and her two adult sons. Betsy is to look after Jessica (Christine Gordon), the wife of the eldest son, who is possibly suffering from a mental illness. She wanders around blank-eyed, much like a sleepwalker, or, maybe even like... a ZOMBIE!! Whether this 'twist' was always as obvious to the viewer as it is today, I cannot say, but there remains something very creepy about the way Gordon plays her, with her head at a weird angle, and her eyes looking down.

Not relaising the truth, Betsy decides to take Jessica to a local Voodoo ceremony, in the hope that this can snap her out of her mental problems. The journey through fields to the ceremony contains some very memorable images, as they rush through a landscape both stagey and fake, but somehow real than a location shoot. There is something about a set that is shot, lit and designed well which can convey an emotional truth, a feeling of how it would feel to be there, if not the literal look of. I Waled With a Zombie excels in this area.

The voodoo theme links zombies with the local black population, something which George Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968) removed from zombie lore. It's treated here as well as it ever could be, with an acknowledgement of the evil of slavery, and black charcters who are nuanced and interesting. Even so, it is hard to avoid depicting voodoo as a primitive religion of a susperstiious people.

However, I Walked With A Zombie remains an interesting film, which almost outstays its welcome at 70 minutes but not quite. The set piece of the tri to the ceremony, and ceremony itself, rank amongst the mos tmeorable in horror, but the surrounding material does not consustently hit such highs.

Film review - Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers' Where the Wild Things Are (2009)

2009-12-16T04:54:00.000-08:00

Is Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers' adaptation of Maurice Sendak's children's book Where the Wild Things Are the ultimate 'kidult' movie? That is, a movie not so much for kids, as for stunted adults, caught in perpetual adolsecence.

Although I fully expected it to be so, it's quite a surprise to find that for most of its running time, Where the Wild Things Are actively seeks to put itself at a kid's level. Literally, through having the camera placed low, forcing us to share a child's view, and emotionally, by making us engage with the lack of power and respect afforded children, and the power fantasies which rail against this.

It's become acceptable for children's movies to not just nod to adults, but to include movie references and plot events which are either way over a child's head, or which even actively mock them. I'm thinking of a film like Monsters Vs Aliens, with its references to 3D movies of the past, which movie fan adults love picking up on, but which leave kids bewildered. Or even Pixar's Up, with its brilliant, but much-too-subtle opening montage, which left kids at the showing I attended utterly confused.

Where the Wild Things Are often achieves what a film like Wizard of Oz does, and which seemed to have fallen out of fashion - to talk to both children and adults, by using a metaphor that both can understand to relate to real life, even if they take it at differing levels.

However, there is a kidult angle here, and rather than being rooted in smart aleck movie refs, its in the obvious Oedipal complex of Max, something normal for a young protagonist, but which the film backs up, and singularly fails to solve, ultimately putting it on the side of perpetual childishness over maturity. Granted, this means the film is working at a much deeper level than your typical Dreamworks animation, but prevents it from achieving the kind of honesty about life, death and growing up which a film like Bambi can deliver.

Sendak's book uses the titular Wild Things in a way which is simple, yet universal - they are a metaphor for rage, they are the untrammelled ID. By trying for something more nuanced, the film risks losing its mythic connection by being too particular to a place and time. For the most part, this is avoided, and the American setting is not intrusive, due to this being a downbeat, realist America, one with grey skies and ordinary people (the kind of imagery previously seen in Jonze's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.) It feels like a real place, rather than the fantasy 'America' seen all too often.

The opening scenes of the film are set in a real world which sets up the adventure to follow. Max is no longer simply a bad boy causing mischief. We are invited to understand his motivations. He has a teenage sister who ignores him. His mother is constantly working. Max is obviously highly imaginative, but lacks a playmate willing to share his world. His carefully constructed fantasies are populated only by toys. A teacher's science lesson comment that the sun will one day die triggers a realization of the reality of death, and a sadness which can be easily understood by child and adult viewer alike. Happiness only comes when Max manages to provoke his sister's friends into a snowball fight, and we see delight to see the pure joy on his face. Joy all too soon destroyed by the uncaring selfishness of the teens, who escalate the battle beyond Max's level.

A perfect presentation of how to depict emotions so that both grown ups and kids will get it, the only wrong note in this opening section, for me, is Max's absent father. Present solely through a dedication on the bottom of a toy globe which reads 'this world is yours, Max', we guess that the father has abandoned the parental home after a divorce. A substitute father, a boyfriend, appears, and it is his presence which sends Max over the edge, into the 'I'll eat you up!' frenzy from the book. This makes things too particular, less applicable to all. Divorce is common, yes, but some relationships do survive. Presenting this kind of separation as universal and inevitable from a young age is going too far into self regard, if not self pity, in my view.

But then Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are was originally published in 1963. It is a book made for the children of the Baby Boomers, that generation who themselves refused to grow up, kept on putting themselves first, even if that meant walking out on their kids. The film version is the creation of that generation of kids, the 39 year old Eggers, the 40 year old Jonze, and it is in the treatment of the father that this is revealed, linking Where the Wild Things Are to such films as Fight Club in its bitterness towards male authority.

Apart from this, it seems almost a shame when Max sets sail for the Wild Things land, so well realised is his everyday world, and the characters in it. However, his arrival amongst the wild things live boosts the film into a world of metaphor, which works well, even if just what the wild things are symbols of changes through the course of the film. It is clear immediately that the creatures are not just the raging things of the book. They are imaginary playmates, they are the teenagers of the first part rendered cuddly and infantile.

They are also adults, as becomes obvious in the relationship between two of them - namely Carol and KW. (The Wild Things now have names, and are individuated) The cockrel creature, Alex, most resembles Max, as he is ignored, and a figure of fun. Carol is the father, KW, the mother, and Judith, Max's teen sister. It is surely not a coincidence that the father-creature has a female name, and the lead female a gender-neutral one. Carol is initally a ideal playmate and follower, but eventually, he shows his masculine rage, and a fight with KW feels like a restaging of a pre-divorce bust up. There is a disturbing scene of violence here, which, although non-realistic, is still upsetting. The crisis is never really resolved, instead Max runs to the mother, hiding from the raging male monster by returning into mummy's womb. He does decide to emerge, but the conclusion does not find him growing beyond his Oedipal stage, and suggests he will become a kidult too, in time.

This all comes through in act three. Before this, the film is almost faultless, the best moments coming when Max gets the Wild Things to construct a fort. This seems to say that positive creation can overcome the demons, and is very satisfying. So too, is the revelation that this construction will necessarily be flawed. Such insights are deep, beautiful stuff for a kid's film.

The mise-en-scene and camerawork are also incredibly gorgeous. When Max travels to the fantasy world of the wild things, we do not get a Technicolor dreamworld. Instead, Jonze keeps the realist, dingy autumn colours of the real world section. Remarkably, the creatures fit in, being realised extremely well, and tiny details such as leaves in their fur really sell them as real. The technique of combining people in suits with CGI faces is flawless, and the film always keeps to Jonze's style, never falling into a generic CGI look. The fort itself is a bizarre Wicker Man type creation both fantastical and believable.

The use of low angles means we always feel the weight and size of the Wild Things very keenly, making this very much a child's perspective of life, and share his happiness at the wild rumpus. The underlying threat from the creatures is also often near the surface, and is well realised.

Ultimately, this is the only film I have seen for awhile which often succeeds in pitching itself both for kids and adults, and patronises neither. It also offers a generally positive, sympathetic view of life, based on characters and their feelings. It's also very moving, and beautiful. It slips into that whole American-Indie-Pitchfork type thing here and there, but almost depite itself, the central story keeps it accessible. It's the best American film I've seen in a while, and I hope it signals a decision to make more worthwhile films. Altough, that will depend on how it does at the box office, no doubt.

Ji-Woon Kim's The Good, The Bad and The Weird (2008) Film review

2009-12-15T03:33:00.000-08:00

Trailer

Billed in the end credits as an 'oriental western', and obviously taking its English language title from Segio Leone's The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, Ji-Woon Kim's (A Tale of Two Sisters) The Good, the Bad and the Weird aims for a similar transnational mix, where the distinctively American genre of the Western is altered by being mixed with new elements. These elements can alter the storyline, or the actions of the characters.

In the Good the Bad and The Weird, the story differs from the traditional Hollywood western by being relatocated from America to 1930's Manchuria. The classical Western battle between good and bad Americans, who representlaw and lawlessness respectively, is here replaced by heroic Koreans who believe in independence, who fight Japanese invaders, and perhaps worse, those who collaborate with the Japanese regime. Thiss eeks to put the weight of Western movie myth in the service of Korean national interest. The first words sporken in the film come from a Korean yelling for independence, showing the importance of this theme to the film. That he is quickly knocked down by a Japanese also shows the heroic cost of (literally) standing up.

In addition to this story change, the film also seeks to bring the Western up to date through the use of computer imagery. This allows the use of what seem to be endless takes, and also to present images which are highly contrived, such as the opening scene where the camera moves from a soaring eagle, down to a steam train racing across the desert, before plunging into the steaming funnel, and into a carriage.

This level of contrivance gives the film a comic book style, while the use of a caerma which follows characters at ground level, before tilting up to take in wonders (such as the giant Buddha ststaure being hauled through a market), makes the film resemble a video game.

The story is simple - a Good character, the Bad, and a buffoonish 'Weird' one, all of whom seek a treasure map.

The bad is the most compelling presence. An evil greasy git, charismatically played by Byung-hun Lee, he dominates the film, along with the Weird, a character who would be the sidekick in a US western, but who is here the point of view character, and
played by Kang-ho Song (The Host), with genuine likeability and humour. The weak link is the Good, played by Woo-sung Jung as a somewhat blandly good looking hero, and obviously models himself on Clint Eastwood's Man With No Name character, but who completely lacks his sullen, dangerous charm. The Good's outright disdain for the Weird makes the buddy elements of the film easy to take, and the last act revelation that the Weird might well be a more interesting character than we had previously thought works very well.

The story is studded with set pieces, all of which are incredibly are very well done, apart from a certain CGI jerkiness, which occurs when one take is morphed into another, or when an angle suddenly changes. This is quite noticable, and is distracting and distancing. The set pieces take place in a variety of locations - on a train, for the opening attack, then in a rainy shanty town, in the desert. A chase by the Japanese army, involving our heroes, and some raiders is a highlight, eben amongst the thrilling visuals on display here.

The most expensive Korean film ever made, The Good, the Bad and the Weird is the film that Wild Wild West wanted to be - a mix of new and old, clasical and CGI modern, all held together with fun action.

Film review - Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon

2009-11-25T15:25:00.000-08:00

I can't say I'm a great fan of Austrian arthouse director Michael Haneke. I tend to love cinema for its images, while Haneke takes a much more theatrical approach - keeping the worst stuff offscreen, in the viewers imagination. This leaves me cold, as it simply makes me aware of the process of staging, the artificality of cinema. Maybe that's part of the point, but I suspect the true goal is to disturb, rather than to distance.

However, Haneke is clearly a major talent, and so I feel almost obligated to see his films, in order to challenge myself to appreciate him.

I wasn't much looking forward to the White Ribbon, especially as the poster had a picture of a crying child. This seemed to promise more offscreen abuse, of the kind seen (or more correctly NOT seen) in Funny Games.

Luckily, the White Ribbon is far superior to Funny Games. It's Haneke's best film, and it's easy to see why it won the Palme D'Or at Cannes.

Set in an Austrian village, prior to World War I (something only revealed towards the end), the film explores what lies under the beautiful look of the village. The film begins with the local Doctor falling off his horse, after someone has tied a tripwire between two trees, on his normal route home.

A peasant woman is killed in a machine accident, which her son blames on the local Baron. The Baron's cabbage field is destroyed, and his son is beaten up soon after. Violent incidents continue, including the abusive pastor, who humilates his naughty children by making them wear the eponymous white ribbon - a symbol of how they have disapointed him. Finally, the teacher discovers the truth, but the village doesn't want to know. So he leaves.

The 'secret' is obvious from the beginning, and is a theme repeated throughout. This is, in the words of Philip Larkin: 'they fuck you up your mum and dad.' Surprisingly for a Haneke film, this isn't literally so. But the parents do mess up their kids with their harsh, hypocritical morality. The key Larkin line would probably be: 'man hands on misery to man, it deepens like a coastal shelf.' Only the four year old pastor's son is immune to this, being too young to have been spoilt as yet. He holds out hope for the future, if only he can keep his innocence.

The attack on the cabbage field and the Baron's son seems at one point to suggest class struggle, and it is the monied characters of Baron, priest and Doctor who truly control the village. The teacher is part of a middle class between peasants and the wealthy. To see his fiancee, he has to beg a bicycle from the Baron. But class is less of an issue than morality, the insistenc eon doing things as they always have been done, whilst the twentieth century begins to be born around them, promising a freedom from village life, but greater, darker, deeper violence to come.

As a naive character, the teacher is spared the guilt of the other adults, and of their children. The teacher's romance with a young girl is both touching, and slightly creepy, but we cling to it, becuase he is the only 'good' adult character in the story.

The film also looks lovely. The black and white cinematography by Haneke regular Christian Berger is stunning. And the editing by Monica Willi is just right, too. Slow, but not overly so. The long shots give the viewer space to explore the mileu of the village. The long take of a class learning, whilst drawing our attention to the girl facing the wall at the back, is subtly, and beautifully done.

Overall, this film is far less didactic than I ever thought Haneke could bear to be. Whilst the general point of the film is clear quite early on, the telling allows the viewer to find his or her own conclusions, in the same way that the long shots and use of camera allow him or her to find their own point to focus on in the action.

As such, this is a great step forward from films such as Funny Games, where Haneke had characters talking to camera, to tell us off. He is beginning to trust his audience to read the film, rather than explaining. This can only be a good thing, adn the White Ribbon is a great film as result.

Doctor Who special - The Waters of Mars review

2009-11-18T02:38:00.001-08:00

The influence of 28 Days Later hangs all over the latest Doctor Who special like decaying zombie brains. Okay, Waters of Mars is set on...Mars, with Dr Who appearing on a colony which he knows will soon be destroyed in mysterious circumstances. But just how that happens involves crew members becoming 'infected' - albeit by an evil Martian water that's been buried deep in the rocks for a very long time.

While that idea has wandered in from Quatermass and the Pit, the detail that even one drop of nasty water will turn a nice person into a slavering zombie creature, and that drop might fall into their upturned eye - well, that's directly from 28 Days. So is the way the infected crew go all evil-eyed, and run after their prey. And how they turn their backs before going all twitchy as they change. Where they diverge is that these creatures can spew great quantities of water at their victims. To be honest, it looks a bit naff, like the spewing scene in Witches of Eastwick. Zombies pretty much always work though, and so the pursuit of the crew by running evil faced possessed infected whatevers does have a thrill or two, albeit of the PG level variety. It's good claustrophobic stuff though, certainly a cut above the recent Hollywood made zombie films. The jumps are effective, and probably more than a few kids dived for the safety of the sofa when previously nice characters suddenly turn to camera all monster-faced and evil.

Two things really save the story from being 28 Weeks Later for kids, in space. One is Lindsay Duncan's portrayal of the ill-fated commander. In scene after scene, she plays the pain and anguish for real, and makes us care, even when the usual no-mark victims get zombified, just becuase she does. The second thing that's good about that Waters of Mars is the Doctor Who element. Should Who try and save them, or must the crew die in order for mankind to take the next step to interstellar flight? The story tries to have it both ways. First it goes all elegaic as Who excuses himself and goes tromping off across Mars to the Tardis, while the luckless goons die by zombie smart water. Then it suddnely goes for Hollywood style action and low angle hero poses, as Who has a change of heart, and goes back for them.

This decision to save the crew is presented as evidence that Who has gone bonkers, become a megalomaniac, that he's bigger than time, now, baby! Kind of bizarre, in a way, that we are manoevured to actually want the poor saps to die. Very British in a Scott of the Antarctic way.

Of course, it's all a set up for David Tennant's Xmas day swansong in the role, before a very young looking man with a funny head takes over. He doesn't look promsing from the stills, but he may be good in action, I suppose.

I just want the BBC to sign their Who actors up for a bit longer. I know that's not terribly British, but it's the only way to stop all this changing of actors. Apparently Hugh Laurie wasn't happy when he realised he couldn't just walk away from his role as Gregory House after a season or two, and personally, I'm glad he couldn't. And I want the same kind of lock-in for Who actors, too. Even Mr Young Funny Head.

Roll on Xmas day though, a very nice tradition that in itself justifies my licence fee, although most years I'm too drunk to know whether it's me, or if the story really doesn't make any sense at all.

E4's Misfits - episode one review

2009-11-18T01:40:00.000-08:00

Misfits is a new TV series with the uninspiring premise of a group of young offenders, who suddenly gain super powers while doing community service. To be honest, I had to really force myself to even start to watch this, it sounded so terrible.

But it wasn't. It was great. At least mostly great. Almost all great. The first scene is something seen too rarely in British TV - a big, bold statement of ambition. Writer Howard Overman is clearly after giving the audience much more than they expected. The dialogue is far superior to the workday British TV on-the-nose functional stuff we've come to expect. It's snappy, it's cool, it's funny, it's inspired. It's how teens think they speak, wish they speak. It's Joss Whedon with swearing, and how it works.

The story unfolds at super-speed, with the quick introduction of six young offenders. Of these, only two, chav girl Kelly, and yob Gary seem at all real. The rest are as unlikely offenders as can be imagined. But that's good, because they're more fun to watch, and it signals a desire to break away from the stultifying grip of realism.
They are motormouth Nathan, disgraced athlete Curtis, 'sexy' Alisha and Emo boy Simon.

The group are painting benches when a freak storm unleashes giant hailstones on them, sending them scattering. This scene uses CGI in a great way, copping its lurching, blurry camera style from 28 Days Later, and creating something which doesn't look cheap and rubbishy. It looks cinema quality. The group are then hit by lightning, and after that, they slowly discover they now have super powers, while being menaced by their probation officer, who the lightning has turned into your usual white-eyed 28 Days Later infected-zombie-thing. Only Gary misses out on the storm altogether, but he falls prey to Mr. zombie officer.

The plot isn't like Heroes, or like any superhero story. It's horror, with people stuck in a single location being menaced from something outside. And it works. Really well. In fact, it'd work without the characters having super powers at all.

The powers are tailored to fit the characters in a way that's quite dumb, though. The shy Simon becomes invisible when ignored. It's doesn't work too well, at least not in this episode, becuase 'being ignored' is too random a rule. Kelly can hear the thoughts of others, but all they are thinking is 'she's a chav' over and over. (Except Nathan, who's wondering whether he fancies her). Alisha's power is the worst a 'sexy' girl, she becomes sexually irresistible to men in a way that suggests her role will be the victim who is constantly being saved from near-rape scenarios. Pretty sick, and a bit crap, to be honest. It's a bit of a let's-please-the-Nuts-readers move, and so is Kelly being able to hear the thoughts of her dog. It almost destroys the whole show, just to have one joke.

There are a few other problems, too. The biggest, for me, was the character of Nathan. He's very very funny, yes. But the script just loves the guy too much. He's like Bugs Bunny or something - a constantly wise-cracking cartoon who will always get the last laugh, always run rings round everyone else. Despite mercilessly insulting Curtis and Simon, he never even gets punched. Simon, okay, but Curtis? Not even a slap? Nathan needs some kind of depth, or he's just an indulgence.

But Nathan is still very amusing, and Misfits is for the most part, a great show, and not just a great British show. A quick comparison with the kind-of similar Being Human shows the differences up all too clearly. Where Being Human is quite-all right, quite-good, quite-funny, Misfits is brilliant, witty, rude and grab-you-by-the-throat hilarious. It's something to treasure.

Pil-Sung Yim's Hansel and Gretel - Film review

2009-11-01T15:02:00.000-08:00

This Korean film, directed by Pil-Sung Yim, is not a straight adapation of the fairy tale, and its use of the title is somewhat annoying. It is, however, an often magical fantasy-horror, about a family who live in deep in a labyrinthine forest. Their beautifully designed house is not gingerbread, but looks gorgeous, with a 1950's style, that combines bright cheerful colours with weird pictures on the walls of rabbit faced humans, or simply rabbits faces glaring down. It always looks set-bound, but this doesn't matter, it is a triumph of imaginative mise-en-scene, designed by Ryu Seong-Hee, who worked similar magic on OldBoy.

Sadly, the story that surrounds this house doesn't match up to the quality of the visuals, at least not for most of the running time. The third act's revelations make the film deeper and more emotional, and bring its characters to life beautifully. It's just a shame that it comes so late, after a very predictable first two-thirds.

Lee Eun-Soo (Cheon Jeong-Myeong)crashes his car while en route to his pregnant wife. He is rescued by a pretty young girl, Kim Young-Hee (Sim Eun-Kyung) who guides him back to her house. Inside, evetything seems perfect, but stilted. The girl's parents, her younger sister Jung-Soon (Jin Ji-Hee) and older brother Man-Bok (Eun Won-Jae)all seem awkward, their smiles stilted.

Lee Eun-Soo stays overnight, but the next day, an attempt to escape finds him lost in the forest. He returns to the house, where everything still seems as perfectly unreal like a child's picture book, but he later overhears a violent parental argument.

The next day, the parents have gone, leaving a note asking the visitor to look after the kids. He does so, and invites them to call him Uncle. This turns out to be a bad mistake, and the house begins to seem like a trap. The arrival of two more guests, one of whom is psychotic, mean things soon take a turn for the violent...

The opening section of Hansel and Gretel feels familiar. Partly, this is becuase the story is aiming for a timeless, fairy tale tone. But mostly, it's becuase the story has been done before, and the manner it's told here feels as old fashioned as the house itself. The film takes its time getting to its plot turns, and these invariably play out as expected, as comforting as an old Twilight Zone episode.

The final act pulls it all together, with a typical Asian horror tale twist that everything is caused by some extreme nastiness in the past. This pretty much saves the film, as it makes the weird family much more believable, rather than just creations who exist to be cute and spooky and weird.

A quite strange Christmas element also appears, with Santa recast as both fake and real, able to grant wishes, but not necessarily good, despite how he presents himself. This Christmas theme, specifically of children's hopes being crushed by violence, is strong, but also very queasy.

Best of all is the near-climatic moment when the kids implore Lee Eun-Soo to stay. Even knowing the deaths which have occurred in the house, it's easy to want him to stay. It's such a lovely place, and the kids are so cute, that you might want to live there, too. This sweet/sickly mix is there earlier, but it only becomes really effective when you know what the stakes are.

Sadly, this comes too late to make the film a classic, as the main plot remains just too obvious. Ahh but the house, and the kids, they're truly great, places and people you'd want to visit again and again, despite any warnings to the contrary.

Vampires according to Nick Cave

2009-11-01T14:30:00.000-08:00

Call me old fashioned, but I think Stephanie Meyer has just got the vampire all wrong. They're not about abstinence. They're about gorging!

This is what it's all about, Stef -

RELEASE THE BATS!

baby is a cool machine
she moves to the pulse of her generator
says damn that sex supreme.
she says, she says damn that horror bat
sex horror sex bat sex sex horror sex vampire
sex bat horror vampire sex
cool machine
horror bat. bite!
cool machine. bite!
sex vampire. bite!

And look, Nick can be just as doe eyed as your boy Edward!

Here's the song live if you dare, Ms Meyer...

Twilight - the lie behind the character of Edward

2009-10-31T08:17:00.000-07:00

The film of Stephanie Meyer's Twilight has had huge appeal for teenage girls. It's not hard to see why - the vampire character of Edward is sexy without being sexual. Not evil, not good-bad even, he's a superhero.

Edward is pure wish fulfillment, the bad boy on a leash, who dotes, but is still completely in control. As such, Twilight illuminates no truth about the human condition, and instead stops its fans understanding the kind of adult relationships such a fantasy should prepare them for.

He brings to mind Ursula K Le Guin's 'Plausibility in Fantasy', in which she says of fantasy stories:

I believe that as soon as wishful thinking or a conscious political or didactic purpose intrude...the story loses plausibility. Wishful thinking gives us the feeble kind of fantasy where everything is easy...An ideological purpose produces a sermon, or satire (which is not fantasy, and has very different standards of plausibility, since it is a mirror held up to actual life).

Although Bella does have problems during the story, the essential, most difficult ones are not addressed. She does not have conflict with her father over him, or with Edward's 'family', nor with her school.

Edward is doubly implausible, both wish fulfillment and embodiment of a didactic purpose - the creation of a Mormon writer seeking to encourage teenage sexual abstinence. The lie behind the character is that teenage bad boys, or older men, will restrain themselves sexually while in the throes of passion. If the passion is that all-consuming, the boy will not suddenly shout 'STOP!' and rush back across the room. And if he does, he's most likely gay.

But then Edward is a mixture of feminine and masculine. James Dean hair and moody eyes, mixed with heavy pancake makeup and eyeliner. He glitter camply in sunshine. He is an idea of the masculine for yougn girls, and thus half feminine, lest he be too alien. This is fine, but to have such a character be a vampire flies against the whole point of the bad boy metaphor it contains.

The second lie the character pushes is that the girl must never take the lead, or she will inflame the guy too much for him to bear. But he can kiss and touch her whenever he likes. This is a backward, religious view, and most ikely comes from Meyer's much ballyhooed Mormon beliefs. As such, Twilight begins to look like relgious propaganda.

Although he often tells the bland everygirl love-interest Bella that being a vampire is terrible, we see no evidence of what is so bad about it. All the nastiness has been removed - Edward can go out in sunlight. He doesn't sleep in a coffin, he stays awake 24 hours a day. He doesn't drink blood, he dines on animals.

So he's just like us, then, although it would have been fun if the dinner party scene had shown Edward and his foster siblings sinking their teeth into still-living rats while Bella watched. But, of course, that wouldn't happen, becuase Edward is not really a bad boy at all. He's a wimp.

He is never forced to act in any way which might make him look bad. When Bella is menaced by drunken louts, he simply gives them a smouldering look and growls a little. This is suffiecent, denying us any kind of battle, but also excusing Edward. If they had laughed at him, or just shoved him aside, the entire film would have collapsed. Either becuase he would be revealed as ineffectual, or becuase his resulting violence would have made him too intense, too adult a character. So the story must forever walk a very thin line in terms of plot action.

Edward sometimes seems to be on the point of revealing darker, only for the film to flip things back sunny side up. So, when he goes into a beam of woodland sunshine, there is a half expectation his face might reveal a glimmer of the monster within. It doesn't. He just sparkles like he's been doused with glitter. a girl's picture of her ideal boy/girlfriend.

All of Edward's bad traits are externalised into James, a vampire much more like those usually seen in horror films. But his attack on Bella is excessively violent, and ends with a stylised Matrix style bit of wire-fu, which seems completely out of place. Instead of this attack, it would have much better to have made Edward somewhat more threatening, and to have dispensed with James altogether.

It's a nasty combination, and I have the sneaking suspicion that Meyer crafted her book as a religious, repressive contradiction of the liberated, liberating Buffy.

But, of course, despite this, Edward is still hawt.

Gaspar Noe - Enter the Void Q and A at the London Film Festival

2009-10-31T06:22:00.000-07:00

The Vue Cinema Leicester Square, London. The 1.15 showing of Enter the Void as part of the London film festival. Gaspar Noe walks around in front of the cinema, being quite open and friendly. Inside, there are many of the expected men on their own, but there are more young men in groups. But, surprisingly, there are a lot of solo women there, too. Noe walks up and down the aisles, talks to a group of young French girls, tells one guy moving towards a second row seat, 'don't sit there, you don't want to sit too close'.

Eventually, the director takes the stage. He's small, bald, with a goatee beard and a Mexican bandit -style drooping moustache. He's also unshaven and stubbly. He tells us that the film is long, but getting the funding took longer. He also says he is doing a Q and A at the NFT later.

At the NFT, I have booked a seat in row B, which I find out is actually the front row. The talk begins. The moderator and Noe go through his films in order. It seems like most of the people there haven't seen Carne, because there's quite a reaction when the mouth-stabbing bit is shown. Irreversible's head meets fire extinguisher scene is shown, but cut short. 'Ahh it was just getting good' says Noe.

He says that he wanted to make Enter the Void after Seul Contre Tous, but there was no money. There was money for a rape/revenge film, and so he made that. The floating camera in Irreversible was just a test run for Enter. It seems like he's positioning Irrerversible as a less personal, work-for-hire movie.

Asked about his family history, he says his dad was an artist in Argentina, so was his uncle. Noe is positive about the State help for filmmakers offered in France, saying they had all been supportive. Later, a young man at the back asks for advice, as an aspiring director of 'darker' subject matter. Noe's clearly well worn joke - 'don't listen to any advice' -, brought a laugh. But 'move to France' might have been a better answer.

Noe keeps saying that documentaries are the real dangerous films - the makers really put themselves out there. Then finally, he says that he wants his next film to be a documentary, but doesn't say on what subject. This sounds pretty disappointing, as Enter the Void is such a masterpiece, and almost demands a follow up to go deeper into this territory.

But perhaps the documentary will turn out to be an extreme Mondo movie? Or, is Noe using 'documentary' in the same way that the makers of Last House on the Left do on the DVD commentary for that film? Which is to say, he's going to make a porno flick?

Noe says he made Enter the Void in English because he wanted people to be able to focus on the images without reading subtitles. The film will be dubbed around Europe, but if it was in French, it would be subtitled in English speaking countries. He didn't want that, because he noticed that the countries where Irreversible was dubbed were the countries were they got most offended by it - they got closest to the images.

The Q and A brings out some strange questions. A young man with a big curly quiff, and a soft, babyish face starts saying something about Eraserhead (which Noe had said was his favourite Lynch) but mangles his words. Noe cuts in with 'you like Eraserhead because you have his hair! Look! Eraserhead!' which is true, but the eruption of laughter makes the poor sap blush red. Noe carries on, talking about his Destricted short, whose name escapes him. 'WE FUCK ALONE' yells Eraserhead boy, who still has the mic.

A girl starts off with 'this isn't a question', which makes it seem a feminist rant is coming (which would be quite good, possibly), but instead she's an actress and wants a part in his films. He doesn't really react to this. 'Can someone give him my card?' she asks, hoping one of the people with the microphones will help her out. One of them takes it, eventually, but doesn't give it to Noe. 'I've played a vampire!' the girl cries, getting desperate.

One girl does ask a great question - why does Noe want to hurt his audience? Why does he have such a long rape scene in Irreversible? Noe dodges it. He says that rape is a part of life; he wants to show all parts of life. The girl follows up, and asks again why it was so long, but no real answer comes. Especially as Noe earlier says that he prefers Bergman's arthouse film The Virgin Spring, to the much more explicit horror movie, Last House on the Left. (Although the moderator reminds him that Noe was happily handing round the Last House making of book, last time he was in England.)

Despite this stated preference for art over trash, Noe often quotes low budget, trash and genre films as an inspirations through the talk, including Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

After an hour and a half, the talk concludes, leaving the fans to push their way out into the cold London air, minds filled wit the weird and very wild images of Gaspar Noe…

Dollhouse season 1 episode 1 review

2009-10-27T10:07:00.001-07:00

Dollhouse is the new series from Joss Whedon, the screenwriter who was riding high at the end of seven seasons of Buffy The Vampire Slayer (a show which can surely count both Twilight and True Blood as progeny), but who has since struggled, with his sci-fi show Firefly getting cancelled after one season, and a spin-off film Serenity that didn't really substitute for several lost years of episodes, and mainly brought a budding story to a juddering halt.

After that, Whedon has been reduced to making his own intenet content, and writing a Buffy comic book. Whilst good, these projects didn't put him back where he truly belongs - writing great fantasy TV shows.

Fox TV made Buffy, and also Firely, and they have now green-lit a second season of Dollhouse, but aparently it's unlikely the show will continue after that. Which would be a great shame, if only for me and Whedon, becuase even though I have only seen one episode of Dollhouse, I love it.

The first season has been on dvd for some time in the UK, but its appearnce on the Geezer's channel of choice, ITV4, gave me a chance to easily see it. They showed the pilot episode last week.

But the pilot is not really the pilot. Another episode once had that honour, but in the tradition of the original Star Trek series, that was pulled, and replaced with another, easier to understand version.

This already rings alarm bells, doesn't it? I suspect Whedon really needs to dumb down when he starts a new show. The first season of Buffy is a classic example - it's clear, not really very clever, but it's fun. That's all you need. Get clever in season 2.

Anyhow, the Dollhouse pilot that gets shown, though, the one I saw, well, that's great, but it's one unholy mish-mash. After a short talk scene, the show roars intothe kind of scene most dumb Channel 5 shows would kill for - a girl, a guy, a motorbike, frenetic racing action, hint of sex, snappy dialogue, WOW! Then our man pulls the rug out - the girl is a spy, and the mission over, she goes back to the Dollhouse, a top secret lab come base, where she has her memory wiped.

So the pleasure of that opening is taken from us, just as it ends, the point being that such shows are silly, unrealistic, their characters all just 'dolls'. To love this, you're going to have to both love silly sci-fi and action shows, but also think about them in a deeper way. How many people are there who want to do that? Well, me, obviously, but spods like me are taken as read. What about the mainstream? Or even the mainstream geek? I doubt they want their fantasy exposed as such, and ruined. Come on, even Charlie Brooker just DIDN'T GET THIS at all!

The rest of the episode oscillates in an alarming way between dumb fun action and scenes of quite exciting ambition. The two clash quite badly. So a clever, cinematic scene that intercuts between a combative boardroom meeting, and a boxing match (with verbal punches landed equated to real ones) is soon followed by a very silly genreic one where our Doll, who we now know is called Echo, (Eliza Dushku), gets to sit in a chair and have a new mind inserted in her head. This is quite like Joe 90 meets Nikita. When she comes out of the chair, she now wears glasses, and is all schoolmarmish and prim.

This is laughable of course, quite fun, you might think. But Whedon keeps on chipping away at our pleasure from beneath - when she goes in the chair, she feels pain as her mind is changed. And the hostage negiotiation expert she has become was raped, leading to problems when she chances a meeting with her abuser during a tricky part of the deal.

A Cleaner like character appears towards the end, having been glimpsed breifly earlier, having her new memories added. She simply comes in and kills everyone, but Echo is not pleased with her, as she had just negotiated a peaceful end. So again, even the fun of gratituouus violence comes with a little price - you can never just sit there and go 'oh cool! maaan!!'

Topher, the funny, nerdy guy who is the mastermind of the brain wiping tech, is also given a sinister undertow - is he good, or more like Dr Menegele? There's some Philip K Dick stuff in there too! About what it means to be human, if you have your brain changed, are you still you? or someone else?

At the end of the espiode, the girls go into beds in the floor, arrnaged in slots like a star. It's like a toy box, perhaps.

All of which limits the audience by massive amounts. If you like thoughtful stuff about what makes us human, you might not like something that sounds like sexploitation. If you like simple action, fun, you won't like your simple pleasure being undermined.

Whedon should really have made the Dollhouse masters totally good, should have cut the sex stuff out (let the geeks write their own sex stories online, let them think they're being naughty). And then in season 2, pulled the rug. Becuase although this s potientially the most interesting show on TV BY MILES - it's niche is pretty tiny.