Nobody Politic: A Review of ‘Body of Lies’

Like the son I never really had an opinion one way or the other about: the script by William Monahan for Body of Lies depicts yet another post-Oedipal, woman-free zone of masculine friendships and apathy.

Shortly before departing the house for what turned out to be a private viewing of Body of Lies (evidently even Peckhamplex’s “bargain Tuesdays” have failed to beat the credit crunch, or indeed the lacklustre reviews), I saw the opening segment of the December 1st Daily Show: in it, Jon Stewart and John Oliver discussed the recent terrorist attacks in India, and concluded that the perpetrators were “motherfucking motherfuckers”. This alternative news show, normally quite willing to dig deeper and more acutely than major US news networks, responded emotionally and crudely to the tragedy. Ridley Scott, director of this new but by no means fresh geopolitical thriller, fails to engage either emotionally or intellectually with the subject, and concludes much the same as these pseudo-journalists, only without the slight hint of grace required to illicit laughs in light of a massacre.

It is difficult to in the film down, it spins away in so many lacklustre directions. Leonardo DiCaprio plays a CIA operative in Iraq who is frequently mis-handled by Russell Crowe’s overweight strategist back in Langley. Between them they manage to balls up seemingly every operation they come into contact with, preferably utilising missile-laden helicopters. It turns out that, while this sort of thing is permissible in the war zone around Baghdad, it doesn’t fly so well in Amman, where DiCaprio’s Ferris initiates a hesitant yet doomed friendship with the self styled king of Jordanian intel. As the script later spells out, trust is the overriding factor in cross-cultural co-operation involving Arab nations and organisations, and Uncle Sam seems inherently unable to show all his cards.

With the casual detail and atmospherics that come as standard with a Scott production (from either brother, for that matter), it is at first a pleasure to watch an Iraq depicted as a real place, rather than the dramatic borderland of DePalma’s Redacted, or the bomb-stricken dysfunctional state viewed nightly on BBC news. However, the more destinations the film visits, the more they each feel the same, as though every Middle Eastern country had the same roads, architecture, bakeries, and slums. For all the absurdity of James Bond’s latest sojourn around the globe, at least every place he visited felt alive with its own customs, weather, people, and even introductory font. The people moving in front of this background don’t liven it up much either: protagonist Ferris orchestrates his existence as if he is writing the screenplay of the film himself, while Crowe’s Analyst Ed Hoffman serves little purpose than to provide a counter-image of America: the packaged sushi-eating bad father to DiCaprio’s do-gooding cultural nomad (although, if he loves the Middle East so much and has worked there so long, why does he make such rookie mistakes as offering a new inamoratas his hand to shake while being watched by so many purist locals?).

Amongst the anonymous score by Marc Streitenfeld and unremarkable Pietro Scalia editing, one of the few pleasures to be had is Mark Strong’s performance as Jordanian intelligence chief Hani. Walking a fine line between several cliché characterisations, all of them a million miles away from each other, he lends dramatic weight and intellectual curiosity (if not believability) to all scenes in which the character features. William Monahan’s script fails to provide the same taste and refinement for the other characters, while the narrative he crafts follows a similar sons-impressing-their-father’s trajectory as his work on Kingdom of Heaven and The Departed, but is tellingly free from the bracingly unique statements of personality and individual identity that made those so sly and rewarding.

The film is watchable enough, and were it a movie of the week imported to this country from HBO, it would be little more than an uninteresting diversion. However, with the calibre of much of the talent, and the indication from many of those involved from previous projects that they have an interest and sensitivity towards a more compelling and progressive depiction of geopolitics than one finds in the latest Bruckheimer production, Body of Lies is a sore and unwarranted disappointment.

Confirming Suspicions: A Review of 'Max Payne'

The Unbearable Boredom of Characterisation: Wahlberg plays the titular cop like he's sitting down playing the original videogame, only with less emoting.

It snows a lot in New York. Unless it’s raining (and then it’s raining a lot). Or if it’s in a caramel-tinted flashback where the dipping sun seems to be positioned just outside every window of happy, family-oriented detective (!) Max Payne’s house. But this glowing, treacle-like existence was a long-time ago, and now Mr Payne is a tortured soul, the city around him evoking his emotional and spiritual frostbite with oodles of pathetic fallacy. Emphasis on the pathetic.

Yes, we’re firmly in hollowed-out-dour-renegade-cop territory with Max Payne, based on the apparently very successful videogame of the same name. As with other such adaptations, the film succumbs to a workmanlike hyper-kineticism and a forgettable blue-black-chrome colour palette which, originally an invocation of ‘serious’ drama, has now been appropriated into the realm of cheap teenage thrills (recent exhibits being Shoot Em Up and Death Race). In fact, much the same slippage could be applied to star Mark Wahlberg, a man not serviced well by playing characters without a sense of humour and constrained to keep their lingo suitable for a 12-certificated crowd.

Investigating his family’s massacre, as well as the subsequent disembowelment of several other unremarkable characters, Wahlberg’s Max Payne uncovers a dangerous pharmaceutical designed for application within the military which turns you into either an invincible super-soldier or leads to the taker suffering visions of apocalyptic fire and brimstone (memories of Constantine’s similarly digital hell-on-Earth). These hallucinations, all swooping devils and searing sparks, occasionally pull a viewer from their stupor, but in making both the screeching judgement day and everyday New York equally stylised and embellished the film surrenders its most original conceit to the deadening onslaught of plot-predictability and slow-motion shotgun blasts (the latter of which continue over the closing credits, magnified to fill the entire screen, the much smaller actor’s names indicating something of a hierarchy of priorities). One need only look to the upcoming Franklyn to see how the wildly strange can mix with a brittle everyday existence far more effectively.

Featuring some unfortunate acting from those from some perversely cast actors (true, we might not expect better from Chris ‘Ludacris’ Bridges, but I think you’d be hard-pressed to discover anyone desperate for the return of Chris O’Donnell to our screens, while at least Beau Bridges has the excuse of following in his brother’s recent Iron Man footprints), Max Payne seems like a labour of apathy for all those involved, a tired and unnecessary film walking glumly down a well-worn path.

Losing Yourself: A Review of 'Franklyn'

'It's not you it's me' - Franklyn depicts four very different world views, all of them fantastical and embellished in their own way.

A little over an hour into Franklyn, things start to becomes clearer, if not entirely make sense; strands which seemed disparate unexpectedly link up, and earlier events which seemed disconnected turn out to have everything in the world to do with each other. It’s a rewarding moment, the pieces of the puzzle falling into place, but it also carries with it the whiff of screenwriter contrivance: in the world which has been presented to us, it seems a far more honest conclusion would involve those links remaining tantalisingly out of reach.

The four story-strands themselves are all interesting in their own right: a father looking for his lost son, a suicidal college student trying to communicate to herself, a yuppie having a jab of nostalgia after being ditched at the altar, and a masked vigilante in a strange metropolis of religious zeal and towering church spires called Meanwhile City.

The latter is certainly the most immediately arresting, gothic visual clutter lifted from Terry Gilliam’s Brazil mixing with what seems like a semi-parody of Wachowski vigilantism. Ryan Phillippe also manages to sketch deeper insight into his character than the bizarre facial accessory and ornate production design around him would seem to allow.

It is part of the success of Franklyn that this nether-world becomes less captivating in comparison with the other, seemingly more mundane stories the more they are all fleshed out. Eva Green’s frustratingly egocentric Emilia becomes increasingly sympathetic despite the odds being stacked against her, before Bernard Hill’s seemingly dead-end story evolves into a quiet tragedy all of its own. It’s a shame, then, that Mark Riley’s pining romantic never quite convinces, his part in the dramatic crux of the film edging too close to mawkish astrological pre-ordainment.

The director describes the film as a ‘modern fairytale for cynical times,’ and it certainly carries a hard edge to it. Dealing with abandoned, abused, and psychologically unhinged individuals, it is successful for the most part in pulling an audience into four different visions of the world, all of them seriously skewed and – in their own way – shockingly self-involved. Whilst the conclusion suggests that such egocentrism can be all too obliquely solved by external agents of unknown origin, Franklyn nonetheless deals with some compelling themes and, if not transcends then certainly side-steps being overly derivative.

Faithless Hearts: A Review of 'Appaloosa'

Shooting the breeze: Appaloosa plays by its own rules, but, if challenged to, probably couldn't tell you what those were.

What on earth is ‘Appaloosa’? This difficult question concerns the viewer long after the opening moments of the film, which establish Appaloosa to be the name of a small town of 1881 in dire need of some law and order to counter the bathetic violence of local tradesmen Mr Bragg, and it lingers into the closing credits, with their strange whiskey-advert aesthetics of soft American rock over tactile, almost haptic images of Western lore. This film both stars and is directed by the great actor Ed Harris, and it’s everything one would expect the man not to be: quirky, inconsistent, and overly concerned with matters of the heart.

Appaloosa gets the heroes it deserves in the shape of Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch, who immediately begin to shoot any man not conforming to the new laws they have themselves put into affect. However, their arrival is concurrent with that of Ali, a prettily formed widow who catches the eye of the steady-handed and inexpressive Cole. Whilst her presence could never be described as the linchpin of the drama (no matter what the final voiceover tries to convince us) it is from her that the film seems to harvest all its most striking ideas. Though it is Bragg’s arrest by Hitch and Cole and his inevitable escape which forms the backbone of the story, Ali’s responses to the ebbing and flowing of this masculine tide leave the strongest mark.

Ignorant to the blunt social portraiture of James Mangold’s 3.10 To Yuma recent remake, the single-minded methodology of Kevin Costner’s Open Range or even – and most unexpectedly – the moral mire of Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven, Appaloosa begins a strange beast and only becomes more odd as it goes on, edging dangerously close to absurdist parody at times. This ever-present sense of humour is by turns spiky and soft, simple and high-minded, and reminds one at times of Sergio Leone’s cock-eyed view of the American frontier. Almost upended by these laughs, the film is nonetheless able to sneakily express a deeply unsettling image of American humanity and a highly cogent undercutting of Western mythos: corruption is endemic, genderless, and such a part of human character that it lugs around no sombre somnambulism nor visual viciousness, instead being a rarely negotiable and ever-present obstacle to one’s own advancement.

Despite this agenda, the film is certainly not immune to providing some of the expected generic pleasures, albeit with twists: the one gunfight of any substance is thrillingly built-up to in a beautiful Mexican town, a saxophone stretching itself out on the soundtrack in anticipation: although, when the shooting happens, it lasts the blink of an eye (Hitch comments ‘that was fast,’ Cole laconically replies ‘yeah, they could shoot.’) White picket fences and references to European trade make an appearance, but the most affecting expression of the suppression and taming of the frontier occurs on a verbal level, as characters vie with each other to express themselves with as much circumlocution as possible and ensure that laws, no matter how hastily assembled, are written down before they are enacted (even though, as Cole says, legality is just a way of making him feel better about what he would likely do anyway).

What is Appaloosa, then? It is an experience which, for the most part, absolves Renée Zellweger of her cinematic crimes to date, as she delivers an earthy and air-headed yet somehow gracious performance as the widow Ali. It is also a perilously complex re-evaluation of Western cliché which remains, for much of its running time, regrettably uninvolving, despite its strengths. Finally, Appaloosa (the town and the film) is a literate place in which expediency, companionship and consistency are all examined, and seen to be as bafflingly absurd as each other.

Anarchy Loves Company: A Review of 'The Dark Knight'

The Hollywood Blockbuster equivalent of James Joyce in narrative style, The Dark Knight is a mad, free-association assemblage of moral quandaries and spectacular destruction.

In superhero fashion, dark is the new black. Mood and introspection are the accessories of the now. The backlash has already begun, and films like Hancock and Iron Man actually appear ‘niche’ because of their insistence of lightweight fun. It’s tempting to blame Tim Burton for all of this, his Batman and Batman Returns revelling in the demented grotesquery of the circus freaks who populated a wildly over-conceived and dangerously top-heavy Gotham City, itself an ornate architrave beneath which combatants duelled theatrically. Burton’s films fed upon the yuppie consumer malaise of Reaganomics, depicting a fear subverted by fetishism and all but eliminated by societal apathy; in Christopher Nolan’s fresh take on the franchise the fear, like the hallucinogen in Batman Begins, has infiltrated the bloodstream of the social body and is ready to explode at the flick of a switch.

That 2005 reboot told the story of a simple billion-heir punishing himself in various ways in order to understand why bad things happen to good benefactors: Bruce Wayne, his parents killed, learns lessons both martial and moral, then unleashes both on a cabal of assassins attempting to destroy the city. Batman Began, but seemed unsure how he was going to get to wherever it was that he was going: the plotting could only be considered anything other than a complete mess if one read the film as an externalised Jungian nightmare, which was a stretch at the best of times. The same confusion affects the sequel, only this time reveals itself to be an intention rather than a vice – in The Dark Knight, the word to spread is most certainly panic, but it spreads beyond the schemes of the villains and the reactions of the citizens, infecting the performances of the actors, the composition of shots, the musical score; the very texture of the film.

Gotham City, evolved from a composition of urban environs into a Chicago-inspired (and shot) dystopia of political aspiration and mob rule, is attempting to haul itself out of the mire of corruption and depression. Hot-shot D.A. Harvey Dent is giving the ordinary people hope against an empowered criminal underclass. Newly-minted Batman is thwarting drug deals and gaining co-operation from the police, particularly Major Crime Unit commander Jim Gordon. Bruce Wayne remains a pompous, over-sexed jerk. Before any of these elements are established, however, Christopher Nolan and his co-writer (and sibling) Jonathon Nolan have introduced the match-head which threatens to burn down this particular urban forest: standing half-hunchbacked on an intersection in the sunlight, clown mask in his hand, the Joker begins his reign of terror.

Cut loose from the time-shifting opening acts of Batman Begins and The Prestige Nolan initially seems to be floundering, his drifting narrative lacking the excuse of warped chronology. Events in this first act notably fail to cohere to one another, creating less a plot and more an incredibly high-sheen superhero soap opera. This fractured, shard-like style never lets up; where its predecessor eventually jettisoned the fragments for a linear roller-coaster (the frenziedly elliptical editing notwithstanding), The Dark Knight has no choice but to revel in its own chaos, sub-plot proliferation and jaunts to Hong Kong abound. The Joker arrives as an almost extra-textual element to the film, a demented punter setting fire to the auditorium, causing the performers on screen to desperately utilise celluloid means to extinguish a corporeal flame.

And what a flame it turns out to be. Not since Robert Duvall turned the volume up on Ride of Valkyries has so much destruction been wrought over such a wide area with such panache. Like the characters of Michael Crichton’s Sphere, the Joker seems to need only to conceive of some malevolence than the barrels of gasoline appear and the clock starts ticking. The gleeful nature with which Nolan instantaneously manifests such chaos puts shame to Batman’s silent appearances and vanishings. These moments begin to transcend their earlier incarnation as plot-holes, following as they do the logic of a nightmare. The Dark Knight is in awe of such power: even composers James Newton Howard and Hans Zimmer seem cowed by the Joker’s mere presence onscreen, their normally bombastically ominous score becoming nothing but a shrill whine as some fresh horror of his making unfolds.

The destruction mounts, and Nolan stages particular sequences with a verve and tension that at times beggar belief. A three-way cross-cut sequence leading to an assassination (but whose?) is edge of the seat stuff, despite two of the imperilled characters being mere bit-parts. The most cohesive fifteen-minute stretch – a street-chase involving an armoured convoy, a bazooka-wielding Joker, some monumental stunt-work, and very little music – makes the film worth the price of admission no matter what the cost, playing out with vintage Michael Mann precision rather than comic book bedlam.

This sequence aside, the film suffers the similar (albeit enviable) fate as its forbearer and remains a collection of grand and fantastic ideas under-executed and swiftly departed from. Floated relatively early is the plot-point that the Joker’s reign of terror will cease only when Batman reveals his true identity; a few scenes later this is effectively dropped, so that later still when the two come face-to-face the Joker fails to even suggest that the bat has an alter ego. While this is an intriguing way of suggesting the growing synergy between the two characters (i.e. as the Joker has no past or alter ego, neither does the man in black), it flits past so quickly, and is surrounded by so much flying debris, that it is in danger of being lost to the cacophony. So too is the concept of an ontological sonar-based CCTV system which Batman uses to hunt down his nemesis, the thrill and danger of one man being able to map in real-time the movements of an entire populace becoming just another piece of visual bombast in a sequence already full of it. The most resonant idea being heard above the din is that there is just no point to it all, and that if – as the final act suggests – the expected moral norm that an individual is more ethically sound than an endangered mob can be inverted, then anything is fair game and the very concept of heroism is meaningless.

The Joker’s schemes affect not only other characters within the film, but the very texture of the film itself.

With the vision of a city in chaos, hospitals exploding and bound hostages being used to deliver messages via the nightly news, The Dark Knight is at pains to be fiercely contemporary. It becomes impossible to speak of the plot in a vernacular that does not reflect Western political anxiety; even the characters within the drama give up halfway through and identify the Joker as the terrorist that he is. Beyond these aesthetic lifts the most original expression of the new normal within the film is the uncertainty which grows with every minute. Every character can be killed, every building can be destroyed, and every good man can become a ruthless murderer. Beyond this, the Joker’s insanity infects even the plotting: whatever framework of control the characters or the audience attempt to impose (It’s the story of a superhero in crisis! It’s a love triangle! It’s about an imperilled political operator! It’s the story of an alliance between the mob and a madman!) is literally blown to smithereens almost in the very moment at which it is conceived.

The cast, for the most part, are as unhinged by this randomness as the viewer. While the aforementioned lighter summer films of Hancock et al were designed around central star personalities, Christian Bale’s Bruce Wayne neglects to command such control, ceding it instantaneously to Heath Ledger’s fluttering psychotic. Much praise will be given to Ledger’s performance (much of it entirely deserved) and all I would attempt to add here is that – for all his violent audacity – the character is beautifully anchored in some miniscule way by a bittersweet sense of something lost (sanity? history?) which could never be regained. Bale himself deserves praise for making his Bruce Wayne as casually dislikeable as possible, and his dark Knight as monotonous as possible – just as Wayne himself would play the Bat. Other actors seem pleasingly frazzled by the chaos around them, Gary Oldman being a particular stand-out, elevating his Jim Gordon from the one-note idealism of the first film into a living, breathing, middle-aged criminal investigator seemingly way out his depth in this particular sea of madness. The casting of the bit-parts, meanwhile, goes beyond the mere stunt and into an inexplicably euphemistic realm – witness Eric Roberts playing, effectively, Eric Roberts, and the in-joke casting of former ‘Batmanuel’ Nestor Carbonell as the new Mayor of Gotham.

At two-and-a-half hours the film is certainly long, and with its extended third act and constant state of frenzy, it is easy to feel wearied. However, the brilliance of the craftsmanship (the brooding score, Lee Smith’s flash-point editing, Wally Pfister’s granite-like cinematography) makes the elongated running time welcome. While others have termed it the greatest superhero film of all time, I hesitate to apply that label, for the principal reason that I do not feel it is a superhero or comic book film: the pleasures on display are for the most part divorced from the sorts of thrills that are contained within that generic label. The Dark Knight is far more notable for its social theory, emotional tone, and (most of all) the originality of the narrative-style than for its duels or its scenes of caped crusaders flying through the air. As such, it represents a director pushing the boundaries of his craft in the most literal way possible, and demands viewing on the biggest screen you can find.

Down From The Mountain: A Review of 'Seraphim Falls'

Coming to us courtesy of a director whose experience has been limited so far to television cop shows of varying repute, Seraphim Falls has far more to offer an audience that simply a name that needs to be spoken twice to anyone who asks it. Firstly, it gives Pierce Brosnan another chance to bring his brand of business-like charisma to the screen, something which is always welcome, and delivers some fantastic photography in addition to a surprisingly engaging story.

‘Never turn your back on the past’ is the tagline for the film, which is presumably an attempt at irony on the part of writer-director David Von Ancken, as the film-making seems resolutely against giving any additional information other than the presently-occurring facts: Brosnan, name unknown, is being pursued through the wintry climbs of some mountains in the American south-west in the years following the civil war by a band of calmly calculating gruffians, led by Liam Neeson, name unknown. The one man flees from the rest, getting shot, injured, submersed in ice cold water; all the while the film staves off an explanatory flashback in the same way that Brosnan’s character keeps one step ahead of those after him; when the past seems to catch him, it is but a fleeting glimpse, the chase resumes, and the audience stays in the dark.

I am sure that Ancken was pressured to put some kind of explanatory titles at the start of the film; that he has not caved makes him worthy of real credit. It is a rare pleasure to simply watch events unfold without repeated overtures made to what led everyone here. It lends the film an urgency and excitement that it is able to maintain for much of its lean-feeling two-hour running time. When the details begin to trickle through it feels natural, not forced: Brosnan introducing himself as Gideon, and the dropping of Neeson’s character’s name being Carver. These are not introductions, they are overheard snippets.

In lieu of back-story, we get to watch Brosnan repeatedly mumble and wince in pain as he is put through several tortures, which suggest the makers recently viewed Die Another Day. His character is described as one ‘who doesn’t speak much’, and it is indeed half an hour before he says a word. It is hard to see why Brosnan was cast in the role (the involvement of Mel Gibson’s Production Company Icon and the near-constant infliction of pain suggest the erstwhile lethal weapon was previously drawn to the part), but it works a treat, as does Neeson’s quietly venomous but ultimately human portrayal of a man out to catch another man.

Moving from icy primitivism through familial concern and towards the corporate civilization of the railroad (via Christian missionaries, of course), the various stocks-in-trade of the American Frontier myth are addressed and subtly manipulated. Having thus crafted a state-of-the-nation circa 1868, the film then veers towards the surreal, in the last reel moving unexpectedly into David Lynch territory (although one suspects even he would have had second thoughts about Wes Studie cameoing as a character in charge of a watering hole called Charon.) This is not entirely unwelcome; indeed, it brings a new slant to the story, as does the movement from the top of the mountains, through an autumnal pine landscape, and onto the boiling heat of a featureless salt flat. One might criticise that the visceral energy presented, however mutely, in the first hour begins to ebb away from the piece, but if this slight remove gives off the whiff of intellectualism, surely that is a far sight more interesting than another town-based gun battle, no matter how confidently staged? The film demands a second watch, not because of any plot twists or character revelations, but because it conjures up the sights, smells and atmosphere of its locales in a way that few other films, let alone Westerns, manage so confidently.

In the final reckoning – having mixed a tweaked Outlaw’s Progress tale with various elements of Greek tragedy, biblical emotions, and historical cliché – Seraphim Falls is oddly able to walk into the sunset with head held high.

Arms and the Entrepreneur: A Review of 'Iron Man'

'I was in an Elton John video? When did this happen?'

It’s a curious comic book adaptation that opens with the abduction of a wealthy American in Afghanistan, centres on a character who is essentially an asshole, and co-stars Gwyneth Paltrow. Iron Man performs all these feats, while ticking every box on the origin-story template that’s been banging around for forty years, and giving Robert Downey Jr. the role, if not of a lifetime, then certainly of the season.

He plays Tony Stark, head of a massive weapons manufacturing company currently hocking its latest product to the US army. He has the ingenuity to build a bunker-busting missile, the spiky energy to set off any party, and the rakish charm to disarm even the most good-looking investigative reporter. In short, he is a man due for a comeuppance – which duly comes when he is forced at gunpoint to assemble a WMD for Arab terrorists. He capitulates, but constructs his own method of escape: a one-man war-machine of wrought iron and flamethrowers, powered by a quasi-hydrogen battery. In doing so, and slaughtering countless gibbering captors, he learns that helping people is better than building things that kill them. Helping white people, that is.

The plot thickens on his return to America, but I shan’t go into that here, as one needs to take all the surprises one can (unless you’re a fan, in which case you already have a fair idea of how the third sequel is going to pan out). There are romantic entanglements with secretaries, predictable double-crosses, and shit-gets-built montages aplenty, the whole thing occurring in a universe which has never experienced The Incredibles, let alone Frank Miller or Alan Moore. It could all be quite wearisome, were it not for the first-rate cast and the manner in which they have been directed.

Jon Favreau, perhaps best known for his starring role in Doug Liman’s indie-comedy Swingers (and here providing a cameo as, very appropriately, Stark’s bodyguard and bag-handler) shows a surprisingly strong hand, and a welcome willingness to allow his cast to improvise and generally piss around. It isn’t Altman, but it does grab your attention. While there might be some to claims that Downey Jr. wheels out the same mannered, drug-spun bundle of ticks in all his recent performances, his Stark is an entertaining mixture of charm, idiocy, and muscle somewhere between Jack Sparrow and Batman. It is a credit to the actor that he makes no effort to alter the essential attitude of the man post-abduction, a move which forces the sceptical among us to question the ethical veracity of those who have been part of his inner circle all along, including the perpetually placid Terrence Howard and the alarmingly not-terrible Paltrow. Then there’s Jeff Bridges, playing the ridiculously titled Obadiah Stane, who – though he is the obligatory grizzled old guy – invests his character with some pathos and psychology, even if his plotline is underdeveloped. (I guess there’s a reason he’s named after the shortest book in the Old Testament.)

In these $100 a barrel times the cyber-dream of flawless man-machine integration cannot be that simple: Stark’s suit is a sleek exhaust-free number which literally runs on the power of his own heart, whereas his nemesis’ bulky Hummer-parody belches exhaust fumes. The latter is a personification of the outdated mechanised armoury of the pre-Cold War period; Iron Man on the other hand is an example of contemporary military tactics, even at one point being mistaken for an UAV. This American playboy – whose father literally invented the Atomic bomb – at one point launches at whim into a middle-eastern war zone, overcomes the villains with his absurdly advanced artillery, then exits as soon as he has brought about peace, leaving the natives to happily sort out the mess. All this happens bloodlessly of course, Favreau showing a marked aversion to killing, always cutting away at the moment the trigger is pulled. Still, considering the fetid morality of films such as Jumper, these sidesteps cannot be entirely condemned.

It is by no means a masterpiece, but in the modern blockbuster environment, when the best James Cameron we can come up with is Michael Bay, it certainly entertains for a couple of cheerful hours, and we can only hope it makes absurdly sculpted goatees 2008’s must have facial accessory.

22 Things I Learned From ‘The Incredible Hulk'

'I'm not looking at it, it's just that it's at my eye-level, that's all.'

1. All it takes is a fancily edited title sequence and the addition of the words 'The Incredible' to rewrite filmic history.

2. The quality control in South American bottling plants is sub-par at best.

3. A dose of gamma radiation turns you into a cross between Shrek, David Hasselhoff, and Rafael Nadal.

4. Helicopters are always disembarked from in slow motion.

5. It is possible to get Lou Ferrigno to do anything for you if you give him pizza. (He is, also, the man.)

6. Director Louis Leterrier has a rather surprising interest in the weather.

7. The killing of U.S. army personnel en mass is acceptable if they are attacking you just for being who you are.

8. When fleeing the bad guys you’re always going to run into the obnoxious bald guy whose cock you earlier blocked.

9. William Hurt is no Sam Elliott.

10. Injections of bio-serum help you trim those extra pounds and make you feel great, but result in nasty, scaly, mood-damaging side effects. So, a lot like heroin then.

11. Bigger Stan Lee cameos aren’t necessarily better.

12. Tim Roth manages to sound as if he is swearing even when he isn’t.

13. Tim Blake Nelson is rather superb.

14. A lime tinct deflects all projectiles.

15. Brazalian favelas, New England university campuses, Harlem: nowhere is safe from shock-and-awe occupation by the U.S. military.

16. A non-stop musical score can be aggravating and unnecessary, like someone telling you how much fun you’re both having during sex.

17. Ang Lee probably saw this film and muttered ‘I coulda done that but I didn’t wanna.’

18. It is now a legal requirement that any film star a lead actor from The Wire, even if they only feature as an extra fleeing a fireball.

19. A massive green man with stretchy pants remains unfilmable.

20. It’s hard not to enjoy a movie in which a police car is utilised as a pair of boxing gloves.

21. A relentlessly forward-moving narrative can be an effective distraction from increasingly incomprehensible plotting.

22. Marvel Studios are on their way to making rather a lot of money, and not entirely undeservedly.

22 Things I Learned From ‘Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull’

"Looks like he died waiting for the magic to happen."

1. Elvis songs, CGI prairie dogs, Soviet spies, area 51 and drag races do not sit well beside one another. And that’s just the first five minutes.

2. The effects of the Holy Grail have been greatly exaggerated. Downright lied about, it turns out.

3. FBI agents wear matching ties. And, once laboriously introduced, vanish into bureaucratic air.

4. Man-gets-hit-in-the-crotch-by-fast-moving-foliage jokes are funny.

5. By climbing inside a fridge you can survive a … no, I’m not writing that down, it’s just too silly.

6. It’s been a while since Karen Allen worked for a reason.

7. South American sanatoriums are really quite spacious, and the management take a relaxed view to in-room vandalism.

8. Russians keep rocket-propelled grenade launchers (loaded, of course) in the same place as highly dangerous captives.

9. It takes but one burly extra to sate an entire colony of flesh-eating ants.

10. Ray Winstone knows a place to get lighters which work after having been submerged in water several dozen times.

11. A been-there-done-that archaeologist has trouble identifying a rapier.

12. The Amazon is full of parallel roads.

13. Cate-Blanchett-gets-a-magnetic-erection jokes are really, really funny, and probably unintended.

14. That is the janitor from Scrubs.

15. John Hurt needs a new dentist.

16. Shia LaBeouf needs a new hairdresser.

17. Jim Broadbent needs to learn how to say no.

18. The mythical city of El Dorado was actually … no, I’m not writing that down, it’s just too silly.

19. George Lucas is a toxic human being lacking any creative idea which doesn’t involve moving vehicles, jumping, clanging scenery, jumping, swarms of things, and jumping.

20. The desire for knowledge is punishable by unpleasant immolation; the desire for material wealth is an admirable, rakish pursuit.

21. Some franchises retire for a reason.

22. This movie will result in neither fortune nor glory for anyone involved.

My Dark Places: A Review of 'Street Kings'

Nothing better to do on a Wednesday night. Go to the pictures. New movie. Street Kings. Script part-written by James Ellroy. Like him: crime writer. Hard-boiled. Sparse. Also written by Kurt Wimmer. Guy made Equilibrium. Suggests there wasn’t a lot of that in the writing process. Ellroy leaves treatment unguarded. Gets out the shower. Broken glass. Window shattered. Script gone. ‘Damn you Wimmer!’

Keanu wakes up. Keanu plays Tom. Tom’s a cop: LAPD. Tom’s violent. Tom’s a widower. Tom throws people in the trunk of his car. Tom’s like Jack Traven all growed up and gone to the drink. Or John Constantine, beating on ethnic minorities instead of demons. Either way: derivative.

Close-knit ‘special vice’ unit. Led by Forest Whitaker. Memories of The Shield. Who else in the cast? Jay Mohr. Okay. Cedric the Entertainer. Funny, not ha-ha. Hugh Laurie. Bizarre. John Corbett. John Corbett!?

Well-worn trajectory. Tom gets in trouble with IAD. Tom gets set-up. For a cop, Tom sure misses the obvious. Clearly never read an Ellroy book. Hooks up with a friendly detective outside his unit: Diskant. They investigate shit. They kill people. They have racially charged interactions with the Latino community. They bond. Homoerotic subplot weighs heavy.

The guys who did it aren’t the real bastards at all. The rot goes deep. The rot goes up. The rot goes all the way to city hall (implicitly). Oedipal issues. Violence solves everything. What did he just do with that spade? Baddies can’t just be corrupt: have to be rapists too. Women exist to be submitted to and/or saved. That guy is still in the trunk – have they forgotten?

Shot hand-held. Shot on 16mm. Should have cost less: the grit’s too polished. Conceptually shocking ending forced safe. Forced nice. Disturbing to watch if unironic.

Los Angeles is a character in this film. Not saying much. City gets hotter every year. Not cold enough for Ellroy. Room temperature drama. Chris Evans nails it as an honest cop. The others flounder. Redundant scenes alternate with incident-heavy nonsense. Needs to be forty-five minutes longer and a lifetime smarter.

That guy’s never getting out of the trunk.

Living In Oblivion: A Review of 'Into the Wild'

An image of a handsome young man is seen displayed on a bedside table in the middle of the night. A disembodied voice on the soundtrack, then the startled gasp of a mother waking from a nightmare, wondering where her son is, whether he is safe, and what his motives were for severing all contact with the world he knew. The young man is Christopher McCandless, a high-scoring graduate who decided to live the life of a great American wanderer, beholden to no-one and no-thing, and while what follows celebrates such idealistic liberty, this opening scene of Sean Penn’s dramatisation of these true events in the early nineties suggest the keen awareness the film has of the collateral cost of self-ostracism.

This awareness seems to evade Chris himself, as he abandons his car one day and never returns to the life he knew, instead grabbing odd-jobs for a few weeks to earn enough money to pay for supplies and gear to keep him moving through Arizona, Mexico, and eventually Alaska. His abandoned sister states that the reason Chris has not sent her any letters is because he knew she trusted him enough and loved him enough not to need them. A romantic notion, but perhaps also a deluded one.

Chris is seen initially making camp in a deserted bus in the Alaskan wilderness, subsequent overlapping, dreamlike, and subjectively fractured sequences revealing his cutting-loose, his journeys, his encounters, and the growing realisation and pain brewing at his erstwhile family home. As the unpleasant domestic environment in the latter is sketched through Terrence Malick-esque voiceovers it becomes easier to see Chris’ quest as a simple attempt to escape the society that he sees represented by his abusive father and his brittle and cold mother. That he then spends much of his trip searching out surrogate father figures – all of whom live outside societal restrictions – is a bittersweet irony. It is not, however, highlighted in the film, but a motif left to drift unobtrusively through it, like a dust caught in afternoon sun.

Penn, directing for the fourth time, again chooses a story about individuals who cannot be understood, and whose own stated motives are merely proxy to a wealth of inner turmoil and yearning which cannot be expressed in words or narrative. Marrying the visual elegiasm of Badlands with an attraction to the obsessive, self-deceptive, and pining characters of Werner Herzog, Penn makes films which are above all a celebration of the existence of life and spirit in the face of overwhelming scepticism and random unpleasantness. Into The Wild only touches on the anguished mania that is seen in The Pledge and The Crossing Guard, but this state-of-nervousness remains a necessary corollary of any attempt to influence a world which, thanks to its absurdity, can only ever be mapped on the level of the subconscious. The growing confusion and loss of William Hurt’s paterfamilias certainly belongs in the same warped AA meeting as Jack Nicholson’s distant loners.

While one would never expect the film to be rushed, at two-and-a-half hours the story begins to weary, as McCandless continues to (eventually) reject potentially corrective adult role models, and slowly makes his way to an environment which has no trucks to hitch rides on, or helpful hippies to cook him dinner. Alaska might be seen by some as the nadir of McCandless’ intent, but it seems to show an extreme to which even he should not quite be willing to go. It is telling that he chooses to camp in the only indication of humanity for miles around. His subsequent difficulties are the most compelling of moments of the film, and for all the implicit and explicit support and vindication of Chris’ actions throughout, the dangers begin to seep in.

Incredibly well made, the film draws typically genuine and quintessentially American performances from its high-calibre cast, Emile Hirsh not only resembling McCandless but capturing his peculiarly charismatic vacancy. The music, while frequently beautiful, unfortunately serves occasionally to undermine the drama and the quietly breathtaking landscape cinematography – one sequence of Chris climbing a snow-drift, the sound of his shoes crunching on the earth and the clean air rustling through the trees achieves in a few seconds what a dozen specially-written songs attempt throughout.

In Friedrich Dürenmatt’s original novel of The Pledge the motivations of the detective in befriending the single mother and her pretty daughter are never in question: he is to use them as bait to catch a killer, and we hate him for it. Just as Penn muddied these simple waters in his earlier film, here he keeps the exact reasons for Chris’ movements indefinite, forcing us to consider his actions, and those of his parents, as motivated by the immense and invisible forces of environment and psychology, rather than a writer’s need for structure, consequence, and moral arithmetic.

Public Speaking: A Review of 'Michael Clayton'

In Michael Clayton the eponymous ‘fixer’ at a prestigious law firm based in New York begins to see his world crumble, an old friend having slipped off into the deep end thanks either to the crushing weight of his sins of silence or having gone off his meds.   Clayton, played by George Clooney, is having a hard enough time as it is, debts up to his eyeballs and a family circle that veers between judgemental and drug-addled. His attempts to hold his own life together form the core of what we observe on screen, but the film keeps pulling away, visualising moments of bizarre pathological hysteria, seen as the consequence of an unpleasant corporate world that surrounds and bleeds into everything.

At no point do we see any of the victims of the deadly toxins to be found in the fertiliser pedalled by bulletproof corporation U/north. The story takes place in boardrooms, restaurants, hotel rooms, and other people’s living rooms. While evoking Erin Brockovich in plot, Clayton keeps away from the collateral damage caused by his law firm and their clients – fellow attorney Arthur Edens (Tom Wilkinson) has connected with the poor souls, and the result is more than moral realignment: it is a total psychotic break.  Wilkinson’s performance in this role is both grandstanding and convincing, his opening monologue – set to images of an empty law office – is an incredible piece of cinema, quietly compelling in its compulsive mania.

Yet writer-director Tony Gilroy does not preach like a man possessed; rather, he films like a methodical, enormously capable, brittle first-timer – like the character of Karen Crowder, a legal professional within U/north who is completely out of her depth.  Moments where we see her carefully arrange her clothes for a business meeting, or obsessively rehearse answers to a forthcoming Q&A session make far more of an impact than Clayton’s debt-problems or broken family.   His afflictions are temporary, and will either get solved or be his downfall by film’s end; Crowder’s quest for a permanent suitability is a far deeper, more horrifying suffering that cannot be admitted, let alone corrected in two easy hours.  When her character is forced to decide whether to end a life for the sake of her job, Michael Clayton finds the sting in its tale: this is not a story about the ethical lapse of doing nothing while evil is in your midst, its about the temptation to choose evil because it is what is expected of you.

The film is structured around a series of displays of intent, beginning with Eden’s frenzied explanation of his motives, a speech in which Clayton is addressed and examined, but not seen – when the story finds him a few minutes later he is revealed like just another cog in the machine: how could he possibly deserve the honour of Eden’s confession? We perhaps expect the film to show us how he becomes worthy, but in a sly joke the opening scenes are a flash-forward, the Clayton sitting at the poker table already having heard the rousing call to arms of Eden; and yet, there he sits.   The finale, too, plays games with the preparation and delivery of vital information and audiences in and out of sight.

Gilroy’s direction is crisp and exciting, occasionally unfolding events and motivations in wordless passages of surprising weight and tension.       His script is intelligent and polished, but for me contained one too many leftovers from his work on the Bourne series, assassinations shown that, for all their effectiveness, should have been concealed.  The best writing comes in the true-to-life moments like a father insisting to his son that he is better than both his father and the people his father hangs around with, or the frustration felt between friends when one betrays another.  A shame, then, that the tale is so well-worn, resembling Soderbergh’s aforementioned work, as well as Clooney’s recent Syriana, and any number of seventies thrillers starting with The Days of the Condor.

A surprisingly strong showing in 2008’s Oscar nominations will hopefully bring the film to a wide audience, which Swindon’s performance particularly deserves.  The whole work will, I suspect, reward further study, and indicates the proper introduction of a mature and disciplined presence behind the camera.

Reigning It In, Letting It Loose: A Review of 'Shine a Light'

'What do you mean, you're not going to play 'Gimme Shelter'?'

Back in the day, there were Beatles people, and there were Stones people. Sure, the former were more politically active and maybe presented a higher echelon of hippie-consciousness, but barring some kind of Lazarus-like resurrection (of both people and careers), you’re not likely to get them playing an 18-song set at the Beacon Theatre in New York – even when they were all still alive, they had moved on. The Rolling Stones will never move on. Until Mick Jagger collapses on stage like an oversexed Moliẻre they’ll continue to delight in the adrenaline of the live show.

To capture this stubborn commitment, Martin Scorcese has furnished himself with ten cameras, a team of Oscar-winning cinematographers (like Cameron Crowe collaborator John Toll), and a triple-decker stress-sandwich in order to make superlative part-documentary mostly-concert film Shine a Light. The film hints at being both a larger historical project (which it was once planned to be), and a behind-the-scenes examination in the manner of Jean-Luc Godard’s Sympathy For The Devil, but ultimately sets himself the more difficult task of capturing just what it is like to watch the band play live.

On an IMAX screen this is accomplished with aplomb. We see Jagger’s fillings and Keith Richards’ dishevelled veins in all their (in)glorious detail. The little details surprise and engross: Richards leaning on the shoulder of bassist Ronnie Wood during a lull, drummer Charlie Watts sighing in exhaustion after a solo, pretty blondes in the front row desperately trying to get a picture of Jagger on their mobiles.

Having opened the Berlin film festival, Shine has garnered mixed reviews. True, the set itself is not a barnstormer, designed as it is to highlight lesser-known tracks rather than recycle wall-to-wall hits (which come as the encore), some of the riskier lyrics have been excised thanks to the presence of a Presidential dynasty, and the performance – to a much smaller crowd than the band are used to – occasionally lacks a certain something, most notably in the opener, ‘Jumping Jack Flash.’

Those who are not that familiar with the band may not be able to get past these quibbles, while even hard-core fans may be unimpressed due to them. Either way, the work behind the camera is exceptional, Scorcese and his team turning fresh what could so easily be stale, the editing and cinematography crisper and more rewarding than in most concert films. The opening may resemble Spinal Tap without the irony, but it successfully sets a tone of frenzied anticipation and fin-de-siecle grandiosity.

This is a film to either stick on in the background on a Sunday afternoon in your open-plan flat while people come and go, or to be overwhelmed by in the immersive environment of Waterloo’s IMAX, an experience made all the stranger by the necessary passivity of the audience in the face of such an energising performance.

The Tie That Binds: A Review of 'There Will Be Blood'

Paul Thomas Anderson has been quoted as saying he had to learn how to direct all over again in order to tackle the filming of Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil!, a sprawling and accusatory novel about Californian oil production at the start of the twentieth century. While it shares the extended symphonic movements of Magnolia, the slowly encroaching meltdown of Boogie Nights and the sharp use of music of Punch Drunk Love, There Will Be Blood is certainly a departure for the writer-director, and one which reveals him to be a filmmaker who can move beyond the eclectic post-modern chaos he has previously revelled in.

The story is that of Daniel Plainview, an oil prospector who gets word of a potentially massive reservoir of oil in a sleepy desert town; he settles there, and goes about constructing the apparatus to acquire both the oil and the goodwill of the locals. Daniel Day-Lewis, never an actor to be accused of apathy, delivers a tremendous performance as Plainview, a man whose attempts at personability are just off-note enough to be resolutely unsettling. He is cast opposite the young Paul Dano (of Little Miss Sunshine fame, of all things) as Eli Sunday, whose single-minded desire to construct a religious community in the town around his own theatrical preacher-shtick is as monomaniacal as Plainview’s own obsession for obtaining black gold. The potential for mutually beneficial cooperation is suggested, but what is seen as the natural enmity between organised religion and capital enterprise sows leads to inevitable violent conflict between the two.

The characters veer dangerously close to empty ideologues, and in a different context this would appear simplistic and unenlightening; however, Anderson constructs the film as a kind of fable about the manipulative nature of those who wish to be patriarchs. Oil may be the catalyst, but the sadism which gradually unleashes itself from the souls of these men has nothing to do with the material world – twinned scenes of Plainview and Sunday being forced to accept the creed of the other reveal the extent to which greed can override any other scruples a man may have.

‘I look at people and I see nothing worth liking,’ Plainview states at one point, and the world depicted is indeed an unpleasant one, violence and betrayal lying below the surface, bubbling up during times of seismic activity, and being unleashed by those with power. The craftsmanship with which this is depicted is nothing less than astonishing, Jonny Greenwood’s music drawing a viewer hypnotically into the story from the first frame. There Will Be Blood presents little which is worth liking, but much to be admired.

Nothing More Than Meets The Eye

A dusted-off review of 'Transformers', for all those with recently teenage'd children who find it has suddenly appeared in their DVD collection:

There was a time when a project such as this would have been considered below Michael Bay – this is the man who, along with Jerry Bruckheimer, helped create the modern twenty-something’s blockbuster: all swearing, violence, and drugs; Bad Boys was a film for people who felt 48 Hours too risqué. Don Simon’s affection for a lifestyle matched only by the pace of his films cost him his life, and Bruckheimer, perhaps sensing the danger to himself but not wanting to pass up a buck, altered and in effect neutered his own product so that it cold reach as large an audience as possible. Bay, too, while always selling to grown-up children, has embraced the wider opportunities that come with peddling one’s product specifically to the virgin-market. 2005’s The Island may have been his last stab at anything resembling artistic integrity – dull scene followed dull scene for two hours and it was obvious Bay’s heart was not in it, while the massively negative commercial and critical response meant that, thankfully, such an exercise would never be repeated. Now, Steven Spielberg has been brought on board to see to the controlling of the lesser angels of Bay’s nature, as he before has overseen children-oriented films such as Gremlins and Small Soldiers. So, arriving like a case of cheap Belgian beer to a party everyone was about to leave, Transformers is laid expectantly in the middle of 2007’s blockbuster season, and we’re all invited to dig in and lose a few more brain cells.

The strangest thing about the movie is that it spends so long trying to convince us all that it is anything but a film based on a toy brand. Barring a ludicrous (but quite welcome) prologue, the first hour or so relegate the eponymous characters and action as much to the margins as is possible. The car purchased by our hero Sam Witwicky remains resolutely a car, and the attacks perpetrated on American soldiers in Qatar seem more like outtakes from an aborted Terminator 4 project than scenes from a Hasbro-made production. Perhaps to compensate for such an extended opening act the makers stuff in enough slapstick and high school humour that only the richly fussy visual style reminds one that this is not a Chris Weitz picture. While much of this is funny, thanks in part to the comic timing of Shia LaBeouf, it seems bolted on for our pleasure rather than an innate part of the picture. Unfortunately, this desperation to please hangs around for the duration of the film, like a bad smell, culminating in an embarrassing performance from Anthony Anderson, and one which frankly does not deserve mentioning from John Turturro.

He plays a man from the shadowy government agency called Section 7, an agency so secret not even the Secretary of Defence has heard of it or takes it seriously at first – which makes one wonder how they manage to get anything done: mystique is one thing, anonymity is quite another. Section 7’s brief appears to have been to generally hang around until all hell breaks loose on planet earth, at which point they shall gather all the characters given more than token amounts of screen time up until this point (and, what the hey, a couple of the tokens as well) and explain to them at length how exactly the screenwriters have managed to engineer a world and narrative in which cars which transform into robots can operate with a minimum of humiliation. This involves a quasi-nuclear cube-shaped power-source (called, ingeniously, ‘the cube’), an arctic explorer from the nineteenth century, the reverse engineering of the microchip from a dormant Megatron, and not a great deal of success. Such explanations – and indeed the characters that spout them – are soon forgotten as, having forced us and himself to meander through nearly ninety minutes of mostly explosion-free muddle, Bay is allocated the second half of his budget, and so begins a third act of unrelenting action.

The battle for earth begins at the Hoover Dam – which remains unaccountably standing, being quickly discarded for the lesser expenses of the American highway (that most recent and uninteresting of action-scenery to be discovered by Hollywood, for which we have the Wachowski brothers to thank) and the urban centre of an effectively anonymous mid-size American city. Here, in a movie which began at a military base in Qatar and has featured references to North Korea and Iran begins – if one squints out the robots and concentrates on the screaming civilians, the almost constant air-strikes, the rubble-strewn streets – to resemble a particularly bad day in Baghdad. American GI’s, happy to be involved in a war between two cultures they have very little understanding of and have heretofore treated with bureaucratic hostility, assist the unquestionably virtuous in their plight to destroy the cacklingly evil. Untold damage to property (but no – human – lives lost; please, this is a 12) ensues, and it all looks, to be sure, rather astounding. No one throws a car through the air quite like Bay, even if one can practically see the man bent over his toy box playing these moments out around the clock for the last thirty years of his life. And then there are the Transformers themselves: the cinematic equivalents of the Hasbro toys (no doubt to be re-released and updated with a charm lobotomy) somersaulting through the air like Russian gymnasts. These machines are neither metal nor plastic, but that strange digital substance which sounds so very weighty (all metallic crunching and grinding and thrombotic echoes when hit by heavy artillery) but which looks like some highly polished and solidified version of silly putty, or moulded chewing gum. The special effects are highly accomplished, but they remain observably “special”, like a British stage thespian parachuted in to give some life and soul to proceedings, who hams up a storm and has a grand old time doing so: entertaining yes, but conspicuous above that which surrounds it. As polished as the effects are, seeing massive robots battle it out between skyscrapers will always be reminiscent of everything of a similar ilk from Godzilla to The Power Rangers Movie.

Ultimately, the film draws to a close like the piece of teenage entertainment it was always going to be. The job that it set out to do it has accomplished with minimal success. While people on the internet may wish that someone like David Fincher had brought these robots in disguise to the screen, any sane person knew that was not going to happen. Intellectual rigour was never going to be the name of the game; accepting that, Bay may well have been the best man for the job. To gripe about what Transformers is would be churlish; rather, I only find it a pity that such a piece of fluff has received so much monetary backing – it seems to be the devil’s arithmetic of contemporary Hollywood moviemaking that the lowest common denominator picks up the lion’s share of the pie of budget and marketing simply because it has the potential to reach the widest audience.

Seeing Red, Acting: A Review of 'Redacted'

At the start of Brian De Palma’s new film Redacted comes an unmistakeable – but potentially ironic – statement of intent, as grunt Angel Salazar (whose video-camera footage comprises – among news segments, youtube videos, and documentary clips – the motion picture viewed by the audience) states that his intention is to reveal the truth of the Iraq war, omitting nothing, censoring nothing; he intends to impassively reveal the totality of his subject matter. No wonder the man has already failed to get into film school – since the first piece of celluloid sped through the interior workings of the first projector, directors have been aware of the impossibility of showing everything.

The video diary, along with everything else in the film, bar the photographs that comprise the epilogue, is fabricated. Like the recent Cloverfield, the film plays games with the concept of user-generated content, and the hook of the illusion of an un-biased proletarian viewpoint. The style, as it is utilised here, has promise: the moments the narrative is hijacked by news bulletins and internet-based clips have an exciting palpability, as though our own flicking through channels and web-surfing is gradually revealing the story of a small group of US soldiers stationed in Samarra who, tired and fidgety, decide to rape a young Iraqi girl.

However, scenes of the horrendous act itself fail to convince because of the increasingly irrational passivity of the filmmaker Salazar, and the ridiculous high quality of his image and sound. Supposed security camera clips also disappoint, the static viewpoint, unnatural dialogue and raw acting evoking a hastily put together student play about the horrors of war.

The film does not cohere, but was never intended to: the fragmented pieces of evidence and story given to the audience demonstrating the fractured manner in which news of an overseas war reaches the television-viewing public. But all the pieces, however subconsciously, strike the same tone, and that tone is resoundingly Anti-War. The potential heroism and bravery of the soldiers is never addressed, characters becoming empty shells, the kind of which one can get a head-start on by re-viewing De Palma’s earlier stab at a similar topic, the more successful Casualties of War. People are either vicious bastards, anguished academics, or an amorphous suffering mass; the discounting of the heritage or personality (or basic intelligence) of the Iraqi people is perhaps a worse violation of a culture than that perpetrated on the fifteen year-old girl who suffers at the hands of the stars and stripes.

Interesting questions are raised about spectatorship, voyeurism, and the increasingly present feedback loop of media consumption and production, but these are things that De Palma has tackled before and can do in his sleep. The anti-war message of the piece, driven home in the final minutes, is cloying and simplistic, and forces an audience to ask why fictionalisation was necessary if the facts are as they are insisted to be; and if a story needed to be fabricated, why allow it to be written so ungraciously, and painted in the broadest of strokes? If Redacted was De Palma’s effort to get into UCLA film school I have no doubt he would be a shoe-in; if only the film attempted to be as self-aware with its own politics as it does with its format.

Thoughts on Indiana, Bond, and Oscars (post-dated)

This week we have been graced with the trailer for a small, modestly budgeted under-the-radar picture with a name so silly it climbs the mountain of kitsch to gaze out over the lands of retro pastiche: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Thoughts move instantly to the work of Damien Hirst. Will Spielberg’s movie be an indictment of the rape of African nations and resources by the Western world in the same fashion? One doubts, although the issues that surrounded the diamond-studded human skull which Hirst unveiled last year with a Lagerfeldian flurry of self-importance and off-handedness, do to some extent reflect the problems faced by the new archaeological adventure.

As with Lucas’ Star Wars of 1977, the Indiana Jones films were exercises in the reanimation of a style of wilfully breezy filmmaking that had gone out of fashion as America adjusted itself to the long winter of the Cold War. Replicating the simplistic narrative framework of earlier days, but with budget, effects, and stars which were previously unheard of, the American Blockbuster exploded onto the stage, and American Adult Cinema walked quietly to the back of the theatre to pretend to be very interested in the wallpaper.
But, as the world seems to tip into ever-shallower Baudrillardian arcs of self-regarding “irony”, we must wonder what the point of this new Indiana is. The trailer, stuffed with clips and nods to the preceding trilogy, seems almost a Far From Heavenesque exercise in pastiche, making it an imitation of a replication. Harrison Ford acts like a man trying to act like Harrison Ford in a film which is trying to be an Indiana Jones film.
On the nitty-gritty side, the warehouse set-piece looks like so much recycled gymnasto-technics (is that Colin Farrell and Tom Cruise I spy fighting in the background?), Ray Winstone appears to already be in costume for the forthcoming tie-in night at G-A-Y, and some of the effects look just plain bad. Still, nostalgia can be a powerful drug.

Another franchise instalment received a silly title this last month: Quantum of Solace meaning both a significant yet infinitesimally measured amount of comfort, and a huge paycheque for all those involved in what was formerly termed Bond 22. Picking up where Casino Royale left off (in the manner of The Karate Kid, Part 2, if you will, or the first episode in a fresh season of ER), it seems Bond is out for some payback. The title, inevitably, grows on you, and we can only hope that like its namesake in the world of physics it shakes the foundations of filmic discipline to its very core and opens up entirely unheard of avenues of human investigation into the world around us. Or at least tells us whether Mathis was a bastard or not.
Finally, we can all breathe a collective sigh of relief: the writer’s strike is over, and the Oscars shall go ahead. How would we have coped learning all the results at one a.m. in a dull press conference, missing the unalloyed joy of learning not just who won Best Supporting Actress, but also those lucky devils who achieved Best Sound Design and Best Foreign Language Sound Design before giving up, buggering off to bed, and having someone who’s been up for thirty-six hours mumble the results to us the next morning? Alas, we shall never know.