Sunday 30 March 2008

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.

Sunday 9 March 2008

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.

Saturday 8 March 2008

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.

Wednesday 5 March 2008

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.