Systemic Malignancy: A Review of 'Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps'

Early in 2010, Paul Greengrass decided (or, perhaps, was compelled) to make a film about the war in Iraq. Green Zone showed the hunt for WMD, the strategic folly of disbanding the Iraqi army, and the impotence of those who were manipulated by warmongers. However, to do this, names were changed, Matt Damon was cast, and John Powell’s score was cranked up during exciting chase scenes. The effect was a damning dilution of whatever was being said in the first place, which was mostly accepted public knowledge beforehand, and the lingering unease that follows the brandishing of the weapons of the enemy by the liberal left (a moral hazard best left alone).

Following an identical model, Oliver Stone in Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps depicts recent factual, cataclysmic, and widely reported historical events – the 2008 near-collapse of the global financial system, ground zero being, appropriately enough, Ground Zero. Like Greengrass, Stone upends much of the value of his project by re-aligning the facts to follow a Hollywood template, here a family drama. Shia LaBeouf’s Wall Street trader is our guide through the turmoil – but even he gives his mother $30,000 he “doesn’t have” to bail-out her failing real estate business, thus proving himself to be part of the problem in more ways than one. Indeed, Stone’s awareness of the circularity and repeatability of frailty and disaster is a rare strength in this sequel.

The other assets are put brilliantly on display in the first hour, as the naturally metaphor-oriented writer-director demonstrates more visual flair than he has in fifteen years. The titular neighbourhood glistens and gleams as invisible information shoots from one anonymous trading floor to another and an audience has a struggle keeping up. Only after the first act does it become clear that we weren’t really meant to – the meat of the story is a marriage crisis. He is a trader, she runs a lefty website; but her dad is Gordon Gekko, who has turned over a new leaf but still orders his life as a serious of predatory trades.

Gekko, played with jewelled menace by Michael Douglas, is again the star of the show, as he was in the 1987 Wall Street. He has been in jail for the entire 1990s, released in the wake of 9/11 (he then bides his time for seven years, presumably writing his book, before his stage-managed, Edmond Dantès-like return). This chronology, eliding as it does Bill Clinton’s presidency, as well as the period between the cold and on terror wars, is intriguing, as though Gekko’s such as these have no choice but to hibernate during Democratic administrations. But for all his correct predications (there’s no bigger aid to a screenwriter than hindsight), Gekko curiously lurks at the edge of events, a bystander to the systemic problems, rather than the marble-solid manifestation of them that he was in the 1980s. There is mileage in this interpretation, but not validity, certainly not with the ending Stone has in store.

The touting of the funding of fusion reactor research seems a knee-jerk move towards clean technologies, but the explanation of this reveals a paradox: intense energy is concentrated on a miniscule point, which then detonates, the immense outpouring offering more energy than was put in. Of a piece with the frequent talk throughout the film of unsustainable bubbles and systemic problems, this suggests that all optimism is deluded. A hint of this cynicism can be detected in the otherwise cloying final moments, but this vibe seems bolted on to a Hollywood template rather than ingrained in the logic of the tale being told. The tale is classical, mythical, and the entire point of myth is to reassert the continuing nature of things, the stability and order of the world. What Wall Street and Wall Street could do without is any more myth.

Like Green Zone, too much faith is placed in a radical alternative within the media. The stinging irony of this is the thudding conservatism with which both that film and Money Never Sleeps proffer their depiction of historical occurrences, changing details enough to not be libellous, and facts enough to not be accused of dullness. These are not allegations that can be levelled at The Social Network, but then that story had something of a (systemic) happy ending, and is a far more deserving companion piece to Oliver Stone’s 1980s icon in its laser-sharp revelation of the absurd institutional dynamics of the moment.

Gordon Gekko was a bracing creation in 1987, but he was ahead of the curve, the Wall Street meltdown which occurred shortly following the release being credited with much of the box office success and legendary status of Wall Street. This re-tread is hopelessly behind the times, like a two-year old Sunday supplement. However, with strong brand recognition and a vigorous marketing campaign, the film did manage to make back its $70 million budget. It’s not only banks that are too big to fail.

The Techno-Narcissist Imperative: A Review of ‘Tron: Legacy’

Is there an alternative? It seems not. The system as it stands is irrefutable, and while changes for good or ill may occur within it, the logic and the coordinates of life will remain the same. When Sam Flynn (outcast, motorcyclist, millionaire) plunges into the world of The Grid, he appears in a replica of the real world. A monolithic tetris-shape of a craft hovers above and illuminates him, just like an LA police chopper did ten minutes ago. As the board of the company he is ostensibly in charge of have supplanted his authority for nefarious purposes, so the world of The Grid has been taken over by a megalomaniacal dictator. Welcome to the world of Tron: Legacy, a world quite similar to any you’ve ever seen.

It is this similarity which makes this new $200 million Disney Blockbuster so fascinating. Sam is the son of Kevin Flynn, who pulled the same trick in the original Tron of 1982, but is now stuck in the digital world thanks to the actions of the aforementioned dictator: an exact copy of himself but without human compassion, or the capacity to age, named Clu. Sam, after suffering gladiatorial combat in an arena of awesome size and malleability, teams up with his father, and together they do what all good action heroes do, and try to overthrow the status quo while also improving their own lot into the bargain.

The film offers refreshingly direct expression of the ideological structures which underpin almost every piece of cinema of its ilk. The Oedipal trajectory is as usual reconfigured to limit the importance and agency of the female/mother, while stressing the choice between good and bad fathers, here explicit in the confrontation between two versions of the older Flynn. Both played by Jeff Bridges, the villainous Clu is made to look as Bridges did when he was in his late twenties, with special effects that (as in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) don’t quite convince. But this is entirely appropriate – as the character of Clu is a digital copy from a human base, so the representation of him in the film is underscored by an everpresent digital artificiality. He is both more and less than human. All cinema relies on estrangement of a kind – acknowledged but overcome by what has been termed the “willing suspension of disbelief” – but here this rupture between our space and the existence of that viewed has a digital light shone brightly upon it, allowing what is on one very approachable level a Jules Verne adventure tale to also be a full-bloodied and vigorous examination of the tactics of allegory.

The Grid functions as a paraspace in which Sam realises the importance of being an active participant in the world, and settles his issues with his father through his own realisation of himself as an improved version of Kevin Flynn: the ternary relattionship of two fathers and a son becomes a binary conflict between the false and true sons. Rather than simply deploying such psychological halls of mirrors, Tron: Legacy embraces the narcissism inherent in the entire exercise. As God makes man in his own image, Kevin Flynn makes Clu as a duplicate of himself; but the introduction into this closed system of the “Iso’s”, a form of life seemingly ontologically existent only The Grid, initiates a need to conceive of other forms of living, other individuals besides ourselves. Clu, tasked to make a perfect world, eliminates the Iso’s in a holocaustal purge. Thus activating a historical discourse of the history of mechanization (the timeline of which will lead to digitisation, globalization, Tronation), the film admits the culpability of privileged Western interventions “for the making of a better world” in the horrors of the twentieth century. The path which leads finally to spectacular Disney 3D vehicles visits on its way the wholesale slaughter of a scapegoated other. As the older Flynn advocates, in light of such horror, a logical response is to “remove oneself from the equation” – thus inaugurating the death of politics, the waning of affect, the end of history.

“Bio-digital jazz” a character calls the utopian potentials of enacting agency upon The Grid, but the film presents something more like bio-digital stadium rock, its gladiatorial battles evoking (as did the original 1982 film) the narrative of Spartacus, a film in which Christian righteousness is trampled by McCarthyism, and the individual within the system is manipulated, dominated, and commodified. The original Tron was a fascinating demonstration of the inexorably growing truth of this logic, as the individuals in the cyber-world were at the mercy of unknowable gods (users) and a systemic program only interested in furthering its own strength and scope with no regard to human individuality or even world governments, a synonym for the continuing domination of world capitalism even after the global crisis of 1973. In 1999 The Matrix offered something similar, but tendered a glimmer of hope in protagonist Neo’s messianism; the sequels shut down such an avenue of resistance by making Neo’s powers and actions predetermined encodings of the malevolent system itself. “It’s too bad she won’t live,” says a character of a bio-mechanical replication of humanity in 1982’s Blade Runner, “but then again who does?” No one, it seems, at least not by their own rules – in the original cut of this film our romantic heroes remove themselves from the equation by fleeing urban space, in the recut version they simply get into an elevator car, seemingly to be trapped there in a non-living limbo for all eternity, a more logical consequence to any strategy of resistance.

Science fiction is at its best when expressing this allegorical potential. Our world can be better understood through the transplanting of its elements and its struggles onto a future time. We may accuse such spectacle of ‘making-safe’ our anxieties, and the implication that our problems will continue to be problems hundreds, thousands of years into the future as a conservative justification for the inevitable failure of any radical political action. However, the strength of the Tron world is in the opening up of a space in our own time in which to express doubts about the very power of allegory itself. The Grid is a dream, an unreality without spatial coordinates or physical mass, manifesting the ubiquity and immateriality of the system in which we live.

The deployment of visual effects to this end stresses our reliance on such technology (this is the representational flipside to the same conditional coin brandished earlier this year by The Social Network), and does so without pretence: this is not ‘a whole new world’ as in Avatar, this is a world of our making, a world of overt CGI, a world of 2010 and all the baggage that comes with it (in a clear contrast to Inception, the rules of this world are not explained, they are shown or intuited by an audience, a further indication of the innate familiarity of this paraspace).

Thrillingly propulsive, but with a willingness to settle down from time to time, Tron: Legacy’s ability to entertain on a gut level outstrips most of what else was on offer this year. Daft Punk’s score deserves a considerable amount of credit for this, as do the personable performances of Jeff Bridges and Olivia Wilde. Some may find the film alienating, and it certainly is, but only so far as it should be. In its own commitment to removing itself from the equation, the film clears a space for both simple entertainment and genuine intellectual reflection amongst the exploding pixels and bass-filled soundtrack. Indeed, the power it has comes from the revelation that these conditions of spectacular overload can themselves be contributive to such contemplation.

Death Toll: A Review of 'Knowing'

A note on spoilers: if you have not seen Knowing (or 2012) and were looking forward to curling up with them on a cold Winter’s evening then a) I pity you, and b) you should probably avoid reading the below. Spoilers are not overt, but are lurking between the lines

Placing the events of 9/11 into a framework of cosmological inevitability, and frequently referencing the attacks in both dialogue and visual aesthetics, Knowing works very hard to separate historical happenings from epistemological experience. The former is elided entirely from meaningful discourse, while the latter is elevated to an organising principle whose primacy is overtaken only by religious determinism.

As an MIT professor, we can assume our protagonist John Koestler is a man with a rigorous focus upon rational explanations of the physical world. When his son receives a fifty-year-old document consisting of a sprawled mass of seemingly random numbers, it is the sequence 091101 (that is, 9/11/01) which catches his eye. One drunken night on google later and he has identified a pattern in the numbers (which is more than can be said for most people after they spend a drunken night on google) – they 'predict' all major disasters of the last fifty years, with death toll usefully appended.

Thus determinism sets in early. For all Koestler's assurances that he believes “shit happens” (his wife died in a hotel fire, of which more later), the delineation of historical flow into specifically defined disasters sites – with attendant numbering of those killed and even a GPS locator of the event – smacks of straight-jacketed human perception far more than the film-makers seem to realise. Take 9/11, the only disaster dealt with in detail: what precise GPS coordinates would be given here? The address of the World Trade Centre? A field in Pennsylvania? The Pentagon? We never discover (nor whether the death toll includes those who died later from their injuries, or from the asbestos-laced ash in the streets that day); but given the film's (and American culture's) insistence in localising the events of that day at “ground zero”, educated assumptions can be made.

There is of course the possibility I have approached the film from the wrong direction: rather than questioning the inclusion criteria of the disasters (one has only thirty-three deaths, which hardly strikes one as worthy of listing, unless of course one happens to be in the direct vicinity of it, or related to one of those unlucky thirty-three), perhaps these events were only chosen by the Cassandra whose hand sprawled those numbers on that paper because they would be the first things thrown up by a google search. In the Old Testament, Moses had to make do with plagues which affected the entire populace; in the postmodern world, foretellings of doom can be tailored to suit Western-centric search engine algorithms.

As with Roland Emmerich's by turns unintentionally hilarious and intentionally hilarious 2012, Knowing gives up on the oh-so-twentieth century notion of an identifiable apocalyptic source. The characters within these films are at the mercy of mutating neutrino particles or the like, rather than marauding alien invaders or even global warming. Both films also exhibit something of an awed attitude to scheduling: one of the heroes of 2012 (nearly all of Emmerich's films are titled after dates, a tacit acknowledgement that their substance is their events, not their characters) is drafted to write “the most important timetable in the history of mankind”: a grandiose rhetorical description for a document that must by nature lack rhetoric altogether. The sheet of numbers in Knowing is puzzled over until the content of it is transposed into the more exciting – or at least visual – mode of familial protection, at which point it is no longer of any value (Waterworld pulled something of the same trick). Likewise, once it has been made abundantly clear that shit is happening right now and there's not a damn thing we can do about it, the populace of 2012 just get on with panicking rather than troubling themselves with any further explanation.

Which is to say, once science has done its bit in conceiving of a terrible thing, it is jettisoned entirely. Koestler may be an MIT professor, but that doesn't do him a bit of good. The desperation on Nicolas Cage's face as he witnesses another terrible (but blood-free) disaster can be read as the horrible realisation that for all his scientific knowledge he is helpless. Lisa Simpson felt the same way when the skeleton of an angel was uncovered in Springfield but, as we all remember, the doubt in her non-faith-belief system was misplaced. Knowing's lunge towards religiosity in the face of (a particularly 9/11 inflected) end-of-days is much like the denouement to that episode of The Simpson's: a ploy on the part of consumer interests to guarantee high grosses (it worked: the film made back its budget four times over). “The End is Near … The End of High Prices” - in deploying apocalypticism in the marketing of a mall The Simpson's echoed George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead, while also asserting the accurate yet unappealing prospect that total consumer freedom walks hand-in-hand with the holocaustal imaginary.

Yet consumerism, like science, is a false dawn for Knowing, which peddles the safely reductionist line that we'd all be better off staying at home. Koestler's wife died in a hotel fire during a business trip, while the predicted major disasters occur on planes or subway trains (and goodness, the New York subway has never appeared such a mecca for abstractly besuited businesspeople as it does in this film). Salvation comes hand-in-ghostly-hand with a return to an ur-domesticity, even if that is a dishevelled cabin in the woods, or a cloying family hug with your estranged father.

There's no wink at the sublimity of mass death here as there was in Independence Day (remember the stripper-friend, on the roof of a skyscraper in LA, eyes as wide as her smile as she's blown to smithereens by the transubstantial glare of an alien laser-beam?), the reason for which can be explicitly traced back to 9/11. As can the obsession with choice that pervades this and Emmerich's film, but it is 'choice' in quotation marks, a choice rooted in safe populism. In the face of the President's daughter's disgust that only the rich will be saved in 2012, the pigheaded Secretary of State suggests she offer her ticket to a Chinese worker if she feels so bad about things. The passive smirk she gives by way of reply says it all: moral outrage is as much a privilege as is a room on an ark. People get chosen, they do not themselves choose, and once chosen you get with the program because to do otherwise would be to conceive of a universe that admitted the possibility of transgression, disorder, and personal agency.

Which all generates a cinema of eschatological comfort. Teleological (that is, regressive) in the same way as Will Smith's I Am Legend, Knowing peddles the line that even chaos is not chaotic. 9/11, your wife's death, your kid's partial deafness: all are cartographic points of reference on a map of divine will. Human political potential is reduced to nought, and all we're asked to do is follow the signs on our way to an inevitable and enriching (well, briefly) family reunion. Powerlessness never felt so absurd.

Killshot: A Review of 'The American'

There’s a great deal of pleasure to be taken in craftsmanship alone, especially when it is both precise and concise. In The American, George Clooney plays the titular countryman Jack (not his real name), hiding out in a sleepy Italian village, who applies his considerable technique to constructing a weapon for an assassination. His own quiet commitment is echoed by director Anton Corbijn, who treats the film as though he were planning an understated death-act of his own.

Meticulous but involving, The American finds a way to work firmly within genre boundaries without being ‘generic’. It’s one of those films “they don’t make anymore”, but the ideological implications of it suggest there may be more on the way. Jack works with his hands on tactile material to produce a one-of-a-kind tool that rates as a work of art; he is also besieged by suspicions and shady characters. America, once coloniser of the European unconscious (a phrase I borrow from German filmmaker Wim Wenders, whose work is also echoed here), is now relegated to isolationist artist whose labour will be abused by those controlling him: it is the world of earlier Clooney film The Good German inverted for the twenty-first century. In a time of collapsing money markets, only physical objects can be invested with meaning, but even these can be put to unintended uses.

With its invocations of a gothic hell-on-earth for the emotionally tormented it is also reminiscent of In Bruges, but without the jokes (the presence of Thekla Reuten, the love interest from Martin McDonagh’s comedy, only aids the feelings of familiarity). It is also any movie about hit men who themselves become targets. But despite this, the film avoids a mythic quality, even as it toys with pseudo-poetic images of butterflies and intertextual references to Sergio Leone (Once Upon a Time in the West plays in the background, although a closer narrative model would have to be High Noon).

Promisingly, Clooney’s is the only name most people will recognise from the opening credits, and this sense of his alienation amongst a population he does not understand (the language barrier is symptomatic of a more existential gulf between Jack and everyone else) adds to a sense of claustrophobia which is potent despite all the sweeping scenery. Corbijn even finds a few ways of filming his star in an original way, which for a face as overexposed as Clooney’s (did someone say Nespresso?) is quite an achievement. He also has an eye for the details: shoes being removed before a foot chase, a restaurant bill paid even in the midst of incredible tension.

Rich in allegorical potential, if not potent allegory, The American is a film to slowly relish rather than greedily consume. Closer to the work of Graham Greene than a modern airport novel, it is satisfying and sly, and feels a lot more contemporary than any fiction that might offer America as the centre of gravity and Europe as anything other than a treacherous hinterland of precarious stability.

Colour Me Stupid: A Chastising of 'Red'

Okay, Hollywood.

Sit down.

We need to have a talk.

No, by “we need to have a talk”, I mean, you sit there and listen, okay?

Good.

I honestly don’t know where to begin. You’ve let me down. You’ve let the viewing public down. And most of all, you’ve let yourself down.

Don’t sit there and shrug like you don’t know what you did.

You know.

Really? You want me to spell it out?

Fine. We’re here to talk about Red.

Yes, I know you thought what you were doing was, what do the kids say these days, cool? But it wasn’t. Just because it stars a bunch of ageing popular actors like Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman and John Malkovich, is based on a graphic novel, and has a fast-moving nonsensical plot, doesn’t make it acceptable, let alone “cool”. Don’t give me that “but Helen Mirren shoots an Uzi” defence. The people at E! might buy that, but you’ll get no sale from me. Helen Mirren firing a gun is just as lame as Jason Statham firing a gun if the film around them is lame – that’s basic movie maths.

Speaking of the plot: I know it’s only trashy fun and all that, but nonetheless, if you’re going to use the massacre of a Guatemalan village as the instigator of your torturous narrative, then treat it with some respect. You’ve no idea what I’m talking about do you? If your heroes are CIA killers, then you need to be quite careful about how you portray them.

Let’s look at Grosse Pointe Blank. Quiet, I know it’s old, but I’m trying to teach you something. There’s Martin Blank, right, and he’s an assassin. He kills people for a living. But the film is a comedy. It’s light-hearted.

Yes, I know so is Red, let me finish.

So Martin Blank kills some people in the film. Mostly these are anonymous thugs or out-and-out weirdoes. Martin is also afflicted with a terrible ennui, brought about by his job. He comes out at the other side of all the gunfights with a newfound respect for human life. This journey helps us associate with him as a protagonist. The tone of the film also lessens the unpleasantness of his character: other people each have a pithy, unbelieving remark when he says he’s a contract killer (“do you get dental with that?”/”can I join up?”/”good for you, it’s a growth industry”), and the reason he has been marked for death himself is a bizarre accident involving a stick of dynamite and a millionaire’s pet retriever.

Compare this catalyst with the one in Red: the massacre of a Guatemalan village. This, like the exploded dog, is an unseen event and one which is way, way down the list of narrative priorities. A dog being detonated is funny, if morbid. The slaughter of a native population, especially one seemingly based on true events in Salvador in 1981, is less of a laugh riot.

I’m not against using real occurrences to spin out a fictional narrative, even one as fanciful as this. But to do so without the least bit of explication, respect, or even basic interest … that’s just unnecessary. Then to do so without suggesting any culpability on the part of the central “sympathetic” characters (who covered the murders up for the CIA without any trace of conscience) and not even having the decency to explain the compartmentalised blame (on an American politician, of course) is bordering on corrosive.

Fine, no one watches these things for the plot.

Yes, The A-Team featured successful US adventurism in Iraq (as did Iron Man), and The Losers began with the hilarious sight of the death of several dozen children before ditching all mention of them. I know.

That doesn’t make what you did in Red okay.

Nor is it the most annoying thing about the film.

Everyone enjoyed the sight of black ops teams and submachine guns in suburbia in Mr & Mrs Smith, but let’s not call that film a masterpiece. Let’s also note that whatever spark the Brangelina vehicle had (beyond the stars) came from the (over)awareness of the absurd disconnect between the action and the setting.

In Red, pretty much everyone’s a spy and a killer, and people show up with grenade launchers and no-one bats an eye. Remember Star Wars, and how Han Solo was always bursting the pomposity with his cavalier, blue-collar wisecracks? And remember how George Lucas’s recent prequels sucked so, so much, in part because they lacked this outsider perspective to all the nonsense?

No, Mary Louise-Parker’s office-worker-along-for-the-ride does not count. Why? Because she becomes normalised to the violence almost instantly (compare that, if you will, to Jason Bourne’s companion Marie vomiting when she sees her first dead body), and is excised entirely from the drama in the third act.

And don’t get me started on the troublingly reductive attitude towards women, all of whom either need to be saved by men (even gun-toting Helen Mirren) or take their cues from them at every turn.

What else? Stealing music cues from the Bourne films, Mr and Mrs Smith, and The International is a fine way of confirming that your movie has no original ideas. I know Kick-Ass did the same thing. But you know what? Kick-Ass was lazy, crass filmmaking too.

I have more to complain about, but I think our time here is almost up.

It doesn’t matter that those guys on rotten tomatoes mostly thought it was “alright”. If they thought making Paul Bettany into a post-apocalyptic action-hero was “alright” would you do that too? Point taken. But then these are the people who thought Salt was “alright”. Jurassic Park 3 was “alright”. Give them a press-pack with a complimentary key ring and they’ll rave about The Expendables, and that thing was like an etch-a-sketch of a crayon drawing of a trailer for an action film a six-year-old heard about one time.

Yes, I could have been more forgiving.

But you’re spending a lot of money. More than that, you’re spending my good will.

And I think we’re both running perilously low on both.

Now get out of here and don’t do it again.

'Enter the Void': A Milkshake Recipe

This is a great recipe that a friend of mine turned me on to. He’d made it three times in a fortnight, and enjoyed it more every time, calling it “nice”. The last batch he made was even bigger, and that’s the recipe below, because I know you’ll love it so much dear readers!

(I know, I know, a lot of the ingredients are hard to source, and it won’t be to everyone’s taste, but it’s pretty mind-blowing – if you’re not faint of heart give it a shot!)

1 Tibetan Book of the Dead

2 slightly ripe but effective performances

1 enfant terrible auteur with the talent of Stanley Kubrick (try to get one from French Argentina if you can)

1 aborted foetus

3 replays of the same car accident (these should get more horrible as you go on)

25 pills of DMT

1 Avatar, stoned

A generous handful of sex

1 bunch of voids (various)

First, cut up the Book of the Dead into large pieces so it’s impossible to miss. Sprinkle liberally throughout. This makes it hard to ignore, but the solid flavouring helps the guide the mouth through the rest of the dish.

Simmer the ideas behind the milkshake for several decades in the mind of the enfant terrible, then let this loose with a modest but well used budget. Don’t worry about technical problems or any absence of craftsmanship – despite apprehensions to the contrary, this will remain perfectly formed throughout.

Boil off any similarities to Panic Room and Cloverfield, but be careful not to skim off the flavours also found in Avatar. Use a heavy-bottomed metropolis like Tokyo, and keep the neon pink/blue/green stove-light lit and all times.

Those big name stars like Monica Bellucci? – leave them on the shelf!, you don’t want to detract from the uniqueness of the recipe.

Make sure the sexual perversion doesn’t thicken into tastelessness – keep it on a low heat but don’t let it turn rancid: it needs to leave a pleasant taste in the mouth.

Add the DMT liberally (and any other class-A’s in your possession), but be sure to fold in a zero-tolerance tract about the horrendous consequences of being a junkie.

The final product should resemble a French cheese, with plenty of holes (or, ha ha, voids!) all over it, with much the same flavour – but this isn’t a Summer Hollywood bag of revels, but a mellower dish. It should float on the senses, being challenging and spicy at times, sometimes scrumptious and inviting.

Serve in individual bowls and let everyone take from it what they wish.

Trip: A Venn Diagram* of 'Enter the Void'

Click to enlarge. Or, better still, don't.
*May not actually be a Venn diagram.

Blue Collar Professionalism: A Review of ‘The Town’

Armoured car robberies. Divided loyalties. Love across social boundaries. A single-minded FBI agent. These are not elements which sound fresh, even if they do instantly push reliable buttons of escapist entertainment. If Michael Mann did not put a lid on the genre with Heat, then surely David Mamet did with Heist? The former expanded everything to an epic framework of isolationist emptiness, the latter honed in on the mechanics of the con and found them to be hollow too. But the heist film lives on, and is now tackled by Ben Affleck in his follow-up to his debut Gone Baby Gone. The Town is a disappointment, but it’s an immersive one.

Affleck casts himself in the lead role, a Charlestown, Boston native and professional bank robber. Not that professionalism is the focus of the film: the details in the robbery sequences (microwaving security tapes, bleaching away prints and fibres) are engrossing, but there are no meticulous scenes of planning and organisation. This is a day-job for Affleck’s Doug MacRay and his gang: they’re normal people, not single-minded automatons. This allows the film to ground itself in the everyday existence of the characters, their barbecues and casual social connections. Like the Boston neighbourhood of Gone, Baby, Gone, Charlestown is here a grim and hopeless place which nevertheless the residents take deep pride in (“like it was something they’d accomplished”).

This focus on a locality, as well as the criminal milieu and downbeat plotting, call to mind Antoine Fuqua’s recent Brooklyn’s Finest, and The Town suffers from many of the same problems. Fuqua is better at sloshing in the dark dramatic pulse of the seediness he depicts; Affleck’s skill is the perhaps more mature even-handed depiction of protagonists that would be turned into caricatures by a director with less understanding of his setting (Affleck grew up in a nearby neighbourhood). Such an approach harkens back to similar American thrillers of the 1970s, films like Cruising and The French Connection, in which criminal activity was endemic of social disenfranchisement.

For my money Affleck’s debut was better at revealing the tension between glossy narrative simplification (bound up with media saturation) on the one hand, and personal moral imperatives on the other. When, in The Town, a character who is being forced to betray a friend asserts “I’m a person”, it’s the cry of a character in a genre piece trying to be more than the mechanics of her role in the drama. This is a fascinating approach to the issue of realism and drama, and it bubbles away beneath the surface throughout (once again Affleck uses the CSI series as an abutment to his own methodology).

As a technical exercise, it is in the film’s final third that it most impresses. A robbery at a Boston landmark devolves into a gun battle which can stand amongst cinema’s best, even though there is the lingering suspicion that the pyrotechnics are undermining good work elsewhere. When Neil McCauley moves to kill a member of his gang who betrayed him in Heat it is an expression of his newfound personal freedom; when The Town begins moving in the same circles, it feels like lazy playing to the gallery.

As a consolidation piece (of Affleck's directorial skill, of Jeremy Renner's credentials as an angry young sociopath, of Boston's de facto positioning as recession era every-America) there is much to admire. Indeed, while it feels unremarkable for much of its running time, it has been two days since I visited The Town and I'm itching to go back, fearing I missed of neglected some of its subtler topography. This alone makes it the best splashy American crime offering for some time.

Running Up That Hill: A Review of 'Salt'

Why name a film Salt? And a Hollywood star vehicle blockbuster at that? This question concerned me before I saw the film, and it and many, many others echoed unanswered around my brain after it had finished. But only for about an hour, after which it is hard to remember much of anything about this contemporary espionage action thriller.

The pitch: Angelina Jolie plays CIA operative Evelyn Salt who is accused of being a Russian sleeper agent. Films have been predicated on less, it’s true, but Salt takes minimal set-up to new extremes. In a half-hearted attempt to compensate it scatters brief and unenlightening flashbacks throughout, which only serve to emphasize the shallowness of the exercise.

Within minutes our protagonist is on the run, and watching Jolie run is the true purpose of this film, even though she runs like an eight-year-old girl being egged on by a demanding father at sports day. Salt’s sprinting athleticism does not so much dominate the film as it is the film, her movements through diverse spaces in leaps and bounds operating in the same manner as hyperactive editing in a Tony Scott film, or costumes and masks in a superhero narrative: it is the principle organising schemata around which all else revolves (check out an athletic act of vengeance towards the end, or compare the depictions of her body in the opening and closing scenes). The model is overtly Bourne-esque, but where Damon flinched Jolie pouts, moving as she does into each encounter with the innate knowledge that the framing, choreography and wirework will all be on her side.

Charitable viewers might call the sensations of the first act ‘ambiguity’, although I prefer ‘rudderlessness’. The third and fourth reels appear to have been lost, and moments after her flight from the authorities Salt is embroiled in the assassination of a foreign leader that in any other film would be the finale (it is foreshadowed accordingly, in a manner inescapably similar to that parodied by Shane Black in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and which could be called ‘Power Plant Climax’ syndrome). Having got this out of the way, Salt then casts around aimlessly for more drama, and goes off the rails in the same manner that seasons of 24 were wont to do at about the eighth episode.

The central conceit of highly trained undercover Russians attempts to commingle anxieties of the cold war and contemporary fears of terrorist sleeper cells, but it’s hard not to think of the recently exposed real-life agents in America whose political and strategic irrelevance would have been far more intriguing a focus, and would seem to be a better fit for both this cast (with quiet character actors like Liev Schreiber and Chiwetel Ejiofor in supporting roles) and director Phillip Noyce, whose Jack Ryan thrillers Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger would laugh Salt out of the situation room.

Then there’s the racism, which somehow manages to be both outdated and bland while still offending – writer Kurt Wimmer seems unaware that the cold war ever ended, or even that the Soviet Union dissolved. One cannot go too far critiquing the film for its one-dimensional and broadly villainous Ruskies, as the presentation of the American Commander-in-Chief – played, appropriately, by an actor named Hunt Block, who I hope was cast for that reason alone – is stupefyingly basic. President Block’s utter lack of charisma, characterisation, or distinguishing features (even the aforementioned 24 has moved on from white male leaders) seems to codify within Salt a response to any critique of its anti-Russia sentiment.

With an America, and Americans, this boring, we almost cheer the ushanka-wearing vodka-swilling black-coat-wearing Kalashnikov-wielding bastards on for wanting to spice the place up with a little … seasoning.

Inter Action: The Expendability of Star Power

The action hero is dead. Tom Cruise may strut his stuff across the globe in Knight and Day, but he is little more than an animated corpse, marking time until a retirement that is closer, and more comprehensive, than ever before. The failure of the Tomster’s most recent vehicle has been well covered by the trade press (see, for example, JoBlo), and it is tempting to see it manifesting the beginning of the end of the star system as we know it.

Tempting, but perhaps not entirely accurate. Certainly, along with Angelina Jolie’s Salt, Knight and Day feels like the last gasp of this kind of front-heavy filmmaking, all star wattage, a credible but non-authorial director employed (Phillip Noyce and James Mangold respectively), and a plot which turns everything into an undeveloped McGuffin in order to better focus on the face and body of the star. Yet Salt’s box office figures were not unhealthy (roughly making back its budget in the US, as opposed to Knight and Day’s domestic loss of nearly $50 million), and poor ticket sales can easily be blamed on a combination of recession-hit consumers (and inflated cinema ticket prices) and the proliferation of free media (including pirated recent releases).

The summer of 2010 has also seen a concerted consolidation of an alternative: the ensemble action film. This is not a new genre, but it is certainly coming of age, and seems to be crowding individual star vehicles and buddy films out of multiplexes. The wannabe titan of the bunch was of course Sylvester Stallone’s The Expendables, which took much mileage (all of it, actually) from the action credentials of the cast. Unfortunately, the concept never quite made it off the drawing board, leaving the likes of Terry Crews and Randy Couture (who?) to fill out the special ops team, rather than the intended Wesley Snipes and Steven Segal (who somehow gain credibility by turning the job down). We are still left with Sly, Jet Li, Jason Statham, Dolph Lundgren and Mickey Rourke. Arnie and Brucie have cameos. But there’s no excitement to this agglomeration, and it’s all a bit like a High School reunion – everyone pretends to have a good time, and they dance a little with each other, but at the end of the evening they’re all leaving wondering why they came at all and going home to their frumpy wives. We’ve all moved on.

Marginally more successful was The A-Team, which was polite enough to cast talented actors who could ape their televisual antecedents without overly humiliating themselves. Whenever they talked about their moral dilemmas, or their dreams, we winced; but the easy camaraderie of the group was more convincing than The Expendables, and was more successfully engineered into the plotting (what little of it there was). Better still was the blatant A-Team rip-off from earlier in the Summer, The Losers. Moving with a light touch not evident in the effects-heavy, noise-tastic splurge of Hannibal Smith’s plans coming together, The Losers was like a glass of cheap fruit squash: of no nutritional value and with a plastic taste, but just what you need on a hot day. “The bit when we were on fire was my favourite, but the shootout, man, that was good times,” says Chris Evans’ character Jensen towards the beginning. This is the action film as hanging out; movement as breezy weightless spectacle.

Both The A-Team and The Losers depict a team of American soldiers betrayed by the CIA on foreign soil, who then fight their way back to America and end up in the Port of Los Angeles (their term) to face down the villain. Their appeal is spending time with alpha males whose non-threatening easiness with each other can be read either as the re-emergence of the unapologetic macho identity, or a desperate scramble to convince us that such uber-masculinity is still vital in a world of metrosexuals and post-traumatic stress disorder. But both films consistently undermine their males, like John McClane’s blue-collar loser in Die Hard, and in this they vary radically from The Expendables, with its valorisation of muscular display and violent triumph at the expense of logic, coherence, or significance. For all its inference of unity, Stallone’s film is about male action in isolation.

Whether this move towards ensemble adventures will continue remains to be seen, although it is worth mentioning some forthcoming Marvel projects. Thor, directed by Kenneth Branagh for some reason, has unknown Chris Hemsworth in the lead role, while The Avengers (due, exhaustively, in 2012) is designed around this group dynamic. Perhaps the assembly of a team is becoming the de facto expression of relaxed homosocial banter, while lone heroes are expected to suffer their loneliness as inaccessible martyrs, as in The Dark Knight. So, speaking of Christopher Nolan, let me end by pointing out that even a film as relentlessly subjective and isolationist as a thriller set inside dreams still relies upon squad-based plotting and humour (“don’t be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling”). For all the readings applied to Inception we might also add that it emplots the conflict between the successful and enjoyable experience of group enterprise with the ever-present spectre of personal secrecy and isolationism, and leaves us in limbo as to the victor of this ontological battle.

Flights of Fancy: An Essay on 'Con Air': Parts 6 - 7

Part 6: Penitentiary Wars and Love Songs: Flirting and Power

Laura Mulvey’s seminal essay ‘Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema’ describes the manner in which women are treated cinematically. Mulvey sees them as objects to be looked at by a male-centred camera gaze; their presence “freezes” the story, as they are presented for erotic contemplation. She mentions the trend in 1980s Hollywood to remove such elements from action films by the invention of the ‘buddy film’, in which the interaction between two male stars is given primacy at the expense of the development of heterosexual relationships in the narrative.
    In The Rock, when Stanley Goodspeed states he will “do his best”, his veteran guide to Alcatraz remonstrates: “Your best? Losers always whine about their best, winners go home and fuck the prom queen.” Goodspeed cocks the gun in his hand and explains that his girlfriend was the prom queen. It is a moment of defiant heterosexual bravado, but it also has elements of the flirtatious. In Con Air, such homosocial one-upmanship is pushed further towards explicit male-on-male sexual energy, which – given both its marginalized and stigmatised position within American culture but also the conventions of the action genre and especially that of the prison film – could potentially carry with it overtones of rape and violence. One of the most surprising aspects of Con Air is, for the most part, a disavowal of the sexual deviancy of both convicts and non-dominant sexuality.
    Cyrus Grissom, orchestrator of the escape plan and uber-alpha male among alpha males, is fawned over by the other convicts. Pinball Parker is described as Cyrus’ boyfriend by a DEA agent using Parker as a human shield. Shortly following this, and after Parker has failed in securing an apology from Cyrus for calling him a “two bit dope fiend”, Cyrus comments that Cameron Poe’s involvement in the brief hostage crisis was “truly nice work.” Later, Cyrus takes Poe’s side over a decision regarding the fate of the remaining prison guards whom Diamond Dog wishes to execute: Poe winks at Diamond Dog at the end of the exchange, like a romantic lead who has gotten the better of a love rival. “A self-educated man” Poe says approvingly when Cyrus mentions that he learned nothing from his father – again, the line plays like flirtacious banter.

    The antagonism between Poe and Billy Bedlam seems to have no basis, but the boiling-point for it comes at the point that Bedlam discovers Poe’s personal items, particularly those concerning his daughter. “I knew you was a punk, and I was right,” Bedlam announces, and his revelation could well stem not so much from uncovering Poe’s lie about the length of his sentence than about his pronounced heterosexuality, evidenced by a wife and child. (This revelation is symbolised through a cuddly toy which becomes vital to the mise-en-scene). Poe’s own conversion to the all-masculine world of the penitentiary is hinted at in the montage of his life behind bars. On a care package sent by his wife: “those pink coconut things have made me quite popular. Met a guy the other day, Baby-O, he sure does love ‘em.” Deconstruction of such a line seems unnecessary.
    There are numerous further examples, the most direct of which are on the extended cut of the film (Poe: “I like black cherry jello.” Cyrus: “You like black cherry jello? I like black cherry jello. And I like you.”).
    These are veiled ideas, but they hint at the peculiarly American fear of prison as a place of inevitable sodomy and sexual debasement (The 25th Hour being the most obvious example of this on film). Rather than suggest that the plane full of hardened criminals is a place of sexual threat, the film instead creates a small community of like-minded sexual liberals (barring Jonny-23, who is despised by ringleader Cyrus). The transsexual convict Sally-Can’t-Dance is at no point threatened or abused by anyone except our hero (who cannot bring himself to land a punch and so slaps her). Cyrus is aware and accepting of her life choices (he tells her to scratch the eyes out of any police, as he stuffs a clip of ammunition in her cleavage).

    The conditions between the prisoners suggest a need for alliance and an acceptance of sexual difference – but not the sexual normality which is defined by Poe, which is symbolised through his waiting family, itself encapsulated in the fateful bunny which is brandished as a symptom of his betrayal by both Billy Bedlam and Cyrus, before finally being reclaimed by Poe and presented to his child. It is, however, “a little dirty”, the conflict over Poe’s normative sexuality having left its scars.
    This comfortable homosocial environment can also be seen as reflective of the action genre itself, and a development of the buddy movie’s excision of female agency and aesthetics from the principle narrative. Action films are primarily for men, and there is an element of aesthetic pleasure in the spectacle of another well-toned male torso barely concealed by an ever-dirtying white vest. Con Air goes some way toward acknowledging the inherent acceptance of man-on-man appreciation which terrifies other films into violent debasement and objectification of women (I would argue the examples of the threatened Bishop and the pretty Trisha are too tame to count). In this it is truly unique within the normative and often sexually immature world of the genre.

Part 7: Concluding Thoughts

I have experienced a tension in writing this piece, exposed or not, between a colloquial tone justifying the analysis of Con Air while also engaging in a (hopefully) lightly humorous drawing out of both the ridiculousness of the film and what could be perceived as the ridiculousness of studying it with any academic sincerity; this sincerity itself being the opposite pole, one of an attempted rational engagement with concepts of postmodernity, narrative and gender issues which understands Con Air as a symptomatic cultural artefact.
    The purpose of the above, then, has not been an attempt at a rhetorical flourish through perverse subject choice; but nor has it been a dry deconstruction of a piece of cinema. This is one of the challenges of both Con Air and the study of contemporary Hollywood blockbuster cinema. Such films offer themselves as empty spectacle, and do so with such competent craftsmanship for this stated goal that to understand them as, if not culturally meaningful, then certainly symptomatically indicative of prevailing cultural ‘turns’ (postmodernism, masculine studies) and the theoretical frameworks applied to these shifts (the work of Baudrillard, Jameson, et al) is to invite the accusation of frivolity.
    Con Air seems to me to go out of its way to invite such use as an evidentiary document, and in addition to the above the film contains potentially complex and at the very least unnecessarily problematic viewpoints on race and ethnic identity and the utility and consequences of incarceration, to name but two further avenues of study. This may not necessarily make it a smarter film than its peers (and I tread wearily around the issue of artistic value linked to the successful fulfilment of authorial intention, the hairline fractures within which thinking the modern art movement began to show many years previously) but it in my mind makes it more interesting. It remains a piece of entertainment in which men in vests flee from explosions in slow motion; however, the hollowness of both the sentiment and the spectacle on display seem to offer more methodological grip for investigative analysis than other examples of American action cinema.
    It was at no point my intention here to suggest that Con Air is a masterpiece (although that argument can of course be made). It was rather my goal to intimate the ways in which popular cinema can offer intriguing discourses on a multiplicity of subjects without being necessarily overt or academic about it, and to use Con Air for this purpose because in my own mind it is a superlative example of this.

Flights of Fancy: An Essay on 'Con Air': Part 5

Part 5: Reasons To Rehabilitate: The Use of The Feminine

The protagonist of Con Air is fighting to get back to his blonde wife and angelic child (and along the way he protects the honour of a female prison guard from a rapist). The codification of women as passive objects to be obtained at the heroic conclusion of the narrative is widespread in Hollywood films – the desire for a heterosexual relationship and masculine environmental control interpreted as a great cultural leveller. Poe’s wife Tricia does little of consequence, and Guard Bishop exists in much the same role as Poe’s obligatory black friend – to be imperilled, used by the villains and saved by the hero.
    Despite their conservative use within the narrative, the female characters are surprisingly free of objectification. Tricia is a married woman, a mother, and un-sexual (the possibility for a steamy scene in the opening minutes is avoided, presumably due to her pregnancy). Larkin’s assistant Ginny clearly has an unspoken affection for him, but this plot goes nowhere and she is never used as anything other than a professional at work (if a slightly wimpy one: “All those prisoners on one plane” she says apprehensively at the start of the film, which Larkin flippantly dismisses). Her twinning with Tricia in one of the last shots of the film explicates the unconditional existence of female affection in the world, and the gaudy uncomplicated nature of it (through the bank of glowing lights behind them):

    Guard Bishop is treated as nothing but a sex object by rapist Johnny 23 (“When you wake up, I’m gonna be Johnny 24!”), but his viewpoint is undermined by the marginalized and lecherous positioning of his character (“Don’t treat women like that!” yells Poe as he knocks Johnny out). The unconscious rapist is in effect castrated in the finale, his arm (the symbol of his violent virility, carrying a tattoo for each victim) torn off and left dangling on handcuffs. (The only presence in the film to invite objectification as a female sex object is the male cross-dressing convict Sally Can’t-Dance, about more in Part 6).
    One of the only times Steve Buscemi’s crisply cool sociopath Garland Greene talks about his own crimes is to state that “this one girl, I drove through three states wearing her head as a hat.” It is unclear whether this “girl” is a woman or a child. Poe’s response to this claim is to insulate himself from the arbitrary sickness of Greene by reminding himself that today is his daughter’s birthday. A subtle but important connection is drawn between Greene’s crimes and, in opposition to these, the utopian life Poe expects when united with Casey.
    It is Greene’s actions when he meets an eight-or-nine year old girl in a trailer park near Lerner Air Field which redefine his character. They talk and sing bland songs inside a dry swimming pool, and a jump-cut forces the audience to assume Greene has murdered the girl. When we later see her waving goodbye to the convicts’ plane, it is clear that Greene is to be seen in a new light. This allows his escape from maximum security isolation to be a happy ending.
    The poverty-stricken girl has for Greene been a “walking, talking reason to rehabilitate” (as Guard Bishop said to Poe of his own daughter). This man, who has perpetrated dozens of motiveless killings, is redefined by a single non-violent meeting. In discussing the presentation of paedophiles in the media, Yvonne Jewkes states that “the moral panic over paedophilia has perpetrated the notion that sexual dangerousness resides in strangers and that those strangers are not like ‘us’.” (Media and Crime, p97). Greene is indeed a stranger – isolated within his own vehicle for prisoner transport, gagged like Hannibal Lector, and attired in a white jumpsuit with the word SEPARATEE emblazoned on it, he is treated by society as a virulent pathogen.

    While he is dangerous, he is never labeled a paedophile, even though the tea party between himself and the child hinges on the threat of abuse, not least in the disturbing point-of-view shot that closes the scene. Greene’s violence and cruelty are spoken of, but not depicted: a moment in the extended cut of the film hints at his premeditated and unnecessary murder of a guard (“feel better?” asks Cyrus when he sees the body) – while this omits directly presenting the murder, it still failed to make the final cut, presumably in part because it makes the happy ending of Greene’s escape more discernibly worrying.
    It is left to Cyrus to be a threat to the little girls of this world. “The last thing little Casey Poe ever gets to smell will be my stinking breath,” he says to Poe with lasciviousness. “You ain’t getting near my daughter,” Poe retorts later, and it is this reminder of Cyrus potential paedophiliac qualities which most justify his overwrought punishment and death. 
Con Air treats women conservatively as objects under threat or objects of reward. However, it presents pre-pubescent girls as the ultimate engines behind correct action, as Poe’s desire to meet his daughter are his explicit motivations, while Greene’s rehabilitation suggests that love and mercy shown to a child are enough to overwrite heretofore unremitting sociopathy.
    I hope to here have indicated the conventional approach to the feminine taken by Con Air, which is reinforced by its depiction of (inevitably female) children as angels of redemption. This groundwork is necessary for the following exploration of the strange and unexpected presentation of masculine identity in the film.