Friday 28 May 2010

Speaking Of The Apocalypse: A Review of 'Pontypool'

It is true of films as it is of people that they can be too smart for their own good. They utilise their cleverness to outsmart you, leaving you befuddled and – maybe – impressed, but certainly not rewarded. As a result of successes such as ‘The Usual Suspects’ and ‘The Sixth Sense’ the last fifteen years have seen the prevalence of the “twist ending” grow, such reversals inevitably becoming either rote and expected or unfathomable and bewildering. It is a rare film (and, indeed, person) that employs cleverness not to outwit you but to reward you, and that has enough faith to methodically reveal its treasures without feeling the need to hurriedly pull the rug from under you lest you become fidgety.

‘Pontypool’ is such a prize experience, and even if it did not feature a mesmerising central performance, subtly rich atmospherics and confident use of a small budget, it would deserve acclaim simply for thinking its ideas through properly and trusting the strength of an interesting concept.

It would be discourteous to speak too much about what these ideas are, as coming to the film cold is a distinct advantage, even though it lacks overt narrative surprises. Suffice to say that it is set in the radio booth of a local station for a small Canadian town, into which strange reports come concerning the behaviour of the locals. Rather than venture beyond the borders of the converted church of Radio 660 the film instead becomes tighter, more claustrophobic, genuinely engrossing and quietly horrific.

“Mrs French’s cat is missing…” intones Stephen McHattie’s Grant Mazzy in the film’s opening, and his gravel-hued voice subsequently offers the viewer what seems a solid anchor, even as more and more clues suggest that it is language that is what should be feared in this world.

We return to the missing cat several times in the film in ways which are easy to overlook: this is just one subtle repeated idea which is used to provide a structure which, the more it is developed, questions the very nature of structure itself. Does the repetition of an idea create meaning or destroy it? Familiarity is vital to successful discourse, and rhetoric thrives on repetition, so what would be the consequences of a requirement to de-familiarise oneself from the things that, arbitrarily, are concrete?

These might be strange questions, and I am being purposefully vague, but it is clear ‘Pontypool’ is playing games with the idea of apocalypticism, and the film would be best read with recourse to James Berger’s rewarding book-length study of end-time thinking ‘After The End.’ In it, Berger speaks of the trauma of the apocalypse rendering the event itself unreadable, and texts from the Bible onwards cop out by conceiving of the post-apocalyptic in pre-apocalyptic ways: in the Book of Revelation, when an angel “measures the new Jerusalem, it uses preapocalyptic, human measures.” It should be left to another reviewer less cautious of spoilers to investigate the film as it relates to Jacques Derrida’s concept of language and the “absent referent”, but ‘Pontypool’ should certainly be seen as grappling with serious issues regarding apocalypticism, a way of thinking which can so easily lead to lazy satire (‘Zombieland’) or unenlightening teleological religiosity (‘I Am Legend’).

If such sociological enquiry fails to get your blood pumping, then never fear – there are plenty of well-handled shock moments, including a nasty ‘cold-turkey’ sequence which, apart from its overwrought punch line, is quietly but pervasively upsetting. These and other moments of tension are insidiously effective, and make ‘Pontypool’ one of the best films I have seen in recent years. Seek it out. Just make sure when in company who have yet to see it you force yourself to be as tight-lipped as the tagline demands: “Shut Up Or Die!”




Sunday 23 May 2010

22 Things I Learned From 'Robin Hood'

1. We have Robin Hood to thank for the Magna Carta.

2. It takes a band of men less than a week to sack a dozen towns from York to Peterborough.

3. All English monarchs are idle, self-involved and idiotic. French monarchs are strategically minded, cunning, and intelligent.

4. ‘The Odyssey’ is a strange, but welcome, inspiration for the second act of a movie with this subject matter.

5. Robin Hood is a ‘Big Society’ Tory.

6. Women may command troops in battle, but only if their troops consist of children, and their presence is in no way vital or commented upon.

7. The repeated use of day-for-night filming techniques in the twenty-first century smacks first of genius, then of weirdness, and finally of boredom.

8. French rapists prefer cunnilingus.

9. Director Ridley Scott can do ‘historical epic’ in his sleep, but ‘cheeky family fun’ is not his forte.

10. Historical accuracy be damned: Cate Blanchett demands foundation and she demands it by the ton.

11. Convoluted scripts aren’t necessarily good scripts.

12. Innuendo-laced comments about Little John are funny.

13. Mark Addy’s boisterous portrayal of Friar Tuck is most avowedly not funny.

14. Protagonists in Hollywood fare must find meaning and purpose only through a new understanding of what a great man their father was (see also ‘Iron Man 2’, ‘Star Trek’)

15. When the hero rides towards battle a subordinate must throw him a sword.

16. Even when creeping political correctness demands an absurdly re-imagined Maid Marian, it is still acceptable to vilify both the Church and the French.

17. If you’re going to feature a beach-based swords-and-arrows battle as your climax, why not go ahead and make a movie about the Battle of Marathon instead?

18. There was more twelfth century ambience in thirty seconds of the recent ‘Valhalla Rising’ than there is in all 140 long minutes of this.

19. Peter Jackson should sue for royalties.

20. Robin Hood spent more time launching military campaigns on the seashore than he did as an outlaw in the woods.

21. When the animated closing credits of your film are more ingenious – and bloodier – than what has come before, there’s something amiss.

22. If this is the best this creative team can come up with then the inevitable sequels are going to be very hard work.



Saturday 15 May 2010

The Pieces Matter: A Review of 'Luther' (BBC1) and Thoughts On Dramatic Structure

A cursory glance at the list of reducible units of narrative deduced by Vladimir Propp from an analysis of Russian folk tales reveals that his work remains relevant and is fruitfully applicable to the new BBC television drama Luther. It is as though the casting of Idris Elba in the title role was justification enough for the existence of this weekly serial, and anything else in the work drawn from somewhere other than stock cultural situations and dynamics would be an unwanted distraction.


Indeed, Elba is mostly effective as intense London detective John Luther. Walking with a distinctive bob, and grasping his forehead when in contemplation as though his mind moves almost too fast for him to articulate, he’s an engaging protagonist, even if he is a carbon replication of Vincent D’Onofrio’s near-autistic detective in Law & Order: Criminal Intent, who was himself a more disengaged Will Graham from Michael Mann’s adaptation of Thomas Harris’ Manhunter.


While Graham’s psychological insights and instability were enforced onto the mise-en-scene around him in that film, Luther is unaided by simplistically cast supporting actors and locations. A child kidnapper (not rapist, presumably for watershed broadcast reasons) is run down in a cavernous and abandoned industrial site. A potential killer resides in a thirtieth floor Barbican apartment. The estranged wife (a Humanitarian Lawyer, so lots of chance for character development there) works in city office with glass elevators.


More derivatively, Luther’s immediate superior brings him back to the force after a suspension following the near-death of a suspect that still haunts him. His new partner is a fresh-faced rookie who applied “three times a week in writing” to work with him. Someone higher up the chain of command worries that Luther is a loose canon who could sink the entire unit. I could go on.


Perhaps a more rewarding task, however, would be to question why such elements are once again being trotted out. Partly, it is the sincerest form of flattery: director Brian Kirk (clearly a recent film school graduate) mimics the visual language of Heat-period Michael Mann, while creator and writer Neil Cross plays the unexciting trick of imbuing characters with a vague knowledge of their structural purpose (dialogue such as “was that the speech?” and “let’s have that talk where I tell you such-and-such” abound). This latter device is welcome, but hardly fresh, and was inevitably better done by Steven Soderbergh in the Ocean’s films.

Familiarity, of course, is a warm blanket, and we must be reminded of the following exchange from that masterpiece of satire Futurama, when Leela attempts to make the television show Fry has written more dramatic:


Fry: Married? Jenny can’t get married.

Leela: Why not? It’s clever, it’s unexpected.

Fry: But that’s not why people watch TV. Clever things make people feel stupid, and unexpected things make them feel scared.


Fry is correct to some degree. A genuinely dramatic piece of detective entertainment will perfectly poise the audience on the edge of realisation, but also make them rely on the final push to come from the protagonist. I wrote briefly in my review of Iron Man 2 about the tendency of Hollywood blockbusters to actively discourage audience involvement by crafting denouements so obtuse that we can only shrug in bemusement at their solving. Luther goes too far the other way, for reasons that feel lazy. We all guess that the gun is in the dog long before this is revealed because, in a scene that sticks out like a sore thumb, the dog is the only thing seen being cremated. During a coffee break Luther realises that the person he is interrogating is the culprit of the crime; returning to the interrogation room the suspect is clearly in on the fact that he now knows. Dramatic tension remains, but resolutely at a singular level. Multi-dimensional interaction is deemed too difficult. Rather than the villain seducing Luther’s wife by impersonating a normal person who was molested by the detective, she instead attacks the woman and hisses threats.


Another reason for the wholesale embrace of cliché must be related to the BBC’s budget and public profile issues, and the corporation’s hope for a “sure thing”. It is an unfortunate surrendering to populism, especially considering Channel 4 are both incapable and uninterested in creating anything as interesting as their now-finished Prime Suspect.


I never felt stupid during Luther, nor scared (even though, in the ruthless Alice Morgan, the show attempts to emulate Millennium’s terrifying demon Lucy Butler). At my most charitable I saw a production which was certifying itself in the fundamentals, before hopefully edging into more interesting territory. Unfortunately, these fundamentals consisted entirely of the aforementioned Proppian narratemes: the ‘Absentation’ or broken family unit, the villain’s ‘Reconnaissance’ of the hero (aided by Google), and even the ‘Receipt of the Magical Agent’ in the form of the fragments of the murder weapon. Such obvious formalist elements, presented straight as structural components, leave no room for the airless and uncomfortable moments of real life, nor do they allow room for the exploration of a drama at more than one level. The power of the scene in which the protagonist kicks in a door when he hears his lover is sleeping with someone else comes not just from the aggression, but from the raw directness of it among the multi-layered complications that surround it in the lives lived around such moments. Violence shocks because it is direct and clear, a clarity which is lost without a comparison to the muddle of the everyday.


The runaway popularity both commercially and critically (initially, at any rate) of the U.S. show 24 testifies to the fact that people enjoy entertainment that is not only very basic, but revels in how basic it is by recycling the same information scene-by-scene. Luther might not be this bad, but it certainly does not want us to be left in the dark, either in terms of plot information or character motivation.


Cultural theorist Fredric Jameson wrote in 1984 that to understand, or “cognitive[ly] map” the emerging postmodern world of digital connectivity and apparent creeping social homogenisation “will involve the invention of remarkable new languages and forms.” When I first saw Michael Mann’s (sorry, him again) 2006 film Miami Vice I thought that the first twenty minutes of that film might just be an illustration of such a new language, as it presented a world of simultaneity, complexity and unstoppable motion without offering a clarification beyond its visual existence. I now suspect that I may have been wrong, that the mapping of the psychology of the twenty-first century will take place through the medium of shows such as Luther, storytelling that reassure us that everything is deducible, that we are able to keep up, and that the only tragedy that can befall us is dramatic, and so understandable, and even cathartic.

Tuesday 11 May 2010

Bunker Buster: A Review of 'Iron Man 2'

There are certain moments in ‘Iron Man 2’, Jon Favreau’s sequel to his own 2008 Blockbuster comic book adaptation, in which the thundering roar of machine gun fire is so loud and so insistent it begins to edge the spectator into a sublime state of disinterest. One wonders why they felt the need to crank the engine of apathy up to such excesses at these times when it seems to hum along just fine without the aid of special effects and boringly disinterested plotting.

Mercifully, these onslaughts come towards the end of the film, although we have previously been asked not merely to suffer through but to judge both sassy and dramatic a fight between two robots set to a remix of Queen’s ‘Another One Bites The Dust’. Up until this descent, there is much to be entertained by. Robert Downey Jr. reprises his narcissistic playboy arms manufacturer, playing Tony Stark like a cross between the young Howard Hughes and a less insufferable Tom Cruise. Favreau directs with commendable looseness, allowing Downey and Sam Rockwell in particular to improvise as though they did not have a $170 million production riding on them (the only drawback: editing together such ad-libbing leads to distractingly dire continuity).

The problems begin to set in around the halfway mark, or perhaps the novelty just wears off. Poisoning himself to an early grave with his own thrill seeking, Stark recklessly commandeers his company’s entry in a Monaco grand prix, but is cut down mid-race by Mickey Rourke’s vengeful Russian physicist. Between Stark’s lithe panic at being challenged and almost bested, Rourke’s monolithic determination, and the unexpectedness of the harbour racetrack setting, the scene comes close to presenting something akin to storytelling.

After this, it all begins to spiral away, Rourke is neutered, the Wider Marvel Universe (TM) rears its unenlightening and one-eyed head, and dramatic tension bleeds away to nought. Don Cheadle’s Lt. Col. Rhodes is an exemplar: moving through scenes like driftwood, he is given little motivation and no character whatsoever, but merely does and says what is required of him by an increasingly desperate script.

During a scene in which the intriguing life-sucking corollary of Stark’s heroism is solved in the laziest fashion possible, it is hard not to be struck by the realisation that this film, and those like it, actively discourage thought. Like Downey’s other franchise grab ‘Sherlock Holmes’, any mystery displayed here is so convolutedly both dispersed and minute that the process of attempting to grasp it is highlighted as futile, even stupid (yes, we all guessed it involved The Map, but the obfuscated digital imprint of an entirely new element?).

While the first ‘Iron Man’ offered an interesting schemata of contemporary terrorism and the dream of a one-man American war machine finishing the job started by the Bush administration, ‘Iron Man 2’ is happy for the job to remain firmly done. Having, in his words, “privatised world peace”, Stark now functions as a human nuclear deterrent, although the implication that his sartorial weaponry keeps any other countries from attacking the United States sounds less like world peace and more like a globalised national dictatorship. Either way, the games that are played and the battles that are fought are between American companies and different factions of the military industrial complex. Vacuously, the finale takes place in the same exhibition space as the film’s opening demonstration of technical superiority by Stark, and both are just displays of meaningless flash and bang, of exorbitant financial expenditure without appreciation for human collateral.

It might be too much to ask for such Summer Entertainment to contain the trace of drama, but given the scale of the production one is certainly entitled to question the lack of precision. Perhaps when those who are today teenagers grow up, and realise their cultural memories are made of cheap, plastic-covered nothing, they will have a creative recession similar – but worse – than that generated by subprime mortgages and asset inflation. Only the quality of the inevitable ‘Iron Man 3’ will give us any clue as to whether it will be a double dip.