Well, I Do Have Some Thoughts...

A View of Destruction, From a Chicago Penthouse: A Review of 'Transformers: Dark of the Moon'

2011-06-30T14:14:00.000-07:00

“I think World War Two just started!” screams a character in Pearl Harbor, Michael Bay's Mission Accomplished take on world history. As historical revisionism it's a tad US-centric, if not wholly inaccurate. Never one to let a bad idea rest, and after re-tasking the Hoover Dam and the Pyramids of Giza in previous Transformers films, Bay now draws the Apollo programme, Sputnik and even Chernobyl into the swirling black hole whose event horizon is his own visualisation of World War Three. Only, you know, with giant robots.

Transformers:Dark of the Moon, as this third film will be called, worryingly comes out the same summer as Cars 2 and Hugh Jackman's Rock 'em Sock 'em Robot Bullshit, suggesting that any further Terminator films would be extraneous in our present era: the multinational conglomerate of Cyberdine Systems and GM Motors have already won this war. But before we can get to messing up the sheets/streets, we have the tedious business of peacetime to wade through (or, the Continuance of Boredom by Other Means) with screenwriter Ehren Kruger stickily holding our hands.

The economy is biting, and poor Sam Witwicky can't find work. His muscular frame may be busting out of his shirt, but he never gets to show it, and he's stuck in the worst kind of job-interview-montage that not even Shia LaBeouf's desperate, slightly confused mugging can save. Even his old comrade-in-arms Tyrese Gibson has quit the Air Force so he can supervise tow-tractors, a job the film considers so fitting for this sole black dramatic presence that he is forced to continue wearing his blue-collar overalls even during combat. Luckily, though, he proves useful later when it turns out he knows a bunch of guys living in motels with guns the size of Ikea floating shelves just waiting for a pick-up truck to take them to where the action is. Breathe in deep. Smell that? It's America.

Round up the old crew (except Megan Fox, she spoke out of turn, and women are just as replaceable as engine parts): the next stage of the war between Autobots and Decepticons is about to commence.

The unappealingly surly website Pajiba based their entire review of Transformers:Revenge of the Fallen around the size of Michael Bay's penis. It seems unfair to lay so much blame at Mr. Bay's door ("you can't direct!") while also thereby acknowledging the almost unparalleled dominance of his auteur signature. No-one – literally, not a soul – would cut from an extended prologue set during the space race featuring reconstructions of the moon landing, stock footage and digital recreations of Presidential addresses by Kennedy and Nixon, and the most glittering and pleasurable special effects work for some time to an unmotivated shot of (or rather, up) the bikini-clad ass of a lingerie model. In 3D.

So, while I give Michael Bay all due credit for being the most Michael Bayingest person in the universe, I still wish he'd tone it down a bit. With the Transformers franchise he has realised he is utterly bullet-proof, and he'll offer to take the audience out for dinner, but then keeps talking about how awesome it'll be later when he fucks us, but only later, after he's finished his hot wings, and maybe swung by Krispy Kreme, and closed a Mercedes product placement deal on his hands-free while fumbling down our pants. And finally, when we get fucked, we'll begrudgingly agree it was awesome. But until then we'll have to put up with tacky comic relief, urgently nonsensical plotting, and wild over-acting so pungent it made me gag. Indeed, of the two hours and thirty-four minutes to suffer through, there are only sixty or so of this film that bear thinking about.

Without any acknowledgement of dramatic timing, but rather just because the movie is over half-done and the majority of the budget has just been released to him, Bay slips Dark of the Moon into his unique and delirious third-act mode, injudicious narrative ellipses making you feel like you're playing a computer game with someone who keeps skipping those boring bits that explain plot and motivation: why are those soldiers there? What are those base-jumpers doing? How did those robots get taken hostage? Never mind – open fire! There's even a Doom-style RPG moment.

The motivation for Battle: Chicago is non-existent. Gotta lay waste to something, and with all the collapsing skyscrapers it would be little inappropriate to choose New York. In LA, back in 1988, John McClane jumped off the roof of a skyscraper as it blew up behind him, which was exciting. But for this franchise, Witwicky and the gang have to nearly fall out of a collapsing skyscraper, jump out the top, slide down the angled glass walls, shoot their way back in, evade a deadly robot, then fall out the building again as it's torn apart from the inside-out by a mechanical version of one of those worms from Dune. And that's but a small section of the fun that's had on the shore of Lake Michigan.

It's all there in the poster: a giant robot war machine, a Victoria's Secret model, city-wide devastation, and you, right in the middle of it. This beautiful emplacement is even augmented in the film with slow-motion that is genuinely sublime, in an Immanuel-Kant-bludgeoned-by-Jerry-Bruckheimer kind of way. The verisimilitude of some of these effects, finely detailed even when near-frozen in contorted and impossible scenarios – all bathed in a bright crunchy sunshine that seems to envelop you as well (this is perhaps the first 3D film to get the light balance right) – should short-circuit the logic centre of any brain over the age of twelve. The fact that it's all totally meaningless only adds to the rational spectator's exhilarated malaise.

The bad guys, after all, are called Decepticons, which doesn't really give them the opportunity to be bastions of goodwill. That said, for all their dignity and largesse, anything the Autobots said or did mostly blew past me like the lush instrumentals of Steve Jablonsky's absurd score. Those dastardly Decepticons, meanwhile, proved they were both more culturally sensitive and civic minded than their opponents by not only decamping to Chicago in the first place but setting fire to that city's awful Navy Pier. That they treat Patrick Dempsey with contempt takes them up yet another notch. (Did Jon Hamm say no to the role?). Meanwhile, Optimus Prime is still blabbing on about faith, not to mention frequently demonstrating that his top speed when in truck form is slower than his walking speed as a robot, which surely defeats the point of him ever being in truck form.

Quite accurately viewed by the press as the nadir of the contemporary summer blockbuster (from the positions of both resigned appreciation and resigned condemnation), Dark of the Moon is something to behold. For long stretches it jumps around yapping annoyingly like a chihuahua. The smashing and crashing is fun, but not a patch on the extended Rio bust-up of this year's earlier Fast Five. Hell, even Hasbro's other property G.I. Joe managed to outdo Bay at times with its frenetic imagination-on-the-run CGI deployment. But then there are times here when Bay hits his stride, and the slow-motion tumbles and crumbles are like $220m advertisements for themselves. It's like the guiltiest pleasures of Inception, but bigger and without all that talking. And since this film will make an extraordinary amount of money, you'd do well to get used to it. We're all Bay's bitches now.

Somehow, Satan Got Behind Me: A Review of 'Luther', Episode 1 of Season 2

2011-06-15T07:41:00.000-07:00

Mel Gibson's LA Detective Martin Riggs has done it. Arnold Schwarzenegger did it just before fighting off the apocalypse in End of Days. And now Idris Elba does it, putting a single bullet (kept, bizarrely, in the microwave) in a pistol, spinning the chamber, and putting it next to his temple over breakfast. Unsurprisingly, this being the opening sequence of the first episode of four in a new run of BBC One's crime drama Luther, the gun clicks empty. At which point DCI John Luther puts it down, finishes up his half drunk cup of coffee, and sets off to work.

I've no doubt this is something many public servants do on a Monday morning, but in the hands of this singularly improbable cop show it comes off precisely as an affect learned from The Big Book of Genre Conventions, rather than anything in the territory of a compelling character trait. In this way it is indicative, as Luther shows nothing in the way of originality, wit or style. For some reason, though, its creators care about the characters involved, even as they abuse them, undermine them, and pour them awkwardly into different moulds on a weekly basis to fit another generic template. This equivocal commitment is one of the things makes Luther so strangely addictive (you can read my piece on the pilot here, and the ridiculous final episode of the first season here).

The more things change the more they stay the same: DCI Teller is gone (hopefully back to drama school, for her sake) to be replaced by someone I could have sworn played a psychiatrist in season one, but who now heads up one of those “special crime units”, a phrase synonymous with “weekly cop show serial”. So, new sets and a slightly new dynamic, but of course writer Neil Cross must have people intone “I was once your adversary, but now we must work together”, as though these alliances were the stuff of Wagnerian myth, filtered through Hollywood taglines.

The most intriguing relationship remains that between Luther and Ruth Wilson's Alice Morgan, a calculating sociopath, currently incarcerated, and who Luther appears to be helping escape. Alice still has something of Millennium's Lucy Butler about her, and has the potential to be much more threatening than the villains-of-the-week who are trotted out, but the show continues to misuse her. It's as though two first-class actors had arrived prepared for a production of David Mamet's play Oleanna, but their director had re-heated some old CSI scripts instead. “Breathtakingly unerotic” she says of her surroundings, and she's right: beyond her and Luther's relationship (or rather, the potential of the relationship) the show has no sex and no passion. It wants to evoke a nightmarish city of gothic threat, but can't do better than some shadowy basements and hand-held pseudo-porn.

At least Luther avoids cod-rationality, and one can sense forces within pulling it to a darker place, a more scatological and anarchic territory of pain, suffering, but also delight. Bolted down and sealed up by rigorously dull plotting, these impulses simmer away, almost invisible. Yet there's something perverse in the colours of the outfit worn by the young woman Luther saves from consensual rape, and the hint at even more tenebrous delights in the shackling of her to a chair in straight-laced even-voiced Paul McGann's gloomy loft conversion. No doubt this potential will be squandered, but an eager viewer has to take what they can get. Alice Morgan is still scheming away, and one of the most thrilling cliff-hangers for me is whether she'll escape prison before her brown roots start to show even more disastrously beneath that arterial blood-red dye job.

For all these faults (and many, many more) it's more engaging than the BBC's other big budget cop serial, the jaunt-y and Italian-y Rufus Sewell-fueled Zen. Luther's London may be no less unrealistic and painful to watch than that show's English-language Rome, but where Zen's de facto tone was “fun”, Luther at least has a mite of Satanic energy lurking somewhere within it - something only fair considering the inevitable cop-show ingredients of murder, insanity and lust. That may be enough to get me through another three hours of this second season, otherwise it might be time to throw the book at this show. Criminal offence? Pedalling in genre porn.

Must Try Harder: A Review of 'X-Men: First Class'

2011-06-04T07:33:00.000-07:00

Let us start with a rhetorical question: If one is endowed with a genetic mutation (possibly nuclear-catalysed) which allows one to teleport, taking with oneself as many as three or four other people, would one stand idly by as several hundred missiles hurtled towards one and one's allies? If one is Azazel, a demonically red but otherwise characterless mutant as played by Jason Flemyng (really? yes, really) in the new X-Men film, then stand rigid waiting for molecular decimation is exactly what one does.

Well, the word “new” should here be heavily qualified. Inaugurated by Usual Suspects savant Bryan Singer in 2000, this film franchise is based on a wealth of Marvel comics material, has included a central “trilogy”, one dire spin-off, and now comes at 2011 with some kind of period prequel, all those tantalising character grievances and historical encrustations given their own place in the sun. Thus we witness the early lives of Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr, an Oxford professor with telepathic ability and a Holocaust survivor who can bend metal with his mind respectively. Lehnsherr, soon to become Magneto and Ian McKellan, is here played by Michael Fassbender, and is by far the most interesting of the group. Group? Yes, group. Extended recruitment and training montages introduce us to many more mutants, whose powers become steadily less interesting, and the film becomes bogged down in a peculiar kind of X-cess.

Rather than crafting anything that might resemble a story, director Matthew Vaughn and a host of credited (and no doubt several uncredited) writers play Dramatic Conflict Roulette™ for two hours. In the middle of a scene or sequence up will pop a mutant and their particular dilemma and/or burden, without any regard for tension or plotting. Call me unsympathetic if you must, but when the US and USSR are minutes away from nuclear armageddon, I couldn't care less about a big furry blue guy wrestling with his inner demons. It's not that Beast (his finally awarded moniker) is uninteresting, far from it – here is a guy who wants to look normal, undergoes a Jekyll-and-Hyde transformation when he tries a little genetic beautification, and as a consequence clearly harbours shockingly violent tendencies beneath his gosh-I'm-such-a-nerd-me Nicholas Hoult exterior. Interesting then, but when treated with such throwaway clumsiness not in any way engaging.

But there's plenty more random, unstructured characters and arcs floating around. A film following the friendship of Lehnsherr and Xavier, including an awkward simmering rivalry regarding both their class differences and the sought-for affection of the latter's sister Raven, which finally erupts into conflict (and which we were promised) would be an effective thriller, especially if shot with the cool style and grown-up irony of Singer's earlier films and Matthew Vaughn's own Layer Cake. Instead this storyline jostles for position amongst the crowd, the early promise of subtitled foreign-language scenes and Nazi influence of US government policy in the post-war years soon hastily forgotten.

Nor do any of these elements build to any sort of crescendo. There's brief pleasure to be had from the establishing of the Cuban Missile Crisis scenario in which the X-Men make their (not-quite-public) first appearance, but any sense of synthesis is eradicated once several unremarkable mutant fights start taking place, none impacting upon the other, all rendered palpably mute by ropey digital matte-work. The film loses track of its own rules, and so we end up with Flemyng's red teleporter, standing on a beach, waiting patiently to be eviscerated. Why? Because it's not his turn to have a character moment. It's like watching a pop group politely defer to each other's solos.

Aspects of the subject matter suggest that the intention was perhaps to do a proper version of Alan Moore's graphic novel Watchmen – the film version of which Zack Snyder made a cocked hat of several years ago – yet First Class's excerpts of JFK on period televisions and some nicely 60s touches (the cushions, the curtains, Xavier's willingness to use the word “groovy” in his chat-up lines) are undermined by a total disregard of the politics of the time, or any politics at all. Perhaps it will be argued that the film operates metonymically, the mutant powers a stand-in for various Othernesses, thus letting the film off the hook of actually being aware of, say, the civil rights movement, but the treatment of the sole black mutant is appalling. Rose Byrne's CIA agent along for the ride perhaps fares worse: the speed at which the film forces her to strip down to black stockings and suspenders gave me whiplash, but doesn't quite match the invidious misogyny of her final scene; in between these bookends entire hours go by in which she gets a line or two, despite being present in most scenes. (Maybe this is an homage to the lost-looking Famke Janssen in X-Men: The Last Stand, who – despite being the chief villain – hung around the edges of scenes like a waitress waiting to ask if the food is okay.)

To be a mutant is to be endowed with a gift that makes one different from everyone else, and so ostracised, but which can lead to radical self-empowerment. The extent to which the film does not understand its own concept is revealed when the idea is floated that a serum could be found which makes mutants “look normal”, but doesn't “affect their abilities”. Such an uncoupling of style and substance suggest the coldly fragmentary, unsynthesised format of X-Men: First Class, and most other superhero films bobbing and whizzing around the multiplexes lately. It's not that they lack the courage of their convictions, its that they don't have any convictions at all.

Clunk: A Review of 'Thor'

2011-05-24T15:50:00.000-07:00

What would an American Zoetrope superhero film look like? We perhaps came as close as we were going to with Thor, directed by erstwhile Laurence Olivier clone Kenneth Branagh. There’s not much of Branagh’s Olivier-esque intellectual poise and Oxbridge masculinity on display here, which is perhaps to be expected, but it’s the lack of paroxysmal twitches of insanity that most disappoints. Say what you like about Branagh’s 3 ½ hour uncut Hamlet, but his 1994 version of Frankenstein for Francis Ford Coppola’s production company was a deliriously pleasurable gothic grand guignol, revealing that to do justice to such source material it was necessary to remain truthful not just to the text itself but to its tone and its intent (Danny Boyle take note).

But of course, Marvel films exist within a tightly sealed environment that will broach nothing so definitive as an auteur signature. Just as a guiding creative light will spearhead the first episode or two of a television show in order to establish a template for those in their footsteps (stand up, Len Wiseman and Hawaii 5-O, or – more classily – Martin Scorsese and Boardwalk Empire), so Jon Favreau’s breezy-but-clunky aesthetic for Iron Man has become the de facto mode for this studio. Thor mimics this closely, and at times appealingly, but overall it’s the same sloppy product which has been churned out several times before.

At least this time there are some distracting details. Chris Hemsworth’s performance in the lead role has been made much of, and he is appealing, but hardly groundbreaking. The best moments occur in the second act, during our hero’s banishment from the twinkly CGI realm of Asgard to the drab cardboardscapes of New Mexico, as he interacts with a supporting cast including Natalie Portman (filling her one-film-a-month quota without anything further to note), Stellan Skarsgård (who surely should have been hired to fill out the throne room, but makes good cop of a research scientist instead), Kat Dennings (who gets the best lines) and Clark Gregg. Now, Gregg should get more attention than he does, being the glue that holds a lot of Marvel films together (that is, to each other), and he continues here to make what is a rather bureaucratic non-character into an entertaining rather than perfunctory presence. The same cannot be said for the showier Agent of SHIELD who continually makes post-credits appearances – The Avengers movie is coming soon, is it? Well, get on with it then, before everyone ceases to care.*

So on Earth we get a good old fish-out-of-water plot with some nice running gags, and it almost made me nostalgic for the early 1990s, when cinemas were full of such things. There’s something of Terminator 2 in Portman’s attempts to acclimatise the Norse God she has befriended to the niceties of coffee-ordering and breakfast-making. By contrast in the Other Realms we get plastic-looking sets, gods whizzing around like shooting stars, and Rene Russo’s most thankless paycheque yet. This Olympian material is handled better than it was in Clash of the Titans, but there remains something too explanatory, too literal, too banal in the staging which prevents the film from evoking the sought-after cod-profound quality of myth.

Somehow, through sheer velocity, Branagh managed to elevate Frankenstein to such heights, as though willing suspension of disbelief were a matter of centripetal force. While certain kaleidoscopic sequences do set out to dazzle in Thor, they are of a trend with other hyper-cut, orbital-scaled superhero fare, rather than the work of a director trying to bedazzle the audience with audacities. Amongst all the clamour the villainous plot contains slightly more nuance than normal, and is invested with some pathos, but it remains nothing more than moderately inflated sequel-minded trajectory-setting.

There were times when the film made me smile, times when I felt involved, but I suspect these were more down to a subconscious urge to get my money’s worth out of the experience, rather than genuine entertainment. It’s a suspicion which is becoming ever more prevalent. Stop the Marvel Universe. I want to get off.

* … too late.

22 Things I Learned From 'Fast Five'

2011-04-24T08:09:00.000-07:00

1. Briefings by hard-ass DEA agents are always delivered while disembarking a military plane.

2. Drug warehouses have less security than a local supermarket.

3. Uniform cops always take reading material with them to the bathroom.

4. Goatees require hair stylists.

5. South American criminal overlords, invariably played by Joachim de Almeida, are getting dumber by the year.

6. Police in Rio are equipped with top-of-the-line cruisers (for a refutation, see Elite Squad).

7. Female criminals, trained by Mossad, are only good for wearing bikinis and getting groped.

8. Car thieves aren’t bad guys, just misunderstood.

9. Brazilians aren’t misunderstood, they’re just all bad guys.

10. Eliding nearly all muscle car races from a series that has built a reputation (albeit infamous) on such things is a witty, but risky, approach.

11. The DEA have access to technology that can see through masks and scan entire cities in seconds, yet insist on transporting stolen criminal assets on unprotected passenger trains.

12. If wearing a vest were acting, Vin Diesel would be nominated for an academy award.

13. If sweating were acting, Dwayne Johnson’s head would win an academy award.

14. If having blue eyes were acting, Paul Walker would, well, still be a confused-looking beach bum.

15. Favela da Rocinha in Rio is swarming with the heroes of stalling franchises, and contractually requires sweeping helicopter shots every five minutes (see also, The Incredible Hulk and the forthcoming Twilight: Breaking Dawn).

16. With pregnancy comes solidarity.

17. Taking part in a horrendously dangerous and destructive heist won’t cost you your job with law enforcement.

18. Six codas is five codas too many.

19. After directing three of these films, Justin Lin has finally figured out how to smash one car into another car (and – preferably – smash that car into another car into a bridge into another car and into a bad guy, and into another car).

20. This film makes the Nicolas Cage Gone In Sixty Seconds look like the Nicolas Cage Drive Angry 3D. And as if that wasn’t enough to recommend it, it doesn’t star Nicolas Cage.

21. Driving irresponsibly isn’t just cool, it’s heroic.

22. Fast Five, Fast and Furious Five, Rio Heist: whatever you call it, five is this franchise’s lucky number.

Battlegrounds: A Review of 'Sucker Punch'

2011-04-01T14:52:00.000-07:00

‘Whose subconscious are we going through, exactly?’ says the aptly named Ariadne at some point during last year’s crowd-pleaser Inception. Dress this same character up in stockings, a short skirt and Kevlar, give her a samurai sword and a gun, and trot her in front a series of imaginative but depthless digital backdrops, and the answer is ‘Zack Snyder’s, of course!’ The Visionary Director™ behind Watchmen and 300 has only gone and made himself a fully-fledged Visionary Writer-Director™, crafting here a tale of psychological phantasmagoria and female empowerment.

Or so Sucker Punch would like to be.

Snyder’s films have only ever had the most passing of acquaintance with reality, and there is some considerable promise in the premise here, which turns his predilections for hyper-stylisation and combat display into potential strengths. However, barely out of the starting gate, the film suffers a conceptual problem: protagonist Babydoll’s lapses into outrageous videogame combat scenarios serve to assist her in getting out of her mental asylum/brothel/prison-house, helping her discover an escape plan at the same time as transfixing onlookers with an intoxicating dance display. Does retreat into simplistic fantasy serve empowerment and freedom? Or is it a tactic the mind employs to escape unpleasant truths? Freud would certainly think the latter. Yet here we have a woman whose mental withdrawal during moments of heightened sexual objectification are celebrated. Somewhere in Sucker Punch’s barely audible superego is an awareness of the falsity of this arithmetic concerning trauma and catatonia.

This is instead a two-hour surrender to the id. But not even the female id – which would at least maybe offer something fresh – but rather the id of a fifteen-year old boy, whose excitement over hover trains, CGI samurai warriors, and zombie Nazis is matched only by his interest in Abbie Cornish’s décolletage. Now, I may not be fifteen, but I’ll confess readily to finding all of those things appealing in their own way. In which case, the frenetic fantasy sequences (yes, the whole film is a frenetic fantasy sequence, but you know what I mean) should be the moments the film flies in its own headless, deranged way.

Unfortunately, striking though these moments are, they lack even the vaguest thread of logic. Wholesale adoption of mythical constructs for allegorical ends can work, and is perhaps the perfect approach to this kind of shallow spectacle, but Snyder takes things both too literally and not literally enough. The same problem bedevilled Inception, appropriately enough – a paradoxical commitment to clunky literalism amongst visually incongruous dreamscapes. It goes without saying that I think Tron: Legacy managed to chart a steadier course through these problematic waters, but so too the Matrix sequels, in their own way, did more interesting things in a similar gambit involving the recognition and pastiche of a narrative template, even if they did suck all the life out of it in the process.

‘If you don’t stand for something, you’re likely to fall for anything,’ says metaleptic mystic helper ~~Keith Carradine~~ Scott Glenn, seemingly not realising that neither he nor the film he is in stands for much of anything, although maybe he’s being mystically ironic. Sucker Punch, after all, manages to equate losing one’s virginity with losing one’s mind, and as life-changing as your average lobotomy can be, the film fails to convince that it’s thought through, or even considered, the ideology it espouses, seemingly by accident.

But then no one is here for ideology, or even story. That makes the tameness of the effects sequences all the more disappointing, rigorously sticking as they do each time to the same boilerplate, and even committing the cardinal sin of petering out: too late you realise the film is rounding itself up without any more battleground ballistics, and the feeling that you’ve just put your hand in an empty cookie jar when you were sure there were a couple left in there is hard to shake. The cookies weren’t that great to begin with, but still.

In the recent run of psycho-subjectivity films like Shutter Island and Black Swan, Sucker Punch will be a minor entry, if remembered at all. Which is a shame: Snyder came up with a genuinely fruitful idea here, one which could even be augmented by his particular hang-ups of high stockings, big guns, and slow motion sword-slicing. Yet the film is never delirious enough to properly entertain, nor sensible enough to intrigue, which came as a genuine, dismaying surprise. Consider that, and this, the worst kind of sucker punch.

The Ten Commandments of 'Faster'

2011-03-27T14:20:00.000-07:00

Thou shalt privilege style over content.

Thou shalt shoot first, and never think to ask questions.

Thou shalt herald the return of Dwayne Johnson to where he doth belong.

Thou shalt feature the best work Billy Bob Thornton’s done for years.

Thou shalt condemn Carla Gugino to being an expository third wheel.

Thou shalt devote undue time to off-kilter yet oddly sober sub-plots.

Thou shalt not, despite advertising strongly suggesting the contrary, feature a car chase worth mentioning.

Thou shalt make unto thee a graven image of all generic precursors.

Thou shalt covet religious solemnity.

Thou shalt reap congenial entertainment from unpromising material.

'Hawaii Five-0' Checklist and Drinking Game

2011-03-20T15:22:00.000-07:00

Drinking takes away the pain.

Obligatory surfing scene [shot of vodka]

Women in bikinis on a beach [shot of dark rum]

Alex O'Loughlin's torso displayed unnecessarily [shot of white rum]

A comment is made about the unnecessary displaying of Alex O'Loughlin's torso [shot of whisky]

Scott Caan says something irreverent in an irritable way (possibly about Alex O'Loughlin's torso) [shot of tequila]

Daniel Dae Kim says 'bro' [shot of gin]

Touchscreen computer technology used for simple task [shot of sambuca]

Helicopter shots used for no discernible reason [pint of lager (downed)]

Our protagonists have homoerotic argument while driving [pint of Guinness (downed)]

The Five-0 squad investigate the murder of a close friend/mentor/family member [yard of ale]

Product Placement [one Jägerbomb per example of any of the following]

Chevrolet

Hawaii Airlines

Hawaii Tourist Board

Bing

You forget that the show isn't called CSI: Honolulu [the full “ginning”]

The suspicion that it will soon be cancelled becomes impossible to ignore [strong cup of coffee]

Book 'em, Danno [cyanide pill]

Forget-Me-Not: A Review of 'Unknown'

2011-03-08T11:39:00.000-08:00

‘We Germans are experts at forgetting,’ states Bruno Ganz’s private detective when he is approached by Liam Neeson’s befuddled Dr Martin Harris, a man whose first trip to Berlin began with lost luggage at the airport and – several taxi crashes, spousal shunnings and murder attempts later – has only got worse. So what looked from the trailers like a re-heated version of Neeson’s unfortunate 2008 action splurge Taken is actually an amnesia-thriller in the Bourne mold. Unknown, at the very least, knows from what cinematic cloth it is cut, but it is at its best when it dabbles in more unexpected material.

While Jason Bourne had no idea who he was and had to earn himself a moral compass – not to mention the approval of demur colleagues, matriarchal CIA directors, and grouchy Parisian mini-owners (women all) – in Unknown it is everyone around Dr Harris who seems to have suffered anamnesis adjustment, yet without any concurrent trauma. His wife looks just as lovely as she did four days and one coma earlier, only now she claims not to know who our hero is, and is even clutching the arm of a doppleganger who, she assures, is actually Dr Martin Harris.

Given that his wife is played by walking shard of frosted ice January Jones, and the seemingly usurping paramour by an effectively similar Aiden Quinn (if only the budget, and his ego, would have stretched to casting Harrison Ford for this role, an actor many reviews have compared Neeson too here, then the face-offs between these two characters would have sparked with a flinty meta-intensity), it is briefly conceivable that Mrs. Harris just simply hasn’t noticed the change. Yet that’s not it, and either she’s complicit in some nefarious plot, or the good Dr Harris (that is, the good Dr Harris) is losing his mind.

The introduction of Mr. Ganz only adds to the confusion (what is an actor like him doing in trash like this?), but when his character begins to talk of the bad old pre-unification days, and later uses Stasi informants to aid Harris’s search for existential security, we realize that he’s here because there really are meat on these bones. Then there’s Diane Kruger’s cab driver, forced to work overtime in an Arab café and in no way willing to help out. Another dead-end and more crumpled euro notes spent. It is now when we might start to realize the depth of the film’s depiction of Berlin, a world city as much as London, but with a gaping absence that twenty years of glass and steel architecture and Checkpoint Charlie souvenirs cannot efface. This is a city hostile towards embarrassment and insecurity even as it breeds ambiguity and chilly uncertainty: just ask Bourne, who had to overcome the chaos of rush hour Alexanderplatz to get his way, or Jodie Foster’s Kyle Pratt in Flightplan, whose grief-ridden plummet into possible insanity began at the same metro station Dr Harris spies someone following him. Or does he?

Certainly, there is no getting away from the fact that there’s a hulking great car chase in the middle of the film, and even if it is an effective set-piece (and it is really rather good), it still bears witness to the stamp of producer Joel Silver and the need for blockbuster action cred. Yet you’ll never catch Neeson with a gun in hand, and while pedestrians might be expendable, minor characters are not. There is a subtly nuanced (and possibly unintended) naming and mourning of an early victim, while subsequent collateral damage is decried in a scene that would normally exist only between jump-cuts.

All of which makes the inevitable slide (and it is inevitable, and it is a slide) all the more regrettable, even if the mechanics of the revelation are handled somewhat smoother than those in the aforementioned Flightplan. Even so, among the nonsense that riddles the final reel there are some nice details (I’ve never seen a Hitchcock blonde treated quite like that before), and the finale should not scrub the positive qualities of the rest of the film from your mind – even if it is precisely this logic which Unknown itself frustratingly advocates by way of conclusion. It is a resourceful piece of entertainment, derivative and simple-minded on the surface, but while the twists may be under-developed, it is in the margins that the film is able to pleasantly surprise. This alone makes it at the very least memorable.

22 Things I Learned From 'Drive Angry 3D'

2011-03-01T15:22:00.000-08:00

1. Satanic cults have a high rate of attrition.

2. Hard asses take their coffee black, with lots of sugar.

3. No one caresses a handbrake like Amber Heard.

4. The US mid-west has been abandoned by all rational people and colonised by laconic, diner-visiting demons (see also Legion, which I can only assume is better, if only because it’s four minutes shorter).

5. Calling a slightly overweight person “fat” is a funny enough joke to sustain five minutes of screen time.

6. Real men ask for a shotgun the same way the rest of us order an espresso.

7. The sheet at the back of the garage always conceals an immaculate classic American car.

8. Hell has a poorly protected armoury (which is running low on stock – three bullets?!), and a disintegrating drawbridge of some kind. No, really.

9. Louisiana police captains have a very relaxed dress code (and poor taste in t-shirts).

10. There’s always an old friend that lives nearby.

11. There’s always a flirty waitress (or several).

12. Never trust the FBI.

13. Women don’t bruise.

14. Nicolas Cage seems to be interested in little else these days than a self-directed retroactive career assassination.

15. David Morse has given up on life, or at the very least on cinema. (You’re not the only one, David, you’re not the only one).

16. If this film was aiming for the vibe of an apocalyptic Johnny Cash ditty then it failed, and only succeeded in making me wish it were as brief and succinct as an apocalyptic Johnny Cash ditty.

17. That this was written, edited, and directed by the same person indicates that that person should seek help.

18. A perverse, slightly intriguing performance by William Fichtner as a diabolical bounty hunter can look like a stunning exercise of comic genius when surrounded by utter, utter dreck.

19. Drive Angry 3D. The three Ds are driving, demons, and despondency.

20. When even Nicolas Cage looks bored, you know you’re close to witnessing the very atomic structure of boredom.

21. Grindhouse this ain’t. Shucks, this wasn’t even Machete.

22. Hell is another Nicolas Cage film.

Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me: A Review of ‘Black Swan’

2011-01-25T04:55:00.000-08:00

Where to begin? Director Darren Aronofsky chooses to begin in a dream, his ballet dancer protagonist illuminated against the darkness by the white shaft of a spotlight. We may well stay in this dream for the duration, so ethereal and otherworldly is Black Swan. Where his previous film The Wrestler made a big noise about its lack of big noises and real-world, follow-shot aesthetic, here Aronofsky marries similar devices of verisimilitude to the splintered hallucinoscapes of Requiem For a Dream and The Fountain. Such catachrestic combinations makes for something of an Aronofsky ur-experience, but Black Swan is such an accomplished feat of filmmaking that every grace note and every plunge, every glide and every misstep, are entirely intended.

Surely there is no need to rehearse the plot here, so much hype has the film received on ‘the festival circuit’ – suffice to say it concerns the casting, rehearsals, and performance of a new production of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, and the intense psychological pressure placed on lead dancer Nina Sayers. As played by Natalie Portman, Nina is a quivering and epicene virgin predestined to become an emotional wreck in a matter of years – indeed, the same thing seems to have happened to her mother, whom actress Barbara Hershey does a fine job of saving from the pigeonhole of thankless grotesque.

There is no mention of a father figure, absent or otherwise, which is indicative of Black Swan’s attitude towards gender roles. Some may find its sexual politics dubious, but as an effort to create a dramatic scenario between competitive women not dependent on male attention it is to be commended. But wait!, you may cry, what of the insidious director of the ballet Thomas (Vincent Cassel) and the importance his approval plays in the story? This is true, but it is also skin-deep, and to an extent the film dramatises the attempt of women to forge a space for themselves which does not have to suffer phallic intrusion. The strange final gesture of Winona Ryder’s over-the-hill (at 28!) dancer Beth is the most explicit condemnation of such violation, while those familiar with Swan Lake itself will note the far from insignificant omission at the end of the production-within-a-film, itself suggesting a measure of success for Nina and her sex even in a moment of tragedy.

This focus on the way women are looked at called to mind the recent Amer, an ode to Dario Argento currently playing at London’s ICA, which also deployed some schlock horror to make its point (although in Amer’s case I could have done with much more). Black Swan itself goes some pretty dark places (to put it mildly), and there is certainly something trashy about some of the shock-cuts and accompanying thunderous music stings. Yet once again these are deployed in something of a sincere attempt to enter a feminine subjective viewpoint – it should be noted the occasionally creepy Thomas is never the subject of horror (and a throwaway backstage moment during the final performance from the actor playing the villain Rothbart is telling), but rather the many women who surround Nina provide the jolts, themselves all possibly projections of Nina’s splintered Freudian subconscious.

Issues of psychological breakdown under intense pressure and identity slippage? Did somebody mention American Psycho? Mary Harron’s adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’s novel on yuppie malaise makes a wonderful companion piece to Black Swan, and rather than the differences between the films accentuating the genders of the protagonists, a comparison if anything reveals the precariousness of Patrick Bateman’s masculine authority and draws out the common ground between the ballet dancer and the investment banker. Narcissism, insecurity and submerged violent urges are not to be relegated to one sex or another, but are common features of the contemporary human condition. For New Yorkers, at any rate.

The allegorical structure of the film of course demands that the production be more than mere background, and certainly Tchaikovsky’s music is just as integral to the experience of Black Swan as is the narrative of the ballet. What further intrigues, though, is the extent to which the film may be read as a depiction of the creative process: the stress, tensions, and rewards of the long gestation of a piece of great art, a process at once both self-revelatory and self-destructive. I would, perhaps controversially, or at the very least bizarrely, also suggest an affinity between this and Tron: Legacy, both grappling with the burden of creation, and ultimately coming to a similar conclusion of drastic self-effacement (although prompted by somewhat different motives). Even Patrick Bateman is himself something of an artist – check out his daily planner – and his “no catharsis” moment in the final scene is itself a catharsis, as he is subsumed to the indistinct mass of designer suits and tanned skin from which he never really departed. (The camera itself even has a habit of disappearing in Black Swan during the many fleeting moments one should be able to see it reflected in the myriad of mirrors on display.)

This is all to somehow avoid mentioning the remarkable synthesis of sound design, staging, and special effects in the film. There is something unforgettable – yet above all accurate – about the chiaroscuro effects of the New York subway (and this film is so very, very good on New York) overlain with the creeping sounds of flapping wings. The minutiae of ballet dancing preparation is explained with all the care of a documentary (shoe preparation, sessions with a physiotherapist – apparently a real event captured by Aronofsky after Portman injured herself on set), although one hopes the rehearsal spaces at Lincoln Centre don’t much resemble the charcoal-shaded carcereal tombs created by a remarkably on-point production design team.

So where do we end? Where we began of course – on the stage. That hot spotlight is well earned, as Black Swan is a remarkable filmmaking achievement which may have a heightened awareness of its own artifice, but more than make a virtue of that, makes it the whole point.

22 Things I Learned From 'The Next Three Days'

2011-01-11T14:34:00.000-08:00

1. Having identified the prime suspect of a murder minutes after the crime has taken place, the police will sleep on it and arrest the suspect the following morning.

2. Prison doctors exhibit undue commitment to their felonious patients, and sound as though they were educated at Oxford.

3. Accepting a lift across state lines from a kindly stranger makes you an accessory after the fact.

4. You can break into a van using a tennis ball.

5. You can pick a lock using a filed down key.

6. Suicide attempts should under no circumstances be taken seriously.

7. Don’t trust a sleazy, drug-dealer-recommended low-life to make you a fake passport.

8. Do trust a motorcycle riding deaf stranger to make you a fake passport.

9. Russell Crowe ate all the pies.

10. Male detectives are intense, psychic, and insanely committed to their jobs.

11. Female detectives bitch a lot.

12. It takes heavily built criminal lackeys, armed with shotguns, an age to kick (not shoot, apparently) open a locked wooden door. Only faced with the threat of imminent immolation is the required effort put in.

13. You don’t need psychological depth when you have criminal instruction videos.

14. Given the choice between a possibly sociopathic Elizabeth Banks and a kindly, flirty, willing-to-babysit Olivia Wilde, some men would choose the former. Fools.

15. There’s always a group of sports fans to blend in with.

16. The professor always delivers a lecture which is spookily appropriate to his own situation (here, on Don Quixote and escapism).

17. Writer-Director Paul Haggis cannot write a scene, or frame a shot to save his life.

18. The centre of every American city can be locked down within fifteen minutes.

19. The murder of drug dealers will be investigated with all the manpower and forensics that the Pittsburgh police department can muster.

20. The murder of a well-paid company executive will not.

21. Sponsored items required for a jailbreak include, but are not limited to, an iPhone, a satnav, a North Face coat, a digital camera (with face recognition), and a Prius. Access to youtube, google and amazon are also musts.

22. Willing suspension of disbelief is fine. Three days worth of unbelievable, badly plotted, poorly judged nonsense is not.

The Best Films of 2010

2011-01-02T10:02:00.000-08:00

Enter the Void

The story may be somewhat uninteresting, but it’s all in the execution in Gaspar Noe’s ground-up re-invention of cinema, which treated the issue of subjectivity with enough respect not to relegate it to window-dressing. Don’t confuse it for a “drug film” as some have done – this was the most immersive, creative and above all loving piece of film in 2010 (click here for full review).

Shutter Island

Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of Dennis Lehane’s psycho-thriller positively vomited everything up its sleeves straight into our eyes. What reveals the precision of the schlock is just how successfully it all holds together while it twists apart, even offering a history of twentieth century trauma alongside its wonderfully overwrought mystery and fucking ugly ties.

Tron: Legacy

Stridently echoing the deep blue 3D steps of Avatar, this unpromising behemoth managed to considerably better James Cameron by allowing itself to be swallowed up by its own contradictions and allegorical baggage. A committee-designed film if ever there was one, yet invested with the (accidental) smarts to dance a little dance when on top of the world, revealing the hollow uselessness of absolute digital totalitarianism (click here for full review).

The Runners Up

Daybreakers

A curiously well-worked out and fascinating vampire-filled future-world kept this short, jumpy film afloat even when it started to lose focus in the third act. More narrative refinement could have sharpened the satire of consumer society but may also have polished off the rough edges which kept this particular viewer determinably entertained (click here for hilariously truncated review).

The Ghost

That arch sense of humour director Roman Polanski possesses stopped this perfectly crafted thriller from lapsing into the lefty whining which was in hindsight so very nearby. Carefully considered architecture may have upstaged the performances for much of the running time, but these were only to be knocked into a cocked hat themselves by the glorious ending.

The Social Network

A very trendy film to like, but unfortunately it was indeed very good. David Fincher’s subdued direction allowed Aaron Sorkin’s trademark Ivy League prose to shine through, nailing the contemporary moment in all its incompatible, alienated, over-privileged horror.

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

2010-12-27T15:21:00.000-08:00

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’

2010-12-18T07:38:00.000-08:00

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'

2010-11-19T02:02:00.000-08:00

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'

2010-11-16T14:14:00.000-08:00

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'

2010-10-24T11:39:00.000-07:00

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

2010-10-12T13:04:00.000-07:00

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'

2010-10-11T13:40:00.000-07:00

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

Blue Collar Professionalism: A Review of ‘The Town’

2010-09-29T10:04:00.000-07:00

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'

2010-09-16T12:09:00.000-07:00

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

2010-09-07T14:18:00.000-07:00

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

2010-07-29T12:19:00.000-07:00

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

2010-07-28T13:53:00.000-07:00

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.

Flights of Fancy: An Essay on 'Con Air': Part 4

2010-07-27T12:26:00.000-07:00

Part 4: Sand, No Trees: The Environment of the Left Behind

As Zeigmunt Bauman argues in Globalization: The Human Consequences, time-space compression brings with it not just an advantaged class for whom distance and capital are of no object, but also a devalued underclass who do not have the resources for such integration and so become more isolated, and more disenfranchised, than previously in world history. Bauman rather fittingly chooses California’s Pelican Bay – a high security prison – to conclude his argument that the harshest punishment globalisation can inflict is the forced locality of an individual. Prison in the twenty-first century is about disconnecting individuals, preventing them from learning skills or even performing mundane but utilitarian tasks to fill the days and concentrate the mind. Conviction of a crime results in complete spatial and temporal disconnection.
The dream of the convicts in Con Air is to escape this control. Yet once they have begun their escape they must first move through a forgotten landscape: Lerner Air Field is a place left behind by globalisation, and it is fitting that the prisoners seem so at home there. In this space it is the regimented representatives of authoritarian control – the police and SWAT teams – that are dangerously out of place.
The America of Con Air is an empty, dusty, useless space. Lerner Air Field is a collection of rusty buildings and scores of abandoned vehicles left to decompose in the desert heat. It is, as Cyrus states, “forty-nine minutes from anything resembling authority”. Whilst other action films of the late nineties revel in the surveillance-culture of modern civilisation (The Matrix, The Peacemaker, and Enemy of the State all present the world as a collection of images on a series of screens), Con Air presents the flipside of late capitalist globalisation and technological homogenisation – the unmonitored and inconsequential wasteland.

In The Cultural Turn, Fredric Jameson identifies the clash of high and low culture that predominates in “newer postmodernisms,” which are “fascinated precisely by that whole landscape of advertising and motels, of the Las Vegas strip, of the Late Show and B-grade Hollywood film” (p2). Las Vegas, for Jameson as for other critics, is a personification of the false pleasurezone of consumerism: casinos with no windows, replicas of landmarks from a dozen continents, the only culture present being that of pastiche (especially if we use that word with Jameson’s delineation of it in mind, as explained in Part 3).
A crash landing on the Las Vegas strip fulfils the necessary criteria that an action film have a destructive and kinetic action sequence in a recognisable landmark. This is a trend notably distilled in The International and mocked in Quantum of Solace, which both embrace the chilly, isolating consequences of late capitalism. Twelve years before these examples, Con Air exists with the echo of Reaganist American self-absorption still perceptible, and its Las Vegas sequence depicts the friction between hedonistic abandonment to consumerism and the existence of a dangerous and neglected underside to that dream. In it, wards of the state, who should be kept from public scrutiny, brazenly tear through the dream of a plastic America. (It must be noted that this structure is echoed in Zombieland, in which a hostile, empty, and consumer driven (i.e. the Twinkie-quest, the star cameo) America reaches its summation in a literal fairground).
Bauman considers the utopian city to be unpolluted by history (p38). Las Vegas goes one step further: it does not include history, but it does quote it (replicas of the Eiffel Tower, etc) and in doing so neutralises the threat of a dormant authenticity, or a foreign alternative to the pleasures on offer: there is only this island of lights in the desert, a long straight road which is inevitably reconceived of as a landing strip. It boggles the mind to consider what the narcissistic French postmodernist Jean Baudrillard would think of it all, with his obsessions with replication, America, speed and vanishing points, and this is too hyperbolic a topic to broach here.
(Nonetheless, by way of further evidence, we should note that when asked where he is taking the captured plane, Cyrus states “we’re going to Disneyland” – a place Baudrillard considered to be “the perfect model of all the entangled orders of simulacra”, a place of unconcealed artificiality which exists, hiding-in-plain-sight, to “make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and America that surrounds are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and the order of simulation” (Simulacra and Simulation, p12). As with Disneyland, as with Vegas: Cyrus is more accurate than he knows about their destination.)
The crash itself and subsequent fire truck chase embellish Las Vegas as a playground of spectacular and violent pleasures. Cyrus’s death – he is thrown through sheets of glass, electrocuted, then has his head crushed by a building site mechanism – embodies this overblown shallowness, while the concurrent nadir is the explosion of an armoured car. These moments lack a framework for them to be understood as logical occurrences. The destruction of the armoured car and subsequent raining down of burning dollar bills exists solely for the purposes of sensation, and as such it is a fitting metaphor of the spectator experience of the Hollywood blockbuster: watching millions of dollars go up in a series of massive explosions staged for your pleasure.
For Walter Benjamin, the glass arcades of Paris were the quintessential experience of modernity in the 1930s. They presented capitalism and consumerism as a phantasmagoria of sensation and architecture. In Con Air, the deserted spaces of Nevada, Utah and Arizona, as well as the gaudy Potemkin village of Las Vegas, are indicative of the space of postmodernity, or at least the side of it which is left to the technologically and culturally dispossessed.
“I’ll be able to see some nice scenery whipping by down there,” Poe says when asked to fix the undercarriage of the plane, “trees and stuff.” He is joking: all he will see is desert. These sand-blown non-spaces (where does the plane take off from initially, exactly?, we see only the depopulated airport) are appropriate to the marginalized and segregated body of prisoners. When they crash through into the populated world of consumerism it is Jameson’s embodiment of “low culture”, the Las Vegas strip, and the first trees we see are a set of plastic palms engulfed in a fireball. We should not confuse this for the real world though, especially considering the casino the plane finally crashes into is, fittingly, the Las Vegas Sands.

Flights of Fancy: An Essay on 'Con Air': Parts 1 - 3

2010-07-26T13:05:00.000-07:00

Part 1: Introduction

“Oh well, why not,” says Stanley Goodspeed, played by Nicolas Cage, in the 1996 action spectacular The Rock. He then slams on the pedal of his stolen Lamborghini, and smashes through a plate-glass window in pursuit of a dapper ex-SAS soldier on the run in San Francisco. The moment is absurd. The absurdity is acknowledged, and offered as a pleasure in and of itself. There are plenty of such moments of heightened ridiculousness in The Rock, but the film tries to have its grenade and detonate it too, as director Michael Bay is wont to do, and so fails to fully exploit the potential for parodic excess in the action genre. This is not a reticence observed by the nadir of the 1990s Hollywood spectacle Con Air.
Beginning with an introduction to the plot of the film, and going on to analyse several facets of it, the subsequent several blog posts will attempt to suggest how a film that seems to be empty and unremarkable spectacle is worthy of analysis.

Part 2: Every Creep and Freak On One Plane

The story goes that Don Simpson, one half of the producing partnership that also included Jerry Bruckheimer, hated the idea of Con Air. Simpson and Bruckheimer had together produced some of the most overblown and superficial films of the 1980s and 1990s, films like Top Gun, Bad Boys and The Rock. Quite what black mark the producer-auteur thought Con Air would smear on his resume we will never know – Simpson’s death in 1996 left Jerry Bruckheimer free to hire debut director Simon West and action-star of the moment Nicolas Cage and go ahead and make the Die Hard-with-prisoners-on-a-plane movie he had always wanted.
Cage plays Cameron Poe, a hellraiser from Alabama who has turned out good by joining the US Rangers. Returning to his pregnant wife he gets into a bar-fight, kills someone with a punch, and is imprisoned by an uncaring and hypocritical legal system. Years later he is to be released, but first must “hitch a ride home” on a plane transporting “the worst of the worst” to a new “supermax” prison. Among these nasty characters are educated sociopaths (John Malkovich’s Cyrus Grissom), militant Black panther-types (Ving Rhames’ Diamond Dog) and eerily tranquil mass murderers (Steve Buscemi’s Garland Greene).
These prisoners soon take over the plane, and Poe must retain their loyalty in order to protect his close friend (a diabetic in need of insulin) and a sexually threatened prison guard (Rachel Ticotin). They land at Carson City to offload some prisoners, then on to Lerner Air Field where a plan to switch planes goes awry. Pursued by earnest FBI agent Vince Larkin (John Cusack) the prisoners are forced to flee Lerner and soon after crash-land on the Las Vegas strip.
The film will here be analysed for the manner in which the illogic of elements of plotting and mise-en-scene construct a pastiche of action genre templates; the depiction of America and the non-spaces the marginalized convicts are forced to function within; the use of children as a compositional element and the complicated portrayal of sociopathy and implied paedophilia; and finally the simultaneous reverence and undermining of masculine identity.

Part 3: “On Any Other Day That Might Seem Strange”: Absurdities and Violence

The overt pleasures of Con Air are the action sequences, which come thick and fast, but each carefully delineated within what are frequently similar backdrops and concepts. In his essay connecting action cinema with the adventure narratives of ancient Greek novels (via Bakhtin), Martin Flanaghan states the world of action/adventure narrative is “ruled by chance and coincidence”, and is “structured around wild detours from reality that despite their infeasibility are perfectly acceptable within the self-determined logic of the genre” (p108 in ‘The Chronotope in Action’ in Action And Adventure Cinema, edited by Yvonne Tasker). I would like to suggest that Con Air is aware of this ‘necessity of infeasibility’, as it were, and uses it to comment not just on the spatial and temporal mechanics of the action film, but also on the culture from which the imperative to create such wild worlds originates; namely, late twentieth century America.
When Poe et al are making a break for it, only to be confronted at the rear of the plane by a corvette being dragged through the air behind them as they take off, Poe’s comment “on any other day that might seem strange” can be interpreted as “in any other genre that might be out of place.” This surreal sight is soon trumped by Cyrus threatening to kill a stuffed toy rabbit (“make a move and the bunny gets it”) at a crescendo of high drama. These are sly winks to the audience (much like that which Cage offers in the final image within the end credits), but their purpose is more interesting than easy bathetic humour.
Fredric Jameson explains parody as a response to modernism which ridicules the “excessiveness and eccentricity” of “stylistic mannerisms”; he delineates this from pastiche, implicitly a more developed and perhaps more depressing phenomenon, as it is a similar form of mimicry but is performed “without parody’s ulterior motive, without the satirical impulse, without laughter, without that still latent feeling that there exists something normal compared with which what is being imitated is rather comic.” (Jameson, ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’ in The Cultural Turn, pp. 4-5). A montage depicting Poe’s years in jail near the beginning of Con Air shows him working out, learning Spanish, writing to his daughter, avoiding prison riots, and learning origami. Let us repeat: the hero of this violent, adult action film learns origami. This is not a parodic moment. Perhaps if it featured within Hot Shots!, or an Airplane film we could consider it parody. But the placement within an overtly heartfelt sequence and the po(e)-facedness of delivery make it, by Jameson’s rules, pastiche.

Con Air presents a world vacated by the normal. It responds to the increasing absurdity of Hollywood spectacle by presenting an America with no grip on reality, populated by dramatis personae who are so grotesquely not of the real world that they seem to belong to a cartoon. This is symptomatic of a move towards artificiality and immateriality that can be identified in a postmodern interpretation of the contemporary moment, as well the response of Hollywood cinema to this turn. Axiomatic of this is the presentation of bloodshed.
In the last decade or so films with $100 million+ budgets have become increasingly ingenious in presenting violent actions without presenting violence. The Matrix created a cyber-world where any number of innocent bystanders could be mowed down – all in the name of the freedom of the human race. Comic book films show shootings and conflagrations, but without blood or corpses. Action in the 1980s and early 1990s was more visceral: before family entertainment consolidated itself as the central brand for enormous financial returns, blood and gore were good business.
Con Air is balanced precariously on the seesaw between the squib-and-swearing fueled action the preceded and the bloodless aversion that followed. It is a violent film itself, but the surreal and overtly absurd elements detract from the unpleasantness of the violence, and seem to be a reaction to it. The ethos offered by Hollywood – that violence is spectacle, and this spectacle can, through editing and scripting, be somehow non-violent (by which I mean non-brutal, and lacking consequences) – is in Con Air boiled over into a world where nothing sticks, and logic is secondary to bedazzlement and earnestness.
In reacting to other Hollywood films of its ilk, Con Air is responding to an absurdity with absurdity. Its critique is not satirical, political, or comprehensive. If the “wild detours from reality” of the action narrative are “perfectly acceptable with the self-determined logic of the genre”, as Flanaghan asserted above, then Con Air self-determines its own (il)logic with nihilistic abandon.

Downside Up: A Review of 'Inception'

2010-07-20T13:11:00.000-07:00

Huddled together in a darkened auditorium, the communal experience of seeing a newly released film at the cinema is something akin to that of a shared dream, especially if that film contains the limitless worlds afforded by digital special effects and their attendant unshackling of aesthetics from indexical reality. James Cameron’s recent Avatar pulled the audience into the lush and bioluminescent world of Pandora through the device of the human protagonist effectively being put to sleep, his dreaming self let loose in new body into a strange world. The Matrix, ten years ago, pulled the same trick. Perhaps such dream-zones are the most pertinent space in which to explore the alienating same-but-different world of global hyperspace, in which our minds can alter our surroundings at will, our projections of ourselves are limited only by our imagination, but in which the rules and dangers are never fully explicated.

Christopher Nolan, director of puzzle-thrillers Memento and The Prestige, has taken this conceit in his latest film Inception and turned it into a device to cause as much havoc as possible. The Freudian diagnosis of dreams as evidentiary expressions of subconscious clutter is used as the basis for what would, if it were not for the dream-within-a-dream-within-a-dream madness of it all, be a pretty straightforward heist thriller. If our secrets are hidden within our subconscious, the logic of the film goes, why not create a world in which these secrets can be stolen by teams of “extractors”, skilled in entering the dreams of others, navigating the immune-system of mental mazes, and stealing the guarded secrets of the most powerful people on earth.

The frisson of describing a potential target as having a “militarised subconscious” is unfortunately undercut the further it becomes evident that Nolan’s conception of dream-theft is going to rely on a prevalence of automatic weaponry, and deploy massive explosions the same way other films do jump-cuts. It is fitting that all the psyches entered in the film are male, as the ensuing mental constructs are reliant on weaponised conflict and hulking, crashing machinery. Offering the suggestion that this is intentional, the only women in the film are either “architects” (a kind of dream interior decorator), air stewardesses, or demonic interstitial shades (the depiction of the last, admittedly, entertainingly playing on the ‘mad-woman-in-the-attic/basement’ trope).

The film is a two-hour long action sequence unfolding across various levels with different rules, goals, and characters on each, like playing several computer games at once. A genuine first, Inception may be edited together faster and be considerably louder than its own trailer; composer Hans Zimmer is a Wagnerian talent, but his free-associative, thunderingly loud, and literally non-stop contribution here is wearying. In Nolan’s previous film, The Dark Knight, chase and fight sequences proliferated to the point of ceaseless crescendo, but this was all in the service of a story about the terror of arbitrary action and the morally dubious deeds undertaken at times of frenzy. This, by contrast, is a world of rules and limitations which are repeatedly expressed to ensure the audience is aware of how the game is played: when the fact that death in a dream makes the dreamer wake-up is bluntly explained once again I realised how much I craved for the tension of a set-up like that in, say, Pontypool, in which the fascination with remarkable goings on stems from the necessity for the rules to be discovered through desperate inquiry.

Inception is remarkable at times in the skill with which it orchestrates the grandiose, often unique, and occasionally (but only occasionally) mind-bending action spectacle (a single-take fight in a rotating corridor is coordinated with – pardon the phrase – Kubrickian genius, if only the vehicular catalyst for it were not so lazy). The casting of Tom Hardy and Joseph Gordon-Levitt are also particular successes, but it was a shame to see Ellen Page forced into the role of exposition-prompter. Continuing the conspicuous consumption of the near $200 million budget beyond the sets and effects, even the minor roles are filled by name actors (Pete Postlethwaite gets one line, Michael Caine’s role is in the trailer in its entirety, and it turns out that Lucas Haas is still working).

The film is similar in intellectual register to Tony Gilroy’s underrated spy thriller Duplicity, but where that film was unwilling to give the audience very much beyond the occasional frozen pizza joke, Inception wants to give the audience everything it can. It is certainly stunning, but there is a hollowness to the exercise. Leonardo DiCaprio’s protagonist Cobb and his guilt-ridden psychology are given pride of place, but this is at the expense of all else. Say what you will about stories that revolve around guilt-ridden protagonists pining for redemption and middle-aged men seeking reconciliation from their fathers, these elements are not fresh. Never mind that here they are less the subject of the drama than the subjectivity of them is the subject of the drama, but nonetheless their predominance is a disappointment.

Possibly the lack of surprises towards the third act is itself intended to be a surprise, but personally I would have enjoyed an increased tension between the heist players, or more shades to Ken Watanabe’s bankrolling corporate benefactor who inexplicably (in a logical, rather than narratological, sense) accompanies the team into the mind of their target. Duplicity had similarly impermeable characters, but their heavily guarded personalities were the subject of a bravely medium-oriented enquiry into trust and the inability to ever know what another person is thinking. Despite all the time spent within mindscapes, there is little of note to the way anyone in Inception thinks: the characters are ciphers, and reduced to gun-toting grenade-throwers before too long.

Nolan is a very giften director, and he and his team are impeccable at their craft, although the editing of Lee Smith remains too scissorhands for my liking. But in their eagerness to create a well-ordered world of rules, levels and action they have lost sight of the charm, freedom, and bizarreness that are the lasting pleasures of both good dreams and Blockbuster cinema.

Curses! A Review of 'Kick-Ass'

2010-07-01T13:59:00.000-07:00

Like hastily eaten junk food, comic book films continue to repeat in stale belches across cinema screens. It is only logical: no matter how minor the comic it will still have some devoted followers, who will – being likely in their teens and very active in techno-blogo-twittersphere – generate more hype than warranted, increasing the slim possibility of a decent opening weekend before inevitable and hasty evaporation of ticket sales and audience interest. In addition to this financial concern, the comic turn is natural considering the movement of mainstream American filmmaking towards hollowness, callousness and self-justified viciousness.

It seemed that Kick-Ass would be something of a relief from all this. Promising a knowing inclusion of the dramatic and aesthetic expectations of the “young adult” comic book genre (a deadly eleven-year old girl!), but with a critical eye towards the link between this film world and the real world: how are the goals and ambitions of the average American teenager formed and manipulated by widespread generic banality? The real and the fantasy feed off each other, currently only able to offer a trajectory that spirals ever downward. There is certainly room for a film attacking these issues and which, even if not excoriating the peddlers of morally lazy trash, at least opens up alternative avenues of thought to those of unreal empowerment through dress-up and revenge.

Kick-Ass seems to engage with these issues, but very quickly backs away. Or, more accurately, becomes drawn in by the lure of easy answers through violence. The protagonist, Dave Lizewski, is tired of being a non-presence at school and getting casually mugged on his way home. Donning a mask and batons to fight crime, he is promptly beaten up and stabbed. A bracing concept. Yet there is something unsettling about the stabbing. Digital blood, followed by a comedic overwrought car crash. This is not bathos, it is glorification.

(These digital spurts of blood are becoming increasingly prevalent in Blockbuster cinema, again a result of the comic influence. But while the panels of Frank Miller feature a splatter of red across them, the brutality inherent in this captured moment is lost when translated to the screen. These gushes of obvious post-production tinkering plainly separate violence and spectacle, focussing exclusively on the latter. It may be a direct translation of the visual style of the comic onto the film, as it was in Sin City and 300, but the different medium alters the meaning of the aesthetic. Grittiness is expressed differently on a printed page than it is on the silver screen at twenty-four frames a second.)

The violence in Kick-Ass functions narratively (initially at least) as the unpleasant intrusion of the real into the fantasy; however, it is filmed in such a way that it merely fuels the fantasy, driving it further into masturbatory indulgence.

Fine, then. This is not to be the To The Lighthouse of comic book films (as last years Watchmen could and should have been, in the same way that the sharp source material by Alan Moore was so comprehensive it made all further graphic novels about masked avengers redundant). As it develops further, and Lizewski (superhero name: Kick-Ass) becomes a media star through youtube footage and canny social networking, there is plenty of room made available for satire to creep in. Unfortunately, nothing except sensationalism manages to survive the ensuing din. The film aims for cynical but ends up utterly charmless.

A more successful duo of crime fighters is introduced, who are at war with a villainous yet wholly undefined syndicate responsible (indirectly, it must be highlighted) for the death of an inevitably unnamed and voiceless female figure of maternal comfort (worryingly, Lizewski’s mother is also depicted as dying silently and indolently). These various characters all become embroiled in possibly the most lazily plotted of such scripts to date, and less and less gets in the way of violent action sequences (each one with a soundtrack stolen from elsewhere: John Murphy’s signature cues for 28 Weeks Later and Sunshine, and Ennio Morricone’s overexposed For a Few Dollars More theme).

Director Matthew Vaughn’s Layer Cake, made in the ebb of hype following Guy Ritchie’s own London gangster films (which Vaughn himself co-produced), was one of the most stylish and inventive British films of the last ten years, easily earning the title of The Long Good Friday for the twenty-first century. Since this, however, Vaughn has increasingly looked like a director-for-hire, even though he co-produced and co-wrote Kick-Ass. The most memorable parts of the film are the zaniest, and feel distinctly like they have been conceived of solely to keep Vaughn interested in his production (and it takes something pretty zany for interest to be retained in a film which cues up the song ‘This Town Ain’t Big Enough For The Both Of Us’ when two superheroes meet).

We end up on the same damn rooftop that Iron Man 2 ended on: man and woman sharing an intimate moment, a poor digital recreation of New York behind them, the unwelcome promise of a sequel, and not a single thought given to the disproportionate collateral damage wrought during the preceding “adventures”. Kick-Ass in the end tells us nothing more than that the temptation for violent catharsis through a cartoon lens is too much even for what seems a highly talented crew. The generic template is adhered to so closely that attempts to interpret any critical discourse on the unpleasantness unfolding become increasingly difficult, and finally impossible. This is not to say it is not entertaining: it’s a film with great comic timing and some fresh ideas up its sleeve. That it feels so hollow in the end should be a lesson for future filmmakers to avoid indulging in the temptations that are here so fully given in to.

22 Things I Learned From 'The Book of Eli'

2010-06-30T13:26:00.000-07:00

1. It’s okay to kill a hairless cat.

2. Thirty years after the end of the world it’s still worth checking the taps for running water.

3. Jeopardising a mission to save mankind by sidetracking to charge your iPod is not the action we expect of a stoic protagonist.

4. KFC, Motorola and General Motors will survive the apocalypse, their marketing departments remarkably intact.

5. Once you go black, you go Christian.

6. The hero always enters the town in slow motion.

7. The hero always enters the bar in slow motion.

8. Gary Oldman is at his most entertaining when he is channelling the ghost of Jack Lemmon.

9. You don’t need a seatbelt if you’re pretty.

10. There’s always a quirky, fidgety guy who’s good with electrical appliances (preferably to be played by Tom Waits).

11. End-of-the-world settlements will be ruled over by a faux-intellectual despot and populated by a bunch of illiterate thugs (see also The Postman, 28 Days Later).

12. There may not be any water or food in this world but there is plenty of petrol.

13. Having a character whistle Ennio Morricone does not a clever Western pastiche make.

14. Two fight scenes and two exploding cars does not an action film make.

15. Ponderously dull and literal scripting does not an art film make.

16. Casting the woman who voices Meg Griffin in Family Guy as the love interest somewhat undermines whatever credibility your listless production may have initially had.

17. Shooting Denzel Washington in the chest only makes him stronger (see also Man On Fire).

18. It is possible to make an entire film about the bible without understanding one word of it.

19. Malcolm McDowell is making a career out of being the last straw.

20. Endings which sacrifice logic, characterisation and the moral lessons of all that has gone before at the altar of “looking cool” are somewhat frustrating.

21. If you couldn’t get enough of the trash-punk vehicles, windswept desert vistas and imperative-free plotting on offer in Terminator Salvation, this should certainly be for you.

22. For everyone else, you’re better off reading a book.

Through The Motions: A Review of Episode 6 of ‘Luther’

2010-06-12T12:26:00.000-07:00

Having disgraced himself in the eyes of his fellow soldiers, and in doing so undone all his previous heroism and also put his family at risk, Ajax announces that he will journey to the beach of Troy for solitude. It is at this point that Sophocles has the soldier speak of the capriciousness of alliances and identity:

‘I have learnt this-

hate an enemy knowing he may be a friend

love a friend knowing he may be an enemy.

Men are tricky things.’

(translation by Robert Cannon)

Not as tricky as endings, perhaps, judging by the final episode of the first (only?) series of Luther, the London-set detective drama broadcast on the BBC this summer. The more-than-two-millennia old play Ajax begins after an act of extreme violence, and presents the dissolution of a hero renowned for his concrete fortitude. Those Ajax relied upon for support – the goddess Athena – are revealed as at best uncaring towards him, while those he considered sworn enemies – the crafty Odysseus – go to great lengths to restore the shamed man’s honour. So too Luther’s own world is flipped upside down, a state of affairs perhaps intriguing but inevitably fumbled.

(Viewers still in need of catching-up using iPlayer be warned, to fully explicate the sweeping ridiculousness of this sixth episode of Luther it will be necessary to describe the plotting in detail up to and including the final minutes.)

For those who have stuck with the increasingly absurd series, the nadir was surely reached when Luther’s former best mate gunned down Luther’s ex-wife in a scene that could not have been more forced had the actors literally re-positioned themselves according to explicit floor-sketched markers. Perhaps this was intentional – an indication of the hand of fate, the inescapability of tragic circumstance. This is no weak spirit for a drama to mix with: the superlative American cop-show The Shield structured the entire final three seasons (of seven) around a claustrophobic vice of incident, connecting events pregnant with consequence stretching back to the pilot episode with offhand moments throughout the show to create a perfect storm of dread and finality.

The key is in that final word, and the satisfaction it brings. Resolutions can be the male and female protagonists at long last getting together. For our pop-nihilist mainstream though, better to have an arrest, a beating, or best still a murder. (The Shield, in its last episode, managed to trump all of these in its own inimitable way, and if you have not seen the show I urge you to seek it out). We all know the Greeks called it catharsis – the exhausting but welcome purgation of emotion. As those who have kept track of the mainstream response to the Robert Pattinson vehicle Remember Me will be aware, it is always appreciated if the conclusion of a drama is just that – a conclusive rendering of themes, storylines and characters that have been previously established, rather than random occurrences. Luther’s creator and writer Neil Cross goes to great lengths to stack the deck in his favour on this front, and the result – four principle characters converging in a bloody and faux-moralistic confrontation on an abandoned train platform – fails to satisfy on almost every level.

What are these levels? Firstly, and most obviously, there is characterisation. DCI Ian Reed began as just another cop in the office, and Luther’s “best mate”, but without warning or reason he becomes in the last episode and a half a desperate murderer. The extent to which he has covered up his crimes and tried to frame his friend is ludicrous; more damagingly, it undermines any involvement as once again realism is ditched in favour of Drama with a capital D. “But it’s just escapist entertainment” you might cry. However, Reed’s killing of Zoe, and subsequent arrangement of the scene (in minutes, it seems) to implicate Luther is the act of a man far more composed and calculating than the harried wobble that actor Steven Mackintosh grants the character. Escapism is fine; a gaping dissonance between the portrayal of a character and their actions is not. Beyond these accusations, the final scene itself commits further sins of capriciousness, as Reed begs Luther to kill him then, when the tables are turned, fights desperately to save himself. Perhaps a sense of the pitiable wretchedness of his personality would have saved such fluctuations, but as it was not on display we shall never know.

Secondly, and perhaps less noticeably awkward, is the staging itself. The logistics boggle the mind: Zoe’s civilian boyfriend Mark North has, unchallenged, stolen personal property from a police station (property itself left over from the previous episode, and in no serious way remarked upon or given dramatic significance) which implicates Reed. The detective then makes a phone call and asks for North, who is on foot, to be ‘tracked’. North’s position then appears on Reed’s sat-nav and a pursuit begins. Quite what technology is being employed here I do not know, but I suspect it is somewhat outside even the wildest dreams of the Met. North leads Reed to what appears to be an abandoned platform at Waterloo station, at which point there is much yelling, and even gunfire. No police arrive and no civilians interrupt, despite the clear indication that this is an easily accessible space.

Finally, and most offensive, is the deployment of Luther’s dead lover. Any respect for her character has already been shredded by the positioning of her murder as an instigator of Luther’s fugitive-status, rather than an event in its own right. In a move as narcissistic as the shows title, Zoe’s death functions solely as a way of changing Luther’s living conditions. Any hope that this will be rectified is swiftly banished when North, Zoe’s boyfriend who believes Luther to be her killer, is convinced otherwise offscreen! Never has a jump cut been applied so callously to cover up so calamitous a gulf in narrative logic. The final scene brings the final insult – Reed tries to incite Luther to violence by claiming to have slept with Zoe, using previously unheard sexual terms like ‘coming’ and ‘orgasm’. Zoe, originally depicted as a character with strength enough to depart from Luther’s sphere of influence, throughout the series begins sleeping with him again, dies because of a plot that in no way involves her, and is ultimately humiliated. (Humiliated twice over in point of fact: these sexual incitements are meaningful only because they attack Luther’s masculinity.)

In up-turning the world of Ajax, Sophocles might be making a statement (about the fallibility of alliance, the generosity of men, answers on a tweet-feed please), but crucially he is providing a basis for his play using reversal and irony, solid rhetorical traits. The play is assembled using dramatic elements that fit into a meaningful and satisfying formal scheme. The villain in Luther becomes another cop, while the murderess from episode one and the jealous new boyfriend of the ex-wife become allies.

These inversions are meaningless, though, when they fail to force Luther to see his world in a new light. In a show that has been unremittingly singular in its focus, it fails to provide a new insight for the character. Episode one began with a Luther who had let a bad person die and is now psychologically tortured for it. After six hours packed with incident, betrayal and death, Luther is in a situation similar enough to be conventional, but not exactly replicated enough to be understood as an echo, or theme. We end where we began in a tangled hierarchy which works better when there is an awareness of its deployment (as in the Bourne series, which begins and ends with the drowning protagonist). Neil Cross reverts to this device not to create meaning, but because he understands that it is the correct way for exciting stories to end.

I was perilously close to falling asleep during the last twenty minutes of the second episode of Luther. It was clear that the show was going to be content week-in-week-out to feature a swathe of destruction which only the bearish Luther could prevent, while in the background other characters remained shackled to their roles as prescribed more by scriptwriter templates than realism or psychological depth. Then, during a confrontation between them, the murderess Alice called Luther her friend, and – after initially resisting – Luther stated “well, one coffee doesn’t make us friends,” and they stroll off together.

Rather than embrace this staggering mutual need, the show relegated it, and Alice’s complete inefficacy in the last hour – when she should have come into her own as a temptress pulling Luther further down the path of self-justified violent action – was one of the final nails in Luther’s coffin (by my count, the most important contribution she made was making Luther a cup of tea).

In sacrificing logic, character and originality at the altar of the wilful need to entertain, the show undermined even its own minor pleasures. The resolution it offered was nothing more than stock – like gravy without a meal to go with it. Of all the things it was trying to prove – that the BBC can make primetime television as good as America, that lead Idris Elba is star enough to carry a show, etc. – Luther succeeded only in showing that drama without investment is so cheap as to not be worth bothering with.

Big Nowhere: A Review of 'The Killer Inside Me'

2010-06-01T10:26:00.000-07:00

The question of whether the depiction of violence is morally justifiable has been cropping up a lot in discussions of Michael Winterbottom’s new work ‘The Killer Inside Me’. The issue is certainly one worth exploring, but gives the impression that the film itself is an ‘8mm’ style investigation into the intersection of realism and fakery, violence and pornography, titillation and culpability. It is none of these things, instead settling for a slick, shallow-feeling noir with some seriously upsetting sequences, which utilises ambiguity a lot more than its occasional upfront brutality would suggest.

Casey Affleck plays small-town cop Lou Ford, an aw-shucks simpleton with a pretty fiancé and a penchant for stovetop coffee and classical music. Or at least that is what Lou himself thinks the rest of the town take him for, when in truth he carries the sickness – a compulsion to murder women, boys, and anyone else he can convince himself is an impediment to his half-baked schemes. Or at least, sickness (always italics) is what it is termed in the original 1952 novel by dime-store noir master Jim Thompson. The film itself suggests a Freudian web of troubling childhood episodes, Winterbottom calls it schizophrenia in interviews, while Affleck’s own performance suggests a self-deluded sociopathy.

This grey indeterminacy at the heart of the drama is what both makes it a hollow and unconvincing experience as well as a compelling and tense one. The reconcilement of such opposites is reminiscent of Emile Zola’s 1890 novel La Béte Humaine, in which various steamy affairs and murderous impulses are all simmered together in an overpoweringly gothic stew which makes nods towards social relevance, but only ever satirically so.

‘The Killer Inside Me’ flirts with the gothic in the dark impulses of the characters, but retains a blandly art deco façade. It is this matter-of-factness that makes the killings so vicious and potentially offensive, not just the calm way they are filmed or the bizarre continued devotion that everyone seems to still feel for Lou even when he is beating their face to a pulp. This disassociation from the protagonist and the film-makers intentions (the narrative has such a recycled clean-break-gone-wrong framework as to be almost invisible) threatens to estrange the audience; the sustained depiction of it pulls us back, forces us to re-associate with what we are witnessing in a way that Lou does not. These are ideas Quentin Tarantino has been playing around with for a decade now; unsurprisingly, Winterbottom’s clear-eyed commitment to them is more rewarding.

These killings, which stand so proud and vital within both the film and discussions about it, threaten to overshadow the rest of ‘The Killer Inside Me’. If they are not allowed to do so then the weaknesses surrounding them begin to reveal themselves: the ambling plotting, the disconnected final reel, the often sub-par musical choices, the plainness of the filming which seems ill-at-ease with what Winterbottom states is intended to be such a subjective experience of a killer’s own mindset. Such analysis reveals further how the film plays with violence as a structuring device, a marketing ploy, a (non)pleasure to be focussed upon at the expense of all else. Kathryn Bigelow does much the same in her cinema, and lays herself open to the same accusations of relying upon the very conventions she exposes.

The entertainment to be found in ‘The Killer Inside Me’ is not of the visceral variety, nor the generic. These pleasures are offered, but critiqued and disregarded to the extent that to come away from the film praising the shooting, or the cleverness of the plot, would be somewhat perverse. Lou, it turns out, is unaware that he has not quite pulled the wool over the eyes of those around him as successfully as he thought, and this revelation further complicates the interaction between the film and the spectator. Like Lou, we aren’t sure quite whether we are as secure in our received narrative as we seem, and like those around him we don’t understand what the motives for the crimes we witness are. These misgivings, and not the fierceness of the violence, are what offer ‘The Killer Inside Me’ its power.

Speaking Of The Apocalypse: A Review of 'Pontypool'

2010-05-28T09:04:00.000-07:00

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!”

22 Things I Learned From 'Robin Hood'

2010-05-23T08:04:00.000-07:00

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.

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

2010-05-15T14:28:00.000-07:00

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.

Bunker Buster: A Review of 'Iron Man 2'

2010-05-11T14:52:00.000-07:00

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.

Release the Cacophony: A Review of ‘Clash of the Titans’

2010-04-15T12:01:00.000-07:00

A gift to the creators of summer blockbuster taglines, “Titans Will Clash” screamed trailers and posters, which is (one hopes) as close as we’ll ever get to a movie being sold on the explicit promise that “Things Will Break” or “Stuff Will Boom”. It might be churlish to mock the lack of actual Titans within the mise-en-scene of the piece (there weren’t any in the 1981 quote-unquote original film, after all), but the fact that what we get in return is a bored-looking Ralph Fiennes and the far from titanic Sam Worthington has got to be cause for complaint.

Worthington (a man who has mastered the fine art not just of looking like he can swordfight when he in truth cannot but also that of looking like he might just be acting when he’s really not) plays demi-god Perseus, a kindly soul who lives with his family on a small boat and seems somewhat starved of opportunities to meet people. Thankfully for him, a brewing war between men and the gods soon overtakes his life, and before he knows it he’s joined a group of Argosian soldiers off on a dangerous quest to ensure their city isn’t destroyed by fabled sea monster The Kraken (one must always put the definite article first, like ‘The Situation’; as for pronunciation, kra-ken seems to be the accepted form, although some cast members add a frisson by calling it The Kruk-en, as though it were a bookcase from Ikea).

The problems set in early, from the structural (if man’s worship/failure to worship the gods is what leads to their displeasure, why is there at no point any demonstration of what form such worship might take?) to the rational (immediately after you directly affront the gods a black vapour congeals itself in the middle of your throne room, manifesting itself into a giant face, and the first question you ask is “who are you?” … really?). There is a way to make a film like this, carefully balancing the grandiose absurdities with light humour and real human emotion – Joss Whedon has made a career out of such calculation.

‘Clash of the Titans’ has no interest in emotion, though, only in things going boom. At times this becomes borderline ingenious, as ancient ruins are re-tooled as battlegrounds, and Greek columns, pediments, friezes (and at one point, I swear, Tibetan statues) are torn asunder; classical culture, already twice shat on by a myth-disregarding film and a logic-disregarding remake, is thrice ground into dust.

Beyond the semiotic appeal of such dispiriting metaphors, what we are left with is a truly awful screenplay and no effort made to disguise it. Like a ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ film with the wit excised and the budget slashed, ‘Clash of the Titans’ insists on grandiloquence with its booming score, visceral editing, and heroic one-liners, but at root is just a bunch of lazy actors standing around on a surprisingly small set made out of black flint (always black flint: the production designer is so in love black flint he even makes a character out of it).

Big stars in it for the cash like Fiennes and Liam Neeson (who, with ‘The A-Team’ also on the horizon, has clearly decided it’s time to pay off the mortgage on his Miami beach-house) make no impression at all, and are not assisted by frankly stupid costuming and staging as Olympian-in-name-only deities. It’s left to Mads Mikkelson to steal what little show there is with his veteran soldier Draco, a man who seems just as confused by the placing of Worthington’s dull Perseus centre-stage as the audience is. Proclaiming himself a fisherman, not a fighter, Perseus demonstrates this by returning to camp in the middle of the woods with a mite of a fish, sourced from an unseen body of water, and clearly not enough to feed a single one of the seven or eight grown men he accompanies. “You are a fisherman!” exclaims a comrade, worryingly without sarcasm.

It’s worth praising, briefly, the presence of Gemma Arterton and Alexa Davalos, both women with far more magnetism and class than the Rachel Weisz’s and Kate Beckinsale’s of this world, even if the narrative continually positions them as either passively ineffectual or prostituted sacrifices/sex objects (none more so than in Arterton’s offensive final deus ex machina). I also feel compelled to mention the presence of Danny Huston as Poseidon, who is given one sole line of dialogue before wisely getting the hell out of dodge – is this last-minute re-editing, ridiculously over-starry casting, or just the actions of a confused casting director?

The best acting comes, surprisingly, from a terribly CGI’d Medusa, whose look of disappointment when she realises she cannot turn one of her victims into stone with her gaze is genuinely touching. Then the victim activates some sort of grenade in his heart (or something) and I lost interest again. Speaking of the special effects, there is alas too little space here to bemoan the worst animatronics on film for some time (the ferryman of the underworld deserves better), the ridiculous-looking stygian witches (who don’t even pass their one eye between them, which is the whole point) and the generally sub-par digital landscapes and creatures. As to the 3-D, greedily added in post-production to ride ‘Avatar’s dimensional wave, I took the advice of the reviewosphere and saw it in 2-D and so could not comment (I urge you to go me one better, and not see the film in any dimensions at all).

Maybe – just maybe – ‘Clash of the Titans’ gets a passing grade as a basic action picture. But it squanders the possibility of making an epic spectacle of Hesiod’s Theogony, failing on every level to capture even the most basic enticements of mythical narrative: there are none of the overlapping genealogies, dense soap-opera-like back-stories or pungently tragic trajectories that make even a glancing read of the Dummies Guide to Ancient Greek Myth an intriguing experience.

As the gang enter Medusa’s lair to Perseus’ bark of “Let’s go kill that bitch” the movie suddenly reveals what it should have been: a sweary, cleavage-filled, lad-oriented adventure. Severed heads, illogical plotting, a fierce distrust of all things feminine – the ingredients are all there. Instead, like the gods who were fooled by Prometheus into accepting the bones and skin of sacrificed animals while men received all the meat, the audience is tricked into swallowing down a pile of unwanted and foul-stenching cast-offs.

Easy Answers: A Review of 'Green Zone'

2010-03-11T09:48:00.000-08:00

Our governments lied to us. For reasons of profit, vengeance, convenience, or a combination of all three, the administrations of the United States and the UK relied upon faulty intelligence in making the case for war in Iraq. So a million column inches have said in the days since. So, too, Paul Greengrass says, declaratively and to little effect, in his new film ‘Green Zone’.

There seems little room in popular culture for the war in Iraq to be anything other than a decisive act of will. The messy reality of what might actually have occurred in the months and years leading up to the invasion are polarised into black and white, right and wrong, democracy and dictatorship. Only ‘In The Loop’, Armando Iannucci’s brilliant satire based on his own BBC show ‘The Thick Of It’, managed to express any of the shades of grey, as civil servants and button-pushers who had little inkling or concern for what was truly happening around them were prodded, manipulated and coerced into making the case for war. (Although the televised coverage of the Chilcot inquiry comes close to matching this fudged, awkward depiction of events).

In ‘Green Zone’ this thronging confused mass becomes something much more recognisable: rather than the sexing up of doubtful intelligence, here we have outright fabrication, villainy and murder. An American military officer on the hunt for WMD begins to doubt the validity of his leads, in doing so discovering and being disgusted by the lies he has been fed. The story is told straight by director Greengrass, who originally cut his teeth on political documentary (and went on to make ‘The Bourne Supremacy’ and ‘The Bourne Ultimatum’) and who here uses a $140 million dollar movie as a vehicle for a howl of political dissatisfaction.

There is a fundamental illogic at the heart of the enterprise that makes it an impossible film to respect. Greengrass stated in an interview with The Guardian that he wanted to try to bring the Bourne audience along to this new picture, explicitly a cinematic rendering of a dossier he produced on events titled ‘How Did We Get It So Wrong?’. Yet anchoring the story to a traditional action-film narrative of goals (first a book of addresses, then a outlaw Ba’ath party politician) and cheap characterisation (manipulated journalist, antagonistic special forces commander, callous Neoconservative politician) makes his interpretation of events – valid as it may perhaps be – seem at best a fairy tale.

Further undermining credibility, much of Baghdad is recreated in helicopter shots using digital effects. These fail to create a compelling environment, and instead render the world of the characters Star Wars-esque: a backdrop to larger-than-life heroics and simple solutions to basic questions. Due to the certificate of the film there is little blood, and less swearing – when the hero gets to yell, “What the fuck are you doing?” his mouth is even obscured by an AK-47, making the line all the easier to dumb down for the US television broadcast. Complain all you like about the politics of Ridley Scott’s ‘Black Hawk Down’, but at least when he crashed a helicopter he did it for real; here, it’s all digital, and the crash itself is offscreen. This matters not so much because of the lack of efficiently delivered spectacle, but because of the indifference it demonstrates towards the lives of the third-tier characters, an acceptable offence in a big budget action flick, but a heinous crime in a picture about the dangers of political expediency and disregard for the lives of soldiers and civilians. The script judiciously attacks those accused of lying, or involved in peddling a lie, yet Greengrass’ filmmaking here is as heavy in rhetorical propaganda as the Bush administration ever was. We see the former president deliver part of his ‘Mission Accomplished’ speech and are supposed to scoff, but the film itself finishes off in the exact same absurdly triumphalist tone.

Supposedly based on ‘Imperial Life in the Emerald City’, Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s factual tour through post-invasion Iraq, the film ditches this material for the most part. ‘Emerald City’ revelled in the surreal experience of twenty-four year old city administrators lying poolside in the Saddam Hussein’s former imperial palace while half a mile away civilians were being killed in car bombs and water and electricity were luxuries in short supply. A little of that survives here, but only as window dressing: the most interesting scene of the film sees a soldier in full uniform walk entirely ignored through a crowded hotel lobby thronging with westerners holding bottled beer. This incongruity, as the mise-en-scene of war brushes up with recognisable everyday activities, is where Chandrasekaran’s account found all its strength, so it’s a shame that ‘Green Zone’ so studiously ignores it. Compare to ‘The Hurt Locker’, with its pirate DVD market, and the memorable scene in the American grocery store at the end; or ‘In The Valley of Elah’, and the denouement that reveals the twenty-first century psyche as incapable of distinguishing between combat and domesticity. Or, of course, ‘Generation Kill’, David Simon’s HBO miniseries, in which soldiers waiting to attack quote lines from ‘Heat’, and later edit together a video montage of their own experience of battle with Johnny Cash on the soundtrack. Watched in the light of such recent work, ‘Green Zone’ looks almost mould-breakingly naïve.

In the run-up to the last presidential election, Matt Damon criticised Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin for being ill-suited to the job, remarking on how the bringing of her folksy wisdom to the White House would be "Like something from a Disney film," and therefore ridiculous. Unfortunately, by taking the lead role in ‘Green Zone’, he is guilty of exactly what he there condemned, and which the film itself preaches against: the distortion of facts to make them fit a classical narrative which serves a specific agenda. Subsequently, the film succeeds neither as political statement nor as spectacular entertainment.

22 Things I Learned From 'The Crazies'

2010-03-07T08:17:00.000-08:00

1. If a Zippo lighter is going to be used later, it must first be introduced and demonstrated as fully functional.

2. Rather than slashing (or shooting) car tyres, the US Military will instead go through the unnecessarily long-winded process of wheel-clamping every vehicle in a containment zone.

3. If the protagonists of a movie about a pandemic viral outbreak are a husband and wife who are town sheriff and town doctor respectively, then numerous references will be made to the role of the sheriff, while the doctor will dress exactly one wound and provide no insight into epidemiology.

4. It’s never a good idea to split up.

5. Always check behind the door.

6. Never flee up stairs. Come on people, it really is time we learnt this one.

7. There’s only one black man in Iowa.

8. Car washes are scary.

9. Bone saws are scary.

10. A lone girl bicycling through an abandoned high street is ridiculous, and not scary.

11. Having no one torn to pieces by a combine harvester is a missed opportunity.

12. Three-day growth goatees are a nightmare for continuity.

13. No car or truck is safe from overturning spectacularly. Or exploding. But not both.

14. Small town mayors always put politics before the safety of the people (see also: ‘Jaws’). They also, oddly, fail to get their comeuppance.

15. It would be more rewarding for audiences if the rules and consequences of infection were delineated in more detail. Or, in fact, any detail at all.

16. The keys are never in the cab.

17. Timothy Olyphant is made for this sort of stuff.

18. Radha Mitchell is not.

19. The American military a) fail to successfully transport a hazardous biological agent from one state to the next, b) cannot secure even the smallest of civilian populations, and c) merrily wait for three full days before deploying the nuclear option they were going to use all along.

20. If a cap and trade system were judiciously applied to the amount of shock moments in horror films, ‘The Crazies’ would be way over quota.

21. Slickness, explosions and chases have replaced tension, satire and existential dread.

22. Just because you can remake a little known George Romero horror film, doesn’t mean you should.

Take The Edge Off: A Review of 'Edge of Darkness'

2010-01-30T12:37:00.000-08:00

In the pilot episode of the BBC television serial ‘Edge of Darkness’ from 1985, the father of a woman who has been gunned down is consoled by a co-worker. This co-worker herself breaks down and begins to cry. The father, police detective Thomas Craven, gently hugs her in return, but morosely asks her to stop crying, “otherwise we’ll all be at it.” This scene does not occur in the blockbuster film remake of the show, and if it did then star Mel Gibson would probably shoot the woman for getting in his way. Thomas Craven is no longer a downbeat stoic Northerner, but a brashly Catholic Bostonian. So too the story is no longer a meticulous revelation of human frailty and corruption, but a conspiracy thriller.

There is nothing inherently wrong with these changes, and the first hour or so of the film is strong. The relationship between Craven and his daughter is believable, his grief at her death effective, and the suggestion of corporate malfeasance intriguing. Director Martin Campbell was also behind the original show, and the introduction of both the Boston setting and writer William Monahan to the mix are successful. Themes of parentage and mortality surface, and a quiet conversation at a kitchen table is frankly superb.

Then, at around the halfway point, there is a shocking car accident which strains credulity to breaking point. From here, it’s only a matter of time before cabals of villains plot and scheme, friends become betrayers, and Craven goes renegade with just a gun and a snarl.

The shift in the final reel is so out of keeping with what has occurred before that it might yet be a big joke. Suffice to say, anyone struggling to conclude their own screenplays concerning labyrinthine mazes of incident and intent could take a leaf out of Monahan’s book, but only if they’re willing to write the phrase “then he gets shot in the head” a few dozen times. I have previously been a great fan of his work in ‘The Departed’ and ‘Kingdom of Heaven’, and while he sprinkles references to F. Scott Fitzgerald and Diogenes throughout ‘Edge of Darkness’, it’s clear Monahan has no handle on the story he’s telling or what it’s trying to say. The original was about British anxieties concerning nuclear power and the political manoeuvring of labour unions; what the 2010 version is about is anybody’s guess. (Perhaps the absurd illogic at the centre of the conspiracy is intentional, and the whole thing is actually a parody.)

Taken on its own terms, the film should perhaps be seen with an even dimmer view. Ray Winstone masters the sly black ops man he is given, but is then given nothing to do for much of the time. An awareness of the consequences of the frequent violent altercations is hinted at, but then never addressed. It is fair to assume that these problems stem from the re-shoots asked by the studio, which result in utterly pointless kidnappings and nauseating moral lurches. Yet, the studio is ‘Icon Productions’, whose figurehead is Mel Gibson – surely he knew what he was signing up for? Of all the praiseworthy things that can – and should – be claimed of the 1985 serial, that it has commercial viability and brand recognition surely are not among them.

Much like the Hollywood version of ‘State of Play’, another British television series, too much happens too fast and not a lot feels like it makes any sense, which is a consequence of condensing six hours of story into two, and adding gunfights. Perhaps it is time for traffic to move the other way, and for the BBC to create a compelling six-part drama from the screenplay for ‘Payback’, or a subdued political chamber-piece from ‘Commando’. Or maybe ITV could produce a 90-minute action film based on seasons 1 – 3 of ‘The Wire’.

At least such experiments would generate more of a reaction than stunned disappointment, ebbing away into resigned apathy.

The Best Films of 2009

2010-01-07T12:29:00.000-08:00

‘Avatar’

A sensory spectacular. To quote a colleague, ‘a masterpiece, if the most flawed movie ever to get such acclaim.’

‘The Hurt Locker’

Kathryn Bigelow returns from the wasteland with a meticulous unpacking of the twenty-first century American military psyche. It’s the modern-day ‘Platoon’, only well written.

‘In The Loop’

Whether Armando Iannucci is aware that his teetering-on-the-borderline-of-immaturity satire ends up compartmentalising the blame for the Iraq war to an out-of-control spin doctor, thus for the most part excusing the (here unseen) world leaders from blame, is immaterial: well-made, caustically written, and always on the move, ‘In The Loop’ was an outright success.

‘The International’

While other films of its ilk are happy to rest on the sobriquet ‘70s-style’, this precise but invested thriller managed to be both of its time (a banking crisis!) and timeless (how does the individual function within the system?) in its concerns.

‘Public Enemies’

In an example of superlative filmmaking, if not run-away entertainment, Michael Mann somehow marries the men-with-guns pomposity of his digital crime thrillers with the spooky existentiality of ‘Manhunter’.

Honorary mentions:

‘The Taking of Pelham 123’ (played to my fondness for New York-based heist thrillers), ‘The Hangover’ (a welcome tonic from the Apatow-domination of bromances), ‘Rachel Getting Married’ (bravely down-to-earth cinema about the dawn of responsibility), ‘Duplicity’ (not so much about the art of conning as the art of film-making, and how god-awfully repetitive and meaningless it becomes after a while), and ‘Let The Right One In’ (cool, stylish, scary, and very well made).

The Pros and Cons of ‘Daybreakers’

2010-01-07T12:14:00.000-08:00

The Cons:

- Someone drives a classic car through a plate glass window

- Willem Dafoe doesn’t die horribly.

- A Humvee explodes.

- It stars Ethan Hawke.

- The trailer features Placebo covering Kate Bush. The movie does not.

- Just when you think there isn’t going to be a vampire massacre … there’s a vampire massacre. In slow motion.

On the other hand…

The Pros:

- Someone drives a classic car through a plate glass window

- Willem Dafoe doesn’t die horribly.

- A Humvee explodes.

- It stars Ethan Hawke.

- The trailer features Placebo covering Kate Bush. The movie does not.

- Just when you think there isn’t going to be a vampire massacre … there’s a vampire massacre. In slow motion.