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

“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

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'

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'

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'

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'

‘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'

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

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'

‘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'

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’

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'

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.