22 Things I Learned From John Wick

1. Contrary to expectation, Keanu Reeves is chock full of awesome.

2. This film’s trailer has more plot than this film.

3. Assassins have their own hotels.

4. Assassins have their own gold-coin based economy.

5. Assassins never fight in anything other than immaculate three-piece suits.

6. Stabbing yourself is a reasonable fight move.

7. Aggressive stunt driving is a great way to work off widower grief.

8. New York City is jam-packed with actors from HBO TV shows.

9. Dogs get delivered at night by courier.

10. The most exclusive nightclubs require you to shower before entry.

11. When in doubt, blame a nepotistic Russian crime syndicate.

12. Ornate churches are reasonable cover for money laundering.

13. You can never have enough gunfights, until you can.

14. You can always have enough chrome.

15. Michael Nyqvist may very well be able to act, and possibly to act well, but we see no evidence of this here.

16. The handcuffs can always be picked.

17. The best friend always gets tortured.

18. The villain always has a chopper waiting.

19. Don’t hang around Bethesda Fountain after dark.

20. It’s acceptable to kill approximately 6,567 people one-by-one in gruesome ways if you’re avenging the death of a cute puppy.

21. Since Reeves’s rhythmic, slightly off-tempo and quite beautiful fight manoeuvres make up exactly 96.7% of the running time, perhaps John Wick would have worked better as a ballet.

22. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. In the land of mediocre action thrillers, the one that can string together a halfway adequate fight scene is disappointingly hailed as a masterpiece.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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