LONDON CITY NIGHTS: 4 stars

Friday, November 7, 2014

'Nightcrawler' (2014) directed by Dan Gilroy

Friday, November 7, 2014 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

"If it bleeds, it leads". This motto runs through Nightcrawler like the message in a stick of rock. Night in the big city transforms the environment into darkness punctuated by pools of of light: the halogen glow of the asphalt, primary coloured neon advertising, sickly orange street lights and, every few minutes, a scrawl of blue and red flashing emergency lights. It's those last ones where we sit up and take interest.

Lou Bloom (Jake Gyllenhaal) is an unemployed, amoral, unlikeable loser. We first meet him stealing a chain link fence to sell to a scrap yard for a couple of bucks. Desperate he tries to sell his services to the yard boss, explaining that he's a hard, conscientious worker, as well as a quick learner. He's quickly rebuffed; "Why would I want to hire a thief?" Good point.

Disconsolately driving home he spots a traffic accident. Drawn to it like a moth to a flame he's transfixed by a woman bleeding to death on the hard shoulder, her shattered car burning behind her. Rushing up behind him comes Joe Loder (Bill Paxton), who films the accident and sells the tape to TV news. His operation is called Mayhem News and he makes his living as a 'nightcrawler'. Impressed by the job Bloom quizzes Loder, almost instantly coming to the conclusion that this is the job for him.

And so he sits on the side of the road, ears peeled to the distorted chatter of police dispatch, listening for gory accidents, violent crime and structural fires - preferably oozing tears, blood and guts. Very quickly it becomes apparent that Bloom has found his calling, his lack of empathy an advantage in getting the shots that most reporters would balk at. He sticks his camera in the faces of dying men, sneaks into murder scenes and even begins moving bodies to create better shots. His sensational footage is lapped up by news producer Nina Romano (Rene Russo) and, with a nervy assistant Rick (Riz Ahmed) he claws his way towards success over the backs of dead men.

Nightcrawler belongs to a long line of cinematic critiques of press sensationalism. Hungry for the next big scoop, desperate journalists will ignore all boundaries, legal, moral and physical to get their story. There's a through line of cinematic DNA that runs through Billy Wilder's Ace In The Hole, Network and Broadcast News, all of which explore the problem of having to produce a daily news show that balances informing and entertaining, feeding the public's rubbernecking lust for graphic carnage under the guise of reporting fictional crimewaves.

This makes Nightcrawler's characters pretty familiar archetypes. You have the numbed TV careerist whose moral boundaries have long eroded away in a quest for ratings, the disapproving arbiter of journalistic standards who queries whether gore and death are news, the vain and airheaded anchors who repeat what they're told and, in the centre of this whirlpool, a hero whose soul is destroyed by greed.

The twist here is that Lou Bloom doesn't have a soul. A gaunt Gyllenhaal, with sunken cheeks and eyes the size of cue balls, plays Bloom as a scarily intense creep without a conscience, empathy or any respect for his fellow man. He appears to have no normal life, no friends or family and meagre possessions - the only thing we see him caring for is a houseplant. This, coupled with his nocturnal existence, makes him an all too plausible vampire, swooping through the night and craving the blood of the innocent.

As cinema sociopaths go Bloom is one that's going to lodge in the memory. His malformed personality is a warped reflection of the capitalistic ideal. He chatters endlessly about business growth, managerial technique and is constantly engaged in endless financial negotiations. Bloom reduces every single person he meets to a cog in his financial machine, assessing their monetary worth to him and ruthlessly exploiting it.

A couple of characters mention that Bloom just doesn't understand people. They're wrong - he's dangerous because he understands people perfectly. He knows what they want to see, how much they're willing to give him for that and precisely how to manipulate them into doing what he wants. As soon as he's introduced to the world of TV news he realises that it's an environment he can prosper in - where human experiences captured on film can be instantly monetised. So he's a monster, but he's a logically created monster, the embodiment of rapacious, predatory capitalism that literally trades in human misery.

In a slippery moral twist, writer/director Dan Gilroy can't quite find it in himself to outright criticise Bloom. Working from the maxim, "don't hate the playa, hate the game", Gilroy treats Bloom as the logical conclusion to the industry he works in and the free market society he lives in. That said, if he did openly criticise his protagonist he'd be a big fat hypocrite. There's a queasy duality in watching a rapt Bloom scurrying from corpse to corpse, taking care to beautifully frame each within his shots. In turn Gilroy's camera follows Bloom, as much enjoying shooting this carnage as he is. In turn we lap up the carnage, eagerly awaiting what splattered mess Gilroy is going to serve up next.

Considering that Bloom takes pride in his cinematography and lighting it's entirely appropriate that Gilroy and his D.O.P. Robert Elswit do the same. The L.A. night is smeared with bright colour, reminiscent of Only God Forgives or Spring Breakers - highly saturated primary tones jumping out of the darkness. Throughout it's astonishing to look at, their palette and framing choices allowing stylistic nudges like Gyllenhaal's features becoming a skull, or his hunched silhouette a vulture crouched over a carcass.

It's a hell of a film from top to bottom. This could be a career best performance from Gyllenhaal, who grabs our attention in minute one and doesn't let up until the credits roll. Riz Ahmed and Rene Russo similarly impress, though each merely reacts to the compelling moral black hole that Lou Bloom represents. Dan Gilroy was already an accomplished writer, but Nightcrawler marks him down as a director to keep a seriously close eye on.

★★★★

Friday, October 31, 2014

'The Skeleton Twins' (2014) directed by Craig Johnson

Friday, October 31, 2014 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

Suicide and comedy seem unlikely bedfellows, yet from Harold & Maude and Groundhog Day onwards the two have proved fruitful territory for comedy. Once you have a character who's given up on life you've got someone with a plausible reason for acting in an outrageous manner. Sure it's morbid, but my favourite comedy tends to be laced with sadness and desperation.

The Skeleton Twins isn't exactly a comedy, but boy is it funny. You might have your doubts based on the opening, but bear with me. Here we see Milo (Bill Hader) writing a glib suicide note: ''To whom it may concern, see ya later.'' He then slices his wrists open. Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, his sister Maggie (Kristen Wiig) stares blankly at the bathroom mirror, holding a handful of pills.

She's about to gobble them when her phone rings. She's informed that her brother, who she hasn't seen in ten years, has tried to kill himself. Putting her own suicide on hold, she travels to California to see him. Feeling a sense of filial loyalty she invites him to live with her and her husband Lance (Luke Wilson) in upstate New York. The stage is thus set for a knotty, mordant drama about inter-family relations, depression and the impossibility of completely healing trauma.

I bet you're laughing already! Well, you will. The key to The Skeleton Twins is that while it always treats Milo and Maggie's problems with utmost sincerity, these characters are too smart to truly wallow in self-pity. Despite their initial differences, Milo is a depressed, gay failed actor living in California and Maggie is in apparent domestic bliss and trying for a baby, the two are immediately and obviously two sides of the same coin.

In each other they see their their insecurities, paranoias and lack of confidence reflected - resulting in a fractious relationship that spins between familial intimacy and vicious arguments. A high water mark for happiness is a touchingly hilarious scene where the two get high on nitrous oxide; collapsing in an anoxic, befuddled daze in the corner as they gigglingly confess secrets to each other. It's funny, sad and kind of cute all at once. Scenes like this cement the perfectly balanced double act that Hader and Wiig have constructed. It's a pleasure to see two actors complementing each other's performances so well; mutually building their performances from the dramatic footholds the other provides.

Of the two I preferred Wiig, though only by a hair. Her misery is tangible and we see rather than be told of her lack of control over her (rather unsympathetic) actions. She wears the consumed expression of someone suffering from intense guilt with no real way to alleviate it. Though she's obviously beautiful she emerges in the later traumatic scenes pale, drawn and looking as if she hasn't had a good nights sleep in weeks.

The supporting cast are no slouch either. Ty Burrel as Rich, Milo's former highschool teacher and lover, comes at his role with a stone-faced permanence. His face is almost mask-like; neat, trimmed and with his thick-rimmed glasses almost Clark Kentish. Given that he's repressed his homosexuality we quickly read these stony-faced features convey a inner turmoil.

But it's Luke Wilson's Lance who really, really shines in a supporting role. In a film of slightly haughty, effete intellectuals he's a bouncy, loveable and behaves rather like an excited labrador. Every time he bounded onto the frame I had to suppress a smile, his simple good nature and optimistic outlook a joy to watch. In Lance we get our example of what a purportedly 'normal' person should be behaving like and though our sympathies always lie with the screwed up siblings, his character demonstrates that conventional domestic bliss might not be such a bad thing after all.

He makes me feel happy just looking at him.

At times The Skeleton Twins feels like a headlong race towards death. Milo and Maggie seem to be caught in a kind of sibling rivalry as to who's more screwed up, with every other character helpless to stop the two destroying each other This means that though Maggie is theoretically supposed to be helping Milo recuperate, the two end up acting as each other's therapist. Taking life advice from a man who's just tried to kill himself could seem corny in the wrong hands, but there's a bedrock of love in the film that can't be poisoned by their various deep-seated issues.

Very much an actor's film, The Skeleton Twins only slightly falls apart with some rather humdrum visuals and sound, and the occasional blob of melodrama. The ending in particular feels airlifted from another, far more heavyhanded, movie and there's the odd line here and there that feels overly didactic; 'this is the message of the film and by god you're going to know it'.

Very much worth a watch, if only to see two extremely talented actors bouncing off each other. It's a cut above your average indie dramedy, but this is purely on the shoulders of Wiig and Hader, who elevate the material beyond cliche and all but force us to emotionally relate to Milo and Maggie, two wonderfully complex characters.

★★★★

The Skeleton Twins is released 7th November 2014

Friday, August 15, 2014

'Alleluia' (2014) directed by Fabrice Du Welz

Friday, August 15, 2014 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

Bloody hell. Grinding industrial electronic music blasts over the end credits of Alleluia. I look around the screening to see a roomful of people exhaling in relief, some grinning at what they'd just been through, some wide-eyed and staring like conscripts returning from a very bad war. Alleluia is intense. Alleluia is traumatic. Alleluia is nauseating. Alleluia is sadistic. Alleluia is downright demented.

Taking inspiration from the real life "the Lonely Hearts Killers", Raymond Fernandez and Martha Beck , Welz' film lures us down into a pitch-black cellar, entangling love and murder, romance and sadism. The centre of the film is the relationship between Gloria (Lola Dueñas) and Michael (Laurent Lucas), who meet over internet dating. Even before they're together they emanating sinister vibes; the film opens on a shot of morgue-worker Gloria washing a corpse and the first time we meet Michel he's engaged in a quasi-occult masturbatory ceremony designed to get Gloria to "succumb to his charms".

Clearly he's onto something because they immediately get on the right foot, Michel playing the debonair manipulator while Gloria looks on with shy adoration. The two quickly team up, weaselling their way into lonely women's lives, conning them out of money and murdering them. Surprisingly it's the mild-mannered Gloria that goes full-bore homicidal, transforming from housewife and mother into bloodthirsty predator, getting sexual joy from crushing windpipes and caving skulls in.

This dizzying carousel of blood, sweat, tears and cum is shot on grainy handheld camera, with a penchant for tight-close ups on the staring eyes of their shocked victims and the erotic joy on the killer's faces. Welz' lens roams around this horrible couple, implicating us within their crimes as silent observers. Structurally the film is divided into four acts; which correspond to four women within the film. Within this are a series of tonal peaks that allow us a brief respite of domestic safety before descending into blood-soaked carnage. Disturbingly, we find ourselves anticipating the chaos, looking forward to the quick-cut bravura film-making that accompanies the most brutal scenes.

Like the corpses Gloria and Michel leave in their wake Alleluia is narratively pared down to the bone. Every inch of fat has been sliced away leaving a 90 minute rollercoaster of a movie that, once it gets going, never eases up. Bravura moments are a nightmarish sequence where we see the naked killers dancing around a bonfire. The shots are sliced up into a disorientating whirlwind of flames, blurry appendages and screaming, ecstatic faces. All this to a seriously intense electronic soundtrack that bludgeons us about the head with screeching distorted sonic shards. It's full on, man.

At the opposite end of the spectrum is an intensely creepy shot of a dull-eyed Gloria standing next to a nude corpse laid out on a kitchen table. Her gaze bores right through the screen as she breaks into a impromptu song, apparently for our benefit alone. There's a sickly, tangible 'wrongness' to what we're seeing that turns the stomach green - the scene reminiscent of the gross fuckuppery of Chris Morris' Jam.

Even outside these highlights the film is constantly shot through with careful framing and beautiful lighting. Highlights are primary-coloured nightclub and cinema sequences at - the characters wallowing in cold electric blue and hellish red light. These moments stand out a mile compared to the desaturated reality of the rest of the movie, which has a camcorderish home movie quality that makes the violence that much more palpable.

Similarly impressive is the way Welz uses cinematography to tell the story in place of expository dialogue. In an early scene we see Gloria and Michel in the throes of passion in a darkened room. Michel's side of the frame is wreathed in pitch darkness while Gloria's still has spots of light illuminating her. As the two come together they're drawn down into Michel's dark world, the light vanishing from the frame as they furiously rut on the grubby floor. The handheld style gives a free, loose sensation to the film, making it seem improvised - but the careful framing proves that every frame is carefully calculated to maximise horrible, creepy nausea.

Another arrow in Welz' quiver is devastingly close-ups. The camera is often tightly locked on Dueñas' face, which we see progressing from romantic innocence to homicidal fury. Dueñas is simply magnificent, her Gloria a genuinely terrifying cinematic creation, reminding me Charlotte Gainsbourg's 'She' in Antichrist. As she moves in for the kill her eyes roll back in her head like a Great White about to take a chunk out of an unsuspecting diver. In the opening scenes you assume that arch-manipulator Lucas' Michel is going to be the leading villain, but both actor and character are quickly overshadowed by Dueñas' Gloria, a straight-up tour de force role.

This graphic, amoral carnage play quickly reminded me of the casual brutality of Rémy Belvaux's monstrous 1992 classic Man Bites Dog. So it was with no surprise that I later learned the films share a co-writer, Vincent Tavier. These films are the cinema of a grand guignol; gouts of sticky blood leavened with the blackest of black humour. Be warned, Alleluia is emphatically not a fun watch, it's a nasty, sick little bastard of a film where the innocent are slaughtered while the killers giggle and fuck.

Alleluia has a black, ichorously Satanic heart but though it's up to its eyeballs in evil it's a goddamn brilliantly constructed film. Perhaps not a great date movie, but perfect fodder for aficionados of extreme cinema, those who crave intense weirdness and perverts of all stripes. My feel-bad hit of the summer.

★★★★

Alleluia is released 22nd August

Wednesday, June 4, 2014

'Cheap Thrills' (2013) directed by E. L. Katz

Wednesday, June 4, 2014 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

We may want to be luminous beings but we're in the end we're just greedy beasts with simple needs. To fill these needs; be they food, shelter or the latest fancy piece of consumer electronics requires money; and you're going to have to debase yourself in way or another to get it. Whether you're biting your tongue and saying "Yes boss" to a bullying superior, giving a dead-eyed rictus smile to a moronic customer or feeling like a piece of shit on a shoe as you just ask for some from someone. Money makes whores of us all, and it's this simple concept that Cheap Thrills builds on. How far would you go to fill their wallet?

Craig (Pat Healy) is a typical middle-class failure. Beginning with grand designs on being a writer, he realised tapping a keyboard doesn't pay the bills and has been (in his eyes) reduced to blue collar labour as a mechanic. And now he's even been sacked from that. Unbeknowst to his beautiful wife and newborn son the overdue bills are stacking up - and pinned to the front door of his crummy flat is an eviction notice. Setting out to sink his sorrows in a dive bar he runs into Vince (Ethan Embry) an old school friend. As the two men reminisce and commiserate with each other, they catch the eye of Colin and Violet (David Koechner and Sara Paxton).

Colin is an obnoxious middle-aged bro-type in a ridiculous porkpie hat that marks him out as a tosser the second he sets foot on screen. Violet is a largely silent blonde beauty with the grace and demeanour of a praying mantis. The two toss around dollar bills like confetti, casually bribing the barmaid so they can snort coke at their table and ordering tequila by the bottle. Like moths to the flame Craig and Vince are drawn into their orbit, and a little betting game soon develops; $20 to the first person who'll down their shot. $50 to anyone that can make a woman slap them. $100 if you'll punch that bouncer in the face! This is the structure of the rest of the film; and as the amounts of cash increase so to do the extreme acts needed to earn it, the characters spiralling haplessly into a bottomless whirlpool of crime, kinky sex and self-mutilation.

Cheap Thrills is a jet black comedy that splits audience sensibilities right down the middle. One on hand these characters are somewhat sympathic, particularly Craig, who just wants to stop his family being evicted. Even though he's a bit pathetic it's difficult not to identify with his situation, and part of you hopes he'll just get the hell out of there and leave these sharks behind. On the other hand, the sadistic side of you wants to see how far this poor bastard will go for a couple of bucks. As his quivering hand raises a blade to his own flesh we find ourselves silently willing him to gouge away, purely because it'll make for a more interesting movie.

The consequences of these bloodthirsty urges are that the audience finds themselves aligned with the rich couple egging them on. This is a queasy feeling; these people are obviously evil and yet their humiliation game is amusing us as much as it is them. That the film can effortlessly create this disjunct between what we'd like to feel and what we actually feel goes some way to raising it above your average gross out gore film. Cheap Thrills is a movie with a social conscience, one that takes the question of how far desperate people will go for money to its grisly conclusion.

It's most obviously politically aware when it's delineating the class divides between the characters. Craig obviously considers himself to be a temporarily embarrassed successful person, full of shame for squandering his education and presumed writing talent. Vince, meanwhile, is more firmly working class. He's a hedonistic waster, apparently working as a small-time debt collector for loan sharks. Both can detect that, despite their past friendship, the two are operating in different class spheres, a sensation that causes ever more frictions.

Throwing that into sharp relief is the tasteless extravagance of Colin and Violet. They're so stratospherically richer than both men that, from his perspective, they're socially identical. They may as well be two ants bickering on an anthill as far as he's concerned. What this results in is a microcosmic example of divide and rule, two working class men scrabbling for crumbs while the rich man peers down at them with amusement, totally safe from any repercussions.

Underneath all the blood, screaming and shit, Cheap Thrills is a rather straightforward economic allegory; something that quietly nudges us to remember our basic dignity when it comes to providing for ourselves and our families. After all, what use is luxury if capitalism has rendered you numb, hollow-eyed and scarred: a shell where a human being used to be?

Katz has created a film that's the best of both worlds; successfully combining a punkish low-budget exploitation aesthetic with some high-falutin' ideas. At times it's cringeingly disgusting watch, but it's solidly competent film-making with rock-solid performances from the leads. It's probably not for everyone, but this is a great example of how to infuse low-budget schlock with politics without getting too preachy. A nice surprise that's on the verge of being a hidden gem.

★★★★

Cheap Thrills is released June 6th.

★★★★

American Interior is released 9th May 2013

Tuesday, June 3, 2014

'Jimmy's Hall' (2014) directed by Ken Loach

Tuesday, June 3, 2014 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

"Ken Loach doesn’t think very much of me. In a broadside against critics, he described us as “the kind of people who live in darkened rooms” and who don’t “engage in political struggle in the real world.” Well, nuts to you Ken Loach, maybe your invective applies to the toads that squat in The Daily Mail newsroom, or the snooty crypto fascists of the Express, Star etc. but not to me. And what’s more Ken, I really enjoyed your film for (I think) the precise reasons you intended."

Read the rest of my review at We Got This Covered

★★★★

Monday, June 2, 2014

'Fruitvale Station' (2013) directed by Ryan Coogler

Monday, June 2, 2014 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

In grainy iPhone footage we watch cops wrestle a handcuffed man to the ground and shoot him in the back. The camera wobbles as the crowd lets out a collective gasp of disbelief. This is the murder of Oscar Grant III, a young black man shot dead by a cop early on New Years Day 2009. The release of this footage on Youtube led to protests and riots, the execution serving as a catalyst for years of seething resentment against institutionally racist police officers.

In developments which won't come as a surprise to any Londoner, the BART police immediately threw up a smokescreen of misinformation, claiming that Grant was trying to assault them, that officers risked being "bruised" by him, and of course it logically follows then that on some level he deserved to be executed in cold blood. Eventually, after successfully arguing that he merely intended to taser Grant and grabbed the wrong weapon, the cop in question was convicted (by an all white jury) of the lesser crime involuntary manslaughter, spending just 11 months in prison before being released on parole.

How much is the life of a young black man worth in the USA? By the looks of things, not much. The 22 year old Oscar Grant worked a series of low paid, menial jobs, had a young child by his girlfriend and had served a prison sentence for small time drug dealing; a depressingly familiar blueprint for the urban working class. What Fruitvale Station sets out to do is explain exactly why a life like Grant's is important, and underline the tragedy of the killing of the common man.

That Grant simply had the misfortune to be in front of the wrong cop at the wrong time means his story is necessarily mundane; Coogler repeatedly underlining the notion that Oscar Grant could be any young black man in California. This means that much of the film is consciously down-to-earth - a domestic existence free of melodrama and narrative. It takes some courage to make a film that, at times, is consciously boring, but crucially this is boring with a point.

Even boring with a point can still try your patience on occasion, but fortunately Coogler has a great lead actor in Michael B. Jordan. This is a multi-layered performance with a number of things going on at once. First and foremost, Jordan has to make Grant into a sympathetic figure. It's not enough to simply tell us how much his family cares for him and expect us to follow, the character has to earn the audience's respect. Jordan does this by showing us a man in deep self reflection; we can almost see the cogs turning inside his head as he analyses what's wrong with his life and tries to figure out how he can pull himself out of his rut. More prosaically, Fruitvale Station also shows us tiny, simple acts of kindness from Grant; helping out a woman with a fish fry recipe in a supermarket, successfully negotiating the use of a bathroom for a pregnant woman or cradling a dying dog in the street.

It'd be disingenuous for the film to hang a halo on Grant's head, presenting him as some innocent lamb being led to the slaughter, so we also see his less attractive side. But here, most notably in a powerful flashback to his mother visiting him in prison, we see the violence in his life as a symptom of social infantilisation. Discrimination and economic torpor all combine to subtly remind Grant that he is worth less to society than most.

For the most part the film sticks with this low-key, consciously aimless urban drama, spending a pleasant day with Grant as he arranges his mother's birthday party and carries out various domestic chores. From an audience perspective though, the passing of time over this casually normal day is tinged with impending disaster. Having opened with footage his death, we know that every step Grant takes moves him closer to his grave. As we see the pieces begin to fall into place; the tiny decisions being made that will ensure his death we feel a dreadful gravity sucking us down; a chaotic whirlpool with Grant's bloody body dead centre.

When the final turns of the screw are being tightened it's almost unbearable and in a flash the night transforms. The editing picks up pace as we close in on the bestial faces of spit-flecked cop chins as they bark "nigger" at their captives. In their dead eyes we see no flash of humanity: as they force the men's faces down into the concrete there's only the dull boredom of routine. These are men who speak in a vocabulary of brutality; they converse with the slap across the jaw, the punch to the guts, the grinding of teeth against rough asphalt. This is sadism on autopilot, guided largely by muscle memory. It's only when the gunshot goes off that they finally remember they are dealing with a human being, the whipcrack echo jolting them out of their programmed modes of dealing with black men. As if seeing Grant for the first time they try to comfort him, rubbing salt into Grant's wounds - the tragedy of a man dying while staring into the apologetic eyes of his oppressors.

Fruitvale Station is undoubtedly propagandist. It's an angry, personal film about the victimisation and discrimination of young black men, crystallised around the short, abruptly and unjustly terminated life of Oscar Grant. Undoubtedly it warps the truth - I have no idea if the actual Oscar Grant bore any resemblance to Williams' portrayal of him - but these crticism are essentially pointless. The police oppress, harass and sometimes kill black man, and they often get away with it. In these times well-made, smart and conscientious propaganda like Fruitvale Station isn't only correct, it's necessary.

★★★★