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Showing posts with label Luke Evans. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Luke Evans. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 13, 2015
Tuesday, October 13, 2015
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“Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months.”J.G. Ballard's 1975 novel High-Rise deserves a top-class cinematic adaptation. Aside from having one of the all-time greatest opening lines, it's a marvellous feat of imagination. Ballard's setting is a futuristic tower block in which every human comfort can be found. Aside from chic, modernist living spaces: the building features a supermarket, a gym, a swimming pool, a school - almost as if you never have to leave.
This society-in-a-bottle quickly begins to disintegrate. Power cuts plague the lower floors, planting seeds of discontent. All too soon the residents of the building; lower, middle and upper, are engaged in literal class warfare. Veiled threats snowball into violence and suddenly everyone is giving into their primal urges; the elevator shafts and corridors of the high-rise becoming an orgy of mutilation, rape and murder.
Our protagonist is Dr Robert Laing (Tom Hiddleston), a recent arrival on the 25th floor. Recently bereaved, he desires insulation from the rest of the world and hopes to find it in the anonymity of the tower block. Detached, dispassionate and unfailingly polite, we learn about this world through his eyes. An educated middle class professional, he's able to move between the upper and lower class apartments, meeting both top-floor resident and reclusive architect of the building Anthony Royal (Jeremy Irons) and lowly second floor political agitant and documentary film-maker Richard Wilder (Luke Evans).
We first meet the building as a model of order and sanity but it's not long before the cracks begin to show. Whether it be a smashed bottle of wine falling from an upper deck, disagreements over blocked rubbish chutes and annoying power failures, the writing is on the wall. As if heeding the second law of thermodynamics, entropy kicks in and soon we're off into into dog-eating territory.
I recently took an architectural tour around the Barbican Estate in Central London and while watching this I couldn't help but remember what I'd learned. The magnificently realised tower in High-Rise is built to the same modernist aesthetics as the Barbican, with both the fictional Royal and real-life firm Chamberlin, Powell and Bon trying to achieve the same goal: a housing development that caters to the residents' every need.
Like Ballard's building, the Barbican Estate sports with libraries, shops, gardens, sports facilities, schools and so on. Both structures are carefully designed in order to impose a top-down social vision upon the residents; the desired endpoint a friendly, happy and cohesive community.
Both projects have proved to be failures; though the Barbican Estate never descended into murderous anarchy it ended up as an eerily quiet ghost town, the expected crowds populating the aerial walkways never materialising. Now the Barbican isn't sought after because of its strong communal bonds, but because it's an oasis of silence in Central London, where a contemporary Dr Laing can keep to himself in his soundproof box without having to deal with the smoky rumblings of the city that encircles him.
Ballard's vision of a building where each resident has their individuality sanded away until they fit into a pre-defined nook, and the failures that would inevitably arise from it, was prescient in 1975. But in 2015 we know that this style of living doesn't work - modern architects tend to work backwards, observing human behaviour than designing buildings around that. This makes High-Rise a prediction of a future that's already in the past, which inevitably saps a little venom from Ballard's scenario.
Still, by any standards this is a magnificent bit of cinema. After the excellent yet relatively small-scale productions of Kill List, Sightseers and A Field in England, Wheatley clearly relishes working with a noticeably higher budget, going all out with production design and ambitious effects shots.
If I had to choose ten memorable shots from the London Film Festival, High-Rise would account for most of them. Whether it's the flesh being peeled from a skull rendered in anatomically precise detail, a super slow-motion shot of a body hitting a car bonnet or simply Hiddleston's face spattered with grey paint (as if he's merging with the building), the film lodges in the head: every frame carefully considered, every bit of scenery complementing the performances within, every semi-period costume patterned and coloured to perfection.
It's also design porn, so long as you have an appreciation of brutalism. The high rise might be a symbol of authoritarian control and class divide, but goddamn it's beautiful. The apartments have spires of naked concrete jutting through the middle, which feeds into a gently serrated exterior, crowned with a cantilevered set of balconies that scream confidence and permanence. Even the elegantly retro typefaces are carefully chosen, emulating the creme de la creme of 70s modernism.
Performance-wise, Hiddleston is excellent as a malleable man who's never entirely present. You sense that he's willing to be moulded by his environment, sacrificing his individuality to avoid personal responsibility. Also excellent is Luke Evans in a career best performance, brewing up a heady mix of rugby masculinity, fuzzy sideburns and testosterone. It's Jeremy Irons that get the best lines though, clearly loving saying killer lines like "This is my party, and I shall be the one who decides if someone gets lobotomised".
My only criticism is a slightly jumbled third act. Arguably this jagged narrative reflects the societal breakdown, but cross-cutting three or four narratives inevitably means a loss of focus, especially in comparison to the tightly-reined in opening third. I never lost the thread, but occasionally it's difficult to work out who's kidnapping whom, or which floor a certain character is on.
With each feature Ben Wheatley proves himself as one of the most exciting contemporary British directors. High-Rise, in keeping with his other work, is stylish, thoughtful, disturbing and darkly funny - and easily does justice to Ballard's vision. Whatever Wheatley cooks up next I'll be there opening night.
★★★★
Saturday, February 2, 2013
Saturday, February 2, 2013
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'No One Lives' is a film where a maniac kills a fat guy then cuts open the body and hides inside it, gruesomely emerging in a bloody rebirthing scene. It's a sick little film mainly concerned with the process of disassembling its cast, who are among other things impaled, shot, strangled, stabbed, bashed, beheaded, mangled, pierced and processed into a chunky paste. If nothing else, 'No One Lives' can be admired for the gusto with which it goes about this process of dismemberment.
The setup for this chaos is fairly straightforward. We meet a gang of criminals, ranging in likeability from utterly detestable to merely evil. They all live in a big house together and seem to wear shirts with the logo of their crime gang on the back. It's like a 5 year old's idea of what a criminal gang is, but then this is not a film overly concerned with subtlety. Soon, one of the particularly evil criminals runs a couple of tourists off the road and steals their car. But these are no ordinary tourists.
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| Driver - Luke Evans |
The driver, named only as 'Driver' (Luke Evans) is an unbelievably competent and sadistic killer. He's the Batman of murdering people in ridiculous ways. As soon as Driver starts his campaign of terror, people start blankly intoning lines like "It doesn't matter what you do, he's going to kill you all". It's slightly interesting in a sick way, because the victims are vicious criminals we find ourselves rooting for the 'monster'. This is a bit disturbing because Driver is an antihero in the loosest sense. While he has no internal conflict his motivations are extremely muddled and there's a slightly annoying self-awareness to him that totally undercuts any attempt to take him seriously. As far as psychopaths go, he's got much more in common with Wile E Coyote than he does with Hannibal Lecter.
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| "Nobody kills Ethan!" |
The rest of the cast are to various degrees, different varieties of meat for him to cut through. Aside from one noble exception in Derek Magyar, these are the sorriest group of actors I've seen assembled in a very long time. The acting is generally at about the level of a well-produced porn film. This isn't helped by one of the worst scripts I've ever seen. Judging by the dialogue I assume the writer, David Lawrence Cohen was being paid by the use of the word "fuck". "Fuck! Shut the fucking door you fuck!" says one character, "Fuck YOU!" says another in reply. It's pretty clunky stuff and results in ridiculous moments when a character sees a bloody knife sticking out of a wall and says inquisitively "something's wrong here". You think?!
You also get bizarre sequences like the astonishingly violent fight between two women at the mid way point. Everybody is hiding in terror from the killer when things flare up between two members of the criminal gang. For the next few minutes the killer is forgotten as the women roll around together, bodyslamming each other through glass coffee tables and throwing each other right across the room. Even the other characters in the scene look slightly confused by what's happening. It feels a bit like some slimy producer turned up on set and started demanding that there be a cat fight in the movie.
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| A suspiciously well lit junk yard. Guess someone was throwing away spotlights and dry ice machines. |
Damn near everything about the film other than the gory murders is half-assed. It's clearly got a small budget, but this doesn't mean that it has to look quite this cheap. It's shot digitally, and considering nearly all of the film is set at night this results in huge, washed out black areas of the screen, something exacerbated bystrangely expressionistic lighting. The film is lit like a rock concert or a stage musical. Characters appear backlit by spotlights surrounded by mysterious plumes of dry ice. If they went fullbore with this unnatural atmosphere it might just about work, but they don't and it doesn't.
I try to keep an open mind whenever I watch a film, pre-judging stuff before you've seen a frame can poison enjoyment of a perfectly good film. Having said that, I felt a little tingle of dread when the first thing on screen informed me that the film was a World Wrestling Entertainment production. As far as I'm concerned there's no real reason that the WWE shouldn't be able entertaining enough action film, so I tried to forget about it. But when you have characters bodyslamming each other through tables and suplexing people into cars it's difficult not to become a little suspicious that you're watching pro-wrestling in disguise.
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| If you like seeing women getting cut up then boy is this the film for you. |
What's a little more disturbing are the frequent links 'No One Lives' makes between sex and death. Perhaps this kind of thing goes with the exploitation genre but even so when we're looking at a strangled, semi crucified woman tied up in a bathroom it feels a bit weird that her gigantic blood stained breasts are front and centre in the frame. On a slightly subtler, but arguably weirder note is the central relationship between the Driver and his captive. It's some kind of weird Stockholm Syndrome style attraction that doesn't make any sense whatsoever. The film seems to want to set up some kind of commentary on the way victims of abuse become dependant on their abuser, but it's garbled to the point of incomprehensibility.
I've got to admit that at least on some weird trashy level 'No One Lives' occasionally works. When there's some bonkers murder scene going on, or when the killer is running around naked and smeared with blood it approaches entertaining purely through B-movie audacity. But make no mistake it's an absolutely atrocious film on almost every level. I've seen quite a few films directed by Kitamura over the years and found 'Midnight Meat Train' surprisingly worthwhile. Unfortunately 'No One Lives' is boring, badly acted bargain bin trash punctuated by the odd moment of sadistic relish.
*/*****
'No One Lives' is apparently in theatres on April 18th. I suspect it's more likely to end up going straight to DVD.
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