LONDON CITY NIGHTS: Stellan Skarsgard

Wednesday, April 22, 2015

'Avengers: Age of Ultron' (2015) directed by Joss Whedon

Wednesday, April 22, 2015 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

If you crave the sight of superheroes bashing apart robots then Avengers: Age of Ultron will not disappoint. Within these glossy 141 minutes an armada of CG robots are beheaded, exploded, sliced apart, crushed, electrified, melted and disarticulated. Buildings are reduced to rubble, cars are tossed about, extras run every which way screaming and gigantic floating ships buzz around in the sky. Everything is happening at once! But also, puzzlingly, nothing is happening.

The film continues right where Avengers Assemble left off with our heroes mopping up the dangling plotlines of that film. After that in the mood for celebration; but these spirits are dampened when Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr) accidentally creates Ultron (James Spader) an evil robot that wants to wipe out humanity. The rest of the film involves the familiar faces of Captain America (Chris Evans), Thor (Lia, Hemsworth), Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) and the Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) tracking down Ultron and foiling his nefarious scheme.

Along the way they pick up a couple of new recruits, the Maximoff twins Wanda (Elizabeth Olsen) and Pietro (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), and zen robot Superman-a-like The Vision (Paul Bettany). Rounding out the cast are a smattering of supporting characters from the Marvel franchise and a couple of character actors who look happy to collect a paycheque.

What's most vexing about Age of Ultron is that there's nothing thunderingly wrong with it. The action is competently shot, the script gets to the point with a minimum of fuss and there's a big action scene about every half an hour. Joss Whedon has delivered a summer superhero blockbuster that ticks every box required of it. I've always approached criticism on the maxim that I'd much rather watch an interesting failure than successful mediocrity, but the latter describes Age of Ultron to a tee.

Part of the problem is that, very quickly, the film defines itself as an interstitial chapter leading up to the future Thanos/Infinity Gauntlet films. Entire scenes are devoted to setting up this future threat, leaving us in no doubt that the 'real' peril is still to come. The consequence of this is that the narrative we're actually watching feels increasingly sidelined. This also means the tug towards the status quo is irresistible to the point where, as the credits roll, we are almost in precisely the same place as we began.

This applies to the increasingly repetitive character arcs as well; so the Hulk learns to control his rage a bit more, Black Widow comes to terms with her history a bit more, Captain America gets over the past a bit more and Thor worries about Asgard a bit more. Theis repetition is especially egregious in Tony Stark, who by my count for the fifth time in a row learns an important lesson about hubris. Maybe this time it'll stick, but given his vaunted presence in the upcoming Captain America: Civil War I'm guessing probably not.

That lack of forward momentum even extends to developments within the movie. The crowning moment of the trailers for this film is the promise of an upgraded 'heavy' Iron Man duking it out with the Hulk. This fight plays out exactly as loudly as you'd expect, the destruction broadly quoting the climactic scenes of Man of Steel. Problem is, the fight is of so little consequence to the plot that it could be cut from the film with little to no impact to the narrative. It's an action sequence for the sake of an action sequence in a film that exists because an Avengers movie was scheduled for 2015.

Even a contractual obligation with hooks for future instalments dug into it like ticks could say something with it's narrative. Age of Ultron doesn't. In fact it almost aggressively resists being about anything. The closest we get is a repeated motif where the characters idly ponder whether they're monsters or not, complete with a couple of basic visual references from Frankenstein. Symbolically it's about as deep as a puddle, believe me I tried to find something to grip onto here - but that's the best I could manage.

Pressed for something to recommend, I enjoyed James Spader's villainous turn as Ultron, who reminded me of a somewhat toned down version of Bender from Futurama. Rarely have I seen such a moustache-twirlingly evil robot on screen. Sure his motivations and intentions are kinda confusing, but he's never less than amusing to watch, dancing around the frowning superheroes like an refugee Disney villain.

That's about all there is to say about this. There's a crushing inevitability to Age of Ultron. It will make a ridiculous amount of money. It will be hoovered up by mewling nerds who're happy with watching things happen. It will successfully spawn sequels ad nauseum. Honestly, it's a dull and pointless experience and you shouldn't bother with it.

But come on, let's not kid ourselves. You'll go anyway.

★★

Avengers: Age of Ultron is released 24th April.

Tuesday, September 16, 2014

'In Order of Disappearance' (2014) directed by Hans Petter Moland

Tuesday, September 16, 2014 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

"Snow falls on the just and unjust alike in Hans Petter Moland’s In Order of Disappearance. The white stuff has always been a great symbol of the nature’s indifference to man – a blanket that erases everything under static, frozen purity. To battle against snow is like ordering the oncoming tide to retreat.

In Order of Disappearance finds its Canute in Nils Dickman (Stellan Skarsgård). He lives in a remote, snowblasted town in the backwaters of Norway, devoting his life to the vital task of clearing the roads of snow. His tool for this is a gigantic industrial plough, a fearsome mechanical beast with tyres wreathed in chains and an armored wedge bolted to the front. Nils is hugely respected, we meet him just as he receives ‘The Citizen of Year Award,’ and local politicians are trying to convince him to stand as a political representative. Life is good. Chilly, but good."

Read the rest at We Got This Covered.

★★★★

Monday, February 24, 2014

'Nymph()maniac Parts I & II' (2014) directed by Lars von Trier

Monday, February 24, 2014 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

It's perverse that a film where women get repeatedly punched in the face, pissed on, fucked up the arse, slapped, gorily whipped and generally humiliated all round should wind up as one of the most straightforwardly feminist works of cinema around. But that's Lars von Trier for you. It's impossible to go into this film without preconceptions, but funnily enough, after all the breathlessly prurient press hype about hot n' heavy porno cinema, there's nothing in these sex scenes that's particularly shocking. There's a small thrill of novelty in seeing bobbling boners and quivering quims blown up to enormous size across a cinema screen, but all thefucking is in obvious service to an intellectual message and never feels remotely gratuitous or for the matter, particularly erotic.

Nymph()maniac isn't even a particularly difficult film to decode; von Trier explicitly outlines his argument throughout - that society is shot through with hypocrisy when it comes to dealing with the spectrum of female desire. Over two films comprising four and a half hours, von Trier performs an exhaustive autopsy on misogyny: delving deep into how we instinctively judge 'fallen' women, how we compartmentalise female sexual desire and just how constrictive our supposedly enlightened post-sexism society is.

All that and we also get lessons on (among other things), fly fishing tactics, the Fibonacci sequence, the 'satanic' tri-tone, Bach's use of polyphony, the perfect way to park a car, a short history of the division between the Eastern and Western Christian churches and the lifesaving qualities of the Prusik knot.

The primary vehicles for this are the titular nymphomaniac Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg), and Seligman (Stellan Skarsgård), who finds her bloody and beaten in an alley. Refusing both ambulance and police, Joe is helped back to Seligman's dingy flat where he gives her a cup of tea and asks what happened to her. The rest of the film is Joe's self-told life story, beginning with the immortal line "I was two years old when I discovered my cunt." (oh Lars...). The rest of the run-time is divided into chapters, obliquely titled things like "The Compleat Angler" or "The Little Organ School".

After Antichrist and Melancholia, neither of which can really be described as pleasant experiences, it's surprising how lighthearted much of Nymph()maniac is. Throughout Part I the cinema rang to the sound of laughter, von Trier confidently creating a kind of farcically absurd atmosphere - a distant comedy relative of Chris Morris' Jam. It's in Part II where things darken up a bit, though no matter how disturbing things become they're always leavened by the bedrock of humour that underpins the film.

By anyone's standards this film contains an embarrassment of cinematic treasures; the decadent run-time allowing von Trier the space to properly work through his argument. This is laid out upon a blank cultural canvas; though we see 40 or so years in the life of a woman we don't begin 40 years ago and we don't end in the modern day. The world of Nymph()maniac feels dislocated in time; a kludge of 1980s to contemporary fashion, technology and architecture - landing somewhere between Britain and Scandinavia, but never quite one or the other.

In terms of performances there's a split between the von Trier veterans and the newcomers. Throughout Part I, which covers the first 25 or so years of Joe's life, she's played by newcomer Stacy Martin. It's difficult to believe this is her first film, such is the gusto with which she hurls herself into the role - the prime weapon in her arsenal a devastating deadpan indolence. At times there's an eerie numbness as her face peers over the shoulders of the many men humping her - giving the camera the bored expression you'd see on someone waiting at a bus stop. At others, when she's at her most predatory, we detect the sadist lurking behind those big eyes, regarding the men around her like a snake might regard a mouse.

Practically everyone else is great though; from Uma Thurman's bizarre scorned wife to Willem Dafoe's paternal gangster - all launching themselves into the material with total fearlessness. Particularly impressive is Jamie Bell as the s&m dom 'K'. He runs a strip-lit utilitarian dungeon that looks like what the NHS would come up with if they started running a therapeutic sadomasochism service. K is unreadable, clinically exacting and horribly violent, yet (as fucked up as this sounds) when he viciously beats Joe you sense the love in his blows. The only real misstep is Shia LaBeouf as Joe's on/off longterm partner; his accent is one of the dodgiest I've heard for a long time, one moment somewhere around London, the next Sydney - then perhaps a short stop off in Cape Town.

Though there's a ton a of A-listers here, the real prima donna of Nymph()maniac is von Trier himself. Every frame of this movie beats with his idiosyncratic heartbeat. There isn't another director alive with an ego big enough to pull off some of this stuff; leaving his audiences open-mouthed as he launches into a stout defence of paedophiles who never act on their urges, pausing to argue that being anti-Zionist doesn't make you anti-semitic or, most bizarrely, a brief debate as to whether its acceptable to use the word 'negro'. At these points the characters (particularly Joe) transparently become mouthpieces for the director. It'd be easy to view this as a flaw in the movie but I enjoy this audacity, the marvellously bonkers self-confidence of a director who'd even consider putting this in a film. Anyway, despite the shaggy dog narrative, the digressions into trivia and the eyebrow-raising sociological arguments the film is never boring - an impressive feat given the gargantuan run-time.

At it's heart, Nymph()maniac is a baldly feminist statement about the hypocrisy of a society that supposedly strives for equality yet instinctively denigrates, slut-shames and abuses women that express themselves sexually. One of the biggest character developments in the movie comes when Joe finally accepts that her proclivity for promiscuity is neither unnatural nor immoral - refusing to be characterised as a 'sex addict' and proudly adopting the label 'nymphomaniac'. Throughout we also get jabs against rape culture - von Trier going out of his way to underline that no matter how many men a woman has slept with, no presumptions can be made as to whether she's going to sleep with you.

The film goes so far as to equate feminine sexuality with religious awakening; orgasm associated with divinity and the labia visually linked to the spiritual 'third eye'. In this vein, von Trier encourages us to view the beaten, bruised and damaged body of Joe as suffering passion in both the sexual and religious senses of the word, drawing direct parallels between Joe and Jesus Christ, both possessing a divine nature and both suffering under the fists, boots and scorn of a humanity that senses enlightenment and instinctively moves to crush it.

Modern culture tends to the juvenile, and consequently to the prudish - you only need to look as far as the kerfuffle surrounding this film's release to get an idea of just how immature a modern audience can be to a film that has a bit of fucking in it. It's deeply refreshing to see a film that's unapologetically positive about the whole of the sexual spectrum, casting off vestigial puritan moralities and presenting us with an unvarnished view of the world as is. Cinema is an art form that allows us view the world around us through others eyes; yet all too often these visions have blinders on them. In a von Trier film you never sense any restrictions as to what you're seeing - he alone apparently having unfettered access to the full range of human experience on film.

Nymph()maniac is a intelligent, beautiful and brave piece of cinema. If you don't enjoy it then it speaks more to flaws within you than it does to any problems with the film. To know that there's people like von Trier out there with the guts to make these sprawling, messy, wonderful pieces of art that make this fucked up planet just about tolerable to live on.

★★★★★

LONDON CITY NIGHTS