Recent Articles
Showing posts with label film. Show all posts
Showing posts with label film. Show all posts
Tuesday, September 19, 2017
Tuesday, September 19, 2017
- 0 Comments
It was somewhere in the middle of the third act that I realised that Mother! is not going to be financially successful. Darren Aronofsky is no stranger to weird film-making, the excellent Noah primarily baffling audiences and his criminally over-looked The Fountain vanishing without a trace. But Mother! might be one of the craziest films ever to get a major release.
Watching the trailer after seeing the full feature, you realise that Aronofsky has executed a cinematic sucker punch, reeling in the audience with the promise of a sleek psychological horror studded with A-listers and then hitting the gas and careening straight into crazytown. What audiences actually receive (and there's going to be heavy spoilers from here on out) is a movie that hates God and Christianity, arguing that it has warped humanity into something monstrous and that institutionalised religion has poisoned the world.
To achieve this, Aronofsky reworks the Bible into a creepy domestic drama. The world is reduced to an isolated house, occupied only by a frustrated poet God (Javier Bardem) and a female personification of Gaia, Mother (Jennifer Lawrence). Their relative peace is disturbed by the arrival of the first man (Ed Harris), who moves in uninvited and quickly makes himself at home.
Soon after we see him with a suspiciously rib-shaped wound in his side, his wife (Michelle Pfieffer) shows up: a similarly destructive presence who alienates and scares Gaia, culminating in the pair plucking the forbidden fruit, incurring God's wrath and being kicked out of Eden.
Soon after, Cain and Abel arrive and commit the first murder, leaving behind an indelible stain of violence that gradually corrodes the whole world. We descend into a nightmare house party that's only ended with a cataclysmic flood that drives the uninvited guests from the house. It is not in the least bit subtle, but then subtlety is highly over-rated.
The film concludes with one of the most insane sequences I've seen in cinema. Mother gives birth to the infant Jesus, who is soon snatched from her grasp by God and delivered to a crazed mob, who pointlessly kill it and then devour the corpse in a demented cannibal nightmare. The West is culturally inoculated against how freakin' weird Christianity is, but this violently strips all the liturgical mystery away and (exactly as the Catholic Church does) takes the Bible at its literal flesh-munchin', blood drinkin', word.
At this point, it's understandable at this point why audiences have rejected Mother! so violently. After all, your average moviegoer is probably not up for seeing a newborn baby being torn apart and eaten by psychos. But this imagery and these ideas comprise the core of our culture and Aronofsky makes a persuasive argument that the ecological destruction that threatens our very civilisation is a symptom of it.
As the film accelerates towards its apocalyptic conclusion, we finally understand the relationship between the patriarchal God and the feminine Mother as a theological separation of Creator from 'creature': institutionalised religion providing the philosophical framework upon which nature is brutally subjugated to man's will.
Aronofsky is frantically yelling that humanity is on the precipice of catastrophe and chaos, trapped in a cycle of narcissism and consumption and poisoned by false dreams of spirituality and immortality. The only possible conclusion to all this comes in cleansing waves of fire: Mother Nature's reset button.
Aronofsky is frantically yelling that humanity is on the precipice of catastrophe and chaos, trapped in a cycle of narcissism and consumption and poisoned by false dreams of spirituality and immortality. The only possible conclusion to all this comes in cleansing waves of fire: Mother Nature's reset button.
It's light years beyond its cinematic contemporaries (it's also objectively a technical marvel) and once the dumb-ass reactionary negativity dies down, is going to be recognised as a modern classic (at which point certain people will claim to have secretly liked it all along). Honestly, if you have the slightest interest in cinema as an art form you owe it to yourself to see this: films like this simply do not come along very often.
Right now the world feels like a chaotic, scary place with a real 'last days of Rome' vibe. Watching Mother! isn't going to get rid of those sleepless nights you've been having, but it will provide the context for them.
Monday, March 13, 2017
Monday, March 13, 2017
- 0 Comments
Every new Alejandro Jodorowsky film feels like a gift. Despite making two of the greatest countercultural films of all time in El Topo and The Holy Mountain, his directorial career appeared to suffer an untimely death after the 1989 release of Santa Sangre (we will ignore the 1990 director-for-hire work on The Rainbow Thief). 23 years passed, during which his most famous works were locked in legal disputes and went unseen.
It was only the long-delayed and highly praised 2007 re-release of El Topo/The Holy Mountain that made him return to the medium. After a handful of abortive projects, 2013 saw the release of The Dance of Reality, chronicling Jodorowsky's early years in Tocopilla, Chile. Endless Poetry continues the story, showing the director's emergence from adolescence to young adulthood, along with his formative artistic experiences.
Though Jodorowsky is now 88 years old, Endless Poetry shows an artist continuing to evolve. It's a film brimming over with creativity: every rigorous shot pregnant with symbolism, humanity and an abundance of imagination. It's also a neatly touching family affair: Adan Jodorowsky, his youngest son, plays his father as a young man, and Brontis Jodorowsky plays Alejandro's tyrannical father.
Key to understanding The Dance of Reality and Endless Poetry (and to some extent all of Jodorowsky's work ) is to understand cinema not as a simulation of reality, but as a translation of the director's psychology. This is literalised in the opening moments when we return to the neighbourhood Jodorowsky grew up, now a dowdy, boarded up no man's land. With the click of a finger period photographs are placed over the buildings and a steam train chugs down the street, showing us how he sees the world.
This heightened style gives us access to the emotional truth of his memories. His shopkeeper father humiliating a thief becomes him stripping her naked in front of a baying crow, while a miniature Hitler barks orders at them. His kind mother communicates only via opera. Unpleasant relatives become Hogarthian caricatures, culminating in the young Alejandro hacking at his family tree in a crazed frenzy.
The style is best exemplified by how Jodorowsky treats his first romantic encounters. Advised by fellow artists to visit a bar to find a muse, he heads to Cafe Iris. The place is a lifeless grey mausoleum, populated by droopy headed old men served beer by ancient waiters - it looks like something out of Gilliam's Brazil. Then, bursting into the room with a swell of primary coloured exuberance, comes Stella.
Stella is a condensed ideal of Freudian desire - most strikingly because she's played by Pamela Flores who also plays Jodorowsky's Mum. She's also a chaotic feminine mystery, simultaneously sexually liberated (repeatedly tearing her blouse open as a prelude to violence) and virginal (explaining that they're to have a non-penetrative relationship). She's a hurricane of every feminine ideal - looking like the Venus of Willendorf at a rave - and works as a magnetic centre of the film. Her presence piques in an impossibly erotic scene where the two caress each other - and she reveals she has a string of skull tattoos along her spine.
Other than some loose connection between sex and death, I have absolutely no idea what the skull tattoos signify - but, crucially, not understanding something doesn't diminish its potency. This stuff is the foundation of Jodorowsky's self-developed psychomagic therapy, in which is that the unconscious mind treats symbolism as fact, leading to the conclusion that behaving in an abstract, symbolic manner can solve psychological conflicts.
Thus the film becomes a sort of a self-induced therapy for the director - working from his own theory that one must ritually enact ones own unconscious desires in order to unclog your inhibitions and shed your unwanted mental baggage. Or, in Jodorowsky's own words (from his Manual of Psychomagic):
Punching a cushion produces relief from anger toward an abuser. But to achieve good results, the person who punches the cushion must, in a way, free herself from any morality imposed by the family, society, and culture. If the consultant does this, she can, without far of punishment, accept her (always amoral) inner urges. For example, if someone wants to eliminate his little sister, because she attracts the mother’s attention, and pins a photograph of the little one onto a melon and busts the fruit apart with a hammer, his unconscious assumes the crime is done. This way, the consultant feels liberated."
Dance of Reality and Endless Poetry are this process writ large - the attempt of an old man to purge the last of his demons. It makes the occasional appearance of the director in the film incredibly moving - offering advice, comfort and perspective to his younger self. This reaches a zenith in the extraordinary final scenes, in which Jodorowsky and his sons come together in a collective exorcism of their petty fascist father/grandfather - finding an honest way for him to be a positive presence in their minds
Ordinarily, I'd be sceptical of a director creating a film purely as therapy - but when the end result is as compelling as Endless Poetry it's difficult to argue. As we watch the aged Jodorowsky playing puppeteer with his past via his sons, we sense the through-line of history - people, locations and culture colliding into a prickly, chaotic and often indecipherable ball of conflicting symbols.
There aren't any other directors like Jodorowsky. There aren't very many people like Jodorowsky. I desperately hope he gets to make the final part of this trilogy. After his lengthy and knotty career, this autobiographical trilogy may well be what he's remembered for.
Endless Poetry is on DVD/Blu-ray/streaming now.
Thursday, October 20, 2016
Thursday, October 20, 2016
- 0 Comments
"The Man from Mo’Wax is a very strange music documentary. Most films of this ilk are glowing accounts of an individual or band’s inexorable rise to the top of the charts, demonstrating their musical virtuosity, inherent genius and the growing adoration of their fans. Here that curve is inverted, director Matthew Jones painstakingly dissecting a person with next to no discernible musical talent as his career crashes and burns.
That person is producer and DJ James Lavelle – hardly a household name – yet kind of an icon to dance music aficionados. His career spans three distinct periods: the first is that of a musically teenage wunderkind who sets up his own cooler than cool record label, Mo’Wax Records. The second is as creative leader of UNKLE, where he collaborated with various musical legends to create a series of increasingly poorly received and badly selling albums. The third follows the disintegration of his personal and professional life, the lasting image being of a sad and lonely man trapped in a storage space surrounded by his broken dreams."
★★★★
"When four attractive teenagers go camping in the woods on the exact spot where four attractive teenagers were brutally murdered forty years ago, what the hell do they expect to happen? Lake Bodom, by Taneili Mustonon, shows us that the answer is… well, pretty much what you’d expect.
Setting it apart from the pack is that this backstory is ripped from reality. The Lake Bodom murders are one of Finland’s great unsolved mysteries: four teenagers sleeping soundly in their tents really were brutally murdered in 1960.
The killer introduced himself to his victims by plunging a knife through their canvas tent. Two hours later, three of the teenagers were mutilated beyond recognition and the sole survivor was staggering away with a concussion, a broken jaw and facial fractures. In a creepy detail the survivor reported glowing red eyes pursuing him as he ran through the dark forest. The killer promptly vanished, and he/she/it was never caught…"
★★
"Psychonauts, the Forgotten Children is a weird, brutal and lyrical Spanish animated film (with no connection to the Double Fine game of the same name) that feels like the mutant lovechild of Hayao Miyazaki and John Kricfalusi. Alberto Vazquez, adapting his own graphic novel with co-director Pedro Rivero, spins us a tale of cute child animals desperate to escape their nightmare island.
Any suspicions that this is for children vanish pretty quickly in the opening narration, which explains how Cute Animal Island industrialized itself and subsequently suffered a catastrophic nuclear meltdown. In an apocalypse scene reminiscent of Barefoot Gen, the mice workers are scorched into ashen skeletons by a wall of radioactive fire."
★★★
Thursday, October 13, 2016
Thursday, October 13, 2016
- 0 Comments
"50 years ago a gunshot rang out across the University of Texas campus. Claire Wilson, a pregnant student, was hit in the belly, instantly killing her unborn child. Her fiance, Thomas Eckman turned to her and asked “What’s wrong?” A second shot ensured he would never hear the answer.
For the next hour and a half, death came to the campus. A sniper had taken up position in the central tower, firing indiscriminately at anyone he could get a bead on. By the time he was killed by police he had murdered 11 people and wounded 32.
Reaction at the time was frightened bewilderment. Why would a person take out their frustrations on random strangers in such violent fashion? Little did they know that these shootings were merely the opening act of a continuing trend, one, encompassing names that have become synonymous with tragedy: Columbine, Aurora, Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook and Pulse.
Keith Maitland’s documentary, Tower is a shot by shot recounting of the events of August 1st 1966, telling the tale through the survivor’s experiences. Their memories are interwoven with archive footage of the event and rotoscoped animation that allows us to see what the cameras didn’t capture."
★★★★
"Marco Bellocchio is superhumanly prolific; a member of a very small group of directors who turn out a film about every year. Granted, they range in quality, but he’s undergoing a personal renaissance, with his most highly regarded work coming in the last decade and a half. Those film, Good Morning Night, Vincere and Dormant Beauty, are loaded with a rock-solid sense of time and place, coupled with an emotional heft that largely avoids sentimentality.
His latest is Sweet Dreams, an adaptation of journalist Massimo Gramellini’s autobiographical novel Sweet dreams, little one. The book and film are an extensive meditation on grief, loss and mourning – following the life of Massimo from childhood to middle age as he struggles with his mother’s suicide."
★★★
"In December 2013 the rains began. The residents of the Somerset Levels looked on anxiously as the ground became waterlogged and rivers swelled into torrents. Soon a huge swathe of land was submerged, with catastrophic consequences for those who live and work upon it. Anger soon flared up, directed at a government that had cut funding for flood defences and at insurers dragging their heels on paying out.
This is the landscape of The Levelling, a grim little first feature by Hope Dickson Leach that uses the floods as a backdrop for exploring themes of guilt, grief, family and a person’s connection to the land they walk upon."
★★★★
Monday, October 10, 2016
Monday, October 10, 2016
- 0 Comments
Roughly halfway through Damien Chazelle's La La Land, Emma Stone's would-be actor Mia is fretting about her upcoming one woman show. "It just feels really nostalgic to me." "That's the point." Ryan Gosling's jazz pianist boyfriend Sebastian replies. "Are people going to like it?" she responds. He turns to her with that cooler-than-cool Gosling gaze and replies "Fuck 'em".
"Fuck 'em" indeed. It's a naked bit of self-examination from writer/director Damien Chazelle, who's perhaps understandably worried that the reason the big budget tap-dancing trad-musicals have all but disappeared from our screens is because nobody wants to see them. Sure, you get the odd (generally iffy) Broadway adaption here and there, but we're a long way from the days of Singin' in the Rain, West Side Story and My Fair Lady.
He needn't worry, La La Land is one of the most sure-fire critical and commercial darlings I've seen in a very, very long time. It's got two of the most bankable, adored stars in Hollywood being very funny, very sweet and dancing their socks off. It's got gorgeous faux Technicolor palette and full Cinemascope photography. It's got a script that, despite the sugar-coated trappings of the genre, manages to feel vividly real. It's got musical numbers so dazzling that, in an auditorium full of jaded film critics at the London Film Festival, the opening sequence received a spontaneous round of rapturous applause.
Set in what feels like a dream of contemporary Los Angeles, La La Land is the story of Mia and Sebastian's relationship over one perma-summery year. They first meet when cutting each other up on the freeway, Sebastian honking his horn and giving Mia the finger as he pulls past her. "What an asshole..." she mutters. But soon all too soon - despite their protestations that they despise one another and there's absolutely no chemistry between them - they're falling in love.
What follows is admittedly cut from some pretty familiar cloth: their relationship grows, encounters problems and the two engage in some soul-searching about just what they mean to each other. But despite the familiar template this still surprises, serving up a romance that's simultaneously personal and universal, and one that concludes with an astonishingly effective emotional crescendo.
The ghosts of the golden age of Hollywood haunt these characters, looming in the background of scenes throughout, and at one point Chazelle stylishly and memorably mirrors an establishing shot from Rebel Without a Cause. But the film avoids outright fetishising old Hollywood, instead subjecting it to a mild critical examination via its most extroverted manifestation - the all singin' all dancin' musical. Though Gosling and Stone might tapdance their way down the streets like Astaire and Rogers, they're rooted firmly in 2016 - one of my favourite character touches is that the screen of Mia's iPhone 4S is cracked, an incidental detail that speaks volumes about her life.
Though crammed full of surface retro-stylings, the film consistently argues for innovation rather than slavish copying. The main vehicle for this is Gosling's Sebastian, who's initially obsessed with jazz dinosaurs and has an idea of musical purity lodged sometime in the 30s. It's only when he begins to experiment with form and removes the muso stick from up his own ass that he begins to loosen up and enjoy his art rather than merely appreciate it. Stone's Mia goes through a similar process, evolving from someone craving the approval of others to defining success in their own terms.
To convey all that while singing and dancing isn't going to be a picnic, but Chazelle simply couldn't have cast two better leads. Gosling in particular exudes a timeless style and poise, staring out from the screen with a hangdog yet confident expression that, appropriately enough, has more than a tinge of James Dean to it. He is every inch the moviestar, approaching every scene with grace and jaw-dropping cool. As a graduate of The Mickey Mouse Club it's no surprise that he can sing and dance, but few about these days could slide into a musical number so sleekly and naturally. Stone is also wonderful - the duo fizzing with refreshingly old-school chemistry.
I'd come to think that films like La La Land just couldn't get made anymore. These are insincere times, and this is a painfully sincere movie about two fools drifting in and out of love. It presents a gently loping, largely tension-free story without an atom of irony and resists the urge to insert vestigial elements like comedy best-friends and bitchy villains. It just is, functioning as a contemporary ideal of what the Hollywood studio machine once could (and amazingly, apparently still can) do best.
Damien Chazelle was already sniffing at the big leagues with Whiplash. After La La Land he's going to be white-hot. I can't wait to see what he does next.
★★★★★
What follows is admittedly cut from some pretty familiar cloth: their relationship grows, encounters problems and the two engage in some soul-searching about just what they mean to each other. But despite the familiar template this still surprises, serving up a romance that's simultaneously personal and universal, and one that concludes with an astonishingly effective emotional crescendo.
The ghosts of the golden age of Hollywood haunt these characters, looming in the background of scenes throughout, and at one point Chazelle stylishly and memorably mirrors an establishing shot from Rebel Without a Cause. But the film avoids outright fetishising old Hollywood, instead subjecting it to a mild critical examination via its most extroverted manifestation - the all singin' all dancin' musical. Though Gosling and Stone might tapdance their way down the streets like Astaire and Rogers, they're rooted firmly in 2016 - one of my favourite character touches is that the screen of Mia's iPhone 4S is cracked, an incidental detail that speaks volumes about her life.
Though crammed full of surface retro-stylings, the film consistently argues for innovation rather than slavish copying. The main vehicle for this is Gosling's Sebastian, who's initially obsessed with jazz dinosaurs and has an idea of musical purity lodged sometime in the 30s. It's only when he begins to experiment with form and removes the muso stick from up his own ass that he begins to loosen up and enjoy his art rather than merely appreciate it. Stone's Mia goes through a similar process, evolving from someone craving the approval of others to defining success in their own terms.
To convey all that while singing and dancing isn't going to be a picnic, but Chazelle simply couldn't have cast two better leads. Gosling in particular exudes a timeless style and poise, staring out from the screen with a hangdog yet confident expression that, appropriately enough, has more than a tinge of James Dean to it. He is every inch the moviestar, approaching every scene with grace and jaw-dropping cool. As a graduate of The Mickey Mouse Club it's no surprise that he can sing and dance, but few about these days could slide into a musical number so sleekly and naturally. Stone is also wonderful - the duo fizzing with refreshingly old-school chemistry.
I'd come to think that films like La La Land just couldn't get made anymore. These are insincere times, and this is a painfully sincere movie about two fools drifting in and out of love. It presents a gently loping, largely tension-free story without an atom of irony and resists the urge to insert vestigial elements like comedy best-friends and bitchy villains. It just is, functioning as a contemporary ideal of what the Hollywood studio machine once could (and amazingly, apparently still can) do best.
Damien Chazelle was already sniffing at the big leagues with Whiplash. After La La Land he's going to be white-hot. I can't wait to see what he does next.
★★★★★
Sunday, October 9, 2016
Sunday, October 9, 2016
- 0 Comments
"Fictionalising a real-life suicide is an tricky job, primarily because the person whose tale you’re telling isn’t around to give their side of the story. On top of that, you’re making a drama with an unavoidable downer ending, you have to deal with understandably suspicious family members and friends of the deceased and, well, you’re being a bit of a vulture.
Antonio Campos’ Christine gracefully sidesteps these obstacles, presenting us with a sensitive, compelling and fantastically performed drama about a woman pushed over the edge. That woman is Christine Chubbuck, who killed herself while delivering a live news report. While her name might not be immediately familiar, the legend of the news reporter who committed suicide on air certainly is."
★★★★
Friday, October 7, 2016
Friday, October 7, 2016
- 0 Comments
"Dasy and Viola are teenage siblings who’re joined at the hip. And no, that’s not a metaphor. From Stuck on You all the way back to Todd Browning’s classic Freaks, conjoined twins have long proved fertile ground for cinema. Edoardo De Angelis’ Indivisible joins them, taking us on a subtly surreal tour of Italy’s grimy industrial south: a grimy land of burning trash and abandoned warehouses, populated by a gallery of grotesques eager to get their claws into Dasy and Viola (Angela and Marianna Fontana).
Blessed with both beauty and perfect harmony, the twins are breadwinners for their extended family – available to hire for children’s parties, weddings, baptisms and so on. Scumbag father Peppe (Massimiliano Rossi) is their Svengali, providing them with a songbook full of treacly pop songs, most of which are about the importance of unity and/or female submission."
★★★
Wednesday, July 27, 2016
Wednesday, July 27, 2016
- 0 Comments
For all our fancy philosophisin', humans are ultimately just farty sacks of skin and meat. Beyond feelings, emotions and desires lie the needs of a biological machine: food, warmth and shelter. This is the territory of Couple in a Hole, a film about a Scottish couple reverting to a primitive existence in a hole in the middle of the French Pyrenees.
In the woods life is focused. John (Paul Higgins) spends his days foraging for food, ensnaring the odd the rabbit, tugging up clumps of edible plants and discovering mushrooms. Meanwhile Karen (Kate Dickie) spends her days in the hole, curing animal pelts and mending their clothes. At night they come together around a fire, silently consuming a meagre meal before returning to their hole to rest for another day of the same.
It's a strange, silent, feral existence. The two converse only in clipped half-sentences and appear to be undergoing some ascetic penance. Occasionally indecipherable rituals pop up: John coaxes Karen from the hole and times her as she consumes a wriggling grub, or climbs a mountain to hurl a tiny parcel of leaves from the summit.
The burning question is, naturally, why the hell would anyone live like this? Geens (writing and directing) refuses to romanticise their wilderness, emphasising the dirt, the damp and the isolation with Herzoggian straightforwardness. Throughout the film the answers are gradually doled out as the situation unwinds. A chance spider-bite sends John into a nearby town for antivenom, which kicks off the intrusion of civilisation into their warped Garden of Eden.
Without spoiling too much, it soon becomes apparent that shutting out the world at large and retreating to a hole represents depression. Whittling back life to the fundamentals, - forcing yourself to concentrate on providing basic physical needs - is a way for the characters to avoid dealing with trauma except in the most abstract of ways. Sure, wild animals may grieve, but they also have to constantly worry about being eaten/eating.
Geens sets this out early on, showing us the butchery of a rabbit followed by John roughly massaging Karen. In both we see flesh yielding to human hands, the fat and muscle of the rabbit mirrored on Karen's emaciated and sinewy back. The rest of the film is a warped kind of healing process, with the time limit of a rapidly approaching and apparently fatal winter. John begins to secretly reconnect with civilisation, trying to figure out a way to bring Karen along with him. But her apparent deathwish makes things... complicated.
Slow-paced and meditative, Couple in a Hole is a film you have to settle into the rhythms of. Long portions go by without dialogue, forcing the audience to puzzle out what's going by observation and deduction rather than by exposition. Fortunately, Geens quickly proves an able visual storyteller, efficiently communicating the situation with a featherlight directorial touch. In general visual terms, Geens is quite literally down to earth, his camera closely following the characters down into the muck.
Despite all the mud, there are frequent moments of beauty. Sam Care's cinematography presents us a series of striking tableaux; the silhouette of John atop a mountain shrouded in fog, a shaft of light illuminating Karen within the cave or a simple head-on close-up of Karen eating worms. It's an impressive combination of visuals and storytelling, especially when performance, direction and cinematography combine to create the impression that our characters are physically becoming one with the earth.
Obvious credit is also due to Paul Higgins and Kate Dickie. You can easily tell that this wasn't the most luxurious of shoots, but each carries a perceptibly heavy weight in gaze. Higgins does a wonderful job of showing the green shoots of recovery, the highlight a wonderful and heartbreaking moment where he breaks down in tears after tasting a morsel of sausage. But it's Dickie who really catches the eye, with her far more primal performance. With her translucent skin and razor-sharp features she looks bizarrely Gollum-ish, a performance that blurs the boundaries of human and animal, conveying the most intense self-inflicted misery I've seen in ages.
It's a top class piece of cinema - psychologically, visually and performatively ambitious. It's got a great ominous synth soundtrack by BEAK> (Geoff Barrow of Portishead) and tickles all my cinematic boxes. The only flaw is that it doesn't quite stick the landing in the final scenes, though considering that everything that's come before has been rad as hell, I can't complain too much.
★★★★
Monday, May 9, 2016
Monday, May 9, 2016
- 0 Comments
Alan Moore is one of only a couple of people that have permanent spot in my personal pantheon. My adoration of musicians fades as they put out a couple of dodgy albums; I find myself growing out of writer's styles and promising directors' are forgotten when later film lack the spark of their early work. Alan Moore isn't like that - the man is a writing genius and I'll be a fan 'til the day I die.
Though primarily known for his comic books (which are light years beyond any of his contemporaries), Moore's also a musician, prose author, philosopher, magician, publisher, activist and now screenwriter. He's described in the programme for his event as "one of the most important postwar British authors"; an accolade he more than lives up to.
Over the last twenty years his focus has shifted to his hometown of Northampton, writing the brilliant Voice of the Fire, guiding readers through 4,000 years of Northampton history, Northampton centred alt-culture magazine Dodgem Logic and the upcoming epic novel Jerusalem, an intimidating one million word (!!!) magnum opus about a 1/2 mile stretch of, you guessed it, Northampton.
And now we get Show Pieces, Moore's first foray into screenwriting. Set, predictably, in Northampton, it comprises three short films baked into a single open-ended narrative. The first, Act of Faith, is a tense and stylish mini-narrative about the extremes of kink and sexual gratification. This bleeds into the double-hander Jimmy's End and His Heavy Heart, which follows James Mitchum (Darrel D'Silva)'s very bad night on the tiles.
I may be a diehard Alan Moore fanboy but I was a bit nervous about Show Pieces. I had no worries about the writing, but a script is only a component of cinema. What if it's badly shot? What if the acting is amateurish? What if it just looks cheap?
Pleasantly and cheerily, it clears all these hurdles. But that's probably the only context you can use "pleasant and cheerily" to describe Short Pieces, which proves to be a suffocatingly intense and disturbing trek through sexual humiliation and Egyptian afterlife by way of a fag-stained working men's club.
In Act of Faith, Jenkins pitches up somewhere between Nicholas Winding Refn and David Lynch; fetishising the rolling on of stockings, slugging back neat vodka and the slow, sticky application of blood red lipstick - all under washes of luminescent primary colour. In the 'main feature', the Lynch-cribbing ramps up a notch, with tattooed burlesque dancers, horrific circus performers and thick velvet red curtains.
I guess if you're doing a surreal horror short Lynch is a decent place to take tonal inspiration, but even I was a little dismayed when the evil and sinister clown archetype reared his head. Psychopathic clowns are - to say the least - a bit played out. Fortunately, Moore's clown (wonderfully played by Andrew Buckley) quickly proves to have a lot more going on than usual - namely being an avatar of the Egyptian god Anubis by way of the East Midlands.
Short Pieces develops into an excellent showcase for Moore's skill at making incomprehensible mystic processes and metaphysical beings as at home in your local pub as they are on millennia old papyrus. This fuzzy partnership between domestic/cosmic works gangbusters, heightening the horror by bringing it home for tea. In practical terms it's difficult to relate to the workings of the Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead - but in Moore's hands Anubis, Set, Ra and all the rest might be loitering just around the corner...
After the show we were treated to a Q&A with Moore and Mitch Jenkins, compered by journalist Charles Shaar Murray. Moore was, as expected, a warm, polite and deadpan presence (his online reputation as a bitter and miserable grump continues to perplex), discussing his fascination with Northampton ("not just the centre of Britain, but the confluence of all time and space"), the processes of shooting in Northampton and his interest in Ancient Egypt eschatology ("great at makeup, but fucking morbid").
 |
| L-R, Alan Moore, Charles Shaar Murray and Mitch Jenkins |
I asked Moore if it was refreshing to get to show people how it's done, considering the famously iffy quality of Hollywood adaptations of his work. He explained that he has no desire to see any of those, but that working with Mitch Jenkins was an eye-opener in terms of translating his words to images. Moore's famous for his lengthy and precise comic scripts (once writing ten pages of notes to an artist for a single panel) but film is a different beast, the end product the work of many creative collaborators.
Despite this process, Show Pieces feels very much like an Alan Moore joint - he has a small role in it, wrote all the music (the bands credited are fictional) and designed every product in the film. The intent was to create a self-contained fictional universe that, like so much of Moore's work tends to, has begun to bleed into the 'real' world.
Short Pieces closes on the hellish image of Nighthampton "where Northampton goes when it dreams". This will be the setting of Show Pieces follow-up: where our unfortunate protagonists will journey further into Alan Moore's bottomless and terrifying imagination. I can't wait.
Show Pieces is available on DVD now.
Saturday, March 26, 2016
Saturday, March 26, 2016
- 0 Comments
I've always gone to bat for Zack Snyder, often despite my misgivings. Sure, 300 was queasily fascistic, but it was visual dynamite. Watchman was flawed, yet studded with nuggets of brilliance, the Dr Manhattan origin sequence alone making the whole affair worthwhile. I even gave him the benefit of the doubt on Sucker Punch - sure it looked like a creepy fetishistic wet dream, but it's really a commentary on action film sexism..... right?
So it was with Man of Steel. It's by no means a great film but there's enough interesting stuff going on in there that you felt he was on the cusp of an artistic breakthrough. And now, with millions of dollars of studio money behind him and two of the biggest cultural icons of the 20th century meeting for the first time on screen, I figured Batman v Superman was going to be that breakthrough.
Christ almighty. What the hell was I thinking? Zack Snyder is a fucking hack.
Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice is a misjudged calamity of a film with ideas embarrassingly far above its station. Boiled down, it's trying to do two things. The first is to launch the DC equivalent of Marvel's cinematic universe. So we get shoehorned in cameos from characters we know (and care) nothing about, together with ominous rumblings of the 'real' bad guy to come. The second is a high-minded philosophical exploration of the relationship between man and god, via examining the psychological effects of the 9/11.
This is all told by a convoluted story pieced together from, among others, clandestine CIA gun-running to African warlords, people smuggling, high-level Washington political machinations, and Frankenstein-like genetic meddling. The aim of this incomprehensible narrative is, as the title of the film suggests, to get Batman (Ben Affleck) and Superman (Henry Cavill) into a scrap.
Simmering away in the background is a barmier than usual Lex Luthor (Jesse Eisenberg), a personality free Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot), the perpetually concerned looking Lois Lane ( Amy Adams) and a smattering of supporting talent (Lawrence Fishburne, Jeremy Irons, Diane Lane, Holly Hunter), all of whom desperately try to salvage some semblence of character from a script that has none.
The film lumbers from set piece to set piece, tosses in half-baked moral queries, constantly spouts cringeworthy dialogue and has some serious performance deficits, mainly from Cavill's charmless Superman. But I think the core problem, the thing that makes the film so astonishingly unbearable, is a surreal lack of humanity.
Batman and Superman are essentially reduced to embodiments of philosophical posturing draining humanity from a film that already looks glossily CG sterilised. On top of that, Snyder is utterly self-serious about superheroes. Sure, they can be used to convey complex, mature ideas - but you need a dose of self-awareness that they're essentially there to amuse children. Even Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy, despite its reputation for maturity, still recognised the basic ludicrousness of it's core concept.
So Batman v Superman has a comical lack of self-awareness of how ridiculous it is, perhaps best demonstrated so than in a pivotal scene where Superman portentously strides through the US Capitol building in Washington to deliver evidence to a Senate Hearing. Serious looking man in suits turn in slow motion to regard coolly regard Superman's presence, as if a man in a skin-tight primary coloured jumpsuit and cape just fits smoothly into The West Wing like it's no big deal.
This certitude that superheroes are serious business for serious grown-ups poisons every part of the film. Batman now sadistically stabs, shoots and brands criminals while rescuing/terrifying a prison cell of sex-trafficked women, Superman sports a constant miserable glower and spends his time joylessly floating around looking like he wishes he was anywhere else. The rest embody a low-level misery; Irons' Alfred clearly not giving a shit anymore, Fishburne's Perry Mason fruitlessly watches his newspaper go down the tubes and Lois sitting naked in her bathtub traumatised by guilt.
The nadir is the treatment doled out to Superman's Mum. She's kidnapped by Lex Luthor, who taunts Superman by scattering torture porn polaroids of her at his feet. These show a terrified, gagged woman with 'WITCH' scrawled on her forehead, shot in sickly pale snuff film lighting. It's tone deaf - and powerfully unfun.
No film has an obligation to be 'fun', but perhaps a summer superhero blockbuster should be, at minimum, enjoyable. The film isn't even an interesting fuckup; theoretically a superhero film with a stick shoved this far up it's ass should be interesting if only in its peculiarity. Yet, the predominant emotion experienced here is boredom - boredom with the lumbering narrative, the dull as dishwater characters and the ominous sense that they're setting us up for countless more servings of this tripe.
It's perhaps appropriate that the film ends on a vague promise of nihilistic horror to come. Just before the climax, Wonder Woman opens her laptop and stops the narrative in order for us to watch three teaser-trailers for The Flash, Cyborg and (god help us) Aquaman. This isn't even the most blatant sequel hook in the film - that comes when, apropos of nothing, a man rips a hole in space and time to yell confusing gibberish about the sequel at aperplexed Batman.
I can't quite believe I'm saying this, but Batman v Superman made me appreciate the dull competence of the Marvel films. Sure they're content with averageness, but at least they achieve that with broad professionalism. And, mercifully, at least there we're spared ridiculous intellectual pretensions that mercilessly eradicate any pleasure from the simple concept of strongman in silly costumes doing outrageous things.
What's that Zack Snyder? You're currently developing an adaptation of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead? Of course you are.
What's that Zack Snyder? You're currently developing an adaptation of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead? Of course you are.
★
Monday, March 7, 2016
Monday, March 7, 2016
- 0 Comments
As a boy I was taken aside by the school choir teacher and gently told that it would be better that I mime rather than sing. Friends and family will attest that my vocal skills have not improved with age. So I find some sympathy in the eponymous Marguerite, a woman whose gap between her self-perceived and actual singing talent is of Grand Canyon proportions.
Loosely inspired by similarly tin-eared American soprano Florence Foster Jenkins (who is getting her own biopic starring Meryl Streep later this year), director Xavier Gianolli sets his tale in early 1920s France. This is a fractured country in recovery from the hell of the Great War, one that's beginning to question the ideals of nationalism, patriotism and calcified class structures.
We open at the country estate of the Dumonts, who're hosting a recital by the hoity-toity 'Amadeus Society' in aid of war orphans. We're led into this world by young singing talent Hazel (Christa Theret), who's ushered through a series of luxurious parlours, speckled with photographs of the lady of the house in various operatic costumes. This is Marguerite Dumont (Catherine Frot): spoken of with the utmost respect and consideration.
The crowd falls into a reverent hush as she enters the room, looking every inch the performance diva in an elaborate gown and a jaunty peacock feather head-dress. The full he orchestra strikes up behind her, launching into Mozart's notoriously difficult Queen of the Night from The Magic Flute.
She takes a deep breath and... what emerges is an utterly bizarre collection of strangled squeaks, off-key caterwauling and deformed notes. It's excruciating. The crowd collectively winces, politely suffering through their hosts demented warbling.
Yet at the back of the room, Lucien (Sylvain Dieuaide) and Kyrill (Aubert Fenoy) react somewhat differently. They're gatecrashers, eager to milk the rich for funds to launch an avant-garde art space - and they see Marguerite and her delusion as the perfect vehicle with which to expose the hypocrisies of the bourgeoisie.
The bedrock of Marguerite is a re-imagining of The Emperor's New Clothes; nobody has the guts to sit Marguerite down and candidly explain to her that she's incredibly untalented. Her husband, friends and professionals quickly realise that it's easier to support her delusion, fearing that a dose of reality might irrevocably hurt her feelings or, worse, interfere with her considerable financial bestowments.
Pretty much everyone in the film exploits Marguerite's in one form or another; be it her husband who needs her title and inherited wealth to maintain his business; the young artists who use her to make a political point; the music teachers who see her as a way of paying their debts and; the general public, for whom Marguerite is a wince-inducing freakshow.
The most fascinating of the exploiters is Marguerite's taciturn manservant Madelbos (Denis Mpunga). At first he appears intensely loyal to his Mistress, indulging her fantasies by shooting and developing endless soft-porny vanity shots of her. You initially assume that he's miserably going through the motions - yet there's gradual hints that he's the one orchestrating Marguerite's surreal journey to the limelight.
Madelbos is a striking character in a film layered with umpteen layers of political and artistic meaning. While it never really trips over its own feet on these, there comes a moment where you wish Gianolli had a smidge more focus. The various threads of Dadaist philosophy, French national character, class warfare, ponderings of what objective artistic skill is and explorations of mental illness (etc etc etc) never quite coalesce into a coherent statement.
This leaves a satisfying, ornate and well-performed film, yet one that's also a bit overlong and undisciplined. Side characters like introductory ingenue Hazel or avant-garde journo Lucien wander in and out of the narrative, leaving unresolved subplots dangling forlornly in the wind. The film even ends on a enigmatic note, refusing to neatly resolve the story we've watched. I don't want to criticise the film for prioritising message over narrative (and it is tres arthouse), but I'm a bit perplexed as to what the precise message is.
Despite those grumblings, the film is anchored by Catherine Frot's sterling central performance. She's infused with cool serenity, making it all too easy to understand why nobody can bring themselves to shatter her illusions. Frot understands that though Marguerite's delusion is unrelatable, her heartbreak, fears, hopes and passions are not, making her easy to root for.
Though not half as gut-bustingly funny as was promised by the advertising, Marguerite is an interesting and enjoyable watch. Giannoli successfully allows us to both laugh at his heroine and feel sorry for her - having his cake and eating it by gently implicating us in her delusion. It's a sturdy, good-hearted piece of cinema and worth a watch.
★★★★
Marguerite is on general release from 18 March.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
