LONDON CITY NIGHTS

Saturday, February 2, 2013

'No One Lives' (2012) directed by Ryuhei Kitamura

Saturday, February 2, 2013 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

'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.  

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.  

"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.  

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.  

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.

Friday, December 7, 2012

‘Seven Psychopaths’ (2012) directed by Martin McDonagh, 4th December 2012

Friday, December 7, 2012 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

‘Seven Psychopaths’ is a very easy film to analyse as it does all the hard work for you.  Rarely have I seen a film so eager to consciously pick itself apart and explain why it’s ridiculous, silly and half-baked.  This is writer/director Martin McDonagh’s follow up to the transcendant ‘In Bruges’.  On the surface that film is a ‘geezer gangster’ romp in the vein of  Guy Ritchie, but very quickly starts grappling with some big, important themes.  I enjoyed it so much that when I actually visited Bruges earlier this year I was more excited about spotting locations from the film than I was about the medieval architecture.

After I’d taken this trip I found myself wondering what else McDonagh had done, it’d been four years since his last film, what on earth had he been up to?  So it was with some anticipation that I found out he’d been making another film with Colin Farrell to be released later this year.  I don’t really know much about Martin McDonagh, but based on this film I think I can hazard a guess why he's been having so much 'second album trouble'.

‘Seven Psychopaths’ is about a screen-writer living in LA struggling with writer’s block and encountering a series of eccentric weirdoes.  I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to imagine that this roughly aligns with the McDonagh’s actual experiences in LA.  The plot isn’t particularly important, it boils down to ‘guys steal dog, dog’s owner wants dog back’.  What ‘Seven Psychopaths’ is really concerned with is its own writing process. We follow a character writing the film we're watching and struggling how to balance his artistic sensibilities against what an audience wants.  It's almost too obvious to say, but lead character ‘Marty’ is an obvious fictionsuit for the director.

This is basically the director as played by Colin Farrell

Naturally this film doesn’t skimp on the psychopaths, nearly all of the characters are unbalanced in one form or another.  What this means is that the actors have license to ham it up a bit, everyone looks as if they’re having a great time in this.  Sam Rockwell as Billy Bickle comes perilously close to smashing right through the fourth wall.  He’s a character given free reign to pretty much do whatever he wants.  I’ve always admired the way Rockwell can act extremely obnoxiously, yet still somewhere, deep down, retain a kind of wounded sympathy.  Throughout the film, the characters regularly commit atrocious acts, but faced with a hyper-reality, and a gallery of grotesques, we're on their side.

Christopher Walken’s ‘Hans’ is a great creation.  This is Walken playing to his type, slightly off-skewed and dignified, like an alien trying to masquerade as human.  The film is unashamedly emotionally detached, and Walken plays a very stoic and zen-like character, yet if there is a heart to this film, it’s in Walken.  He’s deeply in love with his wife, who’s hospitalised with cancer.  It’s a very sweet relationship, one that seems a little at odds with the arch tone of the rest of the film. 

Christopher Walken doing his thing.

Aside from this, there are a plethora of amazing character actors; Woody Harrelson, Harry Dean-Stanton and Tom Waits standing out.  If you see any of these people on a cinema screen, you know you’re in for something special, even if their appearance is all too brief.  McDonagh gives all three excellent opportunities to play up to their type, it’s some very clever casting.  There’s also a blink and you’ll miss it cameo from Crispin Glover, someone who it’s always nice to see on screen.

The only slightly weak link in the cast is Colin Farrell as our lead, Marty.  It’s not a criticism of his acting, rather that his character doesn’t really have much to do other than react to what’s going on around him.  After seeing him in loads of pretty bad movies, when I saw him in ‘In Bruges’ I finally realised why he kept getting cast, and I was expecting a similar calibre of performance here.   But for all the crazy events that he gets swept up in, we never really learn much about him.  His artistic motivations are wrapped up in the film’s slightly awkward criticism of gratuitous violence in film.  From what we can gather he’s become disillusioned with Hollywood clichés in film and wants to make a film where people sit around in the desert: “just human beings talking to each other.”

Sam Rockwell being enjoyably wacky.  He's good at this.

 The problem with criticising a film like this is that it’s all too ready to do the job for you.  At times, this feels like McDonagh undergoing a process of self-flagellation.  People point out that the in-film script of ‘Seven Psychopaths’ doesn’t have any well-rounded female characters, and any that are introduced tend to be brutally killed soon after, and as the script in the film says, so the film we're watching does.  Now, just because a film outlines what’s wrong with it, does than invalidate criticism?  

Towards the mid-way point, ‘Seven Psychopaths’ begins to feel like it’s a collection of vague ideas and sketches for stories haphazardly stitched together.  There are so many subversive moments where what would ‘normally’ happen in a major studio film doesn't happen that the film becomes a compilation of ‘wouldn’t it be neat if…?'s. The net result of all this self-referential dialogue, dream sequences and films within films is that we don’t particularly care how the film we're watching ends up.   But, of course in this film it’s difficult to work out whether or not elements in it are consciously half-baked to make a point about other films and screenplays, or just genuinely not quite there. 

Frankly you begin to get a headache.

Walken and Farrell in a dream-sub-film-script-writing meta sequence.

All this fourth wall nudging and self referencing is on one hand very funny, and on the other a little off-putting.  McDonagh writes great dialogue and has a perfectly developed sense of the absurd.  The narrative freedom that the structure and tone provides gives him the perfect excuse to be unpredictable.  Characters react to events in bizarre ways, almost consciously screwing with established rules of film-making and storytelling.

The flipside is that the film for all its irreverence, has a bitter and cynical heart.  It’s a critique of things in modern film that I presume McDonagh genuinely finds annoying and boring.  I agree with a lot of his arguments, the points the film makes about use of gratuitous violence, coincidence and the role of women in film are all valid.  It's just that the film tends to be a little too smug in its cleverness.   It’s as if McDonagh is lashing out at his employers, saying, in effect “I’m too smart for this crap”.  This is unattractive, and it should be noted that while the film rails against a lot of narrative devices and problematic cliches, the solutions it presents are pretty damn vague.

Tom Waits and some rabbits.

‘Seven Psychopaths’ is compelling enough while you're watching it, you’re never sure which filmic convention they’re going to ignore, or what bizarre turn the plot is going to take.  Afterwards the whole exercise feels a bit hollow, perhaps because there’s no emotional core here.  The nearest filmic comparison I can think of would be Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze’s ‘Adaptation’ which features a similarly fictionalised version of the author struggling with writer’s block.  ‘Adaptation’ uses many of the same tricks that ‘Seven Psychopaths’ does, yet manages to also make us care about the plight of its leads.

Disappointingly, this is a big step down from ‘In Bruges’.  That film dealt with big universal things: redemption, revenge, guilt, grief and the afterlife.  ‘Seven Psychopaths’ is more concerned about exposing silly writing clichés.  It’s very much the equivalent of a band's ‘difficult second album’.  The first album is written before the band are big, the songs have been developed at the band’s own pace with not much pressure and are about things people can identify with.  The second album tends to be written on the road, and invariably becomes about the travails of being famous or pressure to perform.  ‘Seven Psychopaths’ is Martin McDonagh’s difficult second album.  I hope writing and directing it has at the very least cured him of his writer’s block.

Sunday, December 2, 2012

'Life of Pi' (2012) directed by Ang Lee, 2nd December 2012

Sunday, December 2, 2012 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

'Life of Pi' by Ang Lee is beautiful both aesthetically and structurally.  It's paradoxical in that the less we see on screen, the more meaningful the film becomes - attaining a kind of Zen minimalism.  Based on Yann Martel's 2001 novel of the same name Lee has succeeded in 'filming the unfilmable'.  The film tells us the story of Pi, a teenage Indian boy who finds himself in the middle of the Pacific Ocean sharing a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger with the unlikely name of 'Richard Parker'.  We hear this story from the adult Pi (Irrfan Khan).  He quickly and efficiently gets us up to speed by recounting his childhood in India.  As he grows up the character is played by Gautam Belur, Ayush Tandon and finally Suraj Sharma.  

These performances are uniformly excellent.  The early sequences of the film showing Pi's early childhood feel like a lyrical update of Satyajit Ray's 'Pather Panchali', and there are echoes of Subir Banerjee's performance as the young Apu in Gautam Belur's Pi.  As we see the character grow up these performances meld seamlessly into one another.  It's Suraj Sharma as the shipwrecked Pi that is the obvious stand out though.  For a performance that I'm guessing was primarily projected at a green screen, or a paper tiger's head on a pole it's quite stunning.  By the midway point of the film we can see the wisdom accumulating in his eyes as he develops a system of living in his bizarre predicament.  Although Pi generally remains stoic and calm there are moments when he's screaming at the sky during raging storms. It's a performance that feels complete: by the end of the film we've seen the character pushed to every conceivable emotional limit and Sharma does it without putting a foot wrong.

Over the course of this film Ang Lee proves himself a master of modern cinema.  This is a film-maker harnessing the very cutting edge of technology, processes generally only used in multi-million dollar Hollywood blockbusters, and using them to create an intensely personal film about the nature of God, faith and nature.  I generally try to avoid 3D films, I was impressed by 'Avatar' and 'Cave of Forgotten Dreams', but everything I've seen since then has felt a bit desperate.  My feelings stem from the idea that I've never watched a classic film and thought "you know, that was good, but it was a bit 2D".  'Life of Pi' goes some way to melting this scepticism.  Lee's use of 3D transforms images and sequences that would be 'just' beautiful into something jaw-dropping.  The last big 3D film I saw was 'Brave' and the impressive effects in that  just made me think "that's a nice bit of computing, I wonder how they did that".  'Life of Pi' avoids this by being so visually lyrical that you'd have to be a soulless machine to sit there wondering about the pixels and polygons used to construct these environments.  

Frequently there are shots so awe inspiring that it taps into an illogical part of the brain.  I wanted to try and analyse these, to try and pick apart the artistic and religious illusions in them, but you get bludgeoned over the head with so much beauty that it leaves you a bit woozy.  There is one sequence in particular where the surface of the sea is as flat and smooth as a piece of glass, with the effect that the lifeboat appears invisibly suspended between a seamless sky and sea.  I'm not doing it justice with this description, and I'm wary of spoiling some of the film's beauty, but this film contains images you really have to see for yourself.  

The film is insanely gorgeous from the off.  The opening credits are as 'simple' as showing animals in a zoo going about their business, but Lee photographs them with a care and intelligence that gives their movements grace and meaning.  Much of this film concerns itself with the division between man and beast, and appropriately the film is packed with exotic animals of all shapes and sizes.  These animals are primarily rendered in CG and the danger here is that the film turns on feeling the vibrant life pumping through these animals, of being able to see into their eyes and feel something looking back at us.  So if these graphics don't convince, the film fails.

Aside from the various actors playing Pi, the co-star of the film is Richard Parker, a 450lb Bengal tiger.  He's (nearly) entirely computer generated, and the film conveys a lot through his eyes.  In many ways it's more difficult to render a realistic tiger than the alien monsters of 'Avatar'.  We know what a tiger looks like, we know how it moves and behaves.  Any flaws in his appearance and creation will be magnified, and if we don't buy him then the film falls flat.  He's an absolutely realistic creation, at once dignified while also feral and savage.  The film repeatedly underlines that Richard Parker is not a cuddly cartoon animal, he's vicious and for all that Pi does for him over the course of the film the tiger cares nothing for him.

All of the film's visual wizardly isn't simply to dazzle the audience.   'Life of Pi' tells you straight up that it's going to tell you a story "that will make you believe in God".  Religion runs through 'Life of Pi' like lead through a pencil, but despite this it almost totally avoids  feeling preachy.  Pi is shown as fascinated by religion, becoming simultaneously a Hindu, Christian and Muslim.  He practices all three faiths at once, leading another character to joke that if he joins a few more religions he'll be on holiday all the time.  This device allows the film to transcend being 'about' any one religion and concern itself with bigger concepts of faith and the place of humanity in the world.  The 'God' of this film is treated in an Einsteinian way; the concept of an active, anthropomorphic deity is rejected.  God in the 'Life of Pi' is a spiritual presence shown throughout the film in the images of harmonious beauty presented to us.  

To talk any more about the themes in this film I'll have to resort to spoilers, so if you don't know the plot of the book or haven't seen the film I'd stop here.  'Life of Pi' joins 'Skyfall' and 'Samsara' as the capstone of a beautiful year in cinema, as well as being both narratively and structurally satisfying.  Go and see it!

'Life of Pi' is on general release in the UK from December 20, 2012.

Spoilers begin here

'Life of Pi' tells us a story that is conscious of its own ridiculousness.  The story is told with such verve that we pretty much accept what it tells us at face value.  We're on board with it despite the fact that we recognise how far-fetched it is.  This makes it incredibly jarring towards the end of the film when we're presented with an alternate story of Pi's survival that  is far more realistic and far more depressing.  We hear how rather than being stranded with animals, he was stranded with two other passengers and his mother.  This situation spilled over into violence and cannibalism, leaving Pi alone as the only survivor.  The film then engages in auto-analysis, explaining how the different aspects of the story we've seen are symbolic of what really happened: Pi is the tiger, a cruel cook was a hyena, Pi's mother was an orangutan and a passenger with a broken leg was an injured zebra.

The film then asks us to choose which one to believe in.  One is a life-affirming tale of survival, and the other a crushing tragedy.   Given the choice, the obvious answer is the beauty and lyricism of the tiger story.  This choice is then explained as akin to belief in God.  If the end result is the same, why should we want pick the more likely, yet more miserable option?  If the results are ultimately the same (Pi survives and everyone else dies in a shipwreck) what does it matter how we get there?

My initial reaction to being presented with this choice was annoyance.  Is the film really telling us that a comforting lie is preferable to reality? Is its big argument for the existence of God that it's something you may as well believe in because what harm does it do?  I profoundly disagreed with this stance and left the cinema a little disappointed that such an enjoyable film had ended philosophically half-baked.

I thought a bit harder later and I realised what's key is how the film had presents its two stories.  The fantastical tiger story is involved, emotional and beautiful.  We're taken on a tour of nature in all its incredible beauty, to the surreal limits of our world.  The realistic story is told to us matter-of-factly by Pi in his hospital bed.  There are no flashbacks showing us what happens, Pi tells us the story in long, unbroken shots and it plays out in our imaginations rather than what we see on screen.  

This contrast between where the two stories are visualised is important.  It's telling that the key player in the realistic version of the story is the cook, played by Gérard Depardieu.  He has maybe four or five lines in the whole film, and is on screen for about a minute.  Why hire such a recognisable actor for such a small role?  I think it's because this allows us to more clearly visualise Pi's 'realistic' story.  The audience becomes an army of personal film directors during this sequence, making subconscious choices in how to visualise the story we've been presented with the tools Lee's given to us.  

The effect of this self-directed film playing within our heads is to underline the realistic version as what deep down we know actually happened.  By the time Pi's story ends we have witnessed two versions of it, one beautiful, comforting version on celluloid, and one playing out amidst our own jumbled neuroses.  Viewed like this the film doesn't become an argument for believing in God: it becomes an argument for the desire to believe in God.  We can know deep within our bones that there's no guiding force in the universe, that we project our own light into the tiger's unfeeling eyes, but that doesn't mean we aren't susceptible to wanting to believe that the world is as beautiful and harmonious as Ang Lee presents it.

Wednesday, November 21, 2012

‘Jagten' ('The Hunt') (2012) directed by Thomas Vinterberg, 21st November 2012

Wednesday, November 21, 2012 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

Cinema can be an exceptionally cruel world to its inhabitants. To be a character trapped in a film is to face extraordinary ordeals with no promise of redemption at the end.   Watching a film like this can feel like you're enjoying pulling the legs off a spider, experiencing a vicarious sadism in just how bad things can get for someone.  That 'someone' in 'The Hunt' is Lucas (Mads Mikkelsen), a divorced nursery school teacher trying to win custody of his teenage son.  He’s respected in his small community, great with kids and on the verge of regaining the loving family life he desires.  This hopeful positivity collapses when one of the children he’s looking after falsely accuses him of child abuse.  The accusations spiral out of control, and Lucas becomes a pariah, hated and feared.

Watching ‘The Hunt’ is not an especially cheery experience.  I went into it knowing very little about the plot other than that Very Bad Things were going to happen to the central character.  The film begins by giving us an extended look at the way this small town Danish community functions.  We see how well Lucas gets along with the local children; he leads them home when they’re lost and empathises with them if their parents are arguing.  He knows all the fathers well and we see them happily hunting and drinking together.  Throughout these tranquil scenes there’s a solid and sinister background hum.  The gods of cinema are capricious; what is the point of showing us something functioning and healthy if not to then infect it and allow us to clinically observe its painful thrashing?  With this in mind, the disgrace of Lucas begins to feel like a crushing inevitability.  From the moment the innocently vindictive child Klara (Annika Wedderkopp, a brilliant child actor) opens her mouth to accuse her teacher the die is cast.  With grim relentlessness the lie snowballs, with each repetition gaining more victims and sick new details. 

Lucas (Mads Mikkelsen)

The instigator of the lie that fuels the events of ‘The Hunt’ is a young child and Vinterberg quickly absolves her of blame.  She recognises that she’s done a bad thing, but when she tries to take it back nobody listens to her.  The adults assume that she’s repressing traumatic memories and ironically it’s their actions and words that construct the reality they fear most.

As we watch the parents spinning this lie into something bigger and scarier by the day we’re confronted by an uneasy fact: on some level these people want Lucas to be a child molester.  It’s a fiction that suits them, one they’re happy to believe in, contribute to and embellish.  They’re told to keep an eye out for extremely vague symptoms of suspected child abuse in their own children like nightmares and depressed behaviour.  All of this ‘evidence’ mounts up against Lucas, he becomes exactly what the town needs to despise: an outsider, an interloper, a monster: the other.  

This film has been interpreted as a portrait of the breakdown of a community, but I disagree.  This community does not break down, if anything they become more tightly knit when given a communal hate target.  In the opening scenes we see married couples bitterly arguing with each other, but as Lucas becomes a scapegoat these arguments cease.  Throughout this picturesque little Danish town there’s an undercurrent of repressed violence, for example the walls of the houses are covered with the heads and skins of shot animals.  How thin is the line between comfortable bourgeois life and the pack psychology of the violent animal?

Lucas and his ex-best friend Theo (Thomas Bo Larsen)

Humanity gets a pretty rough ride in ‘The Hunt’, instinctively this community operates under an unthinking stupidity.  People believe what they want to believe and if the story starts to look a bit shaky they’ll unthinkingly create a new set of lies to reinforce it.  This process is incredibly frustrating to watch, particularly when we see the adults putting words into the mouths of the children while they're being interviewed. 

Scenes like these demonstrate how adults can exploit the blurriness between reality and fantasy for young children.  Klara knows she is lying when she makes the initial accusation and tries to take it back.  She’s reassured by the adults that this really did happen to such an extent that eventually she can’t be sure that she wasn't abused.  A similar process used on the other children, who begin concocting a detailed story about Lucas abusing them in his basement.  The film tells us that children are mentally malleable, so the horrifying conclusion is that these parents are giving their children false memories of abuse.  If they have memories that they believe to be true what difference does it make whether they were actually abused?

Grethe (Susse Wold) and Klara (Annika Wedderkopp)

In the centre of this whirlwind of vicious gossip and recrimination sits Lucas.  Mikkelsen is intensely fragile here.  The role of Lucas could easily be used an excuse for an actor to give an emotionally overwrought, histrionic, Oscar baiting performance, but he underplays almost everything.  This is a man that is trying to keep himself together and conduct himself with dignity even as his world turns against him.  For the most part he's remarkably composed, behaving with a heartbreaking naivety that gives way to suppressed paranoia. This makes his moments of weakness and anger that much more effective.  These are few and far between, generally Lucas endures the misery inflicted on him by this town with a numb stoicism.  There are moments in the film where he is almost Christlike in his suffering.  In one scene the townspeople can barely bring themselves to look at his bruised and bleeding face.  Here, rather than appearing pathetic and beaten, Mikkelsen has a palpable aura of holy martyrdom.

Vinterberg is a careful and precise director.  The mental deterioration of Lucas is matched with the increasingly untidiness of both his appearance and his home.  Dishes sit in the sink undone and piles of dirty clothes lay haphazardly on the stairs.  Lighting also plays a large part in adding atmosphere, generally the darker the film gets, the darker the colour palette.  This is especially evident in the way Vinterberg lights the children.  When they’re lying and scared they are shrouded in shadow, lit faintly and eerily from below. 

You'd be miserable too if you were him.

‘The Hunt’ is a great film, but very hard to watch.  It functions as a useful lesson on the importance of scepticism, and the need for evidence and proof rather than gossip and hearsay.   Even so as the film ends it hasn’t given us a solution to the situation it presents.  We can't ignore allegations of abuse made by children, allegations that by their nature won’t necessarily have any evidence behind them.  Equally we cannot destroy people’s lives on the basis of wild accusations and hysteria.  The film ends on a discomforting and depressing note.  The stupidly paranoid behaviour showcased in this film is not unique to these characters, it’s embedded deep within the human psyche and will never, ever go away.

Thursday, October 25, 2012

‘Argo’ (2012) directed by Ben Affleck, 22nd October 2012

Thursday, October 25, 2012 - by londoncitynights · - 1 Comment

‘Argo’ is a film that tells you a story so preposterous that it must be true.  It’s a very funny film that gets seat-grippingly tense.  One that tries its level best to do justice to some pretty complex geopolitics but also fumbles the ball a bit in a few aspects.

The film is set in Iran at the time of the Iranian Embassy hostage crisis.  The Shah had just been deposed and was been granted sanctuary in the US.  The Iranian people wanted to put the Shah on trial, but the US refused to turn him over.  The boiling point came when a mob stormed the Iranian embassy in Tehran, and took 52 embassy staff hostage.  So far, so well known.  What’s less well known is that six embassy staff managed to escape onto the streets in the confusion, and took refuge in the house of the Canadian Ambassador.  Eventually the Iranians realised that they’re short six staff members, and came hunting for them.  The USA had got to get them out of there, and their best bet was Tony Mendez (Ben Affleck) an ‘exfiltration’ expert.  His plan was to smuggle them out of the country under the guise of a Hollywood location scouting crew for a fake science fiction film called ‘Argo’.

Ben Affleck as Tony Mendez

It’s a hell of a good story, and Affleck has done a great job bringing it to life on screen.  There are some bravura directing moments in this film, particularly the opening sequence showing the embassy being stormed.  The film begins with a quick run-down of the C20th history of Iran, before moving straight into the midset of an furious mob demanding justice.  Almost immediately we get a sense of the geography of the situation through aerial shots of the building and the crowd.   As the situation becomes worse, and the protesters begin climbing the walls a well drilled panic sets in that gives way to chaos very quickly.  We see the Embassy staff frantically destroying as much classified information as they can, and the military desperately trying to work out how to contain this situation without pouring petrol onto an already out of control fire.

Affleck quickly cross-cuts between the embassy staff, and the crowd outside who are swarm ing the building from top to bottom.  The sense of things rapidly spiralling out of control is captured perfectly.  Suddenly there are people on the roof, in the cellar and before you know it, through the front door.  The mixture of aerial shots (which may be really great CG), and handheld grainy film gives everything a feeling of intense authenticity.  The scene is given added power by the recent embassy attack in Benghazi.  The similarities seem clear; staff initially taking the mob for granted ‘after all, there’s protests every day’ to the sudden cold sweat of panic when they realise all barriers have been overcome, and there’s nothing between you and an angry chaotic mob.

They may not look it in this picture, but trust me, those Iranians are FURIOUS

One of the main reasons why this scene works so well is that the Iranians are represented as more of an unstoppable force of nature than as individuals.  We see them seemingly acting as one, their faces twisted in anger, practically foaming at the mouth.  Affleck seems to use a lot of the same directorial tricks as you'd see in a zombie film, particularly Zack Snyder's remake of 'Dawn of the Dead' (2004).  Meanwhile, the embassy staff get quickly sketched character moments over the course of their escape.  These sketches evolve throughout the film, we quickly engage with the personalities of these six and sympathise easily with their plight.  Meanwhile, the Iranian people are generally represented by large mobs, and if we do get to see individuals, they are generally shouting aggressively in Farsi and terrifying our leads.

This obviously is a bit problematic, but to be fair the film seems conscious of the somewhat murky tools its using to create suspense.  As mentioned, it takes care to contextualise the story in the history of the country in a comic book style that seems to take direct inspiration from Marjane Satrapi’s ‘Persepolis’ (2007).  So, theoretically the film justifies the anger of the mob, it's at least partly successful in explaining why these people are so angry and upset at Americans.  It’s less successful when it comes to the sole entirely sympathetic Iranian in the film, a loyal servant who sacrifices herself to aid her Western masters.  In going to so much trouble to outline her as ‘the one good Iranian’, they perversely make everyone else look much worse. 

The embassy staff trapped in the Canadian Ambassador's house

Ben Affleck seems like a conscientious film-maker (he even added a postscript praising Canadian involvement in the operation this film depicts after people got upset), but at the heart of the production process here is a catch 22.  To make it as tense and effective as possible, it’s dramatically necessary to portray the Iranian people as a single-minded, violent horde.  For narrative purposes they sort of have to be extremely otherised, the more sympathetic they become, the less we're scared of them.  I don’t believe Affleck sincerely wants to paint an entire people with an understandable political grievance as monsters, but he's in the difficult position of doing just that.

For me, this was a hard stumbling block to get over, as were the general politics of the film.  I’m not exactly inclined to buy into any narrative that posits the CIA as fine, upstanding, noble people when all evidence points to the fact that they’re one of the most sinister and immoral organisations of the 20^th century.  What I have to concede is that in this instance they seem to be acting justifiably, and anyway, I'm not going to side with the Ayatollah.

US exceptionalism clocking in for the day

It’s fortunate then, that the central plot of this film is so compelling and unique (well, maybe ‘Three Kings’ is a little similar).  ‘Argo’ uses the central plot device of a ‘fake’ movie shoot as a way to shine a light on the way intelligence services spar with one another.  In a fantastic sequence we see a fake press event for ‘Argo’, complete with bombshell actresses dressed in unlikely, cheesy looking Flash Gordon gear cross cut with footage from the hostage crisis.  The message seems clear, this is all theatre.  The difference is that if the hostage's performances aren't convincing enough then they're going to be killed.  

This comparison raises the film up from being just another espionage thriller, and the audience knowledge that all this really happened only adds to the feeling of import.  The film only really falters when it decides to artificially make things more exciting.  In the final sequences there are perhaps one too many hurdles placed in front of our intrepid heroes, one too many unlikely coincidences or times when they look doomed, and then are saved in the nick of time.  This adds up, and the fact that the film becomes a bit more self-consciously unrealistic saps some of the tension from the end of the film.  What should be a sudden, intense relaxation of tension ‘merely’ becomes a happy ending.  It’s a little frustrating, they had me!  I was on the hook for much of the film, fully involved with each little idiosyncratic twist the plot took, but you get the feeling they felt that their amazing real-life tale wasn't quite amazing enough, and had to embellish it a bit.

Ben Affleck and an angry, unnamed Iranian (one of many in this film)

So this is a film with issues, but ones that it’s possible to overlook.  It’s a fantastic achievement in direction for Ben Affleck too.  His performance in this is perfectly serviceable, playing as he does a man whose skill is in blending in, but it’s behind the camera where he shows some real élan.  This directorial confidence, coupled with a top notch supporting cast means ‘Argo’ is a fascinating snapshot of a rarely explored part of recent history. 

'Argo' is on general release from the 7th of November 2012

Monday, October 8, 2012

‘Looper’ (2012) directed by Rian Johnson, 6th October 2012

Monday, October 8, 2012 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

I've always had a soft spot for time travel movies.  They give a director express permission to head into the world of the surreal and the odd.   Suddenly the laws of physics and space become malleable, and past, present and future all pile up into one big confusing melange.  Add to this that also I'm a bit of a sucker for visions of the future, it allows for some neat and incisive political commentary on how the director views the present day, and lets us visualise futures to avoid at all costs, or to try and aim for.

Rian Johnson’s ‘Looper’ is a fine entry into the time travel canon.  Set primarily in 2033 Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Joe, a looper.  The job of a looper is essentially a binman for the future of 2074.  Gangsters zap people they want disappeared back in time, Joe blasts them with a blunderbuss the moment they appear and then he disposes of them in an industrial furnace.  They’re called ‘loopers’ because the prevent paradoxes they must 'close their own loop'.  In practice this means that at some point their own future self will be sent back for execution.  But Joe’s future self (Bruce Willis) manages to escape, and Joe must catch him to close his own loop.  Old Joe is on a mission in the past, engaged in what seems like a classic time travel idea, to kill a child that will one day grow up into a monster, the all-conquering 'Rainmaker', who has indirectly killed Old Joe's wife.  High concept stuff.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Joe

Rian Johnson delights in playing with this complexity, about the fun and deeply strange consequences of time travel.  How does the same person interact with himself at a different point on his timeline. If something happens to the younger Joe, what effect will it have on the older one?  How does memory work if the younger Joe does things that Old Joe didn't do?  This film more than answers questions like these and keeps throwing interesting variations and kinks into the mix, like the unforgettable and terrifying time mutilation sequence.  At the same time, he treats time travel with a refreshing irreverence, with Jeff Bridges excellent (and very Slavoj Žižekian) Abe pronouncing "don't think about this stuff too much, it'll fry your brain".  It's like he's speaking directly to the audience.  Analysing how the mechanics of time travel apply here is completely missing the point; this is a film about bigger things that merely uses time travel as a narrative tool.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt is one of my favourite rising stars.  He first came to my attention as someone to watch in Rian Johnson’s ‘Brick’ (2005) where he played a hard-bitten Marlowesque PI working through a noir like plot while still in high school.  This performance was outstanding, so my expectations were high for this, his second collaboration with Rian Johnson.  He met, and exceeded these expectations.  His performance here is delicately multi-levelled, and he manages to simultaneously define Joe as a distinct character, while also managing a subtle Bruce Willis impression and at the same time maintaining the ironically detached, quick-witted persona established in his recent career.  He’s playing this role through some prosthetics to give him a bit more resemblance to Willis, but these soon become invisible to the audience, and Levitt utterly melts into the character.  I suspect that many a lesser actor would have been happy with a straight Bruce Willis impression, but there’s a distinction between Bruce Willis’ stock film persona, and the character of Old Joe.

Bruce Willis doing what Bruce Willis does best as Old Joe

On the other hand, Bruce Willis has never been an actor that melts into his character.  Pretty much every role he plays is refracted to some degree through the prism of the Die Hard series’ John McClane.  Whether this is because McClane is essentially Willis, or that over the years Willis decided that people just want to see McClane doesn’t matter.  This isn’t a criticism per se, Willis is very good at doing what he does.  Namely gritting his teeth, being underestimated by those around him and through a mixture of improvised smarts wiping out the bad guys (all the while with a dose of wry humour).  Here, Willis as Old Joe allows this persona to come under some pretty effective criticism.  The character of Old Joe is very much in the classic Willis mode, and there is a huge dollop of charisma on almost everything he does.  What sets this film aside is the way in which these old school action hero traits are shown up as part of a self-sustaining cycle of violence and misery.  The intense charisma of Willis is subverted into a mask to keep a child murderer focussed on his mission.

At first glance, our protagonist Joe looks like the quintessential cool movie hitman.  He’s got a smart car, an upmarket minimalist flat, an attractive trophy girlfriend, a big gun and dresses in a refined retrofuturistic style.  He’s an easy man to like and respect; the epitome of a certain materialistic brand of masculinity.  But Johnson systematically strips all of this power away from him as we learn more about the world he lives in.  The job of a looper may pay well, but it’s looked down upon as lazy work for those who can’t plan ahead.  There is no skill in it, and all the job seemingly requires is a minimal level of competence and a kind of reckless, blank stupidity.  So we see this hitman archetype reduced to the binman of the future.  His smartly designed futuristic gun the ‘blunderbuss’ is shown to be next to useless as an offensive weapon, his clothing style is mocked as overly calculated and affected and his interactions with people outlined as desperate and shallow.  By the time we see him desperately puking in the dirt as he goes through drug withdrawal, we as an audience understand that this is not someone in a happy place in their life.

Emily Blunt as Sarah (someone I haven't talked about very much because I don't want to spoil the plot)

Initially, Old Joe seems a lot better, a happier man, one who talks about how the love of a good woman has cleared his head.  His existence seems like a bright light at the end of the tunnel for Joe.  But this is all a lie.  Old Joe is barely any better than his younger self, sure he may have kicked the drugs, but his first instinct when faced with difficulty is to resort to lethal force.  We see in montage what happens in Joe’s life, the transition from Gordon-Levitt to Bruce Willis.  It’s a bloodbath, a life lived at the barrel of a gun with innumerable casualties.  

Old Joe's motivation is to prevent the death of his wife by killing the child that will eventually become the super-gangster responsible for her death.  It seems like a noble quest, but it's fatally undercut when Joe points out to his older self that if he wants to save his wife, then simply show him her picture.  When he sees her in the future he’ll turn away and ignore her, thus preventing her murder in the future.  It’s an elegant solution, yet requires a level of self-sacrifice that Old Joe simply doesn't possess.  Instead he embarks on a deluded mission to murder three young children.  It’s heartbreaking seeing Old Joe heading off to murder children, desperately trying to justify to himself that he’s doing the right thing.  Ironically, by swimming through this river of blood he manages to ensure the very future he's desperate to prevent.

Joe meets Joe

This is a film that goes out of its way to show violence as an actively harmful agent to society, but what can oppose it?  The answer is maternal empathy and communication.  Throughout the film the links between mother and son are strongly emphasised.  The effect on Joe of his mother’s abandonment of him, and his subsequent ‘adoption’ by Abe, the dark father figure that turns him into a looper has consequences throughout the film.  Old Joe’s wife seems to function as much as a surrogate mother for him in his old age.  Later, the central relationship in the film switches to that of a young boy and his mother.  It’s this bond that proves crucial to a happy future.  Old Joe is a creature born of blood, someone who has killed his way to the top, and when his younger self is confronted by this his natural reaction is disgust, and this is the root of where the two grow apart.  

The crucial difference between these two sides of one time-shifted individual is that the younger Joe realises the consequences of his actions.  He realises that violence begets violence, the importance of communication, empathy and trust and finally comes to the conclusion that there is only one real way to stop this loop of misery perpetuating itself.

Joe on the job.

Johnson provides us with an extremely depressing yet grimly plausible vision of the future.  The US has embarked on an inexorable downward spiral and the future here is a visual echo of the Great Depression of the 1930s.  The cities are filled with squalid ‘tent cities’ reminiscent of Hoovervilles packed full of desperately poor people.  Contrasted with them is an opulent, wealthy and snobbish upper class who pass their time with material goods, empty thrill seeking and drug addiction.  The state of the world in general is never directly explained, but we can infer several things from the production design.  Nearly all of the cars are retro-fitted with solar panels, and these panels seem plastered over most available surfaces, the climate has changed so much that it’s now possible to grow sugar cane in the US and the currency bears the face of Chairman Mao.  It’s a damn miserable world to live in, and with the advent of time travel, one that’s to some extent parasitically living off a slightly better future.  The more gold and silver that's sent to the past, the more it fuels the loopers, who are a load of fucked up semi-psychopaths.  If these are the people the past is empowering, then no wonder the future is so screwed up.  It creates an inexorable feedback loop that seems to make things worse and worse the longer it goes on.  The worse the future is, the more bodies get sent back and the richer the mobsters in the present become, in effect making the future worse.

Jeff Daniels as 'Abe' and Noah Segen as 'Kid Blue'

This is a film to be admired, one that wears the clothes of a science fiction action thriller but subverts expectations and goes the philosophical distance in exploring the consequences of its characters actions.  In my view Johnson correctly identifies how cycles or loops of self perpetuating violence function and the demonstrates misery they spawn irrelevant of whether the motivation for committing them was good or evil.   Aside from the philosophy, this is a film with intelligent and effective production design, some brilliant performances and smart direction that knows exactly how much information to feed to the audience at any one time.  It uses the language of cinema to effectively deconstruct much of the thrill of the violence inherent to the genre.  We see Old Joe escape after being zapped back in time twice.  Once in exciting, quick cut closeup where we see him expertly, gracefully and with supernatural confidence knock his younger self out, and once in one long-shot, where this gracefulness and poise is revealed to be clumsy and comedic.  This motif of exposing our bloodlust as something foolish and immature carries into the overarching architecture of the film as a whole, especially given the deceleration of the the films latter half.  It's a remarkable feat of directing to make a film that consciously decides to become less thrilling, while never letting loose the grip on the minds of its audience.  I loved 'Looper'!