LONDON CITY NIGHTS

Wednesday, December 17, 2014

'Ex Machina' (2015) directed by Alex Garland

Wednesday, December 17, 2014 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

Science fiction that ponders whether an artificial mind is truly conscious is hardly breaking new ground.  As far back as 1921 Karel Čapek's play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) explored the idea of lifeforms that are almost human, but not quite.  Since then they've been a mainstay in all eras of cinema, from Fritz Lang's Metropolis, through The Day The Earth Stood Still, up the modern day via stone cold classics like 2001, Alien, Blade Runner, The Terminator, The Matrix and Her.

So what new angle does Alex Garland bring to this crowded field? Set in an unspecified near future, our protagonist Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) is a hotshot programmer working for competition crushing search engine BlueBook.  He wins a company lottery, his prize a week long visit to the home of the reclusive genius and company CEO Nathan (Oscar Isaac). Nathan lives in isolation with his non-English speaking maid Kyoko (Sonoya Mizuno) in the beautiful Alaskan wilderness. His mostly underground home is ultra high-tech and tastefully decorated, looking like a nuclear bunker as designed by IKEA.  

Soon we learn the reason for such isolation.  Nathan has made a breakthrough in artificial intelligence, and her name is Ava (Alicia Vikander).  Ava is intelligent, beautiful and ultraperceptive, yet also sheltered, childlike and naive.  Nathan quickly confesses that the reason for Caleb's visit isn't a holiday, he's to be part of an quasi-Turing test designed to evaluate Ava to conclude whether she's truly conscious.  The rest of the film revolves around a series of interviews between Caleb and Eva, as they open up to each other the film gradually reveals more about Ava, Nathan's ulterior motives and Caleb's true role in the experiment.

Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) and Nathan (Oscar Isaac)

I don't want to spoil too much, so I'm going to leave the plot there.  Much of Garland's screenplay is concerned with misdirection, sending both Caleb and ourselves down paranoid trains of thought while keeping 'the truth' in plain sight.  With a pared down cast of four (one of whom doesn't speak), the claustrophobic and increasingly sinister surroundings and the precise pace at which the film proceeds, the tension gradually ratchets up scene by scene as the truth is slowly unfurled.  

On a basic structural level, Ex Machina is a series of philosophical conversations in confined spaces.  Consequently, though the film is beautifully shot by Rob Hardy, boasts deeply impressive production design, a great synth score and seamless special effects, it lives and dies on the quality of the actor's performances.  All are excellent, though Isaac's vaguely Steve Jobsian tech guru stands out.   The programming geek stereotype is completely absent and with his shaved head and masculine beard he looks a bit like Russell Crowe's Noah, the epitome of the dirt-under-the-fingernails mythic paternal figure.  Isaac continually finds some fascinating new angle on Nathan, or fresh mood in each scene, both actor and character taking a sadistic pleasure in constantly pulling the rug out from underneath us.

Good as Isaac is, the true star of Ex Machina is Alicia Vikander's Ava.  A trained ballerina, Vikander moves with inhuman grace.  She's so subtle in this that it's difficult to pin down individual moments; more that every action is millimetre precise, adding up to a queasy combination of sexuality and uncanny valley 'wrongness'.  Ava is intentionally designed to express sexuality, but some dark thing twinges in your brain when you realise you're turned on by a creature whose skin is a metallic lattice and whose robot guts you see whirring away in her belly.

Ava (Alicia Vikander)

Learning to love (and lust) for this bundle of fibre-optics, carbon fibre and rubber skin is at the heart of Ex Machina,  which treats its subject matter as a sober examination of what it will mean to live in a world where beings like Ava exist.  Thing is, though this is all very well conveyed, it's not exactly breaking fresh ground.  It's been more than thirty years since Blade Runner and though the world has seen a quantum leap in technology, the central questions of Ex Machina are almost identical to what Roy Batty and Rick Deckard violently debated on the rainy roof of the Bradbury Building.

Even the aesthetics are a bit familiar; Caradog James' excellent and underrated The Machine did the beautiful translucent robot girl (who, bizarrely, was also named Ava) thing a year ago, and the cosy pastel and natural materials set design is strongly reminiscent of Her.  This isn't to say that there's anything remotely lazy here, just that the visual punch of Ava is slightly dulled if you've seen a robot sci-fi film in the last ten years or so.  

Ex Machina finally breaks fresh ground when it eventually reveals itself not as a robot philosophy film, but as feminist science fiction.  As we explore Ava's humanity, both audience and characters objectify her.  As she is an object, this provides a useful path into a thorny subject. As we learn more about her creator, we come to understand Ava as a sex slave; most notably when Nathan proudly explains the myriad features of her robot vagina.   Later developments underline the idea the female body as equipment for men to use, the film gradually becoming less about the ethics of artificial intelligence and more about emancipatory feminist ideology.

That Ex Machina looks for all the world like it's about one thing, yet secretly turns out to be about something completely different feels pleasantly appropriate given the film as a whole. I really hope this finds an audience: it's got some really striking images, a bevy of fascinating performative tics and an absolute humdinger of an ending.  That intellectual, firmly adult science fiction films like this can be made gives me the warm fuzzies.  I hope it does well. It deserves to.

★★★★

Ex Machina is released 23 January in the UK, 10 April in the US.

Monday, May 5, 2014

'Frank' (2014) directed by Lenny Abrahamson

Monday, May 5, 2014 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

So what's the deal with the big fake head? This question fuels Frank, an idiosyncratic muso-comedy that has the balls to take one of the most handsome leading men of our time and confine him to a super freaky looking staring head. This head has burned itself into Britain's cultural conscious; invented by Chris Sievey for his comedy character Frank Sidebottom - a creation that doles out amusement and nightmares in equal amounts.  But Frank is not a biopic of Sievey, it's an askance examination of just why a man would wear a big fake head that underlies a deeper look at the dangers of egotism in art.

Our entry point into the world of Frank is Jon (Domhnall Gleeson), a frustrated songwriter living in a coastal town that they forgot to close down.  He walks the dull, grey streets trying frantically to compose lyrics that, y'know really speak to people, yeah?  He's not having much luck, lyrics about women holding bags and children building sandcastles not amounting to anything.  This a man seems built for a life of desaturated corporate misery, this destiny averted by chancing upon a man trying to drown himself.  This man turns out to be the keyboardist for a band called 'Soronprfbs', fronted by the enigmatic, big fake head wearing Frank (Michael Fassbender).

Immediately volunteering himself as a replacement keyboardist he finds himself drawn into the chaotic vortex of the band, which aside from the obvious strangeness of Frank, is entirely composed of weirdos. Prime among them is the surly Clara (Maggie Gyllenhaal), a character that immediately endears with the snarled line "don't touch my fucking theremin!".  With Jon in tow they head to a remote Irish cabin to record an album, followed by a reluctant appearance at SXSW in Austin where everything goes tits up.

Jon is a talentless, annoying dick. But that's kinda the point.

Frank often feels a little too self-consciously quirky, though it's easy to forgive this in a film that has something genuinely important to explain about what makes an artist and a general instinct for expressing yourself.  The two poles of the film are our protagonist Jon, a character who treats music as a short-cut to adoration and Frank, who, with the anonymity granted by a big fake head is a creature without ego.

We repeatedly see Jon wrestling with his own songs, trying frantically to find his voice and write something truly meaningful - and failing utterly.  He envies the mental illnesses, the troubled childhoods and eccentricity of his band-mates - vocally moaning about how his well-adjusted, middle-class childhood has left him devoid of inspiration. What we eventually realise is that all the effort he expounds upon realising his inner artist is pointless. There is no inner beauty within him - Jon is an intrinsically untalented individual with absolutely nothing to say to anyone.

His is a quest for popularity; a success measured in Twitter followers and YouTube hits. He craves a conventional vision of musical success, all couture leather, eyeliner, flirting with pretty A&R girls and rides to gigs in the back of limousines. He expresses himself as a sop to his ego, seeking the adulation of the masses via 'likeable', middle-of-the-road music.  Jon would fit perfectly into a band like Coldplay or Snow Patrol, but when confronted with true passion in the form of Frank and Soronpfrbs he can't help but fuck everything up.

Though all his character flaws are intentional, Jon is the biggest problem with Frank, Domhnall Gleeson's smug, ironic voice-over unpleasantly echoing the execrable About Time.  Fortunately, Michael Fassbender's Frank more than saves the film. He's the model of an artistic soul, able to find create art from thin air, with lyrics about dirty bathroom and damaged carpet springing direct from his soul. His jumbled up word salad lyrics are heartfelt - sung with no self-examination or analysis.  The anonymity provided by his head removes ego from the equation with a stroke, erasing the individual from the music and forcing us to interpret him purely through art. 

So Frank boils down to a stand-off of ideas: Jon's vision of music as a vehicle for his ego and Frank's instinct to create because he needs to.  The rather depressing  (though probably accurate) conclusion to this argument is that if you don't really feel it then you shouldn't bother - that anything consciously created to make yourself look better is hollow and shitty.  In a world of instant ticket to fame talent shows and ephemeral online fame it's a timely idea - a pointed rebuttal to the aphorism "fake it 'til you make it".

This makes Frank, for it's imperfections, a deeply smart film.  It's narratively uneven, and relies a touch too much on the intrinsic humour of the Frank visual.  That said, its heart is definitely in the right place; it's got a great acid-inflected soundtrack, a complex and vanity-free performance from Michael Fassbender, a sweary, spiky, cooler-than-thou Maggie Gyllenhaal and genuinely does follow through on its promise to explain why a man would spend his life inside a big fake head.  In a multiplex lineup of superheroes and drippy romances it stands out a mile: a passion project that, while not an unreserved success, is a brave bit of film-making that deserves an audience.

★★★★

Frank is on general release 9th May 2014

Thursday, August 15, 2013

'About Time' (2013) directed by Richard Curtis

Thursday, August 15, 2013 - by londoncitynights · - 1 Comment

About Time is a film devoid of curiosity, wit and intelligence yet stuffed to the gills with unbearable schmaltz, whiny acoustic guitar music and cutesy dull rubbish.  This is about as crap as it gets: two hours of not much happening to not very interesting people. Every moment the plot looks like it might head somewhere interesting the film shrugs its shoulders, does a U-turn and makes a beeline right back to Dullsville.  I lost count of the times I muttered "for fuck's sake..." under my breath and sunk into my seat as the film obstinately refused to end.

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