LONDON CITY NIGHTS: Jessica Chastain

Saturday, November 8, 2014

'Interstellar' (2014) directed by Christopher Nolan

Saturday, November 8, 2014 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

Spaceships majestically floating around the galaxy to dramatic orchestral music is very much my kinda thing. Bonus points if the music sounds suspiciously like Philip Glass' score for Koyaanisqatsi. I cannot overemphasise how much I enjoy trippy cosmic science fiction that bursts at the seams with science so theoretical that it borders on the mystical. The ur-example is, of course, Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, but more recent entries like Darren Aronosfky's The Fountain, Hideaki Anno's End of Evangelion or Ridley Scott's Prometheus keep blood pumping through the genre.

Other than the basic genre trappings of space, what gives Interstellar common ground with these films is the suturing of objectivity (as represented by science) to subjectivity (usually represented by the power of love). The upshot is a weird, religious intensity that arises when cinema tries to pin down the point where science ends and faith begins. This is usually signified by a balls out crazy psychedelic sequence full of flashing lights and crazy music, or as I call them 'the best bit'.

As far as I'm concerned the actual narrative of Interstellar takes a back seat to the imagery, music and philosophy of the movie, but it provides the backbone necessary to keep everything else ticking over, so here's the gist. A hundred or so years from now Earth is a dying planet. The crops humanity relies on to survive are systematically dying off, and the farmers are plagued by gigantic dust storms that smother the sky and choke up the lungs.

But NASA has a plan. The last, best hope of humanity is to go hermit crab: slough off the crummy old planet and find another. So it's handy that a mysterious wormhole has opened just off Saturn, with a fresh solar system beyond ripe for the plucking. A crew of explorers is assembled captained by Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), and they blast off into the void.

Complicating matters is that Cooper has two young children who he must leave behind on earth. Complicating matters even further is that relativity is mindmelting stuff, so time spent hanging out near black holes means that, for example, every hour is equivalent to eight years on Earth. Complicating matters still further is a litany of betrayals and emotional chicanery that reveals what humanity is really like when its back is truly up against the wall.

And then things get weird.

But enough about that science fiction frippery, Interstellar is really about fucking. More specifically, the film is a camouflaged guide to make men more attentive and responsible lovers. Cooper might be narratively out to find a home for future generations of humanity, but symbolically he's out to give the cosmos the time of her life via mindblowing sex that concludes with simultaneous orgasms and fertilisation of her ovum.

The spacecraft is a stylised blastocyst

From wall to wall the film is covered in reproductive imagery; from the spermatozoa landing craft piloted by our hero to the fertilised egg shape of the base craft Endurance. Then they have to fly their ship right into a gigantic space vagina and choose a suitably hospitable planet/egg to seed with the collective DNA of mankind. Symbolism like this isn't novel or subtle, but where Interstellar stand out is its focus on the quality of the sex and the importance of choice of partner, rather than just the fact of its happening.

Nolan repeatedly emphasises that Cooper's skill in bed, and that he knows precisely how to satisfy a lover. We repeatedly see him clutching a phallic spacecraft joystick, positioned neatly between his legs as he guides his spaceship through all kinds complex manoeuvres. His skills in manipulating his craft are thrown into sharp relief by a later example of an astronaut who is a bad lover.

Go get 'em tiger.

In a tense scene we see the rape of a spacecraft, the unwilling docking ports hamhandedly bashed against to disastrous effect. The sweaty, paranoid astronaut just wants to get himself off with no consideration as to the needs of his partner, something the film outright condemns as short-sighted selfishness. By contrast Cooper is a sensitive lover, expertly matching the motions of the machine to the effect that it's port opens up like a petal and he can achieve penetration. The sequence, one of the best in the movie, echoes Jodorowsky's 'Love Machine' in The Holy Mountain, the two movies overlapping in their tendency to show mankind transcending itself.

Soon after our hero is whirling through a psychedelic void making an unmistakable, gritted teeth O-face while caught up a flaming blast of intergalactic semen. The cosmos has been well and truly satisfied and fertilisation has occurred. Both Cooper and the universe then lie back on their pillows and share a celebratory cigarette. The film then folds in on itself to reveal the consequences of this; which serve to intensify the more obvious surface themes of parenthood and responsibility.

So in summary, with Interstellar Christopher Nolan gives us a lesson on how to be great in bed. Namely that you need to tend to your partner's needs as much as your own, that selfishness in bed leads of misery (and the real significance of the spacecraft being named Endurance becomes apparent...) and, most importantly, if you end up with a child at the end of it all for god's sake do right by it. More fundamentally, Nolan correctly recognises sexuality and eroticism as one of the basic behavioural building blocks of the human condition, something that should be wholeheartedly embraced if you desire happiness.

And he does all this while keeping a whizzy and tense space adventure story going. Whattaguy.

★★★★

Wednesday, February 20, 2013

'Mama’ (2013) directed by Andrés Muschietti

Wednesday, February 20, 2013 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

"Presented by" code for "Didn't have much to do with" I bet.

Nervous, scared laughter is my favourite reaction from a cinema audience. Mama, which I saw in a packed screening last night, fills the screening room with frightened yelps and relieved chuckles. It’s unashamed in using classic scare techniques. So for example, when someone is nervously wandering around a remote, abandoned cabin at night and their torch starts flickering you know their goose is not only cooked, but more or less how it’s going to be served. And, as the poor victim staggers around in the dark with weird swooshing evil sounds moving around him, you start to giggle in anticipation of the big shock that’s about to come. Don’t get me wrong, Mama isn’t groundbreaking or even particularly memorable, but it is an scary and well constructed horror film.

The premise is solid; Lucas (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) and Annabel (Jessica Chastain) are a cool young couple. He’s an artist of some kind, and she’s the bass player in a punk band. Five years ago Lucas’ twin brother Jeffrey snapped, killing his wife and running away with their two young children, 3 year old Victoria, and 1 year old Lilly. They were never seen again. Lucas has been searching for them ever since, and has almost given up hope when his team find a cabin out in the woods with signs of life.. Miraculously the children have survived five years in the wilderness, regressing to a feral state, running on all fours and snarling viciously. Their childish drawings on the walls of the cabin and the hospital show them being protected by a sinister looking figure they call ‘Mama’. Lucas and Annabel adopt the children, moving into a big, shadowy house to reacclimatise them to society... but has something followed them from the woods?

AHHHH!

Much of what makes Mama work is when it sticks to the principle that your imagination is much more horrifying than whatever a 3D graphics package can produce. There are some incredibly spooky scenes where we realise with a chill that something horrible must be just out of shot. Your mind races trying to fill in the blanks. The environment helps a lot, our characters being transplanted from their hipstery cluttered flat into an austere and dark detached house, the previous tenant apparently having been a big fan of very low watt lightbulbs.

This environment is so obviously spooky that, in a perverse way it all seems oddly familiar. Andres Muschietti isn’t showing off a huge deal of originality in the imagery he uses here, but it’s impressive how well he’s managed to synthesise many different nods to classic horror into a coherent whole. The dolls composed of twigs and leaves the children play with might have fallen out of The Blair Witch Project. The monster moves like Giger’s Alien. The black rotting stains on the walls recall Polanski’s Repulsion. The themes of loss, revenge and corrupted maternity ring through Japanese horror like Shimizu’s Ju-on series or Nakata’s Ring.

AHHHHHHHHHHHH!

That's not to say that Muschietti doesn’t have his own moments of directorial brilliance. There’s an absolutely brilliant dream sequence midway through the film that seamlessly fills in much of the backstory. Shot from a first person perspective it’s interestingly digitally textured and coupled with the framerate being overcranked it gives us an intensely claustrophobic sequence that left me holding my breath with tension. Other highlights are a Sam Raimi style active camera, walking us into places we don't want the characters or ourselves to go. The classic example being a character being scared to open a door, they reach for it and begin to open it, and then we cut to a shot from inside the room. It's in Mama, it's in Evil Dead II and probably a thousand other shockers. This puts us in the action as much as the characters, with the monster popping up to scare us as much as the characters in the film.

The monster itself is also well worth the price of admission, although predictably, the more you see of it, the less interesting and scary it is. Muschietti pulls an incredibly smart trick in letting us repeatedly see the children’s crude pictures of Mama. You’re never able to quite get a handle on her but you know she’s spindly, black and tall, with long clutching arms. You sense the influence of producer Guillermo Del Toro in her movement. She moves like she's broken some pretty important bones in her body. As she comes for our heroes she flops and staggers awkwardly, but suddenly it’s as if she finds a rhythm and can move terrifyingly fast (usually right at the camera accompanied by a sudden violin sting). She’s obviously fantastical, but Mama makes a strange physical sense - you might not understand what she is, but you get an idea of how she works. It gives fantasy a slightly indefinable realism and plausibility, reminding me of the Faun or the Pale Man from Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth. To add a pleasant bit of complexity, this is a maternal monster motivated by love and loss rather than pure hatred and evil, which muddies the waters a bit, the film encouraging us to sympathise with the darkness lurking in the shadows.

AHHHH.... oh. Uh cool t-shirt.

Jessica Chastain isn’t exactly stretched here, but she gives the film a decent dramatic weight as she inadvertently becomes a mother figure herself. Also, on a purely superficial level, she looks great in thick eyeliner, a black bob haircut and tattoos Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (of Game of Thrones fame) is good enough, but has slightly less to do and spends most of the film incapacitated. The two young girls, Megan Carpenter and Isabelle Nélisse, are both excellent, especially Nelisse as the more feral of the two. When she scuttles around on all fours it’s genuinely freaky to watch.

Mama is a competently and professionally put together film that’s been put together by a director who clearly knows his way around the horror genre. The CG infused ending sequence is a bit crap, and perhaps too many people end up wandering around the woods at night with a malfunctioning torch, but on the whole Mama is a nicely thrilling piece of unpretentious horror cinema.

***/*****

'Mama' is on general release from 22nd February 2013

Saturday, February 9, 2013

‘Zero Dark Thirty’ (2013) directed by Kathryn Bigelow, 6th February 2013

Saturday, February 9, 2013 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

O cherished torturess, steely eyes glinting in a filthy room, the professional set of your jaw!

O venerated torturess, LCD-lit flawless porcelain skin, ultra-clean ultra-smart trouser suit!

O sweet torturess, flaxen hair falling cinematically across your mirrored shades, will your chariot bear his corpse?

O noble torturess, sacrificing youth and life to keep us safe, doing “what must be done”!

I’ll stop this bullshit right here. And if you're wondering, yes, Zero Dark Thirty is every bit as reprehensible as you’ve heard. Kathryn Bigelow has created a film where we sympathise with torturers. Our heroes are men and women who practise dark arts like placing people in stress positions for prolonged periods, putting collars on people and leading them around like dogs, shoving prisoners into tiny wooden boxes, sexual humiliation, waterboarding and just plain old fashioned punching them in the face over and over again. It’s a moral car crash of a movie, one where absolution for war crimes comes in the form of a teary close-up where we see just. what. the. personal. toll. has. been.

Jessica Chastain as Maya.

Bollocks to your "personal toll", Bigelow. I couldn’t give a tuppenny fuck about the conflicted internal lives of your dead-eyed gang of war criminals. The old joke rings true; a man sits miserably in the corner of a pub mumbling:

“This pub, this very pub we're just sitting in. I built it, with my own hands! But do they call me the Pubmaker? No! See the wall over there, that protects our town? I built it, with my own hands! But do they call me the Wallmaker? And the bridge, you know, that crosses our river, I built it, with my own hands! But do they call me the Bridgemaker? But I tell you man. You fuck one goat….”

The heroes of Zero Dark Thirty are these goatfuckers, irrevocably stained by their crimes against humanity. It’s easy to be suckered into seeing the film as a moral swamp which no-one comes out of cleanly, but this is having your cake and eating it. Zero Dark Thirty has pretensions towards journalism rather than entertainment, every cinematic choice is made with an eye to grounding the action, everything is muted, coldly realistic, oozing a confidence gained through meticulous research. It’s one of those films that has the gumption to be a bit dull and difficult to follow because “this is how it went”.

These cinematic and aesthetic tools are deployed with precision accuracy by Bigelow in a way that adds up to a moral justification of torture. Now, I don’t believe Bigelow hungers to see prisoners humiliated and brutalised, I take her at her word when she says:

“(I’m) a lifelong pacifist, I support all protests against the use of torture, and, quite simply, inhumane treatment of any kind.”

But despite this she's directed a brilliant piece of PR for the CIA, a film that makes a crusading heroine out of a vicious torturer. She argues that “depiction is not endorsement”, yet the structure of the film she’s created inevitably nudges its audience towards acceptance of torture as a necessary evil.

This process begins from the opening moments. The panicked screams of those dying in the burning World Trade Centre are played over a jet black screen. In terms of propaganda, this is a “Why We Fight” sequence. It sets the stakes, justifying almost every action that our heroes will take. As far as the structure of the film goes, this makes the emotional case for revenge before we see a single photographed frame of the movie. When we cut it’s to a CIA black site, with a terrified detainee being menaced by men in black balaclavas. A link is thus made in our minds. This sweaty, panicked man is responsible for the deaths we’ve just been forced to listen to. It's crass and exploitative; the dead of 9/11 pressed into service as emotional shock troops to excuse the barbarism we’re about to see.

Real life butts into the film whenever events begin to become a bit sterile. The action was almost literally brought home for me during the recreation of the 7/7 London bombings when the doomed bus drove past the end of my street. The hunt has gotten a little esoteric by this point and Bigelow wants to reinforce who the ‘bad guys’ are, reminding us that the increasingly dry intelligence tactics we see actually have a purpose.

Unfortunately, using 7/7 to show the importance of our CIA heroes’ quest is a critically flawed move. The conclusion of the official inquiry into 7/7 found that the bombers acted independently: there was no connection with al-Qaeda and certainly none with Osama Bin Laden himself. “The London attacks were a modest, simple affair by four seemingly normal men using the internet”. So, not content with exploiting the final words of 9/11 victims, Bigelow now moves on to using our memories of the 52 victims of 7/7 to add emotional impact to the film. In fact, there’s arguably more chance that the images of torture that emerged from Abu Ghraib prison and the reports of CIA “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques” influenced the bombers.

This all helps underline the importance and urgency of our hero's actions. Zero Dark Thirty is complex and methodical film that requires you to pay attention or risk losing the thread of what’s going on, but in some regards it’s also an extremely simple one. It’s a film about "THE GREATEST MANHUNT IN HISTORY", one noble woman’s quest to catch the bad guy of bad guys.

One of the common arguments I've seen to defend this film is to claim that Maya (Jessica Chastain) isn't a hero in the traditional sense. This is disingenuous. Firstly no-one can reasonably claim that she isn't the audience identification character. In the opening scenes of the film she is as visibly shocked and disturbed by the torture happening in front of her as we presumably are. As she toughens up and learns the simple pleasure of beating the shit out of restrained prisoners of war so, apparently must we. We are dragged along with her on her path to moral degradation.

As disturbing as it is to see someone becoming accustomed to sadism and consumed by obsession, I can't deny that Jessica Chastain does a damn good job in the role. She's like Agent Scully gone bad, someone who's allowed herself to become chewed up from the inside out, as if working for the CIA hollows the humanity out of you. Her sensible,ultra professional trouser suits betray no personality whatsoever, the fluorescent lighting she's under for much of the film accentuating her bony body. Even the sunglasses she wears tend to make her head look disturbingly skull-like. Maya becomes death. The destroyer of worlds.

But for all the death imagery that swarms around her, Maya is the hero of the film. At the mid-way point she's sliding neatly into the archetype of the rogue cop, she's a maverick, but she gets the job done. She's inhabiting her narrative heroism fully when she's scrawling numbers on her boss's door ("she gets results you stupid chief!"). Maya, inevitably, becomes the one person who sees things clearly, confidently saying she's 100% sure that Bin Laden is in his compound when everyone else is waffling through a series of bureaucratic cliches. By the time she's standing on a runway her hair whipping around cinematically as she awaits the delivery of Bin Laden's carcass she may as well be the reincarnation of Sarah Connor.

Maya Sarah Connor

That Zero Dark Thirty uses this archetype is partly what exposes the lie that it doesn't endorse torture. If Maya so clearly occupies the heroic narrative space, then her target Osama Bin Laden (though never seen) becomes a straightforward narrative villain. With the story viewed as Maya's heroic ascension, the torture in the first half of the film becomes retroactively justified. So what of the final shot of the film, her weeping as she realises she's sacrificed so much to capture this man? This reaction is the weight of her crimes preying upon her. Her entire adult life has been devoted to catching this man, and now that she's stared into his dead eyes she has and is nothing. Maya looks down at the corpse of Bin Laden, and Bin Laden stares right back up at the corpse of Maya. But though she may have sacrificed everything, the screams of those trapped within the World Trade Centre still echo in the film. Maya's self-sacrifice becomes noble. This was a shitty job, but someone had to do it. By any means.

That Zero Dark Thirty endorses torture makes it, for all its considerable technical and cinematic charms, a truly vile film. It excuses the crimes of the CIA, allows us to view torture as a viable means of extracting information and begins to normalise it in popular culture. This normalisation is probably the most distressing consequence of all, huge swathes of the audience walking out of the cinema tutting in liberal angst at what they've seen, but on some level accepting that it was a necessary evil.

Cinema is one of the most powerful and wide-reaching forms of media in our culture. History and war become defined in the popular consciousness largely by how they're depicted in popular film. Zero Dark Thirty wears its disguise of journalistic pretension so well that it's destined to become the popular version of events. When future generations look back on the War on Terror, how Western civilisation reacted to the physical and psychological trauma of 9/11 and specifically the hunt for Osama Bin Laden, Zero Dark Thirty will be what they watch. What will they see? A culture that deifies torturers; that casually inflicts pain upon the desperate; that believes that the end justifies the means, no matter how horrible. Is this what we want to be?

Monday, September 3, 2012

'Lawless' (2012) directed by John Hillcoat, 2nd September 2012

Monday, September 3, 2012 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

'Lawless' tells the story of prohibition era moonshiners the Bondurant brothers. The screenplay by Nick Cave is an adaptation of the book 'The Wettest County in the World', which is written by the grandson of our central characters, Matt Bondurant. The director, John Hillcoat has a good track record, his last films being 'The Road' (2009) and 'The Proposition' (2005), both of which I enjoyed very much.

John Hillcoat and Nick Cave share a 'blood n' guts' aesthetic, and their partnership on 'The Proposition' paid off magnificently. Both of them seem to take a grim pleasure in realistic violence and men 'doing what they've got to do'. So, it's not exactly a surprise that this film is packed full of men gritting their teeth and murdering each other graphically. Our protagonist is Jack (Shia LaBeouf), the youngest Bondurant brother and "the runt of the litter". His brothers, Forrest (Tom Hardy) and Howard (Jason Clarke) run a successful moonshining operation in Franklin County, Virginia. Opposing the brothers is Special Agent Charlie Rakes (Guy Pearce), a corrupt and intimidating lawman enraged by defiance from what he sees as a bunch of 'hicks'. In supporting roles we get big time gangster Floyd Banner (Gary Oldman), barmaid Maggie (Jessica Chastain) and Jack's sweetheart Bertha (Mia Wasikowska).

All of the men in this film are violent, territorial and sadistic. The only thing that separates our 'heroes' from the villains is that the villains are comically evil. In both of the director's previous films we see environments that will chew you up and spit you out if you're not willing to sacrifice your humanity in exchange for survival. The three brothers seem to be at various points along this process, Tom Hardy's Forrest being almost Terminator-like in his invincibility, while Jack begins as a weak and put upon wimp, and begins to transform himself into what the film paints as the masculine ideal.

The Bondurant brothers.

This masculine ideal, as told by 'Lawless' and in Nick Cave and John Hillcoat's wider work is, admittedly entertaining to watch on screen, but after nearly two hours of men either grunting terse dialogue at each other or cutting each other apart it gets a bit much. We're encouraged to see the Bondurant brothers as loveable rogues even as they torture their rivals to death.

In the opening scenes LaBeouf's Jack is unsure of himself, reluctant to resort to violence and seemingly quite sensitive. By the time we're through he's a raging, materialistic killing machine. This transformation is a classic gangster film narrative device, running right through the classics of the genre (all three 'Godfathers', 'Goodfellas', 'Scarface' et al). Where these films succeed is that while we can take a certain sick pleasure in watching our protagonists bloodily claw their way up the ladder to the top, we also see the toll it takes on their family, friends and mind. Traditionally, by the end of a gangster film like this we should clearly see the toll on the central character, and we realise that family, friends and loyalty are more important than glitzy material wealth. That's because, for all the gleeful violence and voyeuristic hedonism, the gangster genre is at heart a morality tale. This is where 'Lawless' falls apart. As Jack learns the ropes, he begins to swan around in fancy suits, owning expensive cars and generally getting a bit full of himself. So far, so gangster normal, butthe film never condemns this materialism. The cool cars and clothes are apparently steps on the path to a happy life. This all-pervading amorality gets a bit depressing after a while, and even though our protagonists are being played by charismatic and likeable actors, it's hard to shake the conviction that they're unsympathetic monsters.

It's telling that they have to construct a fairly ridiculous and obviously evil villain so that we've got someone to side with the brothers against. In a mostly realistic and unglamorous world Guy Pearce's Agent Rakes stands out as a cartoon character. He's played with the same kind of eccentric evil as Dick Dastardly. If Agent Rakes had a moustache in this film, he'd be twirling it at every opportunity. I'll say this for Guy Pearce, he looks like he's having a ton of fun here. He manages to disgust and creep out everyone he interacts with, even those supposed to be allied with him. This visceral hate effectively translates through the screen into the audience, and I was amused to hear people gasping in shock when he turns up on screen. He's tremendously fun to watch, although the way in which Hillcoat distinguishes him from the central brothers is a little questionable. While the brothers are uncomplicated masculine men, Agent Rakes is neat, perfumed and fussy. He's described to his annoyance as a 'nance'. I guess this character is part of a long tradition of the effeminate metrosexual psycho, but even so it does quite clearly delineate what the film paints as the 'correct' gender roles'.

Guy Pearce as Special Agent Graves

Women don't fit well into the masculine world the film constructs, and both Jessica Chastain's Maggie and Mia Wasikowska's Bertha are pretty much one-dimensional character sketches. Maggie in particular seems to exist mainly to get abused by other men, thus giving the brothers a reason to inflict grisly revenge upon them. It's all a bit problematic and although Chastain stands out as particularly beautiful amongst all this dirt and carnage she is more of a dramatic device than a developed character. Wasikowska's Bertha does get a little more development, although this is restricted to her growing affection for LaBeouf's Jack. As Jack becomes more violent and materialistic, the more she likes him. Again, this seems to show us a very narrow definition of a 'correct' masculinity'.

For all that, there is much in this film to enjoy. Tom Hardy can express more emotion with the back of his head than most actors can with their whole body. He's the magnetic centre of every scene he's in, and things become electric every time he's on screen. His total confidence and invincibility complex are hugely entertaining to watch, especially as he throws himself into seemingly suicidal situations. He's so fun to watch that you can't help wishing he was our protagonist rather than LaBeouf. Gary Oldman is in the film surprisingly briefly, although in his few scenes he manages to convincingly portray a combination of ruthlessness and power, especially in a great action scene when, cigar clamped in mouth, he empties a tommy-gun into a moving car. It's an iconic gangster image, and Oldman totally sells it.

A moment of kindness with Mia Wasikowska's Bertha

Hillcoat's direction is sure-footed and confident. The film is shot digitally, recalling the visual tone of Michael Mann's 'Public Enemies' (2009). Shooting digitally seems to somehow make things more relevant and modern. It sounds like cliche to say that it brings the past to life, but it definitely has a different feel to traditional film. The desaturated tones make the blood seem more immediate. I've got a pretty strong disposition when it comes to gore in films, but some of the violence in this film turned my stomach. Again, this seems to translate out to the audience, with gasps and moans from the audience as the more disturbing scenes play out.

The only stylistic choice that feels odd is the soundtrack, certain scenes have lilting bluegrass songs played over the top of them. At these points the film seems to get a bit cheesy; the atmosphere transforms into that of a Jack Daniels advert. It's a weird choice, especially as the soundtrack is composed by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, who've previously collaborated on film soundtracks to fantastic effect.

Tom Hardy as Forrest

'Lawless' is a very well put together film, with at least two brilliant performances from Tom Hardy and Guy Pearce, but there's a disturbing nihilism at the core that's hard to ignore. I should mention that even within all the blood it's frequently darkly funny, with Tom Hardy getting most of the laughs in the film. Even so, this is a film with an extremely pessimistic view of human nature, and the absence of empathy in the film means it's hard to like these people. This in turn makes it hard to become emotionally involved in the narrative, which hurts the film. The poster loudly exclaims: "BROTHERS. GANGSTERS. HEROES.". They should be prosecuted for false advertising. There are no heroes here.

LONDON CITY NIGHTS