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Showing posts with label Matthew McConaughey. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Matthew McConaughey. Show all posts
Saturday, November 8, 2014
Saturday, November 8, 2014
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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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
★★★★
Friday, January 17, 2014
Friday, January 17, 2014
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The first thing we see in Dallas Buyers Club is a rodeo cowboy struggling to stay atop a bull. It's shot in tight close-ups of its blank eyes, heaving flanks and bulging muscles: every tactic in the director's arsenal used to impress upon us a power and ferocity. This bull is AIDS and the cowboy struggling to not to be dashed into dust is Ron Woodroof (Matthew McConaughey). As symbolism goes it's a heavyhanded but effective, neatly encapsulating the film's view of HIV/AIDS sufferers engaged in a frantic, visceral battle for survival.
Ron Woodroof is not a very nice man. He swaggers around dispensing casual violence, dull homophobia and sexism like a walking Viz cartoon, a cocktail of testosterone, alcohol, cocaine and methamphetamine pumping through his veins. But unbeknownst to him there's something even more dangerous swimming around his blood; the human immunodeficiency virus. This is Texas in 1985, a time and place where HIV/AIDS is casually dismissed as "the faggot disease", so when diagnosed he angrily accuses his doctors of insinuating that he's gay. Given a 30 day life expectancy he rapidly proceeds through denial and grief, settling for miserably guzzling illicitly obtained experimental drugs, cocaine and whiskey.
28 days later he's a walking skeleton, powered only by anger at the injustice visited upon him. After a brush with death, saved only by an emergency blood transfusion, he desperately heads to Mexico, where he learns that the experimental drugs he's been taking are destroying his immune system and making him sicker. His resurrection spurs him on to greater things and so he heads back to Dallas with a car stuffed with unapproved yet effective medicines and sets up the titular 'Dallas Buyers Club', providing quasi-legal medical care to anyone that can stump up $400 a month. His treatments work, and soon the HIV/AIDS wing of the hospital is emptied, the stage set for an adversarial battle between pharmaceutical companies, the FDA and Woodroof's endearingly ramshackle operation.
Dallas Buyers Club's biggest asset is the brilliant double act of McConaughey and Jared Leto as his trans assistant Rayon. Both throw themselves into these roles with gusto, totally committing mentally and physically to the reality of these people's lives. They're fascinating in n purely visual terms, their bony bodies setting them apart from the rest of the world. The men are ostracised for their sickness; doctors wearing breathing masks as they examine them; the public backing away, terrified of becoming infected themselves. At best they're treated with pity and condescension and at worst with fear and disgust - shared experiences that draw the sufferers together, developing a tightly-knit, self supportive community.
Woodroof's epic moral odyssey from asshole to messiah takes just two hours, the one constant in his transformation the tough as nails hustler's edge that allows him to figure out loopholes in the byzantine regulations placed in his path. His friendship with Rayon is genuinely touching, the highlight being a scene where he sticks up for her against one of his old friends. Despite the extent of his transformation, the film is mercifully free of scenes where Woodroof has emotional breakthroughs, McConaughey developing layers empathy and kindness literally scene by scene.
In any other film McConaughey would walk away with the acting laurels, but he's more than matched by Leto's astonishing Rayon. She's an utterly magnetic character, Leto's cut-glass features giving her an aura somewhere between vampire and angel, embodying strength, self confidence and fragility. As the disease takes its toll on Rayon she gets ever more brittle and desperate, to the point where the audience reflexively lets out a gasp of shock when they see just how little of Leto is left under the trashed out wigs and glam-rock frocks.
The problem with Dallas Buyers Club is that aside from these two brilliant performances there isn't a great deal else going on. Aside from one or two visually neat moments the direction is competent but invisible. This is a grittily realistic world, but it's one viewed externally, the director taking care to showcase McConaughey's performance, but never quite letting us into his head. Another consequence is that any characters who aren't Woodroof or Rayon get pretty short shrift. Jennifer Garner as a doctor suffering a crisis of conscience is faintly unconvincing and restrained, though her secondary role in the plot turns out to be a thankless one that doesn't quite go anywhere.
More egregious problems lie in the script, which has far too many clunky expository infodumps where doctors explain the basics of HIV/AIDS treatment circa 1985. There's a hell of a lot of "as you knows" in the dialogue, which sounds quite stilted and unnatural in comparison to McConaughey's raw, directness. The development of effective drugs to combat HIV/AIDS is a just too complicated a story to be relegated to the background of a character study and whenever the focus is shifted onto wider issues the film suffers. The recent documentary How to Survive a Plague soberly sets out that fight, anyone who's seen that will quickly realise how Dallas Buyers Club vastly simplifies the ethical battle that drives the second half of the film.
That said, it feels a bit cruel to criticise a film that does so much right. My biggest fear was that the film would eventually devolve into sanctimonious melodrama, replete with vomit-inducing epiphanies and important lessons learned. This never happens - even within the sadder moments Vallée maintains an earthy, sober tone that grounds things in reality. Given the rather grim subject matter it's fortunate that the film knows when and how to deploy a spot of gallows humour to briefly lighten the mood. But first and foremost this is an actor's showcase: McConaughey and Leto's gobsmackingly great performances make Dallas Buyers Club a brilliant character study, though perhaps not an outright brilliant film.
★★★
Dallas Buyers Club is on general release from February 7th.
Tuesday, April 30, 2013
Tuesday, April 30, 2013
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First things first: there is much to admire in Mud. But despite its considerable riches, it’s a difficult film to recommend. Mud is Jeff Nichols follow-up to the critically acclaimed Take Shelter, a film that I shamefully haven’t watched yet, despite the universal praise directed at it. In a Q&A after the film he explained that it’s a project that’s been in development for about 10 years, and it’s clearly a personal film with a hell of a lot of thought put into it.
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