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Showing posts with label bad. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bad. Show all posts
Saturday, February 9, 2013
Saturday, February 9, 2013
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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.
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| 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.
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| 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?
Saturday, February 2, 2013
Saturday, February 2, 2013
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'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.
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| 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.
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| "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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
Wednesday, August 29, 2012
Wednesday, August 29, 2012
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| They stole my colour scheme! |
The 'wedding comedy' is one of the most restrictive subgenres around. You can reconfigure and twist it, but there are boundaries and jokes that you can't avoid. A catastrophic stag do with consequences, a barmy family, a mounting sense of tension during the ceremony, a terrible best man's speech, tension between the groom and the father-of-the-bride. 'A Few Best Men' strolls down this well-trodden path bereft of any sense of originality or surprise.
This is the latest film from Stephan Elliott, who has fallen long, long way from 'Priscilla, Queen of the Desert' (1994). We're told the story of British backpacker David (Xavier Samuel) who impulsively proposes to an Australian girl named Mia. The rest of the film chronicles David and his friend's visit to Australia for the wedding. Oh, you wouldn't believe the scrapes these guys get into! Actually, having said that, remember that film 'The Hangover'? Well take the basic concept of that, and then dial everything down. Dial it right down to the point where everything is bland and inoffensive, and any sense of danger has been completely sucked out. What you're left with is this insipid rubbish.
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| Oh. What scrapes these lads get into. |
The three "lads", Tom (Kris Marshall), Graham (Kevin Bishop) and Luke (Tim Draxl), are cut from familiar cloth. Tom is the laidback, cool one, Graham is the highstrung, nerdy one and Luke is the morose, moody one. This is the kind of role Kris Marshall could play in his sleep. He plays his role as an extension of his (seemingly) career defining role as Nick in 'My Family'. It seems cruel to say, but he's getting a bit old for this sort of thing. Tom has the 'cool' looking floppy haircut, but this and the studenty outfits they put him in all looks a bit strange on a 39 year old. Having said all that, he probably is the best thing in the film.
That's faint praise, being the best thing in this film is like being the best piece of chewing gum stuck to the pavement. On the opposite end of the likeable scale is our groom, as played by Xavier Samuel. He's an actor who looks like he's been designed by committee, a man who woodenly lurches from one scene to the next, annoying everyone as he goes. From the moment we meet him we instinctively dislike him, and this dislike only grows as the events of the film unwind. In this instance, it's easy to blame the actor entirely for this dislike, as the character of 'David' has a lot of sympathetic qualities. He's an orphan searching for a replacement for his lost family, searching for it in his in-laws and in his friends. The character is genuinely in love, and is totally convinced that this wedding is the right thing to do. This combination of certainty and tragedy in the past isn't exactly original, but you have to really screw up to get an audience to hate the earnest orphan type. But Xavier Samuel makes us hate him with gusto!
Predictability isn't something to avoid at all costs in comedy. There can be a great deal of pleasure in watching someone unknowingly approaching the banana peel, anticipating the inevitable tumble. Here, and especially in the shadow of 'Bridesmaids' and 'The Hangover', the anticipation seems hollow. Everything is too obviously telegraphed and by the time the punchline has crawled past us an hour later we're bored. There is no pleasure in waiting for the gag here, when we're introduced to the father-in-law's prize ram in the first half a strange sense of nihilism sets in. Your expectations are lowered to the point where the best possible outcome is that the film gets it over with quickly. There are a few actual honest-to-god funny moments in this film, but they're laboriously set up and few and far between. When your highlights are characters walking into contrived situations, and someone saying "it's not what it looks like", you might want think about writing some actual jokes into your film.
For a 'The Hangover' ripoff to work well you need a genuine sense of danger. That film had a tiger, a kidnapped baby, homicidal gangsters, a stolen police car and a drunken marriage. If nothing else, the stakes were high. In 'The Hangover' you feel that there actually could be consequences for these actions. In 'A Few Best Men', we have a very similar situation, though entirely neutered. These characters could just theoretically ignore things for a few hours, and enjoy the wedding.
One of the hallmarks of the wedding subgenre is the tension leading up to the ceremony. Traditionally in these sorts of films the emotional highpoint is the vows and the kiss with the bride. Here the actual ceremony happens fairly early on, and while I guess any sliver of originality is something to cling onto, it has the effect of draining all the anticipation from proceedings. If our happy couple are actually married early on, then what is the worst that could happen?
Compounding this is a weird decision to make Rebel Wilson's 'Daphne' a fake lesbian. She's introduced to us as gay, but soon after reassures us that she's only pretending to be a lesbian to annoy her father. The pretence is entirely redundant (why not just make her actually gay?), and leads to some quasi gay-bashing jokes that feel especially strange coming from the director of 'Priscilla'. The father's homophobic comments feel queasily close to punchlines in their own right, especially when the film gets laughs from his referring to his daughter as 'he'.
It's always depressing to film bereft of any ambition or passion. There's a palpable sense of boredom from everyone here, clearly a film like this is no-one's passion project. Please don't go and see this film, it'll only encourage producers to make more of them. This is a depressingly joyless and cynically calculated piece of crap.
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