LONDON CITY NIGHTS: capitalism

Sunday, January 19, 2014

'The Wolf of Wall Street' (2013) directed by Martin Scorsese

Sunday, January 19, 2014 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

In The Wolf of Wall Street Martin Scorsese elevates financial trading to a dark religion that promises heaven on earth. This is a story of mystical market forces, primal chest-beating, mind-bending narcotics and rapt crowds worshipping the most corrupt of high priests. Scorsese serves us up 3 hours of excess; horrible men engaged in horrible acts, their fabulous wealth the product of a million tiny swindles, men stickily fingering their way through our wallets and purses - a fingering we hate to acknowledge we're getting off to.

This is the world of Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio), the film chronicling his progress from ambitious penny stock trader to mentally deranged sociopath. The meteoric rise and collapse of Jordan Belfort has neat parallels to Scorsese's Goodfellas and Casino, completing a thematic trilogy of predatory protagonists getting precisely what they want, then having this world crash down around them. One of the cleverest decisions Scorsese makes is understanding that the minutia of financial trading is essentially irrelevant to the story. In a marvellous voice-over, DiCaprio's Belfort often starts beginning a complicated explanation about how pump-and-dump schemes work before reminding us that all we really care about is that he's conjuring dump-trucks full of money apparently from thin air.

Much has been made of the morality of the film; the central criticism being that showcasing excess with such gleeful, stylish verve amounts to an advertisement for it - columnists fretting over reports of audiences of financial traders whooping in recognition as they recognise their own lives. As I see it you'd have to brain dead to watch this and come to the conclusion that this is something to be sincerely emulated. That said, it's honest film-making to acknowledge that living a purely hedonistic lifestyle is at minimum superficially attractive. We find ourselves comparing our own lives to this glitzy, chaotic free-for-all - a predatory, materialistic part of us wanting to be in Belfort's shoes as he blows coke up a prostitute's arse or trashes his sports car.

This pretty much sums it up.

The key to all this is the voiceover - revealing Belfort as a deeply unreliable narrator within the first few minutes as he corrects the film, explaining that his Ferrari is white rather than red, the reality of the film immediately warping to accommodate him. That what we're seeing is malleable and fluid is Scorsese's secret weapon; this is Jordan Belfort's story, and he edits his life to make himself look great. Sometimes reality peeps through though, like a telling moment when he recounts the story of one of his partners who committed suicide - a grisly crime-scene photo flashing on screen that's at odds with the glossy high-saturation aesthetic. Almost as if realising that this is a bad route to go down - Belfort quickly skips past this and onto more extreme partying - constantly papering over the cracks in his ugly edifice.

For me, the most illustrative moment in the film is a faux 90s 'Get Rich Quick' infomercial starring Belfort, replete with neon-bikini babes, yachts and fast cars. "All this could be yours..." informs a smartly suited Belfort. We scoff at the cheesy production values and obviously manipulative message, yet even as we chortle at the suckers who'd be convinced in by this rubbish we can't help but envy Belfort's material success. This infomercial is a microcosm of the film as a whole; revealing The Wolf of Wall Street as carefully constructed fantasy, seducing us with a soapy handjob as it exploits our secret, base desires.

It'd be real easy to make a film about Wall Street (or for that matter the City of London) that functions as a cathartic Django Unchained style revenge fantasy, showing us the baddies getting a violent comeuppance. Scorsese goes deeper than this, showing the character's accumulation and worship of money as something endemic to capitalism, the excess of Belfort merely the logical conclusion of desires instilled in us throughout our lives. No matter what your political convictions, to grow up and live within a consumerist, capitalist society indoctrinates you into a world of possessions and property, a world where, as much as you might convince yourself otherwise, deep down you measure the worth of a person by the amount of money in their bank account.

Jordan Belfort, horrible though he is, is not a particularly unique or surprising kind of monster. His existence is the inevitable consequence of the free market capitalism espoused by the great and powerful, his insatiable greed and willingness to exploit people leaving him a perfect amoral creature that naturally thrives within an economic system designed to reward his behaviour.

Though the film doesn't cover the 2008 financial crash, the contemporary caricature of the slimy, profit-obsessed banker looms large in the background. But again, despicable though these people are, it's us that's in the firing line - every moment we catch ourselves secretly envying Belfort's material success another condemnation of us. Rubbing salt into the wound, Scorsese goes out of his way to undermine the glitziness by showing the sex as mechanical and unfulfilling, the drug-taking as nauseous and pathetic and the possessions as transitory and destructive - yet even though we know wealth won't bring us happiness we can't help but want it like an addict wants the needle.

Jonah Hill - two time Oscar nominee and deserves to be two time Oscar winner.

The last shot of the film sums it all up. Belfort is reduced to giving motivational 'Get Rich Quick' talks, facing an audience of gormless, slack jawed nobodies who want to be just as horrible as him. See that moron in the crowd pathetically dreaming of his shiny Ferrari and model wife? The person who sees human scum like Belfort trotting around like a pig in shit, ripping off people to maintain his opulent existence and thinks "Oh my god, I could be that human scum!" That's you that is.

Scorsese thus posits disasters like the 2008 crash, the election of free-market promoting governments and the exploitation of the poor as symptoms of the beast that squats in our collective capitalist heart. The events of the film rub our noses in the horrible world, but it's a horrible world that we've created by silent, inactive consensus - and there's no way out. As Žižek famously said, "it's much easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism" and so, because of our own limited imaginations and indoctrination, we're condemned to suffer the depredations of infinite Jordan Belforts. And we probably deserve to.

The Wolf of Wall Street's 3 hours zip by, and the film contains an energy that you wouldn't necessarily expect from a 71 year old director. It's got an impossibly witty script, is one of the funniest films of the year (there's even a brief sojourn into Mr Bean territory!) and has a dynamite cast - the standouts being DiCaprio, a fantastically demented Jonah Hill and an all too brief yet memorable appearance by Matthew McConaughey. There's no reason why you shouldn't go and see this. So go and see it already.

★★★★★

The Wolf of Wall Street is on general release now.

Wednesday, December 4, 2013

'Nebraska' (2013) directed by Alexander Payne

Wednesday, December 4, 2013 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

Nebraska looks like a right shithole. Payne shoots the film with an arthouse zombiefilm sensibilities: beautifully framed and composed shots of boarded up shops, cracked pavements and obsolescent industrial machinery starring a cast of the shuffling elderly who look like they're on their way to audition for Walking Dead. This is the full stop at the end of the American Dream, a grey featureless sea of fields punctuated by ghost ship towns crewed by the damned - people too old, too dumb or too poor to escape.

This is road movie as manifesto; a tour of the aftershocks of economic collapse. The impetus for the journey is impeccably grumpy old duffer Woody Grant (Bruce Dern). He's so anti-social and single-minded that it's difficult to tell whether he's suffering from senility or just that he couldn't give a crap about anyone other than himself. Woody a casually, brutally, blunt man, restricting himself to single-word responses to questions and displaying a freakishly numb attitude towards most of his immediate worldly needs. The narrative conceit of Nebraska is that he's received a piece of junk mail promising a million dollar prize. Woody wants to travel from his home town in Montana across the country to Nebraska to collect it.

He's so singleminded in pursuit of the loot that he's taken to setting out on foot down the freeway hard shoulder, exasperating his wife and adult children. They're beginning to consider putting him in a nursing home if only to give their poor Mum a break. His younger son David instinctively rails against this, arguing that all Dad needs is something to keep his mind in gear. Eventually, at his wits end he decides to drive Woody across the country to the office that issued the junkmail so he can collect his illusory winnings.

Woody Grant (Bruce Dern)

En route the two stop off in Hawthorne, Nebraska - Woody's home town. It's a podunk dead end in the middle of nowhere: a land that time forgot populated by wrinkled down-at-home boys who've spent a lifetime chopping wheat, milking cows and castrating pigs - and are now left to slowly sink into beery, TV-hypnotised catatonia. Word gets around town about Woody's 'win', and the townspeople, like a drowning man clutching a piece of wreckage, swarm around him - desperate for either a piece of his non-existent pie or simply to bask in his reflected good fortune.

That all makes Nebraska sound rather depressing. It's not. Sure there's melancholy, but it's leavened with wry, well-observed dabs of humour. Most of them arise from the irascible temper of Dern's Woody as he monosyllabically grunts his way through scenes that in most other films would be tender moments between father and son. Dern expertly walks the tightrope between making Woody utterly unpleasant and weirdly charismatic - even when drunkenly barking "cocksucker" at his infinitely patient son.

The rest of the laughs come from the gawping locals of the town who Payne treats with a sincere Coen Brothers-y fascination. Nebraska is inquisitive rather than judgmental, genuinely wanting to find out how these people make their way through life. By and large, the elderly population is portrayed as simple, good-natured people happy with their limited lot in life, content to while away the years in a semi-somnolent daze. There's a family reunion mid-way through the film where Woody's myriad brothers gather to stare listlessly at the TV. We watch the scene from the point of view of the television itself, and the slow realisation dawns that we're staring at each other across a geographic and cultural gulf - the Nebraska men silently engrossed in their sport and the London audience quietly enjoying their black and white arthouse flick.

Kate Grant (a fun June Squibb)

Payne is similarly fascinated with decayed American iconography. The camera frequently taking a detour from narrative and character to focus on a passing truck, some piece of farm machinery or an interesting bit of urban decay. There's a telling scene where the characters regard Mt Rushmore from afar, Woody derogatively dismissing it as unfinished - "it's like (the sculptor) got bored halfway through!". This is a mini-mission statement, that Payne is engaged in aggressive deromanticisation of the American Dream.

Nebraska puts forward a complex, mature argument that it doesn't matter whether American Dream is will ever come true, but that people can't function without hope. If they're being beaten with a stick the carrot dangling in front of them becomes that much more crucial. We see it in the explicitly pointless quest that forms the backbone of the film, in the way the townspeople and Woody's extended family are utterly entranced by even the idea of financial security and wealth.

That Woody, a miserable, decrepit, coffin-dodging old man, becomes the embodiment of the American Dream is a clever commentary on the current uneasy psyche of modern America;. This is a country beginning to feel its cultural, financial and industrial grip on the world slipping; going through the geopolitical equivalent of a mid-life crisis. Nebraska isn't a satire, it's important that Payne never pokes fun at Woody, treating his simple desires with admirable sincerity. In the perfectly pitched finale we see that a miniscule, symbolic triumph can be as powerful as anything tangible - the characters consciously embodying a lie in order to provide some comfort to those spiralling the economic plughole.

This is touching, beautiful and humanistic stuff from start to finish; occupying very similar psychic territory to David Lynch's The Straight Story, and titans of Americana like Five Easy Pieces or The Grapes of Wrath. Crucially, it recognises the importance of the capitalist dream that fuels America, fantasy of cars, God, money, consumer goods etc. In the end they're all lies, but when everything else recedes lies are the only crutches these people have got and you'd be a cruel git to kick them away.

★★★★

Nebraska is on general release from 6 December

Tuesday, October 15, 2013

Captain Phillips (2013) directed by Paul Greengrass

Tuesday, October 15, 2013 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

Captain Phillips is the tale of four brave, doomed Somali sailors. These are men that spend their days trapped in a nightmarish sand-blasted hell with an infinite desert behind them and an infinite ocean in front. This is a world where the life expectancy is a smidge over 50 years, where power comes down the barrel of an AK-47 and where life is about as cheap as it gets.

'The Internship' (2013) directed by Shawn Levy

Wednesday, June 26, 2013 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

The Internship is incredibly bizarre. A mainstream comedy that spends two hours giving a loving, soapy titwank to an enormously wealthy multinational corporation. A film that gets down on its knees and with a song in its heart commences giving Google the best blowjob of its life. Maybe it needs one, the rampant tax dodging and secret NSA spying programs have taken much of the lustre from the Google brand. But this isn't going to heal the company's image -it's more like rubbing salt into the wound. This is a powerfully lame film.

‘Fire in the Blood’ (2012) directed by Dylan Mohan Gray

Thursday, February 21, 2013 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

Fire in the Blood exposes some unsettling truths about the consequences of Western economic dominance. It’s a catalogue of injustice and cruelty perpetuated without hate or malice, but, with a beady, utilitarian eye on maximisation of profits. What we see in this film are the blunt and bloody consequences of capitalism: desperate people gasping their last breaths in a hospital bed, bodies thrown onto an enormous pile millions of corpses high: a sacrifice to the almighty free market.

This documentary is about the supply of antiretroviral drugs (ARVs) to HIV/AIDS sufferers, with a focus on sub-Saharan Africa. In 1995, millions of people across Africa had no future to look forward to a slow and painful death. Suddenly through this gloom shot a ray of hope - a new course of treatment with results that seemed nothing short of miraculous. Skeletal, bedridden patients when administered ARVs began rapidly improving in health, a condition the doctors began to call “The Lazarus Effect”. In Fire in the Blood we see South African High Court Judge Edwin Cameron's life transformed from utter misery to competing in a long-distance cycle race entirely through the effects of ARVs. It’s not a cure, but ARVs make living with HIV/AIDS possible, to allow them to be able to work, exercise and appreciate life again. In these sub-Saharan countries, with vast swathes of populace stricken with HIV/AIDS this was a light at the end of a very long, very dark tunnel.

But there's a problem. Though the drugs cost peanuts to produce, the price was strictly controlled by enormous, avaricious drug companies. Treatment cost $15,000 dollars per year, a sum impossibly out of reach for the poor with HIV/AIDS. The message from the developed West from companies like Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline is clear - if you haven’t got the money then get ready to embrace death, sucker. The resulting genocide of 10 million Africans is almost incomprehensibly horrific - men, women and children who died as a result of not having access to medicine that costs a few cents to make.

Much of Fire in the Blood is an impeccably and methodically researched argument explaining precisely why the price is so high and the moral contortions big pharma twists itself into to justify having the blood of millions on their hands. We come to learn that the reason these drug companies behave like this isn’t because the individuals running them are monstrously evil, it’s because they are entirely beholden to a system of maximising profit. Their reasoning was that if they lowered the price of ARVs in Africa, then they risk their US customers - their most profitable market - turning against them. If they allow generic ARVs (chemically identical to the patent version at a fraction of the price) to be imported, they run the risk of setting a legal precedent against their patents, potentially lowering the worth of their intellecual property. If profits dip from the stratospheric to the slightly less stratospheric, shareholders will get antsy and the board will be held accountable. The upshot is that on an accounting spreadsheet in an air-conditioned New York skyscraper, numbers are moved from one column to another. As a result in Uganda, hundreds of thousands of people die needlessly.

It’s easy to see how people buy into the drug company’s rhetoric - at first they seem to have some good points, but Fire in the Blood systematically demolishes them. These arguments range from the practical and vaguely plausible: "the reason these companies need to charge so much is to recoup what they spend in research and development". The implication being that if they sell these particular ARVs at a low price, then future R&D will be affected adversely. Gray shows us that far from these companies leading the way in development, they tend to gobble up smaller companies that have developed drugs using public funds. According to the film, they’re responsible for only 12% of R&d research worldwide.

The other end of the scale in the argument that poor Africans should be denied these life-saving drugs is far more insidious, dipping into outright racism. Spurious arguments are made that Africans can’t be trusted to follow a course of drugs (it eventually turns out they can - better than Western patients) with reasons ranging from some kind of innate laziness, to not being able to comprehend the idea of a clock - “they tell time by looking at the sun!” bleats one particularly gormless looking US senator. Even among HIV sufferers in developed countries there’s a fear that providing ARVs to poor Africans might lead to a drug-resistant strain of HIV/AIDS evolving, so, really it’s in everyone’s best interests if these Africans would just crawl off and die as quietly as possible, preferably without making too much fuss. As they say: “fuck you, got mine”.

So we’re presented with a situation where, as Professor Peter Mugyenyi, specialist in the field of HIV/AIDS simply puts it, “‘the disease is where the drugs are not”. To illustrate this we see cartoons of a skeletal man in a hospital bed reaching vainly towards a giant, locked pill bottle. Fortunately there are those who stood up against the drug industry, working both within and outside the law to get the ARVs where they’re needed most. The highlights are the Indian manufacturers of generic ARVs who devise a way to provide the medication for less than a dollar a day to HIV/AIDS sufferers - a yearly course costing just $350 rather than $15,000. We meet committed political activists who risk their own lives and liberty, like Zackie Ahmet, co-founder of the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) in South Africa who personally sacrificed his health in a boycott of ARVs until they could be provided for everyone. The above mentioned Professor Peter Mugyenyi ordered low-cost generic ARVs from India, defying Uganda’s patent laws and challenging authorities to arrest him until the drugs were allowed into the country - an action which opened the floodgates of low-cost generic ARVS into Africa. Some of the ‘good guys’ end up being quite surprising - for example it’s a pretty unique experience to think for a second “hey, maybe George Bush Jr wasn’t all bad...”.

Fire in the Blood is one of the clearest political arguments I've seen in a long time, but thankfully it works as a piece of cinema too. It’s frequently quite beautiful, the African scenery popping with colour and framed with an expertly artistic eye. There are some very clever cuts subtly linking ideas, like cutting from the grave of an AIDS victim in Uganda to the US Capitol Building in Washington DC. We never dip too much into the abstract, and Gray's confidence in the importance of his material shines through - he always lets his interviewees speak rather than bombarding us with a blizzard of quick cut visuals. Perhaps the only slightly disappointing aspect are some aspects of the score, which is a bit heavy-handed: long ominous bass tones when they’re telling us about terrible things, light orchestral triumphant pieces when something good has happened. Perhaps this is simply the nature of the beast in documentaries, but it’s a tiny bit frustrating to be emotionally prodded rather than trusted to react to the material in a humanistic way.

Fire in the Blood is a sober and eye-opening look at a topic so terrible, wide-ranging and complicated that many prefer to regard HIV/AIDS in Africa as “just one of those things”. Gray has created a film that breaks the situation down into easily digestible chunks, building his case against the drug companies piece by piece into an incredibly compelling whole. Apart from the central narrative, it becomes a searing indictment of free market capitalism. The frantic race towards maximising profits literally leads to mountains of corpses, the deaths of millions justified as a necessary evil in protecting someone's bottom line. A person that profits from restricting the supply of generic life-saving drugs to the world's poor should be on trial for crimes against humanity - they have consciously and coldly committed genocide for financial gain. Before watching the film I assumed the title Fire in the Blood referred to HIV/AIDS. It is, but it's also appropriate for the anger you'll feel when you learn about this senseless waste of life.

*****/*****

'Fire in the Blood' is playing at the Prince Charles Cinema on 22 February and across the country on the 25th of February.

Thursday, February 7, 2013

‘Warm Bodies’ (2013) directed by Jonathan Levine, 5th February 2013

Thursday, February 7, 2013 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

Why are zombies so popular at the moment? I’ve seen books about how to survive a zombie invasion, shot hordes of them bits in videogames, even met people with actual honest-to-god zombie preparedness plans and, of course, watched an inordinate amount of films about people surviving their way through the ruins of the modern world, now infested with shambling corpses. What does this obsession say about us?

I find the whole craze a bit tasteless; zombie invasion as an outlet for people's anti-social, violent fantasies. Everyone imagines themselves as the lone survivor, a ruthless and pragmatic shotgun wielding warrior eking their way across a damned world full of mindless, flesh-eating monsters. One of the most common factors in zombie survival films is the necessity of ruthlessness. The cliché scene is the frazzled survivor coming across a zombie and “oh no!” it’s their father. But he’s one of the undead now, and the only right thing to do is to shoot him in the head. It’s this frame of mind that I find most disturbing; the notion of surviving a zombie outbreak is a socially acceptable fantasy allowing you to murder or dismember your friends, family and countless strangers.

R (Nicholas Hoult)

The solipsism inherent in the premise also bugs me. The zombie genre promotes a view of the individual being the most important unit in society. The worst fate in a zombie film is to be infected and become one of the masses, to join the shambling hordes. Traditionally zombies are a metaphor for mindless consumerism, but I’m with ‘The Real Doctor Phil’ on this when he identifies them thusly:

“Zombies as a horror staple are the result of some unfathomable biological or supernatural crisis that cannot be reversed. They are mindless. They are faceless. They are ugly. And they want to invade your home and feast on your flesh. If this does not work as an allegory for bourgeois attitudes to and fears of the working class, I don't know what does.

But at the same time zombies offer an opportunity for asserting superiority, mastery, contempt, and individuality against the mass. Zombies are slow and stupid. Humans are quick and intelligent. Zombies are limited by their reach. Humans can use all manner of weapons. Provided they are not swarming in great numbers, humans run rings around them - lopping off a limb here, beheading another there, removing their teeth, chaining them up, what fun can be had! And all without a troubled conscience too.

Zombie settings offer a simple fantasy where one can assert the self - sometimes heroically - against the world. You have to beat the undead hordes. Unlike the ever-popular vampires, one cannot join them. Zombies tune into ruling class anxieties and a popular longing for recognition and simplicity. And as long as capitalism blindly lurches from crisis to crisis in the mindless pursuit of profits, so the popularity of the zombie will endure.”

So where does ‘Warm Bodies’ fit into this paradigm? Perhaps inevitably it’s been labelled a ‘zomromcom’. The concept seems like a bad joke, a satire on the Twilight crowd like the atrocious ‘Vampires Suck’. Much of the appeal of this film is curiosity how they can make the bizarre premise of a Romeo and Juliet inspired love story between a zombie boy and a human girl work.

R and Julie (Teresa Palmer)

To my complete surprise this relationship not only works, it works well. ‘Warm Bodies’ doesn’t skimp on the ‘zombie’-ness either. Our hero, ‘R’ (Nicholas Hoult) is a full on rotting shambling corpse. As the film opens he’s just another among an army of undead aimlessly making their way around an abandoned airport. He can just about speak if he concentrates, but can only mutter “hungry” or “eat”. We even get to see him killing a man, cracking his head open and feasting on the goo inside (probably a first for a lead in a romantic comedy).

Fortunately R gets an internal monologue throughout the film allowing him to express himself beyond moans and strangled words. He’s a likeable, pragmatic, wry sort of zombie, aware and importantly, accepting of his situation. In a fantastic opening sequence we see him meandering around the airport he calls home, explaining to us what a day in the life of a zombie is like. Hoult does an outstanding job as R, conveying neither misery nor elation at the life of the undead, but rather a sense of perpetual ennui, unable to communicate, dream or age, slowly rotting into feral oblivion. More impressively, for much the film he tells us all this through groaning and clumsily shrugging his shoulders.

It’s easy to see parallels the film draws between teenage angst and zombiehood, but I think it’s more interesting to view R’s undead nature as a metaphor for mild depression. The way R lonely trudges around a grey world, not caring about anything in particular captures ‘the blues’ perfectly. It’s only when he meets the shotgun wielding Julie (Teresa Palmer) that he begins to regain his humanity, piece by piece. He instantly falls head over heels for her, and without really knowing what or why he’s doing it, rescues her from the other zombies and brings her back to the abandoned plane he calls home. The scenes that follow are the best in the film as we see her terror melt into curiosity and eventually affection.

The first time you see them together, Julie is wide-eyed, panicked with fear at his presence, understandably so: R is shambling, moaning and looks like a corpse, and, in the past, zombies ate her mom. You wonder how the film can possibly going to make this relationship believable. But Hoult plays R with a rock solid devotion to Julie that’s immediately touching. Understandably given their respective situations neither R or Julie are especially extroverted which makes their relationship attractively humble, just two unlikely people randomly thrown together in a mixed-up world.

As the two grow closer to each other R begins to regain his humanity. Some of the grosser elements of his features begin to heal, he’s shocked when he realises he can feel cold and gradually he can speak more clearly. If you think this all sounds a bit cheesy you’re right. It’s literally a straightforward case of ‘love saves the day’, but you know what? Cheesy as it is, it’s cheese that works.

Much of the time ‘Warm Bodies’ doesn’t take itself very seriously; it’s a light-hearted comedy, one that’s not afraid to poke fun at its outlandish premise. So it’s a surprise when the film becomes genuinely moving. There’s a beautiful sequence when a group of zombies see R and Julie holding hands and don’t know quite how to react, followed by scenes where they begin to remember painful glimpses of their former lives. The message that all you need to pull yourself out of mindless zombieism is love and communication is conveyed about as subtly as a shotgun blast to the head, but hell, every other zombie film is a neverending nilhilistic nightmare, why can’t one be sweetly dippy?

More importantly, ‘Warm Bodies’ neatly subverts the themes of the zombie genre, explaining that hard-bitten ruthless individualism is the root of what causes mindless undead monsters in the first place. In pretty much every other piece of zombie media, zombies are mindless human-shaped walking targets, vehicles for people to work out their psychotic impulses on without guilt. This film points out how fucked up those impulses are, explaining that though the rest of the human race might sometimes seem like a mindless, terrifying mass, it’s communication, co-operation and understanding that saves the day, not chainsaws and crowbars.

I enjoyed ‘Warm Bodies’ far more than I expected. My expectations weren’t high, mainly because the marketing campaign is absolutely godawful, but the film won me over almost instantly. If I’d have known it was directed by Jonathan Levine, whose last film was the excellent ‘50/50’, I’d have been more optimistic going in. But ‘Warm Bodies’ is a solid film in practically every regard from start to finish, only wobbling slightly with some dodgy CG characters towards the end. It feels strange saying it, but this zombie film is the perfect Valentine’s date.

****/*****

‘Warm Bodies’ is on general release from the 8^th of February.

LONDON CITY NIGHTS