LONDON CITY NIGHTS

Saturday, August 23, 2014

'Lucy' (2014) directed by Luc Besson

Saturday, August 23, 2014 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

Lucy is the dumbest film about being smart ever.  Working from the discredited (many, many times over) pseudoscientific myth about humans only using 10% of their brain at any time, this film imagines where we might go if we used more. Super-awareness? Telekinesis? Mind control? Manipulating electronics?  Being able to drive a car really really well?  The resulting film is an eyebrow-raising catalogue of barminess, a film stuffed to the gills with tiny little idiosyncracies and half-baked philosophising that left me (and much of the audience I saw it with) giggling in bemusement.

Our heroine, Lucy (Scarlett Johansson), is a student living in Taipei.  We meet her being pestered by her boyfriend to deliver a mysterious package on his behalf.  Suspicious, she declines - but the point is rendered moot when he forcibly handcuffs a briefcase to her wrist and sends her into a den of vicious Taiwanese mobsters.  The package turns out to contain a new type of clubbing drug and Lucy is subsequently pressganged into muling it to Europe. The package implanted into her abdomen, soon splits - sending the substance careening around her nervous system and giving her superpowers. (The questionable profitability of turning clubbers into superpowered god-beings is unfortunately not explored).

The rest of Lucy is split between her accessing ever more of her brain's potential (helpfully indicated by title cards reading 50%, 70% etc) and Morgan Freeman delivering a hilariously clumsily-written lecture cut together with stock footage of cheetah's eating antelops, 1920s footage of clowns and wild pigs fucking.  Freeman deserves a medal for being able to deliver this crap with a straight face, perhaps the only actor working today with the gravitas to pull off exposition this ridiculous.

Oh hey it's a bit like the Matrix.

Lucy is a patchwork quilt sewn from a thousand different influences. One minute there's a prehistoric CG landscape that echoes The Tree of Life, the next we're pulling imagery straight from Akira or action sequences reminiscent of The Matrix.  It's difficult to accuse Besson of theft, there's real love in these homages.  The biggest lift comes from a very unlikely place; the narrative free cinema of Godfrey Reggio's Qatsi trilogy and Ron Fricke's Baraka and Samsara.  The quickfire, time-shifted shots of traffic and food preparation mirror Koyaanisqatsi and Besson goes so far as to transplant actual footage from Fricke's films into his montages.

Given that many of these films rank in my all time favourites, theoretically Lucy should be onto a winner with me.  Problem is, all those films are incredibly intelligently constructed pieces of cinema with oodles of considered philosophy behind them and Lucy is dumb as a box of rocks. 

This magic brain drug looks like a lot of fun.

Intentionally or not, one of the central planks of Lucy is that mind altering drugs are fucking amazing. Notably, the crystalline drug that causes this raise in consciousness looks an awful lot like MDMA (albeit bright blue). There's a decent argument that Lucy's experience mirrors that of someone trying the drug for the first time. As she hits her high she feels totally connected to the world, able to perceive the heartbeats and moods of those around her. She even calls her Mum in the middle of the night to tell her she loves her! At this point I half expected the rest of the film to be Scarlett Johansson gurning her face off, reaching for laser beams and waving glow-sticks in people's faces.

The effect of this druggy psychedelia combined with half-assed cosmological pondering is a wonderfully accurate simulation of being trapped by a wide-eyed sweaty clubber in a chill-out room while they spout absolute bollocks.  Thankfully, just as it's difficult to genuinely dislike a 6am amphetamine mystic, it's difficult to genuinely dislike Lucy.  It's so adorably sincere about its  nonsense, so willing to go the extra crazy mile and so damn unpredictable that it just about works as an exercise in curiosity.  You watch because you want to find out where the hell Besson is going with all this.

Lucy is a movie that seriously postulates that a really really smart person can grow extra hands.

This curiosity is fortunate, because narratively Lucy doesn't work at all.  The plot, such as it is, revolves around Taiwanese gangsters hunting Lucy down while she in turn hunts down the smugglers holding onto the drug.  Problem is, about 25 minutes into the film Lucy stops being a character and turns into a robot.  With Johansson in emotionless killer mode comparisons to Under The Skin are inevitable, but the same act doesn't really work in an action film.  There's no emotional hook to get us rooting for Lucy and her quick onset of invulnerability makes every fight or chase sequence completely tension free.

The visual effects go some way to picking up the slack.  There's some genuinely imaginative visualisations of what it's like to be able to perceive the whole electromagnetic spectrum, see through people's skin or burrow into a person's memories.  The highlight is the climactic psychedelic trip-out sequence (I love these) that kinetically zips us around time and space, taking in Victorian Times Square, some confused American Indians, a vicious dinosaur, outer space and finally re-enacting Michelangelo’s The Creation Of Adam with a dodgy looking CG monkey-woman.  None of this makes much sense, but at least it looks nice.

God only knows what Besson is actually trying to say in Lucy.  Is he going for an action-film adaptation of Flowers for Algernon?  Trying to bring the philosophies of Koyaaniqatsi to a blockbuster audience?  Has he had a life-changing drug experience that he really wanted to share it with us?  We may never know.  What is certain is that Besson really thinks he's actually saying something profound.  He's really not, but he's so confident that he is that it's almost endearing.

Lucy is really really far from being a 'good' film, but it's certainly an interesting one.  Real stupid, but at least it's not boring.

★★★

Lucy is out now.

Friday, August 22, 2014

'Million Dollar Arm' (2014) directed by Craig Gillespie

Friday, August 22, 2014 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

Baseball and cinema make a weirdly compelling combination.  I've never seen a truly astonishing American football or ice hockey film, and the only classic basketball film is a documentary (maybe there's an argument for Space Jam).  But there's something different about baseball, some mystic weight that's all to easy to find in the sport.  The Kevin Costner baseball duo Field of Dreams and Bull Durham are essentially baseball as a path to Zen enlightenment, and Robert Redford's The Natural weaves the sport into the fabric of Americana.  I even have a soft spot for A League of Their Own.

Can Disney's Million Dollar Arm scale these lofty heights?  Well, no.  Not really.  In fact, for a film about baseball, there's actually very little baseball in the film - the sport itself more of a background noise.  Instead what we get is a movie where a busy, single urban professional in his 40s learns the importance of family and responsibility.  I strongly suspect that, deep in the cellars of the Magic Kingdom, there's a machine churning out doggerel like this by the yard. 

Our stressed, deal-hungry professional (with a Blackberry bolted onto the side of this head) is JB (Jon Hamm), struggling sports agent.  He used to be a big shot, but after making the decision to go it alone his business is struggling - unable to attract any big stars to his management service.  The spark of creativity still flickers within him and he's sure he can find some hot young, unexploited talent.  But where?

In a bizarre sequence we see a depressed JB late-night channel-surfing, beer in hand.  He flicks onto a cricket game.  In boredom he flips the channel.  It's Susan Boyle singing I Dreamed a Dream on Britain's Got Talent.  JB grimaces.  Back to the cricket.  Grimace. Flip back to Boyle. Ant n Dec grin madly at the camera.  Grimace. Cricket. Flip. Boyle. Flip. Dec. Grimace. Flip. Cricket. Boyle. Ant. Cricket. SUSAN BOYLE! ANT! DEC! CRICKET!

EUREKA!  (he jumps to his feet)

"I'm going to set up a pan-Indian televised talent show to discover new pitching talent and pay a million dollars to the original!  And I'll call it... Million Dollar Arm".

Before we know it he's on a plane to a India to ferret out hopeful kids who can throw a baseball real fast. He winds up with Dinesh (Madhur Mittal) and Rinku (Suraj Sharma), two kids from poverty (though a sanitised Disney kinda poverty) and flies them back to the US.  Hijinks ensue.  They don't know what pizza is.  They don't understand how a lift works. You get the picture.  Worse, though this is their rags to riches story, the focus of the movie is almost entirely on a rich, white American and the hardships he must suffer.  

Everyone ends up living in Jon Hamm's house where he gradually assumes a paternal role for these kids, all the while gradually growing closer to sexy medical student tenant Brenda (Lake Bell).  Blah blah some stuff goes down, there's a bit of mild misery and doubt, and then a big triumphant moment where they throw a ball real fast, Jon Hamm smooches Lake Bell and we go home happy.  

Problem is that this sports story bullshit is so damn hokey and the film is so utterly drained of anything interesting that it's difficult to care.  This is a movie obviously produced to a strict template; from the plot to the casting right down to the visual style and score.  What's left is processed cinematic junk food - competently produced junk food - but lacking anything interesting.

Watching Jon Hamm working his way through a film that requires him to sit behind desks, make pitches to clients and wear smart suits unavoidably brings Mad Men's Don Draper to mind.  Consequently, this feels like the shittiest Mad Men episode ever. The vague similarities in tone mean you get frustratingly anaesthetised flashes of what Hamm is best at; presenting a calm, collected surface persona while he's going crazy inside.  But with a script this bland Hamm quickly defaults to autopilot - I hope he at least got a nice holiday in India out of it.

Visually Gillespie sticks like glue to the live action Disney visual style; all subtly over-saturated colours, conventional cinematography and grain-free superslick digitalism.  To be fair the India scenes are a huge step above everything else in the film, but it's the Taj Mahal rather than Gillespie that's doing the real leg-work here. That said the wide-shots of the Indian countryside and cityscapes crammed with life are at minimum competently executed. Everything else is cinema by numbers: a sludgy, semi-invisible rhythm of vaguely pretty LA locations populated by pretty people.

The word I've been avoiding all review is boring.  But hell, tiptoeing around it isn't going to help matters.  Million Dollar Arm is a boring, overlong slog of a movie; you don't care about the stakes, everybody has a simple A-B character progression and it's all couched in Disney's trademark mildly pleasant quasi-humour.  It's difficult to see who this is going to appeal to; it's too slow-paced for children (they were ignoring the film and playing in the aisles), and way too simplistic for an adult audience.  

This is the kind of movie that you end up watching on a long haul flight when you've exhausted every other option.  Not awful.  Just super bland.

★★  

Million Dollar Arm is released August 29th