365 Days, 100 Films #25 - True Grit (2010)

True Grit, 2010.



Directed by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen.

Starring Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon, Josh Brolin, Hailee Steinfeld, Barry Pepper and Domhnall Gleeson.





SYNOPSIS:



A tough U.S. Marshal and a Texas Ranger help a stubborn young woman track down her father's murderer.





If you’re really good at making films, the audience forgets they’re watching them. Reality dissolves into a dream-like state, only with more clarity and a musical score. You come to just as the credits start to roll. “That was pretty good,” slowly dawns on you as you wake.



Afterwards, you start to appreciate those bits that were so finely crafted that they made you forget the film wasn’t real. There are many of these in True Grit, but by far the most impressive, and poetic, is the script. It’s as bold as Hemmingway and flows just as good. The characters speak in some lost American dialect from the turn of the last century. In another’s hands it would come across forced and clunky. The Coens make it effortlessly naturalistic. An example;



LaBoeuf: You give out very little sugar with your pronouncements. While I sat there watchin' I gave some thought to stealin' a kiss... though you are very young, and sick... and unattractive to boot. But now I have a mind to give you five or six good licks with my belt.



Mattie Ross: One would be just as unpleasant as the other.



It’s as though the script were written out in modern tongue, only for every other word to be replaced by its much grander synonym.



True Grit is about Mattie Ross, a girl no older than fourteen, who seeks revenge on the man who murdered her father. To do so she employs Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges), an old, U.S. marshal. They cross paths with a Texas Ranger by the name of LeBoeuf (Matt Damon) who seeks the same man. Cogburn is a drunk and a murderer. LeBoeuf is dull-witted. But in helping Ross they get to show they are both men of ‘true grit’. Not that fake stuff that’s flooded the market.



True Grit is a long way from the black and white morals of most classical Westerns, but it evokes the same misty-eyed steel that they projected - when people were good and decent and weren’t prone to self-indulged soul-searching like the protagonists of the present day. Though it takes the course of the film to show it, all three characters are built upon their principles. Stubbornly so.



It is Ross who eases out Cogburn and LeBoeuf’s true grit. She’s a remarkable gal. Her superego seems too large for her age, separating everything into either ‘good’/‘bad’, ‘lawful’/‘unlawful’ and ‘godly’/‘godless’. She goes about revenge in the language of bureaucracy and supports her sass with knowledge (often to the embarrassment of the adults with whom she talks). It’s what makes her pairing with Cogburn so parental, like she’s some chip off the ol’ block. There’s always the sense that she’s imitating the talk and actions of those much older than her. It’s kinda cute, if a little brash.



The film’s great strength, alongside and because of the script, is this sincerity. The score doesn’t have an ironic note in it. Being post-modern is the easy way out these days. The Coens don’t allow their characters to sit and agonise over personal pain – they internalise it and proceed with the tasks at hand. Psychoanalysis had yet to take off on those shores. Consequently, True Grit conducts itself in heroic charges against terrible odds. It’s easily the film of the year thus far.

Oli Davis



365 Days, 100 Films



Movie Review Archive

365 Days, 100 Films #24 - My Neighbor Totoro (1988)

My Neighbor Totoro, 1988.

Directed by Hayao Miyazaki.
Featuring the voice talents of Dakota Fanning, Elle Fanning, Tim Daly, Lea Salonga, Frank Welker, Pat Carroll and Paul Butcher.


SYNOPSIS:

In post-war Japan two young sisters move to the countryside and discover a forest inhabited by magical spirits known as Totoros.


Remember when you were a kid and everything was massive? Cynicism barely existed back then. You could genuinely believe that a ‘People’s Elbow’ was the most devastating move in all of sports entertainment when really it was just The Rock doing an elbow drop. You could sit for hours in your bedroom plotting out mass, universe-wide battles pitting a Boba Fett action figure against an evil army of Lego drones. Some stories would span across many planets from under the stairs to the back of the garden. Christmas was great not just for the presents, but also because there was a rare military base that appeared only once a year in that assembled tree.

Suspending disbelief is easy when you’re young. There’s no doubting or second-guessing the realities you create with friends or toys. I’ve never seen a film that commits this unquestioning belief to film more than My Neighbour Totoro. It’s about two sisters who move to a new house with their father. Their mother is in hospital, but with nothing serious. It isn’t that sort of film.

Nothing much happens besides three brief scenes. The two sisters, Satsuki and Mei, about ten and four years old respectively, play in the garden and explore their new surroundings for most of the film. Satsuki eventually starts attending school, leaving Mei at home with her father. Mei’s the sort who could entertain herself for hours with only a toy bucket. On one of these play sessions, about half an hour into the film, she sees a tiny, faint blob hopping across the ground in her garden. Its ears are two small triangles on the top of its head. Mei startles the creature and chases it through the bushes at the garden’s edge. She comes to the base of an enormous tree, one that stands about twice the size of the rest of the forest. The faint blob jumps down into a gap between the roots. Mei jumps in after it.

Here she discovers two more of these blob-like creatures, only one is a little bigger and furry, and the other is much bigger and furrier. They are ‘Totoro’, which is Japanese for ‘forest spirits’. Satsuki compares them later on in the film to some drawings in Mei’s picture book. A lesser film might have used this to reveal the Totoro as figments of Mei’s imagination. That’s the easy interpretation – the sisters have created a fantasy to deal with their mother’s extended stay in hospital. If you wish to reduce the film with such redundant psychoanalysis, you’re missing its point. My Neighbour Totoro isn’t about the power of a child’s imagination. It’s about an entire realm of fantasy of which only children are conscious.

My Neighbour Totoro wisely never addresses this explanation, rather opting for a world where such fantasy is real for the children but only warmly humoured by their parents. It suggests that these Totoro are real, but because we’re a little older now, we just can’t see them.

Toy Story does this more obviously. After first watching that film, who didn’t believe that their toys would jump to life as soon as they saw you close the door? See it when you’re a little older though. You’ll appreciate the technique and some of the humour more, but you’ll loose that sense of wonder – that Toy Story was actually revealing something a lot bigger, a grand conspiracy where toys are actually sentient beings. My Neighbour Totoro addresses how a child’s imagination experiences the world more subtly. In doing so, it merges together this fantasy with reality. It makes you want to not only believe like a kid again, but for that lost perspective when you could see where the Totoro existed.

That the Totoro are used so sparingly is another of the film’s great strengths. You’re left wanting far more than you’re given and you start to dream yourself about what they might be up to when they aren’t on screen. Are they nocturnal? Are they the last of their kind? Do they take trips into space on the Cat Bus? Oh, right, the Cat Bus…

The Cat Bus is arguably the greatest animal form of transport ever conceived. It has five legs on either side and two mice on its roof for illumination. Its face owes a great debt to Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire Cat and its eyes beam out strong headlights.

Its first appearance comes in the rain, whilst Satsuki and Mei are waiting for their father at the bus stop. He forgot his umbrella and they’ve brought one to give to him when he arrives. That’s how nice they both are, and how superbly simple this film is. King Totoro (the biggest of the three) has joined them, but he’s has only a leaf to cover his head from the rain. Satsuki offers him her father’s umbrella. He doesn’t know what to do with such a contraption, so he plays with it in Chaplin-esque naivety. He’s delighted when it opens above him. This is the first time Satsuki has encountered a Totoro, yet she batters not a single eyelid.

After standing in the rain for a while, King Totoro lets out an enormous roar to summon the Cat Bus, who gallops down the road and takes him away. You’re as unfazed as Satsuki because you share her child’s perspective, accepting the bizarre with a merry shrug. It’s only when the camera cuts to a witness frog across the street, mouth agape, that you realise the how absurd it all is – two girls and King Totoro underneath an umbrella that’s hardly half his width. Oh, right, and the Cat Bus. Taken out of context, it’s as trippy as balls.

So many movies are hard going. Lead characters often have some form of parent trouble or bereavement; others require parts of intense conflict for the conclusion to mean anything. Some, however, like My Neighbour Totoro, are just charming. It’s easy to read “a child’s perspective” as condescending, like it’s inferior to our wiser, aged view. William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience addresses the differences between the two outlooks. He also spoke of a higher innocence, an enlightened stage that follows experience. My Neighbour Totoro helps you get there.

Oli Davis

365 Days, 100 Films

Movie Review Archive

Hayao Miyazaki: Drawn to Anime

365 Days, 100 Films #23 - Grave of the Fireflies (1988)

Grave of the Fireflies, 1988.

Directed by Isao Takahata.
Featuring the voice talents of J. Robert Spencer, Rhoda Chrosite, Amy Jones and Veronica Taylor.


SYNOPSIS:

A boy and his younger sister struggle to survive in war-torn Japan during World War II.


"Yes, it's a cartoon, and the kids have eyes like saucers, but it belongs on any list of the greatest war films ever made." -Roger Ebert

Seita is a pre-teenager in Japan who has just lived through World War Two. The film opens on him as he slowly passes away, homeless and starving in a train station. His war is over as he utters “Setsuko” with his last breath. He whispers it in the same way Kane spoke ‘Rosebud’. The camera tracks back as two janitors start to tidy him away. The shot’s increased scope reveals many more like him, supported by the station’s numerous pillars. Commuters consider them a nuisance.

Seita takes a ghostly red form and begins to wonder through his life during the war. Grave of the Fireflies is animated, so these moments aren’t ruined by warped special effects. Those at Studio Ghibli imbue more humanity in their subjects than most live action films can muster with their claims to truth. Seita boards a train that will proceed to call at events in his past. It’s so he can understand what has happened and how he ended the way he did. Only then can he finally be free of his guilt.

These flashbacks start at Seita’s home with his mother and young sister. The latter is his ‘rosebud’ – five-year-old Setsuko. The comforts of home and family are in stark contrast to the previous opening scene of Seita’s death. American planes are dropping napalm canisters over their city. Most of the homes are built from wood. They never stood a chance.

Seita and Setsuko become separated from their mother during the air raid. They take cover away from the city and are unharmed, but their mother sat like a duck in the local shelter. They reunite at a makeshift hospital in a levelled city that doesn’t have enough medicine or staff. Seita’s mother is so badly injured, it wouldn’t make a difference if they did. She looks as though her eyes have been seared clean off. Her lips are two swollen sausages and her skin is replaced with blood-soaked bandages. Seita doesn’t let Setsuko see. He tells her that mother’s quite ill so they’re off to stay with their aunt. Seita has decided to shoulder the pain exclusively, and he continues this way until his death. His protectiveness appears noble now, but will become selfish and harmful soon. As they leave we see mother’s body being lifted upon a bonfire. Maggots and flies already feast away.

Their aunt holds a grudge against the orphans. Seita and Setsuko come from a military family, living with more generous rations than their relatives. That Seita and Setsuko do nothing but play like children all day also frustrates the aunt. Her husband and daughter work constantly to support the war effort. But what can the brother and sister do? Their mother has just died and are without a home. Their father is a Navy man from who they haven’t heard in so long. Go to school, their aunt insensitively suggests. It burnt down, replies Setsuko.

By default, Seita is now the head of the family. A very small family, but at least he still has that. Exhausted by the pestering aunt, he pawns his mother’s clothes and withdraws the family savings so he can support Setsuko alone. They find an abandoned air raid shelter near a lake and, like children playing ‘house’, plan the rooms of their new home.

Money, however, quickly becomes worthless as the Japanese currency falters. It’s all about trading needed item for needed item now. As they live outside the system, in their cave by a river, Seita and Setsuko aren’t entitled to food rations. Setsuko begins to show signs of illness. She scratches a lot and has sores on her back. Sometimes she faints. Dependent child characters often become tiresome or annoying. Not Setsuko. It’s the way she’s drawn clutching her doll and wearing her hat. She’s so endearing and helpless you want to rescue her yourself. It’s why Seita’s relationship with her is so heartbreaking.

She becomes delirious from hunger, chewing marbles and making rice cakes out of mud. Seita does all he can to save her. He takes food from people’s empty houses during air raids and steals fruit from farmer’s fields. But he never considers going back to his aunt, even when their situation becomes increasingly desperate. She’s a horrible woman, but she could have saved them.

It’s almost as though it’s because of a hidden selfishness. Seita has invested all his loss, of his home, mother and father, into caring for Setsuko. If he lets someone else take over, or even merely share, he would have failed her and his deceased family. His love is smothering, but he does everything for that girl. He’s only a kid – how’s he supposed to know any better?

The film itself is based on a semi-autobiographical novel. The author lost his sister to malnutrition at the end of the war too, but unlike Seita, he survived. He blamed himself for his sister’s death and wrote the book to make amends.

This is the one Studio Ghibli film for which Disney does not hold the distribution rights. The book’s publishers do. It’s fitting, in a way. Grave of the Fireflies should to be separate from the rest of Ghibli’s canon.

There’s no overt anti-war agenda because the story is such a human one. These aren’t soldiers or politicians, they’re civilians. But in focusing on and attempting to deal with such a personal tragedy, Grave of the Fireflies becomes as powerful a statement against war as Wilfred Owen’s Anthem for Doomed Youth or Roberto Rossellini’s Germany, Year Zero.

Oli Davis

365 Days, 100 Films

Movie Review Archive

Hayao Miyazaki: Drawn to Anime

365 Days, 100 Films #22 - Young Bruce Lee (2010)

Young Bruce Lee (a.k.a. Bruce Lee, My Brother), 2010.

Directed by Manfred Wong and Wai Man Yip.
Starring Aarif Rahman, Tony Leung Ka Fai, Christy Chung and Jin Auyeung.


SYNOPSIS:

A biopic exploring the early years of martial arts legend Bruce Lee.


There’s a great story about how Davey Boy Smith (aka The British Bulldog) got his name. Smith’s mother, still weary from giving birth, accidentally wrote her newborn son’s gender, “Boy”, as the middle name on his birth certificate. Young Bruce Lee opens with a similar mix-up. Bruce Lee has just been born, and his mother, tired and slightly delirious, murmurs the word “push” over and over, echoing her long gone doctor’s words of encouragement. When asked for the child’s name, the American nurse mishears “Push” as “Bruce”. His family and friends knew him as “Phoenix”, but he kept “Bruce” as a stage name. There’s a lot in a name. The Americanised “Bruce” sits snugly alongside the Eastern “Lee”. That juxtaposition was arguably what made him such an international star.

Young Bruce Lee is the story of Bruce Lee before this happened, opening with his birth and ending as he leaves for his first trip to America. Two of his surviving siblings introduce the film in a brief prologue, claiming theirs as the untold Bruce Lee story. One of them is Robert Lee, and it is his book, ‘Bruce Lee, My Brother’, on which the film is based.

There are three stages: baby Bruce (1941), youngster Bruce (1947) and teenager Bruce (1957). You need gaps about that size in biographical films. It lets you change the actors without too much fuss. Throughout he lives with his huge family in Hong Kong and maintains a group of close friends. It’s their exploits that the film follows, including a love triangle between Lee, his friend Kong and Kong’s girlfriend. He can get away with a lot, because he’s been a local film star since an early age, but he values his friendships more than anything else.

It’s remarkable how Americanised their lives were. They listen to Elvis, dance the ‘Cha-Cha’, watch Rebel Without a Cause and dress accordingly. It’s American Graffiti with a Chinese cast. Hong Kong was a portal to the West in these times, but their domestic film product had not yet broken through to the international market. This is what Lee wishes to achieve.

You wouldn’t really know it, though. People wonder through the narrative with no definitive goals, and thus few obstacles that could create dramatic tension. There are flashes in the love triangle, and in Lee’s feud with an American boxing champion, but they phase in and out with little or no build. Apart from the ending scenes, there isn’t anything particularly special about the film’s story. If Lee weren’t its subject, Young Bruce Lee could be accused of being about very ordinary affairs.

Thankfully, there’s a lot of joy to be had with Lee. It shows what an enduring pop culture figure he is. The yelps! I could listen to them all day. The film occasionally treats you to one with a zoom-in close-up. Shit’s old school. It has a lot of heart, too. There’s a big emphasis on Lee’s family, and their warmth to each other comes across very well.

It does have an odd, recurring stylistic device though, where there will be slow motion close-ups of quite mundane actions (a foot stepping forward, a hand being placed on a chair). It’s not like they’re contextually meaningless actions, just that slow motion should be used sparingly. It makes it all a bit melodramatic. The film could have probably shaved off about 10 minutes if they played them at normal speed.

For a film that introduces itself as the “untold Bruce Lee story”, by his brother and sister, you wouldn’t expect it to be so stylised. There’s the aforementioned flogging of the slow-mo close-up, a barely believable ‘Cha-Cha’ competition and quite a few stagey fight scenes. It makes you want to take the film like a Tequila slammer (with a pinch of salt and lots of alcohol). But then, just before the end credits, a series of actual photographs are shown alongside stills from the film. There’s Bruce Lee dressed in a dapper black suit and tie, triumphant with his younger brother after winning a ‘Cha-Cha’ competition. It’s a bit of a slap in the face, but it isn’t your fault for harbouring such cynicism – it’s the film’s. Why should it feel the need for melodrama and exaggeration when its source text is so rich? All it needs is a bit of toning down.

Rating: **

Oli Davis

365 Days, 100 Films

Movie Review Archive

365 Days, 100 Films #21 - Laputa - Castle in the Sky (1986)

Laputa - Castle in the Sky, 1986.

Written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki.
Featuring the voice talents of Anna Paquin, James Van Der Beek, Mark Hamill, Cloris Leachman and Jim Cummings.


SYNOPSIS:

A young boy and girl race against pirates and foreign agents in the search for a legendary floating castle.


People call Studio Ghibli the Eastern Walt Disney. I couldn’t say which people exactly, but that seems to be Wikipedia’s general consensus. That they make animated children’s films is the most obvious reason for comparison, but there’s something more intangible about the similarity. They both share a sense of ‘magic’. Cringe away.

Laputa – Castle in the Sky was the first film the studio released in 1986, which places it within the last classic age of Disney from Fox and the Hound (1980) to The Lion King (1994). To further show the two studios’ affinity, Disney currently holds the Studio Ghibli’s distribution rights in the west.

It follows the sprawling adventure of Sheeta and Pazu in the seas of the sky. Everyone is after Sheeta because she possesses something they all want – a strange stone held in a necklace, inherited it from her mother just before she died. The film opens with Sheeta under military protection, or rather, ‘imprisonment’. But the people in Laputa don’t travel by roads; they voyage on vast airships that surf the clouds as though they’re waves. They’re shaped like giant boats tweaked with wings and propellers to keep them in the air, with a gloss of steampunk seasoning.

The main delight is in the film’s mythology. It places you, along with Sheeta and Pazu, in the middle of a much grander story of which Laputa is merely a chapter. None of us know why the stone floats Sheeta gently down to the mine where Pazu works when she falls overboard from one of the ships, nor why it is so sought after. As their adventure develops, and they encounter other, more knowledgeable characters, the legacy of Laputa is slowly disclosed. Many centuries ago there were races of people who lived in floating cities of their own invention, the grandest of which being the castle of Laputa. In time, these sky people moved to the earth and their history was consigned to legend. Pazu’s father, a pilot, once saw Laputa half obscured by a torrent of windy clouds, but everyone thought him crazy when he spoke of it. Sheeta’s ties to the castle are a little stronger. Such an epic story, spanning thousands of years, invests you in an entirely different world full of its unique history and myth.

The secondary delight is the film’s quirk. It possesses a surreal sense of humour, and you should expect nothing less from a film so imaginative. Pay attention to the background because everyone has something to do. Henchmen struggle with the simplest of tasks whilst others bicker. Most trip or fall.

Perhaps a little too long overall, but Laputa has such a rich tapestry of story and background detail that it’s hard to complain.

Oli Davis

365 Days, 100 Films

Movie Review Archive

Hayao Miyazaki: Drawn to Anime

365 Days, 100 Films #20 - Fertile Ground (2010)

Fertile Ground, 2010.

Directed by Adam Gierasch.
Starring Gale Harold, Leisha Hailey and Chelcie Ross.


SYNOPSIS:

A couple that has recently experienced a miscarriage move into an isolated house with a dark history.


‘Fertile Ground’ sounds like it should be a romantic comedy, probably starring Jennifer Aniston as a clumsy, single gardener. From there you can go two ways: the Adam Sandler route where they join forces to win the local ‘hedge trimming championship’; or cast Channing Tatum as an expert, but unhappily engaged, gardener who teaches Aniston the wonders of nature. The film writes itself.

Or it could go in the ‘haunted house’ direction. Emily (Leisha Hailey) and Nate Weaver (Gale Harold) are a loving couple who experience a (very bloody) miscarriage in the film’s opening scene. It comes from nowhere, during a dinner party celebrating the pregnancy, and is effectively shocking. Afterwards, they both decide to move out of the city and into Nate’s “great-great-great-great…he was old” uncle’s house to help Emily recover. That’s the haunted one, by the way.

[Rant begin]

It’s a good, creepy house. The exterior is a cold white and the barren road stretches off emptily into both horizons. The rooms inside are large, the windows are rickety and it has a basement. But then why is the house itself never scary? Why must the film rely on ghostly apparitions jumping into shot for its frights? It isn’t the house’s fault.

Over-exposure. Horror is most effective when it is unseen or unknowable, but here, at night, everything is visible in the moon’s cool blue half-light. Not only does it destroy the mystique, but it also draws unwanted attention to the background. The lighting’s focus should be on Emily’s terrified face, yet distracting objects litter the view behind her.

You have to be brave to embrace the darkness. It’s more expressionistic, and therefore not as safe. Unfortunately, Fertile Ground’s makers are adverse to such risks, and thus the film’s appearance looks more suited for daytime television.

The generic music and dissolve transitions between scenes only accentuate this impression. The film is also inexplicably, and uselessly, separated into sections by title-cards in the most annoying “scribbled-on-a-blackboard” font: “Starting Over”, “Moving In”, “New Life”, “Old Secrets”, “Strange Happening”, “The Gathering”, “Revelations” - at best these are insufferably cheesy, at worst they are patronising to the viewer.

[Back to the plot]

The two start to uncover dark “Old Secrets” about the house. They find a 150-year-old skull in the front garden (it was interfering with the plumbing) and a trip to the local historian reveals that many a (female) murder have occurred within their walls. It’s probably ok though, consoles the historian, the last death was in the 60s.

This starts to send Emily a bit barmy, tapping into her already fragile, post-miscarriage psyche. Nate, too, becomes angrier and obsessive. Their relationship deteriorates as Emily begins to see more and more strange occurrences; the door is oddly ajar, a bloodstained woman passes through the corridor, her nightmares intensify. All the usual things you’d expect of a haunted house film, and just as formulaic as the most boring within the sub-genre.

Oli Davis

365 Days, 100 Films

Movie Review Archive

365 Days, 100 Films #15 - Attack the Block (2011)

Attack the Block, 2011.



Written and Directed by Joe Cornish.

Starring Nick Frost, Jodie Whittaker, Luke Treadaway, John Boyega, Alex Esmail and Simon Howard.





SYNOPSIS:



When aliens invade a South London council estate, it's left to a teenage street gang to try and save the day.





“He’s much taller in real life”, I thought, “and that’s when a little hunched too”. Joe Cornish ambled across the cinema screen to stand before us. He thanked Channel 4 for his breaks in life; a first job in production; giving him and his friend Adam Buxton their first show; partly funding his debut film that we were about to watch. If it weren’t for them, he imagined in a desperate alternate reality, he’d be holed up somewhere taking crack with his prossie girlfriend right now. “Shouldn’t have said ‘prossie’,” he quickly self-flagellated under his breath. As a listener of the Adam and Joe podcasts, watching him speak felt disorientating. My mind dismembered voice from mouth as though it were a very good piece of dubbing. It’s like the first time you ever saw John Motson. But to the film…



Attack the Block pits the inhabitants of a Brixton council estate, which they defensively refer to as “the Block”, against a very localised alien invasion (note: not ‘global’). The film opens on Sam (Jodie Whittaker), a nurse returning home to the Block, when a gang of hooded teenagers block her way. Their faces are obscured by shadow and the night takes care of the rest. Two of them flank Sam on their bikes to surround her. Their leader, Moses (John Boyega), demands her wallet and the ring around her finger. Shaking, she struggles to remove it quick enough, so Moses pushes her to the tarmac.



You’d expect Sam to be the protagonist here. Well, she’s kinda a co-protagonist later on, but it’s the gang who are the film’s heroes. Yeah, the ones who just mugged a defenceless lady – a white lady at that. When a piece of the sky crushes a nearby car, harbouring inside it a lean, sharp-toothed alien, your appetite begins to whet for the gang’s bloody demise. After all, it’s an established sci-fi/horror convention – the bad guys get ate. But instead it is they who kill the monster, impaling it on a stick with the same aggressiveness they exerted on Sam. You see, they aren’t the real bad guys. They could be, in time, but they’re still kids here.



It’s easy to forget that they’re only young because they’re so intimidating at first. But Cornish admirably reveals the gang’s age by humanising them with perceptive details (“I wanna go home and play Fifa”) and shows them as the youths demonised and ignored by society (unless for a knife-crime statistic). It makes it harder to blame them for bullying the street corners. They mooch back to the Block on their mobile phones, each moaning to their elders about staying out a little longer. You get little snippets from their conversations. They’re talking to grandmothers or uncles, not mothers and fathers. It’s safe to assume the homes to which they return are ‘broken’.



As they walk to the Block, the depth of the film’s cast is realised; Moses, and the other four who comprise his gang, are significantly developed; Probs and Mayhem, two pre-teens who want to join Moses’ gang are introduced; Brewis, a posh University graduate from Fulham, is sorely out of place and looking to buy weed; and Ron (Nick Frost), who gets stoned and watches the Discovery channel all day. That’s why he’s the best person to take the alien’s corpse to – he might be able to tell them what it is, and more importantly, if it’s worth any money. They seem quite preoccupied with this, like most kids who go through a spell of hyper-capitalist entrepreneurialism. I once set up a shop underneath my stairs when I was about eight, convinced I’d earn my fortune. At least I had stairs. They only have the stairwells that connect the Block’s floors.



When the alien ships start to crash to earth around the Block, camouflaged by the firework displays that litter the night’s sky, these brief introductions of supporting characters allows the film to effortlessly cut between them and their different sub-plots later on. But what of the monsters! Their jaws light up with a neon blue, but the rest of their furry bodies are so black they merge with the dark. That’s pretty handy when you consider the cost of puppetry and CGI. It’s called making your budget work for you. You never see enough of the monsters to make out their flaws, and it is this secrecy that makes them relentlessly terrifying. That’s called positive feedback. Germain Lussier at SlashFilm, who called the film a “genre-bending, cult classic in the making”, pointed out how Attack the Block imposes its geeky passion upon the viewer. It “elicits the kind of nostalgia that’ll make fans want to own and display tiny replicas of its protagonists and antagonists.” It’s an odd compliment, but an acute one. Journey into a Forbidden Planet and you’ll see the hordes of McFarlane miniatures of Spawn and Halo exhibited in glass cases. Look a little further on and you’ll see ones from The Warriors and Shaun of the Dead. Hopefully soon they’ll be accompanied by a range of Attack the Block’s monster plushies.



So the monsters proceed to attack the gang, and sometimes the gang attack the monsters, but the teenagers are loosing and get pushed higher and higher up the Block. The film isn’t sloppy though - all this action is fully supported by plot. Why, for example, do the aliens seem to be exclusively targeting them? We must also not forget Attack the Block’s wicked sense of humour and its occasional treats of inspired gore.



Cornish said before the film began that he was influenced by the monster films he watched growing up as a 80s child like Predator, Gremlins and Critters (it does sometimes feel as though he’s channelling Joe Dante). And just like those films, Attack the Block makes you want to have children just so you can scare the shit out of them from an early age.



Walking home at just gone 10pm, after seeing Attack the Block, you realise just how well it was photographed. Every frame captures the urban night. Illumination comes from car headlights, streetlights and mobile phones. It’s all unnaturally piercing, yet at the same time, for those who live in the built up areas similar to the Block, there’s a familiarity to be found in their electric glow. You really appreciate your estate’s orange bath after that, and then maybe you’ll start to understand the youths that share…shhh! Did you see that? Over there, in the corner, just out of the lamppost’s peripherals…

Oli Davis



365 Days, 100 Films



Movie Review Archive

365 Days, 100 Films #8 - Submarine (2010)

Submarine, 2010.



Written and Directed by Richard Ayoade.

Starring Craig Roberts, Yasmin Paige, Sally Hawkins, Paddy Considine, Noah Taylor and Gemma Chan.





SYNOPSIS:



Submarine details the teenage years of Oliver Tate as he processes the confusion of his parents’ dithering marriage and his own longing heart.





Richard Ayoade directed the music video for Vampire Weekend’s ‘Oxford Comma’. It’s filmed in one hugely complex and intricate take, but looks inventively effortless. Wes Anderson-by-numbers, really. Nevertheless, it’s a very good piece of filmmaking. Ayoade is arguably more famous in front of the camera, as the I.T. Crowd’s Moss, or Darkplace’s Dean Leaner, but he’s trying. He now has a feature under his belt - Submarine.



The film follows Oliver Tate (Craig Roberts), an impossible dreamer, through adolescence. He’s read too much Nietzsche and seen too many Truffauts. It puts him at odds with his majestically crude school friends. Oliver tells us all this through his own neurotic narration. He falls for a girl at school, Jordana Bevan. Because she’s a bit of an outcast, like him, he reckons he has more of a chance. When he says ‘outcast’, you know he actually means, and believes, ‘misunderstood’. Teenagers, eh?



Aside from these complications of the heart, and general coping with existence, Oliver’s parents’ relationship is becoming increasingly strained. His father, Lloyd (Noah Taylor), is a marine biologist who’s susceptible to bouts of depression. He once drank hot lemon from the same cup for four days without changing or washing it - a smart detail, signalling for whenever he starts his spiral down. We notice Lloyd holding the hot lemon cup, sure, and so does Oliver (there isn’t much he doesn’t notice). But his mother, Jill (Sally Hawkins), carries on her flirtations with their new next-door neighbour; her old flame, Graham (Paddy Constantine). Hopefully she’s too blinded by the attention, rather than being beyond caring for her dull, dispirited husband.



Later on in the film, it emerges that Jordana’s mother is very ill. She asks Oliver to visit her in hospital the following Friday at 6pm. As he is about to leave,he sees Lloyd sipping from that unwashed hot lemon cup. Does he stay with his depressed father, or visit his girlfriend’s dying mother? The latter is surely more pressing, and he’d promised Jordana so sincerely. Was he going to leave the house anyway? Such choices are beyond the pay-grade of a 15 year-old.



The film is cut with that particularly European brand of melodramatic flair. This is not just for style’s sake. We are watching the film through Oliver’s perspective. He sees his life as some French New Wave masterpiece, one yet to be unearthed by film scholars. It rings true for anyone who has ever been a teenager. We’re all tortured, undiscovered geniuses at that age.



We can all relate. Much of Submarine’s humour comes from this self-absorbed, exaggerated perception of Oliver’s life. It’s funny because we’ve been there. Who hasn’t thought, during an especially significant moment in one’s life, how good said significant moment would look from a crane shot slowly tracking out? However, as Oliver pessimistically notes, his life story would probably only have the budget for a simple track-back. Ayoade’s camera then simply tracks back to end the scene. Even the very mechanics of filmmaking mock Oliver’s teenage self-absorption.



If you watch Submarine with a complacent eye, you’ll liken it to the American ‘indie’ films. Wes Anderson’s name is now never far away when considering anything with contemporary quirk. But that ‘indie’ scene feels stagnant these days. ‘Indie’ is now a style rather than a means of production. At its best, the American ‘indie’ output can be very enjoyable. At worst, though, it can be insufferably smug.



What Submarine accomplishes, and very well, is a joining between the best parts of the American ‘indie’ films – comical neuroticism, benign quirkiness and a deep emotional attachment – to the stylistics of the continent. After all, between the two is where we sit politically. Why not try it out in British film?

Oli Davis



365 Days, 100 Films



Movie Review Archive

365 Days, 100 Films #7 - Rio Bravo (1959)

Rio Bravo, 1959.



Directed by Howard Hawks.

Starring John Wayne, Dean Martin, Ricky Nelson, Angie Dickinson, Walter Brennan, Ward Bond and John Russell.





SYNOPSIS:



A small-town sheriff enlists the help of a cripple, a drunk, and a young gunfighter to help keep the brother of a wealthy land baron in prison.





John Wayne is a walking Alamo. He defends his heart with his southern drawl, squinted eyes and stubborn posture. The characters he plays rarely differ across his films, but that’s what adds such depth to the performances. Each film is a new appendix to the John Wayne identity. In a John Wayne movie, you don’t watch John Wayne play a role. You watch John Wayne. You watch an icon.



In Rio Bravo, Wayne is John T. Chase. The ‘T’ stands for trouble, not Tiberius. Chase is the town sheriff, and he doesn’t have much help these days. Since his deputy, Dude (Dean Martin), turned to drink, all he has for back up is the old and lame Stumpy – and all he’s good for is guarding the gaol.



The film opens with Dude at his lowest. Desperate for his next drink, he stumbles between patrons in the local saloon. He is shot with a high-angle forcing us to physically look down on Dude and his pathetic begging, and in a way we also share his perspective. You stare at the floor if you’re that drunk and depressed because you can’t bear to look people in the eye. Martin doesn’t play Dude as the loveable or comedic drunk; he plays him as the pitiful addict.



Some cowboy flips a quarter for him into the spittoon and the bar cackles at Dude’s dilemma. Thankfully, someone else makes his decision when Chase’s boot kicks it away. He looks down at Dude with an angry disappointment, to then go after the offending cowboy who just so happens to be Joe Burdette, leader of the town’s most fearsome gang. Minutes later, Joe randomly shoots an unarmed man right in the gut.



Chase, Dude and Stumpy lock him away in the town gaol, and the film follows their attempts to keep him there until his transfer. Dude, after three years in the liquor, has a lot to prove. Unfortunately, the detainee’s brother, Nathan Burdette, is the county’s richest ranch owner. Nearly every man in town is his hired gun; leaning on shop walls, menacingly picking their teeth night and day, biding their time to raid the old sheriff’s prison. Mid-way through, on one of his intimidating visits to the town, Nathan flicks a few gold pieces to the Mexican band in the bar across the street from the gaol. It’s a lot of money, so they play his request on repeat till the end of the film: the death march of the Alamo.



The irony isn’t lost on our heroes as they sit guarding Joe’s cell. They’re stuck in their own Alamo –backed into defence whilst facing impossible odds. They bicker and reconcile to pass the time – the “death march” outside can make things a little tense - each working through their own sub-plots and character flaws. Dude’s hands constantly tremble without his precious booze, and we learn he suffers from a broken heart too. Feathers (Angie Dickinson), the town’s new hotel guest, drives Chase wild. She has quite the screen presence. You’d have to if you want to register alongside The Duke. There’s something in the way her hands caress nearby objects. Or maybe it’s the corset. Either way, she wastes not a single movement.



For the film’s running length, there is very little action. Most of it is sustained, subtle character development whilst being under-siege. It really draws you in. At the film’s conclusion, you’ll realise these characters are nothing like how they started out, and that you hardly ever noticed them change. Like the minute hand on a clock, its mechanics are cloaked by an overwhelming refinement.



Oli Davis



365 Days, 100 Films



Movie Review Archive

365 Days, 100 Films #6 - Red River (1948)

Red River, 1948.

Directed by Howard Hawks.
Starring John Wayne, Montgomery Clift, Walter Brennan, Joanne Dru, Coleen Gray, Harry Carey, John Ireland, Hank Worden, Noah Beery Jr. and Harry Carey, Jr.


SYNOPSIS:

A fued erupts between a Texan rancher and his adopted son on a cattle drive along the Chisholm Trail.


“He moved the way singers sing, with huge confidence and daring. You have to imagine how it all began in the way Raoul Walsh saw him carrying that armchair – as if it was a young girl in a red robe being lifted up in mercy and wonder.” - David Thompson

John Wayne’s eyes are curious features, the squinted creases defining him as much as his slow drawl or cowboy’s swagger. At times his eyes disappear altogether in those slits. They’re like a castle’s windows, long and thin for archers to shoot out of; perfect for defence, and advantageous to attack from.

Red River opens with Wayne’s character, Dunston, leaving his girl behind on a stagecoach. He clearly loves her very much. They even share one of those Classical Hollywood clinches, where kissing is just two faces being pushed together at the lips. Dunston is off to start a ranch near the Mexican border and make his fortune. She can visit as soon as it’s safe.

When away from the stagecoach, he hears the howling of Indians and gunfight. Those eyes widen briefly as the first yells are heard, but only for an instant. The stagecoach is half a day’s trek away now and his love is surely dead. Only a young boy, Matt, makes it out alive, who Dunston takes under his wing. Wayne’s eyes narrow, shutting the world out but a few, loyal men. He’s the walking Alamo.

But this is just the prelude, the establishment of Dunston’s hard-hearted character and a necessity for us to identify with him through the cruelty and violence he displays later on. It is now two decades later and Dunston has the largest ranch of cattle in the region, employing half the men in the surrounding town. Matt has grown up into a fine gunfighter (now played by Montgomery Cliff), but has also learnt restraint and humanity from his time in the civil war – a contrast to the cold, steely heart of Dunston. But business has dried and Dunston, in his incredible stubbornness, commands an epic 100-day 10,000 cattle drive, the longest and largest ever undertaken, to forge a new trail across the Midwest.

In the first days of the drive, although there is a strong sense of camaraderie, a heavy tension hangs in the air. This is because of the herd’s size, and that the slightest noise - a coyote howl, a snapping twig - could launch them into a deadly stampede. The men sit around the campfire with noise, not Indians, as their enemy.

These scenes of high tension, but with relatively little action, give the many characters and their relationships time to develop. Hawks treats these interplays with great craft, making us emotionally invested in a lot of different characters, as though we’re a part of their trailblazing efforts. However, the relationships quickly become strained. The main conflict sets Dunston against everyone else. He pushes them without rest in his near-psychotic crusade. In the moonlight, or the flicker of the campfire’s flame, those eyes could be mistaken for Colonel Kurtz. A mutiny beckons…

John Wayne is so compelling precisely because he is fully aware of his own faults, yet knows his stubbornness will stop their remedy. He is powerless to do anything other than belittle and harm those he holds dear, and it torments him to do so. But he always commits acts of great kindness because he’s too proud to apologise directly. It lets us know of the strange, hurt old man underneath his bold exterior. Then once he’s saved the day, or rescued the girl, he’s left alone – absolved for his stubbornness, but still alone. Dunston losing his love early on is hardly mentioned for the rest of Red River, but it’s always present in that squint.

Red River is a long and rewarding film, built upon characters and conflict. Although they fight amongst each other, one never forgets that their main struggle is with the American West itself. They cannot conquer the land, for it is immovable, but they can forge paths along its surface. Those black and white horses and horizons are the stuff for which nostalgia was made. True, cinematic magic.

Oli Davis

365 Days, 100 Films

Movie Review Archive

365 Days, 100 Films #5 - Barney's Version (2010)

Barney's Version, 2010.



Directed by Richard J. Lewis.

Starring Paul Giamatti, Rosamund Pike, Minnie Driver, Rachelle Lefevre, Scott Speedman, Dustin Hoffman, Jake Hoffman, Bruce Greenwood and Mark Addy.





SYNOPSIS:



The picaresque and touching story of the politically incorrect, fully lived life of the impulsive, irascible and fearlessly blunt Barney Panofsky.





It isn’t good form to typecast actors. But what to do when they perform them with such finesse? Just as jazz aficionados get their kicks from subtle variations in familiar songs, or when cinephiles ejaculate praise for subversions of genre, watching an actor play the same role over a number of films can make for fascinating stuff.



Paul Giamatti’s your guy for sympathetic, everyman loser. It feels like a bit of waste if he does anything else. Not that he can’t perform other roles, because he can and very well. It’s just he makes such a good loser. Barney’s Version is essentially a character study of this archetype, spanning across several decades of the titular Barney’s (Giamatti) life. The story is in four parts – his three failed marriages and the final, lonely aftermath.



The film begins, as is sometimes the fashion, near the end with Barney already seasoned with age. He’s a work-driven, heavy-drinking television producer for ‘Totally Unnecessary Productions’. You get the impression he would use that company name to sum up his own life too.



And Paul Giamatti looks oooooooooold. When did he get so old? Sideways was a while back, but not that long ago? He isn’t, and it’s a testament to his performance that he can fool you into thinking so. Sure, make-up helps, but all that age is locked up in his body. He has the posture of a hunchback; his shoulders practically engulf his neck, putting his head at an angle like a badly hammered-in nail. It isn’t until the ‘flashback’ to his first marriage as a young man that you realise Sideways wasn’t made in the late-70s. Unless he can act ‘young’ too…



This first marriage was unplanned and ended miserably. The second, to a wealthy, Jewish academic (Minnie Driver channelling ‘Janice-from-Friends’), was very planned. That ended miserably too. But it was during this second marriage, at the wedding reception to be precise, that Barney falls in love for the first and only time in his life when he happens to glance upon Miriam (Rosamund Pike) through an archway. He chases this woman to her train back to New York that evening and declares his undying love for her. Understandably, having only just met Barney at his wedding, she tells him to go back to his wife.



Stringing all these marriages together, aside from Barney himself, are two subplots. The first is the mysterious death of Barney’s best friend for which he may or may not be responsible. This story haunts the rest of his personal and professional life, but intentionally peters out near the end. It’s nice to see a plot that could easily be the main narrative of another film treated so indifferently.



The second is Barney’s mental condition. The film is littered with tiny moments that first appear as eccentricities. Forgetting where he parked his car comes across as just a little absent-mindedness. But didn’t he take a cab? These moments of forgetfulness are slowly revealed as symptoms of Alzheimer’s and the film’s final act becomes a heartbreaking portrayal of the disease. We’ve watched Barney develop as a character, warts and all in marriages and deaths, to see it stripped away as he forgets his children, misremembers his wife and looses his mind.



The main criticism of the film is that nothing much happens. But since when has a good film had to be about anything? Some of the best films in history have very little narrative substance. However, despite having two superb performances in Giamatti and Dustin Hoffman (as his father), and a poignant final reel, Barney’s Version is really quite dull.



It’s obvious that a book is the film’s source text. The plot stretches itself too thin across such a long and diverse life and its murder subplot is tedious when translated to screen. These sorts of things can work wonderfully in literature. Film can struggle to make it interesting.



But no fear, Giamatti’s next appears in Win Win, a favourite at this year’s Sundance. He plays a sympathetic, everyman loser.

Oli Davis



365 Days, 100 Films



Movie Review Archive

365 Days, 100 Films #4 - 127 Hours (2010)

127 Hours, 2010.



Directed by Danny Boyle.

Starring James Franco.





SYNOPSIS:



Mountaineer Aron Ralston (James Franco) embarks on a remarkable adventure to save himself after a boulder traps him in an isolated canyon in Utah.





Lars von Trier once said that the director’s dream is to make a film about just one person, alone, in a room. Humbly conceding such a task as beyond his talents, von Trier made Antichrist, a film about two people in a room in a forest instead.



Aside from an encounter between our protagonist, Aaron Ralston (James Franco), and two female backpackers at the start of the film, 127 Hours is almost the one-person-in-a-room narrative von Trier dreams of. That is, if he dreams at all (I expect he’s more the up-all-night-screaming sort). “Almost” because Ralston isn’t in a room. He is trapped in an isolated canyon, hidden in the vastness of a Utah national park. This occurs on one of his, presumably frequent, weekend excursions. He makes these trips alone, not telling anyone of his plans. There is no malice in this attitude, or a sour relationship he seeks to escape. Ralston isn’t one of those complex film types, just selfish and immature.



The opening scene is dedicated to portraying such self-centredness. As he hastily rummages together climbing equipment in his flat, Ralston misses a phone call from his mother. He could have told her about his weekend trip, and then someone would know to send out a search party for him when he eventually becomes trapped in a canyon, his crushed arm wedged between a rock and a hard place. More importantly, though, he could have told her he loves her. Ralston misses another trick here, too. His outstretched arm passing over the sharp, metallic Swiss army knife hidden at the back of a cupboard. Perfect for bottle opening or arm severing.



Such selfishness initially makes it difficult to relate to Ralston. Sure he’s charming, but he grates with such hedonistic recklessness. So when he climbs through the earth’s deep cracks and a rock dislodges, falls, wedges his arm between it and the canyon wall, we feel no sympathy beyond that for his situation. We have the specifics - mid-twenties, male, rock-climber, trapped in a crevice – but we have no character to fully feel for.



The film continues like this for a little while longer, detailing Ralston’s injury, his rations and attempts to move the rock – the specifics of the situation. It is all quite entertaining, with Boyle’s cinematic energy whipping to quasi-flashbacks and fast cutting - funny, in a morbid way - but one would expect to feel more. There’s still the humour and rock music. Ralston has been stuck in a canyon for three days, yet it doesn’t feel serious, to him or us.



Then one morning, in a bout of cabin fever, Ralston positions his digital camcorder before him upon that tormenting rock. He looks a lot more haggard now, with his peeling lips and drained face; a lot less like the laughing, invincible adventurer a few days prior. Here, he stages a mock interview with himself, as though he were on a cheery morning news show. Boyle cuts the scene skilfully between the two personas Ralston creates: himself and the manic host. He self-interrogates his stupidity. Why didn’t I tell anyone I was going? Why am I no longer with my ex-girlfriend? Why didn’t I talk to my mum? Having Ralston reflect on these character flaws, the same ones that were so distancing before now, reveals a truly sympathetic and courageous man. He knows he needs to grow up.



The scene owes a great debt to Franco’s performance. His eyes become a lot deeper in those minutes. Otherwise, 127 Hours is visually very quick, with montages, dream sequences and kinetic zooms employed to give the static story an impossible pace, yet here the film pauses, along with Ralston, to evaluate the situation. It’s a crisis meeting, of sorts. Watch the film a second time, and the whole thing would probably seem even more foreboding.



There are some film images that remain burnt upon the retina. To loosely tie-in this article’s opening, one of these for me is a graphic shot of Willem Defoe ejaculating blood in Antichrist. It sometimes rudely interrupts my thoughts, uninvited. Wincing, I work on re-suppressing it. This is now joined with a shot from 127 Hours. When Ralston first attempts to sever his arm, he stabs it with a pair of pliers. Feeling bone, Ralston gives up disheartened, although he is only delaying the inevitable. During this sequence, there is a shot, almost a live x-ray of his arm, of the pliers slightly moving back and forth against the bone. Like finger nails on a chalkboard.



I should really call my mother.

Oli Davis



365 Days, 100 Films



Movie Review Archive

Thoughts on... The American (2010)

The American, 2010.

Directed by Anton Corbijn.
Starring George Clooney, Violante Placido, Thekla Reuten, Paolo Bonacelli, Irina Björklund and Johan Leysen.


SYNOPSIS:

Lucky to be alive after his most recent job goes sour, an assassin retreats to a small town in Italy to lie low. Befriending a priest and pursuing a relationship with a local woman, he starts to build a new life for himself but soon discovers it's not that easy to escape his violent past.


The American’s opening scenes are engaging mostly because of Jack’s (George Clooney) distraction. His eyes are constantly staring into some off-screen space: troubled and alert, like a wounded, resigned beast. It must be impossible to hold a conversation with the man. He evidently has more pressing things to think about. Perhaps he left his iron on.

It isn’t long before his quiet paranoia is given a reason. An echoing gunshot interrupts his morning stroll through an isolated, snow-covered field in Sweden. Jack’s paranoia escalated into action and he finally appears comfortable. One need not be suspicious when danger has fully revealed itself.

For Jack is an assassin. The globe-trotting sort with European accented bosses and both ‘friends’ and enemies hidden across the continent. The snowy bloodshed in Sweden is never explained, but its suddenness, and in such tranquillity, heightens the paranoia a little further.

So Jack takes a low-profile holiday in the rural Italian town of Castelvecchio, provided by the aforementioned European accented boss, but still he can’t shake the suspicion. He constantly assesses people in the street and overreacts to the slightest noise. Then he is offered a job. An easy, low-profile one: build a specialised gun for another assassin.

This is where the film begins to find itself. Before here it is near impossible to relate to Jack as a character, given the aggressive way he deals with the Swedish shootout. He’s far too intense to be likeable. But when he begins to build the gun you see a man focused. The paranoia dissipates as the nuts and bolts, spanners and hammers of his work absorb him. Jack is a protagonist of the Hemmingway sort; a practical man doomed by uncontrollable circumstances. Jack is as taken with gun building as Harry Morgan is with fishing.

Jonathan Romney wrote that The American couldn’t decide whether it wants to be a thriller or an existential musing on life. This hinders the film because ultimately, as his argument goes, the two rarely mix well and there is not enough suspense. This could be why The American’s most widespread criticism is that it is boring. But one cannot label a film as simply ‘boring’! We might start calling things plainly ‘nice’ soon after. English teachers would recoil in disgust…

Now I’ve seen many films with a slower pace and even less excitement than The American, and some of those I count amongst my all-time favourites. So why does The American seem to teeter, and often cross, the line of that forbidden word?

Anton Corbijn’s direction is too indulgent to portray its protagonist. Here is a practical man, a Hemmingway man, dressed in drag by Corbijn’s arty inclinations. This suited Corbijn’s previous, debut film perfectly. Control was about a tortured artist, its black and white photography complimenting the characters and story. Such excessiveness can’t possibly frame Jack. There is even a line where Father Benedetto points out that Jack has the hands of a mechanic, not of the photographer he claims to be. If only Corbijn possessed such a mechanic’s restraint.

If only Polanski had got here first, I thought. The Ghost Writer was one of the better films of 2010 precisely because it gave itself to the genre. Suspense, mystery, thrills – atmosphere, atmosphere – undiluted by Corbijn’s (and probably Clooney’s too, for awards season makes an inviting light around this time of the year) more existential agenda.

But Polanski is an auteur, one might argue. He has the same inclinations for artiness as Corbijn. Indeed, but he operates this flair within his genre’s restraints. One only has to watch a scene of Chinatown to realise this.

This is only Corbijn’s second feature. Before his film career, he was a photographer and these roots are evident in every expertly composed frame. And they are undeniably stunning shots, they just work against the character and story they purport to convey.

As the film begins to snowball its tension and pace near the end, the climactic scenes become very effective: a shootout through the catacomb streets of Castelvecchio. The getaway drive echoes the great ending shot of Michael Clayton, another Clooney film, focusing on Jack’s face as the emotions finally begin to seep through. Of regret and anger, of everything that he has done and what he will now miss. For a performance so restrained throughout, a simple punch-punch of the steering wheel utters all.

Unfortunately, this is undone by the film’s awful ending shot, a pan away from the actors to a butterfly taking flight. The butterfly was a motif throughout the film, but in case you missed it, Corbijn forces it into one’s face. Again, a lack of restraint. Consider Polanski’s ending shot from The Ghost Writer. Similarly, a pan away from the characters, but this time to the right and slightly downwards, showing hundreds of scattered white pages littering some murky, cobbled street in London’s back alleyways. That was fittingly nihilistic. The American’s, however, was spectacularly lame.

Oli Davis

Movie Review Archive

Thoughts on... Predators (2010)

Predators, 2010.

Directed by Nimród Antal.
Starring Adrien Brody, Laurence Fishburne, Topher Grace, Alica Braga, Walton Goggins, Danny Trejo, Mahershalalhashbaz Ali, Oleg Taktarov and Louis Ozawa Changchien.


SYNOPSIS:

A small group of humans find themselves on a hostile extraterrestrial world which acts as a game preserve for the merciless alien species known as the Predators.


There’s a moment in Terminator: Salvation when a young Kyle Reese sits atop a building, tentatively stretching his head above the roof’s surrounding wall to watch a lone Terminator patrolling the street below. His behaviour is much like my own as a child watching the first and second Terminator films; the single, relentless menace terrified me. Shortly after, however, the Terminator lays in pieces around the street. Barely 20 minutes in and the Terminator are disregarded as fallible. No longer a singular force, submerged in the entire machine army, the Terminator was no longer scary.

Terminator, in my head at least, is interconnected with both the Alien and Predator franchises. Actors and directors overlap and entwine, particularly in the case of the latter two. All three have succumbed to the numbers game: Terminator in the example above, Alien with its immediate sequel Aliens, and most recently, suffering the same pluralisation, Predator with Predators.

The original Predator was terrifying (and cool) precisely because it featured a sole antagonist. That strange jungle was made so alien because it joined with the singular Predator and became it. The trouble with Predators is that it contains three of them, the terror diminishing with each addition. Of course, the franchise needs variations or the ‘one-predator-versus-team-of-humans’ formula will stagnate. But to do it in such an uninterested way makes the beasts themselves nothing more than background noise.

We are hurled into the narrative much like the human characters are. The film opens with Royce (Adrien Brody + muscles and a husky voice) hurtling through the air, just having been released from an unseen plane. He freefalls into a jungle, his parachute opening at the last second. There he comes across other humans (read: action movie/ethnic stereotypes) to form a rag-tag bunch trying to figure out “what the fuck” is going on, “who the fuck” are you, and “where the fuck” are we?

The humans are diverse - a Yakuza (Louis Ozawa Changchien), Eric from That 70s Show, a Cartel member (Danny Trejo), a Sierra-Leone death squad executioner (Mahershalalhashbaz Ali, hellava name) – though helpfully, they all speak fluent English. Why have they been chosen? Surely not for political correctness. You see, they are all as much predators as the alien race themselves. It’s all in the interest of good sport. A battle for the humans to survive and escape ensues as they are hunted across the game preserve by a team of three Predators. Contestants, ready…

The film is enjoyable, very enjoyable, but it feels as though there was a much better film left behind at the pre-production phase. The narrative trundles along from action set piece to light relief to tension and round again at an incredibly superficial level. This, of course, is what these films are meant to do and is why we love them, but the yearning comes from its unrealised potential, that it could have been a much better film. Imagine if certain plot points were given a little more gravitas. For instance, when they first behold the alien worlds crowding the sky - their realisation that they’re on a planet other than Earth, a game reserve for the Predator race, needs only a more delicate foregrounding to achieve the much needed emphasis. Nearly every intriguing idea the film has is met with anticlimax.

And there are many of them. The mythology surrounding the predator race is built upon and teased. The notion that the ‘Predators’ title refers as much to the human characters as the ugly beasts themselves. An entire planet as a game preserve, populated with creatures from across the universe, increasing the mystery surrounding the Predator race’s power. But they are all blunted by the film’s artificial and disorientated world. Some of the visual effects are slightly worse than a Playstation 2 cut-scene.

DVD Notes - On the one-disc edition I watched there was but one special feature, not in keeping with the strength-in-numbers manner of the film. A motion comic, or a half-arsed animation, that details how the Predators prepare their game reserve. Quite interesting, but equally disappointing.

Oli Davis

Movie Review Archive