This Island Rod

The Hitcher (1986)

2012-01-17T14:00:00.000+11:00

Ranking, purely on a level of sustainedmoodiness and visual authority, with the best of ‘80s American genre films, The Hitcher is nonetheless a frustratingpiece of work. The Hitcher operatesbest as a waking nightmare, as the situation depicted in the opening scenes,and the blue-eyed malevolence personified by John Ryder (Rutger Hauer), seem topractically step out of a Jungian collective unconscious, grown cancer-like inthe modern psyche where fear is the flipside to the nominal freedom of the highway, and the film itself a bleak inversion of late ‘60s and ‘70s road movies,which already displayed aspects of paranoia about just how open and bounteousbeing on the road would prove. Young Jim Halsey (C. Thomas Howell), beset by micro-sleepblackouts as he travels a desolate stretch of road in Nevada, picks uphitch-hiker Ryder, because, as he will explain later, he thinks a companionwill help keep him awake. Ryder, emerging from the pouring rain and offering apeculiarly distracted line of patter, certainly wakes Jim up, not merely fromdriver fatigue, but from his hitherto cushioned urban upbringing and coddledsense of the world: he’s recently left Chicago for an adventure, having signedup with a pick-up driving service purely to get a vehicle to take toCalifornia, and Jim is from the first instant a naïve young man waiting for ashock. The first half-hour of The Hitcheris as good as any thriller ever made, generating a mood of lonely fatigue andlurking horror with fervent excellence, the images of red taillights soakingthe rainy night with bloody tones sufficient to evoke the truth behind Ryder’sclaim that he cut off a Volkswagen driver’s extremities, even before he pullsout his flick knife. Hauer’s sublime performance sustains a tone of blearyexistential despair and psychic exhaustion even in feeding off fear and mayhem.

The visual pungency of the rainy nightand the subsequent minimalist vistas of desert and dusty diners and lonely truck stops, conveyed with crisp yet muted colours, andmethodical lighting and sound layers, make TheHitcher’s landscape authentic yet estranged, a richly atmosphericbattleground that works well as both realistic milieu and Dali-esquedreamscape. It’s as bleakly interiorised and relentless in its study of thevulcanisation of a young man’s soul through torment in the face of the world’sevil as the same year’s similar BlueVelvet, and like that film hinges on telling images of severed body parts.Of more immediate kinship, it anticipates the same ethereal sense of theMidwestern night as a nightmarish cage in its vastness, populated by strangebeasts, in Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark,likewise written by Eric Red, who must count as co-auteur on both films, whichalso share some essential faults. Director Robert Harmon’s work wearsinfluences on its sleeve whilst maintaining a patina of consistent stylisation,with loud hints of Hitchcock and Paul Verhoeven, unsurprising with Verhoeven’sformer golden boy Hauer on board. TheFourth Man’s image of a punctured eyeball is invoked through dialogue, andwhether or not the villain is a demon or a mere murderer is left similarlyopaque. The Hitcher also belongs in aclass of new-age horror film with Michael Mann’s more oblique but similarly oppressiveattempt to reinvent the gothic horror film with The Keep (1984), particularly in how Harmon uses Mark Isham’sspacey score like Mann used Tangerine Dream’s, to sustain the miasma ofparanoid isolation and hazy veracity.

Intimations of anticipated violationtake on other dimensions as Ryder keeps the knife pressed in Jim’s crotch asthey’re pulled over by a road worker, who takes the gesture for a queerrendezvous. Like another mid-‘80s horror movie, A Nightmare on Elm Street 2, the seemingly inhuman killer provokesvoluble metaphors for gay panic, as the threat of homoerotic violence lends anote of queasy knowing to Jim’s near-psychic link to Ryder and his actionsduring their absurdist chase. Ryder seems to embody an entrapping fact ofidentity that cannot be escaped, and certainly coming along when Jim isvulnerable and in the act of escaping his familiar life. Jim’s refusal tosubmit, that is, to complete Ryder’s dictated statement, “I want to die”, makeshim the top, and Ryder, who seems to be devoutly wishing a consummation,nominates Jim not as victim but as nemesis, the one who must finally grow bigenough balls to take him out, whatever the potential cost, as he provokes Jimat several points to kill him. Ryder begins exterminating everyone Jim getsclose to, from policemen to holidaying families. The Hitcher suggests a Halloween campfire tale effectivelyillustrated, borrowing tropes familiar from urban legends: food spiked withnasty surprises; situations of solitude inviting the unknown danger. Whilst theopening and basic set-up seem to promise a focused set-piece built around aninterpersonal cat-and-mouse struggle, a la Ida Lupino’s spin on the same idea, The Hitch-Hiker (1953), hewing toclassic noir rules, or a The TwilightZone-esque tale of the uncanny and the dissolving limits of the liminal,Harmon and Red soon move on to a Hitchcockian manhunt, albeit played by the farmore expansive rules of ‘80s genre stylings, where infrastructure has to betotalled, guns fired aplenty, and explosions set off now and then.

Even as it shifts gears and genres, The Hitcher still maintains integrityand a compelling aura of dread, as Jim’s own cranking hysteria and will tosurvive begin to incriminate him as surely as Ryder’s mischievous murders. Relieffor the folie-a-deux that is theJim/Ryder death dance is introduced in the form of Jennifer Jason Leigh’swinningly blowsy diner waitress Nash, taking Jim under her wing eventually, asthe promise of violent force from the cops proves as unnervingly extreme as anyhighway psychopathy, and the couple are conjoined by their wish to escape theirlives: just as Jim’s rebellion brings on Ryder, so too Nash’s rebellion bringson the police with white-hot fury, which won’t abate until she is killed. Referencesto Duel (1973) are hard to avoid,especially in the hero’s ordinary haplessness and the villain’s relentlessness,the use of setting, and the general story structure. Hitchcock is the commonreference for both Spielberg and Harmon, with a helicopter swooping in like North by Northwest’s crop duster, on topof the transference of guilt theme. The problem with Harmon’s film is thatwhilst it hints at hallucinogenic fantasy, it doesn’t ever quite make up itsmind, pursuing the basic narrative conceit with an increasingly improbablenarrative that nonetheless never entirely gives into dream logic. The fact isthat Red’s script under the influence of a much more recent genre model,becoming a variation on The Terminator(1984: James Cameron would of course produce wife Bigelow’s film of Red’s nextscript) with unstated supernatural or psychological causes, rather than sci-fi,to justify the Ryder’s inhuman capacity to shoot down said helicopter with ahandgun, and plunging out of a bus and through a windscreen with barely ascratch.

This attempt to blend the hyperkinetichigh style that defined ‘80s American genre cinema with a tale based more inprimal dread and near-subliminal anxieties therefore only works to a certainextent, as Harmon therefore sustains a note of cryptic but essentially earthyurgency. Then again, the film also bears similarities of vision with thefollowing year’s White of the Eye byDonald Cammell, another tale based in versions of normality based in botheveryday life and the templates of genre, increasingly untethered from bothwhilst invoking destructive forces in a desert setting. On a level of basiccompulsive action, too, The Hitchercommits itself with admirably coldness to its singularly nasty proliferation oftricks, from the finger plucked and almost eaten from a plate of French Fries,to Jim awakening in a police station where he’s been imprisoned only to findthe cops have all been murdered and the police dog lapping blood from itsmaster’s neck. Most memorably and inescapably nasty, Nash, taken prisoner byRyder, is suspended between two trucks, to be torn in half with the slightestrelease of the clutch, forestalling both Jim’s and the police’s hopes ofdelivering cost-free justice. Disgusted with Jim’s squeamishness and incapacityto kill his nemesis, Ryder exasperatedly lets the truck roll forward, killing Nash, a moment ofchilling nihilism that vibrates within and around the work: it’s the rarehorror film that has the courage of such taunting convictions to do such athing to the nominal love interest. Interestingly, The Hitcher made a powerful impact at the time thanks to its intimate cruelty, yet it's actually very judicious in terms of what it shows: such unbearable spectacles as a slaughtered cute family and Nash's murder are actually left entirely to the imagination, and become perhaps all the more powerful for it. Many, far more gory films have been made before and since, and yet there's something about The Hitcher's precise malevolence in this regard that makes it especially galvanising by refusing to play nice.

Still, killing off Nash only points to abasic flaw in Red’s script, one he would at least not repeat in Near Dark (which similarly stumblestowards the end with action movie shtick but recovers with a better finish), inthat, in wanting to stay a step ahead of the audience and cut off all familiaravenues, it leaves the film without any real source of suspense in the lastact, which, on top of the film’s wilful abandonment of believability, finallyproves a drag on all of Harmon’s hard work. The final point of The Hitcher is an interesting one,however, in that it seems to boil down to a depiction of achieving finalmaturity means sometimes taking responsibility for unpleasant, even terriblejobs, a variation on “a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do” but inflectedwith an existential quality where either way it costs you something dear toyou. After Jim struggles through a Calvary-like moment where he contemplatessuicide with a stolen police pistol, he instead once again chooses life. Butlife means therefore surviving the persecution of Ryder and the police, and hisunwillingness to shoot Ryder when he gives him the chance, and he might have ashot at saving Nash, means Ryder, who has no concept of mercy, kills heranyway. By The Hitcher’s end Jim isas dead-eyed and relentless as Ryder, if still ostensibly righteous, as heturfs out Jeffrey DeMunn’s empathetic sheriff from his own squad car to chasedown Ryder who, as predicted, stages an escape from a prison bus. The veryfinale gives the impression of a narrative motor finally running down for lackof petrol, no more twists or new revelations possible, as the binary necessityfinally fulfilled, the traditional Reagan-era movie act of punitive punishmentblended with an aspect of mercy killing, as well as self-exterminatingconsummation that looks forward to the bullet-induced cure for schizophrenia inFight Club (1999). Even if it slowlydegenerates into a lesser film than it might have been through trying to be toomany kinds of movie, The Hitcher’sperfect first act and memorably ruthless highlights sustain an impressive andoddly haunting semi-classic. Sadly, Harmon's subsequent cinematc career, including his return to semi-abstract urban legend horror with They (2002) and Highwaymen (2004), has been disappointing, but his interesting telemovie work has included 2000's The Crossing, perhaps the best attempt to film the American Revolution made thus far.

The Hound of the Baskervilles (1939)

2012-01-04T18:58:00.002+11:00

The Classic Hollywood conceptualisationof much classic literature tends to have sunk deep, almost immovable roots intothe popular psyche: in spite of innumerable attempts to shift the impression,nonetheless who thinks of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein’s Monster these days andnot James Whale’s, or Emily Bronte’s Heathcliff and not William Wyler’s?Relatively few. When it comes to schismatic appreciation of this process, fewrank higher in my mind than the pairing of Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce asSherlock Holmes and Dr Watson: the Conan Doyle fan in me cringes inappreciating Bruce’s version of Watson as a fuddy-duddy with a powerful dash ofthe P.G. Wodehouse or Caldicott and Charters-esque old school tie, parochiallybluff charm of the dimly insulated English gentleman. The all-action versionembodied by handsome movie star Jude Law in Guy Ritchie’s current, tedious reinvention is complete, excessive inversion of the image, but only partly closer to theoriginal mark – notably, the only actor to ever remember that Watson was awounded war veteran with a slight limp was Robert Duvall (bad accent and all) in The Seven-Percent Solution (1976).Rathbone’s Holmes, in appearance, could have stepped directly out of the oldStrand magazines, and he embodied the character’s brilliance – the rapid-firedeductions, the delight in disguise, the shows of surprising physical agility –with a perfect flare, even whilst stepping back from the character’s egotismand more antisocial qualities, as a drug-addicted bohemian with a contempt forBritish class distinctions and certain aspects of traditional morality. Thejollity of the Rathbone-Bruce pairing both alienates them from the originals,and yet also confirms why they’re still nonetheless held in high terms by classicmovie fans: they were just so darn good, you stopped caring that theyrepresented an intensely Hollywoodised, cutesy version of iconic Britishcharacters.

The Hound of the Baskervilles was already the most famous Conan Doyle Holmes novel and oft-filmed by the time this version came along, with the first, apparently, being Rudolf Meinert’s 1914 German adaptation (which was strung out as a serial,with increasingly imaginative variations, a la Louis Feuillade), which sawMeinert lay some of the groundwork for the eruption of German Expressionism, ashe would go on to help make Das Cabinetdes Dr Caligari (1919). In any event, Sidney Lanfield’s 1939 adaptation was the first to unite Rathbone andBruce, under the aegis of 20th Century Fox, and another period-dress film, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, wouldfollow hard on its heels before the series was sold on to Universal, where itwould be transferred into a modern setting, and expert English quickie directorRoy William Neill would take over. Neill’s lucid, snappy sense of atmosphereand pacing, and his interesting blending of an unconvincing back-lot Blightywith a personal sense of the material’s quintessential insularity, would moreproperly define the series.

Apure jobbing director, Lanfield’s handling here is languid, lacking compulsivepace or narrative compaction. This is partly because, as the film’s billingcredits indicate, this is an adaptation of a Sherlock Holmes novel but renderedin such a way that it removes specific emphasis on the investigating duo, whoessentially become dominant supporting characters, and renders it by and largeas another romantic melodrama based on a classic English novel, and an each-way bet in terms of audience appeal. The adaptationis faithful, and yet rather than tying the explication of the mystery to theinvestigator’s viewpoints, and specifically Watson’s reportorial zest, whichbalances Holmes’ detail-specific sensibility, here the story is spread out morebroadly. Lanfield and credited screenwriter Ernest Pascal diffuse the mysterywith too many cutaways and weird dalliances, like making Dr Mortimer (LionelAtwill) and his wife (Beryl Mercer) into spiritualists who stage an abortiveséance to contact the dead Sir Charles Baskerville, passing on Holmes’ famousdeduction that Sir Charles must have been running, rather than tiptoeing, whenhe died, from his footprints, to Mortimer, and devoting too much time to thewooden romance between the future Robin Hood and Inspector Nayland-Smith,Richard Greene, top-billed as Sir Henry Baskerville, and Wendy Barrie as BerylStapleton, step-sister to the villain, John Stapleton (Morton Lowry).

Unlike in the 1959 Hammer version, stillby far the best if not the most faithful version, there’s also a generalavoidance of analysing the material for deeper reflexes: whereas the Hammerversion is one of the singular examples of the brilliant Terence Fisher touch in making Sir Henry the living, partly unwitting avatar of thesensual greed, rapaciousness, and cruelty of the worst aspects of thearistocratic past, and the Stapletons the degraded, ensnaring revenge for thatpast, here it’s essentially about the aristocracy’s paranoia about beingsupplanted by the petit bourgeoisie, and the darkly sexual undercurrents aredrained off by making Beryl not, as in the book, Stapleton’s secret, much-abused wife, usedby him as bait, rendering Beryl not as half-willing femme fatale but assimplistic romantic fodder. The Hammer version also more sharply relieves thedisparity between Holmes, man of pure rationality, and the mysterious hound, forceof supposed supernatural agency, and the coherent way the miasma of history,sex, and violence entwine to bridge the rational and the irrational in afashion that only Holmes is clever enough to discern. Here it’s just a straightmurder plot, rendered in a fashion that robs it of essential pulpy force, especially inthe film’s abrupt conclusion, leaving Stapleton’s fate up to chance and seeingthe lone reference to Holmes’ cocaine habit tossed over the shoulder as a weirdbut amusing closing gag. The Baskerville manservant, Barrymore, is hereamusingly rechristened Barryman, and played by John Carradine, perhaps, I canonly imagine, to avoid any hint of satire on the acting clan, and Carradine,like Atwill, plays his role as pure red herring, all shifty obfuscation andhalting line deliveries.

What this version does do well is theentirely expressionistic version of Dartmoor,a model sprawl of fog-licked hillocks, marshes, wizened trees and ancientruins. The sequence in which Watson and Sir Henry delve into the foggy night inpursuit of the convict Selden (Nigel de Brulier) is a deliciously fog-bound,hazy adventure into the primeval, as too is the later scene of Seldon’s death,pushed from a cliff top by the marauding beast. Indeed, the hound itself is,for once, actually a pretty damn fearsome-looking animal. Lanfield offers anice little sequence, usually left off-stage in other versions, in whichStapleton goes about his routine for unleashing his horrendous mutt, which hekeeps in a pen underneath a gravestone, emerging from the ground with genuinelystriking ferocity, thus lending its climactic attack on Sir Henry urgency andthreat. Lowry’s Stapleton is good, a neatly sketched study in upright charm masking peculiarly English psychopathy, anticipating his equally callowcharacterisation in Don Siegel’s The Verdict (1946). Unlike many other versions, this one also seems interested in theresonances offered by the Neolithic ruins on the moor (although the characterfascinated by these remnants is changed, for some reason, from Mortimer toStapleton), as Sir Henry and Beryl meditate momentarily, in exploring theruins, on both the mutability of their own immediate lives, but also on therecurring cycles of human existence. It’s also easy enough to see why the chemistryof Rathbone and Bruce was to make such a marked impression, particularly in thehilarious scene in which Holmes, hanging about the moor in the guise of alimping peddler, draws out Watson to his cave hideout. He maintains themasquerade as Watson, trying to achieve an air of authority, says that hehimself is Holmes: when Holmes reveals himself, Watson flies into a huff, andHolmes delightedly increases the offence by regaling Watson with his screechyviolin sawing. Here the Rathbone-Bruce duo, for better or worse, clearly stakesout the beauties of this variation on the theme, and a winning team is born.

House of Bamboo (1955)

2012-01-02T17:56:00.000+11:00

Sam Fuller only contributed additionaldialogue to the script for this, a film noir set in a deceptively Technicolored,widescreen-rendered Japan,and the difference is telling. The cute but essentially superfluous romancebetween hero Robert Stack and local geisha Shirley Yamaguchi doesn’t offer theemotional volatility or psychological nuance found in similar romances ofFuller’s self-penned The Crimson Kimonoand Verboten! (both 1959), and thatmeans for a lot of the running time the familiar snap-crackle-pop of Fuller’sbald, bold-type style and enriching humanist reflexes are kept on a leash.However, it’s a Fuller film and make no mistake: set loose on foreign soil witha large budget and a superlative technical crew, he builds House of Bamboo into a series of brilliantly directed set-pieces.The story is dark and murderous, full of deception, intimate violence, kinky jealousy boiling up amongst male partners-in-crime, and lusciously weird visions of aculture in a moment of violent upheaval. The opening shots are some of the mostbrilliantly orchestrated in the history of widescreen cinema, with thetourist-board friendly shot of Mt Fuji cut into by the huffing steam train,which is then brought to a halt by a peasant’s cart stuck on the train. Thisvision of technological, modernist, bluntly ugly age being stalled by a remnantof a culturally specific workaday object is keen enough; the subsequent imagesof men in the classical Japanese peasant garb assaulting the train drivers,shooting the one American amongst the guard crew, and making off with themilitary weaponry aboard, resolves in the image of a woman screaming over asplay-legged corpse in a visually acute blast of ironic inversion, from old tonew, natural beauty to human ugliness.

The setting is 1950s-contemporary, in thewaning years of the American occupation of Japan, with the slowly recomposingTokyo and sense of reviving Japanese fortunes riddled with stark corruption anduneasy alliances, and shots of the street life and the urban environs bring outwith a stark clarity just how transitory and provisional much of thearchitecture and infrastructure of the city was at the time. It’s theoutsider’s view of a world familiar from the distracted, ground-level world ofthe era-defining Japanese filmmakers like Ozu, Kurosawa, Naruse, and Mizoguchi.Film noir was even by this time being caricatured as a series ofblack-and-white visual clichés, but Fuller here completely, but effectively,translates the style into Technicolor terms, offering bold, almostcarnival-like hues and precisely composed frames that both evoke Hitchcock’ssimilarly radical sense of how to use colour, and also the visual acuities ofJapanese art. The dominant theme is cultural collision and cross-pollination,as classically attired geishas and festival dancers rehearse on a skyscraperrooftop, and entertainers perform in traditional fashion, before suddenlystripping off their robes and starting to jitterbug. Fuller’s reportorialinstincts and experiential sense of zeitgeist are given free reign in this material. He absorbs through endless succinct shots the fascinating processes of Japan's modernisation and westernisation, as he does the incidental yet telling similarities between the police and the villains, eachmethodically setting about their work, from the pin-pointed evidence of theinitial crime to the painstaking preparatory work by chief bad guy Sandy Dawson(Robert Ryan). Sessue Hayakawa prefigures his Bridge on the River Kwai resurgence (although dubbed by RichardLoo) in playing the Japanese equivalent of one of Fuller’s familiar no-nonsenseauthority figures, as the police inspector Kito. Dawson’s harsh policy to leaveno wounded behind, killing anyone who gets clipped rather than leave them to be grilled by thecops, provides both the first evidence that he and his fellow stick-up men arestill fighting the war, having turned the arts and assumptions of warfare into criminalenterprise.

When Ryan’s mob try to finish off onemember in such a fashion after a robbery, Webber (Biff Elliot), the Japanesepolice and their American liaisons manage to interview him before he finallyexpires, and he begs them to keep his nefarious activities secret from thelocal girl, Mariko (Yamaguchi), and keep her well out of the case, as hiscomrades had no idea about her. Webber’s shady, violent army buddy EddieSpanier (Stack) turns up looking for his pal who offered him a job, a la Holly Martens in The Third Man (1949), and, aftertracking down Mariko, begins trying to shake down local pachinko parlours forprotection money, only to bring on Dawson’s wrath, for he runs the parlours.Cue one of the most memorable introductions in cinema history, and also one ofthe most inspired uses of the Cinemascope frame’s depth of field. As Spanierroughs up a parlour boss in a back room, Dawson’s main man Griff (CameronMitchell) stalks into the frame from the right, grabs Spanier, and clobbers himin the jaw, sending him crashing back through the paper partition behind them,revealing Dawson and the rest of the crew gathered and waiting for his crashlanding on the other side. It’s classic piece of physically forceful yetresolutely simple staging, and both Mitchell’s overheated aggression and Ryan’ssupine authority are clearly displayed in our first glimpse of both. Spanier,after getting roughed up and told off, is then recruited into the gang when hisbackground check turns up an impressive array of priors, whereupon the bluff isrevealed: the man pretending to be Spanier is actually US Army Sergeant EddieKenner, and he’s trying to both bust up Dawson’s outfit and find his inside manin the Tokyo Police.

Houseof Bamboo is a work ofnear-genius as filmmaking, even if Harry Kleiner’s script doesn’t ever quitetake things to the most ruthlessly intelligent level as Fuller was wont to do. The plotting leaves afew explanations to be desired, such as how a mob of westerners can, withoutdisguises, repeatedly commit such daring robberies without bringing down thespecial ire of the local cops or, indeed, the local yakuza: the fact that thebasic story has been transplanted without two much culturally specific thoughtfrom the regulation cop-infiltrates-gang American noir is all too apparent.Still, Fuller ransacks Kleiner’s script for nuances and radicalinterpretations. Unlike in Verboten!,the villains are not a subversive by-product of history and cultural collision,but an imported force of American hoods. Yet as in Verboten!, the tale clearly takeson an element of parable, warning about the dangers awaiting the new UShegemony in the Cold War era in depicting one of its newly conqueredpseudo-fiefs. Dawson and Kenner are thus fittingly mirrored versions of the same,quintessential American male, torn between making the world its stamping groundand shepherding it back to self-direction, in a fittingly prognosticative moveon Fuller’s part. The title suggests quaint exotic kitsch redolent of the other,badly aged Occupation-era movies like Teahouseof the August Moon (1956) and Sayonara(1957), but Fuller uses the motif of the bewilderingly (to western eyes) flimsystyle of Japanese interior architecture, with paper walls and hanging screens,for a game of images, cutting the screen into box-like prisms and repeatedlyseparating characters with thin partitions. These range from that first wall Kenner crashes throughto land at Dawson’s feet, locating the hard American force behind the seeminglycowed, slapdash façade of modernising Japan, to the blind that Mariko lowersbetween her and Kenner when they sleep beside each other in figuration of thepersonal, cultural, and sexual divide between them, and in the finale, where asilhouette glimpsed through a wall proves the undoing of Dawson’s attempt tohave Kenner killed by his own side. Using different materials but similar instyle are such moments as one of Dawson's men, Charlie (DeForest Kelley), keeps a clandestine watch on Mariko through the simple expedient of a huge reflecting bar-room mirror, and the scene in which Kenner, in his guise as Spanier, first tracksMariko, as she darts through the halls of a bathhouse, trying to elude him, andthen he tracks her through a park, Fuller’s panning camera revealing him hidingbehind a tree as she hurries past oblivious, before he finally catches her inher apartment in a moment of distinctly sexualised frenzy. The film becomes through these layers of images a series of constantly shifting identities, permeable boundaries, paranoid surveillance, and changing allegiances.

This overt compartmentalisation hasother ramifications. Whilst the romantic byplay between Kenner and Mariko takesup a bulk of the film’s pensive but overdrawn mid-section, the real emotionalintensity and threat comes from the peculiar relationship of Dawson, Griff, andKenner, where the need for absolute trustworthiness amongst comrades in enemyterritory is not so subtly infused with aspects of homosexual devotion andenvy, as Griff becomes increasingly frazzled and furious at Kenner’s slippinginto his place, Dawson turning cold on his trigger-happy former partner andfixing with such immediate affection on the new boy that he forgoes theleave-no-prisoners rule when Kenner is wounded during a heist. The homoerotictension is both displaced yet ratcheted higher by the self-consciously enforcedregime of heteronormative relations, with the men being paired with submissive,emotionally inessential and yet forcibly dominated “kimono girls”. Kenner enlists Mariko’said against her reservations to stand in for his squaw, leading to long sweatynights of discomfort as the pair have to pretend to be shacking up, with Marikobeing treated as a pariah by her neighbours as a result, whilst their realattraction bubbles away. So dominant is this psychological obsession that whenMariko is spotted meeting Kenner’s army contact, Capt. Hanson (Brad Dexter),Dawson doesn’t assume she’s there to rat them out, but that she’s got otherguys on the side, and he gives her a good slap to make to make sure she staystrue. It’s like the ‘50s genre equivalent of The Iliad.

Whilst House of Bamboo takes a little too long to compose and entwine itsvarious themes, and doesn’t quite achieve the sheer compulsiveness of Fuller athis greatest, the combustive moments, when they finally come, arrive in a flowof moments of dazzling cinema. The heist on which Kenner is wounded is shot like a blend ofjazz and kabuki dance numbers, the fleeing criminals photographed in a defttracking shot against huge screen-like warehouse doors and twisting inchoreographed flourishes of physicality, leaving behind their smoke bombs thatfill the air with delirious smudges. Dawson has to abort a big heist, that seeshim using a political broadcasting bus as a Trojan Horse, when his mole rushesto warn him that the cops are waiting for them: his assumption that it musthave been the jealous Griff who ratted him out, causes him to march intoGriff’s house and shoot him without warning in his bathtub, blasting holes thatspit water with vividly telegraphed corporeal impact in a moment thatanticipates the milk carton in TheManchurian Candidate (1962) as well possessing, again, a potent homoeroticforce in the image of naked, defenceless Griff writhing as Dawson fills himfull of holes. When Dawson and underling Charlie finally realise Kenner is anagent, they try to set him up for a violent death at the hands of the Tokyo cops, but instead German Expressionism is invokedwhen Charlie’s silhouette is shot at by a cop, rather than Kenner, as was planned. Dawson makes his laststand, evoking both the climaxes of WhiteHeat (1949) and Strangers on a Train(1951), but staged more methodically than those two deliberately hystericalfinales, on a globe-shaped tilt-a-whirl elevated high above the city, as if thestory has slipped its immediate liminal situation, leaving behind the past, andbecomes instead a proto-Space Race movie, looking to where the next phase inhuman aggression will take place. Kenner’s final gunning down of Dawson isunderlined not with pomp but with a distinctive note of the downbeat thatprefigures the forlorn, grim tone of the conclusions of antiheroic ‘70s copmovies like The French Connection (1971) and The Seven-Ups (1974): the“happy” epilogue of Kenner and Mariko walking together is so casually appendedthat it hardly dispels this final note of romantic tragedy. Stack issurprisingly sufficient to his role, managing to capture something of thesullen, truculent aggression Sterling Hayden or Richard Widmark would havebrought to the role as would seem a more natural fit, and Ryan and Mitchell ascustomarily punchy.

Cowboys & Aliens (2011)

2011-12-21T21:38:00.001+11:00

Ingredients for anticipated success: take a director,John Favreau, with a couple of smash hits and proven way of contouring goodactors into flashy blockbuster fare to his credit; two generations of majorleague male movie star, represented by Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford; onefairly talented, drop-dead yowza starlet as required, here in the shape ofOlivia Wilde; a battery of excellent character actors including Clancy Brown,Keith Carradine, Paul Dano, and Sam Rockwell; and a story that crossbreeds westernand science-fiction tropes into a bizarre hootenanny of a steampunk actionflick. What do you have? A wild, dizzying swashbuckler that mashes up somehugely divergent brands of pulp with a strong dose of Hollywood glam andprovides a suitably ridiculous thrill-ride to rake in the dough? Well, no, notexactly. One of the year’s bigger disappointments both financially andaesthetically, Cowboys & Aliensisn’t exactly bad, but isn’t anywhere near as fun and inventive as it ought tobe. Not terribly surprisingly, the film works best when sticking close –perhaps too close – to the western side of the ledger, offering initially afree-range mash-up of Leone, Ford, LastTrain From Gun Hill, Rio Bravo, Broken Lance, and a half-dozen others. It’shard to get away from the feeling that the people who had to actually make thefilm, as opposed to the guys in suits who thought Cowboys & Aliens sounded cool, might have preferred to do thecowboy thing and let the aliens alone.

Craig plays a Man with No Memory, awakeningin the middle of nowhere with a bleeding hole in his side and a strange metalgauntlet on one hand, with no recollection of how he got these, or even who heis. When a trio of obnoxious horsemen come upon him and immediately decide thathe must be an escaped convict whom they can probably claim a reward for, thenameless stranger kicks their asses with silent, stunning aplomb, and moves on.He reaches a small town, which is only sustained by the trade of local cattleking Col. Woodrow Dolarhyde (Ford), who has an obnoxious, trigger-happy bullyof a son, Percy (Dano), causing havoc in the vicinity, persecuting themilquetoast bartender Doc (Rockwell) in particular. The stranger, who is soonidentified thanks to wanted posters as Jake Lonergan, a famous outlaw, receivesaid from the religiose Meacham (Clancy Brown), and then kicks Percy in thescrotum to teach him manners. Percy, enraged, accidentally shoots and wounds adeputy, bringing down the wrath of the Sheriff, Taggart (Carradine). Dolarhyde,already in a rage after some of his cattle and ranch hands are mysteriouslyincinerated by fire from the sky, and first glimpsed about to draw and quarterthe confused, drunk lone survivor, steams into town to demand his son back. Aconfrontation is however forestalled when strange flying machines descend onthe town and snatch away locals, including Taggart, Percy, and Doc’s wife (Anade la Reguera), and Jake’s strange bracelet comes to life, proving to be anenergy weapon that fires in response to mental impulse. He picked it up sometime when he too was an alien captive, but how and when, and whether the story he may have killed a woman is true, remain mysteries to be slowly uncovered.

The film’s dusty, muted, brown andochre-hued cinematography, by Matthew Libatique, evokes less the highTechnicolor of ‘50s Westerns than the mud-and-blood style of the post-‘60svariety, but Cowboys & Aliensclearly reveals a working knowledge of genre classics. This isn’t the firsttime someone’s tried to mate the Western with sci-fi – my mind drifts backpleasantly to not just Back to the FutureIII (1990), but also to the charmingly nutty 1987 flick Timestalkers, in which Klaus Kinski wasa futuristic assassin trying to pervert the future by posing as a gunslinger.There’s little that’s really charming about Cowboys& Aliens, however, and that’s because it never really allows itself theluxury of being properly nutty. Rather, it simply, lazily transfers somealready simple, lazy sci-fi fare, like restaging the least convincing “revoltagainst the alien overlords” scenes in movie history, as provided by Stargate (1994), in a long final tusslewhere mysteriously the alien invaders seem to have only brought one ray gunwith them, and they prove resistant to bullets in some scenes but in others can be brought down by spears and knives. Such dazzling, rampant ignorance ofany realistic sense of physical danger and strategic craft in battle would havemade guys like Raoul Walsh and John Ford curl up on the floor and cry with abottle of JTS Brown. Tension between the characters and their worldviews isshouted but then elided, and the finale sees reunions that ignore what we’vegiven to understand about the way these people have related and behaved.Milking pathos out Dolarhyde losing “real” son Colorado (Adam Beach) and then being reunited withhis biological brat Percy, who’s temporarily amnesiac and therefore momentarily tolerable, Favreau and his scriptwriters seem to have lost sight of any actual point other than hurried, contrived catharsis.

The trouble is an inability to tell thedifference between quoting classic storylines and doing so with any wit. Thestory was technically based on a graphic novel by Scott Mitchell Rosenberg, but, rumour has it, actually only inspired by its cover, and the screenplay was actuallyco-written by no less than five writers, with notorious franchise hacks RobertoOrci and Alex Kurtzman amongst them. Whereas J.J. Abrams mostly escaped thelimitations of the Orci-Kurtzman template with his 2009 Star Trek reboot thanks to his solid grasp of story essentials,Favreau falls entirely prey to their usual derivative,relentlessly pubescent exposition. The first half-hour or so of the filmretains sufficient integrity to be engaging in evoking the Western panoply.Craig has been waiting his whole life to play a leathery bad-ass gunslinger,whether he knows it or not, and perhaps so too has Ford, whose Dolarhydeclearly channels such figures as Charles Bickford’s Henry Terrill from The Big Country (1958). That initialintegrity is however misleading, as the screenplay doesn’t actually set out totell a story, but piles up plot elements and hopes they’ll cohere into a storyat some point. We have Jake’s amnesiac distress and his eventual recollectionof an awkward attempt to leave behind his outlaw past with lady love Alice(Abigail Spencer), doomed when they were captured by the aliens and Alice was killed in anexperiment by an alien Josef Mengele. We’ve got Dolarhyde trailing not onlyCivil War trauma but anti-Indian feeling and filial problems, not only relatingto the disgraceful Percy, but also to the young Native American lad Nat, whom he raised and who is now his foreman, patronised, alienated, yet still yearning to be seen as Dolarhyde's loyal progeny.

Later, as the posse of alien huntersforms, including Doc, who of course can’t shoot a gun but who will later deliver a crack bullet when needed, and Taggart’s grandsonEmmett (Noah Ringer) as well as the more weathered hands, they encounter Jake’sornery band of outlaws, now led by the blowhard Dolan (David O’Hara), andan Apache tribe, led by the gimlet-eyed Black Knife (Raoul Trujillo), whospends the requisite amount of time swapping impolite glances with Dolarhyde.And we’ve got Wilde as the mysterious Ella Swenson, first seen lurking in thebackdrop, amusingly clad in bright floral skirt with black sidearm danglinglike a cancerous polyp at her hip. Much like her apparel, Ella remains, inspite of Wilde’s fair tilt at making her work, a confused and ungainly hybrid,posed as tough-gal love-interest for Jake, but who also harbours a peculiarsecret, which comes out after some flagrantly clumsy story twists, in which sheproves to be an alien herself, albeit one of a different variety to the brutishinvaders. She's looking to get even after they wiped out her race as well as help the humans,so she’s appropriated a local body. Unfortunately, the film not only neverexplains how she got here, how she ended up in the body she has, and why shedoesn’t have any kind of technical or even particularly good tactical know-howto lend to the fight against the attackers. It’s hard to get away from afeeling that the writers decided to make her an alien so they wouldn’t have totry and write a love scene for her and Craig, because, you know, girls andkissing are icky. I'm not sure if the sight of Ella crawling out of a river with make-up still perfect is a deliberate touch designed to hint at her false guise or an old-fashioned bit of Hollywood glossy artificiality.

The film’s basic conceit is to offer inthe aliens merely more fearsome, strange versions of the usual Western badguys: they’re rustlers, except they’re lassoing humans and not cattle, andthey’re evil prospectors after gold at all costs, because for them it’s just asscarce and attractive as to us, for reasons not at all investigated. It’s not sucha bad idea if one wanted to play Cowboys& Aliens as a bit of a shaggy dog joke, but rather it plays out with adismayingly straight face even when offering tired clichés and lumbering actionscenes. The aliens in look and demeanor call to mind the shrimp-likeextra-terrestrial proles of District 9 (2009), and like them seem less sophisticated than one might initially assumeabout outer space adventurers. This similarity however simply underlines thefilm’s basic lack of imagination. Nor can the film extract substance out of theconfluence of alien and the atavistic when Ella is reborn from the fires of theApache camp, although Favreau stages it with flashes of colour and strangeness(although he’s busier playing games in trying to keep a family audience whilstteasing with the chance of seeing Wilde’s backside), and the subsequentsequence in which she helps restore Jake’s memory with Indian mysticism andpeyote. One image harkens to what a more inspired tilt at the same materialmight have achieved, that of a paddle steamer dumped unceremoniously in themiddle of a vast prairie, and with the posse bunking down for the night withinits broken fineries. Still, for all its laziness, Cowboys & Aliens holds the attention because of the unshakeableprofessionalism of the cast and crew. The film works well enough on a basic, pulp programmer level, and the notion of alien Ella providing an interlocutor in open range race war, whilst trying avenge one that happened beyond the stars, doesn't entirely waste the potential substance of this theme. The climactic moments, likeJake and Dolarhyde doing battle with the evil alien surgeon, and Ella cradlingthe explosive that will obliterate the alien ship like a precious child - mirroring the image of Dolarhyde holding Nat as a grieving father with her image as an exterminating mother - as sheblissfully reaches her own extinction and that of her enemy, therefore retain a charge ofbellicose intensity blended with measured emotional impact. Craig’s performance holds up under difficult circumstances, as does, surprisingly enough, Ford’s, giving a little credence tohopes sparked by Indiana Jones and theKingdom of the Crystal Skull that he might be finding his late-career wind,although he still can’t rise to anything like the level he might have if he hadplayed Jake, circa 1984.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)

2011-12-10T21:13:00.001+11:00

Herethere be spoilers

As a proclaimed aficionado of both Johnle Carre’s 1972 novel and the original mini-series adaptation, I approachedthis new film version of Tinker TailorSoldier Spy with both a genuine enthusiasm and a dose of salts. I knew very wellthat many of the things I singularly love about John Irvin’s 1979 TV version would probably not make the cut for a feature film version, and tried toprepare myself for that, and hope for a good, hard nugget of drizzle-cloakedspy suspense. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spywas no small challenge to turn into a feature film with its dense web ofmotives and jargon underlying an already knotty, dark, surprisingly tragicportrait of Cold War espionage. And the fact that, whilst it’s certainly a spy thriller, it’s also a deeply eccentric one, a study in situational dynamics,political decay, and most intimately, of character expressed through a prism ofentangled bureaucracy and physical, emotional, and moral danger. And yet I wasstill completely unprepared for this barely competent, eviscerated, essentially factotum adaptation of a well-proven hit, which hasbeen drawing obscenely good reviews from all quarters recently. I suppose most of thatcan be laid at the door of the innate intelligence of Le Carre’s original tale,which Alfredson’s version does its best to leech away but still occasionallyshines through, the endless array of high-class Brit actors in the cast, andlingering affection for Alfredson’s overrated, sluggish, but interesting Let the Right One In (2008). But almostevery single aesthetic decision here, from Alfredson’s endlessly, althoughvirtually never effectively, mobile camera, to Alberto Yglesias’ godawfulpseudo-jazz music score, made me finally want to throttle the creative team ofthis film.

The story essentials are the same:sometime in the mid ‘70s, aging spymaster George Smiley (Gary Oldman) is calledin, one year after getting the boot from MI6’s central command, dubbed “TheCircus”, to investigate when supposedly rogue agent Ricki Tarr (Tom Hardy)makes contact with The Circus’ bureaucrat overlord Oliver Lacon (SimonMcBurney) and raises the spectre of their being possibly a Soviet mole in theranks. Smiley studies the circumstances of Tarr’s forced exile, and the eventswhich originally resulted in his own sacking, along with The Circus’ old bossControl (John Hurt), who subsequently died. Control had dispatched one of hismost trusted men, Jim Prideaux (Mark Strong), on a mission to

Hungary

in ahopeful attempt to get information on the mole that turned into a disaster. NowSmiley has to dig into this past whilst not alerting The Circus’ new regime,headed by Percy Alleline (Toby Jones) and backed up by a cadre including glibgay-blade Bill Haydon (Colin Firth), shifty Hungarian Toby Esterhase (DavidDencik), and bland Roy Bland (Ciaran Hinds), who have become extremelydefensive about their new source of information deep in Soviet circles. Smileybegins to realise that this source is actually a carefully constructed plot ofhis Soviet opposite dubbed Karla, having manoeuvred incompetents into highpositions in The Circus around his own double agent.

The first twenty-odd minutes are theworst, as Alfredson rushes to condense incidents that don’t even take place inthe book into a bite-sized whirl of exposition. The new version of the incidentthat sees Prideaux shot and captured in Eastern Europe, changed from ruralCzechoslovakia to Hungary apparently to get in some scenes in a nicely touristboard-friendly corner of Budapest, is not one-fifteenth as eerie as the sequencein Irvin’s. Alfredson traipses in with the first of many pieces of violent hypehe’ll employ, having a woman with a baby get accidentally shot as the commieagents try to capture Prideaux, in trying to sex up a tale that was originallydistinguished by its thorough refusal to indulge the usual spy thriller tropesand stunts. Much of the problem lies in the adaptation, which perversely triesto leave as much of the original’s dense story intact as possible, whilsthacking away the things that count on the human level. For some reason,Alfredson and screenwriters Bridget O'Connor and Peter Straughan shift thesignificant meeting Smiley has with Tarr from the outset, where Tarr’s personaltestimony and recounted experience forces Lacon into action, to the middle, sothat the very reason why Smiley’s investigation is enabled is renderedbewilderingly obscure. Alfredson handles the first glimpses Tarr has of Irina(Svetlana Khodchenkova), the Russian agent and wife to a blowhard Soviet bigwigwhom Tarr investigated in Istanbuland who first alerted him to the mole’s presence, with an initial adroitness.He plays on his capacity, as displayed in LetThe Right One In, to evoke a voyeur’s vantage of forbidden insight, as Tarr, doingsurveillance on the Russians, sees Irina being abused by her husband after shefinds him screwing another woman, from the privileged distance of his lookout. But Alfredson then fumbles the glimpses of their affair sobadly, including an excruciatingly badly shot sex scene and hollowed-outcharacterisations, that I began to wonder if I would make it to the end of thefilm at all. Tarr here is allowed to retain his faintly romantic dignity as alow-rent James Bond, a privilege Le Carre originally denied him in making itclear Tarr was a self-deluding bigamist. Irina’s repressed religious urges arelikewise sidestepped: here she’s just a standard issue femme fatale.

Tarr and Irina aren’t the onlycharacters left stripped of the bitterly realistic inner lives Le Carre triedto give them, as Oldman’s Smiley here has no depth left at all, stalkingthrough the proceedings as a dried-up remnant trailing his sexual betrayal byhis wife Ann (here not seen except as a shadowy symbolic figure, itself apreciously stupid touch) and a low-key disillusion which only shows throughwhen he narrates the story of his meeting with Karla. That scene subtlydistorts the equivalent in the book and series, as Alfredson, Oldman, and thescreenwriters strain to make it their commentary on the story, loading theline “We’ve both spent our lives studying the flaw’s in each-other’s systems”with a macrocosmic meaning, as if to make up for excising just about all therest of the story’s political commentary (much of which was inevitably datedand yet might still have been tweaked for our own time when so many of us areagain angry at our political and economic systems). Alfredson avoids a flashback here, substituting instead the directorial equivalentof putting his finger to his lips and whispering, “Shhh, everybody, Gary’sfinally going to act now,” as Oldman begins to address the chair opposite him as if it's filled by the shade of his nemesis. Another interesting thing is that although the film, and this scene specifically, evokes Le Carre's fearful point that there was hardly any difference between West and East anymore, throughout the film all of the malevolent ultra-violence is being committed by safely anonymous villains from the Other Side. This isn’t even to touch on how denuded and shallowthe film’s portrait of Haydon, eventually revealed as mole and traitor, is:gone is his beautiful prison cell crack-up and his barely choate politicalmumblings, instead substituting merely the line, “I’ve made my mark,” reducing him to a one-dimensional egotist and nicely excusing the audience from having to think about his reasons fordisloyalty. The film rather crassly makes Smiley’s Man Friday Peter Guillam(Benedict Cumberbatch) gay, seen stowing away his live-in lover for theduration of investigations, a touch that doesn’t loan the film anything exceptthe air of a phony grasp at relevance. Especially considering how it sticks with onlyhinting at the real tragic gay aspect of Le Carre’s book – the long-agorelationship of Prideaux and Haydon that turned into a famous professionalpartnership, underlying the rage of betrayal that drives Prideaux to finallytrack down and kill Haydon.

The alterations to the story for thesake of bringing in the usual violent hype also suck away much of the innersense of the plot. Maybe I could buy the Russians making it look like Tarr hadkilled his Istanbul liaison Thesinger (Philip Martin Brown) to bolster theappearance he’d become a traitor, but the act of massacring their own Istanbulteam is so senseless as to beggar description: it would be nigh impossible forthe Soviets to hide such a slaughter, it would be impossible to blame on Tarr,and the whole event as portrayed here would have set the nerves of everysecurity and police service in a 10,000 mile radius vibrating with interest asto what went down. The worst is still to come: when Smiley interviews Prideaux,he tells of seeing Irina gunned down before him by one of Karla’s goons whilsthe was interrogation, with the spoke message, “Tell Alleline what your saw!”Now, given that all of the story’s intricate mechanics demand that Alleline inno way be alerted to the wheels within wheels of Karla’s plot, this scene makesno sense whatsoever: it’s there simply so Alfredson can sneak a bit of shockinggore in there. The violence isn't just poorly thought-through and opportunistic, though: it actually spoils the neo-Kafkaesque qualities of the world Le Carre created, where people could disappear into the maws of totalitarianism and other global village sinkholes, to be heard from again only as fragments of information, hoping one day some bureaucratic pencil-pusher might write your epitaph. The film is simultaneously weirdly unspecific about that actualcost of the mole’s actions and the personal stakes in catching him – forinstance, the fact Guillam had a whole team of men killed thanks to him. Mostof the film’s better moments come in flashbacks, where Alfredson finds somelooseness, but some inventions, like the Circus Christmas party he keeps returning tofor vignettes revealing aspects of the crew’s former camaraderie, seem contrived and, especially in the case of Hurt’s Control, badly distorting, asControl is supposed to be a deeply intellectual, natural recluse who wouldn’thave had anything to do with such a wingding.

All of these aggravations might not havebe bothered me so much if Alfredson’s direction had not begun to get on mynerves right from the start. Alfredson peppers his scenes with tracking shotsand oblique framings that refuse to congeal into a genuine sense of paranoidstyle or poetic alienation, and a lack of a clear editing rhythm to give thefilm drive. Little is given any time to sink in and gain weight. The film’sproduction team has clearly put a hell of lot of effort and detail intorecreating the grime and seaminess of aspects of the ‘70s English setting, andyet even there the film feels weirdly clumsy and anonymous, avoiding some ofthe non-germane yet grounding casual detail in portraying a London where snottyclubs and bookstores that knew your address exist alongside seamy hotels andcrummy repair shops. This Tinker Tailoris in love with its own pseudo-grittiness painted over in lovingly texturedterms by cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema, so precious compared to theno-nonsense realism and sodden atmospherics of Martin Ritt’s version of The Spy Who Came In From The Cold(1964). Almost all of the dry quips and asides have been surgically removed,leaving the film determinedly humourless, and if you do, like me, know thestory well, there’s little left in the film to derive any pleasure from.Performances do help, although the cast isn’t used very well, good British actors all in a row like this is the upmarket equivalent of a Harry Potter film; Hurt,Cumberbatch, and Hardy are all at the top of their game, working wonders withlittle, Strong invests Prideaux with an intelligent pathos, and Kathy Burke hasa splendid few minutes as Connie Sachs, the former Circus archivist with a dashof sexual perversity to leaven her deeply geeky brilliance. But such good workcouldn’t make up for the film’s lack of focus and pandering reflexes. Finally Iwas so bored and frustrated by this version that whilst the miniseries is sixhours long, this one felt twice as long. Still, whilst my artistic quarrelswith Alfredson and the film in general are not minor, nonetheless in part I’mwilling to concede that for neophytes there’s enough of the story left intactto weave a spell. But what I love about the material is almost entirely missingand the integrity and individuality of the story and its meaning are badlycorroded.

The Debt (2011)

2011-11-29T16:39:00.001+11:00

This remake of a 2008 Israeli film byJohn Madden is a peculiar and initially compelling blend of heavy duty dramaticmaterial filtered through Frederick Forsyth-esque thriller tropes. Madden, thebland auteur of such kitsch as Shakespearein Love (1997) and Captain Corelli’sMandolin (2001), is on the face of it an odd choice to try and compoundsuch elements, but Madden's prestigious, TV and theater-burnished aura of class was probably sought because The Debt requires a strong and dexterous dramatic touch as well as a solid craftsman, encompassingas it does Holocaust angst, generational responsibility, and the moral phthisisengendered by living with lies, self-betrayal, and sexual and emotionaljealousy. The Debt depicts a team ofthree Mossad agents who have been lionised for decades for tracking down andkilling Dieter Vogel (Jesper Christensen), a notorious Josef Mengele-typeGerman war criminal, whom they discovered working as a gynaecologist in EastBerlin. Opening in the mid-‘90s, it depicts the three heroes in haggard latemiddle age. Rachel Singer (Helen Mirren) is being feted once again because herdaughter Sarah’s (Romi Aboulafia) book about the mission has become a hit. Herex-husband Stephen Gold (Tom Wilkinson) is still a Mossad bigwig but confinedto a wheelchair after a car bombing. He pays a call to the third member of theold team, David Peretz (Ciarán Hinds), or, rather, has his young goons come tofetch him, but David steps in front of a truck rather than talk with Stephen.It’s clear that something has haunted all three heroes for a long time, leavingthem even more gnarled and variously battle-scarred than they should be, butjust what can only be explicated through a long flashback to the originalmission, where Rachel, Stephen, and David are played by Jessica Chastain,Martin Csokas, and Sam Worthington.

This central movementof period action is by far and away the most interesting portion of The Debt, even if it essentially riffson some very familiar ideas. Chastain’s Rachel acts as a patient to get closeto Vogel, and she and her partners kidnap him, after she pumps him full of adrug to make it look like he’s having a heart attack. There follows a solidpiece of plain suspense-mongering as the trio try to get Vogel out of EastBerlin by sneaking him aboard a train at one of the points where the WestBerlin rail system overlaps the Berlin Wall. But the film’s most memorable scenes comeaptly when Rachel must prostrate herself before Vogel and undergo examinationby him. This coldly phobic, maliciously funny exploitation of the notion ofhaving a Nazi pervert gaze at your lady parts, a twist on the Marathon Man’s famous “is it safe?”scene, seems wittier and darker than the movie really deserves (it comes right out of the original), especially whenvaginal anxiety gives way to vaginadentata (and prefiguring the way Rachel condenses post-Holocaust Jewish responsible in vividly maternal terms), as prone vulnerable body ofwoman playing patient/victim suddenly becoming lethally physical avenger, asChastain pulls off a move worthy of a Hong Kong movie heroine, catching Vogelbetween her legs and jabbing him in the neck with a syringe. Once the team is forcedto hide Vogel in their safehouse until Stephen can arrange some way ofsmuggling him out, The Debt boilsdown for a time into to a Pinter-esque drama pitting a captive who isnonetheless a malignant expert in head-fucking, against righteous avengers whosehang-ups and youthful weaknesses conspire to corrode their effectiveness.

TheDebt does actually takeon some fascinating and rarely treated notions: what if we take on a mission ofgreat import, with a sense of purpose and right on our side, and yet weourselves are inadequate to the task? Is the appearance of justice being donereally the same, or at least a sufficient substitute, to its actually beingachieved? The team screwed up badly, we learn, as Vogel’s psychological tauntsfinally infuriated David, whose brooding, obsessive dedication to the missionproved to have dangerously febrile underpinnings, and this in turn gave Vogel achance to escape. The shamed and sullen trio decide to tell a false story aboutRachel killed Vogel as he ran off, the same story they’re telling thirty yearslater. But the publicity of Sarah’s daughter’s book seems to have stirred Vogelin his hiding place in a Ukrainian nursing home, causing Stephen to insistRachel go after him and settle the account once and for all. Chastain’sexcellent performance confirms the hints of The Tree of Life (2011) that she’s a star to watch in sustaining a believablecharacterisation as Rachel, intensely vulnerable and yet able to muster resolvesuperior to those around her when the going gets tough. Although she and Mirrendon’t really look much alike, the older actress does a good job transposing andshading her enjoyably unlikely aging assassin role from RED (2010), to extendthe coherent characterisation of Rachel as someone whose fighting gumptionrests uneasily alongside her emotional vulnerability. To a lesser extent,Chastain’s Antipodean co-stars likewise sustain believability, whereas both Hindsand Wilkinson never quite get to be more than respectable actors filling out the cast. But the film beginsto conspire against them all fairly early, as an utterly superfluous and badly drawnromantic triangle develops between the team: David’s reticence keeps him fromresponding to Rachel’s obvious attraction, so Stephen is able to seduce her,getting her pregnant, and whilst Rachel continues to prefer David, she willeventually marry Stephen for her daughter’s sake in a marriage that provescalamitous with such misaligned attractions weighed on top of an alreadypalpable guilt. The notion of watching three official heroes disintegratepsychologically and emotionally could have yielded a fascinating coda.

Unfortunately, and all too predictably,once The Debt moves on from itsflavourful period action into ground where it ought to deepen and portray willto action petering out in disillusionment and frustration, a la Spielberg’smuch superior (and obvious influence) Munich(2005), Madden’s film disintegrates entirely in a welter of weak soap operaticflashbacks and a ludicrous climax, as the filmmakers try to have theirmoralistic cake and eat it too. Perhaps co-producer and screenwriter MathewVaughn (who adapted the original screenplay along with regular writing partnerJane Goldman and Peter Straughan) might have beaten this film into shape if he had directed it, but as it stands he bears part of the blame for the overloaded script. Madden’s lacks as both artist and technician show through here, as theportrayals of Rachel, David, and Stephen post-mission are not given anysufficient space to develop their theoretical guilt and mental fatigue, theirhaunted ménage a trois never developsbeyond the stage of bestseller window dressing, and after plodding through somebog-ordinary spy business, an interesting moral conundrum is set up only to bethrust aside with a wrap-up so painfully neat it might as well have a red bowon it. Rachel approaches the elderly Vogel in the nursing home with lethalinjection in hand, turning the tables of helpless victim and ruthless assassinmediated through inescapable historical duties – except of course the potentialvictim isn’t really Vogel, who actually lurks upstairs, schlepped in old agemake-up but still robust enough to give Rachel a suitably gruelling fair fightwith geriatric wrestling and scissor wounds that serve as neat stigmata forRachel as penitent and holy avenger. Even if the film’s tone hadn’t turned sofacetious by this stage, it would be hard to take this sub-The Boys From Brazil climax seriously. Much like its characterssell themselves out for the sake of not being seen to fail, The Debt sells itself out for the sakeof trying to be a hit and a serious movie all at once.

When Eight Bells Toll (1971)

2011-11-17T18:25:00.001+11:00

Before The Silence of the Lambs (1991) finally made him a household name,Anthony Hopkins had built a formidable reputation as a stage actor, but he hadalso been hovering in the film world since his eye-catching feature debut inthe late 1960s with The Lion in Winter.This indecisive career was seen as hurting his standing in both mediums earlyin the ‘80s: “And whatever happened to Anthony Hopkins?” film and theatrecritic John Walker asked in 1982, fearing he would fall into the same traps asthe likes of Richard Burton and Peter O’Toole but without ever having matchedtheir meteoric phases. For over twenty years Hopkins often seemed on the verge of becominga major screen star, after the likes of 1969’s John Le Carre adaptation The Looking Glass War, and hisimpressive turn opposite John Hurt in TheElephant Man (1980). Hopkins’cerebral, dour, aggressive persona as an actor however limited him as a romanticlead. His obvious intelligence and emotionally discursive style matched theimpression he gave of his seeing right through any lesser material sent hisway, but whereas that’s part of his charm as an older ham, as he turned hisattention towards grotesques and parts of showy gravitas, it dimmed his starwattage back then. Nonetheless he was striking in such odd roles like thevexed, ill-shaven police detective with a family at risk in Juggernaut (1974), and When Eight Bells Toll, the closestanyone will come to seeing Hopkinsplay James Bond. When Eight Bells Tollis in fact an Alistair Maclean adaptation, the author himself writing thescreenplay, from one of his novels which often leaned into Fleming-esqueterritory, although Maclean’s heroes and action each tend as usual to be muchless glamorous.

Hopkins plays Philip Calvert, a British Navyaction man retrieved from service in the Mediterraneanby his old pal Roy Hunslett (Corin Redgrave), an Intelligence officer, to helporganise an investigation into a series of disappearances of ships carryingbullion off the Scottish coast. Calvert makes a plan to track a potentialtarget ship, and this is accepted by Hunslett’s globular snob of a boss, SirArthur Arnford-Jones (Robert Morley), or “Uncle Arthur”, but he also insiststhey use two more familiar and house-trained agents. When Calvert boards the ship in an inlet off thesmall town of Torbay,he finds this pair have been killed, and Calvert only escapes a party of gun-toting heavies aboard by the skin of his teeth. Calvert and Hunslett soon begin todelve into a conspiracy that involves the townsfolk, who are variously employedor blackmailed into aiding with the ship hijackings, including local lairdKirkside (Tom Chatto) and his daughter Sue (Wendy Allnutt). The notion of atown conspiring to wreck ships is encrusted in British pulp folklore, inspiringthe likes of Du Maurier’s Jamaica Inn,but here it’s played in modern dress. The mastermind of the villainy seems tobe magnate Sir Anthony Skouras (Jack Hawkins, after throat surgery had spoilthis distinctive voice, dubbed by Charles Gray), who hovers off the coast in hisyacht with his icy wife Charlotte (Nathalie Delon) and suspiciously bossyguests MacCallum (Derek Bond) and Lavorski (Ferdy Mayne). Calvert is beaten upby local brawlers, and the motor yacht he and Hunslett use as their base of operationsunder their cover as marine biologists is searched by goons pretending to becustoms men, including chief henchman Quinn (Oliver MacGreevy, a hulking baldIrish actor perhaps most recognisable from TheIpcress File, 1965).

Calvert resists returning to London when Uncle Arthurwants to pull the plug on the operation, and instead commandeers the helicoptersent to pick him up and its pilot (Maurice Roëves) to search for potentialhiding places for the stolen ships. Machine-gun wielding villains shoot at thehelicopter, killing the pilot and causing the craft to fall from the sky, smashapart on the coastal rocks, and slip into the sea with Calvert trapped within.He manages to sustain himself with emergency breathing apparatus until thegoons go away. This is a gripping, visually impressive, well-staged actionscene that’s a cool reminder of what those looked like long before fanciereffects and CGI entered the fray. Another dynamic action scene comes later, whenCalvert realises that the villains are sinking the ships off the coast andextracting the gold submerged, and so he ventures out to dive on a wreck andfinishes up battling Quinn in a hardhat diving suit, bad guy trying to roasthero with an underwater welding torch. A great part of the pleasure of When Eight Bells Toll is in this gritty,three-dimensional quality permeating its production and thrills and spills, forcing itsactors to flounder in the frigid northern waters and turn blue in arctic windswhilst they’re pretending to punch and shoot each other. As such it belongsmore to the sub-strata of distinctly British, realistic action movies datingback to ‘50s flicks like Sea Fury(1958), in spite of the Bond-era affectations, which are most sadly signpostedby a tediously declarative by Walter Stott, who simply reminds me of how goodJohn Barry was at this sort of thing.

Peter Ibbetson’s widescreen photographymakes the most of the innately dramatic location photography around theScottish and Irish coastlines, generating a sweeping, primal backdrop for thegenre shenanigans that renders them incrementally more substantial andaffecting, until it starts to look a little like Ryan’s Daughter with more action, especially thanks to directorEtienne Perier’s enriching eye for mise-en-scene.Rather than the glitzy polish of the era’s spy films, When Eight Bells Toll, whilst hardly straining to be lifelike orantiheroic, possesses a sense of physical extremes and paranoid danger –particularly in the way the village’s oppressive atmosphere redolent of The Prisoner TV series – which lend itan immediate and entertaining kind of force. Perier had gone to Hollywood soonafter his start in French cinema to make the little-remembered Bridge to the Sun (1961) and thensettled into a peculiar peripatetic career: after this film he made theengaging, if over-ambitious, neo-pulp epic Zeppelin(1972). The chilly, blasted landscapes make a fine setting for Hopkins’ terse, unromantic,ultra-professional Calvert. Wearing his class resentment on his sleeve andchafing at Uncle Arthur’s unrefined snobbery, Calvert is a tightly wound packageof punitive anger, professional zeal, and firm yet peculiar, personal morality, aneminently human yet dogged protagonist. It’s easy to admit that another major pleasure of the film is in thesight of Hopkins getting into fisticuffs and gun-fights, squeeze into a wetsuit,plug a guy with a crossbow, and do all the things expected of an action hero (although he obviously needed a stuntman much more than, say, Sean Connery),whilst refusing to buff himself into a smoothly palatable screen persona.

The villains try to kill Calvert repeatedly, and succeed in killing Hunslett, last seen being chased down in a dinghy by the henchmen and turning up finally hooked onto the anchor chain of the yacht. This is one of the film's best moments, as Hunslett’s body is slowly hauled from the dark deep by Calvert, who had hoped hewas only being kept prisoner, like several other friends and loved-ones of thelocals being pressed into aiding the hijackers. Perier manages to invest these images with a peculiar aesthetic and dramatic darkness, a quality whichinfects much of the rest of the film. Calvert gets even, ramming a boat full ofhenchmen and shooting them as they struggle in the water with a cold variety ofreckoning, and he sets about pounding the enemy organisation into the ground. Hegets some unexpected help in the form of Uncle Arthur, who, after unwillinglyinvestigating some of Calvert’s leads, realises what they’re up against andcomes north to check up, taking Hunslett’s place in one of the stranger actionmovie partnerships ever: Morley’s bluff, corpulent charm squarely offsetsHopkins’ grim wit. A third member is added to the team when Charlotte swimsover from Skouras’ yacht and claims to be escaping his regime, engaging in adistrustful flirtation with Calvert before proving to be a mole. Romance wasnever MacLean or Hopkins’ strong suit, and the sub-plot of Charlotte is analmost complete bust, alas, in spite of casting the comely Mrs Alain Delon.Nathalie maintains that glazed, louche-eyed elegance of too many Francophonicstarlets of the era where the part seems to need a more playful, jaggedlycharismatic actress. The filmmakers never seem to quite decide whetherCharlotte is supposed to be a likeable bad girl or a straight femme fatale, andthe distinction never gains much importance either way, so it all provides asingular drag on the otherwise admirably sturdy proceedings. The finalscene, where Calvert lets her go even though she’s proven herself duplicitous,is more than slightly bewildering, only coherent in that it suits Calvert’sslightly subversive sense of justice, happy to redistribute some wealth longafter he’s made it plain he doesn’t really care what happens to rich people’sbullion.

Much more entertaining, if far morebrief, is Hopkins’short partnership with the aptly Celtic-hued Allnutt’s Sue. When he breaks intothe Kirkside’s clifftop castle, being used as the base of operations by thecriminals, and needing to extract the hostages from the castle dungeon, Calvertgets Sue to momentarily distract a guard (Del Henney): she strokes the guard’srifle with phallic meaning and asks, “Is it loaded?” Once Calvert has disposedof the guard, he growls in wry disbelief, “‘Is it loaded?’...You must learnmore than deerstalking in the highlands.” Such tongue-in-cheek flavouring runsthrough the film as a whole, but thankfully it mostly retains a steady cooluntil that uncertain final scene. Hopkins gets most of the best lines, tossedabout with dry aplomb, describing Skouras’ yacht as “like Sotheby’s afloat”and, answering Redgrave’s enquiry about how he came to be dusty and dishevelledafter in fact being beaten up by bad guys, “I happened to bump into this wildGypsy girl in the heather, that’s all.” Skouras finally turns out only to beanother dupe, being controlled by Lavorski and MacCullum, whom Skouras begsCalvert to chase down and reveals his real identity: “Lord Charnley?...OfLloyds’?” Calvert asks in mild perturbation, “My god, there’s nothing sacred isthere?” Whilst its flaws stick out squarely, When Eight Bells Toll nonetheless deserves a better reputation,especially compared to some of the dismayingly over-rated ‘70s Bond films, andit made for one of the more surprisingly blissful ninety minutes or so ofrecent viewing I’ve had.

The Swarm (1978)

2011-11-11T16:37:00.001+11:00

The movie business can be a mistress soharsh it makes the sea look like a dewy Manga schoolgirl. Submitting for yourinspection the case of one Irwin Allen, producer, who had started off in themid-’50s with would-be pedagogic fare like his semi-documentary The Animal World (1956) and theoverblown selection of historical skits called The Story of Mankind (1957). With that second movie he laid down atemplate he would revive much later, that of jamming whatever has-been movieactors with even a remnant after-glow of fame he could tempt out of the BrownDerby’s bar with a large pay-check into a small space and calling it anall-star cast. In the ‘60s Allen seemed intent on becoming the second-tierGeorge Pal before he hit the phase of his career he’s most famous for, that of“the master of disaster”, taking up the ball first put in play by Airport (1970), and making his cheesybut entertaining hits The PoseidonAdventure (1972) and The ToweringInferno (1974), movies which did the whole grandiose production deal right.But they also summarised something distressingly cynical about the early ‘70scinema zeitgeist, and spawned a distinctive genre which employed what was leftof old Hollywood’s esprit d’corps. That remnant was fighting a rear-guard action after the dizziness of the ‘60s and the invasionof all those long-haired young east coast freaks, but only able to offer up inreturn all its best blow-dried ingénues, fed up with losing parts to hipper Method-schooled weirdos, andtorpid over-the-hill heroes of yesteryear, as sacrificial lambs to be drowned,mutilated, crushed, or however dispatched after a regulation amount of fashionspread lounging and posing had been dispensed with. Mark Robson’s Earthquake (1974) ushered in the moredebased version of Allen’s template where the supposedly mighty productionvalues are in fact riddled with blue-screen work and set construction so flimsyit starts to feel like a high schooler’s pop-art pastiche. It is, as mycolleague Bill Ryan once put it, a bit like watching Robson and the film worldhe represented, the survivors of the studio system, throw up his hands and say,“I don’t care anymore.”

Allen immediately set about emptying allthe water from the shallow well he had dug with a proliferation of TV movies,and then The Swarm, which probablylooked like a sure thing, combining the already-familiar disaster flickrefrains with the animal attack motif recently turned into box office gold by Jaws (1975), which everyone was tryingto get their piece of, with dashes of TheAndromeda Strain’s (1970) procedural plotting, and the uneasy blend ofcynicism for, and fetishism of, military-industrial infrastructure, as seen in somany large-budget ‘70s films. In short, The Swarm is a compendium of recentlysuccessful movie tropes, and like most such obvious chimeras, the result was acolossal bomb. And it damn well deserved to be. The disaster movie’s official comeuppance with Airplane!(1980), which is perhaps now better remembered than most of the movies thatinspired it, was still a couple of years away, but Allen’s film plays asunintentional prequel, with hapless extras being shaken about inside sets thatlook glued together, limp stunts, and absurd special effects. The latter were providedby L. B. Abbott, an old Hollywood soldier whose work simply never belonged inthe same class as Ray Harryhausen’s or Douglas Trumbull’s, and yet who managed to hold on doggedly as 20th Century Fox's go-to guy for fantastic spectacle. One of Allen’s majormistakes was that, after he had successfully managed to brand his name, he madea play for full auteur status, taking over directing duties. Poseidon and Inferno had been wrangled into shape by battle-scarred Brit vetsRonald Neame and John Guillerman, men who could possibly have squeezed an ounce of dramatic credibility out of Ronald McDonald. The absence of a real director behind thelens is soon obvious, in the complete incapacity of the early scenes to set upany sort of believable tension or sense of menace, as a military team led byMaj. Baker (Bradford Dillman) penetrate an ICBM bunker in rural Texas. All the staff aredead, from an attack by huge swarms of killer bees, except for a small number ofbite victims and their attending doctor, Helena (Katharine Ross), who sealed themselvesoff in a ward. Also lurking around the base is entomologist Dr. Bradford Crane(Michael Caine), and how he came to be on the base and aware of the threat ofthe bees is set up as a question that needs to be answered, for thesatisfaction of both Air Force General Slater (Richard Widmark) andthe audience, but it gets lost in the shuffle.

Instead, therefore, of commencing withnotes of lurking and erupting threat, Allen charges straight into what ought tobe the middle act when the threat is recognised and the response prepared. Thefilm’s first moment of “horror” comes with an appropriate moment of placidityturning to nightmare, in which a picnicking family is attacked and only theadolescent son, Paul Durant (Christian Juttner), survives by locking himself inthe family car. But this comes when the story is clearly laid out, and the beeshave already been seen as a mass of unconvincing dots swirling about Widmark’shelicopters and causing them to crash. This signals Allen obviously learntnothing from Jaws. Not only does thisscene evoke no horror, because the bees simply mass on the bodies of the actorswho lie prone, clearly having been smeared with something by the insectwranglers, without any apparent physical damage, but because Allen, as he willdo throughout, uses hammy slow-motion to hype the bee deaths. The Swarm employs a curiously schismaticapproach, with overtly mean stunts like killing off a yard full ofschoolkids, and then half of the cast in a train wreck, and yet there’s barelyany gore, with virtually no convincing sense of physical danger and agony. Thefilm sets up a half-hearted variation on the tension betweenthe scientific and military approaches to the crisis, with Slater characterisedas a fearsome hard-ass who baulks when Crane is placed in charge of thesituation, thanks to his White House connections and history of playing BillyMitchell about a bug assault. Slater has to sit about while Crane does hippynancy-boy things like research and investigation when they could be doing somegood, solid bombing and gassing, as Widmark’s trademark growling sarcasm getsits 3,754th workout, and Crane whips Slater into line with Caine’s equivalentuse of his patented rising tirade.

After about an hour Caine’s apparentapproach to fighting the bees by wearing turtleneck skivvies and jackets whilstaffecting a raffish professional cool proves ineffective, so they finally moveon to trying to poison them with pellets developed by Dr. Hubbard (Richard Chamberlain),who also brings his awesome beard power into the fray. Henry Fonda also joinsthe team as Dr. Krim, an immunologist assigned to develop an anti-toxin for thebee stings, which are automatically fatal with more than one sting. Paul’sdetermination to get revenge for his parents sees him sneak out of hospitaland, along with two fellow scallywags, tosses Molotov cocktails at one of thebee swarms’ nest. This just pisses them off, and they converge on the adjacenttown of Marysvilleand create havoc. One major sub-plot of the details the triangular romance ofMarysville’s school principal Maureen (Olivia de Havilland), town’s mayor andchildhood friend Clarence (Fred MacMurray), and retired engineer from Houston,Felix (Ben Armstrong). A bit sticky and essentially fruitless, nonetheless Allenseems to have some real affection for this geriatric ménage a trois, as the two old bachelors offer the long-ago beautyqueen bunches of flowers and the three of them end up taking the evacuationtrain together out of town – well if the kids are doing the threesome thing,why not the older folks? But Allen’s lack of wit reasserts itself as all threedie in a train wreck that counts as one of the most inept set-pieces in moviehistory, from the engineers in their pasteboard cabin swatting at a face-fullof popcorn standing in for bees, to the film’s one noticeable African-Americanactor having other extras pile on top of him. The elderly actors are tossedabout as if the train carriage is in a bad storm at sea rather than tumbling down a mountain side, before stunt people in their costumes get tossed out thewindows. It’s a sequence that shows off both Allen’s directorial incompetenceand confirms that all sentiment has become mere grist for the mill, lacking thepathos of the similarly tragic Fred Astaire-Jennifer Jones romance in The Towering Inferno: none of thesecharacters are ever mentioned again.

One interesting, if hardly well-fulfilled,aspect of The Swarm is that it statessomething more implicit in the other ‘70s disaster movies: the notion that theevils befalling America are in some way a wrath-of-god punishment for all the lost faiths and self-indulgences of the previous decade or so. Cranedespairs at the bees’ seeming capacity to absorb everything his team throws atthem, and the assault of Marysville comes across like the Last Stand ofMayberry, before the bees flock on Houston,which is consumed by apocalyptic flames as the army try ineffectually to burnthem out. This idea gains a modicum of urgency from its being tethered toenvironmental concern. The Swarm endswith Caine framed against boiling flames delivering a speech straight out ofthe last frames of a ‘50s atomic monster movie, warning that his victory overthe bees is only temporary and time may run out again. But this element feels, finally, just like everything else in the film, fatuous and dishonest, whilst attempting topush a button marked “relevance”. Early on, Allen’s attempts to build emotionalengagement are mawkish and laughable, like casting Slim Pickens as the angrylocal father of the one of the silo’s dead soldiers, blackmailing Slater intoletting him fetch his boy’s body. Pickens, like Lee Grant’s fetchingly no-nonsensejournalist, enters the film at random and disappears again.

TheSwarm actually managesto get sloppier and sillier, and funnier, as it goes on. Scenes of camp gold flowat a steady rate: Chamberlain and Jose Ferrer, who pops up for about a minuteplaying the boss of a nuclear power plant, are caught in a bee attack inside acontrol room, writhing about in a shower of insects, which, somehow, immediately sets offthe reactor in an explosion. Later, when the bees are flooding into themilitary’s control base in a Houston high-rise, suited flamethrower-wieldingsoldiers try to burn out the bugs: when a couple of soldiers stumble out of anelevator covered in the little pests, one of their colleagues starts spraying fire in theirdirection, with a fourth shouting, “Kill the bees, not the men!” in spite ofthe fact that, well, the bugs are kind of all over the poor unfortunates, andthey both promptly get roasted, anyway. Slater meets his end fighting off theevil commie bugs until the last, whilst Crane and Helena escape by the simpleexpedient of covering their heads in blankets: the couple are saved by a jump cut to a different time and locale so jarring that it beggars belief. Allenrepeatedly uses the hilarious device of having the characters who have beenstung hallucinating gigantic bees looming over them. As the film enters thislast torpid act, Caine and Ross enter the Army HQ and have the followingexchange whilst riding the escalator:

Ross: Now that you’re here without thePresident’s authority, how can you possibly help?

Caine: Well, the least I can do is try.

Both actors deliver these lines, thesort of dialogue you might reasonably expect at the start of an episode in acontinuing TV show, rather than two hours into a two-and-a-half hour megabudgetfilm, with all the urgency and sense of grave responsibility of an infomercialhosting team rehearsing their banter, but without the salesmanship. It’s one of those rare, privileged scenes where you can sense Caine’susually unflappable professionalism completely slip, and, worse, the sort of moment where you can practically feel an actor’s soul wither at the core. De Havilland andWidmark also rack up their worst moments of screen acting. There was always aclose affinity between the disaster movie and television soap opera, and here,almost lost amidst the proliferation of absurdity, is a General Hospital-esquesubplot where Patty Duke Astin, playing Rita, a pregnant waitress widowed by thebees, falls for physician Dr. Martinez, played by Alejandro Rey becauseapparently Ricardo Montalban was too busy on Fantasy Island. Once he’s delivered her baby, she coos from herhospital bed, “I guess it’s true what they say, that a woman sort-of falls inlove with her doctor at this time.” To which he replies: “I hope you will feelthe same way tomorrow…and the day after..and all of the days after.” Similarlydesperate is the moment when Baker and Slater catch Crane praying over Helena’s hospital bed:“Can we really trust a scientist who prays?” Baker asks sneeringly (he doeseverything sneeringly), to which Slater replies, “I wouldn’t trust one who didn’t,”and tells Baker to stop investigating Crane. If you’re like me, you may have towedge some object in your mouth to suppress the potentially fatal physiological reaction of trying tolaugh and vomit at the same time, as inspired by these scenes.

TheSwarm’s lone islet ofgenuine intensity and involvement comes when Krim tries out his experimentalantidote on himself, a bracing few minutes where Fonda reminds us what a goodactor he was and where Allen actually seems able to rely on the natural tensionof the situation, with the black-hearted twist that after the antidote seems towork, this proves only momentary, and Krim dies in a perspiring mess.Considering that much of Fonda’s last few years were squandered in similarly silly movies,it’s somehow salutary that he gives this film its only charge of authenticity. The Swarm re-employed Fred Koenekamp,one half of the Oscar-winning team who had shot The Towering Inferno, andyet it possesses none of that film’s classy lustre: most of the film insteadpossesses that bland, over-lit quality reminiscent of so many of the era’stelemovies. Mostly The Swarm confirmshow Allen’s hit-making model had become instantly out-dated, in putting hismoney into hiring name actors who contribute little and stunningly little real skill intoproduction, after the likes of Star Warsand Close Encounters of the Third Kind(both 1977), both of which cost substantially less than this film, but whichlook and sound infinitely more polished and visually fluent and artful. The one aspect of The Swarm which suggests money well-spent is Jerry Goldsmith's epic score. By thetime this film’s rushed, barely coherent final kill-the-bees plan swings intoaction, it finally becomes impossible to tell if The Swarm was intended to be camp or serious. During the endcredits we get this title…

…which finally begs the question, ifcamp is failed seriousness, then what exactly is failed camp?

London Boulevard (2010)

2011-11-05T20:44:00.001+11:00

William Monahan made a name for himselfas a screenwriter with the likes of Kingdomof Heaven (2005) and The Departed(2006), suggesting an expansive intelligence and gifts for conflictedcharacters and pungent dialogue. But they also reflected a Hollywoodplayer’s over-reliance on predictable dramatic tempos and twists. His debutsees him decamping to Blighty to adapt a novel by Ken Bruen, but he doesn’tleave Hollywoodsufficiently far behind. London Boulevardis however to me a more compelling debut for a major scripting talent than, forinstance, the dutifully slick Michael Clayton (2007) and The Adjustment Bureau (2011) were for fellow big-league wordsmiths Tony Gilroy and GeorgeNolfi, partly because Monahan displays a more volatile and eccentricdirectorial voice. London Boulevard’stitle pays overt tribute to Sunset Blvd.(1950) in remixing the theme of a lone stud male accidentally coming intocontact with a reclusive movie star, but the real driving force here isMonahan’s affection for the classic British crime flicks, and Mike Hodges inparticular, trying to reproduce his distinctive blend of icy, almost art moderne visuals and tough, tangydramatic byplay. Whilst Monahan ends up hitting many over-predictable notes, he invests the exposition with a toey energy, and keepsthe film jerking and twisting like an angry asp, hacking his scene structuresinto cubist hunks and swathing them in ‘60s rock, energising at least for the film's first half, before it all gets away from him.

Colin Farrell gives another customarilyexcellent performance as Mitchell, a former stand-over man just out of prison.His first act in getting out proves to be an original sin he can’t ever recoverfrom: he accepts the help of his featherheaded low-life debt collector mateBilly (Ben Chaplin), who works for underground titan Gant (Ray Winstone). Billystashes Mitchell away in a flat that belongs to a doctor who fell afoul of Gantand had to give up his worldly possessions to him. Mitchell’s intrinsicallyprotective attitude, so potent it’s practically self-destructive, as displayedtowards women and old pals, is based in unstated familial traumas and hisperpetual worry for his damaged, flighty prostitute sister Briony (Anna Friel).This instinctual quality begins to dictate his future even in his first hoursof freedom. Outside a nightclub, he sees off two likely lads about to harassPenny (Ophelia Lovibond), who, impressed by his mettle, recommends him for thejob of bodyguard to Charlotte (Keira Knightley), or “Our Char” as she referredto on the tabloid pages that report her crises with vampiric élan. Anubiquitous movie star and fashion icon, Charlottehas retreated into her London house in a fit ofsocial phobia, abandoned by her playboy husband and suffering the lingeringafter-effects of being raped by a producer when shooting a film in Italy, a crimeshe couldn’t report. Meanwhile Mitchell's old friend and father figure Joe (AlanWilliams), now a street vagrant, is soon murdered by a dead-eyed local teen(Jamie Blackley), and Mitchell sets the underworld telegraph tingling to trackdown the culprit, only to find he’s a football prodigy protected by Gant. Torepay Billy’s favours, Mitchell aids in his debt collecting, but when Mitchellgets beaten up by a cohort of Nation of Islam followers on one such job, Gantsees an opportunity to bind Mitchell to his organisation permanently, byexecuting one of the offending band in front of him. Too bad Billymisidentified a random black teen, but Gant couldn’t care less.

London Boulevard is an interesting failure that declinessteadily from an excellent first act to an underwhelming last phase, suggestinga crisis of confidence and focus on Monahan’s part. He carefully weaves anumber of potentially gripping motifs, in the clash of high and low life, thesurreally disparate yet equally potent versions of fame and fortune exemplified by Gant andChar, as well as the variations of entrapment experienced by the actress andMitchell. Bridge for the two worlds is Char’s perpetually stoned houseguest andguardian angel Jordan (David Thewlis), who adapts readily when necessitydemands from louche intellectual immigrant, reminiscent of a caterpillar in hisshaggy shrugging indolence, to assassin by simply by adapting his actor’s creed– “I am what I say I am” – and a call to arms from Mitchell. Monahan populatesthe vibrant background – perhaps too vibrant – with oddball characters likeSanjeev Bhaskar as Raju, a likeable but repressed doctor who attends to thedying Joe and who falls under Briony’s spell, and Eddie Marsan as the corruptyet utterly spineless top cop Bailey. Chaplin is very good playing that mostinterminable of modern gangster movie figures, the hapless and pathetic friendwho tries to be a player but drags everyone down. The soundtrack bristles withtracks by the likes of Dylan, The Rolling Stones, The Yardbirds and Electric Banana,borrowing their swagger for initially compelling affectations of mod cool andpop-art-inflected Greek choral commentary, and occasional moments in the film,as when Jordan loans Mitchell one of Char’s vintage Rolls Royces to ride off togangland warfare in, that do suggest a mischievous sense of humour.

Mitchell makes for an engaginganti-hero, a man of scruples and humanity who is nonetheless ready and able touse stunning violence to defend his turf, a refusal to bend or retreat or cowerthat will ultimately destroy everything he sets out to protect. Farrell handleshis mixture of confidence in physical confrontations and ever so slightdazedness in the face of paparazzi and the metastasising strangeness of modernlife, as well as his simmering sense of protectiveness towards his loved-ones,with sublime confidence. Likewise his scenes with Winstone are riveting for thedivergent versions of Alpha Male force they invoke, especially when, after Ganthas shot the black hostage, the pair’s mutual fury rises in a squall, bellowingin each other’s faces like dogs arguing territory, confirming, as laterdialogue states unnecessarily, that Mitchell is not only not afraid of Gant,but that if he builds up a head of steam he would prove an engine of murderousdestruction. Only his lingering morals and human ties keep him from doing so,and Farrell expertly evokes the twinges of those scruples, like fishhooks inhis skin, tugging at him as circumstances demand brutal action. Oneparticularly good scene presents the spectacle of Mitchell trying to get hisbedevilled and wilfully fuzzy-headed sister to flee town long enough for him totake out Gant without worrying about her: the schism between his concern andher mixture of affection and contempt is a penetrating momentary portrait of dysfunction and solicitude failing to comprehend each-other.

London Boulevard lacks the ruthless deterministicquality of Hodges’ I’ll Sleep When I’mDead (2004) in portraying a former heavy whose desire to stay straight iseroded by a sense of duty and justice as well as ingrained warrior reflexes.But London Boulevard constantly suggestslarger and stranger things on its mind. In presenting a collision of theunderworld’s capacity for brute and showy force meeting the equally showy andperhaps equally corrosive perversions of show business, it threatens to careendeep into irrational romanticism and meta-theatre ironies, a la Performance (1970), another apparentinfluence, or perhaps a gaudy pop-arteruption along the lines of Seijun Suzuki. But Monahan proves unequal to thatchallenge. Instead, he finally takes refuge in modern gangster movie standbys,from Gant’s scarily discursive conversational gambits, to the last-minutetwist, evoking the likes of Layer Cake(2004) and The Departed where anear-forgotten supporting character returns to ice the anti-hero right at thepoint of victory. The central romance between Mitchell and Char never seems asvital or sexily transgressive as it should be. Char’s most substantial moment,meditating on the essential uses of actresses in mainstream films, is a wry, acute scene, which would ring truer if Char didn’t end up so peripheral to themain story and therefore finish up not far from the sort of feminine soundingboard Monahan’s making fun of. Knightley’s performance is aptly fidgety andbrittle, the familiar planes of her face drawn taut in nervous exhaustionand eyes pools of suggested internal damage just as descriptive as theFrancis Bacon paintings on her walls. Whilst Char never quite seems to find herplace in the movie, nonetheless Monahan seems to be working from some reservoirof experience in his portrait of her and the world she represents, with itssupposedly classy yet often sleazy and abusive vicissitudes. In another telling vignette, Char goes shopping, attempting to retainanonymity in a boutique where her physiognomy is affixed throughout, and herself-consciousness is crucifying. Whereas Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere (2010) depicted a movie star in crisis fleeing the ChateauMarmont, here it’s the last refuge for Char, a mordant reversal in aportrait of fame as a cage where not only is normality out of reach, but so isa common right to justice.

Monahan’s dialogue also often retainsa knowing zing, as when Jordan explains to Mitchell, whose incarceration meansthat he’s not up to speed on the pop cultural moment, that, referring toCharlotte’s acting career, “If it wasn’t for Monica Bellucci, she’d be themost-raped woman in European cinema,” a line that hits several targets at once.Monahan clearly tries to channel his better models and former collaborators increating his cinematic surfaces, including an early Scorsese shout-out asMitchell’s first heroic return to an underworld night spot is scored to the Stones a la De Niro’s Mean Streetsentrance, substituting “Stray Cat Blues” for “Jumping Jack Flash”. But finallyMonahan’s lack of experience begins to show as the film collapses under its ownweight, and his attempts to leave the edges rough give way to a rushed,non-sequitir fragmentation. The last half-hour, like The Departed, dissolves into a rather bewilderingand desultory corpse pile-up, and whilst the stranger, better ideas continue tobob up, like Jordan travelling so deeply within his role he finally becomes adesperado himself, they fail to cohere with moral weight or tragi-comic pep.Chris Menges’ strong cinematography, with its crisp textures and glassycolours, does a lot of the work in maintaining a semblance of cohesion. Theshame of London Boulevard is that it constantlysuggests the better movie it might have been with more courage and originality.

The Lost Continent (1968)

2011-10-06T22:04:00.002+11:00

Outlandish, lightning-paced, and genuinelyhallucinogenic in its flow of bizarre behaviour, feverish plot development, andgaudy Eastmancolor-infused visuals, TheLost Continent is something of a lost continent itself in the realms ofB-movie appreciation. The best directorial work of Hammer scion MichaelCarreras (who also scripted under the name Michael Nash) and the second in a fiscally ill-fated series of adaptations of DennisWheatley novels by the great British House of Horror, The Lost Continent was taken from the novel “Uncharted Seas”,a rather better and more apt title, not least because there’s no real continentin sight. Few movie tropes say ‘1968’ quite like a fantasy-adventure startingoff with a pop love song over the credits, and The Lost Continent sports a swinging theme by The Peddlers. Butonce the credits end it plunges right in with bewildering images, first of ashipwreck-strewn cove clogged with ships from a multiplicity of eras, and asimilarly rag-tag collective of people, clad in the apparel of jarringlyanachronistic fashions, arrayed on the deck of a tramp steamer for a funeralservice being given by the ship’s captain, Lansen (the cast-iron Eric Porter).His pondering of just how the hell he ended up giving a service withconquistadors looking on segues into a flashback when he fled Freetown in his ship, the Carita, a jump ahead of the Coast Guard.Trying to amass money to retire on before his rustbucket disintegrates, Lansen turnedto carrying illegal cargoes, and on this occasion took on a particularly nastyexplosive chemical, one that ignites in contact with water. The old rule of thestage was that a pistol, once flourished, had to be fired by the end, and whenit comes to introducing a plot element like that, it’s a fait accompli thatsomething’s going to go boom by the end.

The ship has a motley collection of crew andpassengers, and the first half of the film unspools familiarvoyage-of-the-ship-of-damned-fools threads as these variously seedy, damaged,and desperate people are placed in close proximity in sweat-inducingcircumstances. Exiled physician Webster (Nigel Stock) tries to keep hisoversexed daughter Unity (Susanna Leigh), and her trust fund, on a short leash.Drunken entertainer Harry Tyler (Tony Beckley) sucks down the booze and charmsthe pants off anyone he targets, and internationally notorious dictator’smistress Eva Peters (Hildegard Knef), has, after her lover’s downfall,absconded with a large amount of his ill-gotten fortune. Sleazy agent Ricaldi(Benito Carruthers) is on board to retrieve that fortune, but he proves open tobribery by cash and flesh. The crew sports a muscular Christian Chief EngineerNick (James Cossins), an uptight first officer, Hemmings (Neil McCallum), andvarious, frantically spineless seamen including ever-familiar faces MichaelRipper and Victor Maddern. The film cranks up as calamities pile up, sendingthe narrative into incidental meltdown: as the ship veers into a hurricane’spath, a loose anchor punctures the hull and water gushes into the hold wherethe drums of explosive are stored. Rather than aid in pulling out the drums,the crew revolt and try to flee the ship, LordJim fashion, but most die as their lifeboat is swamped. Instead, Lansen hasto muster the passengers together to extract the explosives, and finally theremnant vote to abandon the ship when the storm drops, and face dying ofstarvation in the middle of the sea.

The Lost Continent presages the ‘70s pulp revival begun bythe likes of Gordon Hessler and Kevin Connor and taken up eventually by mainstreamerslike Spielberg and Lucas. But the first half seems closer in scope and tone tothe run of ‘70s disaster flicks, with its focus on a collective of colourfulpersonalities pressed into close quarters in a high-pressure situation, Ratherthan the showy blockbuster pretensions and celebrity roasts of Irwin Allen, theemphasis is on generating a serial-like pace and a miasmic mood of collectivehysteria. Like Terence Fisher’s similarly feverish Night of the Big Heat from the year before, The Lost Continent channels a fearsome charge of sexual frenzyabutting the familiar tropes of generic swashbuckling, just at the edge of theera when sex and gore would erupt into the still hitherto rather primmainstream fantastic shenanigans. Erotic angst arcs between almost the entirecast: Lansen, Eva, and Ricaldi, Tyler and Unity and the definitely incestuousglint in her father’s eye, all are enveloped in a roundelay of lust andloathing, particularly keen in the mutual recognition of rot evinced by Tylerand Webster, the former sickened by Webster’s mouthy hypocrisy and the latterdriven to explosive rage by Tyler’s drunkenness. This has a tragic denouementwhen Tyler getssmashed in the lifeboat and Webster, reacting with self-righteous rage,provokes the pianist into slugging him. Webster tumbles over and in spite of Tyler’s attempts to savehim, he gets promptly chowed down by a shark. Tyler’s subsequent decision to goon the wagon inflects the rest of the film with an aspect of a recoveringalcoholic’s DT-warped sense of reality as redemption and damnation are renderedas trippy landscapes of slithering, man-entrapping weed, id-externalisingmonsters, and religious dictators. For the lifeboat drifts into the fringes ofa huge Sargasso Sea which proves to cling to aremote island, and the weed is a living, malevolent thing from which thereseems to be no escape.

The detail piles on with remorseless skill in thesescenes: the passengers forming a chain to extract the drums, intercut with theChief trying to keep his engines from failing; Unity’s crew member squeeze(Donald Sumpter) getting his brains dashed out against a pulley; Tyler drivingeveryone up the wall by pounding out the death march on the piano and reactingin a fury when someone takes his bottle of booze to use as disinfectant in amedical treatment; Eva firing a flare gun into a mutineer’s belly as some ofthe crew try to prevent Tyler and Webster being rescued from the sharks. Thesurvivors find to their luck that the Carita,rather than sinking or exploding, has also drifted into the weed. They soonfind, however, that they’re far from alone in this bizarre netherworld: othershipwreck survivors have formed colonies around the lost island, using acombination of cup-like shoes and inflated balloons tethered to their shouldersto traverse the weed without being snared by it (how they inflate theirballoons, I don’t know). One local, Sarah (Dana Gillespie, who would laterreturn to such fare in The People That Time Forgot, 1977, playingpractically the same role), comes to the ship and warns it of an impendingattack by another hostile party. Sarah seems as much supported by her pneumaticchest, prominently displayed, as by any mechanical aids, but I digress. Sarahis the descendant of exiles searching for religious freedom, whilst the islandis dominated, in the most dizzyingly weird and brilliant stroke, by thedescendants of conquistadors, who maintain a repressive religious regime headedby an adolescent god-emperor El Supremo (Darryl Read), called El Diablo bythose who won’t bow to him, and his puppet-master, the Inquisitor (EddiePowell). They maintain hegemony by raiding supplies of newcomers and offeringthem the choice to join them or die by being fed into the gruesome maw of theweed-beast which lives directly under the conquistador’s galleon, anticipatingthe Sarlac in Return of the Jedi(1983).

The Lost Continent stumbles a little once it finally reachesthis particularly odious fill-in for Fiddler’s Green: Carreras, confident andcareful in setting up the early drama and keeping the action on the boil,gropes a bit once in this new, delirious, but initially rather static setting.Carreras compensates by trying to keep up the breakneck pace, and as much asone hopes the filmmakers will build on the fantasy world into which the film stumbles into, Carreras keeps piling on incident, in the familiar Hammer rush to be over in an hour anda half. The special effects aren’t clever enough to offer quality giant monsteraction on a Ray Harryhausen level, but the glowing-eyed critters that lurch outof the fog perfectly embody id-beasts from the psychosexually twisted, substance-abusingmiasma. The atmosphere, and the integration of theme with visuals, nonethelessstands comparison with Mario Bava’s similarly alchemic Terrore nello Spazio (1966). Carreras allows his characters tointeract with surprisingly animated, aggressive depth, from Lansen and Evatentatively romancing in spite of his repeatedly foundering on his misreadingof her past, to the newly liberated Unity and the newly sober Tyler failingbadly in communication: she takes aim at his shrivelled manhood and looks forsomeone who can service her over-revving engine. That turns out to be a readyand willing Ricaldi, but he’s promptly swallowed by a gruesome tentacle monsterfrom out of the deep. The island proves riddled with such beasties, alsoincluding oversized crabs and scorpions, crawling across the landscape likevengeful vagina dentata to eat men whole. The backdrop of the island with itsperpetual lysergic-hued fogs and stony reaches seething with nightmarish liferesembles, just a little, the alien vistas of Barbarella (1967), beautifully substantiating the psychic pressuresof the characters. Whilst it’s presented as a genuine physical space, this lostrealm looks forward to the island limbo of the TV series Lost in portraying its cast of screw-ups stumbling into a zonewhere their metaphysical quandaries are made solid and they have to learn howto operate as human beings.

Happily, the filmmakers remain solidly on theirside: almost everyone, except for Ricaldi and Webster and sundry dangerouscrewmembers, all active victimisers, wrestle within cages of shame andself-disgust, to effectively become warriors and survivors in a hell-hole runby would-be gods on earth. The ripe Sarah arrives purely like a balm for Tyler’s sapped andself-conscious masculinity, and he sets out, when she disappears, to track herdown. When the Carita’s crew capturesone of the conquistadors, Jonathan (Norman Eshley), he confidently predicts asticky end for them, and Lansen beats the hell out of him to extract vitalinformation from him, stirring Unity’s empathy for the arrogant yet finallyservile, pathetic henchman. The film’s tone remains remarkably anti-heroic inthe familiar late ‘60s mode with all of the characters presented as deeplyflawed, even disgraceful types, and yet there’s a current of peculiar humanismrunning through all of it. There’s genuine substance, even in the film’s headyrush, to the notion of the island as an existential hole into which thecharacters have all slipped, given voice at last as the clash of determinismversus free will is personified, with the Inquisitor and Lansen arguing thatvery matter in terms of struggling against the entrapping weed. Lansen countersthe prelate’s vision of inescapable fate with his own plan to keep fighting, asit’s all that truly keeps the soul alive. The message is backed up by theChief, who bristles with good Protestant fury when El Diablo claims to be thevoice of God. Undoubtedly much of this comes from Wheatley, who tookmetaphysical battles seriously (with a whiff of anti-Catholic prejudice).

The production design and conceptual intriguefinally reaches something close to the surreal in the candle-massed riot ofcolour and strangeness within the galleon, adapted into the throne room/torture chamber/cathedral of apetty empire, where the dress styles of the conquistador descendants haveremained in stasis and their theology has become completely fascistic, and miscreants are stretched on the rack and fed to the weed beast for public edification.Theological debating gives way quickly to a riotous, rushed yet vivid finale inwhich that explosive finally gets used, catapulted onto the galleon, blowing upthe weed-monster. El Diablo himself is finally revealed to be as much aprisoner of the Inquisitor’s sensibility as anyone, pleading to join in theescape efforts of the newcomers only to get a knife in the back from thepriest. The Inquisitor, unhooded in all his leprous glory, dies with what’sleft of his followers into a splendid auto-da-fe, making vengeful prayerswhilst their organ player continues to drone on even as consumed by flames:it’s a potent image of the repressive order and viciousness moralism (“Let themsuffer the agony of their guilt!”) refusing to relinquish a life-stranglinggrip until forcibly annihilated, and the last phase in the characters’ releasefrom self-imposed purgatory as even the evil weed goes up in flames. The finalshot of the massed crews of the different ships giving funeral rites to thedead junior dictator now makes sense not merely on a plot level but also in itsappreciation of the completeness the characters have found in tentativeromantic partnerings – Lansen and Eva, Tylerand Sarah, Unity and Jonathan. The excellent multinational cast, sporting inparticular the intriguing presence of former German starlet Knef and JohnCassavetes collaborator Carruthers does a lot to give the film the heft ofpersonality it all needs, with the familiar Hammer appreciation of realistictypes and actual acting talent even in the bombshells. From one angle the wholeaffair will look like an absurd stew, and yet I’m not unconvinced this isn’t alittle masterpiece of the cinefantastique;in any event English-language genre cinema hardly comes richer or stranger, andit’s one of the most unfairly neglected Hammer works.

Thor (2011)

2011-09-22T13:58:00.001+10:00

Kenneth Branagh’s reassertion of his claim to aplace in the movie mainstream after some notable failures to make good on hisvery great talent, Thor seems at oncepeculiar and perfect fare for one of British cinema’s most energetic yet frustratingdirectors. Peculiar, in that it’s a white bread comic-book adaptation, quitedifferent to Branagh’s earlier multiplex tilt, the messy and franticallyrevisionist Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein(1994), but also perfect in that its essential themes and imagery carry withthem a mythical weight and strength of conflict entirely apt for Branagh’sinterests and talents. The result doesn’t quite pack Shakespearean force, as,like several of the recent Marvel Studios products, it tries to sustain atleast one extra plot thread too many, causing the storyline to remain a bitdiffuse. And yet Branagh manages to make the material coalesce into a visuallygrandiose and surprisingly compact fantasy adventure, quite superior instorytelling and investment of character to just about all of the recentsuperhero franchise entries. The difference is especially apparent in thescenes relating to Greg Coulson’s Agent Clark and the SHIELD digressions incomparison to the dreadful shoehorning of those aspects in Iron Man 2; here Clark is faintlymenacing and distinctly no-nonsense. Scenes depicting Thor’s rampaging throughSHIELD operatives whilst being sized up by Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) take on,rather than the air of overloaded franchise service, aspects of a broadeningworld that the characters barely yet understand, even if it all still onlyserves essentially to soak up screen time that could be better spent deepeningthe angst of its suddenly mortal and bereft hero, and giving the villain’s aimsand motives clearer attention. Nonetheless, whilst Branagh doesn’t make much ofthe mostly by-rote action set-pieces, surprisingly for the guy who did thestill startling Agincourt battle of HenryV (1989), having a director with a genuinely developed sense of dramaticnuance permeates the film in finite ways to make it look, feel, sound moresolid and, consequentially and contradictorily, thus more fantastic.

Here the gods of Asgard are almost explicitlycharacterised as aliens with such sophisticated resources that the differencebetween magic and science is not worth arguing for them. Aging king Odin(Anthony Hopkins) is about to hand over his power to his eldest son Thor (ChrisHemsworth) when an old conflict rears its head again. Odin’s long-ago waragainst the Frost Giants of another world within Odin’s domain has resulted instill-bubbling enmity, with a raiding party of the blue-skinned enemies trying to snatch back a totemic power source Odin confiscated from them; and that was notthe only keepsake of the war he kept hold of. Thor, eager for a bit of thud andblunder, adopts an aggressive policy and attacks the Frost Giants’ world ofJodenheim. He confronts their king Laufey (Colm Fiore) but almost gets himselfand his fraternal warrior-lords Volstagg (Ray Stevenson), Hogun (TadanobuAsano), Fandral (Josh Dallas), and Sif (Jaimie Alexander) killed in beingmassively outnumbered by blue hulks and pet beasties. Odin has to extract themhurriedly, and, furious at Thor, believing him a foolish warmonger, exiles himto Earth and disables his ability to use his walloping warhammer Mjolnir. Thorcrash lands on Earth and is immediately almost run over by research scientistJane Foster (Natalie Portman) and her paternal partner in geekery Erik Selvig(Stellan Skarsgård). Thor stumbles humorously through this world, in which he’sstill strong and able and yet completely clueless and far from omnipotent. Janeand Erik, who were on the trail of a mysterious rupture of Einsteinian physics,actually the manifestation of the Asgard transportation wormhole, the Bifrostor “rainbow bridge”, when she ran into Thor, slowly begin to comprehend hisotherworldly origins, as SHIELD turns up and confiscates their researchmaterial.

Meanwhile, back on Asgard, the real source of thetroubles besetting Odin’s realm is revealed: his other son, Loki (TomHiddleston), is conspiring to usurp the throne. He’s engaged in such villainyeven before he discovers he’s actually a Frost Giant prince, saved from thebattlefield and raised as Odin’s own. Rather than bring Asgard down, however,he plans the genocide of the Frost Giants to prove himself a worthyking and when Odin falls into aregenerative coma, Loki sets himself up as the new heir apparent, attempting tobully the other Asgardians into obedience, and sets up Laufey in adouble-cross. Branagh makes a distinctive mark on the genre: his moderntheatrical colour blindness and interest in multicultural cross-pollinatingsuggested in earlier works results in an appealingly heterogeneous version ofAsgard. A touch of Arthurian myth is tossed in for flavour in the efforts ofhicks and spooks alike to extract Thor’s hammer from the rock it gets lodgedin, none worthy of the prize. There is a distinct similarity in Hiddleston’sperformance as Loki to Adrian Lester’s in AsYou Like It (2006) in playing resentful black sheep, and it’s clear thatBranagh feels confident with this stuff. He makes, after a fashion, Thor into his equivalent of King Lear, with Odin as Lear, Thor as atransgendered, beefcakey Cordelia, and Loki as Edmund and the other sistersrolled into one. Hopkins is in full emeritus mode, but effectively so, evokingthe ferocity of the Aryan paternal figure always implicit in the mythologywhilst also straining to encompass intelligence and affection for his waywardkin. Odin’s appearance on a rearing horse from a bolt of cosmic rays recallsBranagh’s own moment in the breach in HenryV.

The confluence of Branagh’s refreshed pictorialconfidence and his touch with actors helps to keep Thor rocking along yet never descending into plasticity orpummelling raucousness: whilst staking turf in the same realm as Michael Bay,Branagh shows precisely how much he is not Michael Bay.The sweeping vistas of CGI that portray Asgard are suitably awesome, withretro-futurist castles and bastions balanced above seas contained by gravityfields in the midst of deep space, and the Bifrost is excellently depicted as ahyper-fluorescent stream of energy within a great glass catwalk. Branagh usesthese environs to deliver a genuinely spectacular and well-visualised finale,when the boundaries of the acausal pocket about Asgard are broken and theprotagonists literally hang on the edge of nothingness, the fragments ofsuper-science and waters of myth each plunging into a cosmic maelstrom, and thepeculiar nihilism of its villain taking on a sado-masochistic intensity in histwisted, incoherent ambitions. As As YouLike It ably suggested, Branagh’s filmmaking is newly fluent and confident:the stunt-laden excessive camerawork and editing that marred his ‘90s work, asif he was so anxious to prove himself no theatre maven out of his element, arerestrained as he emphasises character interaction. Yet there’s still aconfident sense of movement and spectacle, blended with his vigour of rhythmand coherence of framing and staging.

If the three or four action scenes that punctuatethe body of the film seem a bit boilerplate, with the likeable team of Asgardheroes not getting much time to strut their stuff even when the film sets us upfor that in the finale, it feels like an acceptable lack nonetheless, because Thor retains dramatic cohesion. Branaghmanages to invest it with emotional immediacy. The pain of Loki, the confusionand regret of Thor, the anger of Odin, and the earthly emotions of Jane allmake an impression, and give impact to the familiar but still enjoyable momentswhen Thor’s fellows come to his earthly aid, and his self-sacrifice results inhis power being restored, perhaps the most rousing moment I’ve seen in a superheroflick since the resurgence at the end of SupermanII (1981). Hemsworth, whose sole claim to fame prior to this was in playingKirk’s ill-fated father in Star Trek (2009), is very good as our hero, moving from pumped-up blowhard to haphazardcomic foil to newly contrite and wise warrior, with surprising dexterity.Portman, who knows her way around a blockbuster by now without always escapingthem unscathed, gives another of her more relaxed and bodied recentperformances, and there is a tangible frisson to her attraction to the totallyripped surfer dude from outer space. Especially enjoyable is Hemsworth’sinteraction with Skarsgård, and the film has Renner and Kat Dennings and Rene Russo hoveringin the background because, well, clearly it thinks it’s better to have themthere than not have them there, and I agree. Idris Elba is formidable-lookingas Heimdall, the guardian of the Bifrost, and interestingly he seems to bestinvoke something implacable and fearsomely warlike about the Norse gods. Theresult is not quite a fantasy masterpiece, but it has been distinctly underrated, being far frombeing the franchise dot-joiner it might have been, and brings a genuineflourish of the fantastic to increasingly mechanical and often top-heavy genre.

The Man from Planet X (1951)

2011-09-20T15:50:00.001+10:00

I have extolled here plenty of times the beautiesof the “theatre of the mind” aspect of cheap old sci-fi, and Edgar Ulmer’s The Man from Planet X is a near-perfectexample of that idea. Shot on an incredibly low budget, it is nonetheless abodied, intelligent, and richly stylised little mood piece, if one gives one’sself over to its dreamy evocations of perpetually misted Scottish moors where civilisationscollide and gnomic bauhaus aliens stalk with ambiguous intent. Ulmer’s firstencounter with the cinefantastiquesince his marvellously sepulchral TheBlack Cat (1935) has a similarly glutinous atmosphere of life on the edgeof voids, as journalist John Lawrence (Robert Clarke) writes an account in aremote research station in an old Scottish castle, from which his friends andcompanions have disappeared, and he’s counting out the last hours before afateful encounter. The nature of his predicament is then described inflashback: with a strange rogue planet entering the solar system and multipleUFO sightings seeming to congregate over northern Britain, a scientist,Professor Elliot (Raymond Bond), his daughter Enid (Margaret Field), and hisassistant Dr Mears (William Schallert) have set up shop in that aforementionedcastle, believing that when the planet comes closer to Earth that area will bethe closest natural bridging point, and that’s the reason for the UFO influx.Elliot invites Lawrenceto report on his investigations, and soon Elliot’s suspicions are confirmedwhen Lawrence and Enid discover first an alien atmospheric probe and then aproper landed space craft.

From out of the craft emerges the titular being, adiminutive, gravitationally distorted humanoid with a huge head, a bulboushelmet, and a vulnerable breathing system to survive on the new planet. Afteran initial encounter with the spacecraft’s mind-control ray, Elliot andLawrence manage to make contact with its controller. Although he defensivelywaves a ray gun at them, Lawrenceinspires his trust by saving his life when he can’t adjust his breathingcontrol. The alien soon comes a-knocking at the castle, and Mears hits upon anidea of communicating with the alien through mathematics. Lawrencedoesn’t trust Mears, however, with some good reason, as Mears has undefinedcriminal past that Lawrencebelieves he should have gotten twenty years in prison for. Mears hasn’tchanged, either: he makes contact with the alien, but when nobody’s looking hemanhandles him and toys with his air supply to dominate him, hoping to extractfor purely personal benefit the alien’s scientific know-how. The alien fleesand, angered, starts kidnapping and brainwashing locals, starting with theElliots, Mears, and then taking men from the nearby town. Lawrence is left alone and alerts the localconstable (Roy Engel). As it becomes clear that the alien’s project is designedto coincide with the planet’s passing and that he’s preparing a bridgehead fora mass influx, the army is called in, and Lawrencebegs them for a chance to try and extract the prisoners before the alien’scraft is blown to bits.

This is a low-key film essayed in Ulmer’susual intimate, peculiarly dreamy style. Like Fritz Lang’s Rancho Notorious, from the following year, The Man From Planet X is essayed as if attempting to keep alive thespirit of the Expressionist cinema each director had been schooled in. This wastheir reflexive response to dealing with a low budget, by giving it that whiffof such stylisation, but it was certainly an ingrained aesthetic for both, andthe effect in each film gives it a different sort of charge to theircontemporary genre brethren, a permeable psychological and semi-mythic element. In Ulmer’smovie, his sustained atmosphere contrasts the generally more technocratic andhysterical mood of the ‘50s science fiction genre. Ulmer successfully builds asense of the unknown and the oneiric in a sequence in which Enid, her carbreaking down on the moor and, attracted by the mysterious flashing lights ofthe landed craft, first approaches it and catches sight of its misshapenoccupant: here the distance between sci-fi, horror, and folk-myth seems toconverge for a moment. The alien’s spaceship, a glowing orb, has an aspect of afairy-tale witch’s abode as designed by a ‘30s modernist to it, situated in themidst of gnarled twisted trees and fog-smothered rocks, and pasteboard Scotssettings, as if the alien landed by mistake in Welles’ Macbeth (1948). The creature itself looks like an animated Picassowith his huge cranium, exaggerated African mask eyes, and tiny slit mouth,inexpressive and yet polymorphous in his stylised humanity. The screenplay, byAubrey Wisberg and Jack Pollexfen, is literate, a touch too literate, with thegenerally smart but stiff dialogue punctuated by some more serious lapses byhaving Enid, a scientist’s daughter and helpmate, speak a line like, “I’veheard that one may tell how distant a storm is by the number of seconds betweenthe lightning and the thunder, true?” But the film handles the humans’ firstencounters with the alien with a believable sense of tentative, nervouscuriosity and a reasonable, if not entirely liberal, solemnity and empathy.

The no-name cast is headed by some competent ifunexciting actors, with the exception of the on-target, quietly malevolentSchallert, and with some excruciating Scots accents in the lower-billed fillingthe set-bound Caledonian climes depicted throughout. But it’s Ulmer’s sense ofhow to do much with little that sustains the film. One of the earliest alieninvader movies, coming also in the same year as The Day The Earth Stood Still and The Thing From Another World, TheMan from Planet X stands mid-ground between the two, neither portraying thealien as an avuncular bully or a savage beast, but instead allowing him toretain his actual alienness: he does not speak, his only forms of communicationare gestural, and his motives are not entirely stated. He could be amenable tofriendship and reason, but it only takes a minimal act of violence to turn himoff any kind of outreach. He still retains an empathic quality even as hehaunts the moors like a futuristic hobgoblin and begins to disappear all andsundry, balling his fist in understandable rage when he escapes Mears’ graspand decides to forego Close Encounter pleasantries and get on with his job. Hisjob, it is revealed, anticipates Nicholas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell To Earth (1976) in his desperation to save hisdying, slowly freezing planet. That body comes sweeping in at the end like theherald of When Worlds Collide (1951),Ulmer offering vivid close-ups of his human faces turned towards heavenlyapocalyptic lights, imbuing the film with a strong dose of that fin-de-siecle nervousness that gave theera’s sci-fi films their special quality. Meanwhile the theme of yokelsdisappearing and being subsumed into the alien project clearly looks forward tothe likes of It Came From Outer Space (1953) and others. If the film’s limited action and final lack of truly drivingdrama in a more prosaic finale do dampen its impact and make it more aninteresting rather than exciting artefact, it’s still an engaging andfascinating example of Ulmer’s capacity to make bricks without straw, and ofthe capacity of B-movie sci-fi to defy its often tacky and exploitative aura.

Attack the Block (2011)

2011-09-06T18:17:00.000+10:00

A more timely film in late 2011 is hard than thisenthusiastic paean to the untapped potential of miscreant British youth. Joe Cornishsteps up for auteur props in writing and directing this alien invasion flickthat sports a bunch of snotty young punks in a London council tower, forced totrade a budding life of crime for Sigourney Weaver status. Attack the Block commences with said youths mugging comely youngnurse Sam (Jodie Whittaker), unaware that she lives in the same council tower blocknamed, in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it in-joke, Wyndham Tower. Just as the ladsare fleecing the unfortunate miss, a meteorite plunges from the sky, totals acar, and out from it springs forth a creature that looks part rodent, partferal fish, and all nasty. The leader of the gang, Moses (Joe Boyega),determines to kill the creature after it takes a swipe at him, and he and hismates chase it into a shed where they beat it to death. After deciding thattheir catch must certainly be extra-terrestrial in origin, they stash it in thesafest place they know: in the flat of Ron (Nick Frost), specifically the roomhe has fortified to grow his hydroponic weed in, under the aegis of localgangster overlord Hi-Hatz (Jumayn Hunter). The brats’ initial triumph over the smallgrey monster unfortunately proves a mere overture to a hail of meteorites whichdivulge larger, blacker, hairier creatures with phosphorescent teeth anddecidedly non-vegetarian tastes. When Moses is arrested by the “Feds” Sam hascalled, the creatures attack and kill two of the cops and force Moses, Sam, andthe rest to flee in the cop van, only to crash into Hi-Hatz’ car, which addsanother deadly foe to the already sizeable roster pursuing them. The gang bargetheir way into Sam’s flat to take shelter there, but no matter where they flee,the monsters seem to specifically hunt for them.

Attack the Block is nothing if not a self-consciouswannabe cult hit, channelling some of Luc Besson’s pop-cultural savvy inrecognising the rougher parts of town as a great place to set action films, aswell as being filled with the most loyal audience for them. The milieu offers urgency and grit, simmering class and race tensions, as Cornish describes a locale beset withyoung wannabe toughs who want to triumph on the only level they can see open tothem, that of validated machismo and strength. But it’s all imbued here with a moredistinctly tongue-in-cheek bent derived from Frost’s collaborations with EdgarWright (who executive produced) and Simon Pegg, full of stoner humour and casual acceptance of absurdityby the young antiheroes. Amongst the kids, the most effectively drawn is thesmart-mouthed, pot-hungry wigger Pest (Alex Esmail), who at one point offers adeadly rejoinder to Sam’s assurances that she has a boyfriend who’s workingwith children in Ghana: “Why isn’t he helping kids in Brixton? Not exoticenough, can’t get a nice suntan?” Cornish maintains a lightning pace, at theexpense of expanding on character and locale minutiae, however, taking itmostly as a given that the kids are really just brats with hearts of gold andjustifiable anger at the cops, and that there’s supposed to be somethinginnately noble about their determination to go it alone. Without getting tooDavid Cameron about it, I did start to wonder if my charity was being presumedupon.

Attack the Block’s charms are the kind that can easilybe dispelled if over-estimated, as some of its reception has unfortunatelymanaged. The problem is that the film is energetic and occasionally very funny,yet also too proud of its own stunts and lacking much formal control. Excisinga first act and rushing the third, Cornish’s writing offers a constant streamof pseudo-hip jive blending the referential with glutinous street argot falling from the characters’ mouths, laying out Cornish’s self-ordained credentials asa witty modern wordsmith. Nonetheless it’s virtually impossible to tell most ofthe characters apart for over half the movie. Whilst finally somecharacterisation does creep in, it’s so scant as to feel mostly like aplaceholder until someone redrafts the script. Attack the Block just doesn’t work with the same degree ofsophistication as some earlier, better examples of the jokey monster movie,like Tremors (1990) or Dog Soldiers (2001), in sustainingdramatic credence alongside the self-mocking humour, although it’s arguable thefilm really owes more to The Goonies (1985): take away the swear words and the film would fit the bill very nicelyas a family outing. The film can’t decide whether it wants to undercutsatirically or validate generically the macho posturing of Moses and his littlejerk mates, or do one then the other with any real sense of integrity. Cornishtakes so little care in his set-up, and offers such absurd alien monsters andlimply staged violence, and the kids’ urban argot and swagger is initially so totalisedand tiresome, that Attack the Blockfeels for much of its first half like Ali G vs the Aliens.

Attack the Block does finally settle down andbegin to form a semblance of narrative cohesion and actual human communicationin the first real pause for respite in Sam’s flat, as the try-hard youths lettheir guards down and their basic characters start to reveal themselves: Mosesis beset by a desperate need to prove his manhood; Jerome (Leeon Jones) is anessentially level-headed and friendly tagalong, and Pest just wants to gethigh. He meets his toffy equivalent in Ron’s client, the uni-educated,grass-peddling, stay-at-home Brewis (LukeTreadaway), whose initial attempts to get down with the kids are laughinglyrejected, but who, with his finally useful knowledge of biology and readinessto share cigarette papers, proves a decent bloke. As far as philosophies ofnational healing go, “one nation under the leaf” isn’t such a bad one. When Samhas to make a desperate dash through enemy territory as part of the final planto trap the monsters, Brewis assures he that he would go in her place if “Iwasn’t so profoundly stoned.” One of the best gags sees Moses trying to strikedown a beastie with the samurai sword one of his mates conveniently brings tothe battle, only to get the blade stuck in the notoriously porous material from which the tower block flats' walls are made, a joke that neatly dovetails situational satire, charactercomedy, and plain suspense. Cornish does offer one good sequence of stalk andchomp as short-sighted Jerome gets lost in the smoke created by the heroes’firework artillery, at the mercy of lurking beasts, and there’s a dash of realstyle as Moses makes his final do-or-die dash through the thronging monsters,leaping in newly heroic slow motion as fireworks burst about him. But thefinale, which sees Sam and Moses managing to recreate the send-off of GuillermoDel Toro’s Mimic (1997), offers theimage of Moses hanging from a fortuitously dangling Union Jack on the exteriorof the tower. Here, and elsewhere, the film occasionally reeks of the samejokey-but-not parochialism and tiresomely frantic mockbuster attitude exhibitedin Russell Davies’ Doctor Who reboot.Still, Attack the Block is fun if inan undemanding mood. Performances help a great deal: in addition to Treadaway’sand Esmail’s comic excellence, Whittaker effectively contrasts her own stint asa low-class scrub in Venus (2006),and Boyega reveals some genuine talent in playing Moses’ ambivalent efforts tolive up to his self-image.

X-Men: First Class (2011)

2011-09-01T13:30:00.003+10:00

Matthew Vaughn’s first stab at a heavy-calibre blockbuster and a partial vindication after bailing on X-Men: The Last Stand (2005), this latest entry into one of the best comic book franchises is pleasing and problematic in near-equal measure. The basic idea, to offer an origin story describing the roots of the X-Men world through formative experiences of Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) and Erik Lensherr (Michael Fassbender), and play it out as a retro-futurist James Bond tribute, is an instantly seductive one. Yet the result, which possesses interludes of cool beauty, high emotion, and some terrific adventure, is also beset by rushed, uneven filmmaking, and a lumpy screenplay. First Class commences by circling back to the grim beginning of Bryan Singer’s series opener, with young Erik (Bill Milner) in a Nazi death camp, desperately reaching out to his parents as they’re herded away, twisting a gate into a modern artwork with his metal-affecting powers. This attracts the attention of Schmidt (Kevin Bacon), a Mengele type who seeks for a way to stimulate Erik’s powers so that he can direct them consciously. Schmidt’s mentoring method is to present a gold coin for Erik to shift, and to threaten to shoot his mother (Éva Magyar), plucked from the gas chamber queue, if he doesn’t. Vaughn practically drags the comic-book movie into realms indistinguishable from Sophie’s Choice here as Schmidt’s pressuring and mother’s assurances equally fail to stimulate Erik’s power; it’s not until Schmidt shoots her that Erik’s howling rage sees him compact soldiers’ helmets around their skulls and turn Schmidt’s surgery into a pile of rubble.

Meanwhile Xavier, equally young but growing up in the far more comfortable climes of Westchester, NY, finds the shape-shifting Raven (Morgan Lily) pretending to be his mother for the sake of stealing some food from his mansion. Xavier’s psychic powers instantly penetrate Raven’s disguise and when she reveals her true blue self, Xavier adopts her. Cut to 1962, when they’re both studying at Oxford, Raven perpetually adopting the blonde and reassuring disposition of Lawrence but fretting about her place in the world whilst Xavier chats up co-eds. Meanwhile Erik, grown into the form of Michael Fassbender and engendered with a lean, panther-like cool and deeply traumatised rage, is hunting down Schmidt, threatening Odessa-linked bankers and taking out ex-Nazis in Argentina, in amoment that pay a winking nod to Fassbender’s epic beer hall scene in Inglourious Basterds (2009), and also Bond’s programme of hunting Blofeld in Diamonds Are Forever (1971). Schmidt, when he finds him, is revealed to be a practically ageless mutant, one who can absorb and direct energy, and has reinvented himself as the all-American playboy Sebastian Shaw. Shaw, a powerful mutant in his own right, has collected a powerful team of aides, including chitinous telepathic seductress Emma Frost (January Jones) and teleporting assassin Azazel (Jason Flemyng).

Shaw is engineering what will be known as the Cuban Missile Crisis, manipulating a Russian bigwig (Rade Serbedzija) and his American opposite Hendry (Glenn Morshower). CIA agent Moira McTaggart (Rose Byrne) stumbles onto this plot and looks for someone, anyone, who canexplain Shaw’s talk of mutants. This leads her to Xavier, who, sensing an opportunity for his breed to come out of the closet, swiftly convinces Oliver Platt, playing the Oliver Platt role, to take him and Raven on as mutant agents. Xavier accidentally outs Platt’s scientific whiz-kid Hank McCoy (Nicholas Hoult) as another mutant; Hank’s engineering brilliance has produced prototypical versions of Cerebro and the Blackbird jet. Soon enough Xavier’s and Lensherr’s paths converge in hunting Shaw down, in a scene that amusingly extends the Bondian tribute, as Shaw’s yacht proves to have a submarine attached beneath it. Erik’s efforts to keep magnetic track of the submarine almost get him drowned, before Xavier pulls him away and convinces him to join the CIA project. They soon use Cerebro to find some fitting prospects for a team ofpotentially talented but callow young mutants to take on Shaw’s squad: sound wave-wielding Sean ‘Banshee’ Cassidy (Caleb Landry Jones), winged stripper Angel Salvadore (Zoë Kravitz), adaptive Armando ‘Darwin’ Muñoz (Edi Gathegi), and energy-hurling Alex ‘Havok’ Summers (Lucas Till). When Shaw launches adestructive assault on Platt’s headquarters, kills Darwin, and convinces Angel to join his side, Xavier and Lensherr hole up in Xavier’s mansion with the remnants of the teamto train them in controlling their powers as the Cuban Missile Crisis develops.

Vaughn’s ever-more-confident pictorial fluency and effervescent touch with both actors and camera successfully capture a vibrant yet also chic comic-book look and energy, which make this the most fundamentally likeable superhero flick since at least the first Iron Man (2008). First Class rockets at a swashbuckling pace and offers dazzling stylistic legerdemain essayed in an almost off-hand fashion, from a cheeky appropriation of high Hefner-era sexcapade, as McTaggart gamely strips down to her drawers to infiltrate a high-rollers club amidst an army of similarly attired hookers, to the surface textures of Shaw’s flashy submarine interior. Vaughn’s film buff bent also comes out in a Pentagon War Room exactlyreproducing that seen in Dr Strangelove (1964), pinching the opening credits of Dr. No (1962), and dashes of teen movies from all eras. I confess to being of two minds about a core aspect of the film’s pacing and style: part of the film’s beauty is its pure evocation of the unstoppable illustrative pace of classic serials, TV thrillers, and comic books – it’s a pure romp. But you don’t get too much of a chance to ogle any of it as you should. First Class is almost criminally in a hurry, and that’s probably 20th Century Fox’s fault more than Vaughn’s, as it was precisely his ability to indulge a sense of expansive atmosphere and nuance that made his first three films so good. Unfortunately, the film constantly bears traces of a pressure to get the film into release, and a wariness of distressing the fanboys with too much boring character stuff and period flavour, apparent in the often frustratingly arrhythmic editing and exasperatingly jerky narrative propulsion. Whereas Singer successfully made the series as much about repressed emotion and intellectual mind-games as it was about special effects and freaky superpowers, here the head stuff is pushed aside, which feels like adistinct cheat in the promise of building a portrait of the early character dynamics of the soon to be Professor X, Magneto, and the rest. The film also attempts to compact far too much into its compact running time as far asgetting to the eventual, familiar plot alignment goes, ending with Xavier and Magneto firmly entrenched in opposite camps notwithstanding what the series has already said about how they worked together and grew apart.

The screenplay, bearing the thumbprints of three different creative teams – a story by Singer and Sheldon Turner, developed by intermediate dramaturges Ashley Miller and Zack Stentz, and brought on home by Vaughn and his regular writing partner Jane Goldman – consistently sets up potentially beautiful story elements, but doesn’t quite deliver with the depth and force expected. None of them seem to have figured out to do with Jones’ lithesome Frost, although considering that Jones displays, as in Unknown (2011), a completely listless and drearily immobile affect as a femme fatale, that’s probably a good thing. Lawrence, so galvanising in her preternatural sturdiness in Winter’s Bone (2010), is merely okay as Raven, evolving into Mystique: she gets to display none of the aggression that made Rebecca Romijn’s stint in the role so effective. There is a likeably kinky moment in which, disappointed with the self-loathing and sensual rejection of her true blue form by Hank, she instead slides into Erik’s bed, alternating façades before Erik prods to her assume her natural form, whereupon he kisses her with surprising tenderness. McCoy offers up one too many super-duper inventions which the team can just happen to put into play without the need for pace-slowing design and construction sequences. But Hoult excellently captures Hank’s vibrating unease with his secret, underscoring andfinally undoing his tentative romance with Raven, before his callow attempt to rid himself of exterior signs of his mutation results in transforming himself instead into the blue-haired, fearsome Beast, like Cocteau in reverse. Likewise, I’m not really sure if Byrne’s winsome yet competent McTaggart is germane to anything beyond giving Xavier a love interest, but I’m glad she’s there anyway, because Byrne has a capacity to invest almost any role with an air of soulful substance.

What the film really nails, in large part thanks to McAvoy and Fassbender’s terrific performances, is the genuine brotherly friendship, and the much less easy alliance of methods, of Xavier and Lensherr. McAvoy’s customary fleet-tongued poise and air of conscientious intelligence balances Fassbender’s definitely Connery-esque presence as a young Lensherr, full of lethal intelligence and feral feeling. There’s an interesting undercurrent of deep miscommunication between the pair because of their different backgrounds – “Honestly, I don’t know how you survived,” Erik drawls upon seeing the colossal Xavier mansion which will eventually become the X-Men school – even as they bond over a sense of wonder and mission in realising their gifts. The suggestions of determinism of outlook here admirably fulfils a thread of the series, as Xavier’s prim humanism and Erik’s ever-seething resentment suggest formative influences that can’t entirely be erased, even as Xavier desperately argues otherwise. The film struggles with a bunch of supporting cast mutants who seem for the most part unremarkable or repetitive in their gifts, like Banshee, who can fly using his supersonic screaming powers, a notion that just never quite works, and the dialogue is occasionally, painfully anachronistic. But the middle act, depicting the rapid cohesion of the multi-racial, multi-talent young mutants finding a giddily enthusiastic fellowship, doomed to very soon be fractured by the pressures of force and destiny, captures something of the comic series’ roots in the ‘60s civil rights and counterculture milieu. The finale, in which they play havoc with superpower squabbling, evokes the way those cultural explosions got rudely in the way of that squabbling.

Perhaps inevitably for the guy who made Layer Cake and Kick Ass, Vaughn brings an edge of relished violence and sexuality rare in mainstream comic book adaptations, and he really seems deeply passionate in these moments of cruel focus, especially in Erik’s moments of ruthlessness, tearing out teeth fillings with his powers – Vaughn indulging a money shot from within the victim’s mouth – to stabbing an ex-Nazi in the hand (twice) with his own SS knife. His coup-de-grace to Shaw is an act of relished punitive precision involving that fated gold coin. The film erratic energy surely pay off in a terrific action finale that retools the apocalyptic overtones of the Missile Crisis to its own ends, as the Cold War antagonists bond in stoic patriotism and mutual loathing of the mutants whose powers have just been terrifyingly displayed to them. Erik focuses his power at last and hauls Shaw’s submarineout of the ocean, before sub and Blackbird end up crashed on the Cuban shore in hunks of mangled technology testifying to powers almost beyond mortal control. Having revealed just how much he internalised Shaw’s lessons, Erik takes on a messianic air in the final few minutes as he performs his own equivalent of parting the Red Sea – turning back the superpowers’ weapons upon them. It’s an excellent SFX spectacle, and the pay-off, when Moira attempts to gun down Lensherr, now truly Magneto, only for his bullet-deflecting prowess to cause one to hit Xavier and paralyse him instead, is corny but somehow perfectly done. Top marks to John Mathieson’s candy-hued cinematography. Kudos, too, for the cameo by Hugh Jackman as Wolverine – three words of dialogue, but he does stop the show with them.

Red Riding Hood (2011)

2011-08-25T16:56:00.020+10:00

This largely terrible, occasionally funny attempt by Catherine Hardwicke to recalibrate her successful Twilight formula as a quasi-historical exercise falls prey to a bland and tacky approach to a familiar idea: explore the classic fairy tale through prisms of latter-day Freudian symbolism and more overt references to lycanthropy as a metaphor for animalistic sexuality and incest. Yes, it’s a bald-faced rip-off of Neil Jordan’s Angela Carter adaptation The Company of Wolves (1984), complete with reproducing the set-bound, theatrical environs of Jordan’s film. Pictorially, the result is impressive in spurts throughout, in visions of fog-swathed lakes and stylised forests that retain hints of gothic chic and folk-tale memory-dream. But the result is also divested of narrative complexity, primal unease, and a capacity to investigate its themes in anything but the shallowest metaphors, through some truly lazy writing and what-was-she-thinking? directorial embellishments. Whereas Hardwicke made the first half of the first Twilight persuasive through a lo-fi realism that worked like a fog of the mundane through which hints of the fantastic were glimpsed, here she gives herself up to a totalised mythology which definitely cuts across the grain of her gifts. Amanda Seyfried wastes her time again playing the doll-eyed Valerie, the prettiest pretty in a tiny hamlet somewhere in…well, it could be central Europe or Britain but we’re not getting too specific with that, so let’s move on. Valerie has been in love from childhood with Peter (Peter and the wolf, geddit?...Ah, shit. He’s played by Shiloh Fernandez anyway), but her mother Suzette (Virginia Madsen, painfully wasting what’s left of her career resurgence) insists on her marrying Henry (Max Irons), son of her own former amour, the local blacksmith Adrien Lazar (Michael Shanks). I feel like I should insert a Fiddler on the Roof joke here.

Anyway, a beast has been haunting the woods around the town for decades, but one full moon, the first of a “blood moon” cycle where the lunar body is loaned a reddish tint by Mars, Valerie’s older sister is killed by the animal. Some of the villagers initially laugh off hints of supernatural malice and search for a real wolf, and they catch and kill one after it seems to have killed Lazar. Father Solomon (who else but Gary Oldman?), called in to search for a werewolf by the more credulous, and met now with scorn, warns of grave misfortune after explaining the tale – based on a “genuine”, commonly cited werewolf legend – of how his wife’s lycanthropy caused him to kill her and commence a life of hunting the scourge. What follows listlessly and bloodlessly – both in the metaphorical and for the most part the literal meaning – apes other, better films in depicting Solomon’s repressive, brutally cleansing regime and the real werewolf’s campaign of dread. Red Riding Hood attempts, somewhat desperately, to clearly sustain a link between contemporary teen life and the pseudo-historical setting so that its presumed audience of Twilight fans will clearly, like, totally see themselves in it. These aspirations are clear in scenes like that in which Valerie is condemned by her friends after Solomon brands her as a witch, in a fashion that actually comes across as Easy A-lite. This comes after a hilariously silly scene in which she and her BFF Roxanne (Shauna Kain) dance with Sapphic overtones so that she can make Peter jealous, as if they’re at a High School social circa 2007, amidst a diabolically-flavoured village hoedown that could perhaps represent the most pure interlude of camp in recent Hollywood history. Hardwicke’s grip on the film completely slips when the werewolf begins to speak to Seyfried. The young male leads are supposed to be darkly attractive and faintly, glossily Byronic in the same fashion Hardwicke instilled in Edward Cullen, but the lads only ever come across as dully queeny and sullenly self-involved, sporting ludicrous boy-band hair and seeming to prefer each other to their nominal object of mutual affection. The love triangle is so painfully flat and boring that the screenplay eventually, casually, drops it.

The mid-section does sustain something like dramatic tension in spite of this hilarity, and partly because of it. The depiction of a reign of reactionary terror brought about by the overzealous Solomon, played by Oldman in a turn reminiscent of his uneven hamming in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), is overdrawn and caricatured, but works sufficiently on a melodramatic level. Julie Christie turns in another of her curiously negligible emeritus performances as Valerie’s grandmother, sniffing out potential werewolves and offsetting Suzette’s pseudo-bourgeois frustration with righteous wisdom for her granddaughter, whilst Hardwicke, furiously proffering red herrings, also tries to keep Grandma as another suspect werewolf. This pays off in another camp gem when she and Seyfried enact an inevitable variation on the “oh, what big teeth you have grandma” scene which might recall to the filthy-minded a G-rated edition of Seyfried’s cougar-seducing antics in Chloe (2010). Billy Burke, so believable as Bella Swan’s flaccid blue-collar father in Twilight for Hardwicke, here again plays a paterfamilias but a rather more wicked one as Valerie’s father Cesaire, revealed in an unsurprising surprise twist to be the werewolf. His desire to pass on his taint to his daughter and run away with her imbues the material with a conscious suggestion of incestuous intent and thus a darker contemporary resonance. But like everything else in the film it’s limply fulfilled as Hardwicke mimics Tim Burton’s infinitely superior Sleepy Hollow (1999) in supernatural shenanigans pertaining to the sanctity of a church, and Solomon comes a cropper by his own puritanical petard. The finale seeks to have its cake and eat it as far as teenybopper longings go in regards to balancing oh-save-me-my-hero fantasies and modern empowerment pizzazz, as Peter, as per the rescuer woodcutter of revisionist versions of the fairy tale, arrives to save Valeria from Cesaire’s predations, and she gives an extra coup-de-grace by stabbing her papa with Solomon’s silver false fingernails, a final touch of dizzying silliness. But Peter is tainted now with the curse and goes off to await the next blood moon when he and Valerie can finally get down to some hot lovin’, doggy-style. By the time the film does actually finish you’ll be begging for a silver bullet to end its misery.

Ironclad (2011)

2011-08-13T19:28:00.018+10:00

Bloody, vigorous, and as subtle as a mace in the face, Jonathan English’s third feature film is a balls-and-all parade of medieval bash and chop. English takes a true historical incident, the defence of Rochester Castle by William d’Aubigny during the Baronial Revolt against the King John, and renders it as a Seven Samurai variant infused with levels of physical violence that would make Eli Roth blush, in the mould of gritty period anti-swashbuckler defined by the likes of Paul Verhoeven (with Flesh + Blood, 1985) and Kenneth Branagh (Henry V, 1989), and more recently expanded by Ridley Scott and Neil Marshall. As John (Paul Giamatti) lands with an army of Danish mercenaries, determined to win back his country and nullify the Magna Carta the Barons made him sign, d’Aubigny, or Albany as his name is rendered here (Brian Cox, in fine swagger) puts together a team of motley mercenaries to snatch Rochester Castle, the keystone for controlling southern England, from its owner, the aged and timorous royalist Cornhill (Derek Jacobi). Albany’s force includes haunted, but superlatively skilled, Knight Templar Thomas Marshal (James Purefoy), drunken whoremonger and capital swashbuckler William Becket (Jason Flemyng), scar-mottled archer Marks (Mackenzie Crook), illiterate axe-wielding grot Coteral (Jamie Foreman) and a bunch of other scruffy ne’er do wells. They succeed in slaughtering an advance guard John has placed in the castle, and, in spite of numbering no more than twenty men-at-arms, prepare to hold off John’s Viking thugs until a promised French relief army arrives, an event Marshal holds little hope for as experiences in the Holy Land taught him.

Ironclad’s screenplay, written by English with Erick Kastel and Stephen McDool, is rather too blunt and inelegant in setting up its characters and story threads, to really make the film gripping, with the potential power of both limited to a series of rapidly sketched, essentially one-note postures. John is instantly characterised as a vicious psycho, so there’s little political subtlety to a movie which affects an atmosphere of doubt and moral terror, yet renders the complex issues and results of the Baronial Revolt secondary to standard tyranny versus freedom rhetoric. The final irony of the Barons and their pet Archbishop Langton (Charles Dance) having gone to so much effort to help a French prince take command of their government isn’t entirely without ironic heft, but the attempt to build a conflicted but resolute hero in Marshal just results in a standard glowering, reticent tough guy. A sense of powerful ethical commitment and grinding metaphysical weight is invoked more through the visuals, with a grimy beauty throughout punctuated by moments of unexpected etherealness, as in the appearance of John’s army out of dawn mists like an emanation from the shores of Valhalla, and the sheer gruelling horror of the battles and scenes depicting John’s cruel, wrathful campaign of fear-mongering. John’s leading Danish warrior, Tiberias (The 13th Warrior’s Vladimir Kulich), as well as being Marshal’s equal/opposite from a pagan land, is being held on a leash with threats of Papal violence against his homeland. Marshal hopes his vows as a Templar can save him from damnation, but the harder he fights for his vows the worse he feels. Albany’s young squire Guy (Aneurin Barnard) proves himself as a warrior but stares into an existential abyss in actually experiencing war. Marshal, a truly great soldier, abandons a vow of silence when he sees his abbot friend and patron’s tongue cut out in a fit of John’s pique, and gets stuck in with righteous fury as Cornhill’s young, neglected wife Isabel (Kate Mara) tries to distract him with a sexual interest infused with a desire to touch his obviously contorted soul.

The film maintains a simple, pummelling sense of physical and psychic urgency which Scott’s lame Robin Hood (2010), in spite of its revisionism, couldn’t swing in tackling the same historical epoch and its fluctuations in reckoning human worth. A long, compelling sequence in which John, having captured Albany and some his men with the rest holed up in the Keep, has hands and feet hacked off after delivering a mocking tirade in reply to Albany’s democratic pretensions, culminates in having Albany’s curtailed carcass catapulted at the Keep’s wall. John then lurches away to stand meditatively in a muddy river shallow and recall one of his father’s nastier lessons in regal untouchability, yet revealing he hasn’t learnt the more subtle aspect of the lesson. Here, the film offers a stocktaking sense of the nature of tyranny as apparent in both in John’s espousal of divine right, and in a directly physical sense in his hysterical acts of butchery, suggesting the spiritual cost to the oppressor as well as the resister. Giamatti and Cox, unsurprisingly, keep the film in order, with Jacobi mostly limited to one of his increasingly familiar fey old patrician parts. Giamatti, as well as seeming to enjoy a chance to declaim with force rather than playing another contemporary eunuch, captures something remorseless and pathetic all at once in the monstrous John, and Cox, who probably should have started playing bristling heraldic heroes thirty years ago, effortlessly investing Albany with grit and seriousness in spite of his sometimes shaky stand on principle. Purefoy as usual is an intense and attractive screen persona, but also as usual never seems to let his guard down any more than the character does, and so he and Mara, whilst both decent enough actors, seem to often be acting at one another rather than together, and like too many romances in this sort of thing it just never catches fire.

English’s fight direction relies on furious camera motion and glimpses of grotesque corporeal damage to give his action heft and urgency, and for the most part it works in keeping his film constantly reared and kicking like a bucking bronco, but it also means that it lacks the distinctive mix of visual grace and immediacy of Marshall’s superior Centurion (2010), and also misses Marshall’s gift for swiftly invested human elements. Subplots whirl, including Isabel’s relationship with her husband, whose tastes “do not include me” and who seems genuinely beset by a deep metaphysical despair about what Albany’s crusade is dooming them to, and Becket’s instant lust-affair with scruffy serving wench Agnes (Bree Condon) who gets herself killed as she and Isobel lend their literal weight to trying to keep the enemy out. But these aspects, which should form the human heart of the film, don’t coalesce into anything more than sketches in the margins. The great appeal of the siege movie, in spite of the virtually inevitable scenes like the harum-scarum final moments of near defeat and last-minute arrival of the cavalry, is the way it offers a situation in which human gestures become enlarged purely by circumstance, and the easy fashion in which a storyteller can jump from interpersonal vignettes to flurries of violence and back again. But English seems in too much of a hurry, as if simultaneously he aspires to the grandeur of the historical film and yet is too fearful of being skewered for being unmanly if he lets it slow and breathe for a moment. Whilst you can't accuse Ironclad of pretension, in this case more ambition would have certainly made for a better film.

The Double Hour (La doppia ora, 2009)

2011-08-13T18:49:00.005+10:00

An eerie, engrossing tale of romantic longing, duplicity, and fractured realities, this debut by Giuseppe Capotondi has taken some time to funnel down the alleys of international distribution only to gain some belated admiration. The Double Hour can be loosely termed a thriller, although it’s really more an attempt to capture in cinematic textures a visually fragmented, hazily physical, atmosphere of psychological anxiety and desire. The occasional jolts of real-world action are reminiscent of Olivier Assayas in the way they add external threat to what is really a tale of dire but intensely private, moral straits, blended with elements of inner-space paranoia with debts to later Stanley Kubrick and David Lynch. Leading lady Kseniya Rappoport won the Best Actress award at Venice for playing Sonia, a Latvian immigrant labouring in a ritzy Turin hotel: in the opening scene, Sonia, cleaning the bathroom of a mysterious female guest (Chiara Nicola), who pays her a physical compliment seconds before hurling herself to her death from an open window. This grim, disorientating moment sets a tone of disquiet that permeates even the most placid and romantic subsequent scenes of Capotondi’s film.

Sonia encounters, at a bizarre speed-dating event, where the rapidly shifting couples resemble a Wellesian hall of mirrors, each person offering potential bliss and terror, with a promised randomness that proves to finally be illusory. A former police surveillance wiz named Guido (Filippo Timi), stranded in emotional alienation since the death of his wife, is a regular at these events. He has sex with a woman he picks up from the speed dating, but, after going cold and ejecting the woman, angrily hurls a bottle at the door she’s banging on the other side of, trying to get his phone number. With his evident dissatisfaction with the single life, he is nonetheless swiftly taken with Sonia, whose mix of charm and toey vulnerability seems perfectly pitched to entice him, and after a time he takes her for a romantic getaway at the mansion he now works at as a security guard. When he first kisses Sonia in the woods near the house, they are assaulted by a balaclava-clad man, taken into the house, and tied up whilst thieves systematically pillage the mansion. One of the men returns and starts pawing Sonia, causing Guido to tackle him. They struggle for the thief’s gun, which goes of: the shot rings out through the house and without, as screen fades out.

Seemingly weeks later, Sonia is back on her job in the hotel, beset by traumatised dissociations, and slowly it becomes apparent that the gunshot killed Guido and the bullet finished up in her head. Soon enough she begins catching sight of Guido, in the hotel’s security camera system, even apparently within her apartment, appearing ghost-like in the shadows when the lights go out, and she hears a song he played her vibrating through the walls, audible when she’s under the water of her bath. Her otherworldly awareness is punctuated by violently loud gunshots, and everyone around her, especially a slightly too attentive hotel guest, seems charged with strangeness, even her chirpy friend and fellow maid Margherita (Antonia Truppo); eventually, after giving Sonia the same compliment as the suicide woman, she seems to suffer the same fate. Is Sonia being haunted? Is she entrapped in some kind of metaphysical loop? Are all these manifestations of some more substantial plot she does not yet understand? Or is she herself the engineer of plots, now being dogged by her own malfeasance?

Capotondi sets all this up with such inexorably careful filmmaking that the first two thirds of The Double Hour are engaging and gripping on a high level indeed. Without too-showy camerawork or ostentatious editing, Capotondi’s sinuous style offers in the robbery scene, with the arrival of the thieves’ van explicated not through visuals but through registering on Guido’s surveillance microphones, hints of dread that are not literalised until the firm smack of a gun handle against Guido’s brow. The ever so slightly abstracted, eliding visual quality suggests without exactly describing the corners of the private hells he’s conjured. Other touches throughout suggest the alien paranoia of Michael Haneke, but Capotondi steers clear of his dictatorial misanthropy for a romanticism that suggests forlorn and frustrated hearts operating under facades of determinist rhetoric and urban estrangement. The supple shifts and suggestions as Guido reacts with unexpected courtly rage to one of the thieves feeling Sonia up, and the eventual revelation of the thief to be Sonia’s criminal lover who of course considers her his sexual property, and that fact that Guido’s rash action inspires the only real moment of violence in the film, undercuts this with dark humour. Later Capotondi sets up disquiet expertly as Sonia submerges in a bathtub and hears ghostly strains of Guido’s song, and then the loud jolt-provoking thud of that calamitous gunshot that echoes on and on. The first third of the film contains hints of Claire Denis as Sonia’s thorough entrenchment in an establishment that offers a façade of glamour and comfort, the up-scale hotel, which for a worker for her offers mostly depersonalisation and demeaning effacement.

Both Sonia and Guido are dogged by tragedies in their past that can’t entirely be repaired, with only the promise of romantic coupling offering a salve, but that’s what proves precisely impossible for reasons that slowly resolve from out of the murk of Capotondi’s manipulated perspectives. The middle third of the film is revealed to be a lengthy coma fantasy, and even in these haunted and paranoid deliriums, shards of reality intrude and warn both Sonia and viewer of coming traps that will snap shut certainly. Friends and strangers morph into one another, threat lurks in the most helpful and bland of guises, and Sonia sees loss, degradation, and grim fate at every alternative. Guido’s police detective friend Dante (Michele Di Mauro) dogs Sonia like Dostoyevskian fate; Bruno (Fausto Russo Alesi) is the suspiciously unctuous hotel regular whom Sonia’s paranoia transforms into a psycho killer about to give her a shallow grave in punishment for her sins, but she wakes up into the arms of the barely wounded Guido, in her hospital bed. Capotondi tries to do something original with this now-familiar variety of narrative switchback, in not ending his film with his “it was all a dream” twist, but leaving an entire act still to explore its ramifications.

The layered script, by Alessandro Fabbri, Ludovica Rampoldi, and Stefano Sardo, offers some original tweaks on common film noir themes, like the depressed man engaged in a romance that may be deadly, and the delinquent runaway lovers, in envisioning what might happen to those oft-invoked figures after they flee for a new life. The successful crime resolving with a vision of life in paradise, also often an end point for crime films where one is asked to empathise with the criminals, is also intriguingly warped here, as if to ask if that’s not just another form of prison. Sonia’s shady past and equally shady present see her playing games that she might rather not be playing, but with a distinct minatory charge in undermining the other forms of determinism that would enfold her as just another ordinary worker. Guido, as a former cop and surveillance expert, is supposed to be a man who can sniff out bullshit at a fifty metre distance, and yet he’s become near-fatally distracted by his search for companionship. But Guido is conflated with Sonia’s father, a distant voice of aggrieved authority on the telephone, and a home never to be returned to.

It’s right at the point when The Double Hour might spiral into a truly memorable narrative auto-de-fe that Capotondi’s inspiration and courage abandon him, and he lets it slip away in exchange for an ending that’s dissatisfying precisely in being so modest in its ramifications, which can be grasped without being deeply shaken by them or even disturbed. Capotondi can’t justify his narrative gymnastics, or, from another perspective, those gymnastics betray the essentially gossamer texture of the real point, that sometimes people write themselves into scenarios they can’t escape from even in the very act of escape. Nor does he quite resolve the schism of perspectives between Sonia, who seems to own the film considering that so much of it is not just told through her eyes but through her deepest mental processes, and yet who still remains a slightly opaque character, and that of Guido, who is tantalised and finally forgiving of the peculiar wild animal who stumbles into his metaphorical headlines and out again. Still, the result is a film that captures and describes an intangible atmosphere, and Capotondi will hopefully sort of his priorities to explore more clearly with his excellent filmmaking in his next work.

Dead Heat (1988)

2011-08-07T17:23:00.018+10:00

‘80s B-movie cinema remains something of an unexamined critical trove, and for fairly good reasons. As VHS replaced the Drive-In as the core constituent of trash cinema, low-budget and independent genre filmmakers became rapidly less imaginative, and the era is generally remembered as an ocean of lousy slasher films, teen raunch comedies, and terrible sci-fi monster movies imitating Alien. Even at Roger Corman’s New World, the inventiveness of their ‘70s output gave way to a very forgettable decade, and names from the previous epoch’s exploitation, like John Carpenter, Joe Dante, John Sayles, Lewis Teague, John Landis, and George Romero, were all well on the way to joining the mainstream. But ‘80s trash cinema did occasionally cough up some real outliers, with Sam Raimi and Stuart Gordon as two of the few notable successors to emerge in the era. Mark Goldblatt, the director of Dead Heat, a New World production, doesn’t have the same kind of recognition factor, but his invisible touch is very familiar, lending the same kinetic energy as he offers here as an editor on everything from his earliest work, including Piranha (1976) and The Terminator (1984) to later, huge-scale projects like Starship Troopers (1997) and the second two X-Men movies. His directorial output was limited to two films, this and the infamous Dolph Lungren version of The Punisher (1989) His feature debut is nonetheless one of the more curiously memorable B-movie efforts of the period. I had seen it once, as a kid, and when I found a copy in a $2 bargain bin recently, I felt a surge of pleasant recognition. Revisiting Dead Heat, I was surprised at just how much it feels like a rough prototype for the style of kinetic gross-out comedy-action piece which Peter Jackson was to become initially infamous for, and a lower-budgeted template for the similar LA-tangy atmosphere and self-satirising, blissful excessiveness of Stephen Hopkins’ Predator 2 (1990), which Goldblatt also edited.

Utilising the what-the-hell? teaming of Treat Williams and Joe Piscopo, Goldblatt casts them as Detectives Roger Mortis and Doug Bigelow, who have to bring down two mysteriously bullet-proof jewellery thieves with unconventional tactics during a shoot-out. Mortis’ coroner ex-girlfriend Rebecca Smythers (Clare Kirkconnell) assures them that she had performed autopsies on the two men several hours before the robbery. Someone is reanimating the dead, and the detectives follow a trail to a mysterious clinic where Bigelow is assaulted by a grotesque hulk and Mortis, shoved into a decompression chamber for putting down lab animals, dies. But before rigour mortis sets in for Roger Mortis, Rebecca has recognised the purpose of a mysterious machine in the clinic, capable of revivifying dead tissue for several hours. She and Doug bring Mortis back to life to solve the case before he will inevitably die again. Mortis takes his death largely in his stride, although beset by moments of existential despair, and he and Doug battle zombie hitmen whilst trying to extract information from the clinic’s PR officer, Randi (Lindsay Frost), daughter of the clinic’s owner, the recently deceased plutocrat Arthur P. Loudermilk (Vincent Price). Rebecca’s morgue boss Dr. McNab (The Night Stalker himself, Darren McGavin, having a whale of a time) is really in cahoots with Loudermilk in a scheme to enrich themselves and refine the revivifying machine so that it can sustain select people forever.

Tasteless hardly begins to describe this film, which is distinguished by a singular ruthlessness balanced by a purely tongue-in-cheek tone: every single major character dies, some in an appalling fashion, and yet a tone of black-humoured mirth is constantly sustained, to the point where Williams and Kirkconnell can’t keep their faces straight during a dialogue exchange. The script pokes fun at the clichés of the buddy cop movie, with the inseparable partnership of the straight-shooting, if emotionally clumsy, Mortis, and Piscopo’s Bigelow, as the familiar dirty-minded second banana whose amusing puerile streak is pushed to rare limits, desperate for lunch as his partner rots away beside him, and whose final wish is to be reincarnated as the seat of a lady’s bicycle. Mortis quickly learns to enjoy the way being dead has liberated him from the familiar limits of mortality, shouting “This is going to be great!” as he lets an ambulance he’s been locked in roll down a steep hill into traffic, a crash that would be horrendously fatal except that he emerges utterly blasé about his partly roasted physiognomy. In the film’s most giddily inventive sequence, Mortis and Bigelow track clues to a Chinese restaurant run by Thule (Keye Luke): Thule sets off his own edition of the revivifying machine, stimulating the animal carcasses in the restaurant to rampaging life, including a fearsome barbecued pig, fluttering chicken wings, and a bull carcass Mortis has to wrestle with.

It goes without saying that Dead Heat is hardly a deep enquiry into the nature of mortality, nor is it as fiendishly, admirably compulsive as Jackson’s Brain Dead (1992) or Raimi’s The Evil Dead (1981) in keeping its action steadily lifting into more and more insane territory. There's a final lack of substance to give the film any real emotional kick, like that of the film's obvious model, D.O.A. (1951), to which Goldblatt pays overt tribute by showing a clip on a TV. But overtones of satire of Reaganite yuppie-era hubris bob throughout, with an attitude quite similar to that of the same year's They Live: Randi plays a role similar to Meg Foster's in the Carpenter film, that of the chic winner with a foul secret explaining her success, dissolving to a foul stew as she begs forgiveness from the outmatched, put-upon working-stiff hero. The satirical import compounds more firmly as Loudermilk (Price looking sadly frail but still offering some saline wit), glimpsed in a photograph with Reagan, propounds to fellow zillionaires the benefits of his scheme: ‘Poor people are supposed to die, but the same rule doesn’t apply to us! We’re rich! God wants us to live forever, and even if he doesn’t, we can always buy him off!’ The last act loses steam, degenerating into some flatly staged shoot-outs. But there is relish in the comeuppance that Mortis and Bigelow deliver to McNab, bringing him back to life after he shoots himself so they can kill him properly. If it wasn’t for the fashion Goldblatt keeps things moving with such an arch sensibility, then the casual way Bigelow and Rebecca are killed off would seem terribly cold, but the final image of the two heroes ambling off into the afterlife whilst continuing their stream of adolescent banter – “Something tells me this is the end of a beautiful friendship!” – fends off any ill-feeling. Schlock, pure and simple, but self-aware schlock before self-aware evolved into its more obnoxious contemporary variety.

The Viking Queen (1967)

2011-08-04T20:55:00.013+10:00

Filmmakers, like poets, sometimes use historical settings to imagine alternate modes of life and society. This film was described by Hammer Films historian Marcus Hearn as the daftest film the studio ever made, so of course I could not resist checking it out. The Viking Queen proves a genuinely odd, near-delirious concoction that tried to graft together an uneasy chimera of tragic melodrama, period feminism, soft-core fetishism, and political commentary. Movies set in Roman-era Britain are hardly a major cinematic sub-genre, although the recent releases of Centurion (2010) and The Eagle (2011) have enlarged the field by about fifty percent, but they almost all tend to share an overtone of contemporary parable about the way political situations sometimes slowly invert but the causes and nature of conflict remains the same. This addition to the roster is based very, very (very) loosely on Boudica’s famous rebellion, and set during the reign of Nero. Boudica’s story does cry out for a decent movie depiction, as The Viking Queen is certainly not it, but it is something sufficient unto itself. Seemingly an attempt to elevate Hammer’s horizons into the heady realm of the historical epic, but without a Samuel Bronston-scale budget to back it up, The Viking Queen falls back on liberal dashes of the variety of exotically sexy hype that had infused the company’s big recent hits She (1965) and One Million Years B.C. (1966) to give it lustre. The result is a weirdly entertaining, occasionally hilarious, sometimes compelling mess, alternating patches of historically absurd but basically solid storytelling, with vignettes of magazine-supplement sexy stuff, and portrayals of historical Druidic worship that seriously suggest what The Wicker Man (1973) might have looked like if directed by King Vidor in his Solomon and Sheba phase. The script, by Clarke Reynolds from a story by producer John Temple-Smith, is distinctly Shakespearean, if by that one accepts Shakespearean as meaning that it steals liberally from King Lear (ancient British king with three daughters and a disputed will) and Romeo and Juliet (lovers from different sides of a cultural war).

The story pits Roman macho prerogative against obsessive religious nationalism represented by Druid High Priest Maelgon (Donald Houston. The Finnish-born, one-time-only star Carita plays Salina, the middle member of the dying king’s (Wilfrid Lawson) triumvirate of daughters, his choice as heir because he feels she will govern best and balance the polarised elements. Older sister Beatrice (Adrienne Corri) is aggrieved, passed over because she’s too aggressively anti-Roman and pro-Druid; younger sister Talia (Nicola Pagett) is young, innocent, and prime Roman rape-bait. New Roman Governor-General Justinian (Don Murray) is fair-minded and very non-Tea Party in his approach to taxation, as is his chief civic administrator Tiberion (Niall MacGinnis). Justinian quickly captures Salina’s eyes and thighs. But his lieutenant Octavian (Andrew Keir) is a corrupt brute who wants to dominate the Brits, whilst being in league with their burgeoning local mercantile class who are profiting from the Roman hegemony and infuriated by Justinian’s taxation. The merchants arrange with Octavian to stage some distracting Druidic ceremonies and bandit raids that will draw Justinian away, and give Octavian a chance to snatch power from Salina and her close associates, including respected chief Tristram (Patrick Troughton) and his son Fergus (Sean Caffrey). This plot works, and when Salina and her loved-ones are brutalised by Octavian, she rallies in righteous fury and goes to war.

The Viking Queen is at least clearly in the usual Hammer mould, of being creatively cynical when it came to revealing historical cultural mechanics, but moving beyond the ripe portraits of rotten aristocracy and Victorian bourgeois repression in their horror films into some theoretically fresh territory. The basic gag here is to make a British imperialist adventure but set in a time when the British are the ones being colonially oppressed. Thus the familiar story elements of the Raj adventure yarn, with the usual cross-cultural romances and secret conniving between unscrupulous opportunists of both sides forcing the more honourable opposites into strife, are turned back on themselves. Here it’s ranting Druids rather than Mohammedan clerics stirring up the passions of the oppressed. Simultaneously, The Viking Queen strains to encompass some embryonic comment on late ‘60s gender liberation, with the masculine order represented by Justinian and a British gynocracy forced into a collision: the inevitable clash between an infuriated Salina and her army and a dutiful Justinian will inevitably lead to tragedy. “Stand fast, they’re only women!” Octavian shouts moments before Salina’s column of riot grrrl cavalry crash into him. Such warrior-woman iconography is now commonplace but almost non-existent at that time in mainstream cinema, which makes the film feel interestingly anticipatory. That anticipation also extends to aspects of that peculiarly British strand of imaginative historical cinema exemplified by John Boorman and Derek Jarman in their stripped-down, tactile sense of period setting. More mainstream recapitulations of this film’s basic ideas include the likes of King Arthur (2004), in its freeform melding of the authentic-feeling, the semi-mythical, and the just plain pervy, and Kingdom of Heaven (2005) with its the-past-is-now theme of centrists caught between and forced to pick sides in clashes of fanatics. More specific to its own era are the attempts to exploit the nascent hippy-era interest in pagan worship and pre-Christian social mores.

Chaffey’s direction displays his usual traits of lunging camerawork and editing, generating a gritty sense of the past as a physical space as in Jason and the Argonauts (1963), but only in flashes and spurts. The environs of the British society of the town are modest, with the royal palace not much more than a large barn with a thatched roof, and unlike a lot of the larger budgeted historical films of the period, like the glistening fantastical Cleopatra (1963), this lack of artifice makes it feel somehow more immediate. There’s some admirably inventive camerawork in the outlandish chariot charge in the finale. Chaffey seems particularly interested whenever Keir is the film’s focus. Keir employs his effortless embodiment of Celtic Alpha Male grit in a sneering villain role, prowling about MacGinnis is a shot so tightly framed you practically feel his prey’s nauseous anticipation, and provoking Murray to indulge speeches which he shrugs off as pure limp-dick tomfoolery, and lounging about in fleshy indulgence with slave girls in a period bordello. His pleasure in nastiness reaches an apogee when, seizing an opportunity to take these vexing she-devils down a peg by having Salina flogged raw, taking time himself to rape Talia, before burning the tribe’s Great Hall to the ground. It’s the kind of rampant, corporeal nastiness that would have felt quite at home in a Peckinpah or Tarkovsky film of the period. Houston overacts to such a degree that he almost travels into a meta-state of hambone as Maelgon, who bizarrely makes prayer to Zeus, and is determined to force Salina and the Britons into war with the Romans for the sake of his religious-nationalist power hunger. In a discursive, but weirdly compelling scene, Maelgon and his druids, including his scantily clad priestesses, dance about a cardboard Stonehenge (paging Spinal Tap!) make sacrifices to the old gods with men in a wooden cage hung over a fiery pit until the floor is charred away and the fall into the flames.

The problem The Viking Queen is that, as was a common problem with Hammer’s attempts to elevate their horizons, the production team couldn’t pick a tone and style and stick to it. Period matriarchy, reasonably serious dialogue exchanges, and substantial plotting are all undercut by segues into clumsy glimpses of naked chicks on horses and visions of the villains lounging about with bevies of slave girls, as if the actors are moonlighting in a production of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, with an undertone of indulgent sexism that undercuts the film’s trumpets of feminine empowerment. One supposedly Nubian slave is clearly a plain old English girl unconvincingly painted over. The clash of sensibilities between stolid British realism and the sniggering new-age erotica is all too obvious. But throughout the film, zipping by in disorienting flashes, are fragments of inspired strangeness: scary woad-daubed bandits scream out of the forest. Sack-dress-clad groovy druid priestesses howl the moon. Nipple-tasselled slave girls decorate unused corners of the widescreen frame. Corri as an icon of primal ritual fury sacrificing a Roman captive. Carita gnawing on her own arm to stop herself screaming when being flogged. The wonder of it all is that one can feel the direction a less professional director might have dragged it in, for Chaffey’s attempt to maintain something like a respectable grip on the film works against this polymorphous energy. Rather than wishing the film played straighter, I couldn’t help but wish some real nutcase had directed this, and turned it into a freeform exercise in ahistorical comic book madness: what Russ Meyer or Walerian Borowczyck could have accomplished is worth a happy moment’s thought. Yet The Viking Queen still offers a fitfully delightful parade of camp delight that reaches an apogee when the mini-skirted, fleecy-caped shieldmaidens crash through Roman legions on chariots with scythe blades on their wheels.

Not helping at all are the completely miscast leads: Carita displays only faint acting craft, and her distinct accent is awkwardly explained by her mother having been a “Viking queen”, which also explains the stupid title. Murray, most famous for appearing a decade earlier in Joshua Logan’s film of Bus Stop (1956), looks and sounds badly out of place, and can’t even manage to seem as authentically stentorian as Richard Egan as an American lug in a period European setting. The couple’s big romantic clinch, coming after a spot of flirtatious chariot racing, sees them fall into a pond and make out in the muddy reeds, except that when Murray is supposed to be passionately kissing Carita, it’s clear that for whatever reason he won’t actually put mouth on mouth. But Corri and Troughton do well in their roles as the ferociously bigoted Beatrice, who snaps and snarls and goes to war with real relish, and sceptical patriarch Tristram. The climactic action, so long in getting to, proves a bit sadly curtailed once those chariots have done their business: Salina’s demise, impaling herself on a captor’s sword rather than submit, is neat, but her last words to Justinian are jarringly inane, and the abrupt final frieze suggests the filmmakers couldn’t wait to flee the set. Even if the film as a whole is a fascinating calamity, The Viking Queen’s lessons for cinema titans were not entirely lost: was Keira Knightley leaping about in leather proto-S&M gear in King Arthur anything more than the resurgent spirit of Queen Salina?

The Trollenberg Terror (1958)

2011-07-15T15:27:00.004+10:00

aka The Crawling Eye

Adapted from his own TV serial by famed Hammer horror scribe Jimmy Sangster, this is a sub-Quatermass yarn and an early example of a sci-fi-horror crossbreed. It’s also a worthy go-to example to demonstrate the qualities that make for merely ordinary old-school genre stuff, as opposed to both the surprisingly superior and the genuinely bad. This film is badly hampered by an extremely low budget, and sluggish direction by Quentin Lawrence, which doesn’t wring anywhere near as much paranoia and atmosphere from the story as it should. Nonetheless, the story is fun and irresistible to fans of invading alien movies. Mysterious, malevolent extraterrestrials have planted themselves on a Swiss mountain, needing to acclimatise in the thin atmosphere, ripping the heads off hapless mountaineers who stray too close. They also exude a psychic menace that attracts holidaying young clairvoyant Anne Pilgrim (Janet Munro) and her protective sister Sarah (Jennifer Jayne). Egghead scientist Crevett (Warren Mitchell), researching cosmic rays from his avalanche-proof station close to the mountain, recognises the proliferating phenomenon from a similar incident he investigated in South America with Alan Brooks (Forrest Tucker), and he calls in Brooks to help investigate. Brooks recognises recurring elements of the earlier phenomenon, including the fact that the aliens can psychically possess people and use them to kill potential threats. They take over Brett (Andrew Faulds), an English climber, who then murders both his climb partner Dewhurst (Stuart Saunders) and rescuers sent up after them, before descending to ice his real target: Anne, whose psychic gifts threaten them.

Sangster’s script offers up ideas of potential and some characters that might have been interesting if developed more, particularly the protective sisterly angst of the Pilgrims, and it steadily cranks up the drama from chilling manifestations of the unknown to all-out survivalist warfare in the best traditions of this subgenre. The control of mood and imagery is strong, and John Carpenter has cited this as a major influence on The Fog (1980). That’s easy enough to spot. Like Carpenter’s film, this sports the motif of monsters moving about within a menacingly directed mist, a sequence with a slowly resurrecting corpse getting up from the slab to go stalk the heroine, and a sequence in which the sounds of horrible death in a remote outpost are audible to a listener on the other end of a phone line. What this lacks is a cinematic intelligence as solid as that wielded by Carpenter, or contemporaneous directors like Terence Fisher or Val Guest, who had directed Tucker’s previous tussle with high-altitude monstrosities, the Nigel Kneale-penned The Abominable Snowman (1957), which accomplishes what this film ought to but doesn’t. It also lacks the theoretical and human depth that Kneale wielded, and which Sangster himself usually squeezed in with his horror films. There’s an awkward lack of substantive conflict between the characters and their world-views to offset the alien drama and crank up the hysteria. The fact that Brooks and Crevett already basically know what they’re facing thanks to prior experience saps the narrative of the drama of discovery. Journalist Philip Truscott (Laurence Payne) is introduced chiefly for Brooks and Crevett to expound exposition at rather than offer a contradictory moral or strategic voice, for better or worse. Anne’s psychic link to the aliens doesn’t lead anywhere on a substantial plot level except for justifying having guys trying to kill the pretty girl in classic tradition.

The Trollenberg Terror was produced by Monty Berman and Robert Baker, who for a time in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s attempted with some success to rival Hammer with a distinctly trashier, but also more bizarrely inventive, brand of cinema nasty, often with more gore and a nastier tone, exhibited by the likes of Fiend Without A Face (1957) and Grip of the Strangler (1958). Glimpses of grotesquery dot this film too, if still a long way from the full-bore carnage genre fans would be used to by the ‘70s, with snatched visions of severed heads and bloodied corpses. One interesting scene depicts an amnesiac Brett returning to the hotel where Brooks and the other are congregated, Brooks watching in scientific fascination as Brett laboriously attempts to light a cigarette and pour a drink, his muscular and neural reflexes retarded, not by exhaustion but, as Brooks recognises, by alien influence. The monsters are first seen in a disorienting moment as Brooks saves a child from within a hotel they’re besieging, one of the beasties, a globular mass with a single giant ocular orb, looming rapidly towards the open door. But Lawrence overplays and shows too much of them in amusingly unconvincing model shots. Still, the almost entirely set-bound production gives the impression of having squeezed a hell of a lot out of very little indeed, and there are minor flourishes of cheapjack hype, like the opening titles appearing after the camera, mounted on the front of a train, plunges into a railway tunnel, lettering flashing out of the darkness. Tucker is appreciably cast in the sober rational scientist part after playing the huckster foil in The Abominable Snowman, and there are clever moments scattered throughout the film. It’s not the sort of movie that will keep you out of bed on a cold winter’s night. But if you can’t sleep, it’ll fill in the time nicely with a cup of cocoa.

Peter Falk (1927–2011)

2011-07-15T15:26:00.000+10:00

Bill Hunter (1940–2011)

2011-07-15T15:23:00.001+10:00

Blue Valentine (2010)

2011-07-10T18:31:00.013+10:00

An absorbing, affecting, mostly successful portrait of two young people meeting in the flush of youthful longing and then breaking up some years later in a squall of pathos. Whilst the title suggests some aspiration towards the perverse, American Gothic postures and noirish romanticism of Tom Waits, this is a film far more in the key of heartfelt, straightforward indie rock about why everything turned so shitty with that great girl. The truly excellent performances by Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling are the substance and raison d’etre for this film, which starts out with a relatively facile hook – overt comparison of the stages of commencing a relationship and its final days through a cross-cutting structure, perhaps inspired by the likes of Francois Ozon’s 5x2 (2004) and Gaspar Noe’s Irreversible (2002) – and invests it with biting, flailing life. Gosling is Dean, a deeply unambitious young man with few expectations because of the failure of his musician father. Williams is Cindy, a young woman who successfully struggles to become a doctor, determined to avoid the malaise that beset her parents. Marital collapse commences in a series of small gestures and provocations in the course of a perfectly ordinary workaday morning. Exhausted Cindy is woken from slumber by the playful, painfully contrasting energy of husband and daughter Frankie (Faith Wladkya); aggravations accumulate until the minor tragedy of discovering their dog has been run over after escaping the yard. Cindy encounters a former flame, Bobby Ontario (Mike Vogel), an impudent, narcissistic former jock who once beat the hell out of Dean for “stealing” Cindy away from him. The child is offloaded onto Cindy’s ailing father Jerry (John Doman), as Dean cajoles Cindy into a hopefully revivifying sojourn to a vulgar hotel. There, trapped for the evening with each-other with booze, amidst hideously tacky futuristic motifs, their inability to find any sort of intimacy results in gruesome bout of bad sex. Cindy perhaps gratefully flees in the morning when work calls, leaving Dean alone to imbibe plentifully, and eventually pursue her and start what people often refer to as a scene.

In the flashbacks, interpolated with unnecessary jaggedness by director Derek Cianfrance, Dean, with his signposted quirky romanticism – he carries about a ukulele to entertain the lady he’s a-courtin’ and expresses his certainty that men are inherently more romantic than women – glimpses young Cindy when he’s delivering furniture to an old folk’s home where she’s stashing her grandmother. Cianfrance's cinematic time jerks us elastically between poles, sometimes with clarifying focus. Cindy’s encounter with Bobby seems initially like a variation on the cliched motif of the encounter with the old flame, yet shot through with a strange uncertainty, for reasons that become much clearer once we've seen Bobby and Cindy's past, making it clear he’s a jerk who has hardly grown at all. But neither has Dean, with his receding hairline and scrub moustache, who declares that he has dedicated himself wholeheartedly to family life and holds down a job as a housepainter: he seems initially to be a natural bohemian artist looking for an outlet, but in fact he proves, in perhaps the most original character touch, to be merely a bum. He gives away his spiralling frustration in his simmering discontent and (partly justified) paranoia about her elevation into a different socioeconomic sphere where the profession offers diffuse channels for her passion, and rivals for his love wait aplenty, whilst an incapacity to balance work and home is draining Cindy’s marrow. Gosling and Williams reportedly mostly improvised around Cianfrance’s story structure after he decided to toss the script out, and the result is electrifying in places. Such places include the casually, if calculatedly, delightful slacker-chic song and dance Dean and Cindy improvise on their first date, to the full-bore eruptions of ugly emotion in their hotel room shenanigans and Dean’s infuriated drunken crack-up in the hospital Cindy works in, walloping Cindy’s on-the-make colleague Feinberg (Ben Shenkman) in a furious resentment of her place in a world beyond his reach.

The emphasis is on a certain tactile authenticity, attuned to the rhythms of behaviour, particularly in sex, that clue us in to the state of any given relationship, and in this regard the film is particularly astute. Cindy’s prostration beneath Bobby with his grizzly bear sexual technique contrasts her melting in response to Dean going down on her. The depiction of the couple, older, drunk, filled with hatred and a certain remnant yearning, trying and failing to screw with an edge of violence inflecting Cindy’s desire as she “playfully” pummels Dean before they finish up in a grinding bundle on the floor, forms the film’s best and most compelling scene. Perhaps the most interesting and yet also underdeveloped aspects lie in the hints that show why the relationship is both based in, and doomed by, the same root causes, observed in the subtle way in which class psychology, aspiration, sexual attraction, and emotional expectations graze against each other and then evolve in disparate directions. Dean’s claims for modest ambitions prove to be shot through with resentment and a boy-man’s emotional leeching, whilst Cindy’s designating Dean as “the bad guy” excuses her from examining her own alienating behaviour.

The film in some ways takes an easy option in reducing its concerns to the brittle actor-perfect set-pieces of romance and bust-up, avoiding a causative portrait of decline. Blue Valentine employs some familiar notions, as unexpected pregnancy forces a union that might have either developed with breathing space or exhausted itself, and subsequent child-rearing sucks the easy verve out of coupling. Cindy’s declaration that she will never be like her parents, of whom we get one scarifying flashback depiction of volatile suburban malaise, feeds her remarkable tendency to keep picking the wrong guy, and yet her psychology remains only distantly perceivable. The excellence of the acting and Cianfrance’s fine, if overly mannered, technical filmmaking yearns, and often deserves, to be described as a raw and gritty and honest, but in the end there are vast aspects of the main characters, and the largely caricatured and dismissed supporting roles, that demand and do not receive much examination, and this significantly hampers the film's potential to be a truly insightful human drama. Still, it avoids the stagy, smug, overly-posed drama of the likes of Revolutionary Road (2009) and Rabbit Hole (2010) to which it might easily have otherwise surrendered to. The air of bleary exhaustion that hovers over Dean as he wanders away in a cloud of firecracker smoke captures with atmosphere the way the collapse of the miniature world of family seems apocalyptic and yet stands in contrast to the larger world’s blithe continuation.

Master of the World (1961)

2011-07-04T18:22:00.012+10:00

It often strikes me that the first impulses of what we now call steampunk were evinced in a glut of cinema adaptations of the science fiction pioneers Jules Verne and H. G. Wells in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, films that resisted updating them a la George Pal’s War of the Worlds (1953), and instead based a large part of their appeal in the juxtaposition of technology that never was with an historical era separated by two world wars and manifold social changes, and yet lingering in the common pool of fond, if quaint, remembrance. An adaptation of two Verne novels, this enjoyable, inventive, if rather too cheap AIP production casts Vincent Price as Robur, a genius inventor who, in the context of mid-19th century industrial imperialism, declares war on war, and hopes to browbeat the world into scrapping its armies and navies with his colossal airship-cum-helicopter made entirely from compressed paper. As the novels were essentially a redraft of Verne’s own 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea with a different conceptual gimmick and a similar inventor-rebel antihero, keeping impressed but offended witnesses captive aboard his fantastic machine, a similarity that Richard Matheson’s screenplay exacerbates by giving Robur an idealistic crusade to act out against the might of empires just like Nemo. Master of the World is far less well-produced and dynamically directed than Richard Fleischer’s Disney adaptation of that more famous book. But it’s also weighed down by far less dubious comedic silliness than both that film and Henry Levin's top-heavy version of Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959), and benefits from Matheson’s fluent and intelligent adaptation, especially the well-defined conflict of Robur (Vincent Price), Strock (Charles Bronson), and Philip Evans (David Frankham), representing a triangle of values and methods, rather more distinctly a Matheson trait than Verne’s.

Strock is a US government official assigned to investigate a mysterious phenomenon at the Great Eyrie in Pennsylvania, from which thunder and a booming voice quoting scripture seem to erupt, terrifying the locals. Strock secures the aid of Prudent (Henry Hull) and his daughter Dorothy (Mary Webster), and her fiancé and Prudent’s foil Evans, representing as they do the controlling minds of a ballooning club working on propelled flight, who can get Strock up to the Eyrie to see what secrets it contains. Once they reach the Eyrie, however, the quartet are shot down by rockets, and all four awaken, after a crash landing, upon the Albatross, Robur’s fantastic aircraft, staffed by fiercely loyal men dedicated to Robur’s ideal of using the threat of untouchable force from above to attempt to enforce a pax aeronauticus. The smiles and pleasantries with which Robur greets his uninvited passengers don’t last long, as they bridle at being prisoners to a man with values deeply opposed to theirs: Prudent is, as well as a ballooning enthusiast, a fabulously successful arms manufacturer who’s afraid of landing in Ireland because he sold guns to the British. Evans, brave but obnoxiously bullish and self-satisfied, appoints himself representative of Yankee gentlemanly values, and determines to escape at the first opportunity, disdaining Strock’s apparent ambiguity and cowardice. That disdain flares into outright hate when Strock alerts Robur about his dangerous insistence on trying to shimmy down a water hose, and when both men are punished by being dangled from ropes beneath the Albatross, they fist-fight in mid-air, until Evans is knocked out and Strock has to hang onto him after his rope breaks during a buffeting storm.

Master of the World was directed by William Witney, an old hand from serials, including The Mysterious Dr Satan (1940), comic book adaptations, including several of the ‘40s Dick Tracy movies, and westerns, the genre in which he made his last film in the ‘80s. Obviously no secret auteur, Witney nonetheless infused Master of the World with the rapid-paced energy and squarely illustrative verve of such fare. Except for the usual cheesy comic relief, provided by Robur’s French cook, Topage (Vitto Scotti), the film keeps admirably focused on personality conflict as the sounding board for larger dramas: the stiff-necked, tunnel-visioned Prudent and Evans contrast Robur’s well-intentioned messianic ruthlessness, and Strock’s pragmatic determination to find a way to stop Robur whilst not showing his hand for as long as possible. In such a way, Matheson’s screenplay cleverly teases out a depiction of the modern world being created not only through technology but through responses to situations and implicit values, as well as bolstering the often cardboard, but amusingly, florid, action. As the film rockets toward its climax, sexual jealousy is tossed into the mix as Evans sees Dorothy gravitate towards Strock, and he finally confirms his hypocrisy when he knocks out Strock and leaves him to die on the Albatross, which they’ve conspired to sabotage.

This was a project sadly a little beyond AIP’s financial resources, stretch them as they might. Master of the World is awkwardly filled out with stock footage from films like That Hamilton Woman (1941) and The Four Feathers (1939), more than a bit egregious when Robur rains bombs down upon a Napoleonic-era British fleet. The original special effects are pretty clunky, full of unconvincing back projection, but in a way such limitations only adds to their charm, especially considering that Witney rightly only uses them as a means to an end, unlike too many modern movies, to animate rather than dominate the drama. There are some interesting visions of the airship’s interior and external workings. Witney stages the first revelation of the Albatross with a simple but excellent flourish as his camera zooms out from a detail of the painted logo of the Albatross on the hull to a long shot of its majestic progress through the clouds. Throughout, he offers up a cheery, Technicolor-swathed sprawl that retains an appealing edge of retro charm mixed with comic-book hype, the film’s title leaping out an explosion, and expository titles in period typeface, amidst a film consistently rendered in lithographic hues and given a layer of lushness by Les Baxter’s florid score. The proto-arms control message is interestingly mediated by a critique of the terrorist mindset as Robur gives into exactly the sort of wild-eyed destructive pleasure he professes to hate, as he tries to force two clashing armies in Egypt into ceasing by raining bombs on them, but ventures so low in pursuing his pacifying bloodlust that he severely damages his own ship. Strock, having patiently awaited for Robur to reveal his plans and his mindset, determines quietly to destroy him, making sure his companions know this might mean they have to sacrifice their lives.

Price’s Robur doesn’t suggest the underlying pain and tragic grandeur that James Mason achieved playing Nemo, perhaps because Matheson’s adaptation seems less interested in his background motives than in the immediate matter of the schisms between the perspectives of the characters, emphasising rather Robur’s edge of domineering wilfulness, which contradicts his idealistic slogans even before his actions do. Bronson, just after The Magnificent Seven (1960) heightened his profile immeasurably, is surprisingly excellent playing a far more intellectual sort of hero than he was usually cast as, and like several of his roles in this period, suggest a talent diffused by endless glowering tough guy roles. The closing scenes generate an unexpected pathos as Robur’s crew amass, refusing to abandon him as his ship and dream both plunge into the sea, martyrs to a cause which the heroes have, perhaps tragically, brought to an end, without having their own values altered sufficiently. The result is a film that could be better known to matinee aficionados, even if it's far from being a classic. It’s a pity that Verne only receives adaptations in the form of tacky TV movies these days, because an imaginative, top-flight remake of this might actually be welcome.

The Adjustment Bureau (2011)

2011-07-02T23:09:00.017+10:00

What if Fate was a literal army of humourless bureaucrats shoving people in whatever chosen direction they’re supposed to go in? What if God was a disinterested dilettante sketching people’s lives out in ledger books and then changing the course for arbitrary reasons? The Adjustment Bureau asks these questions, and yet refuses to answer them with a curious blend of imagination and moral and intellectual cowardice that incidentally speaks a lot about certain aspects of the contemporary Hollywood mindset. After George Clooney gave a leg-up to one major hand in the Jason Bourne franchise, Tony Gilroy, with Michael Clayton (2007), here Matt Damon aids another, George Nolfi, who attempts to blend the theme of the man on the outside beset by existential forces of oppression, with more fantastic, overtly conceptual arabesques. The result is both engaging and finally galling. Damon plays David Norris, a wunderkind politician, who, having served as the youngest Congressman in history, is trying to graduate to the senate, but his charge is fatally stalled by a “scandal” where he’s photographed mooning his college chums at a reunion. The notion this is shocking enough to derail a serious senatorial campaign is perhaps the most genuinely alternate-reality touch in the film. Anyway, on the night of his crushing loss, he encounters a charmingly disingenuous, almost anarchic, yet still roaring hot young woman, Elise (Emily Blunt), in a men’s bathroom in the Waldorf, where she’s hiding out for security after crashing a wedding for the hell of it. She inspires David to give an off-the-cuff concession speech mocking the pretensions of his campaign, effective enough to reinvigorate his chances for his next bid.

In the meantime he takes a job with the investment firm run by his friend Charlie Traynor (Michael Kelly). Getting on the bus for his first day, David meets Elise again, and meanwhile a mysterious hatted shadow, Mitchell (Anthony Mackie), who tries with difficulty to arrange a seemingly random chain of events that will separate the couple again. He fails, and David not only gains Elise’s phone number, but arrives at his office early enough to find a horde of more mysterious, hatted goons, who seem to have stopped time within the confines of the office block and who, perturbed at his presence, chase down David and browbeat him into never revealing their existence. As per the exposition speeches of Richardson (an amusing John Slattery, balancing businesslike cool with increasing exasperation and Thompson (a wasted Terence Stamp), David learns their Bureau is charged as agents of order and direction in the human world, through their endless employment of tiny strokes of chance and action to result in desired outcomes, and that have to be kept a part if both are to fulfil their missions to become President and world’s greatest choreographer respectively. The catch, which they can’t divulge: the couple were supposed to be together in several earlier plans for them, and they’re still responding to those implanted cues, and the battle becomes one that pits David’s improvisatory zeal against the Bureau’s omnipotent yet curiously unimaginative power.

If, like Peter Venkman, call it luck, call it fate, call it karma, you believe that everything happens for a reason, then The Adjustment Bureau might seem slightly more substantial than an ungainly blend of paranoid they’re-out-to-get-me conspiracy thriller, romantic chase melodrama, and soul-searching meta-drama elucidating the way coincidence, character, and metaphysics might all work in sometimes contradictory ways. It’s based on a Philip K. Dick story, sporting some classic Dickian ideas, but the result falls far short of Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report (2002) as an attempt to make mainstream thriller stuff out of Dick’s inherently asocial material. To its credit, The Adjustment Bureau tries to take its inherently silly premise and the characters in it with a degree of sobriety. The visual palette employs art-deco architecture and a retro ‘50s man-in-the-grey-flannel-suit look for the Bureau men, and a look for their goons that recalls the security thugs of Fahrenheit 451 (1967), seeming to promise a noir-styled sci-fi swashbuckler that never eventuates. Damon and Blunt are highly engaging to watch play off each other, and like last year’s even worse Hereafter, the greater part of the pleasure it offers is in watching Damon interact with his leading lady: no-one will ever cast Damon in a romantic comedy because of his air of eternal self-seriousness and plebeian good-looks, which is pity. But the film fails not only in not placing convincing impediments in the way of his political ascent, but in the initial task of making David seem genuinely like a guy who’s consistently undone by his weaknesses and immaturities. Damon plays him right from the start as a stolidly likeable idealist, albeit with a hint of necessary melancholia for a man defined by the early loss of his parents, giving him an insatiable need for attention that the Bureau has fostered in him, and which they fear Elise will ease. For a film that’s about the capacity of the individual to avoid conformity to pre-ordained structures, it’s remarkably conventional in and of itself.

The most curious thing about Nolfi’s film is how it manages to take a bunch of potentially fascinating ideas and images and process them into a mild, mushy, gutless love-conquers-all melodrama. The story material invokes multiple strands in Christian and secular humanist philosophy, questioning the limits of free will in the face of chance and forces that might be perceived and comprehended but never entirely overcome, and yet represents them in a lazy, indecisive way. The film is driven along by the hero’s resistance, and yet in the end everyone smiles and goes on their way, in a safely bland, non-committal wrap-up that strains to avoid painting the heavenly operatives as too villainous, whilst still satisfying our desire to see the heroes validated as good self-motivating individualists. The smell of unprocessed contemporary cultural ephemera hangs around this film, but it’s impossible to quite pin down because it’s playing both sides and corners of the fence. The Adjustment Bureau hovers uncertainly for much of its length, waiting for a good solid shove of authorial invention that might either make it an affecting It’s A Wonderful Life-esque fantasy that metaphorically elucidates the primal pleasures and terrors inherent in being an individual human at the mercy of society and time, or a disastrous high-concept train wreck. It never really achieves either status, however, delivering an incredibly weak ending as the heroes are let off the hook by the under-defined Chairman, who might be God, or Rupert Murdoch, or the Great Gazoo. The narrative raises one particularly interesting stake for its drama, in explicating the ways in which ambition and affection compromise many a life, particularly women’s: Thompson browbeats David with the factoid that Elise will finish up teaching dance to eight-year-olds rather than becoming a world-famous, art-form-rejuvenating star if she hooks up with him. It’s made clear that David’s been chosen as an agent of Fate to save the world from global warming or something, but I couldn’t help but feel the film could have been more urgent, say, if the hero was an unemployed welder in New Jersey, or an evicted single mother, you know, people who might have some more pointedly immediate reason to take issue with Fate’s bureaucrats, but then that might raise the eternally verboten spectre of class conflict. Also, there are more than enough politicians in the world who think they’ve been pushed to become Important People by higher powers; do we really need a film validating that?

Tension and amusement does build in David’s war of devices with Richardson, and the concept of a world run by creepy guys in suits with portals between realities, usually rendered in safely generic terms a la The Matrix but here adopting a veneer of fuzzy pseudo-religious fable, is well-visualised. Nolfi handles the shift in locale that the Bureau’s agents can use, with doors into broom closets that open in Yankee Stadium and so forth, with some fluidity and sense of staging. But he seems to totally lack any capacity to develop an enveloping atmosphere of oppression and eerie permeability. The threat of the Bureau never seems all that convincing, especially when Mitchell, who for his own ends, possibly related to disgust at the killing of David’s parents to spark his career (although this is only hinted; the dark side of the Bureau’s activities is only properly signalled by their warnings for David if he breaks their rules), gives aid and advice to the rebel lovers. Any real sense of what The Adjustment Bureau wants to accomplish is missing, the action is finally vapid, thanks to the excessive literalness of Nolfi’s sub-Inception reality bending and special effects, and a tonal indecision. Fortunately, performances buoy this exercise, with Damon, Stamp, and Slattery doing effective variations on their most familiar roles, and Blunt and Mackie, in spite of their clichéd roles as naughty art chick and magical Negro helpmate, imbue their parts with spry solidity.

Blood Feast (1963)

2011-06-28T13:55:00.004+10:00

Some films, in spite of having very minor productions and equally minor merits, are nonetheless enormously important, for whatever reasons, to the history of cinema. Horror cinema in the ‘60s and ‘70s was a particularly fertile field for outsider filmmakers trying to make a quick buck and prove their mettle, with a pantheon of varyingly talented swashbucklers defining that proto-indie scene, many of whose names still offer a certain cache of recognition: George Romero, Ray Dennis Steckler, Wes Craven, Sean Cunningham, Arch Hall Snr, Larry Buchanan, Andy Milligan, and Herschell Gordon Lewis and his producer David F. Friedman. Lewis and Friedman, moving sideways from the nudie flicks that had been their early stock-in-trade, entered the horror genre with Blood Feast, a trash epic shot in Miami for less than $70,000. Blood Feast’s claim to fame is pretty blunt: it was the first real gore flick, offering a welter of crude, unconvincing, yet punchy and gaudy flesh-mangling in full colour, inspiring bouts of nausea and delight from the teenaged drive-in audience that made it a covert smash hit. Just three years after the prim monochromatic blood and edit-concealed mutilation of Psycho (1960) had critics momentarily wondering if Hitchcock had gone too far, Lewis was offering up popped eyeballs, severed legs, scooped-out brains, torn-out tongues, and a plethora of other charnel-house wonders with the enthusiastic gall of a young boy sticking bugs in his sister’s hair.

Lewis became a folk-hero to transgressive artists like John Waters, whose first film, Multiple Maniacs (1969), was a Lewis tribute, and retained his infamy well into the Video Nasties era in Britain in the ‘80s, making Lewis a definer not just of the modern horror movie but also of aspects of the punk aesthetic. Lewis himself retained a droll level of observational sarcasm about his work and his audience, reflecting on how the response to his movies charted the evolution of that audience from easily delighted children to harsh critics when it came to on-screen bloodletting. Fittingly, Blood Feast displays a certain mischievous attitude towards itself, another source, surely, of Waters’ attraction to the filmmaker. In the first few moments there’s a glimpse of a book entitled “Ancient Weird Religious Rites”, a sure tip-off that the filmmakers are working with tongues practically sewn into their cheeks, and the way the gore is presented on screen has that kind of unaffected, unblinking delight displayed by many a student and amateur filmmaker since in trying to make their own gross-out epics. Lewis, with his bold use of colour and occasionally innovative jump-cuts, hints at potential talent behind the lens, as well as a sense of theatre and humour, which diffuses most (but not all) of the grotesquery.

Speaking about Blood Feast on the level of a pop cultural artefact and an icon of self-deprecating exploitation is actually rather more entertaining, however, than sitting through the film itself, which, even at 67 minutes long, is a bit of a slog. Yes, there are signs of humour and cartoonish creativity spotted throughout Blood Feast – it exhibits something very similar to the then-recently banned EC Comics aesthetic. But they’re so infrequent as to barely count amidst acting so stiff it can make you feel like suicide, a dull and obvious screenplay, and a multiplicity of bad sets and stultifying camera set-ups. One can’t even begin to compare Blood Feast to the genuinely vigorous cinema of Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) as an exemplar of indie imagination espoused in the genre. Blood Feast is amateurish claptrap, and this partly accounts for Lewis’ popularity as a model: he demands no sense of cinema as a plastic art, only a kind of blankly illustrative élan. Yet there’s something engaging about Blood Feast’s islets of self-conscious absurdity. The villain, Fuad Ramses (Mal Arnold), is an Egyptian caterer and seller of exotic foodstuffs, who also happens to be an adherent to an ancient Egyptian cult of Ishtar (actually a Babylonian goddess, but that seems to be part of the joke) and wishes to recreate one of the ancient ritual feasts where worshippers indulged a cannibalistic plethora of slaughtered sacrificial victims. When clueless society matron Mrs. Dorothy Fremont (Lyn Bolton) asks Ramses to cater her daughter’s birthday party, he gains the perfect stage for his ambition, for which he’s already been harvesting body parts from hapless young women around town.

Before you can say, “ludicrous coincidence”, we learn that Fremont’s daughter Suzette (Connie Mason) is girlfriend to the police detective in charge of the case, Pete Thornton (William Kerwin), and they’re both aficionados of Egyptian history, so they attend a lecture by a professor explaining the Ishtar cult. It then takes an intolerably long time for Thornton to make the connection between one victim’s memory of her attacker speaking the word “I-tar” and “Ishtar”, the penny not dropping until he finally learns of the theme of Suzette’s party. Some amusingly incompetent set-pieces dot the film, particularly when Ramses stalks Suzette and some friends at a pool party, Ramses approaching close enough in broad daylight to cast a shadow over Suzette, and then somehow managing to run off within the space of a couple of seconds so that Suzette does not glimpse him when she turns her head. Equally funny is when, having captured Suzette’s friend Trudy (Christy Foushee), he whips her with abandon, smearing her back and clothes too with what is obviously fake blood. And yet there are other bits that retain a charge of savagery that can’t be so easily snorted at, as when Ramses attacks a woman in a motel room (Astrid Olson) and tears out of tongue and most of her throat with it, leaving her to expire with a gaping bloody maw. Perhaps the film’s most successful moment of casual black comedy comes when Ramses cheerfully roasts up limbs in a big Vulcan oven. There’s a whiff of the genuinely horrific, too, in the moment Thornton and his partner discover Trudy’s body lying on a table, daubed in gore, surrounded by chunks of bloody flesh, not entirely dispelled by the lashing Godardian red on Trudy’s outstretched body. Again, it’s easy to see Lewis’ appeal for rebellious filmmakers in the simplistic force with which he yields a mischievous delight in seeing his sleazy villain scheming to feed smug and bland bourgeoisie with the offal of their own children. This builds to a casually delivered punch-line when Mrs Fremont responds to news that her feast is a crime scene, “Oh dear, I guess the guests will have to eat hamburgers for dinner tonight!” Blood Feast desperately needed more such overt satire to lend the film's implicit anarchism coherence. As it is it merely predicts later, better filmmakers.