Second Coming - not what I expected

Idris Elba is a great actor, so a film with him in it is going straight on to the 'must watch' list.  I can't remember where it was that I first came across this low budget British film that stars the man himself as a construction worker and family man in inner city London, but the title and premise were immediately intriguing.  Second Coming was billed to refer to something to do with a child in the film, implying that the story would be one about Elba's character's family, with a mystical twist revolving around the biblical story of Revelation.

Well, it isn't quite that.  And though I didn't enjoy Second Coming that much, I didn't have such a crap time as to deliberately spoil it for anyone who might want to check it out.  So I will hold back on giving things away.  What I will say though is that I find it surprising this is a feature length film.  The story of Jax and Mark and their little confused boy JJ isn't that cinematic, and it's a long slog to get to the 'hmm - I wonder what that means...' ending.

As far as my clear up of films I missed when they came as is going - Second Coming is one I wouldn't have been too upset over not seeing in the end.  A review in short - not one to prioritise, as I'm sure the brevity of this post conveys.

Upstream Colour - weird, very weird

Settled in at my new lodgings in Leamington last week catching up on a couple of films that have been around for a while now without me having the chance to see them.  The first was Upstream Colour - written by and starring Shane Carruth, he of minor indy fame for his low-budget science fiction puzzler Primer.  I loved Primer.  It has a feel to it that makes it look like real science at work in the real world of an amateur scientist's garage.  Even though it was filled with pseudo-science, it was realistic-sounding pseudo-science, and crucially made use of the scientific method.  Hence my excitement about Upstream Colour.

With Primer Carruth created characters confused by the world they find themselves creating, with his new film, the same writer creates a world that audiences will find confusing and unsettling.  The film opens with a series of sequences in which a man (later credited as The Thief) cultivates plants that host small maggots, he then conspires to infect a woman (Kris) with one of the worms, which immediately puts her in a hypnotic trance under his command.  After he steals money from her, she is delivered to another man, a pig farmer credited as The Sampler.  Some kind of surgical procedure happens and she is then returned to the world, apparently back to normal but aware that she has lost some time.  The film then continues, marrying up the lives of Kris and the pig with whom she shared time on the operating table.  Kris then meets Jeff (played by Carruth), and their lives become intertwined and parallel the lives of the pigs in the farm.  It soon becomes clear (ish) that their lives are deeply connected, perhaps the fact they met has little to do with chance?

Upstream Colour is even more oblique than Primer.  I don't really know how that's possible, but it would take someone like Carruth to out-oblique his own work.  At least Primer was only a time travel story with a narrative that was impossible to understand - demonstrating the potential reality of non-linear causality.  Upstream Colour is a much more abstract experience that defies any real attempt to categorise it.  You can interpret it as a story about the cycle of life, or how much of humanity lives its life in willful ignorance of powerful controlling elites, or the nature of love and the human condition.  You could even interpret the film as an entirely straight science fiction story, in which some unknown being (the worm) uses humans and pigs to perpetuate itself.  Probably it's all of this, and none of it.  Most likely Carruth is encouraging the audience to find its own meaning where it can, in the best tradition of cinema-as-art.

If you have a spare 2 hours and fancy a bit of abstract art cinema, then maybe give this a go.  But otherwise it's probably a little too out there for its own good.  Big up to Carruth though for making cinema like this, which more than anything else it is, is an exercise in creating wonderful images and then asking an audience to absorb them.  And what is that, if not art?

Star Wars 7 - just relief

Well here it is.  The most anticipated and critic proof film of all time (except perhaps the last Star Wars film) finally arrived across the world 3 weeks ago.  I gave the crowds a chance to die away and studiously avoided spoilers online, before walking down to the Camberley Vue on a wet and windy Wednesday afternoon in late December.  All I ever wanted for Xmas was a good Star Wars film.  No bad dialogue, no soulless CGI sets, no over-animated sword fights, no child actors that can't act, no convoluted and illogical plots, no horribly ham-fisted love interests and DEFINITELY NO FUCKING JAR JAR BINKS!  Just an adventure film about good v evil set in space, that's all we want.

It was therefore with slowly-unraveling relief that I left the cinema a happy bunny that damp Wednesday evening last week, because the latest Star Wars is not a terrible film.  In fact, it might even have been quite a good film.  Plot-wise this fast-forwards 30 years from the original trilogy, to a time in which our original heroes are suitably aged and there is space for a new younger generation to take over.  The 'First Order' are the bad guys this time, complete with totalitarian rallies and black robes, they're every bit the part a bunch of ludicrous bad guys.  When they try to get some plans for the Resistance base (don't ask where these plans come from - 'tis a maguffin) one of the storm-troopers has a turn of conscience and flees.  A bunch of cool stuff happens and then there's and EVEN BIGGER Death Star type thing threatening all that is good and lovely and Jedi.  Well it isn't called the Death Star, but this is Star Wars - so of course it's a Death Star.  Anyway - you know how it's going to end - this is Star Wars after all.

The stuff that's good here is the stuff that made Star Wars good in the first place.  The plot is simple and engaging.  Action sequences aren't headache-inducing.  Harrison Ford is really well cast.  There is meaning in small moments.  The new characters that are introduced are done so with the potential for many layers.  We have a new Jedi with a past hinted at.  We have a rebellious Storm Trooper with alluded-to motivations.  Best of all we have a bad guy in Kylo Ren who is frightened of his own good side, a great twist on the conventional Star Wars fall from light.  The future is bright in this one.

This is a film that should please everyone.  There's plenty for the fanboys, but also plenty for people who only know of Star Wars the brand.  It's not all rosy though, there are some downers mainly regarding the world that has been built for this sequel.  Star Wars was never the best at world-building, but in the original trilogy it was clear that there was a rebellion against the Galactic Empire. Now that Empire has been replaced by some sort of Republic, but for some reason there's still a Resistance militia that looks exactly like the old Rebels.  Shouldn't they have disbanded or at the very least become the Republic's army?  And what exactly did the Rebels of Return of the Jedi 'win' if this First Order crowd are running around looking exactly like the old Empire and building Death Stars?  Sounds like they didn't do a very good job of dismantling the old Empire!  Then there are the plot contrivances, too many to list here, and each of which some fanboy will no-doubt attempt to invoke "the will of the force" or some such crap to explain it.  No matter.  Accuracy of timeline and coherence of plot was never Star Wars' strong point.  After all, this stuff isn't really science fiction, it's an adventure film set in space.

Looking forwards now, one wonders what the next Star Wars film holds.  The eighth installment is already in production, and since episode 7 held so closely to the plot of the original one wonders if episode 8 will largely parallel The Empire Strikes Back.  I very much hope this isn't the case, and that the next film will tell a new story exploring the potential of these new characters.  Abrams screwed up the Star Trek reboot by turning it into an action film, surely the same can't be possible with Star Wars - which is already a Western in space.

And so it came to pass that in the winter of 2015, the one known as J J Abrams did save the world's most recognisable and best-loved science fiction film franchise.  Star Wars 7 has the same problems that befall many an action film in space, but these are largely the same problems that George Lucas' original had.  This is a film that did exactly what it needed to do, it rescued the Star Wars franchise from death-by-prequels and returned it to what the original film envisioned.  As more and more days pass between my watching of Star Wars 7 and today, I am slowly coming to the rather wondrous conclusion that I might actually have really enjoyed it - a lot.  Roll on episode 8.

Transcendence - hopefully not my last film of the year

The writing was sort of on the wall for Transcendence before I even watched it.  When I checked out its IMDB entry I discovered that 'people who liked this' also liked such abominations as Lucy and The Tourist.  Sigh.  But of course silly me I never checked that before the physical DVD was in my possession; so what is a film-nerd to do but watch it anyway and prepare to rage?  So here we go.

Johnny Depp is miscast as Will Caster, a socially introverted caricature of a scientist who is obsessed by artificial intelligence (AI) and who wants to create a computer that can think.  His wife Evelyn (Rebecca Hall) gets to be all weepy and emotional about things (cos she's a women innit) and his mentors & colleagues get to sound all scientific.  Paul Bettany is Evelyn's unemotional foil (cos he's a man innit) while Morgan Freeman stands about sounding like the narrator and getting all the lines the writers think are most profound - cos that's what his career has become.  When Caster is shot by anti-AI terrorists (led by Kara Mara - another good actor who is in this film why?) his team decide to try to save his mind by uploading him to a computer.

This then leads us naturally into familiar science fiction territory - what does it mean to be human, and can a machine ever be so.  Except that the film completely shies away from telling this story.  Instead it turns Johnny Depp's character into some sort of big bad with a huge shoot-out and lots of convenient plot holes that can't be ignored in such a terrible film.

I'm almost more depressed that I've got used to films like this than their actual existence.  Lucy especially is a film very similar to this, a film that never gets deeper than a mere scratch into anything approaching proper science fiction, but somehow thinks itself deeply profound.  It's a film that thinks it's being clever because it asks how a human can prove they are self-aware, but then never goes on to explore that.  It's a film that feels like a marketing opportunity without a script, a collection of famous cast members without any characters for them to play, where the final act of descends into an action shooter because that's what the committee that 'wrote' the script thinks audiences want these days.

In short, this is a very poor attempt at science fiction.  Oh, and Cillian Murphy is also in it for a bit - talk about wasted acting talent.

Some of you might be surprised to find me blogging about Science Fiction trash rather than conducting an in-depth review of the new Star Wars film.  The truth is that I have not seen it yet; I just don't get along very well with insanely packed cinemas of fan-boys.  Probably go and see it between Christmas and the New Year.  Yes I am excited about it, but the crushing failure of the hopefully soon-to-be-retconned prequels leaves me hoping that it simply isn't terrible.  Watch this space for my thoughts.  Merry Xmas all!

Last House on the Left - Horrible Horror

Way back in the day when I was hardly into film at all, my friends were all watching a brand new exciting horror movie called Scream.  Scream took the world by storm, and I was informed by the film-reviewing world that Wes Craven had re-invented the horror genre.  What no-one stopped to tell me though, was that Craven had been here before, creating horror thrillers that inspired a generation of film makes over several decades.  With Craven's recent death, I am taking the time to watch some of his more famous back-catalogue.

Last House on the Left starts innocently enough, but by the end has degenerated into a bloody revenge fantasy in which a nicer-than-nice middle class family shows us how society is only a short step away from violent anarchy.  The plot is that middle class Mary of liberal upbringing and her more worldly-wise friend Phyllis go to see a concert, try to score some drugs, get kidnapped by a gang of sexually violent criminals - and then there's bloody horror.

With this - his first film - Craven set the template for a genre that has now become so ingrained in the minds of the movie-watching public, that it's hard to imagine a time before these tropes existed.  The movie is shot on grainy film stock, often with poor lighting, indifferent cuts and stunted chemistry between the actors - in other words trying not to look like a film, trying to look like real life.  Herein lies the true nastiness of it, rather than trying to tell a horror story or deliberately scare us, Craven is doing something much more animalistic than that.  He's trying to get under our skin by presenting us with youthfulness and innocence, and then ripping it to bloody pieces.

Of course the cleverness here is that even through this, the film is politically charged.  It plays into the fear of every liberal parent, that their liberalism contradicts that animal instinct to protects one's children above all, and that one's civilised exterior is only a front waiting to be washed away to reveal the darkness underneath.  When presented with something of unimaginable horror, such as the people who brutally killed your daughter, where will our civilisation go?  Who are the 'good guys' in the film - do we applaud the revenge of a murdered daughter, or do we shake our heads at the senselessness?

Looking back, it's a film that has been bettered by film-nasties since, but as a piece of film history it's clearly still relevant and seeing the opening shots of a genre that continues to draw huge audience appeal.

Spectre - More Bond!

The release of the latest incarnation of the James Bond franchise was greeted with the usual round of media frenzy over Daniel Craig's abs and teeth gnashing over product placement.  For me, the two most exciting things about this new movie is its title - implying a connection to Bond's most famous villainous organisation - and the fact that it kicks of a hugely exciting winter movie season, which will contain, of course, the new Star Wars.  How the audience gasped when the trailer for that came on (though it hardly seems likely none of those people hadn't seen the trailer already - an observation which might be worthy of a study in psychology).

Spectre does indeed do what one should expect it to from the title.  The movie goes to great lengths to carry out fan service and introduce Hans Blofeld's criminal organisation, complete with scar on his eyes, a white cat, a huge facility in the middle of nowhere and numerous other nods to Bond lore.  In this sense it is doing what this incarnation of Bond has tried to do from the start, which is to update a franchise that was strongest in the 1960s and 1970s for the 21st century.  Here is where is succeeds, with its strong opening sequence it makes effective use of the modern symbology of action films a la Jason Bourne, Bond certainly feels more relevant for the contemporary audience.

In addition to the ambitious and largely successful opening scene, there is a classic Bond super car chase through the streets of Rome, and other Bond tropes that others might struggle to pull off, but work because the audience is familiar with how these films are meant to work.  For example Bond and Bond girl Dr Swan take a train journey across an African desert, and have dinner in their evening wear on the first classic dining carriage.  Because such trains clearly come kitted out the Orient Express.  Oh how the world of Bond loves to suspend our disbelief.

But there are several 'buts', and here they are.  Spectre is far too long.  I noted in particular a scene in which Q (who is now perfectly cast as a modern latte-sipping Shoreditch start-up nerd) is chased for a bit on a ski-lift, but then just escapes without any peril,  100% filler in a 2.5 hour long film.  Spectre also wastes its villain.  Christophe Waltz is introduced as a darkened figure issuing orders silently from the shadows in a scene that has nods to both Thunderball and From Russia with Love, a true kingpin of the international criminal circuit, all rather wasted when we get to see him aimlessly torturing Bond for no real reason.  And consider motivation for a moment, what actually is the motivation for the bad guys in this film?  The plot tries to tie together all the recent Daniel Craig movies under the same umbrella and casts the Spectre organisation as responsible for them, but this in itself feels rather weak.  What's wrong with just stealing a nuclear weapon and holding the world to ransom like they used to?

On a deeper level, I wonder if Bond even works in the modern era of post-Bourne action.  Casino Royale worked and was the best film in the Bond franchise for decades, but it was brutal and unforgiving, Moore-esque eyebrow-raises were nowhere to be seen.  When trying to marry the excitement and visceral action of a modern spy thriller against the occasional camp that the Bond-going public eventually demands, the film plays dangerous games with its own tone.  Take note of a moment during the car chase in Rome.  Bond is being chased by a man who we have just seen horribly gouge someone's eyes out, so a moment when a slightly fat Italian man bump his fiat into a wall and sets off the airbag sort of ruins the drama.  All it does is break the 4th wall and remind us all this is a Bond film, which makes us wonder why we're bothering with all this visceral peril when we know Bond's going to win and get the girl.  Perhaps we were better off in the Moore era with its double-taking pigeons and "... attempting re-entry"?  Maybe not.

Spectre ends in a way that suggests the current run of Daniel Craig as Bond is over, and that the franchise is set up with all the components in place to tell many more Bond stories with many a different leading man wearing the dinner jacket.  As a lifelong fan of Bond I will continue watching these movies as long as they keep making them, but I just can't get out of my head the idea that this character would be better left in the age for which he was invented.

Macbeth - it's *really* grim up North

I will watch anything with The Fassbender in it, just keep plugging away mate - you'll get an Oscar one of these days.  When it was announced that a new production of Macbeth was to be released, with Michael Fassbender in the starring role, well this was a film I had to see.

I am reliably informed that this new adaptation is extremely faithful to the original 17th century play.  The plot hardly needs introduction, but here it is none-the-less.  It is the Dark Ages in Scotland, and the land is in the midst of a civil war.  King Duncan's most trusted general is Macbeth, a man who we see at the start of the film driven to the edges of insanity by the brutality of war and the loss of his sons.  When at the end of his latest victory, 3 witches appear to him on the edges of a misty moor to prophesise his future as king, Macbeth finds himself lost to the temptation of power.

Macbeth requires no analysis by me, many much more well-informed scholars over the years have analysed the play to within an inch of its life.  Personally for me, this is always the Shakespeare play that I found to be the most accessible and interesting as a teenager learning about The Bard.  The story is accessible and character-driven, resonates in the modern world and is uncompromising in its brutality.  Michael Fassbender is a great choice of actor for the lead role, his depth of intensity lends itself extremely well to it.  From the very start he plays Macbeth as a man for whom the constant churn of war and death have left him soulless and hollow.  Marion Cotillard plays Lady Macbeth, less overtly the 'bad guy' here than she is traditionally played - again she seems to be driven by numbness and sadness at the loss of humanity afforded by the bleak Scottish highlands over which the power struggle is played out.

And what about those Scottish Highlands?  Filmed off the west coast of Scotland, the land is a character all of its own here.  The rugged hill-tops are shot with dark reddish filters that create a tone of foreboding and doom - almost as if the human participants are driven to their fates by their dark environs.  Perhaps the 3 witches playing as trickster gods are the physical embodiment of the landscape, tormenting their inhabitants and showing them the human folly of thinking they can 'own' the land.

Fans of Shakespeare will find a lot of interest in this adaptation.  It is very faithful to the source material while at the same time adding an interesting spin to the motivations of Macbeth and his oft-vilified wife.  People who aren't familiar with Shakespeare might - as is ever the criticism of the original plays in a modern context - find individual lines of dialogue hard to follow, but everyone is talking English, and you just need to get used to the idea that you wont understand everything, just as long as you get the gist it's fine.  Sort of like listening to a foreign language.  Macbeth is a classic for a very good reason, take some time to check out this excellent modern adaptation.