Son of Saul - Bleak, Art, Important

The sort of film I definitely would have watched in the cinema back when I was at university and hanging out at Nottingham's premier arthouse cinema every week, Son of Saul is a brutal and terrifying depiction of a few days in the life of a Sonderkomando at Auschwitz concentration camp.  As it turned out, I only got around to seeing it a few weeks ago - one of the few films of 2016 I have actually seen in 2016.  One of fewer still that I have managed to blog about.

There is little shortage of depictions of the horrors of Nazi Germany on the silver screen.  The intent of these films is more often than not a message to the post modern world to not forget the horrors that the modern one wrought upon itself.  Sadly though, only 80 years since Hitler presided over the infamous Berlin Olympics, it feels like many Europeans have forgotten how easy it is to allow peace to slip away.  As far right movements once again take hold of populist politics in France, Austria, Hungary and to a much lesser extent here in the UK, it is more important than ever to reminder ourselves where the politics of hate end up taking us.

Which is exactly what Son of Saul does.  The film follows Saul Ausländer, a Hungarian Sonderkomando who is forced to undertake the horrific work of leading people into Auschwitz's gas chambers, and then sorting their belongings and clearing out their bodies afterwards.  The story is told exclusively from Ausländer's perspective, with the camera residing either just over his shoulder or closely in his face.  In this way, the horrors of Auschwitz are presented to us via his reactions rather than directly.  His reaction (or numb lack of reaction) to what we know is going on out of shot easily as effecting as seeing any other brutal depiction of the Holocaust.  The film is about hopelessness and the pain that people can inflict on their fellows when we stop seeing people as people.  If there is a glimmer of hope in the way the film ends, then it is perhaps a nod to the idea fact that the Holocaust did, eventually, end.  The hope was for a new generation to remember, commemorate, and say 'never again'.

It's a film that's deliberately hard to watch.  But that's the point, keeping the peace and working together for the benefit of all isn't easy.  It's something we all have to work for.  Son of Saul does its part to remind us of the perils of taking the path of the scapegoat.  Please Europe - Never Again.

The Green Mile - I read this AGES ago!

In a rare case of me actually having read a book before seeing the film, I saw The Green Mile a few weeks back.  I know this is a film that was made quite a lot of years ago, and I doubt I ever would have watched it had it not turned up on one of the IMDB's top lists during one of my semi-regular attempts to complete the entire list.  But there it was, a thorn in my IMDB completionist side.  It was time to watch.

Made almost 20 years ago, Tom Hanks looks considerably more youthful as our main protagonist - death row prison guard Paul Edgecomb.  Edgecomb's philosophy is simple: society has deemed the men under his watch to die for their crimes, his job is simply to make the entire process as hassle free and painless as possible.  That means understanding, compassion and avoiding confrontation.  Into this environment is brought the man mountain John Coffey (Michael Duncan), convicted of a double murder of two small girls and destined to die.  Edgecomb's initial fears of dealing with Coffey are soon put to one side, as Coffey is found to not only be a gentle giant, but a man of seemingly supernatural abilities apparently unable to have committed the crimes for which he is guilty.

It hardly requires a degree in narrative analysis to understand that John Coffey represents Jesus Christ.  Being condemned to death for a crime he did not commit, possessing of miraculous powers of healing, living in a society that holds deep structural prejudices against him and - of course - holding the initials JC, things are more overt than the allusions for Paul Newman's character in Cool Hand Luke.  It's a simple story that's rather powerful, says something about the history of 20th century America and very much worth the commitment to enjoy.

For a story that is set on death row, it is surprisingly neutral on the morality of the punishment.  Though of course the death of John Coffey is undoubtedly a tragic event, his death is paralleled with the death of Christ.  Since Christian doctrine celebrates the death of Jesus as a moment in which humanity is saved, it is unclear whether ultimately even Coffey's death is considered a sin.  We have the death of fellow inmate Delacroix that hints at the horrors of the death penalty, but even this horror is perpetrated by sadistic guard Percy Wetmore rather than at the system itself.  In fact Delacroix's journey to death on the Green Mile is portrayed as a noble act, that in accepting his fate gracefully he achieves some kind of repentance.  Perhaps the point is to simply make us think about these issues, which the film undoubtedly does.  One to go back into the annals of film and catch up on.

1984 - Made in 1984

My interested in Michael Radford's 1984 was raised recently when it was revealed to me that Mr Radford's kid attends my girlfriend's school.  Having recently introduced her to his wonderful 2004 version of The Merchant of Venice (Al Pacino plays Shylock no less) the school had him come along and give a talk to the kids about his career.  We never got anything like that when I was in school - I can tell you for free.

I'm no expert on literature, but I think 1984 is one of the great works of fiction.  Structurally and narratively is it as good as anything I've ever read.  Its discussion of the use of language, education and social stratification as a way of controlling a population was a grim nightmare when it was written, however in the modern age the people of North Korea really do live in such a world.  Orwell's vision of telescreens that would allow a totalitarian state to continuously keep tabs on a population isn't beyond comparison to a modern snooper's charter.  The language from 1984 has seeped into the everyday idiom - phrases like "Thought Police", "Big Brother", "Room 101" and "Doublethink" need no explanation.

Anyway - it's my favourite book.

A film adaptation would always be troublesome since so much of 1984 happens in the internal monologue of our main character Winston Smith.  We experience the world from his point of view. Since film-making from a first person viewpoint is almost impossible, and over-use of internal monologue tedious, Radford (who wrote the screenplay) does an excellent job of world-building without resorting to it.  A number of flashback scenes that go to Smith's childhood, mentioned briefly in the book, are expanded upon here to build the nightmare world of Orwell's envisioning.

John Hurt plays Smith, and he does it with a painful strain that conveys everything we know about the character from Orwell's words.  In one of his last ever roles, Richard Burton plays the enigmatic O'Brien, who Smith initially believes to be an operative of the underground movement, but soon reveals himself to be an apparatchik of the state.  His performance is calm and methodical, his character is equally happy sitting discussing politics as he his administering torture.

Having been worried that this adaptation wouldn't be able to do justice to my favourite novel, I came away from watching it fully happy with what I had seen.

Blair Witch - Sorry guys, I went to see it

The title says it all really.  I feel I have to apologise to my film-watching fraternity for going to see the remake of / sequel to (sigh) The Blair Witch Project after generating disparaging remarks about it both verbally and in print.  I had no intention of going anyway near this, but when Mark Kermode said it isn't as bad as it could have been, and I found myself with a spare Saturday morning last weekend, I decided to wander to the Cineworld at the NEC in Birmingham for a matinee showing.

First point of order - matinee showings of horror movies are excellent.  Some people think you want to go and watch a horror film at night.  But why go when the cinema's going to full?  What better way to experience a horror film than in the middle of the day when - if you're lucky - you get to sit by yourself in a large darkened room in front of a massive screen and surrounded by the modern soundscape of 21st century audio?  Horror indeed.

So, Blair Witch.  Set 20 years after the original, we follow James - younger brother of Heather (the one what was in the original film and did the much-parodied-at-the-time solo "... I'm sorry..." monologue into camera).  James wants to find out what happened to Heather, so he enlists the help of his film student friends and some local conspiracy weirdos.  They wander into the woods to try to find the house where Heather, Mike and JOSH! disappeared.  Guess what - they don't find them.

Though the film stays true to the idea of the original - that of the found footage - it adds a few extra things in that mess with the tone just enough to mean it isn't anywhere near as powerful.  The addition of more cameras, brighter, more crisp footage, and crucially a drone camera all tone down the film's claustrophobia.  Allowing us to see an establishing shot of the forest via a drone camera might be a clever way of allowing a found footage film to have an establishing shot; but by putting it in there the forest feels more and conquerable rather than all-enveloping.  The Blair Witch Project never for a moment let the audience out of the space its characters were inhabiting, and from there came its creeping terror.

The Blair Witch Project was terrifying because of what it didn't show you.  No need for jump scares.  No need for malformed humanoid entities to appear in the background.  No need for an unseen force to drag someone off into the bushes.  No need for a character to get an icky-looking wound that they can prod at in graphic detail.  No need for a scene of traumatic underground claustrophobia.  All this does is present the Blair Witch as an actual entity that we could fight if only we knew how.  All this is avoided in the original film, a film which is endlessly more terrifying as a result.

Blair Witch was not a waste of my time.  Its 89 minutes served as a reminder of just how groundbreaking and creepingly terrifying the original was.  You should take my word for it though, if it takes too much money at the box office they might start thinking about making another.

Coherence - Not Quantum Physics

Saw a very short mystery / thriller type thing the other week - Coherence.  This is another of those films that probably started out as a neat idea in someone's head, but in reality there isn't quite enough to string 90 minutes of story-telling out of.  I am reminded of Devil and Exam.  But whatever (they say) - make a film anyway!  "But why Dean?", asked the 2 or 3 people who will ever read this.  Read on...

First the plot.  A bunch of middle class Americans meet up in at the house of a guy who isn't around for dinner - skeletons in the closet all over the place.  There is an asteroid passing overhead and weird things start happening.  Are these things connected?  Obviously.  But how?  And what - if anything - can anyone do to stop this fun evening turning into a nightmare?  Note - stars Nicholas Brendon of Buffy the Vampire Slayer fame.  Good to see he's still in acting!

The coherence of the film's title refers to quantum coherence, which isn't actually what the film's doing - but we'll get away with them misrepresenting the Copenhagen interpretation of Schrodinger's Cat if they can tell a decent mystery thriller.  Sadly, I just didn't buy into the concept of the film, the reason any of it was happening, the decisions any of the characters make and the the way everyone acts throughout.  Pretty damming I guess.

Coherence was at least filmed in an interesting way.  The director makes use of techniques similar to those employed in the production of The Blair Witch Project (of which there is a remake coming - shoot me now).  The actors were given character descriptions for the roles, and then provided with snippets of information before being encouraged to largely improvise.  Sort of like playing Dungeons and Dragons I guess.  Now that's ok in theory, but it doesn't really work when you're trying to tell a story about quantum theory and you have different versions of people flying all over the place.  It gets very confusing very fast, and when someone finally does sit down with a book of science to try to explain everything, it turns into the dullest and most forced exposition scene since Basil Exposition.  It's mainly because of this I think that I didn't buy into anything that was going on.

See when The Blair Witch Project did this it made sense because the confusion of the protagonists was crucial in feeding into the overall tone.  You can't have it both ways.  Either embrace the confusion and have your characters slowly lose their minds to the confusion of the mystery that's engulfing them (Primer); OR have a scientist come and explain everything and have them try to put the universe right (all of Star Trek).  Coherence is made in a way that suits the former, but plotted in a way that insists on the later.

Overall very disappointing.  Coherence messes up its own tone and can't bring itself to not have a neatly wrapped-up explanation for what's going on.  It isn't enough to leaving the fate of our protagonist and where she might be as an open question in the final scene, by that point the mystery has well and truly vanished.

In other words, Coherence is too incoherent.

Suffragette - Bringing history alive and making it relevant

As a progressive, Socialist and Feminist, it is with some shame that have to admit knowing very little about the movement for women's suffrage that swept across the United Kingdom in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  Obviously I know the headlines, that there was a movement called the Suffragettes whose direct action eventually brought about the introduction of votes for women in the early 20th century.  But aside from that - almost nothing.

I assume that I am in a vast majority of British people, and as such the production and release of Suffragette as a major film was welcome.  Starring Carey Mulligan in the lead role, she brings the required star presence the ensure that the film got reviewed more than just as a historical curiosity - well, her and Meryl Streep obviously.  Here Mulligan plays Maud Watts, a washer woman from East London living an ordinary working class life who experiences molestation at work at the hands of her boss and as a result gets swept up into the Suffragette movement.

This is a film that deftly tells a story of one woman's ordinary experiences, and by extension the ordinary experience of women throughout the decades and centuries that eventually lead to the birth of modern feminism.  It's a story of how political change is enacted - via political or direct means.  It's a story about the sacrifices made by those acting to create chance, as they are shunned by their own communities and families.  It's also a story about the role the police take in such matters, how does a police officer who largely agrees with your cause react to knowing it's his job to brutally repress it?  All of this ties in with contemporary protest movements, the daily realities of raging against the machine were the same then as they are today.

Let's turn momentarily to the casting of Meryl Streep as Emmeline Pankhurst.  Initially I was a little miffed that this part went to the American Holywood A-lister, for such a small role why not cast a British actress and allow her to take the limelight.  But then the power of using Streep becomes clear, because Pankhurst's celebrity amongst the Suffragettes is conveyed by Streep's screen presence and our reaction to her.  Similar to the way that Scarlett Johansson's casting in Under the Skin added to the unearthliness of her alien presence in suburban Glasgow, when Streep comes on screen we don't need anyone to tell us that this is an important moment in the politicisation of Maud Watts.

So my message to you Britain is to get out there and see (well, stay in and rent the DVD of) Suffragette.  It tells a side of history that I guarantee few of you are aware of.

It Follow - Old School Horror

A recommendation from two different directions drew me towards It Follows recently - which is an American independent horror / thriller with a distinctive 1980s feel to it.  Both my current favourite Youtube film reviewers RedLetterMedia and one Kim Helman (film-watcher in kind) told me that this was a film I needed in my life.

Given that this is the first film I've reviewed in the best part of 2 months, there was definitely something about It Follows that compelled me to log back into my much-neglected blog.  The plot is as follows: there is a curse which afflicts an individual, the curse is passed on when that person sleeps with someone else.  The curse is that an entity visible only to those who either have or have had the curse will slowly and relentlessly pursue you.  The entity can take on any human form, and will simply walk slowly in your direction until is catches you and dismembers you.  Then it will go after the next last person who had the curse.  Simple eh?

The film opens with a credit sequence that's straight out of the 1970s / 80s horror playbook, with suitably electronic score and graphics announcing the titles.  A foreboding tone is set very early on, and soon with the rules of the curse established we are in for an unsettling story layered with unsubtle towards of teenage fear of sex and AIDS.  For about 45 minutes it is great, but soon it becomes clear that there are only so many ways to film a sequence where the teenagers sit around worrying before IT starts coming towards them.  Eventually they decide that it must be possible to simply put a sheet over it and shoot it in the head, which is a bit of a let-down in terms of special effects and the supernatural quality of the plot.

Everything ends suitably ambiguously, but in order to get there we have to go through an extended sequence in a swimming pool that somehow manages to lose the tension that's been built up over the opening 2 acts of the movie.  It Follows is a very creditable horror film that I would heartily recommend, but I don't think it's quite yet polished article.  Congratulations to the makers of this film though, for successfully managing to capture the vibe of old school horror.