American Mary - fetish surgery

What a bizarre little film this turned out to be.  After winning the awards for best film, director and actress at the 2012 Screamfest film festival, American Mary was highlighted on one of Mark Kermode's radio broadcasts at some point last year.  So I'm clearly going to watch it.

Katharine Isabelle plays Mary Mason, a medical student specialising in surgery.  In the opening half hour of the film we see Mary referred to by her teachers has having huge potential as a surgeon - imploring her to not 'fuck up' as she sometimes appears a little distant in her classes.  She is an unwealthy student though, and so she applies to be a dancer / masseuse in an underground burlesque club in town to make a bit of extra cash.  When the sleazy owner of the bar discovers she is a trainee surgeon though, he asks her if she would like to make $5000 cash by doing a bit of impromptu surgery there and then.  She reluctantly agrees, hoping for this to be a one-off.  Later though she is approached by people from the local body modification community who heard about her work in the club, they are eager to see her practice her underground skills on them.

After something terrible happens, Mary quite rightly loses her faith in her profession.  But her reaction is to go psycho, start dressing in fetish surgery garb (yes - apparently that exists), perform a variety of weird surgical procedures and have little compunction about killing people who wind her up.  As so far as the plot goes, there isn't really much of one - except to say that Mary no longer holds much truck with the medical community she once idolised.  Instead she throws herself into a dark fantasy world of tongue-splitting and limb re-attachments in which she is idolised by an on-line community obsessed by barely-legal surgical procedures.

The film then becomes a revenge fantasy much in the same mould as Django Unchained.  The difference being that American Mary is much less fun than the Tarantino film, dwells for quite a long time on the actual surgical procedures and has a central character who performs a reality-defying personality flip in which she becomes a crazed surgical dominatrix overnight.  The plot gets very screwy in the final act (something about the sleazy club owner fantasising over Mary, so she has to frighten the dancer who was giving him a blow-job.  For some reason.  Something like that?) and there is at least one scene of terrible acting.  In short, with all that blood and darkness I can see why many horror fans could get a lot of enjoyment from American Mary, but there are too many downsides for me to make it any more than an average-to-meh film.  IMDB's current rating of 6.1 is a little too high in my opinion - but if you're into fetish surgery this is probably a must-see!

Sunshine - my favourite scene (slight spoiler)

Watched Sunshine again last night.  Next time someone asks me when a film last brought a tear to my eye, I'll tell them about this beautiful scene from Sunshine (slight spoilers - happens about 45 minutes in) in which captain Kaneda of the Icarus sacrifices himself to save the ship:



The story of the film is of a group of scientists who are sent to the sun with a payload designed to restart it and save all humanity.  Their ship is equipped with a huge screen that shields them all from the deadly rays and heat emitted by the sun at such close range.  The film is on the surface a simple science fiction story, but after watching it you realise that it's more about sacrifice, psychology and human spirituality.  The sun is a metaphor for a kind of atheistic god, and the shield that protects the crew from its deadly light also prevents them from seeing and experiencing this entity that created and sustains all life on Earth.

In this clip Kaneda understands that he must sacrifice himself for the good of the mission, but with his last act turns and looks god defiantly in the face, humanity's final desperate challenge to a creator who has condemned us to die.  Kaneda's crew mate Searle calls out to him - "What do you see?!", desperate to look into the face of his god even though he knows that to do so would bring madness and death.  That burning need to understand, to see meaning in the stars, is universal - and for the crew of the Icarus the pressure of being so close to the creator yet unable to see or understand it is crushing.  It's not just the spirituality of this scene that gets me; the effects, stylisation of the solar heat, music - everything's just perfect.

The final 20 minutes of Sunshine are a bit mad, and I admit that they could have a bit more structure, but they're classic Boyle as they tell a story of psychological breakdown through bonkers camera work.  It's a fantastic film that I commend to science fiction fans and normal people alike.

The Hobbit - An entirely expected disappointment

When Peter Jackson announced that several years back that as a follow up to his epic Lord of the Rings trilogy he would be making a film adaptation of The Hobbit, I thought it sounded like we were in for treat.  Then it slowly emerged that Jackson would be making the ~200 page long novella into a trilogy of films to be released over 3 consecutive winters, the first of a series of announcements that slowly diminished my enthusiasm.  It emerged that the first of this trilogy would be 3 hours long, and that it would be filmed using more frames per second for some reason - ostensibly because it's 'better'.  By the time it came out in the cinemas in December last year my enthusiasm was entirely gone, gone to the point that I didn't even bother to go to see it.

A couple of weeks ago I was loaned a DVD copy of the opening part of the trilogy - "The Hobbit - An Unexpected Journey".  The plot of The Hobbit is startlingly simple, and the plot of this opening part of the trilogy is simpler still.  Some 50 odd years before the events of the Lord of the Rings, Gandalf the Grey convinced Bilbo Baggins (now played by Martin Freeman) to go on a great adventure with a company of rather silly Dwarfs.  The Dwarfs are on a mission to recover a mystical artifact that will restore their nation to its former glory, Bilbo goes along so that he can acquire some anecdotes to tell in his old age.  The film opens with a sequence introducing the background to the Dwarfish nation, and then cuts to the present day in which Bilbo is visited by Gandalf.  The Dwarven contingent gradually arrive until they're all in Bilbo's house having a right ol' time.  Everyone gets to know each other and they agree to go off on an adventure.

This opening bit takes 40 minutes.  40 minutes is an insanely long time in which to have the establishing scenes of a film.  Though I guess we need that long to become familiar with the over-abundance of Dwarfs to whom we are introduced.  13 Dwarfs in fact, none of whose names I can remember now and all of whom are entirely interchangeable for each other (apart from the king Dwarf I suppose).  Once that's out of the way we then go walking to the big Elf city, then on to the big underground goblin kingdom where Bilbo meets Gollum.  They do a bit of tedious riddling and then Bilbo discovers THE RING.  Then there's a battle and it sort of ends without anyone any clearer if they're closer to their goal or just bumbling around in the woods for shits and giggles.

Despite this being a film over which a shit load of care and attention was obvious poured (witness the costumes and sets), it feels very functional.  It feels as though no one really cares about the story of the Hobbit, not the fans (The Hobbit is Lord of the Rings for kids after all), not the studio (they only care about the money) and not the director (perhaps he wanted a make a single film rather than a trilogy?).  It all feels like it's being made by accountants directing CGI whizz-kids, the film moves from one scene to the next introducing each character one after the other ticking off elements from the book and trying to cram every last fan boy-pleasing element in.  It just doesn't feel like there's any love in the film.  Most amazingly of all is that some of the SFX even looks ropey.  This is most clear during the open-ground battle sequence where the Dwarfs are chased by Orcs riding wolves, I'm sure that you can see where the animals have been computer generated.

Overall the film is visually stunning in places, but it's way too bloated and vast to hold my interest for nearly 3 hours.  There was nothing here that made me think I'm be queuing up to watch part 2 come December this year.

The Purge

Not been to the cinema for some time so this week decided I had to make that change.  There's not much on at the minute after all the cinemas local to Wokingham pulled Byzantium off their screens at the end of last week.  That's only 1 week that film was available to see around here, now replaced by endless showings of Fast and Furious 6 and After Earth.  Sigh.

Thankfully though there are still some slightly interesting films out there at the moment, one of which is The Purge.  Starring Ethan Hawke and directed by the same guy who did Sinister I did not have too much in the way of hopes when I first saw trailers for The Purge.  The film has a neat high concept, which is that in order to maintain order in an increasingly violent world, the US government has created a Purge.  The Purge is a single night of the year when all crime is legal, the emergency services are closed down and the population are free to go out, murder, rob, rape and pillage and 'get everything out of their system'.  An interesting idea, one which the film feels the need to explain several times in the opening act.  The film also poses a number of questions about the true motivations behind the existence of The Purge - several news commentators are shown discussing if it is in fact simply an elaborate ploy to kill off society's poor - but none of this is really expanded on in the rest of the film.

We are invited to spend the night of The Purge with the Sandin family, a perfect example of the white upper middle class suburban idyll.  Father James (Ethan Hawke) has made Billions selling home security systems to guard against the Purge, Mother Mary (Lena Headey - about whom I constantly have to pretend to my friends that I don't know if she's going to be needed to reprise her character in each subsequent season of Game of Thrones) is the housewife doting over two stereotypical middle class brat kids.  We see that their neighbours are a little miffed at all the money the Sandins have, since they earned it my flogging security systems to everyone on the street.  But everyone beds down for The Purge and soon the fun begins, as young Charlie Sandin lets a random man from the street into their house and soon a large gang of frat boys are banging on their door demanding their 'right' to Purge.

The film leaves behind its overt politicisation and turns into a sort of Straw Dogs type thing in which the Sandin family have to defend their home from the frat boys and frat girls wielding various types of weaponry.  It gets a bit tedious when people start creeping around the house in the dark, but then it goes rather fun and icky when Ethan Hawke finally gets to go to work with a shotgun and an axe in his pool room.

I think that the film might be trying to have a political angle, but it isn't that clear if it's pro or anti gun.  A friend of mine observed that The Purge probably has a good film lurking inside it somewhere, and likely just needed a few re-writes to tighten the story up and make it a really good film.  It certainly ends on a pro-peace note, but I'm not really sure how it can claim that after the amount of violence it gets though.  Anyway, it's daft in places, a little boring in others, but it has enough mental violence in it and an interesting enough concept to make it worth while.  Worth checking out if you get the chance.

Trainspotting

I went to the Reading Vue on Wednesday night last week to see Trainspotting.  They've been having a season of showing old or classic films recently, so I thought that given Danny Boyle's dramatic rise to national prominence over the last few years it would be fun to go and see one of his early classics in a big screen.

Trainspotting was and remains something of a cult film.  It starred Ewan McGregor, Robert Carlyle and Kelly MacDonald; each giving a performance that provided a platform from which to launch their careers.  The story is of Mark Renton (played by McGregor) and his 'friends', most of whom are heroin addicts living in a run-down area of suburban Edinburgh.  The film is about the life of this heroin-addicted Scot who is unrepentant about his choice of lifestyle in the age of Cool Britannia, but at a deeper level it's about how we all choose to live our lives, the choices we all make and then living with the aftermath.  The film is also a historical document of the music, trends, fashions and way of life of the mid-90s.  It was made in 1996, a year when I was doing my A-levels and finally able to go into pubs without fear of getting ID'd, so many of the fashions are painfully reminiscent of younger, simpler times.

It's tough to pick my favourite scene from the film.  Though Robert Carlyle's swivel-eyed ranting as the psychotic Begbie provide the most memorable individual moments and the film's 5 minute opening sequence is part of the British cinematic iconography, I think the most beautiful sequence is the one in which Renton suffers a bad reaction to an injection and ends up in hospital.



The sequence is lovingly crafted and the music (Lou Reid's "Perfect Day") is the ideal accompaniment.  For Renton the moment of injection is his perfect moment, but it's deeply melancholy at the same time as the look in his eye tells us he's terrified of what he's unleashing on himself.  It's a great film from a director who has given us his fair share of great films over the years, keep 'em coming please Mr Boyle.