Her - Solaris for the post-modern age

Why doesn't Joaquin Phoenix have an Oscar yet?  What more does this man have to do to get his hands on one of those little golden statues?  Not even nominated for his role in Her, he gives a great performance in what is an outstanding film.  The premise is thus: in the near future a new generation of operating systems for computers promises the potential for real artificial intelligence.  When social introvert Theordore (Phoenix) gets his new operating system installed on his phone, he soon finds himself drawn towards her, and he begins to fall in love with Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johansson).

Now, the first thing to establish is the number of ways this could have been a terrible film, so that we can then marvel at what a brilliant piece of science fiction it is.  The film could have turned into a cheesy thriller, with the evil AI going all Misery.  The film could have become nasty, turning its ire on to Theodore and introverted nerd culture.  It could have become pious; finger-wagging its way through our post-modern present and our addiction to mobile phones.  It is none of these things.  Instead it's about humanity, relationships, love, companionship, friendship and how those very human traits will interact with an uncertain near future.  I.e. it's proper science fiction.

Theodore is a character who struggles to make connections in the real world.  He has an ex-wife (Rooney Mara) and works for a company that write heartfelt hand-written letters for their clients, so he clearly is capable of connecting with people on some level.  But for whatever reason he is intensely isolated.  The film suggests her is hardly the only one though, people on the street are constantly distracted on their phones, a woman Theodore goes on a date with seems unable to connect with him as a human, a woman who Samantha hires to be a sex surrogate for them seems obsessed with other peoples' relationships.  It's a world not too distant from our own, where the ease of connectivity through technology seems to have driven us further from our humanity, where society is driving us apart.

This is a world that is brought to life by the set and costume designers on Her, who have done a brilliant job of world-building.  What I mean by this is the small touches that bring this near-future alive and make it feel real.  The way people dress, the small technological changes that look ever-so-slightly-but-not-quite like what we're used to now, but most of all the mere ordinariness of it all.  This is simply the world of 10 or 20 years hence, a world we will all likely experience.  It's a world where some of us might really end up knowing, or being, Theodore.

Whereas the writers of the Soviet classic Solaris had to imagine an unknowable alien force that played on the emotions of the man sent to understand it, in the post modern age we have created our own very real alien intelligences that know all our secrets; and we keep them in our pockets.  Therefore the writers of Her are able to invoke something that we all already implicitly understand.  We experience much more through our computers than we ever have done in the past.  In return, Samantha the OS wants to know what it means to be human, and it's that desire to connect that drives both these characters.

Her is very close to being a perfect film.  The performances are poignant (big kudos to Scarlett Johansson by the way for choosing to take some interesting indie roles recently - it would be very easy for her to stay on the Hollywood bandwagon) and heartfelt.  The near-future world is perfectly constructed and presented.  The themes of human loneliness and friendship are subtly layered through everything that happens.  The eventual fate of Samantha is handled with just the right amount of mystery.  The film's final scene could easily have strayed into cheese, but is instead a wonderful visual statement about the dawn of a brave new world of human relationships.  And I've not even mentioned Amy Adams yet - she's in it too.

This is turning out to be a great year for science fiction.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes - it's summer time!

With summer in full swing and a heatwave sweeping across Britain, what better thing to do than get yourself into the air conditioning of a cinema to cool off and watch the summer blockbusters?  Now that the world cup is over, the summer season of movies has shifted into gear, and one of the first big ones on screens is Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.

Putting aside any reservations that I have about the existence of these spoiler-inducing prequel to the SciFi classic Planet of the Apes, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is a very good movie.  It's the follow-up to Rise of the Planet of the Apes and follows the continuing story of the super-intelligent Caesar, and ape who was created in a lab in the last film and now leads a group of apes living in the forests on the edge of San Francisco 10 years after the events of the first.  In those 10 years, the human race has been almost entirely wiped out by a simian flu virus and only small pockets remain.  When Caesar's band of apes encounter an advance party of humans from San Francisco scouting out a potential electricity source, tensions mount as there are those on each side who see the other as a deadly threat to their continued existence.

Where Rise... was a science fiction film about the balance that scientists have to strike between advancing their field and playing god, Dawn... is a film about politics.  On the side of the apes there is Caesar (Andy Serkis) and Koba (Toby Kebbel).  On the side of the humans there is Malcolm (Jason Clarke) and Dreyfus (Gary Oldman).  On each side one faction is pushing for all out war, while the other is calling for peace. The film-makers do a good job of not picking sides here.  'We' are on the side of neither the humans nor the apes, nor on the side of war or peace.  We simply stand at a crossroads in history, and watch as historical forces play out, each side as convinced as the other that it is in the right.  It's a film that asks questions about hard choices in realpolitik, about the courage it takes to make peace, and how the decision to do so can backfire on a leader who can be painted as weak and a traitor to his own people (examples throughout history are abundant - Anwar Sadat and Yitzhak Rabin come to mind though).

The special effects that are used to create the apes are outstanding.  There were a few moments when the green screened backgrounds seemed to float a little, but I think I was only noticing them because I was in such awe of the effects that were bringing the apes to life, that I was paying even more attention than normal.  Clearly a lot of care has gone into the motion capture process that made use of real actors to generate ape-like movements, the pay-off on screen is well worth it.  The film also allows its simian protagonists to communicate in their adopted sign language, with subtitles for the benefit of the human audience.  To use subtitles as standard in a Holywood film is both brave and serves as a narrative device to remind the audience of the genetic divide between them and the apes on screen.

In terms of negatives, the film does contain a lot of plot holes and conveniences that allow it to fit into the Holywood norm.  For example there's no reason why the humans couldn't already operate their radio without hydro-electric power, since they clearly have petrol and therefore have a way to generate electricity.  How many bullets do they really need to fire in order to test their guns?  Can a man really survive a detonation of C4 explosive in an enclosed area by simply jumping out of the way?  Just how many apes are there?  Like in the first film where they went from about 50 apes to several 1000 in a single cut, here the same thing seems to happen.  This is the biggest problem of all, since the film seems to want to have it both ways.  It seems to want the apes to appear to be a small band of loyal family members, but at the same time numerous enough to engage in a pitched battle against a heavily-armed fortified position.

I wonder how many more of these films there are going to be, and how many more of them are going to be given names that make them sound like the first of a series of prequels.  I guess in theory the studio could carry on making films as long as it has the desire to string out the narrative that the original classic starts with.  Given the kind of shit that we get used to being presented with from the big American studios, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is a refreshingly interesting film.  It has science fiction, politics, action and successfully pulls at the heart-strings too.  If all Holywood films could be like this, the world would be a better place.

The Thing - testing the blood

Time for a quick 'classic scene', this time it's from John Carpenter's classic horror The Thing.  Starring Kurt Russell, the film follows a group of Antarctic scientists who find something weird going on underneath the ice after they discover a previous Norwegian team who have appeared to kill themselves.  It soon becomes apparent that they are dealing with an alien creature that can replicate itself by taking the form of any living thing it comes into contact with.

In this scene, MacReady (Russell) tests out his hypothesis that he can work out which of them are aliens by putting a scolding hot wire into a sample of each of their blood.  The theory being that the blood sample is still part of the alien creature, and that it will feel pain as if the hot wire had been pushed into the person.  Enjoy...



It's an outstanding horror film that, partly because of its reliance on animatronic effects rather than digital CGI, still looks terrifying today.  The film's final scene is one of the best in the history of the horror genre, full of sadness and poignancy at the numbing realisation of what's to come.

You need to have seen this film.

City Lights - IMDB top 50, done

Finished off my long-running project to have watched all the IMDB's top 50 films the other night by watching Charlie Chaplain's classic silent romantic slapstick comedy - City Lights.

When watching films like this in the post-modern age, it is very easy to slip into a trap where you look at the production values, the lack of sound, the occasionally hammy acting and the back-lit special effects, and conclude that such films are historical artefacts.  They're something that can be appreciated only from the point of view of film history, rather than for what they were originally intended.  However it's a trap that one would do well not to fall into, as to do so would be to miss out on something genuinely enjoyable and touching.

City Lights follows the story of The Tramp - played by Chaplain - and his chance encounters with a blind flower girl and drunken upper class fop.  When he is kind to the girl and buys a flower from her, the passing of the rich man makes her think that The Tramp is in fact a man of great wealth.  When The Tramp saves the rich man from killing himself in a drunken rage, the two become great friends, but the rich man can only remember him when he's drunk.  When he's sober again he demands The Tramp out of his house immediately.  And so we have a story of a Tramp, the pariah of the modern city, ostracised by those who are able to judge him by his appearance, but loved by those that are either without sight or without inhibition and therefore free to judge him on the content of his character.  It's a stunningly simple premise, filmed in a stunningly simple way and rounded off with a simple scene of touching humanity that film buffs have occasionally labelled the best final scene of all time - in any film.

This is a Charlie Chaplain film, and as such there is plenty of slapstick physical comedy.  And most of it is pretty funny if slightly awkward-looking in places (again, desperately trying to avoid that trap).  Many people might find the lack of sound and slightly stagy production difficult to cope with, but it would take someone with an incredible hard heart to not take at least some enjoyment out of this film.  Personally I thought it was wonderful.

With the IMDB top 50 under my belt, the obvious progression is to move on to the top 100.  Clearly since the IMDB list is a living document that changes over time, I will need to keep on watching new films as they come out in order to maintain my record.  But that's not hard.  The top 100 has quite a few more titles that I've not even heard of before (and a few that raise my eyebrows - Snatch for example.  It's good, but top 100 all time?  Really?) so it might take a year or so to get through them.  Bring it on.

Inside Llewyn Davis - it's all about the cat

Been away a lot recently and also the world cup's on, so I've either been abroad or drunk or watching football in place of watching DVDs / going to the cinema.  But with the world cup on hiatus last Sunday evening I busted out the most recent DVD that LoveFilm had sent me - Inside Llewyn Davis.  And now with work becoming boring again, there's time to write it up.

This is the Coen Brothers' most recent film, starring Oscar Isaac as the eponymous Llewyn Davis, it tells a short story of this folk singer's time in the 1960s New York folk scene.  The film considers a week in his life, a week in which he encounters various of his friends, travels across the US, loses and finds several cats, and plays folk music with various levels of intensity and success.  Davis is trying to make it as a folk singer, he was part of a small-time duo a few years ago, but his partner Mike killed himself a short time ago and Davis has been unable to find anything close to success since.  The film opens with him being punched in the face, awaking to find a cat on him and then gets odder from there.  Realising he is locked out of his friends' apartment, he takes their cat with him and goes about his everyday business of trying to bum money from his buddies and hating the fact that he plays music for a living.

As with everything the Coen Brothers do, there is a huge amount of subtext being thrown around in Inside Llewyn Davis.  On one hand the film is about the folk music scene of 1960s New York.  On another hand it's about how true art and beauty can often only emerge from some kind of suffering and pain, as is felt by Llewyn and everyone else in the film if the grey / brown colour scheme is anything to go by.

If you want to know what's really going on in this film, then you would do well to pay attention to the cat.  There are lots of theories out there on the internet that suggest the cat has an extra significance to it than simply being something that Llewyn has to deal with while trying to make his way in the world.  I wont reveal anything here, better to let you all try to work things out for yourself, but there are some nice metaphors for Llewyn and his life in his interaction with the cat.  Very arty.

My plan is to try to get back to the cinema next week.  I managed to miss the new X-Men film recently what with being away so much and the world cup being on, but there are a number of summer block-busters lining themselves up just now, starting with the new Planet of the Apes film.