Babadook - Ba Ba Dooooooooooook

Another week and another horror film.  This time The Babadook; which is less horror and more thriller, as is perhaps indicated in its 15 rating.  The Babadook is an Australian production that has received a lot of plaudits in various parts of the press, to the extent that several of my chums who wouldn't normally be into horror films convinced me to come and see it last weekend.  Showcase in Reading seemed to be giving it a strong showing, with screenings from midday and then every couple of hours through to the evening.  Perhaps not a great decision on their part since when we saw it at 2pm the cinema was completely empty, but good to see them giving a small production prominence for one.

The Babadook tells the story of Amelia and her son Samuel.  She is a single mother since her husband was killed driving her to the hospital to give birth to their son.  Hence she struggles each year to deal with Samuel's birthday, since it is also the anniversary of the day that his father died.  Samuel is a difficult child.  Caught in between Amelia's ongoing depression and his delusions of monsters living in his cupboards, he finds it impossible to make friends with other children and becomes increasingly maddening in his behaviour.  When a mysterious book appears on his shelf depicting pop-up caricatures of a thing called the Babadook tormenting a child in his bed, Samuel becomes convinced that the Babadook is real.  Amelia gets more and more exasperated with Samuel's behaviour, and as stranger things start going on in the house she gets visions of doing away with her son completely.

There are a lot of similarities to The Shining here.  Mainly because though the film is clearly tinged with the supernatural, you're never quite sure how much of it is really happening and how much is going on inside the minds of the characters.  There is a strong implication that the Babadook is either a metaphor for Amelia's fears for herself, Samuel and their future together; or that it is a supernatural force manifesting as a result of her ongoing pain at the death of her husband that precipitated Samuel's entrance into the world.  This is especially true in some of the rhyming couplets used in the mysterious book, and the way the film eventually ends.

The Babadook is a film that looks and feels intensely eerie.  It's all very pale, with bright exteriors and dim interiors that make everything grey and ethereal.  The horror comes from the constant tension throughout the film, the creeping understanding that either Samuel or Amelia could snap at any moment and do something terrible, the fact that the Babadook - whatever it is - may not be the real villain.  At 90 minutes long and telling a clever self-contained story, it is better than I could ever have expected going into it almost completely cold as I did.  I was pleasantly surprised, and I think you might be too.

The Zero Theorem - too much maybe?

Did you ever watch a film and think - "that's too much isn't it"?  Well I did, and it was Terry Gilliam's The Zero Theorem, a film that I watched last weekend with a group of friends who seemed only partly up for something as weird and absurdist as this.  Terry Gilliam is well-known for his abstract and existential take on life and the world, but with The Zero Theorem he has taken it to another level.  Here, Christoph Waltz plays Qohen, a high-level computer programmer working in a semi-totalitarian garish near future England.  He works for The Company, an organisation headed by the mysterious Management (Matt Damon) who's interests involve amongst others, proving the Zero Theorem.

Qohen's work takes the form of what we in the current age might recognise as computer games, one looks very similar to Minecraft and involves the solution to the Zero Theorem itself.  The theorem is that there is no meaning to anything, and that everything is pointless.  Qohen himself seems utterly detached from everything around him, and so is perfectly-suited to a job that might end up proving the pointlessness of it all.  He starts out working in a bling-encrusted garish communal area, but is soon moved into the complete seclusion of an abandoned church, where he gets visits from the Management's whiz-kid son, an online erotic entertainer, and a AI psychologist - all of them trying to help him solve the Zero Theorem.

In short, this is a film that's completely mental.  It's mental in its styling, mental in its dialogue and pacing, mental in its sets, colours and outfits, mental in its depiction of the future and utterly mental in is plot and meaning.  A discussion after the film led us to the idea that the story is meant to be about choices, fate, and working out what you want to do with your life.  Qohen is a man who wants for nothing, and the fact that he lives in a church might lead you towards a Jesus metaphor.  Maybe?  In the end the message seems to be that there may or may not be any 'point' to everything, but we might as well all just find our own path and enjoy it while we're here.  Other interpretations are probably better - but that's the best I've got.

The problem is that it's all just too much.  Qohen is a character who never gets introduced properly.  The world he lives in is too crazy to make any sense.  It's hard to work out what's going on or what the plot's meant to be about when you're spending enough time trying to work out what the green vials that Qohen keeps handing through a hole-in-the-wall are actually for.  It's a film that feels like an incredible self-indulgence on the part of the director.  It's like he dreamed a load of mental stuff up that made him chuckle without anyone really coming along and warning him that it might make little sense to the average film-goer.

If you watch The Zero Theorem, be prepared to be dazed and confused.  Also tell me if you think Matt Damon looks like Philip Seymour Hoffman in it.

The Grand Budapest Hotel - Anarchic, Funny, Anderson

Last Sunday evening was film night in the house, and the DVD was Wes Anderson's recent eccentric comedy The Grand Budapest Hotel.  The film is a story within a story, in which an old man who owns the eponymous hotel - now fallen on hard times - recalls its glory days in which he was a lobby boy learning the ropes under the tutelage of the legendary concierge Gustave H (Ralph Feinnes).  Gustave H is an absolute eccentric, meticulous in everything he does and proud of the internationally-regarded status of the hotel under his leadership.  When lobby boy Zero arrives in the hotel it is the beginning of an extraordinary story involving a will, a precious painting and a family's efforts to keep Gustave H away from their inheritance.

The hotel exists in the made-up eastern European nation of Zubrowka, the story is set at some point between the two wars at a time of changing national borders and uncertainty about the future.  The film is 100% Wes Anderson, in that everything is styled to within an inch of its life.  The colours are all bright and garish, the frame of every shot is interestingly constructed without an inch of space left free.  When the action switches between time periods, the aspect ratio of the footage also changes.  Weird stop-animation is used to capture a ski-chase scene.  The cable car up to the hotel is rendered in similar animation.  I'm not sure if there's any intention behind these effects other than to make the film look visually interesting.  If anything they enhance the feeling that the film is set in a surreal past that no longer exists.

The cast list for this film is quite unbelievable.  I guess it says something about the regard with which actors on the A-list regard Anderson.  Ralph Feinnes leads, but there are minor roles played by - amongst others - Harvey Keitel, Adrien Brody, Tilda Swinton, Jeff Goldblum, Ed Norton, Bill Murray, Jude Law and Saoirse Ronan.  Quite the A-list I'm sure you'll agree.  I can only assume that the script looked as good on paper as the result does on screen.  The Grand Budapest Hotel is a film that's sometimes outlandishly funny, but constantly funny is a sideways sort of way, with weird moments and strange asides providing moments of surreal humour.

Ralph Feinnes is superb as the film's main character, bringing the right amount of comic timing to Gustave H's role while maintaining his prim outlook on life.  Interestingly, the actors are all allowed to retain their natural accents in the film.  Fiennes' Gustave H is (I assume) meant to be French, but he maintains his stiff English accent throughout.  In amongst the sea of American accents, perhaps the one that seems most out of place is Ronan's Irish, she's got such a gift for accents in her other film roles that some might be surprised to discover she's even from Ireland!

Assuming that Wes Anderson's insistence on style and weirdness doesn't get on your nerves (for some it might), then The Grand Budapest Hotel is a funny and enjoyable caper that's worth watching.  I am recommending it.

Gone Girl - A completly mental thriller

David Fincher's latest film hit cinemas last week, and for the first time in a bit of time, I was in the first wave of people to go out there and catch it as I headed on into Bracknell last Friday evening.  One of my friends asked if we need to book tickets.  No, you never ever have to book tickets to see a film at Bracknell Odeon.  People in Bracknell don't really do cinema.

Gone Girl eh?  I was told to find out nothing about this film before seeing it in order to get the most out of it.  My views on spoilers and such like are a matter of public record amongst my friends, but this time I decided to heed the advice and learn nothing more about the film than what the trailers had told me.  I.e. Rosamond Pike (Amy) and Ben Afleck (Nick) are a couple, she goes missing, he is suspected by some of having something to do with it.  An excellent place to start any thriller, I'm sure you'll agree.

Since I want to try to avoid spoilers here, that's as much as I'm going to say about the plot.  The story of Amy and Nick meeting, their marriage and the happenstance that brings them to rural Missouri is told in flashback both from Nick's point of view and from Amy's diary.  The tone of the film twists and turns as details are revealed (or are they?) that challenge what you might be thinking is going on.  Nick is a guy who's loveable and caring though goofy, Amy is a woman ill at ease with her minor celebrity status and determined not to be the archetypal nagging girlfriend.  Or is that merely the impression their flashbacks would have us believe?  As the story progresses, we get a view inside a marriage that's initially stereotypical, but soon becomes more murky as the flashbacks dig deeper.

I think that Gone Girl is a criticism and commentary on the institution of marriage in the modern age.  What is marriage if not a compromise?  But how much of a compromise is too much?  It's about the personas that people in the public eye end up adopting in front of a critical media, a media that waits for any misstep as an excuse to paint a person as the devil.  Did that man smile too much at a press conference about his disappeared wife?  Well he must have killed her then.  The world of instant comment and twitter leaves no space for nuance, everyone is either a paragon to be worshipped or a sinner to be condemned.  Yet when you look deeply into anyone's life - or the private life of a married couple - the reality could hardly be further from the truth.  People are constantly wearing fake smiles to pander to a gentrified world, and the world doesn't like it when the mask slips.

The film focusses heavily on gender roles and the way that the world is reacting to changing gender stereotypes.  A man who behaves differently to how society expects is castigated by a gossip-hungry media.  A woman who cries rape is believed immediately despite circumstantial evidence that might indicate she's lying.  There will be some who might accuse this portrayal of gender roles of misogyny, since on the surface it appears retrograde to the cause of women's rights in society.  I think that's a simplistic viewpoint though.  The book and screenplay for Gone Girl were written by the same woman, and the film has a lot of female characters, some of whom embody stereotypes and others that very much don't.  Rather the film is a thriller that exists in the modern age, plays on the fears and possibilities of a changing world and says 'what if...'.

Aside from all this, Gone Girl is a film that looks amazing, with a lot of care put into individual shots and sets.  Everything is particularly well-lit; not something I would normally bother to comment on, but the opening scenes really look like a morning.  Great performances from everyone involved, especially Rosamond Pike who has been deserving of a central role in a film for some time now.  The film has an 18 rating for one moment of horribly bloody sexualised violence, aside from that there's little else to warrant it.  I fully recommend Gone Girl to anyway who wants to see a clever, witty thriller that challenges the way the modern world has conditioned you to think.  In time I may come to judge it differently, but at the moment I would say this is Fincher's best film since Fight Club.

Robocop - The new one

A large amount of excitement was generated in my house Thursday night when the Lovefilm DVD of the Robocop remake came through the door.  I think my housemates have got so used to me renting oddball films from history that they'll latch on to anything they vaguely recognise the title of.  So it came to pass that we immediately fired up the PS3 and watched Robocop - the new one.

Aside from some very cosmetic similarities, this is quite a different film from the 1980 original.  Gone is almost all of the satire, gone is the denunciation of corporate greed and corruption, gone is the 18-rated gore; in its place there's sentimentality, some nods towards the war on terror and the main theme, which is a battle between science and business.  Gary Oldman plays the scientist upon who's work Detective Murphy's conversion into Robocop is based.  At his heart he is a good guy trying to do good in the world, but he gets caught up in the world of trying to make a profit.  In the process loses some of his humanity and sells out his work to the money men.  When the new Robocop starts acting more like man than machine though, Omnicorp start panicking and try to eliminate their creation.

The film isn't entirely devoid of satire.  Samuel L Jackson plays a sort of shock-jock television host in the mould of the Fox network, conflating his opinion with news and demanding that the US people allow robots on to the streets in place of traditional human cops.  That's all the satire we get though, in what feels like a nod towards the mock news reports of a dystopian future from the original Robocop,  It feels somewhat out of place though as the rest of the film is chocked full of  sentimentality and takes itself much more seriously than its source material.  Definitely good casting though, there's no one else I would want to cast if I needed someone just to shout into a camera.

My biggest criticism is probably that it takes far too long for the story to go anywhere interesting.  It takes nearly 55 minutes for Robocop to actually appear on American soil, and even longer before he goes and solves any crimes or confronts any bad guys.  A film like this shouldn't be messing around with showing us Robocop's training simulations, get him out of the streets shooting up bad guys.  Is this an action film or isn't it?

I guess that's the crux really.  It's a film that feels like script-writing-by-committee.  It feels like someone wrote a script that was trying to be true to the satire of the original (note the Samuel L Jackson parts), but then a Holywood committee insisted on focusing on Murphy's wife and kid, then insisted on a chase sequence and removing any blood and gore so it can be a 12A.  Not that the film lacks good action scenes, a gun battle rendered in thermal imagery looks very cool even if it borders on being a little too busy.  But there just isn't enough of it.  Where Robocop the original had showed us a crumbling city falling apart and our protagonist brutally dealing with the punks on the streets and corporate stooges alike, Robocop the new one shows us a prosperous city and Robocop using tasers to coerce the punks into telling him where to find the guy who tried to kill Murphy.  The film's trying to be part satire, part science fiction, part action, and at the same time trying to have a sentimental heart.  It just doesn't mesh together.

I guess I'm only disappointed because the film is called Robocop, and therefore associates itself with another film that's nothing like it.  Anyone who remembers the ludicrous brutality of the ED-209 boardroom scene from the original Robocop will find nothing of that sort here.  In 1987 Robocop wins the day by shoving a spike through the neck of his nemesis, his bloody chest emptying on to the ground.  In 2014 Robocop wins the day by tasering a bunch of people and firing a bloodless bullet.

Don't expect much from this film.

Dead Poets Society - catching up on another 80s classic

This is becoming a big theme for me at the moment, catching up on all those classic 1980s films that I never saw for some reason the first tie around.  With the death of Robin Williams recently a lot of people turned their minds to thinking about their favourite performances of his over the years.  It was only so long until someone mentioned Dead Poets Society, and then the fact that I had never seen it came up.  Cue uproar.

For one friend of mine this film definitely has a lot of importance, and so when we watched it the other week I was not allowed to make any comments afterwards - I think for fear I might not like it and offend.  For some reason people think that I hate every film I watch, I'm going to need to be more positive about the films I like from now on, build up a better rep.  So what better place to start than right here and right now?

Dead Poets' Society is a fucking brilliant film with an amazing performance from the late Robin Williams.  The story revolves around an American prep school, and the new English teacher creates uproar when he strays from the standard syllabus and teaches the students about his love of language.  He treats them as young men and appeals to their creative side, allowing them to flourish and find their own passion for a subject they each previously hated.  We focus on two pupils in particular, one starting at the school for the first time and a second who's father completely dominates every aspect of his life.  Each are clearly gifted in their own ways, but will they find the confidence to express those gifts before they are crushed into conforming?

The film's main character is English teacher John Keating (played by Williams), who is the inspiration we all wish we had when we were young, and we all hope we can be when we're old.  A teacher who connects with his pupils on a level they've never experienced before, who opens their eyes up to the wonder of words and language, the power that they all have to shape their own futures and to be the people they want to be simply by reaching out and grasping the opportunities the world is giving them.  It's all about conservatism versus freedom of expression, about conforming versus being yourself.  The forces of elitism at the school are as fearful of the students as they are of Keating and what he represents.  They want to impress conformity upon them as quickly as possible, to do any other than conform is to challenge the established order - unthinkable in the elitist world of a New England prep school.  So when Keating comes to the school preaching freedom of expression and thought, it is like he is preaching revolution.

The film works on basically every level it needs to.  The pupils are each nuanced characters, and though Keating is perhaps a little too perfect as the inspirational professor, that's meant to be the point - he is supposed to be the paragon we all wish we had to inspire us as youngsters. When something bad happens to one of the students it is heart-breaking.  When the film's final scene rolls around wearing its heart on its sleeve with its call to arms against elitism, you can't help being carried along on a wave of optimism for the youth of today.

This is a film that also works as a counter-point to the received wisdom of the 1980s, i.e Reaganist economics, laissez-faire and Loads-a-Money!  It's a film that says money isn't everything.  Money is nothing compared to finding beauty in words, beauty in art and most importantly beauty in yourself.  It's a film that's an inspiration.