Dirty Dancing - Why am I reviewing this?

A very good question.  Well I happened to be at a small Christmas gathering last night and someone had the TV on.  Upon it there was Channel 5 (though not in HD on a massive HD TV - what on earth is the point?) showing the 1980s cult classic upon which this blog post will focus.  I have a slightly strange relationship with this film.  My Mum was a huge fan and my recollection is that she watched a VHS recording almost on repeat through a portion of the early 1990s.  Back in those days there was only 1 screen in the house, and as such it formed a small part of the background to my upbringing.  Seeing it again last night, I was surprised at the familiarity of the beats and cues of the film, almost as surprised as I was by the adult themes that had largely gone over my head as a 12 year old.

For those who have been living in a cave for the last 25 years, the premise is thus.  The Houseman family go for their summer holidays at a resort in upstate New York.  'Baby' Houseman (Jennifer Grey) is a young woman who falls in love with the resort's hotter-than-hot dancer Johnny Castle (Patrick Swayze).  Citizen Kane it is not.

Sounds simple right?  Well it is.  So why is it so popular?  Well it's a question that on the surface has an obvious answer, but one can go slightly deeper and understand something about storytelling.  The obvious answer is that Patrick Swayze has amazing abs and dances like a god.  Women love dancing and washboard abs - so success is guaranteed right?  Well not quite.  Dirty Dancing is a film with a surprising amount of heart; it deals with issues of abortion, abuse, growing up and - crucially - has a central character in Baby who is the perfect every-woman.  Baby is assertive and confident, but also very vulnerable when she doesn't understand what's going on.  She has a father who is strong, understanding, supportive and emotional; he is a rock when she needs strength and breaks down in tears when she has disappoints him.  Oh and her lover is Patrick Swayze.  Who wouldn't want to be Baby?

This is the thing that so many rubbish films get so wrong.  It isn't enough to just tickle our visual taste buds (I'm talking about guns and action here just as much as I am talking about bums and abs), a film needs to have an emotional connection to make you care.  Don't get me wrong, Dirty Dancing isn't my kind of film, but I can relate to what is going on and I understand why it has come to touch the hearts of so many women (I would say 'people', but let's not kid ourselves eh?) out there in the movie-going world.

Of course there are numerous criticisms that we can legitimately level at the film.  For a start the sound track isn't completely of the 1960s, which is a huge mid-step for a film that works very hard to establish itself in that pre-Vietnam era.  Also it suffers from same as the main problem I have with the Twilight saga, which is that the main character is little more than an empty vessel on to which female viewers are encouraged to cast their own personalities.  I would argue that this criticism has less weight here than in the Twilight saga, here Baby's father and family have crushed her individuality and expression out of her, so we might expect her personality to be a little thin.  However I agree that this is one of the film's major weaknesses.

Certainly no-one is going to be persuaded to watch Dirty Dancing or not as a result of this blog.  These are merely some musings on a cult film that has firmly entrenched its place in the zeitgeist over the last 25 years.  I shall try to get another review in before 2017 - would be a bit weird to end the year on a film that was released in 1987 after all!

Seconds - very Twilight Zone

I honestly cannot remember now what it was that made me seek out this interesting film that's straight out of the playbook of classic 1960s The Twilight Zone, only with a twisted subtext that only gets darker as the plot comes to a conclusion.  Seconds is a minor masterpiece typical of the modernist science fiction thriller genre that was hugely popular in post war US mainstream culture.  John Randolph plays Arthur Hamilton, an aging city banker who is bored of his life and comes upon a secret society that promises him youth and a new identity.  His death is faked and he becomes Antiochus Wilson (played by Rock Hudson), younger, surrounded by youth, opportunity, and a sudden dislocation from everyone and everything he once knew.

If anyone ever wanted to do a study into the impact that direction has upon the tone of a film, then the contrast between the Hamilton and Wilson portions of Seconds provides ample material.  The director uses blocking and framing during the opening 25 minutes to convey the unease of Hamilton's world.  Everything from his dislocation from his wife and career to his fraught attempts to inveigle himself into the secret society - not a word needs to be said to tell us the alienation engulfing him.  Contrast this with the latter half of the film, the camerawork is free and feels more like a pop video at times as it effortlessly describes a world of youth, opportunity and new possibilities.

The film is very much a tale of being careful for what one wishes.  In the great tradition of The Twilight Zone the story presents a character with what the audience knows is a Faustian Bargain, a fact that only becomes apparent to the protagonist far too late.  Some may find the character's ultimately downward trajectory a little too depressing to take, but this is dystopian science fiction at its most pure so I would be shocked if it didn't appeal to a less-than-mainstream audience.  In the end I would recommend this to anyone with an interest in science fiction, especially those who have enjoyed and of the various incarnations of The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits or Tales of the Unexpected that have existed over the years.

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.

Devil - Not all Shyamalan's ideas are shit then!

Those who will permit me to pontificate at any length about films will eventually discover that I am extremely indifferent towards the work of M. Night Shyamalan.  I don't really understand why it is that The Sixth Sense captured the imagination of the zeitgeist in quite the way it did, and as a result elevated Shyamalan's stock to Holywood darling almost overnight.  The Sixth Sense is one twist.  The Happening is boring and nothing happens.  The Village's twist is telegraphed in the opening shot.  Signs is ok for a bit, but the final act is horrible.  People seem to like Unbreakable, but I'm just not into that superhero stuff like them.  Sure he has other work, but I'm going to judge him on what I've seen, and it ain't much cop.

I can't work out why it is that I ended up in possession of a copy of Devil on DVD.  Some vague Mark Kermode review I imagine.  It's a film that Shyamalan had nothing to do with the production of, but it is based on a story by him.  I know this because the DVD cover insists on telling me, such is the assumption that putting Shyamalan's name on a thing makes the thing more desirable.  It is only 80 minutes long, and tells the story of 5 people who are trapped in a lift, the police and workers in the building who are trying to save them.  The supernatural premise is that the people in the lift are being toyed with by the Devil, out to torture some undeserving souls and then kill them off for their mortal sins.  Fair enough, horror shlock here we come I guess!

For starters, the film wasn't what I was expecting.  I was imagining that we would spend most of the film inside the lift, and that how or why they were there would be a mystery.  Eventually it would turn out to be some sort of Jacob's Ladder thing and they all end up at the lift's destination - in hell.  In fact it is set in a very real lift in a very real building, in which there is a very real and overt supernatural force at work.  A spooky face even appears on the CCTV footage to prove it.  Cue Mexican guy doing Catholic prayers and telling mystical stories about the Devil coming to collect souls.  Better get the ethnic to be the mystical one, because that isn't racist.

Each of the 5 people in the lift are a bit of mystery, who they are and what they're in the building to do all eventually sheds light on why it is that the Devil wants their souls in particular.  It's not particularly shocking as far as horror goes, with a bit of blood and voice effects to make things seem nastier than they are, but the ending is quite satisfying - which surprised me a lot.

Maybe this is what Shyamalan needs to do for the rest of his career - just come up with the ideas and let other people flesh them out.  If you want 80 minutes of average-to-good 15-rated 'horror', give Devil a go.

Cocktail - not really for me

My journey through the back catalogue of film history took me further through my girlfriend's DVD collection at the weekend.  After Pretty Woman and Almost Famous, we are left with the remains in the bottom of the barrel - Cocktail.  I cannot say that having never heard of a film necessarily means I should be unsurprised it wasn't very good, that's happened a lot of times before.  But maybe I should make exception in this case.

Here Tom Cruise plays Brian Flanagan, recent returnee from the army who has no job, no prospects and no things.  He heads into the heart of 1980s Wall Street Loads-a-money capitalism seeking to make his fortune.  Somehow he gets a bunch of interviews in big city firms (with no qualifications -how?) but no offers.  Only when he takes a job in Doug Coughlin bar in suburban New York and discovers a skill for - what else - making cocktails does the future suddenly seem bright.

Coming just a couple of years after Top Gun, this is one of Cruise's earliest performances in screen, and his charisma is clear.  Sadly I can't say the same for the rest of this film, which is a little bit about 1980s monetarism and another little bit about being who you are rather than who others think you should be.  Mostly it is confused about its characters, the continuity of its own events and why its female characters especially act the way they do.  Most bizarre of all is Jordan (Elizabeth Shue - her off Back to the Future) who Flanagan falls for and for whom she falls back despite Flanagan acting like a total arse around her all the time.

By the time the end comes around and - spoiler alert - Flanagan gets his happily-ever-after as presciently predicted by Coughlin in one of his opening scenes; I was left wondering how all that had happened, and why it was meant to be interesting.  Certainly this is only one for fans of Tom Cruise or fancy cocktail-making to check out.  To be fair, assuming there are no stunt doubts going on here Cruise did really well to get though the flamboyant cocktail creation scenes - but that's not enough to cause me to recommend.  A curio from the 1980s you can happy pass by.

Despicable Me - What am I missing?

Why does everyone love this film so much?  I guess the answer lies in the little yellow indestructible goblins who bumble their way around the film helping out the comically evil super villain Gru carry out his bonkers plans.  But if you happen to no find the "Minions" funny, what else is there?

Despicable Me is set in a Looney Tunes cartoon world, where dastardly villains have to apply to the bank of evil for funding and people can have missiles shot in their faces, emerging only with a reddened face and little birds flying around their heads.  We follow the trials of the super villain Gru, as he tries to prove himself the most dastardly of all the villains by defeating the young upstart Vector.  After Vector steals the Pyramids of Giza, Gru decides that the only way to prove to the world he is the baddest of all the bad is to steal... The Moon.

So then we are set for silliness on overdrive.  Gru has all sorts of evil tricks and tools for stealing anything and everything, Vector has all sorts of ingenious ways of keeping Gru out of his evil lair.  All the while Gru is fending off the loving attentions of a trio of orphan girls he is trying to use to get inside Vector's lair.  Will they tug at Gru's heartstrings and get him to find his soul?  Does Gru's soul really lie in his thievery?  Does any of this matter - isn't the point to watch the Minions and chuckle at their silliness?

The main issue here is that I just don't find this sort of slapstick Looney Tunes cartoonery funny any more - and if where I do find it funny it is hard to find it funny for 100 minutes.  Yes the Minions are silly.  And yes they are funny with their silliness and funny speech and squishy indestructibility.  But that can't be all this film has going for it.  I guess maybe I'm just not quite the audience Despicable Me was aiming for.  It makes perfect sense that a sequel was made, and that there was a subsequent film focusing entirely on the Minions.  Universal Studios have stumbled on to something that has touched the current zeitgeist with these babbling yellow creations.  Good luck to them and their marketing strategies to milk as much profit as possible out of them, I shan't be handing them any more of my cash.

Inside Out - psychology through colour

Pixar.  The very name has become a byword for excitement in the film-going community whenever a new release from this studio is announced.  Since being taken over by Disney, the studio that brought you Toy Story and the rest appears to have been mostly left to its own devices in terms of coming up with new material.  And why wouldn't Disney want to let them carry on with a creative studio that's made millions over the last 20 years since digital animation came of age?  Disney hasn't made a shit tonne of money over the years by being bad at business.

The latest is Inside Out, a modern interpretation of the Numbskulls in which we follow the little elves running the show inside the brain of an 11 year old girl named Riley.  The film presents a beautiful vision of the way that emotions form inside our minds, via a number of brightly-coloured elves who operate the controls inside our heads and form memories represented by similarly-coloured balls.  The major emotions (Yellow = Joy, Red = Anger, Green = Disgust, Purple = Fear, Blue = Sadness) each play their part, but Joy is in charge.  When the family move to San Francisco and their world is thrown into turmoil, the elves react by trying to re-enforce the joy that Riley felt as she grew up.  Eventually though, they come to learn that joy is tempered and reinforced by the other emotions.  Joy and Sadness go on a journey of discovery through Riley's subconscious, coming to the realistation they emotions are much more complex than they thought, By the end of the film Riley is generating multi-coloured 'emotion balls', and the control panel of the elves is greatly expanded.  Just in time for puberty.

This is what Pixar has always done best.  It's a story that makes use of metaphor to explore growing up, complete with themes that kids and their parents will each love on different levels.  One could criticise the film for over-simplifying the development process when growing up, but this is what all metaphor does.  Inside Out is visually arresting, inventive, emotional and absolutely in line with the ambiance of Pixar's classics.  Have a go.  Have a watch.

Hunger Games Part 4 / 3b - An unfulfilling finale

It was a long time coming, but I finally caught up with the final film in the Hunger Games series on Sunday.  I am impressed with myself that I managed to avoid spoilers for several years, as such the final fate of Katniss Everdeen and the people of Panem was still an unknown to me.  I had made a lot of statements to friends of mine about how I wanted to see the series end, and how thematically the series could end in a consistent and powerful way.  But it didn't really turn out like that.  Spoilers ahead obvs!

 

The plot to this point is well-known by anyone following this series.  In the near-future dystopian version of America known as Panem, Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) is the two-time winner of the gladiatorial Hunger Games - a post-modern reality TV soma that keeps the masses enthralled and oppressed districts of the nation under the control of the all-powerful capital.  Katniss' successes have become a rallying cry for revolution, powered by her strength of character, moral purity, dedication to her family and friends, and the unstoppable power of propaganda pushing her into the limelight.  The story here finally comes to a head, with the revolution she unwittingly powered invading the capital and bringing down the once-omnipotent president Snow (Donald Sutherland).

 

The first few Hunger Games films were highly politically savvy, and Katniss' strength of character was always enough to prevail.  Now she learns that idealism only takes you so far, and that to win the war the rebels have to use tactics as dirty as President Snow's.  The question is asked: what is right and what is wrong in war?  The rebels eventually prevail because they carry out a war crime involving the deaths of many children?  Is victory at any cost it worth it?

 

The film makes a valid and interesting point about the realities of a world full of shades of grey.  However the issue is that as a film, Hunger Games 4 is so messy that the message almost lost.  The tone and pace are changeable from start to finish, the return to the traps, tricks and dangers of the original don't work in a world that has turned to actual warfare, and finally the film drags to a conclusion with a series of epilogue scenes that aren't needed.  There are plot holes; if Katniss is so valuable to the rebel cause, then why exactly is she picking her way through the frontlines of the capital dodging deadly traps?  There are problems with pacing; a big fight between the rebels and a bunch of blind sewer-dwellers holds the narrative back at a crucial moment.  Put simply, this should never have been a two-part film, and in padding it out as such the makers have forgotten the art of the editing room.

 

In a bigger overall criticism of the story, I did not like the resolution to the Katniss / Coin (the president of the rebels - played by Juliane Moore) / Snow plot at the end of the film.  The theme of the whole series has been about the corruption of power, heroism through action, building strength and alliances through nobility and acting for the good of all rather than the self.  Thematically that completely contrasts against Katniss becoming Coin's self-appointed executioner.  Sure Katniss thought Coin was responsible for warcrimes, but doesn't she deserve a trial?  What if Katniss was wrong?  And didn't Coin's actions directly result in the rebels winning the war?  Do Katniss' actions give her the right to go all Judge Dread on her former ally?  Isn't this totally out of character for the noble justice-loving Katniss?  Is it ok because all she wants is to retire into the forest and have a couple of babies in peace?  I wish that the film had aired these questions in the final 10 minutes rather than just cutting to Katniss' happily-ever-after ending and Peeta reading letters from her mother.  And is the ending even a happy one?  All Katniss ever wanted to do was save her sister, a cause she was prepared to die for.  In the end her sister dies and Katniss gets to live on mincing around in a forest with babies.  She could have got all that by not volunteering to replace her sister in the first place.

 

The resolution to the Peeta / Gale love triangle is a tiny bit convenient too.  Katniss chooses Peeta eventually because she thinks Gale was in on Coin's warcrimes.  Essentially Katniss is allowed to kill Coin without trial if she thinks she can make the world a better place, but Gale isn't allowed to do the same.  At least he doesn't get an arrow in the face for his trouble, but it's a case of unmentioned hypocrisy that didn't correlate with the theme of justice that has threaded its way through the whole series.

 

Anyway, in the end I am more than a bit disappointed.  I think that the author decided the main character had to have a happy ending, and that meant getting to be with Peeta and all the authority figures copping it.  That might be a nice teenage fantasy, but with 4 hours of screen time to tell the story of the conclusion, it could have been thematically more coherent.  Katniss started out being a heroine, she ends up with babies after failing to do the only thing she really wanted - keep her sister alive.  Meh.

Machete Kills - again, and a lot

I'm not writing as many reviews as I used to, mainly because I'm now a lot busier than I used to be, but also because I am not watching as many films as in the past.  That plus I've been on holiday recently and a whole bunch of other stuff.  However, I am still watching films.  So I thought I would write a quick review of something I don't think I would normally bother with, mainly to confirm that this blog is still live and that I am still nerdily over-thinking about films.

Machete Kills eh?  I don't think there's much more you need to know about the tone of this film that can't be summed up by telling you that Charlie Sheen plays the President.  In a follow-up to the ludicrously entertaining Machete, Danny Trejo returns as the eponymous anti-hero who slices, chops, shoots and explodes his way through this homage to terrible 1970s action genre schlock.  My enjoyment of Machete is something of a guilty pleasure, the film takes so much joy in its own ridiculousness it's impossible not to go along with it.  There are only so many times you can return to the same theme though and it not seem tired, and while Machete Kills is enjoyable for many of the same reasons as its predecessor, it really is just more of the same.

I can't quite work out where the line lies between spoof and laziness.  Machete Kills has an opening scene that's laden with digitally-added blood and gore effects, I can't decide if that's an homage to bad special effects of the 1970s or just a lazy way of recreating the effects of blood squibs.  Perhaps the names on the cast list are what we should be looking at to know how seriously to take all this.  Lady Gaga (complete with toned down hair) and Mel Gibson are on the bill.  To be fair to Gibson he looks like he has the tone spot on, taking everything just as seriously as it needs to be taken in order to make sure it doesn't turn into a complete farce.

Ok so it might be more of the same and it might be objectively rubbish; but it is only 100 minutes long and "They fucked with the wrong Mexican" still makes me giggle.  Let's be honest - if you think you're about to watch Casablanca then you're severely misunderstood the nature of this genre - it's meant to be silly, spoofy and gore-filled with characters defined by either their brawns, boobs or brains.  Robert Rodriguez needs to move on at some point though, the spoof teaser trailer at the start of Machete Kills sets up a sequel that the end of the film allows for.  I think this might be as far as you can take it Mr Rodriguez, if I see Machete Kills Again out in cinemas I can finally see myself giving it a pass.

"Machete don't tweet"

The Martian - Scientific Fiction

I really am behind on my film watching at the moment.  At last I got a chance to catch up with last year's winter science fiction blockbuster The Martian.  This was courtesy of a couple of very friendly chums of my girlfriend's who put me up for the night at their place in Chipping Norton - iTunes has films apparently.  Whatever next?
 

The Martian is based on the critically-acclaimed novel of the same name, and follows the story of Mark Watney (Matt Damon).  Watney is part of a crew on the ill-fated Ares 3 mission to Mars in the near future. He gets stranded on the red planet when a storm separates him from the rest of his crew.  He is presumed dead and the crew escape for the long journey home.  Watney of course survives, and has to "science the shit" out his survival on Mars until a future time when NASA can send a rescue mission.

 

It's a film that has an unusual tone for this sort of subject matter.  It is generally light and fun.  Aside from the doom-laden opening disaster sequence we have a NASA nerd chaneling Jeff Goldblum in Independence Day coming up with the solution and our main character telling us that he's going to 'science the shit' out of the situation, all accompanied by a 1970s disco soundtrack.  Not only is it unusual in that regard, it also pays a great deal of attention to scientific details.  Mostly notably in the logistics of space travel, but also in areas like scientific funding, media understand of science and biochemistry, the film is clearly based on an extremely well-researched source material.  Crucially the film is also set at a time in the near future when Mars and Earth are next going to be close together, and so a Mars mission is actually feasible - Science bitches!

There is very much an ensemble cast here, with several big name stars that never share any screen time together.  Matt Damon is on Mars, Jessica Chastain is in space and Chiwetel Ejiofor is on Earth (admittedly with Jeff Bridges and Kristen Wigg - but still).  Even so, Chastain has the crew of the Ares to play against and Damon has a soundtrack, a writer's wicked sense of humour and - of course - wonderfully rendered Martian scenery.  Of the film's many achievements, the visual feel of the Martian landscape is an X-factor that could easy go unnoticed.  The footage has a raw and unnaturally clean feel to it that unsettles and fascinates, bringing home the idea that this is a place absolutely untouched by human intervention.  Whatever the cinematographer / CGI team were doing to achieve that look - it worked.
 

Crucially though, for a film that deliberately takes a light-hearted tone with potentially onerous material, is it any fun?  The answer is definitely yes.  The disaster that strands Damon happens within the first few minutes of the film, meaning that we can get on with a story that effortlessly winds science in with fiction, never becomes boring, educates and entertains.  It's a story I would hesitate to call science fiction, rather I would prefer the term 'Scientific fiction' - such is its reliance on real science rather than the fantastic.  Is Con Air is science fiction film because it's set on a plane?  Planes use scientific principles to fly after all.  I think that this is one of the points The Martian is trying to get across; that these days science is part of our everyday lives, and that we would do well to have a greater understanding of the difference between fiction and fact.  I recommend The Martian to one and all.

Mad Max: Fury Road - even faster and more furiouser

Before I write anything about this, I'll start off by saying that I've never seen any of the Mad Max films.  I guess I was either too young or too disinterested in cars when it was the 1980s.  I was assured by a number of people that this was certainly no boundary to enjoying Mad Max: Fury Road.  Having watched the film I'm less sure, only because I would have liked to have understood a little more about what was going on.  Other than this there is a lot to enjoy here.

The film takes place almost entirely on the road, in a drugged up post-apocalyptic desert world where water is controlled by the warlord Immortan Joe.  The only thing more important than water it seems is petrol, which fuels the various bonkers vehicles that the acolytes of Joe use to career around the desert.  The plot is that for some reason Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) decides to abandon whatever privilege she has obtained for herself in Joe's kingdom and escapes with his favoured 'breeders' - a group of lightly-clothed and generally pregnant woman.  Almost immediately Joe mobilises his automobiled army of drugged-up drone-nutters to catch her - for 100 minutes.

It is impossible to disagree with Mark Kermode's assertion that watching Mad Max: Fury Road is something akin to being shouted at while being run over.  It's a chase movie fro start to finish, almost the entire film takes place on the backs of a variety of bizarre-looking buckets of souped-up rust careering about a post-apocalyptical wasteland.  Characters are a mix of insane drone-like beings who live for the thrill of the chase, ethereal pregnant breeders and a couple of vaguely normal-looking petrol-heads - who we presume are our heroes - played by Charlize Theron and Tom Hardy.  Plus a guitarist who leads Joe's warriors into battle from the front of a coverted articulated truck / Ork battlewagon, his guitar spewing flames from its neck obviously.

As an action film it's probably exactly what anyone would want from the genre.  It's simple goodies v baddies in a bonkers world of explosion and unshown consequences where most of the participants value life so little that their own deaths are embraced as an opportunity to show off one's bravado.  There is a comic book style to the landscapes and characters, reminiscent of the recent Borderlands computer game series (though that in itself was perhaps based on the original Mad Max films).  I also felt that there was an element of 300 about it in both style and content, the colour palate has an unrealistic deepness to it, enhancing the fantasy distopia.  This works well with the fact that most of the stunts and collisions are real stunts and collisions, creating a world in which action scenes have the look of a typical comic book action sequence, but with the weight you can only get by actually seeing an actual car smash into another.

I'm not sure what I was expecting; I had been promised a feminist action film, but I don't understand how you can interpret it that way.  I ended up watching 100 minutes of insane comic-book violence; a quite mesmerising blend of the real with the digitally-enhanced that should hold most people's attention for its full run-time.  Can't really recommend it if you're not into this sort of thing.  But if you enjoy a bit of bonkers relentless action, well then this'll scratch your itch - then run it over.

The Revenant - A cameraman's masterpiece

Attended my first 'big' film of the year at the weekend.  The Revenant has been strongly billed around the country as an Oscar contender, and word on the internet is that Leonardo DiCaprio - long over-looked by The Academy - will be picking up the top acting prize for his role.  Worthy of checking out no?

The word 'revenant' means a person who returns from death.  Here this concept is embodied by DiCaprio's character, a man who should by all rights have died.  Hugh Glass is a troubled tracker aiding a group of trappers and explores in the early days of the US expansion west across the Americas.  He is mauled terribly by a wonderfully rendered CGI bear and eventually left to die, but not before rival Fitzgerald (played by Tom Hardy - utterly unrecognisable) gives him good reason to seek a return to civilisation and find his revenge.

It's difficult to not give too much away about The Revenant, mainly because not a lot really happens.  The plot and characterisation of Glass and his contemporaries is very thin.  It's a revenge film in which the character earning his revenge has to endure a series of trials to be reborn into the world of men, escaping the uncaring clutches of nature and Native Americans alike.  What is great about the film is the care and attention that has gone into rendering amazing landscapes on to screen.  All the techniques in the arsenal of the cameraman are on display as the wild frozen scenery is placed on the screen for an enraptured audience to marvel at.  An opening battle sequence (possibly one long take - though perhaps there are cuts) demonstrates an astonishing merger of CGI, camerawork, timing and use of lighting / framing to tell a story of utter panic.  It's a film for which the Director of Photography deserves huge credit.

Though what we see on the screen is beautiful to take in, I did get a feeling that a lot was being repeated, which added to my nagging doubts over the thinness of the plot.  There are only so many times we need to marvel at the frozen prairie landscape before it isn't doing anything to advance the story.  How many times can DiCaprio's character get metaphorically reborn?  How many times does he have to look up into the trees towards heaven, the camera providing the audience with a point-of-view shot?  I reiterate that it looks fantastic, but is it 150 minutes of fantastic?  Rehashing the same beat time and again - that of rebirth and redemption though suffering - I couldn't help be reminded of Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ.  Not a great comparison.

Is Leonardo DiCaprio about to get his Martin Scorsese moment at the Oscars?  Is it the case that he's finally been handed a role in the sort of film that the Academy feel comfortable handing out awards over?  I can't see why DiCaprio has remained on the sidelines of the Oscars for so long, especially since many of the films in which he gave signature performances won awards in other categories (Titanic, The Departed, Inception - even Django Unchained).  I think the Academy is in the process of convincing itself that The Revenant is better than it is so they can give DiCaprio the award he merits for this career's work.  Or maybe The Academy always just give out awards to actors who play parts where they have to suffer.  Not that The Revenant is in any way a bad film or that DiCaprio gives anything less than a solid performance, but I just don't see it as an actor's movie.  It's a movie in which the Director of Photography and special effects team should receive the highest praise.  As for the acting?  Well I remain unconvinced it is award-worthy.

Check it out for yourself; but get a comfy seat, 150 minutes of comfy seat.

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.