The Double - A dark Kafkaesque comedy

Richard Ayoade is an interesting guy.  Having appeared as the arch-nerd Moss in the now classic Channel 4 comedy series The IT Crowd for several years, he has entered into the realm of story-telling on the silver screen, writing and directing his own feature length productions.  Firstly in 2010 with the excellent Submarine, and now last year with The Double - which stars a number of actors from the Hollywood mainstream as well as those he has worked with in his previous small-screen British work.  Is Ayoade moving into the mainstream?  On the surface the answer is maybe.  Though when you watch The Double you realise his ideas are still firmly rooted in the absurd.

The Double is a sort of Kafka-esque black comedy set in a place of dark bureaucratic nightmares not unlike the world of Terry Gilliam's Brazil.  Jesse Eisenberg plays Simon, a small time office worker toiling away in a small cubicle with little or no prospects in the world.  His job appears to be routine and pointless, the security guard he passes every day hardly even recognises him.  The only thing that keeps Simon going is his infatuation with Hannah (Mia Wasikowska), who lives across the street from him and works in the steam-punk inspired photo-copy room in his office block.  He dreams about telling her how he understands her pain and loneliness, but whenever they're together, is unable to even maintain eye contact.

It's into this dystopia that Simon's exact double James (also played by Eisenberg obviously) suddenly appears as the new guy in the office.  Now the weirdness gets really weird, as some people seem unable to spot the similarities between Simon and James, while some like Hannah seem unable to tell them apart.  The similarities between James and Simon are only skin deep though.  James is as brash and outgoing as Simon is nerdy and insular, and before long James seems destined for promotion to the top while Hannah has fallen head over heels for him.  All the while Simon looks on as his doppelgänger starts to live his life better than he was - wondering how it is that someone ostensibly the same as him can be having such a different existence.

It's part science fiction, part dyspotian black comedy and partly a character study into the insecurities of people who find it hard to connect to others and see the world of human interaction as an incomprehensible Kafkaesque maze.  The world of The Double is intricately created, with interesting set designs that give us a number of contraptions and ideas firmly rooted in the steam punk genre.  It's clear that Ayoade is interested in the insecurities of the nerd, and the way that the world of the film is presented to us is almost too unreal to be anything other than simply the way that the introverted Simon perceives it.  James for example is too cool and confident to be real, Hannah too dreamy to be real - both more likely depictions of how Simon perceives others and his inability to understand them.

The film ends in as weird a way as the preceding 90 minutes, with a number of interpretations possible.  There was some debate in my house as to what the final looks between the characters actually meant, and exactly what Simon has learnt or decided about the way he's living his life.  It's entertaining, thought-provoking and darkly comic in just the right way.  It's easily worth your time.

Can you handle the truth?

It's clichéd maybe, but the final courtroom scene of A Few Good Men remains an outstanding example of how to build drama up to a tense conclusion.  The film is part buddy drama between the young lawyers played by Tom Cruise and Demi Moore, and part political intrigue in which the balance between security and freedom in the post-cold war world is analysed.  Sounds boring, but it really isn't.  In this final scene, Cruise the lawyer baits Jack Nicholson's Colonel Jessup into admitting in front of the court that he ordered a marine under his command to be beaten by his fellows:



The screenplay was written by Aaron Sorkin, and the themes running through the film were reflected on an almost weekly basis in his outstanding political drama The West Wing some years later.  Oh, and Spoiler Alert.  But then this is a A Few Good Men - surely you've seen it?

Borderlands - 90 minutes of popcorn horror

Friday night a week ago I was home alone and so I did what any normal horror film fan does; I watched a horror film with the lights off.  The Borderlands is a small budget British 'found footage' film that follows a team of paranormal investigators for the Catholic church who investigate something that has happened in a rural part of Devon.  The team consists of Deacon - a paranormal expert who flies around the world investigating events that people claim are miracles - and Gray - his tech guy who insists on installing cameras everywhere they go to record everything.  Which of course provides plenty of footage ready to be found by us the viewer.

The idea is that the vicar of the local church has submitted a video to the Vatican showing a supposed miracle during a child's baptism.  There appears to be some sort of earthquake during which the camera feed cuts in and out.  Deacon's job is ostensibly to investigate, but there is a strong suggestion that he's actually there to debunk the idea of the miracle ever happening.  Their presence in the local village is not appreciated, especially after the vicar suspects that people aren't taking him seriously and adopts extreme measures to try to prove his point.  The plot proceeds in the way you might expect from this sort of horror film.  Weird things happen, the locals set fire to some things, there are some strange noises, the cameras sometimes don't work the suggestion of something paranormal going on gets bigger and bigger.  It is a horror film after all.

There is definitely one moment of cleverness involving a headstone that pleased me greatly when I spotted it.  And aside from that the film does a nice job of setting up tensions and making you jump.  Ultimately the final scenes are spooky and then properly grim; and though I guess that's all you can really ask for in a film like this the ending doesn't seem consistent with much of what builds up to it.  It's very derivative though, and not really that different to a lot of the other films out there, so I'm not going to recommend anyone goes out of their way to watch it.  Overall, I'm fairly luke warm to Borderlands, but it certainly has it's place on a lonely night home alone in the dark.

Paths of Glory - a very unsubtle message

The march towards completing the IMDB top-100 began last Sunday evening by watching Paths of Glory.  This courtroom drama set in the middle of the First World War is particularly relevant at the moment given that the 100th anniversary of the start of that conflict has recently been upon us.  Here, Kirk Douglas plays a Colonel in the French army, tasked with planning and leading an attack on a fortified hill.  The hill is near-impregnable though, yet with thoughts of personal glory and promotions in his mind, Douglas' commanding general orders the command against his own instincts.  When the attack fails terribly, the French army demands that men from Douglas' regiment be punished for cowardice, and men are selected randomly for courts martial and execution.

With this movie, Stanley Kubrick is making a big statement about the class war that was implicit in everything that happened in the first world war.  It was a period in history where the elites and the upper classes of Europe ordered the working classes to their deaths in unprecedented numbers.  Admittedly war has always been about poor people killing each other for the benefit of rich people, but in the first world war it was done with hitherto unknown efficiency and on an unbelievable scale.  The generals of the day showed unbelievable callousness, which is depicted here in the way that the generals order men to their deaths for personal glory, then when it doesn't come they seek to kill even more men to 'restore morale'.  The generals cannot comprehend a world in which one would want to save an ordinary man for his humanity, and when Douglas' character tries to do this, they assume he must be acting out of desire for personal gain too.  It's a world where the rift between social classes is laid starkly out for all to see, and despite being armed to the teeth, the poor are unable to do anything about it.

A major problem I have with this film is that it lacks any subtlety.  Kirk Douglas's character is introduced with an offhand comment when his commanding officer says something to the effect of "let of not forget he is one of France's leading criminal lawyers".  He'll probably be involved in some sort of court case then?  Hardly subtle, and hardly the face of the ordinary man on the street.  Maybe it comes down to the thing that people always say about Kubrick, which is that he wasn't an actor's director - i.e. he's not a people person, he's more interested in sets, cameras and cinematography.  Paths of Glory is certainly outstanding in that respect, Kubrick does a fantastic job of letting the camera tell a story here, and allowing his cameramen to move around the amazing sets and demonstrate the enormous futility of this conflict.  The personal aspect of the story-telling seems a little bit like an afterthought.

The film's message is certainly an important one to remember just now as some parts of the media think that the centenary of the first world war is an excuse to wave flags and 'thank' the working class British men who were herded to a pointless horrific death.  The real lesson to learn from the first world war is that how little the ruling classes care for the rest of us, and this film sums it up - albeit in a somewhat heavy-handed way.  Overall, from a technical point of view, Paths of Glory is an outstanding film achievement.  From a story-telling point of view it's a bit unsubtle, though perhaps that was Kubrick's intention - to make it accessible enough for everyone to understand, regardless of education or background.

Either way, not Kubrick's best, but worth checking out for both its place in the context of film history and the message it's overtly pushing on to its audience.

Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure - a most funny film

I've got a few film projects going on at the moment.  In addition to my new IMDB top-100 project I'm doing a sort of cultural back-fill project, where I watch all the films I should probably have seen in my youth but didn't cos I was too busy doing Lego or Warhammer.  The very latest in this series was last night, and it was Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure.

Just like The Princess Bride and The Breakfast Club, there are people in my generation who stand aghast when you tell them that you haven't seen this film.  Though I suppose I do the same when someone tells me they've not seen Alien.  Such was a conversation in a pub last week that lead to a friend of mine buying a DVD of BATEA (can I use this acronym?) just so we could watch it.  The risk with these things is that the joy is in the nostalgia, and that by coming to it fresh, as an adult, 25 years after it was made, you lose all the context within which your peers elevated the film on to such a pedestal.  I was very aware that for the people I was watching it with last night, BATEA is something of a Pythonesque sacred text, complete with context-dependent quotes that will have those in the know creasing up with laughter.  I was very worried that I would offend people if I didn't like it!

Thankfully I was in luck.  At no point in BATEA could anyone think that they're watching anything other than a manic stoner comedy where nothing is meant to make sense, and the point is to laugh at the absurdity of it all.  The plot is brilliantly insane.  Two slackers in late 1980s Southern California are in fact somehow the inspiration for the entire future of mankind.  Therefore people from the future travel back in time from the year 2600ish to help them pass their history test, therefore preventing them from flunking out of school.  To do this, they go on a time travelling adventure, collecting famous people from history and bringing them to the present so that they can parade them in front of the school and get an A+.  What could be simpler?

Looking at it 25 years on, what follows is a cultural tour of an era and a way of life that alongside Wayne's World defined slackerism in the 1990s.  The most obvious part the way that Bill and Ted speak, with all those "Whoah dude"s and references to contemporary rock.  My personal favourite is how they seem to dumb down half of what they say, while a moment later they'll use weird flowery language to describe something simple - eg "we will flunk out most heinously" or "we will have a most triumphant time".  It's almost medieval.

As far as downsides go, the film feels very padded out towards the end.  There's only so many places they can time travel to and not reel out the same jokes, so when they run out of material they end up running around the present day trying to keep all the historical figures out of trouble at the mall.  The script unnecessarily ties itself in knots, but then gets itself out of them by implying that Bill and Ted will simply travel back in time after the film's finished and fix it all - which is either brilliant or a cop out depending on how harsh you're feeling.  Feels a bit like they were contractually obligated to get 90 minutes of running time out of the film, and so added a bunch of slapstick sequences to make it just long enough before calling on time travel to resolve everything.  Lazy yes; but funny enough that it can be forgiven.

And that's the point isn't it?  That it's funny?  No matter that the camera loses focus a couple of times, regardless of how ropey the drawn-on special effects look, however terrible Keanu Reeves' hair is or how dated some of the clothes appear or how out of place the weird slapstick sequence is in which Napoleon Bonaparte bloody loves water flumes (seriously) - ultimately Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure is definitely funny.  Plus it has George Carlin in it.  Win.

What's the most you ever lost on a coin toss?

It's Friday, work isn't really happening, therefore blog.  Here's a classic scene from No Country for Old Men:



Awesome way of establishing just how disjointed and psychotic Javier Bardem's character is.  In my opinion No Country for Old Men is definitely not the Coen Brothers' best film, but it's the one they won their best film and best director Oscars for so I guess it'll be what they're remembered for after they've given up making films.  Don't get me wrong, it's very good, but it's not up there with Fargo*.

Enjoy your Friday!

* - I am aware that they won an Oscar for Fargo too btw.

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.