The Hunger Games - Part 3a

The last film I watched in 2014 was the film that was meant to be the final Hunger Games film, but because of wanting to make more money artistic reasons the producers of the franchise have decided to split it into two.  This seems to be a part of life these days.  In the future will we see the middle parts of franchises also split into two films?  If they can split The Hobbit (a 200 page book written for children) into 3 films then surely anything is possible?

Hunger Games Mockingjay - Part 1 is the proper title of this film, one that starts the end of the story of Panem and Katniss Everdeen - played once more with no end of gusto by Jennifer Lawrence.  It is pleasing to see the Oscar-winning Lawrence carry on in her role in this franchise, I can imagine other actors with snobbier opinions of themselves leaving such material behind now that they've graduated into the A-list.  This is clearly a film with a lot of pull for top actors though, with Julianne Moore joining a cast that already contains Lawrence, Woody Harrelson, Donald Sutherland and Philip Seymour Hoffman.  Reading's very own Natalie Dormer even turns up too, sporting an American accent and keeping her top on for once!

This third instalment moves the action permanently away from the actual Hunger Games, loses much of the science fiction from the first part and replaces it with a propaganda war between two factions in Panem's growing civil war.  On one side are the elites in the capital, led by Sutherland's President Snow, on the other are the insurgents of District 13, led by President Coin (Moore).  Each wants to use its own 'victor' of the games to lead a propaganda war to win over the other districts.  Katniss is wheeled out by District 13 as the heroine who stood up to the system and represents freedom - aka the Mockingjay.  The story largely revolves around their attempts to build her up as a heroine of the people and how she reacts to being put on such a pedestal.

I don't want to have to say this, but I didn't think too much of this film.  It was interesting enough because it advanced a story that I found captivating over the previous two instalments, but it felt like it was mechanically checking off the plot points rather than building a narrative.  The tone of the film didn't feel right either.  There is a slightly silly scene in which Katniss can't act, and although it does wonders to showcase Jennifer Lawrence's acting talent, it does little to make the war feel real.  When the action does ramp up and Katniss finally gets into the field and gives an impassioned speech about fighting the capital to the end, the script kills its own momentum by sending her off for a semi-romantic stroll in the woods with Gale.  I can only imagine that this is what happens in the book, and so the script-writers felt compelled to include it, but it doesn't really fit.

I have not read the original books, but I am told that nothing is being left out now, and sequences that were short paragraphs in the book are now being dragged out into elongated segments.  There is a rescue sequence that goes on for a good 20 minutes, in the book this is merely mentioned to have happened outside of the main narrative.  A screenplay should be a different thing to a novel, film and print are very different forms of storytelling and you can't just import one into the other.  It's this sort of milking of a story that can kill a franchise or turn off the casual viewer - not good.

As I've said before, this will all come down to the way it ends.  Everything so far has pointed towards Katniss making the ultimate sacrifice to save Panem.  She sacrifices herself to save her sister in the original reaping.  She is prepared to sacrifice her life rather than kill Peeta at the end of the first games.  She is the 'girl on fire'.  Joan of Arc might be a saint in France, but things didn't end well for Joan herself - look it up.  Despite all this though, I am eagerly looking forwards to part 4.

Under the Skin - Thoughtful Science Fiction

It took me a long time to get there, but I finally watched the much talked-about Under the Skin when I got back from my Christmas break last weekend.

This is an artistic science fiction film that stars Scarlett Johansson as a mysterious alien.  She and her accomplice, a male alien always seen riding a motorbike, travel southern Scotland in search of lonely men.  These men are lured back to a strange and oblique alien dreamscape where they appear to be consumed in an inky fluid, apparently unaware of their fate and for reasons unknown.  Much of this was advertised heavily when the film was released, and so isn't any sort of spoiler, but I wont give away anything else about the story, as the less you know about it the better.

The film is cleverly made in a way that emphasises the themes in the story.  Scarlet Johanssen is undoubtedly a Holywood A-lister, and the disconnect between the world we normally see her inhabiting and the world of southern Scotland is used to best effect.  Amateur and non-actors are used as bit-part characters.  Hidden cameras are used for street scenes.  All of this means that Johansson looks even more alien, as the people acting against and who see her seem ever so slightly star struck and awed by her presence, and the glamour she is normally associated with is striped back to a harsh earthy reality.  Kudos to Johansson for her English accent throughout the film, absolutely flawless - though admittedly her lines are sparse.

What we have then is an extremely thoughtful science fiction film, that's all about humanity and what it means to be a human.  This question is more easily-asked by an outsider, and so it is that Johansson's inhuman alien struggles to understand what humanity is.  The people that she encounters on her travels are vastly different in appearance, motivations and mannerisms, yet they are all humans.  It's the kind of science fiction that I enjoy, with a simple set-up that explores simple philosophical questions about the world.  No messages from the future encoded in a watch by a 5 dimensional being in a bookcase here.  When the special effects do come in though, they're excellent and work even better being their unexpectedness.

I cannot recommend Under the Skin to everyone.  It is a slow burner, and for many the oblique resolution will annoy rather than satisfy.  If you're a fan of real science fiction though, and you don't mind thinking about what you're seeing, then you should watch this film.

Unbroken - Second last film of 2014

Saw my second last film of 2014 last Tuesday afternoon.  It's great to be off work and take advantage of cheap matinee performances starting at 4pm.  Unbroken is directed by Angelina Jolie, her first time behind the cameras.  In interviews she seems to think that she's going to be in contention come Oscar season, I do not agree.

Unbroken tells a true story of one Louis Zamperini, who was the son to Italian immigrants into the US, ran at the 1936 Olympics and then served in the US air forces in the Second World War as a bombardier.  Zamperini was captured by the Japanese after his plane went down in the Pacific ocean in 1943 and spent many years as a prisoner of war, his minor celebrity status sometimes granting him recognition and better treatment, sometimes granting him the opposite.

Now interesting though this man's life may be, I don't really understand why anyone would think it's particularly cinematic.  2 hours and 15 minutes is a long time to drag out a 1500m race, being stranded in the Pacific Ocean and then tortured in a series of Japanese POW camps.  I guess it's meant to be about human spirit, or strength in the face of torment, or maybe a reminder to everyone out there about how terribly the Japanese treated their prisoners of war.  This account of a massacre of US POWs at Palawan certainly provides evidence that there were Japanese prisoner camps where extra-judicial murders took place, but the film's focus on the injury and suffering caused by sadistic guards is interesting.  It seems to turn it into the central theme of the film, one that doesn't really make interesting watching.

Overall then, I'm not really sure what to say about Unbroken.  The true story of the central character's life is interesting enough, but interesting in a way that you might want to read about rather than watch on a big screen.  Jack O'Connell is a good actor and does a good job of looking grimly determined, but that's all that's required of him.  I wasn't really impressed by Jolie's direction; there's a really bland establishing shot at the start of the film of the pilots in the cockpit of Zamperini's bomber, and towards the end she insists on doing a Jesus-shot where Zamperini looks like he's on the cross.  It's very unimaginative stuff.

I think that's the take-home from this review: interesting but unimaginative.  Maybe one to see on the small screen.  Maybe.

The Great Dictator - Racism or Satire? You decide.

The road to the IMDB top-100 continued the other week with another Charlie Chaplain film, this time his landmark satire of Nazi Germany, The Great Dictator.  Made in 1940, just as the world was waking up to the terrors of what the Nazis were doing across Europe, the film is unashamed in its demonisation of them.  It was a film that at the time could be considered very brave to make.  The US was not at war with Germany, and such overt criticism of a head of state of a powerful westernised nation would surely have riled the corridors of power in the US.  Chaplain doesn't just satirise Hitler and the Nazis though, he outright mocks them through his own unique style of slapstick, giving all the characters stupid names, putting on a ridiculous German accent and effectively blowing raspberries in their faces.

One could argue that Chaplain almost goes too far here though.  Is the garbled fake German that he speaks still satire, or is it bordering on racism?  Chaplain plays two characters in The Great Dictator, and it is perhaps clear from his portrayal of those characters that he hold the Nazis in contempt rather than the German speaking diaspora.  Chaplain plays Hynkel - dictator of Tomania (Hitler) as well as a Jewish barber who is a hero from the First World War.  The barber is eloquent and well-spoken, Hynkel speaks in a garbled mash-up of fake German and semi-retarded English.  The barber is shown as resourceful and strong, Hynkel a devious man fearful of his supposed allies.  Chaplain's disdain for Hitler and what he has done to the German nation is clear.

The film is well-known for its final 15 minutes, in which the barber is mistaken for Hynkel and hauled in front of a Nazi rally to deliver a speech to the masses.  Rather than ranting about Jews, the barber gives a moving oration about the brotherhood of mankind, imploring the world to step back from the madness of war, recognise there is good in all, enough for all, and work together for a brighter future.  The cheering of the crowds as he finishes his speech can be read two ways, either there is hope for humanity as the crowd realise the truth in what he says; or that there is no hope as the baying masses blindly cheer whatever is put in front of them, be they peace-lover or war-monger.  However the film's final scene does leave us with a feeling of hope for the future of the German peoples and the world at large.

Undoubtedly The Great Dictator is a landmark piece of cinema.

2001: A Space Odyssey - better on a big screen

The BFI recently re-released Stanley Kubrick's classic science fiction opus 2001: A Space Odyssey into cinemas.  Thankfully this got outside the M25, and so it was that last Tuesday both Reading and Camberley Vue cinemas were screening the original.

I last saw 2001: A Space Odyssey the best part of 20 years ago.  Back then I wasn't anywhere near as into film and cinema-as-art as I am nowadays, but even then I was aware that I was watching a masterpiece.  It's a film about big concepts, like the evolution of mankind and the emergence of new forms of life.  It's about concepts that are meant to be barely comprehensible by our mortal minds, all bound up in the presence of the brutally alien monolith, the true intentions of which remain unknown throughout the film and remain open to interpretation.  Its mysteriousness rams home the idea that the next step in human evolution will be as incomprehensible to us as a space station is to a pre-humanoid ape holding a bone.

Everything in the film is based on a scientific grounding, and like most of Arthur C Clarke's work - it's less about the characters, and all about the concepts.  In fact, the film's most memorable character is a computer - the HAL9000 computer who tries to kill the crew of the ship when he realises that they plan to disconnect him.  This is the one plot point of the film that makes no sense, HAL makes one small mistake and the crew decide the solution is disconnection.  If we all decided to throw our machines away when they made one mistake, we would need a lot more computers.  Anyway, the point is about evolution as a concept, conflict between competing groups for survival, and when a new intelligence emerges, there is necessarily a conflict to see who remains on top.

Some may criticise its lack of pace, its overly long use of shots of ships flying around, the barmy 5 minutes of flashing colours that represent Dave Bowman's journey through the infinite, the simple characterisation or a multitude of other things.  But this film is one of the purest hard science fiction experiences ever committed to celluloid.  The film's use of classical music keeps the tempo up during what might have turned into tedious sequences of space flight.  Kubrick's intention here is to demonstrate how far humanity has come, to make us marvel at that the things we have come to take for granted.  It's a film that has a stark aesthetic too, the sets are flawlessly designed and colours are used contrastingly to make everything feel disconnected and confusing.  It helps us feel even more uneasy about the presence of the monolith and what it represents.

To some, the last 10 minutes are too confounding to be anything other than a boring mess.  There is hopefully a majority out there who understand what Kubrick was trying to do, but think he took it too far into the world of the abstract.  For me though, this sequence stands out in science fiction cinema as a perfect way to end.  The monolith appears in the film at the start to usher in a new age of humanity, and then again at the end to do the same.  We as post-modern Homo Sapiens cannot comprehend the confusion of the pre-human apes who see the monolith for the first time and are inspired to use tools.  Perhaps our confusion as we follow Dave Bowman though his accelerated lifespan is as close as we can get to theirs.  Kubrick's use of cuts to show us Dave's ageing and his own disorientation at the passing of time is flawless.  The film ends on Dave Bowman being reborn as a child and returned to look over earth from a protective bubble.  Interpret this as you will.  Have the aliens delivered us a god?  Has humanity evolved again as it did when our ancestors picked up the first bone and wielded it as a club?  Is future conflict inevitable in the future as it was in the past?

To be honest, I probably would have paid my £10 just to experience this on the big screen with surround sound.  2001: A Space Odyssey is a landmark in the history of science fiction in film.  It's a film that changed cinema, and I am very glad to have finally seen it on the big screen.

They Live - A working class fantasy

Had an Xmas film experience last Friday, more of that later hopefully, but on Thursday we went full-on anti-Xmas by watching the cult action thriller They Live.  Starring ex-wrestling star Roddy Piper, and set in the contemporary urban dust bowl that is 1980s Los Angeles.  Piper plays a drifter called George, down on his luck and heading into the city to look for work.  He settles in to sleep for a few nights at a local commune but is shocked to discover that there's some sort of subversive underground movement going on fomenting discontent and agitating to make people 'see' the truth.

When the police move in to break up the commune, George is landed with a pair of shades.  When looked through, the glasses reveal that the world around him is an elaborate fantasy, and the real world is in fact being ruled by a small cabal of aliens disguising themselves as humans.  Bill-boards and newspaper headlines are in fact subliminal messages urging people to conform and consume.  Aliens disguised as humans are using the real humans as slave labour, and buying the silence of those they can't brainwash into submission.  George immediately decides to deal with this in the American way, with a shotgun and an attitude.

They Live is a cult film for a very good reason.  It's an brilliantly silly fantasy that portrays the world's elites as literal aliens using the rest of humanity for their own profit.  Imagine if your boss was actually an alien trying to take over the world?  Then it'd be ok to shoot him in the face - the ultimate working class fantasy!  The film's politics might be ludicrously overt and the acting bad; but the film is full one-liners, inane action and has a really gritty feel to it.  The design of everything when George is looking through the sunglasses at the 'real' world is great, with lots of greyscale and monotone words on billboards saying 'CONFORM', 'SLEEP' or 'OBEY' (see picture).  It's so silly it's brilliant.  I.e. classic cult.

At 80 minutes long, They Live is no classic, but definitely worth watching.

Excision - seriously messed up

It's a long time since I saw a film and I thought it was completely fucked up, but Sunday night reset the timer on that as I watched the independent American production Excision.  I think this appeared on my film-radar after a RedLetterMedia review of films-you-probably-didn't-see-yet highlighted it as weird enough to bother watching.  The story follows Pauline, a moderately disturbed teenager living somewhere in American suburbia with her frustrated-but-trying-not-to-be parents and younger sister - who suffers from cystic fibrosis.

Pauline is fairly weird, but on the surface no weirder than one might expect from the average teenager.  She has bad hair, bad skin, dresses awkwardly, hates the cool kids and worries about her changing body. Oh and she fetishises dead bodies.  Amongst the film's many scenes that seem to exist purely court controversy, Pauline dreams about having sex with a cadaver missing half its head.

It's almost as if the film-makers are trying to get as much in as possible that will wind up middle-America.  There's a scene in which Pauline seems to fantasise about having an abortion.  There are several comic scenes in which Pauline appears to pray to god with joking repentance as if she were chatting to an older sister.  She obsesses over a used tampon and losing her virginity when she's on her period.  Just your normal teenager then?

I suppose the subtext to all this is that being a teenage girl is weird - this isn't something I have actual experience of, but I'm assured it's a very trying time in the lives of all woman.  Pauline's mother expresses many of the things that the world expects her to do, crucially though she understands the difference between what society expects and what goes on behind closed doors - whereas Pauline does not.  She gets annoyed when Pauline kisses a random boy at a high-society dance, but at the same time seems to understand what's going on and approves when Pauline goes off to have sex with a random boy from her school.  It's the rules of society and etiquette that Pauline doesn't get and doesn't care about.  Basically she's a teenager.

Pauline also wants to be a surgeon.  She obsesses about blood and viscera and dead bodies.  If you can't work out where the film is going with all this then you need to try harder.  Given it's 80 minutes long I wouldn't go so far as to say that Excision was a total waste of my time.  I laughed out loud 2 or 3 times, and for fans of horror there's certainly something nasty about the stuff that Pauline gets up to.  Overall though, this isn't a film I would really recommend to anyone.  It's more of a cinematic curiosity than anything else, proving that the American film industry does have a dark side that sits outside the Holywood mainstream.  Excision - if you're going to watch it, don't eat anything while doing so.