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.

Transcendence - hopefully not my last film of the year

The writing was sort of on the wall for Transcendence before I even watched it.  When I checked out its IMDB entry I discovered that 'people who liked this' also liked such abominations as Lucy and The Tourist.  Sigh.  But of course silly me I never checked that before the physical DVD was in my possession; so what is a film-nerd to do but watch it anyway and prepare to rage?  So here we go.

Johnny Depp is miscast as Will Caster, a socially introverted caricature of a scientist who is obsessed by artificial intelligence (AI) and who wants to create a computer that can think.  His wife Evelyn (Rebecca Hall) gets to be all weepy and emotional about things (cos she's a women innit) and his mentors & colleagues get to sound all scientific.  Paul Bettany is Evelyn's unemotional foil (cos he's a man innit) while Morgan Freeman stands about sounding like the narrator and getting all the lines the writers think are most profound - cos that's what his career has become.  When Caster is shot by anti-AI terrorists (led by Kara Mara - another good actor who is in this film why?) his team decide to try to save his mind by uploading him to a computer.

This then leads us naturally into familiar science fiction territory - what does it mean to be human, and can a machine ever be so.  Except that the film completely shies away from telling this story.  Instead it turns Johnny Depp's character into some sort of big bad with a huge shoot-out and lots of convenient plot holes that can't be ignored in such a terrible film.

I'm almost more depressed that I've got used to films like this than their actual existence.  Lucy especially is a film very similar to this, a film that never gets deeper than a mere scratch into anything approaching proper science fiction, but somehow thinks itself deeply profound.  It's a film that thinks it's being clever because it asks how a human can prove they are self-aware, but then never goes on to explore that.  It's a film that feels like a marketing opportunity without a script, a collection of famous cast members without any characters for them to play, where the final act of descends into an action shooter because that's what the committee that 'wrote' the script thinks audiences want these days.

In short, this is a very poor attempt at science fiction.  Oh, and Cillian Murphy is also in it for a bit - talk about wasted acting talent.

Some of you might be surprised to find me blogging about Science Fiction trash rather than conducting an in-depth review of the new Star Wars film.  The truth is that I have not seen it yet; I just don't get along very well with insanely packed cinemas of fan-boys.  Probably go and see it between Christmas and the New Year.  Yes I am excited about it, but the crushing failure of the hopefully soon-to-be-retconned prequels leaves me hoping that it simply isn't terrible.  Watch this space for my thoughts.  Merry Xmas all!

Last House on the Left - Horrible Horror

Way back in the day when I was hardly into film at all, my friends were all watching a brand new exciting horror movie called Scream.  Scream took the world by storm, and I was informed by the film-reviewing world that Wes Craven had re-invented the horror genre.  What no-one stopped to tell me though, was that Craven had been here before, creating horror thrillers that inspired a generation of film makes over several decades.  With Craven's recent death, I am taking the time to watch some of his more famous back-catalogue.

Last House on the Left starts innocently enough, but by the end has degenerated into a bloody revenge fantasy in which a nicer-than-nice middle class family shows us how society is only a short step away from violent anarchy.  The plot is that middle class Mary of liberal upbringing and her more worldly-wise friend Phyllis go to see a concert, try to score some drugs, get kidnapped by a gang of sexually violent criminals - and then there's bloody horror.

With this - his first film - Craven set the template for a genre that has now become so ingrained in the minds of the movie-watching public, that it's hard to imagine a time before these tropes existed.  The movie is shot on grainy film stock, often with poor lighting, indifferent cuts and stunted chemistry between the actors - in other words trying not to look like a film, trying to look like real life.  Herein lies the true nastiness of it, rather than trying to tell a horror story or deliberately scare us, Craven is doing something much more animalistic than that.  He's trying to get under our skin by presenting us with youthfulness and innocence, and then ripping it to bloody pieces.

Of course the cleverness here is that even through this, the film is politically charged.  It plays into the fear of every liberal parent, that their liberalism contradicts that animal instinct to protects one's children above all, and that one's civilised exterior is only a front waiting to be washed away to reveal the darkness underneath.  When presented with something of unimaginable horror, such as the people who brutally killed your daughter, where will our civilisation go?  Who are the 'good guys' in the film - do we applaud the revenge of a murdered daughter, or do we shake our heads at the senselessness?

Looking back, it's a film that has been bettered by film-nasties since, but as a piece of film history it's clearly still relevant and seeing the opening shots of a genre that continues to draw huge audience appeal.