Written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki. Featuring the voice talents of Anna Paquin, James Van Der Beek, Mark Hamill, Cloris Leachman and Jim Cummings.
SYNOPSIS:
A young boy and girl race against pirates and foreign agents in the search for a legendary floating castle.
People call Studio Ghibli the Eastern Walt Disney. I couldn’t say which people exactly, but that seems to be Wikipedia’s general consensus. That they make animated children’s films is the most obvious reason for comparison, but there’s something more intangible about the similarity. They both share a sense of ‘magic’. Cringe away.
Laputa – Castle in the Sky was the first film the studio released in 1986, which places it within the last classic age of Disney from Fox and the Hound (1980) to The Lion King (1994). To further show the two studios’ affinity, Disney currently holds the Studio Ghibli’s distribution rights in the west.
It follows the sprawling adventure of Sheeta and Pazu in the seas of the sky. Everyone is after Sheeta because she possesses something they all want – a strange stone held in a necklace, inherited it from her mother just before she died. The film opens with Sheeta under military protection, or rather, ‘imprisonment’. But the people in Laputa don’t travel by roads; they voyage on vast airships that surf the clouds as though they’re waves. They’re shaped like giant boats tweaked with wings and propellers to keep them in the air, with a gloss of steampunk seasoning.
The main delight is in the film’s mythology. It places you, along with Sheeta and Pazu, in the middle of a much grander story of which Laputa is merely a chapter. None of us know why the stone floats Sheeta gently down to the mine where Pazu works when she falls overboard from one of the ships, nor why it is so sought after. As their adventure develops, and they encounter other, more knowledgeable characters, the legacy of Laputa is slowly disclosed. Many centuries ago there were races of people who lived in floating cities of their own invention, the grandest of which being the castle of Laputa. In time, these sky people moved to the earth and their history was consigned to legend. Pazu’s father, a pilot, once saw Laputa half obscured by a torrent of windy clouds, but everyone thought him crazy when he spoke of it. Sheeta’s ties to the castle are a little stronger. Such an epic story, spanning thousands of years, invests you in an entirely different world full of its unique history and myth.
The secondary delight is the film’s quirk. It possesses a surreal sense of humour, and you should expect nothing less from a film so imaginative. Pay attention to the background because everyone has something to do. Henchmen struggle with the simplest of tasks whilst others bicker. Most trip or fall.
Perhaps a little too long overall, but Laputa has such a rich tapestry of story and background detail that it’s hard to complain.
Directed by Adam Gierasch. Starring Gale Harold, Leisha Hailey and Chelcie Ross.
SYNOPSIS:
A couple that has recently experienced a miscarriage move into an isolated house with a dark history.
‘Fertile Ground’ sounds like it should be a romantic comedy, probably starring Jennifer Aniston as a clumsy, single gardener. From there you can go two ways: the Adam Sandler route where they join forces to win the local ‘hedge trimming championship’; or cast Channing Tatum as an expert, but unhappily engaged, gardener who teaches Aniston the wonders of nature. The film writes itself.
Or it could go in the ‘haunted house’ direction. Emily (Leisha Hailey) and Nate Weaver (Gale Harold) are a loving couple who experience a (very bloody) miscarriage in the film’s opening scene. It comes from nowhere, during a dinner party celebrating the pregnancy, and is effectively shocking. Afterwards, they both decide to move out of the city and into Nate’s “great-great-great-great…he was old” uncle’s house to help Emily recover. That’s the haunted one, by the way.
[Rant begin]
It’s a good, creepy house. The exterior is a cold white and the barren road stretches off emptily into both horizons. The rooms inside are large, the windows are rickety and it has a basement. But then why is the house itself never scary? Why must the film rely on ghostly apparitions jumping into shot for its frights? It isn’t the house’s fault.
Over-exposure. Horror is most effective when it is unseen or unknowable, but here, at night, everything is visible in the moon’s cool blue half-light. Not only does it destroy the mystique, but it also draws unwanted attention to the background. The lighting’s focus should be on Emily’s terrified face, yet distracting objects litter the view behind her.
You have to be brave to embrace the darkness. It’s more expressionistic, and therefore not as safe. Unfortunately, Fertile Ground’s makers are adverse to such risks, and thus the film’s appearance looks more suited for daytime television.
The generic music and dissolve transitions between scenes only accentuate this impression. The film is also inexplicably, and uselessly, separated into sections by title-cards in the most annoying “scribbled-on-a-blackboard” font: “Starting Over”, “Moving In”, “New Life”, “Old Secrets”, “Strange Happening”, “The Gathering”, “Revelations” - at best these are insufferably cheesy, at worst they are patronising to the viewer.
[Back to the plot]
The two start to uncover dark “Old Secrets” about the house. They find a 150-year-old skull in the front garden (it was interfering with the plumbing) and a trip to the local historian reveals that many a (female) murder have occurred within their walls. It’s probably ok though, consoles the historian, the last death was in the 60s.
This starts to send Emily a bit barmy, tapping into her already fragile, post-miscarriage psyche. Nate, too, becomes angrier and obsessive. Their relationship deteriorates as Emily begins to see more and more strange occurrences; the door is oddly ajar, a bloodstained woman passes through the corridor, her nightmares intensify. All the usual things you’d expect of a haunted house film, and just as formulaic as the most boring within the sub-genre.
Starring Koji Yakusho, Takayuki Yamada and Yuseke Iseya.
SYNOPSIS:
Feudal Japan is in a time of peace, but the sadistic Lord Naritsugu is next in line for the Shogun’s rule. 12 samurai, and one scavenger, are under orders to assassinate Naritsugu to avoid such a political catastrophe.
You know what’s missing from cinema these days? Really good villains. I don’t mean, like, a ‘good’ villain as in a bad-guy who sees the errors of his ways (confusing word order: noted); I mean some detestable sonofabitch that you can’t wait to get their comeuppance. Films that are blessed with such antagonists can build their whole plot around their eventual, humiliating (hopefully bloody) demise. 13 Assassins does so masterfully.
There’s a cheap trick in storytelling called ‘kicking the puppy’. It’s where you have your bad guy commit a bad deed that is separate from his relationship with the hero. These acts should be indefensible and, because they do not concern the ‘good guy’ in any way, will show the villain as an objectively evil person. He isn’t just driven by an accidental wrong the protagonist committed (see: Iron Man 2), but is wicked to the core. So you show a guy kicking a puppy onscreen, or something in a similarly provocative range, and it’s established in your viewer’s mind that he is a villain. It whets the appetite for retribution.
13 Assassins, being a Takeshi Miike film, takes its sweet, graphic time over this. Lord Naritsugu (Goro Inagaki) is the Shogun’s sadistic half-brother, and next in line to the de facto throne of 18th century Feudal Japan. He kicks a whole lotta puppies. In the film’s opening 20 minutes, Naritsugu has already been shown raping a clan leader’s daughter-in-law, then beheading (after three failed attempts, like some demented lumberjack) her husband, and using a tied-up peasant family (who seems to be comprised entirely of women and children, the most sympathetic of puppies) as bow-and-arrow target practice in his garden. Most horrifically, though, is the aftermath of one of his hideous pastimes. A young lady sits weeping in a cloak; her eyes appear black and the tears they leak are a dark crimson. She had been found dumped by a road near Naritsugu’s palace, apparently after he’d grown bored of her. To demonstrate the need for action, one of the Shogun’s advisers, Sir Doi (Mikijiro Hira), is showing an old samurai, Shinzaemon (Koji Yakusho), this example of Lord Naritsugu wickedness. He asks someone to take off the girl’s cloak. It reveals a writhing, limbless torso. “What happened to her family?”, Shinzaemon asks, appalled, but the girl can only speak in cries because Naritsugu had taken her tongue as well. She writes her answer instead on a scroll laid out on the floor. Her red tears stain parts of the paper. An aide holds up the Japanese characters to Sir Dou and Shinzaemon. The white subtitles below read: “Total Massacre”.
The whole sequence is like punting a puppy across a football pitch, and its augmented by those onscreen sharing in the disgust. This is a time of peace in Japan. The Shogun has managed the various clans’ relationships well, and the days of the Samurai are nearing an end. Sir Doi secretly recruits Shinzaemon (“The Shinzaemon?”, everybody seems to ask when he introduces himself, hinting at a glorious past) to assassinate Naritsugu. Shinzaemon’s sword hasn’t been in battle for years. Times of peace aren’t that great for samurai. He dreams of an honourable death, as do the 12 other samurai he recruits for the task. This may be their last opportunity for one.
When you meet a few of the other samurai, you can tell they’re just there for the stuffing, like the red-shirts on a Star Trek away team. You have your loyal one, your joker one, one doing it for the money - it’s all very cute, but they’re never given any time to develop, not like in Seven Samurai. But it’s never really about the 13 assassins. It’s all about Naritsugu getting what he deserves.
Like in Seven Samurai, the 13 men fortify a town. It’s on Naritsugu’s route home, and it is where they will strike. This is what 13 Assassins builds up to. The opening 30 minutes details Naritsugu and the politics of trying to be rid of him. The following 50 minutes show the 13 men being brought together and fortifying the town. It’s paced calmly and with restraint. There’s only a brief flash of swords in the first hour and 20 minutes. Then Naritsugu’s troop arrive at the town. Shinzaemon had prepared to face 70 men. Naritsugu has brought 200. The odds get longer and the body count higher.
What follows is an epic and exhausting 40-minute battle sequence. The cinema frequently gasped at the set pieces, and the chap next to me even punched his fist and said “Yeah!” under his breath at one point. It’s exciting, but because of its immense length, it becomes something of an endurance test. As the assassins tire, so do you. You’ve battled hard with them, and it shows how desensitising and wearing battles really are. And then comes the final showdown. Naritsugu vs Shinzaemon. You’d be hard pressed to find a pay-off sweeter.
Starring Saoirse Ronan, Eric Bana, Tom Hollander, Olivia Williams, Jason Flemyng and Cate Blanchett.
SYNOPSIS:
Hanna is an abnormally strong and gifted, 14 year-old killing machine, and there are a few people out there who want her for themselves.
Joe Wright can sure pull off a decent long take. He had that extended, mind-boggling shot in Atonement, gliding over and across a beach of celebrating World War II Allied soldiers. The longer it went on, the more excited and tense you became, your unbelief compounding at every extra event in shot, scared that someone might break character or miss their cue and they’d have to go again from the beginning. Joe Wright’s latest, Hanna, possesses similar shots, but their impact is lessened somewhat by their number and the occasional betrayal of a CGI pixel (those odd, jerky movements in fight scenes). You can tell where they’ve stitched two takes together too, usually when the sun’s flare burns out the screen entire. They’re still very impressive though - if not for Atonement’s effort and mastery, then for sheer imagination and zest.
In all other respects, however, Hanna is quite different from Atonement. They share an actor in Saoirse Ronan (Hanna in Hanna, Briony in Atonement), but that and the long takes are about it. Hanna is a very special girl. She has extraordinary strength and reflexes, and has been groomed by her father, Erik (Eric Bana), into a survival machine from a very early age. They live in isolation in a wintry forest, heated by fire and hunting deer for food. She’s still very sweet, though. Her face is softly mouse-like, and a book of Grimm’s fairytales lies underneath her pillow alongside a photo of her murdered mother. But who murdered her mother? Why do they live like hermits? How is Hanna so strong?
These questions are slowly answered as the film progresses, but the enemy is established right from the start. Erik looks his daughter in the eye just before this wintry prelude is over and explains that a woman, Marissa (a red-haired Cate Blanchett), will not rest, or tire, until Hanna is dead.
The film is rich with quirky characters. They need their quirks otherwise they’d drown in the cast-list. There’s the manically camp German hitman, Isaacs (Tom Hollander). He whistles sinisterly and wears a full-body matching tracksuit. Constantly beside him are his two Dr. Marten’s-wearing, Ben-Sherman-shirt adorning skinhead henchman. Marissa, who employs the help of Isaacs, shows her obsessive character not in dialogue or intense stares to camera, but by the immaculately stored selection of high-heeled shoes in her room, and the way she brushes her teeth until her gums bleed. One character, Hanna’s grandmother, we only meet very briefly, yet her personality is stored within a few minute actions. As she sits opposite Marissa in her apartment room, knowing that death shortly awaits, she carefully sweeps a few crumbs on the table into her cupped hand to place them neatly on a plate. This woman’s last thoughts are to tidy up breakfast. You show, you don’t tell. It’s a good rule for Directors to go by.
The film’s visual metaphors are heavy, but they work in a post-modern comic book way. One scene shows Erik walking through an airport. It’s one of those extended, single take shots, and the longer it goes on, the more people we realise are tracking him. As Erik becomes aware of his shadows, he passes a few sunglasses billboards on the walls behind him that show five-foot high eyes. It’s giddily self-conscious. There’s probably a lot more of those tucked away in the film. Second viewings should be recommended somewhere on your receipts.
The Chemical Brothers provide the film’s dub-steppy musical score, which works well with the underground comic book mood. The sound design overall, in fact, is sublime. The crackling heat of a waffle iron, and the muffled voices in a room next door could set up a scene with your eyes closed.
You can compare Hanna with Kill Bill and Leon, but really you’re only making a list of female assassin films. In tone and stylistics, Hanna is far more similar to Run, Lola, Run. They share a fondness for the same neon coloured hair and ridiculous editing pace, only that 90s, VHS fuzz is replaced with a much crisper lens. Perhaps the film could have done with more of a climax, and its release of information could have been handled better, but everything is far too fun and absurd for anyone to seriously complain.
Starring Natalie Portman, Vincent Cassel, Mila Kunis, Winona Ryder and Barbara Hershey.
SYNOPSIS:
A ballerina is pushed to the very edges of her sanity in a gruelling production of Swan Lake.
There weren’t any other pictures. I swear.
Darren Aronofsky once said that all his films, when you took away their visual and narrative flair, were about a character’s search for God. They’re certainly all about a search for something. Pi has Max seeking the ultimate number; Requiem for a Dream searches for its next high; The Fountain needed to find a cure; and The Wrestler had lost the American Dream. If you take ‘God’ as an abstract concept for ‘perfection’, Aronofsky’s mission statement makes a bit more sense. Especially so in Black Swan, where Nina’s (Natalie Portman) drive for absolute perfection in her performance of ‘Swan Lake’ makes for her own demise.
But how to achieve perfection? Having an extended lesbian scene between Portman and Mila Kunis is one way. Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel), the ballet company’s director/pretentious visionary, outlines his different method from the film’s start: ‘Swan Lake’ has been performed many times, so they must strip it down to its bare bones and foundations, to then build it back up again. Only then can they make it fresh, and go some way to achieving this elusive and mystical God. They used to do that in experimental psychology labs in the 60s. The theory was that their patients would effectively re-wire their own broken minds when re-establishing mental connections. Results weren’t that great.
Leroy proceeds to do this not only to the play, but also to Nina and us - the viewers. But in a way, because the film is told so subjectively from Nina’s point of view, her and we are almost the same. It follows that any punishment Leroy (read: Aronofsky) exerts on Nina, the viewer also experiences. The feelings you get from watching these gruelling scenes can be quite acute. Aronofsky shows Nina peeling the skin off from around her nail, and you wince as though you’re doing it yourself; Nina’s toes are shot pirouetting in close-up, and yours start to curl. It all falls under the ‘haptic’ theory of film – where the eye is seen as a sensory organ of touch, as though you can feel the things you perceive onscreen. It sounds over-academic, but there’s a lot of truth in it. People spazing out at Saw isn’t because what they see is too much, it’s because they’re imagining those acts upon themselves.
These haptic encounters are pretty raw, but when coupled with Nina’s schizophrenic perspective, the experience is increasingly intense. As the film is told entirely through Nina, we are also privy to her hallucinations and nightmares. Sometimes she sees feathers sprout from the prickles in her skin, others she envisions lesbian encounters. It compromises the film’s reality, twisting it into something gruesome and deformed, and you’re trapped within it.
I like to think I’ve a strong stomach for these kinda films, but I struggled with the opening hour (until the lesbian scene). It’s Aronofsky’s intention. You’re being stripped away, tested to your limits of endurance – just like ‘Swan Lake’, just like Nina.
I was so, so close to walking. It was terror that kept me there, the paralysing sort like when you think you hear someone downstairs at night. In the film’s final reel, after an hour and a half of punishment, Leroy/Aronofsky makes good of their promise: they rebuild you. Something clicks (or rather, snaps) in Nina. She finally understands how she can be the delicate, innocent White Swan, whilst also channelling its seductive, Black counterpart. Her elation in this attained perfection is infectious. You become delirious with her performance and the applause it garners. She’s found her God, but at what cost?
Starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Monaghan, Vera Farmiga, Jeffrey Wright and Russell Peters.
SYNOPSIS:
A solider must relive a train bombing over and over to uncover the man responsible for the crime.
Sisyphus was a very deceitful Greek king who let his ego grow fat and self-important. He wasn’t a nice chap and the Gods ended up assigning him one of those horrible afterlife chores. For eternity he was to roll a boulder up a hill only for it to tumble down just before he reached the top. It ain’t no ‘guts-pecked-out-by-vultures’, but such repetition would grate pretty bad. Infinity is aaaaages.
In other news, hardly anyone likes commutes. They’re early and crammed.
Source Code is a sort of Sisyphusian commute and Captain Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal) is thrown into its deep end. He awakes on a train with his head supported by its window. He has no idea how he got there and recognises none of the carriage’s passengers. The last thing he remembers was flying a helicopter in Afghanistan. “I’m Captain Colter Stevens,” he pleads with the woman sitting opposite him, who was talking to him like they were friends. “No you’re not. You’re Sean Fentress.” WTF, indeed.
Panicked, he stumbles around the train asking others where he is. You see this from both perspectives. You understand Stevens because you don’t know what’s going on either, but you also sympathise with his fellow commuters’ frustration - who hasn’t experienced a crazy guy on their way into work? He retreats to a toilet and notices the mirror. That isn’t his face. Checking the photo ID in his wallet, that’s Sean Fentress.
Understandably flustered, Stevens staggers out the toilet like a confused drunk. The woman who sat opposite him earlier is waiting for him. She’s Christina (Michelle Monaghan). “It’s all going to be ok,” she assures him. Then the train explodes. Stevens awakes in a dark capsule with frayed cables and wires snaking from its walls. They’re loose ends. A woman, ‘Goodwin’ (Vera Farmiga), appears on a monitor. It has a late-90s, Dystopian metallic grey finish. This screen is Stevens’ only connection with the real, outside world.
Earlier that morning, the train Stevens was on had exploded on its way to Chicago. It was a terrorist attack, and more are threatened to come. Stevens’ mission is to relive the last 8 minutes on that train as Sean Fentress so he can find the bomber and prevent any more explosions. But how, you might ask. It isn’t through time travel, it’s through parallel realities and quantum theory and stuff. Sean Fentress died on that train, but Stevens is able to experience his last 8 minutes by tapping into the dying man’s final brain signature. Just imagine it’s like a really intense Groundhog Day. With alternate realities.
Contrived? Maybe, but so was Inception. In ways it’s better, favouring ‘Sci-Fi’ over ‘Action Film’. There’s a 70s political conspiracy edge to it all too, like a more tripped out Parallax View. The score throws in the odd brass section, much like The Incredibles’ take on the same era’s film music, for good measure.
You would think that Source Code has enough plot already, but each 8 minute commute reveals some new, compounded twist. The film untwines in two time lines – Stevens trying to identify the train’s bomber and Stevens trying to find out where he is in that capsule. When did he ever sign up for this timey travelly programme anyways? Last thing he remembers before the train was Afghanistan.
Source Code shares themes with Duncan Jones’ previous film, Moon. Both Sci-Fi, of course, but they also ask questions over the protagonist’s identity, increasingly confusing reality and existence. More interestingly, both Stevens and Moon’s Sam Bell are isolated, one in some unknown capsule, the other on a remote lunar base. Their only communication with characters other than themselves is mediated through screens. Their interaction with reality is second hand, and thus its reliability is cast it in doubt.
SPOILER: If you’ve seen Source Code, revisit Metallica’s video for ‘One’. It’s edited with clips of Johnny Got His Gun, a film about a soldier who was hit by an artillery shell on the last day of the Great War. He lost all four limbs and his eyes, ears, mouth and nose in the impact, but is kept alive by in a military hospital. A prisoner in his own body. Captain Colter Stevens channels this soldier and gives him the release Johnny Got His Gun denied.
And another thing, by the film’s own logic, a parallel reality splintered off from each trip into the source code. Stevens harassed a lot of people in their final 8 minutes in that reality. That’s a lot of crappy commutes.
Starring Nick Frost, Jodie Whittaker, Luke Treadaway, John Boyega, Alex Esmail and Simon Howard.
SYNOPSIS:
When aliens invade a South London council estate, it's left to a teenage street gang to try and save the day.
“He’s much taller in real life”, I thought, “and that’s when a little hunched too”. Joe Cornish ambled across the cinema screen to stand before us. He thanked Channel 4 for his breaks in life; a first job in production; giving him and his friend Adam Buxton their first show; partly funding his debut film that we were about to watch. If it weren’t for them, he imagined in a desperate alternate reality, he’d be holed up somewhere taking crack with his prossie girlfriend right now. “Shouldn’t have said ‘prossie’,” he quickly self-flagellated under his breath. As a listener of the Adam and Joe podcasts, watching him speak felt disorientating. My mind dismembered voice from mouth as though it were a very good piece of dubbing. It’s like the first time you ever saw John Motson. But to the film…
Attack the Block pits the inhabitants of a Brixton council estate, which they defensively refer to as “the Block”, against a very localised alien invasion (note: not ‘global’). The film opens on Sam (Jodie Whittaker), a nurse returning home to the Block, when a gang of hooded teenagers block her way. Their faces are obscured by shadow and the night takes care of the rest. Two of them flank Sam on their bikes to surround her. Their leader, Moses (John Boyega), demands her wallet and the ring around her finger. Shaking, she struggles to remove it quick enough, so Moses pushes her to the tarmac.
You’d expect Sam to be the protagonist here. Well, she’s kinda a co-protagonist later on, but it’s the gang who are the film’s heroes. Yeah, the ones who just mugged a defenceless lady – a white lady at that. When a piece of the sky crushes a nearby car, harbouring inside it a lean, sharp-toothed alien, your appetite begins to whet for the gang’s bloody demise. After all, it’s an established sci-fi/horror convention – the bad guys get ate. But instead it is they who kill the monster, impaling it on a stick with the same aggressiveness they exerted on Sam. You see, they aren’t the real bad guys. They could be, in time, but they’re still kids here.
It’s easy to forget that they’re only young because they’re so intimidating at first. But Cornish admirably reveals the gang’s age by humanising them with perceptive details (“I wanna go home and play Fifa”) and shows them as the youths demonised and ignored by society (unless for a knife-crime statistic). It makes it harder to blame them for bullying the street corners. They mooch back to the Block on their mobile phones, each moaning to their elders about staying out a little longer. You get little snippets from their conversations. They’re talking to grandmothers or uncles, not mothers and fathers. It’s safe to assume the homes to which they return are ‘broken’.
As they walk to the Block, the depth of the film’s cast is realised; Moses, and the other four who comprise his gang, are significantly developed; Probs and Mayhem, two pre-teens who want to join Moses’ gang are introduced; Brewis, a posh University graduate from Fulham, is sorely out of place and looking to buy weed; and Ron (Nick Frost), who gets stoned and watches the Discovery channel all day. That’s why he’s the best person to take the alien’s corpse to – he might be able to tell them what it is, and more importantly, if it’s worth any money. They seem quite preoccupied with this, like most kids who go through a spell of hyper-capitalist entrepreneurialism. I once set up a shop underneath my stairs when I was about eight, convinced I’d earn my fortune. At least I had stairs. They only have the stairwells that connect the Block’s floors.
When the alien ships start to crash to earth around the Block, camouflaged by the firework displays that litter the night’s sky, these brief introductions of supporting characters allows the film to effortlessly cut between them and their different sub-plots later on. But what of the monsters! Their jaws light up with a neon blue, but the rest of their furry bodies are so black they merge with the dark. That’s pretty handy when you consider the cost of puppetry and CGI. It’s called making your budget work for you. You never see enough of the monsters to make out their flaws, and it is this secrecy that makes them relentlessly terrifying. That’s called positive feedback. Germain Lussier at SlashFilm, who called the film a “genre-bending, cult classic in the making”, pointed out how Attack the Block imposes its geeky passion upon the viewer. It “elicits the kind of nostalgia that’ll make fans want to own and display tiny replicas of its protagonists and antagonists.” It’s an odd compliment, but an acute one. Journey into a Forbidden Planet and you’ll see the hordes of McFarlane miniatures of Spawn and Halo exhibited in glass cases. Look a little further on and you’ll see ones from The Warriors and Shaun of the Dead. Hopefully soon they’ll be accompanied by a range of Attack the Block’s monster plushies.
So the monsters proceed to attack the gang, and sometimes the gang attack the monsters, but the teenagers are loosing and get pushed higher and higher up the Block. The film isn’t sloppy though - all this action is fully supported by plot. Why, for example, do the aliens seem to be exclusively targeting them? We must also not forget Attack the Block’s wicked sense of humour and its occasional treats of inspired gore.
Cornish said before the film began that he was influenced by the monster films he watched growing up as a 80s child like Predator, Gremlins and Critters (it does sometimes feel as though he’s channelling Joe Dante). And just like those films, Attack the Block makes you want to have children just so you can scare the shit out of them from an early age.
Walking home at just gone 10pm, after seeing Attack the Block, you realise just how well it was photographed. Every frame captures the urban night. Illumination comes from car headlights, streetlights and mobile phones. It’s all unnaturally piercing, yet at the same time, for those who live in the built up areas similar to the Block, there’s a familiarity to be found in their electric glow. You really appreciate your estate’s orange bath after that, and then maybe you’ll start to understand the youths that share…shhh! Did you see that? Over there, in the corner, just out of the lamppost’s peripherals…
Starring Carey Mulligan, Keira Knightley, Andrew Garfield, Sally Hawkins, Charlotte Rampling, Domhnall Gleeson, Nathalie Richard and Andrea Riseborough.
SYNOPSIS:
A nihilistic tale following the relationships between two girls and a boy. Friends since childhood, they are forced apart and then back together by the dystopian reality they inhabit.
The first 20 minutes of Never Let Me Go are among some of the most boring ever committed to film. Not bad, just boring. Like a really, really dull BBC period drama that has very little dialogue and a lot of shot/reverse-shots of people looking at each other. You see, Never Let Me Go follows the lives of three friends from when they were at school to their mid-twenties, and that means child actors.
Thankfully, despite the director’s best efforts, it picks up. As soon as Carey Mulligan, Andrew Garfield and (not so much) Keira Knightley replace the child actors, the film actually becomes quite engrossing. Those first two are breathtaking actors. The focus is on Carey Mulligan, and she absorbs it with immense maturity. She’s the Jack Wilshere of British film.
Along with the actors, Never Let Me Go has a very intriguing premise. Adapted from Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel, the film imagines an alternate reality to our world. Not set in the future, nor even the present, but in some re-imagined late-70s, early-80s haze. Although the following is revealed only about half and hour in, it may be worth warning the potential spoilers start here. In this alternate history, cloning is a part of life, albeit a quietly ignored one. Children are produced from cloning procedures to grow into organ donors. They rarely live beyond 25. Society barely acknowledges their existence; they shut them away, presumably too ashamed of their dependence upon these doomed children. You can feel the guilt of a nation whenever the clones encounter normal people.
Our three main characters realise their purpose at the end of the film’s first part, when they are still children. It makes for quite a foreboding life. Later, Mulligan becomes a carer for those undergoing organ donations. It means she gets a few extra years before her first operation. We first see her at the side of one of her patients, an eye-patched girl lying pale white and weary in a hospital bed. But her battered complexion and patchy skin are the scars from a previous harvest – the fragile girl hasn’t even been operated on yet. It’s the film’s most heartbreaking moment, but she’ll save the lives of others in her sacrifice. It’s morally abhorrent, but frighteningly understandable.
All of this, however, is background noise. It can get quite loud at times, but the film’s main story is the relationships between Mulligan, Garfield and Knightley. The first two are made for each other, and they know it, but Knightley has a jealousy complex. She takes Garfield for her own and guards him fiercely. Nevertheless, the three remain close friends.
There aren’t any shootouts, androids or meta-humans - this is a subtle ‘sci-fi’ film (note the lower case) with a tragic romance. Sci-fi tales set in the future often hold a warning about our present, about what we might become if we continue how we are. Minority Report, for instance, takes our preoccupation with surveillance to its futuristic extreme. The Matrix does likewise for our dependence on technology. Although set beyond our time, they comment upon our present.
Never Let Me Go, however, seems to be set in the past. Rather than make you look at the present’s effect on the future, it encourages you to consider how the past impacts on today. It encourages you to question science’s role in the development of modern society. Every now and again you’ll see a logo saying ‘N.D.P.’ imprinted on a van door or jacket lapel. It stands for the National Donor Programme. This process, of growing humans for their organs, is a publicly funded government initiative. We’re all complicit, but any anger is directed towards our parents’ generation for letting it happen in the first place. The film is primarily a nihilistic take on the love between two people - but beneath the characters and setting, it’s a cry to arms. For what? Read a newspaper and take your pick.
Starring Matt Damon, Emily Blunt, Anthony Mackie, John Slattery, Anthony Ruivivar, Michael Kelly and Terence Stamp.
SYNOPSIS:
An aspiring politician David Norris falls for the free-spirited Elise Sellas, but this doesn’t fit in with the Adjustment Bureau’s plans, a fate-controlling, supernatural organisation.
Matt Damon has been turning up in quite a few places recently. Appearances in True Grit, Hereafter and 30 Rock have come in quick succession, and now he’s the lead in The Adjustment Bureau. It happens to actors sometimes. Remember when Jude Law was in every other movie for a few years?
Here Damon plays David Norris, a politician seeking election to the U.S. Senate. He’s a down-to-earth kinda guy, and that’s what the voters love about him. He got in a bar fight the night he won his first political victory. After loosing his initial campaign to be elected to the Senate, he gave an unscripted speech about the deceitfulness in politics – not in politicians making wild promises, but of the focus groups and specialist advisers that determine what colour tie would appeal most to the public. He jokes that his team spent a small fortune on the optimum polished/scuffed ratio for the shoes on his feet. Norris isn’t a man to be inhibited by such bureaucracy – not in politics or in life.
The speech is so heartfelt that his opinion polls receive an overnight boom. Straight talking can cut through a lot your rivals’ polished crap. He’s an inspiring politician once again, and there are whispers of great things by both commentators and the Heavens. You see, David Norris has been watched over since birth, unbeknownst to him, by a very discreet man dressed in a hat and suit. It’s this man’s duty to guide Norris through certain events in his life so he reaches his predetermined destination. He’s part of a bigger, grander plan designed by a much bigger, grander authority. Well, we all are, but Norris is more important. Some have called this man and those in his profession ‘angels’. The film prefers to call them the ‘Adjustment Bureau’.
The Adjustment Bureau themselves are a stuffy bunch of administrators, gently nudging the human race along the course their ‘superior’ (read: God) has provided. But what about free will? The last time they tried that we gave them the Holocaust. It’s a wonderful notion, though, that heaven is a depressing bureaucracy, where forms and authorisation must be sought for even the smallest of issues. The film wisely treats this idea as quite lightly, preferring to bring out the silliness of it all, recalling the farcical, subordinated grey suits of Brazil.
The problem is, Norris takes a fancy to something not in the big, grand plan: Elise Sellas (Emily Blunt). She’s a dancer, one of those ‘free spirit’ sorts, a convenient profession for the ‘free’ versus ‘fate’ debate that the film plays out. Norris continues to pursue her, against the plan’s supposedly better judgement and to the Adjustment Bureau’s increasing frustration. When he strays too far from the plan, the Adjustment Bureau are forced to take more significant action, freezing time itself, altering the minds of a few supporting characters and exposing their operation to a bewildered Norris. They give him a choice. He can stick to the plan, stop chasing after Elise and never speak of the Adjustment Bureau’s existence; or he can have his entire memory reset, effectively being lobotomised. A no-brainer, really (1-up pun point).
It’s heartbreaking because the chemistry between Norris and Elise is genuine. You just assume the actors are going out in real life too, and think it a little sad that they aren’t. I’ve always seen Emily Blunt as a bit of an ice queen, but she’s so flimsy and adorable here it’s impossible not to fall for her a little – and Damon is just great in everything. There’s something so American about him, in a complimenting way.
The film poses an interesting question when explaining why the Plan keeps the two apart. Separately, both Norris and Elise are meant for great things. Norris could be on the route to Presidency and Elise is on the cusp of becoming a famous dancer. However, if the two were allowed to be together, the emptiness driving them both would be fulfilled. Their desire to succeed would diminish because they have each other. It’s what happens, isn’t it? To fully strive for something, you need a void to fill. But how can you if you’re completed by love? It sounds corny, but it makes a lot of sense. To be truly great, you must be emotionally retarded.
Near the end, The Adjustment Bureau cops out on this depressing truth. You can’t complain too much, though, because the film is so entertaining. Essentially, it’s a ‘light sci-fi romp’. I don’t know many others either. It’s fast-paced, it’s romantic, it’s a little camp – but in a good way, a (pre-Le Blanc) Lost in Space way. In fact, it’s probably a pretty good date movie. For the more Blade Runner-inclined couple, of course.
Directed by Elliot Silverstein. Starring Jane Fonda, Lee Marvin, Michael Callan, Dwayne Hickman, Tom Nardini, John Marley, Nat King Cole and Stubby Kaye.
SYNOPSIS:
A young woman employs a famous gunman to protect her father's ranch but finds him to be very different than she expected.
The American Film Institute puts Cat Ballou at number 10 in their “Top 10 Westerns” list. It sticks out a little from the other films on there. Along with The Wild Bunch, it is a Western that’s more reactionary than conservative – bawdy and comical instead of slow and restrained. It must be pretty good to keep out Rio Bravo, you would think. Suppose it depends on how you like your Westerns.
The Wild Bunch is rightly placed in the “Top 10” as it was genuinely revolutionary for its genre. It’s like what punk did to prog rock in the late 70s. Cat Ballou is similar in that it captures the rising spirit of the 60s. The film has Jane Fonda as its female protagonist, an actress who characterised that era; its colour palette takes cue from the bold shades of The Forbidden Planet; the pace can often become farcical and the main cast is overwhelmingly young.
Cat Ballou opens at the end, with the titular character (Jane Fonda) being prepared for her execution. How did she get in such a malarkey? Cut to a train journey where she was an aspiring schoolteacher, prim and proper, on her way out West to see Frankie Ballou, her father. His ranch is under threat from the Wolf City Developing Company, one of those evil, faceless corporations that need little explanation. Silvernose (Lee Marvin) is its hired gun and physical presence, stalking the ranch to scare Frankie out. He has a silver nose-strap, you see. Probably something to do with Capitalism.
This 60s agenda transfers well onto the Western. The honest, hardworking homesteader up against the powerful ranch owner is a classic Western narrative. The Ol’ Western philosophy, of a plot of land available to all, accommodates the 60s’ human rights cause. Feminism is given the most attention, showing Cat’s growth into a strong leader. She needs to be to battle against the Company and its Silvernose.
She whips together an improvised ‘Hole in the Wall’ gang from the uncle and nephew outlaws, Jed and Clay Boone (underused), her father’s Indian farm hand, Jackson Two-Bears (wise-cracker/annoying) and the legendary, chronic alcoholic gun-fighter, Kid Shelleen. Here is the film’s stroke of genius. Lee Marvin plays him too.
Shelleen is fuelled by liquor and struggles to aim his gun if not intoxicated. Booze to Shelleen is what spinach is to Popeye. This is largely played for laughs throughout the film, apart from his first scene. To test their hired gunslinger, Frankie nails a piece of paper to the barn wall for Shelleen to play target practice. But he can’t stand still, as though he’s swaying on some imaginary boat. He begs Frankie for just a drop of drink to steady his hand. You can see Cat’s disappointment in the old hero, part of a trailblazing group she used to “whisper the names of when we were young”. This moment of disaffected youth is bitterly genuine.
Revitalised by the liquor, Shelleen declares the gunfighter’s day is over, to then fire two bulls eye shots. You can’t ride around as a romantic outlaw anymore, at least not how it was in his age. Last time he rode through Tombstone, there was a skating rink over the O.K. Corral.
In an interview, the director, Elliot Silverstein, said he never decided on the film’s tone before shooting, and hoped Marvin’s performance would give him an idea. In his first scene above, Marvin had the crew in fits of laughter playing the desperate drunk, but felt something wasn’t right. For the 7th take, Silverstein asked him to “make me cry”. Although it worked perfectly for this scene, this initial confusion explains the film’s disjointed tone.
The humour doesn’t stand the test of time. In some parts it’s too camp, and in others it slightly misfires. But because of its energetic performances and chaotic tone, Cat Ballou is enjoyable on other levels. The jokes may be dated, but the occasional dramatic moments - often the ones set to diegetic music - are quite moving. There’s a melancholy in the old, weathered gunslingers being usurped by a female protagonist and youthful supporting cast, and the film sometimes realises that. But then again, it depends on how you like your Westerns.
Starring Adrián Aguirre, Miriam Balderas, Francisco Barreiro, Carmen Beato and Alan Chávez.
SYNOPSIS:
A family of cannibals struggle to survive after the death of their father.
Watches will always be lumbered with Time. It’s kind of their thing. Yet in the last decade or so they have come to embody Time in a different way, a more finite way. Mobile phones, with the time permanently etched on their screens, have rendered wearing a watch almost obsolete. They’re merely an accessory now. The Watch’s monopoly over Time is running out.
The patriarch of We Are What We Are is a watch repairer. That says a lot about his way of life. We Are What We Are is a Mexican film about a very insular and isolated family. A father, mother, two sons and a daughter - their isolation is self-imposed. They keep their bloodline to themselves with an almost religious dedication.
It is on the father, Papa, on which the film opens. His figure stumbles outside a modern shopping mall, completely disjointed from all that around him. It’s as though he were a caveman dropped into the present day, like some early 90s high-school comedy. He stops to leer at window displays of women in bikinis. His sunken eyes glare with a primitive hunger. Not for sex, but for food. Whatever condition he suffers from begins to overwhelm him. A black bile spews from his mouth like alien blood as he keels over to die on the floor. He was a cannibal, and the chief provider of food for his family.
This brief opening scene is majestic, mimicking the cold, static camera of Michael Haneke. The dark, soiled tone is immediately set, which it shares with the great South American film Tony Manero. Unfortunately, We Are What We Are never quite follows up on its initial promise.
The film follows Papa’s death on the rest of the family, centring on the eldest of the children, Alfredo. It’s now up to him to feed the family, and they’re hungry. You see, they need to perform an important ceremony (eating a human) to anoint their new head of house. Why it is of such importance, we are frustratingly never told.
Their house is adorned with clocks, all ticking and tocking in a deafening natter. They’re like an unseen audience, a thousand ghosts of the family’s victims, all chanting towards that horrific ceremony at the film’s conclusion. A ticking clock, as Hitchcock famously observed, is an effective way to create tension. We are cinematically conditioned to see and hear such timepieces as countdowns. Our minds anxiously whir away, asking: “Red wire? Blue wire? Red wire? Blue wire?” The clocks, and the film’s narrative, all propel us towards the concluding ceremony. If only we were given reason to care.
None of the characters are at all sympathetic. Yes, they might be cannibals, but that’s one of the beauties of cinema – identifying with the protagonists regardless of their flaws. Having a few subtle traits of humanity usually does this, but this family has none. The sister is manipulative, the mother is insane, the brother is impulsively violent and Alfredo, well, there isn’t really much to him. If Todd Haynes can make one sympathise with a paedophile in Happiness, then it should relatively straightforward to help us relate to a family of cannibals. That they are not suggests that this is the director’s intent. We aren’t meant to sympathise.
With such detestable protagonists, We Are What We Are must surely then work on an allegorical level. It’s hard to find one. Whereas Tony Manero perfectly captured American cultural dominance on the countries it subordinates (the film is about a violent psychopath obsessed with John Travolta’s character in Saturday Night Fever), We Are What We Are seems to say nothing about Mexico. If only there was some narrative intrigue and conclusion to why they are what they are. They constantly allude to preserving their bloodline and continuing their practices, something the ceremony is vital for, but nothing is ever satisfyingly explained.
But surely, the clue’s in the name, right? ‘We Are What We Are’ kinda suggests it doesn’t intend to explain itself. Still, that’s no reason to make an empty narrative.
A huge merit the film does possess, however, is its sound effects. Every crunch of bone and puncture of skin is wonderfully realistic. It needs to be as we rarely see the actual gore. Our ears and imaginations are left to do the hard work. The musical score accentuates this. The screeching violins transcend sound to become a mass of ants and maggots and flies swarming over your face and into your mouth, eyes and ears, while you lay in a dark, creaky forest, your face fixed forever in Munch’s Scream. Powerful things, those imaginations and ears…
Directed by Yann Gozlan. Starring Zoé Félix, Eric Savin, Arié Elmaleh, Ivan Franek, Philippe Krhajac and Igor Skreblin.
SYNOPSIS:
In war torn Eastern Europe humanitarian aid worker Carole (Félix) and two colleagues are held captive within an isolated underground bunker by a brutal group of armed, masked assailants.
Cynophobia is the abnormal fear of dogs. Not as glamorous as being scared of snakes and spiders, but far better than ornithophobia (a fear of birds, Hitchcock notwithstanding). Caged opens with a rather extreme example of how cynophobia can develop. Our protagonist, Carole (Zoé Félix), as a young girl, finds her best friend mauled to death by a dog during a childhood game of hide-and-seek. Carole locks herself inside a car to escape, unfortunately providing a front-seat view of the vicious beast clawing at the windscreen. The relentless barks, as is the film’s sound design in general, are very effective. You can’t help but think, “kids and animals in your first scene? Ambitious.”
It explains Carole’s fear of dogs later on in the film and adds an extra dimension to when she finds herself trapped with a young girl. Arguably, it would have been more intriguing for the reasons for her cynophobia to be revealed through the repeating nightmare sequences she experiences, rather than unambiguously in the opening five minutes, but alas. Carole is afraid of dogs and lost a childhood friend. Boom. The cards are on the table.
After this brief prologue, we join Carole 20 years later. She’s an aid worker in former Yugoslavia, a region ripe with evil accent opportunities. She leaves for Kosovo with her co-workers Mathias (Eric Savin) and Samir (Arié Elmaleh). The latter wants in to Carole’s pants, but they’re friendship is good enough for that not to complicate things. As they drive, a gang of masked men ambush their car. They’re a cross between Scarecrow and Slipknot.
This is where the ‘caged’ part of the film comes in. All three wake up in a basement complex of cells after their abduction. They know neither where they are nor why. A fierce pack of dogs can be heard every time the basement’s entrance is opened. Through it come two guards to routinely feed and abuse their prisoners, but, our protagonists notice, still keep them alive. It must be a simple ransom game. If only…
A telephone’s ring changes their assumptions. It’s an order – not in a command way, more of a ‘take-away’ way (think: Chicken Tikka-Masala with a Peshwari Naan, collection only). A prisoner is taken to the room at the end of the corridor, to return on a cart, all opened up with their organs missing. It’s how you wished they treated Keira Knightly in Never Let Me Go.
Caged is quite a predictable horror/thriller film in two ways. Firstly, it’s structured routinely for its genre (kidnap – imprisonment – confusion – realisation – attempted escape – etc), but this can be forgiven. Secondly, however, we’re given the answers for everything almost immediately after they’re presented to us. In the case of Carole’s cynophobia, it’s revealed even before dogs are a problem. The film simply needed to be more discreet about the narrative twists for it to be a gripping thriller, but it instead preferred to focus on escape attempts and things of that ‘exciting’ ilk. The narrative just isn’t intriguing enough.
It’s frustrating because there’s a decent film somewhere here. Sure it’s a bit generic-by-numbers, but Félix provides a strong central performance and the sound effects genuinely stand out. Unfortunately, the director never seems to get over his fixation on flashy camera and editing techniques to ever foster a truly unsettling atmosphere.
Starring Matthew McConaughey, Marisa Tomei, Ryan Phillipe, Josh Lucas, John Leguizamo, Michael Peña, Bob Gunton, Bryan Cranston and William H. Macy.
SYNOPSIS:
Mick Haller, a smug, flashy lawyer, gets entangled in an attempted murder case that threatens his morals and his life.
No one seems to like Matthew McConaughey that much. Family Guy certainly doesn’t. He’s been labelled as cocky and smug, but maybe he’s just laid back. He’s really quite fun in Sahara. Sometimes you need a laid back/cocky/smug guy to make a role work. It can sometimes make any character development a little more pronounced.
The Lincoln Lawyer works on these people’s feelings towards McConaughey in its opening scenes. Mick Haller (played by McConaughey) comes across as quite the dickhead. He has a chauffer driving him around LA in an impressively blocky Lincoln town car, which doubles up as his office. Seeing his house later on, you get the sense that his car, suit and briefcase cost more.
Haller’s convincing. You’d trust him if he asked you to. But then again, you wouldn’t have much of a choice if you needed representation in court. Haller’s a good defence lawyer who takes on a range of cases, from the blatantly guilty to the innocent burglar; not necessarily for the money, more for the extra excuse to be a dickhead. But it’s this democratic approach to taking on a client that shows he isn’t all bad. When you see a few of the people he’s represented, they obviously don’t pay big bucks. One of them is now his chauffer. Perhaps does it because he believes everyone is entitled to the best defence possible. Maybe all the flash and bravado is simply a way to mask his inner-integrity.
Haller is headhunted by the under-investigation Louis Roulet (Ryan Phillippe). Roulet is an incredibly rich, spoiled brat, alleged to have brutally assaulted a female prostitute in her home. It was a set-up, he petulantly protests. It’s all part of an elaborate scam – one where the prostitute had beaten herself up so she could frame and then sue Roulet for a get-rich-quick scheme. Obviously…
This puts Haller in dubious moral territory. He senses Roulet isn’t completely forthcoming, so he sets his private investigator, ex-cop Frank Levin (William H. Macy, with all the solidity you would ever want from a supporting actor), to double-check the facts. But even if Roulet is lying, anything Haller or Levin uncovers will be useless in court. There was something about client/lawyer confidentiality in that part…
And that’s the great thing. This movie makes you think. The plot is deceptively intricate. If you switch off for a few seconds to admire Macy’s moustache, you’ll most likely be punished for your distraction. “But it’s so thick” “SHUT UP AND PAY ATTENTION.”
The scriptwriters are also aware enough to not let any of the standard sub-plots get all self-important. Haller can’t make meaningful relationships work; Haller is too devoted to his work; Haller doesn’t see his daughter enough – all sub-plots that in a lesser film could so easily highjack the main narrative.
If you don’t like McConaughey already, you’ll probably find him insufferable here. He’s never off screen. If, however, you don’t see what all the hatemongering is for, and you appreciate above-average courtroom drama thrillers, then you’ll really quite enjoy this. Don’t hate. You’re probably only doing what Family Guy tells you to do anyway. Embrace the smugness.
