Author: Mege

Paradise: Love

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Ulrich Seidl’s Paradise trilogy takes three basic needs – the need to love, the need to believe in some higher power, and the need for company -, and then shows how we fail most of the time. That doesn’t make Seidl a pessimist – maybe he is just very curious to the point of intrusion. I am not so sure why he chose two women and a girl as his main characters, and I am not sure what the paradise of the title means, but these are three movies that ask the right questions and wisely avoid giving any clear answers.

This trilogy may not be easy to watch. Seidl’s gaze doesn’t flinch, his camera rarely moves or zooms. There is a rigid geometry to his frames: many shots feature some sort of symmetry or at least horizontal or vertical lines of reference – the horizon, train tracks, the roof of a house, a window. His characters are often shown to inhabit the centre of the screen, within clear sight of the audience.

This clarity and order is at odds with some emotional or moral dilemma of one of its protagonists. Sometimes it looks like the edge of the screen is some sort of protection, but more often than not, these three women, and other characters, desperately try to break out of it. The two first main characters are played by renowned Austrian actresses; everybody else seems like they were picked up in the street and put on set. Some of them are.

Paradise: Love

The three main characters are introduced at the beginning of Paradise: Love. Teresa and Anna are sisters, while Melanie is Teresa’s teenage daughter. Teresa takes care of a group of people with special needs; there is, for the whole trilogy, a fitting first scene with bumper cars, not moving at first, then jolting to life and trying to find their route without any clear destination. Everyone has special needs – not because everyone thinks they’re special, but because we are all individuals, looking for something.

Teresa goes to spend her holiday in Kenia. She is egged on by a group of friends to get herself a toy-boy, who will make love to her for money. Both parties are in on the deal. You pretend to like me, and I will pay you and pretend to like you, too. This offer is subject to mood and need and can be cancelled anytime without prior notice. Seidl uses a chilling shot to establish that situation: there is a line along the beach along which men in uniform are patrolling. On the land side, there are rows of deckchairs, where the female tourists lie. On the other side stand the local vendors. They are not allowed to cross the line, and none of them do. The watchmen must exercise a very strict rule over that line, although we never see them at it.

Teresa is shy at first, almost reluctant, and an initial encounter makes her feel used, and she dumps the guy before he gets into bed with her. There are the salesmen on the beach with their beads and keyrings and souvenirs who are crowding her, and when her refusal to listen to them doesn’t work, there is Munga, unmistakable with his dreadlocks, who sends those overeager guys away. She suspects that this is his spiel. He does not ask her for anything, but is happy to watch over her while she wades in the water, and later show her his village, his flat, his bag of weed and his bed. They have sex. Teresa falls for him because Munga treats her as a human being. He seems inexperienced when it comes to touching a woman, and she teaches him how to. There is a sort of grim comedy to those scenes. A guy that inexperienced, he must be… different.

Let me digress here for a moment. There is a fair amount of nudity in this movie. Teresa is overweight, but she is also attractive. In some scenes, when she is on her way to Munga, she glows with the anticipation of meeting him. Other movies rely on younger and slimmer actresses to get naked. My point is this: most women’s bodies don’t look like models’, and most men are not muscle-bound athletes. Teresa looks… normal. Despite Seidl’s visual compositions, there is a realism to his environment that asks for normal people. If the physical appearance of some of his characters is a problem for you – well, what do you and the people around you look like?

To Teresa’s mind, Munga and her embark on a relationship. He introduces Teresa to his sister, who has a baby in her arms. Munga mentions another child who is in hospital and needs an urgent procedure, but Munga and his family don’t have the money. Teresa is happy to help out, and she gives him some cash. They visit a school, and Munga again asks her for money for school funds. When Teresa hands over only a small amount, the teacher gets cross and sends her away. Munga tells her off later, too, and it’s finally clear that this was his spiel. Well, she should have known that all along, but seemed to forget for a moment. He is just more patient than the vendors on the beach, and slightly cleverer as well.

Well, what did Teresa expect? Sometimes, we convince ourselves that we have found the real thing – fame, money, love – that we walk towards the snakepit with eyes and arms wide open. We need to love, and to be loved – it’s one of the most powerful drives in us humans. We can’t not love. And the promise of that makes us far too trustworthy. Some people are hard-wired that way.

The same goes for Munga. I don’t think he is indifferent to Teresa, but when you can get money out of the woman who comes and makes love to you, why not? She must have loads of it. And he must be grateful to have learnt how to touch a woman. Here’s a cruel thought: Maybe his inexperience is part of his act. Maybe his ‘sister’ is his wife, and the kid is his. And the kid in the hospital doesn’t exist. Who knows? Munga is gone, and Teresa has no clue where to put her love.

Of course Teresa is deeply hurt and disillusioned, but she meets another guy. She can’t not try. There must be some truth in her friend’s smirk when she talks about her black boyfriend. Of course Teresa knew that she wouldn’t find lasting love in Kenia, and that bitter disappointment, in herself as well as in Munga, together with her feelings of revenge, lead to the scene with the male stripper for her birthday and the sad hopeless scene where she tries to seduce the barkeeper. This was never about seduction, but about business. Teresa returns home hurt, disillusioned and with some new, shiny prejudices. She is sadder than before her holiday, and her sadness is deepened by her knowledge that she didn’t have a real choice.

Blood in the kitchen sink

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Broken is a great piece of storytelling. The editing, the pacing, the atmosphere – all add to its quality. Even if you don’t know anything about the movie, there are several hints in the first three minutes that there will be blood. After four more minutes, you think you’ve seen the worst, and the rest of the movie is about how people will deal with what has happened. Nope. Brace yourself, you’ve been warned.

And yet, the movie is not a long journey into night. There are hopeful moments, most of them involving Skunk, a smart, kind 11-year old girl. She is played by Eloise Laurence, in a debut performance that has much more to do with instinct than with acting. There is a sequence where she tries to talk her dad into buying her a new cellphone. That moment alone is worth seeing the movie. Eloise Laurence carries the story in the same way Jodhi May did in A World Apart. And oh, it was good to see Tim Roth again, without guns, without shouting. His Archie is a calm, benign father to Skunk and one of the solid centres of the small community, although he himself would disagree.Image

It’s hard to talk about plot. I guess it sort of starts with one of the daughters of the Oswald family, who finds a condom in her older sister’s room. She examines it and then tries to flush it down the toilet, where her dad finds it. Daddy Oswald presses his daughter into wrongly admitting she’s had sex, while she, clearly afraid of her father, blames Rick Buckley of rape, only because he is visible across the street, washing his dad’s car. Rick is thin-skinned and naïve, a good kid, but without any defences. Skunk looks on as Daddy Oswald comes rushing out of his house and beats up Rick. I have only mentioned the first six minutes of the movie. There is no way you can guess what happens next. It is fast-paced, non-linear, and it clocks in at 88 minutes, but feels longer because of all the things that happen underneath the plot. And yet, it never feels rushed. We always know where we are, with whom, why and when.

Daddy Oswald is maybe the most controversial character in this movie. He is played by Rory Kinnear as a wounded widower who does not have the slightest clue how to regain control over his three fast-growing daughters. I might feel for him if he didn’t try to rule by fear and rage.

The movie seems flawless, but I would wish for a less obvious ending. The moments in church are so conventional that they stand out as the weakest scene in the film. Luckily, it’s not a movie you watch for the ending – you watch it for the characters.

Skunk is in some danger because she goes towards people who may better be left alone. There is her brother who is busy becoming a teenager and nicks cigarettes from their nanny who, in turn, falls for Archie, who has no idea what to do with that love, or his own. There is the nanny’s boyfriend, played by Cillian Murphy, who can’t see that Skunk looks up to him, and should act accordingly. In a lesser movie, he would be the teacher who gets accused of abusing a student. Here, he does what any courageous man would do – and it’s very bad luck that he is a teacher. He is untidy with his feelings, but gets more punishment than he deserves. Maybe that’s what the movie is all about. Do we ever get what we deserve? Should we? And what DO we deserve? There is no deus ex machina in this movie – good or bad has to do with yourself and the people who are around you. Sometimes it’s not the stranger with candy that frightens you, it’s the well-meaning neighbour.

Tyrannosaurus wrecks

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Some men know precisely where the fine line between right and wrong lies. That doesn’t prevent them from stepping across it. Joseph seems to be a borderline case. He kicks his dog to death outside the betting shop, and immediately regrets what he’s done. Later, he collects his unemployment money at the post office, spouting forth racist crap at the Pakistani behind the counter who tells him not to come back here. That scene must play out regularly because he might have been out of a job for a long time. Joseph apologizes immediately, and I think he means what he says. Outside the shop, he finds a rock and throws it through the shop window. That scene reminded me of a Roger McGough poem: I am sorry, but this is the way things are.

Joseph is not a racist – worse, he hates everybody. One day, he hides behind the clothes rack in Hannah’s second-hand store in order to escape a beating. She lets him stay and offers him tea. He insults her with precise, well-aimed words. He comes to apologize the next day. She throws him out, but he is… curious about her. He sees her and wants to clean up his act. Then she turns up with bruises on her face.

This is the point where the movie gravitates towards a temptingly easy solution. Joseph could give Hannah’s husband a good thrashing – just as a warning to stay away, of course – and hook up with her. She would feel safe, and he could let his shoulders slump. They would make a nice couple. A lesser movie would go for that solution. “Tyrannosaur” has other plans for its characters. At first, I thought the title referred to Joseph’s predatory nature. It doesn’t. He crumbles in the presence of Hannah’s good side. There is a spellbinding scene where Hannah prays at his dying father’s bedside while Joseph is looking on. She does what he should do, but can’t. Maybe he can return the favour, but he knows she will never agree to him beating up her husband. Their need to find help is overpowering to them both, and if they cannot help each other, they must help themselves, or it might be too late.

“Tyrannosaur” is Paddy Considine’s first movie. It’s about violence and guilt, but doesn’t get bogged down in either. It sidesteps all the cliches of similar movies: Joseph and Hannah are alcoholics, but they behave erratically also when they are sober. Drink is not the trigger, but the drug to numb the pain and the guilt so they can go on for a little while longer. None of the characters reveal their past and present us with the reason they are the way they are. There are hints at Joseph’s family, but they don’t even begin to explain him. The same is true for Hannah. That’s as it’s supposed to be. What if the reason you are the way you are comes from a trivial event? What if the fact that you cannot change your past breaks your spine? What if the reason for your behaviour has gone missing or been forgotten? What if there isn’t any, and that is just the way you are – abusive and violent? In most cases, atonement is impossible. There is no closure – closure is for those who need a shiny cover. You don’t miraculously heal thyself. You go do what you have to – sometimes that means revenge, sometimes it means leaving for good. You have to live with the fact that you might be past saving.

Joseph and Hannah don’t play house, pretending everything is fine now, because they still are who they are. They don’t sleep with each other. They don’t take in the boy from across the street who is afraid to go home because of his useless step-dad’s pit-bull. Joseph tells Hannah in no uncertain terms to leave after she has taken refuge in his living room, and she complies with his demand because she understands him, and she understands what having her in his house means to him, and to her.

The performances are flawless. Peter Mullan has a way of projecting hurt and guilt while only standing there. His Joseph is a man who is twisted back on himself because of all the rage he carries around. Olivia Colman has only turned up on my radar with this movie, but she is on my watchlist now. Eddie Marsan goes to unknown human depths with his role as the husband. There is a scene where he apologizes to Hannah for having beaten her. Listen to how he speaks rather to what he says. Then watch Hannah’s face. Paddy Considine may know that neighborhood – it is only three doors down from Shane Meadows’ “Dead Man’s Shoes,” in which Considine played the lead.

The ending caught me cold, but movies like this are not about their ending. If you need a happy ending, look elsewhere. In situations like this, almost any change is an improvement. There is no real ending to stories like this, and the movie’s ending is far from happy, but not one of the characters would ask for happiness; they get some kind of relief, and must be content.

Down in the Ocean of Sound

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Here’s the thing: on Monday, Elvis Costello and the Imposters were four musicians, while Death Cab for Cutie last night at the Kmplex 457 in Zurich were a band. It’s a surprise to me that the newcomers were the better act than one of my favourite musical artists.

I’ve learned from the net that people tend to avoid the Komplex for its bad acoustics, and I see their point, but Death Cab were so good that this didn’t bother me at all.

They were there for the music. Ben Gibbard barely uttered a dozen words between songs other than his almost shy thank yous. They played almost flawlessly. Some very few effects that give some of their songs their distinctive flavor came from a sampler (like the percussion bits from “Transatlanticism” or the nervous drum from “St Peter’s Cathedral”), but the rest was live craftsmanship, and very atmospheric. It helped that there were no seats, and maybe that’s what stopped Costello from performing better.

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They knew what they were doing. The intro to “I Will Possess Your Heart” had the right mixture of sneak and speed; there was “Doors Unlocked and Open” letting you dangle, but pushing your forward at the same time; and I’ll be damned if “Soul Meets Body” wasn’t a perfect piece of pop – maybe it’s the rhythm, not too fast, not too slow, but just right. The song sounds careless, but it has such a warm tone that I can’t name one other song with that same warmth.

It looked like they didn’t really feel comfortable being on stage, and especially Gibbard keeps slinking around with his back to the audience, but they were there to play their stuff, so they threw everything they had into the sound. It worked really well. No extravagant show necessary.

Somewhat spellbound by the spectacular spinning songbook

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Elvis Costello isn’t the easiest of persons – I kept that in mind last night while entering the Kongresshaus in Zurich. He’s just weird and nasty in some interviews and downright odd in others, and then he comes out and surprises you by being really tame and gentle. So if he announces his tour with the return of the Spectacular Spinning Songbook, I knew that it would take some getting used to. The stage was dominated by that gigantic colored wheel full of songtitles and little in-jokes such as “imperial chocolate.” There was also the Hammer of Songs and the Hostage of Fortune Go-Go Cage. At home, you get Mr McManus the musician; in here, you get Mr Napoleon Dynamite the entertainer.

When he came on stage, I realized the place was only two thirds full, and the applause was sort of lukewarm. No matter – Mr D started with “I hope you’re happy now,” and the go-go girl in the cage made it clear that the maestro was here to have fun. To me, the setting was a slight distraction from the music, and the music… I had a hard time to warm up to it in the first half-hour. I found “Turpentine” flat and uninspired. It was only when someone spun the wheel for “Tokyo Storm Warning” that I knew I had come to the right place. “She” was proof that there was a cupboard crooner in the house.

Besides Costello, there were Steve Nieve at the keys and Pete Thomas on drums, both longtime companions of the Attractions as well as of the Impostors. They did what they could, but there was no way for them to play some of the songs in a way that would have made them more distinct from one another. I had hoped for a rhythm section and some horns that would have played a gloriously loud “Bedlam” or “Needle Time”, but no. “Tramp the Dirt Down” didn’t stand out at all.

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So I went along with what was there: a couple from the audience who didn’t know or didn’t want to tell if they were married, and to each other. (Mr MacManus: “Is there something you want to tell us?”) A good rendition of “Condemned Man.” And there was that folksy woman during some sort of “break,” yodelling and playing a small accordion. Was she local? No idea.

Then after that break, something happened. Elvis Costello came back alone and played an acoustic bit with “Jimmie Standing in the Rain”. That stuff worked beautifully, because here, the musician took over from the entertainer. I didn’t mind that he invited some more audience members and the go-go girls back on stage. And, of course, there had to be “I Want You,” which sounded not nearly as fucked up as it should have. I really would like to hear one live version of that song where it almost falls apart and breaks down. It works best when it barely works at all. It’s a song of its own kind.

Then he started to cheat. He wouldn’t accept requests for “Oliver’s Army,” even when it came up on the songbook, and played something else. It pissed off some people in the audience, but I had to smile to myself. That’s just typical, but what did you expect?

It was a good concert once it clicked. There were the typical imported bits, this time the Rolling Stones’ “Baby You’re Out of Time” and the Beatles’ “Please Please Me”. Last night Mr D the entertainer was in a good mood, and I wish the musician Mr C would have tried to have as much fun as him.

Hold on tight to your severance package

Mege1 Comment

Margin Call is Shakespearan in several outstanding ways. It takes place mainly on the trading floor of an investment firm. Four out of five people get sacked. Why? Nobody seems to know. It’s the economy. One of the first to be sacked is the manager of risk assessment (Stanley Tucci). If guys like him get fired first, something is up. On his way to the elevator, he hands over an USB stick to a low-level analyst (Zachary Quinto) and tells him that there is something suspicious on it, but he can’t quite figure it out. The young analyst can, and it’s looking bad. The firm seems to go bankrupt in the next few days, and nobody is able to stop it unless the financial market will take a worldwide dive while the firm will be safe. This makes getting sacked look alluring. The mechanism that lies at the core of the problem is explained at least twice in the movie, but did I get it? Not really. We have here movie history’s first McGuffin that is explained, but not understood. It doesn’t need to be, because neither do the main characters.

That catastrophic news travels up the chain of command. It’s amazing how clueless these guys are. The analyst’s boss (Paul Bettany) understands so little that he works as a go-getter for the firm. His boss, responsible for the trade floor (Kevin Spacey), has worked for the same firm for all of 40 years, but is clueless as to what all the charts and formulas mean. His boss (Simon Baker) and the chief analyst (Demi Moore) are those who will have to explain that imminent crash to the senior partners and the CEO (Jeremy Irons). None of them understands it either, and they have to invite the Quinto character to explain it once again. The CEO doesn’t get it, and in a priceless scene, Irons tells him with a smile: “Explain it to me as you would to a child. Or to a retriever.” That scene is priceless. Not one guy sees farther than the edge of his desk. If you listen carefully to the dialogues, you’ll hear a lot of questions asked, and the response is either “I don’t know” or another question. What does that tell you about those guys?

I’ve made it sound like people are nervous and in a hurry. Not so. There are secret meetings, blocked phone calls, sideways glances, but no shouting matches or fistfights. A movie that reminds us that an attaboy can mean ruin does not need to show a single drop of blood. The tension builds because those who sort of know what will happen have no power to decide, while those who have sit around a mahogany table and have no clue as to the consequences of their decisions. The whole movie takes place within 24 hours and does not contain one single weak minute.

When I say it’s Shakespearan, I also mean the cast. Kevin Spacey has done his Buckingham and his Richard III, and his role here is only three doors down from Glengarry Glen Ross, but with a whole different pay grade; Jeremy Irons must have done a lot of the bard on stage, but I remember him best from The Merchant of Venice. I’ll give Paul Bettany the benefit of the doubt, and playing Geoffrey Chaucer is close enough. The concept of the movie – the decline of an enterprise, if not of a whole nation caused by the implication of a flawed idea – is pretty close to King Lear. This is an ensemble piece, and they don’t come much better than that.

There are no heroes and no villains. (If you want villains, go see Inside Job, a very good documentary, and the other side of the same coin.) It’s just that nobody really seems to see the whole picture, and the rest is office politics. Tucci hands over his information out of concern for the firm, not in order to take revenge for being sacked. Spacey is reluctant to sell stuff that everybody knows has no longer any value, but considers doing it anyway. Irons is not greedy; he is simply responsible for the survival of the company, but knows that he will fail at least partly. He has to make the crucial decision: should they keep the junk papers, do nothing and thereby destroy the firm, or should they sell all of it to unknowing buyers and let global economy crash? Hmmm… Tough one. Listen to Irons when he tells Spacey why he thinks he has made the right call. It’s one of the best monologues I can remember. David Mamet should turn green with envy.

Maybe the financial crisis started this way, maybe not. It doesn’t really matter. Maybe a few firms were confronted with a similar problem, and the ones responsible acted the way they thought best. Either way, there were casualties, and not just the obvious ones. I don’t understand the ending fully, but I find it scary. I guess it’s about loyalty, but that is such a dangerous commodity in this movie. It’s a damn tragedy, and Margin Call is only the beginning. We haven’t seen the end of it. (by mege1)

We need to talk about Lisbeth

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In my heart of hearts, I knew it. There may be many girls with dragon tattoos, but there is only one Lisbeth Salander. David Fincher’s take on men who hate women is too slick and too self-assured to get anywhere close to the 2009 Swedish original, directed by Niels Arden Oplev. While I cannot recommend parts two and three of the original, the first part is pretty damn good entertainment sprinkled with bits of character studies. We meet a determined but far from bullet-proof journalist who cannot believe the story he has been dragged into. Michael Nyqvist gets his role just right: He knows what he wants to do next, but is far from sure whether it’s wise to do so. I always had the sense that with him, he kept thriving on the difficulties. His dogged determination seems to melt the snow around him. There are many moments where you can see him think, and then act. Daniel Craig’s Blomkvist is too sure about himself; he is never really scared, never really surprised and never really drunk. He isn’t even too fazed when someone tries to shoot him in the woods. He is the wrong choice for this role.

Of course, the Swedish movie will always have the advantage of having introduced us to Lisbeth Salander, on of the most intriguing characters in popular movie-making in a long time. I don’t know how, but Noomi Rapace has exactly nailed the character (now there’s a painful pun) and I pitied Rooney Mara as soon as her name was up for Fincher’s movie. Rapace plays her damaged and in self-chosen isolation, but highly self-reliant; I’ve never been able to see the character behind the role, which is a very good thing. With Mara, I felt I was looking at a goth runaway with an attitude problem and random bouts of Asperger’s. I could see the clockwork behind her acting, and it made the scenes where she brings Wennerström down less credible. The original Salander was surprised at herself that she could feel something akin to love for Blomkvist; the other Salander’s love for him comes to her like an afterthought and finally only stops short of a soppy Christmassy gesture.

Comparisons aside, I also had a number of problems with Fincher’s movie itself. The first three minutes play like Lord Voldemort’s idea of a Prodigy video. As the story unfolded, I could not shake the feeling that this must have felt like watching Gus van Sant’s Psycho remake: the same camera angles, the same lines, the same plot points – heck, there were moments where I was almost sure that the two Salanders and the two Blomkvists inhabited the very same hut, shooting on alternate days. The only good thing they left out were the scenes where little Mikael has Harriet Vanger babysit him.  There are some other changes, but they are insignificant – except, except… they changed the ending. Remember the scene where the original Blomkvist stands in full sunlight for the very first time in the movie, approaching a woman who has her back to the camera whose hair is ablaze with sunlight? Remember what happens then? They cut it. They cut that and turned the ending around. That, and giving Lisbeth that soppy street urchin ending. And while we’re at it: It is a huge, huge mistake to let the characters talk English with a Swedish accent. Once I know the main characters are Swedish, I can suspend disbelief and think of them as Swedes, even if they use proper English – that’s especially true for a movie that engenders a whole lot of disbelief.

I don’t know why I felt that Fincher’s version is longer than Oplev’s. Maybe it’s slower because the atmosphere is so much more subdued. I know a certain drabness and coolness is Fincher’s trademark, and it is essential to Se7en and Zodiac, but here, it sabotages the feel of the whole movie. Blomkvist and Salander are not cool characters – they may just behave like normal people, but they are churning with stuff. They need to be, because otherwise that cold Swedish winter and the shock-frozen Vanger family will get to them.

Some snyde remarks, part three

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I am the guy who thrashed Eden Lake and The Social Network. I am the guest author of this blog, so I am not really behind most of the interesting and well-informed entries around here. That is someone else, and he is in no way responsible for the whining and whingeing about how bad this or that movie is. In fact, he is much more careful in choosing his drug of choice.

So, hey, part three. You’ve been warned. And since you’re still reading after the warning, here’s a promise: I’ll find a movie that I like, and will write about it. So much disregard for your own mental well-being must be rewarded.

Sucker Punch is all style on the outside, and evil smut at its centre. It’s like that golfball that’s supposed to contain poison. There’s that girl, played by Emily Browning, whose mother is dying of some unknown disease. Shortly after, her uncle or stepfather goes after her younger sister, and she dies, too, but I am not sure how, or whether there was any paedophilia involved, as the scene seems to suggest – I think someone became jittery about a possible NC-17 rating and screwed up the stylish display of kiddie abuse by re-editing. She is carted off to a mental asylum, where, strangely enough, the inmates are all teenage girls. Maybe there are other wings, one for old men, one for…

Hang on, where am I? Oh yeah, the staff. There is one half-way sympathetic character, their therapist Dr. Gorski, played by Carla Gugino. There is also the janitor, a shady guy named Blue, who recommends to the stepfather that the girl get a lobotomy, because then his visits would require only one consenting adult, while she will be no longer consenting to anything, nor ever see adulthood. Stepdad agrees, and so the doctor, who looks deceptively like Jon Hamm, points his tool at her forehead. I am talking about that metal needle they use for the lobotomy, and I take exception to the way you think, but it’s Zack Snyder’s fault, not yours.

And just when he wants to insert the needle into her eye, someone says stop, and we are in the Browning character’s psyche, where the asylum is a brothel ruled by Blue the pimp, and the girl orphans, who are all dressed in skimpy school uniforms that would break any school unform rules anywhere, take dancing lessons under Madame Gorski, the dance instructor. The girl, who is now called Baby Doll, is by far the best dancer, but we never get to see her dance, because when she does, the movie switches to yet another level, where a guy who looks deceptively like Scott Glenn tells Baby Doll about a quest she and the girls must go in order to be free: They have to recover a map, a lighter, a knife, a key and another mysterious object. It was at this point that I remembered that whenever a movie goes into cheap CGI mode, it is a good idea to think fondly of the fact that the whole of the Muppet Show is out on DVD.

Baby Doll has to distract the staff by dancing so the other girls can steal the items they need. The second dance shows the girl gang in some sort of super-Gothic bombed-out Dresden. I guess Baby Doll must have liked 20th century history, but got confused on the details, because the real Nazi soldiers were not zombies powered by steam and clockworks. This scene is so ridiculous that it made up for the rest of the movie. I mean, the Third Reich could have used zombies without the machinery, if only to save on the overhead, but never mind. So the gang kill a lot of the steamheads and shoot down a lot of fighter planes, although their mission is to steal a map from a messenger on foot.

And so on. At some point, the music for Baby Doll’s dance stops, and they are discovered. All of the gang except for Baby Doll and Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish) are shot by Blue, who finds out about their plot. It is here that the movie definitely is confused and confusing: We are still in Baby Doll’s mind, so why oh why does she allow for Sweet Pea and herself to be saved, but let the others die? Horror vacui is a real, real thing, people. In the very end, Baby Doll allows Dr Hamm to go through with the lobotomy so Sweet Pea can run from the asylum and board a bus driven by someone who looks like… oh, forget it. Dr Hamm, right after his umpteenth lobotomy, realizes that lobotomy is… WRONG! He will have a great career in advertising. Blue is arrested, but poor Baby Doll is lobotomized. Ha! Didn’t see that one coming, but maybe she did. The movie shows her slightly smiling, suggesting that she has won. But won what?

Sucker Punch has a feminist message, and it is this: Girls rule, especially those with the semi-automatics and the samurai swords, and never mind the skimpy dresses. I have a message for Sucker Punch: show me a kind of feminist statement that involves names like Baby Doll and Sweet Pea, where the female protagonists have to do what their fatherly mentor tells them, and I suggest to you an improved kind of feminism involving spirited debate about equal rights and passionate demands for the improvement of the women’s cause, free of charge, and I don’t even have to try too hard. Because you see, even I, a guy, can see that all that fighting and killing while flashing your cleavage and gusset can wear even the angriest girl out. Me, too.

It is beyond me how Abbie Cornish, who stood up for herself in Bright Star and who impressed me in a small gem of a movie called Somersault, could have said yes to such a piece of guano as this. And Emily Browning is not a moron, I’ve gathered from a few interviews. There will be a movie with her called Sleeping Beauty that seems to feature those sexual politics that Sucker Punch relegated to its own screwed subconscious. Seems like Baby Doll wasn’t the only one lobotomized.

Get rich or die coding

Mege1 Comment

The Social Network could be a great movie if it wasn’t for its trite plot. There is that computer geek at Harvard called Mark Zuckerberg who will never ever get a second date, and so takes his revenge by setting up a ranking system for the female students on the net. Him and some like-minded fellow students can smell the big bucks from where they’re coding, and so they bend over backwards to become very rich very fast. This is a movie about greed. It features that one-dimensional ambition from Wall Street, but makes Gordon Gekko look like a piece of antique furniture. As soon as these guys realize that there is not only big money in working alongside, but against each other, they sue each other for ludicrous amounts. None of these characters is even remotely sympathetic. They were never friends, not on Facebook, and not in real life. They just happened to live in the same dorm at the same time, bumping ideas off each other. Zuckerberg may have a brilliant mind for computer ideas, but his biography is still one from glorified hacker to billionaire (while still being a glorified hacker). It’s not a coincidence that even the screenplay starts and ends with the question if this guy is an a-hole.

Pop quiz: How many lawsuits does the movie show? I think they are all depositions, but it’s hard to tell who’s suing who at any given time. The movie is too slick and self-absorbed to slow down and let us know exactly where we’re at. There is not one shred of criticism about how these idiots behave, which is just as well, because otherwise the movie might self-destruct.
It takes a very good cast and crew to make a bad movie look so good. The screenplay is well-informed and smart and always one step ahead, although I have a suspicion that Aaron Sorkin has no idea about how computers work. Apparently, David Fincher is unable to make a visually boring flick. Almost every main cast member has made at least one movie that is noteworthy: Andrew Garfield has made that fabulous British flick called Boy A, Jesse Eisenberg was in the very funny Zombieland, and John Getz will forever be the remorseful cheater in Blood Simple. What’s more, I’ve yet to hear a better score than that by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. That bit with the Henley boat race is an atmospheric masterpiece, but deserves to be in a better movie. Here’s a thought: It could have been a great movie about rowing, with countless geeks watching a live-stream from their laptops, simultaneously writing in their blogs about how they really wish they could have made it into the rowing team.

Don’t take the Shuttle to Eden Lake.

Mege5 Comments

Here’s a complaint. I do like a good horror movie. I think that it can tell me something about human nature by putting its characters into a difficult or even impossible situation of life and death. Many stories do that, sure, but a horror movie takes the direct route to our subconscious and starts digging. It seems to know exactly where to dig, and how deep. What happens to the characters on screen seems to refer to us personally.

I have to admit that the last decade or so of horror movies has set me at odds. I’ve seen Hostel and Saw, and those are just slasher porn. That’s something I don’t mind seeing once in a blue moon, but I really prefer characters I can care about, because it makes that movie just that much scarier and memorable, while stuff like the Saw series, Hostel and many others are, well, disposable horror. They can be watched and then forgotten.
There are two horror movies that have stuck with me because they are abysmally bad not because they are such bad horror movies, but because they try to be more than just horror movies and become ruthless and sometimes careless about their characters, and even reveal some latent racism.

The first one is a British flick called Eden Lake. It is a disgusting film, steeped in sexism, racism and overall misanthropy. The fact that it tries to sneak out of its responsibility makes it also a cowardly film.
Here’s the first half of the plot from Eden Lake in a nutshell. (And don’t get me started on spoilers – here’s a movie you really shouldn’t see.) There’s that couple, Steve and Jenny, who plan on spending a few quiet intimate days on the shore of Eden Lake, in the midst of a large forest in Buckinghamshire, England. Steve plans to propose to Jenny. On the way to the lake, they stop at a roadside inn, where there are parents who verbally abuse their kids and then stare Steve and Jenny down when they look at them in frowning disbelief. They get out of there and camp at the lake shore. It would be a great love getaway for them, if it weren’t for those kids with their boombox and their dog. It’s almost a sideline when those kids hassle another kid who is in the woods collecting insects. They spit, gloat, shout, smoke, drink beer and feel provoked when Steve tries to tell them to keep it down a little. The kids trail off, but slash a tire of Steve’s car. Now Steve is provoked, while Jenny tells him to let it go, change the tyre and leave. Back in the village, they come across the home of the leader of the kids’ gang, Brett, and Steve jumps to the occasion to confront Brett, but finds himself in an empty home, with Brett’s dad coming home from work or a beer run. Dad isn’t pleased that his offspring has punched a fist-sized hole in his front door, and wants to shout at him some. At that point, it struck me that maybe dad has been doing time: beer, tattoos, mean attitude, cruel towards children, especially his own son, who is busy imitating his old man’s behaviour. The movie doesn’t tell, and that is all the psychological depth or motivation you are going to get from this flick. Steve escapes over the roof of the house. Back at the lake the next morning, the couple realize that a bag with their car keys has been stolen. They have to walk back, but come across the kids, and Steve inadvertently kills their dog. Escape scenes follow in which Jenny and Steve have to hide from the knife-toting gang. Eventually, they get their car back, but crash it, which leads to a sequence where Steve is taken captive and tied to a tree stump with barbed wire.
So far, it’s vintage horror, but there is that moment where Brett makes every member torture Steve. That violent moment is where my problem with the movie starts, and for two reasons. First, each member of the gang is egged on by Brett, but Brett seems very reluctant to torture Steve himself. And yet, Brett succeeds in making them do it. Later in the movie, there are numerous moments where any of the kids could have quit and run away. They don’t. Some of them are picked off and killed, some just disappear from the film without explanation. Brett is the charismatic leader who makes his gang do his bidding, but is a coward himself. That is an odd character build-up at best. Eden Lake shows a lot of graphic violence, but at the same time apologises for it by showing most of the kids being bullied into it against their will, while the bully himself is of two minds about his own orders. Once I subscribe to the violence in a movie, I don’t expect the movie to chicken out and apologise for it. If it does, the violence becomes gratuitous, the very thing it pretended to avoid. Eden Lake has no idea what its stance on juvenile gang violence is, but is all about exactly that. I don’t want to be confronted with torture and slice’n’dice scenes and then be told that, sorry, that is just the way it is with pissed-off idle teenagers today. Eden Lake would be well-advised to not fake any character motivation at all than to shrug its shoulders about the violence it shows.

The second problem is an ethnic one. The only character who seems eager to cut Steve’s face is the kid with African-American background, and he does not have any lines at all. Doesn’t it make you angry that the guy with the most inclination for violence is black? There is one other kid with a minority background, and that’s the bug kid with Indian background that the gang harassed earlier on. His name is Adam, and he is bullied into luring Jenny into a trap. He succeeds, and Brett says thank you by pulling a car tire over his head and setting him on fire. While one non-white kid is a mute slasher, the other non-white kid is a helpless nerd who is used as bait and then set on fire. Oh, and did I mention that there is a girl in the gang who apparently serves two purposes, namely that she can complain that Steve is staring at her boobs and later film all the violence with Brett’s cell phone?

Steve dies at some point, which leads to Jenny running, hiding or clutching the defensive weapon of opportunity to her copious cleavage. The camera makes a point of showing off her blood-soaked, gunk-stained cleavage in her bra-less summer dress. Now I know that the maiden lost in the woods is one of the oldest set pieces of horror stories, and I don’t have a problem with the female form, but the movie accentuates Jenny’s breasts from every possible angle so that I felt like a voyeur, a situation I don’t feel comfortable with. Jenny’s breasts are hardly the point of the last half hour of the movie, but while she has to slash her way back to safety, it sends a sexist message: have a look at Jenny disembowelling some juvenile delinquents in self-defense, but do not miss out on her capacious cleavage. And learn this: Jenny’s psychological dilemma seems to be that, as a teacher, she likes kids, but now must overcome her fondness by slashing some miseducated specimens.

If you think this review is full of spoilers, bear with me. Jenny finally finds her way back to the village and tries to get help from some people at a garden party who turn out to be the parents of some of the kids – and the very parents who verbally abused their kids at the roadside inn. The point here must be that in this village, there is not one single good person. Brett is also at the party, as if it was the evening of another day out with the gang. He is the one who tells everybody in the room what Jenny must have done: She is responsible for the death of some of the kids whose parents are at that party. And let’s not forget the dog, who apparently was one of a set of two bloodhounds. Do the parents question Brett how he knows who Jenny is? No, they start threatening Jenny and want to make her pay for killing their kids. They make clear that no-one will call the police, and one older guy, I think it’s Brett’s father, forces Jenny into the bathroom for a shower. The implications are obvious: we are going to give you a bath because once you are clean, we will abuse and rape you for what you have done to our offspring. (Note that the women seem to, if not to partake, then at least to greenlight, the gang rape the men in the room are about to commit.) The movie doesn’t show us any such scene, but cuts to Brett who is standing alone in front of a mirror, looking first at himself and then at his cell phone. Oh my god, is that remorse? No, of course not: he erases all the snuff files on his cell phone. The implications are also clear here: Brett erases all the traces of knowing Jenny and might, in all likelihood, join in the abuse. Here, the film fades to black, and the credits roll. For the last time, the movie chickens out of its own violent implications.

I have nothing against extreme violence in horror movies, or any other kind of movie, for that matter. Only here, in Eden Lake the unclear stance on violence sabotages the whole story, and it clearly weakens the characters who are off-the-shelf to begin with. Eden Lake has to suffer questions about its latent racism and sexism because it inserts these issues, but pretends it is not about any of them at all.

Some movies approach human nature by carefully describing and sometimes questioning all those things that may make us human. Horror movies zoom right in by undermining any certain answers to what makes us tick by taking away some aspect of a person: common sense, health, empathy, and twists that lead to something uncanny. Done the right way, that’s the source of a horror movie’s scariness. At a very basic level, Eden Lake left me stranded because I didn’t know what to make of the characters. There is precious little to go on to start with; if a movie undermines everything that it has set up, it cannot be taken seriously. If it also makes an issue out of questions of race and gender without somehow consciously taking position on them, it goes beyond lazy filmmaking and introduces questions about race and gender it feels it does not have to answer. There is no humanity in this movie: every single character either kills or is killed, sometimes both. That would be the key ingredient of film noir, but Eden Lake doesn’t seem to know that, either. There is a thin line between horror and disgust, and sadly, Eden Lake really only gets the second one right.

Shuttle is an American production, but with two British actors starring as baddies. It raises similar questions as Eden Lake: It’s about a group of young travellers who catch the red eye back from Thailand or somewhere. There is no bus and no underground, it’s raining, the airport is just too drab, and the next shuttle will be in a few hours. Help turns up: there is a private shuttle offering them a ride home for less money. The teens eventually accept. Big mistake. They get picked off one by one, only to find that the driver of the shuttle has to let the two girls survive, make them bleach their hair blond and stand in white high heels and white underwear in an empty subterranean garage, where an anonymous guy comes and has a look and decides which one of the girls is to his liking. The movie does not tell us who this man is but, once again, can he be anyone else but some perverted creep with a fetish for the very bright end of the colour spectrum? The audience is left with implications as to how that man will make use of the surviving girl; Shuttle, like Eden Lake, stops short of being consequent and veers away from the thing at the bottom of the rabbit hole. That’s cowardice. The last plot twist is that the driver takes some kind of twisted pity on the girl and, instead of delivering her into the serfdom of some fetishist, puts her in a box with food and kitty litter and has her delivered to Asia in an overseas ship container. She might get to live.

The end of Shuttle seems to suggest one of two things. The first one seems to be the driver’s perverted pity of deciding the girl’s fate by locking her up and hauling her halfway around the world after a torturous journey that will take weeks if not months and might very well kill her. The second implication is a more personal one, and I don’t have solid evidence that the movie really wants to purport this message, but it seemed to me that Shuttle, with its very last shot, tries to comment on human trafficking. See, the Western world seems to import a lot of Asian women for prostitution, which is so wrong, so why not have a Western girl shipped the other way around?

There are curious familiarities between the two movies. The driver from Shuttle is played by Tony Curran, who has starred in a movie called Red Road. Its director, Andrea Arnold, has directed another movie called Fish Tank, starring Michael Fassbender, who plays Steve in Eden Lake. Fish Tank is a good movie, and I can recommend it as a social drama, but there is also Red Road, which can be taken to be a very good horror flick, but it is certainly more than that. See it if you can.