Matt – Page 65 – A Damn Fine Cup of Culture

Space race

Nov 4, 2013Nov 4, 2013Matt2 Comments

Gravity is a gorgeously shot film, no doubt. It’s a film by a director who knows what he’s doing; there’s not an ounce of fat on that movie. It’s a thrilling piece of cinematic craftsmanship, and one that has rightly garnered praise from critics and audiences alike. It’s difficult not to see some of the criticism as internet-age contrariness. Is the film’s plot simple? Perhaps. Is it too simple? Well, that point was ably countered by that patron of upper-case criticism, Film Crit Hulk.

And yet, I came away from having seen Gravity being subtly disappointed. It’s a good film, definitely, and Cuaron does a great job – but already one or two days after having seen it, when I try to think about what I saw the images that come to mind aren’t Gravity‘s, they’re from Danny Boyle’s Sunshine.

Now, Sunshine… It’s a flawed film that’s almost sunk by its last third. It’s messy and confused. Yet it resonated with me to a much larger extent than Cuaron’s more accomplished, more consistent movie did. As a matter of fact, one of the reasons why I was somewhat disappointed with Gravity is this: I was immediately pulled in by the trailer, which evoked the visceral dread of floating off untethered into the infinity of space. The film itself didn’t bring back this dread, because of its structure: obviously Gravity wasn’t going to kill off Sandra Bullock, at least not before the final five minutes or so, which meant that there was little sense of risk. It’s possible for stories to solve this conundrum by involving their audience in a sleight of hand where they know a protagonist won’t die, yet they feel that they may just be wrong about that. Gravity didn’t do that, at least not for me, and I’m not sure it wanted to – its aim was to show Bullock’s character struggling and triumphing.

That’s the other thing, though: I did care about the character triumphing, but not much. Dr. Ryan Stone, first-time astronaut, works as an audience stand-in, especially in concert with the amazing cinematography (seriously, if Emmanuel Lubezki doesn’t get an Academy Award for this, the Academy should be shot into space!), but to be honest, I didn’t particularly care about her. Part of this is Bullock’s particularly American everywoman quality: a bit like a female Tom Hanks, there’s something to calculatedly likeable about her. She works well in Gravity, but I often find her (and Hanks) bland, compared to, say, the everyman characters of Jimmy Stewart that hinted at darker qualities under the folksy niceness.

Adding to this are my issues with Gravity‘s themes: Film Crit Hulk (and other critics) liked the rebirth motif running through the movie, but I found it somewhat hackneyed and distractingly obvious. By the time we get Bullock’s zero-G fetal position and realise that the line tethering her character to various space vessels doubles as an umbilical cord, the film is practically shouting its subtext at us in IMAX-sized captions: we’re witnessing her rebirth, get it?

Sunshine is hardly all that more subtle about its themes, but it’s less single-minded – it’s more messy, as I mentioned earlier – and for me this makes the film resonate more. It’s fair to say that Boyle’s movie doesn’t quite know what it wants to be, but the result is that Sunshine‘s themes aren’t as pushy. More than that, though, I cared about its characters and their plight much more than I did about Dr. Stone’s; she may be more likeable, but her likeability is largely predicated on the audience liking Sandra Bullock. Sunshine‘s characters are more flawed, more complicated, and to my mind more human. As a result, when those characters die it feels more like a loss, whereas Gravity‘s deaths were mostly forgotten a minute after they occurred.

There’s something else that Sunshine pulled off and that makes the film resonate more with me than Cuaron’s arguably more accomplished movie: both films have a metaphysical component, but Sunshine‘s goes beyond the individual level. It’s not just about the potential death of one audience stand-in, it’s about the possible death of mankind. It’s about the two directions in which playing God can go: the film’s protagonists are working on saving the sun and, by extension, mankind, while the antagonist wants to return us all to the stardust we came from. Both sides are torn between being flawed humans and aspiring to the kind of power that humans should not have. It is a shame that Boyle turns this metaphysical playground into a slasher movie, almost drowning the more interesting themes in a space-age retread of And then there were none, but the power of the filmmaking – always more disjointed than Cuaron’s, but for me more engaging in this – got to me to an extent that Gravity didn’t in the end.

Gravity is accomplished in ways that Sunshine doesn’t manage. It is the more coherent film, it gets more things right and fewer things wrong. But the things that Sunshine gets right – and even its noble failures – means that I’d rather sit in a tin can with Cillian Murphy, Rose Byrne and Hiroyuki Sanada than with Sandra Bullock and George Clooney. I’m glad that Dr. Stone made it, but for me her triumpant rebirth doesn’t even begin to touch Sunshine‘s final scene, which is confident enough to be simple and quiet – and all the more glorious for it.

City of digital angels

Oct 29, 2013MattLeave a comment

There’s food porn. There’s nature porn. Apparently there’s even porn porn, out there on what is laughingly referred to as “the internet”.

I have virtual timelapse porn.

Since video games have become less Mondrianesque (read: big pixels in primary colours) and more visually rich, more and more bloggers, game photographers and videographers have been exploring their visual appeal beyond the simplistic “Great graphics, most realistic blood splatter, coolest lens flares, 9.5/10!” (I recently posted about the YouTube project Other Places.) It’s not so much about showing that games are approaching photorealism, at least not to me; it’s about getting to a point where the worlds created by games become interesting and arresting in their own right, and where they can be explored in various creative ways.

Are time lapse videos of game locales creative? Let’s put it like this: they can be beautiful, evocative, eerily poignant. There’s more to a good time lapse video than sticking a camera, virtual or otherwise, in one place and shooting one frame per second. And some games lend themselves more to such videos than others – I’ve previously posted about such videos made from the likes of Red Dead Redemption and Assassin’s Creed. To my mind, just about the best worlds for video game photography and videography are those created by Rockstar Games, and their latest, Grand Theft Auto V, is a gorgeous case in point. Ignoring the controversy around the game for once (there are already more than enough articles out there on whether GTA V is misogynist, racist, homophobic, or even (yikes!) a bad game), I am yet again amazed at how well Rockstar can take a real place and boil it down to its essentials. Their Los Santos, while clearly a fictionalised Los Angeles, is more than a Reader’s Digest version of LA – it’s as if the Rockstar artists had taken the world’s collective dream of Los Angeles and put it into textures and polygons. To me, there’s a touch of the hyperreal, and even of Neil Gaiman’s dream of the city in Sandman, and of Calvino’s Invisible Cities (sadly Marco Polo never talked about “Virtual Cities”, but then again, each of his invisible cities is virtual), in how these places resonate, even more so when put into the format of (wait for it…) a timelapse video. They make me want to inhabit Rockstar’s dream of LA, especially at night, when the street lights shimmer through the distant haze.

Do yourselves a favour. Let the entire video download before you watch it. Go for the highest resolution. And definitely, most definitely, go for full screen. If you still don’t see at least a fraction of the fascination these have for me, I’ll spring you a drink. I know this great little bar just off Vinewood Boulevard…

Drowned sins

Oct 13, 2013Oct 13, 2013MattLeave a comment

Jane Campion’s mini-series Top of the Lake is an odd one. Usually I’m quite comfortable pronouncing judgment on a series and how well it holds together – I wouldn’t go as binary as the proverbial thumbs up or down, but I’m rarely as ambivalent as I’ve been about Campion’s latest.

One thing I’m comfortable to say: Top of the Lake is a mess. It’s confused. It doesn’t entirely know what it wants to be. And it would be generous to describe its pacing as fits and starts. The series uses its story of a missing, pregnant 12-year old to outline a society that’s closed off, incestuous (both metaphorically and quite possibly literally), and a misogynist throwback, in spite of being set in what appears to be contemporary New Zealand. It never quite decides on the thrust of its criticism, though, as it gets tangled up in its own ambivalence: so many of its men appear to be (or, just as bad, strive to be) sexist alpha males with little regard for the women in their community, yet the series’ prominent locus of female kinship and healing rarely becomes more than a caricature of neurotic women in search of a New Age guru to follow. Which they find, sort of, in Holly Hunter’s G.J. – more on whom later.

On the whole, too many of the characters in Top of the Lake remain one-dimensional, gendered in simplistic ways: the clueless macho, the weak middle-aged woman, the brow-beaten son. The characters that escape such categories aren’t so much better written as they are elevated into something more complex and interesting by the acting. Elizabeth Moss’s young detective, Peter Mullan’s grizzled patriarch – yes, there’s a bit more meat on the bone in the way they’re written as well, but primarily the actors bring to life characters oscillating between stereotype and archetype. There’s something reminiscent of Sam Shepard and his character constellations in Top of the Lake: at its worst, it’s a jumble of clichés, at its best it achieves an almost mythical sublimation coupled with strong, compelling performances. Top of the Lake is something rarely found on TV: it’s not entirely naturalistic, and it takes a while to recognise, let alone accept, the series’ more stylised approach – an approach that is perhaps reminiscent more of the stage than the small screen.

Having said that, some of the series’ strongest moments would be impossible on stage, relying as they do on the images and the breathtaking landscape of New Zealand. The cinematography is striking and deserving of a big TV, if not even a movie screen. As is some of the cast: even if both Mullan and Hunter especially suffer from writing that misses as often as it hits, they almost burst the confines of TV. Hunter especially is a strange creature: her character’s lines rarely have more depth than fortune cookie wisdoms, yet she has a presence that is memorable when what she says rarely is.

Altogether, Top of the Lake is compelling. It’s fascinating. In its deeply flawed, messy glory it’s considerably more interesting and worthwhile than several other series recently shown by the BBC. It is a series that almost requires being discussed and it’s some of the more ambitious TV I’ve seen in quite a while.

Of serial killers, haute cuisine and empathy

Oct 2, 2013Oct 2, 2013Matt3 Comments

So many series we’re watching aren’t exactly puppies and rainbows 24/7. There’s Top of the Lake, with its panoply of misogyny, abuse and murder. There’s Game of Thrones, whose murder, mayhem and intrigue make Shakespeare’s history plays look like A Midsummer Night’s Dream. So, obviously what was missing was Hannibal, a heartwarming story of a troubled boy, his psychiatrist and food, glorious food.

Coincidentally, at the same time we watched the first episode of BBC’s Messiah series 2 – and while Hannibal probably features the more baroque, aestheticised killings, it’s Messiah that I found more difficult to watch. Not in a positive way, mind you; I didn’t come away from Messiah feeling shocked and sorry for the victims, because I didn’t feel that the series was all that interested in the victims. It wasn’t outright sadistic, but it still used the sadism of its killers (I’m including the first series of Messiah in this) as a somewhat lazy shorthand: the killer these people are up again is really messed up. Which is hammered home repeatedly – but it’s almost entirely about the killer in question and the detectives out to find him.

I was surprised by how much Messiah‘s murders turned me off. I usually have a fairly strong stomach when it comes to on-screen violence, and arguably Hannibal‘s cannibalism and impalings are more gruesome. However, while Hannibal doesn’t necessarily spend that much more time with the victims of violence (at least not before they’re turned into Grand Guignol dioramas by Americas 10 Most Artistic Murderers), it has something that so far I haven’t really found in Messiah: empathy. While the BBC series is happy to say, “These are horrible crimes, because they look like horrible crimes, and our heroes will stop them,” Hannibal is interested in states of mind. It’s interested in the emotional consequences of these crimes. The series’ title character, eminent psychiatrist Dr. Hannibal Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen), may be cold to the point of appearing devoid of emotion, but his counterpart Will Graham (Hugh Dancy) is empathy. He’s a raw nerve, incapable of not empathising.

I used to be a fan of serial killer narratives, and I still like films like Seven, Zodiac and earlier additions to the Hannibal Lecter mythos such as Manhunter and Silence of the Lambs. However, I’ve come to realise that I find these films offputting if the violence they depict seems to be decorative first and foremost. Messiah‘s murders seem to be as elaborately symbolic as they are first and foremost for audiences who may be bored with the common or garden variety of murder. They’re elaborate because that’s what the genre demands. And, for me at least, they are cruel because they’re there for the effect. The murders tell us more about how the series wants to entertain its audience than about the murders or the victims.

What Hannibal seems to be striving for, on the other hand, is that old Aristotelian chestnut associated with tragedy: through Will Graham we’re asked to experience pity and fear. I did feel pity for Messiah‘s victims, but more so because I felt the series wasn’t interested in them. It wasn’t even that interested in the murderer, beyond providing a relatively glib, facile explanation of motive. In that sense, Hannibal is closer to Hitchcock’s granddaddy of all things serial-killery, Psycho, in that it believes in extending its empathy to the people committing the crimes – although in the case of Dr. Lecter, there may be no understanding why he does what he does.

Other than him liking his haute cuisine, that is. Because, seriously, where are you going to get that steaming fresh liver for that dish you’ve simply been dying to try out?

P.S.: I might take on Top of the Lake soon. That is, if I can figure out what I think about it – or if I can figure out an interesting way of saying why it confused me.

Family is murder

Sep 3, 2013MattLeave a comment

Wherever he is, Alfred Hitchcock must be giggling to himself. Chan-wook Park’s Stoker takes his Shadow of a Doubt and adds several layers of creepy glee that the master missed out on in his tale of a murderous Uncle Charlie, his widowed sister-in-law and his young niece – and in doing so, Park has created a poisonous treat of a movie.

I’ve greatly enjoyed many of Park’s earlier films, especially his Vengeance trilogy and most of all what I would call his masterpieces, Oldboy and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance. They’re not light viewing but they show Park to be an inventive, exuberant stylist with a good feel for striking stories and characters. His Joint Security Area, while less visually arresting (it’s difficult to top Sympathy for Vengeance in this respect), is also well worth watching, and even lesser works such as I’m a Cyborg, But That’s Okay have a lot going for them.

Stoker is Park’s latest film and his first done in Hollywood. If I’m not mistaken, it’s also the first of his movies written by someone other than the director, and that’s perhaps where the biggest differences come in.

Stylistically, Stoker is perfectly delivered: Park uses his actors and his camera to fantastic effect, multiplying the story’s already considerable creepiness. There is a gothic fairy-tale quality to the images, and the acting is just the right side of the uncanny valley – the protagonists we’re watching aren’t your usual, Hollywood (faux-)naturalistic characters, they’re broken, alien and insectile, with Matthew Goode standing out especially.

It’s exactly these qualities that make it easy to admire Stoker as a stylistic achievement but difficult to care about, though. Park’s earlier films often featured emotional and physical extremes; they weren’t gratuitous in their violence, but they didn’t shrink from disturbing cruelty and Grand Guignol situations. However, at the same time Park’s directorial eye has been more sympathetic in the past: he wants us to sympathise, quite literally, with his broken characters seeking vengeance, salvation and a measure of peace. In comparison, Stoker features two protagonists especially that fall somewhere between, or even straddle, the sociopath-psychopath divide.

This doesn’t make the film less fascinating to watch, but it makes it less engaging for me than most of the earlier movies. There’s a coldness to Stoker that’s effectively chilling but comes across somewhat like a gorgeously filmed documentary about the predatory habits of praying mantises played out from the perspective of one of these murderous insects. And they’re wearing the skins of Matthew Goode and Mia Wasikowska. And yes, if that image makes you shudder, that’s pretty much what the film does so eminently well.

Flash fiction of the dead

Aug 19, 2013Aug 19, 2013MattLeave a comment

Telltale’s The Walking Dead was a surprise to most critics. While many of their earlier adventure games received moderately positive reviews, no one expected them to deliver one of the critical successes of 2012, and they definitely didn’t expect anything as emotionally engaging and harrowing as what we got. I was just as surprised myself; I’d read the comics and seen some of the TV series, but to my mind the game was by far the most effective of the three incarnations of The Walking Dead. The TV series delivered on the action, but it meandered and had too many characters it didn’t know what to do with, whereas the comics to my mind decided that the most effective way to get to the readers is to shock them.

Myself, I quickly got bored with the escalating brutality and gruesomeness of the comics. It very much felt like they were telling variations of the same story, turning up the volume as the story progressed. The underlying emotional arcs, though, remained the same – and progressively got drowned out by the visceral cruelty.

Telltale’s game series didn’t skimp on bitey walker-on-human action, but it didn’t rely on shock to carry most of the weight. It mainly worked on the strength of the central relationships that developed slowly, decision by decision. Would you have the protagonist side with this character or that one? In a split-second decision, who would they save? In the long run, your decisions didn’t change what happened, but they changed how you felt about things. They made the story personal, and this was reinforced by the quiet moments. Similarly to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, the story was less about “Will you be butchered horribly by cannibals and your flesh devoured by crazed survivors?” than about feeling responsible for another person succumbing to despair or clinging to hope. Yes, there were crazed cannibal survivors, but they were the background to a story that was relatably human.

Time was an essential factor in the game, however. The Walking Dead got players to care about its characters over several storylines, developing relationships slowly. You didn’t feel the same way about little Clementine at the end of the first episode as you did when the final credits rolled when you finish episode 5. When Telltale published the extra episode “400 Days”, with few direct links to the game’s first season, they decided to do away with what had worked so well: “400 Days” tells five stories, in chunks of no more than 15 minutes, starring five different sets of characters. By the time you’ve got to know one of them, you’re whisked away to play a different character. It’s zombie flash fiction, basically, and it’s a strange choice, coming from a developer whose most successful game depended on slow, gradual character development.

“400 Days” is not an unconditional success. Not all of the storylines are equally engaging, and as with all zombie fiction, there’s a risk of diminishing returns – there are a handful of tropes that stories of the undead keep returning to – but I was surprised by how effective the extra episode was nevertheless. The game ends with another survivor trying to recruit the protagonists of the individual episodes for a settlement up north, and they accepted or declined based on the decisions I’d made a few hours earlier. It didn’t feel like winning or losing the game: and when several of the characters decided to decline the offer and set off on their own, it felt like I’d failed them. I’d failed to show them that even in a world of the dead trust was something worth pursuing.

Both players and reviewers, while largely intrigued by “400 Days”, noted that whatever emotional resonance the game had was less strong by its end than the ones developed in the original five episodes of the first season. This is undoubtedly true – but as developers experiment with different story formats and different ways of engaging the player, we only benefit. Not all such experiments work, and few work 100%, but there are many as yet untried methods of telling stories with the medium. Doesn’t mean that every game has to tell a story in the first place, or that every game must be a formal experiment – but games are a literal playground for storytellers, from the likes of Braid and Journey to Dear Esther and The Walking Dead. Personally I’m excited to see where they’ll take us next.

Oh, the places you’ll go!

Aug 12, 2013Aug 12, 2013MattLeave a comment

I’m sure I’m not the only one who finds it difficult to make it clear to non-gamers what I enjoy so much about computer games at their best. While I think the medium has made great strides, it’s still quite alien to people who don’t get the same kind of enjoyment out of games. They see the silly writing, the weird genre conventions, the way that so much gameplay seems to be about doing the same thing over and over and over again, which should bore any sane grown-up, one would think.

For me, the main attraction of playing games is that it takes me to worlds I couldn’t go to otherwise. I’m not even talking about escapism, at least not in any conventional sense: just like fiction allows me to meet and spend time with people I wouldn’t meet otherwise, at its best gaming can put me in places that, whether they’re subtly or wildly different from our world, I could otherwise only enter in dreams. A good game is like a lucid dream. It’s not the power fantasy, at least for me – I can get as much enjoyment out of walking around a virtual deserted island exploring its nooks and crannies as I might get out of running and gunning.

This is also one of the attractions Virtual Reality – or rather, VR done right *coughOculusRiftcough* – has on me. It’s about putting me there in those worlds, with no obvious demarkation line where the screen ends. And that is why projects such as YouTube user ultrabrilliant’s Other Places hold such a fascination for me. Other Places shows video game worlds through the same eyes as Alastair Fothergill’s BBC documentaries show our planet.

So, since it is tritely said that pictures speak a thousand words, here are three epic monologues. Enjoy! (Ideally in full screen and with the resolution turned up as high as possible.)

Twilight of the Superheroes

Aug 6, 2013MattLeave a comment

What if normal people decided that the way to tackle crime was to put on costumes, assume a silly name and fight crime on a one by one basis? And what if Hollywood, as it is sometimes wont to do, did not one but two films based on that premise, pretty much at exactly the same time? (I’m sure there’s a fancy, latinate word for such occurrences, AKA the Armageddon Effect.) Well, that’s exactly what happened in 2010, with Kick-Ass (based on a Mark Millar comic) and Super – although arguably someone who puts on a costume and becomes a masked vigilante is by definition not quite normal, which both Super and Kick-Ass explore. Neither does it entirely successfully, though, mostly because they give in to the perceived needs of the stories they’re telling and the audience they’re hoping to satisfy.

Kick-Ass was the more successful of the two films according to the main metric that determines a film’s success, namely box-office take – so successful, in fact, that it’s got a bigger-budget sequel coming out later this year. It’s probably more immediately entertaining than Super, playing the situation more for laughs: its protagonist is a geeky teenager who reads too many comics, like a sadder, radioactive-spider-deprived version of Peter Parker who is at least as interested in copious masturbation as he is in fighting crime. More interesting, and more funny for the most part, are the secondary protagonists, though: Big Daddy, an ex-cop turned vigilante, and his adorable moppet of a daughter, Hit Girl. A lot of the film’s laughs come from the incongruous display of Hit Girl effecting maximum carnage as she slices and dices the criminal element of New York City. While the actors (Nicholas Cage and Chloë Grace Moretz) make the most of the roles, though, the film does become pretty lazy once it’s discovered its most effective punchline, that of an 11-year old cursing like a sailor while committing acts of hyper-violence, repeating it so often that the movie should almost be renamed The Repetitive Adventures of Hit Girl (introducing Kick-Ass, the Boring Boy Wonder).

More problematic than the lazy comedy, though, is that Kick-Ass only takes its own premise seriously for the first half hour. Our teenage protagonist quite aptly gets his ass kicked – not to mention an ugly knife wound in the abdomen – on his first attempt to fight crime. By the end, though, he’s flying around with a jetpack firing shoulder-mounted gatling guns that, if fired that close to his head, would shred his eardrums in seconds. He dispatches the film’s big bad with a bazooka that’s almost bigger than he is. Kick-Ass‘s initial “What if?” is long forgotten as its eponymous hero commits acts as unbelievable as Hit-Girl’s, and barely any less realistic than those of his super-powered brethren.

Super takes its premise of a socially challenged shlub becoming a masked vigilante more seriously. The film still plays as a comedy, but the humour is decidedly more dark, as the protagonist’s vigilante crusade is shown to be deeply messed up. Sell drugs? Get a spanner to the head. Proposition a child prostitute? Get a spanner to the head. Cut in line at the cinema? Get a spanner to the head. Super‘s wannabe hero characters may in part react to what they see as evil, but what motivates them just as much is the self-righteous power trip they’re on. If the world treats you like a loser, put on a mask and costume and show the world that you’re not a loser by hitting it over the head with a spanner.

While Kick-Ass ends up like a more snarky, hyperviolent version of the stories it sets out to comment on, Super feels more like a grungy, sometimes adolescent take on Taxi Driver. Its protagonist, Frank Darbo AKA The Crimson Bolt, isn’t miles away from Travis Bickle, and just like his ’70s precursor he is torn between seeing bad things in the world and feeling utterly powerless and inadequate (not least when it comes to women). Differently from Taxi Driver, though, Super can’t quite resist buying into the power fantasy. The Crimson Bolt goes on a violent spree not too dissimilar from Travis Bickle’s, and we’re supposed to see it as messed up, but damn, if our clumsy, shlubby loser of a protagonist isn’t suddenly an absolute badass with guns, explosives and inventive movie-hero kills! The film ends up feeling less ambiguous than suffering from ADD, oscillating between, “This is sooo cool! This is sooo messed up! This is sooo cool! This is sooo messed up!”

In the end, when it comes to the messed-up-ness of vigilantes, my go-to hero is still Watchmen‘s Rorschach, himself clearly influenced by Travis Bickle’s philosophy. Doesn’t “All the animals come out at night – whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies, sick, venal. Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets.” sound quite a bit like “The streets are extended gutters and the gutters are full of blood and when the drains finally scab over, all the vermin will drown. The accumulated filth of all their sex and murder will foam up about their waists and all the whores and politicians will look up and shout ‘Save us!'” Admittedly, Rorschach may not offer the same kind of snarky giggles as The Crimson Bolt’s escapades or Hit Girl’s adventures, but as so many times before, Alan Moore knows the score. As far as I’m concerned, we’re still waiting for a “What if people really became superheroes?” comedy that actually takes its premise seriously and works as a comedy.

Earthdown, Moonrise

Jul 29, 2013Jul 31, 2013Matt1 Comment

From an atypical variety pack to a covert one – the Variety Pack that dares not speak its name. I recently celebrated my birthday, which I usually follow with some hedonistic binge buying of DVDs and Blu-rays. We’ve since watched two of the films I’ve bought, namely the indie sci-fi-tinged drama Another Earth and Wes Anderson’s latest Andersoniad, Moonrise Kingdom.

Let’s start with the one I’ve seen more recently, Moonrise Kingdom. I have an ambivalent relationship with Anderson’s films; I find his striking, hyper-arch style fascinating and irritating in equal measures. Having said that, I loved The Fantastic Mr Fox, and I have a lingering suspicion that I’ll come to feel similarly about Moonrise Kingdom. On the surface it very much does what all his films do: tell arelatively simple storiy that is tinged with melancholy using ironic artifice in the presentation. Anderson’s style felt too much like a pose to me in The Royal Tenenbaums, hampering the sadness because the form seemed to whisper constantly, “My, aren’t we being ironic and self-aware about all of this?” There’s something more felt, more balanced in Moonrise Kingdom‘s performances, though, especially those by the two young leads, which renders the sadness much more effective and credible. It no longer feels quite as much as if the director is constantly putting the air quotation marks of irony around everything in his tale, even though the film is stylistically pure Anderson. As a result, Moonrise Kingdom is both a typical, dollhouse-style Wes Anderson confection and a convincingly sweet, touching childhood romance, without the two being at odds with each other. The change is a subtle one – from stills, and probably from the trailer, this will look like any and every film by the director – but it’s definitely worth checking out for those who were ambivalent about his earlier works.

Another 2012 film that I’d heard good things about, Another Earth, turned out to be more of a disappointment. It attempts to marry a relatively generic drama premise (a young woman destroys a man’s life when she, drunk and distracted, crashes her car into his, killing his wife and child) to a sci-fi high concept: one day, a second earth appears, visible from our planet, and get this: that planet is identical to ours in every way.

What a weird, wasted premise. The film later goes back on it, but for most of its duration we’re made to believe that this other earth is identical to our own, the people on it are identical to us. It’s a mirror image – but what good is a mirror image if it doesn’t allow us to contrast what we believe we will see with what we actually see? Another Earth‘s mirage in the sky is a concept that’s used to surprisingly little effect, with little reality for much of the film. In a story that is about regret, wouldn’t a more intriguing move be to make this second earth a constant reminder of “What if”? Since the film has already suggested that things on this second world are identical to ours, it’s not a mirror so much as a copy.

Except, in the film’s last fifteen minutes, there’s suddenly the suggestion that while the two earth’s were identical, this synchronicity was shattered when Earth 2 was first glimpsed, moments before the crash that sets the story into motion. So why not have this as the premise to begin with? For more than an hour, the second earth is a visual, a concept, but a vague, abstract one, a pretty but pointless intrusion on a fairly standard drama about guilt, regret and second chances. Earth mark 2 only comes into focus for the film’s ending, coming across as a half-baked idea in serious need of a rewrite.

What doesn’t help is that the film is too languid, too slow, to keep the viewer distracted from some uncomfortable questions. The main character, before going to prison after the accident that kicks off the plot, wants to go to MIT. She is in love with the universe and its mysteries. Yet the second earth makes not a jot of sense: it starts off small, then gets bigger and bigger, so doesn’t that suggest it’s a threat to earth, a more familiar double of Melancholia‘s eponymous planet? How can such a planet be identical to ours in every way if it doesn’t share our orbit, miraculously appears one day and then comes closer, growing ever bigger in the sky? These questions, to be quite honest, should be absolutely irrelevant – von Trier’s film couldn’t have sustained such science-minded inquiries either – since the celestial doppelgänger ought to be relevant in thematic terms, not scientific ones, but Another Earth fails to make the sci-fi element resonate with its theme. The big blue bauble just hangs there while the fairly predictable, though well-acted, earth-bound drama ensues. Note to the writers: if your main story conceit is irrelevant to the story you’re telling for 80% of its running time, perhaps it’s not that good an idea in the first place. Think about it.

July Variety Pack (but it’s an odd one…)

Jul 21, 2013Jul 21, 2013Matt1 Comment

A quick “Hey there!” in between a week’s holiday in Paris and a work trip to the UK – and since the heat is making my brain frizz out on a semi-regular basis and I don’t have the stamina for a longer-form post, here’s a variety pack. It’s a strange one, though; for once I’m not writing about a couple of films I’ve watched recently but about a few topics that have been hanging around in my brainpan, equally lacking in energy due to summer having icumen in.

What did you do in the war, dad? – I was in an HBO miniseries, son.

We’re currently watching HBO’s The Pacific, a sort of follow-up to Band of Brothers. It’s a good series with great production values and strong performances, and the theatre of war it depicts does come across as distinctly different from the Western front of the earlier series. At the same time, there is definitely something a bit samey about the two series, and about so many American war films of the last ten, twenty years in general. (Clint Eastwood’s Flags Of Our Fathers and Letters From Iwo Jima come to mind.) They don’t go in for the easy, unambiguous heroics of the war films of yore, yet the subtext still seems to be this: these men we’re watching, the soldiers they’re standing for – they deserve our respect. Not because they’re heroes to begin with, but because they’re ordinary men that become heroes in extraordinary circumstances. The experience of war – and, on a more meta level, the act of turning them into film, with all the trappings of the genre – ennobles them. And this is the bit that I’m uncomfortable about: as riveting as a well-made war film is, very few of them end up not telling you unquestioningly that these men and what they do is noble. Being in a war and watching your buddies geting shot to pieces may be hell, but the act of going to war is a noble one. Sad, yes, but that only makes it more noble. Perhaps the Second World War was the kind of fight that sustains these narratives that, at least implicitly, suggest the Good War. Regardless of the ideologies of The Pacific, though, part of me wishes for a genre piece that doesn’t insist with its elegiac soundtrack and close-ups of brothers in arms giving their lives for each other that warfare is a noble endeavour and that soldiers unquestioningly deserve our respect. (For the record, there are scenes and narrative strands throughout The Pacific that provide glimpses of a different perspective – but they still end up surrendering to the superior firepower of the filmmaking that keeps emphasising, “Noble! Sad! Elegiac! And, yes, patriotic!”, rather than leaving me to form my own thoughts.)

History will teach us nothing…

… except that the Middle Ages were oh-so-pretty. And Elizabeth Woodville, wife of Edward IV and Queen of England, could summon storms by going “Oooh, ooooh, ooooh…!” in a menacing way. Not a bad parlour trick!

Anyway, watching The White Queen has made me long for Rome‘s way of handling history. It’s a tricky genre, historical fiction (and perhaps I should just accept that The White Queen doesn’t belong to that particular genre so much as to that of historical romance), and one thing that often goes wrong is that such fiction wants to have its cake and eat it: it wants to show that these olden-times people were different from us and did things differently and we shouldn’t judge them from our anachronistic vantage point of being all enlightened and such stuff, yet then in the next scene it espouses a completely ahistorical, modern point of view to make the characters relatable to us. Balancing these two narrative impulses – Ooh, look at how different and weird these people are! And now look how they’re just like us after all! – is extremely tricky, and I don’t think The White Queen has handled it particularly well so far. In one scene we see the young king almost raping his queen-to-be when she doesn’t assent to a quick tumble in the grass, yet ten minutes later when he actually says he’ll marry her she goes all swoony and Twoo Luv, like a 20th/21st century teenager in love for the first time. If we’re supposed to see this through modern eyes, how can we accept Edward’s earlier attempt at Lancastrian date-rape? Only if we give him the benefit of historical perspective – of course, he’s the king, and she’s a woman at a time when women have very little power, it’s rarely love that starts a relationship in these days, if she’s lucky she’ll learn some affection for him – but then her later behaviour makes little to no sense, because it is entirely predicated on current ideas of romance. Again, though, perhaps that’s it: the series definitely puts romance before history.

Talking of historical fiction: revisiting Deadwood

Alan Sepinwall, TV critic and blogger, is currently finishing his Deadwood Rewind. His perceptive, eloquent posts on the series’ third season are a great read – not least because he’s got some of Deadwood‘s actors visiting the comments threads on a regular basis, such as Jim Beaver (Ellsworth), Keone Young (Mr Wu) and W. Earl Brown (Dan Dority). It’s fascinating to revisit the series through their eyes. (Here’s a link to the Deadwood Rewind for episode 6 of the third season, “A Rich Find”, with some great contributions by Jim Beaver.)