Yes, I like my Quentin Tarantinos and my Martin Scorseses. I enjoy TV series about New Jersey mobsters doing mobsterish things (like breaking kneecaps) or Ancient Romans doing Ancient Roman things (like slicing through kneecaps – remember the Thirteenth!). I don’t mind watching films and TV that walk the dark, cruel side.
But sometimes I think that gentleness is more difficult to pull off and pull off well, at least for an entire movie. Think about it: how many films do you know that you’d consider good and that you’d describe first and foremost as gentle? The problem is that “gentle” sounds milquetoast and boring, but it shouldn’t be mistaken for its blander distant cousins, “timid” and “nice”.
The Japanese director Hirokazu Koreeda is one of the best directors when it comes to gentle films. His work is by no means harmless in its themes, even if it’s decidedly low on kneecapping – his characters deal with painful issues, which is never more apparent than in Nobody Knows, in which a disturbed young mother leaves her four children to fend for themselves. While tragedy is increasingly likely to strike as the film proceeds, Koreeda is not interested in making a domestic disaster movie where we sit on the edge of our seats waiting for the worst to happen. His guiding feeling towards the people he depicts seems to be compassion, as he bears witness to the fact that living, let alone being good, is hard, people are often prone to weakness, fear and pettiness – but we all deserve compassion.
Still Walking, a film in which disaster has already struck, years ago, permanently damaging a family, is similarly suffused with empathy. It’s not happy-clappy, sappy “we’re all human beings so let’s group hug!” empathy – Koreeda’s film does not shy away from the characters’ selfishness and cruelty in any way, but he urges us to look closer, not to condone but to understand, which in the end may be much harder and more uncomfortable than sitting in judgment.
For all the enjoyment I get out of films and TV series that wouldn’t know ‘gentle’ if it held them and stroked their hair, there is something soothing, even healing about Koreeda’s films. While I love visiting the more brutal worlds of many of his fellow directors, it is his world that I would want to live in. (And even be dead in – his After Life, my first experience of Koreeda’s films, is a wonderful, witty and, yes, gentle take on death and memory.)
After last week’s instalment turned out quite a bit longer than expected (a bit like the wait for Max Payne 3, in fact), here is a shorter tidbit – which, apparently, should be spelled “titbit”, but that sounds too much like a snack or breakfast cereal for sex-obsessed psychopaths to me. I’ll be on holiday next week, so I’ve got a good excuse for the next post to be a couple of weeks away, but in the meantime…
I used to consider myself a Tim Burton fan. Around the time when the man made Edward Scissorhands and Batman Returns, his goth-romantic style clicked with me, so much so that I considered his second Batman instalment one of my favourite films. (I still have a great fondness for the movie, but I’m more aware of its flaws at this point.) Then came Mars Attacks!, a perfectly okay half-hour comedy stretched into a feature film, and Sleepy Hollow, which looked like the most gorgeous Tim Burton film ever but felt, well, hollow. Planet of the Apes didn’t have much going for it beyond the make-up and Big Fish angers me with its twee, needy sentimentalism that would give Steven Spielberg a toothache.
Fast-forward to Sweeney Todd. I am not all that much into musicals and had heard of Sondheim but didn’t know him at all. The trailer and stills for Sweeney Todd looked like Sleepy Hollow all over – more so, in fact, with the film’s production design being so Tim Burton, it felt like someone had taken his earlier films, boiled them into a thick, black ooze and used this to paint the sets. When I saw the film at the cinema, mostly for old time’s sake, I was surprised that despite the ultra-Burton look the direction felt… more adult, I’d have to call it. Less of the cartoon exaggeration that Burton had fallen to (and would return to in later films). Even Johnny Depp looked like he was acting rather than simply doing his Depp/Burton spiel.
I’ve just recently rewatched Sweeney Todd, after catching it on stage at the Edinburgh Fringe, and I still consider it to be one of the better of Burton’s recent films, perhaps even the best – yet it is held back by the director’s visual style. Sondheim’s play, for want of a better word, has a certain meatiness. There is a charnelhouse vitality to it, yet in spite of the gallons of gore Burton’s visuals are bloodless. They are designed within an inch of their life. More than that, they make Todd and his accomplice-paramour Mrs. Lovett one of a kind, a sort of Goth His’n’Hers, which hurts especially the pie maker’s characterisation. It’s a shame, really: while I think that Sweeney Todd is proof that Burton still has talent and doesn’t just imitate himself, he also keeps the film from being as good as it could be. And, frankly, while I used to love the typical Burton look, by now it feels less like a style and more like a brand. Predictable, safe, and not a little boring.
P.S.: You know who’d make a very effective Sweeney Todd? Mark Strong. Unfortunately the poor man is typecast and only plays sweet, loveable good guys.
P.P.S.: YouTube is acting up, so instead I went to Vimeo, not expecting to find anything much… except it looks like someone uploaded the entirety of Tim Burton’s film, with Spanish subtitles. Weird, huh? And probably more than just a little legally iffy… Still, while it’s up it’s up, eh?
While I am not an outright fan of explicit violence in modern media, I’m not particularly squeamish either. I have no interest whatsoever in the gore extravaganza of much modern horror, but neither am I put off by the viscera of some of Tarantino’s more recent offerings, and some of the TV series (e.g. Rome or Game of Thrones) I’ve enjoyed most over the last couple of years don’t skimp on the red gushing stuff.
And yet, Max Payne 3 almost made me switch off the game, not just once but twice, due to the brutality it depicts.
And this is in no way an indictment of the game.
Max Payne 3 is a brutal game – and more than any shooter I’ve played it does a remarkably horrid job of showing what bullets do to bodies. Does the game revel in showing exit wounds? I think I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t – MP3 does not present its violence with the frat boy, fist-pump glee of other games, but it has a fascination for showing the damage done, both to people and to interior (and exterior) decorating, in slow motion. So much so that checking out some of the videos on YouTube makes me queasy – less with the game than with the Beavis and Butthead-ish tone of the video description and comments.
But it’s not so much seeing the carnage I’m authoring that made me wince, at least not after the first ten minutes or so. (There is definitely something numbing to seeing henchman after henchman dying horribly at the business end of my gun – and it’s this repetitiveness that’s a major flaw of the game in my opinion.) It’s two key scenes: in one, I finally find the beaten, bleeding trophy wife of a São Paolo business man earlier abducted by a favela gang, only to see one of the gangbangers put a bullet through her head. In another, the business man’s brother is covered with petrol and burnt alive. The game has previously shown the man as shallow, narcissistic and rather pathetic – but the way the game depicts his death got to me, and quite possibly more so than a similar scene would have in a film.
I don’t want to get into the question here of whether games are becoming too violent or whether people are desensitised to real-life violence and cruelty due to watching brutal films or playing violent games. That question is much bigger and deserves a longer discussion in a wider forum. What I’m interested in is this: why did these two scenes get to me to the extent where I wasn’t sure I wanted to continue playing (keeping in mind, as I’ve said, that I’m not all that squeamish)?
I think it’s this: games make a big thing of player agency – as gamers it’s our finger on the trigger, we decide who lives and who dies, it’s, like, interactive! – yet in practice our agency is always limited, it’s circumscribed in a hundred ways: by a game’s design, its user interface, our character’s abilities and, often frustratingly, by the story a game tells. You’re Superman while playing the game, you’re John McClane, you’re Neo – and then comes a pre-rendered sequence, and what’s pre-rendered as well is your impotence in the face of the great god, Plot. The villain jumps from the shadows and skewers your love interest with his great big sword. (I’ve never played Final Fantasy VII, but apparently this is one of the primal scenes of so many gamers into Japanese role-playing games… and I wonder whether the cod-Freudian subtext is as heavy when you’re actually playing.)
Many games use this in a frustrating way that feels like the program is cheating, in revenge for decades of players using hidden cheats and God modes to become invulnerable. Think you’re all-powerful, gamer? Take that! Ooh, that must’ve hurt! The two scenes in Max Payne 3 thatI mentioned earlier (and there are others, although none as pointed) may have an element of this, but I think the game is being cleverer than that: Max Payne, from the first game onward, told a story about revenge and redemption. I’m not sure to what extent it manages the latter all that well, although there’s a lot of quasi-Noirish verbiage in the game about it – but especially Max Payne 3 never lets you forget that the revenge you’re effecting is finally hollow. Yes, you might get to kill hundreds of bad guys in bloody, bone-crunching ways, but Max’ loss is the constant foil through which the player views this revenge. For every henchman killed, for every villain stopped, Max’ wife and child is not a single bullet closer to being alive. For a game that’s entirely about revenge and redemption, it’s bleakly ironic that revenge is shown to be pointless and redemption all but impossible. Max Payne’s extended trauerarbeit (and I don’t think this is wankerish pseudo-analysis imposed on the game – every second line of dialogue is about Max’ ongoing, futile quest to find some sort of meaning in a life that’s had all meaning shot to hell), like the hundreds of painkillers he keeps popping, only serves to dull his pain momentarily.
I’m not saying that Max Payne 3 is a deep, philosophical treatment of mourning, revenge and the futility of redemption – but it does address these issues within the rules it has set up for itself… and, like Rockstar’s earlier Red Dead Redemption (although my vote still goes to RDR for doing more interesting, complex things with the theme) it goes a long way to disabuse the player of this crazy idea that just because he’s got his finger on the trigger he can make everything all right.
It has to be said: as a gamer it’s sometimes difficult not to be embarrassed by video games. Most people with a modicum of taste would take one look at a game called Max Payne (its central character of that name the proverbial Cop With Nothing To Lose, which doesn’t exactly make it less embarrassing) and snort derisively. It sounds about as classy and grown-up as one of those superhero comics where the women have breasts the size of battleships and waists with the circumference of a ripe peach.
The surprising thing was that Max Payne, while not exactly A la recherche du temps perdu (or even Pulp Fiction), was fairly smart and knowing in its writing, at least for a video game in the early years of this millennium, and its sequel, The Fall of Max Payne even more so. Mixing neo-noir cynicism and post-Matrix bullet time with comic book aesthetics, surreal dream sequences and a parodic style that was more Scream than Scary Movie, Max Payne didn’t take itself overly serious, yet it still pulled off that neat trick where we come to care about the characters. They’re funny, but they’re not just the punchline to a joke.
Not even poor, doomed mob underboss Vinnie Gognitti in his Captain BaseballBatBoy costume. Okay, perhaps a bit.
Max Payne 2 pulled off something strangely akin to Tim Burton’s Batman Returns. It shouldn’t work. It should be an incoherent mess of incompatible parts. Dark romance, surreal comedy, cartoon noir and self-referential humour shouldn’t come together to form something that’s somehow more than the sum of its parts – yet it does. Or perhaps it’s a variation on Stockholm Syndrome, where someone who enjoys playing computer games but also enjoys good writing and interesting characters convinces himself that purple prose such as “There was a blind spot in my head, a bullet-shaped hole where the answers should be. Call it denial. I wanted to dig inside my skull and scrape out the pain.” congeals into something that by some process of video game alchemy manages to transcend the clichés it’s assembled from.
What’s the occasion of all of this reminiscing about old games? Call it exposition, call it setting the scene – it’s basically a glorified lead-in for my thoughts on Max Payne 3, the latest (and possibly last?) game in the series, coming soon to a blog near you. Did the series manage to reinvent itself, almost ten years after its last instalment, by transposing its New York neo-noir bullet ballet to the sun-drenched favelas of Sao Paolo viewed through the camera lens left behind by Tony Scott?
As I mentioned in my last post, we were just one episode away from finishing The Prisoner – the original UK series starring Patrick McGoohan, that is, not the remake with Ian McKellen and Jim Caviezel. The Prisoner may just be one of the Top 3 cult series of all time; it’s up there with the likes of Twin Peaks. And, as with so many things that are given the ‘cult’ label, it’s difficult to come to them with fair, realistic expectations, isn’t it?
Well, to begin with: you have to make allowances for the series’ age. Even though everyone talks about how original and revolutionary the series was and still is, in some ways it’s very much a product of its time. Sometimes that’s charming – as in the ’60s art and costume design, making the Village perhaps the hippest prison resort ever – but sometimes it is tiresome, as in the pacing (few of the episodes need to be 50 minutes long, and most would have benefited from cuts) or the fight scenes, which are tame, repetitive and overly long, not least because we’ve all seen better, more exciting fights by now. I imagine that these are less of an issue if you’re revisiting the series wearing nostalgia goggles, but then, they’re not my main problem with The Prisoner.
The thing is, the series was undoubtedly a pioneer – it’s still rare to find much on TV that mixes mystery, politics, psychology and metaphysics as The Prisoner does, and that is as willing, or indeed eager, to keep clear-cut answers from the audience. The series definitely wants us to think along and to form our own ideas on what is happening to McGoohan’s Number 6. At times it’s almost like watching a spy thriller penned by Samuel Beckett. However, looking at the series, its world and its puzzles more closely, I think that one of the main reasons why it raises so many questions is that it has little to no internal consistency: to be quite frank, much of the mystery stems from The Prisoner’s overall mythologybeing an incoherent mess. Remember all the accusations levelled at Lost, especially as they were approaching the finale? “They’re making it up as they go along!” Well, the very same seems to be true when it comes to its older fellow puzzle box of a series. It establishes few rules that it is content to stick with, which may work at the beginning as Number 6 is trying to escape the Village but is foiled over and over again because, well, the deck is stacked against him – but the longer the series goes on, the more it feels like The Prisoner‘s universe is random and arbitrary.
As a result, it became increasingly difficult for me to engage with or care about what was happening on screen. Why think along if the series can just put on a monkey mask and make fun of your wish, if not for answers then for some sort of internal logic? I’ve mentioned Beckett before, and I think there’s a definite similarity between his cruel, bleak and at times strangely funny universe and The Prisoner – but while I may have the patience and will to sit through 1 1/2 hours of Beckett (and even then only if the acting is impeccable), I’m not sure I could sit still for more than one episode of Endgame: The Series. (Oh, wait: I just did. Doesn’t mean that I was happy to, though.)
It’s a shame, because there are a lot of scenes and ideas that are fascinating. There are moments that are great, like Rover sitting (does a giant white ball even sit?) in Number 2’s chair or the sheer silliness of kosho (a sport played by Number 6 that makes sumo wrestling look dignified), there are some fascinating characters, and at times the mood is as menacing as in The Wicker Man (though with less Christopher Lee in drag). There’s a lot of ambition in the series and a rebellious spirit that a lot of TV programmes would benefit from even today. It’s just that these rarely come together to form something coherent – and as a result I’m left to wonder whether the people who profess to love The Prisoner see something in it that I’m blind to or whether there’s an element of weirdness worship going on, where the series is loved uncritically because it’s just so different. It’s very well possible that The Prisoner broadcasts much of its goodness on frequencies that I’m not able to receive, but even then I think it’s fair to say the series is deeply flawed, with its first four or five episodes being pretty exchangeable, the final four suggesting that the producers were getting tired of the format (leading to their use of a rather Trekkian conceit, the Western Episode), and the entirety of the series never quite deciding whether Number 6’s adversaries, the constant procession of new and improved Number 2s, are always a step ahead of him or whether they’re playing a futile game of catch-up, with the titular character just being so much smarter than all of them.
Oh, and don’t get me started on a computer that’s blown up by being asked the Deep, Unanswerable Question: “Why?”
… and yes, you’re right, that post title needs to be read in a booming voice. (Don’t turn around now, by the way – there’s a giant white inflatable ball right behind your chair!)
While the title is prompted by us having only one more episode of The Prisoner to watch (my thoughts will follow in an upcoming post), this is actually more of a “Did you know that you could waste hours by following these links?” kind of post, plugging the following two things:
How long has it been since I’ve plugged anything HBO-related? The A.V. Club‘s John Teti has just finished his series of reviews-cum-analysis of the second season of Six Feet Under. Some of the most insightful writing I’ve seen on the series and especially on Nate and Brenda – and it’s made it clear that it’s time for me to watch the series again in its entirety.
So, what’s special about it, I hear you asking? (Yes, I hear your voices in my head, because that’s how I roll. At least when I haven’t taken my meds.) The specialitude of this post comes from the following: you’re unlikely ever to check out any of what I’m writing about below, because it’s all about this year’s Edinburgh Fringe – so, unless you’ve already seen some or all of the shows I’ll be talking about, you’ve missed them! Ha! Cue comment about the fleeting, ephemeral nature of art, followed by silence as the tumbleweeds roll by.
Assassins
“Everybody’s got the right to be happy… everybody’s got the right to their dreams.” Sounds like common, especially American, musical fare, doesn’t it? Cheerful, inspirational, and simplistic hogwash, most likely? Well, in Sondheim’s Assassins, the protagonists’ right to be happy finds its expression in killing the President of the United States, or at least doing your darnedest to reach that goal. The show we caught – and it was sheer luck, down to two wonderful people who didn’t pick up their tickets for some reason – wasn’t perfect, not least because we sat more or less right next to the small orchestra, which made the non-mic singing difficult to understand at times… but even under these circumstances it’s clear that Sondheim’s musical is sharply written, very funny, and surprisingly chilling. If your culture is founded on the lie that you can make it if you really try, that even a nobody from a small town can become a millionaire – or a president – where does that leave you when your dream just won’t come true? Does it leave you permanently disaffected – or do you pick up a gun and show that you can make a difference because, after all, this is America?
Statements After An Arrest Under The Immorality Act
The title of this play by South African playwright Athol Fugard almost rivals that of my favourite deconstructivist western of the last, let’s see, forty or fifty years – but the play itself isn’t unwieldy or overly long in the least. Performed by a amazing, fearless cast in an effectively minimalist staging, Statements is a beautiful, poetic and essentially tragic story about lovers who, by decree of the state, shouldn’t be. Even 40 years after it was originally written, addressing the racial segregation under Apartheid, the play feels fresh, relevant and utterly touching.
We saw two further South African productions – a raw, sweltering Mies Julie (adapted from Strindberg) and Woza Albert!, but it’s Statements that made the deepest impression.
… last but not least
Where to begin? Not everything we saw was brilliant, and a couple of plays were dismal (The Intervention, I’m looking at you!), but there were lots of moments of magic, from the beautiful, sad and endlessly inventive The Fantasist (manic depression, with puppets! see below for a trailer) to Centralia (equal parts WTF?!, mad giggles and poignancy) to Rites and Regulations (a fairly simple but moving play about funeral rituals in Singapore, pressing all my funereal buttons), from Educating Ronnie (about a young man’s exploration of friendship, charity and guilt – another trailer waiting below) to Pierrepoint (about Britain’s last hangman – again, great performance and chilling ending – and another trailer, seriously, when did stage plays start having trailers?) and Planet Lem (socio-critical sci-fi – on stilts! did you know that Polish people are a bit off their trolley?). All in all, to anyone who’s got an interest in theatre and what it can do, Edinburgh during the Fringe is well worth visiting – we’ve seen 25 shows in one week and feel utterly invigorated. Well, we would, if it weren’t for that nasty cold bug we picked up travelling back on easyJet…
I’ll be on vacation the next two weeks, so chances are I won’t get around to posting any updates. Here’s hoping that I’ll be back bursting with bloggy inspiration at the end of August!
When I was at Uni studying (and later teaching) English Literature, the BBC Shakespeares were spoken of in hushed tones as the most boring thing this side of a Romanian stop-motion remake of Solaris dubbed by a narcoleptic with a speech impediment. Want to make your students hate Shakespeare as much as the average UK pupil does on leaving school? Have them watch the BBC Shakespeares! In spite of actors that have proven to know their way around a iambic pentameter or two, these television versions of Shakespeare’s complete dramatic works made from the mid-’70s to the mid-’80s were complete duds, dramatically speaking, at least according to English Department legend.
Fast forward to 2012, the year that Brits try to put the ‘Great’ back into ‘Great Britain’ with the help of Sir Simon Rattle, Rowan Atkinson and a skydiving Queen Elizabeth. Two years before the 450th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth and produced by Sam Mendes (the erstwhile Mr. Kate Winslet and director of the upcoming Bond flick Skyfall), the BBC got together an impressive set of actors, including Ben Whishaw, Julie Walters, Patrick Stewart, Jeremy Irons, Tom Hiddleston and a guy last seen having sexual intercourse with a pig, for big budget TV versions of the four history plays Richard II, Henry IV Part 1, Henry IV Part 2: Henry Harder and Henry V: The Sequeling. And while I can’t speak for the horrors of the earlier BBC Shakespeares, these four TV versions definitely don’t have to hang their heads in shame – as teachers the world over will be ecstatic to hear, since they can fill two to three school lessons with the watching of one of these.
The Hollow Crown, as the quartet was named after what may be the most famous (and rightly so) monologue in Richard II, was fairly entertaining to watch, though very much improved when the subtitles kicked in – being able to read Shakespeare’s lines while listening to the actors definitely helps my comprehension. Not perfect, and some of the character choices were weird: does Richard II make more sense by being turned into the most queenly king since Marlowe’s Edward II, with Whishaw in the title role channelling both Gloria Swanson and Katherine Hepburn? Also, having seen Michael Gambon as a very funny, charming and ultimately poignant Falstaff, I found Simon Russell Beale’s take on the character too low-key to make his relationship with Prince Hal all that credible and his eventual fate as moving as it ought to be.
My main two bones of contention with Mendes’ BBC Shakespeare have to do with the language, though:
1) Too many of the actors try to make the iambic pentameter sound like regular, realistic TV dialogues – and that just don’t fly. Ignore that Shakespeare’s language is stylised and you end up with clumsy, overly earnest delivery that actually comes across as less realistic rather than more. Accept the language for what it is, play the metre, and don’t keep making short pauses to indicate, “I’m thinking about what words to use here!” and the language comes alive. Actors are often told to fresh-mint the language, to speak it as the words came to them that very minute – and that’s true… to an extent. Fresh-minting Shakespeare’s words doesn’t require an actor to stop, start, hesitate, wait a beat, continue, pause some more. Tom Hiddleston, whose acting I otherwise enjoyed a lot, tended to be particularly guilty of this.
2) Shakespeare tends to have his stage directions hidden in plain sight – that is, he puts them in the lines. “Why look’st thou so fearfully and pale?” reminds the actor it’s addressed at that he should look scared, for instance, in case he’d forgotten. (And yes, that line is made up, but the plays are full of similar – though undoubtedly less clumsy – lines.) The lines in effect are prompts, both for the actors and for the audience – if something cannot be shown fully, speak it so the audience can imagine it. It’s one of the elements that, if done well, engages the audience more fully, asking them in effect to become part of the mis en scene: they’re props masters as well as stage designers, filling in the blanks with their imagination as prompted by the actors. The four Hollow Crown parts, as is so much TV, are done in a realistic style, showing what is shown, from armies (although, admittedly, the armies don’t have the CGIed numbers of the Battle of Helm’s Deep) to castles to ships on the ocean – yet the plays aren’t stripped of such lines, so we end up both seeing the armies, castles and ships while being told about them, rendering too many of Shakespeare’s lines redundant. To my mind, the productions should either have dared to veer from their somewhat restricting realism at times or they should have dared to cut the language to a much larger extent. As it is, it’s difficult not to come away from these films thinking, rather unfairly, “Gosh, that Shakespeare guy must’ve been paid by the word! You could’ve left out half that stuff!” This is especially apparent when it comes to the Chorus in Henry V, who quite literally tells the audience repeatedly, “We can’t show all of this, so I’m describing it for you to imagine!” while the images on the screen showed you exactly those things. They tried to make it work with some sleight of hand involving one of the peripheral characters, but the trick only served to highlight the redundancy of it all. Want to do a realistic made-for-TV Shakespeare? Accept that you’ve stripped a third of the lines of their purpose and cut them.
In spite of these two things, which probably bug me more because otherwise the productions were smart and well crafted, The Hollow Crown was fascinating for the impressive cast, but it mostly felt like proof of concept. If they look critically at what worked and what didn’t – which I hope they will – and learn from these things, whatever follows this historical quartet might end up quite glorious.
Have I mentioned before that Criterion is planning to ruin me financially? As a matter of fact, I have my suspicions that the company was created entirely for that purpose. This guy’s version of a honeytrap? A life-long subscription to Criterion. I just haven’t figured out yet what the incriminating pictures would look like – although now that I’ve brought it up, I sort of wish I hadn’t…
The thing about Criterion (often in combination with the A.V. Club or with DVD Verdict) is this: it gets me to watch stuff I wouldn’t even have heard of otherwise, like A Night To Remember(discussed here). Or…
Make Way For Tomorrow
… a film that, if I’d read a plot synopsis beforehand, I would probably have avoided, because it sounds like sheer melodrama (even more so in black and white): an elderly couple losing their house and ending up separated, each staying with another one of their less than understanding children, and their final day together before they’re split up permanently. Yet it’s turned out one of the most poignant and sad films I’ve seen in a while, and the sadness of its last half hour doesn’t bear a trace of melodrama. Don’t let the text panel at the beginning fool you into expecting a moralising story about how children should honour their parents – the film is astute about the difficult relationship between parents, especially of the elderly kind, and their grown children, and it doesn’t ignore that its two protagonists aren’t the easiest of people to be with. What elevates the film from a good, though probably not special film to something great is the final act, which doesn’t make any concessions to an audience expecting a happy ending – or at least a clear denunciation of the children and an easily understood lesson in morality along the lines of “Thou shalt…” and “Thou shalt not…”. Instead what we get is an emotional honesty that hurts by being entirely unvarnished.
Jane Eyre
“Cary Fukunaga… Didn’t he do that film about gang brutality in Mexico, Sin Nombre or something? Sounds like just the right guy for that Jane Eyre flick we’re doing!” I don’t know what the producers were thinking when they hired Fukunaga for their adaptation of Charlotte Brontë’s classic – but they were absolutely right to do so, as the result proves. Jane Eyre is difficult to do right, as there’s a major temptation to streamline it into a generic historical romance, Jane Austen with less humour and more madwoman in the attic. The casting of two misfits who supposedly aren’t conventionally attractive with Michael Fassbender and Mia Wachowski would have suggested an audience-pleasing approach, but Fukunaga, his cast and his crew, while cutting their source down to the essentials (you can’t afford not to, unless you’re doing a BBC-style miniseries) get to the heart of Brontë’s novel. The casting and acting work wonderfully, the script is respectful of the original novel without being beholden to it, and the cinematography is breathtakingly gorgeous at times. I’ve sometimes described films as the moving equivalents of paintings – you’d want to frame them and put them on the wall, but you don’t necessarily want to pay attention and listen to them. Fukunaga’s Jane Eyre is the sort of film you want your eyes to feast on but there’s plenty to listen and pay attention to as well. And for all its beauty, it’s not your conventional pretty costume drama, thank god.
Benny’s Video
I know that at least one occasional reader of this blog hated this film with a vengeance when she saw it years and years ago. Myself, I wouldn’t say I’m a fan of Haneke’s, but I’ve found all of his films intriguing. It’s easy to get pissed off at what the films often do at a first glance: there’s something both didactic and smug about their themes and tendencies, as if Haneke judges you for watching, say, Funny Games and dares you to switch it off, while at the same time wanting you to continue watching to validate its thesis. At the same time, there’s usually more going on underneath the surface, and Benny’s Video is a good example of this. Going in, I expected a film about a young man desensitised to violence by the videos he watches, and there is some of that – but at the same time the videos are partly a red herring, as especially his parents prove at least as compromised as him, and they don’t have the convenient excuse of “Slasher flicks made me do it!” The film has some rough edges and some of the director’s decisions are questionable – at times the characters and their actions are sketched too cursorily, turning ambiguity into muddledness – but even at this early point in his career Haneke is masterful at staging scenes clinical yet uncomfortable without pushing any gratuitous viscera in your face. Even when I end up angry at Haneke’s manipulations, he makes me think more than most directors do… so perhaps he’s not doing such a bad job at being didactic after all.
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 