I have found a new addiction. It’s called Mark Kermode. And the last couple of days I’ve been bingeing on his reviews (either on the BBC website or on YouTube).
What makes a good reviewer? I think that most people, me included, tend to respond first to those critics who agree with them. I also respond to critics who take a film on its own terms, something that Roger Ebert ten years ago (less so now, as far as I’m concerned) used to be brilliant at. A good critic should be able to acknowledge that in terms of what it achieves a brilliantly made genre piece (say, Raiders of the Lost Ark) is up there with the best of cinema, even if it may not be about ‘important’ things.
The best critics are the ones whose reviews you may disagree with completely, but that a) show you that the critic cares about the medium they’re writing about, b) make you think (and about something other than, “What’s this guy going on about?!”) and c) know how to write. Kermode hits all three of these, and trust me, there are a couple of reviews where my take on the film is practically 180° in the other direction. Fair warning, though: he can be smug and he is at times somewhat in love with his jokes – but he also seems self-aware enough to laugh about himself.
Anyway, enough from me. Here are two recent(ish) reviews by Mr Kermode that I liked a lot – enjoy!
It’s fascinating, and not a little unsettling, how little certain things about warfare seem to have changed. In the almost 100 years since the First World War, you’d think that soldiery has become something entirely different – that stealth bombers, ‘smart guns’ and UAVs would be worlds away from the gruelling trench warfare, mustard gas attacks and biplanes of the early 20th century.
There obviously are big differences between the wartime experience of a soldier in the trenches trenches near the Somne and that of a Marine deployed in Afghanistan in recent years. The wars can barely be compared. And yet, after watching Restrepo (by Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger) two things seem to be very much the same: the powerlessness while you’re under fire, and the tedium in between fights. In spite of PSPs and other distractions, the lulls between one engagement and the next seem to be as much of an enemy as the guys on the other side armed with AK-74s. It’s the moments when you become painfully aware of the situation, of the guy who was shot in the neck the other day, who used to be a friend and now is a body. It’s those moments when the overpowered gun you’ve got that’s so good at tearing apart the bad guys is of no use whatsoever.
Watching Restrepo it’s difficult not to think of Generation Kill although the soldiers in the HBO miniseries keep saying how Afghanistan, now, that was a good deployment. None of that Iraqi quagmire shit. However, for all its realistic look and feel, its journalistic credentials, Generation Kill is storytelling in a way that Restrepo isn’t. The former is structured in a way that makes it more immediately watchable and relatable. You care about Sgt. Colbert and Cpl. Person, about Lt. Fick and Doc Bryan, in ways that you don’t immediately about the Platoon depicted in the documentary. Hetherington and Junger didn’t over-narrativise their subjects, which is frustrating for the audience: there are times when Restrepo feels unstructured, and the tedium that the solders experience does creep in. It’s exactly this, though, that gives the scenes when an operation goes wrong and US soldiers get killed all the more chilling. When you watch one of the men realise that one of his friends has died and break out in loud wails unexpected from a guy who before had been much closer to the cliché of an all-American grunt.
It’s rare to get a depiction of men at war as devoid of judgment as Hetherington and Junger’s. Whether factual, facts-based, fictionalised or outright fictional, most writers and film makers dealing with war have certain attitudes towards the soldiers they depict. I haven’t seen many films, though, that leave it up to the audience to make up its own mind as much as Restrepo. It’s irritating, but it’s also liberating; I don’t mind documentaries taking a clear stand, as long as the bias is always overt, but Restrepo does that rare thing: it reports. It doesn’t opine. Which doesn’t mean that the film is artless – the craft of the film is evident – but it doesn’t use its art to tell the audience how to feel towards what it’s showing. It’s a rare document that deserves to be watched and remembered… even if it didn’t get the Oscar. And much more so because it is one of the last works of one of its authors.
Taken fromVimeo: “‘Diary’ is a highly personal and experimental film that expresses the subjective experience of my work, and was made as an attempt to locate myself after ten years of reporting. It’s a kaleidoscope of images that link our western reality to the seemingly distant worlds we see in the media.
Camera + Directed by Tim Hetherington Edit + Sound design by Magali Charrier 19′ 08 / 2010″
I lost my nouvelle vague virginity to Truffaut’s Jules et Jim, and boy, was it a fantastic first time. After seeing that film, I was excited for the medium of film. Never mind that the film was over 40 years old at that time, I’d seen something that in its cinematic language was radical and fresh and lightyears away from tropes as old as the mountains. Probably some of that was a cinematophile’s crush on a young Jeanne Moreau (and who better to have a crush on than her?), but a lot of it was Truffaut’s way of making the material become incandescent through making it new. Even now, just thinking about the film makes me want to rewatch it – and if I could go back to being a teenager, be assured that a Jules et Jim poster would adorn my bedroom wall.
In the meantime I’ve seen a couple of films that are attributed, more or less loosely, to the nouvelle vague, from precursors like Bob le Flambeur and Ascenseur pour l’échafaud, to Truffaut’s Les 400 coups and Tirez sur le pianiste. Yes, Truffaut’s a constant, mainly because I was hoping to find something that would leave me as amazed as his seminal love triangle. Bob didn’t do much for me (for a heist film it’s disappointingly tame and lacking in memorable scenes – or perhaps I’m just too much into Soderbergh and compare every heist flick to Ocean’s 11), and both Truffauts mentioned above were good enough though somewhat underwhelming. Ascenseur, Malle’s first feature, worked well enough, but that is due in no small part to Miles Davis’ soundtrack, bringing out the sadness beneath the cool, and to Jeanne Moreau walking Paris in the rain for what feels like an eternity.
While nothing had lived up to that first time, I thought I was ready to graduate to Jean-Luc Godard. The signs were in my favour: here’s a French director whose name recalls both my mother’s maiden name (don’t ask me why this would be a good sign, but I thought it was) and my favourite Starfleet captain. (Somehow I think that if Godard had founded a society, it would have had a big sign at the entrance: “No geeks!”) It had gorgeous black and white photography and a cute-in-that-French-way-although-she’s-American Jean Seberg.
Here’s an admission: if a film’s main character is a dick, I will have to work twice as hard to like it. If the protagonist is a sexist dick, it becomes three times as hard. And if he’s behaving like an adolescent ass, four times.
Jean-Paul Belmondo’s Michel in A bout de souffle is all of that. He’s full of himself, he’s a blowhard, he’s a revolutionary in his head but a reactionary in his gut. He’s a git with an inflated sense of entitlement. In effect, in all but physical age he’s a teenager. Which would be okay, but the film seems to buy into him completely. The film seems to think that Michel is cool, revolutionary, a breath of fresh air. Cocky arrogance, that’s okay, that I can deal with – but Godard’s film seems so infatuated with its central character it becomes difficult for me not to transfer my intense, immediate dislike for him to A bout de souffle.
Stylistically Godard’s movie is interesting, and there are individual scenes that work well for me. All in all, I think I would have loved it as a 10-minute short. As a 90-minute feature, though, it feels at least two hours too long. Thing is, you can find a number of parallels between Truffaut’s film and Godard’s, and between its central characters. Catherine and Michel are both amoral, they’re both self-centred, and they get what they want at the expense of others. They’re both willful and capricious and narcissistic. They’re both adolescents in their emotions and actions, and both films ask us – at least up to a point – to forgive their actions. With one big difference: for everything horrible she inflics on the two men in her life, I can forgive Catherine. Michel, on the other hand, I want to punch in the nose, repeatedly.
I guess it’s like Vincent Vega said: “My theory is that when it comes to important subjects, there’s only two ways a person can answer. For example, there’s two kinds of people in this world, Elvis people and Beatles people. Now Beatles people can like Elvis. And Elvis people can like the Beatles. But nobody likes them both equally. Somewhere you have to make a choice. And that choice tells me who you are.”
Nothing to do with films, TV series, video games or books… but as a geek I have to say I love this recent XKCD comic:
Reminds me of one of my favourite bits in Michael Ende’s Momo… and I always thought that Google Earth would be a thousand times as cool as it already is if you could zoom in to where you are and see a little version of yourself looking at Google Earth, zooming in on himself.
P.S.: Don’t worry – actual original thought (well, sort of) coming again on Eagles on Pogo Sticks very soon!
P.S.: If you have no idea what this is about, then do yourself a favour: get The Wire. Watch all of it. And then complain to me because you got your heart broken by Bubbles, Wallace, D’Angelo, Randy, Dukie, Bodie etc.
The British have this knack. They take topics and plots that have a pronounced risk of ending up as high kitsch and bathos, and they make them work. Case in point: The King’s Speech. A predictable plot riddled with tired old tropes – a teacher and his reluctant student, a friendship across the classes, an eleventh-hour crisis, protagonists overcoming adversity and pulling off a climactic challenge to prove their worth to themselves and to others, growing in the process. We’ve seen these beats dozens of times.
In the hands of Hollywood, so far so nauseatingly familiar. But the Brits tend to add gentle self-mockery and ambivalence, two elements that are often absent in American treatments* of the same story. Perhaps it comes with being an old nation and losing an empire (“Now where did I put India?”). Whatever it is, it is my impression that English directors, writers and actors more consistently take the heroic and find the flawed, ridiculous and deeply human in it. Colin Firth’s Albert (later George VI – that’s twice the George that Mr. Speaks-to-Trees was!) is a figure of pity, first and foremost, not a hero in any conventional sense, yet the pity is tempered by the script’s wit and its sharp dialogues, played with relish by Firth and his Oz counterpart Geoffrey Rush.
That ambivalence more common to British films is also evident in The King’s Speech. Yes, the final scene of the film, the titular speech at the onset of the Second World War, is shown to give hope and unity to a kingdom in dire need of these things, but an encouraging regal speech notwithstanding, the country is still on the brink of a war that will kill millions. The victory is not of the fist-pumping, Independence Day kind – it is momentary and does not ignore the fact of the coming losses.
It’s the irony and ambivalence of the film, combined with the level of craft on display (much of the acting is quite wonderful), that make the film so enjoyable. They also cover the fact that The King’s Speech, for all its self-mockery, ambivalence and Firthery, is quite conservative, like so many vehicles for Imperial nostalgia. The eponymous King is taken down a peg or two by an Australian speech therapist with little respect for class or the monarchy, but he is elevated by the plot’s trajectory at the same time. The gentle subversion personified by Rush’s Lionel Logue in the end serves to reinforce the conservative structures. “It’s good and right that we have a king,” the film seens to propose, “as long as he pulls himself together and doesn’t forget he is human.”
The problem with this is that it buys into the notion that things were better in the past, that traditions have innate value and should be preserved, if at the cost of a few minor concessions to modernity. Especially when it comes to the monarchy, the film has an underlying hankering for the Good King. Its irony finally has an insidious side, because it emphasises that what is needed to overcome a crisis is a better king but not, heavens save us, a discussion about whether we need a king in the first place.
To get back to where I started: I enjoyed The King’s Speech a lot and I admire the acting craft on display. I also enjoy the way the Brits pull off nostalgia and pathos with a touch of self-mockery and ambivalence but I am wondering whether these result in questionable ‘eternal’ truths being propped up and reactionary values made palatable. Irony is the spoonful of sugar perhaps. Or perhaps I’m worried about the credibility of my wannabe neo-Marxist credentials crumbling under the stealth attack of Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush being witty, touching and altogether entertaining. What’s an Elgar-loving pinko liberal to do?
*Not always, mind you. For instance, people rarely remember that the original Rocky ends with the titular hero’s defeat.
I’m not a big fan of Heavy Metal. Perhaps it’s that I’ve never had the hair to go with headbanging. Perhaps it’s that I dislike the sexism that often seems to go with it. Perhaps it’s simply that I was raised on Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf and that has influenced my entire musical development. I’ve always been more into borderline pretentious psychedelic prog rock, if anything, and then lots of indie singer/songwriter stuff than the leather-and-studs bridgade. I enjoyed This Is Spinal Tap, but half the jokes probably went straight over my head. Other than Ozzie, I’m not sure I could pick any of the greats of Metal out of a police line-up.
Imagine my surprise, then, when I started playing Tim Shafer’s Brütal Legend (savour that umlaut!) – and immediately fell in love with the world and atmosphere of the game.
Tim Shafer could be called the Tim Burton of the videogame world – if you disregard Burton’s creative stagnation, his repetitiveness and his increasingly mannered goth shtik. His games are strong on character, world building and storytelling, to the point where the gameplay becomes secondary. He’s the guy who spliced together Casablanca and the Mexican Day of the Dead and who created a summer camp for the psychic. And he’s the mastermind behind Brütal Legend, a game that takes as its inspiration Heavy Metal – not only the music, but the aesthetic, the ethos, the feel of it all (minus the “Smell the Glove” misogyny, mind you). Its world is designed to look like all the Metal album covers you can imagine, turned up to 11. It’s inhabited by laser-eyed black panthers and mastodons with gleaming metal tusks. It should be tacky – but instead it pulls off its loving hommage with style, with a little help from Jack Black. I mean, how can you not warm immediately to a game featuring lines such as these:
– Ever feel like you were born in the wrong time – like you should have been born earlier, when the music was… real? – Like the seventies? – No. Earlier… like the early seventies.
What is perhaps most amazing is that in a game featuring KISS-faced Amazons, phony big-haired rock stars (even the guys from Spinal Tap would find General Lionwhyte embarrassing – and yes, he’s one of the game’s villains) and a very familiar-looking Guardian of Metal, Shafer manages to pull off a story that takes turns being funny, thrilling and finally poignant. It’s difficult not to wipe away a manly Metal tear at the game’s ending. In a medium that’s full of teenage male wish fulfillment gone wrong (or just stale), that’s a rare gift.
Cinema loves end-of-the-world tales – but then, who doesn’t? Who doesn’t get a big dose of endorphins out of watching zombie hordes ravaging mankind, asteroids punching holes through our planet, or killer chickens devouring us in revenge for kazillions of McNuggets? (Apparently we taste especially good with secret sauce.)
Obviously there’s a certain potency in telling stories of the end of the world that’s difficult to come by when what’s at stake is much smaller. End of your village? Your high school? Your local Tesco’s? Doesn’t quite pack the same punch as the potential end of everyone you ever loved, hated, sat next to in maths classes, bought frozen peas from.
The main problem with Fernando Mereilles’ Blindness is that it doesn’t just want to tell a story about an almost-apocalypse. It wants to have meaning beyond that generated by its story and the plight of its characters. It wants to be symbolic, too, and literary, which isn’t surprising as the film is based on a novel by Portuguese Nobel Laureate José Saramago. Unfortunately the story doesn’t carry the weight of some deeper, symbolic meaning. As a tale of a Very Special Apocalypse it works well enough, in a depressing Lars von Triery way, but it fails to live up to its own ambitions to such an extent, it risks turning the audience against itself. I’m always willing to feel empathy for fictional characters, like the bleeding heart liberal literature lover that I am, but I found myself getting annoyed with the way the film managed to escalate the sheer horridness of its scenario over and over again, mistaking misery for depth.
It’s a shame, because there’s so much skill in almost every facet of the film. It’s beautifully shot, the acting is largely impecable, the editing works. Yet the flawed apocalypse extravaganza that is Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later finally works better as a film, mainly because it tries to be less and succeeds to be more. Mereilles’ film, undoubtedly the more ambitious of the two movies, fails to live up to what it so obviously tries to be, it’s difficult to see it as anything other than a noble failure, the emphasis being on the latter.
P.S.: Having said that, I’m greatly looking forward to the director’s future work. After City of God and The Constant Gardener, Mereilles would have to turn out the equivalent of Lady in the Water or The Village for me to start thinking that the previous displays of his talent were mere flukes. Even one of his failures is vastly more interesting viewing than a successful Brett Ratner flick.
P.P.S.: Blindness was adapted for the screen by Canadian author/director/actor Don McKellar (who also has a small part in the film). For people looking for an interesting end-of-the-world film that succeeds better, perhaps for trying less hard, check out his Last Night, the sort of apocalypse movie that only the Canadians could pull off.
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 