Author: Matt

Swan on Swan

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So, tonight’s the night. Stars all gussied up, waiting to hear those coveted words: “And the winner is…” A show that is best enjoyed with vast amounts of alcohol and decadent nibbles. (A couple of years ago, my girlfriend and I pulled out the sofa in front of the TV and made it into a bed, slept until early in the morning and then had toast and salmon while watching the Oscars. Good times. Much better than the one where we tried to do a Vacherin fondue and the cheese both smelled and tasted putrescent.)

I haven’t seen all of the nominees, far from it. Colin Firth hasn’t stuttered his way into my heart yet (aww…), an ageing Dude hasn’t yet shown us what True Grit is, and I have no idea whether The Kids Are All Right or not. In the last two weeks I’ve watched two of the multiple nominees, though: 127 Hours and Black Swan. I enjoyed both films, but I wouldn’t necessarily call both of them ‘good’ films. They both are showcases for their directors, full of stylistic flourishes – but I found 127 Hours exhilarating, thrilling and moving, and I was able to take the film seriously throughout. Black Swan, for all its technical accomplishment, struck me as silly to the point of becoming laughable.

It’s an eminently well made, well acted, well shot, well edited film – but it’s a B movie dressed up to be Oscar bait. It’s a Brian De Palma thriller pretending to be a relevant statement about the artist’s responsibility to destroy herself in order to produce true art. And it’s cheesy as hell – but like a good cheeseburger, it is a yummy treat and should be acknowledged as such.

My main problem is this: if you’re going to make a film about someone going mad, with scenes that signal at every edit, “Is this real or is this only happening in her poor, psychotic imagination?”, you need to have a certain base reality. Natalie Portman’s Nina, though, is a few feathers short of a cygnet from the beginning, and even the scenes that are supposedly real are turned up to 11, producing a hyper-reality that is only halfway removed from the all out insanity that eventually grips Nina’s mind. And the turny-twisty revelation at the end might be believable (I’m not talking about realism but about what is credible in the world established by the film) in opera, but decidedly less so in this movie.

What doesn’t do the film any favours is the spectre of better films that haunts it: All About Eve and obviously Powell’s The Red Shoes. And no hot (though imaginary – oops, did I give it away? The film already does a good job of doing so…) bedroom scene straight out of Lesbian Spank Inferno III: The Birds can banish these ghosts completely. There’s even a hint of Buffy‘s Faith, although that is one ghost that makes Black Swan look good by comparison – Mila Kunis is both hotter and a more convincing actress than poor Eliza Dushku.

So what about that much praised performance by Natalie Portman? She definitely does a very good job, but she’s not always helped by the script, which keeps the character samey for the first half, varying between forte and fortissimo, and then escalates it for too short a time. Portman finally makes for a magnificent black swan, but it’s difficult to say how much the performance is bolstered by make-up, costume and CGI effects.

So, who will win? Hmm… From the films I’ve seen, I can’t really say much about the nominated actors, having seen too few of them in these specific performances. I also don’t think all that much of a “Best Picture” category, since the best films in different genres can hardly be compared. (Is Chinatown a better film than Raiders of the Lost Ark? Does it matter?)

I am rooting for L’Illusioniste, though, because its doomed, beautiful magic has given me one of the most enchanting cinematic experiences, not only this year, but ever. Pixar’s got enough of those little golden men on their mantlepiece, after all.

Exit Ghost (Writer)

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Roman Polanski’s The Ghost Writer (or The Ghost, if you’re in the UK) is one handsome looking piece of celluloid. It is clearly made by a director who knows his craft.

It is also a film rendered trite, silly and questionable by a woefully inadequate plot.

I remember the reviews at the time of the film’s release being fairly positive. No one called this a Chinatown or The Pianist, but critics described it as a smart political thriller. The problem with such a description is that The Ghost (I’m going to stay with the UK title, since that’s what it says on my DVD case) isn’t particularly smart and ends on a downright imbecile note, and it isn’t much of a political thriller. It gives the appearance of one, at least for its first half; dealing with a ghost writer called in to complete the memoirs of the British ex-Prime Minister after the former author and aide of the PM ends up with a lungful of salt water, it exudes Tony-Blair-Iraq-War-“Special Relationship” vibes all over. The cast is as handsome as the cinematography, with Pierce Brosnan a flattering doppelgänger of Phony Tony and Olivia Williams offering a take on Cherie Blair.

Thing is, though, and this is where people averse to spoilers should get the hell outta Dodge, Robert Harris pulls the same trick he did in Enigma: when it comes to resolving his thriller, the political takes the backseat to the private, in an ultimately cheap twist. Throughout the film, Ewan McGregor’s writer finds more and more evidence that former Prime Minister Adam Lang was pretty much acting on behalf of the CIA when he got his country into a problematic war in the Middle East. (Sound familiar?) However, the twist – delivered in an immensely hackneyed fashion, in a sentence formed by putting the first words of the memoir’s chapters together – reveals that it wasn’t Lang acting on behalf of the CIA, it was his wife.

Wow. That changes everything, doesn’t it? Scenario A: a British Prime Minister acts on behalf of the USA’s interests and gets his country involved in a dubious war because he’s employed by the CIA. Scenario B, post-twist: a British Prime Minister acts on behalf of the USA’s interests and gets his country involved in a dubious war because he’s manipulated by his wife who is employed by the CIA. All the difference in the world.

What doesn’t help the twist is that it’s delivered in a cod-Hitchcockian scene: very well shot, but utterly nonsensical, and ending with the author killed and the mystery a secret yet again. Except the ghost writer’s actions suggest that he’d already died of a massive stroke, because his last action (before getting run over off screen by Them) suggests that the character was already braindead. I have a fairly high tolerance for characters doing things that are less than bright, because I can believe that someone scared out of their wits may not be at their best intellect-wise, but Ewan McGregor’s character’s final action is that of a retarded cucumber. And what we’re left with is a film that I wouldn’t mind framing and hanging on my wall – as long as we can consign its plot to a government vault whence it will never re-emerge again.

Vale of Tears, HBO style

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My tastes probably tend towards the dark and tragic somewhat. For a while David Fincher’s Seven was my feelgood film (and I’m only exaggerating slightly). I’m not particularly into comedies, mainly because I don’t tend to find them funny – but I think that Shakespeare’s Richard III and John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi are both rich in humour, though of the blackest sort. I tend to label things as “bittersweet” that my Significant Other would call “depressing as hell”.

Imagine my surprise when we finished watching season 2 of Oz… and my reaction was pretty much this: Whoa. This series may be too negative, too pessimistic, too “everything is going to shit” for me. By comparison, the last two seasons of Six Feet Under were light tragicomedy, The Sopranos is Analyse This! and Deadwood is Paint My Wagon. In the season 2 finale, Oz gives us a pedophile ex-priest getting crucified by Arians, a Latino guard’s eyes getting stabbed (with disturbing visuals of the damage) and one inmate’s arms and legs being broken. (I can still hear the snapping sounds…) When an old Nigerian gets stabbed to death, it almost feels like a relief: Thank god, they could have put his arm down the garbage disposal and then fed him his own kidneys!

Oz is open to allegations of being gratuitous in its use of violence, at least in this episode – but then, I can think of scenes of Deadwood, Rome and indeed Six Feet Under (elevator bisection!) that are as visceral and gory. So what is it, if not the gruesome depiction of violence? Is it that the characters are by and large doing evil things? Hey, Al Swearengen could pull off as many as six evil things before breakfast, without breaking into a sweat. The Soprano mob was no bit more angelic than the inmates of Oswald Penitentiary. So, again: what is it that makes Oz less bearable?

I think it’s this: Oz is about a world where hope is mostly dead, and what hope is left is killed over and over again. All these other series, for the pain, suffering and evil acts they depict, they haven’t killed off hope. Goodness can exist and survive and sometimes even thrive. In Oz, the only way that goodness can avoid being trampled is by hiding away, making itself smaller. There are sparse moments of light, but they are so exceptional and all the characters seem to know it that you almost dismiss them as a mere distraction from the doom and gloom. And yes, there is humour, but most of the time it’s grim as hell. Even the world of The Wire is more hopeful. Consider that: The Wire is more hopeful than Oz.

Arguably, that’s the world the series depicts: its version of the American penal system is Hell, an institutional hell where goodness is weakness, and the weak get their arms and legs broken. But if a series is that relentlessly negative and nine out of ten times something good happening is just occasion for the characters to fall from a greater height, it becomes wearying. And it’s the first HBO series where I’m not exactly eager to get started on the next season as soon as possible.

Perhaps I need to recover with something lighter.

Time keeps on rippin’

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There’s one big problem with Red Riding – and for once I’m not talking about the absence of English subtitles. No, the problem is much more basic, and it’s this: the trilogy starts on the strongest film (1974), continues with what is basically a structural retreat (1980) and ends on a disappointment (1983). Since I haven’t read the novels the series is based on, I cannot tell whether this is a problem with the original material or to what extent the individual directors are to blame – in technical terms, the filmmaking and acting are strong throughout, but they’re put to increasingly lesser use.

I’ve read internauts describe Red Riding as Zodiac meets The Wire. The first part of that description, while limited, is relatively apt: the atmosphere of fear, the trip back to the ’70s and early ’80s, the way the protagonists – journalists, policemen – go mad trying to bring about justice. I can see where the comparison to The Wire comes from, just about; both series deal heavily with corruption. But that’s where the comparison ends, or rather, falls flat on its face. Corruption in The Wire is a cause and symptom of systemic rot, but it’s the system that’s fucked up. In Red Riding, corruption is basically due to Evil, Greed and Villainy(tm). And unlike in HBO’s Baltimore, the Channel 4 Yorkshire’s brand of corruption could conceivably be killed, literally, by putting a bullet in the heads of its proponents, who are vile, horrible figures that are barely human at all. Yes, there may be evil of this metaphysical sort, but in that case it’s doubtful that a shotgun blast to the cranium will make a difference in the long run.

1974 has the best understanding of its noir roots, telling the moody, dark tragedy of a deeply flawed man who, in the end, signs his own death warrant not because of right or wrong, or even because of petty ambition, but because of love – a love he barely understands himself, since he’s so used to getting laid just because of his youthful good looks. 1980, for all its strengths – especially its cast -, makes the mistake of telling almost exactly the same story. Flawed protagonist digs too deep into a conspiracy, ignores warnings and threats, finds out too much and gets killed. There are elements that are different, from protagonist Peter Hunter’s dogged belief in justice (where journalist Eddie Dunford in the first film was a romantic, Hunter is an idealist) to the theme of betrayal, but basically we get a very similar story, told with somewhat less conviction.

The problem with 1983 is that it doesn’t know which story to tell, so it half-heartedly starts three stories but is mostly busy tieing up loose threads. Thing is, when your story is about corruption, there is no such thing as loose threads. The system cannot be healed, not fully, the kindly but creepily ingratiating older man (whether it’s Chinatown‘s Noah Cross or Red Riding‘s Reverend Laws) is only symbolic for the deeply rooted rot, so blowing off his head doesn’t suddenly make everything all right – nor does the cheesy, slow-motion scene of one of our protagonists emerging with the cute-as-a-button blonde abductee girl from the Wolf’s underground lair. We’ve been watching a series of films that at least claimed to be about corruption, and the corrupt men in power are still where they were before… so yes, rescuing the girl is obviously not to be scoffed at (nor, if we admit to our reactionary urges, repeatedly shooting Reverend Laws with a shotgun), but what about the police force? What about the men toasting their crimes while they’re supposed to work for justice? You can provide an ending that is ambivalent – but 1983 isn’t ambivalent so much as amnesiac, forgetting completely what the red thread was going through these three films.

If anyone’s reading this and wondering whether they should check out the series, I would say: absolutely… as long as you stop after the first film, or lower your expectations and forget about thematic consistency. For all its Yorkshire accents and grey weather, 1983 is too Hollywood at heart to live up to the promise of the first film. And there’s no need to see 1980, since you’ve already seen that story, just better. If anything, watch the second and third film for the filmmaking craft that went into both – but accept that you’ve already seen the best, and from here on it’s all downwards.

P.S.: Admittedly, some of my liking of 1974 is due to the plaintive, moving music by Adrian Johnston (of Jude fame):

Johnston could be accused of having one theme only for the film, slightly varied again and again… but hey, it works for me!

Le retour du sous titre

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You know what’s almost as bad as not having any subtitles in a series of films filled by mumbling Yorkshiremen? (Note that in the meantime a friend’s lent me the German edition of Red Riding, which features subtitles along with the English audio track. Blessings upon their Teutonic heads!) Buying a DVD that advertises, right on the back, subtitles in every language under the sun, or at least in English, German, French, Russian and a fair number of other languages – but then the actual DVD bears little resemblance with what’s promised on the box.

Other than featuring Andrei Tarkovsky’s enigmatic Stalker, that is. I’ve been interested in the film for, oh, about 15 years now, ever since a friend mentioned to me that it’s one of his favourite movies. My interest was piqued even more when I played the Stalker games, although they’re based less on the movie than on the novel Roadside Picnic (and ironically, while the games are relatively thoughtful, they still look like an ’80s action movie next to Tarkovsky’s film). I ordered the DVD on Amazon.fr ages ago – precisely because the edition promised subtitles in lots of different languages – but only got around to seeing the film now.

First impression: man, my French sucks. I was never very good at it, but after letting what ability I had rust for 15 years I understood perhaps 40% of what was being said. (Or rather, 40% of the subtitles; I understood even less of the Russian dialogue, although I did understand “бутерброд”!)

Second impression: even if I understand fairly little and the film is extremely slow – there’s something eminently compelling to Tarkovsky’s style. Even more than Solaris (which suffered somewhat from being set in an outdated future, the fate of so much sci-fi) Stalker is hypnotic… and gorgeous to look at. It is atmospheric without going for any of the predictable tools of atmospheric film makers. The world of Stalker is ominous and eerie, yet at the same time naturalistic, creating an effect I haven’t seen in any other film. There’s something almost documentary in its visuals, yet there’s a dream-like quality – and it’s this seeming contradiction, this tension, that is utterly fascinating.

More than that, perhaps it helps to see the film in a language I don’t fully understand. Films that are put in the ‘art film’ box tend to have a certain portentous, somewhat affectated quality to them; as much as I like Bergman, for instance, a number of his films have a certain self-aware heaviness that can be more alienating than is necessary. Perhaps Tarkovsky’s work has this same quality if the viewer understands the dialogues enough to realise that they’re unintelligible – but my impression was that while the world and themes of the film are portentous, the characters feel real. Not 100% and not all the time, but they’re more than just vehicles for themes.

In the end, though, I can really only judge Stalker as a visual experience until I’ve rewatched it (after a French refresher, perhaps), and on those terms alone it’s well worth seeing. Even if there’s a relative scarcity of Ukranian mercenaries, radioactive mutants and frantic gunfights.

But if I get my hands on the people responsible for that mendacious DVD edition, je m’occupe de vos miches à la médiévale!

To the North – where we mumble as we bloody want!

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I’m torn on the subject of subtitles. Of course I like to know what’s being said in films, but often the sound mix favours things other than what is spoken, added to which not every actor enunciates like Sir Ian McKellen. (Though that would be funny; imagine The Wire‘s McNulty intoning “What the fuck did I do?” in that marvellously fruity RSC drawl.) But a) when I’m looking at subtitles, I’m not looking at the actors, and b) so many subtitles don’t discriminate – what is whispered and is supposed to be hardly intelligible is usually presented as crisply as what is spoken clearly. Subtitles – the great leveller of dialogue. (Still – vastly preferable to dubs in 99.9% of all cases, though that’s a different discussion.) There are times when I prefer not to understand everything to having every single word spelled out for me in big frickin’ letters.

And then comes along Red Riding, a Channel 4 produced trilogy of films about murders and police corruption. A beautifully produced series of movies, gorgeous to look at, feeling like someone had taken the best elements of David Fincher’s Zodiac and James Elroy’s L.A. Confidential and put them together. Gritty, dark, complex, compelling.

And then those Yorkshire coppers and criminals open their mouths… and out comes – what? Strange vowel sounds. The occasional half-strangled consonant. Words that sound like the H.P. Lovecraftian equivalent of English spoken through snaggle-toothed, monstrous teeth and lips. Honestly, I was under the impression that ‘oop North’ it was all “All right, luv!”, but I thought they still spoke a recognisable form of English!

And these films live off their dialogue. The intricate plots within plots, the conspiracies and betrayals, are conveyed by speech… and half the time I have no idea whether the characters are talking or expelling phlegm from their throats! To be fair, the second of the three films – 1980, following 1974 – is easier to understand, not least because the worst offenders against clear speech are killed horribly in the first film. But still – even for native speakers of the language, I doubt that understanding those Yorkshiremen and their dark, corrupt doings comes easily.

So, what better than to activate the subtitles. To understand what people are saying. Bliss… except the DVD doesn’t feature subtitles. I can choose between Dolby 2.0 and Dolby 5.1 – but subtitles? Something that would actually help me understand what is going on? Something that would allow me to answer questions of the “So, explain this to me: what the bleep is going on?” kind with some sort of authority. But no – I have a lovely sound system, and all the good it does to me in this case is this: it allows me to hear the unintelligible noises with perfect, hifi quality. Thanks a bunch.

Note to self: next time, check out the German DVD edition after all. Perhaps they’re kind and wish their foreign audiences to know what’s going on. Because, let’s face it: bugger those Southerners if they can’t be bothered to live in Yorkshire!

P.S.: There’s something wrong when Peter Mullan is more easily understood than half the rest of the cast.

No more gifts from Mr Soze

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By now most people will already have heard, but on 2 January 2011 Pete Postlethwaite died. He’s never been one of the big stars, but he was undoubtedly a great actor, with a presence and gravitas that made so many of his roles – even in bad films, and he definitely had those – worth watching. I first noticed him in The Usual Suspects, where he was the improbably named Kobayashi (with an even more improbable accent – which the dimwits at Empire magazine voted the ninth worst movie accent, completely failing to understand what was going on in the movie). Not many people could make the line “I may only castrate your nephew, Mr McManus” work as he did.

After that, he started popping up in a number of films (usually ones I caught a while after they’d been on at the cinema), and the moments he was on screen were usually among the best scenes in those films. He was a great Father Laurence in Baz Luhrman’s Romeo + Juliet, showing the kids how to do Shakespeare; and of course he was the heart at the centre of Brassed Off:

I didn’t necessarily go to see a film because of Postlethwaite, but I definitely enjoyed films more if he showed up. I will miss seeing his rough face, his gravelly voice. Pete Postlethwaite, films are poorer for having lost you.

You cannot be series!

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It’s that time of year. No, not Christmas (which this is too late for anyway), not the end of one year and the beginning of another.

It’s time for a new series.

Within a short period we finished Carnivale and got to the end of the current (well, for Swiss standards) seasons of Fringe, True Blood and House. (The latter, while still blessed with a great main actor, should slowly be put out of its misery, mind you.) So, what were we to watch next? Mad Men? The Shield? I, Claudius?

What we went for instead: the grandpappy of the HBO series that I’ve gone on about at great and boring length before. Not the grandmother, Sex & the City, because the moment I start watching that series you may want to look out the window for four guys on horses. No, I’m talking about the testosterone-riddled Oz. Looking at the setting and cast, it very much looks like an audition for later series such as The Sopranos (hi, Edie!) or The Wire (seriously, does Bodie only come with a single change of clothes that he takes along to every series he does?). Like many of these other series, Oz takes something that is relatively high concept and sees what it can do with it. In this case, the concept is: let’s do a high-security prison series that isn’t about trying to escape and that doesn’t outstay its welcome three episodes into season 1.

Make no mistake: this is no Prison Break. This isn’t pulpy escapism with the occasional white supremacist of imprisoned mobster thrown in for light relief. It’s grandly operatic drama with shower rapes, murder and ethical dilemmas. It’s also strangely Spike Lee; perhaps it’s the racial tensions that feel a bit like a ’90s update of Do the Right Thing, but mainly it’s the directorial flourishes, camera and lighting work, and the stylised elements – especially the Greek chorus-type soliloquies provided by Harold Perrineau Jr.’s character (with Waaaaaaalt! barely a twinkle in his fresh-from-Romeo & Juliet eyes).

It’s also these soliloquies that are most responsible for me not taking to the series as immediately as I took to a lot of other HBO fare. Again, like Spike Lee, though at his worst, the speeches are often too on-the-nose and too smugly enamoured of their cleverness (which they aren’t – often they belabour the obvious) that they feel like a 21-year old film student’s “Wouldn’t it be artistic if…?” at 2am in the morning after lots of cheap red wine and Foucault.

Having said that, while we cringe at some of the series’ moments, we’re in it for the duration – not least because I’ve got the complete set. The material’s definitely interesting, and I’m happy to give Oz a chance to drop its self-conscious ‘tude and become more confident with what it’s doing and how it’s doing it. Who knows, it may even get to join the pantheon of those HBO greats by the end of the final season.

Well, if it doesn’t, at least it isn’t stuck on constant reruns of the same episode, with only the faces and the names of syndromes changing, or eager to do the tired, old “Will they, won’t they?” spiel. I bet I’m not the only one who wishes, in the case of certain other series, that it were lupus. The terminal kind.