Movies

Artifice, authenticity, affectation

MattLeave a comment

If there’s one word I wouldn’t mind seeing banned from use for the next, hmm, fifty years, it’s this one: authenticity. Yup, that’s the one, the word I’ve come to dislike as much as its closeish relative, the phrase “Based on a true story!” What’s my beef with it? It’s either phony, self-aggrandising or both. A certain doddering old father once told his son, “To thine own self be true,” and as a motto it sounds quite nice, except – I think this notion of an “own self” to which you should be true is silly. Do something because you want to do it, because you think it’s right to do it – but talking about an authentic self that you should honour? That’s fine, as long as your “own self” is one of the good guys – but what if you consider your authentic self to be that of a xenophobic bastard who hates those bloody foreigners? Does the notion of authenticity* ennoble your arseyness? People’s identities, their characteristics, are fluid, and pretending that there’s a ‘real you’ inside you that’s a yardstick for all your actions is romanticised claptrap at best, disingenuous bullshit at worst.

If you’re still reading after this rant, you’re probably wondering: why does a geek blogger who usually writes about movies, games, books and comics post a diatribe against the word “authenticity”? Doesn’t he have first-person shooters to play and pretentious wankery to write about them afterwards? Bear with me, gentle reader – relevance (of some sort) is just around the corner. It’s basically this: the overuse of the A word extends to art critics and the culture pages of newspapers and magazines. “Authenticity” is used as a word of praise for movies, when usually writers use it as a way of making their “it’s, like, for real, man!” comments sound sophisticated. Let’s be frank: authenticity in art – including any art form that’s primarily about narrative fiction – is an effect. It’s an artifice. It’s like a Photoshop filter: turn up the authenticity to 10, eh? It’s the fashionable, and often trite and superficial, name given to works that used to be described as being in the style of realism or naturalism. It’s an author’s conscious choice on how to present their material. It’s a style, an artifice, pretending not to be one.

So, what’s brought on this tirade? Probably the fact that I recently re-watched Drive, a film I greatly enjoyed the first time and downright loved the second time. How does it tie into this extended waffle on authenticity? Pretty much by eschewing the Authenticity Effect altogether. Nicholas Winding Refn uses a decidedly theatrical style – perhaps not as much as in his earlier film, Bronson, but Drive is still markedly focused on its own artifice, in its visuals, its central performance, its choice of music. The director’s hand is visible throughout. Refn is clearly not interested in the pretense of reality – yet his film, for all its artifice, resonates with me. While I’m watching it, the Driver feels real to me – not in spite of the artifice but because of Refn’s immense skill at using artifice as one of the colours on his palette.

Art, at its best, doesn’t try to replicate the look of reality in a facile way. It embraces its own stylisedness, using whatever style is most suited to achieving a certain effect – and yes, that effect can be realism or naturalism… but neither of those automatically makes a film more authentic, unless our understanding of authenticity is hopelessly naive. “Based on a true story” doesn’t make that story more real, documentary visuals don’t render the subject more authentic. After all, what we’re looking at here is art, and the moment art denies its own artifice, it becomes schizophrenic or shallow. If art wants to be true to its own self, then it is most authentic when it accepts its own dependence on skilled, intelligent, passionate artifice.

*I seem to dislike the word so much I keep spelling it as “authenticify”… To mine own self spell true, eh?

P.S.: Having grown up in the ’80s, the aesthetics of Drive may very well feel more ‘real’ to me, because that’s what my childhood, filtered through TV, looked and sounded like.

July Variety Pack (1)

MattLeave a comment

I’ve been away for work and needed to recover from my lack of sleep, which I hope excuses the lack of recent updates. I’m back now, though, with a healthy list of films etc. to blog about. To start off with, here’s Wot I Watched On My Telly Recently. (More Variety Packs may follow later this month!)

Lourdes

An Austrian-German-French co-production about pilgrims and/or tourists visiting Lourdes looking for miracles – probably doesn’t sound particularly appealing to most, does it? The film is definitely not for everyone, but it’s well worth checking out nevertheless, deftly mixing different themes and genres, from satire to psychological drama to a critique of the faith industry and of petty sanctimoniousness, while always feeling of one piece. Lourdes is also smart in that it doesn’t rely in any way on the viewer’s own beliefs (or lack thereof), and the performances are subtle and effective throughout. It’s the kind of film, though, where the truly interesting things go on inside the characters and remain implicit to the viewer.

A Night To Remember

Ah, Criterion — mon semblable, — mon frère! I’ve rarely gone wrong with Criterion DVDs, and the 1958 precursor to James Cameron’s Titanic didn’t disappoint either. The film makes an interesting counter-point to Cameron’s iceberg extravaganza; taking a disaster that lends itself to melodrama of the worst kind (which Titanic – the 1997 film, not the ship – indulged in some scenes, avoided in others), A Night To Remember is the more restrained, more British (for want of a better word) film, though it is exactly this restraint that makes it all the more devastating. It’s as impossible to avoid dramatic irony in filming the sinking of the Titanic as it is when referring to Mr. Lincoln’s night at the theatre, but the film doesn’t overplay its hand, nor does it go for a simplistic, smug class warfare view of 1st class passengers as parasites and steerage passengers as accented, saintly victims. Also, considering the film’s age, its effectiveness in depicting the disaster is in no way lessened by the datedness of its effects, which speaks for the quality of the directing, acting and script.

Che

I used to be a big fan of Steven Soderbergh. Starting with Out of Sight (still by far the best Elmore Leonard adaptation in my opinion, and the best use of Jennifer Lopez), I enjoyed almost every single one of his films, in terms of craft and storytelling. Yes, there were exceptions – Full Frontal comes to mind – but even slight works such as Ocean’s Eleven were examples of a director pretty much at the top of his craft. Then, probably around Ocean’s Twelve, something changed. I still liked the second cinematic méringue for its French New Wave experimental frothiness, but I started to get the impression that Soderbergh was mainly doing these films to scratch some private itch, and whenever he became aware of the audience and its wants and needs, as with Ocean’s Thirteen, there was something calculating and cynical about the films. Soderbergh, who’d always led with his intellect, seemed to have lost what heart there was in his films. I haven’t yet seen his most recent work, but Che, his two-parter about some guy on a t-shirt, failed to grab me, nor did it excite, educate, intrigue or irritate me in any way beyond the vague irritation that this Soderbergh guy used to have something to say.

Both parts of Che are beautifully shot, well acted and examples of great craftsmanship, but especially part 1 so assiduously avoids any suspicion of biopic clichés that it ends up a handsome but strangely empty variation on the theme of “What I did on my holidays”: And then Guevara went there. And then this member of his band of rebels died of a cough. And then that outpost was taken. Part 1 picks up towards the end, and part 2 benefits from the story’s more dramatic angle – if the first film is about Che’s (military) rise, the second depicts his slow, drawn-out fall – but just a bit more character, just a smidgen of story would have helped. As it is, the films feel strangely like a documentary shot by a cinematographer who wasn’t interested in much beyond how his film looks. You can do unconventional biopics and avoid the trap of facile psychoanalysis without stripping a film of personality altogether, Steven, m’kay?

Not your average assembly line heroes

Matt1 Comment

As a nerd/geek since childhood, I’m a bit of an odd duck. I never read superhero comics as a kid. Asterix, yes, as well as Tintin, and for a while there I also read some of the Disney stuff, but never very avidly. The caped crusaders, men of steel, the uncanny mutants and amazing arachnid-boys, though? Nope. I was never particularly interested. Yes, I watched the occasional superhero movie and am still a fan of Burton’s Batman Returns and Nolan’s takes on the dark’n’depressed knight, I did catch most of the X-Men, Spiderman and Iron Man films at the cinema, but I never felt all that engaged. At their best they were a fun way of spending two hours, at their worst they were forgettable but had some cool special effects, but I didn’t get what would make people go and buy regular instalments of their favourite heroes’ comic series.

My first superhero comics were the more revisionist ones, Moore’s Watchmen, Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns (which I can safely say I didn’t like), later Mark Millar’s Superman: Red Son, all of which riffing to some extent on the comics that had gone before, and that I was aware of in a second-hand, “I’ve read about these…” way. The traditional superheroics, though? I wasn’t interested – unless they were written by someone whose writing I really liked. When Joss Whedon did his run on Astonishing X-Men, I bought the trade paperbacks and greatly enjoyed them, but I always put that down to Whedon doing his thing, not to anything intrinsic to comic book heroes. Same with Brian K. Vaughan’s Runaways, which reminded me a lot of Whedon’s TV work. (Ironically, I’m not a big fan of Whedon’s run on Runaways, which should have been a perfect fit but the writing was unengaging.)

What I liked about these especially – Whedon’s X-Men and Vaughan’s Runaways – was that they had characters who weren’t defined by their powers or gadgets. These were characters I’d want to spend time with even if they weren’t saving the world, beating up baddies or fighting their nemeses. And, more than that, they were about dysfunctional (surrogate) families, that old old Tolstoyan chestnut… Families that brought out the best and the worst in each other. Just like those other families in Whedon’s work, the Scoobie Gang, the crew of Serenity, even the team of Angel Investigations.

I didn’t realise that at their best, the superhero comics (at least Marvel – I have to say, I don’t know DC particularly well, although Vertigo’s Sandman is also about a dysfunctional family, of course) are exactly about that. They’re not about the BIFFs, the ZINGs and the POWs, they’re not about being able to punch someone through a mountain, climbing up vertical surfaces like a human spider or running at supersonic speed. And that’s exactly where Joss Whedon’s The Avengers took me completely by surprise. I went in thinking, “Well, I liked Iron Man, I like Mark Ruffalo and Jeremy Renner, and Scarlett Johansson is relatively easy on the eye. Perhaps Whedon will make this work.” I thought I’d probably not give a toss about Captain America (how can I, as a European pinko liberal commie of the worst kind?) or Thor (seriously, that outfit? the hammer?) or the Hulk (green, grotesque, always angry – Mr Hyde’s boring descendant, right?).

And yet, I sat in that cinema giggling with glee, whooping with joy, cheering at the heroic poses, applauding as an enormous motherfucking space serpent thing was punched in the face and went down! For the first time I realised what a joyous, potent blend these superheroics could be, and it was because Whedon made me care. I still don’t particularly need to go and watch Captain America or Thor (probably I will if it’s on TV, but I won’t go out and buy the DVDs), but watching the film’s heroes become a family, warts and all, overcoming their flaws and dysfunctions, and kicking some intergalactic ass? I get a big, goofy grin just remembering the film.

Some of my favourite bits:

  • Colour me green with surprise, but I loved the Hulk in this. More than that, I loved Ruffalo’s Banner and his Hulk. Poignant one moment, laugh-out-funny the next. “Puny god”, indeed!
  • Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury wasn’t a showy role, it didn’t go for the SLJ effect (which by now has become as much of a cliché as Al Pacino’s “Hooah!” persona), but I loved the ambivalence. Yes, he’s a good guy, but he’s primarily a master manipulator. Usually these films reserve the manipulativeness for the bad guys.
  • Captain America’s joy when he finally got a cultural reference!
  • The confrontation between Loki and Black Widow. In so many ways.
  • Naked Bruce Banner and Harry Dean Stanton’s caretaker, accepting that this guy just happens to turn into a huge green monster occasionally. No big thing.
  • The moment when the Avengers finally, well, assemble. The moment is cheesy, glorious and 100% earned.

I came out of that cinema thinking, “I want to watch that film again. And again. And again. And possibly send Joss Whedon, his cast and his crew all the Swiss chocolate I can get my hands on.” I’d be lying if I said the film was perfect – it suffers from a beginning that is somewhat generic and unengaging – but I’ll say it again: The Avengers made me whoop with joy. It made me cheer at the heroic poses. This is no “good enough for its genre” flick, it’s no “well, there’ll be explosions, right?” In some ways it’s the polar opposite of Nolan’s Batman films – as good (or even better?), but doing something entirely different. I’ve seen and read the reinventions of the super hero genre. I’ve seen the revisionist takes. Only now have I seen what these stories can be, in their original form.

And I like it.

P.S.: I also like Film Crit Hulk’s take on The Avengers. The guy’s all-caps Hulk spiel takes some getting used to, and I understand that some people give up, but the guy writes well and makes intelligent points, and he cares about this stuff. Well worth checking out.

Game on, John

MattLeave a comment

I’m sorry, this isn’t the promised Breaking Bad post yet – I got started on that one, but life (and exhaustion) got in the way even of mediocre writing. So, to distract you, here’s something shiny! (To my occasional guest blogger: I have an inkling that this may not be your kind of film – but hey, the trailer features John C. Reilly!)

So, for those of you whose childhood was sadly devoid of “Insert Coin” and “Press Button to Continue”, and whose dreams aren’t haunted by the WAKA-WAKA-WAKA of Pacman’s eating disorders, here’s another trailer, which is a good bit and has Christoph Waltz in it.

Empathological behaviour

Matt1 Comment

On most message boards, forums and online communities that I’m a part of (all… let’s see… 3 1/2 of them) I probably post most frequently in threads relating to films, TV series, novels, plays, comics and other media that are largely dedicated to storytelling, characterisation and the like. One recent discussion I took part in was about the HBO series Game of Thrones, and while many of the topics were predictable (OMG sexposition! Just how much does Tyrion rule? Is there such a thing as posting that animated GIF of Joffrey being slapped too often?), one caught me by surprise: a poster criticised that there’s barely anyone in the series to root for.

The reason for my surprise was this: I realised that ‘rooting for someone’ has never been a measure of whether I enjoy a story or not. Of course I root for the Indiana Joneses and John McClanes, the Bastian Balthasar Buxes and… I’m actually finding it difficult to come up with more examples, which is quite telling. Some kinds of stories necessitate a ‘good guy’ to root for, but this isn’t anything I’m looking for in storytelling. On the other hand, what I am looking for is the potential to empathise with the characters whose lives I’m following. And that’s something I find quite easy – you could go so far as to say that I’m a bit of an ’empathy whore’. I’ve never really rooted for Tony Soprano, Richard III, even a Darth Vader – or, for that matter, a Cersei Lannister, not exactly one of the nicer characters in a series that isn’t exactly famous for its many loveable protagonists.

It’s one of the reasons why I’ve greatly enjoyed series whose protagonists do questionable, petty, selfish things all the time, from the characters in Six Feet Under (as the series goes on, Nate becomes more and more selfish in his actions, yet that never makes me care about him any less), to the shades-of-grey cast of any season of The Wire (yes, I even care about Rawls, while fully acknowledging what a dick he is) to the moral monsters of The Sopranos. Which is also why the flip-side of rooting for a fictional character is something I very rarely do – I often read about other forumites wanting this or that character to die horribly, to get knifed in the back or thrown off a cliff or get a bullet in his head, which I just don’t get. I don’t get the vehemence and sadism with which these things are often formulated (and yes, I do understand that wishing death on a fictional character is not the same as wanting a real person to die), but more than that, whether a character is morally reprehensible or not doesn’t have anything to do with whether I want to continue watching them. Al Swearengen is a Machiavellian monster, happy to kill, or have killed, anyone who stands in the way of his plans, yet I can think of few characters who are as enjoyable to watch as him. Tony Soprano made The Sopranos must-watch TV for six seasons, even in the worst episodes. Even generally likeable characters like The Wire‘s Bodie or Rome‘s Titus Pullo do horrible, heinous things. It’s not just that I don’t get why or how the moralities of their actions would influence my wanting to watch them: it’s that their flaws, their ambiguity, often make them more interesting characters for me. (Obviously my enjoyment of the characters also has a lot to do with how they’re written and acted – I want to watch an Al Swearengen at least as much because of Ian McShane’s performance as because he’s a fascinating, complex character, and the same’s definitely true for Breaking Bad‘s Walt White and the fantastic acting by Bryan Cranston.)

However, there are characters – very few, but they exist – that don’t evoke any empathy on my part. There are some that I dislike so much I wouldn’t mind something horrible happening to them. I’ll admit it right here and now: every time I watch One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, I hope that McMurphy will succeed in strangling Nurse Ratched to death this time round. I guess that while I’m a bleeding heart of the worst kind when it comes to fictional characters as well, there’s still a tiny little reactionary inside me wanting to get out and flip the switch.

Dark is L.A. and full of terrors

MattLeave a comment

When it comes to creating virtual worlds, Rockstar may just be the true heir of Origin Systems. Whether it’s the Liberty City of Grand Theft Auto 3 or GTA4, the fictionalised versions of Los Angeles, San Francisco and Las Vegas in GTA San Andreas, the boarding school and small town of Bully or the dying Old West of Red Dead Redemption, in my opinion Rockstar’s greatest creation to date.

L.A. Noire‘s sun-drenched yet crime-riddled 1950s Los Angeles is both an amazing feat and, quite possibly, Rockstar’s greatest wasted opportunity. It’s an impressive recreation, looking just like the movies, from Chinatown to L.A. Confidential – but where I enjoyed exploring San Fierro, New Austin and Liberty City, I never felt at home in this noirish L.A. In Rockstar’s other games, I’d forgo all automated options of getting around the place, I’d drive everywhere myself, just because I enjoyed hanging around in these cities. The games and their locations, they were one and the same. In L.A. Noire, though, I quickly started to ask my partner to do all the driving. In spite of the game’s title the place itself, Los Angeles, is a mere backdrop – and as it’s rarely integrated well into the game, it feels like an elaborate loading screen, or like a technically impressive but essentially lifeless cardboard backdrop – like The Truman Show‘s Sunhaven, and I was the unwitting Truman stuck there.

Unfortunately, L.A. Noire is full of wasted opportunities. The writing is great, as is most of the (voice) acting, but the game’s signature motion-capture technology veers into Uncanny Valley as often as it succeeds at bringing its characters to life.

The occasional disconnect between the characters’ faces and their bodies is one thing; another is that L.A. Noire doesn’t do photo-realism, doesn’t try to, so the animations, realistic down to the imperfections of involuntary twitches, don’t gel with the more stylised look. It doesn’t matter whether the latter is due to technical limitations – the result, while often impressive, does pull its audience out of the moment too often.

L.A. Noire could have managed to pull everything together with its gameplay, but alas, that’s another strike against the game. It’s not so much that it plays badly – what hurts L.A. Noire is that as a game it is bland. Rockstar’s other titles tend to be generous to a fault in the gameplay department, where you might get new elements introduced two thirds into a game’s plot. In its ’50s crime-and-punishment saga you’ll be doing pretty much the same from the first case you’re working to the last. Here a foot chase, there a car pursuit – and the game’s signature interrogations suffer from a lack of internal logic (seriously, guys, at times the choice between Doubt and Lie seems to have been down to a coin-toss).

In spite of all this, though, I’d be lying if I claimed that L.A. Noire didn’t have its compelling moments. As you progress from the first crime desk (Traffic) to the second (Homicide), the single cases start to connect, and the story ties in cleverly with the Black Dahlia murder. As the plot begins to cohere, the characters become more interesting, and the protagonist Cole Phelbs, while rarely likeable, turns into one of Rockstar’s trademark flawed anti-heroes. By the game’s ending, I felt for the guy and his messed-up issues.

In the end, L.A. Noire is a weak game with strong elements – and for a Rockstar game, it’s a failure. It’s a fascinating failure, though, and I’m curious to see how its experiments and assets – the motion-captured acting, the story structure, the ‘real’ location – pay off in future titles by the developer. Grand Theft Auto V will again be set in Los Santos, Rockstar’s earlier take on LA; I, for one, wouldn’t mind seeing L.A. Noire‘s fingerprints on it.

Hold on tight to your severance package

Mege1 Comment

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

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

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

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

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

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