Directed by Phyllida Lloyd of Mamma Mia! fame, no less!
At this point I’m hoping for a Being John Malkovich style mindfuck where everyone is a Meryl Streep character from one of her earlier movies. The sheer amount of different accents would make such a film implode and form a linguistic singularity.
There should be a sci-fi subgenre called “brain in a box”. You know the type of story: the protagonist goes about his normal life (are there any female brains in a box in those stories?), but suddenly things start being… off. Things become strange around the edges. And then comes the revelation: the protagonist’s reality is actually ‘reality’. He’s plugged into some system that simulates life for him, often because he’s no longer a full-bodied human being. He’s a brain in a box. Cue existential despair and dramatic irony, though the upside is vastly reduced rent to pay.
Duncan Jones’ Source Code belongs to that sub-genre, even if strictly speaking Jake Gyllenhaal’s character is more of a torso in a box. It’s definitely a clever, fun addition to the BiaB family – but unfortunately it isn’t quite clever enough. See, it also belongs to a different sub-genre: that of “the one before that was way better.” Duncan Jones set the bar pretty high with Moon, another philosophical, existentialist sci-fi conundrum. Moon was perhaps a tad too ambitious for its own good – it tried to tell two stories but only ended up telling one (who am I, and why are there two of me?) really well, while fumbling the other (heartless corporations are heartless). It was, though, a fantastic first movie: smart, entertaining, poignant.
By comparison, Source Code is the earlier film’s cute but not quite as smart cousin. It’s unashamedly more Hollywood, which is fair enough – films want to be liked too! – but ends up being faintly disappointing. Perhaps I’m just a sucker for poignancy and melancholy, but what makes Source Code the lesser film is that it doesn’t balance its sci-fi plotline and its human element as deftly as Moon. Similarly to another Jake Gyllenhaal movie (think rabbits…) it’s most effective when it’s about a guy who tries to stay in control of his increasingly unhinged life, but when it decides it’s actually about these quasi-metaphysical sci-fi machinations the character drama becomes less touching, less real. It’s more difficult to care when the film geeks out over its sci-fi gimmick.
Not every sci-fi story has to have a strong human element, and not every story needs to be poignant. But Source Code tries to have its cake and eat it – be about the futuristic MacGuffin and be about its protagonist’s existential conundrum) without being quite clever enough to pull it off. Again, without its loony predecessor I might have liked it better, so perhaps I’m not being entirely fair; but in the end I can’t help thinking that Jones could do better than somewhat clever, somewhat entertaining, somewhat engaging. He has done better.
And perhaps, in some parallel universe he did do better the second time round, and there’s a quantum me writing a blog about how the successor to Moon was even better, even smarter – and so poignant it makes your tear ducts quiver with bittersweet glee…
If the cosmic astronaut God-baby from the end of 2001 came back to earth and made a movie, this would be it. (And we wouldn’t understand what it was trying to tell us, either.)
– Andrew O’Hehir, Salon
There can be no doubt about it – Terrence Malick has made some of the most visually beautiful films in the history of cinema. Narrative coherence, strong characterisation, those are not what anyone should look for going into a Malick movie, but they can expect to see awesome images. And not in the Michael Bay, big explosions, expensive CGI and Megan Fox’s cleavage way; Malick and his DPs create images that are poetic, both grand and intimate, and they’re masterful at evoking moods and emotions. Even if all the dialogue were stripped from his films, they’d still be powerful pieces of cinema.
In fact, perhaps the films would be more powerful without the dialogue. Malick is often accused of pretentiousness, and especially from The Thin Red Line onwards the voiceovers are less and less about characters and increasingly about giving voice to Malick’s philosophical concerns. The problem is that the questions voiced are not only grand but veer towards vague commonplaces. Why are we here? Why does Man fight against himself? Where are we going? Are we there yet?
No doubt, these are big and important questions, but they’re so big that they need to be broken down to be addressed, unless you’re having one of those student dorm, 2am, after a bottle or two of cheap red wine conversations. At his best, Malick breaks them down by providing many individual moments and perspectives, all of them contributing in impressionistic fashion towards answers. At his worst, the voiceovers evoke a sarcastic “That’s, like, deep, man!”
The Tree of Life has some of Malick’s most beautiful, evocative images to date, and I enjoyed the film more than his last, The New World. (I’m a Thin Red Line man, myself – and give me Days of Heaven any day.) It also relies less on voiceovers, which is good, because the more verbal Malick gets in his last few films, the more he risks becoming preachy and annoying, like one of those dreadful slim volumes of facile sub-Zen meditations on life. But in its elliptic nature, The Tree of Life becomes vague in ways that are condusive less to deep thought than to confusion. Who’s that kid? Is he one of the brothers? Are those Jack’s parents fighting? Why are we watching a dinosaur step on another dinosaur’s neck? Is Jack dead? Are those angels? Is that Aunt Petunia? Isn’t Smetana’s “Moldau” a beautiful piece of music, even if it’s criminally overused? Should I get a Coke in the break?
During the film’s strongest moments, its insistence on narrative ellipses is as evocative as the visuals. Malick can pull this off as well as Tarkovsky. At its worst, though, The Tree of Life is so intent on letting its visuals and the audience do its work, meditative becomes soporific and self-consciously coy. Does it make the film deeper, more meaningful that there are three brothers, if two of them barely become more than cyphers? Do glimpses of some kid having an epileptic fit in the background, while Jack is being led away, add to the experience if we have no idea whether that kid is a neighbour or a brother or just some random kid off the street? Gaps in the storytelling can be great starting points for our own thoughts, but if the gaps are too big, our thoughts become random – we’re as likely to think about what we need to get from the shops the next day as we are to ruminate about our existence and the grandiose beauty of creation. And the ending? I was torn between being moved, intrigued, “Huh?”ed and thinking, “I remember when this was an Orange ad.”
Would I recommend The Tree of Life? Probably not. Did I enjoy it? That’s a qualified yes. Was it beautiful to look at? Definitely, almost achingly so. Just don’t think too much about that plesiosaur. Just be awed, and don’t feel too bad if your thoughts wander to the shopping list.
P.S.: Is it just me, or is Hunter McCracken (who plays Jack as a child) almost eerily like a young version of Jim Caviezel’s character in The Thin Red Line?
Is The Road a depressing movie? Do cannibalistic chickens have lips? Good question, actually – does a beak count as lips? Anyway, I’m ambivalent on the matter… not of poultry and their facial appendages, but of The Road‘s overall outlook on life. It is a powerful piece of cinema, though – perhaps almost too powerful. I wouldn’t be too surprised if a number of audience members found the grim, sad plot and atmosphere of the film so overbearing they resisted its effects and perhaps even resented its relentlessness.
And relentless the film is, which probably doesn’t come as a surprise to those who have read Cormac McCarthy’s novel – yet it’s not the relentlessness of so many post-apocalyptic films. There are moments that in other films might be thrilling, scenes where the film’s wandering father and son are pursued by cannibalistic survivors (no chickens, though), but in the end it’s not these fleeting moments of jeopardy that are the greatest threat to survival in the world of The Road. It’s finding the strength each morning to go on. The father played by an increasingly Giacomettian Viggo Mortensen has his son to keep him going, but most of the survivors we see don’t even have that. They seem to be alive simply because they haven’t died yet.
Nevertheless, The Road is about survival, not only physical survival but that of the soul, of the part that makes us more than glorified animals. As the son puts it in his childish words, “Are we still the good guys?” You’d think that good and bad would become relative in a world where you avoid other survivors because it’s more than likely that they only survived by preying on others, and the father’s reluctance to show compassion for others makes perfect sense. The son’s insistence on doing the right thing is naive and borders on the suicidal – yet survival, to the son and eventually the father, should not simply be about delaying the inevitable. And it is in this insistence that there is more to living than simply not having died yet, even in a world that seems to be all about death, that The Road, for all its horrors and sadness, is an idealistic story.
This may be the point where The Road loses some: it is difficult to accept the hopeful notes scattered throughout for the sheer weight of all the horrors we’re presented with. Does a single surviving beetle, a dog that’s alive against all hope (and hasn’t been eaten by its famished keepers) constitute a convincing ray of sunshine against the billions dead, the destroyed wildlife and decaying forests (by the way: this is the first film where I had to switch off the subwoofer – because the trees crashing to the ground were simply more than we wanted to inflict on our neighbours!). I bought both the despair and the glimmer of hope, but the former may overpower the latter for many.
Through it all, though, the one thing that’s stuck most in my mind is the desolate, grim beauty of the world Hillcoat depicts in his adaptation. There’s dark poetry in McCarthy’s prose, and the visuals of the film capture this poetry impressively well.
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.
… or at least I thought so.
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.”
I’ll be posting a proper blog post later this week, but for the moment enjoy this: artists’ variations on an imperial theme.
Nerf herded from www.totalfilm.com.
The Social Network could be a great movie if it wasn’t for its trite plot. There is that computer geek at Harvard called Mark Zuckerberg who will never ever get a second date, and so takes his revenge by setting up a ranking system for the female students on the net. Him and some like-minded fellow students can smell the big bucks from where they’re coding, and so they bend over backwards to become very rich very fast. This is a movie about greed. It features that one-dimensional ambition from Wall Street, but makes Gordon Gekko look like a piece of antique furniture. As soon as these guys realize that there is not only big money in working alongside, but against each other, they sue each other for ludicrous amounts. None of these characters is even remotely sympathetic. They were never friends, not on Facebook, and not in real life. They just happened to live in the same dorm at the same time, bumping ideas off each other. Zuckerberg may have a brilliant mind for computer ideas, but his biography is still one from glorified hacker to billionaire (while still being a glorified hacker). It’s not a coincidence that even the screenplay starts and ends with the question if this guy is an a-hole.
Pop quiz: How many lawsuits does the movie show? I think they are all depositions, but it’s hard to tell who’s suing who at any given time. The movie is too slick and self-absorbed to slow down and let us know exactly where we’re at. There is not one shred of criticism about how these idiots behave, which is just as well, because otherwise the movie might self-destruct.
It takes a very good cast and crew to make a bad movie look so good. The screenplay is well-informed and smart and always one step ahead, although I have a suspicion that Aaron Sorkin has no idea about how computers work. Apparently, David Fincher is unable to make a visually boring flick. Almost every main cast member has made at least one movie that is noteworthy: Andrew Garfield has made that fabulous British flick called Boy A, Jesse Eisenberg was in the very funny Zombieland, and John Getz will forever be the remorseful cheater in Blood Simple. What’s more, I’ve yet to hear a better score than that by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. That bit with the Henley boat race is an atmospheric masterpiece, but deserves to be in a better movie. Here’s a thought: It could have been a great movie about rowing, with countless geeks watching a live-stream from their laptops, simultaneously writing in their blogs about how they really wish they could have made it into the rowing team.
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.
