Believable Boyhood

Is there any praise that hasn't yet been given to this film? I went into the cinema with great expectations and for more than two and a half hours I couldn't give a damn about any of them, lost in the story as I was. This is a film as close to real life as it gets without becoming a documentary or without losing its luscious cinematic qualities. As you probably know it was filmed over twelve years with the same core of actors. We can see influences from some of Richard Linklater earliest films, such as Dazed and Confused and Slacker, the same laid back view on youth culture, a bit like Kids without the terrible bleakness. Later on the film takes on some qualities of his philosophising films like Waking Life, without ever losing the natural flow of the story or becoming too forced like some of his later films did. 

Everything just happens to the characters as we take the ride with them, as one of the characters describes it: "You don't seize the day, it seizes you." What I found particularly interesting was how involved the audience got with these characters. With all of them, but particularly with the main focus of the story: Mason. As we see him physically grow up we become his parents when we see him behaving stupidly playing with saw blades in a construction yard and we just want to shout at him to make him stop or he'll hurt himself. We become his best friend as he confides his doubts and insecurities about what he wants to do with his life. I just wanted to hug him and tell him that everybody experiences this and that nobody knows anything for sure. And then there are the small moments that shine through the main story, like a waiter telling the mother how she helped him with some advice she had given him years ago. Absolutely beautiful and heartbreaking.

The film made me remember what a fantastic actress Patricia Arquette is and how we haven't seen nearly enough of her glorious performances since True Romance. Her easygoing attitude along with Ethan Hawke's awkwardness and sketchy facial hair matches the flow of the story so wonderfully, it feels like they are Mason's real parents, and just try to make do with all their flaws and failings.

It would be impossible for anyone not to identify with at least one of the characters in this film. From the hardworking pushover mom, the well meaning but immature musician dad, the overachieving quirky sister to Mason himself, the confused slacker with a longing for constancy in his family life, desperately trying to finding a purpose. I can only recommend you see this film for yourself and take out of it what you need. By finding the moments that feel familiar and truthful to you and give a new resonance to your own struggle just to try to do the best you can with the moments that seize your life.

The Filthy and Glorious Chaos that Only God Forgives

Views of this film seem to be extremely positive or negative. In many films where this has been the case, the cause was often extreme or gratuitous violence. This film is no exception. Only God Forgives is a certainly a violent film, although not as violent as some horrified viewers might make it seem. It is visceral, over-the-top and relishes in slow motions. Yet under the neon shine and beautifully composed shots, so much more is brewing.

Despite the dark picture it paints of the Bangkok underworld, it creates a lush image of a surreal tropical place that made me want to take a plane to the equatorial lands straight away. The atmosphere is sweaty, sticky and sultry, full of dank alleyways and open restaurants with plastic seating and fans whirring. There is a clear line through the film of South-East Asia's most popular past time: karaoke. We get to see many versions of it that contribute greatly to the film's fascinating brand of surrealism. Extreme kitsch and artificial lights make the violence seem unreal and dreamlike. And like a Bataille novel, we start relishing in it. We don't get to know a great deal about the motivations of the most violent characters and that makes the gestures more visual then emotional. When a carcass is cut open, we are completely aware of the neat line of ribs, the deep luscious red of the meat and the blood glistening in the lights.

Meanwhile, we get a nearly unrelenting soundtrack of minimal atmospheric sounds and electronic beats. It is rare to see a film nowadays that gives the music such a key presence. This made me feel the film is more than a little inspired by certain dark controversial masterpieces of the seventies like Taxi Driver or Straw Dogs. At the base of it lies psychoanalytical theory; in this case the symptoms of an Oedipus complex are certainly present. But even a film like The Shining came to my mind occasionally when the main character wanders through the corridors of a brothel, that feature carpets with graphical patterns and the ever-present blue and red lighting. Everywhere the spaces of the film are throbbing, sweat dripping from the walls and with sexual and violent tensions infesting every frame.

Gender is brought into question with many of the characters. From the beginning of the film where one character asks how many of the prostitutes are actually girls; the question is raised that makes us ask who is a woman and who is a man. In one scene we see someone masturbate, but we only see it from the back. The character of the mother functions as the most powerful force that drives most of the violence and the quest for revenge. Interestingly enough we never get the typical satisfaction of revenge-based story.

This is a film that will not be as easily accepted by a large audience as Drive was. It might seem slow at times, there are a great deal of slow motion shots, but it functions to make everything feel dreamlike and make us wade through the seemingly simple story-line like a thick soup. It is a film that is rich and soiled, oppressive and brutally resplendent in every way.

The Feeling of Injustice

Having just seen In A Better World I am convinced Susanne Bier is one of the best filmmakers currently around. After Brothers and After The Wedding she brings us another film not afraid of tackling difficult themes, and yet without ever losing the ability to tell a good story.

When I saw the poster I was afraid of one of those extremely ethical films focusing on problems in Africa, one you feel bad about, but one which would never get close to your own world. And here it is where Bier succeeds where others with better intentions have failed: this is a fantastic film that actually reaches out and touches you. By mixing the stories of two young lonely boys and their difficulties with the far more serious and yet remote problems in an unnamed country in Africa where one of their fathers works, the film achieves a perfect but troubling metaphor on the nature of violence in all its forms.

Especially from the point of the 'innocent' as Bier herself mentioned in an interview. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, a statement that has never rung more true. We have been manipulated by a long history of (Hollywood) film to sympathize with motives of revenge and the process of achieving power and self-confidence while helping others. And yet, what is it that drives us when we search for violence? Is there ever a situation where it can be tolerated, even needed?

When watching a film there is nothing more satisfying than seeing evil being punished, in fact the pleasure is so great that when it is prevented we cannot help to feel frustrated, angry even, for there is nothing more thoroughly infuriating than injustice. It is this frustration with the powerful triangle of injustice, revenge and violence that Bier tackles in her film.

And yet, at the heart of it remains a simple and thoroughly recognizable story of a family with difficulties; parents on the verge of divorce, a family death from cancer and a boy being bullied. Actually, it is this bullying that echoes throughout the film. On many levels characters are being subjugated to the will of another, violated in several different ways. It burns under your skin and it makes your blood rush, it is hard not to feel an anger rise within. This film has a powerful message but also makes us feel very strongly. It has been a while since I have wept in front of the screen.

Spiceless Splice

Before last night I had a great deal of respect for actress Sarah Polley and a reasonable amount for actor Adrien Brody. Now both have greatly fallen in my esteem. Rarely have I seen a couple that has less chemistry than these two. In a movie where the sexual undercurrent is supposed to play an enormous role, I felt completely unaffected by the torments the characters have to suffer. Sarah Polley plays Elsa Kast, a slightly traumatized but very successful geneticist. At the moments of great suffering in the story Elsa is played with the agony of a small child not getting the ice-cream she wants. Elsa is whiney and sentimental for the most part, a severe problem for a woman who is supposed to be an extremely professional and intelligent scientist. How can a true scientist suddenly decide to discard the most important rule of genetic research: that cloned or manipulated DNA must be kept in complete isolation at all times?

But fair enough, this is a modern day Frankenstein story so I was prepared to suspend my disbelief for a while. The premise was promising; two important scientists working on revolutionary DNA recombination technology face the closure of their research project at the point where they might have just discovered a way to integrate human DNA into their subject. So what do they do? Right, they continue the research secretly to disastrous effects. So far so familiar. At that point the obligatory statement ‘It’s Alive’ is made with just about as much convincement as ‘your dinner is ready’. But after this, the story becomes a lot more sordid, with some incestual and psychopathological details I will not go into here. They try very hard to make the movie into something more than the B-monster-flick I thought and was kind of hoping it to be. I do not mind big ideas, but they were hardly executed in a convincing way. What I missed mostly was the plain fun of the monster-film. The problem was that it takes itself far to seriously. A bit of humour would have done so much to alleviate the dreary pressure that lies on the story and its characters. This said, it might have been a tough task combining humour with some of the developments near the end of the story, but it would have made the whole thing a lot more enjoyable and help it to fit the genre. There is no reason why big ideas can’t be combined with some laughter. I remember precisely one very lame joke (‘at least it has some rustic charm’) made by Adrian Brody’s character, which was a dud before it was even uttered.

The character of Dren, the creature they create by combining human with several forms of animal DNA looks quite haunting in a later stage when played by actress Delphine Chaneac but is much less convincing in CGI. What is most hilarious is the first introduction to their research, a creature that looks remarkable like a large floppy penis and is an example of some of the worst CGI done recently. Why couldn’t they have made this creature as a puppet? It would not have allowed for some of the specific interactions they wanted the creature to make but it would have given the film infinitively more charm and believability. But back to Dren, although she is created from the DNA of about five creatures she looks remarkably human, but this can be allowed in a Star-Trek-kind-of-way. It also makes the sexual tension between her and the human characters a lot more believable, although it felt a bit much like ‘Species’ to me. What is problematic is that Dren cannot speak and displays her emotions in an often laughably pantomime way. The corny dance scene half way through the movie made me cringe for the 80s type superficial sentimentality of it, ‘this… is music..’ oh how lovely. Overall the film just makes for a joyless overproduced underacted movie that could have been so much more…

The very Sordid Killer Inside Me

The experience I had this evening was a combination of shock, horror and surprise I haven’t felt since I saw Last House on the Left and maybe even Funny Games. The film I saw was an investigation into the mind of a killer, into its emotional detachment and unreasonable violent solutions to problems. I heard the movie was violent (it didn’t have an 18+ rating for nothing) and that people had walked out of the screening at the Sundance festival. There were even rumours that leading actress Jessica Alba had walked out of a screening, though that rumour is completely unsubstantiated and seems a bit unlikely to me.

At times the scenes of violence approach the intense unpleasantness of Irreversible, especially when we see the continuous deterioration of a woman’s face when Lou Ford keeps beating on it, though it never fully goes to the same lengths. What stopped that happening for me was the luscious period design (it is set in Oklahoma in the fifties) and the odd hints of extremely black comedy in it. This comedy had taken me aback when it first occurred but especially after a gruesome murder near the end of the film that was somewhat unexpected. A comedic western song accompanying a chase follows this last mentioned scene of violence, which gave it an incredibly strange slapstick moment, especially when Lou slips on the urine of the person he just killed and is met with an eerie post-mortem smile. This moment was what reminded me of Last House on the Left, the very sordid combination of sincerely meant comedy and authentic feeling violence when a slapstick moment follows a very nasty gang rape. Winterbottom, the director, said that he meant this strange transition from horror to comedy to reflect the mentally confused state of mind that the main character finds himself in together with his inability to connect consequences to his actions.

It must be said that Lou Ford, the main character, is extremely well played by Casey Affleck, who has had experience with playing loathsome but internally troubled figures in The Assassination of Jesse James and Gone Baby Gone. He plays a man who seems very detached, who hardly thinks twice about brutally beating the woman he loves to serve his purposes in an odd convoluted way. Kate Hudson and Jessica Alba seem odd choices for the two women characters in this quite daring project, but they both played aptly, though their beauty somehow seems a bit out of place in this gruesome story of sadism and masochism.

What is fascinating though, is the reaction this film has received from audiences everywhere, even the one that I sat in. A woman couldn’t stop asking the director why there had to be so much violence in it, even though this question seemed pointless after the director had explained that he wanted to make a film where the violence doesn’t just pass quickly as a way to advance the story easily as it does in most films. He wanted to make a film where the viewer is extremely aware of the horrible reality of what is happening on screen and I admire this sentiment very much. It is only too easy to make a film in what now seems to be the Tarantino-style film making where violence is extreme but the momentum of the film never gives us time to dwell on it. It is because of this that I allowed a comparison with Funny Games although The Killer Inside Me seems a bit too confused to tackle this problem directly. This is also the reason why I think this film is not completely successful. It seems unsure of what it wants to be, a black comedy, a commentary on violence, a psychological investigation into the psychopathic mind or a film-noir pastiche. Its ambitions are extremely laudable but not focussed enough. A fascinating try, though I would rather recommend seeing a film by Michael Haneke.

Ghastly Ghost

What is going on with these directors who were in the seventies considered to be making high quality risqué films, such as Werner Herzog, Martin Scorsese and now Roman Polanski? What is it with their decision to suddenly start making mainstream, often clichéd high production film? Where Werner Herzog more or less got away with it (see previous review) now we have this preposterous film by Roman Polanski called The Ghost. I must admit, the cast list already made me nervous: Pierce Brosnan, who has never really been known for his great acting skills, Ewan McGregor, who had been making worse and worse films as the years have passed (two words to point out the start of his downfall: Star Wars) and Sex and the City’s Kim Cattrall. Who will score very high on this year’s worst British accent list, in atrociousness almost comparable to Dick van Dyke’s Cockney in Mary Poppins.

Flabbergasted I came out of the cinema after seeing The Ghost last night; had this piece of ridiculous fodder been made by the same director who once made Chinatown, Rosemary’s Baby and more recently, though perhaps not in the same league, The Pianist? Over-the-top and completely unbelievable characters marked my shock in the first few scenes, the “typical” American agent being one of the worst, continuing with wooden acting and badly written dialogue in the next few. Ewan McGregor is doing another one of his stumbling fools, supposedly identifiable characters in the likes of all of Hugh Grant’s performances (It seems to fit a common American view on British people), while Pierce Brosnan is doing a very two-dimensional impression of an overly cocky politician involved in some dirty business. All of the characters were so unbelievable that to me it didn’t matter one bit if bad things started to happen to them. The only passable performance of the evening was by Olivia Williams who seemed slightly credible, as much as that was possible with the ridiculous plot twists of the story, as seemingly injured but possible scheming Adam Lang’s wife Ruth. There were some weaknesses in her performance, though mostly plot-related. For instance, when a likely affair between Adam Lang and his secretary is implied and then only in the most clichéd way by the passive-aggressive remarks of disgruntled Ruth. Why bother? It just adds to the incredibility of the story if no one seems to act like any normal person would.

Where Shutter Island and Bad Lieutenant were at least passable or mildly entertaining, The Ghost is a comedy, albeit not meant as one. The conspiracy plot twists just made me giggle in their reverence of the ‘intelligence’ they were revealing. And why does it make perfect sense to believe everything you read on the Internet after you’ve Googled someone’s name?

The ending only seems to confirm that the director didn’t even have the heart to persevere with this preposterous story. Bang, paper flying, The End. What?! To be honest, all this madness makes me fear for the much-anticipated Terence Malick project soon to premier at the Cannes film festival. If a director with credentials like Polanski can mess a film up as badly as this.



P.S.
Rereading this review I believe the amount of question marks proportionally reflect my shock and indignation of this film

The Dark Side of Moon

Last night I was fortunate enough to have a second viewing of the film ‘Moon’ by Duncan Jones. For where I had my doubts about the pace of the film and the conclusion of it the first time I saw it, this time I found it full of plenty of great moments to make for a thoroughly enjoyable experience. In the first few seconds after it had started for instance, I remembered again the fantastic soundtrack. It creates a mood not unlike the one in 28 Days Later, a film that with great music by bands such as God Speed You Black Emperor. One of the few flaws in the film also had to do with the music, however. There are some emotional moments that have been too prolonged almost to the verge of making them pathetic, a somewhat manipulative piano-tune definitely has something to do with this. I had a feeling that the strength of this film could have been severely increased has these moments not been so persistent in making the point of trying to move us. When the director pushes emotion he obviously fails, which is such a shame since this film was a fine piece of craft until this point. But seeing as this film is a debut performance by first-time director Jones we can allow for some small mistakes. What majesty he gives us otherwise!

We can see clearly that the director wanted to make a point of realism by showing a space ship that has clearly been lived in. The wear and tear is visible and throughout the whole film amusing tiny gags are present for the alert viewer, such as a post-it note on the HAL-like computer saying ‘kick me’. This computer, GERTY, is also a highlight of the film, as none other than Kevin Spacey voices it. His cool and under-emotional voice guides our main character, Sam Bell, through his trials and tribulations. It is remarkable that Sam has only been allowed GERTY, a creature that shows sympathy with stereotypical smiley-faces, as his sole companion on the three-year long stay in outer space. No wonder much of the film is about Sam Bell's visions/delusions that at first seem to be a reference to Tarkovsky’s Solaris, but soon turn out to be more of a plot element than a poetic one. There have been some criticism on this film saying it’s too much of a rip-off of Silent Running and 2001: A Space Odyssey, but these are inevitable when doing a film about a man alone in outer space with nothing but a computer by his side. This is about the only thing that links the films and I believe the criticism has more to do with the genre than with this actual film. Space ships and stations are a very recognisable setting and they tend to feel very familiar to us from films we have seen previously. The criticisms seem to be more about this feeling than something concrete.

This movie is mostly held together by a great performance by Sam Rockwell as Sam Bell, which is vital as his presence takes up about 90 percent of the film’s screen time. He has to act out a character in an increasing state of mental and physical dilapidation, the physical part of which gets quite extreme near the end of the film. His battle with loneliness and existential fears are very recognisable despite the foreign setting of a space station in the future. This is a movie with a heart that is believable and despite some small flaws that we will have to ignore for the time being it is a magnificent first feature film. Let’s hope some of these beginner’s problems will be solved on his next project, which I heard is going to be another science fiction film.

Disclaimer:
To conform to all the other reviews that have been written about this film, include the following words in some sort of pun: David Bowie, Zowie Bowie, Ground Control to Major Tom, Space Oddity, Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars