Three Films Make A Post: The most corrupt cop you've ever seen on screen.

211 (2018): To be honest, going into a contemporary movie with Nicolas Cage I do tend to hope it provides the great, strange actor with opportunity to do great, strange acting, so when I encounter him in a more bread and butter action thriller like York Alec Shackleton’s 211, I do find myself a little disappointed. However, if you are able to get over that little problem, you may find this to be very decent film. Shackleton’s direction is a bit too network TV like to really thrill me, but the film’s story is clearly told, and clear effort is  put into characterizing everyone involved, certainly putting this above the level of a lot of low budget shoot ‘em ups.

It’s not really the film’s fault I’d rather watch something crazier than this perfectly decent little number.

Coyote Lake (2019): Sara Seligman’s film about a mother-daughter duo (Adriana Barraza and Camila Mendes) who run a bed-and-breakfast practically on the US/Mexican border which they use to murder, rob and drown men working for the cartels, isn’t exactly a crazy film either. But here, the insistence on telling a tale that would usually make for a pretty extreme exploitation movie by avoiding practically all exploitative elements one way or the other, and instead focussing on a pretty horrible mother-daughter relationship, is actually what makes it interesting as well as pretty admirable. Seligman has a good grip on the elements of the material she has chosen to focus on, the actors are doing very good work (which is particularly important in a film that’s not at all focussing on the violence inherent in the material), so things come together nicely, creating an unassumingly effective film about family, freedom and weaponized capitalism.


Spider-Man: Far from Home (2019): The second Spider-Man film taking place in the MCU with Tom Holland – and again directed by Jon Watts – is a strange little (huge) film. It is strange in the best way, daring a weird teen comedy vibe, destroying beautiful European cities as seen through US tourist eyes and using well-loved  elements of the Spider-Man myth and the MCU to goof off. Frankly, all of this shouldn’t work at all, and while this is indeed a surprisingly messy film whose structure doesn’t bode well for the MCU-less future of our friendly neighbourhood wallcrawler, it is also a whole lot of fun, suggesting a bit more of a freewheeling approach than typical in this kind of blockbuster realm.

Three Films Make A Post: Once the pigs tasted blood... No one could control their hunger!!

The Farthest (2017): I had heard great things about Emer Reynolds’s documentary about the Voyager mission. Actually having seen it, I find myself mostly annoyed by it. In theory, there’s an incredible richness of material in here, interviews with a bunch of intelligent and important women and men who were involved in one of the great achievements of human history, but what the film does with this is pretty pitiful. Because its assumed audience are apparently idiots who can’t follow a thought that’s longer than ten words, it turns these highly intelligent people into talking heads out of a shitty “TV’s Stupidest Awards” show, dispensing sound bites instead of thoughts. Add pretty pictures, a cloying soundtrack, and a nearly desperate drive to entertain instead of to enlighten, and you have your award-winning documentary right there.

Proof (2005): As John Madden’s adaptation of David Auburn’s play proves, you can make things more accessible without making them painfully stupid. Madden also mostly manages to turn the stage play into a movie while neither ignoring the roots of the piece nor having the visual elements be pure, functionless flim-flam. This features Gwyneth Paltrow (before her unfortunate contemporary career turn into hawking crap to the gullible), Jake Gyllenhaal, and Anthony Hopkins (actually acting instead of doing the shtick he has frequently fallen back on after Silence of the Lambs) at their best, working through the film’s complicated emotional and intellectual turns, bringing its thoughts about family, mental illness, “Great Men” and their daughters, and quite a bit more to life. Sure, from time to time things are a bit mid-brow, please give us an Oscar, Hollywood (there’s an inadvertently hilarious montage full of chin-stroking mathematicians you gotta see to believe), Madden can’t get away from completely even in his best movies (let’s not speak about that thing with Nicholas Cage), but the film’s stretching far inside of these genre structures.


Summer Wars aka サマーウォーズ (2009): Because I am apparently a curmudgeon today, turns out I’m also not quite as fond of this anime by Mamoru Hosoda about a traditional, if crazy, Japanese family saving the world as the rest of said world apparently is. It’s not that the animation isn’t beautiful, or the character design doesn’t breathe warmth and love for these characters, nor am I complaining about a lack of clever ideas. It’s just that this thing is so incessantly emotionally manipulative, doing its damndest to squeeze the last possible tear drop out of its audience that it rubs me all wrong, nearly becoming a satire of the things it praises by the pure power of laying everything on so thick and then ladling tears and good cheer on top. Honestly, I felt slightly nauseated by it.

Life (2017)

Warning: while I’m not going to go into too much detail, I’ll have to include some structural spoilers; also, this one made me rather cross!

Apparently, there is life on Mars, and an international probe is hurtling towards Earth, carrying some promising samples in its belly (or wherever probes are carrying samples). The scriptwriters were probably afraid to lose the audience right at the start if not something “exciting” happens to begin with, so the probe is a bit out of control and instead of some sane manoeuvre, the crew – as played by the overqualified and desperately underused cast of Rebecca Ferguson, Jake Gyllenhaal, Ryan Reynolds, Hiroyuki Sanada, Olga Dihovichnaya and Ariyon Bakare - of the international space station tasked to evaluate the samples has to catch the thing with a robot arm, which improbably works too.

The samples are worth the effort, though, for among them is an actual living alien cell. A cell that quickly grows into many cells, and then into an organism that becomes increasingly big. If you think you know where the rest of the movie is going to go, you are exactly right.

For if there is something that is inarguably true about Daniel Espinosa’s alien on a rampage movie, then it is that is has no original bone in its cinematic body. The plot goes where you expect it to go, the characters are the blandest bunch of nonentities with vague motivations you could get from these actors, the production design certainly suggests the 58 million dollars the movie supposedly cost didn’t go into creativity, and Espinosa’s direction is sort of there, but certainly not reaching any – even small – heights of suspense and excitement.

There are two elements about the script that truly stand out: firstly, it is chock full implausibilities: the crew of a small space station who will potentially work on alien biological material does not know what the final stage in a complete breach of quarantine is; a space station manned for this project has only one person actually qualified to work on the samples in its crew; on the other hand, said space station has a potent hand flame thrower; the so-called quarantine measures make no sense at all, the characters might as well just leave all doors open and invite their alien guest in; nobody ever follows procedures. And it goes on and on that way.

Which are of course all problems I’m not unaccustomed to from my SF horror movies, and willing to overlook (though a film at least trying to sell me on its world usually helps my tolerance here) but then comes in script standout problem number two. Writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick use the valuable brain space freed by not taking care of details to demonstrate cleverness without being actually all that clever (a tendency that already annoyed me quite a bit in their scripts for Deadpool and Zombieland). First, they pull a Psycho through killing off one of the “name” actors first (so that they can keep exactly the other two you’d expect them to keep for as long as possible), but telegraph it so much it does not feel surprising so much as expected. It certainly doesn’t help that it isn’t 1960 anymore.

Next, the film tries something so clever with a moment involving a leg you won’t have to look long on the Internet to find people who think it is a plot hole, when in actuality, it’s a character helping the creature because he’s lost it. The characterisation is so bland (probably aiming for subtle, and badly missing) the character never reads like actually losing it until he holds a speech about it. The film is much too coy about actually showing how leg met alien and why for the scene to work at all, and it’s no wonder people do misread what’s going on. It probably sounded like a clever little flourish to add, but again, the script doesn’t put the work in for this part of the plot to feel plausible at all and expects the audience to imagine stuff it doesn’t bother to show them.


The last and most annoying example of the film thinking it is clever for cleverness’s sake is, of course, the ending, when Life attempts to pull what it clearly thinks is a very bright little trick on its audience by lying about what its climax is actually about. That sort of thing can work, but a film really needs to have worked for the audience’s trust and patience up until that point, which this one certainly has not, and really only should use this sort of trick if the realization of what is actually going on in the ending will put everything that came before into a different light for the audience. To my great annoyance, Life opts for using this technique to finagle the usual horror movie bullshit ending. Most horror films save that sort of thing for a single shot pseudo-twist because that’s much less annoying than wasting the potential emotional effect of your whole climax, but then most horror films don’t think they are quite this clever when pulling this sort of crap, unlike Life.

In short: Nighcrawler (2014)

When it comes to films about horrifyingly empty people, Dan Gilroy’s sort of crime movie, kinda thriller, satire and portray of an actual sociopath would probably make a good double feature with Mike Hodges’s Croupier, even though Jake Gyllenhaal’s Louis Bloom in this film is a somewhat different proposition to Clive Owen’s croupier. Where Owen’s character in Croupier loses his tenuous grip on something amounting to humanity, Gyllenhaal plays his character as an alien who genuinely does not understand human ethics or empathy and most certainly never possessed them – quite unlike the characters surrounding him who do understand these things but decide not to act on them for various reasons, enabling the evils Bloom perpetrates for their own expediency and success, and because the void is just so damn seductive.

I found Gyllenhaal’s performance, the way his character parrots phrases he’s learned on the Internet or in how to business books genuinely disturbing, even more so since he clearly sees himself as an all-American success story, an afterschool TV special hero. Gilroy’s film suggests various rather frightening things (that’ll not surprise quite a few of us): that you best be a monster to make it in late capitalist society or transform yourself into one; that the systemic pressures inherent in media and society push people incessantly to give up on very basic elements of their humanity while pretending they don’t; that in this society, being a monster is simply easier than being human; and that pretending to be be an actual human being is much more important than acting like one.


All this is packaged in an elegant, very Los Angeles film, that is so strongly structured and so well made Gyllenhaal’s incredible performance seems a natural part of his filmic surroundings.

Three Films Make A Post: Don't believe the rumors about all the dead bodies... They're the people who fainted watching!

Source Code (2011): If you need proof that yes, you can make a mainstream SF film in Hollywood that works as a piece of entertainment as well as a humanist reminder that neither the boring cynicism of the Bruckheimers of this world nor the Spielbergian kitsch school is the be all and end all of filmmaking, Duncan Jones has you covered. While Source Code is quite a bit more Hollywood (in a Frank Capra makes a thriller sort of way) than Jones's wonderful first film Moon, it's the sort of film that moves so well inside the best of Hollywood's parameters that complaining about it would be like complaining about Captain America dressing up in a US flag - rather missing the point of the whole thing.

The point is, obviously, that you can still make a film with a brain and a heart, taking what's good about the conventions of the thriller and the undercover SF film (that is, the SF film mainstream reviewers won't ever call SF because it doesn't include squid in space), and just leaving out everything else.

Death on the Fourposter aka Sexy Party (1964): Jean Josipovici's film (original title Delitto alla specchio) is another one of those Italian movies from the early 60s that tried to bridge the gap between the Italian Gothic films and what was already beginning to become the giallo genre. It's not very successful at it - way too much time is spent on decidedly not sexy sexy-times that will delight hardcore lovers of camp but left me wishing for something to actually happen. Once (after half of the movie is already over) the actual plot starts, the film gets a slightly more exciting, at times even a bit clever, but I don't think a handful of scenes of gothic atmosphere is worth fighting through forty-five minutes of dubious sexiness. As a historical artefact that's nearly a giallo of the "rich bastards in a castle/mansion", the film is mildly interesting, as a movie much less so.

Scream of the Banshee (2011): As if I needed another reminder how crap so-called horror can get (though I have to admit it is pretty horrible), along comes this derivative, badly written stinker whose sole saving grace is that Lance Henriksen is in it for a bit. It's still crap, though.

 

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