Three Films Make A Post: Hope Burns Brightest in The Cold

Black Crab aka Svart krabba (2022): Some time in the near future, when Sweden is struck by a civil war between groups the film doesn’t bother to define for us, a group of soldiers is tasked to ice-skate over the ocean behind enemy lines to transport some canisters that’ll win the war for their losing side. The movie directed by Adam Berg is going for the whole universal/archetypal thing, apparently, so giving the audience the space to decide if they actually want these characters to achieve their goal is not in the cards; or any actual, concrete politics. Also not in the cards is anything amounting to characterisation for anyone but Noomi Rapace’s character. She gets a lot of superfluous flashbacks to early civil war life with her daughter that do very little for the movie yet take up quite a lot of time.

The film is a war movie made by people who somehow managed to miss how films in this genre understood how to speak about something universal by focussing on the specific, and decide that vague handwaving is the way to go instead. We do get as many war movie clichés as we never wanted, all of which I’ve seen realized in so many better films.

Windfall (2022): I liked director/co-writer Charlie McDowell’s The One I Love from a couple of years quite a bit as a very clever contemporary and adult movie-length Twilight Zone episode. This thing with Jason Segel, Lily Collins and Jesse Plemons is rather less successful, playing out like an attempt to make a somewhat contemporized version of a Coen Brothers film in the Fargo mode crossed with a TV show bottle episode. Just one that can’t seem to get up the imagination to give any of its three characters any amount of depth – after the first couple of scenes, you really know all you need to know about everyone, and nothing of interest will be revealed about their personalities. Also missing are a sense of timing – the ninety minutes drag as if they were three hours – and really much of a point.

An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (1982): Fortunately, this P.D. James adaptation by the usually rather more experimental than he is here Christopher Petit rides in to save this post – or rather its writer – from complete frustration. The seldom seen on screen Pippa Guard plays secretary turned private detective Cordelia Gray with quite a bit of presence, generally finding something interesting to add to any standard detective movie scene. And there are a lot of them in a film as chock-full of detective movie tropes as this one is. Petit and his fine cast use most of these tropes for good, making a pretty meandering film whose sense of meandering isn’t a weakness but very much the point of the whole endeavour, because it provides ample opportunity to think about class, gender and obsession.

In short: The Trip (2021)

Original title: I onde dager

The married couple of unsuccessful actress Lisa (Noomi Rapace) and soap opera director Lars (Aksel Hennie) head into a cabin by the fjords owned by Lars’s father for a quiet and peaceful weekend. Nominally, this is, for in truth, both are planning to murder the other there. Fortunately, for friends of true love finding a way and such, before anyone can murder anyone else, the perhaps not quite so happy couple are visited by a trio of very violent criminals (as played by Atle Antonsen, Christian Rubeck and André Eriksen), whose various attempts at rape and murder might be just the thing so save a marriage.

I’m pretty sure there will be quite a few people who can’t stomach Tommy Wirkola’s very specific mix of 70s exploitation style home invasion horror (the only good kind of home invasion horror) and darkest comedy; it takes a very specific kind of constitution to allow a film that can get quite as nasty as this one to also be funny. Despite my love for the more unpleasant side of traditional exploitation, I often tend have problems when it is mixed with humour myself, mostly because humour often seems to cheapen the harsher elements of a film or because some things just aren’t funny.

For my tastes, Wirkola (who does of course historically have a bit of talent for his sort of thing, see Red Snow) manages the difficult task of deciding what to keep simply unpleasant, which unpleasantness can be made funny, and which simply not to touch very well indeed, knowing what kind of brutality can actually make for a good, cynical joke, and which one would be tacky to use that way.

It does of course help there, too, that Wirkola is as experienced with comical timing as well as the sort of timing needed in an ultra-violent thriller as he is. An experience that also clearly makes it easier for the guy to find the points in his tale of marriage-saving blood and guts where he can quietly push the absurdity of things so far, he’s also at least partially satirizing exactly the kind of film he is making.

Add to that a cast of actors who seem fully in on the joke and just as capable to shift codes as Wirkola is, and the resulting film is a whole lot of decidedly non-stupid fun.

Close (2019)

Warning: Vague spoilers about the film’s ending ahead!

Sam Carlson (Noomi Rapace) is a bodyguard who apparently typically works in war zones. She grudgingly (though I suspect she does everything grudgingly) takes the job of protecting poor little rich girl Zoe (Sophie Nélisse) for a week of London nightlife and then transport her to a safe house belonging to Zoe’s mother Rima (Indira Varma) in the desert near Morocco. Zoe’s father has just died, and she has – very much to the surprise and anger of her mother – inherited a considerable amount of shares in her mother’s and father’s company, so she would make a lucrative target for kidnappers.

After their arrival at the house, in Sam’s last night on the job, they are attacked by a well-armed group of men who know suspiciously much about the place’s security system. Sam saves Zoe, and they both end in the hands of the police. Alas, these cops are clearly on someone’s payroll, and Zoe kills one of them while Sam is putting two others down rather less lethally. So, now the two are going on the run together. And yes, of course, the shared experience will see Sam not only killing quite a few people but also working through her relationship with her own daughter and her trouble with opening up to people, and Zoe will learn valuable lessons, too. Yawn.

Yes, yes, I know, the writers of Hollywood thrillers and action movies are bound by some kind of eternal law to always include this sort of “emotional grounding” in their scripts, but it’s such a been-there, done-that sort of thing I’d actually be all too happy to encounter a film whose heroine is saving the rich teenager because she’s a decent human being instead because of some vague psychological connection to a daughter. And since neither Sam nor the audience ever actually gets to meet her daughter, this so-called emotional core is particularly weak; who cares about a characters relationship to some off-screen name? It’s all very perfunctory and exactly how you’d expect it, and also absolutely unnecessary.

The film’s case when it comes to its supposed emotional core isn’t exactly helped by Zoe being a particularly boring example of the poor rich girl type, with little personality showing, and therefore little weight to Sam’s and her growing connection. Which wouldn’t be much of a problem if the film weren’t hell-bent on foregrounding this stuff, putting the time in but not the actual writing work necessary to keep the relationship interesting.


The film’s other big script problem is how often it cuts back to the villains of the piece, destroying every bit of tension director Vicky Jewison’s often deft handling of the action business has managed to build up despite the general weakness of her and Rupert Whitaker’s script. For most of the film’s running time, I was rather puzzled why we spend so much time with Indira Varma’s character. After all, the parts of her scenes actually useful for the rest of the plot could have been handled in one cell phone conversation. In the end, it turns out the film ruins its pacing and drags its audience through badly written business meetings to prepare a last act plot revelation regarding the true identity of the villain. Too bad that change only makes even the tiny bit of sense it does make because these draggy scenes were indeed meant to be cleverly ambiguous instead of tedious and vague – if only they actually were. Also, replacing the evil mother trope with the one about evil Chinese corporations isn’t exactly exciting.

Bright (2017)

Los Angeles, in an Urban Fantasy world humanity shares with orc, elves and other typical fantasy creatures, and where some Dark Lord or other did Dark Lord-y things two thousand years ago, with only the orcs taking his side (a decision that has hounded their descendants ever since). Somehow, the place is still the same LA we know from a thousand movies and TV shows – with some very minor changes - but that’s Urban Fantasy, the least imaginative sub-genre concerned with the fantastic for you. Street cop Daryl Ward (Will Smith) is just returning from sick leave following getting shot, and he’s not a happy man. Being partnered up with the first orc managing to become a police officer, Nick Jakoby (the great Joel Edgerton) hadn’t been exactly to Ward’s taste already, but Nick’s inability to apprehend the orc who shot Ward really makes the always pretty grumpy human extra-grumpy.

To be fair to the man, Ward is probably the least orc-racist cop in town. Jakoby for his part doesn’t just have to cope with daily racism by humans but also with the fact that his nature as an “unblooded” orc (even filing down his excellent orc teeth “to fit in”) and a cop makes him anathema to orc society too. But, since this is a buddy cop movie, there will soon come quite a bit of outward pressure to turn the squabbling cops into a proper couple: they stumble onto the trail of a lost magic wand (in this world about as dangerous as an H-bomb), the elf who stole it (Lucy Fry), and the evil sorceress who actually owns it (Noomi Rapace, giving one of her by now patented fun villain performances), among other things. Lots of violence ensues, one-liners are uttered.

I’ve seen Bright described as one of the worst films of 2017 by more than one critic, which rather suggests these guys and gals haven’t seen all that many films during the year, or aren’t able to appreciate David Ayer’s Netflix big budget film for what it is: a pretty traditional buddy cop action movie (with a bit of comedy mixed in, of course) that just happens to include fantasy elements to mix things up a little. As such, it’s not terribly intelligent a movie, and its explorations of racism and police violence are paper thin, but that’s really not what this sort of film is about. Rather, it belongs to a genre all about men who can only express their tender feelings towards one another via squabbling, one-liners, and physical violence, and the quality of whose films is consequently measured by the fun-ness of the squabbling, the hilarity (intentional or un) of the one-liners, and the quality of the action sequences.

And I have to say, the squabbling is pretty fun – in part thanks to the delivery of old squabbling pro Will Smith and the always delightful Joel Edgerton –, the one-liners are cheesy, and the action set pieces are loud, varied, and sometimes downright exciting (turns out evil elves/elfs are pretty much supervillains while our poor heroes are only normally human/orcish, and not even the Batman kind of normal). That Ayer knows how to direct an action sequence was what made the last third of his generally misguided Suicide Squad watchable; here, the action is embedded in a script that may lack in depth but which certainly is much more focused than that of the DC movie (at least it knows what the film at hand is actually supposed to be about), providing Ayers with a much better environment to work to his strengths in this regard, something he does well and repeatedly.


There’s really not much more to Bright, but for my tastes, it ends up a thoroughly entertaining bit of popcorn cinema.

Three Films Make A Post: IN BLOODY PANIC COLOR

Prometheus (2012): I was going into this completely willing not to believe any critical word I've read about Ridley Scott's Alien prequel, for when have mainstream film critics ever gotten genre films? Unfortunately, this one really is as dumb and ill-thought out as they say, with some basic plot ideas that could have made for an interesting piece of visionary SF/horror, like Arthur C. Clarke meets Lovecraft, if any of the lavish detail that went into the production design had found its way into the script. Instead, there are character who aren't even clichés (wasting a great cast) acting like idiots, characters who also are not even vaguely believable as people, ideas that are never explored, a plot that's driven by everyone being an idiot, random crap that just came into the writers' heads and a painful willingness to be as tedious and uninteresting about everything as possible, and dialogue that could be improved by having the actors make farting noises instead. I'd go into more details, but then I have already wasted two hours of my life on this.

Chernobyl Diaries (2012): As far as horror movies about stupid, self-centered American tourists visiting Eastern Europe and dying of stupidity and because All Eastern Europeans Are Evil™ go, this one's kind of watchable. It just suffers from a way too slow build-up, with long long minutes of getting to know the main characters - turns out there's no reason to give a crap about them -, useless exposition (or do Americans really not know about Chernobyl?), and being co-written by Oren Peli, who, as I by now know, could not write a sympathetic or interesting character or an ending that's not absurdly dumb to save his life. But some of the pissed-off mutant stalk (get out of here, Stalker!) and attack scenes are realized quite well by director Bradley Parker and the locations are mildly creepy, so there is some entertainment to be had here.

I also have to give the film credit for going for a very bleak ending, even though it stretches the limits of my belief even more than the radiation mutants do.

Storage 24 (2012): A handful of people find themselves locked in with a very rude alien in a 24 hour storage facility. Unfortunately, before any monster movie fun can be had, lead actor and co-writer Noel Clarke aka Mickey from Doctor Who will have much space for a love triangle with two equally annoying partners, and many dispiriting soap operatics will occur. That part of the movie would be easier to stomach if the film bothered to make its characters interesting or even just give them actual character traits beyond "Noel Clarke is straight, and whines a lot, but he also wrote the script, so he will be our hero". As it stands, the film already had burned through all of my goodwill once the theoretically fun bits started, and just annoyed me with its alien monster by numbers, its drama by numbers and its plot by numbers, all told without any verve.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,british movies,sf,horror,in short,ridley scott,noomi rapace,michael fassbender,bradley parker,noel clarke

Three Films Make A Post: Featuring the Longest Kiss in Cinema History!

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011): Guy Ritchie's second movie about the adventures of a very pulp hero Sherlock Holmes played by Robert Downey Jr. and his especially long-suffering Watson Jude Law shares all the virtues of the first movie, and is therefore pretty much as good as mainstream adventure cinema gets. It's fun, it's silly, it's playful, and so totally divorced from Victorian reality or the self-image of Victorians as evidenced in Doyle's work, it develops something of a subversive edge simply by treating both with as little respect as they deserve yet also with as much - probably more - love as they do.

Bonus points for a Moriarty who doesn't act like a hyperactive twelve-year-old, Noomi Rapace (who would make a pretty great pulp Holmes too, I think) and the most off-handed Reichenbach Falls ever.

The Life of the World to Come (2010): For some reason, this film doesn't appear on Rian Johnson's IMDB page, but this was made by the director of Brick and The Brothers Bloom anyway. It's a one take/long take concert film without an audience of The Mountain Goats (in this case in the form of John and Rachel) performing the whole of "The Life of the World to Come", the (not exactly religious) album on which all songs are titled with bible verses - which honestly is much better in practice than it may sound in theory; a description that fits The Mountain Goats in general.

For the most part, the film consists of the camera shifting position around Darnielle while he plays on the piano or the guitar, providing the film with an aesthetic that is minimalist and - thanks to the long take business - just a bit awkward at times, which again fits The Mountain Goats nicely, for this is the music of a guy who has always been willing to accept and own moments of awkwardness instead of excising them.

I'm too much of a fan of Darnielle (whose music, together with that of the Go-Betweens, Lucinda Williams, Epic Soundtracks, and the Fellow Travellers may very well have kept me sane at one point in my life) to say much about the quality of the music or the performance, except that the film made me cry just a little.

Finalmente… le mille e una notte aka 1001 Nights of Pleasure (1972): As a genre, the Italian sex comedy, even in its (in theory) more classy aspect, never did much for me, despite sharing at least the female half of its casts with those Italian genres of the same eras I do love. Their ideas about what's funny and mine just disagree a bit too much with each other.

So I found myself rather surprised when (house favourite) Antonio Margheriti's provoked quite a few smiles and even two or three guffaws from me here. The film's combination of low-brow comedy, nudity graciously provided by actresses like Barbara Bouchet and Femi Benussi (and, if that floats your boat, to a lesser degree actors like Gino Milli and, well, whoever plays the other semi-nude guys), and pretty nice to look at production design doesn't exactly add up to something everyone should see, but the film is a fine enough piece of exploitation for those evenings when something deeper, cleverer or less friendly would be too much. This is also another film that supports my theory of Margheriti being - generally (let's pretend we don't know his war movies) - one of the most good-natured of all Italian genre directors, for there's really nothing nasty about the film, even when the joke's by all rights should feel nasty. I imagine Margheriti as a happy man.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,italian movies,adventure,action,music,comedy,exploitation,robert downey jr,jude law,guy ritchie,rian johnson,the mountain goats,antonio margheriti,barbara bouchet,femi benussi