District 9

District 9

Director - Neill Blomkamp

Writers - Neill Blomkamp & Terri Tatchell

Stars - Sharlto Copley, David James, Jason Cope

 

One of those films that I enjoyed much more the second time around. When I first saw it upon release, I was eager for its potential: its premise being aliens coming to earth and receiving the treatment and response that typically greets refugees. There’s no subtlety in this text and I usually take such obvious thematic presentation as I would punk polemics and rap rants. What I remember upon seeing it for the first time at the cinema was disappointment that it just descended into a shoot ‘em up fisticuffs, and some credibility doubts with them just breaking in and finding the lab they wanted within about five minutes. The sharpness of its premise stunted by traditional genre pleasures.

 

But this time around, with expectations aligned with what I knew was going to happen, I enjoyed those genre pleasures, was less inclined to dwell on doubts and criticism because I tuned in more to the b-movie action tropes. More of a ‘Robocop’ or even ‘Westworld’ frequency. The satire is still there, but a little lost to firefights. What there is is plenty of sympathy for the aliens and criticism for institutional and general racism.

 

Presented with the awesome reality of aliens, the human race just reverts to xenophobia. But also, the presentation of aliens as refugees with all the social and political complexities involved is not how movie aliens are usually presented: this is a far cry from the awe-inspiring contemplation of, say, ‘Arrival’. It’s not a deep discussion of the subject, because this has the pell-mell motion of action b-movie, so you won’t get the narrative of what the black and indigenous communities think and feel, or how their social status has been affected by the aliens’ arrival. But there is an overall condemnation of the marginalisation, exploitation and the bigoty visited on the aliens which keeps a live current throughout. It certainly portrays a far too plausible and recognisable reaction (‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’ is a pipedream, its positivity childish in comparison). However, the resolution that it’s a good thing that the aliens go back to where they came from is unhelpful. It’s the context that resonates rather than any questions or answers.

Once it’s clear ‘District 9’ won’t be a deep discourse on the subject of the disenfranchised, what we are left with is the tribulations of Wikus Van De Merwe (Sharlto Copley), rise and downfall. Like the first infamous segment in ‘The Twilight Zone Movie’, it’s a tale where the guy facilitating violent discrimination with a clipboard and prejudicial legalise finds roles reversed. In this case, he inhales something extraterrestrial and transforms, via a body-horror interlude, into an alien. He’s a scumbag happy to exploit and wallow is his role in the Hostile Environment and evicting the aliens who meets his comeuppance. He takes a long time to redeem himself and even then, it’s more a case of just desserts, although the film does give some sympathy.

It’s conveyed at first through documentary and found-footage style, building up pictures from news reports, etc, as Wikus is happy to front fly-on-the-wall propaganda. But the film is happy to dump that pretence as action demands, although it never relinquishes hand-held. And it’s the image of the spaceship hanging over Johannesburg is likely to be the chief lingering image.

 

The aliens are great: some smart, some stupid, some lumbering, some insect-elegant, gullible, forlorn, aggressive, etc. This could be seen as inconsistency, but the positive interpretation is that they are recognisably as myriad as any other species. After all, we don’t know any tier system or hierarchy they may have (the intellects and the workers, for example). Both cookie and intimidating, persecuted and troublesome. They are a convincing early-ish display of dominant digital effects by Weta Workshop – it’s a Peter Jackson production – that still hold up. It’s not above going for the cute kid alien angle either.

 

It suffers from some of the weaknesses of b-movie action – why speechify when and not shoot? Let’s take it on trust that he’ll just remember the way to that lab – and perhaps it doesn’t quite jump from its distinctive, potent premise as highly as it could, but it’s fun, quick, and pertinent enough. Blomkamp and Coley arguably have never quite met the early promise of this debut, but it still maintains its position as a genre favourite.

Curse of the Crimson Altar

 

Curse of the Crimson Alter

Aka: The Crimson Cult

Director – Vernon Sewell

Screenplay – Mervyn Haisman & Henry Lincoln from a story by Jerry Sohl

Stars – Boris Karloff, Christopher Lee, Mark Eden

 

Starts in rip-roaring fashion with a buxom blonde being whipped on a sacrificial alter by a near-naked amazon whilst a dirty old priest looks on. Having been introduced to our typically staid hero, the Swinging Sixties vibe continues (as much as it censorship allows) with a big house party of wild abandon (e.g. painting breasts, pouring booze on breasts, etc). Much of the debauchery and witchy rituals look like they are auditioning for a salacious slot in such Mondo efforts as ‘Primitive London’. 

 

Manning hangs around and discovers that the atmosphere is sinister with the legend of Lavinia Morley, Black Witch of Greymarsh. Witch burning town festivals, psychedelic nightmares, blood oaths, threatening masked juries, sleepwalking, secret passages relatively easily found all follow. When stabbed in a dream, Manning wakes to find he has been stabbed in real life, but this barely seems a conundrum to him and certainly no inconvenience to shagging his host’s daughter. In fact, the film’s sexual politics are decidedly dated, what with Manning’s somewhat presumptive and aggressive come-ons. And it all ends up underwhelming and a little perfunctory – don’t these things end on the rooftop? Yes, let’s do the rooftop!

 

Based on HP Lovecraft’s ‘A Dream in the Witch House’ (uncredited), antique enthusiast Robert Manning (Mark Eden) goes in pursuit of his missing brother and gate-crashes a party at a stately home, finding himself taken as a welcome guest. “It’s as if Boris Karloff is going to pop up at any moment,” Manning deadpans – and lo! Boris does turn up, in a wheelchair, condescending and full of potent and invitations to see his collection of torture instruments. Of course, it’s Karloff and Christopher Lee that give it class (Lee’s no-nonsense sincerity and Karloff’s uncampy ham), but it’s Michael Gough that steals the show as a batty short-lived servant. Eden is uninteresting and quite bullish, like Connery’s Bond without the charm.  Virginia Wetherall’s natural no-nonsense appeal is squandered and all Barbara Steele has to do is to is look imperiously green.

 

Enjoy by simply stuffing the plot holes and cliches with the lashings of unintentional camp.

The Kitchen

 

The Kitchen

 

Director – Andrea Berloff

Writers – Andrea Berloff - based on the comic book series created for DC Vertigo by Ollie Masters & Ming Doyle

Stars – Melissa McCarthy, Tiffany Haddish, Elisabeth Moss 

 

Andrea Barloff’s directorial debut is an adaption of a DC Vertigo comic set in the ‘70s telling how three abused and/or neglected mobsters wives take over the business in Hell’s Kitchen when their husbands are put away. So, the grounds are there for a look at misogyny, violence, gender relations, etc., and if there are any doubts about its feminist intent, there are endless shots of the ladies striding together to a groovy soundtrack. But there is something that doesn’t quite gel, doesn’t quite convince in motivation: with comics, there is plenty of room for the reader to fill in the lacunas, but Berloff doesn’t quite cohere across the time-jumps. There’s the sense of posturing rather than solidity, that it lacks in fully making sense.

 

Which leaves its three esteemed leads a little hit-or-miss, although Elizabeth Moss comes out least unscathed. Tiffany Haddish becomes increasingly one-note and Melissa McCarthy is left floundering. Of the men, Domhall Gleeson is the most intriguing (though his touted psychopathy is ultimately no more than anyone else). And we don’t quite get a montage of them sexying-up, but they definitely get less home wifey and dolled up the more criminal they become. There’s a fleeting gag about what they should wear to meet an opposing mob boss, but it’s another potential insight barely given air.

 

And there’s not a lot of consequence for all the killing that goes on: for all it spanning of years, it’s not so interested in long-term effects. The problem is we are meant to hold up these ladies as fighting against and besting the masculine world of gangsterdom, but there is little besting or bettering when, for all their womanly smarts and pouts of determination, they are just as ruthless and brutal as the men. Exploitation may get away with self-made Angel of Vengeance assassins, but this isn’t that.  They are not icons, even if the film posits that they are right down to the ham-fisted “outta my way” final moment.

Leave your panic at the door - album

My new long player, "Leave your panic at the door" is on Bandcamp now. It's an electronically-inclined effort with bits of electropop (sort of) to ambience. Made during this second year of lockdown, of course.

Fake thriller beats, upper class war on lower class animals, friendship promises, relationship abstractions, fake solar system beats and fake automaton beats, a swooning lady phenomenon, neediness in pieces, lifestyle genres, the last signals from a skull.

 

Pig

Pig

Director - Michael Sarnoski

Writers - Vanessa Block & Michael Sarnoski

Stars – Nicolas Cage, Alex Wolff, Adam Arkin

 

Anyone coming for shouty madcap Cage will be sorely disappointed, because here he is totally in service to the prose of the film as a whole, not just punctuation. It’s a quiet, towering Sasquatch of a performance. Going in knowing very little – they steal his pig; he wants it back – I probably thought it would go the ‘John Wick’, ‘Nobody’ route, and indeed it is filmed with those beats in place, albeit in a very sombre register. But it’s not that either, for it has different goals. For a start, it’s almost so washed out that it’s austere, and it is slow, committedly serious and deliberate and ends on a great, bare bones cover of Springsteen’s ‘I’m On Fire’. It’s a mood piece.

 

(And I feel the need to put a reminder that you should stop reading now if you haven’t seen the film.)

 

Those action-revenge beats are in place: there’s illegal fights, a wealthy nemesis, and Rob spends most of the film with a bloody beard (which nevertheless doesn’t stop him from getting to a prestige restaurant; and he must smell a treat too). And indeed, it’s as if John Wick’s superpowers were a photographic memory and legendary culinary skills instead of super-assassin past. Cage is Rob, a committed hermit with the required irascibility, earning cash as a truffle hunter and selling to Alex Wolff. But these are characters to be coloured-in, and the character study that emerges is one of a talented man scarred irreparably by grief and a fatalism and over-sensitivity; an over-sensitivity, we might guess, compounded and made unbearable by that photographic memory. Rob’s intelligence and empathy becomes increasingly evident and is never clearer than when he is confronting/talking to the restaurant chef (a sublime scene between David Knell and Cage at the peak of their control).

 

It’s a film concerned with subtle shifts, and although Alex Wolff as Amir is often shoved aside as a used and abused observer, and although we don’t get to see it, one could imagine these events have changed him more than anyone. His is a fine performance of natural empathy trying to get out from under the veneer of bolshy business hotshot.

 

Where you might think it is leading to an explosive showdown of some kind… but the showdown is the making of a meal rather than a shootout. The methodology is repeatedly to set up an to undercut expectations. Again, the film follows the beats of a vengeance thriller, even to leaving him a hermit with his tapes which a shallow action film would see as a poignant character beat, but the residual feeling here is different: there’s no satisfaction of “he’s had his vengeance and now everything is back in its rightful place”. ‘Pig’ is after something else: a story of what we care about and the husks it makes of us when that’s taken away.