Blade Runner

Blade Runner

Director ~ Ridley Scott

Writers ~ Hampton Fancher, David Webb Peoples, Philip K. Dick

1982, US-UK

Stars ~Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, Sean Young

 

[This refers to The Director’s Cut.]

 

A classic, of course, but also surely an influence on all sci-fi that came after, ‘Metropolis’, ‘2001: a space odyssey’ or ‘Star Wars’. And of course, Scott’s own ‘Alien’. Just the opening cityscape – dark, fiery, neon – swooning to Vangelis’ transcendent-ageless 80s synth crescendos and diminuendos is iconic. The retro-futurism neon, cyberpunk, the crammed together population, claustrophobic urbanism – Deckard’s place seems part apartment, part airduct, just one neighbourhood away from Gilliam’s ‘Brazil’ – the seemingly eternal nocturnalism, smog and rain… it’s a timeless mash-up feel of the antiquated and the futuristic. Zeppelins populate the sky along with flying cars – and chortle at the old brand names being advertised in the backdrops, although Coca Cola seems a constant. It feels lived in and plausible: part dazzle, part slum. Douglas Turnbull’s effects are both stunning and immersive. The highest of tech exists alongside entropy, the population distracted by the promise of living off-world. 

 

There’s so much detail to get lost in (a headline about mining on the moon; Deckard climbing over a sofa to cross his over-stuffed apartment) filtered through such a dreamy atmosphere that it takes and rewards multiple viewings to digest. It's marred by the moment where Deckard comes over all let’s teach the lady what she really wants where noirish romance involves a little rough foreplay. It’s an attitude that hasn’t aged well, even when all else still feels timeless; a misstep that glares because so much else is balanced so immaculately. Otherwise, the existential drama hinges on the What Does It Mean To Be Human? that Philip K. Dick’s original specialised in (whilst also cribbing the term “blade runner” from William S. Burroughs). If the question is why would they manufacture android-slaves to be so human-like, even giving them false memories, then surely we can look no further than our tendency to anthropomorphism as much as to Other, or indeed our desire to make AI and CGI as life-like as possible. The question of Deckard’s humanity looms large, but the Why? and What does it mean if he isn’t? gets smothered in the teeming mess and bric-a-brac of this society.

 

Harrison Ford has that look of a bad boy fearful of being discovered to be decent, an engaging vulnerability. Despite his apparent reputation, it has to be noted that Deckard doesn’t seem a convincing hunter of replicants: he only lives because his prey decides to do something else rather than immediately kill him (except when he shoots from behind). There’s an uncanniness to all the performances, a certain oddness that makes everyone memorable. Of course, it is Rutger Hauer that steals the show, chewing the scenery just with the crawl of his smile and delivering an improvised quintessential monologue… “I’ve seen things…” 

 

 

Glasgow FrightFest: 'Vicious Fun', 'American Badger', 'Out of the World'

Vicious Fun

Cody Calahan

Writers: Cody Calahan & James Villeneauve

As it says on the label. A horror magazine journalist stumbles accidentally upon a support group for serial killers, and it’s all in-jokes and horror comedy fun from there. These days in the genre, you’re never far from an Eighties setting and the throb of a synth score, and that’s the aesthetic here. It certainly looks good and colourful.  It covers most of the bases of serial killers – even the anti-serial killer serial killer – and, although it is constantly winking to the audience, it never quite becomes obnoxious or overdone.  Evan Walsh’s central performance as Joel the Horror Journalist is the most winkiest of all, always a bit meta: perhaps his almost-obnoxiousness is a gag in itself, but Joel is also definitely a bit Nice Guy; all he needs is a serial killer to point out his dubious ways. And true to the manner of Eighties horror-comedies, it’s a little clunky in places and most of the killers feel a little short-changed in relation to how good the set-up is. But it’s obvious that the film just wants the audience to have a good time, and that counts for a lot. It has good pacing and moves on when one location has been exhausted; there are several good genre gags (“I’m all my stepdaughter has”; killers appearing from nowhere; a summary of the appeal of the horror genre are all favourites); some nice ensemble work; a little industry satire. And the final drive-in coda is a highlight. 

American Badger

Writer & Director: Kirk Caouette

2021, Canada 

We’re in super-skilled-fighter-saves-sex-worker territory here. But that isn’t quite the whole story. Off-the-grid super-assassin Dean (writer-director-star Kirk Caouette) is meant to seduce Velvet (Andrea Stefancikova) to extract what she knows about the Albanian mob boss she works for and then kill her. But he is solitary and isolated, like an American badger, and inevitably this human interaction gets into him and disrupts the plan. 

The tone is lowkey, washed out and downbeat and possibly a bit introspective for some, but it’s more fascinating than, say, Jason Statham’s ‘Redemption/Hummingbird’. Mostly because ‘American Badger’ lets us know very early on that there are going to be great fight scenes, and here are several. Caouette even cuts away from some to follow the story rather than the action. It’s a somewhat hoary premise (three of the eight films I’ve watched at Glasgow Film Festival feature this criminal-man-perhaps-redeemed-by-female: ‘Voice of Silence’, ‘American Badger’ and ‘Out of the World’) but there’s a pleasing fleet-footedness about the pacing, for however downbeat it is, it doesn’t stress one moment too long unless it’s the fights. And it’s those that really stand out, drawing from Caouette’s extensive experience as a stunt man. The capturing of a drab if cluttered world is assured, where call girls are left in poor imitation of Hollywood dreams, where the rooms they and hitmen live in are messy with just rudiments of character, and where clubs and bars are soulless backdrops to fights. There’s a moodiness here and control that shows Cauoette is no perfunctory director either, lifting it up from the average.

Out of the World

Hors du Monde

Witer & Director: Marc Fouchard

2020, France 

The IMDB synopsis is coy: “A shy man who works as a taxi driver because he can't afford to live as a musician, meets a deaf girl dancer who is attracted to him despite his trouble communicating.” But isn’t so long after our cab driver Leo – a gripping performance by Kévin Mischel – falls for Amélie (Aurélia Poirier) that we’re in ‘The Hours of the Day’, ‘Canibal’ (2013), ‘Henry: portrait of a serial killer’ if not ‘Maniac’ territory here: that is, the humdrum daily routine of killer. He lives and works in his car, but he’s also musician, composing melancholic instrumentals on his laptop of the orchestral kind (it’s good). But as so often happens with film killers, he believes murder is his muse. 

Fouchard’s film unfolds at a steady pace and gets increasingly engrossing as the character study deepens. The film stays close to the Leo’s mindset, incorporating interpretive dance as well as his kills – but how many of the kills are real isn’t quite clear, but he’s certainly guilty.  Leo is totally detached and off the grid, unable to socialise normally: dance turns into confrontation and, in an unsettling highlight, he has to hold a woman at knifepoint for dating advice. Leo doesn’t even know how, but Amélie is a mute dancer and these qualities – her disconnect and talent – entice him and gives him the impetus to try. He’s irredeemable – in an imaginary conversation, he doesn’t even let himself off the hook – but his struggle to try and suppress his nature and routine, to learn the gestures of flirting, are disquieting and gripping. He has a hangdog look that belies his murderous nature. 

In the end, murdering to make music is just his excuse: both offer a release for feelings he can barely control; sadness through music and rage through killing (he has mummy issues). It conflates artistry with homicidal nature – a trope of the serial killer genre from ‘Color Me Blood Red’ to Norman Bates’ taxidermy and many, many others - but the music is something Leo could be if he could get past the violence. Which he can’t.

Fouchard’s film weaves a dark spell, a sense of the claustrophobia of Leo’s mind and desires. ‘Out of the World’s deliberate pace demands attention and faith, but the journey to inevitable tragedy – where the film is the most Autumnally colourful – becomes riveting. It’s a strong, unforgettable and beguiling entry in the artistic rather than exploitational end of the Day in the Life of a Serial Killer genre.

Possessor - the chill of psychopaths

‘Possessor’: 2020, Canada-UK

Writer- director: Brandon Cronenberg

Okay, so ‘Possessor’ is a film by Brandon Cronenberg, but I would have said its bloody, visceral surface and clinical, cold centre were Cronenbergian anyhow. This is the genre inverse of epics such as ‘Oblivion’ or ‘Interstellar’: here, the science-fiction rides roughshod over the individual and identity in ways we can barely contain. And it’s the opposite of ‘Gravity’ or ‘Arrival’ that have the mind-boggling to hand but retreat to the safety of familiar human sentimentality. But I am doing that thing on dwelling on the name Cronenberg, but I really don’t mean that as an accusation of derivativeness: it’s more like Brandon is just taking off from the path set by his father’s early work and running into his own. After ‘Antiviral’ and this, it’s obvious that either Cronenberg is a brand worth following.

‘Possessor’ doesn’t really seem to care if you like it. It’s for a certain kind of audience. After all, its protagonist is a psychopath, using her job of possessing the bodies of unsuspecting others to turn them into assassins for her own kicks, although ostensibly it's for corporate intrigue. At first, I was doubting that someone empathy-deficient could carry out missions passing as others, but I realised I was wrong as the mimicry of normalcy is exactly what psychopaths do. And anyway, Tasya is mostly just bluffing her way through, intermittently successful. That’s why they’re scary. 

Andrea Riseborough is convincingly icy and on-edge as Tasya, nonplussed in the extreme to the carnage she leaves behind. There’s the sense that this possessing lark has made her a little deranged. Jennifer Jason Leigh hides her psychopathy behind a kind of Tired Mom façade. Christopher Abbott as Colin Tate is the one that has to run the full gamut as the latest victim (Abbot is one to watch for choices: he was great in ‘Piercing’, and titles like ‘It Comes At Night’, ‘Vox Lux’ and ‘A Most Violent Year’ shows he prefers something off-centre and challenging). There may be a detached veneer to proceedings, but the performances are fully rounded, even down to the warmth of Tasya’s ex-husband and son. One of the high points is when Tasya has possessed Colin and is trying to pass as him to his girlfriend, but the girlfriend just instantaneously knows something is wrong – Tasya can’t even fake one of his kisses. In such a moment, the chilly detachment is shown to be lacking.

The body-horror is there in the hallucinatory segues, but also in details like chopped fingers. The effects work of Dan Martin and Dan Liscoumb is predominantly practical and in-camera, adding a little extra ickiness that CGI just can’t quite reach. We indeed start with a woman inserting a long needle into her scalp, so this should be the first warning. The killings are unnerving in their persistence and length. The moment of wearing another’s face is basic but so disturbing and quite unforgettable.

There is also the air of the privileged running amuck, obsessed only with their own agenda. After all, Tasya Vos’ latest target is the obnoxious Sean Bean, CEO of a data mining corporation that acts as if he has bullied his way all his life and had never been told no. There’s industrial intrigue here, but this is just the thriller framework to hang all the freaky ruminations on identity, sexuality, technology, etc. Certainly Shelia O’Malley feels Cronenberg doesn’t offer enough focus or examine some of the possibilities, and there’s certainly enough here for a longer film: as ‘Possessor’ entered the third act, I was feeling disappointed it wasn’t going to be longer as I was hooked and fascinated. But the finale – a shocker – reveals that this tale is ultimately about Tasya’s complete loss of humanity.  Indeed, doesn’t she end up as a head of department in this shady organisation?

 It’s a genre piece that throws a much bigger picture out there to consider and boggle the mind but focuses on one element; and in this case, any feeling that the thriller element lacks focus is made up for by the sensory overload. It’s gorgeous to look at: Robert Lazarus’ production design is a treat; the way an average street is filmed reminds me of the way Lorcan Finnegan makes mundane suburbia sinister.

It’s not as overtly trippy as ‘Mandy’, but it has an iron grip on bursts of disturbing psychedelia. There are criticisms that it’s joyless - and certainly Jim Williams' score doesn't let you forget the tone of dread - but that’s Tasya’s world: it’s stifling and pitiless. ‘Possessor’ is fascinating, cerebral, often cruel and shocking and recommended to anyone that likes the transgressive and dark genre corners.

John Wick: chapter 3 – parabellum ... revisited: I came for the set-pieces

Chad Stahelski, 2019, 

English-Russian-Japanese-Italian

Original Review here.

So I watched ‘John Wick 3’ again just to see what I felt about it on a second watch. It’s not the usual thing that leaves a mark on me, and certainly the first two hadn’t, and it’s the kind of film I watch just to keep with trends and the mainstream.

What I first noted was that it seemed to me that the opening credits were the kind of montage and design that front TV action series. It’s a world of sicky green, velvety purple, smouldering orange and vivid red, despite a digression into the bronze of the dessert. It’s beautifully filmed by Dan Lausten, giving a little slick class. It owes a debt to ‘The Villainess’ with its ballet-and-wrestling-school-for-assassins, as well as it’s bike chase. The actors all ham it up shamelessly and I am inclined to treat it as a comedy, so silly and over-the-top and narcissistic are its narrative and character outbursts (and I’m still leaning towards Laurence Fishbourne as bad here). Halle Berry’s plays it straighter than the others, as if she’s come in from a more serious film and gives a little gravitas to proceedings. She proves a good foil for Reeves, who delivers his one-liners with his slacker drawl that undercuts some of the silliness in a way that a more lip-smacking performer wouldn’t.

But none of that drew me back in. It was those first twenty minutes that I couldn’t shake. The library fight, the museum fight and – quoting Reeves here – the horse-fu are three knock-out set-pieces in succession that still retained their effect on me. The fight choreography gave me the same buzz that I got from ‘The Raid’  films: fight scenes are as pleasing as dance-offs with the dubious punctuation of violence. It provides the same rush as good pop or rock music. But it was even more notable this time at how well the editing facilitated the action.

With the library scene: oh, that’s how you use a heavy book to fight? There’s the moment when you realise they have found a way to make books lethal, to give you that oh! gratification.

And then there’s that moment when, having been shooting and brawling, both Wick and his adversary take a second, look around the weapon museum around them, and think “Wait, we have an arsenal here!” and start smashing into the knife displays with desperate abandon. Then are the closing knife-in-the-eye and axe-to-the-head gags that are framed for maximum effect, both for squirm-inducement and humour (because there’s humour in outrageousness).

It's the same humour in outrageousness that gratifies when, pursued into a stable, Wick starts to use the horses as weapons – gloriously over-the-top. And when you think of the logistics of horse and bikes and crashes, all in the same take, the film-making skill is evident.

These are each great set-pieces that would have been peaks in other films. And then it gets bogged down in plot and world-building and the silliness takes over. But upon a second watch I enjoyed the shoot-out-with-attack dogs more than before because this time I could see the skilful editing, timing and framing. And boy, so many headshots. It’s a very violent film.

Sometimes I can take a film for it’s set-pieces: I have a friend that felt the uneven nature of ‘Ad Astra’  showed that James Gray failed at narrative, and that may be so, but again that film’s sci-fi set-pieces won me over despite the unevenness (well, that and Hoyte Van Hoytema’s cinematography wowed me). Tarantino’s films are often a sequence of grandiose set-pieces. Jodorowsky’s odysseys are built on moments and vision rather than coherence. If there’s inventiveness, skill and pleasing aesthetic, that alone can impress. But there are many superficial pleasures to be had and quite often the overall vision can compensate for narrative weaknesses.

So, those opening set-pieces of ‘John Wick 3’ still strike me as worthy and impressive in their talent, inventiveness and execution, and that half hour alone will still gain marks from me, although I may find it easy to b thee indifferent to the rest of it.