Us

Us

Jordan Peele, 2019, USA-Japan

Jordan Peele’s ‘Us’ starts with the Reagan-era commercial for “Hands Aross America”  playing on a tv set with ‘C.H.U.D.’ on the VHS pile beside it, and this juxtaposition proves a big clue to the film’s agenda – ripping the trick from ‘Climax’. Oh, should I then write that as ‘U.S.’? The focus of many reviews will be on the film’s sociology and politics, and Amanda Marcotte provides a useful and direct analysis that ‘Us’ concerns the uprising of the consequences of Reaganism. Peele says ‘Us’ is not about race this time, and it’s true that its metaphors are set more on class, but of course class will always feature race. The director of ‘Get Out’ is unlikely to ever be able to escape the shadow of that debut, but it is also unlikely that he would want to. Just to say that having a black family as central protagonists in a horror film seems quietly ground-breaking enough (see Shudder’s ‘Horror Noire’ for a fine run-through of the dearth of black representation in the genre). 

But why both ‘Get Out’ and ‘Us’ will have longevity beyond being attuned to their contemporary contexts, their eras and political climate, is that they deliver their horror wholeheartedly and with panache. ‘Get Out’ had the don’t-go-there premise, the dark secrets of a superficially benign community and the mad scientist trope. ‘Us’ has the doppelganger, the monsters underground, home invasion, the bodysnatchers and repressed coming up from the tunnels. Both films are stuffed full of all this horror stuff so while all the social commentary and poignant analogies are taking most of the attention, these tropes are providing all the fun. And they are fun films too: they are good with the natural humour. Maybe ‘Get Out’ suffers from having an obvious comic relief, but the humour in ‘Us’ is far more organic and fulfils much of the crowd-pleasing. 

I saw a Twitter witticism by someone that he had just overdosed on ‘Us’’s metaphors and had to lay down. Surely some will accuse Peele of trying too hard, of being too full of itself, but going off the rails and reaching too far is what horror does and Peele has a fine sense of the balance between fun and symbolism. After all, it’s not as if Romero’s ‘Dawn of the Dead’ is subtle. Peele is obviously wallowing and enjoying the tropes so if you read this as cliché, it’s not going to exceed disappointment. And there are all the references and rips from other films – there’s ‘Climax’ at the start, there’s ‘Funhouse’, even the red of ‘Don’t Look Now’, if you like, or Myer’s boiler suit, and the glove that is both a reference to Freddy and Michael Jackson – and on it goes. Typical of contemporary horror, the Easter eggs for fans are plentiful. 

And that Peele delivers good, solid and relatable characters that are far above the genre standard shouldn’t be undervalued. One of the notable touches is how he has characters in such outrageous scenarios talking in a more realistically casual manner that isn’t quite typical of the genre. It helps the whole cast deliver memorable performances whilst still working as archetypes (the man-child horny husband, the indifferent teen, the unfulfilled trophy wife, etc.). Lupita Nyong’o especially gives exceptional lead and support performances, proving again that the genre is giving women some of the best roles around ~ but everyone gives great twin performances.

The doppelgangers are, of course, the Ids of the characters: the brutish father, the creepy grinning daughter, the animalistic and destructive son. It is with the son, Jason (Evan Alex), that there is perhaps one of the films greatest subtleties: at a crucial moment, he seems to realise that Pluto (his double) is the worst of him, but that they come from the same stock and so intuits Pluto’s trap, that he can control his “tethered”, then apparently melding with Pluto to thwart him. And although everyone gives fantastically physical and otherworldly Id-performances, it is surely Evan Alex’s scrambling around like a monkey or a spider that remains most memorable, and so at odds with the more prosaic character of Jason. Even Umbrae’s (Shahadi Wright Joseph) smile-like-a-horror-icon and Red’s horror-croaky voice are pulled back just at the moment of being over-done. 

But like ‘Get Out’, ‘Us’ almost sabotages itself with an unsubtle moment where everything stands still for exposition. These moments are untypical of the fluid flow and fine judgement on display before and after, but it seems there is so much to get in that Peele hasn’t yet quite figured how to avoid these moments of obviousness. But nevertheless, much else is so strong that surely this weakness can be forgiven. 

It’s not so much about the twist which any genre-savvy viewer will suspect/know – so it’s barely a twist at all, maybe – but how the film plays with that throughout and what it goes on to say: it’s about how, given the chance, she came from the underground and learnt all the signifiers and mannerisms to be the thing above ground, in a comfortable middle-class and loving family. Did we think she was just playing a part, because she really did seem to care about the kids, etc.? No, she undoubtedly really meant it. Give the underclass a chance and they’ll be indistinguishable from the privileged. Hell, they might even achieve “Hands Across America” where the privileged failed.

It's a little uneven, a little mumbled, but‘Us’ is a far more open work, far

more willing to let the audience pile in with interpretation where ‘Get Out’ was more definite. It’s chock-full of social commentary and symbolism that can be parsed long afterwards. It helps that there are many striking images to hang it all on and that it’s all nicely and sharply filmed – already I note costume companies are taking the film’s get-ups as Halloween options. Peele offers another meal of genre tropes to interrogate another perennial topic of sociological horror, but does so with humour, vigour and with a sense that the genre can stab and viscerally reveal subjects in ways that others cannot. 

"Lonely Decoy" - Buck Theorem album #2

Here is my second album, "Lonely Decoy". I was asked years ago to do something for an open mic in Manchester, and at the time I really didn't have much to perform and thought spoken word was the way to go. That's where the track "Lonely Decoy" comes from. But then there's a cover of Orbison's "In Dreams", which I reckon to be my oldest favourite song as I have loved it since I was very young and going through mum's collection of 7-inches, And then there's a track about a seance, and then other ambient tracks to fall asleep to.

If one track does nothing for you, I say try the next... just in case...

Capernaum

CAPERNAUM

Nadine Labaki, 2018, 

Lebanon-France-USA

This is the tale of Zane (Zane Al Rafeea), who is apparently around twelve or thirteen (they can’t quite tell). Zain has a tough life, struggling to exude masculine confidence and dominance over the surrounding chaos of his family and the outside world, all whilst looking younger than his age. When homelife becomes unbearable – like Zvyagintsev’s ‘Loveless’, the parents are too obsessed with their own misery to impart real affection to their kids – he takes to the streets and strikes up an unlikely babysitting job with illegal immigrant Rahil (Yordanos Shiferaw).

Labaki directs with her focus always on her subjects, although there a couple of occasions that it descends into annoying blurry and unintelligible shaky-cam, or there will be a breath-taking birds-eye view of Beruit. Her husband produced, giving her a freedom from studio demands. Mostly it has the naturalistic, quasi-documentary feel that many bildungsroman focusing on poverty utilises (‘Pixote’, ‘Kes’, for example) rather than the magic-realism trend (‘Tigers Are Not Afraid’ comes to mind). Robbie Collins says, 

“…Capernaum is closer in both texture and spirit to the Brazilian crime epic City of God: it teems with the same excitement and danger as Fernando Meirelles’s film. The sensation of being right there on the ground stems from the nimble camerawork, which darts after Zain through the city’s markets and slums, and also the incidental colour vividly woven through the story itself.”

There are plenty of tentpoles where it could hang its drama upon, but even the courtroom framework where Zane is suing his parents dissipates once the characters speak their piece. It’s the kind of conceit that promises the most tabloid of structures and narrative, but the verdict is not the point. Many moments that could have made for high-drama are played out off-screen to allow the sorrowful struggle of the desperate and disenfranchised to play out mostly unruffled by cruder demands of narratives. The film doesn’t want for emotive and heart-tugging moments, but they’re as clear-headed as they are manipulative. It also navigates around something more lurid and grimmer (I’m thinking of ‘The Golden Dream’ and ‘Helos’ (both excellent)): for example, the sequence where Zain is trying to sell to various groups on the street and often getting beaten up is delivered as a montage rather than dwelt upon. In this way, it retains understatement whilst trawling through its tragedies and absurdities. 

In a world of mostly belligerent and manipulative adults, Rahil provides empathy and softness. You will wonder that the toddler playing her baby (Boluwatife Treasure Bankole) seems to be giving as much of an affecting performance as the adults (which is evidence of masterful editng). Zain Al Refeea’s look of constant resolve and defiance is the film’s guiding force, charging forward, until it becomes a mask for an irreparably hurt kid. Anyone familiar with the tricks of these things knows it is likely to culminate in Zain finally smiling as he has spent the entire film morose and never cracking one – even during the somewhat hilarious encounters with “Cockroach-man” – but even when it comes, there is a moment just before when you doubt if he can even achieve it.

You Total Cult - my podcast debut.

Well, I was recently ambushed to appear on the most entertainingly nerdish podcast “You Total Cult”. I wasn’t expecting it, but it proved most fun. I was in the usual fine company - the YTC host, Mike, and James Eastwood and Rich Byrom-Colburn - and we were in a pub in Lewes as a most atmospheric mist crawled and glowed outside. 

Mike knew to catch me unguarded, priming me earlier by texting “Think of some of your oddest and most obscure films – I’ll tell you why later.” I had never been on a podcast before. I was a little taken aback that he declared I had some influence on his taste, but then we got on talking as we usually do about films and I felt on much safer ground. And then he punningly named the episode after me…

You Total Cult

iTunes

@You_Total_Cult 

Burning

Burning

Lee Chang-Dong, South Korea, 2018

Hangul: 버닝 – RR: Beoning 

Maintaining and leaving a thorough sense of ambiguity, when done correctly, can create the most haunting of fiction. For this reason, for example, Kubrick’s ‘The Shining’ will always be a Rorschach test and it seems to me that no line of Henry James’ ‘The Turn of the Screw’ can be trusted; or maybe it’s just perhaps something you can’t quite put your finger on, like the early works of Nicolas Roeg. Lee Chang-Dong’s ‘Burning’ is all about ambiguity: for example, is there a cat/well/killer? 

Lee Jong-su (a rivetingly disarming Ah-in Yoo) is a loner looking for a story to write. But he mostly seems aimless and friendless. Also, his dad is on trial for violent behaviour, leaving the farm for his son to look after. Then one day he runs into an old a neighbour, Shin Hae-Mai (a charmingly shambolic Jong-seo Jun) … or is she? After all, he doesn’t recognise her as she says she had plastic surgery to now make her beautiful. Like everything else, there indeed seems to be some truth in there somewhere: she does seem to recognise the old neighbourhood, for example... 

She asks him to look after her cat when she’s away, which he never sees. Nevertheless, it’s obvious he’s becoming obsessed with her, so when Hae-Mi returns with rich-boy Ben (a mesmerisingly opaque Stephen Yeun), Jong-su is put out and even more repressed than before. Ben’s behaviour seems more and more like that of a sociopath, and Jong-su starts to suspect him of being a serial killer. Or maybe he’s just privileged and shallow?

Maybe Hae-Mi just disappears because the last thing that Jung-su said to her was staggeringly rude and she no longer wanted to play? Maybe the watch is in the drawer because she deliberately left it behind because she didn’t like it – maybe she dropped it? And maybe the thing about Ben and burning down greenhouses is just a pretension, a fancy? After all, there does seem to be some fabrication going on. And who can trust a cat's reactions? Everything is circumstantial, which means bewildered Jung-su’s escalation of assumptions and conclusions takes a more chilling and tragic turn. The more you try to pin down the film’s certainties, the more they tend to the subjective. It’s all in Hae-mi’s pantomiming: just believe it’s there. 

It’s the mystery that lingers, but as well as precisely staged, ‘Burning’ is beautifully filmed in slightly washed-out colours that verge on film noir, wallowing in slow reveals until it has fully planted its questions in you. Like everything else, the sound design and music also take time to show how meticulously placed and riveting it is. Based loosely on Haruki Murakami’s short story ‘Barn Burning’, it’s as much based upon its lacunas and ellipses as what we see. There’s the gamut of issues of violence, class, repression, sexual longing and rivalry informing this troubled central love-triangle: big game is being caught here, even if motivation is often obscure. There’s the sense that the elusive centre is just within reach, calling from a distance like the propaganda blared across the border to the Lee farm. 

The three leads are exceptional, all playing a little abstract and yet thoroughly human. Yoo gets so much from silences beneath which sexual jealousies and class resentment is festering; Jun is the life and soul of the party, both bubbly and slippery and it’s easy to see why she would be the object of infatuation. Yeun is rivetingly all surface and slick, unknowable; saying so little but seemingly doing so – unlike Jung-su – out of arrogance and a superiority complex. ‘Burning’ is firmly anchored by these performances while taking its time distributing its clues and secrecies and pantomime. 

Is Jong-su looking for the truth or a story? But that’s a little disingenuous: he’s looking for both and the question is of how much the latter obscures the former. Then again, perhaps things are just what they seem. And we’ll never know because all we are left with are assumptions. And also a great film about how those assumptions and our need to impose narratives dictate our obsessions and behaviour. And class war, and sexual jealousy, etc...

Amusements

Nicolas Rapold on how 2018 film was representing progressive hope.

For those who like sci-fi panoramas, here's Fan Gao's portfolio:

Feathered dinosaur tail!

The Jam's "A Town Called Malice": That one-two punch of Bruce Foxton's opening bassline that demands that you lose your cool immediately and then followed by that opening line that reminds you that your life is all your troubles makes for one of the great beginnings to any song.
And here are Weller and Foxton on it's conception.

And one of my favourite Kate Bush songs. Somehow, for me, it just effortlessly conjures up the canon of English literature. 

The Spy Who Loved Me

Lewis Gilbert, 1977, UK

Coming after the much derided “The Man With The Golden Gun”, “The Spy Who Loved Me”, along with the subsequent “For Your Eyes Only” are generally seen as the best of the Roger Moore Bonds. Whilst it is true that Moore owns the role here and convinces adequately both as combatant and seducer, knowing when to look serious and when to put his tongue in his cheek, this is still pretty much “Carry On Up Yer Spying”. The most expensive Bond at the time (Biggest! Best! Beyond!), it works best as a weak parody of itself. 

Bond is never one exotic location away from getting laid – Bond is here; he’s there; he’s everywhere – and never one woman away from trite innuendo, occasionally tied into the rote patriotism that makes him a national icon. The biggest joke of the film being that Bond has to team up with sexy Russian agent XXX, Major Anya Amasova (Barbara Bach… and is that kisses? X-rated?), and ... well, you know how men and women are different, yes? Even when fleeing death, Bond will pause to raise an eyebrow at the efforts of a lady because, well, you know how women are? See how agent XXX has trouble getting a van going to escape danger? Women drivers, right? See agent XXX pursue a lethal killer in a sleek evening gown, high heels and clutching a handbag. Etc.

The plot is a tracing over “You Only Live Twice” and we are firmly in science-fiction land and a long way from, say, Harry Palmer and John Le Carre. Okay, so that realism is not what the Bond franchise was engaging with and Bond is far more Flash Gordon than George Smiley, but it seems a shame to have Bond just a sequence of weak gags and innuendo until harder-edged action steps in from a far more convincing if no less silly film. But there has always been a part of Bond films that want to be all things to a mainstream audience. It’s a grab bag of generalisations held together by leading man charisma, gadgets and girls. Oh, but Richard Kiel as definitive henchman "Jaws" steals the show.

The Favourite

Yorgos Lanthimos, 2018, Ireland-UK-USA

writers: Deborah Davis & Tony MacNamara

There was something about Lanthimos’ previous features ‘The Lobster’ and ‘The Killing of a Sacred Deer’ that didn’t quite hit that final mark for me: good play but no last-minute goal or touchdown or whatever sports analogy you prefer (perhaps another viewing will change my mind). But there is none of that feeling of the point not quite being made to ‘The Favourite.’

In interviews, Olivia Coleman tells of how Lanthimos likes to leave things open and unrequited, to let the actors find their own answers – and doubtless the audience too. This reaps rewards in ‘The Favourite’ in that the three lead women eschew Lathimos’ previous deadpan style and give full-blooded performances that undoubtably makes this that most unlikely beast: a crossover Lanthimos film. Lured by the promise of the cosy tropes of costume drama, audiences get something far odder. It operates with the elegance associated with period drama and the iconoclastic sensibility and dirty words of a sketch show. 

Through the vast rooms and corridors of court, everyone wants the Queen’s favour: the men for politics, the women just to thwart oppression. There’s the surface tomfoolery and absurdism, but always the tragic underpins it all; not least in the ever present seventeen rabbits representing the children Queen Anne has lost (when interviewed by Simon Mayo, Coleman said that Anne was entitled to be as mad as she pleased after such loss).  But it’s also there in the background details of what the women must do to survive; Abigail’s fall from grace, for example, and her determination to rise again. Don’t come for historical accuracy (those rabbits are a fabrication, for example, but Screenrant provides an overview of the true story) but there’s plenty of emotional truths here. And always the hint of danger (the shooting range) as well as a topping of a little uncomfortable slapstick (watch for “Nude pomegranate Tory”).  But mostly there is also a litany of one-liners and bon mots to savour – “You look like a badger.” “…and something called a ‘pineapple’.” – and the cast relish them. 

The regal period drama has always been a home for dry wit and satire, and 'The Favourite' brings a slight lampooning of the genre and of history that opens it up without recourse to total veracity. It’s a woman’s film predominantly and Coleman and Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone wallow in the opportunity and captivate and delight without Lanthimos’ direction getting in the way. It’s three brilliant performances plus probably a career best from Nicholas Hoult. The screenplay by Deborah Davis and Tony MacNamara provide a great script for them to get their teeth into. It gives Lanthimos a solid through-line that is at once playful and cruel but with a wide streak of empathy and sympathy that hasn’t previously been part of this director’s provocations. It also has a final note that, although it’s apparently all games and one-upmanship, no one wins. A thorough delight with a sour bite. 

Beautiful Boy

Felix van Groeningen, 2018, USA

screenplay: Lucas Davies & Felix van Groeningen

Although based on both the memoirs of David and Nic Sheff – ‘Beautiful Boy’ and ‘Tweak’ respectively – Groeningen’s adaptation, written with LukeDavies, tilts more towards the father, making this mainly a paternal viewpoint of a son’s addiction. 

There is a streak of obviousness in ‘Beautiful Boy’ where it uses a Notebook of Exposition or is too on-the-nose with the song choices, but just like it’s choice of Neil Young’s ‘Heart of Gold’, it is equally sentimental and clear-headed and ultimately moving. It is not working in abstraction or even subtlety, but this is where the aesthetic stops it falling into addiction-of-the-week TV movie. The mosaic of memories and incidents undermine much of the sense of cliché to allow the performances and mood to dominate. And dominate they do: Colin Farrel and  Timothée Chalamet are both excellent. Chalamet is a fine physical actor which reaps rewards when he is overdosing in a toilet. Farrel is more quietly affecting in his confusion and determination to support his son, excelling when he cracks up and cries. 

Josephine Livingstone finds ‘Beautiful Boy’ lacking as an expression of the truth of addiction: “Homelessness isn’t Timothée Chalamet draped handsomely across a diner; it’s contemptuous glances and shame.” For such films, Livingstone points out, the devastating effects of drugs is just a starting point for family drama and dysfunction, and that’s true. But the slight remove from the details of Nic’s experience meant that I never felt his tale or that druggy miserablism were predominant: that is, it’s the father-son dynamic as the family looks on baffled and helpless that drives the feeling rather than a grim truth of addiction. That is, this isn’t ‘Christiane F.’ or a film that casts the addict as an anti-hero, rebelling against the tedium and hypocrisy of the mainstream. And his problems cannot be located in social context: Nic is seemingly just as confounded by himself as everyone else: he’s a child of privilege from a split but loving home and can go back to that at any time, but drugs have a solid grip on him. 

There may not be detailed insight to crack addiction but the evocation of its effect on a family feels sincere enough. You may find, suddenly and unexpectedly, that it has tapped into real feeling. I certainly abruptly felt that I had been truly stirred at something incidental about halfway through rather than an obvious emotional moment, because I had been affected by the culmination of the overall experience. Particular note for the sound design and choice of songs that guide and glide over the collage and tonal shifts like stream-of-consciousness. There’s nothing new here, but it reaches genuine feeling in its pot pourri of colourfully photographed vignettes that make it an but undeniably emotional experience, whatever flaws it may have. 

The Spy Lodgers: "Miss Secret Agent Regrets" EP

Miss Secret Agent Regrets... but she'll never tell. Instead, listen to these new files from The Spy Lodgers.

And here are some promo videos for this EP, by Henrik Svedlund.

"They Crash Their Cars"

"Dead Friends"

"Late Night With the Lowlife"

Johannes Lang playing piano for

"For the girls back home"

https://www.johanneslangmusic.com/

The Equalizer 1 & 2

The Equalizer 1 & 2

Antoine Fuqua, 2014, USA

Antoine Fuqua, 2018, USA

Robert McCall (Denzil Washington) likes to sit in a café and read as a tribute to his late wife. But then he sees a young woman being misused by the Russian Mafia and must put his pensiveness on hold to get involved as her saviour. Luckily, he is a super-skilled killer.

This is of course the big screen adaptation of the Eighties' Edward Woodward series. Here, Robert McCall is just as lethal and miraculous a fighter as Batman, and the repeat close-up of his eye, verging on ‘The Terminator’ vision, is like a signal that the super-powers are about to kick in. He also seems to have the money to do whatever he wants, to come and go from work when he needs to go abroad in disguise to kick some bad guy ass… but then maybe he just does his Uber job to find out who needs his equalising services. Yeah, that’s it. Or in the first film, he works in a hardware store, which supplies him with no end of weapons. Either way – Uber driver or salesman – his working man credentials are established. At one point, we don’t even see him do his equalising thing, just hanging a sledgehammer back into its place after he’s borrowed it to even some score. It’s almost a gag.

The problem is that there is never any doubt that he will prevail without much threat, so there isn’t any suspense or tension. He just walks in and smacks down whoever needs it. This means both ‘The Equalizer’ films end up being like the guy that says, “…then I hit him, skewered the head of the asshole on my left with a pencil and smashed the one on the right’s face in with a teapot, etc.” In the first film, he walks into a room of bad guys to kill them all and this starts a chain of events; in the sequel he walks into a local street gang’s place (which he knows) for a rescue. Now, I’ve seen enough films to know that bad guys would surely have him marked and surely this would just be the start of a conflict? But there’s no follow-up. It’s just a naked vigilante fantasy untroubled by consistent consequence (there doesn’t seem to be much police follow up to the aftermath of his set piece slaughter). There’s also an occasional streak of real nastiness that borders on sadism rather than the exhilaration of excessive action. There’s never quite the gleeful embracing of silliness of Collet-Saura’s Liam Neeson vehicles.

In both films, it is McCall’s designated primary victim that provides the soul and emotional interest. It’s Chloë Grace Moretz in the first film and Ashton Sanders in the sequel. Whereas Moretz is mostly there to bookend with motivation and resolution – a kind of Thank you, rampaging father-figure – and gives the role far more substance than is warranted, Sanders does better as a fully rounded character. In McCall he seems to see a Tough Love father-figure that bolsters his confidence as an artist and disapproves of the allure of gangster street life that threatens to entrap him. But Sanders projects a vulnerable, conflicted machismo that, again, gives the role greater substance than a cold reading might imply. 

For his part, Denzil Washington has a charisma that keeps the silliness watchable and entertaining. He doesn’t do anything remarkable or demanding but floats through on that charm. Occasionally he seems to be switching films between scenes. Of course, McCall’s preaching life lessons, with a filling of judgementalism, his pretence to self-sacrifice and soulfulness are all hypocritical because he and the audience just want to see him kick ass in the most lethal fashion. Everything else is just window dressing to convince us and himself that he’s a good guy. 

A film with a similar save-the-girl plot like ‘You Were Never Really Here’ gets around its familiarity with a sense of oddness and an anti-hero that is mostly irredeemable, so that we can engage simultaneously with the aesthetic and his redemption. Fuqua, by comparison, directs ‘The Equalizer’ with a slick flare that rarely offers up anything individual: there’s nothing impressive or distinctive like his single-take fight in ‘Creed’. There’s nothing here but an empty tin of competently made vigilante fantasy of the most obvious kind.

The Strangers: Prey at Night

Johannes Roberts, 2018, UK-USA

A sequel that comes over a decade after the original for 'The Strangers', who are kind of b-level icons in the horror genre because they are easily recognisable and easily imitable from their masks. Also, they know how to act like horror killers: they step in and out of shadows, tilt their masked heads menacingly, can break into anywhere and appear soundlessly, play incongruous music for their kill-spree (this is a more contemporary requirement) and say pithy nihilistic one-liners like “We’ve only just begun”; or when asked what their motivation is, “Because you were home” or “Why not?” They even roll up in their killer’s van to Kim Wilde’s “Kids in America” so that the point of modern American youth’s nihilism and sociopathic nature is underlined right from the start. In this sense, it’s certainly belongs to that strain of youth-hating horror and one that portrays murder as the logical end of their privilege and self-obsession.

‘The Strangers: Prey at Night’ offers nothing new and your investment in the protagonists may vary, but the family is probably better rendered than many. The misbehaving daughter (Bailee Madison) is introduced with her black fingernails stroking a soft toy, which is surely one of the most immediate announcements that we’re dealing with Goth/Emo. And then there’s a jock brother (Lewis Pullman) and the parents who are floundering in their attempts to break through to their teenagers; this has led them to relocate and temporarily stay in a trailer park where The Strangers are prowling. The family dysfunction and the seemingly obligatory obnoxiousness of the youths is par for the course – although anything is bound to be improved by the natural class of Christina Hendricks. But what it ends up being is more like the troubled kids versus the bullies and mean kids and there’s not really a sense that this family is the kind of film family that deserves what it gets.

What it runs on is a series of decent set-pieces. Johannes Roberts films everything cleanly and the tempo is at a steady clip so that it hardly drags. The confrontations mostly stop from being overplayed, the family starts to call on your apathy, the killers are just short of smirky. It’s generally well-judged until the final stretch where it plunges ahead without a care and you’ll be lamenting stupid behaviour that has up to then been kept to a minimum (“Move out of the way of the van!!”). The best of these is the pool scene: unfolding with the pace of dread and plausibility, a flickering neon behind the head of someone forced to kill is a vivid visual cue for someone psychologically crossing the line into a moment of madness. So, on the one hand you have a film the delivers consummate horror set-pieces with some flair; on the other is a film that isn’t above having things put on books called “A Stranger is Watching”, prefacing with “Based on true events” or using jack-in-the-boxes for weak scares. It’s diverting and slick enough but doesn’t rise above its conventions.

The Tree of Life

The Tree of Life, 

Terrence Malick, 2011, USA

I received, firstly, the advice that if I could last the first half hour, I would be okay. “Tree of Life” starts with a whispery, portentous, frequently one-word voice-over (“Brother.” “Father.” etc.) that is guaranteed to set my teeth on edge and my sneer twitching. Oh, such resonance and poetry in these words! But these hushed voices are less narration than fragments of disembodied thoughts that sporadically appear, intending to elevate the poetry and occasionally offer insight into the characters, as little as we are offered (“Mother. Make me good.”). And these whispers do not guide the film: they just annoy with drawing attention to the film’s portentousness.

Rather what steers the film is the vertiginous camera, a hand-held vision that is aggressively mobile, often as disorientating as any found-footage excursion. In “The Tree of Life”, the camera swoops insistently, often to napes. When a camera that glides through an office complex is intercut with a camera that glides through nature and back without losing a beat, the magic of the film starts to come to life with this juxtaposition. A nineteen year-old is dead: the mother is devastated; the father tries to retain a square jaw; a brother reflects – and this triggers off the memories that will be the bulk of the narrative.

Where did it all begin? And here Mallick throws in his most audacious conceit by taking us back to the forming of the universe and the world in a prolonged spectacle that offers gorgeous, dazzling visuals rather than story. It is a special-effects sequence that can’t help but provoke memories of “2001: a space odyssey” (and indeed, Douglas Trumbull was involved in the creation of this sequence). It also prompted my friend to recall that moment in “Ed Wood” where Ed professes enthusiastically that he could make a whole film out of a bunch of stock footage. Indeed. And then Mallick becomes even more audacious and throws in the thing that probably is the film’s greatest contention: suddenly, we are looking at a dinosaur on a beach. Filmed mostly in low light and tones, these CGI creations look real enough and they are presented as prettily and with as much reverence as everything else that precedes it and is to follow. And, for the record, I liked the dinosaurs. This first sequence gives us a chapter that references evolution. Later, this will conflict with the fall into a mundane family drama and their reliance upon religion. And by “mundane” I mean that it is the simple and unextraordinary qualities that the film triumphs and considers most vital. The universe was created by incredible processes, and so was the earliest life on Earth, and then there were dinosaurs and, eventually, there were these three brothers and their loving and strained relationship with their parents. How wondrous and remarkable these things are, how grand and great the differences in size these moments seem, and where does one lead to the other? Of course, this can also be read as tapping into human narcissism, that we and our individual experiences are the true centre of the universe…

To that end: a tale of a boy growing up during what seems like a short period of a couple or years or so in a certain house in smalltown America (the memories end when the family has to move). This is, as the ominous voiceover tells us from the beginning, a tale of fathers and brothers, just in case we aren’t sure. Strange, then, that aside from the two brothers we become most familiar with there is also a third brother who seems superfluous. Indeed, it may be hard to work out which younger brother will die: this death is like a Hitchcock “McGuffin”, there mostly to set the story of memory in motion. The father spins from being affectionate, dictatorial, protective and unreasonable. Mother is rendered mostly in moments of dancing around: on the grass or sometimes in the air, for example. She is cast as angelic and therefore barely needs a complex personality until called upon to render maternal grief at the loss of one of her boys. She is “Grace”, but with little to do for herself, the film is imbalanced towards her apparent primal opposite: the father.

Aside from our main protagonist, the boys too have vague characters. They run and play charmingly and as they grow older, they start to experiment with meanness and unhappiness brought about by their stern father and messing around with other kids. Our protagonist becomes increasingly troubled and complex as time goes on and he starts to move away from the confines of the house; we often see him wandering around the streets, occasionally so slow he might just as well stand still. The bulk of character interest is the father, who comes a fully rounded character: charming, conflicted, authoritarian, loving, et cetera. This is probably more achieved by Brad Pitt’s exceptional performance than the screenplay. He manages to fight off most of the symbolic imagery to become a character.

This is a story of where we come from, of memory and loss. It also appears to be a tale of the union and conflict between the natural world and God. If you find inspirational meme’s insightful, then you may be stirred by the religious symbolism, the whispery voiceover and themes that permeate the film: life is a waterfall, cascading magnificently; we are but grains of sand in the wind; and so on. Many may be seduced by the religious symbolism and probably feel that is where the poignancy lies, but this is the laziest of signals. Tales of people, of time and place and growing up, the forming and conflicts of the young and the failings and struggles of adults, these are the things that speak truth and the nods to God here are but pretentions to poeticism that drag insights down to man’s most narcissistic interpretations of existence.

And that brings us to the beach at the end, where Sean Penn wanders and meets the cast of his past. There are reunions of a sort and the mother gives over her son to God – all on a pale beach. It certainly feels a little confused and confusing. However, I prefer to read the beach as less some kind of afterlife or Heaven’s Gate – which the sentiment and otherwordliness might imply – but rather as a plateau of (Jack’s) memory, where its cast wander in Jack’s mind; as a place where he can bring them all together again, as if they had never aged, as if they are forever on call from that time in his childhood. I do so to sidestep the triteness of the afterlife depicted as a beach of the soul. 

The opinion seems to be that Malick is aiming for ‘pure’ cinema, one unburdened by narrative constraints, that is given to the visual rather than story and dialogue. This usually means the cinematic version of a stream-of-consciousness tone poem.

Malick’s film shares more with, for example, Tarkovsky’s “Mirror” and Korine’s “Gummo” where visual aesthetic wrestles and fragments with often simple tales to elevate them into something universal, metaphysical and cultural. Their contrivances are more audio-visual than plot. As it is, the visual splendour and audacity of “Tree of Life” fights for supremacy with the intimacy of the bildungsroman which reaches deep to remind us of growing up and what it is to be besieged by memory and dwarfed by the universe.

 “Tree of Life” is definitely going to reward repeat viewings and is the stuff that books and criticism will be written upon for, oh, as long as people are interested in film. It is a splendid experience, not only visually but it has emotional weight despite the its obviousness and pretensions. But then Malick has a total new edit for the Criterion release – an extra fifty minutes (!) – so maybe that makes all this review redundant? This speaks to the film’s fidgety and impressive portrayal of restless memory and cinema and also to its inability to pin itself to anything deeper than the emotional gestures of commercials and stale aphorisms.

One Cut of the Dead

Shin'ichirô Ueda, 2017, Japan

(カメラを止めるな! Kamera o Tomeru na!, lit. "Don't Stop the Camera!")

At FrightFest 2018, there was a lot of buzz about ‘One Cut of the Dead’ and it then went on to appear on several “best of festival” lists. But I missed it as it wasn’t on the main screen but at the Prince Charles Cinema: I always had the impression that I had missed out. Well, it’s returned to the Prince Charles, by popular demand apparently and certainly when I went it was a packed house: judging by social media, there were many people who had missed this at FrightFest and were catching up.

I had carefully avoided hearing too much about it and I recommend you doing the same, if possible. I knew it was a “filming during a zombie apocalypse” kind of thing, mumble-mumble, and that it had undead, obviously, but little else. This meant I was able to enjoy its surprises to the fullest. By way of highlighting how much fun this turns out to be, let me just say that you shouldn’t be fooled by the apparent negligible moments of pacing and acting and scripting or whatever of the first half and stay with it for the long-game. And if you haven’t seen it yet, you should stop reading now.

And then, like ‘Climax’, halfway through, the credits come, it seems, and the intrigue is upped. But whereas Gasper Noe's halfway mark denotes a following decent into hell, Ueda then presents the trouble with conjuring one up. It’s a cannier film than at first appears, doubling back and drawing laughs from the same material just seen by introducing a new perspective and context. Many of those things that initially seemed “off” hit home as jokes. In this way, Ueda’s supple script traversing the perspectives of “laughing at” and “laughing with” with cheerful aplomb, celebrating and gently lampooning shaky-camera horror and improvisation. 

It doesn’t need too much characterisation, just archetypes, but it’s all satirical enough: the hapless director chosen for self-publicising as average; the slightly arrogant lead; the woman who takes her role too seriously; the drunken extra, etc. It has a touch of bad taste, a dollop of silliness and a faint appeal to sentiment, but it’s structure and speed means that there is never too much of any one thing. It’s a joyous celebration of gung-ho low-budget film-making.

By being slightly meta-genre, it’s both fun and knowing enough to please both the demands of comedy and consideration. As a horror behind-the-scenes farce, its entertainment value and building reputation is bound to give ‘One Cut of the Dead’ cult longevity.