Three Films Make A Post: BIG MEETS BIGGER

The Maus (2017): Using genre cinema and elements of the fantastical strictly for parable and allegory is usually the best way for a genre film to get friendly nods from critics who prefer their movies Serious and Meaningful. As Yayo Herrero’s film demonstrates, there is an easy trap to fall in with this approach, asking an audience to somehow connect with a film whose characters aren’t people – aren’t even supposed to be people – but stand-ins for groups of thousands or more individuals and/or mouthpieces for ideas.

Consequently, here, the two Serbian characters are human monsters, the Bosnian woman traumatized into violently striking back, and her German boyfriend just not able to understand because nobody murdered his family. A series of clichés which I believe amply demonstrates how shallowly this film that’s supposed to be about ideas approaches its historical target, turning a complex and horrifying part of recent history into something that’s pat and easily understandable, not reduced to its basics but simplified until the whole noble gesture of this being a Meaningful movie about Serious things seems rather dubious. Why, I can’t help but think if the film had been about specific people instead, it might have been able to actually say more about the world they inhabit and the forces that shaped them.

Habit (2017): Staying in the realm of not terribly convincing genre filmmaking, how about this poverty porn/horror movie by Simeon Halligan? If you went and told me a film concerning a cannibal sex cult running nightclubs and bordellos could be quite as bland and bloodless as this one, I wouldn’t have believed it. Alas, bland and bloodless it is, selling its argument that life as a modern city poor, the inevitable emptiness only lightened by drunken debauchery (don’t tell filmmakers not all of us lower class people are self-destructive alcoholics), can easily push one into enjoying the supposed feeling of life that comes with being a cannibal (the film tells yet doesn’t show that feeling, obviously), with all the energy and depth of an empty battery.

There’s absolutely an exciting, insightful film to be made out of the basic set-up and its basic interests, but that film would have some life to it, and would probably have a point its actually trying to get across beyond: being poor is really bad for your mental health. Who’d have thunk?

Thoroughbreds (2017): Fortunately, I can end this post on a satisfying note, namely with this nasty black comedy about the friendship between two teenage female upperclass sociopaths (Olivia Cooke and Anya Taylor-Joy in performances that are in turn disturbing, sad, and funny). The film recommends itself not only through the performances of its wonderful leads, but also through its sardonic portrayal of the young women’s upperclass world, the kind of privilege that seems bound to create sociopaths while only willing to notice them when they are acting out a little. It’s the old ditty about the terrors lurking beneath the surface of a supposedly normal world given a large twist of class consciousness, and presented with dry wit.


Director Cory Finley’s clinical style of direction will not be to everyone’s taste but to my eyes, it seems the perfect approach to telling the tale of two people who only ever perform emotions.

In short: Ready Player One (2018)

In the bad future of the 2040s, the world is a greyish brown craphole, so large parts of society escape into the virtual world of Oasis, a random assortment of pop culture and videogame tropes nobody actually playing MMOs today would believe to be successful or not sued into oblivion for copyright infringement. Oasis was apparently mostly built by a cliché tech nerd named Halliday (Mark Rylance) and his only, later bought out, friend Ogden Morrow (Simon Pegg, doing to an American accent what he has already done to a Scottish one). For his death a couple of years before the plot sets in, Halliday has hidden away a Big Secret as well as the ownership of Oasis as an Easter egg inside of the virtual world. Until now, nobody has been able to find the secret, despite hordes of fans as well as an Evil Corporation™ trying very hard.

The film follows the meandering adventures of Halliday superfan Wade aka Parzival (Tye Sheridan), his best online bud H (Lena Waithe) and the mysterious Artemis (Olivia Cooke, who actually gets to do more stuff than you’d expect from a female character for this sort of film with this particular guy in the director’s chair) when they actually start to unravel Halliday’s increasingly stupid riddles while fighting off EvilCorps's Saturday morning cartoon goons.

I don’t think the critical mauling of this Steven Spielberg flick based on the insufferable novel by Ernest Cline is completely undeserved, seeing as its first hour or so mostly consists of mediocre animated characters wandering through an ugly and random animated world mostly based on 80s and 90s pop culture – speaking of actual design seems uncalled for – with characterization and dialogue on the level of a YA novel for particularly dense teens (which is still preferable to the smug winking of Cline’s book). Worst of all, it has a joyless feel you don’t usually encounter in a non-serious Spielberg movie.

However, then, after an hour or an hour and half of boredom, something strange happens: the pop cultural references start to cohere, visual gags sometimes become funny, and Spielberg finally falls back on his talents as popcorn cinema storyteller extraordinaire, suddenly hitting well-worn plot beats with heft and energy, making the up to that point absolutely lifeless film feel vibrant and lively. The plot is still pretty stupid, mind you, but now it is presented with a sense of excitement and fun Ready Player One had before been missing completely. The ending is complete pap, of course, but then, how are you sensibly going to end a film whose final philosophy is “reality is real” (insert sound of your favourite dead philosopher rotating in their grave), that wants to criticize consumer culture, but not so much as to anger any of the myriad of product placers involved in it, and that thinks virtual reality is awesome, but you need to take two days a week off to snog Olivia Cooke?


But hey, there are at least 45 entertaining minutes in here, which is quite a bit more than I’d say about the novel it is based on.

In short: The Signal (2014)

After the first half an hour of its running time or so, I was prepared to praise William Eubank’s SF film for some fine direction, some more than decent acting by Brenton Thwaites, and the promise of something clever. The next twenty-five minutes or so even strengthened that impression, and I was all set for a clever and stylish take on a cross of an alien abduction movie with a bit of the X-Men, perhaps even with a good bit of SF philosophy.

Alas, then the rest of the film happened, and what I took for style turned out to be a case of cargo cult filmmaking that takes the signifiers of better movies but misses their points. Pointless Lynchisms meet a story that goes for your classical mindfuck movie but misses out on the part about these films where they actually need to make sense according to a logic of their own (in The Signal, there’s really no sense to make, because it finds its SURPRISE ENDING too important). Ridiculous slow-motion scenes are supposed to produce an emotional impact they can’t have because the script never bothered to establish emotional stakes or characters who are more than their relations to a main character who himself becomes increasingly uninteresting; the female lead Olivia Cooke is only there to open her as eyes wide and to be dragged around by our male main character (often literally so). And that SURPRISE ENDING is just crap of the kind that pretends to have some deeper meaning but doesn’t go beyond the mere gestures of a DEEP EMOTIONAL AND INTELLECTUAL IMPACT. I’m shouting this because that’s exactly what the direction does, most probably to distract from the fact there’s really very little of impact on screen here, and the whole affair has about the intellectual depth of a really bad SyFy original movie – only with the little difference that those films don’t have pretensions of being more than a bit of a fun time for their audience.

This makes The Signal particularly useless in a time when intelligent indie SF is actually a cinematic thing, and when the big superhero blockbusters have a bit of a brain, ambition and a heart to their brawn too. It’s just pointless and – I’m surprised I can actually use the word the way it’s meant to be used – pretentious.

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In short: The Quiet Ones (2014)

By my count, John Pogue’s (spoiler) possession horror “based on true events” whose plot I find too tedious to synopsize, is by far the worst film the undead new version of Hammer studios brought out since it got serious about the whole filmmaking gig. (Of course, I wrote this before having seen The Woman in Black 2, my editing persona who has seen that film now adds with a shudder).

I do not base this assessment on Pogue’s technical abilities – the film’s a pleasure to look at, and while I don’t buy the POV horror parts as authentically made during the 70s, they mostly don’t fall into the worst traps of the style. In this case, it’s really all the script’s fault. The credits inform it’s by Craig Rosenberg, Oren Moverman, Pogue and “based on” the screenplay by Tom de Ville, which already suggests what the resulting film really turns out to be – a film full of undead parts of earlier drafts of the whole affair walking around without a good reason, and clearly without the involvement of anyone willing or able to clean the mess up and bring it to coherence.

So if you want to watch a film that knows what its theme is, you’re really shit out of luck here because there are suggestions of half a dozen thematic bases here none of which will then be actually explored or brought together with the other one’s in any shape or form. Thanks to this, The Quiet Ones is less a narrative but a series of false beginnings that never lead anywhere, with the film’s main interest clearly in providing some cheap, seldom bloody scares. It’s just too bad that scares can mean only little in a film that doesn’t have any actual context for them, a picture full of one-note characters who never act with any internal logic (I’m not against people under stress acting irrationally in movies but people’s irrationality is still connected to their personality, which the film’s characters alas just don’t have), and are slaves to the terrible whims of many a moments of It’s In The Script writing. Because it’s clearly more important to a film to put in some stupid plot twist, or three dozen loud jump scares, than to work from a script that is internally consistent, or meaningful.

Not surprisingly, the resulting movie is an exercise in frustration, with single scenes sometimes working quite well if you look at them as standing on their own but never cohering to anything, not even an interesting kind of incoherence, the supernatural here being about as anti-rational as a piece of soap.

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