Three Films Make A Post: Working here can be murder.

Thor: Ragnarok (2017): In another example to disprove the curiously much-vaunted nonsense that Marvel’s superhero movies don’t leave space for their directors to express their individuality, Taiki Waititi’s Thor movie is very much a Taiki Waititi Thor movie, featuring exactly the style and tone of humour you’d expect from the director. While I would have preferred someone to actually succeed at a Thor movie going for the big and operatic tone the best of the source material tends to have and actually succeed with it, I take a fun, fast and brilliant to look at SF action comedy with pleasure, even though I don’t enjoy it quite as much as James Gunn’s Marvel SF action comedies, which feel just a bit warmer to me. Which is to say that I had a lot of fun with Ragnarok’s loving and silly plundering of Greg Pak’s fine Hulk and Walt Simonson’s transcendentally brilliant Thor runs.

The Cradle Will Fall (1983): In a very different time, medium, and budget bracket, often great TV director John Llewellyn Moxey shot this adaptation of a Mary Higgins Clark potboiler about a brilliant assistant DA with tragic past-based commitment issues (Lauren Hutton) coming head to head with a mad scientist doctor (James Farentino). This certainly isn’t one of Moxey’s best movies, mostly thanks to a script that never quite seems to be able to hold tone and focus, a problem that’s further exacerbated by the need to shoe-horn various character from the soap “Guiding Light” into minor roles. From time to time, Moxey gets the opportunity for one of his patented classical suspense scenes, but much of the film seems fixated on the elements of the plot that are the most conventional and least interesting. Despite a spunky turn by Hutton and some joyful scenery chewing by Farentino, the whole thing never really comes together as a suspenseful narrative.

The World Beyond (1979): Staying in US TV movie land, this is the second of two abortive TV pilots about the adventures of Paul Taylor (the brilliantly named Granville Van Dusen), who is commanded by visions of dead people to protect the victim of the week (here portrayed by JoBeth Williams) from supernatural forces.


The plot sees Van Dusen and Williams fighting a mud golem on an island off the coast of main. Director Noel Black does some pleasantly atmospheric work with the locations, and seems to enjoy the sort of macabre little events that warm my heart too, so you bet there’s a mud golem hand staying active after having been cut off, an occult dabbler causing the whole affair, and some simple yet pleasant moments of classic suspense. There’s no depth to it, of course, but as an hour of spooky entertainment, even in the badly looking version recorded from TV and dubbed from what I suspect to be an EP VHS tape that’s the only way it is making the rounds, is well worth one’s time.

In short: The Gift (2000)

As a widow with three kids somewhere in the rural South of the USA, Annie Wilson (Cate Blanchett) doesn’t have a particularly easy life. She’s earning a living as a clairvoyant, though in her particular case, this means she is a combination of amateur social worker and amateur psychologist, helping people in her community who’d never seek or find professional help with kindness and empathy as best as she can. There’s for example Valerie Barksdale (Hilary Swank) who is regularly abused by her prick of a husband Donnie (Keanu Reeves), despite Annie telling her again and again she should pack up and leave; or the local car mechanic Buddy (Giovanni Ribisi), whom she is trying to help confront some deeply buried trauma that is breaking him apart inside.

Annie does have actual psychic powers, mind you. Dreams and visions do tend to tell her things, and right now, those visions are telling her there’s trouble on the horizon, though it’s unclear what kind of trouble it is. The only thing that’s sure is that it’s going to be bad.

Say what you will against Sam Raimi (we all have suffered through that thing with Kevin Costner, and various odious comic relief outings by his brother Ted, after all), but the man has always been more than just a one-trick pony, by now showing a filmography that manages to be diverse in tone and style yet still showing a consistent world view and a personal touch.

So, it shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise that his Southern - mildly gothic and supernatural - thriller The Gift shows a filmmaker who is just as accomplished at making a character-focused film without any big set-pieces or much blood as he is when concerning himself with Bruce Campbell’s blood-spattering adventures or Spider-Man.

While its plot about guilt, murder, and ghosts isn’t terribly original – these things are what we expect in the South to happen right? - The Gift thrives on two things. Firstly, it carries a deep sense of place, turning what could be cliché South into something that lives and breathes like an actual place (from my chair in Germany I wouldn’t dare suggest an authentic depiction of the South, mind you), built up by Raimi through often surprisingly subtle framing choices and a direction style that always emphasises the bits of scenery that tell us about the place they belong to without the film ever actually pointing it out.

Secondly, there’s the acting ensemble. It’ll come as no surprise that Blanchett is pretty damn great, turning a character that could be your usual caricature medium right out of a mediocre TV show into a believable woman - in turns fragile, strong, sad, and nearly painfully compassionate without ever feeling like a sugary saint. On the other hand, it’s difficult not to be a little bit shocked by seeing Keanu Reeves do that thing I never thought he could do: act, and quite convincingly thanks to the magic casting someone against type can produce.

All of which leaves us with a calmly accomplished film that is unspectacular only in theory but in practice can knock off a pair of socks or two.

In short: Hanna (2011)

(I'm keeping the plot pretty vague today to avoid unnecessary spoilers.)

In a house in the snowy woods somewhere far away from civilisation live Erik (Eric Bana) and his seventeen year old daughter Hanna (Saoirse Roman, who will turn out to be able to project wonder and frightening coldness in equal measure). Apart from the rules of survival in the wilderness, Erik has taught his little girl an astonishing number of ways to kill someone quite dead, all in preparation for the day when Hanna will have to come out of hiding and tangle with the world of spies.

Hanna - without question also driven by the sort of youthful unrest one develops when one has never met anyone beside one's father and knows large parts of the human experience only from an encyclopaedia - decides that the time is now, and begins an odyssey that'll take her some decisive steps on the way to growing up.

Hanna will have to survive the unhealthy interest of CIA agent Marissa Wiegler (Cate Blanchett) in her, learn a few things about her family's and her own past, and will do a bit of violence to quite a few people in the process.

Joe Wright's Hanna is a pretty darn odd entry into the books of the modern spy film. At first, it has all the hallmarks of being a movie deeply indebted to the semi-realist school of the genre that culminated in the Bourne trilogy, as if somebody had planned to milk the idea of "Jason Bourne as a strange teenage girl". But the further the film goes along, the clearer it becomes that any form of realism, be it semi or complete, is not at all what the film's aiming at. Sure, the film's action sequences stay inspired by Bourne's ways, everything else, however soon mutates into an often dream-like mix of quite unexpected elements. Allusions to the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm abound, and Hanna's travels (or is it a quest?) lead the film into places where the spy movie, the fairy tale, and the free-form strange mix into one of the more unexpected films about a teenager growing up.

Somehow, Wright still manages to keep what could be a mess of metaphors being a highly satisfying movie. Usually, I'm not the biggest fan of films this obviously in love with their own - often quite obvious (Cate Blanchett stepping out of the mouth of the big bad wolf, etc) - metaphorical systems. Hanna, however, manages something pretty special. It takes its metaphors and not just presents them to its audience with a shout of "look how clever I am!", but really makes them dance and live as parts of a world its audience watches on screen. This is the sort of film where it feels natural and not unnecessarily artificial when one of the characters begins whistling a motive from the Chemical Brothers' (surprisingly excellent) soundtrack.

There's something special about a film that manages to flow as beautifully as this one, that can picture a brutal action sequence, the silent sense of wonder Hanna shows for the outside world, the panic she feels from the information overload, and the strangeness of Morocco and Berlin (like any place, strange in their own ways) as part of the same continuum of movement and rhythm.

As should be obvious by now, I'm pretty much in love with Wright's film, seeing as it does mix various of my favourite cinematic things (spies! movement! music! fairy tales! irreality! female ass-kickery!) in a perfect way, but really, it's the sort of film that is so heavily in need of being experienced first, and talked about second, that all I can say about it seems insufficient.

 

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