Three Films Make A Post: Unlocked. Unleashed.

The Lair (2022): Watching the last three movies of Neil Marshall has been as dispiriting and somewhat confusing experience. It is very much like watching a musician trying to hit all his favourite notes, but missing them, sometimes (Hellboy) barely hitting any note at all, or, like in this case, missing enough to mess up melody and rhythm. Marshall’s weirdly insecure direction also has to cope with a script by Marshall and his apparent creative partner Charlotte Kirk (who also acts and produces, like with his last movie) that has never met a cliché it can’t reproduce in an awkward manner. Mostly pretty terrible acting, perfectly embodied in Jamie Bamber’s accent, does not help either.

Unlike with the last two films of Marshall, there are a couple of moments here that suggest he might slowly be working himself up to better things again, but it’s not a process I enjoy watching.

See How They Run (2022): This period meta whodunnit by Tom George has quite the cast: Saoirse Ronan, Ruth Wilson, Adrien Brody, Sam Rockwell, the inevitable Reece Shearsmith, the list goes on. It doesn’t, however have much substance. Its meta genre exploration tends to be a bit too cutesy for my taste, and never does much with the genre quirks it ever so mildly sends up; this is the kind of movie that thinks having a screenwriter complain about flashbacks on screen after we watched some flashbacks is the epitome of wit, instead of a minor joke. Admittedly, there are a couple of scenes that suggest the film wants to have a bit more going on but forgets about it to make room for having Agatha Christie (Shirley Henderson) poison the wrong guy with rat poison, and other shenanigans of this style.

While there’s little depth here, See How They Run is still a pretty fun watch, slickly directed, if the sort of thing I’ll have forgotten all about in about a week’s time.

The Invisible Man Appears aka Tômei ningen arawaru (1949): Shinsei Adachi’s and Shigehiro Fukushima’s Japanese invisible man movie is not the wonderful box of delights a somewhat later invisible man’s encounter with a human fly would be. It’s a bit too much of a melodramatic crime movie for that, and sometimes, the invisible man is more of a gimmick as a necessary part of the plot. However, even in 1949, Japanese studio cinema was made by technically extremely gifted filmmakers, so there’s a lot to like here too, starting with – for its time – fine invisibility effects, and certainly not ending with the expected mix of slick looking (again, in the style of its time) filmmaking. If not at least every second scene of your movie contains a perfectly framed shot, you’re not a Japanese studio director.

Three Films Make A Post: Mary's Evil is Beyond Legend

The Dead Next Door (1989): For people with sympathy and tolerance for microbudget horror, and even though this one’s budget actually wasn’t quite as micro as you’d assume, J.R. Bookwalter’s film is one of the pioneering efforts of this particular type of indie horror. Not just because this is one of the early films of its kind, but because Bookwalter operates on a comparatively epic scale, with ambitious scenes and a plot that actually takes place in more than just a living room and someone’s garden. The script about the misadventures of the curiously accident-prone “Zombie Squad” in early post-zombie-apocalyptic Ohio (and a bit of Washington, D.C.) is certainly goofy and a bit silly, but the writing comes over as so good-natured and likeable these things become some of the film’s true virtues, as is pacing that doesn’t waste the audience’s time. The actors were overdubbed in post-processing, giving the affair a certain Italian genre movie vibe, while action and special effects are some of the best semi-professional work I’ve ever set eyes on.

It’s also certainly the best-looking film ever shot on Super-8.

The Nice Guys (2016): Rather on the other side of the budget divide dwells this Shane Black action comedy taking place in a fever dream version of the 70s. It’s a bit too nasty to its characters for my general taste in comedy (cruelty is only very seldom funny unless you’re a bully or a serial killer) but I do admire the way Black from time to time manages to move his – really rather well acted – lead caricatures Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling into some actually human emotional beats and scenes without breaking a sweat. And even soft-hearted old me can’t deny how well the film manages to create its world. Now if it were only populated by people I – or the film – cared about.


Mr. Right (2015): Paco Cabezas’s film does work better for me than Black’s does. It’s still full of the old comical ultra-violence but I find the black humour warmer, the characters definitely more likeable in their amorality. The way the film mixes the general absurdities of action movies with killers as heroes and your run of the mill romantic comedy is rather effective – and very funny – too, Sam Rockwell and Anna Kendrick making for a pleasantly odd couple. And who wouldn’t root for one of those, right? Particularly when they have to kill their way through a bunch of lovingly caricatured gangsters and Tim Roth looking to have a lot of fun doing his particular villain with a dash of tragedy. Why, even RZA brings his best acting game.

In short: Poltergeist (2015)

I’m not a very great admirer of the Spielberg/Hooper joint, so in principle, I shouldn’t harbour any strong feelings against a remake. On the other hand, what director Gil Kenan delivers here is such a bland, pointless and tepid outing I honestly don’t understand why anyone should bother with it when there’s an original that’s much better at being Poltergeist and so many other films much better at being horror films. The latter problem comes up specifically because the film borrows so many highly generic bits and pieces from other movies without ever actually making something out of them apart from a series of basically competent but uninvolving versions of more interesting things.

Additionally, Kenan shows little talent for setting up creepy scenes, nor for making effective use of the loud special effects sequences. The effects for their part are just uninspired in conception and frankly more than a little boring.

You’d think at least the film’s gestures towards grounding itself in another time than the original might lead somewhere, but the few nods towards modern technology and technological culture don’t have much of a point, and its idea of its central family having come down economically suffers from the simple fact that incessant complaints about only being able to afford a really big house (one must assume they were inhabiting Buckingham Palace before) and one credit card makes the characters sound like rich whiners more than like people in actual financial trouble. Oh noes, Mum might have to work! And like with pretty much anything else in Poltergeist 2015, there’s actually little point to the economical sub plot anyway, with no thematic tissue connecting it to anything else going on, most certainly not the central haunting. It’s something that’s in the film to help fill out the running time without actually meaning anything.

The cast, all the while, is absolutely overqualified for the things the script by David Lindsay-Abaire has them to. The actors are certainly not putting any more work in than the film actually asks from them in performances that aren’t exactly indifferent but certainly don’t show much enthusiasm or creativity. Like everything else about Poltergeist 2015, the acting is basically competent yet bland.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,horror,gil kenan,sam rockwell,rosemarie dewitt

Three Films Make A Post: Jet-hot action! Jet-hot suspense! Jet-hot thrills!

The Expatriate (2012): Philipp Stölzl's film about a former CIA operative (Aaron Eckhart) getting into trouble with an international conspiracy that includes his former handler (Olga Kurylenko) and threatens to cost the life of his daughter (Liana Liberato) is a neat example of the modern international (producing countries are the USA, Canada, Belgium and the UK, the director is German, and the actors are coming from everywhere) spy thriller. It's not a film that hits many surprising beats but it tells its story well, with the proper amount of violence and one of the more convincing variations on the "daughter and father come together through the father's talent for lethal violence" theme. Plus, the acting's more than decent and in the Europe of this film - quite unlike in that of Europa Corps. movies - brown people aren't automatically evil.

Killer Joe (2011): This is one of those cases where I absolutely understand the wave of approval a film and its director (in this case a William Friedkin absolutely not willing to coast on previous achievements or attempt to copy them) are met with, see the artistic value and the plain effort in every shot, yet still, when it comes down to it, can't get excited about the film in the slightest, and even feel rather annoyed by it. Large part of the reason for that might be an ending that works wonderfully on a subtextual level, less so as the tour de force where blackest comedy and violence meet I think it's supposed to be, and makes little sense when you try and see the characters as people. And here comes the other, much heavier, problem I have with Killer Joe into play - I have my doubts it sees the uneducated Southern poor it concerns itself with as actual people instead of as objects it can slyly look down on as so stupid and alien they deserve whatever shit is coming to them; at the very least, the film lacks any kind of sympathy with its characters, and without that sympathy, I don't really see a reason to care about a film be it as artful as it may.

Seven Psychopaths (2012): Yet another movie I'm not as in love with as I'm probably supposed to, even though it is full of things I love in my movies: Christopher Walken, Sam Rockwell, meta, the subversion of genre standards, an excellent taste in music, shaggy dog stories and direction that thrives on details. Problem is, I like my subversion of genre tropes rather more subtle, or at least less self-congratulatory. Martin McDonagh's film loudly points out that it's subverting tropes right now about every ten minutes, instead of just doing it and trusting in the audience to understand what it's doing. There's something self-congratulatory and smug about this approach that rubs me the wrong way and really doesn't fit the actual charm and intelligence that the film's script shows when it's not patting itself on the back. Of course, this is also a film that loves to stop its critique halfway, pointing out the absence and uselessness of women in action etc. cinema but then not doing any better by its own female characters, so maybe I'm just expecting too much of it.

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Cowboys & Aliens (2011)

The Old West. A man (Daniel Craig) with a pretty strange wound, a futuristic looking bracelet around one of his arms and not a clue who he is and how he got there wakes up somewhere in the desert. After proving his alpha male badassitude on some ruffians and demonstrating why men with tiny little heads shouldn't wear hats, he reaches the nearest town, where he eventually learns that he is a wanted robber and possible murderer named Jake Lonergan. His trip to a federal jail is cut short when aliens attack the town and, as aliens are wont to do, abduct some of its inhabitants (among them a badly underused Keith Carradine). Fortunately, Jake's fine little bracelet turns out to be some sort of blaster, which doesn't save everyone from abduction but is rather helpful in pushing the rude aliens back to wherever they came from. For now.

Lonergan (still wearing hats though he shouldn't) becomes part of a posse of townsfolk trying to rescue the abductees. Among the (obviously rag-tag) bunch are the local sadistic torturer and potentate with a hidden heart of gold Woodrow Dollarhyde (Harrison Ford, better at wearing a cowboy hat) and his kinda-sorta Apache adoptive son (Adam Beach), the mysterious Ella (Olivia Wilde, much better at wearing a cowboy hat than Craig), a shotgun-toting preacher (Clancy Brown in a too small role), a wasted-on-his non-role Sam Rockwell (he's the mild-mannered shop keeper learning to be A MAN, you know), a goddamn orphan boy and his stupid dog and various other alien fodder characters.

Later developments will see the group team up with some bandits and a small tribe of Apaches as the only hope to save Earth from the scouts of an alien invasion. Because no alien baddies ever follow up on their lost scouts.

Wasted as a bunch of great to competent actors are in it, I did find Cowboys & Aliens much easier going than the full-grown catastrophe its critical reception let me expect. Sure, it's a film full of tired old cliché characters doing tired old cliché things, but it's also a film actually willing to use the oldest tropes in the writing book (and by the way, why are scriptwriters Orczi, Kurtzman and Lindelof so much less intelligent when they write for the movies than when they write for TV?) to entertain an audience in an adequately old-fashioned style. There are some moments of the dreaded "wink-wink, nudge-nudge, we know how silly this all is", but more often than not, Cowboys & Aliens plays its silly nonsense straight, which of course is the way silly nonsense has to be played to be any fun at all.

For me, more problematic than the clichés alone ever could be is the film's length in combination with these clichés. There's really no reason for a concoction about cowboys (and Native Americans and bandits) fighting off an alien invasion to be one-hundred and thirty minutes long when ninety would lead to a faster, punchier and less bloated feeling movie; I don't think Cowboys & Aliens would have lost anything by cutting thirty minutes of character bits (and the orphan and his dog), especially not when all the character bits are taken from the handbook for blockbuster writer beginners and are below actors like Rockwell, Brown, Beach, Carradine and Wilde (see how I cleverly not mention Craig and Ford?).

And here I go again making a film sound much worse than I actually feel about it. For most of the time, Cowboys & Aliens is utterly serviceable - if dumb - entertainment that may be completely forgettable, but is at least mildly exciting while it lasts. Which, sadly enough, makes it much better than your average blockbuster shat out by Hollywood these days.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,jon favreau,daniel craig,harrison ford,olivia wilde,sam rockwell,clancy brown,sf,western,reviews

Moon (2009)

There will be spoilers (although I'll be as unspecific as I can get away with).

Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) is on the last three weeks of his working stint servicing the automatic helium harvesters of a private company (and this in a film made before Obama gutted NASA) on the dark side of the moon. It is obvious that Sam needs the return to Earth badly. Live communication feeds between his base and home have been out of service for ages, with pre-recorded messages which are relayed via Jupiter his only contact with his bosses and his wife (Dominique McElligott).

The only thing alleviating Sam's loneliness is his "Robotic Assistant" GERTY (voiced by Kevin Spacey), an AI who displays its emotional reactions mostly through smiley faces and wouldn't fulfil most people's emotional needs.

As a reaction to this isolation (and probably the boredom of his work), Sam has taken on a classic mad hermit persona, with all the rambling to himself and lack of hygiene that implies. The astronaut has also started to hallucinate, seeing the shape of a girl where there can't be one.

Distracted by one of these visions, Sam crashes his vehicle into a harvester and loses consciousness.

He awakes in his station's infirmary, not being able to remember what exactly happened to him (or how he got there). Sam soon realizes that something is not right. GERTY seems to be having secrets, possibly even a live connection to mission control, and Sam's not supposed to go outside until a rescue team arrives. It's as if there is something out there nobody wants him to see.

With a bit of creative sabotage, Sam manages to get outside and to the site of his accident. In his vehicle, he finds an unconscious, wounded man. A man who looks exactly like himself...

One of the more annoying aspects of the majority of SF in the movies in the decades after Lucas' Star Wars is the implicit insistence of too many of them that "SF" means "space opera" and nothing else. Of course, I like exciting adventures in outer space as much as the next guy (see my momentary slight obsession with Bioware's new Mass Effect game), but I find the way movies reduce a very rich genre to a single one of its sub-genres rather depressing. Add to this that movie space opera is usually ignoring the inspiration it could get from the more thoughtful - and frankly more interesting - literary space operas by people like Iain (M.) Banks and you have a recipe for the endless repetition of the same three or four ideas. Sure, movie SF has gotten a little better again in the last few years - mostly through the efforts of directors not from the US - but the success of a film like Avatar doesn't make the outlook for less loud SF any better.

Moon, directed by Brit Duncan Jones, is a perfect antidote to this sad state of the genre on film. It's not that its ideas about typical SF-nal elements like cloning or AI are revolutionary or new to someone even halfway familiar with written SF and its tropes, yet they are seldom treated with this much respect or concentration on the movie screen.

Jones is very good at playing with his audience's expectations, with the way movie conventions just let us assume certain points of view to be correct without asking any questions about them or looking at what's going on below our feet. In a way, we start watching the film the same way as Sam sees his life, taking what we are told to be the truth. At a certain point of the film, the viewer's interpretation of what is going on and Sam's will start to drift away a little. Most viewers will certainly realize The Awful Troof before our protagonist does, but it is very much to the movie's credit that it doesn't play the moment Sam realizes what the viewer already knows as a moment of revelation for anyone beside the protagonist.

Apart from an exceedingly clever script, Moon has a lot of other factors going for it.

Jones' direction is just fantastic, with nary a scene that isn't in some way important for mood, character, theme, or worldbuilding (the Holy Quartet of SF), but also without the strange feeling of claustrophobia I tend to get in too tightly constructed films. Moon does believe in the importance of incidental details, but as it is with Sam's moon base, there's still no wasted space in the film.

I'm also very fond of the production design. The moon base (and with it Sam's everyday life) feel right in a way you don't get to see too often in SF films. I can imagine this to be a place where a person has to spend years of his life, carefully designed not to let him lose his mind too fast.

Being basically a special sort of one person play (plus robot voice and video messages) with a heavy emphasis on character, Moon could still have been ruined by the wrong lead actor. Fortunately, Sam Rockwell's performance is just about as perfect as they come. Rockwell (at least in this film) has a natural acting style, without the "Warning! I'm acting now!" grandness of gesture Hollywood stars trying to act often fall into. As everything else in the film, Rockwell's performance is just right.

 

Technorati-Tags: british movies,duncan jones,sam rockwell,sf,reviews