The Laws Of Highschool-Land are clear and sharply defined. As a citizen of the state, there are certain people you must be friends with, certain things you must wear, certain actions you must carry out, certain things you must say. As long as you stick to those rules, then you will be safe and content, and nothing will ever happen.
Which is why those rules are designed to be broken.
Continue reading Rules Of Engagement: Easy A and the laws of Highschool-land
The David Fincher remake of Neils Arden Oplev’s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is looking worse by the minute. I know it’s an exercise in foolishness to judge a film on the strength of a couple of trailers and a poster. But Sony Pictures have sent out these images to garner a first reaction to the film. So here’s mine.
(NSFW after the cut. There is an exposed nipple. It is pierced. Be afraid.)
Continue reading Who’s that Girl? Lisbeth Salander, remakes and makeovers
In a move that’s boggled the minds of UK horror fans, the BBFC have refused to certificate the sequel to Tom Six’s The Human Centipede, Human Centipede 2: Full Sequence. 2009’s Jap horror Grotesque was the last film to join this rarified club of films too awful for the sensitive British public to see.
Continue reading Cut: Censorship,The BBFC and Human Centipede 2
These are good times for film soundtracks. Reputable dance acts are now willing to work with a director and come up with music that complements and adds to the visuals, rather than simply licensing a couple of songs to play over the end credits. Instead of a duff compilation or an orchestral suite, soundtrack albums are becoming sharp experimental works with a proper narrative flow.
The big beat boys of the nineties make music that has always had a cinematic edge, and the addition of an orchestral edge to the bounce really opens out the sound. Basement Jaxx’s work on Attack The Block adds theremin to the mix, accentuating the sci-fi. The Chemical Brothers created a jagged, jittery soundscape for Hanna that seems to have influenced Joe Wright’s cutting style.
Then of course, there’s the epic score to Tron: Legacy, which has frankly raised the bar for electronic soundtrack work. The scale and sweep of Daft Punk’s work made the album one of my favourites of last year.
A decent soundtrack album can be a sheer joy, mixing great songs with massive instrumentals and moments of mood and drama. Some don’t work at album length. I’m thinking specifically of John Carpenter’s Assault On Precinct 13, which is simply the same cues played over and over again at different track lengths. Or, sadly, Clint Mansell’s music to Moon, which I love to bits, but is stretched uncomfortably thinly over 75 minutes. The final ten-minute piece Welcome To Lunar Industries (Three Years) gives you everything you need. Tellingly, it’s the one track not available on Spotify.
There are certain soundtrack albums that have managed to find an identity above and beyond their origins, becoming works of art in their own right. Here are my top five. I’m sure there are more. I’m sure you’ll let me know.
Continue reading The Minor Fall, The Major Lift: 5 Soundtracks That Transcend Their Movies
A girl and her father live in a cottage in the middle of a forest. It’s a simple existence. They hunt, and read together, and every so often the father will leap out of the undergrowth and try to beat the girl up. He warns her that she needs to be ready for attack even when asleep, and she assures him that she will be in several languages.
The girl decides she is ready to leave the forest. So the father digs up a military transponder. Once she flicks the switch on it, the world and all it’s dangers will come to her.
She flicks the switch, and the wolves come running.
Joe Wright, director of so-so adaptations of literary classics, has decided to radically change direction with Hanna, his first film based on an original story. It’s an up-tempo thriller with an SF twist, backed with a killer soundtrack from the Chemical Brothers (the best I’ve heard since Daft Punk’s Tron: Legacy monster). It boasts a couple of great central performances from Saiorse Ronan and Cate Blanchett and a nice story idea.
But it doesn’t hold together. The script is full of plot holes and dangling threads. Tom Hollander’s monstrous assassin is a bundle of cliches tied up in an ill-fitting Tacchini tracksuit. The nice bunch of middle-class hippies that offer Hanna a different definition of “family” to any she has hitherto known simply vanish at the end of act two, never to be seen again.
While watching, I kept coming back to the transponder, the literal flick of the switch that starts the movie going. Why would Hanna’s father insist that if she was going into the world, it would be as a warrior at bay? I waited for the reason, the revelation of the long game that he had been playing. The revenge play, the public exposure of the terrible plot.
It never came. There was no point to bringing Marisa, evil step-mother and big bad wolf in one power-suited package, back into the picture. It seemed to be an unnecessary sacrifice of everything that father and daughter had shared in the forest. It started to seem uncomfortably like a fit of pique.
As a movie, Hanna is dressed up nice and plays pretty. There are some sterling action sequences, some fun camerawork, and it’s not, at least, part of a franchise. But the lazy comparisons with the work of Luc Besson do both parties a disservice. Hanna is not Nikita meets Leon. It doesn’t have Besson’s bite and fire. Worse, it has a hamfisted way with visual metaphor (count the eyes on posters as Eric arrives in Germany. We get it. He’s being watched) and a final line and shot that you can see coming a mile off.
Summary: Not quite a wasted opportunity, but nowhere near as clever or groundbreaking as it believes itself to be. What a shame.
The Island was Michael Bay’s last film before he disappeared into the creative black hole of the Transformers films. It had a difficult shoot, an advertising campaign from which Bay disassociated himself, and a public response that varied between lukewarm and actively hostile. He rushed it out in less than a year to get the jump on a mooted remake of Logan’s Run, and the experience and reaction to it nearly broke him. He retreated to a sweet franchise deal with a baked-in non-judgemental audience, where it didn’t matter what the critics said.
That’s a pity, because The Island has a lot to recommend it. The basic pitch is clear – Logan’s Run meets the Clonus Horror. A post-apocalyptic colony, isolated after an ecological disaster are gradually revealed to be clones, grown as organ donors for rich clients. The island of the title, allegedly the one uncontaminated place on the planet, is a mirage. It allows the evil scientists running the place to whisk away their bags of meat with no questions asked. Everyone in the colony wants to go to The Island, but being picked for the privilege means death. When two clones discover the truth about the world and their place in it and escape, the running, chasing and shooting at which Bay excels can begin.
However, up until that point it barely feels like a Michael Bay film at all, and you can see why he and the studios were so concerned about the Logan’s Run reboot. The opening section of The Island is a solid rip-off of the early parts of the kitsch 70s classic, with a Nike-futurist twist. The surfaces are all glass, polished concrete and ribbed fabrics. The clones waft about serenely in form-fitting tracksuits, and the dome comes across less like a living space and more like a mall. The similarities between the lottery for The Island and the black crystal marking you for Sanctuary are clear. The idea of a friend moving on to a better place and leaving everyone behind, never to be seen again, and for that sudden loss to be an expected and normal event is the dark place at the heart of both films, and they both reap benefits from it.
In fact, there are quite literally dark places in both films. Evil scientist Merrick’s offices are clad in dark stone and underlit through patterned glass. The computer that controls life in Logan’s dome sits in a vast, dim, cathedral-like space, the status panels glowing like stained glass. Bay and his design team seem to be drawn back to the design cues and plot beats of Logan’s Run – Merrick’s private army are dressed like Sandmen, and are relentless in their pursuit of the two runners, Lincoln and Jordan.
Famously, Bay was drawn to The Island because of the script and its exploration of how much value we put on life. He’s never subtle, but the way in which the clones are treated more like prized and pampered cattle than people still packs a punch. The moment that drew him to the project has a shocking power that’s not matched by anything else in his back catalogue. A pregnant clone is “taken to The Island,” giving birth only to see her baby taken away before she is put to sleep. The newborn is given to her client duplicate, who shows no concern for the surrogate. This is the point of the movie. The clones have been sold to the public that use them as unthinking, unfeeling creatures. Jordan and Lincoln’s escape puts that fiction under threat.
The world outside the dome is a hard, cruel place with some harsh lessons for the childlike clones. Jordan and Lincoln are both confronted by their doubles, who are shown as vain and duplicitous – quite literally two-faced. Ultimately, it’s the clones, sheltered from the world, that come across as the characters with the most humanity. There’s nothing particularly original about the story or it’s themes, but compared to Bay’s other films The Island is Shakespearean in depth and scope.
It’s a real shame that Bay, one of Hollywood’s purest visual stylists, has retreated from scripts with a bit of resonance and interest to spend the last five years directing Shia LaBeouf shouting “Optimus!” into a bleached-teal sky. The Island is no masterpiece, but it’s interesting enough to be worth your time.
Superheroes are mythical beings. They stand above and apart, capable of acts that we humble mortals can only accomplish in our dreams. In many cases they are not human at all, choosing to protect us out of some sense of loyalty or in gratitude for an act of kindness. They are otherwise aloof, and they have their own agendas and motivations. We should be grateful that they are not gods, for as any student of mythology knows, gods are cruel, capricious and selfish beings.
In 1962, Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and scripter Larry Lieber realised that they could take existing mythological beings, and tweak them for the comics market. Greek and Roman tales were too familiar. But the legends of Asgard had a fresh feel. Hence, with a crack of lightning, Thor, the God of Thunder appeared in the pages of Journey Into Mystery. He would battle monsters, man-made and otherwise, and struggle against the machinations of his brother and arch-enemy, the trickster Loki. Like many Lee/Kirby creations, Thor had an alter-ego, the crippled doctor Donald Blake, whose disguise would vanish should he strike his cane, the cloaked hammer Mjolnir, on the ground.
It’s hard to write about Thor without slipping into the vernacular. Lee and Leiber have no truck with understatement, and their prose can never be too purple. Thor and his Asgardian family speak in a strangled cod-Shakespearean English which makes no sense when you consider that they’re supposed to be Norse gods, but somehow fits with the goofy charm of the series. It’s widescreen, deep-focus, scenery-chewing fun of the highest order.
Kenneth Branagh, tasked with bringing nigh-on fifty years of myth, mystery and magnificence to the screen has taken the right approach. He’s kept things lighthearted, while giving the simple script some proper emotional heft and weight. He was always an interesting choice of director. He gets blockbuster action, while not allowing it to overwhelm the story.
The film looks great, taking the best parts of Kirby’s technomythological (yes, that’s a word now) designs and giving them a subtle modern sheen. The scale and spectacle of the piece give you, true believer, one big fat double page spread after another in full eye-popping Kirbyvistascope. Upgrading Asgard into a society that has moved beyond the simple definitions of magic and science is a neat move, and making sure that the Clarke Paradox gets an airing shows that he knows the core audience. The film is full of little nods and winks to the fanboi community, but they’re not in your face.
Our Ken is very much an actor’s director, though, and it shows. All the cast get a chance to shine, and help move the story away from Wagnerian bombast and towards a tale that has a little more humanity. I’d save special kudos for Jaimie Alexander, who embues warrior maiden Sif with the right blend of toughness and vulnerability. But it’s Tom Hiddleston as Loki that makes the film. Whenever he’s on screen, you can see him plotting, planning, always ten steps ahead of everyone else. In interviews, he’s admitted that this was how Branagh had directed him; another sign of how attuned the director is to the mythology.
If I have one grumble, it’s that the script gives Loki a backstory, a reason for his schemes. That’s unnecessary. Gods don’t need motives. Loki is a trickster because it’s in his nature. The scorpion will always sting, even if it means his own doom. It’s how the myth works.
Branagh and his cast and crew have proven themselves worthy bearers of the torch that Lee, Lieber and Kirby lit forty-nine years ago. At last, we’re starting to see superhero movies that can stand up to the weight of all that history, and all those stories, and present them with grace, wit and style. It’s a thundering good film. Excelsior!
An interesting discussion on the Frightfest forums about the nature of the genre – and more specifically, when is a horror film not a horror film – led me into a bit of a muse last night. Frightfest was one of the first venues in the country to show The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. A strange but somehow logical place to show a film about a woman-hating serial killer. The curators have frequently shown movies that stretch the bounds of what you or I would call horror.
Which films, I thought, would be out of bounds to most horror festivals? I’ve come up with a list of five films that I reckon really wouldn’t fit the bill. You might not agree, but that’s part of the exercise. I’d love to know if you think I’m wrong, or which films you’d put on instead.
Continue reading Five Horror Films You’ll Never See In A Horror Festival
The second filmed interview in a week led docoDom and I to Hackney. This one would be a big deal. As part of the M25 Spin documentation, Dom had somehow snagged a chat with Iain Sinclair, acclaimed author and, for our purposes, writer of probably the best book about the ring around the capital, London Orbital. It would be a long, tense, but massively rewarding day.
Continue reading A Ring, A Tree and Yuan Fen: How We Interviewed Iain Sinclair
Source Code is a tightly written, sharply executed dose of intelligent SF, with winning performances and characters that you can care about. Why then does it remind me so much of Sucker Punch, the bloated ugly adolescent fantasy I ragged on last week?
EXCUSES AND HALF TRUTHS 