Tuesday 22 November 2016

Asylum

ASYLUM
aka. House of Crazies

Roy Ward Baker - 1972 – UK – 88m

Amicus anthology with above-average atmosphere but scuppered by Robert Bloch’s schoolboy sense of insanity. Robert Powell is the new doctor challenged with guessing which patient is the asylum chief. This paves way for three other stories. ‘Frozen Fear’ is creepy and grimly ridiculous, centring on a chopped-up body coming back to life, providing the film with one of its best images: a head wrapped in brown paper, the paper sucking in and out with its breathing. ‘The Weird Taylor’ promises much, but despite a well-measured performance from Peter Cushing, succumbs to the half-baked resolutions almost all the stories deliver. 
‘Lucy Comes to Stay’ runs through some of Bloch’s motifs from ‘Psycho’ – schizophrenia equalling psychopathology; a staircase murder – but to little effect. ‘Mannikins of Horror’, the bracketing story, succeeds by being more eccentric than previous stories (and the twist may be that it is the most fantastic, despite being set in the ‘real’ world and not the recitals of the patients). Herbert Lom makes unforgettable killer dolls in his cell, convinced he can invest them with his consciousness.

Black humour and some decent performances make this diverting, as well as an incredibly dark and claustrophobic atmosphere, but the acting is also stodgy in places and too many moments end with reductive maniacal laughing despite it's gleeful embracing of the absurd. But there's plenty to enjoy because of that absurdity and because it captures horror of another era.



Monday 21 November 2016

Waiting Women - Kvinoors Vantan

WAITING WOMEN
KVINOORS VANTAN
U.S. title: Secrets of Women

Ingmar Bergman ~ 1952 ~ Sweden ~ b&w

Three women discuss their various sexual awakenings ~ through marriage, infidelity and lost loves ~  as they wait for their husbands to arrive for the Summer.

Simple as the premise may be, Bergman’s use of composition and especially of light-and-darkness here is exemplary, exploiting black-and-white photography to its fullest. The first story is a sun-drenched tale of angst and unfaithfulness. The central threesome verbally barter with, seduce and injure one another in the best Bergman style. The second tale is near-silent, cloaked in shadows and often startling images. A seduction is played out using almost solely a man’s hand; half-seen images and shadows are sinister, although ordinary in origin ~ all creating the paranoid and dream-like state of the female protagonist.  The third episode uses a faulty lift for dramatic and comedic effect; here again the faulty light makes maximum use of atmosphere. This last tale is also evidence that Bergman can amuse where perhaps ‘Now, about these women’ felt strained and ‘A Lesson in Love’ a little too light.

What perhaps is most surprising is that, for all the dark corners, all the pains, ‘Waiting Women’ is profoundly optimistic. Wonderful moments in a slightly seedy nightclub, by the river, in the lift, all remain memorable and masterfully executed. And then, as always, it is the performances that truly elevate Bergman’s bright-but-troubled backdrops. There are several familiar faces from his other films, but Dahlbeck and Bjornstrand in the elevator deserve special credit. 

Foregrounding women’s concerns and forgiveness, ‘Waiting Women’ is both easy and insightful.    

Sunday 20 November 2016

Amusements

Peter Strickland horror recommendations.

Alexandre Aja on twists and sequels etc.

A reunion of the cast of "The Singing Detective"


Favourite Songs


Monday 14 November 2016

Arrival

Denise Villeneuve, 2016, USA

When I first saw the trailer for ‘Arrival’, I groaned at the voiceover (“one day that defines your life, blahblah”); and then there was the moment where she took off her helmet for a “proper introduction” with the aliens which smacked to me of movie-motivation than realistic procedure. So I wasn’t quite hooked and loaded with expectation, but I saw it was directed by Denise Villeneuve so I was then intrigued. And to be fair, there’s more detail in the film proper to show why she would take the chance and take off her helmet, but I’m not sure it quite overcomes its human narcissism to realise its science-fiction possibilities. 

Simon Mayo and Mark Kermode say that ‘Arrival’ breaks your heart in the first five minutes. Well I can see the design that is supposed to cause that, but the melancholy tinkling music and the not-good and not-needed voice-over still automatically put me on my guard in their obvious bids to manipulate. Something more wilfully abstract would have reaped better rewards. After all, it worked for ‘Up’. So then, on guard, I start noticing little things that otherwise I’d let pass, like how Forrest Whittaker’s military chief does that tough-man act that military men all have to do in the films: for example, she says she needs twenty minutes to change when he just turns up and says get in the helicopter and he answers that she has ten. Why? Does the helicopter explode in ten minutes? No true deadline is given to justify his reaction (like: something is going to happen ohmygod! in the next hour so let's rush!). I guess military types always like to be dominant and demanding. Oh, I am sure all this is meant to add urgency, but that’s the kinda I’m gonna domineer thing that I always find denotes a bullying, assholish tendency in people. It’s going to put me off. When a film’s manipulation is obvious, this means you have to look elsewhere for nuance and that’s where a more picky viewing nature will kick in and you might start to notice such details. So that opening is something like Terence Malick with the voiceover being annoyingly obvious instead of annoying pseudo-poetic and such a evident bid for emotional resonance forewarns me that, yeah, this is really going to be about humans and not the aliens. 


And so it is, but director Denise Villenauve is too good to let this spoil proceedings. Oh I am sure that for many such obvious emotional mechanics makes this a moving experience, but, like ‘Intersteller’, for me it’s another example of human emotion trumping the hardcore science-fiction. It doesn’t enhance: it makes it lesser. ‘Intersteller’ is a more rampant example of the self-obsessed human content scuppering the sci-fi and yet winning over audience emotions and ‘Arrival’ follows in a similar vein. On the other hand, the story concerning the daughter turns out to be not quite as expected. Mark Kermode says, 


“Yet from the atemporal monologue of Ted Chiang’s Story of Your Life, in which the narrator remembers events in the future tense, screenwriter Eric Heisserer has spun an admirable script for a film as cerebrally adventurous as it is emotionally accessible.”


And this is true, but by the end, it seems as soon as they have done their part to facilitate Dr Louise Banks’ story, the aliens just leave. Hell, even the film itself says that the pairing up of the central duo is more important than the first contact. Such human narcissism reduces the sci-fi content to drama we have seen in abundance elsewhere.  


But Amy Adams is great, proving again that she is exemplary at making you believe she is receiving information when we know there’s nothing there: in ‘Nocturnal Animals’ it was reading; here it’s looking at CGI. And no, the aliens are not disappointing and the image of their vessels hanging in the air is likely to stick in the memory. The other characters are not quite allowed to become the stereotypes they initially threaten to be: for example, Jeremy Renner’s physicist doesn’t become a contrary science-bore and Whitiker’s army dude never becomes an obnoxious military boor - the seasoned actors are to thank for this. Bradford Young’s washed-out cinematography provides a sense of neo-realism and Villeneuve’s pace, as in ‘Sicario’, has a sense of constant motion that keeps things constantly urgent despite the emotional baggage threatening to bog things down. The linguistics angle is fascinating and we’re a long way from ‘Independence day’, which is why reliance on human tragedy as the aim of the piece instead of it being part of the fabric feels such a limitation.

But emotional sci-fi is quite popular. Other examples: I know it’s supposed to be translated as a paean to wonder, but ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’ is the story of a man so obsessed with the idea of first contact that he leaves his family. ‘Intersteller’ loops the cosmic to a single bedroom. ‘Solaris’ also seems to reduce alien contact to human tragedy, but it’s also ambiguous enough to be a comment on human narcissism. It’s not that science-fiction can’t be emotional – far from it – but the idea that human heartbreak dominates the universe is mostly reductive. So although its ultimate message wants to be uplifting, the reason why things turn out positively is all to do with specific human grief (to do with her saying something to resolve things, something to do with dying words): people only act on personal emotion rather  than principal and altruism it seems (and if this is a criticism of militaristic thinking, the film doesn't seem to bend that way). It doesn't quite imply that humans act out of innate goodness and selflessness so just how positive the message is is somewhat questionable.

So if you’re looking to science-fiction to confirm that It’s not all about you, ‘Arrival’ is not the place to look. It therefore results in something lesser than it might have been, as enjoyable as it is.

Saturday 5 November 2016

'Big Fish' - storytelling for the unquestioning

Tim Burton, 2003,USA


Isn’t storytelling magical?

In Tim Burton’s ‘Big Fish’, Will Bloom (Billy Cradup) has been fed nothing but tall tales from his father Ed (Ewan McGregor when younger; Albert Finney when Older) so much so that there is nothing else to him. With Ed apparently on his deathbed, Will makes one last attempt to find some truth. Based on Daniel Wallace’s novel (which I haven’t read and so could be different), John August’s screenplay and Burton’s vision makes this one of those annoying excursions into magic realism that feels no duty to anything grounded.

Hell, I’m a big fan of fiction myself and I waste a lot of time thinking about it, but I’m going to distrust a kind of unquestioning belief in it. When everything is infused with a kind of isn’t-storytelling-WOW!? I start to twitch at the protestations of wonderment. This is not like Life of Pi which is about choosing fiction as a copping mechanism and its relation to cognitive dissonance (clearer in the novel than the Ang Lee film, it’s true), but something more akin to Ray Bradbury banging on about how incredible stories are. Yeah it’s true, but we’re watching/reading one so if there is little there to articulate why there is usually a deficit of reality for comparison. You keep waiting for an insight but there isn’t one.


It’s often pretty. There’s Helena Bonham Carter’s unconvincing old lady make up. There are some pleasing carnivalesque diversions. It all seems to be in the manner of American Tall Tales whose sentimentality undoes the pleasure of the surreal trimmings because it’s emotional agenda is so mundane.

Big Fish’ is odd in that it seems based upon the premise that it’s okay if you’re a bad parent that never tells the truth as long as you’re telling tall tales. Telling stories excuse everything. And then the true story comes, but… But what to do when the truth proves just as fanciful as the stories (so he bought the whole town and then… oookay)? This leaves Ed’s motivation stranded, based on nothing but the fiction of itself. And then we learned he stalked a girl until she married him and this is considered romantic. Only in movies.

Big Fish’ never addresses these issues and in fact does not recognise that these might be concerns: it just ladles on more isn’t-storytelling-WOW!? In that way, the film itself exhibits a lack of self-awareness that leaves it fundamentally unconvincing in ethos and its characters lacking dimension. It looks nice and is competently acted but, as it is quite unmoored from any considerable reality, it sets adrift on moviedom and remains in the shallows.

Friday 4 November 2016

I, Daniel Blake


Ken Loach, 2016, UK-France-Belgium

The thing with Ken Loach’s latest, ‘I, Daniel Blake’, is that it hardly feels like fiction at all. Oh he’s been accused of exaggerating and fabrication in the name of Leftist propaganda and all that, but it really didn’t scan that way for me. I’ve heard too many tales and read too many accounts that the idea that it was all made-up just didn’t enter my head. Anyone who has had to call up HMRC or any Government call line (I flinched at writing “help centre”) will instantaneously recognise the trial of calling up to state a grievance or enquiry and getting a lot of stonewalling or/and jargon for the effort after a prolonged wait. Indeed, one of the biggest laughs in the sold-out screening I attended was when the classical music for being put “on hold” came on: Yeah, the laughter seemed to say, we’ve all been there. 

It’s been accused of miserablism, but I didn’t get that. Oh, it’s about people being made miserable but the tone was too truthful and elevated with unforced humour. This was hardly Bela Tarr, ponderous and wallowing (hey, I love Bela Tarr). Surely one of the dominant aftertastes is how Loach portrays a society that is always helping one another, a constant current of small acts of assistance. Not only with Daniel Blake (Dave Johns) befriending a struggling single mother (Hayley Squires), but in people helping him when he goes to the library, or at the food bank or simply neighbours. Commentators like Toby Young may condescend and disbelieve but the characters in Loach’s film are bonded together by the fight against the patronising, sneering proclamations and the assumptions and stereotyping of those that have not experienced such hardships. Perhaps because Loach doesn’t portray the claimants as “scroungers”, Young does not believe. Young seems to think “reality” TV shows such as Channel 4s ‘Benefits Street’ are more truthful, showing that he knows not how such things as editing and narratives work. This rendition of society full of the little fleeting, casual altruisms that we all need struck as truthful, touching and defiant: it implies society is commonly decent and obliging. Everyone chips in when up against a seemingly impenetrable wall of Government policy concerned with game-playing and chastising those in need.


The performances are great. The camerawork is typically unfussy, allowing character rather than technique to come to the fore. It’s funny because people naturally are. Paul Laverty’s script even finds a way to make the final speechifying credible. Yes. there's all this to note technically, but it's one of those films that is likely to bypass the artifice that creates film to speak directly to people's experiences.

Yes, Loach’s ‘Kes’ had a similar effect as it always reminds me of school and this is the neo-realism that typifies his films, the kind that renders life and people so recognisably. It did not occur to me that people would attack ‘I, Daniel Blake’ for being false (put that down to my naivety); I thought the truth of its portrayal of a certain time and experience in England was incontestable. The reason why people go “misty-eyed” at this film, Toby Young, is because they recognise themselves and friends in it, or stories they have personally been told. You can politicise these reactions and deride them, but they come from real experiences. And in that way, this film is so much of its time which makes it vital and needed; the kind of film referenced by politicians to illustrate a point. A film that will speak to and for many at this time, and one that will be looked to in future to illustrate how political policy can insidiously but surely destroy lives.