Category / Film

by Jonathan M

Why You Want to Fuck Christopher Hitchens – Celebrity, Consumerism and the Search for Online Identity

 

I’d like to open with a kind of history. This history takes many forms and surfaces in many different places with the names of the actors sometimes replaced. Occasionally, the role of the nation-state is assumed by religion and at other times it is the gods of classical antiquity who take the lead. Regardless of which iteration of this history you have heard, its narrative will be familiar to you for it is a narrative of loss.

Once upon a time, people lived in tribes. These tribes were small social entities made up of a number of different family groups that pooled their resources. Members of tribes lived together, worked together and died together and this permanent state of communion with others made their lives meaningful. Of course, human nature being what it is, tribes could not peacefully co-exist and the tribes soon began conquering each other until their dominion extended over millions of people and thousands of miles of territory. Because these abstract tribal groupings were a lot harder to manage than a couple of families that had been living and working together for generations, tribal elders began reinventing themselves as governments who began to rule over abstract political entities known as kingdoms and principalities then as nations and states. Of course, nation states were never anything more than a way of referring to the territory under the control of one particular government but they stuck around for long enough that people began to forget their tribal loyalties and began to see their nationality as a fundamental fact about themselves, a fact no different to their sex, their gender, their sexuality or their race, a fact that took the form of a noun.

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by Jonathan M

REVIEW: Giorgio Moroder Presents Metropolis (1984)

FilmJuice have my review of Giorgio Moroder’s eighties remix of Fritz Lang’s immortal Metropolis.

Lang’s Metropolis is a science fiction fairy tale dealing in class warfare, economic collapse and the power of compromise and understanding to deliver a world that is at the very least tolerable to all. Grounded in the cinematic techniques developed by German Expressionism to increase the bandwidth of silent film and unlock new depths of emotional complexity, the film is two and a half hours of directorial brilliance. However, though the original cut of the film has now been recovered, there were decades during which people believed it would never be seen again. Given that Metropolis is not only a beautiful but also an intensely important film, it was perhaps unavoidable that attempts to restore it would stir up strong feelings. In fact, the debate over what should be done with the Metropolis fragments rapidly coalesced into a bitter confrontation between those who wanted the original film left as it was and those who wanted the meddle with the footage in the hopes of recapturing some dim afterglow of Lang’s genius. Giorgio Moroder’s Metropolis is not only the best known and most interventionist of the alternate edits of Metropolis, it was also the most widely seen version of the film as the ‘hip’ scoring by eighties pop stars combined with the short running time ensured that copies of the film flew in and out of video rental stores throughout the eighties and nineties. Now that the original cut of the film has been recovered, it is tempting to simply consign Moroder’s edit to the bin and move on but this cut has historical merit on its own.

Moroder’s Metropolis is a short and punchy affair that feels very much like an extended trailer for original version of the film. Moroder solves the narrative problems of the various re-cuts by stripping out much of the dialogue and drama in order to focus upon the big cinematic set pieces and emotional moments. Somewhat unsurprisingly, this results in a film that bubbles with the same hysterical energy and visual spectacle as the Michael Bay Transformers movies. However, rather than leaving his characters to scream and flail about like Shia LaBoeuf, Moroder attempts to fill in the emotional gaps by scoring the film with a series of somewhat heavy-handed eighties power ballads performed by the likes of Bonnie Tyler, Freddy Mercury and Pat Benatar. Moroder also colourises the film in an attempt to convey changes of mood which, though obvious from the context of Lang’s longer film, struggle to emerge from the mangled cinematic vocabulary of the truncated versions.

Watching this film, I couldn’t help but wonder what other alternate edits of classic films are out there… the film is being re-released today by Masters of Cinema in a limited edition steel shell thingy. Release of the standard edition is coming later this year according to the Brazilian river place.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – The Woman in the Fifth (2011)

VideoVista have my review of Pawel Pawlikovski’s The Woman in the Fifth. Based on a novel by Douglas Kennedy, the film is a meditation on the costs and benefits of artistic creativity. Grounded firmly in the old trope of a sensitive and broken man who is only saved by the love of a good woman, the film presents its central character with a choice between a woman who makes him creative but also insane and a woman who makes him happy but only at the expense of his capacity to write.

I have two main problems with this film. The first is that the vision of creativity the film proposes is based entirely upon an almost ludicrously self-indulgent and melodramatic vision of the creative process. Many gifted artists produce great work without lapsing into either madness, violence or depression. Frankly, seeing these psychological problems as an inevitable by-product of the creative process is nothing more than palliative bullshit put about by people who really need to start taking responsibility for their own mental health. Being an artist does not make it okay for you to be a complete prick.  The second problem is that while Pawlikovski’s direction is entirely watchable, it is also desperately boring. Seriously… what is going on in art house filmmaking? when did it all become so fucking boring?

We are currently undergoing the greatest economic and social crisis since the Great Depression and the political decisions made today will shape the future of entire continents for generations to come. Given that the world is now continuously shifting beneath our feet and that our democratic institutions are positively crying out for an intelligent electorate that can understand and engage with the issues confronting them, do we really need another film about a novelist who is struggling with writer’s block? Do we really need another French film in which a bunch of listless Parisians tumble in and out of bed with one another? Do we really need another film in which a terminally passive and unattractive male protagonist somehow finds himself at the centre of a vortex of redemptive totty? The answer to all of these questions is a resounding ‘No!’

As I said in my piece about this year’s Cannes film festival, European art house cinema is rapidly becoming stale. A decaying boy’s club dominated by a shrinking clade of middle-aged white guys, both its ideas and its language are in desperate need of renewal and The Woman in the Fifth is yet further proof of the scene’s increasing creative sterility. Did we need another film about a novelist with writer’s block? FUCK NO! Nor do we need another polite little film directed by a middle-aged European white guy. Pawel Pawlikovski is not a bad director by any stretch of the imagination but he is a director who is part of the problem. Pawlikovski’s early works including Dostoevsky’s Travels and Tripping with Zhirinovsky were deeply personal reflections of a youth lived under Communist rule. However, as Pawlikovski freely admits in the Blu-ray’s extras, he has decided to set aside the things that made him unique as a director in order to churn out the same old derivative francophilic shit as every other art house director. Clearly… this shit needs to stop.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Total Recall (1990)

FilmJuice have my review of Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall. The review is of the freshly released and genuinely fantastic Blu-ray release of the film and it ties in quite nicely with this recent piece I also wrote for FilmJuice about the films of Paul Verhoeven.

The first thing that struck me about this film was how violent and sexually explicit it is by the standards of contemporary big budget filmmaking. Indeed, the likes of Michael Bay will frequently include women draped decoratively across motorbikes or ascending stairs but the actual sexual content of their films is practically non-existent. The reason for this is two-fold: A) These big budget films have absolutely immense budgets and in order to maximise their profitability, they need to be accessible to as wide an audience as possible. Hence the death of the ’18’ rated action film that dominated much of my childhood. B) The target demographic for most contemporary action films is teenaged boys whose sexual experience is usually limited to ogling and giggling… so whenever Bay has an actress bend over but not actually have sex with anyone, he is attempting to position his film in the sexual universe of horny teenaged boys. Compared to contemporary action films, Total Recall comes across as not only quite explicit but also quite surprisingly adult… particularly strange is the weird sexual energy that fizzes between the characters of Schwarzenegger and Stone as they beat each other up and pretend to be married:

One particularly wonderful element of the film is the relationship between Schwarzenegger’s violently bulging everyman and Sharon Stone’s pouting secret agent. Indeed, Stone plays the roll of a woman who is either a loving wife to Schwarzenegger or deep-cover operative assigned to keep him under surveillance lest his secret identity as a Martian freedom fighter begin to reassert itself. Rather than pitting these two personae against each other and musing as to which is the ‘real’ one, Verhoeven simply runs them together meaning that Stone’s character comes across as a lovingly traitorous wife who wants to kill her husband and have sex with him, quite possibly at the same time. Victims of actual domestic abuse might squirm as Schwarzenegger and Stone flit between flirting and kicking each other across the room but Verhoeven fully embraces the tension and presents it almost as a form of sadomasochistic play. Tellingly, when Schwarzenegger decides that he can no longer trust his wife, Stone’s character makes one last attempt to win him over by offering to let him tie her up. Verhoeven’s bizarre sexualisation of domestic abuse is both intensely unsettling and utterly compelling.

Total Recall is an excellent film and this Blu-ray edition does it proud.  Definitely worth revisiting and re-appraising.

by Jonathan M

The Films of Paul Verhoeven

FilmJuice have just uploaded a piece I wrote for them about the films of Paul Verhoeven, director of Robocop, Total Recall, Showgirls and Basic Instinct.

Regular readers of this site will know that I have a marked fondness for unpopular blockbuster directors like Neveldine/Taylor, Michael Bay and Zac Snyder. Part of what drives my fondness for these directors is their willingness to set aside human values in pursuit of absolute spectacle. All of these directors use violence and action to entertain their audiences but they also use sexuality and fascistic imagery in a way that many directors are reluctant to do. My view on these directors is that one cannot defend Big Dumb Blockbusters like Avengers or Spiderman whilst turning one’s nose up at films like Transformers 3. Summer blockbusters are in the business of pushing buttons and to have your buttons pushed is an inherently dehumanising process. The difference between directors like Bay and directors like Spielberg is that Bay is completely unapologetic about what it is that he does. He makes films for the sweaty masturbating homunculus in all of us:

When people talk about blockbuster action movies, their minds naturally gravitate to the works of sexless man-children such as Peter Jackson, Stephen Spielberg and George Lucas. The reason for this strange cognitive bias is that most people feel ashamed about watching big dumb action movies and so they need their violence to be not only bloodless but also presented in terms of absolute moral simplicity. Spielberg always cuts to the heroic working-class dad because cinema audiences need to know that their yearning for cinematic carnage does not make them a bad person. Similarly, George Lucas can neither shoot nor write a love scene because you can’t have people falling in love and then shooting each other in the face. That simply would not do.

My take on Paul Verhoeven is that he is a transitional figure in the history of blockbuster filmmaking as he spent the late 80s and early 90s building up mainstream audiences’ tolerance for sex. Without Verhoeven, people would never have gone to see Snyder’s Watchmen or Bay’s Transformers.

by Jonathan M

Calvinball Mythology: The Inevitable Follow-up Post

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a piece about Ridley Scott’s Prometheus that allowed me to voice some ideas about the role of escapist media in contemporary spiritual life.  Evidently this post struck a chord with a good deal of people as I have been receiving a lot of traffic from people kind enough to link to me. While I cannot address all of the points raised by people, I can address a few of the comments that caught my eye.  Thank you all for your attention and I am delighted that you enjoyed the read!

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by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Howl’s Moving Castle (2004)

FilmJuice have my review of Hayao Miyazaki’s adaptation of Diana Wynne Jones’s Howl’s Moving Castle. Re-watching the film for the first time since it first appeared in a UK cinema, I was struck by the extent to which it is a microcosm for all the strengths and weaknesses of Miyazaki’s direction:  On the plus side, the animation is spectacular, the mood is uplifting without ever seeming false and the design is a profound expression of nostalgia for a sophisticated, metropolitan Europe that may never have existed in the first place. On the down side, the plotting is frequently nonsensical and the characters have so little depth that they struggle to command our interest, let alone our sympathies. As I put it in the review:

If you are one of those upper middle-class parents that have latched onto Miyazaki as a reliable source of non-violent and morally uplifting children’s entertainment then Howl’s Moving Castle is definitely the film for you. The animation, artwork and pacing are more than enough to keep the little ones amused while their parents sit in open-plan kitchens drawing up plans to take over a Tuscan bean farm or a gite in the Dordogne. However, if you are a grown-up looking for grown-up ideas and characters then Howl’s Moving Castle is a touch more problematic.

A couple of years ago, I wrote a piece about Miyazaki’s Ponyo (2008) in which I suggested that Miyazaki’s attitudes towards humanity moved back and forth between flesh-rending misanthropy and warm-hearted sentimentality. In that piece, I concluded that Miyazaki tended to ‘do’ warm-hearted sentimentality a lot better than he did complex adult morality. Having recently re-watched both Ponyo and Howl’s Moving Castle, I now realise that my earlier diagnosis was entirely off base. The problem is not that Miyazaki struggles with adult morality, it is that he struggles with human psychology but that these struggles are less evident when they are presented as part of a film aimed directly at children. Indeed, both Ponyo and Howl’s Moving Castle suffer from the fact that they are films that revolve around entirely unconvincing love stories but because Ponyo presents itself as child-friendly, we are more inclined to forgive its lack of psychological foundation while Howl’s Moving Castle seems much more grown-up and so the lack of real characterisation is both obvious and grating.

by Jonathan M

Prometheus (2012) – Calvinball Mythology and the Void of Meaning

0. We Crave Mythologies, Not Stories

Humanity has always told and listened to stories. Given that these stories sometimes provide the backbone for an entire culture or mode of being, it is only natural that stories should evolve to suit the needs of the cultures that tell them. Western culture has changed a lot over the last fifty years and one of the ways in which our culture has changed is that we have acquired a taste for longer and longer stories. Once upon a time, we watched films, read novels and enjoyed TV shows that could be watched in almost any order. Now, we read series of novels, watch trilogies of films and feel cheated if our TV series do not end by paying off storylines that span multiple seasons and dozens of episodes. As a culture, Westerners no longer crave stories… they crave mythologies.

While explanations for this trend towards narrative expansiveness may lie beyond the scope of a single blog post, I would suggest that we crave fictional mythologies because the religious mythologies we inherited have lost all credibility and the market has stepped in to fill the gap. Though we may not believe in the mythologies of Marvel comics in the same way that our parents believed in God, the experience of engaging with escapist literature is very similar to that of engaging with religious text.  As J.R.R. Tolkien once put it:

It is the mark of a good fairy-story, of the higher or more complete kind, that however wild its events, however fantastic or terrible the adventures, it can give to child or man that hears it, when the ‘turn’ comes, a catch of the breath, a beat and lifting of the heart, near to (or indeed accompanied by) tears, as keen as that given by any form of literary art, and having peculiar quality.

This ‘turn’ comes in the form of the moment when we suddenly lose ourselves in a fictional world and cheer inwardly when the narrative logic of that world asserts itself upon the events of the plot. When a hero finally wins the day or the tragic queen finally dies, we feel a sense of consolation that is entirely lacking from the ‘real world’ we inhabit for much of our waking lives. This desire to feel that the world abides by the rules of a story and that everything in the world happens for a reason is central to the religious impulse. Even a staunch Catholic like Tolkien recognised that the sense of fulfilment we gain from a good piece of escapist literature offers a faint echo of the sense of fulfilment that can be gained from having Faith in the Christian story.

As Westerners have come to demand more and more from their escapist media, creators have responded by not only satisfying those desires but by encouraging them whenever possible. These days, one cannot have a successful film without a franchise and one cannot have a franchise without a suite of media tie-ins including novels, games, TV series and comics. Each of these spin-offs adds complexity to the franchise and allows for the creation of yet more products whose worlds intersect that of the core franchise. The talent, manpower and money poured into the construction of these trans-media megatexts would be horrifying were it not so historically familiar… The truth is that our culture builds media franchises for the same reason that the Ancient Egyptians built pyramids and Medieval Christians built cathedrals: We are taking the fantastical and making it concrete so as to make the fantasy feel more like reality.

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by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Shame (2011)

Back in 2008, I struggled with the religious imagery of Steve McQueen’s debut feature Hunger (2008). I struggled with it because it seemed too obvious and because the troubles had been cast in that particular light altogether too many times.  I have since rewatched Hunger and I now realise that I was wrong. I was wrong to read the film as being Catholic in sentiment and I was wrong to argue that it was simply retreading old ground. When I said that Hunger “cannot get out from under the weight of cinematic history”, I might as well have been writing about my own review. Given that my fondness for Hunger has grown over the years, I was somewhat reluctant to go and see his second feature Shame at the cinema. Aware of my history of not ‘getting’ McQueen’s films and concerned that the film’s subject matter struck me as over-exposed and boring, I waited for the DVD release… and then waited some more. In truth, I was happy to let this film slip away from me until I was offered a review copy. Just When I Thought I Was Out… As a result, Videovista have my review of Steve McQueen’s Shame and it is full of ambivalence.

Set in an economically prosperous but emotionally barren New York City, Shame tells of a successful man who devotes his life to the pursuit of orgasms. Orgasms by hand, orgasms by mouth, orgasms by any means necessary and to the exclusion of all other avenues of pleasure and fulfillment. Moving from one nameless sexual partner to the next, the character leads an admirably simple life and appears to experience none of the downsides traditionally associated with a hedonistic lifestyle. However, this simple existence is thrown out of balance when the character’s emotionally incontinent sister comes to stay. Suddenly plagued by feelings of shame, the character attempts to re-invent himself as a normal person only to fall at pretty much the first hurdle. While much has been made of the film’s interest in the question of sex addiction, my view is that the film is attempting to do what it says on the tin, namely examine the role of shame in making us do the things we do:

 What distinguishes Shame from the likes of Lost In Translation and Up In The Air is that it pointedly refuses to use the same psychological model as most films and TV dramas. Most film and TV writers create their characters using a somewhat simplified version of Freudian psychodynamics. In particular, they tend to be very fond of the Freudian concept of displacement whereby an irrational over-reaction to one thing is actually the product of a rational but socially unacceptable reaction to something else. For example, in Up In The Air, George Clooney’s character comes across as excessively hostile to a co-worker who is attempting to force him off the road and into an office job. Initially, this reaction seems perfectly understandable but as the movie progresses and Clooney’s character becomes more and more unreasonable; we learn that the true source of his unease is the fact that he has no social bonds and hates the hugely successful career that he has built for himself. Some critics have sought to interpret Brendon’s sexual escapades in light of an unmentioned childhood trauma, but McQueen pointedly makes no reference at all either to Brendon’s inner life or to the emotional life of his childhood. The reason for this is that McQueen wants us to focus only upon that which we can see and what we see is a man who is forced out of his comfort zone because he feels ashamed.

While I think that McQueen’s attempt to break new psychological ground is nothing short of heroic, I am not convinced that the film ever gains any traction on the concept of shame. Add to this the lack of visual firepower and what you’re left with is a quite traditional arty drama held together by two decent performances. Which is a recipe for Oscar-bait, not thought-provoking cinematic art.

by Jonathan M

I Saw the Devil and His Name Was Kim Jong-un – Vengeance and South Korean Cinema

Kim Ji-woon’s I Saw the Devil tells of a South Korean intelligence agent who responds to the death of his wife by tracking down the man who murdered her. However, instead of simply killing the man, the agent decides to install surveillance equipment that will allow him to continue punishing the murderer over an extended period of time. Initially, the killer is taken aback by the agent’s hatred but he soon comes to enjoy the confrontations and so lures the agent into an increasingly brutal contest of wills. Hideously violent, unflinchingly brutal and yet beguiling to watch, Kim’s film offers a traditionally Nietzschean warning to those who would consider embarking on a quest for revenge:

Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.

While Kim’s film is beautifully made and eminently entertaining, I cannot help but wonder why it is that he felt inspired to make a film with this particular message. Back in 2005, Kim directed the wonderful A Bittersweet Life in which the protagonist exacts a bloody revenge on his employers for the way in which they deprived him of a personal life and yet responded with furious anger the second he stepped out of line in an effort to grab some happiness for himself. Given that A Bittersweet Life convincingly communicates the idea that revenge is a necessary but ultimately self-defeating course of action, it is strange to see Kim making yet another film with this precise message. Especially when the message in question is so blindingly obvious that it scarcely merits a passing thought at all let alone enough thought to fill two entire films. Even more puzzling is the fact that Kim is not alone in his desire to brood over the morality of vengeance. In fact, South Korean cinema has produced so many revenge films in recent years that one can comfortably talk about them constituting a sub-genre in their own right.

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