Category / Film

by Jonathan M

REVIEW : Hansel & Gretel (2007)

Videovista also have my review of Yim Pil-sung’s Hansel & Gretel.

Over the past month I have been reading and watching a lot of stuff that consciously plays around with pre-existing forms of imagery.  For example, Blindness (2008) seemed to address not just metaphorical blindness but also the idea of blindness as a metaphor.  I also sat through not only Stephen Moffat’s direction-less Jekyll (2007) but an equally uninspiring theatrical reworking of the original novella by James MacLaren entitled (somewhat unoriginally) Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

One of the main problems with Hansel & Gretel is that while it plays around with the idea of Hansel and Gretel, it really does not have anything to say.  It is a film that draws heavily from the del Toro tradition of stories about abandoned children and in bringing together those two traditions, all it really manages to do is make us realise that del Toro’s stories are hardly revolutionary.

However, in thinking about this film and Blindness I could not help but wonder whether there isn’t some kind of bell curve for reinventions.  Fail to do enough and your story comes across as hackneyed but do too much and the story gets lost or, as in the case of Blindness, the metaphor effectively becomes so flexible that it becomes effectively meaningless, thereby leaving the writer looking like a pretentious pseud.

On a completely unrelated subject, this month’s Videovista also featured my review of the old TV mini-series Escape from Sobibor (1987), which, if nothing else, shows how films such as Schindler’s List have helped make mainstream media a good deal less squeamish about the Holocaust than it used to be.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW : The Warlords (2007)

This month’s issue of Videovista has recently gone up and it contains my review of Peter Chan’s The Warlords (2007).  It is not a bad film at all and it draws attention to two interesting characteristics about contemporary Chinese cinema.

Firstly, that while Chinese films are lagging behind the West in matters of digital jiggery-pokery, they have acess to material resources such as sets and extras that render a lot of these techniques largely moot.  For example, I suspect that had The Warlords‘ battle scenes been shot for an American film, the armies would have been mostly digital and, as a result, much much larger.  After all, why have a few dozen ships when you can have thousands?  I call this the Troy Effect.

You can also see the impressive material infrastructure of Chinese cinema on display in Alexi Tan’s Blood Brothers (2007) ,which I also reviewed for Videovista.  The film’s opening scenes are set in the Chinese country-side and instead of a few internal shots and maybe some location work, the film benefits from having been shot on what apears to be the kind of vast back-lot that Hollywood has long since transformed into theme parks.

Secondly, both films are set at times in Chinese history when there was a good deal of foreign involvement in China’s internal affairs.  Indeed, Blood Brothers is set in 1930s Shanghai, which hosted a large British ex-pat community including J. G. Ballard.  Similarly, The Warlords is set in the aftermath of the Opium Wars, the wars between China in Britain that not only netted Britain Hong Kong but which opened China up to foreign trade and cultural influence.  However, despite this both films are completely free of British characters and Western faces.

Since the apologetics of Zhang Yimou’s Hero (2002), it has become tempting to see all Chinese cultural exports as exercises in nationalist propaganda and the degree of cultural re-appropriation going on in both films invite us to consider them in this very light.  However, this strikes me as a rather egocentric vision of Chinese cinema.  Not every film (or song) is about the West or even for Western consumption.  As a result, it seems more reasonable to see this kind of historical airbrushing as being an expression not of ideological projection but of yielding to popular tastes.  So just as American audiences prefer to think that their country won the Second World War single-handed, I suspect that most the Chinese audience would react badly to films that remind them of their country’s quasi-colonial status.

by Jonathan M

Don’t Let The Wrong One In : Re-inventing the Femme Fatale

*Please Note – This Piece is Full of Spoilers*

There are ideas that seem to be of a certain place and time.  Call them icons, if you will.  One of the most powerful icons of the early to mid twentieth century is the femme fatale.  Born of a cultural climate where gender was not divorced from sex and where women were expected to be virginal and submissive, femme fatales rejected this essentialist vision of gender by being sexually aggressive, socially independent and more than willing to use their sexual wiles to render men subservient to their own desires and goals.  Decades after the arrival of the contraceptive pill and miles down the road towards sexual equality, you could be forgiven for thinking that a society such as ours has outgrown the need for bold cinematic challenges to our understandings of gender.  Indeed, nowadays the femme fatale seems like little more than an anachronism; as out of place in the modern world as a cockney spiv might be in pre-Credit Crunch London.  However,  even the most liberal of societies falls into lazy thought patterns, habits of conception that need to be re-examined lest they go stale, rot and become oppressive dogma.  Swedish Vampire film Let The Right One In (2008) is a film that rides out not only against popular theories of gender, but also against the commonly held belief that children are innocent, pliable creatures who need to be protected from adults.  It does so by rejuvenating and reinventing that most iconoclastic of icons, the femme fatale.

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by Jonathan M

Zack Snyder’s Orgasm Death Gimmick

I have always found my view of the genius perceived by others in Alan Moore’s Watchmen (1987) to be obscured by the looming presence of the bleeding obvious.  I respect the form, less so the matter.  Zack Snyder’s  Watchmen (2009) failed to turn this respect into love.  For most of the film I felt the adaptation so submissive and passive that I might as well have stayed at home and read the comic.  However, there are moments of greatness in Watchmen.  Moments that have very little to do with Alan Moore and a lot to do with Zack Snyder.  Moments when Snyder allows himself off the leash, and no… I am not talking about the stupid fight scenes.

In an essay entitled “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (1920), Freud argues that pleasure stems not from stimulation but rather a lack of stimulation.  The lack of stimulation that comes, for example, from taking off shoes that pinch your feet and the moment not of orgasm but the instant of satiation immediately after the orgasm but before post-orgasmic tristesse sets in.  If pleasure is the complete lack of stimulation then it follows logically that death is the ultimate pleasure and that the pursuit of pleasure is somehow also the pursuit of death.  Freud called this drive towards death Thanatos.  No film maker argues the case for the connection between pleasure and death more aggressively than Zack Snyder.

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by Jonathan M

Cinematic Vocabulary – Opening Scene of Touch of Evil (1958)

Write enough reviews and it is easy to fall into the trap of thinking of films as discrete cultural units.  Artefacts cut asunder from the rest of the world and presented to the audience in a neat little package.  Thinking of films in these terms tends to lead one to focus upon macroscopic issues such as plot, performance and theme whilst ignoring the fine-grained details of the film such as the cinematography, the sound editing and the techniques used to convey those plots and themes.  In an attempt to wean myself away from thinking of films as discrete cultural artefacts, I have decided to write a series of pieces that focus on individual scenes from a critical perspective.  My own take on the Anatomy of a Scene series if you will.

The first scene to go under the microscope is the opening sequence of Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil (1958).

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by Jonathan M

REVIEW : Socket (2007)

Videovista has my review of Sean Abley’s Socket.  A film that is not only a work of indie SF, but also of indie gay cinema.

The film itself is not particularly interesting or worthy of note (much like Rocco DeVilliers Pure Race [1995], which I also reviewed) except when you consider how close the film came to being genuinely interesting and how spectacularly it failed.   I am only linking to the review as I think that the failures in Socket point to a rather intriguing cultural battle going on at the heart of gay cinema at the moment.  If you doubt this, bear in mind that Brockas’ last film Boy Culture (2006) was shown at the 2008 London  Lesbian and Gay Film Festival.  Which is a piece of programming on a par with screening Confessions of a Shopaholic at Cannes.

See also my recent review of Jacques Nolot’s Avant Que J’Oublie for a real piece of gay filmmaking.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW : The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941)

Videovista have just put up my review of William Dieterle’s The Devil and Daniel Webster.

A couple of notes on this review.  Firstly, Masters of Cinema always include a little booklet with their DVDs containing essays.  These serve as DVD extras by whetting your thematic apetite and filling you in on historical context.  If I don’t mention these booklets in the reviews it is because they do not systematically get sent out with the review copies.  This is something I rather regret as I think that the extras (even in dead tree form) are part of the pleasure of discovering these old films.  Secondly, I recently crossed swords on a forum with an employee of Eureka or Masters of Cinema and he suggested I put on the subtitles if I couldn’t hear the words.  I took this as a suggestion that I needed to clean out my ears but evidently watching films with the subtitles on is  a ‘thing to do’ with DVD releases of old films.  So apologies to said employee if he reads this.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW : Blindness (2008)

Based upon the 1995 novel Ensaio Sobre a Cegueira (literally Essay on Blindness) by the Portuguese Nobel-laureate Jose Saramago, Fernando Meirelles’ adaptation of Blindness serves to demonstrate the conceptual limitations of the allegory as a narrative device.  Where the book was an allegory about allegories, the film aims for the allegorical only to collapse into a film about the relationships between characters who were only ever supposed to be symbols.

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by Jonathan M

Che vs. There Will Be Blood – The Risks of Experimentation

Much like the writers and directors that we poor scorn upon for their predictability, critics are ultimately a lazy breed.  Some critics, thanks to greater levels of insight and more erudition have a larger conceptual toolbox than others, but no matter how loaded down you become with diagnostic tools, you are still going to reach for some more frequently than you reach for others.  If a film is a character study then you write about psychology.  If a film is about the cinematography then you talk about the visual and emotional impact.  If the film is about the plot, you write about pacing and narrative structure.  Write about enough books and films and you start to get a pretty clear idea of how to tackle certain types of work.  However, there are times when you encounter a film or a book that is unlike anything you have encountered before.  A work which, no matter how cynical or lazy you might be, has you repeating Roy Scheider’s line from Jaws (1975) : “We’re gonna need a bigger boat”.

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by Jonathan M

The Value of The Long Take

I have been thinking over the last few days about an interesting post by Andrew Seal over at Bibliographia Literaria about the links between the ‘prestige’ of long take cinema and a similar growth in prestige for authors who use long sentences.

I think it’s fair to say that there’s a hint of vitriol about Andrew’s comments on auteur theory and I for one cannot really blame him.  I think that auteur theory (which analyses films in terms of the explicit wishes and creative histories of the directors) is philosophically extremely wonky partly because of the death of the author but also because film, far more than writing, is a  supremely collaborative activity.  It is also a philosophical school that seems to have been entirely defined by pragmatic forces.

For example, film criticism is a discipline that grew out of film magazines like Les Cahiers du Cinema.  Commercial film magazines benefit from the existence of a star system whereby pictures of certain directors and actors can be put on the cover of said magazines in order to sell more copies.  As a form of discourse developed in these kinds of magazines, it only makes sense for auteur theory to  have grown to mirror these sets of concerns by being about stars rather than abstract theories (though anyone who is familiar with the ‘Maoist years’ of Cahiers will know that this is not a hard and fast rule).  Similarly,  it is worth noting that many of the people who championed auteur theory as critics in the 1950s (people such as Truffaut, Chabrol, Godard and Rohmer) would become, in the 60s, directors who benefited hugely from the independence and awe associated with a conception of the role of the director that emphasises creative accountability and vision rather than mere administrative skill.

So I share Andrew’s scepticism regarding the philosophical foundations of auteur theory.

However, I also think that he is being unfair to the long take…

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