by Jonathan M

The Glorious Indiscipline of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger

The good people at FilmJuice have just updated their site and the latest update includes my article on the films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.

Prior to agreeing to write this article, my experience of the Archers was (like many people) limited to some of their bigger and better-known films including The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. However, after dusting off the excellent ITV box set and delving into Powell and Pressburger’s back catalogue, I quickly realised that posterity has done the Archers a grave disservice by choosing to pool its affections on so few of their films. Indeed, one of the things that distinguishes The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp from films like The Battle of The River Plate or A Canterbury Tale is that they are a good deal more disciplined and thematically focused than many of the Archers’ less celebrated films. For example, The Battle of The River Plate begins by laying the foundations for what we expect to be a traditional World War II naval movie in the grand tradition of Noel Coward and David Lean’s In Which We Serve. However, halfway through the film the battle itself takes place and the action immediately moves away from the war ships on onto the journalists and diplomats reacting to the battle. From there, the film explodes into what can only be referred to as a ‘naval procedural’ in which people debate shipping laws and propaganda. However, rather than celebrating the cleverness of men in suits, the film concludes with an enigmatic but nonetheless moving scene in which a bluff British naval officer pays tribute to the aristocratic German captain who held him prisoner. This refusal to expand upon the relationship between the two men or relate it back to the core themes of the film may initially seem quite slapdash but it ultimately manages to capture something of the complexity of modern warfare. War, the Archers seem to suggest, is not about ships or spies or even victory… it is about people and people often get squeezed out when nations go looking for stories to tell their people. A similar thematic largesse features in A Canterbury Tale:

Set in an idyllic English village, the film follows a group of conscripts as they try to uncover the identity of the man who is terrorising the local women by pouring glue in their hair. Initially quite genteel and grounded in social realism, the film soon spirals out into a demented meditation on the wartime emancipation of women and the ambiguous nature of social change. Filled with lovely cinematic moments and a central figure that would not be out of place in a J.G. Ballard novel, A Canterbury Tale never quite manages to present a coherent argument or viewpoint and so comes across as the product of adoring foreign eyes surveying a dying civilisation. Think of a Miss Marple film directed by Yasujiro Ozu and you will get a good idea of the film’s tone and focus.

In writing this article I realised that part of what makes the films of Powell and Pressburger so special is their refusal to pin themselves down to a single idea or a single theme. Filled with dangling threads and thematic bombast, the films of Powell and Pressburger are a mess. A glorious and undisciplined mess just like this sequence from their adaptation of The Tales of Hoffman:

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Lifeboat (1944)

FilmJuice have my review of Alfred Hitchcock’s recently reissued huis clos drama Lifeboat.

Set during World War II, the film tells of a mismatched group of people who are forced to share a lifeboat when the Nazis torpedo their ship. Rather than turning this set-up into a thriller, Hitchcock places his emphasis firmly on the characters as they wrestle with the responsibilities and challenges of leadership. Indeed, the film can be taken as an exploration of Plato’s metaphorical Ship of State and the question of who is best suited to rule. Is it the successful businessman? the blue collar tough guy? Or is it the Nazi superman?

Looking beyond its political themes and its character studies, Lifeboat displays the fondness for small sets that reappears in such better-known Hitchcockian classics as Rope, Dial M for Murder and Rear Window. Unsurprisingly, the film received a bevvy of Oscar Nominations for its searing black and white cinematography and the directorial flair required to set an entire 98-minute film on a solitary lifeboat.

Technically superb and filled with lovely cinematic moments, Lifeboat is a powerful reminder that there was more to Hitchcock than perfect pace and clockwork plotting.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – The Ledge (2011)

FilmJuice have my review of Mathew Chapman’s jaw-droppingly awful The Ledge.

The fact that The Ledge got made at all offers an interesting insight into the difference between British and American attitudes towards religion. For example, despite having an official state church and being an ostensibly Christian nation, British society is now so profoundly secularised that atheism is now our cultural default. In other words, when you meet someone new you do not automatically assume that they are a Christian. Instead, you assume that they are either an atheist, an agnostic or sufficiently non-religious that you do not need to worry about offending Christian sensibilities in casual conversation. In fact, British society is now so profoundly secularised that many intelligent atheists are becoming annoyed at the shrill combativeness of the so-called ‘New Atheists’, thereby creating a market for books that embrace a less confrontational form of atheistic thought. America, on the other hand, is still a de facto Christian nation. This is evident from the fact that politicians tend to speak in explicitly Christian terms while even the more outlandish Christian beliefs are seen as serious moral positions. Simply stated, no British person would think to make a film like The Ledge because British public discourse has effectively banished the more outlandish Christian beliefs meaning that the confrontational attitude of the New Atheists comes across as bullying and uncouth.

Even more problematic is the fact that The Ledge is not the film it purports to be:

Despite ostensibly resembling a thriller, The Ledge is actually quite a talky and slow-paced film constructed around a series of set pieces in which characters deliver extended speeches for and against a belief in God. Given that Chapman places so much emphasis on these speeches it seems safe to assume that The Ledge is intended to be a film about ideas. Unfortunately, Chapman’s attempt to make a film about the clash between atheism and religion fails on two levels: Firstly, none of the ideas contained in The Ledge are particularly new or profound. In fact, the characters of Gavin and Joe are so unsympathetic and intellectually stilted that it rapidly becomes clear that Chapman has just as little insight into atheism as he does into religious fundamentalism. Instead of providing us with well-rounded characters and thought-provoking ideas, Chapman delivers banal caricatures filled with nothing more than hot air. Secondly, despite bloating the film’s running time and draining the thriller elements of all urgency and tension, the polemical aspects of the film are so poorly integrated into the plot that they seem more like a distraction than a primary focus. Look beyond the PR guff about ideas and The Ledge reveals itself to be little more than a squalid melodrama about a traditional love triangle.

Even more problematic is that, once you strip away all the God-talk, The Ledge is revealed to be a deeply misogynistic piece of filmmaking. At the heart of the film is a confrontation between two individuals who are so convinced of their moral and psychological superiority that they feel utterly entitled to the love of a beautiful woman. Indeed, while Joe dominates Shana by dragging her to a series of increasingly repressive churches, Gavin dominates her using mind games designed to make her fall in love with him. The Ledge is a profoundly misogynistic film because both forms of domination not only succeed but also go completely unchallenged by a director who refuses us all access to Shana’s thoughts and feelings. Denied both agency and meaningful self-expression, the character of Shana is nothing more than an empty vessel for the desires of selfish and hateful men. Time and again, Shana is given the opportunity to speak up for herself but instead Tyler simply stares impassively into the camera like a beautiful doll whose sole purpose in life is to be owned by an alpha male.

The Ledge is easily one of the worst films I have seen this year. Now that the scars have begun to heal on the viewing experience, I am almost tempted to say that the film is ‘so bad it’s good’ but then I think about the scene in which the atheist crows about getting Liv Tyler’s character to masturbate while thinking about him and I’m reminded that this is nothing more than a dull and misogynistic piece of pseudo-intellectual garbage.

by Jonathan M

What is the So-Called Cinematic Experience?

The movie website FilmJuice have just published my first feature article entitled simply ‘The Cinematic Experience’.

As regular readers of this site will doubtless recall, I have a great fondness not only for the cinema as an institution but also its capacity to bludgeon us into a state of supine beatitude with no more than a thunderous explosion of transforming robot. In fact, I recently had a ‘best genre films of 2011’ piece published in the BSFA’s house journal Vector and my top ten included Takeshi Koike’s recently released Redline, an anime so beautifully animated and insanely visual that its finale rivals the pure cinematic spectacle of the opening sequence of Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life. However, despite enjoying both 3D and action movies projected on vast IMAX screens, my article expresses a good deal of concern over what I call the technological arms race that is currently raging between the cinema chains and the consumer electronics firms:

The race began when James Cameron resurrected 3D technology and made a fortune with his Smurf-based epic Avatar. Convinced that 3D was the future of film, cinema chains spent billions retrofitting their theatres with digital 3D projectors. For a while, this worked quite nicely and everyone made money. Then audiences began getting tired of having to pay extra for poorly made 3D films and technology companies soon found a way of providing 3D at home, thereby sending everyone back to square one. Next came the suggestion that the only way to experience Brad Bird’s Mission Impossible – Ghost Protocol was on one of those giant IMAX screens that are usually used to entertain tourists with images of shipwrecks and dinosaurs. Unfortunately, while it is difficult to imagine Samsung and LG finding a way of making home IMAX systems, the failure to sell Andrew Stanton’s John Carter as an IMAX experience suggests that the popularity of IMAX may be even more fragile than 3D. Furthermore, if IMAX is to become the new benchmark for cinematic experiences, then cinema chains will be forced to spend even more money building thousands of new IMAX. With many industry insiders already talking up vibrating seats as the Next Big Thing, the toxic and self-destructive nature of this technological arms race is becoming all too apparent.

While I do not mention it in the article itself for reasons of space, I feel that a far better use of money would be to invest in updating the existing cinematic infrastructure so as to ensure that every screen in the country has comfy seats, good quality projection, properly functioning speakers, adequate sound-proofing and a concession stand that aspires to being more than a dementedly ruinous tuck shop.

For me, the cinematic experience is not some fairground ride but an act of almost religious devotion. I choose to see films in the cinema because I value the act of leaving my house and traveling to see a film. I choose to see films in the cinema because I like sitting in a space designed solely for the purpose of viewing films. I enjoy the distraction-free environment of a quiet cinema and I am more than happy to pay for the opportunity to use it because I believe that it is the best possible environment in which to surrender myself to a director’s vision.

And if you’re looking for a personal recommendation: My favourite London cinema is the big screen at the Curzon Mayfair.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – The Portuguese Nun (2009)

FilmJuice have my review of Eugene Green’s art house drama The Portuguese Nun.

Set in the backstreets of Lisbon, The Portuguese Nun tells the story of a French actress who plays the part of a Portuguese nun in a historical drama. Left mostly to her own devices by a director who prefers shooting architecture to working with his actors, she aimlessly wanders the streets of Lisbon encountering a series of male archetypes who compel her to examine the person she has become. Hounded by self-doubt and self-loathing, the actress eventually finds redemption at the hands of a local nun who helps her to realise the similarities between her life and that of the character she plays in the film.

Beautifully shot and partly redeemed by a final confrontation that positively reeks of human desperation and beauty, The Portuguese Nun is a profoundly problematic film. The main problem is that while the film does contain some ideas and some elegant photography, these moments of beauty struggle to redeem a film that is ultimately nothing more than a boring homage to art films passed:

The first thing that strikes you about The Portuguese Nun is the eye-catching beauty of its cinematography and the purity of its visual composition. As with Jose Luis Guerin’s In The City of Sylvia and Jim Jarmusch’s The Limits of Control, we spend so much time simply experiencing the city that its moods and textures come to form an integral part of the film itself. Indeed, The Portuguese Nun is probably best understood as an homage to the Portuguese director Pedro Costa whose films In Vanda’s Room and Colossal Youth attempt to capture the patina of life in a Portuguese city and reduce it down to some purified artistic essence. However, unlike Jarmusch and Guerin who use the interaction between their cities and their characters to tell a story and advance an idea, Costa and Green are quite content to treat their cities as ends in themselves resulting in excruciatingly boring but undeniably decorative cinematic experiences.

Though I absolutely adored both The Limits of Control and In The City of Sylvia, I genuinely struggle to see the point of the kind of films that are produced by the likes of Green and Costa. Beautiful photography and a steadfast refusal to indulge anything as proletarian as plot or characters are all very well but art house directors have been making variations on this particular theme for fifty fucking years! Frankly, there is only so many times that you can march your audience round a picturesque medieval city before people start questioning the artistic point of the excursion. When I reviewed Pedro Costa’s Colossal Youth I argued that these types of films are a kind of shibboleth for cinephiles in that they are so profoundly and perversely uncommercial that they seem like nature’s remedy to the Transformers and Avatars of this world.  Unfortunately, beauty and truth do not triangulate and while the likes of Transformers are undeniably dumb as posts, it does not follow that truth and beauty will emerge simply by making the opposite decision to every choice made by Michael Bay. In order to justify lengthy run times in which nothing happens, directors must have a point to make or an argument to advance and it is increasingly clear to me that the likes of Green and Costa propose neither. Self-indulgent, pompous and not particularly intellectually engaging, these films are a toxic perversion of the techniques that go into true art house filmmaking. Frankly, I worry for a critical fraternity that struggles to see the very clear differences between smart films like In The City of Sylvia and ploddingly pretentious disasters like The Portuguese Nun.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – The Doom Generation (1995)

FilmJuice have my review of Gregg Araki’s fifth film, the surreal and nihilistic teenage road movie The Doom Generation.

Revisiting this film was an interesting experience for me as I can remember both seeing it and reacting to it as a part of the vogue for nihilistic films that gripped 1990s American cinema. The set up is as simple as it is classic: A pair of fucked-up teenagers take to the road after accidentally killing a convenience store clerk. Moving from town to town, they rub up against the weirder elements of the American condition and try to come to terms with their place in the grand scheme of things. Each character voices a different attitude towards the sense of disillusionment and alienation that all generations feel upon coming of age. Indeed, this is a film that is as much a response to films like Easy Rider and Badlands as it is to True Romance and Natural Born Killers:

According to postmodern nihilism, nothing matters other than the mundane details of our lives. As might be expected from a broad cultural pattern, American film engaged with the idea of postmodern nihilism in a number of different ways. For example, at one end of the spectrum Quentin Tarantino’s patented blend of operatic violence and trivial chitchat spawned films such as Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers (1994) and Tony Scott’s True Romance (1993) in which nothing seemed to matter other than love. Meanwhile, at the other end of the spectrum, Larry Clark’s Kids (1995) reversed the polarity and argued that Generation X actively avoided answering the bigger questions by filling their heads with talk of relationships and old TV shows. Trapped between the romanticism of Tarantino and the outrage of Clark lies Greg Araki’s The Doom Generation a film about costs and benefits of cynical detachment.

All things considered, I think that The Doom Generation is perhaps a little bit too ‘meta’ to be anything more than an interesting rejoinder to a more worthwhile set of films, but then perhaps that was always the point of the exercise? What better way to lend voice to the angst of Generation X than to suggest that everything has been said and that all we can ever hope for is just enough sex and violence to pass the time?

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Corman’s World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel (2011)

The good folk at FilmJuice have my review of Alex Stapleton’s documentary Corman’s World.

Corman is an interesting figure in the history of American film as he appeared at a time when the American film industry was very slow to react to the cultural needs of the post-War generation. By remaining attuned to the desires of the babyboom generation, Corman managed to bootstrap himself first into commercial success and then into a certain degree of artistic respectability:

One of the most poignant moments in Corman’s World sees Martin Scorsese and Peter Fonda reminiscing about Corman’s willingness to fund films such as The Trip and The Wild Angels. Filled with psychotropic imagery and language lifted from Vietnam War demonstrations, these films not only gave younger people a voice, they also laid the foundations for such ground-breaking films as Easy Rider. As people who rose to prominence on the back of the 1960s, both Fonda and Scorsese seem perplexed as to why Corman never followed them out of the drive-in and into the academy but this is because both men seem to have mistaken Corman for an idealistic filmmaker. Despite trying his arm at politically engaged filmmaking, Corman was never an idealist… he was a democrat and a capitalist who gave his audience idealism because that is what they wanted to pay for. The unease we feel about Corman’s willingness to pander to his audience is the same unease we feel about Hollywood as a whole: are they making art or are they making money? The answer suggested by Stapleton is that they are doing both because both activities involve telling people what it is that they want and need to hear.

Stapleton’s documentary is probably best understood as a companion piece to Peter Biskind’s book about the post-War movie brat generation Easy Rider, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock-‘n’-Roll Generation Saved Hollywood (2008). I say companion piece as Stapleton’s documentary leans quite heavily upon Biskind’s vision of a generation that stormed the barricades of Hollywood and launched successful careers before either collapsing into narcissistic self-indulgence or devoting themselves to selling toys. However, while Biskind’s book provides a deliciously unflattering portrait of that ‘golden’ generation of post-War filmmakers, Stapleton provides a far more enthusiastic picture of one of that generation’s most noted losers. Indeed, as I suggest in the above quote, Corman stood poised to become a ‘serious filmmaker’ but he somehow never made that transition and by the time he was in a position to capitalise on his success the likes of Lucas and Spielberg had pipped him to the post and convinced Hollywood that the future lay in pandering to audiences with multimillion-dollar B movies like Jaws and Star Wars.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Weekend (2011)

FilmJuice have my review of Andrew Haigh’s relationship drama Weekend.

The film tells the story of two gay men who meet in a club and spend the night together. Upon waking, Glenn (Chris New) sticks a tape recorder under Russell’s (Tom Cullen) nose and asks him to give detailed feedback about the sex and the way the pair met. Horrified by Glenn’s frankness and yet compelled to accede to his request out of affection and desire, Russell begins to talk and when Russell begins to talk the one night stand slowly begins to transform into a relationship. Weekend is the story of how two very different people strive to overcome their differences in order to find enough common ground to exist as a couple:

It seems faintly absurd that, in this day and age, we should feel obliged to make the case for why it is that more straight people should watch gay films. Many fans of gay independent film will stress the educational benefits of watching a film about people unlike yourself but this makes it all sound a little bit too much like homework. People should not seek out Andrew Haigh’s Weekend because they feel obliged to be supportive of minority filmmaking or because they want to see something a bit different and exotic. The case for watching Haigh’s Weekend is the same for watching any great film: Watch it because it will help you to better understand yourself. In fact, Weekend is the single most grown-up film about human relationships that you will see this year and that is true regardless of who you are and how you live your life.

Needless to say, I adored this film and recommend it to anyone and everyone who happens upon this blog post. So many films deal in relationships and bndy about words like ‘love’, ‘desire’ and ‘loneliness’ but few actually address what those words actually mean. Weekend is one of those films.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Babycall (2011)

FilmJuice have my review of Pål Sletaune’s psychological thriller Babycall.

The film tells the story of a mother and child that are placed in a witness relocation programme after their abusive husband and father is sent to prison. Intensely nervous and over-protective, Anna refuses to allow her son to sleep in her own bed until she purchases a baby monitor that allows her to hear him sleep. However, once the monitor is plugged in it begins picking up horrific sounds of abuse coming from another device in the same apartment block. Assisted by Helge, a man whose status as the son of an overprotective mother allows him to understand the woman’s desire to protect her son, Anna begins investigating the source of the noises only for her entire life to begin unraveling.

At the heart of Babycall is the complex, unhealthy but ultimately humanising relationship between Helge and Anna. Fresh from her success as the original cinematic Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, Noomi Rapace offers us a veneer of faceless maternal anxiety that slowly peels away, revealing more and more humanity as Anna becomes more and more detached from reality. Similarly impressive is Joner who manages to find strength, courage and likeability in a character whose life has been defined by a cowardly willingness to apologise for the actions of a monstrous and tyrannical parent. These twin performances, though entertaining to watch in their own right, provide a sound human basis for what could all too easily have been a directionless attack on abusive parenting. The power of Babycall lies not in the decision to confront the issue of abusive parenting but rather in the capacity to make these types of parent appear sympathetic. Indeed, we feel for Anna because she is afraid and because she loves her son but when that love produces individuals as broken as Helge, we have to ask whether maternal love is really the unambiguously positive thing we have always assumed it to be.

Flawlessly paced, psychologically compelling and full of brilliant twists and turns, Babycall is not only a fantastic psychological thriller, it is also a very brave film indeed. Without wanting to give too much away, it might be worth seeing Philippe Claudel’s I’ve Loved You So Long (2008) before you see Babycall as both films tread quite similar ground (albeit in very different ways).

People with an interest in well-executed psychological thrillers might also want to check out Sletaune’s previous film Next Door (2005), which I reviewed over here.

by Jonathan M

How to Make An American ‘Independent’ Film

Once upon a time, the term ‘American independent cinema’ designated an approach to filmmaking that was personal in outlook, regional in sensibility and European in aspiration. The goal of the movement was to learn from the European Art House movement of the 1960s and apply those lessons to films that looked beyond shoot-em-ups and courtroom dramas to what it really meant to be an American in the 20th Century. While the movement produced a wide array of different films, it is best known for its most successful work: Stephen Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989).

As Peter Biskind notes in Down and Dirty Pictures (2004), the astronomical amounts of money generated by Sex, Lies, and Videotape kicked off a boom period for American independent film. Suddenly, American indies were big business but in order for them to stay big business it was necessary to replicate that success over and over again. The film industry has always reacted to unexpected success by repetition and the success of American independent films were no exception to this and so a template began to emerge allowing studios to keep making the same films for the same audience over and over again.

Here is my guide to creating an American independent film:

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