Tag / film criticism

by Jonathan M

Limitless (2011) – Mega Mega White Thing

They say that cocaine can make a good man great.

The also say that it can make him into a tedious jabbering fool.

These things are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

One of the more intriguing sequences in Charles Ferguson’s Oscar-winning documentary about the credit crunch Inside Job (2010) reveals that, prior to the crash, a number of New York brokerage houses and management consultancies allowed their employees to pay for sex on their company credit cards. Ferguson uses this revelation to add a tinge of decadence to his depiction of Wall Street institutions but it also raises the question of a degree of kinship between betting large amounts of other people’s money and a lifestyle littered with cocaine and high-class escorts. Ferguson hand-waves this association with some waffling about pleasure centres in the brain but what if the link is not neurology but a question of peer groups? Are the sort of people who tend to do well in banking also the sort of people who tend to enjoy coke and hookers? Does a fondness for coke and hookers mark financial executives out as ‘our sort of chap’?

Neil Burger’s Limitless is a science fiction film about a man who discovers a drug that unlocks the untapped potential of his brain. Initially a struggling science fiction writer, the film’s protagonist soon morphs into the sort of arrogant, swaggering, bollock-talking bell-end that seem to dominate the world’s financial institutions and, as long as he keeps taking the pills, there’s a good chance that this particular bell-end will wind up President.

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by Jonathan M

The Valley of the Bees (1968) – The Cross or The Cock?

In his best-known work – The Essence of Christianity (1848) – the Bavarian philosopher and anthropologist Ludwig Feuerbach argues that religion is a form of psychological projection as humanity created God as a means of externalising such basic human values as benevolence, love and the ability to do as one pleases. Religion is the process through which values are stripped from individual things and rendered abstract for the purposes of worship and contemplation. God is nothing more than Man; he is the projection of our inner nature and our most basic desires. According to Feuerbach, this process has become increasingly problematic over the years as people now prize the abstract construct over the values themselves. God was supposed to be a means, but now he has become an end.

Frantisek Vlácil’s film Údolí vcel (a.k.a. The Valley of the Bees) is an examination of what happens when people project their desires onto abstract entities only to forget that these entities are not actually real. Set in medieval Bohemia, the film tells the story of one knight’s love for another knight and how, by projecting that love onto God, something as simple and human as wonderful as love can be distorted into something truly monstrous.

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by Jonathan M

BG 38 – Sucker Punch: Video Games and The Future of the Blockbuster

Futurismic have my 38th Blasphemous Geometries column.

The column is one part review of Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch to one part examination of the nature of blockbusters to one part analysis of trends in popular culture and the way in which video games are coming to replace super heroes as the blockbuster genre medium of choice (hence the length):

Sucker Punch mirrors the growing intertextuality of the video game experience by having Baby Doll shift seamlessly between the reality of the game, the reality of the brothel and the reality of the insane asylum. However, what makes Sucker Punch such an interesting film is not the fact that it displays an impressively detailed understanding of video game aesthetics, but rather the way in which it uses these images and techniques to attempt to create a cinematic effect.

by Jonathan M

The Hunter (2010) – America Unter Alles

Every morning, when I turn on the radio and hear of yet another wave of revolutionary uprisings or demonstrations in the Middle East and North Africa, I invariably think that such events are long overdue. But what causes a popular uprising? What makes such a thing overdue?

In the West, we have an ageing and apathetic population ruled over by a largely corrupt political class who have little or no interest in rocking the boat. However, though archly conservative and hugely selfish, the mindset of the political classes broadly mirrors the attitudes of the ageing population they claim to represent and so, despite the odd march and protest, a revolution is not likely to take place any time soon. However, in the Arab World, the picture is startlingly different.

In the Middle East and North Africa, a similarly corrupt, conservative and selfish political class is currently in power. However, unlike the West, the population of the Arab World is not conservative and apathetic but young, vibrant and idealistic. For a while now, the older political class has managed to keep the young in line by making lavish promises and allowing them to blow off steam by whipping up anti-US and anti-Israeli sentiment (despite their vocal outrage, Israeli atrocities have been a political godsend to the autocracies of the Arab world). When these fail to work, the ageing political classes use Western weapons and truncheons to put down the protestors while screaming about ‘foreign influence’. However, as the news reveals to us every morning, this tactic is rapidly starting to fail and the youth of the Arab World are starting to demand representation in the political classes of the countries they inhabit.

What makes this wave of uprisings feel overdue is the fact that they are largely the product of demographic weight.  The political algebra is quite clear:

Insufficient social and political mobility + high birth rate = revolution

But where does the truth of this equation come from? Where do revolutions start? Iranian director Rafi Pitts’ The Hunter suggests that, while revolutions begin with unhappy people, they seldom end that way as political issues have a tendency to outlive the people who first draw attention to them.

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by Jonathan M

Tokyo Sonata (2008) – How To Live a Meaningless Existence and Not Be Overly Bothered

According to both the Romantics and the Moderns, we are all guilty children of a slain father figure. Standing over the corpse of God with blood on our hands and tears in our eyes, we look down upon slain divinity and weep for the way that his touches always made us feel special. Informed by this sense of loss but unsure of how to respond to it, 20th Century literature built upon 19th Century psychological realism by focusing its gaze inwards to the point where the external world seemed to simply fade away. Convinced that god is dead, science is boring and politics is useless, 20th Century writers wrote about themselves and their problems, coaxing thousands of novels and hundreds of films from the unbearable tragedy of being middle class and a little bit unhappy. Unhappiness framed in terms of the disappearance of God and so made to seem important and cosmic rather than irrelevant and self-indulgent. The truth is that we no more morn the death of god than we do the fall of the Roman empire, like most people who lose a parent, we have moved on and now live our lives not in the shadow of a fictional God but in the sunlight of the real world. Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Tokyo Sonata is a film about the ultimate irrelevance of questions of meaning and consolation to the lives of real people.

 

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by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole (2010)

Videovista has my review of Zack Snyder’s adaptation of Kathryn Lasky’s Legend of the Guardians.

Despite really liking Zack Snyder as a director, I thought this film was absolutely terrible.  Though, to be fair, Snyder’s direction is the best thing about it. Here’s a taste of my review:

Snyder is shamelessly misanthropic and perfectly adapted to a cultural climate where the individual is king and the king is assumed to be a complete cunt. His exquisite fetishisation of violence, his love of gore and grue, his spirals of death and destruction are not just an expression of a personal philosophy, they are a coherent and beautiful directorial vision. Zack Snyder speaks to the miserable, lank-haired, compulsively masturbating homunculus in all of us, but while the singularity and power of this vision has won him a legion of fan-boys, it also makes him a somewhat poor choice for making a children’s film about owls.

by Jonathan M

Archipelago (2011) – Genre not as Tyrant but as Vocabulary

There are times when you wish that Ayn Rand had been a literary critic. Who else could ever hope to capture the sense of adolescent rebellion with which critics and authors alike invoke the word ‘genre’? In contemporary culture, genre boundaries seem to exist solely as things to be transgressed. But so many works now ‘redraw the boundaries of genre’ and ‘confound genre expectations’ that genre labels are effectively meaningless. They are empty suits, paper tigers and straw men that exist purely so that authors and critics can claim them to have been defeated by some new towering work of genius. Might it not be time to accept that genre has been so thoroughly transgressed, redefined and deconstructed that there is no longer any glory to be found in escaping its clutches? Might it not be time for a more grown-up attitude towards the idea of genre?

Genre is like a long-suffering parent. Endlessly forgiving and endlessly patient, it responds to its children’s professions of hatred with an affectionate pat on the head and a mug of hot chocolate to calm them down. You can scream, “I hate you! I wish you were dead!” at genre till you are blue in the face and genre will still be there when you need your next film financing or a convention circuit for your book tour. There is nothing heroic or original in transgressing genre because that is precisely what it is there for. So perhaps we should look upon genre not as some cartoon tyrant that artists can easily defeat but rather as a part of what makes up a work of fiction no different to language or lighting or pace. Joanna Hogg’s second film Archipelago displays just this attitude towards genre.

Every inch the genre film, Archipelago sees Hogg taking the basic template of French art house drama (the Victorian novel’s obsession with psychological nuance combined with the system-under-pressure psychological mechanics of psychoanalysis and the sense of perpetual loss of identity forged in existentialism) and applies it to an upper-class English family that simply cannot say how it feels or what it wants. The result is a beautifully shot, exquisitely observed and surprisingly original work of cinema that uses genre expectations not as things to be transgressed but as a means of eliciting an emotional response from the audience.

 

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by Jonathan M

REVIEW – The Living and The Dead (2007)

Every now and then, a film comes out that seems to slip completely through the net.  Not picked up by the festival circuit, the major distributors or even the more cultish elements of the genre scene, it washes up on the shore of DVD review sites unloved and largely ignored.  Kristjan Milic’s The Living and The Dead is the kind of film that provides a compelling argument for the continued existence of DVD review sites as it is not only unloved outside of its native Croatia, it is also genuinely brilliant.

Set in two different time-frames, the film explores the idea (much beloved of Nigel Kneale) that certain places in the world have a memory of their own.  A memory so deep and so dark that it curves the emotional space around it.  Sucking in positive emotions and leaving only misery and death in its wake.  Despite clearly being a work of fantastical cinema, The Living and The Dead is relentlessly mundane in its focus… in fact, you could quite easily read the film as just the story of two groups of soldiers fighting and dying for the same insignificant scrap of land.  But to do that would be to ignore some beautifully evocative ideas.

Videovista has my review.

by Jonathan M

Never Let Me Go (2010) – Tommy and Kathy and Paolo and Francesca

One of the founding myths of contemporary intellectual culture is the idea that, denied the consolation of religion and confronted by a universe both devoid of meaning and over-burdened with choices, humanity now finds itself in a world that has become disenchanted.  As Max Weber puts it:

The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the ”disenchantment of the world.” Precisely the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life either into the transcendental realm of mystic life or into the brotherliness of direct and personal human relations. It is not accidental that our greatest art is intimate and not monumental.

The term ‘disenchantment of the world’ is not in fact Weber’s but that of Friedrich Schiller whose critical writings — including Letters Upon the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794) — can be seen as attempts to come to terms with his feeling of being somehow out of step with the world and more in tune with the by-gone age of classical Greece.  An age which:

Displaced humanity, and recast it on a magnified scale in the glorious circle of its gods; but it did this not by dissecting human nature, but by giving it fresh combinations, for the whole of human nature was represented in each of the gods.

With characteristic insight, Gabriel Josipovici suggests in Whatever Happened to Modernism? (2010) that this sense of displacement flows not from a fundamental change in the nature of the world or of man’s relation to it, but from a sense of romantic nostalgia.

This sense of somehow having arrived too late, of having lost for ever something that was once a common possession, is a, if not the, key Romantic concern.

This sense of detachment from the world and yearning after a time when life had meaning is elegantly articulated by Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly’s new book All Things Shining – Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age (2011).  In an early chapter, Dreyfus and Kelly compare the affairs of Emma Bovary in Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857)) with the adulterous affair of Paolo Malatesta and Francesca da Rimini in Dante’s Inferno.  Whereas Flaubert depicts Emma’s betrayal of her witless husband in a way that can continue to command our sympathies, Dante depicts adultery as a form of moral incontinence:

The medieval couple knew that it was wrong to engage in an adulterous affair – there was no question about it; unfortunately, they couldn’t resist the sinful passion of lust.

The medieval couple lived their lives within religion’s enchanted bubble of certainty and, as a result, they knew that they were doing wrong whereas Charles and Emma Bovary, living in the modern disenchanted world, lack a basic moral infrastructure. In fact, despite her shallow tastes, emotional remoteness and infidelity, Charles comes to the point of admiring his unfaithful wife for her betrayal.

Dreyfus and Kelly’s account of Dante’s psychology is above reproach.  It is lucid.  It is elegant.  It is comprehensive.  However, the psychological model underpinning Dante’s characterisation is profoundly alien to our modern eyes.  If Paolo and Francesca were so sure as to the ‘right thing’ to do, why did they act otherwise? And, more importantly, how did they act otherwise?  Dreyfus and Kelly speak of the couple as suffering from what ancient philosophers called akrasia or weakness of the will, but they do not delve deeply into the psychology of akrasia and the ways in which a mindset characterised by moral certainty and a tendency to akrasia might differ from a modern one.  Indeed, as modern disenchanted readers we find it easy to empathise with Charles Bovary’s refusal to condemn his wife because, like him, we have trouble choosing which moral framework to apply to her actions.  Should we judge her by the standards of Christianity?  Or should we be understanding of the fact that she was trapped in a loveless marriage to a dull and unambitious man?  This inability to choose between frameworks is, according to Dreyfus and Kelly, the defining characteristic of our modern disenchanted state:

This sense of certainty is rare in the contemporary world. Indeed, modern life can seem to be defined by its opposite. An unrelenting flow of choices confronts us at nearly every moment of our lives, and most of us could admit to find ourselves at least occasionally wavering.

But what is this “wavering” if not akrasia repackaged in existentialist livery?  Dante may claim that Paolo and Francesca knew that they were doing wrong but their actions suggest a degree of uncertainty as to whether or not ‘the right thing to do’ was actually the right thing to do in that particular situation.  It is my contention that, far from being a modern invention, existential anguish and lack of certainty are fundamental to the human condition.  They are necessary by-products of the way in which human consciousness engages with the world.  As John Gray puts it in Straw Dogs (2002):

When we are on the point of acting, we cannot predict what we are about to do. Yet when we look back we may see our decision as a step on a path on which we were already bound. We see our thoughts sometimes as events that happen to us, and sometimes as our acts. Our feeling of freedom comes about through switching between these two angles of vision. Free will is a trick of perspective.

While we may not possess free will, our consciousness is such that we cannot help but see ourselves as free.  This perception of limitless freedom and responsibility for making choices creates a sense of existential vertigo as we struggle to come to terms with the fact that we could have acted differently and yet did not.  This sense of existential vertigo is omnipresent in contemporary intellectual culture because all systems of value are now open to scrutiny, but even if our culture did not tolerate dissent or ‘shopping around’ for values, we would still feel that lack of certainty.  We would still feel that lack of meaning.  We would still desperately try to latch on to any system that would help our conscious minds make sense of our actions.

Mark Romanek’s adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005) explores both the universality of existential anguish and the universality of the need for consolatory myths.  Deploying science fictional tropes to create a world in which people’s lives have both a meaning and a purpose, Never Let Me Go suggests that the lost certainty lamented by Romantics is nothing more than another myth concocted as a remedy to our innate sense of alienation from the world.

 

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by Jonathan M

White Material (2009) – deColonisation / reOccupation

One of the most troubling things about colonialism is its language. Colonisation implies a degree of tentativeness and impermanence as though colonies are fragile attempts to implant humans into a landscape that has yet to support them.  Colonisation assumes unoccupied space just as discovery assumes that the thing being discovered has never been found before. Jyotsna G. Singh addresses this semiotic baggage in the introduction to her book Colonial Narratives/Cultural Dialogues (1996):

Since the early modern period, this discovery motif has frequently emerged in the language of colonization, enabling European travellers/writers to represent the newly “discovered” lands as an empty space, a tabula rasa on which they could inscribe their linguistic, cultural, and later territorial claims. – Pp. 1

What is offensive about the notions of discovery and colonisation is the fact that most of the lands discovered and colonised by European settlers were actually inhabited.  How can one discover land that is already well known and colonise places that are already inhabited?  Easy… by making the people who were there first disappear. As a result, one should perhaps speak not of lands being ‘colonised’ but of their being ‘occupied’.

A different way of looking at this question is to point out that ‘colonisation’ remains a useful term precisely because of the moral and conceptual absurdity of its connotations.  If one speaks of lands being occupied rather than colonised by the British Empire then one allows for the fact that all human inhabitation is morally neutral because nobody has a natural right to the ownership of the land they inhabit.  We all occupy the land and time brings with it no legitimacy.  The crime of colonialism was not that the Europeans laid claim to land that was not theirs, it was that they laid claim to territory and then used those claims to justify the exploitation of the people who were occupying the land when they first got there.  Colonialism is not a crime against the land; it is a crime against people.  All land is occupied.  From the perspective of the land, we are all colonists.

Claire Denis’s White Material examines the process of decolonisation without the assumption that there is such a thing as legitimate ownership of the land.  Denis’s film presents Africa as both perpetual virgin territory and eternally dried-out, exploited and ancient wasteland.

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