I feel, in the words of Malcolm X as though I have been bamboozled, led astray and run amok. I refer, of course, to the trailer for Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds (2009). When it first filtered out at the beginning of the summer, the Guardian devoted a blog post to it referring to it as one of the worst trailers ever made and it was difficult to disagree with that assessment at the time. Having just got rid of a government who resorted to arguing semantics when addressing allegations of torture, it seemed tasteless in the extreme to produce a film that seemed to be all about torture. Torture not as a necessity to save lives but torture as an expression of basic natural justice. Torture as funny and entertaining. The trailer even included Eli Roth, one of the founding fathers of the so-called ‘torture porn’ sub-genre. However, the film I saw is not about torture and it certainly isn’t about cartoonish violence and stylised action. It is a film about talking. Just talking. And therein lies its greatest successes as well as its greatest shortcomings.
Tag / film criticism
REVIEW – Orphan (2009)
I went to see Jaume Collet-Serra’s Orphan over the weekend and found it to be a huge amount of fun. Firstly, because it has a script that is properly character-based and secondly, because it reminds me enormously of an old favourite : Curtis Hanson’s The Hand that Rocks the Cradle (1992).
THE ZONE has my review.
Mesrine : Killer Instinct (2008) – Only I Exist… and I’m Great
To a greater or less extent, we are all solipsists. We live our lives trapped in a prison of pure subjectivity, profoundly alienated not only from the real world but from the subjective experiences of other people. We assume that people think like us and that the external world is out there for us to perceive and interact with but we don’t know. Not in the same way that we know whether or not we are thinking or feeling pain. We infer, we assume, we project, we deduce, but we do not know. That which is out there is not as real as that which is in here. We all possess this instinct. An instinct that has inspired countless philosophical schools from classical scepticism through empiricism and the the socialised idealism of post-modernity. It also explains why the dominant currency of the humanities is phenomenological; feelings, emotions, beliefs and the self. To creative people in thrall to the solipsistic instinct, these mental constructs seem far more real and far more accessible than facts about the real world and so they are accorded more importance. An excellent example of the privileged position of the phenomenological is the form of the autobiography.
Most autobiographies do not try to invoke impersonal forces or neurological causality in their attempts to explain the author’s decisions or apparent personality quirks. Instead, most autobiographies are stories. Stories in which the author is the protagonist while the real people they encountered in their life become extras, side-kicks, love-interests and villains. These are the kinds of stories that we all tell ourselves when we think about our place in the world.
Jean-Francois Richet’s L’Instinct de Mort (2008) is perhaps the most formally honest screen adaptation of an autobiography you are ever likely to see. The film’s representation of the life of famed French criminal Jacques Mesrine fully embraces the solipsism of both the autobiography and its psychopathic protagonist by showing us a world in which Mesrine is the hero while everyone else is just set dressing.
Art House to Slaughter House – The Evolution of the French Horror Film
Videovista also have my extended essay on the history of French Horror film. Ostensibly a “10 Best…” list, I tried to explain how the current wave of French Horror films draw upon cinematical antecedents ranging from the gothic and exploitation to the properly art house. I have been slowly working on this for a couple of months but it is only in the last week or so that I managed to fashion a proper historical narative. Worth taking a look at if you’re interested in my views on films such as :
- The Fall of the House of Usher (1928)
- Spirits of the Dead (1968)
- Female Vampire (1973)
- Les Diaboliques (1955)
- The Tenant (1976)
- Eyes without a Face (1960)
- Switchblade Romance (2003)
- Them (2006)
- Inside (2007)
- Martyrs (2008)
von Trier’s Antichrist – Context
This weekend, I saw what I think is possibly the film of the year. Lars von Trier’s Antichrist (2009) is a triumph of style, content, and artistic politics. It is such a complex and subtle film that I feel that I need more than one post to do it justice and so, this is the first in a series of posts about Antichrist. The first intalment is about the correct way to approach the film as a work of art.
REVIEW – Moon (2009)
Sometimes it isn’t easy to love the cinema. Increasingly, the greatest popular art form of the 20th Century has become a means of oppression : Every year, the summer blockbuster season lasts that little bit longer. The season of empty months. Months during which the few decent films that do make it into cinemas are instantly forced out by over-hyped sequels and works of distorted genre. Works so disjointed and violent in their imagery that they have come to resemble twisted parodies of the world we know. Works that do not seek to elevate our collective humanity but to pervert it by filling our poor throbbing skulls with whole new vistas of psychosis and paranoia. Vistas we can only escape from with the help of consumer products, the antics of boy wizards and bellicose robots. Vistas produced by a media-industrial complex that keeps us supine and malleable lest we realise the living hell that we have made of our collective existence. A collective existence so cruel and unhinged that were we to grasp its true nature for even a second we would all run screaming into the streets, tearing at our clothes and flesh in a hideous and brutal attempt to somehow get clean and free of a system that has crushed us beneath its heel for far too long.
But then a film comes along that seems to recognise all of this.
Cinematic Vocabulary – Three Moments from Irma Vep (1996)
So far, Cinematic Vocabulary has focused upon isolated cinematic scenes. The reason for this is that, while matters of style and technique impact upon entire films, it is frequently easier to isolate these aspects of a film by filtering out issues of narrative and characterisation that tend to function more on the level of entire films than on that of individual scenes. However, as with atoms and tables, there is a point where the small things come together to form something recognisably large. This column is about how a series of scenes can link up in order to form a part of a wider thematic arc.
A few months back, I wrote about Olivier Assayas’ Demonlover (2002). Intrigued by the cerebral and somewhat extreme piece of French film-making, I tracked down the best known of Assayas’ works, Irma Vep (1996). Set behind the scenes of a fictional remake of Louis Feuillade’s silent era crime pulp Les Vampires (1915), Irma Vep casts Hong Kong martial arts veteran Maggie Cheung as herself playing the titular Irma Vep character. Much like Truffaut’s Day for Night (1974), Irma Vep uses its film-within-a-film structure to comment upon the nature of film production in general and the health of the French film industry in particular. The result is a hugely rewarding film filled both with touchingly funny moments of human frailty and insightful critiques of what French film has lost and where it should be heading.
REVIEW – 35 Shots of Rum (2008)
Recently, Ruthless Culture has become somewhat fixated with films that deal with alienation, death, misery, insanity and violence. Fixated enough that I think a bit of a change might be welcome and I can think of no better a vehicle for change than Claire Denis’ 35 Rhums (2008).
35 Shots of Rum is a warm-hearted but utterly uncompromising drama revolving around a somewhat extended family grouping. Lionel (Alex Descas) lives with his daughter Josephine (Mati Diop) in a block of flats that also serves as home to Lionel’s old partner Gabrielle (Nicole Dogue) and old friend of the family Noe (Gregoire Colin). If I use vague terminology such as ‘partner’ and ‘friend of the family’ it is because, initially at least, many of the relationships in 35 Shots of Rum are unclear. This lack of clarity is not only intensional, it is one that continues throughout the film as Denis tries to place us in the same position as her characters… we know how we feel but we do not know where everyone stands.
Blood Of The Beasts (1949) – Humanity’s Capacity to Dream
Georges Franju’s background was in theatrical set design. As a set designer, he would have learned to create atmosphere through the use of subtle visual queues but he would also have learned that every scene and every shot are a world of their own. Properly conceived, a single shot can convey as much information as an entire page of dialogue. Where the camera focuses, when people enter, where objects stand and how they are lit are not merely aesthetic variables, they are to cinema what words are to poetry and literature. As such, it is perhaps fitting that Ruthless Culture’s first look at a work of Franju should be a short film that is practically silent; His 1949 short film about Parisian slaughterhouses Blood of the Beasts.
REVIEW – 20th Century Boys (2008)
VideoVista have my review of Yukihiko Tsutsumi’s 20th Century Boys.
Watching this film put me in mind of archeology or anthropology. It is based upon a series of manga which, while hugely successful in Japan, have yet to acquire much of a cult status in the West. Because of the popularity of the source material, the film and everyone involved in t seem to be making a real effort to produce a film as close to the source material as possible. So in effect, the film is this huge homage to this pop cultural deity that I have never heard of. It’s like some weird and incomprehensible religion; to those within the sphere of influence of the manga, clearly the film is a big deal. To the rest of us all of the slavish respect seems irrational and incomprehensible. Which is probably a good state to be in when it comes to popular culture.
Ruthless Culture 