Only God Forgives (2013) Nicolas Winding Refn…

In Brief: Ninety minutes of pregnant pauses, broken by brief bouts of violence, yields no useful results although I now feel better acquainted with the reality of black holes *

source: Netflix

Nicolas Winding Refn surely has completed his transformation from middling copycat to almost transcendent hack with Only God Forgives. It’s a remarkable film, boasting the inner life of Terri Schiavo gelled with the laboured pacing of a man straining to carefully negotiate the exit of a particularly corpulent shit. I know the first part of that comparison is in poor taste but, being honest, Refn’s work is difficult to categorise in standard terms. I think it’s supposed to be some kind of nihilist intent that fuels his, what I think is intended to be ‘extreme’, cinema but it’s becoming increasingly evident that he should probably just pop a Nyquil or four and see if he doesn’t feel less cranky tomorrow morning.

Intense! Mysterious! Stubble! Manlove! Matricide! Eau de Ryan Gosling. Available now.

The story concerns a young man, let’s call him Ryan Gosling, who lives in Thailand and hangs with a rough crowd of people who aren’t Ryan Gosling. His brother kills a hooker so her father kills him and then someone else kills her father and, actually, no one cares. Anyway, Ryan Gosling’s mom, let’s just call her Kristin Scott Joan Crawford Thomas IV O.B.E. is mean and she says mean things to everyone. Meanwhile a retired policeman who is basically a god-like figure of vengeance, let’s call him Chief Inspector Stabitat for Humanity, because Anton Chigurh or whatever is already taken, doesn’t like anyone so he kills everyone a lot. Only he can forgive though so take notes or whatever. Oh, you don’t care? That works too.

Turn off the shitty movie, HAL!

If nothing else, we can all acknowledge that the film looks beautiful, aglow with rich colours and intricate patterning courtesy of a carefully nuanced set design. Of course it’s all so preposterously formal that long stretches feel like an accidental spoof of the finale of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Moving at a leaden pace, the film extrapolates a vision of Ryan Gosling railing against wire hangars, so to speak, before being put out to pasture by Stabitat for Humanity. That’s not a spoiler because no one could possibly give a shit what happens anyway. Seriously, Refn seems set to dare anyone to even try.

What is intended as dark, dread-laden atmosphere is instead boredom inflected with inadvertent comedy. The soundtrack, which features a couple of good tunes, had they shown up elsewhere, often suggests tension by just making it sound like the film was shot next to a screening of Inception. Still, there’s at least one amusing joke involving Ryan Gosling prepping for fisticuffs before being beaten senseless by wacky old Stabitat. Any whiff of existential terror is swept away in hilariously awkward conversations and over-baked acts of violence that are entirely unsuitable for children, mainly because if they saw them you’d have to listen to them complaining about how fucking boring the movie was. To be honest, the potential for a MST3K commentary track for this film is immense. I think due to my own boredom I composed half of such a track myself as the film slumped into its second half.

God has a black-belt in karaoke

As a final comic nod, the film is dedicated to Alejandro Jodorowsky and, in the film’s imagery, a certain glib overlap with his Santa Sangre is plainly in evidence. French provocateur Gaspar Noé also gets a ‘Thank You’, suggesting Refn has leapt so deeply into fiction that he thinks he’s playing the same sport as these other men. He’s not, but you’ve got to hand it to him for managing to make another whole film without accidentally swallowing his own tongue.

He’s an odd chap, Refn. He’s recently been appearing on audio commentaries, championing some great fun, and genuinely good B-movies like Maniac Cop. In fact, I think he may even be teaming up with that film’s original director Bill Lustig (now head of first-rate exploitation boutique film label, Blue Underground) to help produce a remake. So it’s apparent that Refn didn’t grow up watching terrible films made by dullards. So what is his excuse?

The Immigrant (2013) James Gray…

In Brief: A melodrama that tries to throw back to Hollywood’s Golden Era but really just needs to be thrown back **

source: Theatrical showing

It’s difficult for me to imagine who on Earth actually wants to make films like this but then I read up on the writer/director’s influences and it all becomes clear. Apparently this project was written with two things specifically in mind: firstly that Marion Cotillard’s visage communicates realms of depth akin to Falconetti’s famous performance in The Passion of Joan of Arc and secondly, where did those great roles for the likes of Barbara Stanwyck and Bette Davis go?

With those elements in place, James Gray set to work to design a film that is, ostensibly, just a horrible misunderstanding of how good film works. After all, taking nothing from Falconetti’s miraculous presence, there was a whole lot more going on in the film than her just staring at the camera looking distressed. Meanwhile, while I’ve also found myself wondering where things went so wrong for women in Hollywood, where in the liberated 2000s they now have noticeably less purchase than they did in the patriarchal snare of the 1950s, I’ve never thought the solution was to try and recreate those old performances verbatim.

America: Please bring your own dour sack-cloth outfit

Gray’s film then, is some kind of attempt at a throwback melodrama, a film of the fifties reborn anew. Alas, there’s something missing here, and that’s the originality and creative zeal of those original productions. Cotillard and those who surround her are capable actors but, almost from the very first frame, this film feels like a spoof, gathering every conceivable cliché about immigrants gathering at Ellis Island, trying to gain their entry into the New World and the American Dream, and tossing them about with grand abandon. Cotillard’s visage, her make-up made-down, does indeed remain radiant as she plays a put-upon Polish woman trying to bring her sickly sister through. And yes, Cotillard’s character is demure but possesses an intractable inner strength and yes, her sister has Tuberculosis/lung disease because that’s a rule. To reinforce her credibility in the role, Cotillard speaks lots of Polish because that requires extra work of the actor and proves their dedication to their craft. Of course what this all really adds up to is a cinematic purgatory where nothing feels authentic and there’s no conviction in the film’s clear artifice either. Back in the fifties, the lead actress would have arrived to the island in full glamour make-up and she would have spoken perfect English with shimmering close-ups, allowing perhaps a clumsy hint of a non-specific ‘foreign’ accent for dramatic effect. And that would be fine, because it’s a movie. The Immigrant‘s unfortunate recipe of modern sheen and wholesale theft of every trope of ‘the immigrant experience’ (Disney World take note, this could be the new Pirates of the Caribbean) seems to fatally misconstrue what made Stanwyck and Davis stars.

It doesn’t help that the story itself is one of almost cripplingly little interest. A woman shows up, she is abused, she remains strong as women do, men do stupid stuff around her, she forgives them, there’s a murder etc. Again it’s not so much that the tale is so classic that its repetition is merited but rather that we’re trudging through the foot-prints of a thousand better works of art. Meanwhile where Gray feels like making a social point, like how Joaquin Phoenix’s character, an exploitative Jewish pimp, is himself an outsider in larger American society, he helpfully labours this point by having the police constantly call him a ‘kike’ before beating him up. This happens more than once. Thanks Mr. Director, glad I didn’t miss that little nugget of, ‘hmmm, makes ya think.’

Who needs stimulating content? More period details! Look at that watch-chain. Phwoar!

Meanwhile the film’s visuals, shot by the eminently talented Iranian cinematographer Darius Khondji, are steeped in a horrible yellow that I have noticed creeping more and more into contemporary cinema. His compositions are elegant and, to the most part, suitably traditional, but this awful colour-balance, perhaps an attempt to hint at sepia, renders the entire film utterly unappealing to my eye. Previous generations could look back fondly on the ravishing ‘inaccuracies’ of Technicolor and how they were harnessed by the masters of the trade (Jack Cardiff for example, a magician) but I cannot fathom anyone ever looking back at this kind of tampering and wishing it were employed more often. At best it’s vaguely irritating, at worst it sets me on the path of designing jokes about the film stock perhaps being developed in a bucket of piss. And no one wants that to happen.

The main saving grace was catching the film with an audience in which I was among the youngest member. I’ll say this, whatever disparaging remarks I might conjure up, the film seemed a pretty solid hit with ladies in the 70+ year-old bracket who surrounded me and gasped and smacked at every lumbering twist of the plot. Which seems a fair summation of the film. If you’re an easily impressed, elderly woman, then you could apparently do worse than watching this. As for me, I’d take Chaplin’s film of the same title any day. It’s funnier, sadder, considerably shorter, and it’s cinematographically urine-free too. And to top it all off, it was made five years before this film was even set. Which means that even harking back to the past, James Gray still managed to be behind the curve.

Hellgate (1989) William A. Levey

In Brief: So bad it’s good? Or something worse? Make up your own mind because it’s pretty great fun either way ***

source: Arrow UK Blu-Ray

If ever there was a good example for, ‘making up your own mind,’ then gay sex is it. But Hellgate also works. Cursory research reveals a body of criticism that denigrates the film as just another slapdash, low-budget relic of the direct-to-video era. A film cynically parsed together under an accountant’s watchful eye to positively trick viewers into renting it. Certainly, that’s not false but it misses what roped me in, almost from the first frame- that no matter how cynical its genesis, it’s also a genuinely strange film. Its obvious shortcomings manifest in unexpected ways while its successes satisfy, catching you equally as off-guard. Although not by design, Hellgate emerges as a horror-comedy with an oneiric twist, albeit one where the horror is intended, the comedy, less so, and the oneiric, not at all.

Ruh Row, it’s the Scooby Gang

It’s tricky to put a finger on just what’s wrong with the film during its opening phases. Half the battle is separating the production’s limitations from its quirks. We open with some ‘youngsters’ (by horror movie/Beverly Hills 90210 standards) sharing ghost tales in an isolated cabin. This ushers in a flashback concerning a young woman murdered by a motorcycle gang back in the 1950s. Her father is understandably upset and comes to despise strangers in his town. He is the mayor of a little hamlet whose sole economy is being a tourist recreation of a 1890s prospecting village. Around this time, he happens upon a crystal that can reanimate the dead (who hasn’t?) and he uses this to resurrect his daughter who then becomes a siren to lure strangers to their deaths. The name of the motorcycle gang who killed the girl also happen to be called ‘The Strangers’ which might count as prophetic if it weren’t just really stupid instead.

Blue Steel?

This vignette is intercut with another youth’s (Welcome Back, Kotter’s Ron Palillo, about forty at time of production) attempt to find his way to the cabin where the storytellers are staying. He stops, he asks for directions, and then he happens upon a ghostly young lady who lures him to…wait a minute! It’s around this point, and really only with a degree of goodwill from the audience, that it becomes clear that the 1980s framing device and 1950s flashback are part of the same world. So, to recap, our 1980s protagonists soon find themselves contending with the undead inhabitants of a ghost-town from the 1950s that was designed to look like it’s from the 1890s. A backdrop that’s surely so pointlessly convoluted it almost counts as avant-garde.

Period details!? I’ll take them all! Mwahahahaa!

There’s so much here that just doesn’t work that it becomes difficult to keep track of what’s failing at what time. Unsurprisingly, the period details quickly fray as three distinct timelines haphazardly combine, leading to all manner of weird, obviously improvisational, flights of fancy from the set designers. Meanwhile the script is replete with goofy puns and jokes that are signposted by the characters themselves laughing at them. Ron Palillo is a bizarre choice for a dashing leading man, although that’s explained by his previously established working relationship with director William A. Levey. In the role of the ghostly siren, fashion model Abigail Wolcott, turning in a one-off acting credit, is left high and dry despite her best efforts because her countenance can’t help but scream fashion model rather than small-town fifties girl. Granted, it doesn’t help that as her character’s father mourns her passing, the photo that hangs in his study is obviously one of her portfolio head-shots. Which suggests the set dressers either mugged the casting director or just started pulling pages from a Vanity Fair to try and complete the scene. He also recollects his daughter in a flashback that inadvertently smacks of porn-ish intent. I guess he really loved her.

“I really miss you, my sexy, sexy, sexy daughter.”

Still, all those are quite ordinary faux pas for the stalwart viewer of 80s schlock. Now imagine all these things – the meandering timelines, the miscasting, the tone-deaf, insistent “comedy” – and then factor in one more crucial ingredient- that the entire film was shot in South Africa using mostly local actors who were cast based solely on their ability to reproduce an American accent. Yes, that might be why Hellgate feels less like one more hastily produced C-Grade horror and more like the sound a one-handed tree might make as it applauds its own collapse in an empty forest.

Retro-dining, Apartheid-style*
*Non-white people not included with original set. Imports from US available on request.

Is that you Mr. Welles? The remarkable ageing effects of Hellgate

Activate sexiness in T-minus 10…9…8…

Yet despite all these problems Hellgate boasts a number of successes too. As the poster-art proudly declares, its special effects team previously worked on Hellraiser and its first sequel, Hellbound. That being the case, even with the caveat that the main FX crew decided they were uncomfortable with setting up shop in Apartheid-era South Africa and sent their secondary team instead, the film delivers when events turn to the gory and unnatural- although less so when make-up matters turns to simulating aging, which you think would be easier than rigging an exploding mutant goldfish but what do I know? Meanwhile, if the story might not make a huge amount of sense, the pacing at least ensures that there’s always something curious occupying the frame to serve as distraction.  Oh, and explosions. Don’t forget the explosions.

Dare you face the horror of…The O-Face?

So I’m going to be a dissenting voice here and suggest that Hellgate deserves more love than it currently gets. Which isn’t difficult considering right now it feels about as welcome as a congested five-year old at an open salad bar. Still, I think it’s all a question of your state of mind, and what you look for in films of this era and economy. Sure there were genuine classics that snuck through under the auspices of cheap thrills (the aforementioned Hellraiser, for example) but while it’s nice to find a gleaming gem amidst the dusty rock pile of direct-to-video cinema, there’s also a lot to be said for recognising a given rock for its peculiar shape and heft, even if it lacks polish. And who says rocks can’t be associated with popular entertainment? If that’s the case then explain how ‘rock’ music got its name (ed. please feel free not to research that). Wait, am I still talking about rocks? In any case there has to be something to be said for a film that feels like a goofy step-sibling to The Beyond. Obviously it’s nowhere near as obtuse as Fulci’s film, but it steers closer to it than any sane person ever should. So don’t believe the hype. Or do. I’ve just written close to 1,100 words on Hellgate so I’m probably not a reliable source for life advice.

Thief (1981) Michael Mann…

In Brief: Michael Mann emerges fully formed with his first theatrical feature, a crime thriller boasting slick visuals, a great score, and an arresting central turn by James Caan ****

source: Criterion US Blu-Ray

With a few documentaries, television episodes, and a made-for-TV movie under his belt, Thief is where Michael Mann really kicked off his reputation for stylish yet oh-so-gritty crime movies. Although it came early in his career, there’s nothing fledgling about this project. Indeed, it’s a little surprising how fully developed all the things one might generally associate with his cinema already is here, so close to the beginning. His best loved film, Heat, is a fleshed out reworking of his own 1989 TV movie, L.A. Takedown (also very good), but much of the core themes of both already exist here, and arguably in a more concentrate form.

Pared down to a minimal aesthetic, the film follows career criminal, Frank (James Caan), as he strives to establish a normal life, with wife and kids etc., by carrying out one last score. A master safe-cracker who generally designs his own projects, Frank gets an offer he can’t refuse from a crime syndicate who has noticed his work. The payout is huge and the project is difficult but if it all goes to plan, he should be able to finally realise his dream of settling down. Of course, when you’re as good at your job as Frank is, it can be hard for others to let you slip back into the shadows.

It’s all here really. Mann’s documentarian eye is evident, with a strong focus on the nuances of the heists- a tactic that readily calls to mind other giants of crime cinema such as Dassin’s Rififi and Melville’s Bob le flambeur. In an ironic bit of casting, a crooked cop is played by John Santucci, who served as an advisor to Mann, offering his insights as a former (and later relapsed) jewel thief. Tellingly, the criminal world Mann depicts allies closely with capitalism as it is readily understood. Illegally gained money manifests in functioning corporate entities, be there used car lots or metal plating companies, that trade on the open market, offering legitimacy and standing as good business acumen. The police force is depicted as uniformly corrupt, disinterested in the law and far more concerned with how they might benefit financially by forcing commissions for their own ‘protection services.’ In a subversive twist Frank, with his measured goals and strong vision, is a victim of interference in the market in the form of both other criminals and the police.

Caan’s performance anchors the whole film. Through small gestures and unassuming passages of conversation he creates a character of impressive depth and resilience. One who elicits more sympathy than likely is his right. Though he has turned to crime as a way to sustain himself, he seems aware that it’s pulling him in undesirable directions. His mentor and dear friend Okla (Willie Nelson, in a small role) is set to die in prison as his heart fails him, an end unbefitting of his skills as a master-thief but all too easily real through the indifference reality offers. Seeking escape, Frank wants to establish himself as a ‘legitimate’ member of society, with a wife and a family- a dream that takes further root in his self-perception as a perpetual outsider turned self-made man. The woman he seeks out and marries, Jessie, finds a kinship with Frank and together they buy a house and adopt a child. Both milestones necessarily hinge on criminal enterprise. The latter because Frank’s criminal record bars him from fostering a child through the state care system- ironically the same system that formed the basis for his own childhood. But of course unwrapping yourself from a life steeped in state care (orphanages or prisons) and crime unveils certain Catch 22s and lays down a tenet that will be immediately familiar to fans of Mann’s cinema: that for adherents of crime, no facet of a lifestyle can be so vital that it cannot be cut loose without hesitation.

Visually, the film is all rain-slicked streets and neon reflections- the quintessence of the urban eighties and undeniably beautiful – dour greys and blues intersected by vibrant lights- the product of commerce, be it neon advertisements or the sparks cascading from a soon-to-be-compromised safe. Accompanying this is a pulsating score from German synth pioneers, Tangerine Dream. It fits like a glove and it’s difficult to imagine the product gliding along without it, even if, as the stakes grow higher, tipping us into grim acts of violence, a wailing electric guitar pushes to the fore and feels like misstep.

Rough and ready, fatalistic, but vibrant, Thief is quintessential crime cinema. Mann would of course go on to do other great things but there’s a purity of form here that isn’t as readily reflected in much of his later work, which grew exponentially more ambitious and consequently more convoluted too.

Attack on Titan: Dimensions of (Bad) Dialogue…

So I admit I’m only halfway into this show but I have my suspicions that the details below will remain broadly accurate. I used to watch more anime. Was it always like this? I mean, obviously Attack on Titan might as well be titled Neon Genetack on Titangelion, but I don’t recall being bothered by that older show’s extended bouts of pompous, pseudo-religious navel-gazing- even as I identified it as such. In fact, I thoroughly enjoyed Neon Genesis Evangelion. Maybe I shouldn’t ever watch it again, just in case.

That aside, even though each episode sets my eyeballs rolling like a Pentecostal on Sunday, I’ve resolved to see Attack on Titan through to the end because it’s not quite entirely awful and I apparently have no other plans for this week. If nothing else, what with the giant shambling, shaggy-haired monsters loping about and eating people, I like to believe that the show serves as deeply-veiled allegory depicting the destruction of the family unit by munchie-affected potheads. Whoa, that’s like, très deep, dude.

So, if you ever want to write a popular anime series that I’ll hate, here’s some guidelines for your script to adhere to…

Look out, here comes the science!

PowerPoint Graphs: Legitimizing Bullshit since 1995!

• 40% – Internal Monologue (additional breakdown provided below)

• 18% – Exposition (shouted)

• 2% – Exposition (spoken)

• 10% – Descriptions of emotional states (all shouted)

• 10% – General chitchat

• 10% – Assorted gasps and/or screaming

• 5% – Heavy-handed overtures towards the philosophical and/or political

• 5% – Specific acknowledgement that Titans are currently eating people

I made this graph at work so this is technically ‘professional quality’

Further Breakdown of ‘Internal Monologue’ category:

• 45% – Describing their own mental states
• 35% – Talking about being a failure and/or delivering extremely lengthy soliloquies about how they must take action immediately or else all is lost because something terrible is about to happen and unless I stop talking right now and do something there will be untold chaos and carnage and that would be a very bad thing so I really, really should just stop discussing this with myself and just do that thing I need to do to make the terrible event not happen because if it happens then…
• 15% – Narrating/Describing events that literally just happened
• 5% – Moments of dubious epiphany
• 0% – Dialogue that makes me hope they don’t die horribly

**Additional Note: Roughly 15% of all of the above is repetition due to flashbacks

Giallo and Dracula 3D or: How I Ended a Dario Argento Binge and All I Got Were These Lousy Films…

With these two films, I close out a tour through Dario Argento’s work I started early last year. It’s been a fun journey. Although admittedly it got a little less fun towards the end.

“Please let me come with you! I’m a civilian with no police training. Pleeeeaaaaassseeee!!?!”

Giallo (2009) Dario Argento – source: Maya Home Entertainment US DVD

I might say that Giallo achieves a rather unfortunate median, managing to not be Argento’s worst film but stepping forward as an easy candidate for his least interesting. It likely doesn’t help that he had no hand in the script, which shines through with a certain anonymity that permeates the project unfolding on screen- an accusation you could hardly make stick against his previous work, for better or for worse. Otherwise the film boasts an easy amalgamation of the elements that define the Italian’s career – a serial killer sending beautiful women to slaughter, a preference for blades, and a risible psychological foundation underpinning it all – but that misses all the beats that separate his work from the huddled masses.

Plot-wise, beautiful women are being kidnapped in Turin, only to be found days later, murdered and horribly mutilated. Trying to catch the killer is Inspector Enzo Avolfi, played by Adrien Brody (who also scores a co-producer credit). He has profiled the killer and reckons he’s someone who likes to destroy beautiful things because he is ugly but other than that he has little to go on. Luckily, his glib profile is 100% on point, which is terribly convenient. Otherwise he battles with (very cinematic) flashbacks to his mother’s brutal murder, a crime he witnessed as a young boy. When another young model goes missing, her sister (Emmanuelle Seigner) teams up with Avolfi to try and crack the case. She’s not a cop or anything, it’s just cool to bring civilians to hideous crime scenes.

Although seemingly business-as-usual for Argento, Giallo does boast a few unusual elements. Firstly, the murderer here is no disembodied set of hands, concealed until the final scene. No, the gloves are off, quite literally, with the villain working bare-handed and in plain sight of the audience. He’s deformed and mean and he’s played by Adrien Brody too. That may seem important but unfortunately, though obviously meant to load the film with overtures of darkness, it really just means they had to pay one less actor. With the villain apparent, weaknesses come to light that are not properly counterbalanced. Although generally saddled with a bit of pseudo-Freudian psycho-babble to define their motives, Argento’s killers maintain interest through their fastidious nature and lack of identity. The bloody work wrought by their hands defines them, with the audience always kept on the defensive as clues and red-herrings bob and weave before them. The general lack of credibility to their final motives is absolved by being paired with a big reveal that offers the audience a chance to compare their notes as invested viewers with the director’s work as master of ceremonies. This all slips by the wayside when the murderer is just ‘that guy’ who’s on screen a lot. At that point the murderer might need a slightly more plausible or at least dynamic raison d’être and we have no such luck here.

Additionally, the development, or perhaps degeneration of modern horror comes quickly into focus here, as compared to Argento’s earlier work. While that was transgressive, marrying an edge of violence with a popular appeal that was comparatively atypical in its day, the 1990s and 2000s have brought us into an era where on-screen violence has ultimately become an exercise in empty, gory grandstanding. Although so many of his greatest set-pieces were fundamentally about jabbing knives into the sexy bodies of sexy ladies, what made Argento’s best work so thrilling, and so influential, was that each scene came as a grandiose showcase in operatic fervor. It was certainly violent, but it was a fully developed aesthetic package too. Over the years, the spectacle gradually morphed from the details of the camera capturing the murder to the details of the special effects depicting the wounds. That shift is to something more intimate and ultimately more unsettling, but such a weighty topic can’t realistically be sustained in the endless replication of genre cinema. A slashed neck in Caché might shock but only because the film otherwise moved in greater circles of meaning. By the time we get to Saw and Hostel and a myriad other titles now circulating under the pejorative ‘Torture Porn’ label, a film requires a concept to back up its gore unless it wants to just sink down into the rest of the pack.

I’ll take, “Things that never happened to Mick Jagger for $500, please, Alex!”

To that end, Giallo is easily among Argento’s most brutish films, lacking the swagger to reframe the depiction of his murderer’s foul deeds as artistic flourish rather than grim, and thus rather rote, representation. The entire film is played unusually straight by the director, who seems quite happy to just let the basic ingredients, generic as they might be, unfold the tale with no need for addenda. One might wonder if that’s because the film looks to have a slightly higher budget than many of his more recent forays (a number of which, in the early 2000s, retreated to television) and so there was a preference to avoid rocking the boat with elements that might feel ‘untested’. It boasts some nice locations, shot in and around Turin, and even finds a grand setting or two to launch chase sequences although those are ultimately all the more disappointing because the obvious Hitchcockian intent invariably brings to mind, well, Hitchcock. The final chase then, feels like a retread of Argento’s own Cat O’ Nine Tails, which leads to a similar kind of disappointment. After all, I could just have watched that film again.

Trying to complicate things, or at least make things look less simplistic, the casting of Brody in dual roles as the protagonist and antagonist is supposed to fold back into some kind of comment on both characters being reflections of each other. On this point I’ll give Argento a pass since he didn’t write the script and, based on his final treatment in the film, he didn’t seem very convinced by this thread either. It’s best left as an afterthought since, after all, our protagonist once committed murder to attain a very real vengeance whilst the antagonist kidnaps, mutilates, and ultimately murders innocent women because he’s a self-loathing douchebag. Short of the jury being composed solely of Immanuel Kant, I’m pretty sure most people would consider the two acts to be quite separate matters.

Beautiful things

All of which just sums up the film really. Although well budgeted, and efficiently composed, no one seems at all convinced by the machinations of the script. It’s a thinly written piece without a hint of uniqueness that ostensibly repels serious inquiry. That it integrates the moniker of the sub-genre (giallo) that made Argento’s name into the meat of the script does not establish a credible relationship with the genre, and Argento looks to be keeping his distance too. This is just a by-the-numbers, gory, cops-n-robbers thriller. I mean, they didn’t even make the murderer a transvestite and that’s ‘Giallo 101’ right there.

Argento’s Dracula 3D (2012) Dario Argento – source: Netflix

There may be two kinds of Dario Argento fans: those who regard his Phantom of the Opera as his worst film and those who regard it as, ‘just one of his worst films’. I also think I might be the only person among the later camp as I actually quite enjoyed Phantom as a scatological comic-book romp. It’s certainly not the Argento film anyone needs to seek out but he has worse films, if only because they’re less interesting (see Giallo) or less enjoyable (see The Card Player). I only mention this because Argento’s most recent film, a 3D adaptation of Bram Stoker’s most famous tale, finds easiest comparison with his Phantom of the Opera. And I only mention that I kind of enjoyed that earlier film to serve as a caveat when I announce that Dracula 3D is worse. Your mileage may vary, I guess. If you really hated the scattershot pitch of Phantom then you may prefer this film for at least being more tonally consistent. One thing’s for sure, no one’s going to claim this as a return to form for Italy’s great maestro of horror.

I’ll mention up front that I did not see this in 3D, although I suspect doing so would not have added the dimensions required to render it as entertainment. The film is quite resplendently ugly, its period setting allowing it to wear its mid-budget limitations on its sleeve with an ever-present digital sheen affixing its garish palette to every frame. The technocratic veneer here means Argento’s visual style escapes comparison with previous vampire tales. The chiaroscuro of Nosferatu and Tod Browning’s Dracula; the oneiric bent of Herzog’s 70s recapitulation; the T&A exploits of Rollin and Franco; the lush, but muddled (but lush) surrounds of Coppola- no, if Dracula 3D is reminiscent of anything visually, it’s of those ‘Full Motion Video’ Adventure Games that were popular in the mid-nineties. Think Phantasmagoria and you’re in the ballpark. Now look for the exit. No one wants to be in this ball-park. It is a lonely and depressing place.

Phantasmagoria or Dracula 3D? Spot the Difference

Aside from looking ugly as sin, Argento’s film is short on other defining characteristics. Considering how much Stoker’s tale has been shaped and adapted over the years, there’s no change here that might be considered radical. The film never moves events to England, Dracula can shape-shift into a wider variety of different animals (all courtesy of clumsy CGI), and the body count is higher. That’s about it really. At heart, the film suggests it wants to move more in line with the fast-and-loose European adaptations of the 60s and 70s, maybe trying for a happy median between Hammer’s stateliness and Jean Rollin’s ‘clothing optional’ compass points. Unfortunately familiarity with those texts only further highlights deficiencies here. Unlike Hammer, the sow’s ear of the production budget never remotely resembles a silk purse, and the general tone never feels fun or experimental, and certainly never raunchy. Even with its pitched sense of violence it hits a wall of Blade, From Dusk Till Dawn, and John Carpenter’s gory Vampires. Aside from Argento’s name on the credits, this just seems devoid of any niche that might have it.

No caption required

Although I’m not sure I’ve ever heard anyone particularly herald an Argento film for its acting, things are notably mixed here. Playing Van Helsing, Rutger Hauer gives a typically refined performance, which makes it all the more unfortunate that he hardly appears until the final quarter. As the suave, and supposedly a little tragic Dracula, Thomas Kretschmann does surprisingly well with very little material and far too many special effects. Meanwhile the women of the piece generally look dazed. Which you might think was intentional but I’m pretty sure that’s not quite what they were going for. I’m still not entirely sure if Asia Argento can act, or if she just finds roles (like in Assayas’ Boarding Gate) where her slinky, sexual presence gels to the part so wholly as to make the question redundant. What I do know is that her performance here may help Keanu Reeves feel better about his work in Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula. She generally seems terribly unsure of herself, as if maybe she was cast at the last minute or something. She does strip off for her dad again though, which almost seems like an Argento in-joke at this stage.

It’s the unfortunate feeling of cheapness that pervades everything here. This feels awfully like a bargain-bin vampire tale, best suited to the undiscerning eyes of children who hopefully also like their women to have big knockers. The 3D elements reek of gimmickry. No amount of things popping out of the screen could possibly rescue this from redundancy. Meanwhile the use of that same technology has rendered every frame a visual abomination while also limiting Argento’s choices with regards to camera movement and shot composition. It’s a shame then that he didn’t think to crank up the camp, or otherwise find a more ridiculous tone to offset these limitations. This needs more William Castle and less of whatever the heck it already has. Argento did so, whether on purpose or not, in Phantom of the Opera and it did help the film. There it felt more like we were in on a joke rather than witnessing something being made the butt of one.

Actual in-game graphics, I mean, um, in-movie footage. Oh, whatever!

Dracula 3D will likely not be the last film Dario Argento makes, but it represents a low ebb in his career. Currently there is a remake of his masterpiece, Suspiria, in the pipeline but he’s not actually attached to the project. Just thinking about that film being remade, it seems a ridiculous idea, one doomed to spectacular failure because there’s really no recreating what Argento achieved at the apogee of his career. Unfortunately, looking at films like Giallo and Dracula 3D, we might concede that it’s unlikely Argento himself is ever going to rekindle those glory days either.

How I Wasted Last Week…

Jack the Ripper (1976) Jess Franco ** – source: one of those no-budget, three movies on one DVD, thingies

In Brief: Jess Franco shocker that’s short on shocks and feels long in the tooth.

For a long time I thought Jess Franco was incapable of making a good film until one day I watched his Venus in Furs and was quite pleasantly bowled over by its freewheeling, meta-textual chicanery. Alas it’s never difficult to be reminded that Franco was more than capable of making terrible films or, in the case of his Jack the Ripper, just decidedly dull, compromised ones. Even with Klaus Kinski in the lead role, this incarnation of the famous tale has little threat and even less dramatic pull to it.

Granted, I did have to endure a horrible looking, unrestored print with a poor English dub but I’m fairly confident they didn’t render a sow’s ear of an actual silk purse. The dub offered its own amusements. I swear, every time a supposed Victorian prostitute opened her mouth I half expected Prof. Henry Higgins to strut triumphantly out of shot. As is typical of Franco’s work, the film is pretty well turned out, its cinematography boasting shadows and mist to keep the light interesting. Unfortunately that’s about all it boasts. Geraldine Chaplin and Franco mainstay Lina Romay are on hand but this is really the Kinski show and his Jack the Ripper, a simpering, Freudian mess, just can’t be very compelling in a film whose story seems propelled by clumsy happenstance outlined in huge chunks of exposition (all badly dubbed, in this instance).

The few scenes of gore would no doubt have elicited disapproving gasps from regular audiences in the 70s, if they managed to stay awake long enough to see them, but ultimately feel tame and poorly designed for anyone familiar with this brand of exploitation cinema. The creepiest thing on offer here is watching Kinski, an accused and likely child molester, playing a man tormented by Freudian demons. I guess that level of ‘ick’ suffuses all his cinema although I tend to think about it more during films like this and Crawlspace than while watching him duke it out with Herzog’s camera in the Amazon basin.

Street Trash (1987) Jim Muro **** – source: Synapse US Blu-Ray

In Brief: A bone-fide 80s cult classic that conjures up connections to Repo Man’s anarchic, punk sensibilities.

It’s difficult to get a handle on Street Trash. While most people would tend to summarise the plot as being about a case of lethal hooch doing the rounds of the homeless community in New York City, liquefying anyone who drinks it, that only captures a fraction of what’s actually on display here. Although the deadly liquor is certainly the film’s most salient element, it’s not really central to the plot. Indeed, there hardly is a plot really, but rather a series of vignettes connected by overlapping characters and locations. Yes, in some strange sense this feels a little like Short Cuts, only with less Raymond Carver and more neon goo deaths.

The scope of the project is admirable, even as the film seems to lurch all over the place. What holds it together is its energy and its production values, the latter of which impress even while we’re left in no doubt that the film was working with few resources. It’s not often where you can cite the Steadicam work as being far more adept than the basic acting, but Street Trash makes that happen. That they have a Steadicam at all speaks to the grandiose sense of scale the film’s architects obviously envisioned even as they scraped funds together around a 16mm short film that centred exclusively on the deadly booze. What also helps is that Street Trash feels a lot like a punk song distilled onto celluloid. For all its scope it knows it’s primarily going to piss people off and its portrayal of the homeless community, working stiffs, cops, Vietnam veterans, and everyone else is resolutely garish and caricatured. That’s fine though, because it’s funny and it also clearly doesn’t care what you might happen to think.

Around the dissolving bodies, we have a love story, a criminal investigation, turf wars, rape and murder, and a comic scene involving a man chasing around after his newly severed penis. There’s just so much going on that they had to cut out a dance number which was also shot. If that sounds terribly messy, and it is, then it’s part of the fabric of the film and a defining aesthetic choice rather than a distracting deficit. Sure we might never be expected to take a film too seriously when one of its opening scenes involves a man dissolving while on the toilet and eventually flushing himself down the tubes but Street Trash gleefully sells you that and a whole lot more. Also, Synapse’s Blu-Ray looks almost impossibly beautiful and bring a whole new level of admiration to the project.

Drinking Buddies (2013) Joe Swanberg **** – source: Netflix

In Brief: A mature little film about romance, friendships, and how they’re complex. Y’know, the exact opposite of 99% of romance films in existence.

I’ll admit up front, I don’t really follow contemporary cinema all that closely. Actually, I don’t really follow any particular cinema closely, I just watch all kinds of random stuff and sometimes that inadvertently leads me to being able to form opinions. But anyway, I’ve heard the names of some of the cast here but really I’ve hardly seen them in anything that I can recall. Director Swanberg helmed arguably the strongest segment in horror anthology V/H/S but that’s not exactly deafening praise (I don’t intend it as an insult either, his work was good) and Anna Kendrick put in a fine turn in End of Watch, which was a shame because she needn’t have bothered considering the end result was so much videogame epilepsy anyway. So having established that I’m way behind on who’s doing what in American cinema, this film pops out as a very pleasant surprise.

The film relies heavily on improvisation and it works well here, allowing the cast to create a warm, familial atmosphere that gives credibility to the delicate nuances of the emotional turmoil examined. At first, I must admit, I was worried that the film seemed to heavily signpost a kind of tired teleology as two couples end up breaking each other up. That’s not quite what unfolds and the film is all the better for it. Swanberg’s film is nothing ground-breaking, but it’s the sort of film that we really can’t have too many of. It understands, as so few commercial works concerning relationships choose to do, that romance is actually pretty tricky work and that committed relationships require quite a lot of thinking, and decision-making, and not being a fragile little flower looking for ‘the one.’

It might not be a soaring work on the human soul, or a searing treatise on the self-destructive impulses of human desire, but that’s actually totally fine. With a small cast, a simple design, and an eye for detail, Drinking Buddies is at once engrossing and universal.

Computer Chess (2013) Andrew Bujalski **** – source: Netflix

In Brief: A highly peculiar amalgamation of scenes about computers and the humans that program them…to play chess…in the 1980s…shot entirely with retro video-cameras.

It would be easy to write off Bujalski’s latest film as a gimmick: a film about computers; set in the 1980s; shot using old video technology. How ‘meta’ right? There’s enough raw ‘pretention’ there to feed a class of film students for a month. And yet Bujalski’s film has a spark and offbeat tone that quickly assuage any fears we might be wandering into someone else’s artistic masturbation session. Of course plenty will still find Computer Chess ultimately frustrating because if it bucks audience expectations it also carves out a trajectory that rejects any sort of classical storytelling.

The entire film is set in a small hotel that is hosting a tournament where various computers will face each other in chess battles. The winning system will then play a human to see how developing artificial intelligences are matching up to the canniness of the human mind. Even that brief story synopsis is ultimately misleading as the film becomes more a series of loosely connected scenes detailing fragmented human interactions and perceptions, allying the all too human programmers to the lines of code they prepare for battle.

The much-vaunted use of retro-technology, the film was shot almost entirely using Sony AVC 3260 tube video-cameras, the model that most likely would have been used were such an event being recorded in the 80s, proves to be no gimmick either, but a central supporting structure for this curious product. Simply put, the film could not function in the same way without its grainy image, replete with the innumerable visual artefacts that stem from the limits of the technology. Bright lights scorch the tube, leaving an imprint of objects that lingers in the next shot, while moving objects often leave a trail in their wake. The hazy black-and-white suffuses the entire project with a slightly surreal air, making the gently implied period setting entirely credible while also gently suggesting to the audience that they might not want to take the depicted events at face value.

If all that sounds very dry, then it’s worth bearing in mind that Computer Chess is less interested in making statements and more concerned with providing a space for the audience to start their own discussions. Sure, that might just be my guarded way of saying, “I can’t claim I understood it, but I definitely enjoyed it” but honestly, that’s not a bad thing anyway.

Say Anything (1989) Cameron Crowe **** – source: Netflix

In Brief: John Cusack plays the loveliest young man in the world and everything turns out okay.

In Briefer: See ‘In Brief.’

A Good Marriage (1982) Eric Rohmer **** – source: Arrow UK DVD

In Brief: The ‘romantic comedy’ as imagined by Rohmer.

Not going to write much on this one because, to my shame, I started to fall asleep during it. No, it’s not because I find Rohmer’s films trying or boring, quite the opposite really. We’ll have no ‘paint drying’ jibes (although most of the people who bring that one out have either never seen Night Moves or any Rohmer films). Really I was just very, very tired. Which isn’t a great idea when watching a very talky, subtitled film. Even when the film hilariously, though with no lack of sensitivity, observes a typically assured Rohmer-ian protagonist as she decides she is going to get married. Who is she going to marry? That will come later, what’s important is that she has determined quite sensibly that this is the wisest course of action for right now. Luckily, I’d seen it before so my unplanned slumber wasn’t too disruptive. If you know Rohmer, then you’ll know this is a treat. If you’re unfamiliar with his work, this is a perfect place to start. It’s just like a typical ‘romantic comedy’ except Rohmer removes all the narrative conveniences that allow the genre to offer happy conclusions. It also boasts an awesome old-school synth theme, which might not typically be what people look for in the work of Nouvelle Vague auteurs.

Upstream Color…

Optimism Vaccine: Inoculations: 2013

I was kindly asked to contribute to media blog, Optimism Vaccine, for a feature on film picks for 2013. Now as per usual, I’m way behind on the big names of the year, but that’s not too important since Upstream Color is quite resolutely timeless. Yes, ‘spoiler alert’ should you actually read the article, I liked the film.

Probably the best show in town…

My local cinema’s hoarding promises so much. Shame this isn’t a real film because, let’s be honest, this sounds like just the shot in the arm Paul Greengrass and Tom Hanks need. How the heck do you reclaim a container ship from velociraptors? Well maybe one of the containers contains a nail-gun and some C-4. Heck yeah, I’d watch that! Better than The Bourne Supremacy anyway, which felt like a backpacking trip through Europe with an epileptic in tow.

A Star is Shorn…

As much as I’d love my first post here to be witty, pithy, and profound, that’s just not going to happen since this is really just a test.