Under the Skin (2013)

The film opens with a sequence of measured shots, slowly revealing a Kubrickian blackdrop into which colour and shape are birthed over the swirling dissonance of an atonal minimalist score. Reminiscient of 2001, it is a hypnotising draw which expertly settles the brain’s waves into the rhythm of the following 2 hours.

We follow the dispassionate exploits of an alien dressed in a Scarlett Johansson suit whose mission it seems is to ensnare the men of Scotland in a gloopy black honey trap.

The pattern of seduce and destroy is presented in two styles. The first takes the form of a hidden camera documentary in which Johansson crawls the urban kerbs of Scottish cities in her white transit van, soliciting the conversation of unsuspecting members of the public who really were unsuspecting members of the public. It was only once lured into the van that the director Jonathan Glazer briefed the men about the conceit and hired those willing to be a part of the film to take part in the second of the film’s styled scenes in which Johansson takes her victims into a kind of parallel universe and leads them backward into the sticky black abyss where, one assumes, they are either preserved for study by her alien race or just eaten.

I really liked the film. It is slow but it is involving. Johansson’s performance succeeds in the same way David Bowie’s had to in The Man Who Fell To Earth. Her job is to demonstrate a range of ‘emotion’ through blank glances and the stilted misunderstood movements of her alien’s new human shell. Subtler than a silent movie, the measure of her success is how clearly she conveys the alien’s progression from ruthless efficiency through sympathy and towards eventual depression with very little acting tools allowed.

The direction is beautiful, never losing the measured purpose of the opening sequence. Scotland feels desolate and inviting. It’s a cold film and your engagement with it will creep up on you; that’s how it functions. By giving you a limited ‘way in’, the connection you eventually make with the film is a firm one.

Inside Llewyn Davis (2014)

Llewyn Davis is a struggling folk singer in Greenwich Village, New York, in 1961. Gloriously, and in typical Coen Brother’s style, that’s it. That’s everything.

The film is a vignette of a man frozen in his own endurance against a set of circumstances which really aren’t rewarding his dedication to his art. It is a black comedy of errors that offers no respite to its central character in the way of plot development or hope. It sounds bleak, it is bleak, but it’s also sweet, funny and utterly absorbing.

Oscar Isaac gives a measured performance of give-up glances and hundred-mile stares that invites sympathetic sighs despite Llewyn clearly being the washed-up loser everybody is telling him he is. The supporting cast fill out the world around him with a mixture of dedicated artists (Justin Timberlake, Adam Driver), ageing music business types (F. Murray Abraham) and a very angry ex-lover (Carey Mulligan). All commit themselves to colouring the Coen’s barren world of frustration and sterile ambition.

Talking of colouring the Coen’s world, the film looks beautiful. French cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel marinades every scene in the muted browns, greens and blues of old folk album covers enhancing the coldness and melancholy of the film immeasurably.

As Llewyn stumbles from mishap to mishap, he finds his path repeatedly crossed by a series of ginger tabby cats who may or may not be the same animal. Whether they are or not is a tease. As Joel Coen said himself “the film doesn’t really have a plot. That concerned us at one point; that’s why we threw the cat in.”

If anything, the cat(s) are just a parallel to Llewyn, highlighting the randomness of fortune. Some incarnations of the cat are lucky; others (the final one) are very unlucky. Perhaps the key difference between Llewyn and the cat is demonstrated in one of the best sequences in the film where Llewyn journeys on the subway with the cat held carefully over his shoulder. Eyes glazed over, Llewyn stares at the floor. Suddenly we are given a POV of the cat who is looking out of the window at the stations as they whizz by. Excited by the sights, the cat makes a dash for it. Proactive and outward looking, the cat embodies the perfect contrast to Llewyn’s introversion and inertia.

The Coens’ direction is, as always, delicate and purposeful. Long single takes of music performances add a sense of truth and grit which mirror the themes of folk songs in general. There are no cutaways faking a complete performance through a compilation of separate takes – it all happens live (including sound, which was, for the most part, recorded live on set.) Llewyn himself is rarely framed in a shot with others. Even if he is having a conversation with someone sitting on the same park bench, still he is alone.

Apart from staying honest to a range of characters and the wit with which the ear-candy dialogue is constructed, perhaps the biggest achievement of the script is in not painting Llewyn as a consummate victim. We feel sorry for the hard time he is having but his laconic reaction to roadblocks and the sanctity with which he preaches about his art despite being so dependent on his friends lead us to suspect that perhaps Carey Mulligan’s character Jean is right when she says:

“You don’t wanna go anywhere. And that’s why all the same shit is gonna keep happening to you – because you want it to.”

Having us empathise with Llewyn’s melancholia despite his cyclical self-made woe is the key to why Inside Llewyn Davis is such an exquisite film. The look of the film, its period detail and precision direction just amplifies this engagement. A joy.

Blue Jasmine (2013)

The Woody Allen archetype is one of the most lucid cinematic creations of the last 50 years. It is the big screen extension of Allen’s early stand-up career, the neurotic ramblings of which crossed over successfully onto his filmic characters, drawing knowing laughs from the nervous-wreck component in the psyche of everyone who saw them. Often – especially in his early films – Allen would play these characters himself but, even when deciding to remain behind the camera, fast-talking anxiety-ridden anti-heroes still pepper his work.

Plenty of darkness follows these characters through their tribulations and Allen has always laced shades of tragedy through the scripts he writes – his most celebrated style is a kind of gloomy light-heartedness – but nothing of his I’ve seen explores the back story and motivations of his muse with as much mastery and depth as Blue Jasmine.

The film essentially grabs the psychological turmoil of his lead, Jasmine Francis, from the incidental and thrusts it right into the spotlight before examining it at close quarters. Cate Blanchett is compelling as the eponymous character who is forced into taking refuge in the home of her adopted sister, Ginger (Sally Hawkins), when her life as a New York socialite married to an obscenely wealthy financier (Alec Baldwin) crumbles as a result of her husband’s downfall and disgrace. There is comedy of course, but this rather seeps through the tragedy rather than vice versa.

Jasmine is at once a terrifying and immensely sympathetic character, eliciting grimaces from the audience the deeper she digs her holes. On the surface, she has an honest effort at rebuilding her life, working thanklessly as a dentist’s receptionist to support her computer classes which she takes with a view to becoming an interior designer. Nevertheless her neuroses won’t yield and, simply unable to adjust to a life lower down in the socio-economic scale, she aids her own mind’s disintegration with a dependency on Xanax and alcohol which deepens the more face she tries to save. (The exact nuances of a person lonely and depressed and how consummately Allen and Blanchett observe them deserve to be written about at length and in depth and hopefully have been/will be elsewhere.)

In the score, the familiar lounge jazz of many Woody Allen films dovetails between scenes in a way anempathetic to Jasmine’s plight but sometimes coming across as a sigh at the inevitability of her decline.

I see three tones balanced impeccably throughout the film, the first is the drama/tragedy that impels the narrative, second is comedy and third is horror. In a way, Blue Jasmine really is a horror film and the laughs are served up and indulged in as a reaction to the terror of losing one’s mind, catching in the throat as soon as they rise. My favourite scene demonstrates this powerfully. Jasmine sits in a café babysitting her two nephews and begins (as she often does) drunkenly drifting into a monologue as if the boys were not present. They sit open-mouthed as she waxes on about the song ‘Blue Moon’ and her life’s ambitions. Suddenly she is present and advises the boys to be generous when they become wealthy. When they respond “mom said you used to be OK but then you got crazy”, the look on her face is more terrifying than her wide-eyed Galadriel close-up in The Fellowship of the Ring with none of that moment’s surprise factor needed. As she finishes “there’s only so many traumas a person can withstand until they take to the streets and start screaming” the audience’s reaction is a confused mixture of laughter, tears and recoil. That response adequately sums up the film.

July Catch-up Part 1: The Bling Ring & Now You See Me

These two would make a neat double bill on the theme of superficiality. Both deal with appearance and illusion and as such, both leave themselves immediately open to criticism for being somewhat empty and insubstantial films. One of them could actually make a case for being an engaging study of vacuous people; the other, however, is essentially vacuous in and of itself.

The film I’m being fairly positive about is The Bling Ring, Sofia Coppola’s heist drama based on the real-life exploits of a group of affluent teenagers who burgled the unlocked homes of Hollywood’s most fashionable celebrities repeatedly over a year-long period beginning in October 2008.

Considering the goldmine of themes that Coppola has the opportunity to exploit and examine, she has little to say in either support or condemnation of the annoying gang of thing-obsessed youngsters at the heart of her film. The script is saturated with so much “like”s “totally”s and “oh my God”s that there is barely enough room for any dialogue that means anything. We learn little about the motives of the perpetrators, see nothing of their pasts that might shed some light on their characters, in fact see nothing beyond the artifice of their shallow concerns. Coppola refuses to be drawn on whether the bling ring are victims of a society obsessed with fame and shiny objects or simply opportunists looking for expensive stuff and an adrenaline rush.

The direction is stylised for sure, with notable heavy use of slow motion which serves to glorify the great time everyone is having. My favourite shot is a static wide (probably filmed from a helicopter) of a huge Hollywood house which is entered by the two leaders of the group, Rebecca and Marc who rifle through their victims belongings, pack their spoils into bags and exit – all in the space of around 2 minutes.

The cast consist of several solid debut performers, with Katie Chang and Israel Broussard being particularly impressive in their first outing. Inevitably, much of the spotlight falls on Harry Potter megastar Emma Watson but – as in The Perks of Being a Wallflower ­last year – she continues to defy the washed-out-ex-child-actor stereotype posting another accomplished portrayal. Her character Nicki Moore has the arrogant swagger at the film’s core and, although she has little screen time compared to some of the others, her presence is a strong adhesion in the group scenes and pure deadpan in the press interview scenes.

However much you might want The Bling Ring to be a bit harsh on someone or something, it isn’t a biting satire. It isn’t a eulogy to glamour either. Clearly Sofia Coppola has made a vapid film in order to depict vapid lifestyles – which is almost a get out of jail free card… as such, it’s difficult to praise or criticise the film beyond saying that her approach is probably the right one. It’s about nothing and has nothing to say about characters who live for glitzy nothings. And that probably says everything.

***

Now for Now You See Me which centres on four illusionists/con-artists (Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson, Isla Fisher and Dave Franco) whose massive live shows appear to drain the biggest bank vaults of the world and spit the stolen money out into the grateful audience. With the authorities on their tails desperate to prove them as criminals, ‘the Four Horsemen’ – as they dub themselves – put on shows of ever increasing size and ambition. The film is constantly building momentum towards… something… Whatever it is, we never really have it defined for us and by the time the film works itself out, everything ends and a soldered-on denouement offers a tedious explanation, leaving us feeling as empty and unconvinced as a film can.

Riffing on the theme of performance magic and hiring various Christopher Nolan regulars, the film has heavy pretensions of being something like The Prestige – one of the best films there is – but comes nowhere close.

In The Prestige, when Michael Cane says something mysterious about the psychology of magic, it is then backed up by an absorbing array of film trickery and breathtaking narrative misdirection all of which ties plot, character and atmosphere into something approaching the best film of the 00s. In Now You See Me, when Morgan Freeman says something mysterious like “the more you think you see, the easer it’ll be to fool you” or “the closer you think you are, the less you’ll actually see”, what then happens is a few special effects, magic show audiences then say “wow” in an attempt to make the cinema audiences say “wow” and eventually we’re all wowing at how little anything ties together.

World War Z (2013)

With a troubled stop-start production spanning over 5 years from the initial script stage, through several rewrites, shoots and re-shoots, and finally released last Friday, World War Z is a perfectly OK way to spend 2 hours and a perfectly unnecessary way to spend $200 million on a genre that never needed it.

Brad Pitt stars as Gerry Lane, a former U.N employee drafted back into service when a worldwide zombie pandemic causes general mayhem in every corner of the globe. Thankfully, Pitt does the American leading man thing very well and so his performance is one of very few things gluing this messy film together. The blatant cracks discernable in a project with so many writers and producers become less of a problem as the story progresses. We know we’re rooting for Gerry Lane – barely anything else makes sense – so Pitt’s performance is the one straight arrow we can hang onto.

I can live with the directionless narrative. I’m sure some people involved in the film are devastated with how incoherent World War Z’s story is but I’d rather a film aimed for Hollywood thriller formula and missed than put me to sleep with a gentle lead through tension/release/tension/release. What did kill the film for me was any element of the ‘Action’ genre thrown into the mix, which diluted the sense of threat and dread that a good zombie film can imbue.

Big explosions, plane crashes, helicopter shots of citywide inferno, pacey cutting sequences showing swarms of undead braineaters encroaching on Israel. All looked so expensive to make and yet had so little dramatic impact. I remain unconvinced by sprinting zombies whose presence ensures only that their victims have less time to feel terrified and spend more time being eaten than running away.

The film takes an unexpected turn for the better half an hour from the end when, after another expensive-looking set piece involving an exploding grenade on a commercial flight, Gerry Lane finds himself crash landing next door to a World Heath Organization facility in Cardiff – actual Cardiff, in Wales. From my limited research I understand that at this point, the writing credit switches (for the nth time), this time to long-time Joss Whedon collaborator, Drew Goddard, which might explain why the film suddenly seems to tighten up. The maze of corridors in the WHO facility is the perfect playground for the undead.

Not only does Pitt have to sneak past the infested area to retrieve some *important items* but the zombies have slowed down considerably. Described now as ‘inactive’, they amble around with the traditional clumsy sloth of the zombies in classic horror films and, for the first time, we get to have a few clear 10-second close-ups of the creatures. Not surprisingly, this is the scariest sequence of the film. Ridden with tension and wrapped in a lucid goal-orientated narrative, after nearly 2 hours, World War Z actually begins to get… exciting…

And then it ends.

The Great Gatsby (2013)

The Great Gatsby provides Baz Luhrmann with his perfect source material – a tragic love story perpetuated by the delusional glitz and shine of a hopeless idealist. Just like Moulin Rouge. Just like Romeo + Juliet.

Cinegoers who can’t leave F. Scott Fitzgerald at home have a hard time squaring with the blinged up, hyper-reality of Luhrmann’s world and stare aghast as perhaps their favourite novel is given the sugar-injected treatment of his direction. This is how he does film, how he always has. His style is as frivolous and obstreperous as a pop music video but betrays exactly the same flashes of authentic emotion as that throwaway medium. These pangs are what made Moulin Rouge exhilarating and why I looked forward to The Great Gatsby.

Unfortunately, for me, The Great Gatsby doesn’t quite match up to Luhrmann’s 2001 zenith. Ironically, considering the criticisms usually levelled at the Australian filmmaker, I actually think he pays too much reverence to Fitzgerald’s novel and this often nips in the bud any moment that threatens to burst into vibrancy. So characteristic is his style that it can only work when images assault the audience, daring them to keep up with the swift cutting, confusing them into giddy frenzy with a ridiculously number of unnecessary camera angles.

The film does have its moments of pupil-dilating rushes. Gratuitous mile-long crash zooms down the sides of skyscrapers or across the lake from Gatsby’s mansion to the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock do raise the dopamine levels; however, the obligation to expose the steady fluency of Fitzgerald’s narrative puts the handbrake on Luhrmann’s usual hyperactivity.

The cast are generally very good, with Leonardo DiCaprio really shining at times. Since first working with Luhrmann in 1996, DiCaprio has developed into one of America’s brilliant film actors but, even so, I hadn’t expected him to get quite so close to the smile that Fitzgerald describes as ‘one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life.’

To my great happiness he also lives up to another of the most important and moving scenes in the novel – his meeting with Daisy at Nick’s house. Here, in my screening, he elicited laughs and moans from a packed audience as he endearingly conveyed the desperate and pathetic frenzy of a man whose reunion with a long-lost love is going achingly unaccording to plan.

Carey Mulligan too achieves something like Daisy Buchanan with the highlight being the look on her face first time she hears that Gatsby is living just across the bay. She is not as cruel as Fitzgerald’s Daisy Buchanen, who I always imagine having the caprice and cruelty of a femme fatale.

Tobey Maguire’s performance is kind of bland but it doesn’t matter; it reinforces the sense of his character Nick being a spectator to wild times and counterpoints well against the wild people Nick is hanging around with. One thing I’m not on board with is the film’s decision to reinvent Nick as an alcoholic ruin of a man reminiscing about the roaring twenties and writing it down as therapy into a book, the book, The Great Gatsby.

As Maguire reads passages from the book, the text assembles itself on screen before dissolving away. This is Luhrmann admitting that his film lacks Fitzgerald’s brilliant descriptive passages and apologising for it. I’d much rather he didn’t and, instead, got on with showing us his vision. A book is a book. Not better than a film but a different medium altogether. We shouldn’t be read to in a cinema. This is the major problem of the film. Its director acts as if a film (in this case his film) needs to be the definitive version of the original text and is a failure if it loses something in translation.

The book is there for us anytime. Any adaptation is, or should be, its own reflection of the characters and themes and should follow its own integrity.

Although the film suffers because of Baz Luhrmann’s reticence to drop the homage routine, it is probably still the most idiosyncratic of all Great Gatsby’s so far and is surely worth seeing for this reason.

Dark Skies (2013)

When trailers put you off virtually everything, the great thing about resigning yourself to anything is that sometimes something advertised as average tosh might turn out to be genuinely interesting. Step forward Dark Skies whose tag ‘from the producers of Insidious and Sinister’ promises a jumpfest of cheap scares with nothing too substantial in terms of narrative or theme. When the trailer is intercut with title cards that read: “When they come for you… there’s nowhere… you can… hide” alarm bells really start ringing. But like I said, being resigned to having “nowhere to hide” from the prospect of an awful film is a sweet state when the film actually turns out to be quite good.

The horror genre really is something special. When done well, nothing packs a greater punch in the cinema. The best horror films have always spoken in metaphors, exploiting the fears of each passing age and inviting audiences to mock themselves or – even better – shock themselves into recognising what their fears actually are and how their behaviour shapes itself in reaction to those fears.

Dark Skies targets a very traditional subject for its attention, one that stretches way back to The Exorcist (1973) and probably further – paedophobia; that is, fear of children, but more specifically in this case, fear of the maturation of children – fear of encroaching adolescence. Broadly speaking, Dark Skies’ central theme is family and the fear of anything that can undermine the institution of the family. Marital turbulence, unemployment, financial insecurity, house insecurity – all feature in the lives of the doom laden Barrett family. However, all are outstripped by what is by far the biggest concern of parents Daniel and Lacy: the world outside the boundaries of the home and the influences that could be invading and shaping the development of their growing boys, Jesse and Sammy.

The genius of the film is that we empathise at all times with the young couple and never suspect them for the perpetrators of their own nightmare. They are presented as an extraordinarily ordinary middle-American man-and-wife with the hope, dreams, trials and troubles of any family in the developed world. The film does not attack them for over-parenting but instead implicitly hints at a culture, accepted as ordinary, which obsesses over the safety of children – a culture which may be inadvertently damaging the futures of young people by anesthetising their environments.

The invasion of the Barrett home by extra-terrestrials I believe to be a metaphor for Daniel and Lacy’s fear of the influences on their children of things beyond their control. The feared abduction of their children is tantamount to their terror that Jesse and Sammy might one day fly the nest and leave home. The Barretts refuse to accept that their eldest, Jesse’s, new set of interests are a natural side-effect of hitting 13 years of age and instead lash out at his older friend Ratner who is assisting in their son’s exploration of violent computer games and pornography. In fact, Jesse’s one fumbling foray into the world of girls results in no harm, merely light relief and, eventually, an innocent kiss. His night time bike ride home after the incident is gloriously underscored with “Days” by The Drums and stands out sweetly from anything else in the film.

Meanwhile, the domestic-centric view of the world held by his mother Lacy is highlighted in a scene where hundreds of birds all converge on the house in a mass mistake of migration. As the supernatural expert Edwin Pollard, who she later consults, explains, “it isn’t what you want to hear but your case is nothing special”. In fact, many families are invaded by what Pollard terms “the Grays” and most cases end in child abduction. Hmm… He also adds (as a brilliant side note) that there have been rare cases reported where the abductees are eventually returned to their families (which I’m thinking is simply the grown-up child visiting from university during the holidays).

Aside from its excellent web of symbology, for me the film succeeds in building a claustrophobic atmosphere of tenebrous inevitability in which one always feels a storm is just around the corner. In fact, it was this heavy sense of doom that hooked me onto what I’ve explained I believe the film to be about. I linked together the moments of dialogue and the set pieces that it seemed were contributing to the moodiness of the piece and all of a sudden it all became clear.

Now there is plenty about Dark Skies that might convince you that all of this subtext is a happy coincidence or a result of my reading too much into things. After all, the film does aim to be a jumpy ‘boo!’ horror film and, without the padeophobic slant, it is a very silly and very average scarefest in line with the Paranormal Activity fare of the world. Its scary moments aren’t particularly blood-freezing and it would be dishonest to pretend that the film doesn’t fail somewhat on that basis. But it would also be dishonest of me to pretend that I don’t fully believe that its makers really did intend to create a biting satire on society’s exaltation of the nuclear family and its attitude of protecting the perfection of the 2-parents-2-children paradigm at all costs.

‘Cos I’m convinced they did mean it and I liked the message and I liked the film.