Amy (2015)

Amy is a special example of the art of making yourself scarce; something that director Asif Kapadia is exceptionally good at. He makes a few delicate choices about how to present a story, spends the right amount of patience interviewing the right people, and then simply presents his findings in a smartly edited collage of memory and sentiment.

Amy is a picture of the life of throwback jazz chanteuse Amy Winehouse. It is constructed entirely from archive footage, giving it a very naturally progressing arch which begins with pre-fame home video footage, moves to the TV interviews and concert footage of 2003-2007 and finally ends in the news reports and paparazzi blitz that defined Winehouse’s final years.

The images are anchored by the voices of Winehouse’s family, friends and colleagues, all of whom delivering the honesty and insight that only comes with a microphone and the hours of patience that Kapadia clearly invested in the project. These interviews – and the editing of them – are the gem at the centre of the film. Full of people trying to forgive themselves, they drip with desperation and helplessness.

Gratefully, the film neglects to tell us how great Winehouse’s voice was, instead choosing to show it through studio footage and unheard versions of overplayed hits. Lyrics scrawl themselves across the screen as the songs underscore recollections of the events about which they were written. Kapadia’s prime interest is the words of Winehouse’s songs and he revels in the fact that they are autobiographical enough to use as a contributing narrator of the documentary from beyond the grave.

The skill of the film is founded in pure juxtaposition. Almost every image on screen has been broadcast on television before but place one thing next to another and haze it in an interview with an old friend together with a well-placed lyric and it starts breathing sad truths. As with all documentaries, the brain recalculates what it feels to be accurate by cross-referencing what this person said with that person and how that adds or subtracts to what is seen.

Beyond the veracity of the mish-mash of accounts, what the film evokes is a simple grief at a life lived and lost under the super-surveillance of our age’s voracious media frenzy. That it does this without resorting to any kind of sugarcoating just makes it all the more vibrant.

Jurassic World (2015)

I never fell in love with a Spielberg film. It’s difficult however, not to foster a respect for his filmmaking formula when films like Jurassic World roll around – films that beg to be as cohesive a heartstring tugger as E.T, as expertly manipulative as Indiana Jones but fall way short due to lack of care and imagination. Unluckily for it, Jurassic World suffers from having the $1 billion-grossing classic, Jurassic Park (1993) as its ancestor, a solid, well-organised film that does what it does excellently.

The story here is very much the same. Humans have made a theme park full of genetically engineered dinosaurs, the dinosaurs get out and there’s lots of death while everyone evacuates and the threat is neutralised. Many motifs/scenes from the original film are ruthlessly re-exploited:

• There are two parentless kids. There’s a man, there’s a woman and there’s sexual tension between them as they fall into the roles of surrogate parents for the children.
• There’s a big establishing shot of the park with that brassy 5-note theme.
• There’s a bit where a crazy “chaotician” warns us with glee that any control humans imagine they have over dinosaurs is an illusion.
• There’s a bit of hiding under cars and a bit of cowering in cars and a crunch of teeth on a vehicle roof.
• There’s a bit of “hey, you might’ve pushed science a bit too far.”

Spielberg’s original was all about the tech. There really wasn’t much besides running away from dinosaurs because there wasn’t room for anything else. What makes it a bit of an anomaly in Spielberg’s canon is that it sacrificed satisfying character development for the sake of thrilling animatronic puppets – a strange stroke of genius, a choice that focused its concerns solely on being a thrilling ride. Jurassic World, however, suffers a crisis of confidence, assuming that “Wow! Dinosaurs!” isn’t enough for a 2015 audience. That’s the only explanation for the jarring amount of token storylines ignited and then abandoned or awkwardly under resolved in deference to the main issue of Running Away from Dinosaurs.

The subject most criminally raised and discarded is the impending divorce of the boys’ parents (who we see only in short scenes that bookend the movie). Spielberg loves divorced children in his adventure movies; he loves taking them on a journey towards accepting their situation by learning to look after themselves. They work through their domestic problems by being involved in lots of thrilling stuff and come out stronger as a result.

But here, children run from danger, hide from danger, and have it defeated around them. By adults – by male adults – while the female lead quails with them in a van, sitting in its passenger seat, shielding them from watching dashboard-based battle updates. “Your boyfriend is badass!” they squeal as Owen roars by on a motorbike. She smiles and that’s that – the film has betrayed its young characters. The children end up props. Props for the love story and props for Claire’s lesson: ‘tone down your ambition and make more time in your work schedule for spending time with family’ – a dubious lesson and one more forced than learned anyway.

Jurassic Park earned a bomb, Jurassic Park re-released in 3D earned a bomb and no one who wants more money could argue against re-realising the exact same film but with more people in the way of the dinosaurs and all the latest CGI, 3D and IMAX technologies to animate them (the dinosaurs, not the people.) Jurassic World is pretty terrible but (sigh) pretty entertaining. I do enjoy watching prehistoric beasts wreaking havoc as much as the next person. I’d just rather this film didn’t pretend to care about its characters and their lives when it can’t afford to.

“Wow! Dinosaurs!” gets you a long way, even now.

Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

The idea of a relentless thrust through 2 hours of near-silent cinema with laconic characters who let the cars do the snarling is an enticing one, one that sets its own challenge. How can a film maintain its momentum when every scene is an explosive set piece, stacked-up against the last and precision-engineered to top whatever came before? The fuel needs to be pure and Mad Max: Fury Road certainly draws its own world with a set of bold visual ideas followed through to their absurd conclusions. It’s a great starting point.

Max is the least capable of the heroes we’re bound to. His initial attempts to escape the clutches of the weird-faced tyrant Immortan Joe are easily thwarted and he is still being used as an unwilling blood donor (strapped to the front of a car) even when the film is well on the road. He can’t shoot straight, nor is he particularly adept a driver as far as we can tell. Agency belongs to the females of the piece, in particular Imperator Furiosa whose journey back to the ‘green land’ of her youth provides the film its narrative arch. However, that Max is the eponym – and not Furiosa – rather highlights his philosophy “hope is a mistake” amid all this elusive struggling towards a better place. The film needs to pretend itself a direction, hence the diversionary storyline of Furiosa and the Wives that we, and Max himself, are riding with. But by having the directionless hero at its centre, the hero whose only drive is survival, its makers have nailed their colours to the darker corner of this dystopian nightmare. Hope is a mistake.

The more I think about it, the more I realise that I liked the film despite sometimes feeling on the wrong end of one of its blood transfusions. Everything about its design is immaculately cohesive, from the ridiculous teal/orange colour grading to the grinding gears and grinning martyrs that populate its fiery dust storms. It is a singular vision and gloriously female-led at times. The only problem, on the first viewing, is pacing. 2 hours 10 minutes of this stuff is too exhausting – it mars the final half hour of the film, which in any case is a kind of journey home that should have begun at its midpoint anyway. The editing of the action is expertly done, but add a little more punctuation here and there and we’re laughing (maniacally into the void). ((With silver spray-painted mouths.))

It Follows (2015)

The way that many teen horror flicks successfully evoke the claustrophobic landscape of adolescence is mostly a happy accident, a natural byproduct of filmmakers needing to kill time waiting for the next big scare and not putting the effort into fleshing out their characters. It’s a strange thing but it accounts entirely for the genre’s success. Who needs three-dimensional characters when whatever big bad thing coming to get a group of teenagers can be relied upon as a metaphor for all their growing-up problems? Outsource all that messy stuff to a ghoul or a demon or an axe-murderer and it’s satisfying enough just to watch them trying to outrun it.

It Follows knows this. And it knows about the sex = death paradigm of these movies. And it knows about keeping adults out of the whole equation. And it has a load of fun with all of it. These are the rules: “it” is a murderous shape-shifting demon thing that never stops hunting its prey at a glacial pace. It can be outrun, if you fancy trying, but the only way to shake it off is to pass the curse on by having sex. Even then, you’ll still be able to see it, it just won’t be after you. Until it has killed everyone else that came after you in the chain. Then it will be after you.

So you see, some tropes are flipped on their head – sex becomes both a way of transmitting a morbid awareness of death from person to person (‘the curse’) but also the only way to keep death at bay. (For the time being anyway.) It’s like the original 80’s conservative slasher film message (“don’t have sex!”) has been updated for a generation of 21^st Century nihilists. Now the message reads: “there are fun things to do while you’re alive. Just don’t forget that one day you will die.”

The absent parent convention is also played with, and to the same end – adults actually do show up in the film, but only as empty vessels, manifestations of the “it” that follows, essentially reminders from the family tree that time is creeping up at walking pace to sweep us all away eventually.

With It Follows, David Robert Mitchell has purposefully made the film that so many writers and directors stumbled upon in the 1980s. It’s not a revolution in teen horror flicks, just a very well made one. But the film knows this, of course it does. Like its characters’ inability to outrun the inevitable, It Follows examines and rearranges all the clichés of its genre, but it can never escape them. And it doesn’t really want to.

Inherent Vice (2015)

It has me going back because I’m after what Doc is after and none of us know what that is.

We must be getting somewhere.

The camera movement is telling us as much. Slow push-ins over minutes-long conversations imply the truth is just around the corner if only we follow the leads that this guy is giving us. And the leads that follow those leads.

1970 LA is the perfect time and place for a noir. Hippiedom is over. What about it that can be used to sell stuff is being rapidly assimilated into popular culture, whether that be a buzzword like groovy, a fashion choice like shoulder-length hair or a recreational drug like the weed that Doc’s nemesis, LAPD Detective Bigfoot Bjornsen, quaffs at the film’s coda. Anything else countercultural is disposable as a creeping paranoia sweeps through the Californian beach communities soon to be demolished and replaced by high-rises.

If anything makes sense, it’s that a stoner would be trying to make sense of his place in a world on the cusp of leaving him behind.

Inherent Vice drips and aches nostalgia. That’s where it starts and that’s where it lands. Everything that happens in between is a magic trick, precision-engineered to entice you into a riddle you think you can solve even though one jigsaw piece is always missing. Then at your wit’s end, you’re abandoned, and you’re Doc, and you might walk out of the cinema but Paul Thomas Anderson has you where he wants you. Turns out you weren’t here to work out whodunit but to spend 150 minutes feeling both warm and sad and not knowing why.

And you can break it down technically, if you like. You can examine the direction, cinematography, costume, music and performances and find it flawless, if you like. But once you add it back up again, there’s always something extra, extra and elusive, that wasn’t on the ingredients list.

It has me going back and back because I don’t know what it is.

Into the Woods (2015)

The thing about musicals is that they’re melodramatic. I’m not their biggest fan but, the way I understand it, the conceit is this: emotional things happen and excitement swells until the characters involved just cannot keep from spontaneously exploding with all of their joy and sadness into song. Which is fine. I mean, it’s weird, but every genre has its rules, so fine.

When they work on stage, the best musicals have big characters brimming with melodrama. This is partly so audiences on the back row can see what’s going on (and partly because the songs have to be justified somehow). On film, you don’t need to be so big. You have to find ways of communicating the brash audacity of a stage show with devices particular to the medium. That’s how Les Miserables (2012) worked; that’s how Sweeney Todd (2007) worked. Both of these films feel like films. Rob Marshall’s Into the Woods feels like a filmed musical, a throwaway money-spinner.

Les Mis was big in that its characters maintained the melodrama of the stage and were then knowingly filmed in portrait-style close-ups to give audiences a perspective they could never have even sitting on the front row in a theatre. That’s really smart.

Sweeney Todd was big in that, in the hands of a gothic auteur, it was drenched in the visual language of a silent movie and injected with pace by a man who knows a few things about cutting.

As with adapting novels, so with adapting musicals. You won’t offend anyone by blandly covering all the angles and making sure the actors read the script and sing the songs. But it takes a bolder attitude to make it a worthwhile endeavor. The wit of Sondheim and his distinctively angular vocal lines will always be a pleasant thing to sit through but that’s where the good time ends. As a film, Into the Woods just feels exhausting and unnecessary.