Red State

HERE BE SPOILERS

I went to see Kevin Smith's latest, Red State, pretty much as soon as it came out. It hasn't had a massive campaign in the UK, and I suppose it's quite a niche market film. Also, I went to see it on a Sunday afternoon; not exactly peak cinema time. Still, even accounting for all of this, I was quite surprised to find myself alone at the screening. Now, I've been to the cinema on my own many a time, but I have never been alone in a screening until Red State. Even the weekday, off-peak screening of The Skin I Live In that I attended a few weeks ago had three other hardcore fans in attendance. I found myself vaguely alarmed by my situation, especially when this trailer came on, as I'm sure you can imagine.

But now that I am no longer sitting alone in the dark, I can reflect upon the fact that, rather than being alarming, it was actually pretty strange that I should find myself alone in a screening of such a brilliant, blackly comic, gun-crazy critique of post 9/11 US society. Set almost entirely inside a compound belonging to a murderous family of fundamentalist Christians, Red State, while making the effort to distinguish itself from the real life Westboro Baptist Church (more commonly known as 'God Hates Fags'), clearly takes a hefty portion of inspiration from the above, as well as from the Waco Siege in the early nineties. Three teenage boys lured into the compound are to be tortured and murdered as irredeemable sinners; however, the plan goes wrong, the feds show up (led by the amazing John Goodman) and the fire fight to end all fire fights breaks out, the family having even more guns at their disposal than the feds themselves.

The film is brilliantly written with some killer one-liners, but ultimately it's the standout performances that stay with you - John Goodman as the lead cop, but especially Michael Parks as Pastor Abin Cooper (see above) who you might remember as Earl McGraw from Kill Bill: Vol. 1, and Esteban Vihaio from Kill Bill: Vol. 2. Parks plays Cooper so well that he almost disappears into the role, rather like Daniel Day Lewis in There Will Be Blood. Cooper is so twisted, so disgustingly maniacally evil that it is almost impossible to credit that people like him really exist on this earth (as unfortunately, we know they do). And yet, his character is at all times perfectly believable, and therefore quite terrifying. At least until, without giving too much away, he gets taken down a peg or two.

Red State twists and turns so much that it's impossible to predict; anything and everything can and does happen. After a while I stopped even trying to form ideas about what might be coming next. Kevin Smith is such an eclectic and imaginative filmmaker that you hardly know what to expect from him anyway, let alone in a movie like Red State; at one point (!slight spoiler!) he actually had me believing that he had made a film which really, honest-to-God, ended with The Rapture.

Red State is one of my current Films of the Moment; if you can find it being screened, go see it. It'll be very interesting to see where Smith goes from here.

Avatar: The Revolution of the Real

Vaguely considering going to see Avatar in 3D at the Kingston IMAX this week - I have seen Avatar before, of course, including once at the BFI IMAX, but Avatar is the kind of film it's worth taking the opportunity to see on the big screen when it rolls around. The below is an article I wrote in January of 2010, just after Avatar's original release.

The narrative is unoriginal and predictable, the characters are one dimensional, and the complex combining of the various themes just doesn’t quite square. Even so, Avatar, the film we were told was going to revolutionise cinema, is undoubtedly a visual feast. Sitting in the cinema I had a viewing experience which was entirely new to me; I found my eyes sliding from level to level, looking through the screen in a way I never had before. But has Cameron really managed to pull off what so many others couldn’t? Has he produced what everybody seems to be on the lookout for these days, the single perfect revolutionary film which will change the face of cinema forever? Has Avatar heralded the day that we take the old regime, throw it against a wall and shoot it with, in Cameron’s case, a three foot long poison tipped arrow? Is this really what Cameron was trying to do, anyway? Can we say that he’s failed, if he wasn’t even making an attempt? And of course, the biggest question of all the questions that are thrown up by this film, does it even matter?

It didn’t quite achieve what many conjecture to be the ultimate aim of cinema; that is, virtual reality style immersion. It never made me forget that I was in a theatre, but it did at times make me forget that what I was looking at wasn’t technically ‘real’. It always surprised me when I periodically remembered that these were not big blue people I was watching run through a forest and scrunch their toes in the soil. These were, essentially, animated characters, albeit animated characters being played by humans. There are no blue people; there is also no forest, and more than likely no soil. If The Matrix films showed us the desert of the real, then Avatar has shown us the revolution of it. Let’s face it, watching Jake Sully and Neytiri do something as simple as walk through a forest beats even ‘The Burly Brawl’ (in which Keanu Reeves fights off hundreds of Hugo Weavings with nothing more than his wits and a big metal pole) all to shit. Digital effects have become famous for their contrariness; without wishing to denigrate The Matrix too much, digitally duplicating an actor over and over again becomes a relatively simple procedure when compared to getting a character’s pupils to contract correctly, or their hair to blow convincingly in the wind. When it comes to digital effects, the devil is in the details. The 3D isn’t even a factor when simply considering the ‘reality’ of the effects, and is probably no less a gimmick now than the last umpteen times the attempt was made to introduce it into mainstream cinema. Avatar looks pretty stunning with or without 3D, but without it there is much less of the afore-mentioned ‘sliding’ of the vision through different layers of celluloid. Look carefully through, not at, but through, any given scene on the planet Pandora, and you will be able to count anywhere from three to six or seven different ‘levels’ for your eyes to latch onto. 3D, like Cameron’s new ‘e-motion capture’, is itself simply another layer of the attempt to make Avatar realer than real, until the indentations in Jake Sully’s skin become more authentic to your eyes than the ones on your hand three inches in front of your face.

However, there is a confusing contradiction inherent in films such as Avatar; while you are watching something that seems infinitely more ‘real’ to your eyes and brain than say, a gritty eighties drama, you are at the same time watching an incredibly artful and calculated artificial world. As we progress toward the future of film, it seems that we as viewers need more and more technical tricks to fool us into accepting that what we are seeing is ‘real’. This is no easy task, especially considering the media saturated age in which we live. To make us forget the cameras and the crew, and to train our brains into accepting that nothing is ‘real’ beyond the edges of the screen can be a laborious and thankless task. One wonders whether that is how Cameron now views his latest creation. Tearing down the giants of cinema with a single sentence is a popular practice; Avatar was slated from the second it was released, and deservedly so. It’s too long, it’s predictable, the acting isn’t exactly stellar, and it’s self indulgent in the extreme; it has even been labelled racist by some, and given a new name by the internet gossips, the inspired ‘Avatard’. The general consensus has been “sure Jim, it looks pretty, but how about hiring some decent writers?”

While I agree completely with this view, I believe I would have to relinquish my status as a film geek if I wasn’t more than willing to let Cameron off the hook. In the same way that the idea of cinema was invented long before it could be actualised, and early filmmakers were forced to wait for the technology to catch up with the concept before they could really begin committing their ideas to the screen, Cameron formulated Avatar years before the technology was anything like as advanced as he needed. While the product of his gargantuan effort may not be perfect, you have to look at it for what it is; Cameron was essentially making it up as he went along. The art of film and filmmaking, which, especially within the Hollywood system, can be an incredibly ingrained and systematic process, is advanced only by those who are brave enough to risk utter ruin by pioneering new technologies, new techniques, and new ways of seeing. Often whether these new techniques ‘work’ or not is irrelevant. Film, like any other art, is constantly developing, changing, and attempting to convey something new, and in a world where most people consider film as nothing more than a Friday night’s distraction, let alone an artistic pursuit, it can be very easy to forget that.

Let’s sit back for a moment and look at what Cameron has actually achieved here. Whether he was really trying to revolutionise cinema is a question that only he can answer, and we have already agreed that even if he was trying he hasn’t succeeded – but what he has done is make a pretty damn spectacular action movie, with its own unique visual aesthetic, that whatever critics might say looks like nothing any of us has ever seen before. Has Cameron changed the face of cinema forever? The answer, in my opinion, is no. Sure, people will follow in his footsteps, the technology will develop even further, and I’m sure that a lot sooner than you think you’ll be able to sit in a cinema, turn your head around 180 degrees, and still see trees behind you. But the cinema is not a perfectible art; as Andre Bazin wrote even in the early 20^th century, there is no ‘total’ cinema, no ultimate goal that filmmakers are working towards, even if they think that’s what they’re doing.  Any filmmaker trying to make ‘perfect’ cinema will get to what they think is the top of the mountain and find a whole new cliff face waiting for them. If Avatar has failed at an impossible task, then it really hasn’t failed at all. My advice to those who would, based on its faults, dismiss Avatar completely, is this; come back and talk to me again when you’ve had a try – then maybe you’ll cut Cameron some slack.

As to whether Avatar, or any of the issues related to it, really matters as far as contemporary and future cinema is concerned – this is a matter of personal opinion. But for those of us who live and breathe for the big screen, the occasional appearance of films like Avatar is why we get up in the morning.

Hold Onto Your Butts...

Rereleasing movies is a hot issue - at least, one would imagine it to be a very hot issue in some head offices. I'd like to have been a fly on the wall of the boardroom in which this latest rerelease decision was made; I can just imagine a load of frowning guys in suits trawling through lists of popular movies, wracking their brains over which one would make them the largest possible amount of money if it were once again to be made available to the masses in supersize form. And then, suddenly, one guy spots a promising title out of the corner of his eye; he searches back up the list, before finally alighting on Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park. A strange, crazy glint of light appears in his eyes, as one by one his colleagues stop shuffling their papers and turn to him, both excited and unnerved by his manic expression.

"Gentlemen," he says. "I think I've got it."

There is a pregnant pause. And then;

"Jurassic Park."

There is a stunned silence as the magnitude of the suggestion makes its way around the table in a Mexican wave of synergistic telepathy, until finally it reaches the chairman. All eyes upon him, he shifts slightly in his seat. A note of unease enters the atmosphere, as all wait to see whether the idea will be raised to a pedestal, or nailed to a cross. Finally:

"Jones," the chairman says, eyeing his surbordinate. "You'll be made regional manager for this."

He favours Jones with an awed stare of approval, as the rest of the besuited men cheer, rip off their ties and start planning their next month long trip to Monaco. Jones meanwhile, sits quietly, not quite believing what he has just achieved.

In truth of course, it didn't happen that way at all. Jurassic Park has only been rereleased because it will very soon come out on blu ray. But surely even if this were not the case, it would have been a damn good decision anyway. Especially seeing as the movie has not been majorly changed at all (why mess with perfection), so we are not faced with a hideous, Star Wars-esque 'Godless abomination', as Amy McGoldrick put it. No, it's still the same old Jurassic Park, only bigger, louder and much much scarier; you can really appreciate the significance of being inside a car which is getting beaten to shit by a T Rex when you're watching it take place on a screen as high as five double decker buses. Not to mention the surround sound; I wouldn't be surprised if people walking past the BFI IMAX this weekend thought there was a freak earthquake going on.

Jurassic Park is only getting a very short release, so if you're desperate to see it, I'd get a move on and spare no expense.

Fish Custard

 I don't have a lot of time for watching contemporary TV these days. Aware as I am that there are shows out there, many of them probably brilliant, that I 'should' be watching (The Killing, Spartacus, The Wire, etc), I have accepted that I am not superhuman. There are only so many hours in the day, and I cannot afford to spend all of them catching up on the prolific episodic outpourings of every single televison network. And so, I do what any self respecting busy young ambitious working woman would do; I prioritise.

Earlier this year, I prioritised HBO's Game of Thrones. And I mean really prioritised, seeing as I don't even have the channel that it was aired on, and was therefore forced to trawl the internet every Monday morning for one single bastard link that would lead me to a working upload of the latest episode. It was worth it however, especially seeing as the series was aired in the USA on Sunday night, but not in the UK until Monday night, so that despite not having Sky Atlantic, I would still have seen the latest episode a full day before anyone else in the UK. I may not be completely culturally au fait when it comes to the latest television shows, but when I prioritise something, I prioritise it all to shit.

I miss the days of Game of Thrones, when every week, for ten glorious weeks in a row, I would have a new excuse to massively geek out in an obsessive and preferably amusing television based manner. The television show I have most recently been prioritising (or trying to) is Doctor Who. However, the reason I have not been geeking out on the internet over this show nearly as much as I did over Game of Thrones is that the jury is still out on the second half of this series, which began four weeks ago with the admittedly wonderfully named 'Let's Kill Hitler'. Up until the episode before last, 'The Girl Who Waited', my overall opinion of Doctor Who had not suffered any major upheavals (although I didn't (and still don't) buy that Amy and Rory are willing to accept the loss of their daughter quite so easily).

However, 'The Girl Who Waited'  has had the interesting effect of finally making me dislike the Doctor. Fair enough, the Doctor always was a bit harsh, a bit mad, and a bit of a twat, but he was likably amusing and heroic, and therefore the twattish mad harshness only accentuated the amusing heroism, making him all the more intriguingly likable. But, the other week, he finally went just a tad too far over the line into Mean Bastard. Fair enough; he had to do what he did. But he didn't have to do it the way that he did it. Yes it made good television, but in the world of suspended disbelief where there are no cameras or scripts, that shit just wouldn't have flown. And on top of that, Amy seems to have been fine with what her other self was forced to endure; unless we are to assume that she gave him a right bollocking 'between episodes' as it were, and they were able to sort out their differences before the opening scene of 'The God Complex'.

The one redeeming feature of this otherwise rather uncalled for plot development is that, looking back, the fact that the Doctor essentially 'dumps' Amy and Rory at the end of 'The God Complex' makes sense when you factor in the whole heap of bullshit he got them into in the previous episode. What would have made more sense is if he had dumped them off immediately after the whole Green Anchor/Red Waterfall fiasco was all wrapped up, instead of first taking them to a  suspiciously Shining-esque hotel frequented not only by their own worst fears, but also by a fucking minotaur, for no good reason I can discern.

Anyway, that's enough of that for one evening; one can only hope that the writers return to form for the rest of the series and bring back the Doctor who wears a fez and eats fish custard.

The Skin I Live In

some SPOILERS - but not really.

Almodovar's latest, The Skin I Live In, sees him reunite with old friend Antonio Banderas to tell the tale of an obessive (and probably insane) plastic surgeon who is attempting to create a new type of artificial skin which could have saved his badly burned wife (who threw herself out of a window upon catching sight of her reflection). Despite the assertions of many critics, The Skin I Live In is very much a traditional Almodovar film. It is clear however, that he has been watching rather more Hitchcock than is healthy and has also taken his fixations with sexuality, understated violence and body horror to new levels. This film is what Almodovar would have made if somebody had handed him the script for Hitchcock's Vertigo; he has replaced the romance and passion with clinical obession, the hidden motives and manipulation with obvious coercion, and the madness with cold hard insanity. It's Almodovar's version of horror; not very scary, just plain weird.

The old Almodovar does shine through, however, mostly in the cinematography; while not as vibrantly hued as usual, you can see his classic use of colour in the frequent spots of red which jump out of the otherwise quite monochrome screen, themselves reminiscent of the open wounds and surgical cuts which adorn the form of Banderas' unwilling yet submissive guinea pig (Elena Anaya). Plus, there's the mad interlude where a guy in a tiger costume shows up - perhaps he threw that in just to reassure everyone that he hasn't abandoned his signature style (loud, colourful, and camp). The music (Alberto Iglesias) is perfect, as ever. The Big Twist that comes about half way through the film is also classic Pedro; obviously I won't give it away, although if you know Almodovar's work it is a little bit transparent, and unfortunately I managed to twig it about ten minutes too early.

If you're expecting lots of surgically based gore, you won't get it; Almodovar's violence has always been, like Haneke's, subdued, understated, and all the more real and unsettling for it. This film is a new direction for the director, something a bit different and brilliantly done. I'd advise you to go and see it before Odeon wise up to the fact that it's costing them more to screen it than they're making in ticket sales (there were four people in my screening, including me) and take it off the bill. Unfortunately there ain't much demand for Spanish 'mind-fuck' cinema at your average English cineplex. Look at it this way; you'll be in an almost completely empty screen enjoying some excellent, exquisite, thought-provoking film while the hordes of whiny brats (who will soon be back at school, thank God) are all down the corridor seeing Cowboys and Aliens or some shit.

Top Ten: Evil Children of Cinema

10. The White Ribbon: This 2009 offering from Haneke is a tense, slow burning drama set in a rural German Protestant village just prior to WW1. A series of strange and ever more tragic and horrible accidents begin to take place in the village. Attempts to uncover what is truly going on meet with confusion and failure, until it begins to be suspected that the children of the village are perpetrating the crimes in some sort of macabre punishment ritual. Not particularly frightening, but lingeringly disquieting.

9. Village of the Damned: Beware the Stare! A small English village becomes infested with demonic blond children who, through their eerie glowing eyes, manipulate and murder the adults around them. Allegedly, these children are the product of aliens who one day decided to impregnate every woman in the village with their energy beams. You'd have a job talking your way out of that one.

8. Children of the Corn: Based on a Stephen King novella, Children of the Corn centres on a small American town in which all the children come under the sway of a boy preacher; they worship an evil presence which resides in the corn fields and set about murdering every adult they can find. I'm starting to see a theme developing.

7. Night of the Living Dead: Romero's original and classic; over forty years old and still probably the best zombie movie ever made, it makes the list purely because of the scene in which a small girl, after succumbing to zombism of course, stabs her own mother to death with a garden trowel. They don't make 'em like this anymore, kids.

6. The Wicker Man: (Orginal, of course, not remake - pisses me off I even have to specify) A devout Christian policeman visits a small island in search of an allegedly missing girl called Rowan. Not only is Rowan not actually missing, but her entire 'disappearance' is part of an elaborate plot to lure the policeman into becoming a human sacrifice to the Pagan Gods worshipped by the islanders. The children of the island, raised in a world where death doesn't exist and a toad on the tongue can cure a sore throat, are creepy as hell. Check out the classroom scene for evidence; also, Rowan happily dancing and singing as the man who thought he was about to save her burns alive.

5. The Ring: A dead girl left to drown in a well who, if you watch her avant garde short film, climbs out of your television and frightens you so badly that your heart stops and your face instantly rots in the most horrifying way imaginable. And if that wasn't bad enough, she rings you up to let you know this is going to happen a week in advance. At least you'd have time to get the house nice.

4. The Exorcist: possessed by a demon claiming to be the Devil Himself, twelve year old Reagan has a wild time of it peeing on her mother's expensive carpet, murdering her mother's friends, taunting priests with 'your mum' jokes and doing unspeakable things with crucifixes. They wouldn't get away with this one today. Well, they probably would, but nobody would have the nerve to try. Has to be seen to be believed.

3. Rosemary's Baby: in third place, one of the greatest directors of our time (leaving aside the whole rapist thing) Roman Polanski, and the Devil's Own Son Adrian/Andy Woodhouse. Rosemary's (Mia Farrow) husband sells her body to the devil without her prior knowledge or approval in order to further his acting career. She unknowingly carries and gives birth to the demon child under the ministrations of a coven of elderly Satanists who happen to congregate in her block of flats. Never trust anyone over sixty who tries to get friendly with you; they're almost certainly after your fertile uterus to house the Anti-Christ.

2. The Omen: The Anti-Christ takes both third and second place; Damien Thorne, the son of the Devil, born of a jackal, terrorises Gregory Peck and Lee Remick, along with diverse others. Some tricks he gets up to: ramming into his mother on his toy bike so that she falls off a balcony, going apeshit when they try to take him into a church, and driving his nanny to throw herself out of a window with a rope around her neck. Eventually Peck makes up his mind to kill Damien, but loses his nerve in the horribly heart wrenching "no daddy, no!" scene, and then himself dies in a hail of police bullets. Damien ends the film at his own parents' funeral, smiling evilly into the camera as he clutches the hand of the US President.

1. The Shining: In first place, the Grady Twins; axed to death by their father after he is driven mad by the malevolent presence which lurks within the Overlook Hotel, the twins decide to hang around for a while so that they can stand in corridors blocking the way and inviting unsuspecting young boys to come and play with them, forever and ever and ever...

If you're going to San Francisco, be sure to take lots of guns...



So, it's yet another 'let's find a cure for Alzheimer's by performing experiments on animals until they get smart enough to open their cages and take sweet revenge on proud humanity' movie. In other words, it's Deep Blue Sea with apes instead of sharks. All in all, The Rise of the Planet of the Apes is an intriguing and visually pretty wonderful re-imagining of how the apes started to take over prior to the main Planet of the Apes fiasco. But, I'm still going to pretend it was never made. If it had been just a tad more believable, it would have been a significantly better film.

The actors do their best with what they've got, but frankly, what they've got isn't all that much. Tom Felton, aka Draco Malfoy, pretty much appears to be playing an American version of his most famous role, only taking his wizard angst out on apes instead of Gryffindors. Andy Serkis, as lead Apelord Caesar, reprises his role as CGI creature of the year - if you thought it wasn't possible to be typecast as an effect, think again - although, you won't hear Serkis complaining, seeing as in his pre-LOTR days the highlight of his career was a bit part in a little known Poliakoff drama. James Franco is not up to his usual standard, although you can see he really is trying to be; he just doesn't quite get there. In the end, the CGI itself steals the show.

There are a few nice allusions to the classic 1970s original, including the obligatory 'get your stinking paws off me you damn dirty ape', but unfortunately the film makes itself just a shade too ridiculous, especially with the whole 'Caesar learning to talk' thing which, as Sophie Rickard pointed out, would really be quite impossible on any level within the context of the film. The drug given to these apes in order to make them super-intelligent is neurologically based, and therefore could not possibly cause vocal chords to develop in such a way that would allow an ape to speak. However, you could argue that because Caesar was not in fact given the drug but was born with it as part of his genetic make-up after it had been given to his mother, then he could feasibly have developed the physical capability of speech, but frankly that's a massive stretch, and rather more geeky and obsessive than this film deserves considering its many flaws.

Plus, the ending is mawkish and anti-climactic. The only reason to go and see this film is if you're in the mood to see apes wrecking up San Francisco and beating the shit out of humans during a pitched battle on Golden Gate Bridge. Fairly amusing and interesting to look at, but you'll only ever need to see it once.