April 2011

Posted on April 30, 2011 by badblokebob

Spring has sprung, but the number of films watched isn’t looking so lively…

The Nine

This month I watched nine feature films I’d never seen before (plus one short). That looks a bit weak compared to previous months this year, which averaged out at (just under) 13 each.

I blame TV — lots on this month; doubly so as I decided to rush through the last series of Doctor Who before the new one started. That’s about 10 hours of viewing, or an average of five films — which, if I had watched films, would bring me more in line with previous months. There’s always a reason, eh.

To put this month’s number in further perspective: I need to watch (just over) 8 films a month to reach 100 in December — I’ve beaten that. By this point last year I’d reached #41 — I’ve beaten that. And my ‘official target’ for April (any and every April) is #33 — I’ve well beaten that. So things aren’t so bad after all.

#39 The Girl Who Played with Fire, aka Flickan som lekte med elden (2009)
#40 Monsters (2010)
#41 My Neighbour Totoro, aka Tonari no Totoro (1988)
#42 The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest, aka Luftslottet som sprängdes (2009)
#43 Dog Day Afternoon (1975)
#43a Lumet: Film Maker (1975)
#44 La Règle du jeu, aka The Rules of the Game (1939)
#45 Cameraman: The Life & Work of Jack Cardiff (2010)
#46 A Bunch of Amateurs (2008)
#47 Family Guy Presents Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story (2005)

Reviews

I was going to say that there weren’t many reviews this month either, but as you can see I’ve posted them for half of the above list — percentage-wise that’s better than the first three months of this year (at their individual ends, not to date).

That said, I’m still quite far behind overall — 22, is it? Crikey. I aim to get considerably more posted in May. We’ll see.

Next time on the all-new 100 Films in a Year monthly update…

These monthly updates finally reach one year old (the first, obviously, was May 2010).

More importantly, I’ll hopefully watch enough new films to reach #55 — which will be the 500th counted film for this blog!

Exciting times.

Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (1957)

Posted on April 26, 2011 by badblokebob

2011 #7
John Huston | 102 mins | TV (HD) | PG

The title may sound like a ’40s rom-com or a ’70s TV sitcom, but Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison is nothing of the sort. It’s set in the south Pacific in 1944, at the height of World War II, and begins with titular US Marine Allison (Robert Mitchum) washing up on an island that’s occupied only by a novice nun, Sister Angela (Deborah Kerr). He was the only survivor of a Japanese attack on a submarine; she ultimately the only survivor of a Japanese raid on the island. With no hope of rescue they must plot their own escape.

If this were made today, Allison and Angela would surely turn out to be dead and in purgatory; 50 years ago, however, all is as it seems. What we get is almost relentlessly a two-hander. Some Japanese turn up, and (spoilers!) some Americans, but there’s only one line of English dialogue spoken by someone other than the two leads. Luckily, Mitchum and Kerr are talented enough to carry a film alone, while Lee Mahin and John Huston’s screenplay (from a novel by Charles Shaw) has enough events to keep things ticking along — this isn’t the kind of two-hander where a pair of characters sit around and natter until something turns up to end their conversation.

As well as playing on their plans for escape and the tension of survival once the Japanese occupy the island, the film also draws a lot of thematic weight from the interesting comparison between the Church and Angela’s devotion as a nun, and the Marines and Allison’s devotion as a soldier. Though one may be opposed to violence and the other created purely for it, the kind of loyalty and rituals they both entail reflect each other intriguingly.

There’s also a kind of burgeoning romance between the two — as a novice nun she has yet to take her final vows — which creates a different kind of will-they-won’t-they than the usual love-hate dynamic. It all leads to a pleasing ending, where your expectations for what a Hollywood film will do (especially with the groundwork that’s been laid) are subverted in favour of a more plausible turn of events. It’s not the kind of ending that makes the film — it’s already done more than enough to hold one’s interest — but if done wrong I think it would have undermined the rest.

The idea of a two-hander can be off-putting — how can just two characters sustain a whole film without it becoming overly philosophical or overly dull? Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison does have some elements of the philosophical, but there’s enough action going on to satisfy the need for dramatic momentum, and Mitchum and Kerr are effortlessly watchable. It could’ve done with a better title though.

Dog Day Afternoon (1975)

Posted on April 16, 2011 by badblokebob

2011 #43
Sidney Lumet | 120 mins | DVD | 15 / R

Director Sidney Lumet sadly passed away a week ago today. In tribute, I watched one of his many highly-regarded films…

On August 22nd 1972, John Wojtowicz and Salvatore Naturile attempted to rob a Brooklyn bank to raise money for Wojtowicz’s male wife to have a sex change operation. The ensuing hostage situation was watched live on TV by millions of New Yorkers. If you made it up people wouldn’t believe it — especially in the ’70s — which is why this film, closely based on those events, strives so hard for naturalism. And it succeeds, and then some.

There are multiple reasons it works so well, and I’m glad I for once got round to watching all the DVD extras because they reveal these factors very nicely. I’m going to use a liberal sprinkling of those facts as a way into my thoughts on the film, so if you’ve watched those features some of this may seem too familiar. Sorry.

Let’s start where all films do (well, should): the screenplay. Written by Frank Pierson, based on a magazine article about the true story, it was his screenplay that attracted both director Sidney Lumet and star Al Pacino to the project. It’s immaculately structured, from the excitement of the opening — a confused, amateurish bank robbery — through negotiations with police, emotional telephone conversations, and on to a nail-biting finale at JFK airport. The pace is well considered. It doesn’t rush through events but it never flags; the tension is maintained but important emotional scenes are never sped through. More on that in a moment. Importantly, the plot’s numerous reveals are well managed too — for instance, Sonny’s homosexuality and transgender partner are revealed quite far in, by which point we’ve already built a firm opinion of the characters. This was important for a ’70s audience (as Lumet suggests in his commentary), to try to circumvent built-in prejudices that would’ve adversely affected an audience’s reaction too soon. It still works now — it’s not a twist, per se, but it is likely to change one’s perspective on the film and its characters mid-flow, which is always interesting.

The dialogue is also spot-on, but that’s not all down to Pierson. While rehearsing, Lumet was so keen to capture a realistic tone that he allowed the actors to improvise the dialogue. This was working so well that he had it recorded, transcribed, and Pierson rewrote the dialogue based on the cast’s improvisation. (His scenes and their order remained intact, just the words were changed.) This, coupled with additional improvisation techniques used on set, lends a believable tone to the characters’ actions and words — they’re not speaking dialogue, they’re just speaking.

In terms of performance, this is a real showcase for Pacino. As Sonny — the movie’s version of John — the whole film rests on his shoulders, and he’s more than capable of bearing the weight. Some roles allow an actor to subtly be good throughout the film; others allow a few grandstanding set-pieces where they can Act; but Dog Day Afternoon gives Pacino both. The latter are, naturally, easier to recall: the way he works the crowd (“Attica!”), the pair of draining phone calls to his wives; but most of all, the will-writing scene. As the climax looms, Lumet allows the time for Sonny to dictate his will in full to one of the bank girls. Pacino is brilliant, understated but — in a combination of performance and writing (though, in this case, the text is taken from the real-life will) — revealing, cementing some of the conflicting forces that have pulled on Sonny throughout the film.

In trying to get a handle on the real Sonny when he was starting on the screenplay, Pierson talked to various people who knew him, but struggled to reconcile their conflicting accounts of the same man. The link he found was that Sonny was always trying to please people, and that’s what he used: in the film, he’s not just out for himself or his boyfriend, but also trying to placate and please his hostages, the police, the media, his partner, his mum, his other wife… Pierson and Pacino do indeed make him a different man to all of them, and this is one of the reasons Sonny is such a great character and a great performance: he’s genuinely three-dimensional. All of us behave differently, to some degree, when we’re with different people — we don’t necessarily realise it, because they’re all facets of the same us, but we do it — so to put that into a character is to make him real.

Pacino is propped up by a spotless supporting cast, all of whom get their moment(s) to shine and use them to excel. Of particular note is John Cazale as Sal, the other robber. It’s a largely quiet role, but he nonetheless conveys an awful lot with it. Lumet says that Cazale always seemed to have a great sadness in him, which you can always see come out in his performances, and he’s certainly right here. We learn very few facts about Sal during the film, but we still know him, you suspect, as well as anyone does.

Chris Sarandon is also superb (and Oscar nominated) as Leon, the gay wife who wants a sex change. Lumet was keen to avoid presenting a stereotypical homosexual type, throughout the film trying to avoid turning any of these unusual characters into freaks, and Sarandon pitches it right. He plays the truth of a conflicted, confused character; a man who is perhaps easily led but hard to please, I think. As with the rest of the cast, the little touches he brings — such as starting a sure-to-be-emotional phone call to a man currently in the middle of a tense hostage situation with “so how are you?” — sell the reality of the piece.

Capturing reality is clearly Lumet’s prime concern — it’s reiterated multiple times across all the special features — and I think he succeeds admirably. Some things we might not even notice — the film is lit with natural light outside, the bank’s real fluorescent lights inside, and the nighttime sequences by a genuine police van reflecting off the white front of the bank — while other things, like the complete lack of a musical score, are more readily apparent. I say that, but that’s not readily apparent: one may well notice, but it’s such a perfect decision that it never rears it’s head. Lumet argues that having an orchestra chime in to underline an exciting or emotional moment would have broken the realism of what we’re watching, and he was right — there’s not a single scene here that could be improved by music, but several that would have been damaged by it.

The way the film’s shot supports this too. This is from the ’70s remember, before the craze for faux-documentary and everything being handheld, so it still looks like a film, but it’s not one that’s been precision-staged. Indeed, quite the opposite. Everything is kept loose — sometimes actors block each other’s shots, or talk over each other, or the handling of a prop goes wrong, and so on — but Lumet leaved it all in, even plays it up at times, and makes it work to his advantage. Rather than being the obvious “we’re trying to make this look real” of today’s grainy shakycam stuff, this just feels real; the heart and truth of it come through, not the surface sheen of it being documentary footage. That’s more important.

There’s great editing by Dede Allen too, though most of the time it goes unnoticed: in keeping with the aim of letting the audience ‘forget’ this is a film, most of the cutting is simple and natural. Two examples leap to attention, however, and those are the two times (the only two times) guns are fired. Lumet and Allen recreate the confusion and violence of such an event with a smash of fast, sub-one-second cuts on both occasions. We see mindless fast cutting all the time now, but this incongruous example shows the effectiveness a fast montage can have when done by the right hands. The soundtrack also jumps with each cut, which is equally vital to the slightly disconcerting way it works — they’re not just smoothing over this series of flashing images, we’re being deliberately disorientated by them.

Remember earlier I mentioned Pierson’s pace? The editing plays a role in that too, naturally. After the film had been tightened for the final time, Lumet felt it had lost something, especially when it came to the will-dictating scene, which now felt slow. So with Allen he went back and added six or seven minutes of footage back in — as with his staging, making it a bit looser, more naturalistic, and in the process fixing the pacing issue and making the important will scene feel right again. Without being able to see that cut it’s hard to say just how necessary it was, but as the final result feels so right it seems his instinct was a good one.

Pierson’s screenplay won at the Oscars. The film was also nominated for Best Picture, Actor, Supporting Actor and Editing, but this was the year of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest so that took most of the big awards. That’s another of those all-time classics I’ve not seen, so I can’t offer my personal take. What I will say is that it goes to show (as most of us I’m sure already know) that the Oscars are as much about the year you’re in as the film itself: Dog Day Afternoon is better than masses of films that have won the same awards before and since, but clearly it got an unlucky year.

I’ve written quite a lot here but, brilliantly, I’ve still only got a certain way beneath the surface — there’s plenty more in there. That’s always the mark of a good film. And there’s certainly more memorable anecdotes and interesting directorial techniques I learnt from the special features that I’ve left out. Lumet set out to make a believable film about an unbelievable situation, and I do believe he achieved that goal. These are normal human beings with normal emotions — not like you and I, perhaps; taken to an extreme, certainly — but in a very bizarre set of circumstances. It was important to Lumet that they didn’t come across as freaks and, with the help of Pacino and the rest of his cast, I think they’ve achieved that too.

The film treads a delicate line between drama, comedy and thriller, but doesn’t once tip too far in any direction. It’s got several genuine laughs, but none compromise its serious side or claim to reality — it’s tense and touching too. Anyone else making a film about an extraordinary situation, be it a true story or from the mind of a crazed writer, would do well to look at Lumet’s work here.

Dog Day Afternoon is on ITV tonight, 19th November 2014, at 2:30am.

See also my review of the documentary short about the making of Dog Day Afternoon, which is also on the DVD, Lumet: Film Maker.

Lumet: Film Maker (1975)

Posted on April 16, 2011 by badblokebob

2011 #43a
Elliot Geisinger & Ronald Saland | 10 mins | DVD | PG

This ten-minute documentary short is made up of behind-the-scenes footage of some of the filming of Dog Day Afternoon, with the occasional on-set interview with some (to be honest, minor) crew members, snippets of audio interview with Lumet himself, and a voiceover narration.

Today it’s the kind of material that would come out as part of the EPK and be included on the DVD — it has a largely promotional tone, talking about how great Lumet is to work with, how great Pacino is, that kind of thing. From a modern perspective, much of the information is duplicated elsewhere on the DVD, but for those not interested in a two-hour audio commentary it’s here.

What it does still add is footage of Lumet at work. Based on what we see, you can well imagine how he managed to finish the shoot a whole three weeks ahead of schedule, and how he produced such an authentic-feeling final result. There’s the soundman, for instance, who humorously has to dash off halfway through his interview for the next setup.

It feels a bit daft reviewing what would today be just an EPK and/or DVD featurette. But as this comes from a time before those things existed, when it wasn’t designed to go straight to the DVD just for the interested (though I don’t know where it was shown — in cinemas as a kind of extended trailer, I presume? It doesn’t look like a TV special, especially at just ten minutes), it’s a “documentary short” — look, IMDb says it is.

But then, are feature-length DVD ‘making of’s a kind of film too? Lost in La Mancha would have just been the DVD extras, had the film not gone tits up. What about Hearts of Darkness, which is now, pretty much, placed as ‘just’ a Blu-ray extra?

Oh dear, I fear there may be another lengthy and inconclusive waffle coming on…

Nanny McPhee & the Big Bang (2010)

Posted on April 13, 2011 by badblokebob

aka Nanny McPhee Returns

2011 #24
Susanna White | 105 mins | TV (HD) | U / PG

The first sequel (I say that in the hope there’ll be more) to Nanny McPhee offers more of the same. Normally that sounds like a criticism, but here what I mean is that it offers more entertainment in the same style.

It’s not a rehash. That’s quite clearly marked by the change of setting: where the first was Victorian, here we’re in the midst of World War II. Writer (and star) Emma Thompson puts the setting to use too: the plot takes in evacuated children, a father away at war, a trip to the war office, and a climactic unexploded bomb. The focus, however, and naturally, is on the children Nanny McPhee must sort out. She still teaches her five lessons, but they’re different lessons, and though some of the ways the children react are similar to the first film there are enough differences — and different set pieces — to make this a suitably standalone piece.

It’s still a sequel in all the best ways, though. Thompson treats the audience with respect in relation to the first film, playing on expectations and speeding through parts of the story we know. You don’t need to have seen it, but you’ll get a bit more if you have. Also as with the first film, there’s a perhaps surprising undercurrent of genuine emotion and serious issues. This is one of the things that marks these two films out from the overcrowded kids’ film genre: they’re prepared to tackle things in an appropriate way, never allowing them to overwhelm and make an Issue Film but not sanitising them because It’s For Kids. The ending to a lovely picnic may well bring a tear to your eye.

The child cast are excellent. That’s always worthy of note, but they’ve struck gold two films in a row now. Impressive. Maggie Gyllenhaal is always worth watching in my opinion, and here her English accent is astoundingly perfect. This isn’t the “American doing an English accent Well” of Renee Zellwegger’s Bridget Jones, this is the “if I didn’t know better I’d assume she was English” of… hardly anyone else, as far as I can recall. A supporting cast of once again recognisable faces (I won’t spoil any surprises) round things out nicely.

CGI is also used again to magical effect. And, even more than that, to very cute effect. It feels like a bunch of scampering CG piglets, or a cuddly CG baby elephant, should be a little disturbing and wrong, but they’re not — they’re all incredibly cute, in fact. Aww. And they get up to plenty of funny and entertaining things. As with most of the enjoyment in both Nanny McPhees, it may be aimed at children, but I think it’s done in a way that appropriately-hearted adults can enjoy too.

Director Susanna White was previously responsible for TV’s Bleak House, Jane Eyre and Generation Kill — all excellent, but certainly not the material that springs to mind for a family movie. Thankfully that dark, dirty, grainy style isn’t dragged kicking and screaming into this film, and instead we’re treated to the appropriate vibrant colours of a glowingly perfect English summer, the kind you get in memory and picture books and never in real life. It’s spot on.

I loved the first Nanny McPhee, which always sets a sequel up for failure. However, Thompson (though she’s not in the director’s chair I think we can be certain she’s in charge of this series) doesn’t disappoint. She’s taken a brave route by setting the film in a completely different era with an all-new supporting cast (except for one lovely last-minute surprise for the attentive), but it’s paid off handsomely. This is at least as magical as the first, perhaps even more so.

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest (2009)

Posted on April 10, 2011 by badblokebob

aka Luftslottet som sprängdes

2011 #42
Daniel Alfredson | 147 mins | Blu-ray | 15 / R

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest — or, in America, Hornet’s Nest (oh, Americans!) — or, translated from the original Swedish, The Pipe Dream That Was Blown Up — or, according to a different translation, The Air Castle That Was Blown Up (guess that’s a cultural thing…) — is the third and final part of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy.

I say “final” — Larsson planned on writing a total of five to ten books (depending on which source you listen to), so the trilogy he completed is only a fraction of his plans. Despite that, this film seems to wrap up every dangling plot thread from the preceding instalments and round everything off neatly. Whether they’ve done this by creating endings not in the book or excising subplots I don’t know — I’ve not read any of the books — or maybe Larsson just didn’t leave anything else hanging. Whichever it is, as a film Hornets’ Nest provides a suitable ending. Thank goodness for that.

To succinctly compare this to its predecessors, it’s better than The Girl Who Played with Fire but not really as good as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. This is in part because there’s not as much detail of the investigation. Lots of the plot seems to be forwarded by people explaining it to each other, rather than genuinely digging and uncovering information, while the villains futilely attempt to stop the heroes publishing everything they already seem to know.

The story centres around a decades-old conspiracy to do with a secret police force and a Russian defector. Writing that, it sounds slightly more exciting than it plays in the film, where it feels much more grounded despite its inherent improbabilities. The conspiracy element works better here than in Played with Fire, leaving that whole film as little more than overlong setup for this one. Unfortunately the conspiracy also seems surprisingly easy to unravel once the heroes pick up the right thread. While that makes for lots of lovely victories, it means much of the film is driven by the villains simply trying to threaten the heroes into not revealing the truth. The mystery isn’t as fulfilling as that of Dragon Tattoo, or indeed many of the other entries in the recent wave of Scandinavian crime we’ve been treated to, such as The Killing or the Krister Henriksson–starring Wallanders.

Perhaps the investigation works better in the novel? Perhaps the actual specifics of it have been stripped out of the screenplay to keep the drama, action and focus on Lisbeth’s trial (of which more in a moment)? There’s a lot going on across various plots and subplots, maybe so much that some threads wind up underdeveloped in this adaptation. I’ll have to read the novels to find out.

The other cornerstone of the film is Lisbeth’s trial for the attempted murder of her father at the end of Played with Fire. The final third of the film is dominated by a series of immensely satisfying courtroom scenes in which the defence trounce the opposition, not through American-esque grandstanding but through a quiet and thorough application of facts and truth. You can see the satisfaction bubbling under Lisbeth’s almost-static face as the prosecution unknowingly hang themselves, the defence — Mikael Blomkvist’s sister Annika, for what it’s worth — holding back her killer evidence until the prosecution have dug themselves a pit so deep even this mixed metaphor would be buried. Both Lisbeth and Annika walk all over them by remaining calm and logical, dispatching the case against Lisbeth in a way that becomes an absolute joy for the viewer.

Some have complained that Lisbeth, and consequently Noomi Rapace, aren’t given enough to do in this film. On the surface they seem right: she spends most of the film sat quietly in a hospital bed, followed by more time sat quietly in a prison cell; it’s only during the trial scenes she has much dialogue, and even then she spends a lot of it quiet. But I think to say she’s underused would be to do the writing and, particularly, Rapace’s acting a disservice. Lisbeth’s actions are not as dynamic as her activity in the preceding films, certainly, but that means the quality of Rapace’s performance can shine through. She does a lot with her few lines of dialogue, and even more with silent reaction shots. It means Lisbeth remains an unknowable, elusive mystery, but then isn’t that part of what makes her so fascinating? The full exposure of her troubled (to say the least) history in this episode clears up some of her ambiguity without lessening her as a character. It’s a testament to the understated excellence of the performance that actions as little as a smile or saying “thank you” are huge revelations.

The film ends with an extended epilogue, where a freed Lisbeth deals with her brother. This is from the novel (that I checked), but sadly it feels tacked on. It was an element that needed resolving, but as her brother had spend the whole film pottering around doing sod all it was a needless one. It would have been better if he’d been off killed in the second film, rather than lingering over this one for no reason, ending the film on the victory of the trial — the actual end of the story. While I remain unconvinced about the US adaptation changing the ending of Dragon Tattoo (we’ll see how that goes), this is one modification that I think the inevitable re-adaptation of the two sequels should definitely make.

It seemed to me that Larsson’s Millennium trilogy is like so many recent film trilogies — Pirates of the Caribbean, say, or The Matrix — where a successful standalone first tale leads to an inferior two-part ‘epic’ follow-up. Despite being a relatively understated thriller, I think the ‘secret police’ conspiracy plot counts as epic in its own way, and the two sequels certainly form two parts: the first leaves most of its story unresolved, the second balances on top of the events in its predecessor. The difference is, I properly enjoyed Hornets’ Nest. I wouldn’t watch it again in isolation (unlike Dragon Tattoo, which doesn’t need its two sequels to function as a story), and perhaps it had too much going on for its own good — or perhaps I’m being too demanding of the intricacies of the investigation — but it’s a solid final episode with a lot of satisfying moments.

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest is out on DVD and Blu-ray in the UK tomorrow.

Monsters (2010)

Posted on April 8, 2011 by badblokebob

2011 #40
Gareth Edwards | 94 mins | Blu-ray | 12 / R

Six years ago… NASA discovered the possibility of alien life within our solar system.

A space probe was launched to collect samples but broke up during re-entry over Mexico.

Soon after new life forms began to appear and half the country was quarantined as an INFECTED ZONE.

Today… The Mexican & US military still struggle to contain ‘the creatures’…

So begins Monsters. Expecting an epic SF-action movie where soldiers kitted out with futuristic weaponry battle an alien menace? You might be disappointed. Indeed, the relatively low IMDb rating suggests people have been. Monsters isn’t an action movie. It’s barely a sci-fi movie. And that’s not a bad thing.

It is a science-fiction movie — it’s set in the near future (about 2017, it would seem) and there is an alien presence on our planet — but this is a science-fiction film that transcends the sci-fi genre. It’s got more in common with Lost in Translation or Before Sunrise than it does with Independence Day or Battle: Los Angeles. This probably explains its low rating on IMDb: I imagine most viewers are SF fans in search of an action/horror experience, something this film resolutely does not provide. It also doesn’t deal particularly with SF concepts, so I can see the more intellectual SF fan being disappointed too.

What it has instead is a real-world aesthetic and a human story. It’s certainly science-fiction, because it’s set in the future and the titular monsters are extraterrestrials, but the story is rooted in humanity: it’s about two twenty-somethings trying to get home and having a very grounded ‘adventure’, learning about each other and the world and all that. Only without being as worthy or on-the-nose as that makes it sound, I promise. As writer-director, Edwards has made a film that’s relatively Arty (for want of a better word), with lingering shots and wordless scenes. It tells the story visually quite often, letting the Infected Zone signposts or candlelit shrines to dead children or stunning scenery do the talking when dialogue isn’t necessary.

There’s a slight documentary aesthetic to the whole thing, and not only because Edwards (also acting as cinematographer) has shot it handheld — that’s everywhere these days and when it’s unnecessary it pisses me off, but here it fits. Rather, it’s like one of those films which don’t hide the fact the main story and characters are fictional, but has been shot in the real locations and has used real people for extras. Take, for instance, a sequence where Kaulder and Sam (our two twenty-somethings) are in the jungle spending the night with their Mexican escorts. The men talk about what it’s like to live in these conditions, prompted by questions from their American charges, and it plays for all the world like real people really living in this situation telling their stories; like the bit with the fascists in It Happened Here, say. Obviously it’s all fake — we’re not in 2017 and we don’t really have aliens roaming across Mexico (just in case you forgot) — but it plays as real, and that grounds the whole film.

The CGI is virtually faultless, which is doubly impressive as the vast majority of it is on shaky handheld shots, not nice clean plates. And Edwards created it all by himself I believe. Writer, director, cinematographer, single-handed visual effects unit — it’s no wonder much of the focus on Monsters has been on the clearly considerable skill of its creator. Much of the CGI would, I imagine, pass the casual viewer by: everyone knows the aliens are CG, but the film is littered with signposts and other such set and scenery extensions. It’s the kind of thing a bigger budgeted film would simply have created physically, but, working with next-to-no money, Edwards has managed to paint flawless versions of everything from simple road signs up to border checkpoints with his computer (and even bigger things, but they’d be CG’d in a big-budget movie too, so… well, hopefully you see my point). There’s the odd thing that doesn’t sit with complete realism, but even that depends how hard you’re looking. I’d say they’re the exception rather than the rule and very easy to forgive — nothing ruins its own shot, never mind the whole film.

The next paragraph is spoilersome. Not wholly spoilersome — I’m protecting you from yourself a bit, gentle reader — but if you want to go in knowing nothing of the ending, please skip it.

The ending of Monsters is at the beginning. Normally this irritates the hell out of me, as regular readers may have noticed, but Edwards uses the trope to a slightly different effect. For starters, the line is blurred: the film starts with green night-vision footage of a military strike on a creature, before jumping into full-colour ‘the film proper’ with a scene of devastation and the dead remains of an alien — it’s easy to think what we saw in the night-vision sequence has led to this. But it hasn’t, because the military were Americans and we’re in Mexico. I’d wager this passes some viewers by, and perhaps it’s meant to, but there’s another clue: one of the soldiers whistling the Ride of the Valkyries; and when we get to the end of the film, as a pair of humvees trundle out to retrieve our heroes (by this point stranded in an evacuation zone just inside the US border), we hear the same soldier whistling again. And here’s where the change comes: rather than reaching the bit we’ve already seen and going beyond it, Edwards cuts off before he even reaches it. To put it another way, the chronological end of events is only at the beginning. It’s quite clever, and it also obscures what happens to the characters (how I shan’t say). That’ll irritate some, especially as even when you piece it back together it’s inconclusive. I’ll leave it to others to argue whether that’s the point and whether it matters. The final shot is clever though: instead of closing on the characters’ finally kissing, it ends on them being pulled apart. Technically their separation is only temporary — they’re both going with the military after all — but, as we saw at the beginning, one of them might not survive the journey home; a more permanent pulling apart. Nice metaphorical linking, Edwards.

Another review I read somewhere commented that it’s a shame the title Aliens was already taken because it would suit this film down to the ground. And they’re right. Damn you, James Cameron! It has to be said, as simple and iconic as “Monsters” is, it doesn’t really describe the film. Perhaps if this was like Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, with every human a bastard out for themselves — “are the aliens the monsters or is it us? gasp!” and all that kind of fairly obvious palaver — it would fit, but Edwards’ film is a bit above that and perhaps deserves a more reflective title. It might also have led to less people being misled — it’s certainly not the kind of film I thought it was going to be when I first heard about it and saw the first trailers. Perhaps the title belonged to an earlier concept of the film, one with less heart; or perhaps there are human monsters in the film after all — the US presence, for instance, is entirely militaristic; we see even less of it than the creatures and it’s arguably more brutal and devastating, and therefore more monstrous and/or alien.

But the issue of the title and expectations are an aside, really, because taken on its own terms — as all films should be — Monsters is a triumph. The word visionary is overused in trailers these days (mainly, Zack Snyder trailers), but with filmmakers like Edwards, Duncan Jones* and Niell Blomkamp** emerging with their low-budget, story/concept-driven genre films, not to mention Chris Nolan being allowed to do more or less what he likes in the big budget sphere, it’s easy to see why this is a very exciting time to be a lover of proper science-fiction. If they all continue to make films like this, we can look forward to an astounding future.

Monsters is out on DVD and Blu-ray next Monday in the UK. The US Blu-ray is region free, has more extras, and is barely more expensive even with international shipping. Just sayin’.

Monsters placed 6th on my list of The Ten Best Films I Saw For the First Time in 2011, which can be read in full here.

* not that I’ve seen Moon, still. ^
** or District 9. I’m a bad bad fanboy. ^

Cloak and Dagger (1946)

Posted on April 6, 2011 by badblokebob

2011 #27
Fritz Lang | 106 mins | TV | PG

A World War II espionage thriller about the OSS — spies, basically, and the forerunner to the CIA. Despite all the thrills this should elicit, especially when directed by Fritz Lang, I wasn’t particularly impressed.

The film has its moments. A fight between star Gary Cooper and a Nazi security chap towards the end is quite good — rather brutal, scrappy and realistic for the period — and the final shoot out is effective too, even if it precedes a bluntly curtailed ending. I don’t know if Lang’s preferred (but rejected by the studio), longer original ending would be any better, but it might not feel so abrupt. There’s also some nice details of how the OSS operated, feeling quite realistic and grounded in truth. This is probably the benefit of being based on a non-fiction book.

A needless love story slows down the middle, however. Nothing wrong with a love story, but this one’s a bit dull. Aside from that and the few flashes of goodness, the rest was a bit pedestrian and lacklustre; certainly not up to the other Langs I’ve seen from his time in Hollywood.

Cloak and Dagger featured on my list of The Five Worst Films I Saw in 2011, which can be read in full here.

Monkey Business (1952)

Posted on April 5, 2011 by badblokebob

2011 #15
Howard Hawks | 93 mins | TV | U

Monkey Business came recommended in the Radio Times as a forgotten gem from the ’50s. Hm. And on DVD it’s branded as a Marilyn Monroe film. Hm.

Let’s take the second first: Monroe has a small supporting role. That’s fine, but it makes for some mighty misleading DVD packaging. Luckily that wasn’t why I watched the film. Why I watched the film was the first thing, the Radio Times recommendation. I’m not an expert on ’50s comedies, but I wasn’t convinced this was a “forgotten gem” so much as a decent-enough effort. Comedy-wise it’s daft and silly. That can work, obviously, but it didn’t work successfully enough in this instance, at least for my taste. It’s funny in places but not consistent enough.

It isn’t helped by the non-existent story arc. The plot sees a married couple accidentally take a youth serum the husband has been developing, causing them to inexplicably start acting younger — much younger. But in terms of the story, we see a happily married couple wind up happily married having been through no real strain. Maybe if they’d been having some differences and their childhood regressions had reminded them how much they really love each other or something, then it would’ve felt a bit more worthwhile. Or if the regressions had forced them apart — in a real way, rather than the brief and vague way it does once or twice — only for them to come back together via whatever means, maybe then it would have felt more coherent. Instead, the story consists of “Cary Grant behaves like a college boy” followed by “Ginger Rogers behaves like a stroppy newlywed” followed by “Cary Grant and Ginger Rogers behave like 6-year-olds”.

There are good moments nonetheless — particularly the very meta opening titles — but not enough for my liking. It could do with a bit more speed too — compared to something like His Girl Friday it’s positively sluggish. Though I suppose it’s unfair to try comparing the average to the exceptional.

Monkey Business featured on my list of The Five Worst Films I Saw in 2011, which can be read in full here.

The Girl Who Played with Fire (2009)

Posted on April 4, 2011 by badblokebob

aka Flickan som lekte med elden

2011 #39
Daniel Alfredson | 130 mins | Blu-ray | 15 / R

Creating any kind of sequel is hard — the endless array of failed attempts is testament to that — but I think creating a direct sequel to a successful crime thriller may be the hardest.

With action movies or superheroes or what have you, the same formula can be rehashed; it’s better if the concept or story is pushed forward, of course, but as most movies in those genres have the same plot regardless of the hero, it stands to reason the sequels can survive it too. With a straight drama you can continue the lives of the characters, throw some new, plausible (preferably), dramatic hurdle in their path and show how it affects their lives. But with a crime thriller…

Almost by definition a good portion of your cast are wiped out: if you didn’t kill them for the sake of a twist, they’re gone because they were tied to the first case. Drag every survivor back at your peril: their mystery’s been solved, and the chance of them all being involved in a new one is too improbable to consider. So you’re left with only the one or two or three investigators, and they need a brand new case to become embroiled in. And it’s got to be as good as the last one, but it can’t be the same because we’ve had that mystery solved. You could have a different solution, of course; you could change some of the details, naturally; but police dramas on TV vary their types of murders every week for a reason. So in your new tale, the new characters have to be just as interesting as the first batch, the new mystery has to be just as intriguing too, and it really ought to be a notably different crime being investigated.

Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy has an advantage here: with Lisbeth Salander as a break-out character, you can take a certain degree of the drama tactic and just throw something new in her path. Plus there’s the only story thread left hanging from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the handful of hints at Lisbeth’s past, to feed off as well. On the other hand, there’s the problem of having sent Salander off to a new rich life at the end of the first book/film. Not only do you have to get her back, you have to re-team her with the investigative driving force of the first tale, journalist Mikael Blomkvist. Unlike a cop and his partner, say, these two have no shorthand way they would have to be reunited. There are other ways — the fact they had developed some kind of sex-based intimacy for starters — though for goodness knows what reason that’s ignored here in favour of some plot-engineered improbabilities of fate.

One solution to the sequel problem is to “make it personal”, and that’s exactly what we get in The Girl Who Played with Fire. A journalist and his girlfriend working for Mikael are murdered and Lisbeth is suspected of the crime. It’s somewhere around here that the coincidences begin to pile up. It makes perfect sense as a plot in itself, but in bringing Mikael and Lisbeth back together it doesn’t work — it’s not related to their previous encounter, so it’s entirely coincidental. Coincidence is a dangerous thing in fiction; it asks your audience to accept something that doesn’t fit our logic of how stories work. It happens all the time in real life of course, but in real life a flipped coin with a 50/50 chance of being heads or tails could turn up heads twenty times in a row, but a person asked to estimate twenty results of a flipped coin will never put more than two or three of one side in a row (unless they know to subvert it… look, this isn’t the point).

That said, if you want to be kind (and why not?), time has passed since they last met — it’s not as if Mikael ran into Lisbeth while pursuing his very next article. (We’ll overlook that the time passed is the nice round period of a year.)

What about the case itself, then? Sadly it’s not as engrossing or unique as the one in Dragon Tattoo. It seems based in sex trafficking, but that’s just window dressing: it’s never seriously looked into and, consequently, other dramas have tackled the issue with greater depth, sensitivity and insight. What Mikael and Lisbeth are actually looking into is a conspiracy of sorts around some murders. The way the trail is followed isn’t as clever as it was in Dragon Tattoo and, consequently, isn’t as interesting. The two protagonists go about their investigations independently. This is a long-held technique in novel writing — multiple strands allows the author to alternate which is followed from chapter to chapter, almost by itself providing momentum and the must-keep-reading factor as the reader has to race through the next chapter to rejoin the thread of the previous one (it’s not that simple or we’d all be churning them out… but look, I’m getting off the point again). The problem here is that Dragon Tattoo was largely at its best when the two were together, so keeping them apart is less satisfying. To top that off, they’re each finding out different things, which means as the audience we can feel a few steps ahead of the characters as we have the benefit of both sides of the case. That’s not always a bad thing, but it can be slightly disconcerting when you know the answers your hero is still searching for.

Despite Lisbeth being the focus of much of the attention laden on these books/films/remakes, she’s a less engaging character when by herself. Here she shuffles around silently, digging up files that she and we stare at to reveal information. There are only a few moments for her (and, consequently, Noomi Rapace) to show off what endeared her to viewers before — her confrontation with a pair of arson-bent bikers, for instance.

Revelations at the end of the second act give things a kick up the rear, both for the characters and the plot, but it still has an undue reliance on coincidence, varying degrees of improbability, and the middling conspiracy plotting. This felt underscored by a henchman who’s essentially a Bond villain. In fact, as a white-blond (half-)German who feels no pain, he’s a specific Bond henchman (see: Tomorrow Never Dies).

The ending isn’t close to being conclusive. The mysteries where this particular tale began are solved, but numerous questions thrown up along the way are only just beginning to be answered. Whereas Dragon Tattoo works perfectly as a standalone thriller, even though it hinted at elements of Lisbeth’s backstory, this builds on them and leaves plenty hanging. In this respect it seems to be very much Part Two of a series (I’d say “trilogy”, but considering Larsson had (depending on which report you believe) five to ten books planned, that seems inherently inaccurate).

It also feels less filmic than the first film. Is it poor direction? Is it just the opened-up 1.78:1 ratio? I’ve read that all three films were shot like this, as they were intended for Swedish TV, meaning Dragon Tattoo’s Blu-ray is cropped to 2.35:1. You hardly ever see 2.35:1 on TV (Red Riding is the only made-for-TV example I can think of; most channels even crop films) so it automatically lends a filmic aspect, and therefore might explain the discrepancy. Conversely, I’ve also read that Dragon Tattoo was produced as a cinema film then later the two sequels were shot to serve as episodes three to six of a TV miniseries (with Tattoo extended using deleted scenes to make the first two episodes). Perhaps that explains it.

That’s besides the point anyway, because it’s not the direction or cinematography that lets The Girl Who Played with Fire down in comparison to its predecessor. In summary: the case isn’t as unique or enthralling, and by splitting up the protagonists we don’t get the full benefit of either. It’s not a bad tale, it’s just not a patch on the first.

This time next week, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest. Hopefully.

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Monthly Archives: April 2011