Three Films Make A Post: The old flesh is dead, long live the new!

Darklands (1996): What starts out as if it could become a considerably interesting piece of post-industrial folk horror (the sub-sub genre still waiting on its day) becomes less and less so the longer it goes on, the film wasting some promising ideas on occult conspiracy by the numbers plotting. On paper highly interesting elements like the connection between a “back to our Celtic roots” right-wing politician and a revived druid cult are wasted on barely competent suspense scenes; the filmmakers clearly didn’t do any research on actual pagan practices and most certainly couldn’t come up with anything exciting on their own. The conspiracy plot only manages to remind one of films who are much better at this sort of thing. There’s really little there apart from the initial promise, this being the first Welsh horror movie or not.

Project Power (2020): On one hand, I really think superhero cinema could use more of Henry Joost’s and Ariel Schulman’s focus on POC characters, and featuring among others a plot line that’s explicitly about empowering a young, poor, black teenager is a fine thing to have in this sort of thing. But the film’s not terribly good at integrating these aspirations into its more typical superpowered business, the action movie parts never feeling actually informed by the rest of the film. It doesn’t help that the film is one of those films that believe replacing superhero tropes with action movie tropes somehow makes its view of the world more realistic, when in fact, it’s just blowing up its body count.

Generally, the film has a bit of a meandering quality, its plot lines taking too long to come together (and I would argue that excising Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s character completely would have cost the film nothing but an actor working below his abilities), and the big dramatic beats never quite having the heft the film seems to think they do.

Visually, the Netflix production is a bit of a middling affair where ugly colour schemes meet competent but often slightly bland action.

Ava (2020): Also perfectly watchable but not exactly great (or even good) is Tate Taylor’s tale of a killer for a weird organization with the least believable procedure finding herself in the crosshairs of her own people while also trying to solve some family business I could care less about. The cast – with Jessica Chastain, John Malkovich, Geena Davis, Common and Colin Farrell among others – is great, but the script loves to go through the most generic plot beats available at any given time, leaving these poor people to pretend the way that organization does business (from its boss doing business at his home next to his playing children to the bizarre assassination plans) makes any kind of sense even for an action movie or allude to not terribly interesting backstories.


All of this would be perfectly forgivable if the action were actually impressive, or the family drama all that riveting, but the former is competent (with action-inexperienced Chastain sometimes struggling to go into the action heroine poses) at best, the latter simply not very interesting.

Mile 22 (2018)

Usually, I relegate movies that piss me off quite as much as this thing to my Saturday “Three Films Make A Post” segment but sometimes a boy does have to express his anger and pain in more than a hundred words. Really, calling this a movie goes a bit far, and is a bit of an insult to those people making movies in their grandma’s backyards and could probably use the 35 to 60 Million US Dollars this was apparently budgeted at to make a thousand films that at least show some enthusiasm for the art of filmmaking; and who certainly have more talent than the crew of highly paid professionals under “director” (I use this term loosely) Peter Berg demonstrate here.

Now, if you’ve seen any of the other films Berg made with Marky Mark in the lead, you’ll probably expect the reactionary spirit far beyond the average of the not exactly progressive action movie genre (and as you know, I love me some action movies even if they have their heart on the wrong side), as well as the inability of Wahlberg to act his way out of a wet paper back, his macho alpha male posturing mostly emphasising how ridiculous the guy is in these roles; the casual racism is going to be a given too, I suppose.

But Berg (and whoever else is responsible for the decisions made during and after production) doesn’t stop there this time around. The dialogue (“script” – and I use the term even more loosely then “director” - by Lea Carpenter) is a painful mess that’s made slightly more bearable by a sound mix that seems as embarrassed by this shit as everyone else involved also should have been and buries about half of the dialogue under noise and crappy music. The action direction lets the Michael Bays and Tony Scotts of this world look like beacons of clarity, Berg apparently going out of his way to shoot the action sequences by pointing away from the action as often as possible. This becomes particularly egregious during the martial arts fights of poor, misused Iko Uwais (who also happens to be the only one in the movie bothering with some acting; Marky Mark can’t, John Malkovich won’t), scenes that suggest to me that Berg would really hate for the audience to see or actually enjoy any of this crap. For reasons only known to the filmmakers, our “hero” spends much of his time insulting everyone he meets, be it co-workers, strangers or random passersby, making the guy unsympathetic even in a genre whose heroes are borderline psychopaths anyway. The film’s also suffering from the delusion that gritty (you can bet everybody involved just loves that descriptor, plus the good old “edgy”) dialogue means having Marky Mark use the word fuck at least ten times in every scene. In reality, this just makes the character we spend most of the film with even more of an asshole, and a childish one to boot.

Tonally, this pretends not to be a proper action movie at all, but more the kind of think-peace-style semi-political semi-action thing like Sicario or Zero Dark Thirty (both films I have problems with, too, but rather more upmarket ones having to do with their meaning and storytelling and not a lack of even the most basic filmmaking skills). That nobody involved has the brains or the talent to actually make that sort of film nearly goes without saying; turns out there’s more to this filmmaking stuff than pointing a camera away from the action. Though that bit, Berg has down pat.


I could go on berating Mile 22 for another six-hundred words or so, but by now, my imaginary readers will have gotten the gist and can supply their own insults towards its “storytelling” and “plotting”.

In short: Bird Box (2018)

To nobody’s surprise, it’s the end of the world again. This time around, some apparently rather terrifying things are racing around the world driving most people who see them to suicide. We will later learn that they also drive a small number of people into hunting down the people who somehow have avoided looking at them. Because being down on the mentally ill is always okay (he said, his voice dripping with sarcasm), the film also suggests it is people with mental illnesses thusly susceptible.

We learn all this via flashbacks while following a woman named Malorie (Sandra Bullock) and two little kids apparently named Boy (Julian Edwards) and Girl (Vivien Lyra Blair) on a blindfolded voyage down a river towards what may or may not be our usual post-apocalyptic sanctuary. So when we don’t have dramatic boating adventures, we witness how the usual rag-tag bunch of survivors (including Trevante Rhodes, John Malkovich, Sarah Paulson and Jacki Weaver) get slowly whittled down to the trio we are flashbacking from.

Turns out, Netflix can make this sort of “serious” Hollywood genre fare as well as the major studios, ending up with a film so riskless and obvious, yet technically very competent, it would have been the lone Oscar nominated movie a couple of years ago, before the Academy realized you might as well nominate good and interesting films beside those trying to be “worthy”. One of the best things among many wonderful things about Black Panther is that it’s not a film designed for Academy nods.

Don’t let my somewhat disgusted tone steer you wrong: director Susanne Bier’s post-apocalyptic horror film is in all regards perfectly decent or better, and absolutely worth a watch. She’s certainly a very competent filmmaker, and I’d love to see something by her with a more ambitious script. What we get instead is Eric Heisserer using the perfectly wonderful and weird basic idea of the apocalypse from Josh Malerman’s novel for a post-apocalypse by numbers film, with characters only more lively than stock because the cast is really rather good (even Bullock does great work, especially for a woman who can’t move half of her face anymore), and so full of aggressive attempts to make its audience feel feelings I found myself less moved the more the film went out of its way to touch me.

That last aspect of the film is not at all improved by the its treatment of Bullock’s character arc. Not terribly great parenting has apparently caused her to be so emotionally distanced she can’t even (gasp!) look forward to having a child; fortunately, the apocalypse comes along and teaches her the value of motherhood and not giving your children names like “Boy” and “Girl”. The ending’s pretty ridiculous too, with a pat little happy end that fits not at all into what we’ve seen before. Does she name the children when she arrives in Happyland? You betcha! The Babadook, this certainly isn’t.


But honestly, Bird Box is a perfectly watchable, extremely well made film, with a couple of fine suspense sequences, it’s just annoying me righteously with all its gesturing towards a supposed depth it doesn’t actually have.

Three Films Make A Post: They faced death......and found life.

The ABC Murders (2018): Or as I like to call it “Poirot: The Grimdark Years”, seeing as this BBC mini-series directed by Alex Gabassi and written by Sarah Phelps goes down the road of all bad grimdark stuff of presenting a worldview and view of people so bleak it becomes more than just faintly ridiculous. In this film’s world, everyone is horrible 24/7, then murdered by a horrid person who in turn is hunted by a past his prime Poirot (John Malkovich doing his best with a crap script) haunted by the shadows of an of course sordid past. Thing is, once your portrayal of humankind becomes as one-note negative as the one presented here, an actual complex and complicated human being watching it does tend to lose the emotional connection to the oh so dark caricatures grimly making their way through one’s field of view. There is, needless to say, quite a bit of scowling involved, as well as the expected scenes of the killer (Eamon Farren) throwing “creepy” poses for the camera.

Need I mention that the main colours in the production are poison green and piss yellow as if this were exactly the low rent copy of a David Fincher production it indeed is?

The Dead Room (2018): As a matter of fact, this half-an-hour ghost story for Christmas written and directed by Mark Gatiss, is just as dark as that Poirot thing. Here, though, it’s a darkness that comes from an actual exploration of character and guilt of the piece’s lead character, radio horror narrator Aubrey Judd (wonderfully performed by Simon Callow). Where The ABC Murders only knows how to strike poses, this one derives its strength and its darkness from an understanding of human complexity rather than from turning humans into caricatures that only know how to be shitty.

Because Gatiss must have been in a hell of a form when he did this, the short film also deftly creates a sense of place and of time having passed, all the while demonstrating – as expected – the writer/director’s love for the classic British ghost story. Quite an achievement for half an hour of television.


Christopher Robin (2018): Despite today’s complaints against a particular style of grimdarkness, I am still a bit too cynical to enjoy the particular style of all ages personal improvement feelgood cinema of most films like Marc Forster’s Christopher Robin. However, in this particular case, I found myself rather spell-bound by the whole affair. In part, it’s certainly an effect of the nostalgia towards Winnie the Pooh et al, but there’s also the fact that the film is quite serious about its portrayal of a very specific post-war malaise that sees Christopher Robin (a fine turn by Ewan McGregor) losing himself in the surrounding greyness of 50s England (despite being married to the most certainly not grey Hayley Atwell). Also bound to win my heart is the portrayal of Christopher’s former friends around Pooh as childlike and gently, yet utterly weird living plush toys. Well, expect for Tigger, who is hilariously deranged and not at all gentle. Really, the only thing that isn’t enjoyable about this one is that it doesn’t solve the problem of alienation in a capitalist society it posits and instead has McGregor inventing paid leave, but I may be asking just a tiny bit much.

Some Thoughts About Der amerikanische Freund (1977) & Ripley’s Game (2002)

Even if you ignore the twenty-five years of change in the technical aspects of filmmaking and the world around it, it does come as a bit of a surprise how different these two adaptations of Patricia Highsmith’s novel - the older directed by Wim Wenders, the newer by Liliana Cavani – are. Even though both films hew very close to some of the main plot beats, there’s a world of difference in sensibility between them. As a dear friend of mine remarked when I tried to explain the difference between the films, it’s a lot like a piece of classical music realized by (very) different conductors.

The choice of very different lead actors and two very different approaches to the character of Tom Ripley seem to me symptomatic for the difference between the two films: where John Malkovich in the Cavani film hews closer to Highsmith’s text and is a cultured sociopath whose main relation to neurotypical humanity seems to me a curiosity about how people who are very much not like him function internally, Dennis Hopper’s Ripley is a guy in cowboy hat who understands high art probably as well as the Malkovich character does but seems to find actual enjoyment in those things Malkovich-Ripley will probably sniff at as low-brow, and who seems not as precisely drawn as is his 2002 counterpart. There’s a blurriness around Hopper-Ripley’s edges, a wavering between a kind of melancholy that would be alien to Malkovich’s Ripley and the ability for ruthless action they both share. As its Ripley, so are the films: Wenders’s movie feels much more leisurely, much more interested in exploring the inner life of Bruno Ganz’s Jonathan Zimmermann (his version of Dougray Scott’s character in the Cavani film) but also arguing that you can’t understand anyone’s inner life in a precise way. Meandering and circling and walking in a direction that might very well be the wrong one (but one won’t know until one has tried) is more Wenders’s style.


Cavani’s film, on the other hand, seems to me to be all about precision and hard edges, to always know where it is going and why in the clearest manner. Malkovich’s portrayal of Ripley is of a fastidious and neat man who always gives at least the illusion of control, so Cavani’s treatment of the plot needs to and does feel much tighter and leaner than Wenders’s approach. One would be tempted to call her film more conventional, but that does sound rather patronizing to a film that is as strong as this one, and that is as much about finding beauty in the strangest of places, moments and people as it is about its thriller plot. Perhaps the difference is that one of these films was made by a woman who is nearly seventy and has seen and experienced a lot more and the other one by a comparatively young man who still had a lot to catch up on when he made it.

In short: Shadow of the Vampire (2000)

Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau (John Malkovich) is filming Nosferatu, his great, unofficial adaptation of Bram Stoker’s “Dracula”. Unbeknownst to anyone but Murnau, the man playing the vampire Orloff, Max Schreck (Willem Dafoe), is in fact an actual vampire playing an actor playing a vampire. Murnau has bought his cooperation by promising him his lead actress Greta Schröder (Catherine McCormack) once the shoot is over, perhaps with the thought to betray him.

Though once the vampire starts to become impatient and sets teeth to some of the crew, it becomes quickly clear that the director is willing to – quite literally - sacrifice anyone on the altar of his art, apart from himself, of course.

That latter bit is one of the things E. Elias Merhige’s strange (in all the good ways) horror film, drama, dark comedy Shadow of the Vampire understands much better than most films concerned with questions of art and sacrifice: how it’s very often others who pay his price, while the artist takes on the pose of suffering. Consequently, Merhige’s view on artistic production seems cynical bordering on the outright bitter, Dafoe’s Schreck embodying all kinds of emotional horrors, among them the worst sides of certain artist types that, like the film’s Murnau, would commit every atrocity as long as they can excuse it with their art, in classic horror film style externalizing internal horrors.

At the same time as Shadow of the Vampire is an appropriately horrific look at the dark aspects of the artistic impulse with a vampire as a metaphor, it is also a horror movie whose vampire is quite real, an often visually darkly poetic film, and also a comedy with a wickedly dark sense of humour.

All three of these aspects are embodied in Dafoe’s fantastic portrayal of a thing so ancient it has forgotten what it means to be human, a monster grotesque, pathetic, and dangerous all at the same time.

How Merhige manages to keep all these different aspects of his film in check without them tearing apart Shadow of the Vampire while dragging it in all directions, I’m honestly not sure. A pact with the devil, perhaps? In any case, he does, and leaves us with a film so rich I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed trying to make sense about it.

Three Films Make One Very Sleepy Guy: There's No Waking Up From The SLEEP OF THE DEAD!

Ölümsüzler (1971): This Western is not exactly a shining example of the virtues of Turkish pop cinema. Though there are certainly some things to recommend it - among them Erol Tas, yes Dr. Seytan himself, mugging charmingly as the main bad guy - there's an atypical dragginess to the film's pace, and a painful fascination with scenes of people riding, riding and then riding some more while needle-dropped music you just might know from somewhat more effective Westerns plays that make it difficult to enjoy the film.

 

Red (2010): Action comedy very freely based on the graphic novel by Warren Ellis (who was able to buy his daughter a pony from the money he got out of this, so there's at least that to say for the film) and Cully Hamner. It's all highly paid actors of the good sort, silly action and flat jokes all the time, presented with exactly the type of Hollywood slickness that makes my feet fall asleep. It's quite an inoffensive film in that it is perfectly watchable, but also a terrible waste of talent and theme (what happens to men and women of violence when they get old?), seemingly too cautious or just too damn disinterested to make something out of its budget (you know, an amount several dozen indie films with ambitions could be made from). It's mainstream cinema at its most riskless, and neither as fun nor as funny as it pretends to be.

 

Dead Clowns (2003): Of course, having none of that big time Hollywood money does not necessarily save a film from being a bore. As it turns out, in the wrong hands, even zombie clowns can get frightfully boring. Ölümsüzler might drag through the sheer power of its riding scenes, but that's still better than being like Dead Clowns and dragging through the sheer power of various actors and "actors" holding incredibly tedious monologues until they are killed off by clowns. A plot that might just be enough for a twenty minute short film gets blown up to ninety horrible minutes, contemporary scream queens (= actresses who are probably great people, but haven't been in anything worth watching in their lives) appear and die or do exposition and die, there's no editor in sight, and why am I feeling so sleepy all of a sudden?

 

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