Red Sparrow (2018)

Bolshoi ballerina Dominika Egorova (Jennifer Lawrence) is hurt in an on stage accident that will later turn out not to have been an accident at all. In any case, she will not be able to dance again on her old level, leaving her and her sick mother without much of an income or even a place to stay, for even their apartment belongs to the ballet company. Fortunately or unfortunately, Dominika’s uncle Vanya (Matthias Schoenaerts) is deeply involved in the world of espionage and is perfectly willing to provide his niece with a way in, especially after he has provided her with information concerning the truth about her accident and is probably quite satisfied with the talent for violence she then demonstrates.

Eventually, Dominika lands in a school for sexspionage (headmistress: Charlotte Rampling) where she shows talent as well as a rather unwanted spine. Thanks to her uncle, and one General Korchoi (Jeremy Irons), she soon is set upon her first case/victim. There’s a highly placed mole somewhere in the Russian secret services, and Dominika is supposed to seduce the mole’s handler Nate Nash (Joel Edgerton) to find out their identity. Dominika for her part might have plans, perhaps even feelings, all of her own.

Francis Lawrence’s spy novel adaptation Red Sparrow is an at times rather impressive watch, yet it it is also full of niggling little problems. The most obvious faux pas right from the start is the filmmaker’s decision to have all the Russian characters – none of whom is actually being played by a Russian actor, pretty much the only nationality where that sort of thing is still allowed without people on the Internet shouting angrily – speak with mild, fake Russian accents, because clearly, all Russians talk in accented English with each other, right? It’s definitely the sort of decision that already starts the film up feeling highly artificial. The movie’s problematic idea of Russia is further increased by its portrayal of the little it shows of the country’s culture as exclusively inhabited by rapists and human monsters. The film’s portrayal of the political side of things seems to have little to do with actual Russian nationalism and the way it works today and much more with a US-style nightmare vision of their old enemy turned new enemy but actually staying completely the same. Which would bother me much less if the US secret services at least were played a little less like a goody-goody bunch who apparently don’t do horrible things on a daily basis. Edgerton’s Nash is such a nice, careful, pleasant and loveable guy it is impossible to buy him as a spy, for whatever country.

And still, I had a lot of fun watching this thing, once I had adjusted my perspective on it towards it being a really high budget exploitation film of the kind nobody makes anymore (and really, that was seldom made at all even in the past). It’s a surprisingly unpleasant film for what at its core is a mainstream spy movie, full of torture, sexual violence, threats of sexual violence, and a lot of random nasty stuff put in just to make the film feel extra gritty. There is, for example, no reason at all to give our heroine’s uncle the incestuous hots for her apart from making him even less pleasant than he already is; it’s like adding kicking dogs as an additional vice to Hitler. The thing is, director Lawrence turns out to be a great big budget exploitation director, so all these scenes of suffering, vice, and men not named Edgerton behaving toxically, only to be punished by our heroine in one way or the other, are unpleasant to watch in just the right way to be entertaining, and not just only in the “did that big Hollywood production honestly just do that?” kind of way. The film has a melodramatic, operatic drive to it, really digging into the core of making movies you enjoy to cringe at. And like with a lot of good exploitation fare, you can perfectly well argue the whole she-bang is actually a feminist film about a tough woman with an untouchable moral core beating all the asshole men in her life with their own vices.

It helps that Lawrence the actress seems – as usual – in absolute control of her abilities, not attempting to portray Dominika as a normal person but the sort of heightened, iconic near-mythological being that exists in this sort of plot. It’s an honestly great job at point-exact overacting through a lot of grim facial expressions, never laying it on too thick, but always exactly as thick as the film needs. Her counterpart Edgerton – usually a fine actor - is surprisingly colourless, but then, what’s a guy to do when a script doesn’t give him any actual personality beside being as morally upright as a knight? The rest of the cast does traditionally fine character actor work (sadly, Irons isn’t there to do more than look thin, pale and sad), so it is difficult not to enjoy the film at least on this level.


But then, I’ve never pretended to dislike exploitation films, so I’m certainly not going to start complaining when I see one made by talented people who have been provided with a lot of money for excellent outfits and only the best locations and sets.

In short: Mother! (2017)

While I sometimes think I’ve seen basically everything in a movie, and can find my way around any of them, there still is the possibility to encounter a movie that takes me by surprise and may even confuse me quite a bit. So how about Darren Aronofsky’s somewhat divisive Mother!?

This may or may not be a religious allegory (which may or may not be saying that the creator godhood is an asshole sucking the blood and love of women –perhaps standing in for humanity - while giving them nothing in return but an illusion of love and a baby he’s going to take away again), a film about that horrifying conceptual entity known as The Artist (which may or may not be saying that The Artist is an asshole sucking the blood and love of women while giving them nothing in return but an illusion of love and a baby he’s going to take away again), or a couple of other things. Insert your own favourite theory here, really - you’ll probably find more than enough ambiguous moments in the film to hang it on.

It most probably is a male-driven feminist work, curiously because Aronofsky’s camera can’t seem to glance away from Jennifer Lawrence – whose performance dominates the picture not without good reason – for more than a moment, than despite of it, clearly wanting to say something about the way women and society in public and in private relate.

In the beginning stages, this aspect also turns Mother! into something of a social horror film with a couple of scenes that reminded me of the books of Ramsey Campbell in their dread of skewed social situations; later it becomes a (probably metaphorically) apocalyptic one. It’s not a film made with a horror audience in mind, though. At least marketing-wise, Mother! really wants to be sold to a mainstream audience, though it certainly isn’t the audience that would get much out of it.


Be that as it may, this is clearly the work of a director who is perfectly alright with presenting his film to an audience not being willing to follow where he goes, one misunderstanding him, or one just getting out of a film whatever the hell they want. Even if this approach doesn’t work for a viewer – and for once, I wouldn’t even blame anyone for calling a film pretentious - one should at least appreciate the incredible visual power of Aronofsky’s filmmaking, as well as the fearlessness to make a film like this and pretend it’s totally going to be the sort of thing a mainstream audience is going to want to watch without complaining afterwards.

Three Films Make A Post: Y9u never kn9w when y9ur number is up

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013): The second film in the trilogy continues what was pretty great about the first film and builds on it well and with style. Sure, we’re still in blockbuster land, so subtlety lives elsewhere, but we are in a district of that particular country where an audience is assumed to not be made up out of idiots that need to be talked down to, and where the astonishing amounts of money involved are actually put to good use. Which is quite the thing in an area of filmmaking where compromise and assumption of idiocy all too often are the name of the game.

And, you know, the film also goes to show that genre movies with female leads where the guys are getting the usual plot position of The Girl sell perfectly great to audiences if they are good, but then I assume that’s not going to be a surprise to anyone not working in big media.

Cold Eyes (2013): Like a magic trick, Jo Eui-seok’s and Kim Byeong-seo’s apolitical surveillance thriller and superior remake of Hong Kong movie Eye in the Sky doesn’t impress by anything you could analyse about it because it’s really not at all about depth but about the wonders lying on the surface of things. Like any good action film, it’s a film where bodies and movement express everything it has to say.

In this regard, Cold Eyes is practically flawless, with no detours to detract an audience from the film’s core, and really nothing to get in the way of film as a physical experience. It’s as much of a dance as a particularly great martial arts movie, and as with particularly great martial arts movies, criticizing its lack of depth means getting wrong what it’s actually about.

Alien Lockdown (2004): A bunch of doomed uniformed people scampers through the usual dark corridors fighting a monster that just happens to look a lot like a crap version of the one from Alien. Nothing of interest or of note happens but this might be more effective against troubles falling asleep than counting sheep, so there’s that to say for the film (if we have to call it one). Plus, it’s not horrible so much as painfully dull, though I’m not at all sure if that’s a positive or a negative.

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Three Films Make A Post: A HORROR HORDE OF CRAWL-AND-CRUSH GIANTS CLAWING OUT OF THE EARTH FROM MILE-DEEP CATACOMBS!

The Hunger Games (2012): As someone who hasn't read the book (YA in general is not meant for me, what with me being older than time and liking writers who use complex language), I don't have an opinion on the quality of Gary Ross's film as an adaptation of it. But I do recognize a confidently clever piece of dystopian SF when I see it, appreciate a film that's tighter directed than it seems to be on first look (seldom has blockbuster Hollywood been less showy while using the untold millions in its budget for production design good), and respect how script and film transform everyday experiences of its main target audience into action and drama on screen without having to betray that element for the SF, nor the SF for that element. Add to that another great (and appropriately physical) performance by Jennifer Lawrence and you'll see me all aflutter about a film.

The Survivor (1981): The IMDB (not the most trustworthy of sources, of course) says there exists a twenty minutes longer version of David Hemmings's film, which - if true - may just be the version that makes good on all the film's promises, as made by the often moody direction and a very good cast including Robert Powell, Jenny Agutter, and a ridiculously unnecessary Joseph Cotten. Unfortunately, the version I've seen is just terribly undercooked with no characterization to speak of and a plot that seems too fragmentary for words; it really does feel as if all the connecting tissue of the story were missing, with characters appearing and disappearing from the plot at random, and no sense of progression. That sort of thing can work if a film is so weird the lack of normal narrative connectivity actually feels more fitting, but in The Survivor's case, it just leaves a hole where the film's core should be.

Paprika (2006): Generally, I'm not as excited about the body of work of anime director/writer Satoshi Kon as many of my peers are. The high aesthetic and technical standards of the man's films are of course out of the question. However, I've always felt uncomfortable with the way the Kon uses pop culture to express his loathing of popular culture, even more so with the cloying nostalgia for a stagnant past that seems to underlie most of his films, even if the result is as difficult to resist as anime giallo Perfect Blue. Basically, Kon put his incredible talent in service of a conservatism that makes it impossible for me to get too excited about his films. Ironically and sadly, Kon's final finished movie sees the director changing his tune. Here, the film's designated bad guy is sprouting exactly the sort of ideology usually underlying the director's films; here, the possibility of change and a humanism in Kon's earlier works have become core values. This change of mind is packed into a SF story in techno thriller mode about the manipulation of dreams, the mutability of identity and dream-images as striking as one could wish for, always hinting at a richness and depth the Kon is actually willing and able to provide.

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In short: X-Men: First Class (2011)

After the insults to my beloved X-Men that were Brett Rattner's third X-Men "film" and whatever that Wolverine abomination was supposed to be, I had a hard time giving anything this particular studio would do with one of my favourite universes in pop culture the benefit of the doubt, and dithered about seeing this prequel pretty long and hard.

So it did come as a bit of a surprise to myself that I loved pretty much everything about First Class (with its particularly bland version of Emma Frost as the major exception, but Bryan Singer's X-Men films had a particularly bland Storm, and were still pretty darn great), even the self-conscious winking in the direction of its predecessors and the comics, and John Dykstra's sometimes surprisingly weak special effects.

What makes me a very happy X-Men fanboy about the film is that Matthew Vaughn and/or the script actually got what - at least Chris Claremont's X-Men - are all about (hint for Brett Rattner: it's not being shit), and kept the many changes he made to the film's characters and relations well inside the emotional and ideological parameters of the comics.

I was particularly delighted by Michael Fassbender's Magneto, who is allowed all the complexity, bad-assery and fragility he had at the height of Claremont's run on the comic. Vaughn plays fair with Magneto's and Xavier's respective positions, too, which adds an actual moral tension below the comic book ones.

Of course, there might be a bit too much blockbuster characterization shorthand as shown in the somewhat broad way the film treats most of the rest of its characters for some viewers, and some of the film's big speeches might sound a bit mechanical to the same people, but I found myself experiencing these elements of the film as tonally appropriately close to the comics I still love and pretty entertainingly old-fashioned in a mainstream cinema world where one-liners rule.

For me, First Class is a movie fun and dumb and clever and playful enough to nearly make up for what Fox did to the Phoenix Saga, the sort of film that made me run, not walk to my Essential X-Men books (who can afford colour reprints or singles?), smiling happily.

 

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Three Films Make A Post: TODAY- The Pond! TOMORROW - The World!

Los Marcados (1971): A Ranchero that is heavily influenced by styles and theme of the Spaghetti Western, so expect lots of close-ups of the faces of ugly and sweaty people, more implied and more than implied nastiness than you can shake a stick at and peculiar uses for the camera's zoom objective. Plus some fascinating weirdness, latent homophobia, and heavy, melodramatic sighing into the camera.

Alas, the film's narrative style is so confused and unclear that it's pretty impossible to understand why people are sighing into the camera, and how they relate to the other people in the film. I'm somewhat impressed that director Alberto Mariscal makes what is basically a simple revenge plot this difficult to understand, I just wish he'd put the energy he uses for that attempt into quickening the improbably slow pace of a story in which not much is happening anyway. I suspect if a viewer can get into the film's groove, she might find something psychedelically relevant here. I couldn't.

Space Battleship Yamato (2010): It'll come as a surprise to nobody that, provided with a large budget and a horribly cliché-ridden script based on a much-loved yet horrible old anime show, the Japanese film industry will crap out the same sort of nonsense most high budget US movies try to torture their audiences with. So expect a bit of pew-pew, much bathos, a tear-jerking soundtrack, and a script that barely bothers to cohere because it prefers to spend most of his time to regurgitate ye olde clichés of military porn. Though it's pretty obvious that someone in charge of the production has seen at least a few episodes of Ronald Moore's Battlestar Galactica, it's just as obvious that said someone wasn't willing or able to actually apply any of the lessons he could have learned there to the movie at hand.

I could cope with the film's complete lack of ambition and applied intelligence better if the film were at least somewhat charming, but where other stupid movies might carry a sense of wonder or some visual imagination around, Yamato only has the vacuum of space.

Winter's Bone (2010): Thanks to Debra Granik's Winter's Bone, I don't have to end this on a bitter note, because what could have been a particularly arrogant and cynical piece of Oscar-baiting poverty porn is anything but. Granik does not look down on her characters, and she doesn't judge them or the world they live in in a simple way.

Most of the film's strengths lie in Granik's ability to give her story a quiet and unassuming intensity built out of the acting's unhurried subtlety and a visual style that finds beauty and clarity in compositions that seem much more spontaneous and natural than they actually are; there's an art in achieving an emotional effect by underplaying how much work you've put into achieving it, and Granik seems quite an expert at it. That her film is a perfect counterpoint to the self-important "I am big, deep art" gestures and kitsch-philosophical depth of stuff like The Fountain and Tree of Life does make Granik's approach to filmmaking like a holiday in a land where artists from time to time look away from their mirrors, too.

 

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