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.

In short: Molly’s Game (2017)

Failed freestyle ski Olympic skier Molly Bloom (Jessica Chastain) finds her true profession when she first helps a vile Hollywood producer run a high-stakes poker game just this side of being illegal gambling, and then turns it into her own. Apparently, the FBI has some problems with this sort of thing, particular when organized crime sits at the table.

The directorial debut of – much beloved though not necessarily by me – screenwriter Aaron Sorkin is an interesting example of the dangers of basing your film not just on “a true story” but on an actual memoir about said “true story”. So if that memoir/”true story” has an incredibly obnoxious Frank Capra ending, your film is going to get one too, even if it tonally doesn’t fit what came before at all. Though, to be fair, I can’t imagine many films this particular ending would fit with.

Other problems are that Jessica Chastain’s Molly Bloom is just a bit too perfect, too nice for what she’s actually doing and a bit too likeable for the film ever to sell her tale as anything but a cinematic fairy-tale about a woman who is done wrong despite her being super-awesome. Even when she steals the producer’s game she’s in the right, the way the film tells it. I could have gone without the Freudian bullshit between her and her psychoanalyst Dad (Kevin Costner!), and the film’s dubious general ideas about psychology too.

There’s quite a bit to like here, though. More often than not, Sorkin does a pretty decent visual Scorsese – circa Goodfellas – imitation. The film’s certainly not boring to look at, and keeps moving along at a merry pace, despite a two hour plus running time.

The dialogue is fun and clever - if, in typical Sorkin style, bereft of any concept of different people having different patterns of speech - while the cast doesn’t just include the always excellent Chastain (who by the way off-screen-monologues with the best of ‘em) and Costner in a good mood, but also Idris Elba (getting some quality expressive shouting time in), Michael Cera (finding his inner creep), and a horde of other good people doing good work.


All this adds up to a film that’s neither as good in the mildly horrifying “quality cinema” kind of way it is clearly aiming for, nor actually saying terribly much about the state of America as it seems to think it does, but that is certainly worth spending an evening with, even if it is only to enjoy the actors strutting their stuff and looking at the pretty pictures.

In short: Crimson Peak (2015)

Fair warning: this isn’t a horror film but a gothic romance with ghosts so if you can’t cope with films not precisely being horror films please do not watch Crimson Peak and then complain about it not being a horror film or it not containing enough jump scares.

Yes, I’ve seen some pretty damn irritating reviews of this one, how’d you know, imaginary reader?

Anyway, I can absolutely understand why someone might not like house favourite Guillermo del Toro’s gothic romance: it’s highly artificial, its melodrama is turned up to eleven, and it belongs to a sub-genre that generally has a horrible reputation at least among horror fans – if a viewer dislikes Gothic romance on general principle, she certainly won’t be happy with Crimson Peak. I, on the other hand, eat that sort of thing up, at least when it is done as well as here, shot and designed with a sumptuous eye for the gothic detail, the metaphoric value of colours, buildings and ghosts, and a clear idea of the way that metaphoric value and the reality these elements need to take on in a film (or a novel, of course) intersect and speak to one another.

Not surprisingly, the film’s beautiful to look at, drenched in colour in the spirit of Hammer, Bava and Argento (who didn’t do gothic romance, of course, but who built what most of us think of as “gothic” in cinema nonetheless), and blessed with set design that’d be worth the price of admission alone. Lead actors Mia Wasikowska, Jessica Chastain and Tom Hiddleston find just the right tone too (which I can’t imagine to have been particularly easy), all three reaching the sweet spot between high melodrama, artificiality and conscious acting without ever falling in the trap of becoming caricatures.

This being a del Toro joint, there’s also a subtle play with certain gothic romance tropes turning some generic elements around a little, and poking mild fun at others without getting out the club of ironic distance. For distance is what the film – del Toro’s films as a whole, I’d argue – has no interest in. This is cinema seen as a sensual thing, luxuriating in artificiality until it feels so real it hurts, making every emotion, every place so huge it becomes more real than reality. In a sense, that’s of course a classic Hollywood approach, and while I certainly don’t want every movie I watch to be this way, when it is done as well as it is in Crimson Peak I’m happy with the approach.

In short: The Martian (2015)

Well, at least it’s better than Gravity. But seriously, I basically have the same troubles with this film I had with Andy Weir’s book, namely that it’s such a typical example of that kind of absurdly optimistic SF that’s convinced every problem can be solved in a technical manner if one only applies enough elbow grease. And while I certainly prefer that to The Cold Equations style bullshit, this approach does ignore the fact that sometimes, you’re fucked even if you do not do anything wrong, that there’s situations you can’t escape from. One might even argue this sort of tale suggests if someone doesn’t survive a catastrophe, it’s their own fault because they weren’t plucky American enough. And people wonder why I’m sceptical about optimism as a concept. Though, when I compare this to the brilliant but also less elbow-greasy Interstellar, it’s not the optimism as such but The Martian’s inability to sell it, perhaps because of trouble number two.

For trouble number two is the incredible blandness of Matt Damon’s main character, a man whose emotional reaction to being possibly doomed to die on Mars is to shrug, quip, and go on to the business of applying elbow grease and science to grow some potatoes. As book and film portray him (though you could argue the book’s even worse), Damon’s Watney has no character traits, no psychology, and really nothing and nobody about Earth he seems to miss in a way that actually hurts, which makes it rather difficult to care about his survival – if the set-up and tone of the whole affair didn’t make it clear from minute one that he’s going to survive in any case, so there’s no reason to get excited about him from that perspective either.

If you can ignore that, The Martian’s not a bad huge SF disaster movie, with a cast ridiculously overqualified for the little the script gives them to work with, shiny special effects. Pretty much what you’d expect from a flick made by Ridley Scott in his by now nearly two decades old incarnation as a director who does little but add a glossy professional sheen to every project he’s involved in, his days of giving his films actual personality long gone. As Scott, his The Martian is big time Hollywood professionalism, for better or worse.

In short: Interstellar (2014)

Not to sound like the head of the Christopher Nolan Appreciation Society (again), but then, if the guy continues to direct films I really rather massively appreciate, I hardly have a choice, or do I?

Anyway, a few notes on all the things I loved about this particular example for the fact you can indeed make a high budget mainstream Hollywood SF movie that is neither desperately stupid nor full of dishonest bathos (*cough* Gravity *cough*). Not that Interstellar is afraid of writing its feelings big; it does however put a lot of effort into coming by them the honest way, which is to say, by actually building the characters and themes these emotions spring from with great care, and consequently to great effect.

For my tastes, Interstellar is one among a rather small number of earnest-minded big SF movies that also manage to get the balance right between visionary aspirations, a sober view of the way the universe works, and a deeply human(ist) yearning for humanity to be or become more than just mere cogs in a mechanist system. And although this sort of thing of course always threatens to dissolve into an aspirational speech on how great humanity is because it is capable of love (this is after all a film that posits love as a transcendent force as real and built into the universe itself as gravity), the film doesn’t forget that its humanity also is a highly destructive force, at best straining to follow those impulses that transcend the evolutionary struggle for survival. It’s just not all there is; and – even though I’m philosophically a wee bit more pessimistic about humanity as such or love’s grand place in the universe outside the human heart – I really prefer this to the Cold Equations we use as an excuse not to become any better than we are.

That the film is as convincing as it is does of course also have a lot to do with some excellent and nuanced performances, with Jessica Chastain’s grown-up Murph and Matthew McConaughey’s Cooper being able to carry the film’s more problematic scenes through their difficulties. It’s also difficult to praise Nolan’s direction too much, I think. The organic way the plot’s emphasis shifts from Cooper’s plotline to Murph’s, mirroring the film’s thoughts about the connection between the big Out There and the Down Here, using the parallels between their parts of the plot until they unite again in the best way possible. It’s all excellent stuff.

And of course, it’s pretty needless to even mention the quality of the effects, or Hans Zimmer’s score, and so on, because in these more technical aspects, mainstream Hollywood is always dependable. Yet even in the times of the intelligent superhero movie, it’s still not quite often enough that these technical powers stand in service of a film actually worth the effort and the huge amounts of money thrown at it as to not mention this at all.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,sf,christopher nolan,matthew mcconaughey,jessica chastain,anne hathaway,michael caine

Three Films Make A Post: They Live the Sweet Life But They Play a Game of Sudden Death!

Antiviral (2012): Brandon Cronenberg's Weird SF horror piece surely is a very accomplished film, walking the line between strangeness, repulsion and attraction with great care. My problem with the film is how little there is to differentiate it from a mid-period piece of the director's father David; Antiviral may have a personality, but it seems to be the one of David, not Brandon Cronenberg. It's a rather confusing state of affairs when the son makes movies that are more like his father's films than those his father now makes, and I'm not completely sure what to think about that.

Mama (2013): I would have loved to love Andrés Muschietti's feature film enlargement of his own short film as produced by the always welcome and enthusiastic Guillermo del Toro. The film's basic plot idea is certainly intriguing, and the acting's certainly fine (particularly from Jessica Chastain and the child actors), however, the film doesn't really have any idea how to develop that basic idea into an interesting story. My, it's as if someone was trying to turn a short film into a feature without actually having enough substance to work with. Worse, Mama stumbles badly when a horror movie can least afford to stumble, in the horror set-pieces. Those scenes turn out entirely predictable, and even manage to be barely creepy at all, centring as they are on what never looks like anything but a bad special effect.

Dark Skies (2013): Speaking of horror films with fine performances by their female leads (in this case Keri Russell who seems to get a minor second career wind playing brittle yet capable women) that are completely let down by their supposedly horrifying scenes, Scott Stewart's Dark Skies comes to mind, though, given that Stewart directed Priest and Legion, an uninvolving piece of mediocrity like this is still a step up in quality for him. Dark Skies does Mama one better (or rather worse) in that its horror scenes aren't only not creepy, frightening, horrifying or exciting but more than once merrily jump over the line separating the creepy from the unintentionally hilarious.

The rest is an alien abduction movie by numbers, with a little (but only a little) added spice in form of the economically obvious "oh no! the working rich stop being rich when they lose their jobs" dance working class people may feel an impulse to sneer at, but demonstrating little imagination otherwise.

Technorati-Markierungen: canadian movies,american movies,in short,sf,horror,brandon cronenberg,andrés muschietti,scott stewart,jessica chastain,keri russell