Three Films Make A Post: Practice Doesn’t Always Make Perfect

Piercing (2018): Visually heavily influenced by the classic giallo (even the one sheet has the appropriate colour), Nicolas Pesce’s film, is placed somewhere between horror, general weirdness, and a very dark comedy about the ways people navigate their darkest desires. The whole thing is classed up by having Mia Wasikowska and Christopher Abbott going through all the stylized and ambiguous motions they are supposed to go through with the proper amount of suggested darkness and mystery. As an exercise in tone and style, the film is highly successful, evoking the mental states of its characters through sound and vision; I’m just not sure it really succeeds at doing as much with this as it could, not really seeming to go anywhere.

Ella Enchanted (2004): With a script that involves the talented hands of Karen McCullah and Kirsten Smith (who can make teen comedies do really clever and charming stuff and make it look it easy) I was expecting a bit more from this mock fairy-tale version of Cinderella about a young woman (Anne Hathaway) cursed/gifted with the inability to refuse an order, living in a fairy-tale land that does it damndest to evoke The Princess Bride (they even hired Cary Elwes) but is much too beholden to randomness and genericness to get there. But then, there are three other writers listed too, so it’s anyone’s guess how much of what made its way on screen is their fault. Tommy O’Haver’s direction is competent but also corporately bland in a way that is not a good fit for any comedy, and most of the film just barely gets by on Hathaway’s charm. The feminist subtext isn’t terribly involved, and too many of the film’s clever ideas aren’t actually.

Holy Smoke (1999): This comedy/psychodrama directed by Jane Campion, in which Harvey Keitel plays a charming asshole deprogrammer hired to brainwash Kate Winslet’s character back from her love for an Indian guru is usually treated as one of the director’s weaker films, and it is relatively easy to see why, even though a weaker Campion film is still better than anything various male big name critical darlings deliver on their best days (cough, Woody Allen, cough).

But there is a reason why comedy and Campion-style psychodrama are not usually genres that are combined - they don’t really come together well at all, and the film has quite a few moments when the comedic parts and the deep, tour-de-force character exploration (wonderfully portrayed by Winslet and Keitel) seem to belong to completely different worlds, or into completely different movies. This problem is certainly exacerbated by how awkward quite a bit of the film’s humour is.


And still, even though it is sometimes a struggle to get through the funny bits, Campion’s willingness to let ambiguities and complicated contradictions in and between characters stand and explore these spaces between them while keeping the social and all that comes with it in mind is so admirable, her ability to let certain things stand unresolved because they are not truly resolvable is so great that I’m rather okay to have to fight with the film a bit.

Three Films Make A Post: Past Passion. Past Terror. Past Murder.

A Little Trip to Heaven (2005): At first, Baltasar Kormákur’s deeply Icelandic (for a film set in the US, at least) movie seems to be a bit of a Fargo-alike, but the longer it runs, the more it becomes clear this has somewhat different sensibilities. It is a bit less concerned with futility than the Coen Brothers film, and even allows Forest Whitaker’s character to take a half successful redemptive action and end up in a curious sort of heaven as his reward. That’s despite the film being just as clear about the darkness in the hearts of men, particularly those who think they are much brighter than they actually are. It just seems to have a bit more compassion with its characters than the Coens sometimes show.

Apart from Whitaker (who is always great even if he flaunts as dubious an accent as he does here), the film also contains fine work by Julia Stiles and a particularly good performance by Jeremy Renner.

Out of Thin Air (2017): Staying in Iceland (though this is a British film), this documentary by Dylan Howitt about two suspected murders in the country and the people the police apparently tortured into believing to have committed them, without any physical evidence (like corpses) whatsoever coming up, seems to me an exemplary piece of true crime filmmaking that tells its tale calmly, not feeling the need to construct or spout outrage because the facts of what happened, and what the audience can suspect happened really don’t need to be made more dramatic than they actually were. It’s not as if the film pretends to have no position on the case, mind you, it is just intelligent enough to assume it doesn’t have to speechify at its audience about its thoughts.

There’s also a quiet, philosophical undercurrent to the endeavour, suggesting a construction of selfhood through human memory that’s all too fragile, leaving self and truth as things always in doubt.

Jane Eyre (2011): Give me the Brontë sisters and their sense of the Gothic and the dramatic over Jane Austen’s ever so ironic tales of the marriage market any day. So it’s no surprise that I enjoyed Cary Joji Fukunaga’s version of Charlotte’s Jane Eyre quite a bit, particular as it is based on a Moira Buffini script that uses the proto-feminist elements of the novel in excellent ways, drawing Jane as a woman not quite fitting into her time because she as a matter of course takes the promises of humanist philosophy as belonging to her as a woman too. And all that with dialogue often very close to the book. I wish the film had done something about the madwoman in the attic, but honestly, I wouldn’t know how to go about that without rewriting half of the book either.

Fukunaga’s direction makes excellent use of bleak but exciting (to me, at least) landscape, period interiors that are claustrophobic or pretty depending on what’s appropriate, never trying to pop the film up too much nor letting get things too BBC stuffy.


Mia Wasikowska – whom I’ve still have to see in anything amounting to a weak performance – is expectedly wonderful, fully realizing the fragilities, the immense strength, the mix of wisdom won through pain and the naivety of the not terribly worldly Jane. Michael Fassbender is fine, too, though the film does focus quite a bit more on Jane – and rightly so.

Three Films Make A Post: You are what they eat.

The Visit (2015): What fresh hell is this? As a rule I’m not generally getting terribly worked up over really shoddy films or undeservedly famous directors anymore (and if I do, I usually hold my peace), but after having suffered through this piece of deeply reactionary, plain stupid and generally not even funny (particularly not when it is trying to be) tripe that was clearly written by an extraterrestrial who has never met an actual human being (and certainly not a mentally ill one) in its life, I cannot help but ask myself the question: how is it possible that this thing’s “writer”/director M. Night Shyamalan is still getting regular work while guys like John Carpenter can’t scratch together enough money to make films, and many women and men with actual talent have to jump through all the worst hoops Hollywood has to offer?

Last Embrace (1979): But now to something completely different, namely Jonathan Demme’s big Hitchcock homage made in the phase of his career before Silence of the Lambs made him a big mainstream director; or as I call it “the brilliant phase”. Roy Scheider plays a spy who has just been released from a psychiatric hospital where he tried to recover from a complete breakdown he suffered through the death of his wife. But something’s not at all right with his world: is he getting paranoid or are his own people trying to get rid of him? And what about the series of murders he stumbles upon? Scheider was always particularly good at portraying a specific kind of 70s macho maleness with cracks, so he’s ideal casting for the role. Demme being Demme, every single character here is cast perfectly, of course. And this being a Hitchcock homage, Demme twists his general ability to suggest that every side character in his films has a full storyline of her or his own outside of the film to suggest that everyone has a dirty secret and nobody is who he says he is; otherwise, the film goes through the handbook of Hitchcock themes and techniques with verve, a degree of irony and wit.


Tracks (2013): I am rather fond of films about relatively solitary characters moving through a landscape while not terribly much plot or action happens, so I am rather predisposed to like John Curran’s film about Robyn Davidson’s (here portrayed by the typically brilliant Mia Wasikowska) trek through the West Australian outback and desert with some camels and her dog. But then, Curran’s film doesn’t make appreciating it terribly difficult. There’s not just Wasikowska’s ability to carry the movie, but also the beauty of the landscape (brilliantly photographed by Mandy Walker) and an idea of nature that never devolves into kitsch, as well as Curran’s way to anchor the film in its time and place. Now, you might argue that the film’s psychological side – adding the usual stuff about dead fathers to the book - is a bit too simple and on the nose but watching Tracks, I found myself thinking of it rather more as stripped down to the basics in a way that befits this trek through the desert.

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.

Alice in Wonderland (2010)

The original Alice of Wonderland fame has grown into a pale young woman (Mia Wasikowska) with not much to look forward to in life. Her beloved father is dead and her mother is trying to sell her off into a marriage with the most boring man on the planet. Alice doesn't remember much about her initial adventures in Wonderland anymore, and what she does remember, she takes (rather understandably) to have been a fever dream.

Nonetheless Akuce prefers to run after a white rabbit in a livery on her surprise elopement party (that is, a party where Alice is to be surprised by the fact that she is supposed to say "yes" to a marriage proposal from the least fitting husband for her) instead of falling into the arms of her future would-be husband. It turns out to be a sound decision that leads her back into Wonderland, or Underland, as the place is really called.

Things aren't well in the girl's home away from home. The rather rude Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter) and the rather dim, but at least not fixated on beheadings White Queen (Anne Hathaway) are at war - more or less. Worse, the Red Queen has won - more or less - and rules the place with, well, a tendency for violence and nonsense, so really, it's not much different from the old state of affairs. Be that as it may, the White Queen and her rebels need a champion to slay the Red Queen's champion, the Jabberwocky with the Vorpal Sword. And wouldn't you know it? Alice is the prophesied champion of all that is good and relatively sane. She only needs to find the sword, flirt with the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp), find her inner strength (yes, it's one of those films) and slay the Jabberwocky.

I'm pretty sure that the things the young woman will learn in Wonderland will help her cope with her problems in the real world later on (it really is one of those films).

Ah, it is good to know that Tim Burton is still able to finagle large sums of money out of boring old corporations like Disney to finance an go-round through his usual visual obsessions. Most viewers will certainly know the typical Burton look by now, and will probably have realized that there is not much of that silly old substance stuff under all the gnarly trees and acid-influenced designs.

I can't say I have a problem with that. Fortunately, some of my visual interests are quite compatible with Burton's, and there's something joyful about the man's absolute aesthetic single-mindedness. He knows what he likes to look at (gnarly trees, Helena Bonham Carter, pale young women, weird floaty stuff, crooked things and candy colours), and by god!, he will throw these elements on screen again and again (and really, the reason why his Planet of the Apes is his worst film is that the original film and Burtonland just don't have anything in common), whether people shout "We have seen this all before!" or not. That's perfectly fine by me, although I can understand that it isn't everyone's cup of tea.

Burton's cinema is always one meant for the eyes and not for the intellect, and that is not something bound to make a director everyone's favourite, especially when he is as unapologetic about it as Burton is. Burton never tries to hide behind "social importance" or other stuff that wins one Academy Awards in his films and treats plot as something to ignore.

Alice does have a little message, of course, but, because Burton doesn't put as much importance in it as a different director would do, it doesn't ruin the film's pleasures at all. There's also the fact, that I find it difficult to argue with a moral that goes something like "a young woman should live the life she wants to live and not the one others want her to, even if what she wants is a little strange".

What I can and do argue with is Burton's weird idea to send his heroine to exploit China in the end, as if that's any sort of Happy End. I'm pretty sure though that this is Burton being naive and not Burton being malevolent. Compared to the dreadful morals Disney other films still tend to have, this is still quite a success.

 

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