In short: Crooked House (2017)

On paper, Gilles Paquet-Brenner’s Agatha Christie adaptation of one of her more interesting books even for a Christie-sceptic like myself should be right up my alley. It does, after all consist of pretty yet excellent actors like Max Irons, Stefanie Martini, Glenn Close and Christina Hendricks broadly strutting their stuff in front of sets so stylized to be of the 50s your eyeballs might melt and you might just feel they have nothing at all to do with the actual feel of the era the director looks at here. It also features show-off camera tricks that’d make young Brian De Palma blush or (gasp) request moderation. But in practice, I had little joy with the thing, for this isn’t a case of style as substance but a film akin to watching a director you’re really not terribly into masturbate to his own image for two hours straight. There’s little emotional or thematic point to anything going on here, apart from the usual suggestion that the rich are vile, pretty, and spend all their time getting their outfits in photogenic shapes. Instead of having much at all to say, the film is just a parade of loud but empty gestures that never add up to much, and while it is pretty to look at, it’s the prettiness of a particularly empty head. While there’s a surfeit at excellent actors on screen, there’s only so much anyone can do when asked to inhabit an empty shell.

The mystery is probably well-constructed (though the “shocking twist” is neither well realized by the film nor terribly shocking for anyone who has seen a horror movie or three), but at about half of the film’s running time, I found myself encountering a very typical feeling when it comes to me and traditional manor house mysteries: the realization that I not only didn’t care which of these high-strung arseholes killed their arsehole pater familias, but was hoping for the rest of them to be killed off too right quick (spoilers: not much joy there). Which probably isn’t the kind of emotional involvement the thing is going for, but a boy must distract himself somehow when a film’s aesthetics are quite this pointlessly tacky, and there’s no intellectual stimulation to be had by it either.


So this turns out to be pretty much the film I unfairly expected Brannagh’s Murder on the Orient Express to be.

In short: Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (2016)

I’ve never shared the growing annoyance of certain parts of the critical classes with the way Tim Burton’s personal obsessions took over his films, despite some moments in his later films where even I wanted to grab the guy by his shoulders and tell him to just calm the fuck down for scene or two.

But if you’ve suffered from that particular illness worse than I did, it might just be worth it to return to Burton for this one. Turns out replacing Johnny Depp with house favourites Eva Green and/or Samuel L. Jackson has calmed Burton down enough to put a bit more effort into shaping the film into an actual narrative instead of a series of moments of whacky strangeness. The book this is based on and Jane Goldman’s script might have helped there, too.

There are of course still a lot of Burton’s visual trademarks on display, his patented eye for the lightly macabre, and so on and so forth. But even here, the director seems to attempt to get out of his standard approach, using actual locations beside the still excellently artificial sets, and managing to fuse the expected Tim Burton-ness with the demands of the family adventure world he is operating in.

All this adds up to a film I’d have a hard time finding reasons to dislike: the cast – including young (but not as young as their characters) leads Asa Butterfield and Ella Purnell and a horde of well-loved faces – is in fine form, the plot is fun for the whole family (unless one’s family is really boring, obviously), the film’s very nice to look at, and there’s nary a scene that doesn’t contain at least one charming, imaginative detail.

Three Films Make A Post: All they had was a skill for violence and nothing to lose but their lives!

The Stranger (2014): This Chilean film concerns s a very interesting variation on the right now second-most overused horror monster, and, if nothing else, proves you can do something worthwhile with it still; at least if you’re the film’s director Guillermo Amoedo. Amoedo not only manages to do something interesting and at least half-way original with his monster but also finds a place where the naturalistic portrayal of pretty shitty lives and a dream-like mood aren’t mutually exclusive approaches.

The fact that the film, mostly cast with Chilean actors speaking their English with more or less obvious accents, takes place in what seems to be supposed to be a US small town (I think), actually furthers the weird mood of proceedings for my tastes, locating the film not in a place as in the idea of a place. However, it is, like The Stranger’s somewhat peculiar pacing, certainly a point that’ll annoy some viewers to no end.

The House of Hanging aka Byoinzaka no kubikukuri no ie (1979): Kon Ichikawa is one of the big Japanese directors outside the pure arthouse realm I often find myself having the most trouble with. It’s not that I don’t think some of his film’s are masterpieces, but he seems – at least for my tastes – to have rather more films like this adaptation of one of the adventures of private detective Kosuke Kindaichi (in this case embodied by Koji Ishizaka) than I’d like. Films that fluctuate in tone so heavily and so (in)consistently – in this case between stuffy comedy and handwringing melodrama – it becomes difficult to ascertain what tone the director is actually going for; films where for every brilliantly and complex staged scene there’s another one bland, boring and lifeless, and a further one where Ichikawa just seems to be showing off; films where contrasts neither rub productively against one another nor seem to have another reason to be there.

In House of Hanging’s case, these problems are exacerbated by one typical flaw of late 70s biggish prestige productions from Japan, needless length that makes a film feel rather bloated and slow, particularly one which really could have been improved mightily by having various scenes of “comically” inept cops removed, and various plot strands tightened.

Mystery on Monster Island aka Misterio en la isla de los monstruos (1981): I don’t loathe Juan Piquer Simón’s family adventure movie quite as much as parts of the Net do, but then, that’s because I’m trying very hard to ignore the odious comic relief taking up half of the film, the idiotic twist ending (which actually is Jules Verne’s fault as author of the novel the film adapts), the plodding pacing, the expected (because nobody in his right mind will expect a production like this to actually afford many shooting days from these gentlemen) underuse of Peter Cushing and Terence Stamp, the film’s dubious racial politics, on account of this being a rather naive children’s film I did indeed enjoy when I was a kid.

For us grown-ups, even for those of us used to “bad” movies, the whole thing just might be pretty unpalatable, but then, it isn’t actually meant for us.

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Ultramarines (2010)

Grim future. Only war. Etc. and so on. An Imperial shrine world is sending an automated distress call; all further contact with the full company of space marines stationed there to protect a holy relic is lost.

As this is the Warhammer 40K universe whose military organization is utterly atrocious whenever a plot demands it, there's not much of a military force close-by to answer the distress signal weeks later. Only a rookie squad (with an experienced captain and a war-weary apothecary) of Ultramarines is near enough to be of any assistance. After holding some "WE ARE SPACE MARINES! RWOAR!" speeches, of course.

When the group lands on the planet, they soon enough find traces of a massacre committed by chaos forces. The logical course of action here is obviously for the twelve marines to somehow try and reach the location of the distress beacon, in the hope that twelve marines will survive what just slaughtered a hundred of their brethren. For the Emperor, etc. I'm sure it'll end with a perfectly low body count and without anyone encountering a very stupid plan to corrupt the whole Ultramarines chapter.

When I first heard of Ultramarines, the first official Warhammer 40,0000 movie, I wasn't exactly hopeful about it, especially seeing that it's fully computer-animated, a type of animation that only promises catastrophe when put in the hands of a company like Games Workshop that can be pretty sure fans will lap up everything it puts out regardless of quality. A bit of hope developed with the information that Ultramarines would at least be written by Dan Abnett, whose work-for-hire novels in the franchise often are real highpoints of their special little niche.

And indeed, apart from the hideously contrived set-up, and the rather stupid evil plan (which is to say, the whole of the film's plot) Abnett's script is the best part of the movie. Don't take that as high praise, though. Abnett's writing here is quite unexciting and completely unoriginal, front-loaded with every "For the Emperor!" style phrase the Warhammer universe provides, and contains nothing of the writer's trademark ambiguity. At least it's vaguely competent and constructed with professional knowledge of dramatic beats.

The voice acting is pretty alright, too, although I'm not sure if the movie wouldn't have fared better cast with experienced - yet still cheaper - voice actors instead of people like Terence Stamp, John Hurt and Sean Pertwee, whose acting chops just aren't needed for what's in the script (nothing). Though I have to admit it's pretty funny to hear Hurt say the "grim future" wall of text.

The producers could have used the money saved on the stars and put it into the place where it's desperately needed - the animation. As it stands, Ultramarines' animation is a complete embarrassment, falling far behind even the standards set by the CGI cut-scenes of the first Dawn of War videogame (made in 2004, ages ago in this area). I really hope you like to watch jerkily animated characters with putty faces from the uncanny valley jumping (is there grasshopper DNA in Space Marines, by any chance?) and moonwalking through grey and brown low-detail backgrounds, because that's all Ultramarines' animation department is prepared to deliver. On the design side, the whole affair reeks of cheapskating too - everything that isn't a space marine looks as if it were scrapped together in just about five minutes by a trainee. All in all, the animation doesn't look like an actual finished movie should look, but rather like an early draft for one.

Martyn Pick's direction fits this cheap and/or lazy approach perfectly. There's no sense of visual imagination, nothing that doesn't look like mere performance of a contractual obligation on screen. Of course, given how shoddy the animation itself is, I'm not sure what even the best of directors could have made out of it. This is after all a film so cost-conscious that most of its action sequences take place in the dark or during sandstorms so that there's no need for detailed backgrounds in them. Not that there are many detailed backgrounds outside of the action scenes, either. Well, at least there are lots of shots of bullet casings falling in slow-motion.

And why should there be any actual creative effort put into the movie, as long as there's a big "Warhammer 40,000" on the DVD cover? Surely, fans don't deserve quality.

 

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