Nobody Knows Anything

No cinema visits this week. I do intend to get back to the cinema, perhaps sometime in June, I’m thinking, at the moment. In the meantime, I’m going to celebrate the death and crucifixion of Jesus by watching movies full of gore, slugs, zombies and a not-very-friendly teenage girl. Praise the Lord!

Slither (2006)

A monster movie like they used to make them back in the 1980s, only done with exactly the right tone and not a hint of camp. It’s taken me an awful long time to work my way around to this one, but it was worth the wait. It’s so cheerily disgusting, I was mildly diverted by wondering why this hadn’t been handed an 18 certificate. James Gunn did such a nice job of directing his own script that I was moved to check out one of his earlier screenplays, the infamous remake of…

Dawn of the Dead (2004)

John Skipp and Craig Spector were two horror writers who teamed up in the 1980s to produce a number of novels that for the most part weren’t published in this country. They formed part of the so-called Splatterpunk movement, horror’s version of the cyberpunk wave that brought us William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, among others. One of the projects Skipp and Spector collaborated on was an anthology set in the world of George A Romero’s zombie trilogy called Book of the Dead. (Since this is horror, there was also a sequel called Still Dead: Book of the Dead 2.) This remake attracted a certain amount of heat from internet-based horror purists still wounded by the appalling length of time it seemed to have taken Anchor Bay to release their definitive 4-disc DVD of Romero’s 1978 original. But after seeing the 2004 version, I’ve always thought of it as another entry in the Romero universe along the lines of those contributions to Skipp and Spector’s anthology. This is just what happened in another mall in another state, “fast” zombies and all. And aside from all of that stuff, Zack Snyder is a really interesting director, and he makes a lot of excellent choices of staging and point of view and camera angle, all of which would be then pushed to the next level in his follow-up film, 300 (2007). I don’t envy Snyder the task of producing a film of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen (1987), but if anybody’s got half a chance of producing something decent from the War and Peace of comics, then he is the man.

Hard Candy (2005)

Only in the making of documentary did I learn that the director David Slade is an alumnus of RSA, the advertising agency run by Ridley and Tony Scott. Some of the filmmaking techniques looked very familiar, and no wonder. But this wasn’t showy technique for technique’s sake, it was all at the service of character and story. These kinds of films, where you’re basically filming a play (though this was an original screenplay) with only two characters, live and die not only through the performances of the actors, which are awfully good, but how they are made. It’s always refreshing to come across a film like this with a hard edge and an uncompromising attitude, that deliberately puts the viewer in a moral quandary between two indefensible positions and leaves it up to them to see where their allegiances lie.

No cinema visits this week.

Mission: Impossible III (2006)

Americans, eh? There was a time when summer blockbusters were R-rated extravaganzas like Total Recall (1990) and nobody really gave two hoots that the principal audience for these films were teenage boys, who shouldn’t technically have been able to see the films unaccompanied by an adult, but who quite clearly did anyway. Then a number of bodies in the States, some of them archly-conservative Christian organisations like Focus on the Family, started issuing press releases and making noises in Washington about what they regarded as the appalling practice of marketing R-rated movies to kids. And once it became apparent that lawyers and lawsuits might be involved, there was a certain amount of backing off on the part of the studios and we find ourselves in the current era where an enormous majority of mainstream releases are deliberately tailored to be PG-13 rated in the States and 12 rated here in the UK. Amusingly, nothing has really changed in the content of the films. I enjoyed The Bourne Ultimatum (2007) as much as everyone else, but I also did think the film seemed to be awfully violent for a 12 rated movie, and wouldn’t a 15 certificate actually have been more appropriate? And so it is with the third of Tom Cruise’s appearances as Ethan Hunt: in a lot of ways this is just another blockbuster extravaganza from the 1990s, it’s just as violent as those films used to be, except without the swearing. This ludicrous cultural crisis has its origins in the introduction of the R-rating in 1968, with its proviso that a child may see a R-rated movie only when accompanied by an adult. The result in reality of this was that 10 year old kids and younger could see Basic Instinct (1992) if their parents wanted them to, or they could find anyone who looked adult enough to get them into the theatre. Whereas if the R-rating had been the equivalent of our current 18 certificate in the first place, a lot of the censorial nonsense and hypocrisy of the last 40 years simply wouldn’t have happened.

Caligula (1979)

For the record, this was the unrated version of the film with all of Bob Guccione’s hardcore inserts intact. The comparison with I, Claudius (1976) is particularly instructive, I believe, since what Caligula so noticeably lacks is a point of view. Jack Pulman’s brilliant adaptation of elements of the two Robert Graves historical novels I, Claudius and Claudius the God (both 1934) puts Claudius centre stage as narrator and observer of the extraordinary upheavals, scandals, violence, sex and murders that characterised the ruling family of the Roman Empire of the time. Tinto Brass’ film has Claudius played by the Italian equivalent of Christoper Biggins, and he has no part to play in the wider narrative, although the murder of Caligula, his wife and his daughter at the end and the sudden elevation of Claudius to Emperor are pretty much identical in both versions of the story. What is most obvious about the film is that it hasn’t been finished, hasn’t been properly edited, hasn’t been properly scored, and what has stood as the definitive Penthouse version of the film for all these years is actually a work in progress on which the work had stopped long ago. There may be a good film lurking amongst all the genitalia, but it will in all probability never be allowed to emerge. What remains is something that, for all its craziness and excess and fantasy, may resemble the actuality of Imperial Rome in more ways than we can possibly imagine.

No cinema visits this week.

Natural Born Killers (1994)

Quentin Tarantino’s original script for this movie was published in the Faber script frenzy that followed the lengthy delay in awarding Reservoir Dogs (1991) a video certificate in the early 1990s. It was designed to be shot by Tarantino himself possibly in 16mm on an even lower budget than his eventual debut. Tarantino’s script has only one location: the jail cell where Mickey gives his interview to Wayne Gale, though a lot of the interaction with the camera crew that made it through to Stone’s finished film first turns up in Tarantino’s version of the screenplay. There was never any attempt to depict Mickey and Mallory’s killing spree, no indication of the continual changes in film stock, all of what could be fairly described as the intense postmodernism and breaking of the fourth wall that goes on in the first half of the film, there was no direct indictment of the media, all of the stuff that continues to make the film compelling 13 years later in other words, when real life has upped the ante on celebrity culture to an extent unforeseeable back in 1994. The whole famous for being infamous thing has got a whole lot worse since then, to the extent that celebrities are now being deliberately manufactured for no other reason than to celebrate their celebrity in celebrity magazines, and not because these people have any talent or skill, or are likely to acquire any talent or skill in the future, or ever possessed any talent or skill in the past. What Natural Born Killers looks like now is a dire warning from the heart of the Tabloid Decade, when murderers became more famous than their victims through their presentation, celebration and glorification in the media. Natural Born Killers does likewise, both having its cake and eating it, glorifying its two killers while at the same time showing how the media plays as big a part in creating their notoreity as they do themselves. And Mickey and Mallory are meant to be fictional. Chantelle and Preston, Jordan and Peter, Cheryl and Ashley, Victoria and David: are these couples any more real than their fictional counterparts? Are their lives any more worth chronicling in unending detail? Is there really an insatiable appetite for this material, or will there come a line that shouldn’t be crossed, that is then crossed anyway? As there was when Heat magazine thought it was a jolly good laugh to circulate a badge making fun of Jordan’s handicapped son? There will be more of this, it will only get worse, our non-culture will continue to feed on these non-celebrities with their non-lives, non-liposuction, non-breast implants, non-breast reductions, non-weight loss, non-weight gain, until someone somewhere takes the kind of decisive legal action that will end it all forever because a celebrity magazine has taken it over the edge. That day is coming, and it cannot come soon enough. Either that, or Britney Spears, hounded by paparazzi and stalkers and users and abusers, will turn into Mickey and Mallory Knox and the whole house of cards will topple down in flames.

I don’t watch television, and this is why.

No cinema visits this week.

Smokin’ Aces (2007)

Second films can be tricky, they can confirm the promise of the debut and hit one out of the park – a recent example would be Pulp Fiction (1994) – or they can lie there like a horrible mess bleeding to death, promising only that the filmmaker is going to have a really tough time making it to film number three – Lynne Ramsey’s Morvern Callar (2002) might be a good example here, except I really liked Morvern Callar; the problem is that almost nobody else did and her third film has yet to materialise. Joe Carnahan made a mini-splash with the excellent Narc (2002), a tough cop thriller like they used to make ‘em back in the 70s, released through Paramount at the personal instigation of Tom Cruise, which in turn led him to the director slot on Mission: Impossible III (2006) after David Fincher but before JJ Abrams. Creative differences reared their head and it’s taken Carnahan five years to make his second film. And… it isn’t that great. There is a ton, and I mean a ton, of plot and character exposition in the first half hour of the movie, the characters are basically a bunch of colourful lowlife scumbags (and that includes the FBI as well as the Mob guys), and while the violence has been expertly filmed, the movie’s rendered really rather meaningless in that none of it seems to matter, and Carnahan makes a fatal mistake in the plot denouement near the end where the plot’s MacGuffin is inadequately explained. Oops.

La Vie en Rose (2007)

Unlike a lot of recent biopics of musical performers, Olivier Dahan’s film takes a kaleidoscopic approch to Edith Piaf’s extraordinary life. Piaf suffered more heartbreak and disaster in any one year of her life than most of us would be unlucky enough to experience in our entire lifetimes. Accordingly, the film jumps around throughout the chronology of her life without paying attention to one of the deathly methods that can strangle a biopic at birth: introducing characters through clunky exposition along the lines of “Edith, here’s a lonely Frenchman in New York, he’s a boxer called Marcel Cerdan, you may remember he fought Jake LaMotta last year.” In this film, Piaf just meets Cerdan in a diner and we don’t necessarily know who he is. Whereas some may find this a minus, I found it very much a plus. We know how the other method of making a biopic works since we’ve seen it so many times, so why not try something different? If the film reminded me of anything, it reminded me of the films of Nicolas Roeg, and that is never a bad thing. Obviously, I bought the movie in the wake of Marion Cotillard’s Bafta and Oscar for Best Actress, and I have to say that the voters definitely got it right this year: Cotillard, who is yet another in the unending supply of beautiful French actresses, is fantastic in a role the quality of which she may never see again. And there’s the music; about halfway through I worked out where the film was heading at the end, and if you think about it a bit, you can work it out as well, but this didn’t spoil the film for me at all.

Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006)

Every bit as good as everybody said, and then funnier still. It’s not often that all of the deleted material could have been left in the film, but this film could have happily been 24 minutes longer. Except maybe sketch films should be short; the Pythons found that there would inevitably be a sag in the more sketchy of their films, and that there was almost nothing they could do about it. The only thing missing from the DVD is any information about how they did it, who was real and who wasn’t, and how the lawsuits are doing. The lack of behind the curtains material (and I can understand Baron Cohen’s reasons for not including any) is almost made up for by the sequence in the promotional reel that climaxes in a making the bed scene with Martha Stewart live on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno that is almost as good as the naked wrestling.