On the count of ten, you will be in Europa
Sunday, July 15th, 2007Two cinema visits this week, marked with a *.
Hostel Part II (2007) *
Nerds with too much time on their hands really seem to have it in for Eli Roth, a mouthy American with a gift for self-promotion and actual filmmaking talent. For my part, it’s about damn time someone a) expressed a desire to make proper R-rated horror movies with nudity and gore and b) showed that he knew how to do it. Although I’ve previously ranted about horror sequels here, at least this one has been made by someone who shares some of my views, oddly enough. Part II presents more of what was good about the original Hostel (2005) in triple portions with all the trimmings. Roth is aware enough of the genre and the extent to which women have been abused in it to play some extremely sly games with audience expectation. The first death is so baroque it no longer exists in reality, the second death happens off-camera, and Roth uses the tried and tested “Final Girl” formula in a new and disturbing way, informing his audience of pasty male youths that they should watch what words they use around women, since some of them may not take it very well.
Die Hard 4.0 (2007) *
One can only assume that Live Free or Die Hard, the onscreen American title, has been borrowed by something else at this time. Kim Newman, in the latest issue of Sight & Sound, has, rather unsportingly, pointed out all of the things that are wrong with this film, and he is entirely correct about all of them. However, as long as things exploded and Bruce Willis hit people, I had no complaints. The McClane/fighter jet interface was absurd, but no more absurd than anything in Die Hard 2 (1990).
Die Hard (1988)
I needed me some more McClane, so I dialled up the original for some legendary hijinks. Die Hard just gets better every time I watch it. Away from its original reception in 1988, it becomes apparent just how supremely well crafted it is, how perfectly cast, how flambuoyantly filmed, how incisively edited, and how brilliantly directed. I’ve gone on here before about how great John McTiernan is as an action director, but one example will suffice. When McClane makes it up to the roof to radio for help (”terrorists” have taken over a building), the leader sends three of his minions to get him. McTiernan films this on a real roof with a camera laid on a track that swings through 180º to show very clearly how two of the terrorists are driving McClane into a trap where the third one is waiting. McTiernan does all this in one dynamic shot, an object lesson in proper action filmmaking that today’s over-edited, all-CGI bad boys could do with learning.
Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995)
One wasn’t enough so I checked out the third film as well, to which Samuel A Jackson brings his A-game. It lacks the claustrophobia of the first film, unsurprisingly, and ups the ante on the threat level, as does Die Hard 4.0 (2007). One thing: for some reason unknown to me (namely that they’re a bunch of bastards), Buena Vista Home Entertainment, or Disney, insisted this film be released in the UK in 1995 with a 15 certificate, and to meet this, the film was cut by themselves in consultation with the BBFC. And you would think, 12 years down the line and several Die Hard box sets later, that this would have been reversed at some stage, and the proper uncut 18 certificate version of the film would have been released in the UK. But this hasn’t happened. Obviously, I own the uncut Region 1 version of this film.
The Element of Crime (1984)
Naturally enough after all of those explosions, I longed for a little more meat, and I may have got it if I’d been able to see what was going on. Amusingly, on one of the commentaries, there’s some joshing about this along the lines of didn’t anyone on the set know how to read a light meter? This was Lars Von Trier’s first film, made when he was only a couple of years out of film school, where the courses seemed to have consisted of Blade Runner (1982), the films of Andrei Tarkovsky, and a lot of other arthouse films of the 1980s. Von Trier has the glacial pace of late 70s/early 80s art films down pat, and he shrouds the onscreen musings in an extremely penumbral gloom cast by shooting everything with sodium vapor lighting as used in Scotland to light motorways. I am not making this up.
Epidemic (1987)
Made as a bet for one million Danish kroner (which is a lot less than it sounds), Von Trier’s second film chronicles both the scriptwriting phase of the film itself in grainy monochrome 16mm and includes brief snippets from the film that’s being written in nicer 35mm black and white. The conceit of the film is that Von Trier and Niels Vørsel write the plague of their film into existence in reality through the act of writing itself. It’s a lot less interesting than it sounds, though one amusing passage, thrown in because it seemed like a good idea at the time, tells of Vørsel’s attempts to write a novel about Atlantic City by getting female teenage penpals who lived there to write to him about it.
Europa (1991)
At least this resembles a proper film with actors, a script and cinematography where you can see what’s going on. Von Trier, however, is still in his art film, self-indulgent phase, so the backgrounds have been filmed first, and the actors are filmed separately later in an overcomplicated mix of rear and front projection, all intended to conform to the 800 shots of the storyboard. Although Von Trier claimed this was intended as a masterpiece (he says things like this, primarily, I think, to annoy people), he himself realised that the superabundance of filmmaking technique was a dead end, and he threw it all away when he moved onto The Kingdom (1994), where nothing looked beautiful, the performances of the actors move to the fore, and Von Trier starts himself on the road to the breakthrough international success of Breaking the Waves (1996).