DISTRICT 9 @ 15

After an alien mothership appears in the sky above Johannesburg, the insect-like inhabitants are taken in with a humanitarian perspective. Soon, their rehousing solution turns into a shanty town and a project to move them into more constrictive quarters, further away from sight is underway. At its head, the responsible department boss puts his son in law to see the transition through, with the idea that he might klutz it and disappear from family life altogether. The film picks up as Wikus starts his supervisory role with the zeal of the new boy, getting his hands smudged at the ghetto itself. He comes across a tube that has been developed by the aliens and panics when it splashes all over his face. That's what it takes. After a few tests he is told that he is transitioning to an alien.

Neill Blomkamp's 2009 action satire looks like it was made before the CGI was properly dried and suffers from more pacing problems than it should but it rings as true today as it did then, especially after a nine year run of bad government and a decay in the perception of helping the needy here in Australia. If the racial groups of South Africa could reconcile after over a century of eye popping oppression by one of the others, having a new other on the block just sends them down the same crushingly depressing path.

But District 9 has more on its plate than this ever repeating scenario. The aliens (called Prawns by the humans, and not pleasantly) have weapons genetically matched to their species. When they discover that Wikus can use them with his mutated arm the mission changes to harness the power of the new devastating guns and set to work on finding a path to military mutation. While this seemed like empty commerce as a target of satire in 2009, it feels all too horrifying now. The martinet soldier despatched to recapture the now escaped Wikus who has increasingly sided with the aliens, is a two dimensional bad guy but this is completely necessary for this plot. This is a character who would intentionally render himself without complicating sides to his own let alone an enemy.

Wikus' character journey from everyday bigot to committed anti-authoritarian fighter is largely made through his increasing acquaintance with the alien called Paul and Paul's son. Walk a mile, indeed. This might be deemed a little too sermon-like but Blomkamp's Peter Jackson like fervour for gore, action and sheer cheek add too much for that to stick. Sharlto Copely measures his performance into credible portions until his change feels natural and the meaning of the final shot gains its gravity.

Fiction doesn't change governments nor can it stop international aggression but if audiences can leave films like this, feeling as though they have shared a change of mind as it happened as they witnessed it, a gentle effect is legitimate as a greater one is untenable. When Tim Burton made Mars Attacks as a kind of cancelling tone to the oafish Independence Day he presented all he could, which is to say, he made a goofy comedy whose theme of tolerance was easily lost among the gags. District 9 is the better riposte. 

BLOOD SIMPLE @ 40

Bartender Ray is driving his boss's wife Abby home and their talk leads to revealing their attraction to each other. The photographs of their night in a motel are given to the boss Julian by the private detective he hired to straighten out his suspicions. When Ray shows up at the bar Julian, barely under control, warns him that Abby is playing him and they part in dark moods. Time for action, Julian calls the detective back and orders a hit. The chain is on and wound tight. The line on the poster read: The thriller is alive and well in Texas. Who knew what film noir meant in 1984?

Joel and Ethan Coen did and how.  Their debut feature did modest business at the cinema but was held up to the heavens by critics who recognised its taut construction, black humour, pace and characters as one for the future. And the Coens became a brand. By the end of the decade with the likes of Miller's Crossing and Fargo in the near future, citing the team as a favourite to people you didn't know outed you as one of the warmer cinephiles who did know what noir was but wouldn't correct you on details.

The Coens' cache was a rarity for film making teams, getting the auteur stamp early. A scene where the camera, moving along a bar and then lifts over the body of a collapsed drunk and back down again in this film is the kind of takeaway nugget that anyone could donate to a party conversation when new movies came up. It illustrated the kind of knowing humour reserved for the quietly adept in the previous decade and wasn't a spoiler. The Coens made their own cache, happily wearing cult status until their titles started paying for themselves and all that brand power starts. Just shy of the kind of rote admiration garnered by Stephen Spielberg, who peaked early and stayed there, the Coens added cool.

Cool is what Blood Simple bleeds. Instead of the by then old hat means of suggesting links to past genres and shooting in black and white (that would rise again in the '90s) the Coens chose the contemporary pallet of hard neon and soft light and thick colour like Michael Mann's decade-defining Thief from 1980. They knew they were making a noir and didn't want to distract their audiences from it, they wanted it to look like a noir if made in the mid '80s when it was. Apart from the diegetic Same Old Song played in the bar jukebox, the music is brooding and electronic, keeping a tight grip on the tension.

The cast was largely unknown but fit exactly into their roles to the extent that they appear both as essential components to the narrative but also the art direction. John Getz seems chiselled out of oak, a guy who falls into his gravity and never needs to do more than mumble, sexily macho. Frances McDormand's first film role shows her as a femme fatale who offsets natural beauty with Texan deadliness and practicality. She, of course, has gone the furthest of the cast from this faux ingenue to the potty mouthed harridan of her gleeful maturity. Dan Hedaya wasn't new to any size screen and keeps his constantly threatening emotional combustion barely under control. The least forgettable turn of them all, here, is M. Emmett Walsh as the detective with his gymnastic voice drawling around a stream of southern wisdom and his dodgem car physique. It's one of the decade's most durable performances.

The Coens don't rate their own debut highly. It displays their style, leanness of writing, and clarity of vision perfectly but it ranks low with them. Of course, when your rap sheet includes Fargo, Barton Fink, O Brother Where Art Thou among many bangers, they can afford to dump on a few (though there are still The Ladykillers, Burn After Reading, The Hudsucker Proxy, and Intolerable Cruelty and more of those, of course. Nevertheless it was the expectation of more of the tension and white knuckle comedy that kept us lining up for the next one. When they broke through it was with that cool intact which kept them on the indy side of approval long after their budgets and returns moved them into the mainstream. Blood Simple didn't start American arthouse cinema but it did embolden the style of it for over a decade as the Hal Hartleys and Quentin Tarantinos rose in the following decade.

I saw this on second run after my move to Melbourne. A bunch of us went down to the Richmond Valhalla cinema on Victoria St. After the usual quirky sketches and quirkier trailers for upcoming indy movies, this spectacle came up and we thrilled to its almost overcompetent finish, the perfectly timed visual gags, the noir intrigue and gleeful abandon to the sharpening and polishing of crime genre tropes from the '40s. It's movies from this time that I'd see in places like the long departed Valhalla that match electronic scores with edible colour visual pallets and will forever give me shivers of nostalgia. Blood Simple, the lean, little neo-noir that threw in a fable about capitalism along with its bleak adventure and belly laughs, will always be near the centre of my affection for the '80s. That it's still good apart from that makes it the same as an old stone building, beautiful on the outside, dependable shelter on the inside.

RUN LOLA RUN @ 25

 

Lola Jaeger, 20 something and punky, gets a fevered call from her boyfriend Manni. He's a bagman for a local gangster and he's just finished a job. It went perfectly except for the part where he left the bag bursting with cash on the train. As the homeless guy who helped himself to it strides gleefully away, Manni calls Lola for any ideas at all to get 100K marks in twenty minutes to him before he crosses the road and holds up the supermarket. So, without a clear plan, Lola runs.

So begins the film that conquered the world in 1999, the year when little movies with big ideas beat the odds to carpet the cinematic world. Fight Club, The Matrix, South Park, Being John Malkovich, The Blair Witch Project, the list just stretches out, including this outlying comedy of anxiety from Germany whose big idea was an old one but with an execution as hip and up to date as could be had.

The O. Henry story Roads of Destiny tells of a traveller who chooses different directions on coming to a forked intersection that lead him to different fates made of the same elements. Lola's improvisations while physically on the run feature parallel routes where wildly differing fates await herself, Manni, and people she bumps into while running. From winning lotteries to dying lonely and overdosed, the effects of chance rule the universe. But for a single break in the scheme (hint: gun) Lola has no memory of running the course in other circumstances; this isn't the constant self-improvement of Groundhog Day but rather a blocked system whereby every different iteration of the single action is played without cross reference. That exception is thrown in as a cheeky wrong footing. There's another whereby a character Lola keeps meeting seems to be aware of the other run-throughs (sorry, these puns are compelled).

These different plays are, of course, for the benefit of the audience and we both warn Lola through gritted teeth to avoid this corner or not to run down there in gleeful futility. That we also are fed a massive amount of information about Lola's life and that of the people around her further fuels this effect of our feeling godlike in vision but with no control. That element is left with Lola herself and she doesn't always make the decisions she should. The story is punctuated by her own screams of frustration which rip out at different points in the play-throughs, reminding us of every single time that we felt ourselves caught in knots of malfunction or unwelcome surprise.

The young Franka Potente as Lola, whose squeezed out mop of dayglo hair, cargo pants and army boots were rendered iconic with a look that was a gift to poster art across language and cultural boundaries, holds the electric centre of the film. As the mixed media flashes around her from ugly home video grind to gleamingly perfect 35mm cinematography, she either runs at an Olympic pace or is frozen in rapid thought, as still as a figurine as time and the rest of the world move around her. The few moments of apparent calm where flashbacks to post-coital pillow talk are offered in infernal red light and feature trains of conversation that do not conclude. Manni's shocked chaos on the initial phone call reveals the worst that desperation will push forward. By the time Lola notices the casino our hearts sink but we're so invested we almost yell at her to enter. Add the constant pulse of the EDM electronic score which either throbs beneath the action or rises to a gurgling acceleration of it that  crosses over the frequently frenetic editing and you have a film guaranteed to surprise its viewers that it's only eighty minutes long.

In 1999, if your work made it into a scene from the Simpsons you had not only arrived but were probably influencing costume parties. As Lisa ran along the road to the strident gobbles of techno, everyone knew what those few seconds came from. Run Lola Run is remembered for its action rather than its dialogue but it has bucketloads of talk. Most of this is exposition but we're surprised with each new viewing that we forgot it. One thing that occurred to me this time, though, is technological. This film's events would only be hampered by mobile phones. The phones we see are no longer much in evidence anywhere, rotary diallers and booths. But hand-held communicators would remove Lola's invention, her readiness to meet the crises that pop up like a kinetic obstacle course throughout. This is not just about her superhuman sprint but how long a second is in a human brain. It's also about how fresh the contents of time capsules can appear to us. And fresh it remains.

NORTH BY NORTHWEST @ 65

Madison Avenue exec Roger Thornhill is abducted from a business meeting and taken to a country mansion where a sinister crew interrogates him, using a different name. Puzzled and miffed, he resists and then survives an attempt on his life. This is already action packed but from this point on, he's about to get thrown into Alfred Hitchcock's most kinetic thriller adventure. Along the way he is accidentally in the frame for the murder of a U.N. official and persistently mistaken for a secret service agent and takes time to fall into mutual fascination with the beautiful, urbane and young Eve Kendall. All that is well before the hour mark in this over two hour film.

It's hard to know what to say about this one as it joins Vertigo and Psycho as one of Hitchcock's most written about movies. I'll be keeping this on the shorter side as I'd be here all night otherwise. I did note, as I went through it again for this blog, that it was probably the first time since his WWII movie Saboteur that Hitch would cast his hero into such a thrill ride across the country. The two share a kind of patriotic touch point in this as North by Northwest with its Cold War connotations, makes much of the glorious post war affluence in the architecture of New York City and Mt Rushmore as poster sized adverts for the land of the free.

The casting is noteworthy. James Stewart pleaded with Hitchcock for the Thornhill role. Gregory Peck was also considered. Both men had been in Hitch's movies but the thriller auteur chose against them and banked on the intergenerational sexiness of Cary Grant. In a brief moment when Grant walks through a woman's bedroom and her tone changes from alarm to attraction and Grant wags a finger at her with a pronounced, "uh-uh," he's not only funny but believable. Neither alternative castings could have carried that off. It does ring a little naff, now, but only a little. Grant was in his mid-fifties but physically trim and had a face that aged beautifully. This still happens and the examples of it are easily listed.

The other thing that still happens is the romantic paring of older men with decades young women. Eva Marie Saint was over two decades younger than Grant at the time. Her character describes herself as being a decade younger still, broadening the age chasm. My assumption is that the goodwill of Grant's stardom covered what can only be obvious in widescreen Technicolor as it is, here. Also, Jessie Royce Landis who was a single year older than Grant, plays his mother. Personally, as I'm knowingly watching fiction, I tend to look past age gaps (especially since I know a fair few people younger than me who make more of them) but the Grant/Saint rift is only smoothed by a pair of committed performances.

Hitchcock's 1950s were mostly larger and more lavish productions than he'd been used to, with few exceptions. Here, he seems to gleefully flaunt the big bucks that MGM could still throw at its productions. The setpieces that mix soundstage and location like the crop duster chase, Mt Rushmore scenes, the exterior/interior U.N. building and so on survive the punishing clarity of 4K in a way that some recent films shot that way have not. The final act sequence with the modernist house and the monumental Mt Rushmore heads is given a nocturnal dark blue wash that feels so confidently contrived that we happily accept it.

But that's the thing about these big, bold Hitchcock epics from this time; they have more scope than normal thrillers but less substance than almost any musical. Hitch's famous trope of the McGuffin (an  object that primarily served plot motion) doesn't make an appearance until the third act and feels perfunctory. The triangle of Grant, Saint and the intimidatingly urbane James Mason as Van Damm makes us care more than anything else. There is nothing of the creepy psychology of Vertigo, the stark horror of Psycho or the unease of Marnie on screen, here. Hitchcock and writer Ernest Lehman just like the idea of dummy agents enough to dress it in a plot and cast Cary Grant and some big scenery. In this run of Hitchcock greats, North by Northwest feels like popcorn. But it is deluxe popcorn.

Viewing notes: I watched the recently released 4K, plain edition from Warners which looks astounding all the way through. A puzzling but not displeasing Dolby Atmos soundtrack is on by default which can overstate Bernard Hermann's blaring score but that's not a big issue. Some good extras like the writer's commentary and contemporary promo featuring Hitchcock himself also come recommended.

BANDE A PART @ 60

Franz and Arthur, young and aimless in Paris, add Odile who is in the English class who mentions that her Aunt's tenant has a pile of cash at the house. That turns into a scheme and the rest is hysteria. Well, it might be but this is a film from the early years of the Nouvelle Vague or New Wave in French cinema wherein the heavily American influenced movies of young directors on the rise were beaten out of shape in pursuit of the new. So, when we get to the botched robbery, it neither plays like a well oiled plan nor is a morally redemptive disaster, it just kind of falls into confusion and  heads into inconsequence.

Jean Luc Godard's seventh feature film finds him back in familiar bohemian Paris with bright young folk quoting Rimbaud, hanging out in cafes, staring through the fourth wall and even stopping the action to make points. Along the way, the robbery which would have been at the centre of an audience's attention, is blithely left in the background as the trio negotiates its life, affinities and so on. Sounds twee and precious? It isn't. Some of the dialogue strays into philosophy but there is a greater appeal to popular culture and the three effectively imagine themselves in the movie that we are watching.

While Godard did have serious points to make, having emerged from three much harder films about terrorism, war and fame's exploitation, this outing with its sprint through the Louvre, testing people's tolerance of silence on screen (the duration of which is just over half the claimed minute but feels interminable) and a parade of other conceits that might have ended up cute in the hands of another filmmaker. Godard is yet again showing his audience how fiction is fabricated, how actors are quoting and how the action centrepiece of a noir plot is both farcical and serious.

Anna Karina as the yet again self-illuminating centre provides us with a young woman willing to approach her life as a jam session. She leads an impromptu dance with the boys in a cafe which looks improvised but was choreographed that way. She brings the action to a halt by demonstrating the minute of silence. She struggles with the attentions of Arthur but admits her attraction early. Next to her complexity, the philosophy spouting romantic Franz seems like an overdressed lightweight and the puggish Arthur a directionless drifter. That means that when the robbery comes up, the mishaps are sometimes comic and sometimes grave, all in one extended scene (there are actually two attempts at the robbery but let's relax that for the point). When bumbling action is intruded upon by fatality, the transition suddenly feels natural. After all that whimsy and lightness, Godard has brought it together to give us a high stakes climax.

The film auteur's most popularly celebrated film is his debut feature A bout de souffle (Breathless) which is a playful noir. I much prefer this in the same vein for its confidence and the more assured use of that kind of play. I enjoy Breathless but I'm compelled by Bande a part. Godard had covered musicals in extraordinary fashion with Une femme est une femme, tough politics in Les carbiniers and Le petite soldat and self reflexive cinema production in Le mepris. His return to noir showed him stronger this time around the loop. This would continue until his political commitments drove the narrative out in preference for harder essays from 1966 on to the extent where he collectivised his film production and presented the results of his demolition of conventional cinema (at least for his own work, of course).

That made him a personal hero to me in my undergraduate years when I even started smoking lung ravaging French cigarettes and claiming a preference for the later, less watchable films (while always preferring the easier ones). It also exposed me to a world of ridiculing normies who thought they were being witty when launching attacks on any kind of cinema reset and how feeble the counter argument was and is. Godard's efforts in tearing convention to shreds influenced everything those folks celebrate about the New Hollywood of the '70s or Tarantino's self-avowedly derivative work (his production company name Band Apart is lifted from this movie). If you are familiar with Godard's early career but find it variously too cute or arcane, track this down. Of all the milestones and audacious taunts at convention, Bande a part remains the solid sweet spot. If you can't come out of this something like a sigh of pleasure don't investigate Godard any further, it won't be for you. If you are pleased by it, you have a world of endeavour before you, a lot of it tauntingly difficult but most of it worth every second. Start here.

Review: HERETIC

Two young Mormon conversion units knock on the door of the highly affable Mr Reed. He has signalled his interest in a visit and is up for a chat. It's raining hard at the doorstep but they tell him there needs to be a woman present if they are to come in. He says his wife is at home and, satisfied, they settle on his living room couch and begin discussing religion with the waft of blueberry pie coming in from the kitchen. Or is it? There are the usual awkward silences and looks that happen when strangers meet in unfamiliar settings. Then, Mr Reed asks about historical polygamy, the spectre of which still haunts the church, displaying a scholarly knowledge of Mormonism. Sisters Barnes and Paxton are initially impressed but begin noticing things are not quite right. There's a fair bit of detail about this in the trailer but I'll leave it blank here.

This is an A24 thriller. The company that brought you some remarkable genre cinema over the past decade and a bit but also the daggy oldie's term elevated horror, has been on the trail of expanding its brief toward the genre defying goal of good cinema. Mostly that's been seen to with great moments like Pearl. Then, there's this.

Heretic gets to work quickly, dropping Chekovian guns into every opening scene and guiding us with a gentle curve to the point where the weirdness pushes against a tightening tension that bursts in the second act only to be resolved for good or ill in the third. All of this is handled confidently by the film to the extent that nothing at all will surprise you about it. It's like watching the clock that you hear ticking throughout, it's going to keep on working.

Comparisons are odious but I can't sit here and not mention that Barbarian from a few years back managed to wrong foot its audiences near constantly, blowing initial expectations way out of proportion, yet brought everything back home. Heretic attempts this a few times but there is such a lack of tension throughout and the stakes keep getting punctured that the only thing to get on edge about it the theological proposition developing in the dialogue.

Hugh Grant's goofy Englishness pitted against the sinister scheme he's plotting should work better than it does but you just keep wanting to like him. The young women are presented in cliché form, one pious, the other worldly, but this runs into trouble quickly. One character, given advice by the other of how to handle the situation starts doing so in a writerly sudden character development; her change is like a swimmer sprouting fins to evade a shark. It soon feels like an overall essay about the nature of religion using a few nominated characters to mouth declarations and counter arguments. Even the potentially interesting theoretical hijacks feel like they were shouted into inclusion during an all night session in the writers' room over some brews and a lot of muscle relaxants. The whole thing ends up feeling like a challenge to make an a24 thriller based on an essay on belief. Here's a proposition: if you believe you will be surprised by this film's plot, you will be; if you don't believe that, you won't be. 

EYES WIDE SHUT @ 25

Well-heeled Manhattanite couple Bill and Alice go to a Christmas party thrown by their uber one-percenter friend Victor and there, in the boozy, soft light wooze, both are sexually tempted but both decline. Afterwards, sharing a post party joint, they get into an argument about potential infidelity which ends in Alice confessing that she was struck by the sight of a naval officer at a recent holiday they'd been on. Not just struck but after a single glance from him, she says she was ready to abandon her marriage for the stranger. Bill is so slammed by this that he sets off into the night looking for an opportunity to slake his jealousy by any means possible and ends up infiltrating a secret orgy of the great and famous where his life is threatened. He is saved by an interloper whose fate appears dreadfully sealed. Freed, he flees, determined to discover what happened.

Stanley Kubrick was by the time of this film's completion producing so few new films that each was given greater hype than the previous on their approach. Among the rumours sticking to this one was that it was a box office time server before the one he really wanted to make, A.I. Such rumours served to diminish Eyes Wide Shut as a secondary work made to finance a primary one. However, Kubrick had wanted to make an adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler's Traumnovelle (Dream-Story) since the 1960s. It had gone through many different imaginings and castings until finally made in the 1990s. It was a primary work that Kubrick was highly pleased with. 

On the ground around me, people who professed to be lifelong fans of the director mostly expressed distaste for the movie, often exaggerating the lameness of the hyped orgy scene and considering the film a waste or their time as well as the effort it took to make. I was reminded of a lot of backlashes previously, against all kinds of things, other movies, music artists' new albums, novels and so on: Kubrick didn't make the movie they wanted so whatever this one was was angrily flushed. For my part I had been unconvinced of Kubrick's unquestioned genius but had seen something in this last one that fascinated me. To this day, I consider it one of his best and most rewatchable. This is not, I swear, my own contrariness, the film's themes of responses to jealousy feel hauntingly genuine to me, heightened by the high sheen of the visuals and gravity of the music. If I had to choose, I'd rather have this than Lolita, Barry Lyndon, or Full Metal Jacket.

Why? Well, expanding on my reason given just then, I think it's one of the most accurate treatments of sexual jealousy committed to screen. Not only does it hit the disproportionate responses between the couple but neither consummates their extra marital desire. It plays and feels more like a fable than the erotic thriller it's often touted to be.  Alice, however drunk she is, resists the charms of the Hungarian lecher at the party. Bill seems on the edge of following the two models who appear like a masturbatory fantasy from the golden light of the glitz. The couple's post-event discussion about each other's moments of temptation leads to the argument and Alice's confession. That confession, while it still haunts Alice, becomes a motif for Bill, recurring throughout his adulterous trek in a series of black and white vignettes, a scene that never happened for real but is what he imagines his wife imagined and desired. He is revenging himself against a passing thought (a resonant one but still just a thought). 

I don't think that this expresses male jealousy vs female, just the likelihood of a lack of balance between people intimately involved. This story invites you to revisit the often brutal ugliness of a moment of your own jealousy and, honest viewers who were more interested in what the film before them asked of them than in what temporary approval they might find by trashing the movie in front of others, will take away a confronting candour.

Is the orgy scene lame? Compare it to the New French Extremity and the daunting boundary pushing of erotic thrillers since and, sure, it seems very slight for the participants to care too much who knew about it. That point is better expressed in the conversation Bill has toward the end with Zigler which is more about class exclusion. The suggestion that any given modern city might be by powerful narcissists might not be news to anyone but the thought of it, when given a second or two, remains a shivery horror. As to Bill, wandering the rainbow coloured sets of a very clean Greenwich Village crawling with dirty minds, he for the moment can only see opportunities that he feels the force of his will alone bestow entitlements upon him. It's as powerful an allegory for the concentration of sexual arousal as any.

While the casting of the two leads had changed greatly over the decades as Kubrick returned to the thought of this adaptation, he really knocked it out of the park by choosing alpha celebrity couple Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. Young, talented and beautiful, Cruise and Kidman were on screens as much as they were on the covers of celebrity mags at supermarket checkouts. They were characterised as a power couple without controversy. The opening scene depicting the pair getting ready to go to the party feels completely natural and, once established, we feel we are in the company of people we know at the same time as unreachable movie stars. Cruise plays up to his walking grin persona but is also put through such strain that this appears increasingly shallow. Kidman speaks mostly in hushed tones with elongated vowels takes Alice to a point of unquestionable authority. The film's final line is hers and she delivers it with the quiet but abrupt confidence that the whole film has begged: "fuck!"