CUBE @ 25

A small group of people wake up in a cubic room whose walls are backlit circuit boards. This is after a prologue which shows us that there is a system of such rooms, accessible through doors in each wall, and some of them have fatal traps. None of the characters can recall why they were chosen to be there, or when they were reclothed in the prison-like overalls that bear their names. What is it? A survival game, a sadistic futuristic jail, a Hellraiser-ish afterlife? There no clues given beyond the threat of their annihilation if they chose to enter the wrong rooms. They try to reason their way to action but if they were chosen for their particular abilities they might also have been chosen for their snappiness. This is a crew that fights as easily as cooperates. Gonna be a long haul out, if out is actually possible.

Vincenzo Natali's puzzle sci-fi demonstrated how much a little imagination and a small doubled set could do at a time when mainstream genre cinema was growing so lavish that one look through the weightless early CG would reveal how insubstantial all that money could really look. At the end of the decade this reached its Olympic scale when George Lucas returned to his Star Wars realm and attempted to wipe the table of all else. The problem with that, though, was that smaller and smarter sci-fi was showing it up. If the remake of The Haunting was embarrassed by The Blair Witch Project then The Phantom Menace didn't have a patch on The Matrix. Just before that, was Cube which could have been a Twilight Zone episode from the 1960s but clocked in at a tidy ninety minutes and spoke volumes with those two joined boxes for its set.

While we aren't whisked away to galaxies far far away we are invited into the intellects of people who see patterns and meaning in what they are given. They are also, daringly, to be almost right before big mistakes guide them to develop their thinking. The conflicts that flash up like old middle European states are where the flesh, blood and nervous systems appear to threaten the progress that requires concentration and collaboration if they are to survive.

The sci-fi enters through the technology but also the possibilities of why it was created and used. Reasonable propositions only lead to fearsome conclusions and the group's conspiracy-monger freely shares her every theory whether plausible or absurd and this, as it must, lights a few emotional fuses which attack the life-affirming unity. While this is not allowed to cause the kind of incredible mass delusions as it did decades later when a pandemic infected everyone with a lot of impotent rage, an internet account and paths to echo chambers, its inclusion in the dialogue is incisive. That the abstruse claustrophobia of the situation could fuel both fanciful antagonism and physically violent self interest is part of the sadness of the story that prevents it from feeling like an old tv episode. Whether it is entertainment for the rich and powerful or a machine working well beyond its purpose in perpetual motion, the bipedal lab rats might well create their own doom.

A scenario like this is fraught with the need for rapid communication of plot points as well as pauses to examine puzzle solving as well as allow for interpersonal conflict. This gives Cube its fairly brittle, overstated performances. On the other hand, I don't know how well any of its audience would do at being kind and reflective. Maurice Dean Wint often gets mentioned as a histrionic action figure and his eye rolling and grimacing can approach parody but his provision of real threat serves to negate this response. His counterpart David Hewlett, a penpushing nihilist who might know more than he's letting on stretches our patience with his eagerness to find everything ironically hilarious. The paranoid Nicky Guadagni works probably the hardest of all to provide depth beyond her refulgent outbursts. Nicole de Boer plays young and of shifting loyalty but her intellect is believable. Once, you accept the stridently drawn roles you'll be ready to watch such development as the desperation in the story permits. 

Cube is a marvel of economy, a fistful of big ideas in a tight package, the very thing that sci-fi boasts at its most effective. The elegance of its design whereby different rooms are lighted with their own colours would impress if it were not that it is so organic to our experience of the setting from the prologue onward that we quickly accustom ourselves to it. Add a well designed audio scheme and you're there with them, locked and loaded. And this film plays out again and for as many times as you might revisit, as freshly as you first saw it.

Review: PAST LIVES

Three people at a bar. An Asian woman is flanked by an Asian man and a Euro-American. An offscreen pair speculate on the relationships of the three. They're guessing and giving their reasons and are no wiser than we. Then we flashback twenty-four years and kilometres of ocean to Seoul where a young family is preparing to emigrate to Canada. The older of the two children, wants a western sounding name. Her father gives her such and it is close to her Korean one, Lenore or Nora. Later, we see Nora walking with her school friend Jung. He's just beaten her at something academically and she's sulking. Later still, they're teenagers and getting closer. Then she's in New York as a young adult, beginning a literary career and he's slogging through his mandatory military service. One day Jung calls out through his Facebook page and she answers.

This sound like a lot of plot but plot is not what fuels this film. It is of the passing years and slides along in a near daily fashion, letting us know that what these people are going through, the decisions they are making about their careers and relationships are not above or outside of time. Time is a central concept in this story. It's not just the river of it carrying these people along or coursing past them, it's also in a Korean concept that refers to reincarnation and its effect on people gravitating toward each other across lives to eventually join, a kind of predestination by practice. The more Jung and Nora comminate with each other through their laptops the more remote the idea of their pairing becomes. Nora's career furnished her with a marriage while Jung drifts in various jobs back in Seoul. Jung's determination for an adult reunion with Nora finds him struggling with his own motivations. 

The stunningly rich photographic pallet of the film shows New York to one side of its iconic towers so that it seems little different from similar images of Seoul. Meanwhile, after Nora calls a moratorium on their communication the twelve year silence finds Jung still drifting and Nora advanced as a playwright in a marriage that not only looks happy enough but is respectful enough for the pair of them to talk candidly about Jung's imminent visit to New York. When that happens, the weight of the rest of the film which felt so slight begins to press and we begin to discover with the characters what has become of them through these long stretches.

If you read a synopsis of this and thought it sounded like a rom com or just a muted love story you'd be wrong on both counts. This is slow cinema. Not boring, slow. Slow like Bela Tarr or Jean Luc Godard who want you to take in an think about time and place as they fix their gaze on a wall or dip in and out of focus on a wagon ride for ten minutes while you consider where you are and what you've seen. You might well find yourself resisting the slowness to begin with. You really could have a go at conjugating verbs in a language you haven't spoked since high school, and miss almost nothing. But, if you haven't been checking in you'll miss the emotional seizure and breakdown of the final phase. All those long takes with so little dialogue or decisive action, they were the living we had to taste before we meet this strange junction. Then, with an other than obvious thought introduced in dialogue, something that turns the whimsical notion of the reincarnation concept into something more like a sentence, we understand and it is not what we expected nor (I'd bet) what we wanted.

This beautiful and powerful piece is the kind of essential reminder of cinema as a blank screen to be filled as film makers will, an unexpected gift that delights with both its surprise and the surprise that you needed it.

HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER @ 50

 

The drifter of the title rides slowly into the town of Lago and then through it, attracting the attention of everybody he passes. He tethers his horse and goes for a drink at the saloon where he is approached by the local gang. He shrugs them off and then, when they interrupt his shave, shoots all three. Oh, on the way to the barber he responds to the coy attention seeking ploy of the local blonde bombshell by hauling her into a barn and raping her. Is that a sign of consent at the end of the act? This movie is not about to make it easy for you. If that sounds like the shock of a Jodorowsky you're in the right era but you've got he wrong guy. This is Clint Eastwood's second feature and first western, in the guise of the man with no name which had strung him through some fine work by Sergio Leone.

Eastwood had already added to that enviable apprenticeship with Don Seigel's Dirty Harry and The Beguiled where his characters' ethics were of the antihero and not always in the cool sense of the notion. In Drifter he stands way outside all he had previously done. Then again, who does in this story? All the officials and business owners of this town (including the phantom-like mining company who only appears through its connections to the influential townsfolk) are venal and violently interested. This town, that sometimes seems to be populated by about ten people and sometimes about a hundred, has only the appearances of an outpost of the "honest world". There is a spoilable reason for this but until you understand it you might think you've entered a forebear to an AI approximation. The apparent order and holders of order have no integrity that survives a shallow peep.

So, when he is asked to assist with his gunfighter chops to help the town against the approach of a vengeful trio, he accepts on the proviso that he gets what he wants and does as he pleases with impunity and no charge. Those bad guys? Well, they were part of the town's protection racket against the government who sent in a marshal who the threesome whipped to death in the street. If you're thinking of mining companies and their political reach these days, keep thinking it. So, No-Name ploughs through the town's wares and patience, sowing resentment in the men and attraction from the women, and he trains the able bodied to shoot straight from hiding places. And the localised apocalypse keeps advancing. 

Really, you need that level of plot detail to get through this one. No-Name's picaresque trickery and japes break into criminality without an ethical speedbump and if you know your early literature you might see him as much a medieval morality test as a wild west figure. To this end Eastwood depicts his character has having even less muscular substance as any of his Leone roles. Lanky and soft of foot and often shot from below, he moves and poses like an animated scarecrow. There's a spoilable reason for that, too, but it has its roots in an odd dream sequence in which he visualises the bad fate of a character he shouldn't know.

If the comedic or salacious moments feel less funny or sexy than they might it's only partially due to the vintage of the piece as a film but more so to that Decameron-like amorality I alluded to before. High Plains Drifter is almost as strange a western as El Topo. It has better manners than Jodorowsky's movie but El Topo can claim a lot firmer an ethical ground. That is, until you get to the end where if it doesn't quite forgive his worst acts at least explains them. Is that enough? Up to you.

1983 @ 40: BRAINSTORM

A laboratory, filled with gadgetry that looks pre-prototype. One man is encased in a huge harness with bits and wires sticking out while another follows the readings of various bio-metres, as a cheeky young tester goes around the lab and into other areas, trying things like food and physical sensations. The guy in the harness is receiving the sensations remotely, tasting what the tester tastes. He reports back, accurately identifying everything conveyed to him by the technology. Break out the champagne!

We soon also find out that Michael (guy in the harness) has a troubled marriage, the woman monitoring the experiment who is leading the research, Lillian, who was smoking up a storm in the lab ('80s!) is going to pay for all those filtertips and the bossman in the suit might well cave to the military interests doing all that funding. Oh, and this tech that can record human sensations so that they can be replayed endlessly (like a looped orgasm) is kind of open to gargantuan abuse.

Cinema technologist Douglas Trumbull, whose skill can be seen throughout 2001: a Space Odyssey and his own directorial debut Silent Running, took the further step in bringing this story to the screen at a time when advances in technology were enhancing our daily lives as well as making the existential threats of the late Cold War exponentially terrifying. Trumbull's vision is an extension on what was known of virtual reality experiments (by NASA, among others) from passive immersion into direct stimulus. Like any technology designed to elevate humanity this has a big problem in the way: humanity. Forget about the porn possibilities, imagine what it could do for the torture industry.

It is this theme that presses and allows what might otherwise be a pedestrian thriller plot, as different characters encounter the possibilities of the invention (soon shrunk from a lab filling machine to a headset) and are plunged into experiences like psychosis or sex and eventually death and possible afterlife. The theme is compelling and the goodies and baddies plot only extends it. A lot of this is casting.

Christopher Walken is at a stage of his career where he appears to be discovering the unpunctuated vocal delivery that was to make him one of the impressions to perfect. To be fair, he uses it to give Michael the appearance of a purposeful scatterbrain but this trades screen time with the other side of the approach which renders him emotionless and dull. Louise Fletcher is more impressive as Lilly the head boffin, taking the character from impatience with authority to humility in the face of death. If you were soured by her turn as Nurse Ratchet, try this movie for some depth and warmth.

The mastodon in the room, though, is Natalie Wood as Karen the idustrial designer and Michael's wife. Her performance is fine, nothing outstanding but neither an embarrassing swan song. Wood died during the production. This was unrelated to the film but its occurrence brought production to a standstill as thecash strapped MGM and insurers went into a spin. That didn't help an efforts to add some dignity to the demise of a well loved movie star but the film, when completed and released two years later, wasn't burdened with the same bad business that accompanied the death of actors in the Twilight Zone movie at around that time, but emerged as a kind of farewell performance.

Even with this tragic setback, the film did get completed and to a fine sheen. My recent viewing revealed something I didn't remember from the cinema screening in 1983 and would have been undetectable on VHS and broadcast at the time. Most of the film is shot and presented in standard widescreen (1.85:1) but everything showing the point of view of someone in the VR is in scope (more like 2.35:1) so it widens out. I rented this through Prime in HD and it went from scope back to wide with the same letterboxing above and below, making it look like a mini-IMAX show. Trumbull had been  developing a format using 70mm stock shot at 60 frames per second (normal rate is 24 fps) but MGM freaked at the cost and logistics of getting it shown  far and wide so it varied between 70 and 35 mm. This is not particularly helpful as an indication but slow motion is often shot at 64 fps and projected at 24 but you don't really get much of an idea of the smoothness of the motion. If you've bought a digital tv in the past twenty years and winced at how scrubbed and tv-like movies look before finding out how to get rid of motion smoothing in the settings, that's more like what Trumbull had in mind. It might well be truer to the image but we're just too used to the old 24 per second rattling away. So, who knows how it would have gone down, anyway?

What remains of Brainstorm after this history is a solid vision of the technology to come. It's not quite pre-internet as there are frequent instances of people tapping in to the lab recordings through acoustic modems but that technology is allowed to function as a kind of plastic age magic (even though it was real at the time) but the online realm we live in now would require more than lip service with a story like this. Later excursions like Strange Days and The Matrix owe more than a little to Trumbull's notions here and more recent fare like Possessor show that the garden's still fertile. If it were to be remade (no, it shouldn't be but ...) it would probably need to intersect with AI to make any sort of dent. But then I wonder, would that not just push it irretrievably into genre territory to the point that it lost its ethical basis? Perhaps some futures are best left in the past. Seriously, visit or revisit this, if only to see what didn't happen.

Review: EGO- THE MICHAEL GUDINSKI STORY

Biographies are stories like any other. They offer a sequence of events, provide context, and fashion sense from that. At their worst they raise names higher than the dissent and gossip can reach but at their best they can inspire. As villainous figures' life stories are usually packaged as history (imagine Hitler: Rags to Power) biographies of benign figures inevitably veer toward hagiography. This means the quality of a generally positive one gets measured against its readiness to paint the warts on. So, how does this one go?

Michael Gudinski is bound to Australian music history from the 1970s to his death in 2021. His record label Mushroom, while not a cartel, stuck its flag in every year of its first two decades with hits by local artists. He famously passed on megahit acts Men at Work and Cold Chisel, but nabbed Barnsey for the solo career and staged massive tours that talking heads of the lofty heights of Bruce Springsteen and Billy Joel recall here. His dream of a gig to fill the MCG was realised as a fundraiser for the recent bushfires. Melbourne lockdowns? Take it online. Streaming killing off record sales? Get the live shows happening again. He could be seen at local sticky carpet pub venues or stadiums and for decades his was really the only name among many from the management, entrepreneurial side of of music.

And this is also a tale of capitalism, the easy come easy go life of risk and result that is more than once compared to horse racing. It's comforting to hear of decisions made too hastily or lessons learned from obstinacy but the overall impression this film seeks to leave is that of the love and respect that survives the man, rather than offer much in the way of discussion of those business decisions with consequences. Gudinski, against the wall, sold half his business to Rupert Murdoch's interests and then the rest. There were audible clucks and groans in the audience at that part. What we get is less a look at corporate acquisition than how the resilient Gudinski coped personally. The passage feels hasty.

It's harder to do this with fiction where you can speculate on the tightness of a third act or lament the absence of a character thread. In a documentary, and a biographical one, the brief is open to considering the representation and how it sits. There is very little counterpoint to the notion that Gudinski was a passionate, impulsive gambler in business. That his wins are reported more on the scale of fame than money serves to cleanse the achievement and what led to it as we witness the personal growth of a businessman.

Then, it's time to remember the title of this film. The first word refers to one of Gudinski's most significant success stories, Skyhooks and their astute hit song Ego is Not a Dirty Word. This appears on the timeline when appropriate but also plays us out. If you are a demographic outsider to the song it's worth a YouTube. On the surface, it sounds like the anthem of the people who were increasingly dubbed the Me Generation, self-entitled and disingenuous graspers of all around them, but it sings for those who might be better served against such. Gudinski's burgeoning ego is not in question but the things it helped facilitate are on show and they are many.

The form is typical of the format. A fame biography like this is expected to be a frenetic quilt of archival material and talking heads and that's what this is. That at no time is there any lag or padding evident in the hundred screen minutes is testament to the seriousness of the approach to the task. Whatever we might make of Michael Gudinski, we do feel as the credits roll that we have encountered him and the celebration that is at the heart of this telling of his life, if it skimps on the inevitable darker side of anyone who succeeded in a business that is all risk all the time, it at least gives us an enviable list of accomplishments and an impressive roll call of their beneficiaries. As hagiographies go, we don't get served a saint. There's plenty of evidence on show that we might well have enjoyed his company.

I can say that on Christmas day 1975 when I tore through the wrapping of my sister's gift of Skyhooks' Living in the Seventies LP and read the liner notes as I listened, I noted with a smile the eastern European name of the manager mentioned in the liner notes. As a possessor of such a name locked in a landscape of Anglo Celt ostracisers, it sparked a strange pride in me. It meant that when I'd see the owner of the name appear in interviews on Countdown and Flashez, I knew who he was. He didn't write songs like Greg Macainsh but he seemed have it taken care of. This film adds a few jigsaw pieces to that picture and feels a little like the setting of my hearing that record, a little nostalgia, a little extra information, a lot of engagement. Whinges aside, it works.