Review: CIVIL WAR

Weatherbeaten journalism team Lee and Joel set off across an America wracked by internal warfare to try and get the grail, to interview and photograph the beleaguered Trump-like President. Along for the ride are old time reporter Sammy and raw neophyte photographer Jessie. So begins one of the tensest road movies you are ever likely to see.

While not directly about the scenario of the effects of a second Trump term, the parallels are impossible to dismiss. The opening scene has the despot preparing a broadcast speech in which he tries out a number of superlatives to describe his blowhard rhetoric. Outside of that, though, the film is vague enough for events shown and referenced to have an even handed tone. When someone describes the Antifa Massacre, it's as natural a part of the conversation that it needs no explanation: we don't know if Antifa massacred or were massacred. 

Some combatants are in civvies, others in uniform. There is an anti-government military called the Western Forces as well as the old regular army. Both sides are well equipped, drive the same kind of tanks and wear camo and Kevlar. One pair of uniformed soldiers explain that their situation has been reduced to kill or be killed, whichever side they or their antagonist is on. Another pair in uniform are found mopping up after an atrocity and really could be from either side as they themselves are reduced to expressing the power of armed combatants as givers and takers of human life.

In a design coup, the Western Forces flag is the stars and stripes but there are only two stars. It is the very kind of cultural shock that the great sci-fi dystopia cinema of the '70s would use to freeze viewer comfort with something wrong but very plausible. If not quite seeing the apes riding horses and cracking whips in Planet of the Apes it's close to the corporate anthem being played in Rollerball. Writer/director Alex Garland has been here before in 28 Days Later, Annihilation, Ex Machina and Men, weaving the familiar with the confronting to feed his audience's imagination. I would imagine this film is an uncomfortable watch for Americans.

While the theme is grim and constant and the sense of unease is set at a unending pulse, Garland has packed it up in the familiar genre of the road movie. This means dialogue and personal change are on the menu and Kirstin Dunst's hard-arsed photojournalist must find a way out of her stress at the potential disasters in the car in the shape of the old man and the young woman who might not only endanger everyone's lives but destroy the entire mission. Wagner Moura's rockstar approach to his profession recalls the depictions of Sean Flynn and Tim Page from Dispatches. Cailee Spaeny lets her character's enthusiasm collide with the realities of what she's got herself into. Stephen McKinley Henderson provides great gravitas. Beyond them is a Gulliver's Travels or Heart of Darkness of a cast who work to provide a quilt of foreseeable true life horror.

If Civil War falters anywhere it is in its length. At 1.49 it isn't outrageously long but there is so much repetition of military action and some individual scenes of it feel interminable that we are in danger of losing sight of our central quartet. I can understand a desire to convey the fatiguing grind of a mounted assault or a sniper baiting but too often we live through scenes that have long made their points. I could easily imagine that a cut of about 30 minutes would not be noticed.

But Civil War is not just about its points (to varying degrees of subtlety) but the flow of the experiences we are following. It's Brecht's proposition: don't make me ask what I would do if I were him or her, make me wonder if I would act the same under the circumstances. Garland's vision of a torn nation is offered as a sobering choice to world audiences, what would we do if it came to this? One scene depicts a community apparently completely untouched by the devastation. It bears a heavy eeriness similar to the sight of Manhattan streets without traffic or the shattered amusement park. As we recognise this vision with relief before seeing its price, we might wonder how we are still the way we are. I'll finish with a quote from John Webster because I don't do that enough: Say, 'tis well, security some men call the suburbs of hell, only a dead wall between.

Civil War is on general release.

Review: BARBARIAN

Tess is in town for a job interview and finds that her AirBnb house has been double booked. Keith answers the door, sees her in the rain without the possibility of a hotel with a convention in town and asks her in to see if they can sort it out. While there's an edge to the situation he proves charming and self effacing enough to risk taking up his offer of the bedroom. There's a lock on the door and he seems pretty genuine. Strange disturbances during the night seem distant by the light of day and she rushes to her interview, smiling at Keith's note on the table saying he had a good night. Back from the appointment, she finds herself in a situation which compels her to search the house. Ending up in the basement she finds door after door to ever dingier rooms, including one which looks like it's housed torture. When Keith gets back she persuades him to check it which he reluctantly does. After too long waiting upstairs she goes after him, finding not only more dark rooms but a staircase that looks like it goes into the dark forever. Keith cries out. It sounds like he's faraway. Fight or flight?

It's fight, she, like Dante before her, follows on behind.

Barbarian is a crafty contemporary horror film with solid construction and clean lines. There are no arch nods to audiences that let them know that it's just a corny old movie and they are clever just being there getting all of it. It makes no claim to join the groanworthy nonsense of elevated horror. It's just a horror movie. It builds dread and earns its scares. There are references to a horrific crime from the past two decades and what seems a stab at cancel culture takes on more significance which resonates throughout the rest of the film. Two abrupt setting changes variously add backstory and deepen the narrative. There is also depth given to the monster but not at the cost of its threat.

This would just be an exercise if not for the warmth offered by Georgina Campbell as Tess who runs the gamut from personable through threatened, nervous, terrified and furious as the story throws ghastliness at her every few minutes. Bill Skarsgard comes out from behind his Pennywise makeup to reveal a kind of designer hunk with a disarming charm. Justin Long's sudden appearance as a heavily entitled Hollywood  hotshot facing cancellation and ruin, continues one of the most effective and thankless movie careers of recent decades. 

So, this is an accomplishment. I had actually toyed with catching up with the second of the recent rebooted Halloween and then going to see the next one in the cinemas but thought the better of  sitting through something I would most likely find tiresome. I chose this and was glad to sit in the cinema immersed in dread and care. A powerful electronic score comes in handy, there. 

Here's a point of frustration: there is a possible problem here of othering but it would involve too many spoilers to discuss. I'm still haunted by it but know that that doubt is balanced by the great threat that a character bears. It is a lot harder a case than the wincing depictions of baddies in Silence of the Lambs (an unfavourite of mine) or Incident in a Ghostland which as a very recent film ought to have known much better. There is also the counterbalance of the character A.J.'s comparable sins. Still don't know.

What I can say is how refreshed I felt that a current piece of horror cinema made it out of the gate without needing to be anything but itself. 

Review: LONG SHOT

Romcoms need to sell you the conflict early and fast. Political satires need to steer a tight channel between whimsy and cynicism. Both ask you to indulge them for the promise of a big, preposterous resolution. So what happens if you soften all of this and try to inject some everyday grind in among the one liners and physical gags? You get Long Shot and it takes a little adjustment.

It opens on a neo-nazi den where Seth Rogen's Fred tries to pass for one of them, gets found out and runs through a window and splats onto the footpath below looking like he's broken his neck. He gets up and taunts his incredulous tormentors. That is comedy. Charlize Theron's Charlotte, Secretary of State is coddling a Trumpish Bob Odenkirk president into endorsing her as a future presidential candidate as he repeats ideas she's just fed him as though they are his own. That's satire. The real meet cute of this movie is the collision of those two. I spent the first twenty minutes swinging between wanting to laugh more and preparing for some hard cynicism. Both happen and then they stop and then they start again.

Fred meets Charlotte at a charity do and they realise they knew each other as teenagers when she was his idealistic and hell-hot babysitter. Decades on, he's an idealistic journalist and she a political golden girl. After he takes a verbal swing at the Rupert Murdoch figure (an unrecognisable Andy Serkis) and then takes a massive fall down a staircase he's so lodged in her mind that he's engaged as her speechwriter. The middle act that brings them together despite contrary forces is a series of travel locations and tight spots that veer between farcical and poignant. Rogan playing to his audience with a well known and appealing shtick of intelligent goof and Theron again showing a flair for comedy using poise to generate laughs (see also Cary Grant in his own romcoms).

And then we get the big break in the third act where characters choose between happiness or aggrandisement but we also get the tightening swing between the two types of comedy and where earlier scenes felt frustrating and directionless there is now resolution. But it still feels like it has taken too long to get to this point.

What saves this frequently very funny film from collapse is the demand we develop to see more of the leads. However hokey or deflated it gets we perk up at the interaction of Rogen and Theron who get the best lines but do work as a comedy pairing. Theron completely outclasses Rogen but even the awkwardness of this seems to work.

In the end it feels less substantial than it has been, nesting into a goofy feelgood conclusion that, for all its genuine issue-facing, feels warm. The romcom has won. I liked it the more time I had to think about it which is the opposite of more audacious fare from earlier decades like Bulworth or Wag the Dog which tripped over their self-congratulation without the irony they were labouring to create. Network or The Candidate this aint but it kinda works, anyway.

MIFF Session #16: THE UNKOWN GIRL

Jenny, a young GP in a small Belgian town, is taking her intern through some tough criticism. He froze at an urgent moment and while she's being firm but fair he's taking it hard. The door buzzer sounds but she stops him responding, saying that all their patients know it's after hours and need a little tough love themselves. He storms off soon after. The next day she is stopped by two detectives who want to see the practice's security camera footage. A woman was found killed nearby. And there she is on the recording, the one who pressed the buzzer.

Racked with guilt, Jenny takes a still from the video and begins her own investigation. The victim carried no identification. Beginning with those closest to home she passes the image around but no one can identify the girl. Going wider, she establishes that the victim had been a sex worker and had just come from a client before her death. This takes her into some very dodgy territory, both police and local thugs warn her off the trail. But she's too haunted and can't stop.

Adele Haenel plays against her delicate youth with a hard seriousness. She lets us know the struggle that Jenny has been through just to get to this lower link on the medical food chain. When she is threatened with physical violence her surprise at her vulnerability feels genuine. And as her driving guilt over the death morphs into more of her sense of responsibility we understand the strength she is gaining from it. Gravity ensues.

The Dardennes have been my go to struggle-core team for a few years now (I was very late to them but now think they just have no competition). They've taken the grey-day look of social realism and found riches within it so that their visual style is both signature and unobstrusive. Their observation of the delicate balance of life at the bottom is always compelling because it's always driven by performance performance performance. That's what takes these unsmiling tales of life from grim-oop-north grinds into essential dramatic cinema. That's what we have here.

MIFF Session #5: KEDI

All this film had to do was show some cats. I would have copped that for one and a half hours with nary a complaint. But this is not just a film about cats. It's about an ancient city: Istanbul, once Constantinople. And it is about its people. And its cats. Oh, I said that already. Well, this film couldn't have been aimed more squarely at this worshipper of felinity and I enjoyed meeting the lot of them.

There is a status of cat in Istanbul that lies somewhere between stray and domesticated. These are the moggies we are to spend the most time with. They climb the vines and roofs of the classical city, beg at cafes, hunt in the drains, visit the homes of their many admirers, get picked on by other cats and sometimes perish because life on the street does that, too.

Here, you'll meet the fish thief, Psycho the overprotective spouse of the near identical tuxedo cat whose temptresses are warned off with violence and sonics, the market mouser, the cafe adopted by the local aristocat who claws at the window when he is peckish and gets served meals of an increasing fussiness. But you'll also meet the litters upon litters of kittens who in being saved by kindly humans can also save their benefactors who themselves know the hardship of wild life.

This wonderful documentary is a love letter to a city that stood at the centre of one empire for a millennium and its conqueror's empire for longer still. It's people are traditionally a mix of these forces and live as they can as the constant changes around them deliver challenges.

Between the city and its people are the cats, spurned or indulged, exploring gymnastically or gathering for their children. They are shown through the twinned skills of astute, muscular filmmaking and a deep knowledge of their nature. If you have ever loved a cat for its delightful and infuriating antics you will recognise everything you see here and it will oddly feel like seeing it for the first time. There is no depiction of violence to the animals (one is the victim of an attack not seen) but the sheer volume of the stray litters can only suggest that a sizeable number do not make it through.

But as Talking Heads once observed, cats prefer buildings to people and we see them luxuriating in the architecture of their beautiful city, snoozing, stalking or exploring with what one observer astutely calls their superpowers. The cats with names are listed along with the people interviewed in order of appearance in the end credits as we watch both move around a town so close to the origins of civilisation that it feels like archaeology verite. Pdrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.