An action movie is about order wresting itself from chaos, changed, stronger.
Action heroes don't always know they're good people. By the end they are aware of the cost of being good and how important it is to keep up the effort. A bad action movie will have all this but it will push the stunts and pyrotechnics so far forward that that simple moral discovery gets smothered. A good action movie provides a compelling case for the action before it can take place so that we in the audience must need it to happen. True Lies is a bullshit action movie. Drive is a very good one.
Ryan Gosling's nameless driver is a creature of great precision, doing stunt work by day and working as a getaway driver for the kicks as well as the money by night. The film opens with the latter kind of job as he picks up a pair of serious looking burglars and, after a very tight wait for their remergance from the job, and gets them out of danger with a series of impressive evasive manoeuvres. He loves his skill. A flat action star just looks good between lines (Keanu Reeves). A full blooded one shows you what he's thinking and his few lines are precious. Gosling is such an one. When he isn't speaking he's observing. I first saw him as a fuckup teacher in Half Nelson and then as the profoundly damaged loner in Lars and the Real Girl and each time his casting has lifted the film he's in. Same here. By the time you see him shyly notice his beautiful young neighbour in their apartment's lift you start looking forward to seeing how he thaws out for her. And you know it's going to take work.
Much of the attention of the rest of the cast has gone to Christina Hendricks. She does a fine job as an underworld utility but really the attention is related to her high profile role in Mad Men. It's Carey Mulligan who shines brightest here. I know her from the recent Never Let Me Go where she played the dowdy/sobering lead. Here, outfitted with an American accent and bottle blondness, she owns her every shot. A young mother with a husband in prison she shows clear personal strength but allows a fragility through the closer she gets to Gosling's character. Also, having all those qualities but the face of a fourteen year old and the body of a woman in her twenties she is utterly disconcerting on screen.
When the crunch comes for these two it is literal and silencing. Because of the work of establishing their characters has been so full there is a genuine moment of suspense following (no details, no spoilers) as to how this extreme shared experience will play out. It's just a moment but it's there. That's attention to detail for you.
I'm skimping on the plot details as there is just too much to potentially spoil and this is a plotty film. Suffice to say that the driver is taken from his accessory role in crime to a self-revalatory maelstrom that is as believable as it is violent. Rising action maestro from Copehagen Nicholas Winding Refn displays an effortless skill in judging when to turn the action tap on and off and how to soothe the impatient nervous system between times: rest and motion, rest and motion, wrestling and emotion. I will say that the third act felt draggy through an evenness of pacing but also that that appeared to be deliberate.
Also, thanks be for depicting gangsters who don't quote The Art of War or waffle through pages of dialogue before getting to the point. These mobsters are hard arse bastards. When points of vulnerability appear they are dealt with as they would be in life, with a swift and sure dismissal. Comedian Albert Brooks is frighteningly against type and his partner Ron Perlman also. Breaking Bad's Bryan Cranston crawls back from badass into pathos effectively. And the violence, the lifeblood of the middle and final acts of any action movie is tense and ugly, the worst of it kept offscreen to prevent it from bloating beyond its purpose.
Action movies find their morality in the fatefully unacknowledged monsters of heroes. There is a song throughout the film, used initially for scenes of the driver and Irene falling in love but then entering into more extreme fare. It's a heavily 80s influenced synth pop number with thunking bass and ethereal female vocal. The chorus goes" have you the strength to be a real human being and a real hero?" That should be as deadly as a choctop to a diabetic but it works and, blessedly, works without irony.
Melbourne arthouse is dead. Born of wonder and raised against odds it thrived for decades in this city until the mid 2000s when its organs failed one by one and was left in the gutter to wheeze its last. The art of cinema is now held entirely in the mainstream plexes which tower o'er the cine landscape like Easter Island heads. And down on the level of pure competition - one/zero, presence/absence, win/loss - the right thing has happened.
It angers and saddens me but, try as I might, I cannot argue with it. For starters, however much I might revile the impersonal trough that is the supersize popcorn movies of the cinematic Goliath that is the mainstream, I can't blame it for killing off the little David with his feeble stone-loaded ging. The arthouse cinema took so little of the mainstream's audience that the giant never noticed the piffling stings of the stones even when they got near tender bits. No, the arthouse was allowed to die alone by its own flock. People just stopped going. Goliath won and David shrugged. Why?
It's not as though the content was so very different. For every Irreversible playing in a fleapit held together by love of form there was a crowd pleasing Ringu or goofy Boxing Helena. An autopsy of the most bloat budgeted rubbish made to pay for a Hollywood A-lister's home extension will reveal that art runs through its veins. The difference is not an easy one like civilisation vs brutality, taste vs entertainment or quality vs garbage.
The range alone of cultures and traditions that the arthouses used to supply left an effortless impression of freedom of expression that the mainstream would find suicidal. This diversity of approach, the continuing lesson that cinema is a blank canvas rather than a set of standards is the legacy of arthouses that leaves behind snobbery they might have engendered.
This article offers a range of reasons which I can't argue with. EXCEPT it sneaks in the phrase poor-quality films. Where does that come from? Here's another from the Age, also from the time of the Lumiere closure. One smug proprietor looking down his nose at the low end seating and heating. Really? That's why people who supported it for so long have now abandoned it, a fear of cold buttocks? In exchange for a cultural experience that might well be intellectually, politically, socially or even just aesthetically liberating the price of rugging up against fashion is too high? Really? Rea-fucking-lly?
Well it gets worse. Now that the small cinemas have gone the diversity has been forgotten and a new generation of filmgoers has emerged that neither knows nor cares about cinema beyond its function within the service economy. All we have left of cinema's extended possibilities flickers in the next room like a cupcake candle; individuals with modems and credit cards and a select fewer benefiting from the meagre light.
And that's it. A scattered few. An ageing scattered few.
So is it that? Cinephiles just getting old and ricketty and whose health cannot stand the torments of the fleapit shall nurture all their passion for alternative cinema in safety deposit boxes that are doomed to inaccessible dementia? Will none among their progeny or younger kin stand and demand a few stories from the barricades of when they fought the big one before Michael Bay bombed Pearl Harbour anew and did more damage to it than the Imperial Japanese Air Force ever did? All gone now?
I don't accept that. Alternative cinema has lost its community but the makings of that community or a new one are still out there. Attendances at Shadows are flexible and favour the warmer parts of the year (whaddaya gonna do?) but the people who come remain interested in these tales from under the hood and takes from off the wall. Showing the mighty Harold and Maude to a small number of mainly younger folk last year resulted in a new entry to a few more top ten film lists. No one had a problem with the wonkiness of the production values of It Happened Here as the audacity of its concept towered above that little pile of nuts and bolts. Ok, so Noriko's Dinner Table bored when it didn't baffle but the same director's Suicide Circle delighted. The spirit really is willing (even if the goosebump riddled flesh is weak).
Maybe all that's needed is a shift in the paradigm. Maybe we just need to drop the choc tops and remember Brecht's line about rapidly setting up his theatre. You don't have to give up the mainstream. I didn't. There's no need to. But there's everything to gain by accepting the diversity that shines through the difficulties of alternative cinema.
I am one of the ageing cinephiles I mentioned above but I'm not a sentimental one. I dinnae care a mere zot if the film I'm seeing is the result of light through celluloid or was born in a hive of ones and zeros. (I'm similarly unromantic about vinyl LPs which experience I'm happy to be rid of). Similarly I find concepts like perfect film or classic cinema to be unhelpful and near meaningless standards. A film is a film. How do you react to it? Don't know? Well, go and find out. Shadows isn't the only one. Go forage among the what's on schedules and see what's buzzing under the radar and start doing some of your own buzzing. Go on!
Late Spring and thoughts turn naturally to population. Ok, they might more naturally turn to anti-histamines but I've been thinking about the movement of thought in populations, of Arab springs and beseiged coalition governments, of occupied Wall Streets, of mass fever and mass cures. We're down to a briefer than usual four for the last full season part of this year so my choice had to be a tougher one. The four had to fit the theme more or less directly, they had to be very different from each other for variety's sake, and they had to be ... enjoyable. A late change necessitated the substitution of two titles just when I was ready to click Publish. I think it's a stronger selection for all that, though. From unclassifiable dystopias from the psychedelic era through samurai warriors, Eastern bloc oppression, to the whimsy of a comic genuis, I think we've got the right mix. So, come in out of the pollinated breeze and enjoy these tales o' popular control. Friday November 4th 8pm PRIVILEGE (Peter Watkins, UK 1967)
Stephen Shorter is popstar number one in the land of popstars, late 60s Britain. He's as clean as Cliff and as mean as Mick. The film begins with his latest stage setup which involves him singing from a cage, wearing cuffs and then getting beaten by cops. The girls go crazy!
So why waste all that influence just to sell little bits of plastic? A relatively benign tv commercial to help out British apple farmers works as expected. Next stop, get the kids off the streets and back into the churches and ballot booths to vote for their local Conservative.
So is this a what-if? It's more a left hook at the consumerism at the heart of rock music. The crowd might have been singing All You Need is Love at the nuclear disarmament rallies in London at the time but the counter culture also was sinking into politics-annihilating mysticism. Writer/director Peter Watkins isn't saying "watch out or they'll turn you into a tory" he's saying, "why are you wasting this opportunity for revolution?" (See also the hugely misunderstood One Plus One/Sympathy for the Devil by Jean Luc Godard.)
Watkins, a documentarian who frequently crossed the border into fiction, knew the power of mixing verity with fable. His imagined nuclear strike The War Game was banned in its time and can still reduce its audiences to silence. He removed the sentiment from a tall moment in British history in Culloden by reporting on it as a contemporary tv crew might have. For Privilege he used a real popstar, Paul Jones from contemporary mega hitmakers Manfred Mann who proves a natural choice. Shorter's Yoko before her time arrives in the form of supermodel Jean Shrimpton.
While the living parallel of flower power herding has long gone, Peter Watkins' fable of a Pied Piper with syndicated management still shows that he understood that rock music's primary force was mercenary rather than cultural. But for all the grimness of his usual fare (historical warfare reported as current news, the real effects of a nuclear strike on Britain) Privilege finds him more satirical, playful even.
This film has so many antecedents to the culture of its near future. Shorter is somewhere between Scott Walker and the Bowie of the Thin White Duke. The police brutality stage show could be from A Clockwork Orange. The stadium extravaganza was extensively dipped into for The Wall. But Watkins isn't trying to be a prophet here, he's just performing his customary incision on the culture he sees around him.
Oh ... and find me a better version of Jerusalem than the George Bean Group plays in this film.
Friday November 11th 8pm YOJIMBO (Akira Kurosawa, Japan 1961)
An aimless, down at heel samurai wanders into a town held between the forces of two rival gangs. At first, he finds some amusement and profit from playing them against each other but then it gets personal and he has to use all his wits to stay alive and stop the town from destroying itself.
Derived from American noir and westerns, Yojimbo sees the maestro Kurosawa once again in steady and serious pursuit of ideas that dwelt at the centre of his world: pacifism vs military self protection; the cold war's rampaging division; the frailty of human loyalty. There is even the surprise nod at the arms race which kicks the assumption that this is a medieval story right into the modern world. Tough violence rubs shoulders with philosophical dialogue and I'm sure I saw a kitchen sink in there somewhere. If Mifune had been justly celebrated as an actor in Japan this role took him to the world.
Friday November 18th 8pm WHEN FATHER WAS AWAY ON BUSINESS (Emir Kusturica Yugoslavia, 1985)
When his father goes off on yet another business trip and doesn't come back, Malik starts walking in his sleep. He doesn't know that the business this time is an indefinite sentence at a labour camp. It's Yugoslavia 1948 and Tito has just split with Stalin. Malik doesn't have all the details but he has every reason in the world to act out his anxiety.
Emir Kusturica had not yet begun to allow his whimsy to overcrowd his canvases when he made this film. The range of fears and joys from the everyday life of these villagers emerges organically from a strong cast and assured, purposeful writing and direction. This is why When Father was Away on Business turns out to be so warm and so unflinching. This is not the lead weight cinema that a Bela Tarr or Ellem Klimov can threaten us with but a lively and deeply examined look at a life whose every day routines, irks, gifts and joys might be under constant surveillance but still can demand a celebration.
Winner of the Palme D'or at Cannes in 1985. Come and see why.
Friday December 2nd 8pm PLAYTIME (Jacques Tati, France, 1967)
Jacques Tati gives his creation M. Hulot a single task: make contact with a particular person. Easy enough except that the baffling laboratory maze of the modern world separates the two parties. The old-world Hulot determinedly sets about his errand but is continually defeated by architecture and technology designed to render life easy.
Tati's own performance of the loping, constantly bemused Hulot provides a kind of Euro-Keaton against the sanitised space age modernity. There's more than a little digging at the American influence in all of this (always a welcome sport, ah they can take a heckle). Tati shot the film in French and English but really most of this film exists without dialogue. That's not to say it's silent. The sound mix in a JT film is usually so rich and purposed that it not only stands in for dialogue but just about qualifies for the musique concrete Hall of Fame. The fact that this cinecomedian in the tradition of the great silent directors (who yet pioneered well beyond their available scope) could be a visible and audible influence on David Lynch might give you an idea of depth and craft served up for your delectation. Come and enjoy. It's hard not to.
I nod and lead the way along the path to the west of the rock. Time.
"It's important," I tell you, spacing my words to compensate for the climb we have begun, "it's important to observe the details."
"Observe them in your time," you say.
"We are going to perform a ritual," I say. "Should we skip parts of that?"
"Let's just get to it."
"Uh."
The path is rough: pebbles, twigs, bottle shards. Jutting tree roots form an irregular set of steps as though the path had been cut for them. The incline is steep enough to fatigue me if I climb it for too long but I know it plains out soon. You have never been here and don't know that.
The day is fine and mild. Clean. There is a sparkle to everything the sunlight touches. It should make you feel calm but you are irritable. I wonder if you are ready for what you are going to do.
We reach the flatter path and move forward into the bushland. We will walk for another half kilometre before we stop and begin the rite. You are slim but you are puffed from the climb. I should be worse off for it but you are. Whenever I turn and look at you I try to catch your eye but you won't allow it. You shouldn't be this affected.
"It is a nice day," you huff.
I let the blandness of the words fall between us. Nice. What kind of word is that?
"Beautiful."
"What?"
"I'd call it a beautiful day."
"Right."
"I'd say the sunlight is flooding over us without hurdle of cloud or haze."
"Right."
"And that the air is its perfect compliment. It's cool but not cold."
"Ok."
"And that it feels clean. It's as though we are being cleansed just by walking through it."
"Let's just do this!" you say, breaking a little. I wonder if you are ready. You need to be convinced of your right to do this. Are you breaking?
"What, here?"
"I just want to keep the bullshit to a minimum. I need to be clear."
I stop for a moment and regard you. You're ready. I turn and continue. Not far now.
This bushland has been freshened by this weather but there is still a stink from some of the vegetation decaying. That's normal for the season and I quite like it anyway. It's not like a human stink but something older, pre-human. I wonder if this is what a child smells that bonds it to its parents, the odour of the lifegiver. Ah, here we are.
It's a clearing. The yellow barked trees have been kept back to a neat circle and stand around us like a crowd around a street performance. We face each other. You visibly control your racing breath waiting for the words to come. I am calm, looking back, ready.
You close your eyes and take a breath. You relax your skinny self and find your centre in there. There are no birds calling. There is a fine breeze but it's inaudible. You exhale. You have taken control of yourself. I smile.
"Turn," you say softly. "Turn and kneel."
I turn and kneel. The ground is carpeted with fallen leaves. There are no stones to jab into my knees. It is very easy to keep still here. I hear you approach from behind. You are quiet and sure. You wrap one arm around my neck and remove your hunting knife with the other hand. A tiny click from the sheath clip and a whisper as the blade withdraws from the leather.
" I am demon," you say. "I am god the blade and god the wolf. With this scission I consume the will of your blood."
You hold the knife in front of me. You will now plunge it into my heart and cover yourself with my blood and rub it the pores of your face and arms as though it were lotion.
I lift you easily over my head and hurl you on to your back in a smooth motion. You are winded and cannot say what you want to. I rise and kick you on to your front. I stand on your shoulders and bring my left boot to the top of your neck and jam the heel there until the crunch tells me you are dead.
You are limp and light and easily borne. I lower you into your grave and cover you with red earth and leaves.
"You are demon. You are god the blade and god the wolf. I heard your cry in the light of morning. Your pain flew to me on gentle wings. Rest you, now, forever free from torment."
The light is golden. The silence rises to an even breath which surrounds me and lightens the path returning.
Spring again.The warmth rises from the soil and the light of morning is polished to a crystalline sparkle. Once, in the bloom of youth I was a fresh red rose just waiting to be picked. Now I'm old and getting a cold and look more like a fresh red nose just waiting to be picked. Bees hum around the honeysuckle and the jasmine and the larvae of houseflies yet dream softly of the summer. And, och, if the snowdrops aren't already pushing through the earth and lifting their lilywhite heads o'er the tips o' the grass. Spring. And I'm sneezing like a bofors gun.
Your chair, cine-pilgrim, come in from the lingering chill, sit by the fire with a glass of good substance, and witness these six tales o' trouble and desire.
All they say is "kiss kiss kiss kiss kiss" Emiliana Torrini, 2009
Friday September 2 8 pm MATADOR (110 mins, Pedro Almodovar, 1986)
Roll credits. Beneath them hunky Diego is proactively relaxing in front of the tv as a Jes Franco horror flick plays and he thinks of his instructions to his matador students about making the perfect kill and as this happens a beautiful woman seduces and murders men in the same way, marking the point of incision with a red lipstick kiss to the back of the neck. Young, virginal, brought up hyper Catholic Angel asks Diego about seduction and then takes the older man's advice with ugly literalism, dragging the latter's lover into an alley. This is the start of Matador, Pedro Almovodar's show of red cape to Spain's conservatism.
This film is not about bullfighting but the culture that celebrates it, at the centre of which is a former star of the bullring (retired through injury) who has lost touch with any intimacy beyond its violence. And it ain't just him. Blend here those he influences as a teacher of bullfighting including the dangerously malleable Angel (a very young and achingly earnest Antonio Banderas), the clingy girlfriend whose passion seems for the image rather than the man, the ravishing lawyer whose interest in Angel's case deepens and corrupts, and the detective partners who work through a baffling case of perp-confessed rape that turns into what might be serial murder. At the centre of this is an attraction both vile and disturbingly beautiful which, at its consummation, seems nothing less than perfect.
Almovodar, famous for his excess and transgressive taunting, shows the kind of restraint he is alleged to have developed only in his maturity. For there beneath the sin writ large on screen beats a genuine heart.
Friday September 9th 8 pm THE UNBELIEVABLE TRUTH (90 mins + short)
Audry is young and beautiful and set for a life as a fashion model and future with her high school football star boyfriend. Then Josh comes to town. Strong and silent, he has returned to Long Island with a past. He's been in prison but no one can agree what he was put there for, though most assume it was murder. Audry's father is the only person in town who'll give him a job. It's said we covet what we see every day. If what we covet is a mystery as well then coveting pulses up to desiring. Bye bye, footballer.
Hal Hartley's first full go at his entwined themes of trouble and desire remains his rawest and so freshest. His comic touch is light but assured, transparent over more serious issues like trust and deception. Further sorties into this territory like Trust or Henry Fool might have been crafted with greater sophistication but they never felt more sincere than here. The trademark deadpan delivery of smart dialogue begins here and, though it can come across as stiffly contrived, it works. I don't care how false the circular exchange sounds between Josh and the waitress, it's just fun, like a good big dumb pop song. Adrienne Shelley lights up every frame she's in. Robert Burke shows real intellect through his tall dark stranger persona. Great dialogue, cast and characters, good story steered by a helmsman setting out on a voyage of discovery. What's not to love?
Friday September 16th 8 pm DIARY (85 mins, Pang Bros. 2006)
Since her baby left her Winnie passes her time in Lonely Towers, making dolls and keeping a diary. Writing to him and trying to contact him through his work continually fail. Then one day, going to his building she meets someone whose resemblance to him stops her dead. He is so like Mr Silent that she is compelled to approach him. Soon they're having coffee. Soon he's moving in. Next task? She needs to keep in touch with the difference between him and the dolls.
The Pang brothers who brought us the extraordinary The Eye and Ab-Normal Beauty have been in the genre bending business for most of the last decade, injecting cavernous character depth into what might otherwise have been above average horror tales. Here we go on a psychological dive in a bathysphere, all the way to the final line, delivered quietly for maximum gutpunch.
Friday September 23rd 8 pm LAURA (88 mins + short)
Detective Mark MacPherson, NYPD, has been in love with Laura Hunt from the moment he saw her. Trouble is she's as dead as a shotgun blast can make a dame. Following her troubling life from those who knew her he becomes increasingly fascinated with the woman.
Clifton Webb plays the queen bitch newspaper columnist as though his veins ran with nourishing strychnine. Vincent Price in an early, rare non-horror role, is an idle yankee aristocrat and proto metrosexual. Dana Andrews, pointedly at the other end of the class spectrum, hard boils smokily as the haunted detective. But it is Gene Tierney in flashback as Laura whose radiance and benign innocence give clear indication why she was able to rise from obscurity to society damehood without corruption.
A study in fascination by a master of the form.
Friday September 30th 8 pm Mini Double Bill!
THE HOURS AND TIMES / MYSTERY FILM
Brian takes John on a trip to Barcelona in the hope that this occasion with the younger man away from his boisterous cronies might finally give a sign no matter how slight that there is more to their relationship. So what? Well Brian is Brian Epstein and John is John Lennon. This is a self-avowed speculation based on a genuine event that the straight world of Beatle fandom tends to skip. Whatever happened, the idea that the young Lennon might have found something in himself outside of the Beatlemania world that had already grown cage-like at this point is an intriguing one.
David Angus presents a suffering Epstein. Ian Hart gives us a seemingly note perfect Lennon, even chewing gum as a kind of conversational defence shield. This performance clearly gave him a taste for the character as he ressurected it two years later in Backbeat.
While this story is less about the Beatles than it is about love the fact of the historical place of the two men adds significance. There is the class divide that separates them and which both know as a struggle. And there is the divider of fame. A scene where Lennon's attempt at seducing a woman does not go as easily as he expected is powerful for all its underplaying and the suggestion that while soon he will never have to do that much work again he will have lost something by that.
The other part of this screening is the MYSTERY FILM. When I unlock the mystery I'll post it here. Now, I gotta post this blog as time is running out.
Friday October 7th 8 pm DELLAMORTE DELLAMORE (CEMETERY MAN) (105 mins Michele Soavi 1994)
The girl of his dreams is killed after their night o' magic so Franco falls into a wallow. Then he meets her again and the same thing happens. Maybe here I should point out that Franco is the keeper of the local cemetery whose duties include putting bullets into the brains of corpses who have dug their way out of their graves.
Rupert Everett brings a careworn aristocracy to Franco, dispatching zombies during a phone conversation as though brushing off a fly. The Quasimodo-like Naghy can solve complex puzzles but only speak in grunts. And into this gothic everyday floats the ethereally beautiful Anna Falchi ("She" in the credits), a femme fatale as Edgar Allen Poe might have imagined.
Far less a horror film than a romance with a setting that happens to be gothic, Dellamorte Dellamore refuses to cheapen the genres it appeals to with self reflection. There is comedy here but it rises from the overall arc (this from when Scream was corrupting the horror genre into harmlessness). It's fitting that journeyman of Italian horror, Michele Soavi chose this extension of genre as his graduation piece. There is a little showing off with reference to European art (Magritte's The Lovers, particularly) but the ossuary which looks like an overdressed set was, in fact, a real one. Soavi serves up all his elements in a big showy blend before slamming on the breaks for one of the genre's strangest endings.
A hunter's cottage deep in the snowy woods. The hunter spends the long winter nights teaching his daughter, Hanna, about the world. One night she interrupts him with the words: I'm ready. He stops, looks to one side in thought. The next day he goes into the woods and carefully paces a location. He digs and retrieves something very contemporary which he places on the cottage table when he returns. When Hanna asks what it is he replies that it's a tracking device that will tell Marissa where they are and their world will change. Hanna flips the switch. Then it's out the back for weapons training.
Dad cleans up to look more like Eric Bana than he did as a hairy hunter and makes his way toward their planned rendezvous in Berlin. Big military choppers swarm down on the cottage. The first assault ends in silence. A second team bash in to find the first few slaughtered on the floor. A slight blonde snow maiden looks down at them with a disturbing passivity.
Ok, so far that's a hunter and his daughter, a magic device and the powers of a wicked witch. Why is this any more than a fairy tale with assault weapons? Why the hell would you want it to be?
The themes here are genetic modification, wicked witchery, fathers keeping secrets and a babe out of the woods, pure of heart and powerful because of it. Magic and mayhem. But this film has sustained a lot of hate. A lot of paid critics I've read on this one complain about the heavy hand and others (like the ones on imdb) talk about plot holes.
To the first charge all I can say is that the references to Grimms fairy tales, however large they may be writ, work. Yes, I get Cate's witch emerging from the mouth of a huge wooden wolf, but I suspect I'm meant to get it. It's not failed cleverness, it's the film doing it's job. Fairy tales aren't just about princesses, witches and magic they are about strangers and dangers. The thing that I think looks hamfisted to some critics here is the film going beyond use of fairytale iconography for its premise and continuing to become a fairytale itself. Its constant mashup of naivete and worldly gravity (strongest at the Grimm-themed funpark and with the liberal English family Hanna hitches with) serves this end with no necessity to break free of the paradigm. Freeway is a film that does something very similar and, while having plenty of merits, it doesn't succeed to my mind half as well as Hanna.
Second, there is a good deal of inconsistency here, particularly in Hanna's skill set. Why does she freak out at the electricity in the hotel room when she's already experienced a truckload of it at the CIA base? How does she develop sudden skills with internet searching right at the moment when a quick Google would solve a lot of problems? Bumps. One imdb reviewer (I read them first as they are speaking through the experience of paying for the tickets and popcorn) found about eleven major voids in the plot of Hanna which, in his mounting anger, he tabled as evidence of narrative death. I can honestly say that I read all of them, considered them, agreed with most of his points, and didn't remember caring about any of them as I watched the movie. The poster's anger at these resembled that of any other critique of a mainstream film's narrative strength: it's as though they'd thought they were seeing a documentary whose unscrupulous creators delighted in nothing better than deceiving their audiences. Hanna is not only a fiction, it's a hyper-fiction, a story about stories, a fairytale about fairytales. It's really, really not going to be able to stand a lot of scrutiny.
I actually wasn't expecting to like this film. I'd read a lot of negative responses (mostly along the lines of the above paragraph) and others about it suffering from a surfeit of quirk. I'm the first to break out in hives at quirky indulgence on the cinema screen but made it through the screening with skin as smooth as it was while the ad slides were on. Instead, I found a very lean film that did more than its job by doing it with wit and style. Great end to a fun holiday.
Charlotte Bronte's GothRom revisits the big screen again in subtle but hearty form. Mia Wasikovska (our own) plays a Jane plain but with a wandering eye and a frustration at the horizon seen from the window doing the same to her as her life: nix adventure. Jane is a furnace beneath her composure and Wasikovska portrays this through her coal black eyes that smoulder from her poise and cleanliness. Then, as this setup demands (of Bronte and any adaptation) all this control must be exposed to disassembling chaos.
Enter Mr Rochester, master of the castle, lands, goods, chattels and anything else in his ancestors' domesday book entry. Dark and sexy as a blue pointer shark he appears in a crash of violent movement as Jane unwittingly spooks his horse while walking through a fog in a forest (blame Charlotte Bronte!) From that point on it's Jane vs Rochester and the tall dark and sexy Michael Fassbender fills a role most memorably substantiated by Orson the Great many decades ago. He doesn't do Orson. He is far closer to the Rochester of Bronte: aristocratic ad hedonistic when not lightlessly gloomy.
He's a good Roch, she's a good Jane. Is it a good Jane Eyre? Yes, because it lets its strengths (undercurrent, unspoken dialogue, robust control over light and landscape to play the atmosphere like a pipe organ) work under their own momentum and forbids the suddenness of melodrama (Bronte's book is fraught but not bodice-ripping). No, it's not a good Jane because the element that might save it from being too plain , the novel's wafting but everpresent creepiness, is turned down so low that it never quite takes to the air. Without the spookiness Jane Eyre can only be a serious study in restrained power. Is it a middling Jane Eyre? No, because the central performances are so exact and never mannered. Maybe middling because the score is a by the numbers string section wash that while not fulsomely everpresent is always unwelcome to my ears and makes a potentially extraordinary film veer toward becoming a resolutely ordinary one.
So, contradictions. I won't rush to watch this again but I'm glad I took the effort.
Little else to say but this from my particular screening. There was an audio anomaly in the first reel or so (assuming reels were in use) which had the pitch wavering down a noticeable microtone every few minutes. This was only noticeable in the music score with its languid strings but it had the curious effect of sounding like 20th century modernism as though the composer, ashamed of his work's conventionality, was twiddling a pitch control in a last ditch effort to gain some edge. It was corrected about twenty minutes in and the problem didn't return. Made me wonder how it happened, though. That pitch waver takes a lot of work in the digital realm but might only be a dirty pinch roller on an analogue machine. That's why called the duration a reel above, by the way.
