Review: SAFETY NOT GUARANTEED

A small gang of newshounds go out of town on a jaunt to find out if a time travel ad is real, a jaunt that will lead to love, adventure and self knowing. Sounds like porridge, doesn't it? Well, read on.

Safety Not Guaranteed has so much going against it that I'd normally let it pass on spec but some hooks emerged from the used but smooth indy surface that first bade me choose it for my MIFF list and then (having missed out on that) compelled me to stroll into the Kino on Cup Day morning to enjoy a deluxe (ie empty auditorium) cinema experience of the piece.

The story quickly splits into two types of film that while disparate are closely related to each other: buddy movies and quirky love stories or, if you will, a Sideways stirred in with a Harold and Maude. This should fall but the reason it holds is that both threads are tightly woven with a firmly handled theme: risk.

Risk in chief, Kenneth's claim of time travel, has all the incredulity of the world around him biting a tit. Kenneth seems a sad loner, holding on to a dangerously unhinged notion of his own capabilities, supported by an equal delusion idea of his own importance (he thinks government agents are after him). Mark Duplass carries his role far from the mad garage professor that it might have been by allowing a profound sadness to show through as though it were impossible to conceal, as though he must by now be used to everyone around him recognising it. His delusions about his abilities and the government's interest in them ricochet off this sadness but not into ridicule but affection. We warm to him quickly and the question on our minds as to whether this self-aware indy is going to go into debunking his claim for comedy (as in Napolean Dynamite, a cousin film to this one) or pathos OR show its fulfillment. We just don't know until the point where we are not allowed not to.

The buddy movie thread neither intrudes nor suffers from tokenism as its performances, too, are strong. Cocky journalist Jeff attempts his own kind of time travel in seeking out his high school sweetheart. He feels his own ageing and must come to grips with it as well as the object of his nostalgia's obssession. The results have an appropriate maturity to them and in turn spur Jeff to take up the case of the nerdy Arnau with humility and digestible warmth. The climactic moment of this thread isn't funny but doesn't try to be, its founding solemnity bears it without effort.

The small central cast might not seem to be ensemble players considering the story keeps them apart for so much of the screen time but this does end up being a team effort. Well, I'd say that and leave it there were it not for Aubrey Plaza. Plaza's stand up and tv work (Parks and Recreation) form a kind of acerbic wit whose delivery borders on autism. A strange mix of gamer girl and shrewd beauty allow her to be both believably nerdy and seductive in the same scene. Her performance clearly takes her schtick way beyond the brand.

A surprise cast member is Kristen Bell who appears in a scene of game-changing revelation which deftly knocks our expectations out. Bell is known to a majority of what I take to be the imagined audience for this film who would know her from Veronica Mars and Heroes. She is not listed in the opening credits but her appearance in her scene stamps it with cruciality, her presence is saying, "pay attention".

The thing that really makes this film work against its own type, though, is that for all the lightness of the comedy present in almost every frame, the seriousness of its theme of regret and the risk needed to overcome it is played with strength. All comedies must have a kind of memento mori, a token of the grimness that they are asking us to face with laughter. Quirky comedies need this more than rom coms or they will simply fall into silliness (even Wes Anderson understands this, he's just crap at it). Harold and Maude's constant whimsy is bounded by the presence of death applied with equal force, making it one of the greatest comedies ever put on to a screen. I can think of no higher compliment to give Safety Not Guaranteed than to say that while it can't compete with Harold and Maude's power it joins a tiny group of films that go to the same place and come back stronger for the experience.

One of my films of the year. Still in cinemas at time of writing.

Top 10 1/1/2012

Come and See: Title is a quote from the Book of Revelation. No accident as we follow young rosy cheeked farm boy Florya go off to join the local militia to fight the Nazi invaders. Without firing his rifle once what he goes through ages him by apparent centuries. Then he fires and fires and fires and fires. At what? Go and see! .... but with friends .... some good friends.


 


 Eraserhead: Renouncing all other religions I pledge my heart to the greatest movie ever made.

The Seventh Victim: Mark Robson directed Val Lewton genreless piece blends a missing person trail with anti-violent satanists. A lightless room in an office building seems itself to kill one of the characters. Begins and ends with a quote from John Donne. B-movie? Technically, yes, as it was made to go first in a cinema double feature but its quality and the depth of some of its ideas probably outclassed the A feature.

 

 Harvey: Like Harold and Maude (see below) this great comedy advocates freedom at the cellular level. James Stewart, only just beginning to play into his Autumn years, is Elwood P. Dowd a cushioned eccentric who goes about the town, enjoying martinis in the local bars, one for him and one for his friend Harvey the pooka, a six foot white rabbit who acts as friend and mentor. No one else sees or hears Harvey which is why they all want him shut away in the local EST facility. Heartwarming and whimsical without ever once turning it up to cloying.

Fistful of Dollars: Clint makes his Leone debut in this magnificent cover version of Kurosawa's Yojimbo (itself a cover version, this time of American sources). Clint as The Man With No Name rides into town between two warring crime clans and plays them against each other. Music by Ennio Morricone. You got something not to love about all that?

Harold and Maude: BEST. ROMCOM. EVER.

 








One Plus One: Rock stars who don't have to get out of bed in the morning get together in a studio to take a song from a fragile folky try hard into a cultural megaton force. Meanwhile a group of urban guerillas with nothing to lose go about a series of interminable and mind numbing political and paramilitary drills and lose all their energy and focus. Godard isn't asking you to sympathise with them he's asking: what is wrong with this picture? This and Gimme Shelter are excellent weapons of disabuse for anyone who gets starry-eyed about the sixties and the Stones were in both and at their prime.


Picnic at Hanging Rock: This film really isn't made from much but it doesn't have to be. Really, it's no more than corsetted Europe meeting the big scary outback and getting swallowed whole by it. This is a quietly spooky film. Only director's cut I know of that is shorter than the original release. I wish Peter Weir still made films like this.





The China Syndrome: Jane Fonda, Michael Douglas and Jack Lemmon put more than contract fulfillment into their performances of this post-Three-Mile-Island scenario that would play out for real and worse in the next bloc when Chernobyl got mad. The mounting information stress of this film keeps it so straight that when it finally does break into its emotional damburst it's too late to feel any difference between the great sadness of the climax and the wrongs of its cause. Something that's easily forgotten about this film if ever noticed is that it has no music score. Play that to John Williamson and Hans Zimmer. Won't make any difference to their next bloat soundtracks but it'd be nice to watch them wonder.


Audition: A widower is encouraged by his son and colleague to look for another wife. He works in TV so sets up auditions for a fake show just so he can see what's out there. He's already looked through the applicants and by the time the ONE shows up he can't stop himself from crossing the line and praising her. What then looks like a dirty old man's pursuit of a young beauty turns .... well, get a copy and watch it. If family-first valued paranoia movies like The Hand that Rocks the Cradle or Fatal Attraction had you white knuckled in frustration this might be a good antidote as it makes it very difficult to blame either party, though both enact atrocities of scale upon each other. It's tough stuff. When I saw it new at the old Lumiere the small, traumatised audience mostly unacquainted with each other shared glances and relieved sighs as the credits rolled.

Various Apocalypses Part 5: The Dark Hour

Spanish film about knowing what you had once it's gone. A group of survivors from an unidentified cataclysm go about their lives, educating their young, maintaining what they can of their life support in what looks like the last available underground bunker.

Frequent sorties are needed to the outside to cull the zomboid hordes who are encroaching and can infect through the slightest contact. The infection works faster than the one in 28 Days Later and when one of the party does get touched he agrees to be shot to death on the spot. Also, there are the invisibles creatures violent and stealthy that move through the bunker and enter any unsecured door with fatal results. This happens during the "cold hour". The reasons for this naming of hours are unclear until the end. As they constitute a massive spoiler I'll leave them out here.

The day to day is being recorded by the ten year old boy Jesus with his mini dv camera. He stands in as unofficial narrator. He is not in every scene nor is his narration. Though it begins looking like one The Dark Hour is is not a found footage piece. The entire film's video look is there (apart from budgetary concerns) to lend a claustrophobic and ugly edge to the setting. Works.

Jesus and his friend Magda visit old timer Judas in the lower bunkers for their education. Though Magda is a little older than Jesus neither can remember the time before the disaster. Judas plies them with tv, cinema and books from the time as well as his own knowledge and experience. The hopelessness of any idea of a return to this state is almost solid. When Judas gives Magda an old makeup kit, her delight is profoundly saddening in the grimy light of her home.

This is a studiously plain film, measuring its action and dramatics with a weary eye on the maintenance of life. Quite a lot happens in its reasonable 90 plus minutes of screen life but the sense that it would anyway is strong. Only when the pressures of the zombies and phantom visitors mount too dangerously to ignore does the flat and pointless existence meet its inevitable and probably final challenge. The rest is spoilers.

Because of the intentional lack of action movie flash and the surprises of the climax it's hard to say much about this film. If it is to be so realistically grim and ugly why have the big signpost character names like Jesus, Judas and Magda? Wouldn't Juan, Salma and Ignac have worked better, considering the end-time theme was impossible to misconstrue to begin with? They stick out like uncorrected writer brainstorm session contrivances. But this is really the worst I have against The Dark Hour, a film that blends its cinematic heritage and welcome morsel of orginality so well that even at its grimmest it manages to disarm. I saw mine on an imported dvd. Maybe SBS?

Top 13 horrors for Halloween

Okay, as this is an occasion for my favourite film genre I'm doing two unusual things in my tops lists: there are more titles and Eraserhead isn't one of them.

What's the same is that this is not an attempt at a definitive list. Horror is my favourite genre and I like far more than thirteen. I left the inclusion entirely up to what I could think of at the time. This would almost certainly change if I thought about it again this time next week. So, sorry if your favourites aren't here, a lot of my own aren't either.

Halloween: This bloodless coup of a film was the most profitable independent American film until The Blair Witch Project. Through the kill scenes and an atmosphere of undiluted and understated creepiness there is a powerful arc of nerd girl Laurie finding her courage and standing up to the monster. It was this where the masked killing machine who just keeps coming back originated. Original still best. Oh, and one of the best realised music scores for any film in any genre, by director Carpenter himself.

Dark Water: Shivery ghost tale remembers that the best of them include a tragedy at their centre. The convergence of this and the haunting results in a powerful and heartrending climax. Wash this down with a creepy and crushing coda and you have the logical end to the J-horror genre.

 

 
The Blair Witch Project: Campfire tale as cinema verite. Three students try and make a film about a witch in the woods and either fall under her control or get literally scared out of their wits. Not the first found footage film but still the most effective.





Ringu: The man who ended J-horror also began it with this tale of a curse and race against time. Like Dark Water this is also the story of a mother's bond with her child and the rediscovery of mutual respect between a woman and her estranged husband. Climax still freezes me and it's still better than the exponentially higher budgeted American re-bloat.





Suspiria: Giallo maestro Dario Argento's apex drives to the heart of why our nightmares scare us (we have no control over them) and serves one up with frozen blues and thick blood reds. Some of the most tightening murder scenes you'll see and a music score on a par with Halloween.


Martyrs: Outside of Asia contemporary horror has fallen to cliche and uninterestingly slick digital effects but this French/Canadian entry not only gives us gore that is painful to the eye but concepts that make us feel ashamed to be alive. The really nasty stuff has less gore but the ideas behind it are petrifying.




The Haunting: Citizen Kane alumnus Robert Wise made one of the finest haunted house movies of all time with this adaptation of a popular novel. Some still impressive special effects, almost three dimensional lighting design support a very very sad central story. Could watch this on a weekly basis.


The Exorcist: A story of doubt, faith and mother and daughter. You don't need to be religious to get into this one anymore than you need to believe in ghosts to dig The Haunting. As a girl goes through severe changes in mind and body her famous and inevitably neglectful mother is drawn to attention. The father who is only suggested by the gaps in an international phone call has been absent for years. As the tumult within the girl explodes into freakish violence the priests are called in. One is a skeptic, grieving for his recently deceased mother and the other is an old stager who has met this demon before. A mix of tough seventies drama and supernatural pyrotechnics, The Ex remains a wonder of the medium. Try to find the original cut as the "version you've never seen" aka the director's cut just adds bloat and removes power.

Night of the Living Dead: Throw out the magic and ritual of the traditional zombie story and all you have is the dead come back to life. All? Romero's fable of fate, made for the shoe polish budget of a contemporary quirky indy gets everything it tries for right.

The Changeling: Effectively eerie haunted house film builds to a conclusion of real dread. Atmosphere and strong performances lift this already fine story into the ether.






Kairo: Would you like to meet a ghost? So asks the website visited by most of the characters in this apocalyptic tale. No you wouldn't, is the correct answer, not if they're anything like the ones here. A chaos of mass loneliness, Kairo (or Pulse or Circuit as it's variously known in English) was once beautifully described as The Omega Man as directed by Tarkovsky. Yup!

Prince of Darkness: Dismissed even by Carpenter fans my near favourite JC film has ideas worthy of its chief inspirator Nigel Kneale and a human diminishing concept at its centre AND another great music score by Johnno himself. I can watch this just for the atmosphere but love the rest of it too much.




The Cabinet of Dr Caligari: Silent wonder as sleepwalker terrorises town at the same time as sinister bullish carny seems also to run the local asylum. Crazy expressionistic backdrops suggest a constantly unsettled state of mind which might be as easily fallen into as a gutter. Like a nightmare that has sneaked out from an Edvard Munch woodcut.

Top 10 22/10/2012

Withnail and I: Recently screened this to some people who hadn't seen it. This is a film remembered for its dialogue exchanges but I had forgotten a lot of them which freshened up the film no end. Perfect pacing and expert recall of what it means to be young and on the brink of missing out on making that big scratch on the world. Grant, McGann and Griffith all play and different pitches which should be disastrous in such a tightly cast film but here works like a perfectly arranged piece of music. And it's bloody funny.

Eraserhead: Does it to me every time.












 


I Walked With a Zombie: Jacques Tourner's second contribution to the Val Lewton canon keeps to the voodoo mythology but adds Jane Eyre. The walk through the cane fields still sends a shiver and then the socio-political harmonics start ringing in and you've got something typical of Lewton's efforts, a reach well beyond the basic requirements of genre into something other, rich and strange. I think of the Lewton canon as the chief precursor to Cronenberg and Lynch.

Night of the Living Dead: Story of the end of life doesn't need to be scary beyond that single thematic arc but plays beautifully on both genre cliche and new elements. One of the chief success stories of American independent cinema and it's very easy to see why. Romero stripped the magic away from the situation and refused to offer a sci fi cause for the phenomenon. There are zombies. They will get you. All you need. It works.




 The Tenant: Paranoia films don't come more threatening than this. Polanski himself is centre screen as the shrivelling emigre in a Paris populated by crassness, manipulation, ugliness, loneliness, violence, weirdness and Isabelle Adjani.

 





Fight Club: Because I knew nothing about it before I saw it and left with another favourite. I saw it new in a packed cinema. I was still thinking about it weeks afterward and giggling at most of it. Fincher when middling or poorly still has legs as a stylist but when his style is met by material like this (including the cast) he makes contemporary classics. See also, Seven.

Donnie Darko: Is he insane or a time traveller? If you watch the bloated and ruined director's cut you no longer get the choice as a viewer. In it's original cut, this one remains a series of bullseye shots at family, school, wishes and the explosiveness of being young. Writer/director looked like he might claim some precocious autership but quickly sank into pale repetition and loss of control over his material. That director's cut was nature's warning.

Naked Lunch: How do you film the unfilmable novel? You leave the text aside and look at where it came from and go from there. Cronenberg's take on the Burroughs confronting epic of addiction and alienation offers companionship with the source rather than a version of it. This film is better with a reading of the novel. The reverse, dare I say it, is also thus.

Bringing Up Baby: When romcoms remembered to be both romantic and funny, people like Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn who could walk through a great range of roles through their sheer presence walked here. But both when still young were like power appliances when plugged into comedy. This one is all about sex and repression. Grant is a paleantologist headed for a sexless marraige with another paleantologist. As soon as the elegant chaos of Hepburn enters the scene, the dinosaur skeleton Grant is working on is relieved of a bone by Hepburn's pet leopard. It doesn't stop from there until the credits. This is one of the funniest movies you are ever likely to see. An ex of mine, however, sat through the entire thing without as little as a smile but did like the leopard. There's your caveat.

Two or Three Things I Know About Her: Jean Luc Godard read an article about lower middle class women prostituting themselves to keep up with the consumerism that rose like a flood tide in the 60s. While he would never have made a straight drama nor a documentary about this he loosened his grip even more from conventional cinema even more and gave us a bare-faced essay about consumerism and prostitution featuring direct commentary by himself, a kind of anti-narrative that yet involves fictionalisation and a logical time line that doesn't veer to documentary, both a fetishisation and an examination of fetishisation of colour and consumer good, direct address by incidental characters and too much else to list. Two or Three Things vies for my favourite Jean Luc with the same year's (1966) Mascluin/Feminin. While the latter wins the sheer watchability arm wrestle the former offers greater rewards for viewer patience. Before this, Godard might have continued cute, after it his seriousness led him as far away from his fan base as Kurtz got from his intended. Godard saw the prostitute in himself and couldn't unsee it. This is the moment that happened.

Review: SHADOW DANCER

There is a kiss at the centre of Shadow Dancer and it is unlike any you have ever seen. It is impulsive and passionately physical but it is not sexual, not amorous. This is not through any lack of connection between the kissers, they are, by this moment, essential to each other. These characters are not in love; they are connecting this way because they are still alive. To find another screen kiss like it you might have to go to a film set in a concentration camp.

The setting here is the freezing, grazed knuckles world of Belfast during the troubles. The war on the ground is such that the suspicion of betrayal is enough to get you waterboarded, dumdum bulleted or blown up. The film has a prelude which sets the character of Collette for life: as a child she leans on her younger brother to go and do an errand she doesn't want to do and sees him shot by the IRA outside their house. Cut to 1993 we see the grown up Collette nervously convey a handbag so large and ugly that it must be a bomb on a train and then leave it at a tube station.

Bomb doesn't go off but the Brits do, catching her effortlessly and forcing her into the hard place by the rock (Irish girl, English gaol). All she needs to do is betray her brothers and everything will be alllllllright. It's Norn Irn, the very breath of the idea could get her splattered in bloody bits on the nearest steel grey backstreet. She has a young son. Damned if do or don't she does.

 Her subsequent days are spent fending off the suspicions of the local terror leader, taking part in IRA hits and feeling the squeeze of her impossible predicament. Now and then she meets up with Clive Owen's hunky chunky MI5 agent and reports what she finds out. In the meantime he, sick of the attitudes of his superiors and colleagues to these compromised and threatened operatives, tries to find out all he can about Collette's case and discovers something he didn't expect. Although he's in charge of her case he has been denied access to her file. He's about to find out something very troubling which leads to a pair of twists that will make your heart sink.

I say twists but this film does not play for narrative grip as much as a constant amping up of the tension of the beginning. This is not made any easier by the cheerless near monochrome (but not obviously desaturated) streets, homes and pubs of the town.

No ease either from Andrea Riseborough's intense performance. Her strange beauty, like a marzipan-face aristocrat from an eighteenth century portrait, is almost constantly marred  with concern which expresses itself in a stress furrow 'twixt the eyebrows which is almost always present. Apart from moments spent enjoying the sight of her young son's life her Collette is seemingly bound for early mortality or galloping premature aging.

Mac, Clive Owen, is similarly bound, knowing of the certain visceral mess to come but powerless to stop it. At the point of the kiss I began with he is devastated by the circumstances but compelled to play them out. That's why there is no eroticism in the act. That's why it is so simultaneously rivetting and uncomfortable. That's why this is a corker of a film.

There is also a kind of setpiece halfway through involving a street funeral. The British army are out in force to prevent the deceased from being publicly celebrated as a soldier (as opposed to a criminal). At one point a pair of pistols is passed stealthily through the crowd to a pair of men who don balaclavas and fire into the air in salute. As I watched this it occured to me that Stephen Spielberg would have fetishised this moment, luxuriating in the images of the cold steel being passed along lines of funereal clothes, perhaps slowing it down and throwing in some metallic clanks in case you did get the guns were steel. Here it is shown unadorned, grim, defiant and curiously moving and the hatred in it confronting. That's why this is a good film.

Still in cinemas at time o' writing.

Various Apocalypses Part 4: Kairo/Pulse

A ship in the ocean. Extreme high shot, perpendicular. Silence. An image of immediately troubling loneliness.

Cut to contemporary Tokyo. A group of twenty somethings worried about the sudden drop in communication of one of their number investigate. His apartment is as it was but there is a vaguely human shaped stain on the wall. For a moment  in the dark this appears to morph back into their friend with a noose around his neck. Then it's just the stain again.

Case by case this seems to be happening all around the city. Suicides and disappearances. A clue appears in the form of a website that imposes itself on users with the invitiation: do you want to meet a ghost? We follow one internet illiterate student (this is 2001) to his university tech services department and meets Harue who tries to sort out the problem of the site which, by now doesn't even need the modem on to appear.

Across town, Michi is trying to work out what's happening to her friends. We see what happens to one of them as he encounters one of the stains on the walls that has come to life. The scene is unrelentingly strange and terrifying, removing all the control we think we have over it at its start until we feel like screaming along with the boy in the room.

In other settings we see similarly disturbing things. One of the worst is made from the simplest of ingredients. A computer screen playing video of a human figure walking across a room. Just before it gets to the other side the loop replays and its back to where it started.

There is little plot to this film as it is not fuelled by plot. It is a situation that once revealed only needs to keep developing. Althought made within the time frame of the big wave of J-horror (1997-2003) it doesn't belong among the Ringus and Ju-Ons with their clock-beating survival or ghost exorcising climaxes. Kairo's brief is the notion of what might happen if we keep ignoring each other, nurturing isolation and loneliness. By the time one character, literally reaching out to her friend, explodes into a cloud of swirling ashes (or is it insects?) we sense we are beyond hope.

Shot on DV which carefully only ever falls short of a film quality image, we are in a world where dark stains can look like people for a few seconds and people who shoot themselves in the head don't seem to even need to bleed anymore. Ghosts wander the streets, indistinguishable from the living. This warm-toned but increasingly grimy world is coming to an end and there is nothing to be done about it.

This film contains my two favourite moments of CGI. A hercules transport aircraft crashing which is as gutpunching as it is spectacular and, more poignantly and a lot less flashily, a figure in the background of a shot, climbing a tower and leaping off. Perhaps I should add a third as we end (this is not a spoiler) with the image that began the film: the gigantic silent ocean rippling on.