Review: STOWAWAY

Three person crew heads to Mars for a science mission when they discover a fourth for bridge unconscious behind a panel. Getting the injured one out coincides with Co2 scrubber so they are now also running out of air and they are too far away to turn back. So that's months ahead of a stressing captain, humanitarian doctor, a despairing biologist (whose work is the point of the mission) and the little one in the bed who says roll over so that one falls out.

I was skeptical about this 'un as it looked like a number of other VoD originals that use a sci-fi setting for stories variously bland or try hard. But this one was recommended by a trusted source, comes with a great cast and promised a solid core of ethics and the future of Earthlings. So I clicked play.

This is a survival story in space like Gravity was but where Gravity was a great ride in 3D at IMAX I don't know if I'd bother with it in the privacy of my own living room. It's action packed and features the space-set story's baseline of the annihilation beyond the door. But it is content to do that without challenging us as well as its protagonist. Stowaway dunks our heads into a difficult question: mission or murder; suffocation or sacrifice. Are the stakes so high that there can be no question or can the ingenuity that brought these bodies into the great black sky be called upon to save them from it?

This scenario would work with competent unknowns (which might have been an idea) but here we have a rangey Toni Colette in command, a heavily controlled Daniel Day Kim at the centre of the mission, the sheer warmth and intellect of Anna Kendrick as the doctor and a deeply pressured Shamier Anderson who, like his character, has to hold his own among the better known. All that happens.

The weirdness of space travel is constant. The newcomer's shock at rising from his concussion and seeing not the world of his job out the window but a spinning starfield is palpable. It is similar to the sense vertigo I feel when I look up at tall buildings from the supposed safety of the footpath. Not only does it mean he is soon to be millions of kilometres from home but everyone else in his tiny constrained tin can world knows that he shouldn't be there.

So, this is less a hard sci-fi workout than a space procedural (there's a superb spacewalk scene that makes a lot of play about the artificial gravity) where the driving motivator is not an alien hostility but one born of mother Earth. The ending of this one might not surprise you but it will resonate deeply. A really good and deceptively modest effort.

Currently on Netflix.

1971@50: A CLOCKWORK ORANGE

Mum shook at the memory of the gang rape. Dad didn't believe in the treatment but considered it typical of government programs. There was a tension in the room when they talked about it with dinner guests. One of those, a man old years old (I was nine and couldn't tell) defended the film for its irony but I couldn't tell that either so all I registered was that he was being wicked and grinned a lot. It was my first experience of a controversial film and I wouldn't see it for over twenty years.

For the meanwhile please imagine the speedy synth version of William Tell Overture. Kubrick: I get Dr Strangelove when it plays on TV but my focus is Peter Sellers; the tv ad for Clockwork Orange intrigues me with its adjectives from reviews making it sound indescribable; people praise 2001; Barry Lyndon promos are among the most boring I have seen; I am unexcited by The Shining and then Full Metal Jacket so don't see them until they're on video; Clockwork comes out on video in the '90s and I watch it with Swedish subtitles; a Kubrick retrospective brings all the disciples out of the woodwork and they out themselves as bores, replaying what journalists have said; DVD and then Blu-ray bring the movies into clear definition and I watch Clockwork as a 50 year old film.

Burgess: at my sister's encouragement I read the novel (local library's copy has glossary and extra chapter - more later) and then everything else by him I can find. At the time I was going through dystopian books like Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World. I ricochet from Burgess' novels to his promotion of James Joyce. When I think on't I find the comparison between Kubrick and Joyce helpful (if not always complimentary to the former). 

Ok? Good.

So, at the end of Easter 2021, I slip the Blu-Ray of A Clockwork Orange into the ol' player and sit back to enjoy. Picture on the newish TV is deep and rich. Sound is ace. I love the Carlos synthesised classical music and how it plays under the West-Side Story style blue and red fields of the opening. And it's the same movie I've got used to. No better, no worse.

It's not the old process shots. I prefer them original. The driving scene looks like back projection and only gets worse with higher resolution. The pop art modernism of the club and interiors is more of its own time than futuristic but that's more a conscious comment on the classism of the society in the film. All that is fine.

The film is reasonably close to the novel and maybe that's the issue. The sets and scenes offer solid cinema with bold choices and technical virtuosity. The casting is spot on: McDowell is as perfect as Alex as David Bennent was for Oskar in The Tin Drum. We follow Alex's progress from his ultraviolent youth, through the alienating prison life, the institutionalised violence of his "cure" and so on and all of this goes to Burgess' blueprint. But where the novel is compelling the film gets colder by the minute. There is so much detachment on screen, so much distance between Kubrick, his work and us that the film itself seems to develop its own sociopathy. Is this method-filmmaking? Maybe, but that just comes across as a little desperate. We are meant to be horrified by the final shot and Alex's parting line but the horror is of the film rather than Alex.

The flawless face of A Clockwork Orange is that of the obsessive compulsive rather than the auteur (patience, patients, I'm aware of how clumsily I'm lifting those terms from real medicine), the colourless perfection of the narcissist rather than the self-reflection of the sage. If you think I'm missing the point about the film being as cold as its anti-hero read the novel. The approach works well in the later Full Metal Jacket when the military realm is examined and is apt for the horror of The Shining. But here (and in the unnerving sheen of Barry Lyndon) it resists its viewers.

The original edition of the novel had a twenty-first chapter that showed an aging Alex and his droogs slowing down and ready to move on into the all consuming grey of normal life. The U.S. publisher insisted on its removal for that market and the copy Kubrick read ended with Alex's arch assertion. Burgess was writing about mods and rockers, teddy boys, gangs and subcultures and their inevitable absorption by the great flow of nowt that will keep them alive. It was both a candid celebration of the freedom of youth in extremis and an admission of the weight of age (I don't say wisdom, mind).

But here's another thing. As exalted as Kubrick was and however he might have enjoyed his place on Olympus he was still making films for his time. What did A Clockwork Orange look like in 1971? How did it feel? Did its punters stagger from the cinema numb from assault, dazzled by the virtuosity? A Clockwork Orange in 1971 was, apart from anything else, like the novel and the phenomenon that nourished it, rock music and like Kubrick still himself, young. Who among us sits down in the comfy cushioned seat thinking they are about to watch one for the ages? You might think it afterwards but you don't expect to, you're just seeing a movie. And here in my Victorian era living room with the glorious delivery of Blu-Ray am I, passing sentence on a cry of youth as though it would ever sound fresh at fifty. It's not just that all films are not equal they're not conceived of equally either. I could go on about how much warmer Paths of Glory or even Eyes Wide Shut are (I am one of the very few people I know who really likes that one) but A Clockwork Orange and Alex were not trying to be warm. Kubrick had previously taken us to the moon and then beyond the infinite; we could at least let him take us to Leeds. Is it cold? So it's cold. It'll live without my love.

1971@50 PRETTY MAIDS ALL IN A ROW

Year 12 student Ponce (yes, really) rides through a credit sequence on a scooter eyeing all the beautiful girls that the early '70s can offer but his gaze is deflected by every one. Mortally embarrassed by the hardon that his sexy substitute teacher has inadvertently given him he begs excuse and goes off to the boys' to soften down and discovers a dead girl draped over the pedestal, a note taped to one of her buttocks. Ponce sounds the alarm and brings the rest of the school and local cops to rubberneck as he tries to insist everyone (including the rozzers) to keep to the point who is still lying in the cubicle. They stop talking about football long enough for Telly Sevalas to come in as a proto Kojak and take over. Uberhunk Rock Hudson, school counsellor canoodling with a student, stirs at the sight of the cops outside, emerges from his publicly funded man cave to handle the kids and takes young Ponce aside for a debriefing (no, not that kind). Ponce can't stop getting erections but no girl will come near him. Counsellor Tiger (yes, really) sees an opportunity to make Ponce a man and knows how when the substitute teacher (a young 'n' hawt Angie Dickenson) happens by to express her concern. Tiger returns to his den whereupon his secretary's clothes fall off and she gives him that look. And that's the point you really go UH?

See, the credit sequence (set to the tune of a faux folk ballad by Lalo Schifrin and sung byThe Osmonds - yes, really) promised a cute and warming coming of age as young Ponce (I laugh every time I type that) clearly needs a shot of Man-Up so he can vault over the heartbreak and learn love. The scene in the gents' plays like the kind of black comedy that Robert Altman or Elaine May were making their own. The bizarre love-generation romping between staff and students (it's not just Tiger) are a tiny flick away from cringe sex-comedies from the mid sixties. The murder trail of female students gets longer and is not played for laughs. One of the first names you see in the credits is Gene Roddenberry. The creator of Star Trek who took American TV to where no TV had gone before with fables on the evils of warfare, arms races, colonisation and the first American onscreen interracial kiss, also wrote this. The last name you see in the credits is director Roger Vadim.

Now, Vadim is no slouch as a filmmaker but if you make one Nutty Naughty Chateau that's how you get pegged. If you keep making them it won't matter how many earnest pieces you can boast it will be the T&A that will get you hired. So it was that Roddenberry's dark social satire grew leggy and raunchy under the watch of the same guy who made sci-fi sniggeringly naughty in Barbarella (a film I sometimes love and sometimes cringe at). It's 1971 and New Hollywood is soon to rise and tear itself from l'ancien regime irrevocably but, as we'll see in this blog series, until that happened we had a mainstream that was growing increasingly curious and playful. 

Vadim's importation for the director role and his clear hand is smearing his prints over every scene. The thing is that none of it plays well as comedy. The timing is all off and the performances aren't allowing it (they're good just not comic). Rock Hudson's Tiger (also the school's football coach) is straight out of a vintage "What kind of man reads Playboy?" marketing ad. Not even the dependable Hudsonian charm can lift him out of looking like hippy never happened. Vadim's self conscious sex-first zeitgeist is like May '68 never happened. That scared the likes of Godard away from narrative altogether as he dived into the underground (kind of). But Rog? Hey, maybe I can bring a better class of sex to America. And I don't need to change my M.O. Hell they're paying me for it. (You know, even Benny Hill toned it down for his brief comeback in the '80s.)

If, however, you are patient there is a reward to all this and it feels like the writer's intention was too strong to dismiss. The final sequence is an inversion of the opening and carries a suggestion, cold and mechanical, of how the social order is maintained. It is expertly judged and chilling. I guess there were a lot of pretty maids before we got to the row.

Review: SUPERNOVA

We open on a vast night sky. One star near the centre briefly expands with light before shrinking into the darkness. Two men entwined naked in a bed. Then we're on a road trip through a damp English view, the passenger quietly poring over a road map and the driver asking questions that are gently ignored. Change the situation for this scene and the location for that and you have the entirety of this film. That sounds like a bad thing but really it should only suggest a subtheme of the story unfolding: patience. Something is coming to an end. The passenger, Tusker, has early onset dementia and his spouse Sam is coming to terms with what will be a much shorter future than they planned. For the nonce the pair reconnect with friends and family in the country and, quietly, the signs of Tusker's decay make their way to the surface.

Sounds like a tearjerker? Sure but when you have a script with poignant wit like Tusker saying he's no longer the guy Sam fell in love with, he just looks like him and performances that render the words to their appropriate weight and a screen time that clocks in under ninety minutes, you've got something you can stick with and you'll happily spare a few tears. Stanley Tucci as Tusker brings his dependable charm but the constant struggle for control within him undercuts that with a dark realism. Always, a welcome screen presence, here he shows us someone whose containment has become the battle. Colin Firth as Sam gives us the fretting Brit who is struggling to show strength when his source for it is withering.

If this still sounds too gloomy or dull for you consider the restraint with the exposure of the symptoms. An Oscar bait version would make the condition the centrepiece and feature at least one explosion of embarrassment by the afflicted before everyone learned and grew (more than one explosion and you've got a Sundance movie trying for Oscar bait). Tucci allows only the tiniest indications of his loss of awareness, slight winces of uncertainty and eyes that sometimes take in mystifying things. Indeed, the closest thing to a loud cathartic moment happens off screen when a couple of dinner plates smash on a kitchen floor. When Sam runs in to check Tusker is sitting at the table staring into the mess in front of him as though trying to see a finished jigsaw puzzle in a pile of pieces. And then he sits at his chair and keeps sinking and his limbs seem to bend like rubber, powerless and displaced. That's Tucci's performance. We really didn't need the big scene when what we have is how it leaves him.

This story of hard acceptance is strengthened by the lightness of its touch, assurance with its language and a trust that its audience will allow themselves along for the ride. Here's an example of that. As the pair are gently bickering while driving, Bowie's Heroes comes on the radio. For a moment Tusker lowers his gaze and listens. It doesn't, (thankfully) suddenly burst into the sonic foreground but sounds like it's playing quietly on the car stereo. That song back in 1977 when he was probably in his teens and excited by the future in his daydreams would have certainly found a place in his personal soundtrack. The moment passes, an ad blares out and the road rolls on.

Review: SYNCHRONIC

A young couple share a trip that starts out like an hallucinogen but quickly becomes real as one descends to a swamp and another falls to his death from a height that isn't the elevator he just entered. A pair of paramedics answer the call but are mystified by the scene. The next case is even more bizarre. Word of a drug trending wildly on the scene called Synchronic coincides with more crime scenes where contemporary New Orleans people are being skewered with ancient swords or dying from snakebites in modern apartments. And then the daughter of one of the paramedics vanishes. Has she reacted to her pain from the trouble in her home by running away? If she did, did she do it with a dose of synchronic? If so, what does that mean and can she return?

Justin Benson and Aaron Morehead have been quietly building a reputation for no-budget movies with sky high concepts like The Endless or Resolution. They have come to be identified as the current face of cosmic horror, extending the kind of world building that made H.P. Lovecraft's writing so durable. There are even offshoots like After Midnight or She Dies Tomorrow helmed by other writer /directors but given production clout by Benson and Morehead. Usually, what happens from here is either the continuation to exhaustion of an underground effort or a breakthrough that changes its field. Synchronic is the latter.

There's a boosted budget visible on screen in the effects and casting (Anthony Mackie and Jamie Dornan, for starters) and the concept is more given to action rather than the mumblecore workshopping of previous entries. Synchronic has more mainstream production values but keeps the darker thinking that made the others so vital. So, if it looks so comfortably commercial and runs on good ideas, why does it get so draggy?

The set up is intriguing. The notion that a means of fleeing one's own time with a drug that only works on younger people is brilliant. The extra work put into the two leads' lives, their friendship and what will have an impact in the finale is all by the book. The trouble is that there is too much dwelling on information we already have which appears to be added depth until it starts getting fatiguing and suggests that the narrative has stopped moving. That might be cute in another time travel movie but in this one it really only looks like a lack of discipline. To my mind Benson and Morehead have misjudged the impact of the mainstream aesthetic to the effect that instead of it allowing them to smuggle in some radical thinking it only stirs a need in the audience for the kind of heightened action they associate with the look and feel. So, do you dumb it down and get it done or bend the commercial look until it works with the sci-fi? Here it's neither, we just know that we want Steve's discovery montage a lot earlier than when we get it, the intrigue over the drug and its infiltration to be speedier, and the already good bromance between the lead characters to be notched up.

That said, if you relax about this stuff and are willing to get to a gripping conclusion you will be rewarded with a compelling sci-fi outing that will take you places you didn't expect (despite what you might prefer to expect). I can report that by the final scenes I'd pretty much forgotten my reservations about the middle act as I got caught up in an action sequence of a kind that was only left as a promise on earlier outings. Benson and Morehead are worth the support of anyone who wants their cinema mixed up with great what-ifs. And I'm already in line for their next outing.

Review: WHITE RIOT

In the decades since '70s it can be easily forgotten how political British punk was. As one who took part in the Big One back in 1977 I am now well placed to push my pince-nez back and bellow: "these young yobbos who play three chords and get their hair all spiky and say they're punks. We never said we were punks! Never had to .... young .... punks ....." and trail off to get the night's Milo in the kitchen. But I recall with heat the power of the Rock Against Racism movement in the UK. I was comfy in Queensland as part of the extended Euro invasion force and didn't even see the issue where I was. But in Britain they had a neo fascism whose numbers were swelling and getting louder just as the punks were rising. The problem was that it could get difficult to tell them apart.

There are early mentions in this documentary of icons from the time erring in this, Sid and Siouxsie are caught wearing swastikas and Bowie's cocaine-addled bullshit about needing a dictator (and Eric Clapton's rant from God knows where). Hell, tried it myself when I landed in a new town without friends (guess what, that went as soon as I got a social life). While the first two in that list were going for shock value and never espoused any Hitlerism, Bowie and Clapton's gaffs only drew the lines sharper. Jimmy Pursey was a worry as his Sham 69 attracted a few young NF punters but even he calls it in the end for the better side of history.

This is the tale of the co-incidence of a modestly-sized cultural movement using home made forces of DIY press and music events and a generation splitting with the previous one on the value of the great clanging nonsense of patriotism. The organisers of the RAR gigs speak lucidly of the problems of getting traction on a movement that might well have seemed trivial at the time to the extent of massive public events. It might not have crushed the National Front but it certainly hit them in their youth recruitment section. It wasn't Woodstock, it was work, a lot of work, and it made a difference.

Now, if you are gagging from my obvious bias toward RAR I'll keep it short. This account not only moves at a clip it does so with high value vintage footage of the likes of The Clash rehearsing, Tom Robinson and Steel Pulse playing at the RAR gigs, as well as the physical work of setting the stages in parks. At first you might take the sight of what someone has just said typed out on the screen but give it a minute and you'll realise that you are not being preached at but invited into a major part of what holds this film and the movement it examines together. If something isn't archival film or a present day talking head it's cut out and pasted on to the screen like the layout of a fanzine. There are even re-enactments (kept wisely low key) where this extends to live action as when a cop bursts into a flat with the black bar of tabloid reporting over his eyes. By the end credits you get the sense you've been exposed to a lot more information than a barrel of interviews.

Rock Against Racism didn't fix the problem but all it claimed to do was highlight it and invite anyone who cared to come and sing along. Sing it does, though, out to this day of ours with gangs of incels bellowing to the kookaburras in the mountains. But they, while they are not ignorable, are the least of our worries with the insidious normalisation the the right have discovered to the tainting of a term like leftism where it was once a description. Do we need a new RAR? Maybe, but more, we need a film like this to remind us of the tools we already have and our concern, our kindness and our wits.

Thank you.

Written, spoken and memorised by ....

Review: SAINT MAUD

A brief scene following a medical disaster has a nurse squeezed into the corner of an operating room with blood actually on her hands. She is in numb shock and the palette is an icy blue. Then a mass of bubbling blood coloured liquid that might be the pits of hell is revealed to be tomato soup. Maud is getting ready to go to her next job as a private carer, telling us in a voiceover prayer that she is doing what she can before her god has her real job ready. She trudges through her cold British seaside town, ascending to the house of her patient Amanda, a dancer whose body has betrayed her with cancer and left her decaying if still hedonistic. The disaster at the beginning has left Maud with possibly undiagnosed PTSD and she has since got religion in the form of a severe and ascetic strain of Catholicism. So, decrepit old debaucher, meet your quiet, judgey missionary. What could go wrong is the plot of this film.

For a while things seem pretty normal, if you count strange dialogues between carer and patient about the latter's newfound religion and the latter's moments of apparent orgasmic communions when alone. Amanda has not let go of her hedonism, even at death's door and Maud feels compelled to warn Amanda's regular sex worker away from the house. Tensions grow until a moment of cataclysm (seems small at the time but it's enough) plunges Maud into an earthly hell. Fired, she retreats into her stark and small flat, praying by day and luring sexual partners by night in pubs. Then god speaks to her directly, with words, in a voice. He has a plan for her. She needs to be ready. 

It's at that point where we must confront our decision between taking what we see literally and what Maud is seeing in her mental condition. It's not an easy choice. I'm an atheist but have no problem going along with a religious narrative in a fiction if it doesn't expect me to commit to theism (so, I can feel for Fr. Karras in The Exorcist without exactly empathising with him) but depictions of religious mania need to keep a steady course this side of their own compliance with reality. Saint Maud does something else again.

While the full story of the opening scene offers us a lot of context we are still left to marvel at the extent of the change from the nurse Katie to the Maud we first see interacting with the world. Maud does not go to church for masses or confession or even prayer. She does not engage with the community that a church encourages. The state that looks a lot like medieval Catholicism has been formed by Maud herself and includes no one else, no equal under the deity. She is not Bess in Breaking the Waves but rather Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, driven through a self-scouring discipline into the belief that she alone can deliver humanity. There is another film that is probably near impossible to find called Act of the Heart that treads a similar path but cannot compete with the intensity of this film.

This severe delusion has come from trauma which has led to the pressing loneliness imposed upon the survivors of trauma. No one else can know their pain or sense of futility in attempting atonement for the tragedy in her past. Religion provides a form fitted solution to this and, as Denis Potter once put it, it's not the band-aid but the wound. Rather than providing an escape from pain, Maud's invented universe of stern gods and impossible choices simply find a use for it.

Happily, this film does not preach this but gets on with it. Rose Glass weaves a clear style with the gravity of the story in transparent fashion and her vehicle, Morfydd Clark in the title role, grabs your attention by the neck.  Maud's tale, stark and humourless, does not pause for breath and just as you think all is lost at the finish line you are shown something else. Not saying what but it works for the best and the worst.