Day 362: Wednesday Reviews - On Chesil Beach

I had no time to find a suitable film this week, so I went with On Chesil Beach, which my friend Michael recommended to me as being about the sadness of sex and the impossibility of communication, which sounded excellent. Although now I think about it, my friend Michael says that about every film. "What did you think of Toy Story 3, Mike?" - "Yeah, it was good. All about the sadness of sex and the impossibility of communication." Past a certain point it starts to say less about the films and more about you, Michael.

But in this instance it turns out he was bang on the money, because that’s exactly what On Chesil Beach is about. Adapted from the novel by Ian McEwan, with a screenplay by the same, and directed by theatrical stalwart Dominic Cooke, it is a lyrical and sorrowful examination of thwarted desire, sexual shame, and the folly of pride in the repressed England of the early 60s.

We follow young honeymooners Florence (Saoirse Ronan) and Edward (Billy Howle) on the night of their wedding in a seaside hotel in Devon overlooking the windswept pebble beach, the narrative creeping forwards over these integral few hours but spinning away in flashbacks at each locus of difficulty in the conjugal event - the two are still virgins - to explore the couple’s upbringings, their burgeoning relationship, and the decisions that lead to this point.

Florence is from a pompous upper-class family, Edward less well-to-do. She is a prim classical musician, he an intelligent but rumpled history graduate. Her parents are domineering and elitist, his mother is brain-damaged from a head injury, seemingly unable to make new memories, in need of constant care.

They are rich characters, pin-sharp in specificity, wide in universality. The script clearly benefits from its literary origins. The relationship is believable, the world of 60s Britain, on the cusp of change yet not there yet, is brought vividly to life, and the sense of the many lines of their lives converging on one mortifying moment in bed, then spreading out from it again afterwards, the feeling of life sometimes coming to a head in a single flash, the actions in that moment colouring and informing decades to come, is a powerful one.

If the story focus is on character, the filming is theatrical. Cooke’s background as a stage director (he was awarded CBE in 2014 for services to drama) gives scenes the feel of a play, the plot focusing on character interaction and dialogue more than visual event. It’s a good fit for the material, especially with central performances from Ronan and Howle so involved and complete. Ronan especially really inhabits her role, and a key event regarding Florence that explains much is only hinted at, handled deftly, the ambiguity and the uncertainty increasing the horror.

It’s a grand, sweeping film, about a single night but also about a whole life, with an ending crescendoing into such emotion that it is hard to hold back the sobs. To be honest, on paper it sounds like the kind of film I would despise - I have a prejudice against period dramas, I find them enervating; some voice in the back of my head huffs when it’s suggested I watch one - the cinematic equivalent of a bowl full of steamed broccoli. Boring! And anything with a whiff of worthiness or Oscar-baiting about it turns me off. And films that attempt to play on large, bold emotions I have a tendency to find false and manipulative.

On Chesil Beach is very nearly all of these things, but in the end is none. The characters are too well developed, for one. It looks fantastic for two: bunching graphite clouds, bobbing boats with peeling paint, tumble-down houses drowned in shadow, and a camera gliding through in measured movements as tightly controlled as the repressed emotional states. As you'd expect from a director of such theatrical calibre it has some wonderful staging, and much that matters unfolds through people talking to one another. But it is lively and vibrant as well, and certainly cinematic. And that ending is, yes, a touch cliched, and altered from the book, but it brings out the tears effectively as well.

... I'm covered in grime and bin juice, again, from work, and I can't keep my eyes open, so that's it for tonight. On Chesil Beach is an admirable and deserving adaptation, an elegy to regret and clumsiness and tragedy. Much like my friend Michael. He picked well. 

Day 355: Wednesday Reviews - The Hateful Eight

Today I've been watching The Hateful Eight - yer boy Quentin Tarantino's eighth film, a one-room drama of deceit and the promise of violence, set in the decades following the American Civil War. Kurt Russel is the bounty hunter John Ruth, bringing his captive, Jennifer Jason Leigh's uncouth outlaw Daisy Domergue, into town to be hung. On their journey by stagecoach they pick up Samuel L. Jackson's ex cavalryman Major Marquis Warren, and then are forced by an approaching blizzard to seek refuge in Minnie's Haberdashery - a log cabin store and stop-over run by an amiable woman known to Ruth and Warren.

But what's this? Upon reaching the cabin the group find that Minnie is peculiarly absent - gone to visit family on the other side of the mountain, says the not exactly trustworthy looking Mexican stranger Bob, who claims to have been left in charge. Inside are a disparate bunch of characters also seeking shelter from the storm - among them Tim Roth's outlandish hangman Oswaldo Mobray, and Michael Madsen's monosyllabic loner Joe Gage.

Are all these travellers who they say they are? Can they all be trusted? And what's with that jellybean stuck between the floorboards that Warren notices as he comes in?

The Hateful Eight is a solid story, with narrative tropes old as time, a firm genre flick from a director who basically makes the apotheosis of genre flicks - taking pulpy conventions and raising them to the level of, perhaps, fine art.

But I have to say, Tarantino has lacked vitality, for me, ever since 1997's Jackie Brown. You can see his early zestiness sprout through Reservoir Dogs, True Romance, and Natural Born Killers, really come to bloom in Pulp Fiction, and already by Jackie Brown be wilting somewhat. Jackie is maybe my favourite of his films, still lively, yet deeper, more mature than his previous work - but I do think you can sense the zenith of his creativity having been reached, and his cinematic virility cooling into middle-aged filmmaking formula.

Pulp Fiction was the most exciting, Jackie Brown the strongest, and after that he's never been quite the same. I've very much enjoyed every one of his films since, and they've all contained moments of brilliance. But his talent, world-class as it is, has always felt like it's been searching for a spark.

He's worked hard, he's just not been as inspired as he was in those early years.

Anyway, The Hateful Eight doesn't reverse this trend - it's not a Goodfellas-era-Scorsese revival - but it is my favourite since Kill Bill Vol. 2. If we're doing the Scorsese thing then it's all least The Departed, or maybe Wolf of Wall Street.

All his tics are present and correct - the rhythms of the exchanges, the repetitions of the dialogue, the broken linearity of the narrative, the anachronisms of style, the self-awareness. At his worst Tarantino can be like a pastiche of himself, and Hateful Eight perhaps slips once or twice into this realm - when you feel the style is overtaking the content, when he's using jarring techniques because he can't help himself, or because he doesn't know what else to do, rather than because the material demands it. Sometimes you sense a posturing that masks the emptiness of the material beneath - like he's using the template of that carpool conversation from Pulp Fiction over and over, with less and less inside the template that he has to say. Or a scenario that doesn't rise above genre cliche, yet he gets away with it, just, because of the style of the presentation.

But Death Proof through Django were worse for it than this. Mostly The Hateful Eight is appropriately judged, and there's a strong enough story to warrant the stylistic approach. The characters feel alive and human, if larger than life, and there's an emotional core - and an indelicate yet appropriately bold simmering of racial tensions - that gives the film its depth.

Sam Jackson is superb, with eyes bulging and burning with fury, yet also showing hurt and shock, a poignancy at the centre of the story that it needs.

Tim Roth has all the fun with the preposterous Mobray, and Walter Goggins is very good as a racist redneck sheriff, Tarantino once again taking an experienced character actor and allowing him to shine.

And it's all filmed in magnificent 70mm - a wide format offering far more detail than most film, reserved when it was used for Ben-Hur like epics. Tarantino gets an obvious thrill from subverting expectations, opening with the expansive, humanity-dwarfing vistas that are a requisite for the approach, before crushing the narrative down to his cramped one-room play.

Yet he knows what he's doing - the 70mm stock brings a grandeur but also a claustrophobia to the haberdashery, with often the entire cabin visible at once, and the cast spread about as in a painting - two of them perhaps involved in some drama in the foreground, with groups of ones or twos spread out at the corners of the shot.

And because of the proportions and the available detail in the format, Tarantino and regular cinematographer Robert Richardson can leave us in a wide shot of characters, with plenty of surrounding scenery, while still showing us the kind of emotion in the eyes that would normally require a close-up.

It's thrilling stuff, really benefiting the story - in the parlour-game nature of the narrative it's important we keep the players in our minds, where they're situated, the moves they're making - and 70mm is perfect for this.

What else? I was ambivalent about the violence, as usual with Tarantino. Mostly it was shocking for the right reasons, visually beguiling at the same time as being morally repellent, refusing to shy away from the sometimes bloody nature of our world. But at times it crossed into sadism, I thought.

The look of the film was strong, a colour palette of deep reds and browns, blues and burnished golds. You feel the warmth of the cabin compared to the biting cold outside, but it is an eerie warmth, a malevolence hiding within it.

And so, too, the score by Ennio Morricone, who was coaxed into writing one last Western theme. It races ever forwards, like that opening stagecoach, while a threat of malice weaves in and out over the top - like those stormclouds amassing above.

The Hateful Eight is an excitingly told tale, a classic storytelling scenario stretched by a filmmaking grandmaster into a huge and bold piece of cinema. It isn't Tarantino's best work, but it is the best he's been in a while, and despite a few faults it is absolutely worth your time. He may not be the hippest young firebrand on the block anymore, but boy has he still got some moves!

Day 351: The 400 Blows

Watched this classic of the French New Wave tonight after work. It was gorgeous, lively and exuberant yet poignant as well, an evocative tale of childhood on the cusp of adolescence, a coming-of-age tale about a boy in Paris in the late 50s who is in some ways utterly typical in his adventures -passing risque pictures in class, skipping school, and avoiding homework - and in others more troubled.

Directed by François Truffaut, and starring Jean-Pierre Léaud as the young Antoine Doinel, it is filled with wonderfully and subtly observed moments - Antoine lazily going through his mother's possessions while she is out, pretending to be asleep when his parents come through the room in which he sleeps at night, listening to his parents arguing in the next room.

It's got a beautiful pace to it, as the gentle rhythms and quotidian repetitions lead Antoine organically down a path of truancy and rebellion. Léaud is so natural, spellbinding, and the directing is peppy, spritely, joyous.

It's the unfolding of the thing that most impressed me though. I recently heard Tarantino talking about his film writing process, saying that if you look at popular films so many of them are not stories but scenarios - you know exactly what is going to happen, and when it is going to happen, and you're paying to be given that thing that you have seen before and that you like. But real stories, in Tarantino's eyes, unfold. The writer doesn't know where they'll go as they're writing them, nor does the audience watching. Real stories surprise you. They unfold, as a living process, the play of order and chaos, and you couldn't have said from the beginning where you would end up, but when you get there, you look back, and it all followed a pattern.

The 400 Blows made me think of this. There's a lot of tenderness in it, and a lot of truth, and it truly develops, moves on - you never know where it's going, but it's always right that it goes where it does.

A lovely film. Rightfully regarded as a classic.

Day 348: Wednesday Reviews - Taxi Driver

To cap off this week of film reviews I’m treating myself to a viewing of Taxi Driver - one of my favourite Scorsese films, and thus, by extrapolation, one of my favourite films of all time.

Released in 1976, with Scorsese still a precocious young director full of promise, and De Niro a rangy, sinewy actor fresh from his breakout roles in Mean Streets and The Godfather Part II, the film was an immediate sensation. With a blistering script by Paul Schrader, cinematography by Michael Chapman, and a jazz score equal parts mournful and menacing by Bernard Hermmann, Taxi Driver is sublime.

Perhaps the best character study put to screen, it is the story of Travis Bickle, a disaffected Vietnam vet who, unable to sleep at night, takes a job as a cabbie. His is a lurid world of porn parlours and street hustlers, and Travis folds into it fully, a shadow slinking along streets bristling with darker shadows still.

Early in the film he meets Betsy (Cybill Shepherd, never better than here), a political campaign aide, and he invites her for coffee and pie, and then to a movie. Betsy doesn’t know what to think of Travis, he is unlike anyone she has ever met, an animal creeping in from the cold, wild, coiled - and, despite herself, she is intrigued.

But it quickly becomes clear precisely how unsocialised Travis is, how far from the frequency of polite, and safe, society he vibrates. Betsy’s radar goes haywire - as does ours - and she runs away.

And thus begins Travis’s inexorable decline into isolation and paranoia and violence.

De Niro is so natural. He utterly embodies the lost loner, every cell in his body existing as Travis, reclusive, searching for but unable to find connection, wounded, inept, stuck. He is stuck in his thoughts, stuck in his conceptions, stuck in his ruminative loops circling what he attaches to as the causes for his malaise. Travis is a study in mental illness and derangement, yet through De Niro’s masterful work he is as human and easy to follow through the narrative as any character in film.

Scorsese’s camera, too, brings Travis and his environment to life. Shots are erratic, spasmodic, filled with an urgency of movement, yet delicate and even sensual when they need to be too. Watch when Travis is on the phone failing to communicate with Betsy, and the camera gently leaves his side, comes to rest peering sadly down an empty corridor, Travis’s mind and future splayed out in peeling paintwork for all to see.

And then there is that crescendo of violence, as shocking and distressing on the fifth viewing as the first. It is captivating, sure, but we are repulsed even as we are drawn to it, provided no space to which to turn away.

And then the final scenes, making an ironic comment, as many have ventured, about the simplistic and sanctimonious nature of the media, or about how in the sickness of 70s New York, it turns out Travis’s deeds are entirely normal.

But there’s more to it than that, I think. Travis, in the end, is a true hero. Not in the moral sense, but beyond good and evil - he is a man willing to wrestle with the universe and accept the consequences whole of heart.

In the bourgeois world of Betsy and the rest, men like Travis are initially seen as dangerous, whereas the pimps and teenage prostitutes are fine, so long as they stay in their allotted areas. Travis is terrifying precisely because he does not see, or refuses to abide by, societal rules. Harvey Keitel’s pimp Sport (Christ, Keitel is good), for all his deplorability, moves to the same tune as Betsy and the prim uptown aides. He knows what is allowed and what is not. There is a tacit order to the universe, and it carries every other character along. But Travis is an iconoclast; he glides between the currents, makes up his own steps.

This initially puts him at odds with the rest of mankind, and spirals him into chaos. But ultimately he does not compromise, and in his last meeting with Betsy we can see that he has become a master of both worlds, no longer held in sway, free to come and go as he pleases - even if, as that final skipped-frame glance in the mirror hints, his future will not necessarily be one of peace and contentment.

Taxi Driver is a complex and thematically rich work of pulp art, technically accomplished and easy to appreciate on the surface, but with so very much shifting and grinding way down below. A film to watch every five years for the rest of your life.

Day 347: Tuesday Reviews - Stranger Than Paradise

Jim Jarmusch’s breakthrough feature, 1984’s Stranger Than Paradise, is languorous, listless - and curiously full of life.

Its trio of characters - young Hungarian immigrant Eva (Eszter Balint), her deadbeat Americanised cousin Willie (John Lurie), and his dopey friend Eddie (Richard Edson) - have very little to say, and even less to do. We follow them from New York, where Eva has recently landed from Europe, to Cleveland, where the cousins have an aunt living, and eventually to the sandy beaches of Florida - and we wait around, them and us, for something to happen. And we wait. And wait.

Jarmusch has carved out a career from this kind of measured torpor, and it is handled as deftly here as in any of his later work. Eschewing traditions of narrative, yet adhering to some invisible sense of structure, Stranger Than Paradise trades in a solitary and soporific vision of American life, one seen through a glacially-paced swirl of TV dinners, ashtrays filled with smoking Chesterfields, cards played with creased old decks, and motel rooms bedecked with rickety cots and lonely lampshades hanging by curtained windows.

It looks gorgeous in black and white, filmed in long takes with a mostly static camera, and it is deadpan, melancholic, and at its very edges, always just out of direct sight, rich in emotion.

There is so little in the way of story events that to say anything more of the plot would spoil the film. What's important is that the three characters are never happy where they find themselves. They decide to go someplace new, and they discover it is much the same as where they just left. Restless, transient, yet filled with lethargy, they are, in the end, whatever their country of origin, utterly and irrevocably American.

Day 346: Monday Reviews - She's Gotta Have It

Spike Lee’s 1986 debut feature She’s Gotta Have It is a sultry, vivacious, and emotionally honest slice of filmmaking joy.

It is the story of Nola Darling (Tracy Camilla Johns), a young woman living in Brooklyn who refuses to be pinned down, labelled, or made to commit to any single sexual partner. She shares her bed freely and openly with a number of suitors, chief among them the older, ever-serious Jamie (Tommy Redmond Hicks), the fast-talking joker Mars (Spike Lee himself), and the vain, preening, but beautiful Greer (John Canada Terrell).

Each man is initially painted as decidedly flawed, rather hopeless, and yet each, in their own way, offers Nola something valuable and wonderful. Jamie is devoted, dedicated, passionate. Mars is silly and playful and childlike. And Greer is successful, sharp, going places, and happy to take Nola with him.

Nola has different aspects of her personality touched and enlivened by each of them, and she will not choose any over the other. She is always upfront about this. She is a free-spirit, she is enjoying the fullness of life, and any man, or woman, who can’t deal with this is free to go their own way, in peace. And of course this unattainability makes her even more special in the eyes of her partners, and they each want to be the one to capture her, to lasso her spirit and prove to her, to themselves, to the universe, that they are worthy.

But Nola will not be captured, the more people want to pin her down, the more she goes to liquid and slips through their fingers. A Holly Golightly for the Fort Greene neighbourhood. And as her suitors’ impotence grows they lash out, shout at her that she must have something broken inside her to not be able to settle or to choose, for wanting it all, when life, and love, do not work that way. And they’re not wrong, but it’s not their call.

The film’s treatment of sex and relationships and love is mature, refreshing, and liberating. The honesty gives the piece a liveliness, a lot of its humour (it is very funny), and a real vein of sadness.

It is such ebullient filmmaking from Lee as well, shot in lovely black and white under a zesty jazz soundtrack, obviously reminiscent of Woody Allen’s Manhattan - it shares with that seven-year-older film an exuberance and intimacy of space, and an ability to collapse the romantic, the staged and the realistic into one encompassing moment. And, again like Allen, Lee embraces the artifice of film, with characters addressing the camera directly, inserts of still photographs, musical numbers, and sometimes characters interrupting or sharing fourth-wall-breaking monologues. It’s all fair game. The camera is the storyteller’s pen, and may go anywhere within the story - through time, space, into characters’ heads - to say whatever the storyteller’s impulse tells them should be said.

She’s Gotta Have It was a sensation upon release, low-budget and DIY and original, yet clearly earning its place within the milieu of 20th century cinema. It kickstarted the American indie movement of the 80s, inspiring countless filmmakers to tell their own personal stories, and showed the white establishment that black cinema could be urbane, complex, witty, and emotionally available, while still being hip and authentic as hell.

As Lee states in the credits, his film contains “no jheri curls! And no drugs!” Instead it has a thoughtful exploration of the fears and joys of sex - the lusts, the passions, the resentments, and the emotional core of humanity towards which even the most carnal of desires point. 

It is superb, a wonderful debut for a truly vital filmmaker. An updated television adaptation, by Lee himself, is currently streaming on Netflix; but do yourself a favour and check the original out first. It's fabulous.

Day 345: Sunday Reviews - Nocturnal Animals

With Nocturnal Animals fashion designer turned filmmaker Tom Ford presents a slick and effective noir thriller with plenty of heart, though it never quite reaches the peaks of excellence.

Adapted from Austin Wright’s novel Tony and Susan, it is a story within a story, following art gallery owner Susan Morrow, played by the ever sublime Amy Adams, reading from a manuscript that her ex-husband Edward (Jake Gyllenhaal) has sent her in the post. Edward has dedicated his soon-to-be-published book to Susan, and as she reads, and is gripped by the story, she finds that it stirs painful memories from her past.

Her life now is one of staid minimalism and materialistic beauty, of designer dresses, crisp suits, liquid black sports cars, and opulent yet lonely interiors. Her husband, the creamy skinned and gorgeous Hutton (Armie Hammer) is probably cheating on her. She is in stasis.

Ford films these sections in blues and blacks and cool reds, slightly underexposed, with deep poolings of shadows. It is a fixed world, and Susan is isolated within it.

But as she reads the manuscript - also entitled Nocturnal Animals - its own world comes alive, and roils the calm waters of her life to turn them turbid, and dredge up shapes she thought long buried.

This second narrative concerns Tony (also Jake Gyllenhaal), on a road trip with his flame-haired wife and their daughter. The family have a run-in with a gang of vicious Texas locals on a backroad in the middle of nowhere, and Tony’s life is plunged into chaos and violence.

It is a tempestuous and gritty and raw story, filmed in sienna and burnt ochre and burnished gold, and it is clear that through its protagonist the writer Edward is exorcising demons, many of which concern Susan, and the manner of their breakup 20 years prior. Susan chokes at the recognition, and reads, and reads, and reads.

It’s a strong film. Both narratives are gripping, although they don’t quite reflect each other to the extent I would have liked. The manuscript is a vengeance thriller, and it starts tense and effective, but doesn’t have very far to develop after that, playing off the fears of the socialised man realising none of his skills can protect his family from aggressive intruders in a way we’ve seen many times before. It would make an adequate but hardly great film in its own right.

Yet as a counterpoint to Susan’s story it is powerful. Susan's world is less intense, yet also filled with pain, and though the dialogue is a touch expositional, the characters of her current husband and her mother a touch overdone, it is still well-observed, and another exceptional performance from Adams carries it over the top.

Nocturnal Animals has interesting and oftentimes moving things to say about love, commitment, courage, masculinity, and wounds that do not heal. That it never quite hits a crescendo where all these elements combine together is a disappointment, but there is still so much here to love. Visually slick, mature in its understanding of relationships, and in the end appropriately enigmatic, it is definitely worth a watch.

Day 344: Saturday Reviews - Gangs of New York

Martin Scorsese’s sprawling 2002 crime epic Gangs of New York, detailing the nascent days of New York City, and the ferocious denizens who fought and died and were forgotten there, is a mess. It is a self-indulgent, bloated shambles, in desperate need of a stronger narrative through which to channel its sweeping themes.

Taking Scorsese 20 years to bring to fruition, and with a production plagued by arguments between egos, stars dropping out, and an ever inflating budget, one rather wishes the acclaimed director had taken a few years more to get the thing right.

But such is the way of blockbuster filmmaking, where you enter a deal to deliver a commercial product at the same time as tease out a creative work. Where very rich people entrust you with very large sums of money to bring them a return on investment. Where your film isn’t happening for a long time, and then it looks like it could happen, and then suddenly it is happening, and all the forces, the loans, the actors, the producers, the sets, all coalesce, and here you are, and you have to make it work.

Gangs of New York isn’t a great film. But it is a testament to Scorsese that he manages to salvage something watchable - and a hit; it made lots of money - from what is so clearly not a natural winner.

You can feel him struggling at every turn with the thing. Creativity comes and goes, ebbs and flows, and sometimes the muse isn’t there. Essentially it seems to me that when it came to it the film didn’t come together, Scorsese didn’t have the inspiration at the time to make it succeed, but he had too much talent to let it fail. He clings on, tenaciously, sweats out every shot, and the result is… gargantuan, wild, intriguing, often enjoyable, but saggy, lacking cohesion, and it ultimately does not coalesce to explore the themes or impulses that set Scorsese on the path to production.

The sets are lavish, but also clearly sets. It reminded me, especially in the opening, of Pirates of the Caribbean, Thunderdome Mad Max, and Spielberg’s Hook. This is not a good thing.

But my main problem is with the screenplay, and with the characters. The film is positioned as a sweeping conflict between two great men: Daniel Day-Lewis’s ruthless established crime boss, Bill the Butcher, and Leonardo DiCaprio’s young upstart Amsterdam.

Amsterdam is our protagonist; he is on a crusade of vengeance after Bill kills his father, Liam Neeson, in the film’s opening. But take away Day-Lewis’s grandiloquent performance, and Bill isn’t a very villainous villain. He kills Neeson in fair combat, puts him out of his misery kindly, lets his son mourn him, commands his body to not be desecrated, and that his son be paid through school.

All through the film Day-Lewis chews scenery, and his Bill has a glass eye, he throws knives and uses hatchets, he’s meant to be a big bad film character, but his actions, on the page, are always entirely understandable.

Thus Amsterdam's motivations are hard to relate to, and as a character he doesn't draw us through the tale. Later on the film moves towards the idea of shifting morality, a crime world where no one is innocent, where men are drawn to violence despite knowing it will destroy them - a la so much of Scorsese’s work - but where in Goodfellas we empathise with, maybe root for, or at least enjoy the company of, Henry Hill, here there is scant little for us to attach to. DiCaprio acts his socks off, clearly making enough of an impression to inspire Scorsese to cast him in pieces for another decade, and Day-Lewis is exactly as ridiculous as the part requires - but the truth is that neither character in the script is interesting enough.

And it’s not about anything, either. The central struggle is not reflective of the themes presented by the film’s ending, the two characters and their story are not a microcosm for the world, it is simply an extended rivalry (which in fact takes two hours to begin - Christ it's a long film) happening to the backdrop of burgeoning democracy and conscription for the Civil War. When Amsterdam narrates over scenes of Irish immigrants being pulled off the boats, given citizenship and draft cards and Union uniforms, sent back onto boats for the battlefield as coffins are unloaded on the other side, it could be from another film - it has nothing to do with the core plot. You want the themes to be given life through the events of the film, through the characters, the dialogue, the shot choices, through everything. You want your film to always push in the same direction, to be a fractal pattern in which every element reflects and embodies every other.

You don't sense that here. There is lots of showy filmmaking, but scattershot, techniques being abandoned, momentum building then being forgotten.

Like I said, it is not a failure. The performances are all strong. It's a lavish production, and past a certain point, although there isn't enough depth, the sheer width of it all surges over your defences, much like the gathering gang hordes of the enormous battle scenes, and you find that despite yourself, you are being overrun.

But you look at the numbers, the size of that budget, and you are left with the thought: if this is a victory for Scorsese, it is a Pyrrhic one; the cost for such mediocre success is high.

Day 343: Friday Reviews - Hard Eight

If I had to use one word to describe Paul Thomas Anderson's 1996 debut thriller Hard Eight, that word would be "film". And, scamp that I am, I'd probably communicate to you the director, year of release, and genre by way of preamble to telling you that word.

But let us suppose you knew those things already. Well, then, the word I would choose would be "lagoonal".

It's murky, is Hard Eight, melancholic; a whisky-soaked late-night sojourn around a Reno of faded casinos and cut-rate motels, in the company of a cast of sorry hustlers, the kinds of people you'd find left slouching and shuffling across the threadbare carpets once all the highflyers had moved on through.

There's a wonderful sense of life sprouting in interstitial spaces, as if PTA is taking his camera and zooming in from the Reno skyline, past the glamour and noise, into the cracks, the 3am streets, the freeway diners, the deserted bars, and waiting, waiting, for something, anything, to occur.

What occurs is that Sydney, an ageing gambler played with rumpled poise by Philip Baker Hall, meets a young man (John C. Reilly) sat forlornly outside a diner, and offers to take him inside for coffee and cigarettes. After showing the man how to scam a casino for a free room and some food, the two become partners. They grow fond of one another, develop a father-son relationship, but then the young man becomes embroiled with cocktail waitress Clementine (a very good Gwyneth Paltrow) and two-bit hoodlum Jimmy (Samuel L. Jackson), and Sydney, protecting his naive protege, is forced into a world he wanted to have left behind.

The focus is on character, on letting moments organically grow. It's a full hour before the plot really grinds up, but all the hanging out we do up to that point really grounds the film, really makes us care about its cast - and it is beautiful, riveting stuff.

PTA, in his first feature film, is a thrilling director, assured, original, as intriguing in coffee shop two-shots as crucial points of tension. That early casino swindle could be so sedentary, and yet in PTA's hands it is elegantly explained and utterly engrossing - a kind of Ocean's Eleven to bag a bed for the night and a sandwich or two. And this perfectly sets up the world these characters inhabit, their motivations, their desires. Sydney is playing for scraps, but he is playing well, noble and professional, and we wonder what has happened to him to wind him up here.

It looks gorgeous as well. A colour palette of greens and reds and underwater blues. Lenses up close, isolating subjects, racking focus, softening backgrounds. Lots of night shots. Lots of neon.

It is a dreamy world, yet a lifelike one, also. Many of the characters, scenarios, and stretches of dialogue are reminiscent of Tarantino, yet a vibration away, from a quieter universe, more low-key, more sombre, more tender.

Hard Eight is a stunning debut from a magnificent director; a gem gleaming out from beneath nebulous waters. In a word: lagoonal. Give it a watch.

Day 342: Thursday Reviews - Children of Men

Going to try a challenge of watching and writing about a film a day for a week, although some days I may only have time to write a handful of words. Today:

CHILDREN OF MEN

Try not to get yourself in a tizz or anything, but I don’t like Children of Men as much as everyone else. I remember it leaving me cold on its release, and a second viewing has it confirmed.

Directed by Alfonso Cuarón, it’s filled with bravura long takes, exquisitely staged action scenes, beautiful plays of light and shadow - but as a screenplay it is riddled with weaknesses, and thus as a story it is decidedly mediocre.

It labours so inelegantly in the first act to hammer in its central premise - that in its near future the human race has become inexplicably infertile, the youngest person alive is now 18 years old, and, without hope of a future, mankind limps onwards, through habit, down the inexorable path towards despair, chaos, and eventual extinction.

It’s a powerful premise, but one artlessly communicated to us through expositional dialogue, scrawled graffiti, newspaper clippings, television reports - there’s always a goddamned television playing somewhere declaring to us with the most diaphanous narrative veil exactly the information that is pertinent to that scene.

But where a better film would have the confidence to allow us to discover this information organically, and thus make us feel respected - give our intelligence and imagination something to do, bring us alive - here we’re perpetually told rather than shown, front-loaded with the details we wish to find for ourselves.

I’d rather have an opening monologue/text crawl to be honest. At least that’d get the clumsy stuff out of the way in twenty seconds, rather than twenty minutes pretending to be in the film when really it’s saying, “OK, this is what you need to know before we begin.”

So that set me off on the wrong foot. And from there I was looking for issues. A terrorist group kidnap protagonist Theo (Clive Owen) - bag over head, thrust into van - and he comes to in a tiny cell, bright light shining in his face, hooded figures commanding him to not do anything stupid, etc. And a voice behind the figures, hidden in the light: “Hello, Theo.” And, surprise, it’s his ex-wife (“It’s me, it’s Julian”, she says, expositorily), an activist/resistance fighter, wanting to recruit Theo into a scheme, and she’s “sorry for the theatrics, but the police have been a pain in the…”

Uhh, wait. Are the police in this tiny cell here? Were they in the apartment housing the cell when Theo was brought in? The stairwell? The street?

It’s a red herring meant to be exciting for the audience, but it makes no sense within the film’s world. Nor, it transpires, does much of the plot.

It’s one long chase sequence, really, with Theo becoming embroiled - without much agency on his part for like the first hour - in a plan to smuggle a young woman, Kee (Clare-Hope Ashitey) out of the dystopian future UK and to freedom. And Kee - big reveal - is the miracle the human race needs. She is pregnant.

But the pregnancy, and Kee, must be kept secret - because reasons! - so Theo falls into the role of guardian, ushering Kee through one thrilling set-piece after another, all filmed in continuous wide angle takes, the camera catching the edges of action, important characters hit with bullets but we are away running for our lives and the camera swings back but we can’t see and then forwards again and we’re clambering over a gate and ducking behind a wall and OH SHIT HERE’S ONE OF THE BAD GUYS - he raises a gun, but POW, he’s hit by a soldier as another faction joins the fray and we see our opportunity and leap the wall as bullets fly on either side…

They’re all breathless, and impressive, scenes - Cuarón excels at this - but Theo is a dull character, Kee has no characteristics at all - Michael Caine plays a cliched older mentor role that I found too obvious. Character motivations are often hazy. There are no interesting character arcs. They sort of aim for Theo being an ex-activist fallen to cynicism who has his hope reignited by Kee and her baby, finds something larger than himself to believe in, but they don’t hit the necessary marks, they don’t find the heart of their story.

And nor do they manage the primal immediacy of something like The Road. They could have stripped back character and the trappings of social existence, gone darker, but the (occasionally excellent) bleakness is forever undercut by attempts at brevity, by making Theo into a laissez-faire hero full of quips - like when a kidnapper leans in close to threaten Theo and as way of retort Theo comments that the kidnapper has terrible breath.

There’s too much exposition, too much material for the left-hemisphere, for the film to be a haunting melancholic emotional piece. It wants to be a story reliant on plot. But the plot is just not good enough. And without really discovering its characters, the themes don't have vessels through which they may develop. "If there were no more children then the world would go to shit" is pretty much all the film ultimately manages to eke from its premise.

The climactic battle, and its poignant ending, is stellar stuff, one of its decade’s finest moments of cinema, but what comes before is too stodgy, leaden, clumsy, in every regard except visually.

Children of Men, then, is an exciting ride, but when it comes down to it, just not adult enough.

Day 341: Wednesday Reviews - Network

Everyone, on three. One, two, three:

I'M AS MAD AS HELL AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!

The film from which these lines are drawn, Network, is an acerbic and sardonic satire of the world of news anchors, media executives, and television celebrity. Prescient and ever-pertinent, switch out its cast of associate producers, production assistants and head writers for YouTube vloggers and Instagram influencers, and its themes are as apposite today as they were upon the film's release in 1976.

And yet, despite the persistent popularity on social media of its central speech, it is a film somewhat misunderstood, with layers of depth above and beyond that one iconic call to anger, which call is, in fact, only a small facet of the greater and more terrible truth posited come the end credits.

***

While Sidney Lumet (12 Angry Men, Dog Day Afternoon) directs with requisite restraint and control, much of Network's success must be apportioned to Paddy Chayefsky's elegant, exemplary script, which, in a few deft manoeuvres, takes what could have been straightforward (if biting) commentary and raises it to the level of myth, finding the archetypal in its characters, turning its realm of approval ratings and cults of celebrity into a legend with all the hallmarks of Greek tragedy.

It's there from the opening lines, a burst of expositional narration so sublime as to have become paradigmatic:

“In his time, Howard Beale had been a mandarin of television, the grand old man of news, with a HUT rating of 16 and a 28 audience share. In 1969, however, he fell to a 22 share, and by 1972, he was down to a 15 share. In 1973, his wife died, and he was left a childless widower with an 8 rating and a 12 share. He became morose and isolated, began to drink heavily, and, on September 22, 1975, he was fired, effective in two weeks…”

In one succinct stanza we are given the premise of our story, introduced to its pivotal character, and taught about the values of this world, where death and depression, and everything else, have meaning only insofar as they affect the two vital pillars of worship: the HUT rating, and the audience share figures. Beautiful!

***

And so, then, we begin to follow Howard Beale, the booze-hound newscaster, played by booze-hound actor Peter Finch. Beale, in the grip of a breakdown and facing imminent job loss, informs the public during his nightly broadcast that in one week's time, on-air, he will blow his brains out.

The response at his station is one of disbelief and fury, but is mitigated by Max Schumacher, president of the news division and one of Beale's oldest friends. Max convinces the station to give Beale the opportunity to go back on air the following night to apologise for his outburst and to bow out gracefully, saving face for all involved.

Beale, however, after a drink and despair-fuelled spiritual awakening/complete breakdown, instead uses his timeslot to again go off-piste, railing vociferously and decisively against the world's "bullshit" and proclaiming the emptiness of modern life.

Surprisingly - or perhaps not - the show's ratings go through the roof, and studio executives at the ailing network find themselves with an unexpected hit on their hands.

What follows is a caustic, haunting, and hellishly funny journey through a realm of egos positioning for power, old white men hawkishly watching the bottom line, and slack-jawed hordes primed for a prophet to lead them from their supine positions on couches across the nation and towards freedom, wherever that may lie.

***

Max, played by William Holden, worries for his friend, but everyone else seeks to exploit him. Faye Dunaway plays the ambitious and cynical Diane, head of the network's programming department, who sees an opportunity to market Beale as a messianic figure, and to "develop" his news show with the addition of fortune tellers, vox populi boxes, bank heists of the week, and other elements that in truth appear rather staid in comparison to the regular content paraded today on Fox News and its ilk, but which I'm sure seemed ludicrous back in 1976.

There is also Robert Duvall's Executive Senior Vice President of the network, writhing above the viper's nest of producers and presidents and public relations managers, a newer breed of executive contriving to sweep away the remnants of the older establishment and usher in his own agenda.

And, at the centre of it all, Beale, increasingly separated from reality, frequently overcome with fits of religious fervour - or DTs seizures, perhaps - believing himself to have heard the voice of God, passing on the message to the people, cutting through all the artifice and emptiness and greed with words beginning as authentic roar and eventually becoming catchphrase:

"I'm as mad as hell and-" well, you know the rest.

***

It is a perspicacious script, rich in theme, profound in meaning. Chayefsky - an esteemed writer known for leading the "kitchen sink realism" movement in American television in the 50s, gets to the heart of his characters, writes stunning dialogue, but most of all has a sharp instinct for story.

Network is folklore, legend. It correctly posits that television and fame belong to a realm created from dreams and desires, a land that trades in the symbolic and is presided over by the living embodiment of gods.

I love this. The subconscious is, after all, real. Its depths, though mostly hidden from us, are there. Network's premise is that we bestow celebrities, ratings, shows with mythical importance because these things are the visible representations of aspects important to the subconscious world, the tails cresting the surface, as we paddle about up here, of dark things that churn the waters far below.

Beale, in the throes of suicidal despair, ceases to care about the trivial distractions of the surface world. In a moment of freedom he looks down, and with clarity spies glittering pearls coruscating in the usually turbid depths. He reaches down and yanks them up. These pearls he shares with people back on the surface - in the form of his visionary speeches - and the people worship and celebrate him for it.

Yet myths do not allow boons to be taken lightly; the subconscious world is predicated upon ancient and immutable laws. Beale, in transgressing against societal norms, speaking what no one else dares, has meddled with forces he does not comprehend.

We, along with Beale, may think of television stars as gods. But one of Network's ultimate thrusts is that stars are but a cast of heroes and villains, plucky adventurers bestowed with power and riches by the true gods so long as they play the game.

And who are these true gods? In Network they are personified in Arthur Jensen, chairman of the communications conglomerate that owns Beale's network. Jensen, unforgettably played by Ned Beatty, is an omnipotent corporate deity who speaks for the forces of profit and stock, for the "vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multi-variete, multi-national dominion of dollars." And with our uppity promethean Howard Beale he is, to put it lightly, displeased.

By trading in the archetypal in this way, Chayefsky and Lumet are able to take their satire to the level of monomyth. Beale is a tragic hero who, through the warped courage that comes when deciding to kill yourself, is able to descend rapidly to the mystical centre of the hero's journey, to the meeting with the goddess and the winning of the ultimate boon. But such boons are never unguarded, and Beale's spirit, lacking the sane part of him that in successful heroes' journeys must consciously agree to cross the threshold of adventure, and lacking preparation from the road of trials, is frail and unprepared to battle the dragons that his boon-theft awakens. Such a story can only end one way.

So much of Hollywood, and television, and comics, really corrupts the hero's journey, putting all the emphasis on the prizes, and none on the responsibility, the price that in reality is paid by staring down the universe. That Network is able to understand this, in a story actually about Hollywood and television, is, I think, crazy cool.

***

There are things I don't like. Some of the filmmaking is clunky by today's standards - the odd wobbly camera, blood that is obviously red paint. And its attitudes to gender roles is... very 70s, most troublingly in its depiction of the relationship between the avuncular Max and the tenacious Diane. Max is drawn to the alluring (and perpetually bra-less) Diane, and finds himself pulled into an affair with her, despite himself.

Diane is, as Max himself points out, "television incarnate... indifferent to suffering, insensitive to joy". She is a monster, though humanised by the script and Dunaway's perfect performance. The story demands her. And yet something sticks in my craw. Perhaps it's the subtle implication that any woman who is driven and self-reliant must also be ruthless, carved out on the inside, desperate for yet utterly incapable of receiving the love from a man that would save her.

Her knowing cynicism is an astute comment on the behaviour of so many of us sneering our way towards destruction in these waning years of modern Western civilisation. But I don't like how the film portrays Max as the conscience of the piece, despite him cheating on his wife, choosing desire over commitment, and then going back to patch things up when he's bored - while Diane is scolded for her inability to love.

***

Yet in all other regards Network is a masterpiece. Sharp, sagacious, funny, with career-high performances, eminently quotable passages, and a script that finds the mythical in the mundane, and the spiritual in the secular, it is truly a tale for the ages. Sit your kids down and tell them the story of Howard Beale, who in his time had been a mandarin of television, the grand old man of news...

It's one everyone should hear.

Day 320: Wednesday Reviews - Ghost in the Shell (2017)

Questions of existentialism and identity abound in this big-budget American remake of the cult cyberpunk anime from 1995. Sadly, such questions relate not to the film’s narrative, but to the adaptation itself: can the weird and beautiful soul of the original tale survive when transplanted into the cold, robotic body of a mainstream Hollywood blockbuster?

No. No, it patently cannot. Despite the borrowed motifs, visual cues and supporting characters - ghosts of the previous incarnation - this is a plodding, uninspired and artless cinematic slog.

Scarlett Johansson plays Major, a slim and slinky robocop whose brain is transferred into a synthetic shell after an ostensible terrorist bombing in the opening moments. Reborn, in a trippy and arresting early sequence, as a machine with a human soul, Major goes to work as an agent for counter-terrorism initiative Section 9, investigating hacking crimes - which, in a megacity filled with cybernetically-enhanced humans, is serious business.

While responding to the assassination of a scientist working for Hanka Robotics - the shadowy corporation that designed Killian herself - she crosses paths with an imposing and messianic foe who leads her on a journey to uncover the truth of her creation and the meaning behind the “glitches” she has been experiencing in her consciousness.

Draw a Venn diagram of Blade Runner (the original and the sequel), Total Recall, Ex Machina, The Fifth Element, The Bourne Identity, and, of course, Robocop - and in that brown, undifferentiated mess where they all meet you will find this iteration of Ghost in the Shell.

It is derivative, borrowing all of its visual, audial and thematic identity from elsewhere. In fact, add the Matrix to that diagram. And John Wick, from which it unsuccessfully attempts to lift the measured, balletic gunplay.

It is artless, with a plot that flails from one narrative cliche to the next like a drowning sailor grasping for passing driftwood. Shadowy corporation with a hidden agenda? Check. CEO wanting to use a scientific breakthrough for military purposes? Check. Protagonist with amnesia? Antagonist who is the only one who can reveal the truth of the protagonist’s backstory? Antagonist with a plan that involves initially being captured? Protagonist framed for murder and forced to go rogue to reveal conspiracy? Check, check, check, check.

I imagine the screenwriters, like Major's creators, sewing the script together from existing pieces they had leftover from a million other projects. The result is that the story as a whole doesn’t hold together, it looks just about like a story if you don’t pay it too much attention, if you don’t watch it move - but as soon as you peer closely the cracks start to show. Plot points are taken up then unceremoniously dumped a few minutes later, and logic is left squarely at the door.

Here’s an example: the initial terrorist attack that introduces us to Major's unit and role. After an establishing shot swooping through a neo-noir cityscape at night (you know, neon billboards, holographic advertisements, gilded towers of darkened glass), we come to Major, stood resolutely on a rooftop, “On site, awaiting instructions.”

Her unit commander, a taciturn Takeshi Kitano (playing against type, ahem) orders her to “Review and report.” Major scans the building and finds there’s a Hanka scientist meeting a foreign dignitary, and that the meeting is being hacked.

But… but… If she only just found this out then what was she doing “on site” in the first place? What was her mission? Go to a random rooftop and start listening and see if there’s any craic?

Anyway, having luckily stumbled upon a potential crime, she stands and listens until terrorists break into the meeting below and start shooting. She asks on comms where her back-up is - two minutes out - and decides that is too long, and starts prepping her dive suit. The commander orders her to stop - I have no idea why, it just makes good drama when your protagonist disobeys orders - and Major leaps from the roof, and somehow through the window of the meeting room far below, and takes out the terrorists.

Some of the terrorists are men in black suits who break into the room, but some are the robot geisha who the Hanka scientist was (I think) showing off to the dignitary. In fact the men in black suits were robots as well. And the robots were hacked remotely and forced to become killers.

Major and her squadmates, who arrive as Major is finishing up with the last killer robot, don’t actually achieve anything - the scientist is killed, the hacker has done what he wanted - but the film plays it as if they’ve just saved the day.

To keep the engine of the plot in motion Major then discovers that she can meld her consciousness with one of the damaged geisha to attempt to learn who hacked into it. She is again ordered to refrain - it’s too dangerous - but she again disobeys and plugs herself in and dives into the robot’s primitive mind.

But uh oh - turns out the hacker has laid traps for her (exactly as was presumed), and she starts to be swallowed by a virus code. Her squadmate, watching her body fitting and squirming, like how Trinity watched Neo when he was plugged into the Matrix, starts yelling that they need to find a way to get her out, that she’s going to be lost, yada yada blah blah. Finally, right as Major is about to die, her squadmate leaps and yanks out the cable connecting her to the robot, and she wakes up, gasping.

So… umm. If pulling the plug out could have fixed everything all along then where was the tension?

But never mind that, because Major, gulping down air, visibly shaken, proclaims that she now knows where to find the hacker.

And that’s exciting, so now we’re off for another action scene (because obviously it’s a trap, and the hacker knows they’re coming) … and we just bound on in this way, a pinball bashed from here to there, no depth or meaning to any of it, just flashing lights and loud noises and distracting visuals.

… It’s late at night as I write this, and I’m exhausted, so perhaps I'm being harsher on Ghost in the Shell than it deserves. It’s not egregious. It does look slick and impressive, although maximalist, and lacking focus. It has a decent pace to it, and Scarlett Johansson, although undeniably a case of whitewashed casting to make the Japanese original more appealing for Western audiences, puts in a decent performance as the confused and isolated woman turned into a walking weapon.

But then don’t the antagonists of the narrative do to her character exactly what director Rupert Sanders, along with all the writers and producers, do to her, the actor, in this film? Take someone whole and real and complex and turn her into a skintight catsuit, an object for salacious shots, a sexualised walking weapon? That the filmmakers pay lip service to a plot in which such actions are called out as reprehensible in no way assuages this - in fact it is simply them having their cake and eating it too. They do the same with the whitewashing, baking a reason for it into the plot, as if the demands of the story called for a Caucasian actress, and not the concerns of money-hungry studio executives.

This could have been an interesting film, using the stylistic trappings of the original to explore themes of body autonomy, sexual objectification and shifting cultural identity. Or it could have stuck with the original’s meditations on the dehumanising effects of the encroachment of technology into the sphere of the soul.

As it is it does neither, instead choosing to fall back on worn Hollywood tropes to tell what is at heart a bland and uninteresting story. The dialogue is flat, expositional, and frequently asinine. Characters are underdeveloped. The plot is riddled with holes.

Less an acrobatic cyborg leaping into action, then, and more one of these hapless fellas. Time to call for a robot exorcist, methinks.

Day 313: Wednesday Reviews - Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)

So. 2014's Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) is vivacious. Bounding along to bebop rhythms, composed of long takes spliced together to give the appearance of one unbroken journey, the camera roving up and around and over and through the warren-like theatre of its setting, its characters effusing burstfire dialogue or exploding into paroxysms of emotion or wrestling one another maniacally across the floor, this film hums. It buzzes. It jumps.

The work of director Alejandro González Iñárritu, known previously for his multi-character non-linear pieces such as Amores Perros, 21 Grams, and Babel, Birdman is a different beast from these interwoven stories entirely.

Primarily the exploration of one man’s struggle against his ego, it features Michael Keaton as Riggan Thomson, the washed-up star of 90s superhero franchise Birdman - now staging a Broadway adaptation of Raymond Carver’s short story What We Talk About When We Talk About Love in a bid to find the validation and worth that, despite his Hollywood megabucks, have always eluded him.

The film chronicles the few days of rehearsals and previews leading up to the play’s opening night, as Riggan, increasingly beset by internal voices of self-loathing and -criticism and -doubt, lurches inexorably towards mental collapse. Riggan’s ego is personified in the figure of Birdman, who leers over him, in full feathered costume, gravel-voiced, purring that he’s a joke, a failure, that his aspirations of respectability are doomed and he should go back to the only thing he’s ever been good at - making popcorn thrillers adored by the slack-jawed masses.

It’s very funny. Partly because of the obvious parallels between Riggan and Keaton himself, who played Batman - on whom the brooding Birdman is clearly based - three decades ago. But the humour isn’t all self-referential, although there are plenty of sideswipes at blockbuster cinema and the cult of celebrity. It is a comedic film, playful, wry, deadpan; a comedy in the same way you might say Pulp Fiction is a comedy.

Keaton mines the part for all he’s worth, playing Riggan as vainglorious, desperate, monstrously self-pitying, and entirely relatable. His failures are our failures, too. And the supporting cast is terrific. Ed Norton is the critically adored method actor spilling his blood, and other bodily fluids, across the boards in pursuit of authenticity and truth. He is magnetic, impressive, and hilariously insecure. Naomi Watts is his on- and off-screen partner, her role smaller, her performance as mesmerising as ever. And Emma Stone plays Riggan’s drug-addicted daughter and PA, cynical, cutting through the pomp of the other characters, yet underneath the manufactured insouciance and thick eyeliner as broken and uncertain as the rest of them.

Everyone is superb, but it is Riggan that Iñárritu makes star of the show. He is a child, warped, kept brittle, by fame, battling enormously to be an adult, yet utterly incapable of taking the steps necessary to move beyond himself. All his energy is turned inwards. Where Ed Norton’s character pushes his struggles out into the world around him, Riggan withdraws, ruminates. He is being sucked into quicksand inside himself. No one in the film knows what they’re doing, what life is about; they are all lost and scared. And yet they get on with things. Live their lives. Riggan can’t do this. His ego is a black hole at the centre of his being, pulling him in.

It is a struggle with which I have experience, and I love how it is visualised and explored here.

This is as much down to Iñárritu’s directorial style as Keaton’s delivery. The camera is ever on the move, inquisitive, agitated, peering in at characters, searching for something it cannot find. The shots are mostly steadicam and handheld, with wide-angle lenses filming in close-up to create a dreamlike, claustrophobic feel. There’s an urgency and restlessness to it all, a jazz syncopation engendered through the camera and dialogue as much as through the persistent scattershot drumming pattering across the soundtrack.

And there is Riggan’s telekinesis - the opening shot shows him levitating in his dressing room in his baggy and faded Y-fronts, and in quiet moments alone he is prone to dragging, twirling and hurling inanimate objects - like Darth Vader, or perhaps Matilda - exerting his gargantuan movie star/superhero influence upon the external world… although in one telling scene we watch him godlike, wreaking havoc upon his dressing room, and then the camera spins as his agent (Zach Galifianakis, who again is very good, and funny) opens the door - the camera spins back, now implied as the agent’s point of view, to reveal Riggan stood in a pile of mess impotently tearing up shreds of newspaper - with his plain old human hands. It’s a fabulous moment, heightened by Riggan’s embarrassment once he realises he is being watched, perfectly capturing how vast and powerful and tragic we feel in our own heads, versus how small and shameful we feel when viewed from someone else’s.

Birdman is a dazzling film. The technical accomplishments necessary to create the long and intricate takes, the abrupt changes of location, the unbroken transitions between POV, between dream and reality, beggar belief. Yet it does not feel like a technical film. Yes, occasionally it is showy, enamoured by its own wizardry, but mostly it services character and emotion, the craftsmanship of the continuous takes providing tension and excitement without drawing attention to itself.

I’m less certain about the film’s conclusion, though. It works, but feels dangerously close to a cop-out. In the end I’m not sure it quite knows what to say about, what to make of, the themes it brings up.

But as a portrait of a man grappling with his ego it is fresh, boisterous, and captivating, both tongue-in-cheek and sincere at the same time. Iñárritu has the wisdom to puncture his protagonist’s inflated sense of self-importance at every turn, yet the compassion to retain tenderness and pathos while he does it, mining the material for humour and poignancy in equal measure. Birdman is one of my favourite films of the decade. It soars.

Day 307: February in blogging

Hiya. Home from hotels and tool displays and pots of paint and heavy work boots, and ready to collect up the better stuff from the blog from the past month, before I go and pass out.

It’s been a steady month, writing-wise. I don’t think I’ve written a single piece I’ve loved, but there’s been plenty that was sufficient. 

... There I go with that wild self promotion again. Best make sure I keep that in check.

No, but it really hasn’t been a wonderful month. I’ve not had any serious depressive episodes, but I’ve felt about a foot underground, happiness wise, all month. Just been plodding along, doing my best to get words out, to do everything required of me at work, more recently to be on the road with Steve, and not to collapse or fall inside myself at all. If you’re going through hell, keep going. That’s been my mantra these past weeks.

Also, I turned 34 in February. That hit me pretty hard. I’ve achieved so little. But I’m still here. And I’m not giving up. It’s a long road, through hell, but I’m walking it. Step by step by step.

Here are the highlights of this month’s posts:

Day 283: The strange man - A fairly true little tale about a strange man on a bus. I liked this.

Day 284: Gesticulating - And another few paragraphs about a bus journey. I’m sitting on buses lost in thought a lot of late. The stuff about you in there and me in here is something I wanted to get right, will attempt again at some point. It’s something I think about a lot.

Day 288: Tenacity - About ingraining habits and staying positive. Hey, how I was feeling before writing that is how I am feeling now! Listen to me back then, me now! Me back then had some sensible things to say. Pay attention, me now. And that Rory Gallagher sure knew how to play blues guitar, too.

Day 290: Radicals - Some words about 90s punk rock, the thrill of freedom and grunginess and crunchy power chords and love.

Day 293: Facing your weaknesses - Starts off about picking the guitar up again, turns into thoughts on blogging and pushing yourself and overcoming weaknesses. Got a nice ending, this one.

Day 296: Decay - Nice descriptions of inner city dilapidation and decay, if a touch reliant on the rhythms of alliteration. But it was my birthday and I was tired, and it’s nice to just throw pretty words out, even if they’re a bit clumsy and gauche. That’s the exact sketchbook feel I wanted when starting this blogging challenge.

Day 298: Skin - A post about suffering from acne. I hate writing about this, and thus I must do it. I want to get to the same place with my skin as I am with my mental health - something that used to be hard to write about and now is easy as anything. Don’t look back! Keep going! Courage!

Day 304: Inchoate - I like the paragraphs about the early morning light in here. There have been more posts this month where I’ve written descriptively, perhaps a little floridly, about the external world, and I’ve enjoyed every one. More of this, then!

Wednesday Reviews - I’m going to link all four from this month. I’m enjoying writing these more than anything else at the moment. It’s becoming a wonderful weekly ritual, choosing a worthwhile film carefully, sitting down by myself with the lights low and a cup of Earl Grey steaming, and submerging myself in a world of cinema. And then spending a few hours at my desk, or in a coffee shop, gathering my thoughts, typing them out, communicating them as effectively as I can in the time available. In a period of my life when I’m otherwise struggling to switch off, when there’s much difficulty and anxiety and self-doubt, when I don’t have alcohol or drugs to assuage the psychic pain, it’s been so important to be able to concentrate on this. Distraction, but positive distraction. Losing yourself in something that matters to you. It’s what it’s all about.

• The Killing of a Sacred Deer

• Annihilation

• Green Book

• The Lobster

OK. Lovely. Read any of that if you want. I don’t know if the links work when you’re looking at this through Facebook’s browser, if not you can open it in Chrome. Phones and apps hate blogs. I might as well be writing these on scraps of paper and slipping them in bottles and dropping them in the ocean. But why not? That sounds like a marvellous thing to do.

Going to bed now.

Hugs x

Day 306: Wednesday Reviews - The Lobster

Well, I've predictably found no time for this until now. I'm currently sat on the bed in my hotel room after a day working with Steve, dog-tired, aching, flecked with paint. But I've got a cup of Douwe Egberts instant coffee, a Chromebook on full charge, and an hour or so free in which to gather my thoughts about The Lobster.

I liked it! Yorgos Lanthimos' English language debut, starring Colin Farrell and Rachel Weisz, it was a surreal parable about dating and the strangling need to find a mate, told through the conceit of a near-future world in which anyone not in a relationship in The City is sent to a coastal hotel to spend 45 days attempting to pair with one of the other guests, after which time, if unsuccessful, they are turned into an animal. Singletons who refuse to comply run away to live in The Woods and dance alone to electronic music on portable Discmans (Discmen?), and are routinely hunted by hotel guests on excursions with dart rifles, who earn extra days at The Hotel for every singleton they capture.

Colin Farrell plays David, a podgy and taciturn middle-aged man recently broken up with, who must enter The Hotel along with his pet dog, who is actually his brother, who undertook and failed the programme a few years previously.

The animals don’t talk. They don’t have human features. They’re just animals. They’re not a major part of the narrative. Occasionally one wanders through a shot, looking non-plussed, disinterested.

As with The Killing of a Sacred Deer, Lanthimos blends the surreal and the real, the dreamlike and the mundane, in a way that draws out the former from the latter, and reminds you how the latter is always infused with the former. His tone can be Lynchian, at its best is even reminiscent of Kafka, but always is distinctly his own.

Dialogue is clipped, monotone, matter-of-fact. Shorn of their regular context, everyday objects and scenes become profoundly unsettling, the hotel corridors, the tangles of forest, the rows of discount store products in the City suddenly pointing not to their usual rich soup of meaning but standing only as themselves, objects of intense attention and uncanny creepiness. Echoes of Sartre’s nausea. In a way you can never place it all makes your skin crawl.

Yet it is funny, too. Uncanniness and humour can nestle so closely to one another, as with Lynch. Colin Farrell is hilarious in deadpan, but also lost and panicked and relatable, Lanthimos drawing depths out of him that we’ve seen before, but never as consistently. Rachel Weisz is good, too, as a forest loner to whom David is inexorably drawn. She also is here far more serious and honest than anything else I’ve seen her in, her face lined, her hair scraggly, the prim affectations of her late 90s period thankfully left far behind.

Her character is nearsighted. David also has trouble with his vision. This is important in the world of The Lobster. The potential validity of relationships is frequently measured by shared damage. Not just by authority figures but also by characters themselves. It matters to them that if, for example, they get nosebleeds, their partner also gets nosebleeds. They all tacitly understand this to be so.

There’s something childlike and naive about everyone here. As happens with its physical world, the distant tone separates behaviours and mores from the context in which we usually find them, showing them to be absurd and tragicomic. Desiring a partner to be broken in the ways in which you yourself are broken, or falling into petulant rage because of jealousy, or deciding to pretend to love someone for a lifetime rather than risk being alone - the patterns we play out in our heads day after day - here can be seen as ridiculous and fascinating, and unavoidable.

One more consequence of this measured detachment - I found the film to be shockingly violent. Lanthimos has an obsession with things-as-they-are, with looking at the world as a detached observer, and violence is an aspect of this. It is interesting and horrifying to Lanthimos’ lens that we are corporeal as well as mental, intangible beings, that we have physical biological form, and that we frequently enact violence and destruction upon the biological form of others.

Just as bottles of bleach, hotel corridors, trappings of ego become discrete subjects of attention, so too does violence. It is just there. We just see it. Take it in. And yet, without the cathartic role of surrounding emotion and context, we are denied the journey to process this violence, to understand it, deal with it, ultimately let it go. It stays there, stark, monolithic, terrible.

The Lobster is not a gratuitous or gory film, and yet in many places it made me squirm, churned my stomach, unsettled me on a visceral level.

It is, however, gorgeous. Dark and moody, with sumptuous, velvety textures and glassy black folds of water and the intricate play of shadow through trees, and filmed regularly in slow-motion, it provides a sensuality contrasting boldly with the deadpan emotional detachment of the tone.

Yet the film is not without its faults. As most critics have noted, it severely loses pace halfway through. The initial premise feels so full of potential, and yet it never really moves beyond this early promise, never develops out into much more than it first posits. Or, rather, the development falls back to being only an extrapolation of and investigation into the ramifications of the plot, a working through of the narrative tangle, rather than speaking to anything further and deeper in ourselves. The ending is exceptional, perfectly judged, but from the halfway point to these final scenes the film really sags, feeling drained of meaning. I think the worth of the thing is actually a story 45 minutes in length, and stretching it to two hours has left it thin in the middle.

Apart from this, however, it is a dazzling success. As an exploration of selfishness and self-sacrifice in romantic relationships, whether these two opposites are inherent in our natures, whether they are at odds, or compatible, it is perspicacious, troubling, and profound. As an impenetrable Kafkaesque vision rising from depths beyond logic and sense it is fittingly obscure. And as a piece of cinema it is mesmerising.

Day 299: Wednesday Reviews - Green Book

Green Book is a film deeply rooted in formula, but this is no bad thing.

Loosely based on true events, it stars Viggo Mortensen as Tony Lip, a fast-talking Italian American bouncer, fixer, family man, and local hot-dog eating legend, who, in need of rent money in New York in 1962, takes a job driving a sophisticated African American musician on his tour of the heavily segregated Deep South. The musician, jazz pianist Don Shirley, has had his people ask around, and Lip is the name that comes back as someone who can handle whatever is thrown at him, which Shirley knows will be important for the tour. Lip is racist - casually, and not so casually - but he is a professional, in loose terms, when the money is right, and for this one the money is decidedly right.

Cue a road trip in the company of the two, with Shirley, played by Mahershala Ali, as the apollonion picture of reserve, restraint, elegance, and logic, and Lip the dionysian "bullshit artist" chomping down fast food, smoking, belching, telling crude jokes - and protecting Shirley from local rednecks who object to what they see as an uppity negro with ideas above his station.

Odd couple buddy pic, road movie, journey of redemption, feel-good comedy - the film aims for familiar grooves, but it rolls right into these grooves nicely, hitting every cue where it needs to. There's a reason formulas become codified. Like jazz standards, they provide the framework within which artists can experiment. Like driving trips, they offer a roadmap showing the destination, the route you'll be taking, the structure allowing you to have fun along the way.

Green Book is bags of fun. Director Peter Farrelly, better known as half of the Farrelly brothers, the duo behind raucous 90s gross-out comedies Dumb and Dumber and There's Something About Mary et al, here brings colour and verve to the picture, breaking out from an opening that feels more 60s pastiche (if your first scene involves a fight between mafia hoodlums on a lively night at the Copa, let's be honest, you're only ever inviting unfavourable comparisons to Goodfellas) to eventually feel more embedded, and embodied.

Farrelly's comedic pedigree means the gentle humour, which could easily have fallen as a clumsy attempt to lighten the mood, here is baked into the piece, giving the film a confident tone - primarily dramatic rather than comedic, but with comedy and warmth, or at least their memory, always evident, even in the darkest scenes.

So Farrelly is a conductor, directing proceedings with an assured yet light touch. But it is the two leads who truly shine. Mortensen has a grand time with Lip, his obscene gut hanging out over his belt, his gait uninhibited yet purposeful, one hand perennially raising the end of a fag to his mouth while the other bums more smokes, or caresses a steering wheel, or clenches into a fist. The performance, treading close to pitfalls of caricature, ends up more nuanced, more whole - affectionate, yes, and big and broad, but full of depth.

Mahershala Ali, so great in everything in which I've seen him, has the quieter part here, but one with no less impact. He plays Don Shirley with the poise and principle and self-control befitting a world-renowned musician, every action deliberate, every movement seemingly drilled through long and disciplined training. Ali's Shirley is educated, erudite, perhaps a genius in his field. And yet he is lonely, his efforts separating him from his fellow man, his discipline distancing him from the simple pleasures of the world that the crude and coarse Lip has no problem enjoying daily.

And Shirley is black. Through herculean effort, and by playing the entertainer for affluent white audiences, he has won a renown that allows him in some way to transcend the barriers of race of the age. In one scene a row of poor black field workers stand and stare, amazed, at the broken down Cadillac that pulls into the side of the road and disgorges an overweight white guy in rolled up sleeves to work on the engine as, cool and calm in the back, a nattily dressed black man waits with legs crossed for the journey to resume.

And yet he is black. And this simple fact alone means that, despite every other fact about him, he cannot stay in the same hotels as his chauffeur, use the same toilets, eat in the same restaurants. In fact he must take a guidebook with him - the Green Book of the title - that offers tips on how to travel the southern states as a negro.

How Shirley approaches such gargantuan inequalities, whether all the poise in the world means a damn in the face of such endemic racism, provides a major theme for the film.

As a comment on racial injustice it is an unsubtle, albeit effective, piece of rhetoric. But I guess we need rhetoric for just causes, because heaven knows there is enough whispering to us for unjust ones. Stories let you step into the shoes of a person other than yourself and walk around for a while, experience another's joys, wince at the evils enacted upon them. There is no better way to engender empathy than with stories. And there are still so many people in the world who need more empathy. It is the accumulation of simple yet relatable stories, about people who on the surface appear different from us, and yet are not, that slowly changes the world.

So I can't fault Green Book for being broad, unsubtle. And what could have been mere didacticism, worthy yet uninspiring, through the strength of the two main performances grows into something warmer and richer. Within Farrelly's world, Ali's Shirley and Mortensen's Lip come to life, you feel them bond, you grow to love them, and you believe in them. More than black and white, African and Italian, the two characters end up as simply human: two flawed yet intriguing melodies, at first playing in different keys, slowly beginning to align.

Yes, as with a musical standard, we have heard the melodies, the overall tune, before. But it's difficult to not appreciate notes played with such gusto. As with Apollo and Dionysus, it is through the enjoining of the two sides of the dichotomy that a fullness of life is reached. You hear two individual voices, and then the space between the two lines up, and there is harmony.

Kurt Vonnegut once said that it is a plausible mission of artists to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit. I feel that the makers of Green Book would agree.

Day 292: Wednesday Reviews - Annihilation

Alex Garland writes, and more recently also directs, solid four-star films. By this I mean he makes genre pictures that aspire to transcend their genres, fresher and more experimental than films in the middle of the pack, yet never quite reaching the heights of true cinematic art.

His better works - 28 Days Later, Ex Machina - nudge enthusiastically at the boundary between commercial escapism and intriguing art house, while his less successful pieces - Sunshine, Dredd - fall clumsily between the two.

I wanted to like Annihilation, Garland’s recently written-and-directed addition to the straight-to-Netflix film library, but unfortunately it was another one that was too odd for mainstream enjoyment and too simplistic as a work of art.

It is an existential sci-fi horror film starring Natalie Portman as Lena, a scientist who joins a research expedition into a mysterious zone that has arisen around a meteor crash. Within this zone strange phenomena occur, the usual rules of biology are warped, and every team that has previously entered has vanished without a trace.

A central problem for me is the similarity here with Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 meditative masterpiece Stalker. Annihilation, mirroring its protagonists, wades clumsily into territory marked out by that beautiful film, and then falls back on ungainly and simplistic techniques to make it through.

It is a film exploring themes of structure and mutation in nature, of the delicate balance between order and chaos in which life on Earth exists, and the ego’s fear at being housed within impermanent and disintegrating houses of flesh. The sense of unease that it wants to develop would benefit I think from a surreal or dreamlike filmmaking technique - and Garland provides moments of this - but on the whole the film is stolid and workmanlike where it should be unnerving and otherworldly.

The script is heavy on exposition, always directly telling us what we should know rather than showing us the way to figure out ourselves. Dialogue is clunky, inelegant, forcing the characters to spell out what would be better hinted at - “We’re all damaged goods here”; “You’re saying we get out by going deeper in?” - dictating the tone rather than engendering it.

The central relationship is between Lena and her husband, a soldier, played by Oscar Isaac, who was sent into the zone on the last expedition. Portman and Isaac don’t have much chemistry, unfortunately, and the dynamic between the two of them, though it aims for a blending of the personal and cosmic, in a similar way to Interstellar, never quite ties the whole together. I didn’t like Interstellar either, by the way, but at least you knew, you felt how much Matthew McConaughey’s character loved his daughter. Like all of Nolan’s films it fitted together like an intricately carved puzzle, even if it was schmaltzy and ludicrous.

Annihilation doesn’t coalesce in the same way. It’s a prosaic sci-fi horror, most reminiscent, unfortunately, of Ridley Scott’s lacklustre Alien Covenant and Prometheus - for all the cerebral ambition it still clings limpet-like to hoary genre tropes - exposition told through video logs from previous teams, side characters picked off one by one, an ending that inexpertly visualises the protagonist’s struggle as an action scene featuring a trick with a grenade.

There are moments of tension and unease. The sound design is excellent. It looks sporadically good, with splodges of neon fungal growths and shimmering lights contrasting with verdant foliage and desolate beaches - though it often puts you in mind more of expensive television than cinema. Portman and the rest of the team of female scientists are strong.

It touches on some frightening truths, and I wouldn’t like to watch it if I was feeling particularly on-edge or isolated - the body horror successfully gives out to more existential horror as it goes on - but in essence I found the impersonal and disconcerting atmosphere undermined by the leaden plot beats and dialogue.

It isn’t bad, but for a film about mutation and chaos it is all a touch too staid. Reportedly offloaded to Netflix after test-audiences found the film too “intellectual” and “complicated”, I in fact thought it didn’t go anywhere near far enough in these directions. But maybe that’s the problem - too complicated for the mainstream, yet too simple for art house. At one pole you’ve got the schlocky unbridled joy of Aliens, at the other the contemplative meandering of Stalker. Annihilation can’t decide which direction to go in, so eventually ends up shooting for both, and scoring direct hits on neither.

Worth a watch if you're low on Netflix inspiration, but not essential viewing.