A Cure For Wellness

At The Mountains Of Wellness

A Cure For Wellness
Germany/USA 2017
Directed by Gore Verbinski
UK cinema release print.

I’m not the greatest fan of Gore Verbinski as a director, it has to be said, although I did like his very first Pirates Of The Caribbean movie, at least. I would never had bothered with this one if I’d only heard the title, A Cure For Wellness, which isn’t the most inspiring title in the world. However, I was lucky enough to catch a trailer for this a few weeks ago and what I saw appealed to me very much... looking on the surface like something H. P. Lovecraft might have dreamed up if he were alive today and writing screenplays. As it happens, although this film isn’t without its little problems, I was pleasantly surprised by this B-movie horror yarn built with A-list production values.

After a brilliantly designed and shot, low key “big city America” skyline opening credits sequence, taken at a much slower and meticulous pace than we are used to seeing this kind of thing and significantly rendering it one of the greatest architectural opening montages in recent cinematic memory... we have a short prologue to the movie and shortly after we meet the newly promoted, totally unsympathetic protagonist Lockhart. He is blackmailed/tasked by the board of his new company to bring back a former employee who has gone to a clinic in Switzerland for their ‘hydro treatment’ and not returned. Lockhart is played by an up and coming actor who I have a lot of time for called Dane DeHaan. I’ve only seen him in two other movies, the brilliant Chronicle (reviewed by me here) and The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (reviewed here), where he played a sort of good person turned evil in both films. I’m actually worried he’s going to get type cast playing unsympathetic characters if he carries on like this but, you know, he does it so well. And he does it again here in a less black and white way, as his character is definitely the ‘hero’ of the piece but, simultaneously, not someone you would really want to give the time of day to, in all honesty.

The rest of the movie, after the first ten minutes or so, takes place at the castle sanatarium in the mountains of Switzerland and the neighbouring village... both, curiously, shot in different locations in Germany. The film details a story arc pitching him up against the head of the sanatarium, Doctor Volmer (played by Jason Isaacs) while befriending a mysterious girl there, Hannah (who is played by an amazing actress called Mia Goth). He also encounters a puzzle loving lady who is joyfully played by Celia Imrie in exactly the kind of role I wouldn’t expect to see her in. She is absolutely excellent in this too... as are pretty much all of the cast.

The film details a complicated, in its untangling, mystery about the fall out of something which happened at the previous version of the castle three hundred years ago. My overall impression of this, even after it was explained to me, was that it was a little impenetrable in terms of its convolutedness. At the same time, though, it gives the piece a nicely ambiguous feel and my title to this review really fits here, I think, as it’s ultimately a very Lovecraftian affair and has more of the atmosphere of one of his tales than many ‘straight’, actual adaptations of the writer’s work over the years.

Now there are a few problems with the movie, as I see it, and I’ll detail those now.

One is the continuity in some places. Since the film focuses, for good reasons, on people drinking various fluids, there are a lot of shots of half filled glasses and, I have to say, a lot of the cuts between long shots and close ups did have some discrepancies in the level of the top of the fluid in proportion to empty glass, it seemed to me. There are also some discrepancies, I felt, in the timing of sequential scenes and moods of characters in some sequences where the film almost looked like it was heading for a completely different kind of denouement. In some scenes, to me at least, felt like they were completely contradicting each other in tone and character progression and there was, I felt, at least one crucial 'escape' sequence missing. I am wondering if there were two versions of the script as the shoot went on and stuff was shot for both, with the director maybe not wanting to lose certain scenes. So things may have been kept in which screw up the linear flow of the movie, maybe? I’m guessing here but it would make sense to me if that were the case. It would also maybe explain why I was left a little unsure about certain elements of the mystery as it played out. The ending did feel kind of ‘tacked on’ too, to be sure.

One other thing I might say is that, at almost two and a half hours, the film seemed very much overlong in its execution. An hour could have been chopped out of this and it might have played as a much more satisfying and succinct piece. That being said, though, it does have it’s own, European pacing and I’m also quite a fan of this kind of slow burn kind of affair, which didn’t drag at all throughout the course of its length. So, not too worried about this and perhaps one of the reasons it all held together so well was because it has a very nicely put together score by composer Benjamin Wallfisch, which is quite striking and appropriate for the film. Indeed, one of the first things I did when I got home was to pre-order the CD soundtrack and congratulations to the label for actually putting it out in a proper format... so many movies these days are coming out as download only which is a truly horrifying treatment of music.

And that’s pretty much all I’ve got to say about A Cure For Wellness. It’s a great little horror movie with an ambiguous, lurking horror filled with some nicely grotesque set pieces involving eels and dentistry which might test the resilience of some audience members but it all makes for an unusual experience at the movies and I would definitely recommend it to certain types of horror film fans who are okay with a slowly developing story arc. The cinematography is beautiful and the shot design meticulous. It’s a little muddled, perhaps, in its editing but more in what was kept in the movie, I think, than in anything jarring on any other level asides from content. I don’t think it will play at cinemas for very long so maybe it’s one to catch sooner rater than later, if you’ve a hankering to see this one. A flawed but intriguing movie which I will probably take another look at some day. If I don’t, there may be eel to pay.

Pat Savage - Six Scarlet Scorpions

Bronze Veneris

Pat Savage - Six Scarlet Scorpions
by Will Murray writing as Kenneth Robeson
Altus Press ISBN: 978-1618272744

Will Murray is back, writing under the old Street and Smith Kenneth Robeson pen name to create another epic tale in the Doc Savage series, except Doc isn’t actually in this one and, I’m happy to say, doesn’t get too many mentions in it either (I’ll explain while I’m kinda happy about that a little later). Pat Savage - Six Scarlet Scorpions is the first of Murray’s ‘solo’ adventures detailing the stand alone exploits of Doc’s, almost fearless, cousin Patricia Savage... known by many as The Woman Of Bronze or, if you go by the very enthusiastic back cover blurb here, “the golden-eyed Girl of Bronze”.

Pat Savage was always one of my favourite characters in the pantheon of Doc’s wonderful ‘brothers’ in arms although, he really never liked her getting involved in any of his adventures for fear for her safety. She only appeared in 39 of Kenneth Robeson’s 181 published (in his lifetime) Doc Savage novels but she was always a stand up character in my book, starting off in her first adventure in the Doc Savage tale Brand Of The Werewolf and sporadically after that... whenever she found an opportunity to horn in on the action. Over the last 20 or so years, Will Murray has been writing new Doc Savage tales, many of them reviewed here, and he’s seen fit to include Pat in a fair number of them. Well, I guess she must be a popular character because he’s now written Six Scarlet Scorpions which is her first official stand alone adventure. At least in prose form... I believe Millennium Press released a one-shot Pat Savage comic in the 1990s, an issue which has continued to elude me to this day as I wait for that strange mix of art and magic phenomenon which I like to call... the right price.

Now, let me define what solo adventure means here. In the case of Pat Savage, it doesn’t mean that she’s going it alone for this one, it just means Doc Savage himself is never in the picture and, although I was expecting him to turn up towards the end of the story, he doesn’t actually do that and I think that’s right and proper for the first time Pat goes it alone. I’d welcome guest appearances from her cousin in future novels in this new range (I’m assuming there are going to be some because this one rips all the roars and roars at all the rips) but she needs to fly under her own wings the first time out, I reckon..., so I’m pleased that Murray made that decision.

That being said, she does have the companionship, throughout the story, of Doc Savage’s most regular assistant from The Amazing Five, Monk (aka Andrew Blodget Mayfair), the chemist who is more known for his apish looks and physical strength than he is for his unquestionable excellence in his chosen field of science. There’s also a couple of appearances from his lawyer friend, Ham, but the majority of the action in this one is covered by Pat and Monk working as a team.

And it’s a pretty good team.

Murray start things off with a plane crash in the desert in Oklahoma and the whole story is set in the relatively near vicinity of a few towns and a mountain range. Anything within a short plane ride away, in fact. The story involves the ‘vinegarroon’ scorpions of which there are more than six... although the title of the story makes for a nice alliterative attraction... and a chemical substance which causes either heavy disease or death. Of course, with a chemist in tow, Pat should be able to solve this one easily so the writer throws Monk’s portable chemistry lab out with the bathwater and we have a story based on a mystery disease which can’t suddenly be solved and cured within a couple of hours. Especially since Pat and Monk soon find themselves fugitives from the law and its harsh brand of Oklahoman justice. So the two have a lot on their plate as they try and stay away from the police and investigate the strange mystery of the head of a bunch of criminally ambitious indians, lead by a character ripped almost from the silver screen’s theatrical serials and known as the masked mastermind, The Standing Scorpion. And it’s exactly the identity behind this mysterious villain which takes a lot of our two main protagonists collective brain power to  find out, just like it always used to do in those old 1930s - 1950s serials.

The book is loaded with cliffhanger action, as you’d expect from something which is trying to emulate the pulps. One of the initial qualms I had when I started reading this was that, without the curious quirks of the Doc Savage character to describe and work into the main narrative, this felt less than a Doc Savage novel and more like something else. Which, of course, it is. Monk and Ham comply to their character traits and it’s just something that I had to accepts. Pat is not Doc and the experience is never going to be quite the same as reading one of those Man Of Bronze adventures... and nor should it.

All in all, this is a pretty strong opener for the first of the stand alone Pat Savage tales and I really have to slap Murray on the back here and say that he’s done a grand job with the lady. There were, of course, a couple of things I didn’t like about the novel (isn’t there always?).

My first problem with it was the way in which Pat and Monk treated an aircraft pilot to steal his plane. Seems to me this is not the best way forward and it seems unnecessary and pretty out of character for any of Doc Savage’s associates to behave the way they do here. No comments are made to redress the balance about what happens to the fellow later and how he can be compensated. This just seemed a bit off kilter in terms of the way the characters would conduct themselves and I would have liked a bit of an explanation for it.

The other thing which bothered me was something which happens at the end of the novel. The stories usually take place at some point in the existing Doc Savage timeline from the early 1930s to the late 1940s and it’s often pinpointed exactly where the adventure fits in with all the others in the chronology. This one, from some things which are said, I take to be set somewhere in the mid to late 1930s. However, without giving anything away, in as much as you know that Pat, Monk, Ham and Monk’s pet pig Habeas Corpus will have to survive the adventure due to their later, published exploits... something happens which forces the three two legged adventurers into a month of quarantine. Now I can’t say myself that any of these three characters were out of action for a month in the original books or not but, if they were, I’d like to know about it and find out which two Doc Savage yarns this story fits itself between.

However, when all is said and done, these are really minor grumbles here and, as usual, Will Murray does an outstanding job of carrying on the Kenneth Robeson name. I’m hoping this tale is as popular with other readers and as fun to write for Murray as it was for me to read it because I’m really hoping these ‘new adventures’ of Pat Savage will be a regularly scheduled literary event every year. Whether they are or not, though, fans of Doc Savage and his merry colleagues could do a lot worse than picking up Pat Savage - Six Scarlet Scorpions and giving it a good reading. I’m glad I did.

John Wick - Chapter 2

Klaatu Barada Wick2

John Wick - Chapter 2
USA 2017 Directed by Chad Stahelski
UK cinema release print.

And so the Lone Wolf and Cub figure of contemporary American cinema is back... or should that be Lone Wolf and Dog? And instead of Tomisaburô Wakayama cutting a bloody swathe through hundreds of men as his wandering ronin figure, we have the modern stray dog samurai that is John Wick, shooting his bloody way through hundreds of men in a poetic celebration of kinetic violence.

Now, I’ve always had a certain amount of respect for Keanu Reeves. I don’t go and see all his movies but I think he’s an actor who brings a lot of heart and a certain amount of ‘under the surface’ perception to his roles which some other actors might not project as well as he can. He’s an actor who, I suspect, brings a lot of the historical, cinematic intelligence of the medium he primarily works in to the party and I can’t help but think that if Akira Kurosawa was alive today and making American movies, Keanu Reeves might be his contemporary Toshiro Mifune of choice. And as a big plus, Mr. Reeves is an actor who looks like he can do the kinds of wonderfully impossible things he does in these movies.

I actually quite liked the first film in this series, John Wick (reviewed here) and was, therefore, not expecting this second movie, John Wick - Chapter 2, to be much more than a, hopefully, competent follow up. As it was, though, I was pleasantly surprised because this movie is at least the equal of the first film in the series, possibly even a little better, and I had a really great time at the cinema with it.

It’s pretty much what you would expect in terms of content for a sequel to an explosive action movie in that it’s totally a series of well planned fight sequences strung together in a way that showcases some beautiful ‘bullet ballet’ moments where Reeves and, presumably, his stunt man, perform a dance of truly beautifully choreographed moves as hot lead penetrates the fleshy folds of Wick’s less than innocent victims in the truly ‘impossible odds’ style which has been the legacy of Japanese chambara over the decades. I’m not saying Reeves or director Stahelski are actually influenced by, or indeed channeling these classic samurai action classics of celluloid history but... it really wouldn’t surprise me, either.

Actually, right from the opening sequence, which is a continuation of the story from the previous film and set five days later, the audience has to come to terms with the fact that Wick is a little bit invincible in this, in some respects. Some of the things we are expected to believe a human being can get up from and shrug off, such as being hit at high speed by a car, before punching and kicking his way through to the next bloody victim is a little bit much and in some ways might be best suited to the over-the-top antics found in one of Jason Statham’s Transporter movies but, like I said before, Reeves always gives the conviction that he can do this kind of stuff and his facial expressions and body language reactions really sell the smoke and mirrors of this mythical, continued punishment that various people can inflict on each other.

It’s funny because, to write off my own analogy of the John Wick franchise taking its cue from various Japanese samurai movies, I feel that great directors like Kurosawa recognised that the action epic is not so much about the action itself as about the pauses between the action. However, John Wick - Chapter 2 barely lets up in the running, punching, shooting and stabbing business and this really shouldn’t work as effectively as the director seems to be able to make it work here and still have the scenes of violence achieve the poetically visceral impact that they do. He manages to do it, however, so this ex-stuntman turned director is definitely one to watch out for in the future, I think.

One thing I was sure of as I watched these scenes of cinematic brutality play out before me was that modern action cinema still owes a great debt to the James Bond movies of the 1960s. The aggressive editing of Peter Hunt’s legacy to modern cinema in those early 007 classics and, especially, the dialled up sound effects and comic book action on show in movies like From Russia With Love (reviewed here) are something without which the John Wick films, and many others like it, would not be able to exist in modern society. At least not in this form.

One thing I did pick up on in the choreography of the battles is the penchant for the main character to deal with one problem partially and then take out a few more problems before coming back to resolve his original dilemma. By that I mean, there are numerous scenes where Reeves will slightly injure an opponent and disarm him, then take out two or more other opponents, usually with bullet shots to the head (although there are some nice uses of knives and even a pencil here too) before finishing off his original opponent with a final shot. And this style of action takes place constantly like a repeat motif all the way through. I’ve not got a problem with it... I think it works well as a good survival strategy and it shows that the title character has a certain methodology and predictable approach to his fighting technique. It just seems to be a constant punctuation point, one scene after another, throughout the movie. It’s fun to watch though so... yeah, it kinda works well. I can’t remember if that specific way of fighting was a key factor in the character’s genetic combat approach in the first movie but... I kinda suspect it was. I’ll have to go back and have another look at it again at some point. 

Of course, it’s not just the beautiful choreography and the pitch perfect performances of Keanu Reeves and his co-stars such as Ian McShane and, in a wonderful bit of stunt casting, Franco Nero, that make this movie worth watching. The director does some beautiful things with the compositions and especially with the coloured lighting which he uses in some sequences, bringing to mind the kind of artificial cinematography of the likes of Mario Bava and Dario Argento but without having it detract as much from the overall onscreen shenanigans. The media is definitely not the message in this particular director’s work but it does add real meat to the bones. This hyper-real approach includes a nice moment where Reeves is framed by an angel’s wings and there’s even an action scene set in a chamber of mirrors which manages to make you forget the horrible cliché of having this kind of setting in a movie. In fact, it’s almost as good as the one found at the end of the classic Bruce Lee epic Enter The Dragon. So well done to the people behind the lens for making this work so well.

One thing I didn’t particularly care for was the comic book emphasis on certain words in the subtitles to the characters when things need to be translated for the viewer. It’s certainly an interesting idea to emphasise certain words by making them bolder, larger, more colourful and possibly in a different font to the rest but... I don’t think it worked that well here, to be honest.

Okay, now about that story arc... I can understand why the director is saying that this movie series is planned as a trilogy and the ending of this movie, without giving anything away, certainly leads us straight into the idea of a sequel set very soon after. Even the opening of the end credits gives us a man who is trying to escape the shadow of his own destiny and, all the way through, in fact, you can’t help but feel sorry for Reeve’s former hitman character as he unleashes a chain of events that pull him further into the drama of the past life from which he has only ever wanted to escape. Admittedly, there is one scene where he almost brings his final fate on himself but it could be argued that the end result of his resolution to his immediate problems are a forgivable slip. This particular modern day ronin is one who you do empathise with to a certain extent and, if the series does play out as a trilogy as intended, I suspect John Wick probably won’t stand much chance of surviving to the final scenes of a third movie. Although time will tell on that one, I guess.

At the end of the day, John Wick - Chapter 2 is a blast that in no way lets down the memory of the first film and even improves on it, to some extent. I had a thoroughly entertaining cinema experience with this doomed and tragic character and, if you’re a fan of modern action cinema, then I suspect you will too. Certainly a movie where you might have to suspend your disbelief somewhat, at least in terms of the credibility of the human body to withstand the gruelling regime of near constant blows that the movie offers up to the title character’s ‘bullets for breakfast’ lifestyle. But, hey, isn’t suspending your disbelief a good part of what cinema is all about? Give this one a go.

The Great Wall

Absent Without
Official Leave in China

The Great Wall
China/USA 2016 Directed by Yimou Zhang
UK cinema release print.

The Great Wall is a Chinese/American co-production directed by the epic director Yimou Zhang, who brought some great looking films such as Hero (which I loved) and House Of Flying Daggers (which I didn’t but which still looked like some pretty impressive eye candy to me anyway) to the cinematic table. As such, I knew I would probably get around to seeing this movie, even though there was some pretty strong backlash at Matt Damon being cast in the lead role. I don’t, in all honesty, understand the backlash on this one as it’s not once implied that the character was, in any way, a foreigner supervising the construction of The Great Wall of China... it’s already well intact before his character and his companion arrive on the scene. Nor is he playing a Chinese character in this so... yeah, it’s strange what some of the bizarre things you see flying around on the internet are these days.

None of that stuff matters to me, though, to be honest. When I go to the cinema I want to see a great work of art and, preferably an entertaining one. Although The Great Wall is less stylistically rendered than I’d hoped, all in all this is a fairly amusing piece although, it has to be said, it’s pretty much bobbins.

The film tells of a couple of mercenaries who are after the secrets of the black powder (aka gun powder) and their expedition leads them smack into contact with an army at a secret base at part of the film's titular construction who not only hold the secrets of the explosive substance but who, more importantly, are defending China from a terror of which the Western world remains ignorant.

Originally treated as criminals for execution by Commander Lin Mae (played wonderfully by Tian Jing), Matt Damon’s character William and his companion Tovar (played by Pedro Pascal) join forces with the Nameless Order who are defending China against a foe that William and Tovar prove their worth against even before stumbling across their new allies at The Great Wall. So they collaborate although Ballard, another seeker of the black powder played by Willem Dafoe, convinces Tovar to help him steal the goods in a move which slightly fractures the clear narrative at one point but without doing too much harm to the film.

And, of course, it turns out that the common foe is a group of alien lizard creatures who landed on Earth centuries before on a yellow meteorite and who try to cleanse the land every sixty years. Personally I would have preferred dragons or something because I wasn’t a great fan of the design of these aliens and their weak spot eyes located in their shoulders. Nor was I impressed that the much talked about ‘Queen’ creature was really not that much different than any of her subordinate creatures and... yeah, that may be one of the reasons why I was suitably unimpressed by any element of perceived danger in the movie, to be honest. Whether these creatures were actually based on anything from Chinese legend is not something I can actually find out but, if they weren’t, then I think the creative forces behind the film could have been allowed to have done a much better job on the design of these creatures, in all honesty.

Now, I like this director’s style because his compositions are usually very tight and he often employs bright, saturated colours to create an almost hypnotic effect on the viewer. Well, he certainly did have his signature in moments during this film to be sure. There’s some impressive colour coding of the various clans of warriors fighting against the alien creatures in the story, with bright blue, red and yellow armour clad warriors all neatly aligned in different sections of the screen. For instance, the bungee jumping warriors of Commander Mae’s forces are all armoured in bright blue and this, to be honest, gives a certain order to the proceedings. There’s also a lovely moment towards the end of the film where Matt Damon and Tian Jing are ascending the inside of a thin, tall tower, the walls of which are regularly punctuated with stained glass windows which allows the director to throw in big, interpenetrating shafts of rainbow colours colliding on the screen at once. This is a great look and one almost wonders why the characters in the movie don’t stop and take stock of the opulence of their surroundings at some point.

That being said, I felt the movie seemed a lot less than ‘a Yimou Zhang movie’ than I’d hoped for and, though their were a lot of scenes with bright colours and somewhat interesting shot compositions, there seems to be a lot less of this stuff at play here than in any of his other works I’ve seen and it almost felt like it was being deliberately dialled down in some places for the US producers. Most of the time the film just felt like a big, pulpy, standard American action movie instead of the graceful, kinetic art that I associate with both the director and his country so... I don’t know, it all seemed a bit less than what it could have been, truth be told. I don’t know if this was because there were so many hordes of dullish CGI lizard creatures for the cast and crew to wrangle but it somehow seemed tired and yawn inducing when, really, what I was expecting from the director and cinematographer was for them to bring the ‘bright and shiny’.

However, the film is entertaining enough in a pulpy fashion and, although Ramin Djawadi’s capable and appropriate score made me think of Pacific Rim (reviewed here) a little too much, it reminded me of recent films like Victor Frankenstein (reviewed here) and The Last Witch Hunter (reviewed here) in that I felt they were the kinds of films the old Hammer Studios might have chosen to be franchises back in the early 1970s cycle of their studio. Added to this you had the principal actors plus a load of, somehow, familiar faces (including one of the director’s regular actors, Andy Lau) and everyone, including Matt Damon (who I would expect this of anyway, given his indisputably good track record), does a fantastic job in this. Willem Dafoe seems a bit wasted and could have done with a larger and better written role but I suspect, like a few of the actors (I’m guessing here) he only took on the role because he wanted to work with this great, almost legendary, director.

Yes, it’s bobbins but it’s hugely entertaining bobbins and, while I was less enthusiastic about it than I imagined I would be, it’s not a wasted trip to the cinema and I would certainly recommend it to lovers of period set fantasy epics. It’s no Ray Harryhausen movie but it’s certainly in the same cinematic ball park and, while I wouldn’t say the screenplay is any better than any of those early monster fests from the 1950s, 60s and 70s, it certainly feels like it could have been written then and has that hokey, slightly toothless feel that a certain generation of cinema-goers might love. Although, like most of these kinds of fantasy films, this one could have been improved with the addition of Caroline Munro, to be sure. The movie even finishes up with an animated end credit sequence which is not a million miles away from some of those beloved, old Spaghetti Western opening title sequences like The Big Gundown (reviewed here). So, you know, there’s a lot of interesting things to watch out for. It’s not for everyone but you won’t know until you give it a try, I guess.

Blind

Blindy Peekers

Blind
Norway/Netherlands 2014
Directed by Eskil Vogt
Axiom Films Blu Ray Zone B 

Eskil Vogt’s first feature film, Blind, is not one I’d actually heard of before attending last year’s London Film And Comic Con. There was a big area at the show representing Computer Exchange and while my friend and I were looking through the selection of cheap, second hand Blu Rays, he gave a triumphant shout and thrust this movie into my hand. “What’s this?” I said. My friend then replied words to the effect that he’d not actually seen it but it was critically acclaimed and that I should buy it because it has a blind woman walking around naked in it. I asked him if he was sure of the fact of there being a lot of gratuitous nakedity in the movie and he looked me dead in the eye and told me he was pretty sure. Since I realised I couldn’t turn a film down when it had obviously received such critical acclaim, I decided I would pay the princely asking price of £4 and see for myself the quality of the artistic intentions of the director.

Well, as it happens, while there is some brief nudity in this movie, there isn’t a whole lot. As it happens, though, this movie is a huge artistic triumph and was instantly compelling... so I’m not too fussed about the lack of sheer, blind sexiness in the movie, truth be told.

Blind starts off strong with a voice over narrative, which stays with us through the whole movie, presumably of the lead actress Ellen Dorrit Petersen as Ingrid, who used to be able to see but, because of a degenerative illness, is now blind... I think. Actually, that may be the truth or there may be another origin to this character’s blindness but... the movie’s narrative style is such that it both reveals and conceals in equal measure, as I’ll get to in a minute.

We start off hearing her voice over black, as she sees the world. Then we are introduced to some beautifully textured, outstanding camerawork as she describes a park forest, a stray cucumber, a dog and then we realise we are seeing the way she is visualising the world. We then have the opening titles and it’s accompanied by a quite minimal, piano led, musical score by Henk Hofstede which reminded me, somewhat, of the music of Wim Mertens... specifically some of his piano music used in Peter Greenaway’s Belly Of An Architect. I say minimal not just because of the musical similarities to Mertens in this piece but because there is hardly any music throughout the movie and, in the odd scenes where it is brought in for dramatic impact, it’s usually a variant of this piece.

We are then introduced to a second character called Einar, played by Marius Kolbenstvedt, who is obsessed with pornography. However, this guy's back story, in which we are shown lots of pornography of a specific nature which I would have thought would not have been allowed on a British Blu Ray by our somewhat cranky BBFC (being polite about them), is also narrated by Ingrid. She’s somehow describing his life like she described her own and shows his character watching her through her window from his flat opposite and mimicking her movements as he becomes obsessed by her... or is it her?

It took me a while to realise that there was a second blind character called Elin, played by Vera Vitali, because they are not always shown in close up and the hair colour and facial structure are near to each other... and for good reason, without me going into spoilers. Was I watching a flashback or was it something else?

I first noticed something was going slightly awry when we’re introduced to the main character’s young son and then, a shot or two later, it’s her young daughter. Then, as the film progresses, the director starts interpenetrating storylines which you thought were current or coexisting realities, by stealth. Now there’s a reason for this but I won’t reveal certain things about the actions of one of the characters here... but this is, on the whole, a valid and, certainly interesting, way of exploring the characters and situations in this film. The brilliant part, which really threw me until I stopped letting the two shorthand styles distract me, is that it’s happening at the same time that he’s also using visual representations of the difference between what the lead blind character is seeing in her head and the reality of her situation. So something might happen and then the director will just hit reset because it happened in a character’s head.

For example, in an early scene she wonders if the ceilings in her apartment are actually as big as her husband, Morten (played by Henrik Rafaelsen), has told her they are. Later on, we see a shot of her stretching her hands to the ceiling and, in the close up of her arm and hand, we see her fingers reaching just below the ceiling. When we cut to the long shot, however, we can see that her hand is actually many feet away from the ceiling and it’s this kind of brilliant stuff that the director does that keeps the film interesting... that is, asides from the absolutely amazing acting on show from all the people who populate the main cast of this movie. Especially Peterson and Vitali who make amazing blind people.

And, like I said, the worlds within the sometimes puzzling but ultimately justified narrative structure also add another layer to the film. There’s a scene, for instance, where Einar and Morten are having coffee in a cafe. As we see a shot of Einar, we realise a bus is moving in the background of the window. We then cut to a shot of the other man and the whole background in the window is moving. We cut back and see more buses and then cut tot he other guy again and the background outside is static. As Morten goes to put his coffee down on the table he suddenly realises the table is no longer there because part of their conversation is taking place in a moving train carriage and part of it isn’t and it’s all mixed up in their heads... enough so that it sometimes even takes the characters by surprise, it would seem.

And this kind of stuff is, for the most part, so subtly done that it all blends into a single, challenging but definitely decipherable narrative which holds your interest. It even gets to the point, and I’m trying not to give too much away here, where even one of the character’s lines is discarded halfway through her sentence and then replaced with another. As the light begins to dawn on you about halfway through the movie what you are watching, so the interpenetrations and bleed-throughs between different narrative spaces become more frequent. And even with ‘guest music’ appearance of Sonic Youth’s Kool Thing, which I last heard in Hal Hartley’s movie Simple Men, it wasn’t enough of a distraction that I was so engrossed by the narrative habitat created by the writer/director that I barely had time to register it and tap my feet.

As you can probably guess, I had an absolute blast with Blind and it turned out to be one of my friend’s best purchase recommendations. In fact, I am now going to have to lend it to him so he can see what he recommended. As far as I’m concerned, if you are into the art of cinema then you probably can’t help but love this movie so, if you haven’t seen it already, you should maybe rush out and grab a copy soonest. Blind is certainly a film with, ironically, a lot more vision than a lot of movies churned out these days.

Stranger Things

Needful Kings

Stranger Things
2016 USA

A friend of mine gave me access to Stranger Things saying “This is a show I think you might like.” Since it’s one of those streaming thingies on a web site (or something like a web site but a bit beyond my understanding), he probably knew I would never bother to try and see this show any other way than him letting me to watch it. I really don’t like the digital world and streaming deprives me of the neccessary ownership of holding a shiny disc in my hand, not to mention allowing me to ignore the studio if they decide to play puppet-master and pull it from their virtual releases schedule. Having now seen it, I’m not sure I’m the particular audience that Stranger Things is catering for... although I did warm to it by the final couple of episodes.

Set in the, presumably fictional, town of Hawkin (named after Professor Hawking, I would guess), this is the story of four teenage friends who are into cool stuff (like Dungeons & Dragons, for example) and it mostly takes place in 1983. However, as we see at the start, some kind of ‘monstrous thing’ is unleashed and, when one of the boys, Will Byers, goes missing, his three friends try to find out what’s happened to him in the face of establishment adversity, even when the boy’s body is found (which will make sense once you start to watch it). Along with their new super powered, escaped Government Research Group experiment friend 011, aka eleven or Elle for short, the friends become embroiled in a fantastic adventure involving an alternate layer of reality, a monster and a sinister, threatening Government conspiracy. And, of course, multiple sets of investigations... where different, older sets of characters get involved with alternate elements of the mystery so everyone can accidentally end up meeting near the end and then, by pooling their resources and discoveries, beat the evil government agency responsible and find the missing character.

So, yeah, it’s trying to tap into exactly the same kind of source material that J. J. Abram’s Super 8 (reviewed here) was trying to get into... and so you have loads of 1980s horror and science fiction references on show here, with many nods to Stephen Spielberg thrown into the mix... along with stuff like ‘Salem’s Lot, John Carpenter, The Evil Dead... basically everything you’d want to showcase in a loving homage to the 1980s. Even some of the music is a little like something John Carpenter might have come up with for The Fog (reviewed here) in a kind of light form. Having said that, the producers have included The Bangles cover version of Simon & Garfunkel’s Hazy Shade Of Winter in one episode and, thinking about it, that’s a bit of an anachronism. Admittedly it’s a disturbing cover for me because The Bangles only cover two thirds of the original song and left out my favourite verse (“... at any convenient time. Funny how my mem’ry skips while looking over manuscripts of unpublished rhyme... drinking my vodka and lime...”) but what really infuriated me as I was thinking about it on the bus coming home from work was that Stranger Things Season One is set in November 1983... but The Bangles didn’t bring that version of the song out until 1987, if mem’ry serves and is not skipping here. So, you know, if you’re going to do 1983... get it right!

So, okay... all this referential stuff is something I should be well into and, normally I would be... but I found it really hard to get into here. Ditto for my dad who only managed to make it a half an hour into the first episode before bailing on it in disgust at the amount of formulaic writing showcased here. I at least made it to the end of the last episode and, I’d have to say from about episode 5 onwards, things start to get a little more interesting in terms of just wanting to find out what is going to happen next. The characters do grow on you.

For the most part, though, all this stuff is dull and clichéd... something you don’t want to have with even the most post-modernly eclectic approach to popular entertainment and, with its obvious plot line, it did feel like somebody had just taken an old episode of The X-Files and expanded it into something unnecessarily longer. The opening of each episode proclaims it to be A Netflix Original Series but, honestly, it’s so far from original it’s not funny.

That’s not to say there aren’t any plus points and, like I said, I did stay to the end with it. For example...

Although the story is pedestrian in nature and not exactly full of surprises (trust me... you’ve seen it all before, sometimes dressed a little differently), it does at least stick rigidly to being an all round, coherent narrative and this is very much improved by having some really warm characters and, frankly, some great actors in it. I’d heard that Winona Ryder was in this one and she does an absolutely phenomenal job as Joyce Byers, the mother of the missing boy. Of course, it took me half an hour to realise which one she was in it because, frankly, she still looks like she’s in her mid twenties and certainly not old enough to be anyone's mother, especially not of the teenage brothers depicted here. She plays a character halfway between losing it at the disappearance/possible death of her boy and a perceived crazy but driven warrior as she becomes embroiled in the phenomena... talking to her absent son through Christmas tree lights etc. Don’t worry... it’ll make sense if you sit down and watch it.

She is more than ably supported by David Harbour as Jim Hopper, the post-tragedy washed up excuse for a town sherriff who, perhaps somewhat predictably, straightens himself up and opens his mind, becoming one of the real good guys when he realises there really is a government conspiracy and that Joyce’s youngest boy may still be alive. And we have Mathew Modine as the head of the Government group who knows much more about what’s going on, and what’s gotten loose, than anyone else in town. Actually pretty much everyone is really good in this and I could just list the whole cast here and say, these people are all doing a swell job... but you’ll see that if you watch the show.

Special shout out to the four kids who are going after the mostly absent Will, though, because they’re awesome... Finn Wolfhard, Caleb McLaughlin, the outstanding Gaten Matarazzo and the quite unbelievably phenomenal acting tour de force that is the eleven year old (at time of filming) Millie Bobby Brown... who plays Eleven with an amazing level of intelligence and understanding that a lot of actors don’t sometimes get when they are over twice her age.

Now, the story is clichéd, it’s true, but it is kinda addictive... mostly in terms of staying around to see if you are right about what’s going to happen next. However, I did think that the 1980s theme was kinda downplayed quite a lot in places and... I don’t know why I didn’t respond to it much since, well, I remember the 1980s pretty well in terms of the pop culture. It’s funny, I really like movies and books that are retro set in the 1960s and I have to wonder if the majority of the people on places like Twitter and the like who are raving about Stranger Things are so positive about it because many of them are quite young and it gives them a sense of borrowed nostalgia for a time they never, actually, properly lived through themselves, maybe? I don’t know whether that’s true or not but Stranger Things has proven very popular with young audiences, it seems to me, and a second series has already been commissioned. 

Which is lucky because, as is the nature of such shows written by people who know that a follow up could always be on the cards, there are still quite a few questions raised about, for example, the strange world of ‘the underneath’ which features so prominently in this as a mystery element. Is it really a parallel realm or is it, in fact, a near future reality of this town in this fictional version of 1983? Is one of the most interesting characters in the show really gone at the end of the last episode or will that person return for the second season? Is one of my favourite characters really dead at the end of episode three or can something be done about that? And what is really going on with that other character everyone has been making such a fuss about? There’s definitely something up with him.

So, yeah, the writers have written it as open ended as possible so they can riff on other genre conventions in the next series along... so there’s that. And that’s going to happen sometime over the next year, I would guess. Meanwhile, I keep asking myself if I’d recommend Stranger Things to any of my friends and, I think, judging from my own reaction and that of my dad, that it will probably play better to a much younger audience than people who actually lived through those times. It does have its moments of intrigue and mystery and, in terms of direction, shot framing and some nice camera movement which echoes some of the props from one of the episode's directors. It’s certainly a competently put together piece, if you can ignore the clichéd nature of this particular postmodernistic beast. So if you’re 30 or under, I suggest you may want to give this one a go and... if you’re over that age, maybe you’ll try to be a little more understanding and forgiving if some of the stuff in this seems painfully obvious and protracted. At that age you’re not necessarily the target audience, methinks.

The Lego Batman Movie

Brick Grayson

The Lego Batman Movie
Denmark/USA 2017
Directed by Chris McKay
Warner Brothers
UK cinema release print.
Warning: Some spoilers, of sorts.

I was pretty surprised when, a couple of years back, Warner Brothers allowed their Batman character (plus a load of other licensed characters from various franchises) to be diluted, just a little, by having a version of him in The Lego Movie (reviewed here) while the franchise and their film rights were still very much active in the current cinematic landscape. It was a great idea and I welcomed it heartily but I think it was quite brave of them to lampoon their own characters like that and they’ve done it again now with this spin off film, The Lego Batman Movie.

What this means is that they’re allowing a movie with a major character in ‘comedy mode’ out in the very same year that at least one movie also featuring Batman (as played by Ben Affleck) is coming out at our cinemas in the Justice League movie. It remains to be seen whether his character will also make an appearance in a cameo at the end of the new Wonder Woman movie too, to remind the audience what they are building up to but... I wouldn’t be surprised.

However, I’m pretty glad that this movie here is in existence because frankly, and I’m sure most people would probably agree on this, it’s way more of an interesting and engaging film than the current crop of dark DC movies that are being inflicted on audiences and this one really captures certain, albeit exaggerated, truths about the characters in a direct and effective way which the other cinematic representations we’ve had lately just aren’t able to compete with on a similar level.

So, this weekend, I armed myself with a kid, being as I went to the cinema with my friend, his lovely wife and their cute child... and took in the new Lego movie myself and, although there was exactly the ‘first showing overload’ problem I expected to have with it on this one (yeah, I’ll get to it soon enough), I overall had a good time with this movie and it even got me to smile at some moments, a facial expression which is fairly out of character for me, it has to be said.

The first thing prospective audience members may want to know about this one is that you absolutely do not need to see The Lego Movie to watch this. In fact, I couldn’t find any reference to the events and characters of that film anywhere in this one. They might be in there but I certainly didn’t spot them on first viewing so, yeah, this can very much be seen as a stand alone film. Well, other than the fact that Batman is in it, of course... totally not referring to his previous brick-based adventures in any way shape or form. There are, however, quite a lot of references to the previous incarnations of The Batman, both on screen and off, as there are about the DC universe in general... and they do come thick and fast. It was nice, for example, seeing a clip from the 1960s Adam West Batman on the big screen again (there are at least six homages to the Batman TV show and also the film spin off that I could count) and it was also nice to see a brief reference to the 1940s theatrical serials at one point.

And it doesn’t stop there either... the DC universe isn’t the only thing that gets furious referencing here as this follows the same modus operandi as The Lego Movie in that characters from a whole host of other Lego licensed franchises are also seen on screen. I was disappointed that a lot of the DC Universe characters were sidelined in this movie but it was nice to see The Superfriends mixing it up with their Justice League buddies in a party scene. It’s in this sequence that Batman and his newly acquired sidekick Dick Grayson, aka Robin (or Reggae Man... nah, you watch the film to find out) steal The Phantom Zone projector from Superman’s Fortress of Solitude so they can banish The Joker there. Of course, that’s exactly what The Joker wants and it’s here that he teams up and unleashes various Lego versions of their licensed characters (and some unlicensed, as far as I know) and teams up with them to destroy Gotham City. So yeah, we have Voldemort from Harry Potter, the Eye of Sauron from Lord Of The Rings, the Gremlins from... um... Gremlins, King Kong, the DALEKS from Doctor Who and the Wicked Witch of the West with her flying monkeys from The Wizard Of Oz, all involved in an all out attack on the brick city where Batman lives and... it’s pretty much as fun as you would expect.

There are a couple of problems. The main one being that there is so much going on in the movie, both in terms of cramming in a heck of a lot of laughs and action and also in terms of the dialogue/visual referencing that it does get a little difficult to process it at points. Some of the action sequences... especially when Batman, Robin, Batgirl and Alfred (as voiced by Ralph Fiennes) team up with all the supervillains The Joker left behind in Arkham Asylum and go head to head against the aforementioned army of evil... are a little hard to follow at certain points, to be sure. Of course, it could be argued that the choppiness, albeit often inventive action sequences, coupled with the sheer randomness of the assorted roll call of non-DC universe character mash ups are an homage to the free imagination of a child and, well, who am I to argue with that.

Another thing that irritated me a little was Batman’s description of the un-named DALEKS as ‘British Robots’. Okay, British is fine (even though they were created on the planet Skaro) but robots they are not. If anything, they are living creatures driving personal tanks, to some extent. So wasn’t that impressed with the almost derogatory way in which they are referred, especially when they are in the movie a fair bit.

And I also found it strange and somewhat disappointing that in a movie which has Ralph Fiennes doing one of the voices, he wasn’t also asked to voice his recurring Harry Potter villain Lord Voldemort, since he plays a big part here, instead choosing to have Voldemort voiced by Eddie Izzard instead. Don’t know what they were thinking there, to be honest.

However, these are all pretty minor things and it’s a quite fun movie most of the time. Like a lot of these kinds of films these days it also pitches its humour on two parallel levels. You’ve got all the slapstick and stuff for the kids but there’s also an adult level hidden but quite easily decryptable in the movie too... so if you’re an intelligent member of the 'grown ups' race (and not just a man-child like me) then you have something which you can hook into too.

And that’s about it for The Lego Batman Movie. Oh, apart from a quick shout out to Lorne Balfe who provides an excellent, Batman-esque score for the proceedings (the CD is in the mail) and a quick note to say that Billy Dee Williams finally gets to reprise his role of Harvey Dent (aka Two Face) from the 1989 Batman movie, albeit briefly. Other than that though, The Batman Lego Movie is not full of interesting shot set ups or mind-blowing visuals but it does have a huge sense of fun and, like the previous movie, a whole brickload of heart. This is almost certainly going to be more interesting than any other Batman related movie released this year (I’m just guessing here but we’ll see if I’m right) and it’s definitely worth a look... especially if you know your comic book history and like spotting all the references. There’s a lot here to hold your interest.

3 Women (aka Three Women)

Three For All

3 Women (aka Three Women)
USA 1977 Directed by Robert Altman
Warner Brothers Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Very slight spoilers, I suppose.

It’s funny... the first Robert Altman film I saw, years ago in my late teens, was M*A*S*H and it blew me away. Loved the style of it and found the way that the main parts of the book seemed to take a backseat while the lesser scenes were pushed into the foreground in Altman’s adaptation, made it a pretty good companion piece to the source (which is also excellent, by the way).

Ever since then, however, I’ve found Altman fairly hit and miss and, to be honest... mostly miss, although I seem to remember I quite liked McCabe and Mrs. Miller and I still haven’t seen The Long Goodbye yet (it’s in the ‘to watch’ pile). 3 Women, however, is one of those movies I’ve always wanted to see because a photographic still, usually the same one of a publicity shot not actually seen in the movie, was always turning up in various books on fantasy or horror cinema when I was reading through those in my teens. Having now seen the film I can’t really understand why it would have been included in them but... there you go, some people wouldn’t know a fantasy or horror movie if it leapt up from behind a rock and bit them in the face. As proved to me on an almost weekly basis on Twitter, it seems to me.

Altman has cited that he made 3 Women based on a series of dreams he had been having and he has also gone on record saying it was inspired by some of the films of Ingmar Bergman. Looking at this, I’m guessing that Cries and Whispers and The Silence were probably the most influential on this one here... although they’re less of a template and more of a mood which Altman then goes on to explore in a more 'crowded palette’, as it were.

The film concerns three women (no... really) who find themselves thrust into each others lives. The first of the three is Pinky Rose, played by Altman regular Sissy Spacek. She is a young, impetuous girl who leaves home in Texas to come to California and work in a kind of water therapy clinic for the elderly. It’s here she meets Millie Lammoreaux, played by another Altman regular, Shelley Duvall. Millie acts as if she’s a very popular and busy person but it’s soon clear that nobody really wants anything to do with her and they tend to ridicule her behind her back (or sometimes right up to her face). Pinky, however, is very taken with Millie... to the point of obsession... so when Millie needs a room mate, she goes to live with her.

When Millie takes Pinky to a bar, she meets the third woman of the story, Willie Hart (played by Janice Rule), an artist who hardly ever says a word and who is always working on one of many, kinda surreal and hypnotic paintings which are dotted at various places over the local county. Hart is rarely in the story much (and I do almost wonder why it was called 3 Women because of this fact) but her presence is felt by the constant reminder of her paintings and because of one of a number of tragedies that happen over the course of the movie. And, inevitably, because she only wanders into the odd scene here and there, not saying anything (you only hear her talk in the last ten minutes of the film), she is made all the more interesting and mysterious a character for it.

Certainly an interesting character for Pinky, who loves her spooky paintings and is almost as obsessed by her as she is with Millie. The film is a character study as we watch Pinky and Millie interact over a period of time and see how Pinky manages to get on Millie’s nerves so much that, when Millie commits an indiscretion with somebody on the peripheral of their lives, she then later goes on to regret what she angrily says to Pinky next in no uncertain terms.

At this point in the film something happens (which I won’t spoil here) and Pinky’s personality changes dramatically to something which seems to be more like what Millie imagines she, herself, is like... as opposed to the reality of the situation. There’s a scary, almost alien, moment where Spacek’s Pinky just laughs and... well it’s really quite unsettling in the way this exclamation is uttered. Pinky and Millie soon find themselves at each other’s throats until... a strangely surreal dream sequence happens and, before you can totally fathom how this has affected Pinky, we are thrust into another tragic event and things get vaguely bloody.

It’s then that we get an end coda for the movie which is totally open to interpretation due to its ambiguous nature. At least that’s the way it seems to me. My interpretation is that the three women have eaten/absorbed each other’s personalities and shifted the hierarchy, somewhat, living together in some kind of ‘survival mode pack’ with a death which has happened off screen being something they may or... you never know... may not, have been responsible for. It’s quite bleak and there’s not much closure in it, with certain mysteries implied in the movie left unanswered. It’s the kind of ending I really don’t mind, to be honest, as it gives the movie some time to live on in your mind for a while after you’ve first seen it.

The Bergmannesque element Altman cites is fairly evident in the design of the shots throughout as he uses reflective surfaces such as glass to double and treble the image planes in the movie so you can get some solidly delineated sections of the screen collaborating for the viewer in ways they aren’t actually doing in real life... except the viewer can see the juxtaposition of the characters in ways which lend an interesting dynamic to the movie. Although, again, I was puzzled as to why the director fairly often dwelled on splits of two with a title like 3 Women... especially since he also uses a set of identical twins to further push the illusion of duality throughout the movie. Although, now I think of it, it could also be a motif used to push the idea of a split personality which, by the end of the film, is something that pretty much all three of the title characters seem to be exhibiting in terms of splitting off into new/alternate versions of themselves/each other.

It’s an interesting movie and I’m glad I saw it. I’m not sure I would recommend it to anyone but the most sophisticated or, possibly, most jaded of cinephiles but, fans of the director’s work who appreciate the naturalistic kinds of performances he lets his actors run with shouldn’t have too much of a problem with this movie. Not everyone’s cup of tea, to be sure, but certainly something which I think was worth my while so... yeah... one to consider, maybe.

Einstein On The Beach

‘Really’ Of Telly-tivety

Einstein On The Beach
France/UK 2016
Opus Arte Blu Ray All Regions

Composer Philip Glass has been playing a musical backdrop to my life for almost 30 years now. His music, and also this opera in particular, was a big influence on me when I was studying for my degree. Up until then I had been listening primarily to musical scores written for movies but was also shifting into more experimental, contemporary classical stuff. I had already discovered a form of minimalism, the musical form accredited to brilliant composers like Glass and Steve Reich, to a certain extent in the ‘Ladbroke Grove sound’ perpetuated by Michael Nyman, initially through his scores for the Peter Greenaway movies and then onto all his other stuff. When I finished my General Art and Design Diploma I then studied for my degree in Graphic Design at the London College of Printing and it was here, fairly early on, that a fellow student, @thatkeithmartin introduced me to Philip Glass by way of his compositions for the documentary Northstar and the stage show 1000 Airplanes On The Roof. I was absolutely hooked from the opening notes of each and then I went into one of the HMVs in Oxford Street (I don’t believe it’s there anymore) and bought the original CBS CD set of Einstein On The Beach and, predictably, it blew me away.

And that’s the kind of stuff I was listening as a counterpoint to my degree course. A solid wall of Philip Glass in the evenings as I worked on various degree projects and his music just kind of seeped into me and, I’m sure, seeped out again in various ways in my own work on a visual level. And, on and off, I’ve never really stopped listening to him since. I’ve seen him live in concert too many times to count over the years. Watched him do live performances of Koyanisqaatsi and Powaqaatsi a number of times too and seen various operas such as Galileo Galilei and, my favourite of his works, Satyagraha. However, I’ve never had the opportunity to see his opera Einstein On The Beach and apparently, that’s because I missed it when it was in tour in 2013. Which is something I’ve only just found out and which I’m annoyed about but I have, at least, seen this new Blu Ray version of it taken from one of those 2013 productions and... I’m very much better off for having done so.

So I finally got to see what this thing was supposed to look like behind this fantastic curtain of music and... it’s the same but different.

For instance, the opening ‘Knee Play’ music which is one of my favourite all-time Philip Glass pieces and which, in the recording I have,  lasts only four minutes, is performed here in an entirety that I never knew it had... with a long, slow build up to those last few minutes which takes almost a half an hour. I would absolutely love to get a CD of this version but, heck, at least I have it on here (and you can apparently watch this section on you tube too here) and it’s absolutely incredible.

In fact, all in all I’d have to say that this production and the way this has been captured here for the home viewing market, with the director using close ups of various elements of what is often a packed out stage, is just overall incredible in general, barring a minor grumble. That grumble being the introduction, in a few sequences, of some fairly standard dancing moves... thankfully these sections don’t go on too long though and the majority of this thing is absolute bliss. And even if there are some sequences you don’t particularly like, the music is always there in the foreground so, frankly, the whole four and a half hours as featured on this quite nicely put together, two disc blu ray set, is a huge hit with me.

I’d have to say that my favourite part of the opera is the first hour and a half and the opening knee play, where the two ‘main ladies’ start saying words or phrases from the ‘get some wind for the sailboat’ lyrics and hurling out seemingly random numbers (yeah, I bet they’re not). It’s truly startling and the main choreography from original choreographer Lucinda Childs (who put it together in collaboration with Glass back in the early 1970s) is amazing as people move slowly... very slowly... around the stage space and throw out frozen expressions of joy and wonder which, frankly, cracked me up laughing in several places and which really carried me along on a wave of joy right from the word go. As this opening plays out, the chorus gradually, over the space of a quarter of an hour or more, assemble themselves in slow motion until they catch up to the ‘Knee Play' section and start the familiar counterpoint singing... One Two Three Four, One Two Three Four Five Six, One Two Three Four Five Six Seven Eight as a repeat phrase which then, possibly without some people even noticing, metamorphosises into One Two Three Four, One Two Three Four Five Six, Two Three Four Five Six Seven Eight but still retaining the beat for the missing number. It’s just sublime.

And that’s one of main things about the music of Philip Glass that I’ve seen a lot of people struggle with and not realise over the years. It tends to take you by stealth sometimes but there’s always a lot more going on than just a repeat motif... it shifts and strays and progresses itself until it reaches a logical conclusion or change and it does it slowly. Which is another thing which I have a theory on when it comes to people who don’t really ‘get’ the music of Philip Glass. When certain people hear it they tend to hear a jumble of notes repeated very fast, over and over again. Nope, that’s not what it is... as far as I’m concerned...

Think of micropolyphany in music.

It was invented by György Ligeti and some of his music, which was accidentally appropriated by Stanley Kubrick for 2001 - A Space Odyssey without paying the composer (at first), such as Lux Aeterna, uses this invention... which is lots of short, indistinguishable notes played very fast to make up one, long even tone. Think of that concept for a moment and then think about the music of Philip Glass. It sounds fast if you listen on the surface but think about how those notes and phrases are slowly shifting and mutating and you’ll maybe come to the conclusion, as did I back in my college days, that Philip Glass doesn’t really write fast music and that his works do, in fact, incorporate ponderous melody lines. What he does, it is my belief, is write very slow music which is, itself, made up of lots of very fast repeat notes. So try listening to what the notes are saying in clusters rather than as individual notes and... you may start to get hooked on the music the same way I did all those decades ago.

And it’s great hearing this stuff and seeing the accompanying visuals for the first time. Especially with the director hand picking which parts of a composition you see on the stage at any one time so you don’t miss what he considers to be important. It’s also an absolute mind blower to try and figure out how all the performers know where to come in an go out. Glass’s music can’t be all that easy to get right and I wonder how much concentrated counting is going on in the heads of the actors, actresses and singers. My best guess, from having seen some of these singers coming in on the same cue, time after time, is that there is a complex series of clues at work here and each individual is both looking out, and listening out, for them. For instance, when person x gets to that line in the floor over there, the next person can start to move and go into their singing  which will, in turn, trigger somebody else to start their next part of the performance. That’s my best guess scenario anyway.

It must be a fairly complex set of signifiers to get the stuff right, I’m sure and not only extremely easy to screw up but fairly physically demanding... even for dancers (who are notoriously strong). There’s one sequence, for example, lasting around a half and hour or maybe longer, where a girl is strutting backwards and forwards across the stage in repeat motions while her arm is outstretched and pointing upwards at a fixed angle. I was feeling her pain... if you’ve ever tried to hold your arm steady for even a few minutes, let alone keep a beat with the music and keep within your area of a stage while moving fairly quickly... well, you can probably get some idea of what these people are accomplishing here for their art.

The whole opera is very well performed, in fact, and extremely well put together. I’ve both more and less of an idea of what I am listening to every time I reach for that album these days and I think I’m better off for it. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, I’m sure, but it is truly brilliant stuff and if you’re a fan of Philip Glass, or even contemporary or historical minimalism in the first place, then you probably owe it to yourself to give this one a look. Especially since it’s clear some revisions or changes have been made to the original text. I’m feeling really grateful to Opus Arte for being able to finally see Einstein On The Beach in a presentation of some sort and I hope they keep up the good work with their Glass back catalogue and release some more of his projects, past and present, in the future. Really looking forward to seeing more of this kind of stuff out there.

Resident Evil - The Final Chapter

The Clone Ranger

Resident Evil - The Final Chapter 
aka Resident Evil 6
2016  France/Germany/Canada/Australia
Directed by Paul W. S. Anderson 
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Big, major spoilers on this one.
Sorry, but they bring it on themselves.

I left off waiting to write a review of Resident Evil - The Final Chapter for a day after seeing it because, as a fan of the first five films (well, okay, the second was a bit ropey in the second half but the others were pretty good), I wanted to see if my disappointment would be tempered and I could find anything good to say about it. However, that didn’t really work because the crushing blows delivered to the franchise due to the poor story content are still haunting me the next day and I am now just very, very angry with the whole thing.

I’ve criticised film series’ before when they don’t stick to their guns and, instead, destroy their own fictional credibility due to sloppy ‘wet paint thinking’ and I think the writers and producers of these kinds of things should be more mindful of the history of their product and not treat their paying audience like they’re a bunch of half wits. Perhaps the dubious honour of the most devastatingly awful lack of story continuity in a modern film franchises belongs to the X-Men films... which are now so notoriously screwed by the absolutely insane lack of internal logic that the film-makers don’t even seem to be trying to explain away the whacking great holes in their films anymore. Indeed, with the X-Men, they seem to be just making it all a heck of a lot worse with each subsequent installment.

Perhaps a similar film series with as little respect for their audience would be the four pseudo-sequels that constitute the 1940s Universal Mummy movies... which are notoriously awful at both the time in which each movie is set and, indeed, the shifting locations which make certain resurrections of the title monster absolutely impossible. However, at least the writers in the 1940s had a certain set of expectations from their audience in that the films were only ever seen when they were released in the cinema and so it was a lot more difficult for audiences to remember the specific details of the previous movie in an age before television, which would be showing these things many years later, not to mention the birth of the VCR and the modern, digital age of home video viewing.

However, the people who write terrible continuity in modern times should be ashamed of themselves for trying to pull the wool over their audience’s eyes because we are, after all, living in an age of DVD, Blu Ray and digital downloads. People don’t forget very much for very long... especially when you have people passionate enough about watching a franchise that you are now up to, in the case of the Resident Evil films, the sixth in the series. That’s just plain wrong since your built in audience are going to be the first ones to spot these glaring inaccuracies.

Alas, that’s exactly the kind of ‘have your cake and eat it’ philosophy at work in Paul W. S. Andersons latest incarnation of the Resident Evil franchise and it’s such a shame that he’s decided to treat his audience like absolute idiots on this one... because the series had been pretty good up until now.

Okay, so the opening of this one starts off with the traditional ‘recap’ of the series but, in this case, it’s almost all new footage which completely changes the back story of certain elements of the previous five films so we can have a new set of reveals at the end of this one. This is wrong for so many reasons... the primary one being that, if you’ve worked so hard for five films to establish a continuity, why insult your audience’s intelligence by changing it for an end pay off that, frankly, is unbelievably obvious before this pseudo-recap is even over. How stupid is that?

Everything we know about the ‘Red Queen’ from the previous films is rendered useless within the first few minutes of this one and it’s a special blow to the second movie in the franchise, Resident Evil - Apocalypse, which had some of the usual suspects trying to rescue/extract the real life template for the Red Queen from Racoon City as their main goal. Here, we are given a completely new girl in the role of the Red Queen and, blow me down if it doesn’t look like a young Mila Jovovich, who stars as the series’ main protagonist Alice in all six movies. So one of the so-called end reveals that Alice was the real life template for the Red Queen, quite apart from rendering the second movie complete nonsense, is obvious right from the opening (and made even more obvious when you realise that husband and wife team, director Anderson and actress Jovovich, have cast their own daughter in the role of the Red Queen here).

And with all this, frankly unnecessary, change to a key element of the series, one wonders why the writer doesn’t think we’ll notice the hasty footprints left in the wet paint around the corner he really hadn’t actually written himself into... to be honest. This isn’t the film's only weakness, for sure, but it is a pretty major one. Especially when it uses characters, actors and other elements of the series as reference points in a storyline which has been altered, seemingly, to fit the current mood of the producers.

Bearing in mind, then, that the majority of the Resident Evil movies tend to leave themselves on a cliff hanger ending to be resolved in the next film, it’s somewhat annoying that the film decides to only refer to the resolution of the previous cliff hanger as an event off screen, rather than show it in what, I suspect, would have been a budget breaker of an opening sequence, truth be told.

In the last movie, Alice had been re-injected with the T-virus which gave her super powers and rescued by her enemies, as part of their specific mission to do so, in order to help them with the final showdown between the spawn of the T-virus and the last survivors of humanity. Here, we are immediately, after the dreadfully compromised ‘recap’, plunged into a story which takes place three weeks after Alice and her ‘friends’ have been wiped out by the battle they lost. What’s more, there’s a throwaway line that basically tells us that she wasn’t really re-injected with the T-virus after all... it was just another lie. At which point you have to then ask yourselves... why? Why would the fact that the villains of the piece go to all that trouble to rescue her and re-infect her with the virus so she can help them... be a lie? Why bother going through what they did in the last film. Okay, so that’s at least two films in the franchise now made effectively redundant and you have to ask, at this point early on in the proceedings, what the heck Paul W. S. Anderson thinks he is trying to do here.

And the film just carries on like this with lots of things that make no sense and also... and here’s the kicker... is about as dull as a bag of bones and barely fun at all. One of the things the previous Resident Evil films had in abundance was their light hearted sense of fun. Here, everything just seems to be dialled back and a bit of a drudge. The action sequences, including the return of the hounds who were conspicuously absent from one of the films and who seem like just an add on here, are all quite plodding, for the most part. I think a lot of that has to do with the editing, to be honest, which seems to be somewhat rapid fire in the worst places and, for me at least, make the action sequences somewhat hard to follow a lot of the time.

There are two good things about the movie that I could find.

The first is a very small action sequence where Alice springs a trap and fights her way out of it while swinging upside down. Honestly, it’s a good little scene and it’s such a pity that the pay off at the end of it, where she is electrocuted to unconsciousness by the security settings on the bike she tries to steal, is so obvious. It also makes the punchline moment to the next scene where she tries to steal a bike even more obvious but... you know what... if you already have a tricked out bike used to lure someone into a trap, why the hell would you not just let them try to steal the bike in the first place? Talk about going the long way around.

The other good thing about the movie is Paul Haslinger’s score. The ex-Tangerine Dream member is a newcomer to the franchise but, while it’s possibly not the best score the series has had, it more than holds its own with them and feels like it belongs in the same ‘shared world’, at the very least. Kind of a shame the film itself doesn’t live up to it but, what can you do?

And that’s the only two good things I have to say about the movie, to be honest. Other than there’s some nice, quite bleak set dressing in some sequences although, I would have to point out that the really interesting sets would maybe seem more at home in a Silent Hill movie than they perhaps do in a Resident Evil film. Apart from this, everything seems to be just a pointless, dull exercise in keeping a franchise going in the dullest way possible, with lots of “why didn’t they just...?” moments and never, really, an interesting minute. Such a shame because the films have usually had a surprise or two up their sleeve and, as I said before, at the very least been heaps of fun. This one, alas, isn’t and I don’t think I would even recommend it to long terms fans of the previous films, let alone those going in with no experience of the others.

I understand that this movie had some tragedies on set. One stuntwoman had to have an arm amputated after a stunt went wrong and another guy was crushed to death. These things happen sometimes in the pursuit of art and they are always very sad. Must have been very upsetting for the cast and crew to absorb, I’m sure. I hope their colleagues and friends on the movie will always remember them and honour the work they did here.

That being said, although the title of this movie obviously implies it was always intended to be the last, it’s such a shame that Resident Evil - The Final Chapter is such a franchise killer anyway. Especially since the series has now officially become the most successful, in terms of accumulated box office, series of films in history to be based on a computer game. It doesn’t stop this movie being such a bad one, however, and that’s a bitter pill to swallow. One pill makes you larger but this pill makes it small.

My reviews of the previous Resident Evil films can be found here, here and here.

Slugs

From Mollusc To Dawn

Slugs
Spain/USA 1988
Directed by Juan Piquer Simón
Arrow Films Blu Ray Zone B
Ha! This movie, I’ll warn you up front, is quite delightfully terrible... in all the right places.

I’ve wanted this one since hearing of its existence a few months ago when Arrow Films said they were putting a super duper restored print onto Blu Ray. Now, to be fair, it wouldn’t really take much more incentive than the title and the promise of a movie about killer slugs to ensure I watched this anyway but... as soon as I'd heard the title I did a little quick research and realised that this is kind of like watching an old friend, in some ways...

Back in the early 1980s I, like many other kids the same age as me in their early teens, started reading horror novels. There were plenty of them about and the first author I tried was Stephen King, who I liked a great deal (although his first novel, Carrie, never did anything for me for some reason... I much preferred the movie version of that one). Of course, after you’ve tried King, things get to be a slippery slope and you go onto James Herbert where you suddenly find, if you’re at that age of around 12-14 years when this kind of thing starts to be appealing, that the mixture of full-on graphic sex and bloody carnage is a heady cocktail too powerful to resist. Soon you start trying all the trashiest horror novels you can find that have that lethal combination of flesh sliding against flesh followed by flesh mutilated by some unspeakable horror and, like I said, the bookshops of Great Britain were full of this kind of stuff and all the kids at school would be reading things by these kinds of authors.

I got through a load of books by these kinds of trashy (and often fun) horror writers... I might mention authors like John Halkin or Guy N. Smith and the kinds of books they were churning out about killer jellyfish or giant crabs etc. One such author, producing some of the more well written pulps of the late 1970s/early 1980s horror boom, was Shaun Hutson. I remember reading one of his I liked at the time called Erebus and he was also the writer of a novel called Slugs (which later spawned a sequel, Breeding Ground). I hadn’t realised, until Arrow made their announcement about releasing this title, that there had been a movie adaptation of the first novel as a co-production between Spain and the US... which updated the action from the very ‘English England’ of the novel to America.

My first reaction was... why? My second reaction was... wow, I’ve got to see this one.

And so here I am with a first watch of Slugs and, as I said before... it’s really terrible.

Now, had I seen this movie back at the time of its release (and I suspect that over here it would have been a straight to video, pan and scan job), I would have condemned it for being utter trash and would have consigned it to video hell. However, looking back at it now with the benefit of a slightly rose tinted nostalgia for the kind of movies being made and released by companies like, in this case, New World pictures, it becomes a charming, hilarious and somewhat affectionate viewing experience, for the most part.

The acting is awful and, it has to be said, the screenplay isn’t doing the performers any favours either. Neither is the score in some sequences, credited to someone called Tim Souster but credited only as Music Department for this particular film in his IMDB listing. Maybe that’s because, although there is some nicely put together, Herrmannesque scoring for the majority of the scenes, there are some ‘heroic themes’ which are completely inappropriate to the on screen action and they just popped me out of the film in some truly ‘WTF?’ moments. Which, once you have got over the shock, also contributes to the maniacal enjoyment to a certain extent, it has to be said.

However, there are some quite good practical special effects in this one, to be sure. I thought the infamous ‘slugs bursting out from a guy’s eye sockets’ effect was looking pretty good and a scene where a slug takes a small bite out of the main male protagonist’s finger looked pretty amazing. I don’t know if this was done with stop motion effects or what. I don’t think CGI would have been a viable option back then.

So what did I learn from this movie?

Well, for one thing I learned that if you eat some bits of a slug that’s accidentally gotten into your lettuce leaves, they are going to come to life inside you and eventually burst our of your head in a fairly ostentatious fashion.

Another thing I learned was something which I remember being bizarrely pushed a lot in pulpy novels and horror movies of the 1980s... if you are going to have sex with someone and it’s your wife or long term partner then that’s okay. If, however, you are either having an affair or, in the case of this movie, are a teenage couple seeing each other illicitly behind your parents backs and then having sex... you’d better watch out. In this kind of movie, nature will always find some way to punish you by having some kind of monster or mutation dispose of you in some kind of gory but completely ludicrous manner, once you have your clothes off. And, seriously, this movie is about a bunch of slow moving slugs, after all. If you fall down amongst them... don’t stay down while they eat your eyeballs out and crawl over your bosom or unleashed genitalia like they do here, surely? How is this even possible to be a credible kind of death? It’s like these people just want to be slug fodder. Can someone go and get the condiments already?

And, of course, another valuable lesson which is a familiar one with movies of this ilk also crops up again in this story. That being... if you still have three heroes left at the end trying to kill the menacing molluscs of the title then, no matter how much of a nice guy or a family man any of them are, one of them is still going to get gorily eaten by the title creatures... who in the case of this film also turn out to be strong swimmers, somehow.

And there you have it. Slugs sounds like a terrible movie and it is. The performances are varied, ranging from just this side of acceptable to truly terrible and the pacing in some scenes is... well I’d have to say it’s quite sluggish in some places. :-) However, despite all this, I was grinning from ear to ear as I watched this shockingly stupid and therefore immensely entertaining movie and it’s definitely one I’ll be recommending to my friends. Potentially a star attraction for an ‘alcohol and a few movies’ night with your friends, as far as I’m concerned. As usual, Arrow do an absolutely brilliant job with the crisp, flawless transfer and it comes with the usual spate of cool extras which sets them apart from quite a few of the other boutique home video labels based in the UK at the moment. If you’re not looking for high art then... check out this movie and see how long it takes you to groan or laugh. Definitely worth a watch.