Megalopolis

On The Fritz

Megalopolis
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola
USA 2024
American Zoetrope
UK cinema release print

“Head and hands need a mediator.
The mediator between head and hands must be the heart.”
Metropolis, 1927

So the day before I saw Megalopolis, I watched a review by one of my favourite movie critics. 

Now, I find Francis Ford Coppola a bit hit and miss but he’s always very interesting and, one of the reasons I wanted to see this one was because he’d been trying to get this film made since he was talking about it on the set of Apocalypse Now in the 1970s. After many cast changes and false starts he finally raised the $120 million dollar budget out of his own pocket (to ensure the lack of studio interference), selling one of his own vineyards in the process. However, when I watched this one review of the film by the critic I have a lot of time for, it was a ten minute rant about how it’s possibly the worst movie he’s ever seen (someone’s clearly not seen Harlem Nights then!), for various reasons. So I kinda regretted that I'd bought the ticket to see it at Leicester Square but, I was in London to attend a book signing anyway and so I went through with it and, you know what... it wasn’t the worst movie I’ve ever seen.

The film is a fable set in the late 21st Century where Adam Driver’s character Cesar Catilina, who has the power to freeze time whenever he wants, is one of the chief architects and power players in the royalty that is New Rome, taken over from New York (so SPQR USA, I guess). He’s also invented a new and magical building material called Megalon (not the same Megalon who is an enemy of Godzilla in a 1973 movie, reviewed here). And the whole film is a power struggle between the various members of the extended family who play Gods to this new Roman Empire... there’s Nathalie Emmanuel as latest love interest to Cesar, Julia Cicero. And there’s Giancarlo Esposito (Mayor Cicero), Shia LaBeouf (troublemaker Clodio Pulcher), Aubrey Plaza (as ambitious, backstabbing TV presenter Wow Platinum), Jon Voight (Hamilton Crassus III), Laurence Fishburne (as Cesar’s driver and wing man Fundi Romaine) and even Dustin Hoffman as a behind-the-scenes fix it man.

And I think the reason the film has been said to have no story is probably due to the fact that it’s such a fairly simple story that everyone is expecting more from it, perhaps. But there is one. And it’s been called unwatchable by many, it would seem... but no it isn’t. Unlike the reviewer I saw, I didn’t find it incredibly dull and it didn’t really feel longer than its two hours and eighteen minutes (although, it kinda felt like there may have been some cuts which could have expended certain scenes, like the final fate of Clodio).

And, yes, pretty much all the actors are giving absolutely scenery chewing, over the top performances which some may later come to regret and which seem stagey and contrived but... I’ve been thinking about this... I suspect a lot of this may have been exactly what Coppola was going for here.

To explain, the one review I saw didn’t mention a very specific film which, it turns out, lots of other people have mentioned in connection to this film... I just didn’t know about it. So I was about two thirds of the way through Megalopolis before I realised that this is a film very much informed by the 1927 Fritz Lang silent movie, Metropolis (reviewed here). And I wish I’d figured that out sooner because, yes, the dialogue is extremely bad and so much nonsense in this film, for the most part but, if you scratch that off the surface and look at it as a silent movie, treating the dialogue as unnecessary chatter, then you do have a film which starts to resemble those lofty heights that Lang committed to celluloid at the end of the silent era.

Yes, it’s a somewhat bloated corpse of a movie but, perhaps that’s how the younger generation may perceive Metropolis as being if they were presented with it as a brand new film nowadays. And, look, I’m not denying that there are a lot of problems and unfortunate artistic dead end choices in this movie but, I think it’s not something you should dismiss so lightly either... I think it’s definitely worth a look and my gut instinct is telling me that 30 to 50 years from now, if Coppola is still remembered, then this film may come under a certain re-appraisal and people might start taking it a little more seriously than, well, than it’s even possible to do right now.

Given that the film is quite all over the place tonally in some sequences, I have to also give a round of applause to composer Osvaldo Golijov, who manages to shift his musical palette through a number of different styles and really does help bring together the movie as a whole, I think.

One last thing about Megalopolis, before I move on and forget about this one for a while... the reviewer who I watched before I saw the film brought up the movie Caligula (reviewed by me here) and said that it’s a much more interesting way of doing things than what Coppola has done here. I don’t think Coppola was necessarily influenced by that film but, I think it was a good call to invoke it because there were many stretches of the movie, especially at the start, which do call to mind that particular film (actually, if Megalopolis had more female nudity, I would have thought a lot more of it, I suspect). 

It is then, as far as I'm concerned, a never dull but perhaps less substantial take on a kind of melding between the sensibilities of Metropolis and Caligula (another film people are citing in relation is The Fountainhead but, I’ve never seen it so can’t comment either way). And although it is not going to make many people who see it happy, I’m really glad I did take the opportunity to go to the screening and could certainly be tempted back to see it again in ten years or so. It’s not the aesthetic disaster that many reviews may lead you to believe but, similarly, I think this will fail abysmally at the box office and I kinda feel for Coppola (who recently lost his wife during post production). I hope this noble dinosaur of cinema can remain untouched by the possible public lambasting this film may well receive. An interesting failure then but, one which may well be considered a success by many in later years, I feel.

65

Alvarez Now

65
USA 2023
Directed by
Scott Beck & Bryan Woods
Columbia
UK cinema release print

Okay, so this review of the latest Adam Driver sci-fi movie 65 is going to be pretty short. So being because it’s neither terrible or great and I don’t have much to say about it either way. It was fairly entertaining but the negatives and positives of the thing balance out pretty well with nothing really standing out in either direction.

Okay, so the plot is that, while transporting human cargo in suspended animation capsules which should take him about two years, the starship piloted by Mills, played by Driver, is hit by part of an uncharted asteroid cluster and crash lands on an unknown planet. Only he survives the crash, other than one suspended animation pod which wasn’t destroyed. He manages to locate it and thaws out a 9 year old girl, Koa, played by Ariana Greenblatt, who doesn’t speak the same language as him. He then has to get her and himself a number of kilometres away and up a mountain to find where the escape capsule ended up, to see if he can get them off the planet. Where he has landed is the planet earth, 65 million years ago... where dinosaurs just want to eat them, more than anything else. And, of course, those of you familiar with the Alvarez hypothesis will know exactly why Driver’s craft was hit by an asteroid (with bigger ones to follow) and just why he has to get them off planet as quickly as possible.

And like I said, there’s good and there’s bad. The good... well, the three main actors, Driver, Greenblatt and Chloe Coleman as Driver’s ‘sick daughter back home’ (who was so good in Gunpowder Milkshake... reviewed here) are all absolutely brilliant. And, to support them, the special effects are pretty nicely done too. Add in a fine score by Chris Bacon and things are an easy watch.

The bad... well, there are a couple of things. Firstly, I wanted to see this movie because, when I saw the trailer a number of weeks ago, it reminded me of just the kind of story that would have been serialised as a black and white comic strip in a late 1970s to mid 1980s issue of 2000AD, when I was a kid. And, well, that’s pretty much exactly what we've got here. Which is a double edged sword because the script, as in the way the characters bond and the situations they find themselves on their quest, really does seem like it would have been fine in the 1980s but... it just seems a little hackneyed and clichéd these days. There really aren’t many surprises... apart from a truly brilliant, early jump scare when Driver’s character first sees some dinosaurs... and the tired old trope of separating and then running away from danger into even worse danger seems well overplayed here. I think they do that one at least three or four times and, you kinda knew exactly when these moments were going to happen. As well as knowing pretty much how each character was going to get out of their situation, due to telegraphing things earlier in the movie. So, yeah, it was kinda comfortable and entertaining rather than scary, for most of the time.

And the dinosaurs are pretty well done but they’ve certainly gone away from the expected designs of things and these have their own look. Not a bad thing, for sure but, well, when I see a big dinosaur I want it to be at least as scary as those in the original Jurassic Park movies... these one’s weren’t all that, it has to be said. Competent and believable for sure but, no... much less intimidating than I would have liked.

But, like I said, scripting aside, 65 is more than competently handled, very well acted and a general crowd pleaser in terms of at least delivering some action and lots of appropriate growling. It’s just not a great film and, as I said at the start, not a terribly bad one either. I’d recommend it if there’s nothing better on and you want to just lay back in your seat and be entertained, Nothing to write home about but, you’re certainly in the hands of some good actors in this one.

Star Wars Episode IX - The Rise Of Skywalker

Merry Sith Mass

Star Wars Episode IX -
The Rise Of Skywalker
2019 USA Directed by J. J. Abrams
UK cinema release print.

Warning: I’ve decided to write this with HUGE SPOILERS in it because I’d rather this review had a little more longevity to it, since my Star Wars ones do tend to get revisited by people a little more than some of my others. Please DO NOT READ this if you’ve not seen the movie.

Okay so, Star Wars Episode IX - The Rise Of Skywalker is a mixture of good and bad stuff, although I quite liked this one but, before I get into it, I just want to reiterate my spoiler warning above. There’s stuff revealed here that you won’t want to know (even if you’ve already figured it out anyway) before seeing the movie... so just don’t read this until after you’ve seen the film.

Right... so if you’ve been keeping track of my Star Wars reviews over the years you’ll know that I really didn’t think much of Episode VIII - The Last Jedi. I think it was a huge wrong turn of a movie with some brilliant set pieces but an absolutely terrible story and direction for all of the characters. In terms of Star Wars films I’d stick it down with Attack Of The Clones and Revenge Of The Sith as being one of the absolute worst of the series. And, while nobody from the production of the movies has said it outright... although it has been heavily implied by some of the big names behind and in front of the cameras this last few months... I think the producers probably recognised that The Last Jedi was a huge mis-step for the franchise too. Just speculating here, mind but... that’s how I see it as playing out when people have been interviewed. Abrams himself has said this movie is something of a course correction and, yeah... absolutely... The Rise Of Skywalker does spend a lot of its time, perhaps a hugely disproportionate amount of time, backtracking and erasing elements of The Last Jedi. Sometimes though, it does throw the baby out with the bathwater, it has to be said.

To do this, Abrams has had to set up a story beat which I believe he always planned to be there but, because of the way the last movie went (my understanding is that he had little involvement or knowledge of the story of the last one when it was being made) he actually uses the opening crawl to set up the return of Emperor Palpatine where if he’d have done the whole of this trilogy, I believe he would have heralded Palpatine’s return in a much more subtle and surprising way. I don’t have too much of an issue with this, however, because that’s what the title crawls did in the first two movies when they were released in 1977 and 1980 so, it’s not a new thing to bring in new information in this manner.

The fact that Palpatine returns from the dead here is handled in a way that is credible to an extent, if you don’t mind the movie dipping into 1930s/1950s Universal Horror territory... there really is a kind of alchemical ‘weird science’ vibe that’s not been visited before, to my memory, in the Star Wars films but... I think it finds its place in the series and certainly brings a ‘pulp literature’ element with it. And the lighting on Palapatine’s face in his introduction scene reflects this in a wonderful manner too.

Now we get in to the real spoilery stuff so... to quote Edward Van Sloan in Frankenstein... well, we warned you.

A week or two ago, when I realised that Abrams was going to jettison the idea that Rey’s parentage wasn’t important... which is just as well because it was set up so well in the first one that she knew exactly who her important family tree were in The Force Awakens... I was talking to my friend and said, “You know, she’s probably not a Skywalker like you keep saying but Palpatine’s granddaughter. The ‘Rise’ of Skywalker is probably Kylo Ren redeeming himself in a similar way to Darth Vader in Return Of The Jedi.” And, yeah, I so totally called it... those things come to pass in this movie. And it all makes sense except the last little scene on Tatooine where Rey refers to herself... as you know she’s going to because of the way the stroy beat is presented... as a Skywalker. Well she totally isn’t but I guess, because she holds all of the past Jedi in her now, she can maybe take that name and, lets face it, if she calls herself Rey Palpatine she’s going to have some serious hate mail. It all works... just... but I do think the ‘pendulum swing’, as Abrams puts it, of The Last Jedi really did hurt this new film with its legacy and things could have fit together in a lot more smoother manner without Episode VIII.

How Abrams cushions the blow and gets the franchise back on course is to completely borrow (see how I’m nicely not using the word ‘plagiarise’ here) a load of elements from a fair few previous films in the franchise. People who love the series will literally recognise scenes taken almost wholesale from the original trilogy and sometimes it’s done in a referential, loving homage kind of way such as Luke lifting his X-Wing from the sea while Yoda’s theme from the similar scene in The Empire Strikes Back plays out in exactly the same orchestration that it might even have been needle-dropped in and... sometimes it isn’t. There was one scene, for instance, when I leaned over to my friend (who had already seen it earlier in the day) and whispered... “Why didn’t they just CGI Don Henderson into this scene if they were going to do this?” So, yeah, some of the stuff was not that subtle and felt... not out of place, just very familiar and, well... there are a lot of bits in this movie where fans of the films will find themselves in very familiar territory.

But you know what? That’s what Star Wars has always been about. Swiping stuff in a postmodern manner from other things. George Lucas couldn’t secure the rights to make a Flash Gordon movie (Flash Gordon already borrowing heavily from Edgar Rice Burroughs John Carter of Mars books) so he wrote Star Wars and the films have always been full of iconic and often ‘borrowed’ ideas and images which the films have assimilated into their own cinematic language. So I really don’t have a problem with what Abrams is doing here. There are a few things I did have a problem with, though.

Like the introduction of a new droid. Frankly, it’s fun but has no purpose in the plot and feels like a fifth wheel most of the time. It just seems there to sell toys.. as does the clunky (or should that be McClunkey?) bikes that launch the flying stormtroopers. “They fly now!” say three of the characters... somehow oblivious to the fact that their nearest stormtrooper equivalents did in the prequel trilogy too. Didn’t think this added anything to the action scenes but then again, the action scenes were another problem for me.

They felt, somehow, anti-climactic and flat a lot of the time. Ironically, the action sequences in The Last Jedi were far more interesting and impactful. There’s nothing as cool as the throne room skirmish or the battle of Crait in The Rise Of Skywalker, for example. However, the action sequences in this one, although not as exciting, felt more organic to the story and not just slotted in because they felt like they needed something to happen (for the most part). This movie covers a lot of story at a fairly fast pace and so there’s less action but more integrity to the Star Wars universe I felt.

There was a lovely ‘shock’ character death fairly early on in the film but it turns out it was just a dupe and, frankly, lifted from the baskets scene in Raider Of The Lost Ark. I totally bought it for a while before they revealed a certain character was alive. Oh, and for the record, the force energy coming from people’s hands, especially in the later scenes, looks terrible compared to how it looked in the 1980s. Just rubbish and too wispy. Needed to be much more dense, I think.

There’s also a dubious scene which, funnily enough, I was talking to someone about a couple of times over the course of the last few years but I was pretty sure they wouldn’t be able to do it for this film. I said to my girlfriend that they really needed to somehow get Han Solo back in it for a resolution to his son’s character arc but they wouldn’t be able to do it because they would somehow have to coax Harrison Ford back and, also, there’s no precedent in the series for a ‘non-force’ ghost. But, what the heck.... they did it anyway. They must have paid Ford quite handsomely for his little ‘cameo’ here and his appearance is treated in almost exactly the same way as Kevin Costner’s ‘memory ghost’ appearance in Batman Vs Superman. They did it and... it’s a bit questionable but it’s nice to have it and it worked for me.

There were also a lot of voice cast returns of a load of the other Jedi from previous films. I was ridiculed on Twitter by someone for spotting that Liam Neeson’s voice was in the teaser trailer and was told it was Mark Hamil. Nope, it was Neeson, as I’d said. This film would have been a lot better had it brought back full-on force ghosts of a fair few Jedi from the previous movies too but, alas, I guess voice rates must be cheaper and the producers didn’t want to spend the extra money, is my guess.

My biggest gripe is not knowing how in hell they got Luke’s old light sabre still, after that terrible throw away line in The Force Awakens about it being a good question for another day. This was a question I really needed answering and the film makers have just ignored it... which I think is the only way in which Abram’s two movies disrespect the fans of the original films.

One thing I did love about this movie is... finally C3PO was cool again. He’s the least irritating and most witty he’s ever been in the franchise and his character really worked well here. Alas, R2D2 is hardly in it again and I wish they’d used him more but, I’m guessing it might have damaged the story flow in some way and so they chose to do with him what they did here. It was great how they worked C3PO though... really good stuff here.

And, it goes without saying, that the cast in this were all pretty much outstanding... including the new characters although, I wish Keri Russell had turned in her performance without a mask covering her head... she was a cool character. My only grouch about the casting would be that none of the original trilogy characters had much to do and were hardly in it. Carrie Fisher wasn’t integrated nearly as seamlessly as they said she was and, they totally lied about not CGIing her in one scene where, frankly, you couldn’t have had the training scene with Luke and Leia done any other way than to de-age them (and make them look vaguely unreal and cartoony). Luke and Han (who was admittedly a mostly unexpected bonus) hardly have any screen time, Yoda is practically non-existent other than a voice and a brief glimpse and I just felt Billy Dee Williams was kinda wasted in this. He was cool... just under utilised but, at least he got to say a specific line which is pretty much in almost every Star Wars movie, so there’s that. I could also have done with a lot more of Kelly Marie Tran’s character being in here because, frankly, she was one of the best things about The Last Jedi.

There’s probably going to be a lot of criticism of Abrams on this one about how the power of The Force is used in certain scenes but I was fine with it all... especially the cool way in which Rey passes a light sabre to Ben Solo. There actually is a lot of back up in the history of the saga which means this kind of magical stuff is just a slightly different looking iteration of exactly the same kind of thing so I think Abrams and the writers made a good call here. It’s also a really cool moment too so, yeah, again it works for me.

As far as the music goes... John Williams’ score soars as he builds on the themes he introduced in The Force Awakens in exactly the way he didn’t in The Last Jedi. I can’t wait to give the CD a spin fairly soon. I hope they give him an Oscar for this one. He deserves it.

And that’s me pretty much done. I didn’t absolutely love this on first viewing but, like The Force Awakens, which I gave an absolutely terrible review to and regretted doing that as soon as I saw it a second time, I suspect The Rise Of Skywalker will definitely be something I get more out of on future screenings (probably sometime towards the end of next week... I just wish Kerry had been around to see this one). If you are a fan of the franchise then, I think you’ll really like this one. It’s not top tier Star Wars but it’s not bottom tier either which means it’s pretty great, right? But then again, you already know that because you wouldn’t be reading this spoilerific review if you hadn’t already seen it, I hope.


Star Wars at NUTS4R2

 Episode 1: The Phantom Menace 

Episode 2: Attack Of The Clones

Episode 3: Revenge Of The Sith 

Solo

Rogue One 

Episode 4: A New Hope

Episode 5: The Empire Strikes Back

Episode 6: Return Of The Jedi 

Episode 7: The Force Awakens 

Episode 8:  The Last Jedi

Episode 9: The Rise Of Skywalker

The Dead Don't Die

Fourth Wall Of The Dead

The Dead Don't Die
USA/Sweden 2019 Directed by Jim Jarmusch
UK cinema release print

Warning: Some very slight spoilerage.

I’ve always liked Jim Jarmusch as a writer/director, since first seeing his early masterpiece Down By Law in the late 1980s. I’ve not seen all of his movies... there are a few gaps... but I have seen and enjoyed most of them. Every now and again he will make a movie that seems to be a complete side step from his usual fayre. The first time I noticed this was in his truly excellent Ghost Dog - The Way Of The Samurai but he also took me by surprise by making a ‘vampire movie’ a few years back called Only Lovers Left Alive (reviewed by me here). Both of those films were much more commercially minded, it seems to me (either by design or by fluke) but each still transcended their genre trappings and held the key elements that I tend to associate with Jarmusch’s work over the years...

Those being: They were funny, poignant and highlighted the alienation of people sharing different languages and cultures even as they drew together.

So when it was announced that Jarmusch had made a zombie movie, I was interested... not just because I happen to like that sub-genre of horror movie anyway but because I knew, coming from Jarmusch, that it would be like no other zombie movie that ever came before it. Well... I got that right.

The film stars Bill Murray and Adam Driver, both regular collaborators with the director (check out Driver’s role in the directors last non-documentary movie Paterson, which I reviewed here) as two cops who are the main police presence in their small town of Centerville, along with the only other cop in town played by Chloë Sevigny. And they are all supported by a star studded cast, many of whom have worked with the director before, including Danny Glover, Tom Waits, Steve Buscemi, Tilda Swinton, RZA, Selena Gomez, Iggy Pop and Caleb Landry Jones (in a wonderful turn as a petrol and film/comic book merchandise dealer who wears a Nosferatu t-shirt). And, as you would expect from a cast like this (or pretty much any cast under this director, actually), they are all pretty amazing. Between them, Murray and Driver keep the mood sombre with their perpetually downbeat expressions and this helps maintain the minimalistic, gloomy atmosphere of a town, one of many, which has suddenly been overrun with a plague of zombies.

Now, I think this film is going to really divide people and there’s an element that even I, while laughing out loud at a lot of the wonderful humour on display here, found somewhat annoying. I’ll get to just what that is in a minute but let me first look at what this film both shares and, often, doesn’t share with the zombie genre in general.

Well, the common traits are a marked goriness when the humans are attacked although, conversely, when older zombies are out walking there is just dust instead of blood, which is possibly more accurate (I’m not sure, not being an expert on the undead myself). There’s also... and this is quite blatant here and almost being done just to check off boxes, it seems... the comparison of zombies who, like their nearest on-screen antecedents in the George A. Romero zombie flicks, are a satire of various aspects of our culture. Indeed, Jarmusch almost goes over the top to prove a point here by comparing some of the zombies to mobile phone/social media users and demonstrating this while it’s already been established earlier on in the text of the film what the ‘wifi’ so desired by the walking dead has already failed in the town.

However, it does do a lot which the modern, post-Romero zombie movie doesn’t often do. For example, it gives us a pseudo-scientific reason for the outbreak of the undead (which somehow comes in two stages in its ressurectional properties and thus renders the narrative nonsensical anyway... possibly what Jarmusch wants here) whereas most modern zombie films don’t try to find a rationale behind the undead shenanigans, they just deliberately side step it and cut to the chase. Here, Jarmusch has introduced the concept of polar fracking throwing the earth off its axis and this somehow raising the dead. Honestly, though... I think this is just another excuse to heavy hand the various metaphors used within the genre and, in some ways poke fun of it.

And that’s where I have my main problem with this film... the lack of respect for the genre. Now, don’t get me wrong, I have no problem with a director like Jarmusch seeming to say that films made in these kinds of genres are dumb and I’m more than happy for him to have a pop at them. However, the way in which he does it, with a blatant disregard for his own story mechanics where its later shown that... quite literally... anything goes (and if you’ve seen the movie I’m talking about both the final exit scene of Tilda Swinton’s character and the awareness of its non-feasibility in the script by Adam Driver’s character). And this is a big problem for me because, as I’ll get to in a minute, this kinda feels like the director is insulting the intelligence of the kinds of people who would turn out for a film like this... or at least that’s the way it felt to me, anyway.

Also, there’s a lot of referential, postmodernistic jokes in the main body of the film and while the director has done this just a little in the past, usually with a lot more of a story impact than the ‘thrown off’, almost Tarantino-esque way he does it here, I think this dumbs down the movie somewhat too. Again, don’t get me wrong because I had a little chuckle when I saw the late, great director Sam Fuller’s name on a tombstone but this film seems to be loaded with this sort of stuff and, outside of the obvious and loving references to Pittsburgh (where Romero plied his zombie trade), there seemed to be to be way too much of this kind of thing and it felt like the high calibre director was kind of slumming it, to some extent. Jarmusch is better than this, is what I kept thinking... it just seemed a little out of character for him.

Okay, so there were a few walk outs in the audience when I saw this (I’m pleased to say because, if someone like Jarmusch doesn’t get some walk outs then he’s almost failed) and I think this may be due to the quite blatant self awareness of some of the characters, Adam Driver’s in particular... and their inability or disinterest in helping themselves out in terms of where the script is taking them. So, yes, Adam Driver and Bill Murray’s characters both show, from very early in the film, that they are characters in a film and this kinda grates in the way it’s done. We’re not being asked to share in any peril or the particularly humourous modes of speech that the various characters explore (including cycles of repeat phrases which got me smiling quite a lot, it has to be said) because we can’t invest with them in any way as characters. In fact, we are being asked to interact with them on a more metatextual level, it seems but... only when it doesn’t get in the way of the on-screen action... which is a bit like the director is trying to ‘eat all the pies’ and not helpful in creating a film which holds together tonally, despite the minimalistic air of cynicism and acceptance that Jarmusch pulls from the air almost effortlessly.

Despite all these criticisms though, I personally really enjoyed The Dead Don't Die. It’s not ever going to make the top of my list in terms of favourite Jarmusch movies but it’s an entertaining piece and I think long time fans of the director shouldn’t have as much of a problem with it as a more commercially minded audience expecting to see a ‘cool zombie movie’ might have. Recommended to cineastes who are not worried about seeing what I think is personally too many directorial experiments thrown together into the same film. It’s interesting, funny and entertaining so, honestly, what more could you want from a night out at your local cinema?

Paterson

Solo Killer Patters On

Paterson
2016 France/Germany/USA
Directed by Jim Jarmusch
UK cinema release print.

Paterson is one of those quietly paced, unassuming masterpieces that Jim Jarmusch releases to the world with a minimum of fuss and which then continue to haunt you for months or years at a time.
I’m rarely disappointed with this director, a man I’ve been watching since I first saw his third feature, the excellent Down By Law (reviewed here), when it debuted on the Alex Cox presented BBC2 TV season of Moviedrome, back in 1990. He is one of the key directors of the 1980s independent American cinema movement (if such a thing really exists) along with other notables such as Hal Hartley and, to a certain extent, Steven Soderbergh.

This movie has funny timing for me because, only the other day, I was contemplating the current state of the ‘indie film movement’ and was thinking that a lot of those kinds of directors either stay in their particular artistic niche and continue to make very similar films with declining profits (because they are no longer the ‘new face on the scene’) or they start making bigger, more commercial films for major Hollywood studios and kind of accidentally stop doing what they were best at and going for the dollars. Either way is a valid choice and I can’t blame anyone for taking either route but it struck me at the time that Jarmusch is, to my mind and with my limited exposure to the field, unique in that he seems to be making more and more commercially accessible movies like Ghost Dog: The Way Of The Samurai, Broken Flowers and Only Lovers Left Alive (reviewed here) while at the same time making them in a way which is uniquely a part of his identity and without selling out his artistic leanings as part of the process.

On the other hand, I’m not sure how bankable he’s seen by studio heads. The opening night screening of Paterson I went to had maybe ten people in it but... he’s certainly doing a lot more things which seem to be targeted for an expanded audience expectation while still making what are, frankly, some of the more beautiful and poetic works of modern cinema. Those last three films I’ve name checked, for instance, have much less of the sense of not particularly being about anything than a lot of his earlier films did and they have a kind of story arc to them.

Paterson is no exception in that it’s both an easily accessible movie with a current top star (Adam Driver, who is pretty hot right now after playing Kilo Ren in the new Star Wars movies) and it’s also a great piece of cinema. That being said, it does putter along quietly with no clear story arc and in this way, among others, it’s reminiscent of Jarmusch’s earlier works.

The film is about a week in the life of one man, named Paterson, who lives with his girlfriend and her intimidating British bulldog. There’s no clear story arc at all... the movie comprising little incidents and highlights without building into something that even approaches a classic or even modern Hollywood sense of cause and effect film-making.

Paterson, the man, is a bus driver who lives in the town of Paterson, New Jersey and who drives a bus which says Paterson. Every day we see his internal body clock waking him up at around 6.15am and we follow parts of his day and his regular routine as he kisses his girlfriend, eats his breakfast cereal, drives his bus, composes poetry in his head for writing in his notebook on his lunch hour, walks back home, takes the dog for a walk and then leaves him tied up while he has a pint of beer at his local bar. Each day is the same routine but the beauty of it, which is part of the genius of Jim Jarmusch, is that all the little incidents and differences to each day are contrasted against each other and affect the way that the central character, and the audience, experiences Paterson’s daily journey through life. So little things that are ‘off’ slightly, like him waking up a quarter of an hour late, give us a window into his mental state, to a certain extent, or at least allows us to make deductions about him... if we're that way inclined.

Adam Driver is an actor who I really didn’t like when I saw him in Star Wars - The Force Awakens (reviewed here). He seemed to be a weak villain at first but he kind of grew on me on subsequent viewings and when I saw him again in Midnight Special (reviewed here) I realised there was more to him than I’d at first realised and that his almost understated style of playing a character might not, at first, seem the best choice for a Star Wars character but who, I suspect, will pay dividends later on in that particular branch of the saga. Here he proves himself a perfect Jarmusch actor, quietly strolling through the scenes, a lot of them played silently as they are pitched against his voice over as he tries out new balances of words and writes poetry in his head or in his diary... something which Jarmusch chooses to also illustrate via superimposed typography on screen as the words flow from Paterson’s creative mind. Yeah, this is yet another of a fair few movies this year, it seems, where the directors' have chosen to throw up text on the screen to illustrate certain things in their movie and which I’ve both moaned about and celebrated in equal measure, depending on how much they detracted or added to the immersion factor. Jarmusch, I’m glad to say, handles this element very well and it’s not at all gimmicky or distracting as it was in, say, The Shallows (reviewed here).

Paterson’s girlfriend, Laura,  is played by Golshifteh Farahani who is both absolutely wonderful and adorable as a quirky, live at home companion. Each day she is up to something passionate and, possibly, damaging to Paterson’s home but she certainly has a quirky charm. She spends a lot of time painting... the walls, curtains, her dresses as she is wearing them and Paterson returns each day to some new surprise or change of scenery. There’s a beautiful design moment near the end of the movie where she has been going through a phase of painting black and white circular patterns and lines and when she is in the kitchen preparing her cup cakes for sale at a local event, the cupcakes are patterned in exactly the same kinds of monotone designs as everything else such as her dress and the walls and curtains in the kitchen. There’s a shot in here where it all comes together in an abundance of visual saturation and which we see Driver’s Paterson is fully aware of,  just as we are as an audience. It’s a great little sequence and one of many beautiful little moments which make up the film.

There’s a whole host of great actors in here, of course, as you would expect from the kinds of films that Jarmusch makes... they need to be good not to stick out like a sore thumb in this kind of piece. Everyone gets a little moment to shine, not least of which are a couple of teenagers who are on Paterson’s bus. I knew they both looked really familiar but I couldn’t place them as the scene played out. It wasn’t until later, when I looked them up, that I found they were the two child leads from Wes Anderson’s excellent Moonrise Kingdom (reviewed here) and it was just so nice seeing them working again here. Three thumbs up there for a great cameo casting choice.

The film also, to a certain extent, shows Jarmusch’s... let’s say ‘fetish’... for multicultural groups of people coming together and communicating in a way which shoots through any barriers and expresses a truly post modern society of which we are all a part. Everyone seems to be speaking the same language in this one so there’s not so much of  an emphasis on ‘alienation breeds communication’ as there has been in some of this director’s works but he still champions the ideal of a warm and fuzzy global society and I can only applaud him for that.

And that’s about all I’ve got to say about Paterson other than the small audience who I saw it with all seemed to love it and that many of the lighter, comedic moments in the film were, it seemed to me, well appreciated by all. And I was personally happy to find a reference to Abbot and Costello's "Who's on first" routine in this one. It’s a gentle and poetic movie which doesn’t try to hammer home any big ideas and the deftness of touch of the observations which are the building blocks of the movie will both illuminate and haunt you... staying with you, as I indicated before, long after the credits have begun to roll. Another big, hard recommend from me and another movie that proves that this particular director knows exactly what cinema is all about and is able to deliver. In other words... another Jarmusch masterpiece.

Midnight Special

Eye Hopes

Midnight Special
2016 USA Directed by Jeff Nichols
UK cinema release print.

I’ve been waiting to take a look at Midnight Special since seeing a clip and then a trailer for it on the internet sometime last year. I’m not familiar with the work of Jeff Nichols because I’ve never really been all that interested in the subject matter of his previous movies but this one looked like it was a kind of Steven Spielberg style sci-fi movie with a darker edge. After now having seen the film, I can confirm that this is exactly what it is... at least that’s what it seemed like to me.

The film is very much one of those stories which relies on the audience and key players trying to figure out just exactly what is going on as the writer/director holds back on the specific details of the mystery at the heart of the movie. That mystery being the enigma of an eight year old boy called Alton Meyer, played by Jaeden Lieberher, who has eyes which light up, like one of the kids who lived in the Village Of The Damned, and has strange stuff happen around him when this occurs.

This one is very much a road movie, in that it focuses on the boy fleeing with his natural birth father Roy, played by Michael Shannon (aka General Zod in Man Of Steel), and Roy’s friend Lucas, played by Joel Edgerton (who some of you may best remember as the younger version of Owen Lars in the Star Wars prequels). They hook up with Alton’s natural birth mother Sarah, played by Kirsten Dunst, because they need to get the boy to specific coordinates by a certain time. The film is presumably called Midnight Special because the boy can only stand to be up and about in the hours of darkness... as far as we know at the start of the movie.

However, the four are 'fleeing' to these coordinates because they are being aggressively pursued by two factions who want the boy. One faction is The Ranch... a religious group whose chief, played by Sam Sheppard, uses the boy’s words when he has ‘lighty up eye fits’ for his sermons. The people in The Ranch believe that the boy is the new messiah who will keep them safe if he is with them when Judgement Day comes... which they think is just a few days away.

The other faction who are pursuing, not as aggressively but certainly more effectively, is the FBI. They want the boy because the words he has been blurting out when he ‘goes into one’ and which Sam Sheppard has been using for his sermons, contains top secret information and they want to know just how the young ‘un got the intel and what the heck he is. They’re actually better at their pursuit because a young specialist called Sevier, played by Adam Driver (aka Kylo Ren in Star Wars - The Force Awakens), has joined them and has figured out that part of Alton’s words are coordinates.

And so we have a road movie with a mystery at it’s heart as the family and their friend try to survive and get Alton to where he needs to be in order for... something... to happen. Is it the approaching Religious apocalypse? Is it some alien weirdness? Or is it... something else? Well I’m not going to spoil that for you here but I will say that the writer/director certainly doesn’t cop out on the ending of his film. You will see... stuff. And if you think about it a little afterwords and dwell on the last second or so of the very last shot, it does all make a certain kind of sense, although one or two interpretations could come into play here. I’m still puzzled by one specific aspect of something that happens three quarters of the way into the movie so... maybe I should watch it again at some point.

In terms of performances, the film is terrific, with Shannon, Edgerton, Dunst and Lieberher all doing a terrific job. As does Adam Driver, who I completely hated in Star Wars - The Force Awakens but who does an outstanding job playing an immensely likeable person here. So I feel a lot better about seeing this guy in stuff from here on out. The acting is all very low key too and the cinematography and the way the camera rambles smoothly around the scenes matches this. In fact, it’s so low key that, despite the gripping mystery at the film’s fiery heart, I noticed it was having an almost soporific effect on me in some places. It’s kind of interesting actually because it reminded me of something I saw years ago in a fake Steve Martin documentary. Paul Simon asked him if he thought a sad subject in a song works better in an upbeat tempo, or some such thing. It got me thinking about the relationship between the message and the messenger and how a seemingly inappropriate delivery style can actually enhance the original message. I guess another cinematic equivalent might be the invocation of Singin’ In The Rain in Stanley Kubrik’s version of A Clockwork Orange.

Well I think that’s one of Midnight Special’s strengths... and it’s a very common approach in certain strands of science fiction, although that doesn’t negate it’s impact here... is that the acting and shooting style are quite dialled down in order to give a certain weight or credibility to the extremely fantastical concept it’s trying to sell to the audience. If you want people to suspend disbelief and buy into these kinds of concepts without any irony so the drama of the subject can be brought into play, then downplaying the absolute gobsmacking premise of your story springboard is as good a way as any of doing it. Not the only way but, it’s obviously the way Nichols' has chosen to go here and it works very effectively.

Another thing which contributes effectively to the overall atmosphere of the thing is the score by David Wingo. It’s fairly stripped down and not something which relies on dense orchestration... I would definitely call it transparent writing... but it does have a main theme which hooks you in right from the start and keeps coming back at certain points in the movie to cement everything together. It’s a pretty good score and, although it’s not the kind of score I would normally listen to, I’ll probably be picking up the CD to this one at some point in the future, to be sure.

So that’s about all I’ve got to say about Midnight Special. It’s a short review for a short film but I was surprised by just how effective it was and I certainly didn’t feel cheated by the solution, such as it is, of the mystery of Alton Meyer. There’s even a hint of how the story could possibly carry on contained at the very tail end of the very last shot... although, again, that shot is open to interpretation and I certainly wouldn’t want to see the producers wreck the memory of this movie by making a sequel, at any rate. However, if you’ve got nothing better to do with your time at the moment, I would say that Midnight Special is one of the cooler films playing at your local cinema at the moment. So maybe give it a go if you are at a loose end. After all, with General Zod and Kylo Ren in the movie... anything could happen.