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?

Twin Peaks - The Limited Event Series 3

A Prayer For The Diane


Twin Peaks - The Limited Event Series 3
2017 USA Directed by David Lynch
Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: I guess there are spoilers.

So finally... finally... we come to the part of the process that my Twin Peaks rewatch has been leading up to. Namely, I get to see the latest series that aired last year for the first time.

Now, I’m not sure quite what I was expecting here but the one thing I do know for sure is... it wasn’t this.

I remember a couple of years ago that David Lynch and co-writer/co-producer Mark Frost started tweet hinting that the new series of Twin Peaks was on the cards. I also remember Showtime putting the money up for it and then, all of a sudden, David Lynch backed away because he wasn’t being given final cut (if memory serves). Well, I don’t believe he totally had that on the first two series but I couldn’t imagine him doing anything these days unless he has the final say on it and I suspect a lot of people are of a similar opinion because... well, I remember the supporting tweets flying around fast and furious.

However, in the end, Showtime somehow managed to do the right thing and granted Lynch final say and it was all back on again... with twice the number of episodes than originally planned, too.

Honestly, I believe it was absolutely the right thing for Lynch to dig his heels in like that because, having now watched all 18 episodes of this new television odyssey, I can say that I personally don’t believe he would have gotten away with doing a fair amount of what he’s accomplished here on commercial television if he hadn’t stuck to his guns in those early negotiations. Although the ‘brand’ of Twin Peaks has always been synonymous with the auteur David Lynch, I’d have to say that this new incarnation of the show is, if anything, more Lynch-like than anything else we’ve seen made for television... and that includes both his original seasons of the show and another programme I used to like by him called On The Air.

This version of the series feels like an artist at the peak of his powers (which is no mean feat for someone of Lynch’s age) but it also, in many ways, harkens back to his much earlier work and I personally felt that this series was a lot more like the first thing I saw by him many years ago and which has, throughout his interesting career, always been my favourite work of his... Eraserhead.

Certainly the timing and pacing of Eraserhead is all over this thing. People will walk around or sit around and sometimes they will say something and sometimes they won’t say anything but they will, without fail, take their own time about anything they do and this laid back sense of ‘not getting on with things’ permeates the new show in every episode... which is kinda refreshing, actually. When I said, you’d never get away with something like this on television normally I wasn’t referring to the occasional nudity and quite hard violence on display in some of the episodes... the pacing is beyond leisurely but that’s no bad thing.

I mentioned in a previous review that the last time the dead Laura Palmer saw Agent Cooper in the The Black Lodge, where he too was trapped, she told him that the next time she would see him would be in 25 years time and... that’s more or less what it turned out to be, both in real time and also in the time that has passed in the chronology of various characters in the show. This carries on some quarter of a century later and we are reunited, over the weeks, with many of the old cast members (some of them didn’t return)... a number of whom died after finishing their filming. So  characters like Catherine E. Coulson’s The Log Lady, Miguel Ferrer’s FBI agent Albert and Harry Dean Stanton (reprising his role from Twin Peaks - Fire Walk With Me) are all in here but, alas, the actors playing them are sadly no longer with us. Many of the old cast returned though, with some notable exceptions. However, there’s also another generation of the families inhabiting the town highlighted in one or two cases so... lots of characters turn up and there are also a fair number of A list movie stars who seemed to have just turned up for the odd episode or two. Some of them, like Michael Cera, are quite unusual and just one offs. Monica Bellucci, for example, turns up as herself in FBI Director Gordon Cole’s dream about her. Others, like Amanda Seyfried, Caleb Landry Jones, Tim Roth, Jennifer Jason Leigh, James Belushi and Tom Sizemore have more substantial roles.

The old gang that do return are, in some cases, significantly moved on from their previous characters. For example, Dana Ashbrook’s Bobby Briggs character, who was a real hooliganistic, murdering brat in the original show, has made good and joined the police force. He’s actually, along with Michael Horse’s good old Deputy Hawk, one of the most trusty and reliable characters in the whole town now... which surprised me. Other returners, like Andy and Lucy, haven’t changed that much... they are still as entertaining to watch as they always were, though.

We also have some replacements for characters who Lynch obviously needed back to make his story work where they’ve passed on in the years between series. So the late Don S. Davis character Major Garland Briggs is found as a non-aged headless corpse (with someone else’s head placed above his in the aftermath of a murder) but that doesn’t stop his head from floating around an alternative dimension and speaking to Agent Cooper, courtesy of CGI effects. Similarly, David Bowie’s character from the prequel film has been replaced by what I can only describe as a sort of giant tea pot that speaks and spells out things with its steam.Didn't see that one coming.

Then there’s Agent Cooper himself, played once more by Kyle MacLachlan. This gets complicated...

There are at least three versions of Cooper to start with. We have the evil version of him who replaced him from The Black Lodge at the end of the last series and he’s the villainous Cooper who has been active in the last 25 years in our world. We also have a kind of stand in duplicate of Cooper called Dougie Jones, made by Bob as a dupe to replace him when he is supposed to return to The Black Lodge. When Bob fools the people in the other dimension by sending Dougie back... Dougie’s arm shrinks and his head explodes into black fire. However, the real Agent Cooper, after a bit of a surrealistic odyssey, manages to get out of the other dimension, escaping back into our world via an electrical socket. Alas, although he is mistaken for Dougie by all... including Dougie’s wife, son and employer... it would be true that he’s not in charge of his faculties and for most of the entire series he pretty much gets handed around by people in the same kind of way that Peter Sellers’ character did in the movie Being There. He’s operating at just one stage past vegetable but, somehow, he accomplishes so much by accident while he’s in this state. It’s actually not until a couple of episodes towards the end until Coop finally returns to us properly.

A significant new cast member is Robert Forster... who was supposed to play Sherif Harry Truman the first time around but had scheduling conflicts. So instead, he’s now playing Truman’s brother and is the sheriff in Harry’s absence (the character is off sick and, apparently, the actor wasn’t asked to return this time around... which is kind of a shame, actually).

Another interesting cast member is Lynch regular Laura Dern as... wait for it... Cooper’s faceless secretary Diane. We’ve heard ‘of’ her so many times over the years but now we get to meet what is actually a quite iconic feeling character in the flesh. Or do we? Well, it’s complicated but... let’s just say that there’s at least as many Dianes running around as there are Agent Coopers in this series and leave it at that. It was just a pleasure to see her interacting with Lynch, Ferrer and newcomer Chrysta Bell as Special Agent Tammy Preston.

What can I say more about this?

Well, it’s a long series and quite a lot of it doesn’t even take place in Twin Peaks but one strand of the story does and it all leads back there and comes together for the end. My favourite installment was episode eight where the second half of the episode goes ‘full tilt Lynch’ as we hurtle back to the first atomic bomb test and a load of surrealist imagery, much of it in monochrome, much of it set to Penderecki’s Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima. This includes lots of groovy imagery including a kind of flying frog thing which crawls into the mouth of a girl at the end of the episode. Personally, although we’re given absolutely no context or answers to a lot of the things we see on screen, I believe the girl might have been a young Sarah Palmer (Laura’s mother) and that would maybe explain why, in a later episode when Grace Zabriskie’s character is being harassed by someone in a bar, she is able to unhinge her face to reveal a monster on a screen which then lashes out to bite a guy's neck off. At least, that’s the way I figured it.

The series is chock full of cool stuff and, although slow, the experience of watching and wondering how it’s all going to end up is quite an addictive process to be fair. It’s interesting because Lynch does kind of tie most of the things together in the penultimate episode, to the point where I was able to predict a lot of what was going to happen in it and... I did wonder where the heck else he could go in the final episode. Well, after bringing things to a mostly natural conclusion, he then goes one further and messes things up good and proper... at least as far as the clarity of the story goes. I’m not 100% sure of what went down at the end of the final one, although I do have my theories and it’s clear that, although Cooper is put in a bad spot, he also knew most of what was going to happen (if, indeed, it was Cooper). The universe is pretty much reset slightly differently but that doesn’t stop the forces of evil coming for Laura Palmer... or at least the person she has ended up kinda being (or not, depending on your point of view).

A couple of things I didn’t understand were... and if you have seen this series and have any answers then please feel free to leave a comment... just who the heck the ‘glass box’ killer entity was supposed to be. Also, since Audrey’s vision of dancing at the Bang Bang Bar was clearly an illusion from her coma induced insanity (or some such), does that mean the interminable episode endings, where almost every installment finishes with a group performing a song in the bar, are also just a part of Audrey’s nightmare? I don’t know but, in some ways I’m kinda glad I don’t know too... after all, it’s David Lynch we’re talking about here.

Now, I can’t see us returning to the sleepy town of Twin Peaks anytime soon but the possibility is certainly there and, though he seems somewhat less interested than co-creator Mark Frost, Lynch hasn’t ruled out the possibility of a fourth series entirely, so, you never know. Either way, I really enjoyed this third season and would definitely recommend it if you liked the first two series and the movie, with the caveat that it all feels a little less diluted than you’ve seen it before. Approach with a delightful shiver of apprehension.


Twin Peaks at NUTS4R2

Twin Peaks Series One
Twin Peaks Series Two
Twin Peaks - Fire Walk With Me
Twin Peaks Series Three - Limited Event Series

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Ebbing, Easier Screwed

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri
2017 USA/UK Directed by Martin McDonagh
UK cinema release print.

You know, I nearly didn’t bother with this movie.

I'd read on Twitter from a few people that the film was completely devoid of emotion and also, on the IMDB, that it was not much better than a TV movie. Well... I should have probably already remembered to not let the conclusions of people on Twitter, bad or good, be a factor in deciding whether I should go see a film or not... and in the case of Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri... well it’s a good reminder to always take what you read on the internet with a modicum of salt.

As it happens, this is one of those damn near perfect films that come along every once in a while. Consequently, this may be a somewhat short review because I don’t really have too much to say about it but let me press on for a minute or two here.

So the film’s inclusions in this years Oscar nominations were mostly another nail in the coffin for me because a film’s acceptance for a potential industry award is so often completely off the mark in regards to the organisers making value judgements on the year’s cinematic art that it's really not to be taken seriously. As it happens, though, Carter Burwell... who is a composer I feel is a bit hit and miss when it comes to effectively scoring a movie... was nominated for his contribution and so I thought I might as well go an hear what he had to offer. As it happens, though, the score is probably one of the least deserving of Oscar attention that I’ve heard and, if this is in this year’s awards then there’s definitely something wrong with the system here... although, to be fair, the fact that Wonder Woman (reviewed here), Professor Marston and the Wonder Women (reviewed here) and A Ghost Story (reviewed here) didn’t get nominated for at least 15 categories each proves that the whole Oscar thing is a joke... put together by people who just don’t seem to understand or appreciate the art of film. It’s all very strange.

However, for this reason I ended up in the cinema to see this thing and it really is a great little movie.

The film starts off with some fairly strong visuals showing us the three billboards from various angles and master shots to establish them as the defining motif of the film... one which we shall come back to, in terms of the shot content, time and time again. However, this is undercut with this totally rubbish song which started getting on my nerves from the very start and which is joined, at various places in the film, by various other irritating songs that almost managed to kill the scenes they were in... so there’s that.

We then join Frances McDormand’s character, Mildred, as she drives into town past the three billboards of the title, stops the car and then gets the idea to rent them out to poke the police who have kinda given up on solving the recent rape and murder of her daughter. This is what the film is about... the battles she faces keeping the billboards up and using them as a force to keep the police’s mind focused on her unsolved murder. However, this film is not a one trick pony of a movie, it turns out.

It’s a particular work of art which is populated by a very strong cast. Joining the always brilliant McDormand we have Sam Rockwell, Woody Harrelson, the underused, chameleon-like Caleb Landry Jones, Abbie Cornish and Peter Dinklage. They’re all fine actors and all brilliantly supported by a cast of character actors who are all as fine as they are. Despite comments I’ve seen, you would think that these performers, between them, could conjure up the necessary emotion and you’d not be wrong. It’s true, McDormand plays the character of the mother as a somewhat tough and muffled person but... she’s certainly not lacking in emotion and her turn here packs one hell of a wallop, I can tell you that.

I think what impressed me most about the film is that it’s not populated by black and white characters. The writing of the characters... and I’m not necessarily talking about the wonderful dialogue here but the way they are structured... is all very much portraying them in shades of grey. For example, one might say that there are two characters on the police force who could be seen as villains but, as you get to know them, you realise that its not that simple and they more than redeem themselves at certain points in the film, completely changing your perceptions of them. And it’s a similar situation with Mildred’s character... even though you are rooting for her the whole time, you can’t always say that she follows a good and righteous path to her ultimate destination and, by the end of the movie, you may not even be sure what that destination is supposed to be anymore. It’s phenomenal writing and that’s why you need these strong performers to handle the different shades of right and wrong which are inside every character.

The performances also help with the dialogue too. The comedy in this film is brilliant and, though it is a bit of a ‘movie review’ cliché to say this, there are scenes in this movie which will have you laughing your head off one minute and then stone cold sober the next. Such as a moment between a mother, an abusive ex-husband and their son turning from everyone being two seconds away from serious bodily harm to being tempered and turning back into comedy again with the stupidity of the ex-husband’s 19 year old girl friend accidentally diffusing the situation. This stuff requires a deft touch by everyone, I would guess (including the editor) and that’s exactly the kind of perfect attention to getting things exactly right that this film seems to possess in spades. You really don’t know how the characters are going to behave here and some of the drama, especially in a scene where Sam Rockwell’s character is on a phone while holding a shotgun, comes from the various characters never really knowing what is going through each other’s heads. It’s a big strength of the script and the way in which it’s shot. It also means the occasional, visceral violence that punctuates the story is entirely unexpected until various incidents happen. Which is a good thing.

Another thing that struck me was that the director sometimes opts to use shots that are very high in contrast... in that you’ll have a lot of dark and light in a shot. He’s not afraid to turn the lights off and use an outside source to pitch against the darkness, for example. Like when Mildred is reading a letter that Sheriff Willoughby ( played by Woody Harrelson) has left her and she is in a completely dark interior but the windows (she is nicely framed in one for this shot) are a contrasting light source which pitches her into silhouette.

Similarly, there is a scene later where one of the characters is reading a different letter from Willoughby, in a darkened room where he is not supposed to be, having let himself in at night. Because his back is to the windows, he doesn’t realise the building has been set ablaze by molotov cocktails until he is blown forwards by the last of five bottles. But while we watched him reading the letter, the light from the fire outside those windows is what gives the shot this similarly strong contrast and I couldn’t help but wonder if the director had used this kind of composition with strong areas of light and shade to provide a counterpoint to the complicated greyness of the characters. Probably not but it would be a nice thought if this probably serendipitous to and fro between the intricacies of the character’s internal, psychological make-up and the bold, simplicity of the shot design was a conscious decision.

Carter Burwell’s score is... serviceable when it’s not being undermined by needle-dropped songs on the soundtrack. It’s similar in melody to the terrific score he did for Carol (reviewed here) although it doesn’t... ahem... ‘homage’ Philip Glass in its constitution like that score did. Certainly, there were a lot more scores worthy of Oscar attention this year although, ironically, not many (if any) made it into the 2018 nominations list, it would seem.

And that’s me just about done on this movie. The film ends with something which, almost, leads onto a sequel but you know there’s no way you’d actually want to witness the possibilities implied as to what comes next. It is, however, a good ending and that’s another big win for the director here, as far as I’m concerned (I’ve not seen any of his other films so I’ve got no idea what he’s normally like). Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is a phenomenal motion picture and I’m really glad I had the opportunity to still be able to catch it at a cinema. Definitely recommended for lovers of the art of film-making, for sure.

Get Out

Sunken Do Nots

Get Out
USA 2017
Directed by Jordan Peele
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Right from the outset, there will be spoilers here.
If you want to see this movie then don’t be reading this review.

I will kinda half apologise right now because I know a lot of people really like this movie but... I wish I could’ve had a heads up and 'gotten out' of seeing Get Out when I had the chance.

The warning signs were clearly on the trailer. It looked like a truly obvious plot set up hiding no real surprises and I didn’t totally buy into the ‘happy couple’ of the trailer either... something definitely wasn’t as simplistic about that relationship as one of the characters obviously thought it was. In short, it looked like a truly forgettable attempt at a thriller with a possible racist bent and not something I would ever really need to see.

But then, much to my amazement, it started getting some truly great word of mouth on twitter and the like, the week before its UK debut. People and, even some organisations I trusted, were touting this as a modern day classic. Not only that... they were touting it as a classic ‘horror movie’. Really, did I miss something in the trailer which tagged it as a horror movie? Couldn’t see any non-human monsters or supernatural elements in there but if people were saying this was so and being as enthusiastic as they were then... maybe this one was worth checking out after all.

So I did and then, rather than write the review up as soon as I got home from the cinema, I put a good night’s sleep between the computer keyboard and me as that was my review equivalent of counting to ten to calm down because, frankly, I came out of that movie so angry at having such a non-film inflicted on me that I didn’t want to say things I’d regret in the heat of anger. So hopefully my enraged rant is somewhat tempered as I write this the next morning.

Lets get the good stuff out of the way first.

Get Out is nice to look at and is edited in such a way that it all manages to hold together... except in the case of one ‘what the heck, that’s not possible’ moment and I’ll detail that in a while. The main male lead Chris, played by Daniel Kaluuya, is really good in this and one of the few good things about the script is that he’s painted as a really smart and confident character who, frankly, you would want to go to the pub and hang out with. It’s a great performance and it feels a little wasted in this movie, to be honest. We also have Catherine Keener playing the mother of Chris’ current girlfriend Rose, played by Allison Williams. Keener is always a great performer to watch and, along with Kaluuya, is one of the few people in this movie who aren’t playing it way over the top. Which is more than I can say for the guy playing the father, who came off as channelling Bill Murray's character in Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums, it seemed to me. The last guy who is really terrific in this movie is Caleb Landry Jones, an actor I’ve come to admire over the years. I first saw him playing a villainous brother in The Last Exorcism (reviewed here). After a while I noticed him cropping up as a more pleasant and even heroic figure in films such as X-Men First Class, where he plays Banshee (reviewed here) and the incredible Byzantium (which I reviewed here). Alas, he’s back to playing a villainous brother again here and I really hope he doesn’t get typecast in this kind of role because, if he’s not careful, he’s going to end up as the Brad Dourif of his generation and that would be a shame.

That’s pretty much it for the good stuff, I’m afraid. The score is kinda nice but I don’t understand why it’s being singled out by people and, well, it’s not out on CD as far as I can tell, only download, so it’s not like I’ll get the opportunity to hear it away from the movie myself. It was nice to hear Flanagan and Allen performing Run Rabbit Run again on the soundtrack though.

Okay, the bad stuff.

Did I mention it’s really obvious? I’d picked up on all the main, so called ‘twists’ during the first watch of the trailer, including the stuff about Chris’ girlfriend which supposedly ‘comes to light’ two thirds of the way through the movie but which, in fact, is pretty much telegraphed right from the get go. I hate figuring out films ahead of time and maybe it’s because I’ve seen a fair few of them that it’s hard to surprise me but this one is truly not a plot you would need to understand rocket science for, people.

Another thing... this is in no way, shape or form a ‘horror movie’. It’s not even an American slasher. It’s squarely attempting to be a thriller and, if you want to get really technical, I’ll acknowledge that there’s a very soft science fiction tinge to the story, if you want to see it that way. I don’t know why people would buy into the idea this is a horror movie but I can only assume the kinds of people seeing this have no idea what a horror film even looks like. Also, the people loving this movie (and it’s good that they do, actually, because that means cinema is not dead and some of them will go on to perpetuate the industry/art form when they go to work, one would hope) must all be really young and naive cinema goers who don’t have that many films under their belts because, seriously? They didn’t see any of this stuff coming after the first ten minutes of the movie?

There was one thing I even saw coming even though it made ‘absolutely no sense’ for it to be happening. In order to stop himself being triggered by a certain sound which puts him back into a hypnotic trance (the sunken place), Chris, who is strapped down tightly in a chair, realises that the upholstery he has been picking at with his fingers contains cotton padding inside and it’s something that he can stuff his ears with. Which he promptly does? Um... what? So he manages, somehow, to unpick the big straps that have his hands trapped, which he’s already demonstrated is impossible, stuff his ears up and then, even more of a stretch, somehow replace these straps and make them look untampered with? I can only assume that a crucial sequence explaining just how this would have been possible was excised from the movie at some point because, frankly, this completely throws any semblance of credibility the movie was going for at this point. Absolutely no way that happens people!

That’s not all, either. After our hero successfully uses the cotton wool to block his ears at a key point and is looking to make his escape from hostile territory with similar dangers... he throws the cotton wool away! Really? You would throw your one chance at protection from this problem away before you’ve made it to freedom? I think not. This is a serious weakness in the movie and I really can’t think of a way of justifying this kind of plotting, to be honest. This isn’t just ‘not turning a light on in a scary movie’ levels of wrongheadedness... this is completely crazy. 

And I’m racking my brains to say anything else of any interest about Get Out here but I think I’m done. It’s a shame that such fine actors and a quite competent director have collaborated on a story which feels like it comes straight out of 1950s short stories and would make one of the less interesting episodes of The Twilight Zone but I equally can’t blame them because, well, sometimes things look a little rosier on the page than they turn out on the screen. I’m really glad, in some ways, that the film is doing well for them because then, at least, they’re getting something back from it. I just hope it doesn’t usher in a new golden age of truly dumbed down stories that insult the collective intelligence of the audiences like this one does, though, because that’s always a possibility when something like this is a hit. I just hope that next time I trust my gut instincts on the trailer and work out which films to let pass me by. We shall see. I’m not a fast learner.

Byzantium

Byzantium Endures

Byzantium
UK/USA/Ireland 2012 (released 2013)
Directed by Neil Jordan
Playing at cinemas now.

I don’t know much about director Neil Jordan, truth be told. I think I saw The Company Of Wolves once, many years/decades ago, but that was it. But I have seen a fair amount of vampire movies and I remember that last year I saw a really good one from Germany called We Are The Night (reviewed here). Since vampire films have become so clichéd again at this particular point in cinema history, I thought the odds of finding a really decent new one like that were pretty astronomical if I’m being honest with you. To discover two such films in such close proximity would, in all fairness, be fairly unlikely.

But, I’m happy to report that Byzantium is just such a film. A truly great vampire movie that people who are interested in this genre will want to see. We also have the invention of a new term for vampires which is pretty cool if you don’t want to just come out with "the V word" and keep a certain distance to a little of the previous genre baggage. In Blade Runner, Ridley Scott’s “inspired by” movie “adaptation” of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Scott coined the term replicant to give what became his artificial humans an air of gravitas that the term android just didn’t carry anymore. Similarly, the screenplay to this film by Moira Buffini, based on her own play, comes up with the term “sucreant”... which I really like the sound of, to be honest. It sounds quite filthy, to be sure, and almost instantly conjures up the dark sexuality implicit in the kiss of a vampire.

The film seems to me to concern itself with three main themes, one of which is very typical of a vampire movie.

The first of these is, of course, the question of survival. Vampires survive, and make themselves villains in the eyes of the living, by drinking the blood of the living. Byzantium’s two main female protagonists are vampires sharing a certain relationship (I won’t spoil it by telling you right from the ‘bat’ what that relationship actually is) and managing to survive over the millennia by being ruthless and moving on from place to place when the going gets tough. These two central characters have been running for a long time... but I won’t tell you why, because it will become apparent as you watch.

The second of the themes this movie concerns itself with, it seems to me, is temporal displacement. The movie works on revelations through flashback and sometimes, often in fact, those flashbacks are cross cut with the “present” of the character’s timelines, mixed up in a ghostly fashion through both editing and shots where characters share screen time with other versions of themselves. It sounds clumsy, I know, but actually this director does this with a very nimble touch and the results are pure visual and audio poetry in the mode of some of the great European directors over the years, as opposed to what might have been less confidently handled scenes in the hands of another director.

On the first time I thought I was watching a flashback, for example, which was cross cut with one of the two protagonists talking about the past life of the other... it turned out I wasn’t watching a flashback at all but two separate incidents from the same story happening simultaneously. So the director not only dislocates the characters in time due to the way the narrative leads us in to expecting the possibility of flashback, he also dislocates the very audience who are watching the film. So when the film does go into flashback territory, very soon after, he has already set up the feeling that time is not something which vampires worry about or neccessarily perceive in the same way that we do, despite Gemma Arterton’s alpha female Clara constantly telling her companion not to “look back”. This is a brilliant approach to the telling of the story and it carries all the way through the movie until we get to a certain point near the films beautiful climax.

The third theme this movie is about is... the telling of a story. Now a lot of directors (more than I care for) hold dear the idea that their function as filmmakers is to tell a story. It’s always a statement which causes me to groan loudly because it denies the possibility of cinema to exist without narrative structure... which it clearly can. However, unlike many films, this one isn’t just about the telling of the main protagonist’s story... it’s also about the telling of that story and the consequences of its revelation. And that’s a very interesting thing and, because we have this kind of narrative displacement already in the way that this tale is approached... what could have been a very simple storyline is revealed in tiny pieces and it’s only right near the end that we get the whole truth of the history of the two characters. And it’s even much before then that the discovery and telling of that history becomes a prominent point in the story in and of itself.

And again, because of the juxtaposition of two linear timelines, with one going from A - Z but with the back story scrambled and scattered into a different order and then pitched against it, our sense of temporal structure is shifted in exactly the way that the younger of the two female vampires, Eleanor, played by Saoirse Ronan (perhaps best known for her superb portrayal of the title character in Hanna) experiences it. Time is turned somewhat topsy turvy in a sucreant’s world and this is implicit in the creation process of the species as shown in the place of each vampire’s creation. The very act of becoming a vampire is portrayed as a kind of temporal trick... so this temporal misalignment also becomes part of the narrative thrust which surrounds the world of our main characters. And, of course, because of the way the back story develops as one displaced fragment at a time, it’s sort of like watching a film directed by Nicholas Roeg in some ways, but slowed down to a more relaxed pace which lets itself unfold like the slow opening of a piece of paper with an important word of revelation on it.

The performances are incredible.

I would expect no less of Gemma Arterton now, to be honest. She’s proven herself to be one of the powerhouse actresses of her generation and I look forward to being completely immersed in her character whenever I see her plying her trade on screen. Absolutely amazing.

Brilliant, too, is Saoirse Ronan as the younger of the two vampires. She was brilliant in Hanna and proves here that the performance was no flash in the pan, playing a vulnerable but courageous soul who’s voice-over narrative helps imbibe the already beautiful visual imagery with a deeply poetic feel... and this film is truly a study in the cinema of poetry made flesh. Not quite in the same way as Andrei Tarkovsky or Ingmar Bergman might have achieved that kind of feel but certainly Jordan’s treatment of the text and his faith in his cast and crew delivers a beautiful piece of art that could have easily turned into true exploitation cinema if he and his dark practitioners in the art of collaborative cinema had proven to have a less deft touch. Add in cast members like the always watchable Daniel Mays and the ever changing chameleon actor Caleb Landry Jones and you have a movie which is, in fact, a true masterpiece.

It also, having said all that, doesn’t steer away from the graphic violence or the action set pieces either. A lot of the film is shot with beautifully slow moving camera which slowly reveals the way the actors are related to the space around them and changes your perceptions of that sometimes over the duration of the shot. But when an action piece is called for, Jordan has no problem adjusting the tempo and the editing style to hook us into the hard edged action mode and, similarly, when a piece of vampiric violence is called for, made novelty with a nice little substitute for fangs (which, again, I won’t spoil here) then he really delivers. There’s a decapitation scene at one point which really goes for it and treads the fine line between the poetry of violence and all out unpleasantness which really works well.

The film is not that predictable either, possibly due to the narrative structure, and that’s really something rare these days too. It will have you guessing right up until the end which heads are going to roll, so to speak, and you’ll definitely be rooting for people who may have been portrayed as less sympathetic in anyone else’s retelling of the story.

There’s some nice little shout out’s for vampire fans too, such as Clara going under the assumed name of Carmilla, in reference to Sheridan La Fanu’s short story of the Karnsteins (much filmed in many variations by various directors over the years) and the scene where Eleanour is watching Hammer’s Dracula Prince of Darkness in the hotel she is staying in. Alas, the hotel Byzantium in no way, it seems to me, parallels the hotel in Daughters Of Darkness... but one wonders if that was in the writer’s mind.

It’s also interesting in that, like a lot of modern vampire movies, it plays hard and fast with the “established” rules of the game and picks and chooses just which parts of the myth it wants to retain for the sake of convenience. So, for instance, the vampires in this story are fine hanging around in the sunlight (although they “prefer” the night) but they still need an invitation into somebody’s house to be able to gain entry. It’s always interesting to see which parts modern filmmakers will retain and which they will leave by the wayside... the choices made in this one are all pretty intelligent ones and don’t really hinder the story and it’s telling in any way. Nor set it apart from the established mythology too much either. It invents, adds and enriches without alienating itself too much from its cinematic and literary legacy.

What more can I say? Byzantium is just absolutely bloody brilliant... and I do mean bloody, at times. It’s an absolute must for all true lovers of the vampire genre (and is probably not for Twilight fans, I would guess) and even if you are not a follower of that particular vein of cinema, it’s certainly an intelligently crafted piece of celluloidal delight (as much as that can mean in the digital age) and would still be worth taking a look at whether you’re a fan of these kinds of films or not. An absolute full on recommendation from me. Miss it at your peril.