Greta

Hands Held And Greta

Greta
2018 Ireland/USA
Directed by Neil Jordan
UK cinema release print.

I’d never even heard of this film, Greta, until sometime last week when I saw... gasp... a poster up at my local cinema promoting a movie starring one of the greatest French actresses of our time in the title role, Isabelle Huppert. I was pretty much up for anything with her in it so I watched a trailer on YouTube and, although it looked vaguely like one of those bad and tediously predictable serial stalker movies from the ‘80s and ‘90s (the likes of Fatal Attraction and Single White Female, you know the kinds of films I’m on about, I’m sure) I was pretty much up for even going to see one of those because, with Huppert in the role of a psycho, I assumed this would be very special indeed.

If I’d had bothered to check the credits to see who had directed this I might have hesitated briefly because I find Neil Jordan mostly misses for me but, even then, his last film was an absolute beauty (the amazing vampire film Byzantium, reviewed by me here) so I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have steered clear of this one. I also quite like Chloë Grace Moretz, who plays main protagonist to Huppert’s smouldering antagonist so, yeah, there wasn’t much question about me going to see this one.

Alas, there are some things about this which worked for me and other things which... really didn’t.

The performances were all pretty good... even though the writing was kinda clichéd throughout. Huppert plays a standard Hollywood style psychopath with style and relish but there doesn’t seem to be much else to distinguish her character from dozens of other such characters since cinema began. She does it very well but I kinda felt this great actress didn’t have enough to get her teeth into, to be honest. Similarly, Moretz plays a pretty good, slow burn of a victim and Maika Monroe, who played the lead in the excellent modern virus/curse horror It Follows (reviewed here) does a pretty good job as her flat mate.

The set up hook is pretty good too. Instead of the main antagonist slowly building up an obsession with someone they already know, we have a crazy lady who is baiting possible victims by leaving handbags on subway trains, waiting for each one to be returned so she can start a twisted relationship with them (you know all this anyway, from the trailer). So far so good but, alas, the course of the film rapidly strays into familiar territory which, frankly, I’ve seen too many times. It’s done well and I am often the first to point out that just because something is a cookie cutter template of others of a certain genre, then that doesn’t matter as long as it’s done competently. I think for me though, even as much as I like a decent thriller, this particular kind of overdone Hollywood sub-genre is just something I’m not that into. Other people who are into this kind of thing, though, will eat this one up, I suspect.

And, to be fair, there are some nice moments in the movie. There’s a sequence where we are slowly zooming in on a cup of coffee being heated in a microwave and then, as it pings to an end, the background music cuts off and we are left with just a shot of a dark microwave door. Alas, rather than holding that shot for a while, the director chooses to immediately go into something else after a second... I wish he’d have rested on that shot aftermath for just a little longer, though, because it was one of the more effective moments in the film for me.

Another thing he does is a nice thing with a dream sequence and, though what he does is not exactly original to the movies (I don’t want to spoil your enjoyment by mentioning what he does here) it did take me a little while into the scene before I figured out he’d deliberately entrusted that the audience would decode the visuals in a specific way before pulling the carpet out from underneath their feet. Alas, I was still sufficiently ahead of the game here to realise what was going on way before it happened but it was still quite skillfully handled and I have to applaud him for that.

Another nice thing about this one is Javier Navarrete’s very appropriate score and it goes way over the top into the jagged, chaotic, almost atonal territory of a horror movie but, used in a thriller like this, the style of music proves very powerful and certainly adds significantly to the tension created in some of the scenes, I think. Also, it’s quite well 'spotted' and so the absence of music in certain scenes is just as good an artistic decision as when the score cues enter and exit the movie. Jerry Goldsmith would have applauded that, I think.

And... yeah, I don’t have much more to add to this, I’m afraid. The cast were good but I felt they were kind of wasted here, to a certain extent. Ditto for Neil Jordan who had held me spellbound with Byzantium but here just disappointed me with the sheer ‘yuppie Hollywoodland’ feel of the entire movie. Bottom line, I probably wouldn’t recommend this to any of my friends but certainly most people who like these kinds of thrillers, even those who can see the cookie cutter nature of the scenes, not to mention, the nature of the ‘cookie cutter’ scene (no, I won’t explain, you’ll see it coming before it even happens), will probably get a lot more out of this one than I did. So, certainly not a pan from me but something I don’t personally have to watch again at any rate. Greta wasn’t a great film but it was well put together for what it was. I’ll leave it at that.

Suspiria 2018

Entrail Acte

Suspiria 2018
2018 Italy/USA Directed by Luca Guadagnino
UK cinema release print.

Well this is a worryingly problematic film which I’d be tempted to sum up in just a line or two but, since some of it seems to be fairly well made, I’ll give the project its due. Fair warning though... I’ve not seen any other films by this director so I can’t comment on how his particular sensibilities find any commonality with any of his other projects.

Let’s get all the preliminary nonsense out of the way first by clearly stating that there’s no reason and, really no way, that you should... or could... attempt a remake of Dario Argento’s masterpiece Suspiria (which I reviewed here). The original/real Suspiria is a unique film and is also unshakeably bound by the artistic sensibilities of its director. I would no more think of remaking this classic than I would any other classic of cinema such as Citizen Kane, Star Wars or Taxi Driver (and you can bet at least two of those are coming in the next 10-30 years). It’s almost impossible to subvert Suspiria to a modern sensibility with another creative team behind the film and... in some ways it’s a relief to find that this is, in fact, not what Luca Guadagnino has done here with his new, ‘updated’ version.

In fact, the approach to this version seems almost childlike in that he’s almost gone in exactly the opposite direction from all the things that made the original so unique in order to not be compared to it. If that was the case, "well done" because it’s certainly true that this could never be compared to the original. It’s just too different. The original had two things which are common to the majority (not all) of Dario Argento’s work... bad acting and a not so great story. It also had absolutely stunning mise en scene, shot in bright, primary colours via a technicolour printer and an absolutely awesome score by Goblin. It is incomparable to most any other film (even to Argento’s equally superb sequel Inferno) and stands alone as the piece of art it is.

In this new version, it’s hard to find much of any common ground. You have the basics of Daria Nicolodi and Dario Argento’s story of a dance academy housing a coven of witches, also remotely inspired by a certain couple of essay pages written by Thomas De Quincey about the three mothers, often published in compendiums of his writing bundled with Confessions Of An English Opium Eater. And... that’s about it as far as connections go. You have characters who aren’t necessarily fulfilling the same kind of story roles as they did in the original. Dakota Johnson’s Susie Bannion is a completely different kind of protagonist and she has a much different arc here... as does, surprisingly, the character of Helena Marcos (played as one of three roles by Tilda Swinton)... who has a kind of demotion from her status in the previous version (I won’t go into spoiler territory here though).

You also have a great cast... with Johnson and Swinton having to hold their own among equally gifted actors such as Mia Goth, Chloë Grace Moretz and Angela Winkler. One thing this film is big on is acting talent. There’s even a cameo from Jessica Harper in this but the character she’s playing (again without giving too much away as to the true nature of her role), is connected to an element of the film which is in no way present in the original story. Indeed, Swinton’s turn as the male Dr. Josef Klemperer is one of many different avenues the film goes down into a story, set the same year as the original release of 1977, which seems to be more about fallout from World War Two and, also, the whole Bader-Meinhof thing than it does to the witchy goings on in a dance school.

Furthermore, the famous primary colours have been dropped in favour of an almost exclusively washed out colour palette and, although there are a few sequences with smooth, longish camera movements there is also, it seemed to me, an abundance of short, static shots in an edit which is something which pretty much removes this film’s right to be compared to Argento’s opus even more. So you really have to look at this movie on its own terms as, frankly, anything you could use to compare it to the former is taken away from you.

As a film in it’s own right then... well, it starts off really strong and builds up a nicely unsettling and powerful atmosphere which it manages to sustain for the first two thirds of the movie... which it then somehow manages to waste completely by getting truly dull and uninspiring by the time it reaches the last third. This last third includes scenes of orgiastic goriness which, frankly, should have left me shocked and gasping but which... and maybe it’s just the way it was cut and paced... distanced and comforted me in a kind of dull, passive way almost, rather than confront me with the visceral jolt of horror I was expecting. I mean, people having their entrails pulled out, limbs twisted and heads half severed to spray fountains of arterial blood over the rest of the cast sounds like a great and visually ostentatious, fun time should be had by all but, the way it was shot and presented here it just felt a little too much like David Cronenberg-lite, to be honest.

The most interesting things about the film were the bits where it built up the political and redemption sub plots but, honestly, they seem to amount to nothing by the end of the movie and when it comes to Tilda Swinton, one of the great actresses of our time, playing Dr. Klemperer in this one... a character who isn’t even in the original... one has to ask the obvious question here. Why? She does it well but... could they not afford another male actor?

And then there’s Thom Yorke’s celebrated score. It’s just fine. It’s mostly appropriate... although I could do without the songs... but the film is really not as special or as visually striking as the 1977 movie so it doesn’t have to serve the same function as Goblin’s absolute masterpiece of the original. It must be a hard thing to score, knowing you’re going to be compared to Goblin in this way but, there you have it. It’s not nearly as strong but it doesn’t have to be and so, being appropriate and probably a nice enough listen away from the images is absolutely fine. It’s pleasant rather than essential but, frankly, that’s no mean feat anyway so I’m not complaining. I’ll be picking up the CD of this one soonest, I suspect.

And that’s all I’ve got for you as a first impression. This is really not a remake of Dario Argento’s Suspiria. Instead, it’s a nice but somehow muddied (plot wise) horror film which starts off phenomenally well but which then gets burdened with an overlong and excessively dull final third which kind of felt like it wasn’t living up to the strength of its set up. Still, it’s an interesting curio but... why call it Suspiria? I’d hate for youngsters today to think this is in anyway a substitute for the real thing. A nice enough attempt to do something interesting but a failed one (not necessarily a bad thing... spectacular failures can be as interesting as successes) and something which seems unnecessary to be birthed in, quite, this ‘named branded’ manner. I couldn’t watch it over and over again like the original but, then again, I really wasn’t expecting that to be the case anyway.

Kick-Ass 2

Assed & The Furious

Kick-Ass 2
2013 USA/UK
Directed by Jeff Wadlow
Playing at UK cinemas now.

Warning: Very slight spoilers.

I quite liked the first Kick-Ass movie (my short review here) but for some reason I never really liked it enough to get around to taking another look at it. Sure, it was cute and quirky and the Hit Girl character alone was worth the price of admission... but it wasn’t the same kind of phenomenon to me as it was to some of my friends. So having said that, it would be true to say I didn’t exactly rush back to the cinema to see the sequel and, instead, I waited for a week before finally making it along there.

Although the visceral use of violence has been somewhat toned down for this sequel (although I don’t think that was a deliberate move on the part of the producers), the film still manages to pack a punch... but there’s no “shock value” or real surprises this time around. Now normally I would feel this is a sign of a sequel which doesn’t live up to the quirky promise of the first movie but, in the case of Kick-Ass 2,  I’m going to have to call it as an exception to the rule...

Although there are certain triggers and trappings which connect very heavily with the first movie (including the title character’s all important and heart-felt voice over narrative), this film does things a little differently and, it seems to me, has actually gained somewhat by having a more formal, Hollywood style structure (and that’s really something, by the way, for me to say that about a movie)... with the story cross-cutting between the three main characters Kick-Ass (played by future Quicksilver Aaron Taylor-Johnson), Hit Girl (played by Chloë Grace Moretz) and the ‘super-villain’ The M*therf*cker (played by Christopher Mintz-Plasse).

It’s not totally a film about kicking the stuffing out of a bunch of evil people but a look behind the hearts and moral concerns of those people. Yeah, I’m sure, from what I can remember, the first film also covered this area, but Kick-Ass 2 seems to tackle the issues that arise from the lifestyle its main protagonists choose in a more head on and mature manner than the first... and I really appreciated this. It also seems to take the consequences of all the negatives in this arena and highlight them in a more serious manner, rather than just throw them off as another joke. Not that the movie isn’t a laugh riot, of course.

I also liked the action scenes which, while the violence is less shocking and ‘matter of fact’ than the first movie, are still choreographed quite well. My three favourite action scenes being a scene where Kick-Ass is dressed as a pimp on his first re-training mission with Hit Girl coming to the rescue, the scene where Hit Girl in her civilian identity has to show off her dance moves (which she achieves by intercutting a four villain battle in her head) and the sequence with Hit Girl, right after the funeral of a major character, where she rescues Kick-Ass from a speeding van by climbing all over it, avoiding hails of bullets and getting up close and personal with the driver and the gang... with her fists. These sequences are all shot and, fortunatley, edited in a way which won’t leave you scratching your head about what’s going on while still giving you an action high... if that’s your kind of thing. All glued together with a brilliant, consistent piece of action scoring by Henry Jackman and Matthew Margeson. Hot stuff!

There’s some nice stuff too where the movie gives a stylish nod to it’s comic book origins. For example, a scene in which a group of gangsters are talking in a foreign language is not translated with traditional subtitles. Instead, the characters all have comic book talk bubbles coming out of their mouths which translate what they are saying. This is followed up with a nice sucker punch near the end of the movie where Hit Girl gets one final insult in after she’s done killing arch villainess hench-woman Mother Russia... which she delivers in perfect Russain with another speech bubble translation. Nice touch that.

The film tries to have its cake and eat it at the end of the movie. It’s set up that Kick-Ass and his ‘superhero’ chums can’t go back to the lifestyle they were living and Hit Girl, too, has got some additonal problems by the close of the story... but it also seems to be just crying out for a third part and, I have to say, after spending some time with this one, I am hoping the powers that be will find it in their wallet motivated hearts to bring on a third version. I’m ready for it and... if you see this movie... maybe you will be too.