Love Lies Bleeding

The Joy Of Flex

Love Lies Bleeding
Directed by Rose Glass
UK/USA 2024
A24

Well Love Lies Bleeding is a very interesting film, to say the least. Lou, played by Kristen Stewart, manages a gym and has a none too great existence... but it’s love at first sight when Jackie, played by Katy O'Brian, comes to pump up her body in preparation for a body building competition to be held in Vegas. After some steroid injecting foreplay, the two become involved but, when Lou’s sister gets badly beaten by her husband (again), something snaps in Jackie’s brain and she tries to put things right in her own way. And did I mention the owner of both that gym and the gun club where Jackie is currently working as a waitress is also the long standing local villain, who also happens to be Lou’s father... played to the hilt by Ed Harris?

If this sounds like a classic set up for a 1940s/50s film noir then, bingo but, here’s the thing, the film is set in the late 1980s (Die Hard is mentioned as being a popular, recent film) and this has a similar feel to one of those retro-noir movies made in the 1980s for sure. But, the other thing about this movie is... it’s the second feature by writer/director Rose Glass, who had a big hit with her wonderful movie Saint Maud a couple of years ago (reviewed by me here). And this next piece of cinematic artistry is a worthy successor to that debut, although it’s in no way aligned with it tonally and this is a much more playful movie, shot through with a much more blatant sense of black humour.

The film looks beautiful, with a rich colour palette and some beautiful camera angles. Glass is not afraid to adopt a birds eye view shot and then hold it for a period of time when she feels it’s appropriate too... which reminded me of certain shots in Hitchcock’s oeuvre from time to time.

It also has a few surprises up its sleeves too with the director bringing in a couple of well placed, healthy doses of cinematic surrealism to throw into the mix, to wrong foot and certainly surprise the audience from time to time. There’s a wonderful moment during the body building contest when Stewart, who isn’t even in the same city, appears a couple of times and makes a truly spectacular entrance in one scene (in a way that totally is what using CGI in cinema should be about). Sometimes these dalliances with surreal occurrences can be excused as hallucinogenic states creeping up on a character due to persistent steroid abuse and at other times... well, there’s a wonderful denouement with Ed Harris which, admittedly goes the way you think it will in terms of deus ex machina outcomes but, spectacularly not in a way many people would see coming. Like the final shot of Saint Maud, this forces the audience to consider the duality of what they are seeing and to find their own interpretation of just what is going on by this point. Which is a nice gift to the viewer and something you can take away with you after the film is done.

Added to all this we have a fetishistic devotion to the way muscles can be pumped up on a body with a truly heightened sense of sound design and which, itself, is a constant foreshadowing for the scene I mentioned with Ed Harris in the previous paragraph. It’s another interesting element of the film that seems almost a throwback to a couple of decades earlier, when Darren Aronofsky was using fast cut montages with enhanced sound design in films like Pi and Requiem For A Dream.

And... while we’re on the subject of Aranofsky, this film is also scored by the composer for those films, Clint Mansell. And it’s got a very distinctive feel to it... sounding a lot more like his early works in terms of commenting on the atmosphere of a scene in a more vibrant way than some of his later stuff. I think he’s consciously, perhaps, trying to sound like something earlier for the sake of the time period of the film but one scene where I was really surprised was in the first sex scene between Kristen Stewart and Katy O'Brian, where Mansell’s score almost goes into full on 1980s porn soundtrack mode... at least that’s the way it seemed to me. It was a bit ‘off putting’ at first but when I figured out the way it fits in with the aesthetic of the piece, I kinda got into it.

And what more is there to say. Love Lies Bleeding, the second feature length film from Rose Glass, is something which at first feels very familiar but then evolves into something much more challenging to what your expectations might be, I’m pleased to say. I was really drawn into the quirkiness of the project and coupled with doses of sometimes uncomfortable, lethal paranoia, I really had a good time with this movie. I suspect it will totally divide audiences straight down the middle but, that’s okay... that just means a film has a powerful voice and falls closer to being an auteur piece than most. I’m glad that this kind of refreshing, cinematic surprise is still able to get a mainstream release these days and, yeah, I hope it does really well.

In The Earth

Putting One’s
Foot In It

In The Earth
UK 2021
Directed by Ben Wheatley
Rooks Films

Warning: Some spoilers buried within.

"It’s a psychological problem with humans. They want to make stories out of everything." - Olivia

You know, I have a lot of time for Ben Wheatley and he always comes across well in interviews. But I do find him a little hit and miss in terms of my reception to his films. Sometimes I find his films absolutely unforgettable, astonishing and worthy of multiple viewings, such as Kill List (reviewed here) and Sightseers (reviewed here). Other times, well, I find certain films of his to be the opposite of that and I don’t ever plan on revisiting them again, such as High Rise (reviewed here) and Free Fire (reviewed here).

His new film, In The Earth is more leaning towards the former camp as far as I’m concerned... I absolutely loved the build up but I found the end to... not be as satisfying as I’d hoped although, when things were similarly left deliberately ambiguous in Kill List, I couldn’t get enough of it.

The story is set in the present day in the UK during a third lockdown of a pandemic... I mean, Wheatley doesn’t actually mention the coronavirus by name because it will obviously date it too much and the virus can be seen as just another part of the fiction in years to come... but it’s pretty obvious. And we have main protagonist Martin (played by the always brilliant Joel Fry) arriving at a Holiday Inn which is set up as a kind of base camp near where a doctor, Olivia (played by Hayley Squires) is supposed to be doing experimental research in the nearby forest, a couple of days out on foot. However, she’s gone missing and Martin is going to be guided to where she is supposed to be by a ranger, Alma (played by Ellora Torchia), a couple of days out on foot. During the process he learns about the ancient, local Earth spirit Parnagg Fegg, gashes his foot open on a piece of deliberately buried flint and also encounters a somewhat mad and dangerous character called Zach (played by Reece Shearsmith). And that’s all I want to say about the plot set up, because I think I want to avoid spoilers but, I can tell you, the film gets quite intense and intriguing as the story wears on.

Why? Well, the sound design for one thing. There’s the constant clatter of snapping twigs and weird bird call in the forest and, at one point early on in the proceedings it gets so in your face... well, in your ears... that I thought the director was doing this so he could use stealth to bring on the scares later on, when our ears get used to the audio mix. Well, as it happens, sound does play an important part in the film, not just in the way it does normally but also in terms of a plot point later in the story.

Secondly, there are the actors. They’re all absolutely amazing in this. If there’s one thing I’ve seen, even in the films he’s directed which I didn’t much care for, it’s that Ben Wheatley can bleed some beautiful performances out of his cast and this movie is certainly no exception to the rule. And there’s an actress in this, the aforementioned Ellora Torchia, who I’ve not seen before but, I can tell you, when she’s on the screen you can’t take your eyes off her. She has real presence in this movie, for sure.

For a film which is set bang up to date, being shot during the corona plague as well as using it as the ‘norm’ of the outside world from which the central characters are shielded somewhat, it also feels like it’s ‘of its time’... but while also simultaneously feeling like it’s somehow teleported itself from the 1970s. I mean, the opening shot of the title card positively screams 1970s folk horror and there are some other moments in the film which really harken back to my childhood years. Also, the way the story themes are  tackled... and I absolutely mean this as a compliment and I’m sure someone like Wheatley would take it as one... it made me think of Nigel Kneale and the way he would sometimes blend modern science with folklore and supernatural elements. There are certainly small hits of Professor Quatermass in here, I think... not to mention a  more than healthy homage to The Stone Tape (which wasn’t one of my favourites of the great Kneale’s work and I think Wheatley possibly does him one better here).

And talking of 70s... there’s a wonderful moment when Martin and Alma are in Zach’s tent and the walls of the tent are a deep red while the lighting of the characters and other objects is mostly a kind of strong, almost lime green. If this colour scheme here make you think of Mario Bava or even Dario Argento... well, yeah, it’s Ben Wheatley at the helm so I’m sure it’s supposed to.

The film features some nice surrealistic imagery and also a lot of ‘altered consciousness’ moments throughout too. One sequence, where one of the characters is trying to get past an ‘obstacle’ in a hazmat suit with a rope attached to her so she can be pulled back if need be (yeah, think The Midwich Cuckoos via Village Of The Damned, the director obviously likes his references) almost felt this was this film makers version of the famous ‘into the monolith’ sequence near the end of Kubrick’s 2001 - A Space Odyssey. I sat there watching it and thinking, yeah, if anybody is in the audience and they’re doing drugs, they’re going to have such an interesting time with this movie.

Finally, the film has a score by Clint Mansell and a) it's very good and b) Invada Records are currently saying there will be a CD release of it soon... which frankly, was the main thing which got me hooked into watching this one in the first place, the potential of a score CD in the works. If there’s a film coming out where the score isn’t available on a shiny disc and another one where a shiny disc is imminent, I’ll watch the movie that’s going to have the physical score release any day of the week.

Wheatley does a phenomenal job here and, frankly, I’ll probably grab the Blu Ray release of this one too at some point (and see if I like the ending better). That ending is, I can tell you now, growing on me a little as I revisit the film in my head while writing this review and, while it can be interpreted any number of ways, I believe, it’s also not leaving things as up in the air as they might have been. If the director had rolled his wonderful end credits sequence just a minute or two early, I feel I would have had a much more negative experience with the film. As it is, In The Earth is another of Ben Wheatley’s ‘great British movies’, as far as I’m concerned and, well, this one will get a recommendation from me to pretty much most people I know, if they’re into horror movies... and possibly a warning to those people I know who get freaked out by the genre, for sure.

Ghost In The Shell

Carry On Up The Cyber

Ghost In The Shell
USA 2017 Directed by Rupert Sanders 
UK cinema release print.

Wow. Where to start with Ghost In The Shell, I wonder.

Well, I can start by confirming it was a 1989 Manga which was later turned into a Japanese anime... first as a movie and then as a series of TV shows. What I can conclude from that is that it must have been very popular and, in fact, it was certainly popular enough that even I knew of it, though, as it happens, I’ve never read the manga or seen any of those particular anime myself. So, you know, in terms of whether it’s a good adaptation of the original manga or not, I have no way of saying.

I do know, however, that while I am okay with enjoying various manga such as Lone Wolf and Cub and Lady Snowblood, I don’t seem to really get on with anime, truth be told. That being said, I’ve only seen about three of them... the first being Akira, not long after it was first released. Akira, it has to be said, left me cold and my relationship to anime didn’t improve when I saw Wicked City... which was when I realised that, although anime were filled with good ideas, they rarely made for a good, all round coherent and contained story and seemed content, probably by choice, to just be a jumble of half formed ideas with a bit of sex and violence thrown in.

That being said, I liked the anime Metropolis (again based on a Manga inspired but, as it happens, having nothing to do with Fritz Lang’s silent masterpiece) and liked the way the music and story on that one fitted together in a much more satisfying whole. Still anime are not my number one go to entertainment and that’s just the way I am with them. So it would seem unlikely that I’d want to go see an American,  live action adaptation of one but... you know what... I’m so glad I saw this one. Based on the strength of starring Scarlett Johannson who I like a lot (yeah, I know, I’ll address the casting issue a little later but some of you won’t like what I have to say about that, I suspect), I found myself getting hooked in by the trailer and trekked out to see this one on the second day of release, which was a Friday evening. I was quite shocked to find the cinema two thirds empty, even on the 3D showing but... well, we’ll see what box office this takes.

As I said, I don’t know much about the original manga or the anime but judging from the film they both wear their influences prominently displayed on their sleeve because, honestly, I don’t think you would be able to get to the gorgeous visual style of this movie without being a big fan of Ridley Scott’s greatest masterpiece Blade Runner (which I reviewed here). Itself influenced, one supposes, by the emerging cyberpunk movement in science fiction at the time (which was basically still fifties science fiction but dressed up in new technology and having, seemingly, more freedom with the evolution of modern abstractions of technology, from what I can deduce) as much as Philip K. Dick's source novel, the visual style of the 1982 classic can be seen in this new version of Ghost In The Shell quite prominently. The world inhabited by Scarlett Johansson’s character, Major, being a direct descendent of that visual style in the sense of piling on more of the same and making it a bit more holographic in the way in which advertising embeds itself into the architectural structure of the environment.

I certainly wouldn’t be surprised if various crew members were huge fans of Blade Runner because, if you’ve seen the movie enough times (I must have seen it near to treble figures by this point in my life), you will notice little samples of sound coupled with the odd, stray musical note which will set off a little rush of Pavlovian joy, triggered by certain similar moments in this movie and... I’m pretty sure that’s deliberate. So what we have here is a film which feels like an ever so slightly less emotional, hopped up on acid, actionised version of Blade Runner, only told from the replicant’s viewpoint... in this case the robot (the shell of the title) which houses the ghost or spirit of the human character who has had her brain put inside the titular casing.

And that is absolutely fine.

I had a real blast with this movie, which envelops and surprises the viewer at every turn. I particularly liked that in a typically post-humanistic culture in which people are using cybernetic implants of all kinds, the movie was able to reveal sides of the various characters which we didn’t realise existed until, say, somebody takes the front of their eyes off, revealing the prosthetic enhancement within. It’s nicely paced and, although the last twenty minutes seem a little flat and less like an action packed denouement, overall the tone and spirit of the movie seduce the viewer into an experience which, frankly, I would like to see more of by the way of sequels.

The editing is fine and the scoring credited to Clint Mansell and Lorne Balfe, both composers I like, seemed pretty spot on and interesting to me. Hope this gets some kind of CD release soon because I really want to grab this one.

The acting cast is great as well.

Pilou Asbæk as Batou is amazing, Danusia Samal is a shiny, brightness who doesn’t quite get enough of a chance to glitter as much as she could, as is Chin Han and, of course, we have two acting giants in this movie too. First up is the great Juliette Binoche as Dr. Ouelet, who really brings weight to the movie, as you’d suspect. The other giant being Zatoichi himself, the legendary director and actor 'Beat' Takeshi Kitano, who brings some baggage with him in some ways because, if I was the lead villain in this piece, I’d know enough not to try and mess with this guy and take him out so easily with a bunch of machine guns. Kitano is always going to win.

And then we have Scarlett Johansson herself... an actress I’ve admired for years since first seeing her in the absolutely astonishing Ghost World and whose career I’ve followed in films such as her Marvel movies as the Black Widow and, of course, her absolutely stand out role in the Scottish movie Under The Skin (reviewed here). Here she does an absolutely first class job as Major, with lovely, stilted movements at times betraying her ‘shell’ while at the same time giving us a solid presence of the humanity of her ‘ghost’ throughout the picture... it’s a nice piece of work. And I know what you probably want me to address at this point so... let’s get to it.

Whitewashing, as it’s known at the moment, is the accusation that male and female caucasian actors should not be portraying people of other origins in movies. I used to have that view sometimes, when it somehow suited me too but, honestly, it’s a bad standpoint to take. I’ll show you why I believe this using myself as an example.

When I was a kid I used to love the Charlie Chan movies and anyone who follows my blog and reads my semi-regular Chan reviews will know I still do. Of all the actors to portray Charlie Chan in US cinematic history, none of them were Chinese. Warner Oland was Swedish, Sidney Toler was from Missouri, Roland Winters was from Boston and Peter Ustinov was born in Swiss Cottage in London. However, the first two of these, at the very least, were absolutely excellent Charlie Chans but... okay... lets get in to the “I’m not a racist but...” game.

When I first saw the Daredevil movie with Ben Affleck, I couldn’t understand why the heck the Kingpin was suddenly a black guy. Same thing with Nick Fury in the other Marvel movies... how was the always brilliant Samuel L. Jackson playing the white guy who, as Sergeant Fury, headed the Howling Commandos in the Second Word War? It made no sense. But you know what? It didn’t exactly spoil my enjoyment of the movies or of the characters these actors were skillfully portraying. I got similarly outraged when Jennifer Garner, of Texas, was chosen to play the Greek Marvel character Elektra but... guess what? She did a great job.

And to even put another spin on this whole racial thing going on at the moment, there’s this new ‘outrage’ about Black British actors like the amazing John Boyega taking ‘American’ roles in films like the new Star Wars trilogy. Seriously? What is going on here? What happened to the tolerant and united society I thought we all lived in.

The thing about actors is.. they do acting.

Let’s boil that down to what it really is... they are professional liars in that they pretend to be someone they’re not to give you an interesting, enlightening or entertaining experience (and when it all comes together, preferably all three of those things). If you’re going to say they suddenly shouldn’t be pretending to be certain other kinds of people based on the colour of their skin then the issue is more to do with you than them, I suspect.

And lets also look at it in economic terms. I would have maybe picked someone like Rinko Kikuchi to play Major in this. She’s pretty good and I’m pretty sure she’d have done a great job. But I bet they wouldn’t have been able to raise half the budget for the movie without having a major star name like Scarlett Johansson involved and, so, you have to take a step back and think... if someone like Johansson didn’t get involved in this thing, there’s a strong possibility that a movie like Ghost In The Shell wouldn’t even have gotten financed at all. So, you know, have a think about this kind of thing. Also, it's strongly implied, if not spelled out, in this movie that Major's shell looks nothing like her original human body so... who says it has to be looking Japanese? Scarlett certainly doesn't.

And I wonder, just as a little last thought on the subject, how many people who have been calling for a female or black James Bond have been accusing Hollywood of whitewashing? I’m pretty sure that Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, would start spinning at dazzling speeds in his grave if such a thing happened, judging by the tone of the writing he did on these books in the 1950s... which were ‘of a time’ so leave them alone. And, you know, I’m not above feeling strongly about this stuff myself. If Hollywood tried to make a white Shaft, I would be fairly cross about it, for sure. The thing is, though, creative projects have a lot of things which the general public don’t even see and casting the wonderful Ms Johansson as Major in this is... well it’s not a major problem and, frankly, a lot of the people making a fuss about this kind of thing are coming off as either hypocritical or naive about the history of this phenomenon, it seems to me.

So anyway, there you go. I don’t want to start a debate on this stuff but I think it’s important that people who are throwing out accusations like this shouldn’t endanger box office on what turns out to be a really great little movie. Some of them, if they saw the film for themselves, might really have a good time with it... truth be told. Of course, that’s easy to say for someone like me to say, who will be turning 50 next year so, you know, hopefully some of these people will start to develop into well rounded human beings and be less stressed about all this stuff happening in the world. Because if you are going to let something like the casting of an actress get you so enraged then you will probably have a lot worse coping skills for struggling with a lot of the other, much more terrible and unfair stuff which life throws your way in your future. The world is a really terrible place at the moment... so you need to learn to swim above this kind of stuff and learn what that old saying means... “live and let live”.

And that’s me done on this one. Ghost In The Shell is a superb, almost masterpiece movie which will give you a fully immersive experience into the cyberpunk world popularised by authors such as William Gibson. My one possible complaint being that it wasn’t maybe as hard edged in the goriness department as the subject matter maybe called for... I think it could have stood going for a slightly higher rating. Other than that, though... if you like big budget special effects movies done, mostly, right then you won’t want to miss out on this one at the cinema. Great stuff.

High-Rise

Writer’s Block

High-Rise
2015 UK
Directed by Ben Wheatley
Seen at the London Film Festival 
11th October 2015

Hmmm... I’ve only seen two of Ben Wheatley’s films prior to this one but I would still call myself an admirer of the director’s work based on the experience of those two alone; Kill List (reviewed here) and Sightseers (reviewed here). Now I’ve not read J. G. Ballard’s original novel of the same name, on which High-Rise is based, so the usual caveats apply to me being able to say anything even remotely intelligent on its status as a good or bad adaptation of the work in question. For what it’s worth, I’m told this is very close to the source novel.

Ben Wheatley, however, is essentially, someone who I see as an overtly ‘British’ director and although the writer is also, of course, English, Wheatley would not be my first thought when it comes to being a person to direct something based on one of Ballard’s works, to be quite honest. Then again, the only novel I’ve ever got around to reading by Ballard was my old, battered, 1960s edition of Crash (asides from some of his old New Worlds short stories) and so... I’m also less well informed in that quarter too.

All that being said, what I am able to say is that Wheatley does a very interesting job with subject matter which I’m guessing is a little difficult to translate into a visual milieu in the first place. Amy Jump, who adapted this for Wheatley, has therefore done a spot on job in terms of giving the director something less abstract to work with... although the film does have its moments so I can only assume these are appropriate responses to certain passages in the source text.

Now, I have to be honest here and say that I wasn’t particularly entertained or impressed with this movie... at least not nearly as impressed as I was with those other two films I saw by this director. That being said, you have to admire someone who can depict the kind of moral decline of those living at different levels of a futuristic tower block and have it still mostly making sense by the time you come out of the other end of it. I say mostly because there were, for me, and I may be at fault here if I wasn’t processing the amount of rich visual and audio data on offer in this film quick enough, some instances where the narrative either jumped or expected you to take a leap of faith in terms of the time frame and what good old Ballard contemporary Michael Moorcock would probably have referred to as... “the speed of the collapse”.

In terms of linear storytelling, we have a fairly standard, almost 'Lord Of The Flies' style decay taking place at pretty much all levels of the social structure in the High-Rise block in question, with the people at the top of the tower occupying the uppermost rung of the class society and the lowest of the low nearer to ground level. All well and good and, as you’d expect, by the end of the film, when the moral entropy has pulled everyone down to the same level of destructive mayhem and survival... I felt myself popping out of the movie and asking why the heck the world outside hadn’t moved in on the tower block and brought everything back to order. Bunuel, for example, could get away without those kinds of questions being asked in something like, say, The Exterminating Angel (reviewed here), because the dream-like parameters of the prison that the house party becomes in that movie is fairly self contained and less like something which could have a genuine echo in real life, it seems to me. This film didn’t generate that same kind of easy negation to the logic of the events taking place and so I was fairly baffled at the exclusion of the view of the outside world looking in at the chaos.

To be fair, Jeremy Irons character of the 'architect' of the structure, occupying the uppermost rung of the tower, is seen to be deliberately keeping the police at bay in his own pacificistic manner at one point in the narrative but... the amount of anarchic destruction, loss of human life and generally appalling survival tactics going on in the building by this point did lead me to question just why the heck would he do that, after everything that has taken place. I also found myself questioning just what had happened to the job that the central character, Dr. Laing (played very nicely by Tom Hiddleston), has in his real life because a lot of the time it was hard to tell if he was actually getting into work or not, by the end of the picture. One guesses not since he decides to set up a private practice within the confines of the tower block but... I dunno... I’m guessing that there was maybe a fair amount of footage cut out of the final version and something had to give.

Another thing I was disappointed with, to a certain extent, was that the movie didn’t really seem to go far enough in its portrayal of the descent into a barbarism which had the potential to be quite a bit more unsettling, it seemed to me. For instance, when a character played by the always brilliant James Purefoy helped to deliver the baby of a woman who his clique of barbaric, upper class toffs had kidnapped earlier in the film... I initially assumed it was because the baby might seem to them to be a more viable source of nourishment than the horses and dogs they’d begun to have to eat by this time in the picture... but unless some footage was cut out here, this doesn’t seem to be the case. One wonders why, then, when human life has become such a cheap, throwaway commodity at this stage, they are even bothering to help out at all. However, this may not be Wheatley and Jump’s fault here... it may be that in order to stick to Ballard’s vision of the story (if story is the right word to use here... possibly not) then the writer and director may have decided to tone down the level of this particular circle of hell in order to be a closer adaptation of the source.

So, yeah, perhaps I was just a little underwhelmed by it but there’s also a lot to like in this movie such as a moment when Tom Hiddleston’s character goes into a dream and he’s walking down a corridor with some air hostesses, breaking into some dance moves in slow motion. Scenes like that were getting a good reaction from the audience and even I broke my deathly, emotional pallor and chuckled at that one. I also was quite thrown by the scoring which seems to be a mixture of Clint Mansell, source songs and some tracked in music library cues at certain moments. It all seemed a bit uneven and some of the scoring choices really seemed to make less than perfect sense but... it does keep the film interesting and is almost used, in some scenes, to create a juxtaposition of two different emotional hits of opposite moods conveyed by the music and image... which is as valid and oft used a technique as any other I can think of in the history of cinema... it certainly gives one pause for thought during certain sequences of this movie.

Another incredible scene utilising sound, rather than music, occurs after a character called Richard Wilder, played absolutely astonishingly by an actor called Luke Evans, starts repeating and then screaming his name into a tape recorder, his language slowly deteriorating until we are left with just snarling rage and loss of identity. Then, when a person comes in and questions him later, as he lays beneath a table, as an answer to the questions he starts and stops the playback at the correct moments and a raging torrent of incomprehensible vocals are his answers. This was pretty neat.

The film is a heady mixture of brilliant performance from the likes of Irons, Hiddleston, Purefoy, Evans, Sienna Miller, Elizabeth Moss and Keely Hawes, coupled with some nice tracking shots, beautiful editing and, although I noticed rather a lot of zoom shots, the director seems to make even these work within the mix too. I’m wondering if the style of a camerawork was another 1970s homage, being that we have a future conceived of in the 1970s by Ballard and manifesting itself here, distilled by Wheatley through a retro filter to channel that atmosphere.

The Q and A at the end of the screening with both Ben Wheatley and Tom Hiddleston was kinda interesting and it certainly showed the passion and enthusiasm that these two men shared for the subject matter which they’d collaborated on. Hiddleston even read out a part of an old J. G. Ballard interview to the audience to show just how prophetic the author was and, yeah, I think that when you have that kind of belief in a project, the good work is going to shine through in the final product... whether you like that final product or not.

At the end of the day, High-Rise really isn't a bad film. It’s actually a pretty well made movie... which I’m guessing some will find far more challenging than the usual fare on show at their local cinemas. As far as I’m concerned, although I did appreciate it, I think it’s just not my cup o’ tea. Like the time I saw Trainspotting on the release of that movie, I just felt this one was another film where I’ve seen it all before... but then I am getting to be a bit of an old geezah, so that’s not necessarily a good yardstick for whether you, the reader here, will enjoy ot or not. Even though, unlike Wheatley’s other films, this is not a repeat view movie for me, I can recommend that it’s almost certainly going to be a most interesting night at the cinema in comparison to a lot of the other movies coming out in April, which is when this movie is scheduled to be released in the UK, as ar as I can make out. So you might want to make a note of this one in your diaries because... I suspect it will be, at the very least, much talked about when it hits the cinema circuit proper.

Stoker

Stoker, Ace

Stoker
UK/USA 2013
Directed by Chan-wook Park
Playing at UK cinemas now.

Warning: Very slight spoilers if anyone knows their movie history.

Right then. Here we have famous Korean auteur Chan-wook Park directing a film co-financed between the UK and the US and shooting it in English.

Okay... I can do that.

I should, right away though, point out that... out of this particular director’s body of work, the only movies I am familiar with by him are his loosely knitted “vengeance trilogy” and out of those three films, the only one I really enjoyed was Lady Vengeance.

That being said, Stoker is a pretty neat film and my only disappointment stems from the lack of twist or sting in the tail of this one... the whole thing being, I’m afraid, fairly cliché ridden and utterly predictable. However, that’s kinda missing the point with a movie like this and there are a fair few things which raise this past the level of the routine meandering of the story and lift it well into the boundary of “necessary viewing”... the most obvious being the very rich and neat visual imagery on show.

There’s just so much going for it in “the look” and the bright green, yellow and red colouration used in a lot of the shots combined with some very leisurely camera movement and an editing style which is used as metaphor to capture the mood and psychology of the characters when required, makes for a very seductive and addictive piece of film-making. Indeed, a lot of the movie plays without the necessity of character dialogue and the visual richness, not just of the overall mise-en-scene but also of the way shots are rubbed together to create intent and foreshadowing, makes for an almost perfect movie.

Except it isn’t perfect, by any means.

The film does tend to broadcast the overall arc of the film quite blatantly, so perhaps the “silent cinema” mode of some of the sequences were perhaps a little over the top. The movie comes from a lineage which quickly switches from Hitchcock’s Shadow Of A Doubt to a less polluted cinematic legacy which includes movies such as Badlands and Natural Born Killers. Indeed, it could well be considered a less obviously humorous version of Heathers than it could be a lot of other things. And the performances by all the central characters are just superb. Everybody is perfectly framed and delivering lines or going through various actions in a cinematic space which is uncluttered, painterly and gives the performances a lot of room to breathe.

And top marks to Park for coming up with such staggering compositions which still somehow manage to look effortless. One particular shot in the movie has the three main characters sitting down together for dinner and even though the distance between each of the characters is only what can be arranged around a fairly standard sized table, the breadth of depth the director manages to get in by having Nicole Kidman and Mia Wasikowska share two separate planes (and therefore sizes) split up between the back of Matthew Goode’s head in the immediate foreground is absolutely astonishing as you see the three occupying completely different kinds of spaces within the same shot... it just blew me away. Ditto to a couple of other shots right at the end of the movie which were a quite beautiful mix of “blood and nature” which I would have thought almost unique... if I hadn’t already seen more or less the same shots done by Tarantino in Django Unchained (reviewed here) a few months prior to this (no, I don’t know who made their movie first... it’s probably all been done before anyway).

Clint Mansell’s score, too, is pretty good... as are some of the needle-drop choices in this movie. I don’t know if the amazingly sexualised piano duet was his invention or not, but it sounds amazingly like the music of Philip Glass (it’s not) and is making me want to rush out and grab the soundtrack CD as I write this.

My conclusion then, for this movie, is that it’s not as good as Lady Vengeance but certainly the next best of this director’s works... as far as I’ve seen, at any rate. Script, performances and visual poetry aside, the film is perhaps not going to blow you away in terms of originality unless you have not seen a lot of other movies in your lifetime. Ultimately, this isn’t quite the rich “visual feast” I had been lead to expect from this director... it is however, at the least, a very tasty “visual buffet with side salad” and certainly doesn’t deserve to be ignored at the cinema in favour of the loud and clunky Hollywood made movies which are currently on offer at UK cinemas. It’s a well made piece of art and you should take a look at it if you get a chance. Very much a recommendation and something which certainly has a lot to offer in terms of finding interesting ways to convey the inner psychology of the main protagonists and antagonists. Please see it before it goes.

The Swan Kiss Goodnight

Black Swan 2011 US

Directed by

Darren Aranofsky

Playing at

UK cinemas now.

Warning: There are, kind of, spoilers in here for the people who really can’t figure out how this movie will end after being given the story ten minutes into this film.

I’ve been putting off writing this movie up because, for one thing, I know my take on it will probably be quite unpopular and sometimes people take bad reviews as a personal insult against their favourite movies (something I discovered from comments left on this blog in the past ;-). But as someone pointed out to me on twitter... I have to be honest... so here I am and the part of this process which really upsets me, given my reaction to Black Swan, is that I’m actually, or have always considered myself to be, a big supporter of Darren Aranofsky’s work and three of his last four movies are always good for multiple and regular viewings (if I could just get rid of this DVD backlog quicker I’d probably be watching them now instead of writing this!).

I remember when Pi hit the cinemas towards the end of the 90s... it was just an amazing film and seemed to me to be an absolute masterpiece... a conclusion from which I’ve not strayed. I even loved the comic book spin-off from it, The Book Of Ants.

Then came Requiem For A Dream, which I saw premiered at the London Film Festival, and it had a similar, mind blowing effect on me. Memories of leaving the auditorium (a fair few people had already walked out halfway through from the sheer intensity of it) and being completely and totally depressed by it... just totally blew me away. And Clint Mansell’s amazing score... straight away I knew it was going to be one of those classic pieces of music that captures the attention of the world in much the same way as The James Bond Theme or The Pink Panther theme or the two-note repeat structure of Johnny William’s Jaws did. It didn’t take long for the rest of the world to prove me right on that one as the main theme from Requiem For A Dream has got to be one of the most over-used pieces of music on modern movie trailers since the films release... they even recorded a more appropriately re-orchestrated version of it to play out on the trailer to Peter Jackson’s less than stellar but hugely popular movie The Two Towers (aka Lord of the Rings Part 2). Believe me... the long wait between the November London Film Festival and the movie and score’s January release at the cinema and on CD shelves respectively was a long one for me.

Then came The Fountain and, although at first I was unsure of it as it wasn’t as intense or as frenetically paced a film as his previous two masterworks, it proved to have a deeply haunting and emotional intensity as one of the incarnations of the character played by Hugh Jackman battles to try to find a cure for his wifes terminal cancer. A very sad film which, like the two before it, bears up to multiple viewings.

And then there was The Wrestler... and it kind of felt a little bit like Aranofsky had “sold out to the man” and decided not to pursue his quirky and intense little world anymore. Don’t get me wrong... fine film, hard edged with fine performances and a solid, emotional heart (like all his films before) but it was also a little bit run-of-the-mill for Aranofsky, I thought. Not something I would ever bother to watch again so I could get dazzled by his marvellous technique.

And that’s where I am with Black Swan in a way... but maybe it’s not quite as good a film as even The Wrestler for me in that it lacks that emotional heartbeat that keeps all the previous films alive and vital.

I keep wondering if all the pre-release hype about Black Swan actually ramped up my expectations for it... but I don’t think that’s the case as I really didn’t know much of anything about it until I was siting there in the audience other than it was an “intense” drama about ballet dancers who turn into beasts... or some such.

And then there was the music...

Ever since the heady days of Pi and Requiem For A Dream I’ve been keeping an eye out for Clint Mansell’s scores because, for an ex-pop band member, he has done some truly amazing pieces of work. I may not have great memories of the Clive Cussler adaptation Sahara, for example, but Mansell’s score for it is amazing... it’s the greatest James Bond soundtrack ever written for a non-Bond film! Seriously... if David Arnold was ever going to retire from the Bond franchise then just a few minutes listening to Mansell’s Sahara should convince you that he should get the job next. Quite amazing.

So as soon as the physical CD of Mansell’s score for Black Swan hit the shops over here in the UK, about a week before the release of the movie, I rushed out to buy it and take a listen... that’s when I knew there might be something seriously wrong with this movie. What I got on the soundtrack CD was basically warmed up Swan Lake with the odd and not nearly frequent enough dissonance thrown over the top. My first reaction to this was... “Oh... so Clint Mansell likes James Horner’s score to Gorky Park too” because, seriously, this whole score is just like a long but not nearly as intense version of Horner’s Main Title music to that film. I just couldn’t believe it... and it seemed so pleasant in contrast to Horner’s more jarringly effective acoustic assault. In fact, given that Black Swan has only been on release over here for a couple of weeks, I find it more than suspect that a very limited edition of Horner’s Gorky Park has just been remastered and rereleased to a rabid fan base. Hmmm... wonder what prompted that then? Is it because both composers are doing “fucked up Tchaikovsky” as their modus operandi?

So yeah... was treading a little cautiously when I went to the cinema for Black Swan, but still really looking forward to it... until the minutes wore on and I found that... far from being the kind of intense hybrid of Dario Argento’s movies Suspiria and The Stendhal Syndrome that I’d been expecting (well it kinda was story-wise... just not nearly as intense), this reminded me of the old Fame TV show more than anything... but at least on Fame you felt there was more pain and suffering and intensity going on (and believe me, there’s nothing more intensely scary as seeing Leroy wear a leotard... avast!).

I don’t know really what the problem with this movie was for me, because the actors were all top notch talent and all gave a really good performance... I think I have to lay the blame at Aranofsky’s door on this, much to my regret (please... somebody tell me the producers took the film away from him and recut it). In the end, though, I just didn’t care really what happened to any of the characters, there were no real surprises in the movie that you don’t see coming a mile off and, ultimately... it just felt kinda... to abscond with a young persons phrase... well... meh!

And, of course, by having a summary of the story of Swan Lake at the start of the movie (a story I didn’t know until now)... well it kinda gives away the end of the movie and takes away what might have been a final surprise... if one had been snoozing through half the movie. We know the main female protagonist is going to die at the end of the ballet as the swan does in the ballet itself. And no amount of schizophrenic imagery on the part of Natalie Portman’s protagonist and half-hearted attempts to fool us with her distorted perception of events is going to fool us by this point.

Even the fairly well done and sparingly used swan transformation sequences seem a little lacking in energy and all the way through I kept thinking to myself... “Golly! If I didn’t know this was an Aranofsky film I would have never had pegged it to him.” It just seemed so pedestrian you see?

My one positive note on the whole proceedings, to a degree, was the fact that Clint Mansell’s score, in the context of the movie, seemed really appropriate to the on screen action... that is to say... a less than challenging score for a less than challenging film.

And I really wish I hadn’t had such a bad time at the cinema with this movie but there you have it. This will be the second Darren Aranofsky movie that I will fail to buy on DVD I’m afraid.