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.

Crimes Of The Future 2022

You Are
What You Eat

Crimes Of The Future
Canada/UK/Greece 2022
Directed by David Cronenberg
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

Warning: Spoilers all over this one as I want
to talk about it properly. Please don’t read my
take on it until after you’ve seen the movie...
which you need to see if you are into the
art of cinema in any way, shape or form.

So Cronenberg returns triumphant with a great new film called, wait for it, Crimes Of The Future... which was also the original working title for his excellent eXistenZ and the title of his earlier short film (reviewed by me here). Now, first of all, let me address the elephant in the room which seems to be the little ‘out of place’ and unduly sensationalistic reportage of this film. I don’t know why people have been walking out of this one and putting it about that it’s somehow controversial but, no, it really isn’t. By modern horror film standards it’s actually quite tame (I just watched The Sadness, reviewed here, the other night so, please!) and, actually, this one isn’t even a horror film... it’s one of Cronenberg’s science fiction films, lacking the horror element completely. It maybe comes on as minor body horror but, I’ve always found that label a little problematic because, nine times out of ten, body horror movies don’t really shift into the horror genre, to be honest.

That aside, though, I always find Cronenberg a bit hit and miss... although more hit than miss I’d have to say and, if you like his work, then I’m happy to report that Crimes Of The Future is actually quite a charming and playful, fun movie. It’s properly old school Cronenberg delivered with the kind of visual sophistication which he started delivering as an aesthetically polished concept in the 1980s-1990s period of his work, I believe. I wasn’t expecting this to be as good as some of the movies I regard as his classics... such as Shivers, Rabid, Scanners, Videodrome, Dead Ringers, Crash and eXistenZ... in fact, I wasn’t expecting it to be much at all considering the, presumably manufactured ‘controversy’ hype used as a tool for marketers. But I have to say that it’s not only harkening back to a classic period of this director’s work, it’s also one of Mr. C’s best films, definitely in the top five of my favourite Cronenberg movies.

The film is set in a future which, it’s implied visually but not revealed, has survived some kind of apocalyptic event or possible evolutionary cull. The colour palette used throughout seems to be very dulled down, neutral and pastel versions of colours and everything seems consistent with that kind of aesthetic throughout... everything dialled back a notch and then infused with beiges, yellows, creams, blues and greens, I believe. Following an opening where a young boy starts eating his plastic wastepaper bin and then is smothered to death by his mother, our two main protagonists are introduced... Saul Tenser, played by Viggo Mortensen and Caprice, played by Léa Seydoux. The two are performance artists of some esteem. Humans don’t feel a lot of pain these days, the ability has left them but, Saul is one of those who still can and who is continually growing new, mysterious internal organs in his body, which Caprice then cuts out of him as the performance, using a Sark unit with robot arms wielding scalpels.... pulling apart new incisions, retrieving and slicing the organ in question and presenting it to the public (I’m assuming the Sark unit is derived from the term sarcophagous here).

However, after registering his next organ with a new, secret company called the National Organ Registry, things start to get complicated. Tenser meets Wippet, played by Don McKellar and Timlin, played by Kristen Stewart. We also meet the two maintenance technicians who come to service his organic bed (used to help him monitor and cultivate new internal organs) and feeding furniture (to help him eat), called Berst, played by Tanaya Beatty and Router, played by Nadia Litz. For reasons that become apparent later in the movie, the playful nature and agenda of these two struck me as being a female version of Wint and Kidd from Diamonds Are Forever (reviewed here). We also meet Scott Speedman in the best performance I’ve seen him give, as Lang Dotrice, father of the murdered child at the start, who wants Saul and Caprice to do a show based on the autopsy of his kid, for reasons which become apparent after Saul discovers he’s part of a cult of people surgically altered to consume plastic instead of food, in easy to consume chocolate looking bars referred to by one as ‘candy’. Of course, given Cronenberg’s passion for Philip K. Dick as evidenced quite explicitly in eXistenZ along with other movies, I couldn’t help but think this was also a reference to Can-D and Chew-Z from Dick’s novel The Three Stigmata Of Palmer Eldritch, which wouldn’t be the first time the director has referenced this specific novel.

However, a part of what qualifies as the government, as manifested by Welket Bungué playing a detective of the Body Crime Unit, are very much interested in this group of people, especially since the dead child has, it is rumoured, inherited the evolved genetic trait of consuming plastic from his father, rather than be surgically altered. All this is going on while Saul has registered for an Inner Beauty Pageant - Category: Best Original Organ With No Known Function... but he’s also an informant for the Body Crime Unit, unknown to Caprice but, as the film progresses, you realise a few of the people who he comes into contact with might know this already.

And its great. One of the buzz phrases associated with the marketing of the film is that ‘Surgery is the new sex’ which, I thought nothing of but it turns out that this is also a mantra of a few of the people in the movie and, certainly Saul and Caprice indulge their mutual sexuality in this way. With Saul controlling the Sark with a remote unit quite reminiscent of the pods in eXistenZ, she lays naked, enjoying each stroke as he slices up her flesh for her sexual pleasure, before putting the unit on remote and joining her. In another scene, she unzips the scar of a new hardware access point from something put in him to monitor the Inner Beauty Pageant and starts licking his open wound which is given and received in much the same manner as a blow job. The punchline to all this comes later when Kirsten Stewart, who coins the phrase ‘Surgery is the new sex’ in the movie, tries to instigate sex with him through a passionate kiss and he rejects her after a minute stating, “I’m not very good at the old sex.” So, yeah, as much as people are calling this one an edgy film, it’s more full of humour, almost to the level where at some points it’s almost functioning purely as a comedy.

And being as it’s Cronenberg, it all looks fantastic. There’s a brilliant moment where a shot is split vertically by the frame of a door. The door opening on the left with Stewart standing in it, with yellowy beige walls behind her and with Léa standing on the right against the wall of the room in which the camera is placed, the wall cream coloured behind her. It’s such a striking shot composition that one could be forgiven for thinking Cronenberg had used a split screen for the shot... it’s that much of a contrast, in spite of using colours which wouldn’t have a lot of perceived contrast against each other in a busier shot. The film is full of this kind of good stuff and you are constantly reminded you are in the hands of a master director all the time.

Once slight criticism might be that the blood effects in the film look like they’re handled by CGI. They may not be but, they do look like they don’t have much substance to them. At least to me. I have no idea how the effects were achieved but it might be a trade off to easily include the concept of the Sark unit (an earlier conceptual version of which was seen in Ridley Scott’s Prometheus, if memory serves).

And one observation, rather than criticism, is that time seems to drift without warning in the film. Everything seems to be taking place in close proximity to earlier events but, as you go through, you realise days, weeks or possibly even months may have taken place between one sequence and the next with no real warning. I was fine with that and the progression of people and organisations over this time can be easily tracked either visually or in details of the text but, I suspect some people may find this a barrier... not an insurmountable one though and I kind of grew to like that freestyle attitude to the story after a while. And it is a proper story, people... this one more than most of Cronenberg’s is actually leading up to a moment in the last shot which, once you think about the consequences of what you are seeing, actually has a meaning and resonance that hints at an actual evolutionary process in a certain direction without direct provocation. So that was pretty cool.

And all of this is supported by a typically Cronenbergian score, provided by the director's frequent collaborator Howard Shore and, frankly, the biggest crime of the future, in regard to this movie, is that this brilliant score at time of writing, has not been issued on a proper CD. Come on people, get your act together. People need a proper release of this stuff on the only format worth listening to it on.

And, apart from me singling out Kirsten Stewart’s performance as being brilliantly against type... I’m used to seeing her play very confident characters, not nervous and excitable people... I will leave you with a solid recommendation for Crimes Of The Future. It oozes old school Cronenberg charm and I found it hugely entertaining. He really knocked it out of the park here. 

Underwater

Flash, Bang, Wallop! 
Water Picture.

Underwater
2020 USA Directed by William Eubank
UK cinema release print.

Warning: A big spoiler on the ending 
in here, which I’ll flag when it comes up. 

Okay, so by far my favourite movie I saw this weekend was Underwater, which... was absolutely less interesting and arguably less original than the other two (The Lighthouse, reviewed here and Birds Of Prey - The Fantabulous Emancipation Of One Harley Quinn, reviewed here) but made up for in sheer entertainment value what those other two lacked. And yeah, this movie was shot three years ago and has been languishing at the studio it was made, Twentieth Century Fox (the last film to bear that name) due to, among other things, the company’s acquisition by Disney.

Yeah, so let out a big groan, perhaps, as I tell you that Underwater is, not so much like The Abyss (as you might suspect it to be) but much more like a seafaring version of an Alien movie (not quite Aliens and the one with the tightest analogy to this would perhaps be the fourth, Alien Resurrection, I think) cross pollinated with The Poseidon Adventure. I wasn’t expecting much from this and it did have a little problem with the ending, I felt but, yeah, like I said it was my favourite of the three I saw this weekend and I had a lot of fun with it.

The film’s main protagonist, Norah, is played by Kristen Stewart... an actress who I’ve only recently discovered (after seeing her a year or so ago in Personal Shopper, reviewed here). She is pretty cool as a technical expert on the crew of a deep sea, submarine station diving rig, one of a family of such stationery vessels situated between 5 and 7 miles beneath the sea. The film starts off with her monologue on the soundtrack, reliving the experiences of her tale to the audience and it’s this specific viewpoint where my one big problem with the film starts up... but I’ll come back to that later. So...

Norah tells us the story from a first person viewpoint and it has a really strong opening... all that stuff you see in the trailer where the water bursts through the vessel and everyone is just trying to survive it all takes place within the first five minutes of the film. That’s just the set up. Two survivors, including Norah, try to get to a less damaged part of the vessel to safety, picking up a few of the crew as they work their way through wrecked areas that they shouldn’t even be able to fit in and while the audience is all holding their breath (I’m assuming everybody else watching movies with scenes underwater do this, it’s not just me right?). The various actors and actresses include T. J. Miller, Vincent Cassel, Jessica Henwick and John Gallagher Jr. (who you may remember from 10 Cloverfield Lane, reviewed here) and, frankly, there’s not a bad one among them. Sure they go through all the clichés you’d expect as they try to plot a course going down to the ocean bed so they can walk many miles to the next base and also figure out what kind of earthquake activity has wrecked their, now less than airtight, submersible home... but that’s okay.

Of course, it’s not long before they realise they are being stalked by the real culprit behind the damage and destruction of, not just their vessel but all the others. Yes, that’s right, a bunch of aggressively violent, sea creature predators who want to eat the human contents of said vessel for breakfast.

And it’s about everything you’d expect from this kind of thrill a minute horror movie but the point is, it accomplishes the little it sets out to do really well. I don’t know who William Eubank is but the direction and whole feel of the film is that someone’s taken an old, much used template and replicated it in a really competent and watchable manner. And you really can’t complain about that with the kind of movie it is, I think.

So yeah, good acting, some nice photography and a score by Marco Beltrami and Brandon Roberts which is good enough to make me lament that there’s been no proper CD release of the thing, just a stupid electronic download. So I guess I won’t be listening to that one as a stand alone then.

Okay, big spoiler warning right now.

Now, normally at this point I would tell you that the film has no surprises but, unfortunately, by the end of the movie is does pull out one surprise but... yeah, it’s not the best thought through surprise as far as I’m concerned. All the way through we’ve been following Kirsten Stewart’s character as she rescues various colleagues from death in various states of undress, finishing in something which is basically just a bikini (did I mention this movie had some spectacular visuals?) but at the end, she pulls a fast one on the last two of her surviving colleagues who she’s finally managed to get into escape pods, surface bound and then sacrifices herself to save their lives. Um... no... what? Yeah, so the person who has been telling us her story on the soundtrack, I think even in past tense for a lot of the film, dies at the end. Frankly, that makes no sense unless you believe she’s telling her tall tale from somewhere ethereal like heaven so, yeah, no marks for the writers here. This isn't Sunset Boulevard.

End of spoiler.

However, regardless of the ‘quite possibly accidental’ trick ending, Underwater is a solid ‘monsters in the wet’ movie and if you are into those kinds of horror/action pieces, well I think you’ll probably have a good time with it. It has it’s moments and with her ‘shaved head and not much else look’ in a lot of the scenes, Kristen Stewart manages to carry the movie along with her obvious enthusiasm for the role. This is never going to be anybody’s favourite horror movie and it’s not even that jumpy most of the time but it’s a highly competently put together survival horror yarn and I’ve got no problems recommending this to people. Water way to go.

Charlie's Angels 2019

Charlie-vous Fancy?

Charlie's Angels 2019
2019 USA Directed by Elizabeth Banks
UK cinema release print.

Wow... before I say anything else, the new Charlie’s Angels movie is not without some minor problems but, honestly, it’s a great movie and I can’t understand why it’s got so many negative reviews from people. It’s frankly a little weird that there are just so many one and two star reviews on the IMDB, for example. Seriously, enough people hated this thing so much that they decided to take the time to vent negatively about it? Well... it almost seems like there’s some kind of bizarre secret agenda against the movie but I’m here to say that the naysayers are dead wrong about this one. I had a blast with it but... now I’ve got that out of the way, like I said, there are a few problems, albeit minor problems... so I’m going to go right in here and tell you about the issues I had with it. But first, a little emotional context...

I remember when the original Charlie’s Angels TV show came out in the UK around about 1976. I would have been twelve and I think I was one of the few boys who watched it. I don’t know why... I already wanted to sleep with some of the Angels at that age so I couldn’t quite figure out why the other kids at school of my sex weren’t all over this one too but, well, it was just mainly a girl thing, somehow. Pretty bizarre. I watched odd episodes here and there, didn’t follow it religiously but I did like the shows I saw.

Cut to the 21st century and McG’s two Charlie’s Angels movies. I loved these and think they’re absolute masterpieces of cinematic magic. The beautiful and constant colour palette changes from scene to scene, the sense of fun and the chemistry between the girls was all absolutely brilliant and I’ve never been able to figure out why we didn’t get another three or four of these.

So, I would have to say my expectations were a little low on this new one because a) I knew it couldn’t top the sheer artistry and perfection of the McG movies and b) the word of mouth on this one was awful. The one thing which did give me hope is that one of the, relatively, younger generation of Hollywood composers who I like a lot... Brian Tyler (see my review of his first concert here) has done the score for this. Indeed, I had the CD in my hands before the movie even opened over here... so I at least knew the music was probably going to be pretty good. I’ll get to that later.

So there I was, hopeful that the film could be okay but really not expecting much from it. And, for the first ten minutes of the film at least, that expectation was sadly on the nose. The opening scene which is the usual ‘conclusion of an adventure’ sequence that the Bond films pioneered and popularised back in the 1960s is here as expected and, although it gets the male chauvinist stuff out in the open fairly on, the action in this lead-in looks like it’s either been too aggressively edited so you can’t see what’s going on or it's maybe cutting around performers who can’t fight in the hopes it may look like they’re kicking ass (which is something a fair few Hollywood movies have done in recent years, unfortunately). Then, when I was expecting a revamped old school homage to the Charlie’s Angels TV show opening like in the McG movies, I instead got a terrible dose of imagery which, may, have been origins of the leading characters... or maybe not. It was going way to fast for me to process and there was some terrible, blary, loud pop singing going on behind the visuals. I was pretty fed up by this point.

However, against all the odds, the film then proceeded to win me over fairly hastily. The three main girls in this... Kristen Stewart, Naomi Scott and Ella Balinska are all pretty amazing and have some really good chemistry. They are ably supported by various people playing ‘Bosleys’... among them Patrick Stewart, Djimon Hounsou and the writer/director Elizabeth Banks as the ‘main Bosley’ of the movie. And a special shout out to Luis Gerardo Méndez playing a ridiculously cool guy named Saint. For every comment I see that the film is trying to make men look stupid all the way through... well, yeah, maybe that’s a bad agenda but, honestly, this character more than makes up for any of the bizarre, ‘man demoting’ sexism perpetrated by the writers here so... yeah, not a problem.

Okay, so the film by this point is stepping up the pace with some really cool action sequences and some nice humour in the right places. Once again the film purposes itself as being a sequel to all incarnations that have gone before it and not a stand alone reboot. In fact, there’s some terrible and obviously 'deliberately tacky' photoshopping of Patrick Stewart with various incarnations of the Angels through the years, which is a nice touch.

Let me sort out some of the bad now.

The action editing in some scenes still looks like it’s trying to hide a lack of fight training... unless, as I said earlier, it’s a deliberately choppy style which doesn’t quite come off. This is unfortunate but it’s not evident in all of the action scenes and they’re still quite exhilarating to watch, nonetheless. Like the previous incarnations, there’s a big emphasis on fun in this movie, even without the ‘colouring book’ cinematography. There were other sequences in the movie which didn’t quite make sense in the edit to me... however. I felt I was being asked to make certain leaps in understanding which I could have done without in simple things of the ‘how did that person suddenly wind up in that vehicle?’ variety. It did look like the editing was trying to make up for some accidentally un-filmed footage now and again but, thankfully, these moments were few and far between.

The only other problem I had was the horrible and ‘mixed in way too loud’ pop songs which punctuate the film at quite a steady lick. They seemed to be the driving force behind some of the montage sequences when, frankly, it should have been the other way around (I mean, McG’s sometimes terrible needle drop music choices were at least supporting the scenes they were being used in, I thought). Again, though, this is countered with... oh , wait, I’ll save the genius of Brian Tyler for a little later.

One thing which, briefly annoyed me was a stupid plot twist which was revealed halfway through the film. I knew it was coming, the audience knew it was coming and... it was so obvious that it enraged me when it happened. Except... turns out the audience are being ‘played’ at this point. Not going to say anymore about that because it would constitute a spoiler but lets just say I so fell for the writer/director’s art of distraction that I was pleasantly surprised (yes, I know, I was surprised... it happens now and again) when the truth of the situation was finally brought to the foreground.

And all this with... oh yeah... Tyler’s score. He’s great at creating the soundscapes for these kinds of films and, though I was hoping for more of the original 70s Charlie’s Angels theme in it... it only makes a brief appearance in an ‘homage’ closet scene... I have to say that the score for this one really knocks it out of the park. It’s got a strong melody line and it mutates into good solid action scoring on a dime. To hell with Brian Tyler, though, for giving me a score which wouldn’t leave my head after the film had finished and wouldn’t let me sleep that night because my brain kept playing it back while I tossed and turned under the sheets. In fact, I’m still humming it as I type. Absolutely first class work from this composer and I can tell this is going to get a lot of spins on the CD player this month. Nice composing from someone who has fast become one of the ‘greats’ of Hollywood scoring.

So, there you go. Not much more to say on this one. Brilliant cast, good chemistry, fast pacing, some mostly good action and a brilliant score... if you can get through the opening ten minutes without turning off, I think you’ll find the new incarnation of Charlie’s Angels is a cinematic delight. And if you want to see a cameo from an old character from the original show, not to mention various other cameos, stick around for the six mini scenes which play out during the end credits. This is a definite Blu Ray purchase for me when it comes out and... well... I just wish I had time to fit in another cinema screening of this one but it’s the wrong time of year for that. Go see it if you can though. With a few tweaks it could have been a masterpiece... instead it's just a really fun, entertaining movie. And who can argue with that?

Personal Shopper

Ghost Couture

Personal Shopper
France/Germany/Czech Republic/
Belgium 2016 (released 2017)
Directed by Olivier Assayas
Icon/Lionsgate Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Very minor spoilers.

Personal Shopper is a film I wanted to see on its release in UK cinemas earlier in the year but, alas, it was only at my cinema for one week when I wasn’t at liberty to make the trip. I’ve not seen a lot of Olivier Assayas’ cinema but the four I have seen I’ve liked quite a lot so, I was kinda looking forward to this one. I’m not particularly a fan of Kristen Stewart, who plays the film’s main protagonist Maureen but, I figured she must be pretty capable if someone like Assayas was interested in putting her in one of his movies and, yes, she’s pretty great in this thing.

The film deals with Maureen, who is the twin sister of a recently deceased brother. She’s also a medium and she has been waiting around in Paris for the last eight months or so, looking for a sign from him from beyond the grave. While she’s there she works as a personal clothes shopper, picking and buying clothes for her aloof and mostly unsympathetic celebrity employer... fashion items which cost an arm and a leg. She is also doing a little work on the side such as something we see her doing at the start of the film, which is staying a few nights in a potential house purchase for a couple to see if it has any specific spirits inhabiting it and, if there are, whether they are benign or malevolent ghosts.

From what I know of the cinema of Assayas, the film is fairly typical of him in some ways. The acting/writing is quite naturalistic in style which is what is reflected from the film’s key performances (my guess is there’s probably a lot of improvisation going on with the actors) and the lack of story beats and nothing too tangible happening (for the most part) usually ensure that nothing too concrete occurs although, quite often, there is a strong sense of ambiguity injected into what you are watching. Personal Shopper is no different in his approach although, he did surprise me because, since he is such a loose filmmaker, I was amazed that within half an hour we had a very tangible spectre thrown in to the mix and the use of CGI on this fantasy element was completely unexpected, at least to me, in a film from this writer/director.

As it happens, on completing her job for the couple, Maureen has to cope with a continuous series of texts from an unknown number and the implication is that it’s either the ghost that she encounters in the house stalking and texting her through the rest of the film or, possibly, her dead brother. We then have another ‘incident’ which I won’t spoil for you here (but which is on at least one of the trailers for this) and the film kind of turns into an almost Hitchcockian mystery but with the added spectral shenanigans juxtaposed and possible joining this mystery format.

From the outset, the director uses very controlled camera set ups (which is what I was expecting from him) and this juxtaposition of the utilitarian style of the acting with the rigid beauty of the shot design is something which is very much, I think, a signature of this director’s work. Right from the very first shot he is framing things using vertical planes in a very blatant and rigid manner and, of course, positioning the performers in various, specifically defined sections of the screen. In fact, he seems to be using vertical lines all over this thing, especially at the start, while he also uses camera movement around these artificially focused spaces to both reveal and conceal the characters or certain aspects of them when they move. For example, a partially naked Kristen Stewart will walk behind a column into a room and as the camera dollies along parallel to where she was, she emerges behind another plane wearing a full outfit. Stuff like this, of course, keeps the viewing interesting and, if nothing else, most fans of cinema should be able to enjoy this film on a visual level.

As for me, I thought it was a great little film and quite unique in some ways.

For instance, Maureen's phone is almost as much of a star in some of the scenes as she is... as she is constantly bombarded by texts from what could be, depending on your interpretation of the visual data you are given, a pesky spirit. Although, I have to say, I was feeling a lot less sympathetic to the character of Maureen when I realised she was putting in a space before the question marks on the end of her sentences. That’s just appalling... as were the moments when she uses two question marks to re-emphasise her questions. Seriously? Are we supposed to empathise with protagonists who are too thuggish to know good grammar these days?

Anyway, the movie builds to a point when you think the mystery is more or less solved but just before you get to the naming of the resolution, Assayas pauses for a sequence where we, quite definitively, see a ghost making its way down to the exit of the hotel and out through the front doors. It’s done without actual sighting of the ghost in much the same way as you would see it done in those old Invisible Man movies of the 1930s and 40s. An unseen presence which activates things in the environment as it goes about its business.

And then, when you think it’s all over, the film carries on and we are back to being in a very low key mood with the performance again. And then there’s this marvellous little sequence where something very bold happens in the background of a shot which is quite fascinating and leads to a scene later on which is kind of an end coda to the film but which, frankly, could mean different things to different people and clearly does. I’ve seen this end debated on various web sites since I watched this on Christmas Eve this year and, frankly, the ambiguity which I associate with the director seems to have confused the heck out of people (many of whom are even describing/jumping to conclusions to something in the narrative order in which I think they are quite mistaken). Ultimately, I think I know what has happened but I’m not going to add my own interpretation into the mix because a) it would constitute a main spoiler and, b) I don’t think any one interpretation can carry the weight of the ending on its own without falling into certain difficulties which require a major reinterpretation of all the scenes after the last time we see Maureen in a hotel room.

However, what I will say is that Personal Shopper is a pretty good movie and I’m glad I saw this the year it was released because now I can place it within my top 25 favourite films of the year. Definitely a movie for all the self proclaimed cinephiles out there... as well as those of us who, you know, just love the odd movie. One of the better Olivier Assayas films I have seen.

American Ultra

Age Of Ultra

American Ultra
2015 USA
Directed by Nima Nourizadeh
UK cinema release print.

Warning: One slight plot point spoiler.

I’ve always had kind of a soft spot for Jesse Eisenberg as an actor. It has to be said, though, in recent years, I’ve had much less time for him as Jesse Eisenberg the human being, due to some footage I saw of him where he seemed to be saying less than respectful, hurtful things to a person trying to interview him. Now, I’m not sure if that’s a black and white issue or what the backstory to that particular interview was, so I am doing my best to approach with caution on his status as a regular person, especially since his behaviour doesn’t really add up with other stuff he ‘does’ in real life. Thankfully, it’s not my purpose to give a summary of the actor in question’s character... whether good or bad. Actually, I’m not really sure what my purpose is, to be honest, but I can certainly say that, as a personality on screen... he can be a lot of fun.

American Ultra is a film very much suited to his personality type. Or at least suited to play around and defy your expectations of what a stereotype like this can be pushed into being in a certain set of situations, that’s for sure. It’s not like any other movie around in the cinema at the moment... which coming from Hollywoodland is both a surprising and good thing. It’s not the homogenised, cliché ridden, formulaic blockbuster you will be getting on the majority of screens at your local multiplex and that’s always going to give it plus points over most of its contemporaries in terms of quirkiness and appeal. Luckily for us, the cast of actors including Eisenberg, Kristen Stewart and John Leguizamo (always nice to see him working) are all superb and help sell this, as does the director and the rest of the cast and crew... possibly somewhat against the odds when you realise how disjointed the script might have looked on the printed page (no, that’s only a guess, I’m speculating here people).

This is one of those movies which comes along once every few years and has that almost inherent quality of appealing to a small group of people (relatively, in film terms) and usually locks psychic antenna with audiences of a certain age... if I was still a teenager (alas, those weren’t the days) then I would absolutely be worshipping this movie and seeing it a gazillions times before buying it on home video and rewatching it, seated beneath a poster of the film of the same name etc. It seems like a really bad cliché, also, for me to use this analogy again because I’ve used it before for other films and I don’t want this expression to lose any of its weight but... I would say that American Ultra is the Heathers of the current teen generation and it will probably be absolutely loved by that section of the movie going public. It’s got that kind of cult appeal... not a term I am that comfortable with using due to its inherent contradictions within a box office context (there are no cult movies and if there were, we probably wouldn’t have heard of them)... that captures the zeitgeist like no other.

As a film the plot is simple... a stoner/loser type guy is really a killing machine created by the CIA and has a handler who has left the organisation because she loves him and who poses as/is his girlfriend. However, he doesn’t know any of this because he assumes his lack of memory is due to all the drugs he does. Meanwhile, an enthusiastic, success-seeking higher up in the CIA sees him as a risk and sends some people to eliminate him. Easier said than done though because he gets reactivated and goes on an accidental killing rampage every time somebody tries to kill him or his girlfriend as they attempt to flee the action.

This is a slightly simplified summary of the plot but it’s the basic nutshell of an outline and the film uses this premise to basically deliver a load of violence and drug addled humour wrapped up as a situation comedy where the situations are really f****ed up and the solutions to them usually end up as the path less travelled... most brutal. And it’s a blast... I had a great time with this movie and especially loved the vibrant colours and sense of movement the cast and crew were injecting into every shot. This one really connected with my inner teen and, though I found the musical scoring to be a bit less interesting than would normally work for me, it seems to be appropriate response to the swirl of chaos pictured on screen for the large majority of its running time. A running time which whips along at a very fast pace, there's no doubt about that.

Now there’s nothing truly surprising or astonishing about this movie, in all fairness.... it doesn’t push past any genaralised boundaries that other movies in a similar vein might have tried to do... but it’s blessed with being fairly well executed, so it doesn’t matter that it’s not taking you to places you’ve not seen before. It’s still fairly out there, though, in terms of its sensibilities and, being gifted with a constantly shifting menagerie of characters and events, you certainly won’t find yourself struggling to stay awake through this one. The editing is especially good because, bearing in mind the stuff which is going on all at once in this movie, I didn’t lose track of either the action or the plotting so... well... all I can say to that is that somebody is doing their job right.

Having said that, some of the violence seems to have been edited in such a way that it’s implying something out of sight of the camera rather than showing it in a few cases and I’m guessing that this movie was diplomatically pre-cut to avoid censorship issues before it got a cinema release. It looks like there’s a much harder cut of the movie waiting to be inflicted on an unsuspecting audience and, if I’m right, I’m guessing we’ll have a more extreme version of the movie to look forward to when this thing finally comes out on DVD and Blu Ray.

The one thing that did catch me off guard me about this movie is that it wasn’t based on a comic book... it really looks like it’s come out of the same “play with anything” kind of format that gave us movie adaptations such as American Splendour and Scott Pilgrim Versus The World... it certainly feels like it, in many ways. It’s to the filmmakers’ credit that it achieves this level of substance too, in a way, because it can’t be easy to go through a sustained shoot of something this fragmented without having a previously successful template to reference and give you motivation on a daily basis.

At the end of the day I’d have to say that American Ultra is an all around great movie and something that most teenagers and twenty somethings will find right up their street. As for me... yeah, maybe I’m in touch with my inner child just a little too much but I loved it too and would thoroughly recommend it to most people I know. Go and see it while it’s still playing on the big screen folks... it’s better than most of the other stuff showing out there at the moment.