In Darkness

Sight Unseen

In Darkness
UK/USA 2018
Directed by Anthony Byrne
Universal Region B

I know we live in a bizarre time where cinema release patterns can go hand in hand with low quality downloads and home video versions... sometime without any real access for the majority of potential customers at all from the likes of seemingly evil corporations like Netflix. Even so, I have to say, I was surprised to find that, less than a month after it got a limited cinema release in this country, I was able to pick up a DVD of In Darkness from Fopp records (or Amazon, for that matter) for only the price of a crisp, five pound note. I think I was prompted to look at this one by seeing an interview with actress Natalie Dormer via a Twitter link and, having seen this now, I’m not sure if that was a good call or not.

In Darkness was co-produced and co-written with Miss Dormer’s fiance Anthony Byrne, who also takes up directing duties here and, on the strength of this, I’d have to say that I think he’s probably a much better director than he is writer. I was really optimistic when I started this film because, frankly, the first 20 minutes or so are absolutely compelling.

It starts off with a truly wonderful title sequence where a series of shots of the inner workings of a piano, bathed in red, synch up to the piano part of the accompanying music and then we go onto various shots of things which will mean something later in the movie... a scarf, a metronome... but mostly a shot of an eye, also initially bathed in red, which I’m guessing must be in homage to the opening title sequence of Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece Vertigo. Indeed, we even have the eye blinks from that opening sequence which, in this case, usher in new colour palette treatments of the 'eye shot' as Niall Byrne’s score, sadly only available as a download rather than a proper CD, gives us a sinister composition which, by the end, briefly ends up in the same domain of some of the more abstract compositions of György Ligeti.

We are then taken into the first shot of the movie which is of a young lady being strangled by a gloved killer and, yes, it looks like it’s been hoisted straight out of an early Dario Argento giallo and it feels very 1970s, especially with the score going full-on like something you’d hear from Ennio Morricone in the likes of The Bird With The Crystal Plumage or The Cat O’ Nine Tails. Then we get our first and, sadly, only surprise of the story when it turns out this is footage from a fictional film and we pull back to see we are at a scoring session for a movie in which our anti-heroine Sofie, played by Natalie Dormer, is playing the piano part in the orchestra.

It’s here that we are first presented with the idea that Sofie is blind and, after the sessions wrap for the day, we follow her on her journey home. It looks like she works in Westminster, if the platforms are anything to go by and there are definitely a couple of Jubilee line stops shown on her daily journey. Her travels in the film also take her to Camden Town, it seems, as I noticed her going past Mega City Comics at one point in her travels.

When she is home, she listens to a mock up demo of the score that she is helping to perform for the film and it’s a great juxtaposition because the sinister, gialloesqe notes becomes her own soundtrack for the audience as we watch. A musical window onto the world in which she lives as the source music turns into non-diegetic and vice versa. Which is kind of interesting stuff. We also see that she uses the ticking of a metronome to help her concentrate past other noises in the night and help get her to sleep. We also meet her upstairs neighbour, played by Emily Ratajkowski, who is the daughter of a war criminal given sanctuary in the UK and who soon takes a dive out of the window, leaving Sofie as a kind of ‘sound witness’ to the events which may have played out in the flat above her. Sofie also finds herself in possession of something which various interested parties are trying to reclaim, by any brutal means necessary, as she becomes embroiled in a plot involving various different factions and some really good actors like Neil Maskell, Ed Skrein, Joely Richardson and James Cosmo. So there’s a lot to recommend in this film, for sure.

Ditto on the direction and composition of the movie There are some lovely set ups with some nice fluid camerawork, occasionally punctuated by some fast and jerky hand held stuff at appropriate action points. The film looks gorgeous and the acting by everyone, especially Dormer, is first rate so I really didn’t mind paying a fiver for this movie. There are even some unusual scene juxtapositions... for example, where the post autopsy body of the upstairs neighbour is being washed in the morgue by her father which is cross cut with a scene of her in flashback, taking a shower. It’s a strange sequence but I’m all for seeing unusual things in cinema.

However, the problem with this movie is that, after about twenty minutes, I’d figured out all of the upcoming twists, especially the ‘big’ reveal in the last two minutes of the film. I’d suspected one or two things very early on and, unfortunately, the overly convoluted windings of the plot meant that none of my suspicions were diminished and... well, like I said earlier... no surprises here. In some ways, I wish the writers had the courage to stick with the simplistic set up of the opening and leave this premise untouched but, as the movie wore on, I just kept getting a little more discouraged that things were going exactly where I suspected they were going to go... which is a bit of a shame.

So, yes, ultimately, In Darkness is a bit of a visual and audio feast of a movie which packages things beautifully but can’t quite hide the fact that what is actually being packaged is a little bit run of the mill and less interesting once the contents are revealed. If you like good cinematography and music, however, then you might want to pick this one up while it’s still relatively cheap.

King Arthur - Legend Of The Sword

A Mage A Day Helps
You Work, Rest and Play

King Arthur - Legend Of The Sword
USA 2017 Directed by Guy Ritchie
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Any similarities between this movie and the legend of King Arthur are purely coincidental.

Remember that famous moment in Arthurian legend where giant, armoured elephants taller than a couple of skyscrapers attack Camelot with giant, spiky clubs they hold in their trunks? Yeah, me neither. Yet... here they are.

I’m not a fan of gangster cinema but the few films by Guy Ritchie I’ve actually seen - the two Sherlock Holmes films and The Man From UNCLE reboot (reviewed here)- were pretty cool movies, as far as I’m concerned. However, when I saw a trailer for King Arthur - Legend of the Sword a month or so ago it looked absolutely horrendous and I made a decision, there and then, to trust my instincts and stay away from the movie. However, I then found out that Daniel Pemberton was re-teaming with Ritchie after his fantastic score for The Man From UNCLE and, furthermore, while King Arthur - Legend of the Sword was taking a critical drubbing, Pemberton’s score was being singled out as the best thing about the movie and was doing very well in the Amazon music charts (and not just the soundtrack part of it). Since I also knew there was already a CD release of this score... well, I had to go and see this after all. And, I must say, as far as Pemberton’s score goes, at least... I wasn’t disappointed.

To be fair to Ritchie and his excellent cast and crew... the trailer for the film makes it look much less appetizing than it actually is. King Arthur - Legend of the Sword is actually a huge slice of fun and its greatest tragedy, in my eyes, is that it looks like it had a truly great movie waiting in the wings in some alternate cut. However, it’s not without its huge problems and I think the final edit probably hinders the movie way more than it should.

The great thing about this film, the primary strength, is its cast. They’re all very good. Charlie Hunnam is very likable as Arthur, Jude Law makes an excellent villain in King Vortigern, Eric Bana is excellent as Uther Pendragon (for the few minutes he’s in it), British treasure Neil Maskell is wonderful as the likeable guy who ends up as motivation fodder at a critical point in the story and the Merlin substitute, played here as a female mage by Astrid Bergès-Frisbey, who I last saw in the unbelievably cool I Origins (reviewed here) has absolutely the most amazing screen presence in this film. Even Mr. Posh Spice gets a halfway decent moment in the proceedings.

The dialogue isn’t bad either and the opening ten minutes, pre-credits, and the credits themselves are very strong sequences. Pre-credits is the big ‘elephant’ scene I mentioned above, as Uther saves everybody from the evil attacking Camelot before heading to meet his own fate in the betrayal of a close friend and the titles themselves play out over Arthur growing up in a brothel and becoming ‘street savvy’ in Londinium. Unfortunately, this is all the strongest stuff in the movie and, as much as I admired Ritchie’s technique and the way in which he uses the syntax of splicing film to create a finished result, I really think it goes into overdrive too quickly and too long here.

Oh, and the music... as I said before, Daniel Pemberton’s score is absolutely top notch and I expect to see it listed in my top five scores at the end of the year. Truly astonishing work and this guy is definitely one to watch. I’ll probably never watch this movie again in my life but the CD soundtrack is going to be on my turntable for months, when it arrives, I’m pretty sure of that.

So, okay... lets talk about the two things I think let the film down a little.

This doesn’t stick to Arthurian legend at all. There’s no Merlin or Morgan Le Fey... although I’m sure that in the subsequent films that Ritchie was planning on releasing before this flopped big time at the box office, Astrid Bergès-Frisbey’s unnamed mage character would have taken on one of those two mantles. There’s no Guinevere, no Lancelot and other bits of legend are played with fairly hard so they almost become unrecognisable. Also, this is set in a time, according to the script, when magicians were plentiful and roamed side-by-side with normal people... so we have, to an extent, fantastical elements not uncommon in something you might expect in the heroic fantasy genre. That being said, I’ve no idea why giant snakes were so prominent unless Ritchie loved the John Milius version of Conan The Barbarian as much as I did because some of the magical sequences seem to be a little at odds with common sense or follow through here.

Another main difference is that King Arthur, once he’s learned how to wield Excalibur without fainting and lapsing into unconsciousness, can do magic stuff himself... drawing on power from his sword in a similar manner to the way Michael Moorcock’s famous character Elric Of Melnibone gains power from his black, soul sucking sword Stormbringer. So, you know... big changes to Arthurian legend there. Alfred Tennyson might be twirling poetically in his grave at this point.

The other thing is Ritchie’s cinematic language here. Remember those scenes in Soderbergh’s The Limey where he cuts between two different scenes of the same two people to make up one conversation? Well Ritchie does it all the time and while I have observed this trait in him before and while he always, here included, does it very well... using short edits of alternate situations and also just generally cross-cutting between scenes to tell the story... here he seems to be doing it without any thought as to how the abundance of such an approach affects the whole piece. Like he and the editor were on some kind of really wonderful drug while cutting this movie and... it works great as a means to an end but I wish he’d have tempered it back because, honestly, it really gets tiring after just five minutes, let alone a whole movie's worth of fast cutting. Seriously, was there any shot in this film held for more than a few seconds? This really is MTV generation editing taken to a point way farther than it maybe should have been allowed to get.

You need some pauses...

If you look at some of the most iconic action movies of all time coming from the likes of Akira Kurosawa or Sergio Leone or even Steven Spielberg, one of the things you’ll notice straight away after you’ve seen just a few is that they are all about the pausing and build up between action sequences. You make the action moments stand out by pitching them against something which anticipates and teases those sequences. In this film, however, even the long dialogue scenes, of which there are many, are cut together like hard hitting action scenes so, when the three or four action sequences do come along, quite apart from being hard to follow, they are diluted and lose literally all impact because they have nothing to be seen in contrast to. Now it’s obvious from this that Ritchie has the coverage on the various scenes because he keeps cutting back to them.... so I wish he’d have just ramped down from the ferocious editing in some of those sequences a little more and let them play out without chopping about so much because, overall, the film gradually wears you down to a point where the final battles feel like a complete anticlimax and you really do feel like the movie just needs to end soon, to be honest.

And it’s such a shame because Ritchie is so obviously a great director and I wish he would have just reeled himself in a bit because I’m sure, with the footage he already has, this could have been a truly groovy and successful movie. However, it isn’t... the people have spoken with their wallets and, alas, it’s time to move on from this somewhat unique take on King Arthur and his Merry Men. No wait, that’s not right. Although it does seem like the film is trying to be more Robin Hood with magic party tricks and less King Arthur at some points.

So... you know what. If you’ve got nothing better to do one evening, I’d still say go and have a look at King Arthur - Legend Of The Sword because, frankly, you can learn from and be somewhat entertained by a spectacular failure as you can from a film which totally gets everything right. It’s not a great film but it’s not without its moments and, over and above all the mess that this movie is, it’s still got some kick ass, killer music by Pemberton which is really worth the price of admission. The movie is a bit of a write off, to be sure but... there are things work salvaging from the wreckage if you feel you’ve got the time.

Driftwood

Sink Or Swim?

Driftwood 2012 UK 
Written and Directed by James Webber
Produced by Meddy Ford and Freddy Green
Viewed at the request of the director.

If you’ve been reading my blog reviews for a while now, you’ll know that I started off with a general sense of creeping dread towards ‘short films’, but that the more exposure I’ve had to them over the last couple of years since I’ve been doing this, has allowed me to embrace the format a little more gladly. Don’t get me wrong. My three favourite shorts are still Dali and Bunuel’s Un Chien Andalou, Svankmeyer’s Virile Games and Scorcese’s The Big Shave... but some of the films I’ve seen over the last couple of years by people like Leilani Holmes, Damien Cullen, Rouzbeh Rashidi and James Devereaux, to name a few, have really challenged my tired old “I can’t be bothered” attitude to this particular species of the art form.

I saw four shorts at BAFTA just over a week ago (review here) and, based on the qualities, such as they are, of that review, a director called James Webber DM’d me on Twitter to see if I wanted to take a look at his new short called Driftwood. I said “yes”, of course, being that I’m always genuinely flattered when someone can make it through reading one of my blog entries without gnawing their own legs off, and put in the proviso that, if I didn’t like it, I wouldn’t review it... I don’t like to publish negative reviews of a film if a specific person involved with it has actually asked me to take a look at it.

Driftwood tells of a little episode in the life of a young man training to be a competetive swimmer.

It starts off with a slow, but steady, pan/reveal of the central character, Sam (played by Sam Gittins) in a swimming pool changing room. This is cut (almost violently, in terms of sheer agressive editing) to a shot dollying in from the front of the character and the juxtaposition of this relatively speedy shot combined with the look of determination on Sam’s face when he looks up as the camera closes in on him, gives one a real sense of the dogged, self-motivation of the character. This guy wants to win and it’s interesting because that sense of fluid, forward momentum created with the movement of the camera continues during the opening credits, which are intercut with similar set ups showing a relatively static person (static in his own space) combined with this constant state of motion, or ‘moving forward’ from the camera.

It’s actually very powerful because you can almost feel the central character, and the film for that matter, storing up its potential energy by expressing it with a kinetic camera eye, so to speak. Waiting to pounce on you once the credits have finished. Sure enough, as the story starts proper, the stillness of the central character stops (mostly) and we have three parts of the story intercut with each other, each working through in a linear fashion but each part filling in little bits of information about Sam as the camera eye moves back and forth between one part of his story and another, before returning to a fourth, bookending, slice of the story (for want of a better word).

It’s long been my belief that you don’t need everything (or sometimes even anything) spelled out for you in movies and the short film format proves this again and again. Driftwood, throughout, uses the central character and observations about him as you see little details of a bigger story, to give you all the information you need to give incidents an overall shape in your mind. As it cuts between a session with Sam’s trainer played by Brandy Doubleday, a run in with a bully and his gang of thugs, and Sam’s problematic, abusive father, played by the excellent Neil Maskell (who I knew from his outstanding performance in last year’s Kill List, reviewed here)... before reuniting with the opening of the picture to bring us the actual event that Sam has been training for... you are given the chance to ponder the little connections between the events that happen on screen.

Questions like why his father has become abusive and why Sam has become like he is, for example, are referred to in both the sequence with his father and in the run in with the gang of hoodlums. The implications of death and loss are visibly portrayed without ever implicitly stating or overstating what the audience will pick up on. Other details, like the nasty scarring on Sam’s back which his trainer is so obviously concerned with, are left for the viewers to make a decision on for themselves, as to the source of this wound.

This is, I’m happy to say, like a lot of independently produced films outside of a big studio system... not a passive experience for anyone watching. This is how more films should be, giving the audience a little more of an interactive role with the flickers of light and sound beaming into their souls at 24 frames per second and, I’m glad to say, that the end of this film will not wrap everything up in a neat little parcel of ‘closure’ for you. This is a short that doesn’t want to pander to you or spoonfeed your mind but grab you by the collar and ask you to really respond to what you’re seeing. And this short, in particular, does contain a certain amount of, what I like to call, ‘power between the frames’. It’s beautifully shot, well performed, has a nice score which is reflective of the sense of a character drifting from one situation to the next (as suggested by the film’s title and also by the style of the shooting and editing... if I was paying attention to what I was seeing properly) and which also gives you a sense of building to transition within composer Richard Keyworth’s notes, like a caterpillar emerging from it’s cocoon as almost a new species. This, naturally, highlights the ultimate promise of Sam’s original look of wilful determination, foreshadowed straight away in what is only the second shot of the film.

The ‘to-ing’ and ‘fro-ing’ of the camera movement and the rhythmic editing style pull the viewer in to the film almost hypnotically and won’t let you go until the short running time has ended up exactly at the point where the director wants you to finish filling in the blanks, so to speak. This is a really great use of cinematic syntax that will keep your mind occupied and, dare I say it, entertained to the point where you may find yourself haunted by it once the film has stopped running. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t an epic and, obviously, the nature of the short film format kind of precludes that kind of accomplishment anyway (you watch, someone will go and prove me wrong now), but it is a very satisfying and, ultimately, extremely watchable piece of moviemaking. It just shows the incredible talent we have here in the UK working on such great, unsung gems who need to be given the money to make their own feature length movies. So if you find yourself in a position to give Driftwood a watch, then it certainly comes with my recommendation. Anybody who can work the visuals like this, whether it be the story of a swimmer in training or whatever else is in the writer’s head, deserves a larger audience and a bigger budget to bring their vision to the world.

So it’s a big thank you from me to this particular director for doing me the honour of letting me watch his new work. And I’m also really glad I didn’t hate it. ;-)

Follow the director on twitter here and check out the film-maker’s website here.http://www.fingercuffproductions.co.uk/