Snowpiercer

Scenes From
A Carriage

Snowpiercer
South Korea/Czechoslovakia 2013
Directed by Bong Joon Ho
Anchor Bay  Blu Ray Zone A

Snowpiercer is another fine movie from Bong Joon Ho, director of the absolutely brilliant, giant monster movie The Host and the ‘so so’ multiple Oscar winner Parasite. It’s based on a comic book I’ve never actually read called Le Transperceneige so, please forgive me that I’m not able to convey whether this is an accurate adaptation of the source material or not... I just don’t know. It’s also the movie that the notorious Harvey Weinstein famously sat on and blocked from release in the US (it’s still not been released over here in the UK*) for many years now due to the director correctly refusing to cut the film down. I got so fed up with not being able to see this, since there’s now also a TV series based on the work, that I finally got around to importing a Blu Ray release of this thing.

And, yeah, it’s not a bad film. It’s a nice 1950s style sci-fi novel concept (as modern sci-fi often is) although the whole thing feels a little bit dated to me in terms of the film reminding me of a lot of stuff I was seeing from places like Korea in the 1990s. That is to say, the film is kinda complex in terms of the amount of detail crammed into the thing... it made me think of some live action manga adaptations from the end of the last millennium.

The plot is of a post-apocalyptic Earth where nobody can survive (after mankind absolutely doomed themselves by bringing in the ‘big freeze’) unless they are in this specific, very long train which keeps moving and circling the planet on one large track over the course of a year... so, for example, you will always know from the wreckage of the place you are passing again when it is New Year’s Day. Stay on the constantly moving and self sufficient train and you live... exit and you freeze to death within minutes.

However, there is a class system established on the train, from the rich folk at the front, down to the lower classes at the rear who are more or less treated like prisoners in Nazi Germany and it’s here where our main protagonists work together to throw off the chains of their oppressors. The story tells of a group of characters played by the likes of Chris Evans, Kang-ho Song, Jamie Bell, Ko Asung, Octavia Spencer, Ewan Bremner and John Hurt as they finally organise themselves enough to try and fight their way to the front of the train and seize control of their situation. In their path, a whole host of bad guys and henchmen including Tilda Swinton, playing her evil character as kind of a Northern shop steward and the man at the top, Ed Harris.

And so, yeah, if this sounds all very like the original intended version of the late Bruce Lee’s Game Of Death, where his character was supposed to fight his way level by level up the tower... this is exactly what we have here. Except the tower is vertical, moving very fast and much longer. Plus there’s no kung fu action, of course.

As you can imagine from a cast as good as this, all the performances in this are superb (and it’s very grim too, because of it) but it’s the constant changes in interior locations and the inventiveness of different settings which continue to hold the interest as the story progresses. The first three quarters of an hour or more, for example, are really dark and grey and exactly the kind of colour palette you’d imagine for depicting a Jewish ghetto in a film set during the Second World War but, as new sections of the train are unlocked and revealed to the constantly diminishing band of survivors, everything gets more brighter and, of course more decadent as things go on, with the various ruling classes juxtaposed with our ‘low life heroes’ from the back of the train.

There’s a beautiful, breathtaking aquarium environment, for example, where the walls of one carriage are completely lined with aquatic life so the rest of the train can have sushi during certain times of the year. There’s a school room with kids and a somewhat irritating, singing teacher and even some ‘clubbing’ quarters where dancing, drinking and drugs is going on.

There’s lots of fighting going on too and it’s interesting how director Ho manages to get you to feel the emotional weight of some of the deaths when you’ve really only known certain characters for a half an hour. One interesting fight scene is where the incredibly long train is turning around on a huge u-turn of track, allowing a sniper to fire in a gun battle between two carriages while they are in view of each other. This was a nice touch and I have to wonder if this was in the original comic or if someone thought of this visual possibility purely for the film.

Adding to both this emotional weight and the gravitas of some of the action scenes is Marco Beltrami’s excellent score (I need to put this one on order soon). I was especially taken with a ‘call to action’ around halfway through the film where the underlying rhythm of the piece echoes, or actually creates, the sound of the locomotion of the transport. Very nicely done.

Okay, short review then because I’ve not got a whole lot more to say about Snowpiercer other than the fact that there’s a nice kind of twist as to where the narrative is going which you might suspect is coming at some point if you keep your eye on Ho’s regular actor Kang-ho Song... but may not realise is an option until this character starts offering up some science about their situation. It’s an okay ending but doesn’t neccessarily answer anything unless you are able to assume there’s a little more to what you are seeing than you have been shown... at least in terms of the aftermath of the film’s denouement. Not as good as The Host (which also stars Kang-ho Song and Ko Asung) but, at least for me, a solid science fiction vehicle with an interesting premise. 

*Wrote this a few months ago... it’s coming out over here in the on Blu Ray very soon.

Ma

Game, Vet and Matched

Ma
USA 2019 
Directed by Tate Taylor
UK cinema release print.

Warning: This review will contain some story spoilers. Read at your own risk or, you know, come back and read it after you saw the movie, perhaps?

So, Ma, is one of those movies that tries to do a few simple things at once and, mostly, succeeds at the majority of them on some level. It stars Octavia Spencer as the titular character, a veteranarian's assistant... and she puts in a good performance in a movie that is both trying to paint a character who is justified in becoming the twisted individual she has progressed to when we join her in the story and then give us a few lurid thrills over the course of the movie and in the end game... as Ma goes on a kind of roaring rampage of revenge, to quote a much loved movie.

Well, it’s certainly not a terrible film, for sure and I did kind of enjoy it because it rambles along at its own pace and it’s just intriguing enough to hold the attention while Spencer and a bunch of teenage kids, played by people like Diana Silvers and McKaley Miller start having alcohol fuelled parties in Ma’s basement. Silvers plays Maggie, who has moved into town with her mother Erica, played by Juliette Lewis, to start a new life and, within a day, is invited to join the local kids in their shenanigans and, after they are trying to get adults to buy their alcohol for them... have their first meeting with Ma who enters their lives and, ultimately, refuses to leave.

The film does the, perhaps obvious, thing where they set up just how Ma’s mental state can turn on a dime fairly early on in the proceedings, to keep the audience on edge... and then goes on cruise control for a while as it establishes the parents of the kids, including Luke Evans who was so great in Professor Marston And The Wonder Women (reviewed here) and starts weaving plot threads together with a series of flashbacks, not all of them linear in nature, to show the audience how connected things really are and why this chance meeting with Ma may not necessarily be as spontaneous as the various kids thought.

Okay so... it’s not breakneck but pacey without resorting to peril every five mins and it involves enough suspense in it, via the old cliché of “the forbidden area” of Ma’s home, to hold the interest. The performances are okay and, surprisingly for a film of this nature... and this is one thing it gets really right... you don’t completely hate the various teenagers who are put in peril. The usual way these movies work these days is to somehow have a bunch of teenage characters that only teenagers can relate to... thus rendering the empathy for the teen protagonists completely non existent and you’re usually cheering on the malevolent antagonist to get on with their work. Here, the kids are mostly quite sweet and so you do feel yourself getting at least a little pulled into their world and the threat that Ma brings to it.

It’s definitely a film which roots itself firmly in the thriller genre rather than horror... there’s no supernatural presence or inhuman monster to bring a sense of terror to the shenanigans... and sadly, it fails to be as potent in both the violence and the final reveal of the trigger from Ma’s past that’s made the switch in her head flip and set her on her ultimately murderous course.  By that I mean that when you realise that the flashbacks are building to a certain kind of denouement, what the audience can imagine happened is probably far worse and icky than what you ultimately see. Also, some of the things that Ma does to various teens in this world maybe loses the impact when you can see exactly the same kinds of things done as leisure activities on various dark porn sites on the internet. It’s not that some of the stuff isn’t nasty... it’s just that you do get a feel by the final sequences that this film is perhaps a little out of step with its time and that maybe, if the same film was released in the early 1960s, it would have been a much more potent and possibly influential film than it seems to be now.

That being said, there are some genuinely well executed jump scares in the movie and, as I said, it’s sufficiently entertaining to breeze its way through to the final set piece without getting dull for the paying customers. It’s the kind of thing that goes down well with teenage audiences and I can’t imagine it won't make its budget back fairly quickly, to be honest. That being said, if you are expecting a well oiled horror movie or even a competent teenage slasher movie... you may be a little disappointed with Ma. It’s not that it’s not well done but perhaps that’s part of the problem I had with it a little bit. It doesn’t have any kind of raw edge to it and, sometimes, a film of this nature can be a little too polished. All in all though, I thought the film was nice enough for a one off watch... charming even, so if you’ve got no other films at the cinema that you want to see, this one’s maybe worth a look. 

The Shape Of Water

Gill Merman Del Toro

The Shape Of Water
2017 USA Directed by Guillermo del Toro
2018 UK cinema release print.

Well there you go then. Only just over halfway through February and we already have a new movie release that absolutely embodies the spirit of cinema and is exactly what the art form is all about.

It would be fair to say I’ve found director Guillermo del Toro a little hit and miss over the years but, in all honesty, much more with the movie speedometer pointing towards ‘hit’ than at the other end of the scale. I am still a bit reluctant to embrace both of his enormously creative works Kronos and Pan’s Labyrinth, for example... I’m sorry, they just left me cold. However, I absolutely loved the two Hellboy movies he did (especially the second one which, it seemed to me, felt like it had less studio interference) and Mimic, Pacific Rim (reviewed here) and Crimson Peak (reviewed here) were all films I could get behind to some extent.

When I saw the trailer for The Shape Of Water featuring Sally Hawkins, who I think is one of the more engaging and wondrous British actresses of recent years, it looked like a movie which would, at the very least, once again enrich an audience’s cinematic experience with a beautifully crafted, heavily stylised piece of art and... yeah... dead right it does.

It also looked like it was taking inspiration from one of my all time favourite monster movies of the 1950s and, yeah, it does that  too.

The film is set in 1962 and details the story of a mute cleaning lady called Elisa, played by Sally Hawkins, who works with a group of workers, including her friend Zelda (played wonderfully by Octavia Spencer), that look after the cleaning duties for a top secret, government research facility. One day they have a new ‘asset’ brought to the facility... an amphibian man played by Doug Jones (who played a very similar character for this director in the Hellboy films, of course). The creature has been captured in a river in South America (another reference to the obviously inspiration of the character, which I’ll get to in a minute) and is treated cruelly as a science project (or worse) by the majority of the scientists at the facility and, especially, by the accompanying security chief Strickland. Strickland, played with the usual villanous relish by Michael Shannon, is the real monster of this film which, actually, is in no way a horror film but certainly has moments of dark terror to be found in both Shannon’s role and in the ‘cold war’ paranoia surrounding the only kindly scientist, played by Michael Stuhlbarg.

However, Elise slowly falls in love and creates a bond with the creature and, when she finds that Strickland has scheduled its termination and vivisection, she enlists the aid of her commercial artist friend Giles (played so poignantly by Richard Jenkins) and the two of them, including a couple of unexpected allies, plot to kidnap and ultimately free the creature. And that’s about as much I want to tell you of the story arc because, well... you’ll surely want to discover that for yourself.

The film starts of strongly with the allusions to Elisa’s unknown start in life and a wonderful homage to cinema and great TV of days gone by (both visually and on the soundtrack). The beauty and charm of Elisa’s daily routine, where she wakes up in her room above the Orpheum cinema and draws a bath before furiously masturbating in the tub prior to going to work, is full of detail and, much like a lot of past cinematic classics, almost threatens to overwhelm the senses as you watch and let the world wash over you in all its glory.

As you would expect from a director of this calibre, it’s not just the incredible talent he calls on which makes the film into a little masterpiece of the visual arts. The set and shot design is superb and he manipulates some nice, often aquatically themed colour palettes to tell his story... a tale filled with a lot of charm and heart (which is something which I found lacking in Pan’s Labyrinth, to be honest). He also does some wonderful stuff with the sound design too. For instance, in a scene where Michael Shannon’s character is roughly having sex with his wife, the background sound of the springs and rhythm of the bed keep going through to the next scene transition and become the ambient noise of the next environment... which I found quite phenomenal and applause worthy, to be honest.

There’s another little moment in the film later where the lighting in a room where Elisa and the Creature are eating dinner suddenly goes fully into an unnatural state in that the whole room dims to black except Elise, in a spotlight, as something truly touching is about to happen... and then the film goes completely sideways into a brilliant sequence which I really can’t spoil here but... it was absolutely not what I was expecting to happen and it involves a monochromatic sequence of 1930s style spectacle.

The creature itself, of course... and the romance with the main protagonist... is clearly inspired by the classic ‘creature feature’ Creature From The Black Lagoon (which I reviewed here) and the whole film, which does include sex sequences and (yay!) Sally Hawkins in a state of undress, seems like the director had watched that film and become inspired by that moment where the gill man is swimming beneath Julie Adams and falls for her. And, as it turns out, from what I understand now that I read a few lines from the director about the movie from other sources after seeing this... that’s pretty much the case. This film is very much a projection of Creature From The Black Lagoon (although it technically bears a little more resemblance in setting, perhaps, to the first of the two sequels, Revenge Of The Creature) and a look at where that relationship could have gone if 1950s cinema had been perhaps a little more relaxed in what it was allowed to depict, story wise, at the time.

All of this is accompanied by a score composed by the great Alexandre Desplat (although there are a lot of sequences, also, where source music from various eras relateable to the period and its direct history are utilised) and, while its probably not one of his best, it is a nice score and I’m hoping a closer listen (the CD has been sitting in the corner of the room for the last week or two, still in shrink wrap) will make clear why it’s been given an Oscar nomination. It’s nice stuff including a lot of whistling which appropriately helps to build the world as seen through the eyes of Elisa.

The film is both romantic and passionate in its portrayal of the beauty of this world but also pushes the limits in such a fantasy in that it doesn’t shy away from going to some really dark places. There are some things which are tough to watch but the director and his cast manage to pull it off so deftly that it never feels like the two opposing emotional styles are threatening to tear the piece apart and I feel del Toro is much more adept at the art of keeping things in balance than he was, maybe, at the start of his career. Like any other artist, he is a creator who grows better and more skilled as he gains more experience at the helm of these amazing worlds he creates.

The denouement of the movie features something happening which I was half expecting would be made more of, when the story first reveals the scars around Elisa’s neck which are held accountable for her inability to speak. However, rather than being a disappointing revelation of something which some people will also, I’m sure, find a little obvious... it’s just where I personally felt the movie needed to go and I was really happy the writers and director did this thing, while we hear Richard Jenkins recite a piece of poetry on the voice-over narrative which is obviously the inspiration for the title of the film.

And that’s more or less all I want to say about The Shape Of Water. Like Elisa, I have no more words to describe the pleasures and wonders of the environment in which this central character lives her life but I do have the words to recommend this to anyone who answers to the somewhat dubious title of cinephile or even the more casual watchers and lovers of the cinematic form such as myself. The Shape Of Water is another gift from Guillermo del Toro and it’s a present which I know I will certainly be unwrapping again for myself when the Blu Ray gets a release. It’s definitely something which cries out to be caught on the big screen of your local cinema so, my advice would be to swim to this one as soon as you can.