Jupiter Ascending

Ascension Of Disbelief

Jupiter Ascending
2015  US
Directed by The Wachowski Sibs 
UK cinema release print.

You know, I so wanted to title this review Jupiter, Arse Ending, because I’d already been primed by the film’s promotional trailer, to expect one of the worst sci-fi films ever made. Seriously, just like Kingsman, The Secret Service (a film I reviewed here), the trailer for Jupiter Ascending did absolutely nothing to make me want to go and see this movie. The trailer's a mess of clunky dialogue and hollow, non-contextual special effects clips that actually put me off wanting to go for this one. And if I’d missed seeing this one at the cinema, I might never had gotten around to it because a trailer this bad... blimey! And that would have been a shame, as it turns out.

So why did I luck out and go and see it then? Simple. I heard that Sony Music they were releasing a double CD album of the film’s score by one of my favourite contemporary composers, Michael Giacchino. Now, Giacchino’s involvement alone would not have gotten me into the cinema and past that awful trailer, to be honest. What actually got me there was the fact that a double CD album meant that Sony were invested in releasing two discs of a score... so they must have had some faith in it. A score must be pretty special to get the two disc treatment these days and, since I’d already been to see what can only be the worst film I’ll see this year, and a lot of other years besides, Mortdecai (which I review here), I figured there was surely no way that Jupiter Ascending could be anywhere near as bad as that movie had turned out to be.

And so I went to the cinema last night to see, and hear, Jupiter Ascending for myself... and I was both delighted and disappointed by it.

Delighted because it’s, frankly, a damned good escapist, pulp sci-fi movie which is rarely pulled off as entertainingly as this one is and disappointed because, as I said in my opening line, now I don’t get to use my cool Jupiter, Arse Ending title for the review. Damn!

So why does the film work so well?

A friend of mine, Jason Pyke, had told me that it was a bit like Dune crossed with Brazil and that’s a pretty good little summation, I think... one which I’ll look at in more detail in a minute. It’s pretty much a film which covers all the bases and is influenced by a lot of science fiction and space opera over the years. A lot of the influences are not hard to pinpoint and there’s really no reason why this mess of a movie should hold together as well as it does... but it somehow seems to pull it all together and transcend the possible disasters that most postmodern amalgams fall prey to... and has fun doing it along the way.

Some of the things that really shouldn’t work are the clunky dialogue that actors and actresses like Mila Kunis (as the perfectly pulpily named Jupiter Jones), Channing Tatum, Sean Bean and Eddie Redmayne are having to try to say whilst keeping a straight face. It’s seriously bad in some places but the performances, coupled with the way it’s edited, seem to make up for it in a way that the trailer, to be fair, couldn’t have possibly been able to hide. The always brilliant Eddie Redmayne (see my reviews of his films My Week With Marilyn and The Theory of Everything) is somewhat uncharacteristically over the top here... using a terrible ‘treacherous royalty’ kind of accent and a performance which should leave you laughing but... I honestly don’t know how he got away with it but it just about works here... strangely enough.

There are a few things, asides from the performances and awesome visual effects, that the film does have going for it. It really is not unlike the Dune books by Frank Herbert, although the ‘spice’ has been replaced, right up front, by a commodity which will have any sci-fi fan worth his or her salt quoting a certain famous Charlton Heston line from the movie Soylent Green. However, to offset the tone, the film seems to work with the same kind of methodology of a Roger Corman movie... but instead of a scene of gratuitous nudity inserted for every ten pages of script, you have an action sequence to offset any of the plot as it runs it’s course. So it’s very much... talk - action scene - talk - action scene - talk - action scene in the most transparent way but it works like the best examples of that kind of escapist product works, the same way an old Doc Savage novel or a good 1930s - 1950s theatrical serial might work. And it keeps you entertained.

Also, it’s noticeable that a lot of Joseph Campbell’s theories about ‘story and myth’, the ones that George Lucas was making such a fuss about a little while ago, are woven, almost by default, into the story and screenplay... so it works really well when you have ‘magical aids’ to the heroine’s “call to adventure” like antigravity boots and the control of bees thrown into the mix. It’s wild and hilarious at some levels but it moves so fast that you never get the time to be anything other than caught up in the story.

And, yes, you do have a sudden insert into the middle of the movie which is basically ten minutes of Franz Kafka as filtered by Terry Gilliam’s Brazil... which somehow fits right into things and is capped off with a lovely little cameo of a role played by Terry Gilliam himself. A nice little cherry on the cake for that scene and, like I said, this movie is not exactly quiet about its various influences.

Fans of British comics who are familiar with the famous, multi-part epic Judge Dredd story The Day The Law Died will also recognise a strangely winged variation of the terrifying Kleggs, although they are not actually called that here. Also, the arguably ‘real life’ aliens known world wide as The Greys are mixed into this intoxicating cocktail of a movie in a way which is both sinister and representative of their place and function in modern Urban Myth and UFO Folklore. In fact, after a bit of a clunky scene, it was these characters who really pulled me into the mythology of the movie and allowed me to "buy in" to what the Wachowski’s are trying to achieve here... which is, at the end of the day, a hugely entertaining pulp fest reminiscent, it’s true, of various 1950s sci-fi stories but with a lot of heart behind the spirit of the final product... and a lot of action too.

Now, while Jupiter Ascending is unlikely to be winning any awards, it does have a strong, central female protagonist and an underlying romantic story set to a background of upper echelon, royalty and politics... and a heck of a lot of punching, fighting, chasing and general mayhem exploding onto the screen at the drop of a hat. If you go and see this movie, love it or hate it, one thing you are not going to be is fed up with it.

Oh, and as for that Giacchino score I was so anxious to hear... fantastic. Operatic and action packed scoring which isn’t completely buried in the mix and will have you tapping your toes along with the galactic obliteration. It’s a great score for a great little, big budgeted B-movie. A B-movie which, impressively, transcends its short-comings, of which there are many, and polishes it up into a fast moving, entertaining thrill ride which is over way too quickly. Definitely a film that should find its audience, I think. And if you like pulp sci-fi adventure yarns, you should seek it out too.

Eden and After/N. Takes The Dice

Grillet In The Midst

Eden and After (L'éden et après) 1970
N. Takes The Dice (N. apres les dés...) 1971
France/Czechoslovakia/Tunisia
Directed by Alain Robbe-Grillet
Redemption US 
US Blu Ray Zone A

It’s kind of interesting how these kinds of films come to light sometimes and how they’re seen to be perceived by the general public at large. I’d been seeing loads of tweets about Alain Robbe-Grillet just lately and then I saw this US Blu Ray edition containing both Eden and After and the companion piece, N. Takes The Dice, going relatively cheaply at the Westminster Film Fair. So I took the chance on it as a blind buy, thinking I’d not seen any work by this director before, and I’m rather glad I did though, it turns out, my assumptions about my previous experiences with the director were false.

When you look at a synopsis for Eden And After on the IMDB you’ll find that the basic story synopsis has been written to fit in with a very conventional and linear reading of a subjective response to the material which is actually quite alarmingly 'off' and makes me wonder whether the author had actually bothered to watch the film all the way through. It also makes me wonder why a film which eschews such a kind of linear coding, quite implicitly and deliberately (as made even clearer by the character narrative on the recut N. Takes The Dice version of the film) has been subjected to somebody trying to find a story in it for any reason anyway. As it happens, the film can be interpreted in a linear fashion if one so desires... but not in the way that it’s been written up in the IMDB, from what I can see.

Now I thought I’d not seen any of this director’s movies before but, as it turns out, I’ve not only seen one but I reviewed it for this blog a couple of years ago (see my review of Gravida here). As I started watching the movie I started to notice, very quickly within the first 30 seconds or so, a strong game playing element to the film, which led me to say to some people that I felt the movie was playing in the same kind of territory as Alain Resnais’ masterpiece Last Year In Marienbad (L'année Dernière à Marienbad). What I didn’t realise until the day after, when I looked Alain Robbe-Grillet up on the internet, was that he’d provided the story and script of the Resnais classic, so it’s interesting that his writing left his fingerprints all over the work of the Resnais film in such a way that my subconscious could pick up on it with this movie, also written by Robbe-Grillet.

Eden And After becomes quite implicit from the start that nothing is necessarily what it seems, opening with two and sometimes more voices throwing out single words or double word phrases in a kind of question and answer response in exactly the same way that someone interested in psychological responses might play a word association game. Interspersed with these shout outs are also names and job descriptions culled from the opening credits typography, which is being displayed simultaneously as these words are pitched against different shots, some of which may be establishing shots and some of which (if not all) are future or discarded shots from the movie you are about to watch, presented in a fragmentary fashion.

So we have one voice saying something like “Mise En Scene” to be answered by another voice in response saying “Flowing blood” and stuff like this, while the opening titles are running their course. Even this opening is fairly surrealistic and an indicator of the inherent, unreal nature of a lot of the film... concentrating as it does on a lot of shots of texture made by objects as part of the credits montage, pitched against the typography and voices. In a possible, and I think probable, nod to Hitchcock, one of these shots throws typography against an angled set of windows of a multistory building in a way strongly reminiscent of Saul Bass’ opening titles for North By Northwest.

The film is unbelievably rich in composition, design, editing and pretty much everything else you could think of. Starting out in the local student hangout, the cafe known as Eden, where the main protagonists play out their storytelling games with each other... the space is sharply split into vertical shapes which divide the screen and informs the way the characters are sequestered into their own areas of the frame. Indeed, even when the characters are depicted outside the less naturalistic set confines of the Eden of the title, Robbe-Grillet continues to throw up strong vertical shapes when he can and, when we have long stretches of time away from the cafe, this modus operandi helps glue the various pieces of narrative strand, if that’s the right term for this kind of “event cinema”, together in a much easier to swallow form.

Sometimes, for instance, shapes and colours of clothing, bed sheets and the arrangements of these items will match the compositional style of a painting in another shot of the other side of a room. These early indicators of echoing this specific painting become more implicit in the 'narrative drive' later on as the shapes of the painting are revealed to be a representation of a specific location, once the painting is turned through 90 degrees. So these deliberate visual echoes are left in and later exploited to build up levels of mystery in a game the director/writer plays with the audience.

Other stylistic  and creative flourishes include various characters breaking the fourth wall to let the audience know what is coming next at one point early in film. This is very much, again, in the nature of the game playing attitude expressed throughout the film on all levels and, given the free flow strategies and cat & mouse attitude of the deception displayed here, it seems almost surprising that the beautiful shot compositions are chosen to capture the chaos with a very formal, rigid delineation of space.

That being said, the director is certainly not above playing with his compositions in order to facilitate that attitude at a visual level. The cuts to and from shots and sequences in the film can be jarring and when applied to the sense of where the characters are themselves, in the journey from start to finish, can be quite disconcerting if you’re unfamiliar with this style of movie making. He uses, for instance, the ‘narrative’ to fold time back on itself and displace our notions of the order in which events in the film happen... even though this visual and verbal displacement can often contradict what has been implied as a narrative truth in earlier scenes.

Another example of the visual composition used to disrupt our preconceptions of the visual syntax of film making comes in a lovely little scene where the leading lady, played by Catherine Jourdan, is walking backwards and forwards in profile, left and right, while addressing the camera. Pacing completely off the left and right of screen... the shots are obviously stopped and restarted after each time she is absent from the screen for a short time. Robbe-Grillet takes advantage of the static, formless background to change the distance from the camera of the girl dramatically from what she started off with at one point, meaning she quickly re-enters the shot as a much larger size... only the technical limitations of the day highlighting the technique (you can see the cuts as they are being made) to spoil the illusion that the girl is changing physical space within one continuous shot.

The actual dialogue is interesting and spirited but, looking at it from today’s perspective, does seem a little naive and pretentious in some sections of the movie. You get the feeling that the cast and crew are infants who are learning new ways to walk and, in terms of the way the film is put together, there may be a grain of truth in that. However, it is quite spectacular, both visually and in terms of following through the almost surrealistic ideas in a way that does hold together as a single piece... which is perhaps a bit better than the recut the director did from alternate footage of the same shoot for French television. This version is called N. Takes The Dice and is also included on the Redemption Zone A Blu Ray.

Well, I say it’s a version but, in reality, the same scenes, some of them from different angles, are used while others completely absent from the first film are added, plus there’s a whole lot taken out to give us, pretty much, a completely different film with something approaching a more ‘cause and effect’ kind of cinema... something I’ve always used as a shorthand for linear storytelling and which, to my surprise, is a term the director also uses, through the voice of one of his characters, in this recut. Different things happen in this with, more or less, the same visuals due to little tricks like having voices with new dialogue come out of the various actors’ mouths when the shot cuts away to another person. So the students who take on the role of kidnappers and antagonists towards the end of Eden And After are transformed into rescuers/liberators and it’s done purely through the dialogue and the omission of certain footage.

This version was intended to be aired on French TV but it was never shown at the time. I honestly don’t blame them as the straight jacket thrown over it by the experimentation of the director to make the footage mean something else... an element, I suspect, that was always at the back of his mind anyway, and probably the spirit in which he approached the editing of all his films with, to make the film take shape from the treatment of the footage in various ways like a potter might reshape clay... is much less interesting and much less watchable in my opinion. Now it could be that I was less impressed because I watched both features back to back but, honestly, I think it’s more a case of this experiment not working well in terms of something which is entertaining. It might well be considered a successful experiment but, I found N. Takes The Dice to be rather a drag, in contrast to the original Eden And After, which I found naive but refreshing.

Ultimately, though, this Redemption Blu Ray is an excellent transfer of a great print and I had a much better time with it than when I watched his later work, Gravida. I’ll definitely try to explore some more of this director’s work over the coming years and I found this one to be a much better jumping on point for me. If you like French cinema and want to see something which I would best describe as a cross between Jean Luc Goddard, in terms of the form and intellect of the material... and Jean Rollin, in terms of the beauty of the shot coupled with a little less believability in the acting, then you might want to check out the cinema of Alain Robbe-Grillet and, definitely, Eden And After in particular.

A Life Of Philip K. Dick - The Man Who Remembered The Future

VALIS In Wonderland

A Life Of Philip K. Dick - 
The Man Who Remembered The Future
by Anthony Peake
Arcturus Publishing
ISBN: 978-1782122425

“It is sometimes an appropriate 
response to reality to go insane.”

“Reality is that which, when you 
stop believing in it, doesn't go away.”

Two famous quotes from Philip K. Dick.

I’ve always had no problem with the attitude of the first statement... even before I'd ever read it I’d kinda twigged that this is as good a way as any to deal with so called life. The second quote, though, has never really been that convincing to me. Reality is really a non-starter of a term for me. It’s not something that I’ve ever really found any credible definition for and I certainly choose not to live in what my senses perceive to be some kind of reality half the time... it’s just not a nice or interesting place to live, if it exists at all, from what I can make out.

That being said, Philip K. Dick has always been my favourite writer since I first discovered him at the tender age of 14 years old. The year was 1982 and, as anyone into science fiction films would be able to tell you, this was the year the first movie of a Philip K. Dick novel had been made and released into the world (although a TV adaptation of one of his short stories had appeared twenty years prior to this). The film, of course, was Blade Runner (reviewed here) and Dick himself, never got to see more than a few excerpts from it... or so I’m informed. He died fairly young, of a heart attack, earlier the same year and there’s an “In memory” credit to him right at the end of the final credit roll of that movie.

Of course, even at that age, I was quick to recognise that Blade Runner was the greatest science fiction film ever made... and there’s nothing else in the intervening decades that have challenged the fact that it’s also the greatest movie ever made, period, for that matter. I immediately wanted to read something by the original author and, of course, the obvious thing was to read the source novel for the movie, Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? One concept in that, Mercerism, is a little challenging on a first read but I persevered and then read it again. Many people will recognise that the source material and the movie are worlds apart but, saying that, I spent some time when I was doing my degree in Graphic Design writing a thesis to demonstrate that most of the ideas in the book had, in fact, made it into Ridley Scott’s 'homage' to the original material... but that’s another story. I spent the next couple of years picking up mostly second hand copies of PKDs works and ploughing through almost his entire back catalogue.

Anthony Peake’s relatively new biography of Philip K. Dick was a surprise present given to me by someone for Christmas who knows me well enough to know I loved PKD's work. I wasn’t aware of this one but I had read, many years ago, biographies of Dick by both Gregg Rickman and Lawrence Sutin, if memory serves me correctly. I can’t remember much about them but this new addition both reminded me of some stuff I’d forgotten and, also, made me aware of not just the good things about Dick but, also, the slightly worse sides of his character. Which is something I appreciate as it gives me a more rounded view of him.

Of course, there’s still no getting around the fact that, in the last ten or so years of his life, Philip K. Dick was having regular ‘astral visitations’ following visions of a pink light and talking with something which he referred to as different things throughout his experience but were maybe an expression of God or a God-like being. He wrote about these things in a 'never intended for publication' ongoing work of many thousands of pages which he called his Exegesis (which I tried to read some of decades ago and, well... all I can say about that is that I found it extremely challenging on lots of levels... I should maybe revisit it one of these days).

Or... to put all that another way and to paraphrase Brian Aldiss quoted on Dick in an interview on a documentary I saw about PKD many years ago... he went completely mad.

Now the thing is, you have to remember that, while Dick was no stranger to 'exaggeration' or the 'well decorated half truth', it seems to be quite obvious to anyone who was in his presence at the time that he 'absolutely believed' the things he said were happening to him... which runs the gamut from religious visions, off world knowledge received directly in the brain, premonitions and pre-cognitive states, altered and multiple existing timelines (what he called “orthogonal time”) and into the realm of modern alien abduction theory. Personally I don’t subscribe to this stuff until I see proof other than certain kinds of less solid evidence to back up his claims but, that’s my personal belief based on not knowing the person. I know that he did lie for certain reasons sometimes... although not maliciously, from what I can tell. I also know he took various quantities of psychedelic drugs throughout the years and once made a half hearted attempt at committing suicide.

However, I also know he’s one of the most inventive writers who ever lived and that a lot of the things he 'predicted' in his novels have come to pass in the years since his death. This is not exactly an abnormal phenomenon for science fiction writers but in Dick’s case, someone who wrote about the science of ideas, the mind, the attitudes of those in power and the society we live in... I think it’s quite exceptional as the world is fast becoming the corporate dystopia that he foresaw and it’s often in the details that these things emerge. Details which he highlighted in many of his stories.

Now, the thing is, the biographer Anthony Peake seems to be someone who is qualified to have a more open mind than me when it comes to Dick’s claims about what is sometimes called his VALIS period (Vast Active Living Intelligence System and the name of one of his novels)... which is actually unusual when it comes down to this kind of stuff because, frankly, I believe in ghosts and aliens and related phenomena a lot, as it happens. What impressed me the most about this, though, is that the author will not just push his own agendas and beliefs in his work and, frankly, that’s one of the things I look for a lot and one of the signs of a good writer. You treat everything fairly and indifferently with this kind of project and Peake certainly does that.

For example, in addition to taking Dick at this word, the writer also looks at the various other explanations which could have come into play to make Phil Dick believe these things were going on and there are various ideas around these and some of these were even educational to me personally... I now know I have to look into the fact that each hemisphere of the brain fires neurons at different rates and are unaware of the actions of the other etc. I think this kind of stuff is really fascinating, especially since it means, when certain things come into mental alignment, from what I can make out without looking into it myself, a person can hear himself talking about things which he a) wasn’t aware of knowing and b) isn’t aware of it being him saying them. So he hears voices and, perhaps, many years ago, people who had visions or said they can hear God or an angel speaking to them, may have just been listening in on a conversation they could hear from within themselves... so to speak.

Anyway, whether my interpretation of that stuff is correct or not, Peake is outstanding because he doesn’t take sides as such and presents all the evidence for and against... and there’s not a hell of a lot of it I guess... without pushing the reader into believing any one specific theory about Dick’s experiences. Experiences which came to dominate PKDs later stories and novels to the point that he was sometimes in them as a character, such as a cypher character like Horselover Fat, and sometimes even more than one character having a conversation with another version of himself, if you see what I mean. So novels like VALIS, The Transformation of Timothy Archer and Radio Free Albemuth, for example, are manifestations of the writer trying to deal with whatever he thought was happening to him at any one time... including manifestations of the same stuff which appeared in works much earlier than his actual conscious experience of this whole funny business... which fits into his theories on orthogonal time quite well, I guess, if you want to go down that path.

At the end of the biography, Peake gives an assessment of a personality test which Phil Dick took sometime in the 1950s (I think it was) and, since he is qualified to interpret such things, he does so to give as much of an indication of the man Philip Kendred Dick was as he is able. He also states why someone who may have been obviously trying to rig the test, such as Dick might have been, say as much about themselves from their answers as someone who is answering honestly... so that was quite an eye opener of an idea for me, although I would probably have worked that out myself if I’d thought about that idea for long enough.

Again, in conclusion, Peake point blank states that we will never know for 100% sure what was happening to PKD and how it affected him but, when all is said and done, I found that quite reassuring because, frankly, anybody who claimed differently would probably have lost my respect for them as a biographer. So what I can personally conclude from all this data is that Anthony Peake’s A Life Of Philip K. Dick - The Man Who Remembered The Future is a real corker of a biography and, though I don’t think it stands alone- I think I would recommend that people who are interested in PKD should read a couple of the various biographies available - it’s certainly one I would include on the list as an essential read on the life and works of Philip K. Dick. And that’s probably the finest recognition I could give to a book of this nature, to be honest. Seek it out if the subject matter interests you... you won’t find too many better than this.

Kingsman - The Secret Service

Klebb Sandwich

Kingsman - The Secret Service
2014  UK
Directed by Matthew Vaughn 
UK cinema release print.

This movie is based on the comic book The Secret Service by Mark Millar and Dave Gibbons but, apparently, it’s a very loose adaptation of the source material. Unfortunately, it’s not one I’ve read so I can’t say how well it does actually do in that area but my understanding is that it’s just a couple of the ideas and three of the minor characters from the comic (and even those with some changes, apparently) which were the only elements finding their way into the movie. That being said though, it’s a much better film than I was expecting, based on the look of the trailer which, to be blunt, didn’t really sell it to me. I was pleasantly surprised, however, because the movie is smartly put together, has a great screenplay courtesy of the director and Jane Goldman, and is technically quite efficient while still being stylish and warm with the various characters and situations.

It’s also quite unusually edgy considering the teenage target audience it looks like its going for but... I’ll get to that in a minute.

Kingsman - The Secret Service is, unsurprisingly, an homage to the old Bond films and various other super spy movies of the 1960s and it certainly doesn’t let you forget about it throughout the course of the movie. The film is loaded with references to various fictional ‘spy culture’ phenomena and, when you see some of this stuff coming through in the trailer, it all looks like it could turn out to be a bit of a postmodernistic jumble leading to a huge mess of a movie. Well, I’m happy to report that, while the film is, indeed, a postmodernistic jumble, the various referential and nostalgic elements which the cast and crew use to their best effect are treated more like the ingredients of a fine meal... that is to say, it’s well cooked, holds together a heck of a lot better than you think it might under all that eclectic weight and, more importantly, tastes delicious.

That being said, there are a hell of a lot of the clichés you will also associate with this kind of film and, well... just a lot of rather obvious things in general. Without spoiling it here, you probably all know where the end game of the “pick a puppy” scene in the trailer is going to go, for example, and there are lots of little moments of the expected happening with the predictable 'pay offs' left developing for later scenes. It’s certainly very formulaic, perhaps as part of the modus operandi of the ‘homage factor’ at work in this movie but, equally, there are also a lot of little surprises throughout the movie which you won’t... well not always... see coming and, despite the predictability of certain elements in this thing, it’s all done so well that you really won’t mind that you’ve seen most of it before... it’s put together in such a way that you kind of want some of the more predictable rewards to come to light within the scripting anyway.

I say it’s a postmodernistic pot pourri of its influences and it does, I have to say, wear these on it’s digital sleeve throughout the movie. The fact that the cover for the entrance to Kingsman HQ is a tailor shop on Saville Row, linked back to the origins of the Kingsman group and the history they are given in the film, will probably ring a few bells with the audience. It harkens back to the early James Bond movies and the fact that director Terence Young had Sean Connery taken to a tailor in Saville Row for the suits for Dr. No (reviewed here). Another reference, among many, is the appearance of the Rosa Klebb style knife boot, popularised by that character in Fleming’s original novel From Russia With Love (in the book she kills Bond with it, only for him to be resurrected by popular demand in the next book, Dr. No) and, of course, brought to life in the film of the same title by Lotte Lenya (my review of From Russia With Love can be found here). Bond films are also the subject of a discussion between Colin Firth’s Harry Hart character and Samuel L. Jacksons super villain Valentine, played much better and much more ruthlessly than you might expect from the way the trailer has been cut together.

Valentine’s beautiful henchwoman Gazelle, played by actress Sofia Boutella (a male character in the comic books) has a pair of prosthetic lower legs manifested as sharpened blades with which she can accomplish all manner of gory violence... which she, of course, does. This in itself referencing a number of Bond villains of the past who have had a lethally enhanced handicap ostentatiously transformed to their deadly advantage (think the title character of Dr. No,  or Jaws from both The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker etc).  Even one of the posters for the movie is a parody of the old, controversial at the time, For Your Eyes Only advertising. So when I say the movie wears its influences on its sleeve, it is at least a well tailored sleeve and it does so in the most haute couture manner possible.

There’s some lovely stuff going on with the cinematography and editing too... some of which looks well thought out in terms of the way the shots are cut together long before certain specific set ups are even filmed. For example, there’s a nice rolling montage of four or five shots about a third of the way through the movie which has the camera moving from the bottom of the screen to the top and as it reaches the top of the scrolling screen (which is travelling downwards, obviously), a clear and well designed frame stop comes into view and peels into the next part of the scrolling montage. It’s a way of getting the basic messages over quickly and efficiently as to where different elements in the story are heading but, it also pays homage to the film’s comic book routes by presenting scrolling frames which could perhaps be read by some as an echo of comic book panels... so this was all rather well thought out. The camera had to pan through the shots at exactly the same speed to make the edit  work... although that may be an added movement in post production for all I know... but however it was achieved, it all works rather well.

I said the film was quite edgy for the teenage audience it’s going for. By that I don’t mean it’s inappropriate, far from it, but it is quite gutsy of the movie company to let it through in this form bearing in mind the way the BBFC have de-clawed anything and everything in recent memory and I applaud the company for it (there seems to be some disagreement as to whether there were cuts for the UK market or not). Where would the hero of a movie be offered, and make good on, the prospect of anal sex with a princess if he saves the world, for example... no, I’m not making this stuff up.

The film is also very violent, quite spectacularly so a lot of the time. I don’t want to spoil too much of this for people who, like me, are going to go in relatively blind, but there’s a scene utilising a curiously British adorned version of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture which will really make people pay attention (and hopefully giggle uncontrollably) and there’s a lovely little breakdance sequence where Gazelle faces off against the film’s main protagonist Eggsy (played likeably by newcomer Taron Egerton) which will hopefully bring a smile to your face too. The violence in both of these sequences is mostly used to comic effect but there’s also a more serious tone to the violent shenanigans of some of the characters too...

The main premise of the way Valentine intends to threaten mankind, for example, is all tied into a plot device which, when activated, brings on a kill crazy spree of brutal violence not unlike the pseudo-zombies in the 28 Days/Weeks Later movies. There’s a brilliant sequence which is a full on 5 or more minutes of fight choreography involving Colin Firth which is both stylistically brutal but which also shows off one of my favourite things about the action sequences in this movie... they are all edited together so well that, even in a free flow melee involving 80 or more people, you aren’t going to get confused or lost in the choreography. Which is pretty impressive if you think about it, and one of the arts of modern action film-making that seems to have fallen by the way side a little with some directors.

The acting performances are all superb and the editing and pacing all flows right along to give the audience a path through the movie which never once gets boring. The sound design is also pretty amazing, with the sound of the gunshots in particular seeming to have a lot more presence in the mix, so that they sometimes surprise you with their speed and intensity on the soundtrack. Like I said... the film is quite edgy.

And last but by no means least, we have the score composed by Henry Jackma and Matthew Margeson, which really does have one foot in the modern world of action scoring and one foot in the sixties. At various times throughout the course of the movie, the same kind of slow build ostinato fugues that John Barry used to conjure up for such Bond films as You Only Live Twice (reviewed here) and Diamonds Are Forever (reviewed here) are referenced both structurally and in terms of their orchestration, to give the audience a big hit of nostalgic, sixties, super-spy magic at the appropriate places in the narrative. This is all good stuff and I’ll certainly be ordering the CD when it comes out later in the month (hopefully).

At the end of the day, Kingsman - The Secret Service is a big popcorn movie for teenagers and adults alike. It is unashamedly this but, since it also hits all the right notes in terms of tone and does so in a technically competent and brilliant manner throughout, I think even the most jaded popcorn warriors will be hard pushed not to get a thrill out of this one and, frankly, the slightly lengthy running time just whizzes along and will leave you wanting more. I know I’m hoping for a sequel at some point, if the creative people can bring the same kind of charm and intensity to the finished product that this one has. A really great little movie and a definite hard recommend from me. Enjoy.

The IPCRESS File

Palmer, Sans Cheese

The IPCRESS File
1965 UK 
Directed by Sidney J. Furie
Network/Rank 
UK BluRay Zone B

When this well loved and hugely popular British spy film was released into cinemas back in 1965, one of the criticisms of it was that it was “over directed”... whatever that means.

I don’t think it’s over directed.

I think it’s... not only one of the greatest pieces of technically brilliant film making ever committed to celluloid, able to get away with so many innovative things within its modest running time... it also does all these amazing things without ever once losing the fiery, burning, emotive heart at its centre. You do care for and relate to the various characters as you meet them throughout the course of the film... and that’s just the icing on the cake.

Based on the first of Len Deighton’s four novels about a nameless (in the books) spy - The IPCRESS File, Horse Under Water, Funeral In Berlin and Billion Dollar Brain (the last two were also made into sequels to this film) - it was pretty much a conscious decision that the central spy role, called Harry Palmer in the films, a role which pretty much shot Michael Caine to international stardom, would be an antidote to the kind of 'secret agent' stereotypes running in the wake of the hugely successful James Bond films produced, at that time, by Saltzman and Broccoli. Indeed, Harry Saltzman also produced this movie, although he hated the director, which is a shame because Furie is a veritable magician of the silver screen when it comes to what he did with this movie.

I’ve been watching this series of films for over three decades by now and my friend bought me the new Blu Ray edition from the Network label for Christmas. It’s an absolutely brilliant print/transfer and, watching it once more, I am falling in love with the movie all over again as the spellbinding technical innovation, combined with the beautifully written, sharply witty script and the unbelievably cool musical score from John Barry... all work their magic.

The film starts off with almost a double pre-credits sequence, first starting with the kidnapping of a scientist and the death of a British Secret Service agent before introducing us to Michael Caine’s Harry Palmer character waking up in bed to his alarm clock. The credits start running as he goes about his business making coffee, dressing and various other things in a dull routine, with the finding of a misplaced gun in bed to juxtapose the concept that the life of a secret agent is often as humdrum as any other job.

However, even getting to the point where the credits start running over this sequence, the visual and audio artistry already comprises a brilliant few minutes of film, full of beautiful ideas. For instance, as the scientist Radcliffe and his bodyguard, an unnamed secret agent, are walking down Marylebone Station, Furie and his editor Peter Hunt (who edited the early James Bond films and who would later go on to direct the greatest Bond film, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service - reviewed here) use shots of the two of them walking towards the camera. The camera then cuts (on movement, which is an innovation Hunt first brought into play in Dr. No - reviewed here) away to something else before cutting back on the same scene at a slightly different angle and with the figures closer to the camera, still moving towards us. This is pretty amazing because I reckon the first time you see this movie, you don’t even notice Furie doing little dynamic things like this. But this is not the only thing in just this opening sequence...

As the agent discovers the villain’s henchman and the disappearance of Radcliffe, we cut away outside to the disturbing sound of a train whistle heralding death... we then pan over to where the agent’s corpse has been left in a mail trolley. As the camera cuts to a closer shot of the dead agent, with his eyes almost filling the screen in a face tipped on its side, we hear a very cool and extended, mounting John Barry musical sting... followed by the sound of an alarm clock and the replacement of the dead agent’s eye with Harry Palmer’s eye, which we then slowly pan back from to see him at the same kind of angle.

And then... on top of all that... we have a point of view shot from Harry Palmer’s perspective as we look around his apartment and can’t see very much at all... why is it all a blur and out of focus? Because Furie is using this technique as a way of, almost subconsciously, introducing the concept of Harry Palmer’s (soon to be Michael Caine’s) trademark glasses. He puts his glasses on and then the point of view shot of Harry’s apartment is repeated... this time in clear focus. We then see Harry himself from the other side of the room as he gets out of bed and opens the curtains, with the alarm clock in foreground, which has been continuing on the soundtrack all this time. Then he comes towards the screen to hit the alarm clock off and as it stops... that’s when John Barry’s opening title music suddenly thunders in... absolutely gobsmacking stuff and we’re only a few minutes into the film.

And it doesn’t stop there... the whole film is loaded with absolutely clever stuff... including a repeat of the point of view/blurred focus shot much later on, but this time used in reverse as Harry cleans his glasses at a lecture, to highlight the fact that he is still being tailed by the Americans.

Another thing the director does, and somehow makes work brilliantly, occurs when Palmer first goes to see his boss, Colonel Ross (played brilliantly by Guy Doleman).

The scene starts out with Ross looking out of his office windows, feeding the pigeons, and not looking at Palmer, in order to establish his status within the conversation. We see some of the action of this sequence from the other side of the windows which Furie, brilliantly, uses to split portions of the screen so that when Palmer comes in on the other side of the room, he can interact with Ross and both are in the same shot at massively different sizes and each highlighted by different sets of rectangles... marvellous stuff. The scene goes on as Ross makes Palmer go back to shut the door and keep him waiting as much as possible... never once asking him to sit down. When the two characters talk, they are sometimes seen in reverse of each other on opposite parts of the screen as a small head, for example, on bottom left while the entire rest of the screen is black from being masked by the other character’s body. As the characters move about the room, they are seen talking from individual shots in contrasting sizes and angles but, because they are always speaking and looking towards the opposite side of the screen, the eye lines somehow still manage to match between shots and, with Hunt’s deft editing, it all works seamlessly as a conversation. Seriously, you may not notice it the first time around but, try watching it with the sound turned off on just a visual level (something I probably ought to do with it sometime) and you will probably fall off your seat with what the director is getting away with here. It’s just perfect.

He’s also setting the scene for some continuity later in the film - when Ross is seen at one point he is feeding ducks from the side of a bridge which is a nice character echo of him feeding the pigeons earlier in his office. More relevantly, when Ross takes Palmer over to meet his new boss “Dalby” (played so well by Nigel Greene), Dalby plays exactly the same 'office politics' games with Palmer, to the extent that some of the dialogue and shots are pretty much the same, to both show what’s going on and also to offer, perhaps, a slight criticism of the silly suits in power and their stupid games which, frankly, Palmer obviously has no respect or love of.

And later, when Furie shows another of a few meetings between Ross and Dalby, when Ross goes into Dalby’s office, he does so aggressively, taking the upper hand, not playing any of the same games and offering up one of the ultimate insults in office politics... invading the other man’s desk space with his hat, briefcase and umbrella. That probably doesn’t mean a lot to people in some countries and cultures, and perhaps not to the younger generation here in the UK, I shouldn’t wonder, but certainly British people of a certain generation (and definitely back then) will know what all those shenanigans are about.

There’s a lot in the details and focus of the movie and its probably quite rightly been said somewhere along the line, and certainly by me, that the film is fresh and believable because it takes the fantastic plots and chooses to highlight the little details of the hum drum and ‘everyman’ in a secret agent’s life... like always signing forms for a piece of equipment such as a firearm or a car... and making sure the report forms are filled in for each different action in an investigation. Stuff like that. However, even though we are looking at actors playing characters in a very believable and naturalistic manner... you can’t ignore the brilliance and dynamism of the way the shots and sounds... and even some of the dialogue... is put together.

More visual wonders would include things like highlighting an American agent who is tailing Palmer by giving him an even more ridiculous pair of glasses than the main lead (I had a pair of glasses like Palmer's for years, specifically because of this film, and haven’t really strayed too far from the style ever since) and someone has the bright idea of adding a white piece of tape down the middle of the bridge to suggest that they’ve been broken at sometime. However, what that trick with the piece of tape is really about is to make absolutely sure the audience establishes in their mind what the character in question is wearing on his face. Why? Because later, when Palmer accidentally shoots the American agent dead, Furie can shoot the aftermath in a much more creative manner. Once the agent is dead, we don’t see his face again, we see just his distinctive glasses lying on the floor to let us know who Palmer has really shot. This is followed by an absolute humdinger of a shot which is a shot from the ground, looking up through the lenses of those same glasses, to catch the reactions of Dalby and Palmer as they come into focus through the glasses. I’ll say it again... this stuff is absolutely amazing.

All the way through the film, Furie is doing stuff like this shot after visually rich shot. He uses Dutch angles constantly, uses surface colours and textures to split up frames within frames and a load of other clever things while, unbelievably, the footage all cuts together amazingly well and isn’t jarring and certainly never works against the naturalistic tone of the acting. And there’s more...

A shot down through a light fitting on the ceiling of Palmer’s apartment reveals, when the light is turned on, another dead American agent’s body. A fight between Grantby’s henchman and Palmer is filmed from a distance and from inside a classic, red British telephone box, the camera looking through the windows and into the distance as the fight between the protagonist and antagonist is split by the red verticals and horizontals of the booth. This is a far cry from some of the stuff which you see in, say, the average James Bond movie.

Also a far cry from James Bond is the prelude to an unseen sex scene between Jean, Ross’s agent working undercover in Dalby’s team and played by the wonderful Sue Lloyd, and Harry Palmer. It’s all brilliantly done by razor sharp dialogue and body language. After a meal that Harry Palmer has cooked for them, Sue Lloyd asks Caine “Do you always wear your glasses?” To which Caine replies, “Yes, except in bed.” With that, Sue Lloyd slowly removes Caines glasses and the suggestion of what’s about to happen, off camera, is pretty implicit and also very effective. This is pretty good stuff.

One thing I did catch on the dialogue on this viewing, though, was in a scene where Palmer is telling Dalby about another American agent. The sound looping is quite bad in that the words “American agent” suddenly don’t lip synch in on that portion of the sentence. I reckon the dialogue, recorded wild sound on the day, was replaced with a slightly different line, possibly due to some kind of censorship issue, and was fixed later on in the dub. Of course, I doubt if I’ll ever know the truth or not of that guess... but that’s my belief at any rate.

One more important thing to talk about here before I’m done with this review though and that is, of course, John Barry’s tremendous score. He’d already made a huge hit with the sound of spy music with the Bond films, when he reorchestrated Monty Norman’s original Bond theme (subsequently used all over Dr. No in places it wasn’t even rearranged for) and had gone on to build on that success with From Russia With Love, Goldfinger and, from the same year as The IPCRESS File, Thunderball. For this film he uses some of the same musical language but he makes it colder, edgier and also uses a cymbalom, which is similar in some respects to the zither played by Anton Karas in the score which inspired Barry for this one, The Third Man. What we get with The IPCRESS File, of course, is another heavily influential kind of more serious, cold war “spy sound” which would be copied stylistically time and time again.

Barry would build on this himself the following year when he scored the film adaptation of Adam Hall’s (Elleston Trevor’s pen name) novel The Berlin Memorandum. The first of the Quiller novels, this one would soon be retitled after the film adaptation and forever be known, in successive printings, as The Quiller Memorandum (review of this movie in a new Blu Ray transfer, coming soon to this blog). Both IPCRESS and Quiller have wonderful music and represent Barry at the absolute best of his flip side to Bond scoring... truly memorable (and immensely hummable) music.

And that’s about it for this review, I think. I’ve never had the opportunity to take any kind of film studies class in my life (hey, when I was a kid, if you wanted to be 'creative' you had the options of Woodwork, Metalwork or Art and that was it) but I would hope that tutors instructing future, inspired students these days make a point of putting The IPCRESS File on their syllabus. There is so much innovation and inventiveness in pretty much every minute of footage that a proper study of it would surely arm people with an inspired approach to the syntax of the motion picture. But the heck with that... it’s also one of the most enjoyable spy films of the mid-1960s and is an absolute classic that anyone worth their salt, who appreciates movies, will want to look at and enjoy. It deserves it’s status as one of the great British movies... which I assume it surely has... and people should not forget or underestimate this great film. If you’ve never seen it, the new Blu Ray transfer from Network is right up your street, loaded with the same extras as the old Anchor Bay US DVD and with a whole heap of other extras on top of that. Just buy it... you surely won’t regret it.

NUTS4R2 @ FilmsOnWax

Hi there,

Just a quick shout out to some of my off site articles on film music, a subject I love but am less confident when it comes to writing about it. The FilmsOnWax links have all now been added to my music section in the clickable Index near the top right of this page. Just click on ther and scroll on down past the Books and Films before coming to the Music section, just before the TV Shows and Miscellaneous Articles sections.

Alternatively, you can click on the titles below to take you straight to the articles. I hope you like them all and give FilmsOnWax your support...

Best Scores of 2014

Deep Note: The Foundations of a Good Giallo Score Library

Eerie Listening: 31 Great Euro Horror Scores Part 1

Eerie Listening: 31 Great Euro Horror Scores Part 2

Eerie Listening: 31 Great Euro Horror Scores Part 3

Twang! Twang! You’re Dead: The Foundations of a Spaghetti Western Score Library Part 1

Twang! Twang! You’re Dead: The Foundations of a Spaghetti Western Score Library Part 2

Mortdecai

Depp-reciation

Mortdecai
2015  US
Directed by David Koepp 
UK cinema release print.

Okay... I feel I need to do two things here right off the bat. One is to explain my reasons for actually voluntarily going to the cinema to see this tragic misfire of a movie and the other is to point out that there were actually one or two good things to be found in it... just not enough to save the picture, I think.

Also, let me point out straight away, in case you were in any doubt, I really hate trashing a movie where a lot of obviously talented people have worked a long time on something. It’s not the best thing to do... just the most truthful. I said something along the lines of my personal stakes in being honest on the last review I posted (see my review of Ex Machina here) and so I have to be as straight with my readers as I can. Sometimes that means saying things which might hurt some people’s feelings so... I apologise for that now.

Shooting from the hip then, I should perhaps share the story of how I once used to say that Johnny Depp was such a talented actor (and he certainly is a genius of the profession) and builder of characters that there was pretty much no movie he couldn’t save just by being in it. Look at the three sequels to the original Pirates Of The Caribbean movie if you need proof of that. Awful films but still fairly watchable because Depp is such a pleasure to observe. All that changed when I saw a movie he was in back in 2004 called Secret Window, an adaptation of a Stephen King novel he was top lining. All I can say is... not even Johnny Depp could save that movie. It was just awful.

Flash forward to the screening of Depp’s new film Mortdecai and I am once again shown that, even though Depp is obviously doing his best and probably loving it, by the looks of it, he and his fellow talented actors and actresses are unable to pull this through and make it anything more than... hard to watch without constantly checking the nearest time piece. Imagine my surprise, then, when I later discovered that David Keopp, the film’s director, had actually also directed Secret Window back in 2004. I dunno... maybe it’s just Keopp’s movies that Johnny Depp can’t save, who knows? Although some of Depp’s more recent stints for Tim Burton have been hovering into that category, methinks.

Now one of the reasons for me going to see this movie was because the trailer showed a variety of well known actors in a promotion which was, honestly, absolutely terrible looking... but that’s not always a problem. You see, I remember seeing the trailer for the Terry Gilliam remake of The Adventures Of Baron Munchhausen back in the late 1980s and it being an absolutely abysmal advert for the film. I certainly didn’t want to go and see it but, after being almost pressured into it by a bunch of friends who wanted me to go with them, it turned out to be an absolutely marvellous movie and nothing like the terrible trailer, presumably put together by people who just didn’t know how to market this kind of stuff, had made it out to be. I thought this might well be the case with Mortdecai since so many great actors such as Johnny Depp, Gwyneth Paltrow, Ewan McGregor and Paul Bettany were all involved. After all, why would such people lend thier time and talent to something if they didn’t have a heck of a lot of faith in the product... they’d obviously read the script hadn’t they?

Alas, it’s an old cliché about film making at best but, like a few films before it in the history of cinema, Mortdecai appears to be a classic case of the movie makers actually having a much better time filming this half-baked monstrosity than the potential audience would ever have watching it. The script seems to be the main problem here too, in my opinion, having not read Kyril Bonfiglioli’s novel Don’t Point That Thing At Me on which this movie is purported to be based. The cast are all absolutely marvellous and invested in these neat little characters they’ve all obviously had fun putting together but the problem with the script is that... well, for the most part it’s just not even remotely funny. Or at least it’s not funny during the crucial first half an hour or so to help elevate the audience into a lighter mood. Indeed, a fair few of the audience actually started talking to each other after a while, in their restlessness, and continued on throughout the course of the movie. I’ve rarely seen such a talkative audience behaving this badly in a cinema except for once that I can recall, back in 2004. I wonder what that film was called? Hint: I mention it by title in the third and fourth paragraphs here?

The other problem I have with the script is that there are hardly any likeable or redeemable (to a point) characters in this. I can’t relate to any of these super rich, cowardly fops and I think it proves that point when I say that the only one I was really invested in throughout the movie was Paul Bettany’s character Jock Strap (yeah, this movie really is pitching at that level, folks) in that he seemed to be the only character in the film with his head half screwed on the right way round, to be honest.

There are, as I said, two really decent things about the movie, asides from the talented but mostly wasted acting abilities of a number of amazing people, and I’m not forgetting that...

The first thing is the transition sequences from country to country. Mortdecai is an art dealer on a globe hopping, secret agent style mission and the film makers have really done a terrific update on the travel sequences, harkening back to the times in old movies (and films like the Indiana Jones franchise, which were also looking back with nostalgia to those same old movies) of the plane graphic travelling over the map of the world. This time the plane is three quarters on and jetting through easily identifiable and zoomed in landmarks of the various countries including large, two dimensional letterforms standing up in three dimensional space. The various planes swoop past or through the letters of the country to get to their destination, in one memorable moment smashing through the typography for Los Angeles. This is all very nice.

The other pretty good thing about the movie is the score by Mark Ronson and Geoff Zanelli. It’s mixed well into the foreground and sounds like a funky, mid sixties spy movie on acid in certain sections which, to be fair, is not quite appropriate to the visuals but I think that’s not the issue here. I think what’s happening here is that the producers kinda guessed they had a dud on their hands and were looking to the score to save the movie somehow (I’d heard a few tracks from the score before the film opened and that was another reason I’d allowed myself to be lured into the cinema to see it). My suspicion is that the composers were scoring the film that the crew wanted to make, rather than come up with something appropriate to reflect the final product. Either way, whether they were instructed to try and save the movie in this way or not, the score pretty much rocks and if the planned CD release still goes ahead in February, I’ll probably pick this one up, I think.

Not so, the film though, which I’ll hopefully never have to sit down to watch again in my life. From the terrible Temple Of Doom parody at the start of the movie and right on through to the end credits, Mortdecai proved to be a well played, well crafted but terribly written and unfunny attempt at an adventure flavoured comedy. Very young children might, perhaps, quite like it but for anybody with a better developed sense of fun, well... even big kids like myself will probably find it less than enjoyable. A bit of a cinematic disaster, I’m afraid, would be my sad conclusion.

Ex Machina

Blues Ex Machina

Ex Machina
2014 USA/UK
Directed by Alex Garland 
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Some light spoilers on this one, I guess. 

Right. Been worrying about how to approach this review because, frankly, I know that one of my twitter followers really liked this movie and I suspect she’d be very disappointed with my response to it if she ever read this. However, I’ve always kept the reviews on the blog honest as to my reactions to the films and it would be irresponsible to my readers to be anything less than that now... so should Becky Grace Lea of the nethersphere known as Twitter ever stumble on this review... and I sincerely hope she doesn’t... turn back now and don’t read this one would be my best advice to her.

Also, anyone who reads on from here and hates this review should probably go and check out Becky’s review of this which, I’m sure, will probably be up at some time within the next day or two of this review going live and which can almost certainly be found somewhere on the Assorted Buffery website here. She’ll have a much more positive spin on it for you, I’m sure. As for me... well you were all warned.

Okay, so Ex Machina is the first film to be directed by the famous novelist Alex Garland and, I have to say, it kinda feels like it’s a first film and somebody trying to get something out of their system, in some respects. I can’t say I was particularly looking forward to this one since, after seeing the trailer, I was pretty sure I knew exactly where it was going to be going with the ending of the movie. Well, the good news is... the film doesn’t quite go exactly where you assume it will be going from the set up in the trailer. Another piece of good news is that the implications of Deus Ex Machina being used as a literary device to give the film a cop out, miracle ending is not the usage the title of the film is embracing. It’s merely a metaphorical identifier of the origins of the phrase and not the modern, more common usage of the term.

And those are the two bits of really good news I have about the film. Now for the mostly bad stuff...

The ending of the movie and attempted sleight of hand used as a general progression towards that idea doesn’t really work because we are already expecting something almost clever to happen and, when it just starts telegraphing the ending of the movie to us within, literally, the first ten minutes of the opening sequence, we are pretty much there at the end already, and you have the rest of the running time to start wondering when one of the other characters will stop being an idiot and see what’s really going on. Once the power cuts start, and we really know they’re not power cuts right from the very first one, then the audience will sense straight away the degree of manipulation at work within the main narrative strand and it doesn’t take much of a push to realise where this will all be leading to. Indeed, by the time one of the lead characters cuts his arm open to reveal certain information to the audience, it’s already too late... we’ve started ditching those preconceptions based on the trailer already within the first ten minutes... so that surprise at the evidence of actual humanity within the film is somewhat stingless and antiseptic by that point.

But, you know what? There’s good stuff in this movie too. It’s just always tempered with the bad stuff.

Some of the acting, for instance, is very good... although the dialogue does seem to be a bit streamlined and non naturalistic at times. Are the sometimes less convincing moments, then, the fault of the actors or the writing of the lines? I’m not sure. Hard to call. It maybe explains why the one character in this film without any lines coming out of her mouth was, for me at least, the most interesting and watchable presence in the film. That is to say, while I found the main robot creation played by Alicia Vikander to be interesting and, due to her android nature, kind of spot on... it was the character played by another actress I’d not heard of before, Kyoko played by Sonoya Mizuno, who grabbed all my attention in this. As an actress and presence on the screen, she was absolutely stunning in this and the one reason why I didn’t feel like I’d wasted my Saturday evening at the cinema. I’d definitely like to see more films with her in and, possibly because she didn’t have some very basic and clunky dialogue coming out of her lips, I found her to be the best thing about Ex Machina.

The story itself seems to be guilty of the thing I’ve been accusing most US made science fiction films of doing in the last ten years or so... playing catch up with the 1950s. These are exactly the same kinds of stories that people like Philip K. Dick were writing as shorts in the 50s and 60s and for someone to be claiming this is an original idea, or even that it’s executed as well or with at least an element of surprise being retained, is something I find to be really poor behaviour. But, like I said, there’s good with the bad.

Alex Garland can direct quite well.

That’s an established fact, now. The opening montage is, perhaps, a little aggresively edited and some of the shots are maybe not as creative as they could be given the artificial nature of sets which can be controlled to the nth degree. Nothing hugely, visually creative springs to mind when I think back on the film now. However, when edited together, the footage cuts together in a way that was neither confusing or in any way inhibiting you seeing what the director wants you to see... well, apart from accidentally telegraphing the ending, that is. What that means is that, while this does indeed feel like a first film... it’s one where the director has proven his confidence and, frankly, means that people should maybe give him a load more money so he can grow and become the directorial artist that’s obviously lurking within the best selling novelist. I think this guy has proven, with the clean look and feel of this one, that he definitely has the potential.

As a film which is entertaining... it had its moments but most of those, as I’ve indicated already, featured Sonoya Mizuno’s turn as Kyoko. A role not bound by any lines the actress might have been required to speak. In fact, I would say that both Kyoko and Vikander’s Ava were the most watchable aspects of this movie. The two main male protagonists, played by Domhnall Gleeson and Oscar Isaac, both bring a lot of enthusiasm but it seemed, to me, that they were much more hampered by the script. Real people don’t talk like this and, if you’re someone with the genius of a director like, say, Hal Hartley, then the warmth and emotional intent will always come through the stylistic stripping down of the sometimes clinical dialogue but, with this film, the performances seem to add up to being less than the sum of their combined parts, it seemed to me.

The ending, also, or should I say the epilogue to the film, seemed like something we don’t need. The final fate of Domhnall Gleeson’s character was already fairly eloquently sealed at one point and the last series of shots of both him and Ava, after their last scene together, were completely unnecessary. The points about whether Ava has managed to pass a specific kind of test had all been made, perhaps a lot sooner than the director intended, and the final scenes shown are not giving us any new information... I think that stuff could have been pared back right down and, perhaps, if the director had even lead us to the point where he’d cut to the credits before the last scene between Alicia Vikander and Domhnall Gleeson took place, maybe with the final moments having Ava looking over Gleeson's unconscious body, Garland would at least have given us a film with a little more enticing ambiguity at the conclusion as opposed to what we have here. That being said, the totally superfluous last 6 or so minutes might well have been a studio addition as opposed to Garland’s own natural conclusion to the narrative and so it might not be his fault. As it is, the ending is overcooked and it’s a shame because giving us a lot less of a conclusion would have at least encouraged the audience to think around some of the key issues more than they will now, I expect.

The only other possible saving grace to this film might well have been the score by Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury but, while I found it effective in some parts of the movie, I found it to be more wallpapery in other parts and I wonder if that’s the fault of the way the score has been mixed into the foley or if it’s within the composition. I’m not sure how it will play as a stand alone listen on a CD but I think it was a bit of a hit and miss affair in the body of the movie itself. Not sure if I’m going to give it a try away from the movie or not, truth be told. I’ll have to see how much the album is if it ever gets a proper, non-downloadable, physical release.

The film itself, though, seemed a bit less special than a lot of the buzz going around on twitter had lead me to believe. It seems popular, which is good news for Garland and hopefully he’ll get another go to grow as a director. As for me and judging it still in terms of someone who had seen the trailer for the movie first, I’d have to say that Ex Machina certainly wasn’t a terrible movie but, neither was it a particularly good one. That is to say, it’s not nearly as bad as the movie I was expecting it to be... but not nearly as good as the movie I was hoping it would be. It’s not a film which many will find all that challenging, I expect, but some will possibly like the “popcorn” fodder aspect to it and the CGI is done quite well for special effects enthusiasts. I think future generations will probably respond to it better because of the lack of historical journey to the concept when they’re youngsters, perhaps. I just hope there won’t be a Deus Ex Machina Part Deux.

The Oily Maniac

Oil Be Back

The Oily Maniac
1976 Hong Kong 
Directed by Meng Hua Ho
Shaw Brothers/Celestial Pictures 
Hong Kong DVD Region 3

It was just about ten years ago that I first saw The Oily Maniac at the cinema. I can date it fairly accurately because I went with my friends Teresa and @cultofthecinema and the former was pregnant with her first child at the time. However, her “mum to be” status didn’t stop her going to see a Shaw Brothers all nighter at the Curzon Soho consisting of these four films playing throughout the night - The Monkey Goes West (also directed by Meng Hua Ho and the first of the four Shaw Brothers Monkey movies), The Mighty Peking Man (a fun antidote to anyone with a love of King Kong), The Super Infra Man (aw, don’t even ask... but it’s awesome) and this one... The Oily Maniac.

I’d managed to grab the other three movies on Region 3, from the wonderful Hong Kong Shaw Brothers label Celestial Pictures, not long after I first saw them (along with a few other Shaw Brothers classics) but, for some reason, The Oily Maniac had always managed to elude me as a purchase and, sadly, the huge back catalogue put out by the label on R3 is now almost entirely extinct. Then, for Christmas 2014, my cousin Steve came to the rescue as he managed to source a second hand copy of the film from ebay, again on the Celestial Pictures DVD label. This company is renowned, at least with me and a small bunch of my friends, for treating these movies with absolute love and releasing them in pristine transfers, uncut, in their original language and with optional English subtitles that don’t, as some Hong Kong labels are guilty of, look like they’ve been translated by someone who managed to glance briefly at a UK Dictionary at some point in their life.

The movie has a simple plot and stars Tien Lung Chen (of the original Shaw Brothers movie of The Water Margin and the Shaw Brothers/Hammer produced movie The Legend Of The Seven Golden Vampires, amongst others) as a man crippled by having polio in his youth and who works as a put upon young legal assistant for a bunch of less than scrupulous lawyers. However, when his Uncle is scheduled to be executed for accidentally killing one of a gang of villains who are threatening the local Coconut Oil Factory where his childhood lady friend works... things get complicated, in a kind of B-movie 1950s Western kind of plotting way. Just before his Uncle is executed, he reveals to our hero a big set of drawn and written instructions tattooed on his back on how to use a magic spell which will transform our mild mannered polio victim into a defender of justice. Tien copies down the instructions and follows them, digging a big hole in the middle of his living room, which he then jumps in, sinking into the seeping oil beneath. When he comes back up out of the hole he is transformed into... The Oily Maniac.

If this kind of oily plotting sounds kinda crude, well yeah.. it’s not very good. In fact it’s dire... so dire that I love it and can probably stand to watch it a few more times in my life, truth be told. The Oily Maniac goes on an oily rampage and tracks down, over the course of the film, the various villains and, in one case, villainess, who are all tied in with the back handed deals taking place around the Coconut Oil Factory.

Funnily enough, pretty much all the people in this film who end up on the slick end of The Oily Maniac’s wrath all seem to be either an inherent rapist or a woman who is seducing men to her advantage (and other bad things) as well as all being involved in the whole Coconut Oil fiasco. And when I say raping and seducing, there’s a handy guide to telling who is doing what to whom, subtly hidden within the genetic make-up of the film. That is to say, pretty much every woman in the film has her breasts bared at some point... mostly against her will. The ladies in question either have their bodices ripped away from them before being raped - and aggressive breast revealing does seem to be the most common form of communication between men and women in this movie, it has to be said - or they rip their own dresses off to get the attention of the men in their lives. Or men about to be in their lives, I guess.

Not to worry though because, when Tien Lung Chen is lurking nearby and senses this heavy handed nude injustice, he oils himself up to kill anyone with a penchant for revealing female flesh. That’s right... he finds the nearest funnel spewing oil... or can of oil... or some other kind of bizarrely handy receptacle of oil... just lying about on the street... and slathers himself up in it until his transformation takes place and, once more, he is... The Oily Maniac! A creature that looks like a badly latex shrouded, black monster with a glowing red heart and who destroys his enemies while making moans and wailing noises which, to be honest, sound like Lou Ferringo with a bad hangover rather than anything else I can think of right now.

Here he is... a creature who can suddenly turn himself into a badly superimposed oil slick so he can follow cars or appear halfway up someone’s wall before rearing up again in all his well oiled glory. Cut a limb off and he grows it back. Cut his head off and he grows it back. Pearce his glowing, pulsating red heart and... oh, wait a  minute. Nobody thinks of that. Why the heck has he got a flashing, pulsing, glowing red heart in the middle of all that oily skin? I’m sure it might have been scripted as being a weak spot at some stage in the game but... nope, it seems it’s completely superfluous in the final version of the movie as released. Instead, when The Oily Maniac starts becoming a bit of a nuisance and wanted by the police for his dastardly crimes against very bad people... the woman who once loved him finds another, not too complicated to work out, way of ending his black oily reign. I guess it’s what you would call standard oil procedure, in this case.

Standard oil procedure also seems to include plugging in a Johnny Williams score whenever the title creature comes out to play. At first, when the musical alarm bells start sounding (in this original presentation of the film, at least... it might have been “copyright censored” in any US releases), it sounds like composer Yung-Yu Chen is just nicking and rerecording Johhny Williams famous two note ostinato shark theme from Jaws. However, it’s not long before every time our black, leaky avenger roars onto the screen, the film makers just needle drop the famous melody straight from the original 1975 vinyl album of Jaws wholesale, in its original orchestration. This kind of thing goes on a lot in certain kinds of movies from countries where the copyright laws are... well... different to what they would be in any sensible usage. Hong Kong and Turkish cinema are hotbeds of musical lawsuits waiting to happen... don’t get me started. Anyway...

As I said, the story and dialogue in this one are pretty terrible and, it would be remiss of me not to point out that the quality of the acting performances are of an equal calibre in this case. Of course, with lines like the ones they’ve been given, I can only sympathise with the actors and actresses in this tale when it comes to the dim witted sentences they are asked to say out loud but at least the director tries to keep things interesting. The shot design is not the greatest in the world by anybody’s standards but it’s not horrible and there are some nice stylistic flourishes, such as when Tien Lung Chen “accidentally” catches the light fitting in his living room as he is pick axing his way through the floor to make his magic oil hole... the light then swings this way and that, making the lighting and movement in the subsequent shots of that scene quite interesting to look at.

However, as good as the camerawork is in certain sections of the movie, it doesn’t do anything to boost the quality of the film in this case. This doesn’t, however, stop the movie the director has “rigged up” from being a whole can of fun and if you are a fan of inept and, frankly, ridiculous looking monsters  surrounded by scenes of scantily clad, big bosomed ladies and bad acting, all supported by bits of a world famous Johnny Williams score, then you’re certainly in for a treat. As far as my involvement with the film goes and my viewing habits regarding it... well, all I can say is... oil be back.

The Psychology Of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

And All Who Salander

The Psychology Of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo
Edited by Robin S Rosenberg
Benbella Books
ISBN: 978-1936661343

The Psychology Of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is a collection of essays written by various psychologists who are generally specialists in their chosen areas of interests. I was at first put off from buying this tome, it has to be said, because it is from a range of publications branded as “pop psychology” books and, frankly, it sounded a bit amateurish to me. However, I also ultimately found myself compelled to buy it because I am a big fan of Stieg Larrson’s Millenium Trilogy of novels (the films and comic books... not so much) and I haven’t come across any literary, or any other form of, analysis of the characters therein, to date.

That being said and much to my surprise, this is not an amateurish take on pitching a bunch of pretentious ideas and applying them to a literary character to make them fit. It is, in fact, a genuinely enlightening and, for the most part, interesting series of essays about various facets of human psychology and, though the Lisbeth Salander character does, on occasion, just seem like she’s plugged into the central ideas expounded on in a lot of the pieces in here, she is treated as such in a relevant fashion and it’s almost always a fascinating reading experience as you weave your way through various ideas and character types which are relevant to those depicted in the Millennium Trilogy, as they are brought out and explored in a little more depth.

The book starts out a little shakily at first, with an essay on the archetype of the “Goth” subculture. It’s an interesting read alright but the paper starts off with a couple of things which didn’t sit well with me. Firstly, the evidence that Salander is, indeed, part of the unofficial Gothic tribal culture is a bit annoying. I have read the books, seen the four (to date) movies and read the comic books and there’s nothing in there that would have tipped me off to the fact that Salander is an avid follower of Goth fashions or attitudes, to be honest. Secondly, the essay starts off by defining what the stereotypical response of the general public is to a “Goth” and uses that as a basis to argue for and against, in terms of details of the “general” Goth personality. Again, the writers’ conclusions as to how I would stereotype a Goth are far from what I would actually make assumptions about... so are they saying I’m not a member of the general public? That being said, the things it does reveal about the typical Goth personality are very interesting and so I have to say I got more out of it than I was annoyed by, if truth be told.

One stereotype that was definitely shattered for me, as I went through the book, is that I found the tome in question really wasn’t a pretentious and dry load of old techno-babble at all. The book challenged me a number of times and I was extremely grateful for that. For instance, in the essay which is talking about gender, I learnt that a) gender is not another term for a person’s sex, there’s a specific distinction and b) there are actually five sexes (or do I mean genders... I’m now not quite sure) - one male, one female and then three other variations of sex that can be easily hidden and confused within either one or the other, or both. This was an eye opener and something I found fairly compelling.

The Psychology Of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo was full of engaging and intriguing nuggets of information on a whole host of things and I whizzed through the book very quickly, I have to say. Mesmerising topics such as the various methods or approaches a counsellor or psychologist can use when a patient refuses to discuss anything and just remain silent, for instance. Or gems like the ingredients of a person who can develop (or naturally has) a “resilient” personality and why they become like this. Another essay talks about feminism and the way in which sexism manifests itself in various forms and there’s even one section which is a kind of psychological profile of the “hacker” personality and how that fits in with Larsonn’s depiction of his central character. All of these are, of course, interpolated within Salander’s personality and each of the various writers (most of them are writing teams of colleagues) make cases for their specific diagnosis of Salander’s personality or, in some cases, set out to disprove a basic assumption about the character, by juxtaposing various ideas and findings about specific issues and relating them back to Larrson’s work.

Now, there are some less interesting flights of fancy in the book, I would have to say, but most of the essays in here are well worth the price of admission, so to speak, and the various pieces put forward in here all have at least two things in common. One is that they all seem to think, or perhaps the word should be acknowledge, that Stieg Larrson is some kind of genius and a most empathic individual. I would have to agree with that conclusion, at least, I guess. The other thing they all have in common, and this was very important to me as someone who is not, in any way, knowledgable about psychology, is that the essays are all written in a very straight forward and elementary way. I was never once lost in the exploration of what, in some cases, might have been quite challenging concepts if they were written in a less user friendly manner. This is a very easy read and although the ideas on offer here will certainly have you thinking into the night, and possibly wanting to do more research on the subjects yourself, there are no barriers to understanding in the way these are written and... well... someone like myself certainly appreciates the simplicity which complex ideas can sometimes be couched in. So full marks to all the writers for that.

In concluding then, I'd have to say The Psychology Of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is an excellent study, not so much of the central character of Larrson’s books but of various character types which, in most cases, are all facets of the character that he worked into the fictional personae of Lisbeth Salander. Yeah, it’s hit and miss in some places but, ultimately, my misses and hits are not going to be the same as yours and the book does its job. That is to say, it stimulates the mind and allows you to explore very real issues which you might not have known about were it not for the fact that they are being applied to one of modern literature’s most popular heroines in a long time. Anybody who wants to know what kinds of personality types make Salander tick or with an interest in these kinds of issues will most likely enjoy this book. It was, after all, a good buy and something I’m very pleased to have read. This one’s definitely worth your consideration.