Each Day, A Film:
February 6th 2012 (Retrospective)
Believe it or not, we're going to take a break from our standard Superhero season programming - yes, I know, only two entries in, bide your time - to talk about Pet Theories.
Now, I love Pet Theories - whether of the standard 'epilectic trees', or those that get 'jossed' - but I can't actually remember the last time I thought something along the lines of "oh, the spaceship represents man's internal psychological need for catharsis! It's so obvious!"
The choice of film, however, may come as a shock to you.
Yes, we're going to talk about Hitman, and yes, it's a video-game adaptation, and yes, it's not going to win any awards any particular time soon.
But, damn it, it's actually a much better film than I expected.
I have no idea how or why, but a few weeks ago I impulse-bought the film on DVD for a cheeky £0.01, plus postage, which increased the price by approximately 149%. No real reason other than it must have come up in conversation somewhere along the line and it was cheap and if you need any more justification than that, well, here's not the place or the time.
Now, I had actually seen the film before, but while travelling - so it was one of those odd limbic cuts that's neither theatrical edition nor completely bowlderised. The DVD, however is the - now wait while I go check - extreme edition, as in too extreme for cinema.
I don't normally have much truck with the DVD-only "extreme" or "unrated" versions, because the only things that tend to happen are more swearing or less cuts and trims to violence. Alternatively, in the case of the 'unrated' version of Enemy of the State, everyone says fuck every few minutes just to keep the ratings-o-meter ticking over. Seriously, if you haven't seen the unrated Enemy of the State, it's so much fun watching Seth Green swear, you'll have a ball.
But watching Hitman today, I ended up with a theory about the subtext of the film.
Don't get me wrong, the concept of Hitman having a subtext was initially pretty much anathema, but then I stopped being so snobbish, started watching the film, and realised that it's actually very well made. My measure of a well-made film tends to be whether there's any instance where I stop and rewind the film to see a particular instance of pretty - and yes, that's kind of shallow, but I like to liken it to a wannabe magician watching a superstar on stage to learn - but Hitman rewarded me within the first twenty minutes with one of the most beautiful scene transitions I've seen in a long time.
I can't find a specific image, so you'll have to bear with my somewhat ropey description, but;
- Cut to black screen
- Muzzle flash from pistol illuminates 47's face and upper body as he fires a pistol
- Light from the muzzle flash travels with the bullet to illuminate the caption: "Three Months Later"
It all takes place in roughly two seconds of real time, but it's hauntingly pretty, and, quite cleverly, never used again within the film.
Let's get back to the theory, though, because it means I get to use the word Avatars without it sounding like a 3-D sequel.
It's a theory - and it's just a theory, because everyone on the internet has at least two opinions and twice as many theories - but once you strip away the text and go right for the subtext, Hitman is about the avatars of Love and Death.
Of course, because it's such a shitty world they live in, Death is an assassin conditioned from birth to be the best killer possible, and Love is the ex-sex-slave of an abusive Russian politician.
So Death is assigned a target, and kills him; except that he doesn't, because the person he killed was either the real politician (who people with vested interests wanted dead) or a double. Even though whoever-it-is has their head ventilated with high-caliber weaponry, the crowd are persuaded to believe that it was just a scratch, and that he's fine, really.
So when a death goes wrong for Death, that's when his normal daily routine - wash, brush teeth, floss, breakfast, kill politician, catch train - starts to go just that extra bit wrong.
Enter Love, in the form of Olya Kurylenko as Nina, whose ex-boss/partner/torturer, the politician, is now in a state of Schrodingers' Death; her position is now what you might call 'difficult'.
After this, through a series of comical mishaps and hi-jinks, Death and Love end up going on a road trip together, and with time alone in each other's company, a quirky kind of sexual friction begins to emerge, because Death's more afraid of Love than Love is of Death. When Love works this out, it's basically non-stop flirting from thereon in.
Agent 47: [...] That suitcase perfectly holds my Blaser sniper rifle and two .45s and a gag for irritating, talkative girls like yourself. Do you want me to stop and get it out?
Nina: I don't know. Do we have time for foreplay?
You have to admire Nina for having no self-preservation instinct whatsoever other than to continually flirt with the person who kills, and kills, and kills, often right in front of her, as if flirting and seduction were a shield.
This leads to Death and Love sharing a hotel room, where Death's ice begins to crack because Love keeps walking around in nothing but her underwear - and frankly, wouldn't your ice begin to crack at that? - and then, later in the restaurant, there's no guarantee of that:
Nina: What colour underwear am I wearing?
47: You're not wearing any underwear.
Which is revisited a little while later - if memory serves - when Love tries to seduce Death and, briefly, the power dynamic that's been wobbling all over the place shifts towards Love.
Then, naturally, Death sedates Love and goes out and kills more people, because Death's not about the sexual shenanigans.
This is the thing, for me; Death is Love's saviour; he kidnaps her, yes, but after that he protects her in every way possible until he has to send her away because he's being called in for an emergency employee review in turn because he's been hanging around with someone who's melted his heart slightly too much, which leads to fun scenes with Death's fellow employees dropping their guns and agreeing to a knife fight out of 'dignity'.
I have to be honest, by the end the plot had all but disappeared - why 47 was actually killing Belicoff at the end was a bit strange on the surface - it's not like killing him again will actually change anything. At the same time, partly it's about reputation, partly it's about the people who set him up, and partly, I think, it's because this is the man who bought Love for $300 and then tortured and abused her at his whim.
By the end of the film, Love is free - everyone involved in her capture being, well, dead - and Death has something to care for, and treats her to the Vineyard she's always wanted.
It's not a perfect theory - there's the occasionaly lapses between video game and film narrative logic that don't always mesh (why doesn't the FSB chief simply use the radio to tell someone he's stuck in a potentially electric bath somewhere? And what actually happens to the FSB chief? Anyway...) but if you look on the film as the sudden, accidental and pretty meeting of two abstract concepts, it's not a bad thing.
Plus, Dougray Scott kind of wanders through the film trying to catch up with The Embodiment of Death, and when he does finally catch him he only gets to keep him for five minutes before the Americans turn up to free him.
Make of that what you will.
Sunday 26 February 2012
I can hear the sound of violins
Each Day, A Film:
February 5th 2012 (Retrospective)
Then again, if X-Men had the right feel, X2 was a revelation.
Seriously. If the first film was a teaser, an introduction to the kind of superhero world that hadn't been seen in the movies before, then the second was the most amazing broadening of horizons you could really imagine, in narrative terms - all that and Brian Cox, too.
If I sound like a preacher at this point, well, my apologies, but I do need to preach about X2. Sequels are always a tricky prospect, because on one hand you have the opportunity to take pre-introduced characters and thrown them into new situations, but on the other hand the characters are no longer 'new' to the audience, so you have to work out (a) what their expectations are and (b) how to work with them.
There's something else worth mentioning, too; X2 is longer than your average superhero movie; the majority top out at between 90 minutes (although these tend to be the 'smaller scale' films) And 120 minutes. X2 quite happily saunters up to the two hour barrier, finds a bouncer, and convinces them to give it an extra fifteen minutes on top, just because the film needs it. And as part of this, nothing is wasted; yes, there are some odd beats; Cyclops disappears after the prison break and isn't seen again until he returns, mind-controlled, that sort of thing.
What's also interesting is that the press here at the time - most notably Empire, but also others - made a relatively big thing of the uptick in violence, noticeably in the fact that Wolverine finally got to unsheath the claws and go merrily snikt-ing along throughout the mansion invasion sequence. At the same time, it's the kind of bloodless carnage that you need to keep the right friendly rating for the younger audience, and in a funny kind of way, I applaud that.
Put it this way; if you've seen Punisher: War Zone, you've seen enough claret in a superhero-film-context to last you a lifetime. And if you're a fanboy like me and you're thinking 'You Fool! The Punisher isn't a superhero!", well, you're probably right up until you consider the amount of damage one man can soak up and compare it to the Frank Castle pain-a-thon.
But we're getting off-topic.
If X-Men was a sign of validation, X2 is a sign of the growing confidence the studios had that in picking the wallflower of the movie production dance, they'd secretly found a champion tango-dancer, and they were determined to show off this talent for all it was worth.
Again, laboured metaphor, but if you read the Transporter columns, you should be used to that by now. And yes, this is getting way too 'internal-continuity'. But X2 manages to pull off - by comparison to the brash and bold X3, but again, that's 'coming soon' - a quiet kind of confidence where the film knows it's doing amazing things but doesn't thrust the fact in your face and wiggle it about.
Let's illustrate this with two words: Dies Irae.
And that's more or less the opening sequence. Now, let's go back to meshing, the concept that came up a lot during the Resident Evil series of columns, because meshing, kids, is important, and isn't something to be ashamed of. Sometimes it doesn't work, but sometimes, it does, and X2 is a nicely-done mix of action sequences, reminders how we can't escape our past, and analogies for civil rights movements, all wrapped up into a pretty film.
There's really not much else to say, but if you wanted a slightly more personal viewpoint on this, it would have been one of the films I saw at the slightly-oddly-positioned Odeon cinema in Docklands, which seemed to have kind of glommed onto an older building design whereby entry was through the ground floor immediately to the escalators, because a gym had taken over the ground floor. I don't know if it's still as it was then, and it might be interesting to find out.
I also remember bringing this to The Friend with The Sofa - back when he lived in the neighbourhood, so hey, we're back to happy memories, and that's where we're going to stay, for now.
February 5th 2012 (Retrospective)
Then again, if X-Men had the right feel, X2 was a revelation.
Seriously. If the first film was a teaser, an introduction to the kind of superhero world that hadn't been seen in the movies before, then the second was the most amazing broadening of horizons you could really imagine, in narrative terms - all that and Brian Cox, too.
If I sound like a preacher at this point, well, my apologies, but I do need to preach about X2. Sequels are always a tricky prospect, because on one hand you have the opportunity to take pre-introduced characters and thrown them into new situations, but on the other hand the characters are no longer 'new' to the audience, so you have to work out (a) what their expectations are and (b) how to work with them.
There's something else worth mentioning, too; X2 is longer than your average superhero movie; the majority top out at between 90 minutes (although these tend to be the 'smaller scale' films) And 120 minutes. X2 quite happily saunters up to the two hour barrier, finds a bouncer, and convinces them to give it an extra fifteen minutes on top, just because the film needs it. And as part of this, nothing is wasted; yes, there are some odd beats; Cyclops disappears after the prison break and isn't seen again until he returns, mind-controlled, that sort of thing.
What's also interesting is that the press here at the time - most notably Empire, but also others - made a relatively big thing of the uptick in violence, noticeably in the fact that Wolverine finally got to unsheath the claws and go merrily snikt-ing along throughout the mansion invasion sequence. At the same time, it's the kind of bloodless carnage that you need to keep the right friendly rating for the younger audience, and in a funny kind of way, I applaud that.
Put it this way; if you've seen Punisher: War Zone, you've seen enough claret in a superhero-film-context to last you a lifetime. And if you're a fanboy like me and you're thinking 'You Fool! The Punisher isn't a superhero!", well, you're probably right up until you consider the amount of damage one man can soak up and compare it to the Frank Castle pain-a-thon.
But we're getting off-topic.
If X-Men was a sign of validation, X2 is a sign of the growing confidence the studios had that in picking the wallflower of the movie production dance, they'd secretly found a champion tango-dancer, and they were determined to show off this talent for all it was worth.
Again, laboured metaphor, but if you read the Transporter columns, you should be used to that by now. And yes, this is getting way too 'internal-continuity'. But X2 manages to pull off - by comparison to the brash and bold X3, but again, that's 'coming soon' - a quiet kind of confidence where the film knows it's doing amazing things but doesn't thrust the fact in your face and wiggle it about.
Let's illustrate this with two words: Dies Irae.
And that's more or less the opening sequence. Now, let's go back to meshing, the concept that came up a lot during the Resident Evil series of columns, because meshing, kids, is important, and isn't something to be ashamed of. Sometimes it doesn't work, but sometimes, it does, and X2 is a nicely-done mix of action sequences, reminders how we can't escape our past, and analogies for civil rights movements, all wrapped up into a pretty film.
There's really not much else to say, but if you wanted a slightly more personal viewpoint on this, it would have been one of the films I saw at the slightly-oddly-positioned Odeon cinema in Docklands, which seemed to have kind of glommed onto an older building design whereby entry was through the ground floor immediately to the escalators, because a gym had taken over the ground floor. I don't know if it's still as it was then, and it might be interesting to find out.
I also remember bringing this to The Friend with The Sofa - back when he lived in the neighbourhood, so hey, we're back to happy memories, and that's where we're going to stay, for now.
And my heart feels no more pain
Each Day, A Film:
February 4th 2012 (Retrospective)
Let's have some funthis beat is sick; let's declare it Superhero Season. And what better way to start superhero season than with the X-Men films?
No better way. Because, frankly, it's time to enter pun territory again; the reason I have a lot of love for the trilogy (plus Wolverine and First Class, but we'll get to that later) is because they represent - and it's a bad pun, but you were warned - a fascinating example of evolution.
Sadly, a lot of that evolution relates to the narrative tone of the films; if you count the on-screen fatalities (and, sadly, I have, although for a good reason), they rise exponentially between I and III. Now, if you're a comics reader, there's an easy way to describe this, because it happened to them around ten to twenty years before the current superhero popularity boom; everything became, frankly, Darker and Edgier. It was the 1980s and the 1990s; whaddaya gonna do?
But let's do the impossible, for a brief moment, and step back in time, because the first film is entirely a happy experience for me.
Back in the day - cue dissolve effect or wavy lines - I was visiting someone on the coast. This is where the temporal mechanics get a bit wavy, because she would end up being a girlfriend for a while, but at the time that wasn't the case. So this was in the pre-relationship time, where everything probably seemed a little sparkly, i.e. there was that brutal-but-fun denied chemistry.
Anyway.
This would have been during the summertime, between semesters, and I'd gone down to visit her for a party and ended up staying for a few days - and yes, this is so close to being a lyric from Close but No Cigar it's not even funny - and one day, we went down to the cinema (well, the big Leisure Complex near the coast and the train station that had a cinema) and saw the first X-Men film.
There's a word I've used a few other times during this series of columns, and if memory serves it was best used during the Blade column, but it needs to be broken out here again; on leaving the cinema, I felt the most tremendous sense of validation.
Let's break this down; I freely admit that I'm a comics reader, ever since I was taken to the Forbidden Planet when I was much younger. (I get the feeling that wasn't the intention, because the Parental Unit who took me there was more of a science-fiction-books kind of person, so that was probably a bit of a backfire.)
After that, I sought them out where I could, but it's the old-fashioned small-town problem, especially in the pre-mass-market trade paperback days, where trying to get a collected edition meant using the microfiche in the back room of the local bookshop to see if it could be imported, and 9.9 times out of ten, well, no.
Then I hit my teenage years and reading comics became a dirty secret - arguably dirtier than, say, buying pornography, because at least the latter was halfway to an admission that you were growing up, whereas comics were, of course, a retrograde step that you should have grown out of in time to get to the dirty pictures.
Unfortunately, I'm pretty stubborn.
So I would wait until school finished, then get the bus over to the nearest big town and just about get to the nearest speciality comic shop before it closed, then get the bus back, making it a pilgrimage as much as anything.
Then trade paperbacks started to hit their stride in terms of popularity, and things got much easier, although it did mean I got addicted to The Invisibles, which is arguably the worst thing that can happen to a teenage comics reader.
If we then skip on a year or two, I moved to London, and lo and behold the Forbidden Planet was just a train ride away.
Now, you may be thinking that Blade was enough validation that studios were suddenly thinking about all the intellectual property rights they owned viz comic books and were actually getting round to them, but comparing Blade to X-Men is difficult, because Blade was a relatively low-budgeted punt into the superhero arena, whereas X-Men was a full-on acknowledgement that the studios felt there was an audience big enough for the film to be worth making.
Hence, validation. In a way, this is a little sad, because in getting the validation I was looking for, I was essentially recognising that I had finally become part of a target demographic to be appealed to. Then again, if you look at what's happening now with superhero films, sometimes it's nice to be part of a target demographic.
The main contributing factor to that feeling of validation was that the film managed to do that impressive trick of avoiding alienating new viewers while avoiding patronising comics readers who were - and, in some ways, still are - an important, vocal, extremely small minority when it comes to filmgoing. The film was smart, and occasionally funny, and the set-pieces weren't just ways to deploy all the visually-smart superpowers and wow the audience. Alright, there were some dialogue clunkers - let's be honest, we all know what happens to a toad when it gets electrocuted, thanks - but the film just had the most elusive of qualities, the right feel.
I remember that when I emerged from the cinema, having watched the heroes I'd been more-or-less secretly following for a few years by that point, into the sunshine and sea air that I couldn't stop smiling, for reasons I couldn't articulate at the time. I hope I've managed to articulate them better now.
February 4th 2012 (Retrospective)
Let's have some fun
No better way. Because, frankly, it's time to enter pun territory again; the reason I have a lot of love for the trilogy (plus Wolverine and First Class, but we'll get to that later) is because they represent - and it's a bad pun, but you were warned - a fascinating example of evolution.
Sadly, a lot of that evolution relates to the narrative tone of the films; if you count the on-screen fatalities (and, sadly, I have, although for a good reason), they rise exponentially between I and III. Now, if you're a comics reader, there's an easy way to describe this, because it happened to them around ten to twenty years before the current superhero popularity boom; everything became, frankly, Darker and Edgier. It was the 1980s and the 1990s; whaddaya gonna do?
But let's do the impossible, for a brief moment, and step back in time, because the first film is entirely a happy experience for me.
Back in the day - cue dissolve effect or wavy lines - I was visiting someone on the coast. This is where the temporal mechanics get a bit wavy, because she would end up being a girlfriend for a while, but at the time that wasn't the case. So this was in the pre-relationship time, where everything probably seemed a little sparkly, i.e. there was that brutal-but-fun denied chemistry.
Anyway.
This would have been during the summertime, between semesters, and I'd gone down to visit her for a party and ended up staying for a few days - and yes, this is so close to being a lyric from Close but No Cigar it's not even funny - and one day, we went down to the cinema (well, the big Leisure Complex near the coast and the train station that had a cinema) and saw the first X-Men film.
There's a word I've used a few other times during this series of columns, and if memory serves it was best used during the Blade column, but it needs to be broken out here again; on leaving the cinema, I felt the most tremendous sense of validation.
Let's break this down; I freely admit that I'm a comics reader, ever since I was taken to the Forbidden Planet when I was much younger. (I get the feeling that wasn't the intention, because the Parental Unit who took me there was more of a science-fiction-books kind of person, so that was probably a bit of a backfire.)
After that, I sought them out where I could, but it's the old-fashioned small-town problem, especially in the pre-mass-market trade paperback days, where trying to get a collected edition meant using the microfiche in the back room of the local bookshop to see if it could be imported, and 9.9 times out of ten, well, no.
Then I hit my teenage years and reading comics became a dirty secret - arguably dirtier than, say, buying pornography, because at least the latter was halfway to an admission that you were growing up, whereas comics were, of course, a retrograde step that you should have grown out of in time to get to the dirty pictures.
Unfortunately, I'm pretty stubborn.
So I would wait until school finished, then get the bus over to the nearest big town and just about get to the nearest speciality comic shop before it closed, then get the bus back, making it a pilgrimage as much as anything.
Then trade paperbacks started to hit their stride in terms of popularity, and things got much easier, although it did mean I got addicted to The Invisibles, which is arguably the worst thing that can happen to a teenage comics reader.
If we then skip on a year or two, I moved to London, and lo and behold the Forbidden Planet was just a train ride away.
Now, you may be thinking that Blade was enough validation that studios were suddenly thinking about all the intellectual property rights they owned viz comic books and were actually getting round to them, but comparing Blade to X-Men is difficult, because Blade was a relatively low-budgeted punt into the superhero arena, whereas X-Men was a full-on acknowledgement that the studios felt there was an audience big enough for the film to be worth making.
Hence, validation. In a way, this is a little sad, because in getting the validation I was looking for, I was essentially recognising that I had finally become part of a target demographic to be appealed to. Then again, if you look at what's happening now with superhero films, sometimes it's nice to be part of a target demographic.
The main contributing factor to that feeling of validation was that the film managed to do that impressive trick of avoiding alienating new viewers while avoiding patronising comics readers who were - and, in some ways, still are - an important, vocal, extremely small minority when it comes to filmgoing. The film was smart, and occasionally funny, and the set-pieces weren't just ways to deploy all the visually-smart superpowers and wow the audience. Alright, there were some dialogue clunkers - let's be honest, we all know what happens to a toad when it gets electrocuted, thanks - but the film just had the most elusive of qualities, the right feel.
I remember that when I emerged from the cinema, having watched the heroes I'd been more-or-less secretly following for a few years by that point, into the sunshine and sea air that I couldn't stop smiling, for reasons I couldn't articulate at the time. I hope I've managed to articulate them better now.
Friday 24 February 2012
Back on a natural charge, bon voyage
Each Day, A Film:
February 3rd 2012 (Retrospective)
What happens when you keep a bundle of features from both the first, French film, then add in and strip out the Americanisation process, is a metaphor somehow connected to engines that my brain can't rightly process right now, but it's something like stripping out the engine from a BMW and putting it into a Chrysler before junking the Chrysler - except for the wing mirrors - and going back to the BMW.
Yeah, that was kind of laboured, as metaphors go. But the trailer is both amazingly honest and intertextual;
Honest because yes, the majority of the film is Jason Statham punching things and then exploding, although not because Jason Statham punched them - even if that's probably 100% possible. Intertextual because of, all things, The Stooges, whose I wanna be your dog was last heard - for me, at least - in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, featuring, yes, Jason Statham in needless italics.
In a funny kind of way, Transporter 3 is preferable to the second one because, as mentioned above, it's honest about what it's trying to do and the formula it has to stick to, and throws in exploding bracelets for fun just because it can. It also inspires people, apparently, to set scenes from the film to The Pet Shop Boys.
And how could that possibly be a bad thing?
Now, I'm more than willing to admit that these recent journal entries have been light on critical criticism and heavy on general talkage, and there's a reason for that; criticism of the Resident Evil films is like driving a knife through jelly; there's no challenge, and it gets you thrown out of kids parties.
There's all sorts of opportunities, however, to talk about The Transporter. Let's start with the sexuality issue. In The Transporter, Frank is portrayed as fairly heterosexual - oxygen-stealing-man-kissing aside - because he's willing to get it awn with Shu Qi, who then makes him cakes.
Let's not get into the whole Oedipal and Post-Oedipal debate there, because, frankly, I don't need the uncomfortable Film Theory debates about traditional gender roles. In Transporter 2, Frank is now apparently "the first gay action hero!" according to the director, although this does lead to my favourite interview quote for a long time, when Leterrier says "I was sick over the weekend and my 2 Transporters were on, so I watched them and in fact they aren't that gay", as if they might be, say, between 28% gay and 45% gay at any one time, but never over the 50% mark.
So now, in Transporter 3, Frank gets to refuse the advances of an amorous, spoilt, drug-taking and drinking Ukrainian and also refute his homosexuality with the addition of an unwanted 'the', for mild comic effect. Remember, he is not the gay.
For me, there also felt like there were these shades of The Bourne Identity hanging around which weren't present in the first film, in their journey across Europe being tracked - but maybe that's just because, like it or not, the times they are, as always, changing.
Here's the major thing; if I ever make a feature length film - a prospect looking more and more difficult and fraught with annoyance as time goes on - I would like it to be close in character to Transporter or Transporter 3 because, like westerns - many of which I love, but haven't got round to talking about them yet - at least the Transporter films are honest about what they want to deliver and then go on and deliver it as well, with some extra explosions thrown in for fun.
So if there's a lack of informed critical thinking about the film, it's because there's no need for it; the film does exactly what it wants to do and pretty much what you - if you're that fabled ideal viewer - want it to do as well. I'm not sure there's many films which you can say that about, because a lot of films promise and don't deliver or don't even promise and still try and fail to deliver, whereas...
... Oh god, you can actually feel the pun building up at this point, and I can only apologise because it literally just occurred to me, but while I have you captivated with this long run-on sentence we may as well keep it going for as long as possible just to avoid what's coming and say did you try one of those After Eight mint McFlurries while they were around because damn they were oddly nice, I mean you wouldn't expect it to necessarily work but I suppose it's just mint ice cream and at the end of the day you can't go wrong with that and yes this is just going on and on because I'm trying to avoid the final pun but I guess it's like a sticking plaster, we may as well tear it off and get it over quickly -
Unlike other films, The Transporter [series] delivers.
I get the feeling that I should have taken my sunglasses off while delivering that line.
February 3rd 2012 (Retrospective)
What happens when you keep a bundle of features from both the first, French film, then add in and strip out the Americanisation process, is a metaphor somehow connected to engines that my brain can't rightly process right now, but it's something like stripping out the engine from a BMW and putting it into a Chrysler before junking the Chrysler - except for the wing mirrors - and going back to the BMW.
Yeah, that was kind of laboured, as metaphors go. But the trailer is both amazingly honest and intertextual;
Honest because yes, the majority of the film is Jason Statham punching things and then exploding, although not because Jason Statham punched them - even if that's probably 100% possible. Intertextual because of, all things, The Stooges, whose I wanna be your dog was last heard - for me, at least - in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, featuring, yes, Jason Statham in needless italics.
In a funny kind of way, Transporter 3 is preferable to the second one because, as mentioned above, it's honest about what it's trying to do and the formula it has to stick to, and throws in exploding bracelets for fun just because it can. It also inspires people, apparently, to set scenes from the film to The Pet Shop Boys.
And how could that possibly be a bad thing?
Now, I'm more than willing to admit that these recent journal entries have been light on critical criticism and heavy on general talkage, and there's a reason for that; criticism of the Resident Evil films is like driving a knife through jelly; there's no challenge, and it gets you thrown out of kids parties.
There's all sorts of opportunities, however, to talk about The Transporter. Let's start with the sexuality issue. In The Transporter, Frank is portrayed as fairly heterosexual - oxygen-stealing-man-kissing aside - because he's willing to get it awn with Shu Qi, who then makes him cakes.
Let's not get into the whole Oedipal and Post-Oedipal debate there, because, frankly, I don't need the uncomfortable Film Theory debates about traditional gender roles. In Transporter 2, Frank is now apparently "the first gay action hero!" according to the director, although this does lead to my favourite interview quote for a long time, when Leterrier says "I was sick over the weekend and my 2 Transporters were on, so I watched them and in fact they aren't that gay", as if they might be, say, between 28% gay and 45% gay at any one time, but never over the 50% mark.
So now, in Transporter 3, Frank gets to refuse the advances of an amorous, spoilt, drug-taking and drinking Ukrainian and also refute his homosexuality with the addition of an unwanted 'the', for mild comic effect. Remember, he is not the gay.
For me, there also felt like there were these shades of The Bourne Identity hanging around which weren't present in the first film, in their journey across Europe being tracked - but maybe that's just because, like it or not, the times they are, as always, changing.
Here's the major thing; if I ever make a feature length film - a prospect looking more and more difficult and fraught with annoyance as time goes on - I would like it to be close in character to Transporter or Transporter 3 because, like westerns - many of which I love, but haven't got round to talking about them yet - at least the Transporter films are honest about what they want to deliver and then go on and deliver it as well, with some extra explosions thrown in for fun.
So if there's a lack of informed critical thinking about the film, it's because there's no need for it; the film does exactly what it wants to do and pretty much what you - if you're that fabled ideal viewer - want it to do as well. I'm not sure there's many films which you can say that about, because a lot of films promise and don't deliver or don't even promise and still try and fail to deliver, whereas...
... Oh god, you can actually feel the pun building up at this point, and I can only apologise because it literally just occurred to me, but while I have you captivated with this long run-on sentence we may as well keep it going for as long as possible just to avoid what's coming and say did you try one of those After Eight mint McFlurries while they were around because damn they were oddly nice, I mean you wouldn't expect it to necessarily work but I suppose it's just mint ice cream and at the end of the day you can't go wrong with that and yes this is just going on and on because I'm trying to avoid the final pun but I guess it's like a sticking plaster, we may as well tear it off and get it over quickly -
Unlike other films, The Transporter [series] delivers.
I get the feeling that I should have taken my sunglasses off while delivering that line.
Shimmy Shimmy Y'all Shimmy Y'all Shimmy Yay
Each Day, A Film:
February 2nd, 2012 (Retrospective)
That sequel, funnily enough, was called The Transporter 2.
There's a basic rule when it comes to filmmaking in Europe; If something is successful, take it to America. Seriously, stop and think about the Milennium trilogy, or The Killing, just for recent takes on it.
There's a good rationale behind this: American films tend to have higher budgets, which mean you can ramp what you're doing way past eleven if you need to, and a wider audience for your antics. At the same time, you have to lower any pretensions of intelligent filmmaking or artistic statements, because of how your film will play in Peoria.
And I know you can tell what comes next because no, it's not a great problem with The Transporter films. And you're right, and also a little snide, but that's forgiveable. It's okay, you're allowed to judge, we all do it from time to time.
Now, there's a set of magic ingredients when it comes to The Transporter, and number two in the series manages to deviate from this without even recognising it. Those ingredients are roughly as follows:
Dodgy Client + Woman in Trouble + Extreme Driving = Film.
In Transporter 2, the client isn't dodgy - the antagonist is - the woman's not in trouble, it's her child - but at least there's some fun driving. Not sure about the formula? Wait until we get around to Transporter 3.
In a funny kind of a way I'm all for the Americanisation of smaller films, because it means they've achieved a kind of success already, rather than having to work too hard and go grey-haired about trying to make a name in the European film market. Let's not forget that Louis Leterrier was able to parlay the success of the first two Transporter films into the Incredible Hulk gig, a film that would have been massively improved by including the majority of the deleted scenes other than Bruce Banner being punked by sorority girls.
So if nothing else - and, again, that's an unfair assessment - Transporter 2 is an exemplary marker of success for the franchise simply because of the transatlantic switch. The film also has amazing stunt work, a strangely compelling if derailed and deranged storyline, and the fact that Frank actually develops an opposite number in the form of Lola, who's as much The Gunner as Frank is The Transporter, although without the guaranteed results.
The only thing to note is that the film is less gleeful about what's going on than the original - although at least Frank's accent has thankfully moved across to Acceptably Transatlantic rather than the I Am Not A Cockney of the original. In the original, the stunts were exceptional; in the sequel, they're just there.
So what would happen if you stripped out the Americanisation but kept some of the features and went halfway back to the franchise's roots?
February 2nd, 2012 (Retrospective)
That sequel, funnily enough, was called The Transporter 2.
There's a basic rule when it comes to filmmaking in Europe; If something is successful, take it to America. Seriously, stop and think about the Milennium trilogy, or The Killing, just for recent takes on it.
There's a good rationale behind this: American films tend to have higher budgets, which mean you can ramp what you're doing way past eleven if you need to, and a wider audience for your antics. At the same time, you have to lower any pretensions of intelligent filmmaking or artistic statements, because of how your film will play in Peoria.
And I know you can tell what comes next because no, it's not a great problem with The Transporter films. And you're right, and also a little snide, but that's forgiveable. It's okay, you're allowed to judge, we all do it from time to time.
Now, there's a set of magic ingredients when it comes to The Transporter, and number two in the series manages to deviate from this without even recognising it. Those ingredients are roughly as follows:
Dodgy Client + Woman in Trouble + Extreme Driving = Film.
In Transporter 2, the client isn't dodgy - the antagonist is - the woman's not in trouble, it's her child - but at least there's some fun driving. Not sure about the formula? Wait until we get around to Transporter 3.
In a funny kind of a way I'm all for the Americanisation of smaller films, because it means they've achieved a kind of success already, rather than having to work too hard and go grey-haired about trying to make a name in the European film market. Let's not forget that Louis Leterrier was able to parlay the success of the first two Transporter films into the Incredible Hulk gig, a film that would have been massively improved by including the majority of the deleted scenes other than Bruce Banner being punked by sorority girls.
So if nothing else - and, again, that's an unfair assessment - Transporter 2 is an exemplary marker of success for the franchise simply because of the transatlantic switch. The film also has amazing stunt work, a strangely compelling if derailed and deranged storyline, and the fact that Frank actually develops an opposite number in the form of Lola, who's as much The Gunner as Frank is The Transporter, although without the guaranteed results.
The only thing to note is that the film is less gleeful about what's going on than the original - although at least Frank's accent has thankfully moved across to Acceptably Transatlantic rather than the I Am Not A Cockney of the original. In the original, the stunts were exceptional; in the sequel, they're just there.
So what would happen if you stripped out the Americanisation but kept some of the features and went halfway back to the franchise's roots?
I've found myself in some kind of hell!
Each Day, A Film
February 1st 2012 (Retrospective)
We're going to skip merrily on to another film series, oh ye script kiddies who may or may not be reading this (and not, like, commenting, or following, or whatnot).
Can you guess which series that is? Well, here's a clue, in the form of a fun phrase: "No, I am not the gay."
That's right, it's time to talk about The Transporter.
And doesn't that make your heart sing? Because it does mine.
It's mix analysis time, once again; take one part action film, mix in Jason Statham, add in the south of France, a mildly comic sidekick, a villain who I want to say has played pretty much the same role ever since but have no evidence to back that up, and a timely human trafficking subplot.
Now add in car chases, foot chases, Corey Yuen-scripted mayhem, and, oh, let's just throw in a plane chase for good measure. The thing is that the mixture works as opposed to some of the other films recently written about that could have benefited from being cut into two different storylines and fleshed out (and yes, I'm looking at you here, the Resident Evil films).
For no real reason, just the prospect of writing about The Transporter films makes me happy with excitement.
It's not because they're well scripted - although they're not actually that bad, if you genially skip past the second one, but, well, we'll come to that soon enough - or that they have a genuine unignorable statement to make. It's because they're fun, but they know they're fun, and they don't worry about much else.
Look at it this way; the first film is the first time, if memory serves, I've ever seen an RPG deflected using a tea tray.
It's also the first time I've seen Jason Statham kiss a man.
(Although let's remember that he's still not the gay.)
This is one of those strange issues that comes up when your action sequences terminate with a lack of oxygen. Picture the scene; Jason Statham; a garage full of expendable mooks; a tub of oil. By the end of the scene, Mr Statham is seminaked, covered in the oil, surrounded by men, and that's clearly not homoerotic enough, so why not have him have to leap into the water nearby, submerge himself under the now burning-oil-covered surface, and need to steal oxygen from a dead man? It's pragmatism, right?
Ah, I'm making such a big deal out of something that's actually pretty cool.
And that's the point of the film, frankly - to make a big deal out of something that's extremely cool; a professional, with his own code of conduct and and an extremely pretty car, up against ruthless international human traffickers. With some of the best stunts around.
To be honest, The Transporter falls into roughly the same pile as Dog Soldiers for me - not perfect (there are some odd missed beats, the soundtrack sometimes takes the dial all the way to French, etc) but close enough for Jazz.
So good, of course, that there had to be a sequel.
February 1st 2012 (Retrospective)
We're going to skip merrily on to another film series, oh ye script kiddies who may or may not be reading this (and not, like, commenting, or following, or whatnot).
Can you guess which series that is? Well, here's a clue, in the form of a fun phrase: "No, I am not the gay."
That's right, it's time to talk about The Transporter.
And doesn't that make your heart sing? Because it does mine.
It's mix analysis time, once again; take one part action film, mix in Jason Statham, add in the south of France, a mildly comic sidekick, a villain who I want to say has played pretty much the same role ever since but have no evidence to back that up, and a timely human trafficking subplot.
Now add in car chases, foot chases, Corey Yuen-scripted mayhem, and, oh, let's just throw in a plane chase for good measure. The thing is that the mixture works as opposed to some of the other films recently written about that could have benefited from being cut into two different storylines and fleshed out (and yes, I'm looking at you here, the Resident Evil films).
For no real reason, just the prospect of writing about The Transporter films makes me happy with excitement.
It's not because they're well scripted - although they're not actually that bad, if you genially skip past the second one, but, well, we'll come to that soon enough - or that they have a genuine unignorable statement to make. It's because they're fun, but they know they're fun, and they don't worry about much else.
Look at it this way; the first film is the first time, if memory serves, I've ever seen an RPG deflected using a tea tray.
It's also the first time I've seen Jason Statham kiss a man.
(Although let's remember that he's still not the gay.)
This is one of those strange issues that comes up when your action sequences terminate with a lack of oxygen. Picture the scene; Jason Statham; a garage full of expendable mooks; a tub of oil. By the end of the scene, Mr Statham is seminaked, covered in the oil, surrounded by men, and that's clearly not homoerotic enough, so why not have him have to leap into the water nearby, submerge himself under the now burning-oil-covered surface, and need to steal oxygen from a dead man? It's pragmatism, right?
Ah, I'm making such a big deal out of something that's actually pretty cool.
And that's the point of the film, frankly - to make a big deal out of something that's extremely cool; a professional, with his own code of conduct and and an extremely pretty car, up against ruthless international human traffickers. With some of the best stunts around.
To be honest, The Transporter falls into roughly the same pile as Dog Soldiers for me - not perfect (there are some odd missed beats, the soundtrack sometimes takes the dial all the way to French, etc) but close enough for Jazz.
So good, of course, that there had to be a sequel.
Nearest he got to china was a week in Camber Sands
Each Day, A Film:
January 31st 2012
Bonus round! Let's finish off January's entries - especially since we're five days away from the end of February - with a little more Milla Jovovich.
Now, at least, we're shifting from zombies to vampires - well, wait, kind of vampires, but not necessarily really vampires, just hemolytic - no, you know what, I'm not going to try to justify this at all.
If that sounds negative, bear in mind that I love Ultraviolet.
Now, if you watched the trailer, do me a favour and go back and watch it again. Notice both the distinctive music choices and the use of GRAVELLY VOICED TRAILER MAN.
The first is interesting to me because of a concept I was introduced to back in the day; intertextuality. Now, it's not a concept I claim to fully understand, but the understanding I have of it is that if you're reading one book and something specific makes you think of a second book, there's probably a good reason for that, and it's maybe even intentional on the part of the author.
In the case of films, this can be either even more subtle or even more blatant, but the music at the start of the above trailer - Clubbed to Death by Rob Dougan - has massive intertextual power for me because the last time I heard it used (or, at least, used properly) was in The Matrix. Now, obviosuly, that carries a lot of connotations, because, love it or loathe it, The Matrix was a pivotal film.
Ultraviolet is not The Matrix, but it is very impressive, visual-effects wise.
I will freely admit that my entry on Equilibrium was cut short, for various reasons. But a fun thing to do is to treat Ultraviolent as an evolution, or even a sequel, to Equilibrium, and not just because they're both directed by Kurt Wimmer.
At the end of Equilibrium, the masses are freed from their emotionally-numb state, and it's equally likely that while romance, culture and art are going to return, there's also going to be a whole lot of war.
So it's not a stretch to imagine that the same government scientists who thought "Tell you what, let's eliminate emotions with mood stabilisers" could have thought "Tell you what, let's genetically engineer soldiers to put down the rebellion". The same themes are there; oppressive government, super-soldiers, rebellion against authority, but at the same time, Christian Bale couldn't ride his motorcycle across a building.
Ultraviolet is glorious, in that respect, because instead of going with Gun-Kata - which, although impressive, kind of falls down in the face of automatic weapons wielded by anyone with any degree of skill, although that rules out both rebels and mook guards in the Equilibrium universe - Ultraviolet just runs with it. All the absurdity, all the over-the-top, everything; Ultraviolet doesn't care, as long as it's cool. Which is refreshingly honest, really. Oh, there's ropey scientific justificaiton about what's going on, but most of the time it looks like none of the actors trying to give any kind of exposition could actually take it seriously, because oh look there's someone in glass armour! Let's go smash it!
I'm not going to try to defend the film - it's physically, not to mention psychologically - impossible - but at the same time, there's a kind of charm to watching mostly well-staged kinetic cinematic action sequences unfold, and that's never necessarily a bad thing to watch a film for.
January 31st 2012
Bonus round! Let's finish off January's entries - especially since we're five days away from the end of February - with a little more Milla Jovovich.
Now, at least, we're shifting from zombies to vampires - well, wait, kind of vampires, but not necessarily really vampires, just hemolytic - no, you know what, I'm not going to try to justify this at all.
If that sounds negative, bear in mind that I love Ultraviolet.
Now, if you watched the trailer, do me a favour and go back and watch it again. Notice both the distinctive music choices and the use of GRAVELLY VOICED TRAILER MAN.
The first is interesting to me because of a concept I was introduced to back in the day; intertextuality. Now, it's not a concept I claim to fully understand, but the understanding I have of it is that if you're reading one book and something specific makes you think of a second book, there's probably a good reason for that, and it's maybe even intentional on the part of the author.
In the case of films, this can be either even more subtle or even more blatant, but the music at the start of the above trailer - Clubbed to Death by Rob Dougan - has massive intertextual power for me because the last time I heard it used (or, at least, used properly) was in The Matrix. Now, obviosuly, that carries a lot of connotations, because, love it or loathe it, The Matrix was a pivotal film.
Ultraviolet is not The Matrix, but it is very impressive, visual-effects wise.
I will freely admit that my entry on Equilibrium was cut short, for various reasons. But a fun thing to do is to treat Ultraviolent as an evolution, or even a sequel, to Equilibrium, and not just because they're both directed by Kurt Wimmer.
At the end of Equilibrium, the masses are freed from their emotionally-numb state, and it's equally likely that while romance, culture and art are going to return, there's also going to be a whole lot of war.
So it's not a stretch to imagine that the same government scientists who thought "Tell you what, let's eliminate emotions with mood stabilisers" could have thought "Tell you what, let's genetically engineer soldiers to put down the rebellion". The same themes are there; oppressive government, super-soldiers, rebellion against authority, but at the same time, Christian Bale couldn't ride his motorcycle across a building.
Ultraviolet is glorious, in that respect, because instead of going with Gun-Kata - which, although impressive, kind of falls down in the face of automatic weapons wielded by anyone with any degree of skill, although that rules out both rebels and mook guards in the Equilibrium universe - Ultraviolet just runs with it. All the absurdity, all the over-the-top, everything; Ultraviolet doesn't care, as long as it's cool. Which is refreshingly honest, really. Oh, there's ropey scientific justificaiton about what's going on, but most of the time it looks like none of the actors trying to give any kind of exposition could actually take it seriously, because oh look there's someone in glass armour! Let's go smash it!
I'm not going to try to defend the film - it's physically, not to mention psychologically - impossible - but at the same time, there's a kind of charm to watching mostly well-staged kinetic cinematic action sequences unfold, and that's never necessarily a bad thing to watch a film for.
We should be more adventurous with our meals
Each Day, A Film:
January 30th 2012
Let's just get down to business, with Resident Evil: Afterlife.
Before we do, though, let's take a moment to celebrate the fact that Kim Coates is in the goddamn movie, and given that they let him play an asshole, it's automatically a 12% better movie without having to do anything.
Other than that, it's downhill, but an interesting downhill. In a funny kind of way, it's an uphill from the previous installment.
So let's just run with it, because the character development is oddly clinical and economical. Remember all those clones? Yeah, they take on Umbrella's Tokyo faclity, and go boom, because Wesker does like to blow things up. Remember those psychic abilities? Well, goodbye to them too. But Alice does get a lovely plane to fly.
At the same time, this is the first of the films I could actually imagine being a video game in it's own right; I can actually see the fight sequences playing out, along with the vehicle section where you have to land a plane on a hospital roof. My favourite, though, is whenever the Axeman turns up. There's a point where the survivors are standing in the yard, and hundreds of generic zombies are battling aimlessly against mankind's greatest defence - the solid steel gate - when suddenly, the Axeman turns up, and I could almost feel the quicktime event happening;
[Press (X) repeatedly to move police car towards gate!]
[Press (O) to open up garage door!]
[Press [Y] to groan when you realise the engine has been removed from the urban pacification vehicle you needed not to die!]
[Press (X) to change characters. You have selected: Tig]
[Press (O) to shoot another character, steal the plane, and abandon everyone else to their own devices.]
That's pretty much all I got from the prison sequence.
Let's talk about the 3D aspects, though, because while I'm sure - well, kind of sure - they were amazing in the cinema, all the relentless shit-flying-towards-the-screen-in-slow-motion gets really old when watching the film on the small screen.
Let's also talk about how Umbrella have evolved from total arseholes to just complete idiots, because that's always fun.
Correct me if I'm wrong - and, frankly, I'm often wrong, that's the nature of the beast - but Umbrella began life as a Corporation. As in, a business enterprise that, really, needs a world to function in. Now, at some point, Umbrella presumably thought that the world was frankly just a hindrance - so through a series of actions including:
- Creating a virus with a 100% mortality rate and the ability to reanimate those it kills into hyper-effective carriers
- Releasing that virus into the population of Raccoon City
- Trying and failing to contain the virus by nuking Raccoon city
- Hiding underground to avoid the virus but continuing to experiment on even worse versions of it
- Nuking Tokyo to kill hundreds of Milla Jovoviches
- And setting up a fake distress call to round up the few test subjects left alive
- Umbrella is, frankly, the first post-human corporation. By the end of Afterlife, everything is utterly, completly fucked. The world is gone, baby, gone; there may be pockets of life knocking around, but as we saw in the last film, they're either extremely clever or rape-hungry rednecks who keep zombie dogs as pets.
The zombies, too, are evolving; instead of just being mindless flesh-hungry walking plot devices, now they can tunnel through rock given enough time, and the trailer for the next film shows them flying. Also, there's basically not enough ammunition left in the world to deal with what's going on. There's also the apparent complete environmental collapse - as stated in the last film, fresh water sources dry up, plants die, and the ecosystem goes to hell in a handbasket, although this isn't actually mentioned that often in Afterlife.
And, unexplainedly, someone's running around giving people the worst accessory ever; a bloodsucking, spider-ruby-esque brooch, that removes your memories and makes you into a violence-crazy person without the need to zombify you.
So when you get to the Arcadia being a giant floating experimental vessel for Umbrella rather than a place to hide from the fucked-up world you're forced to live in, it's kind of a surprise that nobody just commits suicide rather than go on, because frankly it's that bleak.
Then you have Wesker, who has become super-fast, super-strong and a tentacle monster whenever he feels like it. And his 'death' is kind of strange; the heroes pin him down and shoot him repeatedly in the chest, as if nothing from the previous films has elaborated on the value of headshots, then evacuate the survivors from the room and seal the door. Of course, Wesker seemingly doesn't die, because he comes back to life with the specific purpose of killing Kim Coates, in the weirdest bit of karmic retribution ever.
Because, let's face it, Tig has the best plan out of the entire movie. Instead of participating in trying to leave a prison that's been compromised by concrete-chewing zombies using the urban pacification vehicle that has no engine while the Axeman pounds at the gates, Tig decides, basically, fuck this, I'm out of here. Sticking together is admirable, loyal and wonderful, but if it's the choice between sticking together in a soon-to-be-zombie infested prison and getting the fuck out of dodge as quickly as possible, while teamwork is wonderful, so is not having your organs eaten.
This brings us to the ending, which is just as fucked; Wesker-as-monster is still sealed in the lab below, but if there's one thing these films have taught us it's that zombies are a door's kryptonite, so he's getting out eventually. Meanwhile, on deck, an apparently mind-controlled Jill Valentine - who I didn't actually recognise, because she's not wearing a glaringly impractical outfit - is leading a host of Umbrella helicopters to the Arcadia because, dammit, if you don't wear the fashionable brooch, you don't get to live.
Death below, death above - in the form of a seemingly endless wave of Umbrella helicopters, which begs the question; how do they still have fuel? And, more importantly, where are they going to land? - and then, the film ends.
And soon, there's going to be Resident Evil: Retribution.
*
Here's a side note to explain all this bad craziness. I've been feeling burnt-out with film school recently, and so I decided to try to rekindly my creative side - yes, pretentious, I know - by taking a day off and having a film marathon, but one of films I'd never seen before.
Co-incidentally, I got talking to the aforementioned bad-movie-loving friend, who must have mentioned it in passing. Because then I got on to Amazon, and found Resident Evil 1-4 for £8.07.
This means that watching each film cost me £2, approximately, with seven pence for postage, +/-.
So when I sat down yesterday and watched them back-to-back, I know that I got my £2-per-film worth of value.
Still no word on the burnout, though.
January 30th 2012
Let's just get down to business, with Resident Evil: Afterlife.
Before we do, though, let's take a moment to celebrate the fact that Kim Coates is in the goddamn movie, and given that they let him play an asshole, it's automatically a 12% better movie without having to do anything.
Other than that, it's downhill, but an interesting downhill. In a funny kind of way, it's an uphill from the previous installment.
So let's just run with it, because the character development is oddly clinical and economical. Remember all those clones? Yeah, they take on Umbrella's Tokyo faclity, and go boom, because Wesker does like to blow things up. Remember those psychic abilities? Well, goodbye to them too. But Alice does get a lovely plane to fly.
At the same time, this is the first of the films I could actually imagine being a video game in it's own right; I can actually see the fight sequences playing out, along with the vehicle section where you have to land a plane on a hospital roof. My favourite, though, is whenever the Axeman turns up. There's a point where the survivors are standing in the yard, and hundreds of generic zombies are battling aimlessly against mankind's greatest defence - the solid steel gate - when suddenly, the Axeman turns up, and I could almost feel the quicktime event happening;
[Press (X) repeatedly to move police car towards gate!]
[Press (O) to open up garage door!]
[Press [Y] to groan when you realise the engine has been removed from the urban pacification vehicle you needed not to die!]
[Press (X) to change characters. You have selected: Tig]
[Press (O) to shoot another character, steal the plane, and abandon everyone else to their own devices.]
That's pretty much all I got from the prison sequence.
Let's talk about the 3D aspects, though, because while I'm sure - well, kind of sure - they were amazing in the cinema, all the relentless shit-flying-towards-the-screen-in-slow-motion gets really old when watching the film on the small screen.
Let's also talk about how Umbrella have evolved from total arseholes to just complete idiots, because that's always fun.
Correct me if I'm wrong - and, frankly, I'm often wrong, that's the nature of the beast - but Umbrella began life as a Corporation. As in, a business enterprise that, really, needs a world to function in. Now, at some point, Umbrella presumably thought that the world was frankly just a hindrance - so through a series of actions including:
- Creating a virus with a 100% mortality rate and the ability to reanimate those it kills into hyper-effective carriers
- Releasing that virus into the population of Raccoon City
- Trying and failing to contain the virus by nuking Raccoon city
- Hiding underground to avoid the virus but continuing to experiment on even worse versions of it
- Nuking Tokyo to kill hundreds of Milla Jovoviches
- And setting up a fake distress call to round up the few test subjects left alive
- Umbrella is, frankly, the first post-human corporation. By the end of Afterlife, everything is utterly, completly fucked. The world is gone, baby, gone; there may be pockets of life knocking around, but as we saw in the last film, they're either extremely clever or rape-hungry rednecks who keep zombie dogs as pets.
The zombies, too, are evolving; instead of just being mindless flesh-hungry walking plot devices, now they can tunnel through rock given enough time, and the trailer for the next film shows them flying. Also, there's basically not enough ammunition left in the world to deal with what's going on. There's also the apparent complete environmental collapse - as stated in the last film, fresh water sources dry up, plants die, and the ecosystem goes to hell in a handbasket, although this isn't actually mentioned that often in Afterlife.
And, unexplainedly, someone's running around giving people the worst accessory ever; a bloodsucking, spider-ruby-esque brooch, that removes your memories and makes you into a violence-crazy person without the need to zombify you.
So when you get to the Arcadia being a giant floating experimental vessel for Umbrella rather than a place to hide from the fucked-up world you're forced to live in, it's kind of a surprise that nobody just commits suicide rather than go on, because frankly it's that bleak.
Then you have Wesker, who has become super-fast, super-strong and a tentacle monster whenever he feels like it. And his 'death' is kind of strange; the heroes pin him down and shoot him repeatedly in the chest, as if nothing from the previous films has elaborated on the value of headshots, then evacuate the survivors from the room and seal the door. Of course, Wesker seemingly doesn't die, because he comes back to life with the specific purpose of killing Kim Coates, in the weirdest bit of karmic retribution ever.
Because, let's face it, Tig has the best plan out of the entire movie. Instead of participating in trying to leave a prison that's been compromised by concrete-chewing zombies using the urban pacification vehicle that has no engine while the Axeman pounds at the gates, Tig decides, basically, fuck this, I'm out of here. Sticking together is admirable, loyal and wonderful, but if it's the choice between sticking together in a soon-to-be-zombie infested prison and getting the fuck out of dodge as quickly as possible, while teamwork is wonderful, so is not having your organs eaten.
This brings us to the ending, which is just as fucked; Wesker-as-monster is still sealed in the lab below, but if there's one thing these films have taught us it's that zombies are a door's kryptonite, so he's getting out eventually. Meanwhile, on deck, an apparently mind-controlled Jill Valentine - who I didn't actually recognise, because she's not wearing a glaringly impractical outfit - is leading a host of Umbrella helicopters to the Arcadia because, dammit, if you don't wear the fashionable brooch, you don't get to live.
Death below, death above - in the form of a seemingly endless wave of Umbrella helicopters, which begs the question; how do they still have fuel? And, more importantly, where are they going to land? - and then, the film ends.
And soon, there's going to be Resident Evil: Retribution.
*
Here's a side note to explain all this bad craziness. I've been feeling burnt-out with film school recently, and so I decided to try to rekindly my creative side - yes, pretentious, I know - by taking a day off and having a film marathon, but one of films I'd never seen before.
Co-incidentally, I got talking to the aforementioned bad-movie-loving friend, who must have mentioned it in passing. Because then I got on to Amazon, and found Resident Evil 1-4 for £8.07.
This means that watching each film cost me £2, approximately, with seven pence for postage, +/-.
So when I sat down yesterday and watched them back-to-back, I know that I got my £2-per-film worth of value.
Still no word on the burnout, though.
My eyes have been vacuum sealed
Each Day, A Film;
January 29th, 2012 (Retrospective)
Let's keep the inertia up and plough straight into Resident Evil: Extinction, which from memory - even though I only watched it recently - feels like four or so action sequences tied together with string and wishes.
One thing you may hopefully have noticed is that I hate to directly criticise any film, because until the far-flung future day when I've made any kind of film myself, I don't feel that I can criticise anyone else's work with any kind of validity.
I want to criticise Extinction, though. And most of it's down to logistics. This is a film where:
- A group of rape-hungry idiot rednecks has not only managed to survive in the middle of nowhere in a decimated desert environment but has also managed to corral several zombie dogs into cages just in case they need entertainment; the rationale is that, frankly, they're cannibals, but as this is a 15 rated film (UK certification, American readers), we're okay with the violence and the attempted rape but overtly mentioning cannibalism goes too far, dude, too far
- A character who has survived the previous film and has carried on surviving decides not to mention being bitten by a zombie - in full view of another character - right up until the point he has the burning need to eat someone's brains in the middle of an already-packed action sequence
- A cargo container can hold as many super-zombies as the plot demands - super-zombies who, being polite, only break out of the container when they smell Milla Jovovich, and up until that point wait politely in the black metal walls in the middle of the roasting-hot desert until they have to punch-in on the zombie time-clock and go a-killing
- A desert base surrounded by zombies is accessible by blowing up a fraction of their number on one side, ramming the chain-link fence - the fence which has magically held off an ever-increasing number of zombies - to let the horde in, then magically driving out through the horde as if it's no damn thing
- A protagonist whose psychic abilities come and go - they're no use during the aforementioned attempted rape, but they're quite happy to wreck her motorbike during her sleep, protect people from fire and keep away the naughty-naughty tentacles in the final boss fight
- The birds! The birds!
Again, I like to think that with a little bit of paring down; if you stripped out the Genetic Modification / Psychic storyline and put it in a separate film, and instead made the film about desperate survivors crossing the desert, devoid of hope and in ever-dwindling numbers, you could try and make the Paris, Texas of Zombie Filmmaking. The two genres don't mesh that well, though; the Psychic Zombie Fighter mish-mash just feels a little strange.
The conclusion, too, with there being hundreds more Alices just waiting to get out there and kick zombie ass, is almost a nice touch, but that just lets us segué into the next entry, which is...
January 29th, 2012 (Retrospective)
Let's keep the inertia up and plough straight into Resident Evil: Extinction, which from memory - even though I only watched it recently - feels like four or so action sequences tied together with string and wishes.
One thing you may hopefully have noticed is that I hate to directly criticise any film, because until the far-flung future day when I've made any kind of film myself, I don't feel that I can criticise anyone else's work with any kind of validity.
I want to criticise Extinction, though. And most of it's down to logistics. This is a film where:
- A group of rape-hungry idiot rednecks has not only managed to survive in the middle of nowhere in a decimated desert environment but has also managed to corral several zombie dogs into cages just in case they need entertainment; the rationale is that, frankly, they're cannibals, but as this is a 15 rated film (UK certification, American readers), we're okay with the violence and the attempted rape but overtly mentioning cannibalism goes too far, dude, too far
- A character who has survived the previous film and has carried on surviving decides not to mention being bitten by a zombie - in full view of another character - right up until the point he has the burning need to eat someone's brains in the middle of an already-packed action sequence
- A cargo container can hold as many super-zombies as the plot demands - super-zombies who, being polite, only break out of the container when they smell Milla Jovovich, and up until that point wait politely in the black metal walls in the middle of the roasting-hot desert until they have to punch-in on the zombie time-clock and go a-killing
- A desert base surrounded by zombies is accessible by blowing up a fraction of their number on one side, ramming the chain-link fence - the fence which has magically held off an ever-increasing number of zombies - to let the horde in, then magically driving out through the horde as if it's no damn thing
- A protagonist whose psychic abilities come and go - they're no use during the aforementioned attempted rape, but they're quite happy to wreck her motorbike during her sleep, protect people from fire and keep away the naughty-naughty tentacles in the final boss fight
- The birds! The birds!
Again, I like to think that with a little bit of paring down; if you stripped out the Genetic Modification / Psychic storyline and put it in a separate film, and instead made the film about desperate survivors crossing the desert, devoid of hope and in ever-dwindling numbers, you could try and make the Paris, Texas of Zombie Filmmaking. The two genres don't mesh that well, though; the Psychic Zombie Fighter mish-mash just feels a little strange.
The conclusion, too, with there being hundreds more Alices just waiting to get out there and kick zombie ass, is almost a nice touch, but that just lets us segué into the next entry, which is...
I've got another level that I want to clear
Each Day, A Film
January 28th 2012 (Retrospective)
You know what? Let's stick with Resident Evil. Onwards andupwards, then, to Resident Evil: Apocalypse, which comes from the Ronseal school of filmmaking because it's based on Resident Evil, and takes place during an... Apocalypse.
There's a basic theme that runs through the Resident Evil film series; humans that aren't Milla Jovovich, Plucky Survivors, or Dead, are arseholes, largely masterminded by the the King of the Arseholes, the Umbrella Corporation.
Or, they'reJared Harris Moriarty, master hacker.
There's a certain logic to zombie films once you escape the facility, but let's just freeze on that momentarily, because it's an opportunity to discuss the whole King of the Arseholes problem; Umbrella know what they were making in The Hive, they know what happened when it got loose, they know what the T-Virus does when it does get loose, and yet the Best! Idea! Ever! is to unseal The Hive and, well, y'know, just run with it, frankly.
Just run with it, Frankly could, in theory, be the mantra from now on.
You're a suspended police officer on the edge. You know how to deal with zombies, so when the first signs of an outbreak occur, do you:
(A) Dress sensibly, on the assumption that bites or scratches will kill you slowly, but surely?
(B) Break out that little blue dress that leaves your arms, neck and legs totally exposed to any wandering undead?
If you answered (B), you're both Stylish and Jill Valentine. You also have a higher life expectancy than your boss, who's wearing body armour, the sassy journalist following you around, and most of the trained, fully armed and armoured Umbrella soldiers tooling around the city trying to - contrary to Umbrella's mission statement - help.
In fact, Umbrella's idea of helping is to seal off all the exits and then release a mutated environmentalist hunt down the police forces and generally shoot things with BIG GUNS!
Now, here's a slight plot failure for me - although I realise that in this case complaining about a plot failure in films like this is akin to complaining about spaghetti being too bendy - Nemesis is what happened to Matt Addison after Umbrella decided anti-virus was too good for him. At the end of the film, Nemesis has a change of heart, remembering his quasi-feelings for Alice, and temporarily wanders over to the side of the good guys.
The problem is that it's taken him this long - and being impaled through the chest - to break his programmers hold on him, as opposed to, say, slowly but implacably fighting the programmers since he last had a chance to shoot shit up vaguely in the direction of Milla Jovovich around halfway through the film.
This is where we come up against film logic over video game logic; the bad guy's Heel Face Turn can only, obviously, take place after involuntary cardiac surgery.
This is not to say the film doesn't have clever moments - the shift from stupidly experimental to calculatingly scientific within the Umbrella Ranks towards the end is a nice touch, moving from "lock everyone in the city, see what happens" to "wait, Milla's suddenly more interesting than the rest of the world", especially when That fellow from Downton Abbey .
What's slightly worrying, too, is the repetition of finding ways to make Milla Jovovich look like she's being exploited; towards the end of the first film, there was the Revealing Hospital Gown, and at the end of Apocalypse, she becomes the Naked Girl In The Fishtank.
Again, there's some weirdness with the plot; if you stripped it down to simply a bunch of survivors trying to escape a zombified city while saving a little girl but pursued by an unstoppable menace, it would be an effective film, but all the ornamentation - largely courtesy, of course, of how stupid Umbrella are - kind of gloms on to the narrative and drags it down.
Still, it's not that bad a film. Let's move on.
January 28th 2012 (Retrospective)
You know what? Let's stick with Resident Evil. Onwards and
There's a basic theme that runs through the Resident Evil film series; humans that aren't Milla Jovovich, Plucky Survivors, or Dead, are arseholes, largely masterminded by the the King of the Arseholes, the Umbrella Corporation.
Or, they're
There's a certain logic to zombie films once you escape the facility, but let's just freeze on that momentarily, because it's an opportunity to discuss the whole King of the Arseholes problem; Umbrella know what they were making in The Hive, they know what happened when it got loose, they know what the T-Virus does when it does get loose, and yet the Best! Idea! Ever! is to unseal The Hive and, well, y'know, just run with it, frankly.
Just run with it, Frankly could, in theory, be the mantra from now on.
You're a suspended police officer on the edge. You know how to deal with zombies, so when the first signs of an outbreak occur, do you:
(A) Dress sensibly, on the assumption that bites or scratches will kill you slowly, but surely?
(B) Break out that little blue dress that leaves your arms, neck and legs totally exposed to any wandering undead?
If you answered (B), you're both Stylish and Jill Valentine. You also have a higher life expectancy than your boss, who's wearing body armour, the sassy journalist following you around, and most of the trained, fully armed and armoured Umbrella soldiers tooling around the city trying to - contrary to Umbrella's mission statement - help.
In fact, Umbrella's idea of helping is to seal off all the exits and then release a mutated environmentalist hunt down the police forces and generally shoot things with BIG GUNS!
Now, here's a slight plot failure for me - although I realise that in this case complaining about a plot failure in films like this is akin to complaining about spaghetti being too bendy - Nemesis is what happened to Matt Addison after Umbrella decided anti-virus was too good for him. At the end of the film, Nemesis has a change of heart, remembering his quasi-feelings for Alice, and temporarily wanders over to the side of the good guys.
The problem is that it's taken him this long - and being impaled through the chest - to break his programmers hold on him, as opposed to, say, slowly but implacably fighting the programmers since he last had a chance to shoot shit up vaguely in the direction of Milla Jovovich around halfway through the film.
This is where we come up against film logic over video game logic; the bad guy's Heel Face Turn can only, obviously, take place after involuntary cardiac surgery.
This is not to say the film doesn't have clever moments - the shift from stupidly experimental to calculatingly scientific within the Umbrella Ranks towards the end is a nice touch, moving from "lock everyone in the city, see what happens" to "wait, Milla's suddenly more interesting than the rest of the world", especially when That fellow from Downton Abbey .
What's slightly worrying, too, is the repetition of finding ways to make Milla Jovovich look like she's being exploited; towards the end of the first film, there was the Revealing Hospital Gown, and at the end of Apocalypse, she becomes the Naked Girl In The Fishtank.
Again, there's some weirdness with the plot; if you stripped it down to simply a bunch of survivors trying to escape a zombified city while saving a little girl but pursued by an unstoppable menace, it would be an effective film, but all the ornamentation - largely courtesy, of course, of how stupid Umbrella are - kind of gloms on to the narrative and drags it down.
Still, it's not that bad a film. Let's move on.
Now you go to bed, I'm staying here
Each Day, A Film
January 27th 2012 (Retrospective)
... This catchup season is beginning to feel a bit sisyphean, if I'm strictly honest with you. But let's not be honest, today!
Let's talk about Resident Evil, instead.
Now, as previously mentioned, a friend and I have a thing for movies which aren't just bad, but they're bad movies trying to be good. Often, they fail, for a variety of reasons, but sometimes they gently straddle the middle ground.
One of the reasons you can pick for this failure is the video-game-movie model, especially thanks to Uwe Boll. But this is not about Uwe Boll.
As mentioned, it's about Resident Evil.
Now, basing your film on a video-game property is the ultimate double-edged sword - second only to comics-based films pre-1996 - because while you have brand recognition, a pre-sold audience and a host of tropes and plot points to pick and choose from, there's always going to be the logic clash:
(1) Characters in video games do things as the plot and engine demand
(2) Characters in films do things as the plot demands
(3) Characters in real life do neither.
Now, in the wonderful Zombies Calling by Faith Erin Hicks, there's a nice deconstruction of how nobody in zombie movies ever seems to know what a zombie is. This is an interesting parallel world where either zombies have never existed in popular culture, or perhaps George Romero's Night of the Living Dead was never released.
In Resident Evil, there's a sequence where an elite, trained group of special forces soldiers --
--
-- You know what, Cracked can put this much better than I can;
It takes the Umbrella employees an insane twenty minutes to rediscover headshots. They expend most of their ammunition (and half their team) in a single firefight, and they don't hit a head once. Never mind the basic survival, that's statistically impossible. They hit the walls, the roof, the floor, and destroy the basic 'safety controls' on the experimental mega-zombie containment units littered around the room, which releases even more undead; they shoot so badly that they actually increase the number of zombies.
And this is where the three-point scheme comes in above, because this is film logic in action; conforming to point (1), in a video game a headshot would be logical after the first time other damage doesn't work, and in (3), well, let's just hope that never happens.
For all this, Resident Evil is not a bad film. I come not to praise it, but neither to damn it; the video game logic (memory loss, underground trains/loading screens, boss fights) meshes mostly with the horror film logic (supposedly insane but actually just clinical AI, relentless hordes of undead, a crushing sense of despair and occasional nudity) pretty well. The special effects on the Licker are a little ropey - there's that weird feeling that it doesn't actually have any mass, a lá the Eric Bana Hulk, but that doesn't actually detract from proceedings that much.
If there's one issue, it's the reliance on the -flashes-to-memory- that are a decent but fluffed attempt to set up the events of the day, because the timing always seems a little off, somehow; yes, she's married, but no! he's not her husband really, but yes! he's decided to trump her by selling the bioweapon before she can get to it through her contact, but no! she doesn't remember. Until she does.
This is just me talking - and so is just one more opinion in the vast sea of opinions that stretch from shore to internet shore - but the opportunity for a decent, well-timed setup was a little missed there. Alice introduces herself as having been the 'head of security'; if so, why not spend ten minutes at the start of the film with a tense corporate espionage sequence establishing who's thinking about betraying who before genre-shifting into I-will-eat-your-brains-motherfucker? The memory flashbacks are a fine device, but if it'd just been treated as a tension convention rather than a convenient way to explain the plot, might that not have worked a little better, with the audience not knowing who's going to betray who and how?
Also, let's take a moment to mention Colin Salmon, whose career trajectory comes across as more than a little bizarre on the surface but then, when you apply it to his biography, makes more than a little sense; lots of television, lots of roles, then lots of small roles in big-budget American films, then back to television. It's just a shame he gets killed so quick...
January 27th 2012 (Retrospective)
... This catchup season is beginning to feel a bit sisyphean, if I'm strictly honest with you. But let's not be honest, today!
Let's talk about Resident Evil, instead.
Now, as previously mentioned, a friend and I have a thing for movies which aren't just bad, but they're bad movies trying to be good. Often, they fail, for a variety of reasons, but sometimes they gently straddle the middle ground.
One of the reasons you can pick for this failure is the video-game-movie model, especially thanks to Uwe Boll. But this is not about Uwe Boll.
As mentioned, it's about Resident Evil.
Now, basing your film on a video-game property is the ultimate double-edged sword - second only to comics-based films pre-1996 - because while you have brand recognition, a pre-sold audience and a host of tropes and plot points to pick and choose from, there's always going to be the logic clash:
(1) Characters in video games do things as the plot and engine demand
(2) Characters in films do things as the plot demands
(3) Characters in real life do neither.
Now, in the wonderful Zombies Calling by Faith Erin Hicks, there's a nice deconstruction of how nobody in zombie movies ever seems to know what a zombie is. This is an interesting parallel world where either zombies have never existed in popular culture, or perhaps George Romero's Night of the Living Dead was never released.
In Resident Evil, there's a sequence where an elite, trained group of special forces soldiers --
--
-- You know what, Cracked can put this much better than I can;
It takes the Umbrella employees an insane twenty minutes to rediscover headshots. They expend most of their ammunition (and half their team) in a single firefight, and they don't hit a head once. Never mind the basic survival, that's statistically impossible. They hit the walls, the roof, the floor, and destroy the basic 'safety controls' on the experimental mega-zombie containment units littered around the room, which releases even more undead; they shoot so badly that they actually increase the number of zombies.
And this is where the three-point scheme comes in above, because this is film logic in action; conforming to point (1), in a video game a headshot would be logical after the first time other damage doesn't work, and in (3), well, let's just hope that never happens.
For all this, Resident Evil is not a bad film. I come not to praise it, but neither to damn it; the video game logic (memory loss, underground trains/loading screens, boss fights) meshes mostly with the horror film logic (supposedly insane but actually just clinical AI, relentless hordes of undead, a crushing sense of despair and occasional nudity) pretty well. The special effects on the Licker are a little ropey - there's that weird feeling that it doesn't actually have any mass, a lá the Eric Bana Hulk, but that doesn't actually detract from proceedings that much.
If there's one issue, it's the reliance on the -flashes-to-memory- that are a decent but fluffed attempt to set up the events of the day, because the timing always seems a little off, somehow; yes, she's married, but no! he's not her husband really, but yes! he's decided to trump her by selling the bioweapon before she can get to it through her contact, but no! she doesn't remember. Until she does.
This is just me talking - and so is just one more opinion in the vast sea of opinions that stretch from shore to internet shore - but the opportunity for a decent, well-timed setup was a little missed there. Alice introduces herself as having been the 'head of security'; if so, why not spend ten minutes at the start of the film with a tense corporate espionage sequence establishing who's thinking about betraying who before genre-shifting into I-will-eat-your-brains-motherfucker? The memory flashbacks are a fine device, but if it'd just been treated as a tension convention rather than a convenient way to explain the plot, might that not have worked a little better, with the audience not knowing who's going to betray who and how?
Also, let's take a moment to mention Colin Salmon, whose career trajectory comes across as more than a little bizarre on the surface but then, when you apply it to his biography, makes more than a little sense; lots of television, lots of roles, then lots of small roles in big-budget American films, then back to television. It's just a shame he gets killed so quick...
Saturday 11 February 2012
We are the village green preservation society
Each Day, A Film:
January 26th, 2012 (Retrospective)
Sometimes, though, you just have to talk about what you love, not what you have a complicated relationship with, because if you can't write about something you have a deep passion for, what's the point of writing at all?
That's why this post is about Strange Days.
If you remember, a while ago, there was a chat about Johnny Mnemonic, which took a lot of effort to make something look like it took a lot of effort. While no shortage of effort went into Strange Days - for a fact - it makes it look like it's doing what Johnny Mnemonic tried to do effortlessly.
Don't misunderstand me; for a film made in 1996 about 1999 it's amazingly of it's time, down to minidiscs and Skunk Anansie and pre-millenial angst. At the same time, the 'time' that the film is of completely ties in with the William Gibson ideas of Cyberpunk that it may as well be a sacred text; the subversion of technology, the gentle but unavoidable breakdown of society, the broken hero who can't shake off a past he'd be better off without; this isn't a great summary, but it'll have to do.
And when your broken hero is Ralph Fiennes - and it's something Ralph Fiennes squeezes in between Schindler's List and The English Patient - then it either works or it doesn't, and in this case - in my humble opinion - it seems to work.
Let's bring back the personal element to proceedings, too, because I got lucky in seeing this film on BBC2 on New Years Eve 2000 or 2001 at 2am, back in the dim and distant, and at the time BBC2's scheduling fucking rocked, because someone had the bright idea to put an undergrossing cult American film about the Milennium on the channel on Milennium eve, which struck my then still-just-teenage self as obscenely cool.
I've watched it on a couple of New Years Eves' since, but it didn't retain quite the same kind of vigor.
This is my devotion showing, too, but I don't actually have any problems with any part of the film. The story - based, apparently, by James Cameron on the Rodney King verdict - ties in extremely nicely with the Technology of memory recording, instead of the two sharing a nominal relationship. The characters are well-played, the hero's far from perfect, and the ending is, well, amazing.
I wish there were more to say other than it's perfect (for me, at least), but when there's nothing more to say, well, let's say nothing more.
January 26th, 2012 (Retrospective)
Sometimes, though, you just have to talk about what you love, not what you have a complicated relationship with, because if you can't write about something you have a deep passion for, what's the point of writing at all?
That's why this post is about Strange Days.
If you remember, a while ago, there was a chat about Johnny Mnemonic, which took a lot of effort to make something look like it took a lot of effort. While no shortage of effort went into Strange Days - for a fact - it makes it look like it's doing what Johnny Mnemonic tried to do effortlessly.
Don't misunderstand me; for a film made in 1996 about 1999 it's amazingly of it's time, down to minidiscs and Skunk Anansie and pre-millenial angst. At the same time, the 'time' that the film is of completely ties in with the William Gibson ideas of Cyberpunk that it may as well be a sacred text; the subversion of technology, the gentle but unavoidable breakdown of society, the broken hero who can't shake off a past he'd be better off without; this isn't a great summary, but it'll have to do.
And when your broken hero is Ralph Fiennes - and it's something Ralph Fiennes squeezes in between Schindler's List and The English Patient - then it either works or it doesn't, and in this case - in my humble opinion - it seems to work.
Let's bring back the personal element to proceedings, too, because I got lucky in seeing this film on BBC2 on New Years Eve 2000 or 2001 at 2am, back in the dim and distant, and at the time BBC2's scheduling fucking rocked, because someone had the bright idea to put an undergrossing cult American film about the Milennium on the channel on Milennium eve, which struck my then still-just-teenage self as obscenely cool.
I've watched it on a couple of New Years Eves' since, but it didn't retain quite the same kind of vigor.
This is my devotion showing, too, but I don't actually have any problems with any part of the film. The story - based, apparently, by James Cameron on the Rodney King verdict - ties in extremely nicely with the Technology of memory recording, instead of the two sharing a nominal relationship. The characters are well-played, the hero's far from perfect, and the ending is, well, amazing.
I wish there were more to say other than it's perfect (for me, at least), but when there's nothing more to say, well, let's say nothing more.
Hello, Hello, I'm Johnny Cash
Each Day, A Film
January 25th 2012 (Retrospective)
In some ways I dream of the time when the (Retrospective) will disappear, but given my current rate of return and dispersal, it's probably going to be a little while.
Let's get Edgar Wright out of the way, though, with Hot Fuzz.
This is kind of an odd one for me, because part of me loves it, and part of me doesn't, which makes for an interesting combination.
It's like I love it, and I hate it.
If only there were some easy way of describing that relationship.
This is just me talking, and it's just my opinion - shared, most likely, by nobody else - but if Shaun of the Dead was accidental perfection, Hot Fuzz, in retrospect, feels like a studied attempt at recreating perfection and improving on it.
Look at it this way; the Pegg / Frost / Wright trio make funny, beaufiful things. But they made them without worrying about people seeing them as such; Spaced was cult-ish comedy, but it worked - for the most part - just as much for people who got the references as people who didn't. Likewise Shaun of the Dead; if you knew all the zombie film references, good for you, but the central chemistry was such that even if you didn't it was an enjoyable buddy rom-com that just happened to have the living dead involved.
Hot Fuzz, by contrast, is brilliant, and I'd watch it again and enjoy it again, but every now and then it's like a fifty-gag pileup happening at the same time as a dramatic whirlpool brings in as many of Britain's famous actors to one place at one time. Seriously, the amount of British is occasionally cloying even for me as, well, a British person. It works, because all the actors know exactly what they're doing and how to work out where they fit in the hierarchy, but...
... If it's a sign that I'm getting old that it feels a bit much, then I'm getting a bit old. It's like someone stuck the pages of the Who's Who of drama - Edward Woodward, Jim Broadbent, Timothy Dalton - to the pages of late 1990s/early 2000s comedians - Joe Buxton, Steve Coogan, Martin Freeman - and kind of threw all the results together.
At the time, I prosleytised the film, selling it to all and sundry that I knew, and some of them - who I wouldn't have normally expected it of them - went and saw it, and enjoyed it, and I felt a little vindicated, which is a word that comes up a little too often in this series, but run with it.
Now, looking back, and rewatching, I kind of wonder how they made it work; but that's a discussion for another time.
January 25th 2012 (Retrospective)
In some ways I dream of the time when the (Retrospective) will disappear, but given my current rate of return and dispersal, it's probably going to be a little while.
Let's get Edgar Wright out of the way, though, with Hot Fuzz.
This is kind of an odd one for me, because part of me loves it, and part of me doesn't, which makes for an interesting combination.
It's like I love it, and I hate it.
If only there were some easy way of describing that relationship.
This is just me talking, and it's just my opinion - shared, most likely, by nobody else - but if Shaun of the Dead was accidental perfection, Hot Fuzz, in retrospect, feels like a studied attempt at recreating perfection and improving on it.
Look at it this way; the Pegg / Frost / Wright trio make funny, beaufiful things. But they made them without worrying about people seeing them as such; Spaced was cult-ish comedy, but it worked - for the most part - just as much for people who got the references as people who didn't. Likewise Shaun of the Dead; if you knew all the zombie film references, good for you, but the central chemistry was such that even if you didn't it was an enjoyable buddy rom-com that just happened to have the living dead involved.
Hot Fuzz, by contrast, is brilliant, and I'd watch it again and enjoy it again, but every now and then it's like a fifty-gag pileup happening at the same time as a dramatic whirlpool brings in as many of Britain's famous actors to one place at one time. Seriously, the amount of British is occasionally cloying even for me as, well, a British person. It works, because all the actors know exactly what they're doing and how to work out where they fit in the hierarchy, but...
... If it's a sign that I'm getting old that it feels a bit much, then I'm getting a bit old. It's like someone stuck the pages of the Who's Who of drama - Edward Woodward, Jim Broadbent, Timothy Dalton - to the pages of late 1990s/early 2000s comedians - Joe Buxton, Steve Coogan, Martin Freeman - and kind of threw all the results together.
At the time, I prosleytised the film, selling it to all and sundry that I knew, and some of them - who I wouldn't have normally expected it of them - went and saw it, and enjoyed it, and I felt a little vindicated, which is a word that comes up a little too often in this series, but run with it.
Now, looking back, and rewatching, I kind of wonder how they made it work; but that's a discussion for another time.
Thursday 2 February 2012
And the drums and the drums and the drums
Each Day, A Film:
January 24th 2012 (Retrospective)
It's probably - having introduced Edgar Wright previously - time to talk about Shaun of the Dead.
This is, however, a little difficult for me, because, for a while, I was Nick Frost to a wannabe Simon Pegg. I've talked about this in the pre-EDAF days, in veiled terms - the post about the bridges we form, and burn, and let rot away, and there was probably some other moaning about that godawful new term "frenemy" that my current contemporaries use (although it's strikingly accurate, and also entertaining in that there's a film with ZackGalley Gallifrey Galifianakis that my local supermarket has which has been re-covered to make it look that much more like the DVD case for The Hangover).
Don't get me wrong, I'm chunky, and occasionally slothful and inappropriate, but the guy I'm talking about was... Actually, now I come to think about it he pretty much was Shaun, in a boring-job not-great-life girlfriend-leaving-you sort of a way. And so we listened to the soundtrack, and I got to be the one always trekking to him to go out drinking, and there was the vague general degradation, and then I decided I didn't need that anymore.
Fun story, no?
But I do remember seeing Shaun of the Dead in the cinema, because I'd been obsessing about it ever since the first trailer came out, which is something I do less these days. At the time it was a kind of white-hot obsession, and I went into town as soon as the film was on general release, and watched it in a probably 1/10th full cinema, and loved it.
Then so did America, which was nice.
Now, there are a lot of debates to be had over the Simon Pegg > Nick Frost equation, because if you look at it from a 2011 - 2012 point of view, Simon Pegg = Mission Impossible 4, while Nick Frost = Attack the Block. It's an interesting and potentially vital source of research - how a comic partnership can be cemented, dented, rented and bent out of shape, because then you can look at Paul - although Paul is Pegg, Frost and crucially not Edgar Wright - but at the same time, it's fun to look on it as Englishman done Good (plus his mate done okay).
At the time, though, Shaun of the Dead was the microcosm of every single thing that was cool about cinema for me back in the day; nerdy jokes, English humour, zombies. Now, maybe, I don't know how I'd feel watching it, but I'd be happy to give it a go...
January 24th 2012 (Retrospective)
It's probably - having introduced Edgar Wright previously - time to talk about Shaun of the Dead.
This is, however, a little difficult for me, because, for a while, I was Nick Frost to a wannabe Simon Pegg. I've talked about this in the pre-EDAF days, in veiled terms - the post about the bridges we form, and burn, and let rot away, and there was probably some other moaning about that godawful new term "frenemy" that my current contemporaries use (although it's strikingly accurate, and also entertaining in that there's a film with Zack
Don't get me wrong, I'm chunky, and occasionally slothful and inappropriate, but the guy I'm talking about was... Actually, now I come to think about it he pretty much was Shaun, in a boring-job not-great-life girlfriend-leaving-you sort of a way. And so we listened to the soundtrack, and I got to be the one always trekking to him to go out drinking, and there was the vague general degradation, and then I decided I didn't need that anymore.
Fun story, no?
But I do remember seeing Shaun of the Dead in the cinema, because I'd been obsessing about it ever since the first trailer came out, which is something I do less these days. At the time it was a kind of white-hot obsession, and I went into town as soon as the film was on general release, and watched it in a probably 1/10th full cinema, and loved it.
Then so did America, which was nice.
Now, there are a lot of debates to be had over the Simon Pegg > Nick Frost equation, because if you look at it from a 2011 - 2012 point of view, Simon Pegg = Mission Impossible 4, while Nick Frost = Attack the Block. It's an interesting and potentially vital source of research - how a comic partnership can be cemented, dented, rented and bent out of shape, because then you can look at Paul - although Paul is Pegg, Frost and crucially not Edgar Wright - but at the same time, it's fun to look on it as Englishman done Good (plus his mate done okay).
At the time, though, Shaun of the Dead was the microcosm of every single thing that was cool about cinema for me back in the day; nerdy jokes, English humour, zombies. Now, maybe, I don't know how I'd feel watching it, but I'd be happy to give it a go...
My weapon jammed and I got stuck way out and all alone
Each Day, A Film
January 23rd 2012 (Retrospective)
Sticking with the theme of films actually observed in their native environment as opposed to captivity, let's talk about the strange and annoying experience I had when I went to see Scott Pilgrim.
Now, believe it or not, I don't go to see a lot of films on my own. There are a few - which will no doubt come up in future posts - that I had no real other choice but to, but they weren't particularly bad experiences.
The weirdness with Scott Pilgrim is that because I couldn't actually convince anyone to come and see it - not even, embarassingly, family - I managed to score a ticket and went on my own. Now, as mentioned before, the other experiences weren't so bad - for one simple reason; the cinemas were usually filled with two to twelve people.
With Scott Pilgrim the cinema was full. This isn't the sticking point, though; I took my seat, which was next to a couple of mothers who'd brought their young children. And before you think it, the children were the model of well-behaved throughout the film. No, the issue I have is that within ten minutes of me sitting down, the child next to me was shushingly relocated away from me for no reason that I could actually see, leaving me feeling like being at a cinema alone was somehow indicative that I was a strange, antisocial type who shouldn't be left near the children lest I corrupt them with my odd ways.
In reality, the mother probably thought I'd appreciate not sitting next to the child - in case of acting up, or whatever - but it felt really strange at the time, as if I wasn't a fully-functioning member of society and the younglings needed protecting from me.
Let's move on, though, because I'm probably making something out of nothing.
Scott Pilgrim as a film is probably somewhere in my top ten, because, frankly, it's an amazing synergy of director, material, and, occasionally, cast. Oh, we can all moan about Michael Cera - and he's maybe not perfect casting, but at least he's not Dawson Casting, and he does carry it well even while basically being outshone by Kieran Culkin every time Wallace shows up.
Then again, I do have a man-director-crush on Edgar Wright, starting way back with Spaced and leading on to Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. Don't get me wrong; in terms of directors, my first love was Robert Rodriguez - primarily because of his 10-minute film schools, which fanned the nascent flames of my passion for film - but when I grew up (and after having seen Once Upon a Time in Mexico), I switched gears to the freneticism of Wright with nary a backward glance (except for, of course, Planet Terror).
And, at the same time, thanks to the recommendations of Barbelith - which I still kind of miss, by the way - I'd read the source material, lovingly described by almost nobody as Amerimanga, and while there were perhaps a few narrative missteps there - some chapters could have been shortened, and maybe the ending was a little pat - it was still worth following in all kinds of ways.
The film, though, is something I love for the visual effects. Now, if you've read the previous post, firstly well done!, secondly who are you? and thirdly you'll know that I'm a big one for visual effects, although I only know how to do the most basic of basic personally. (I could probably animate a moving box for you, or some swirly text, or fun stuff like that, which if I were a wizard would be the equivalent of the light spell; useful in certain situations, useless in most others.)
But Edgar Wright uses a cutting style that I'm in love with; it's frenetic, it's often used for silly jokes, but it never breaks the flow of the film. In point of fact, it tends to enhance it - because the cutting means that often two minutes of visuals can be locked down into thirty seconds or a single minute without too much in the way of loss.
I wish I had more cogent arguments to make and more in-depth analysis to give you, but, frankly, I just love the film (not to perfection, but pretty close) for what it is and, maybe, what it represents, because even though it wasn't a particularly huge sucess at the box office, it was - as has been mentioned before - another taste of validation that the weird stuff I liked to read was worth making into a film.
January 23rd 2012 (Retrospective)
Sticking with the theme of films actually observed in their native environment as opposed to captivity, let's talk about the strange and annoying experience I had when I went to see Scott Pilgrim.
Now, believe it or not, I don't go to see a lot of films on my own. There are a few - which will no doubt come up in future posts - that I had no real other choice but to, but they weren't particularly bad experiences.
The weirdness with Scott Pilgrim is that because I couldn't actually convince anyone to come and see it - not even, embarassingly, family - I managed to score a ticket and went on my own. Now, as mentioned before, the other experiences weren't so bad - for one simple reason; the cinemas were usually filled with two to twelve people.
With Scott Pilgrim the cinema was full. This isn't the sticking point, though; I took my seat, which was next to a couple of mothers who'd brought their young children. And before you think it, the children were the model of well-behaved throughout the film. No, the issue I have is that within ten minutes of me sitting down, the child next to me was shushingly relocated away from me for no reason that I could actually see, leaving me feeling like being at a cinema alone was somehow indicative that I was a strange, antisocial type who shouldn't be left near the children lest I corrupt them with my odd ways.
In reality, the mother probably thought I'd appreciate not sitting next to the child - in case of acting up, or whatever - but it felt really strange at the time, as if I wasn't a fully-functioning member of society and the younglings needed protecting from me.
Let's move on, though, because I'm probably making something out of nothing.
Scott Pilgrim as a film is probably somewhere in my top ten, because, frankly, it's an amazing synergy of director, material, and, occasionally, cast. Oh, we can all moan about Michael Cera - and he's maybe not perfect casting, but at least he's not Dawson Casting, and he does carry it well even while basically being outshone by Kieran Culkin every time Wallace shows up.
Then again, I do have a man-director-crush on Edgar Wright, starting way back with Spaced and leading on to Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. Don't get me wrong; in terms of directors, my first love was Robert Rodriguez - primarily because of his 10-minute film schools, which fanned the nascent flames of my passion for film - but when I grew up (and after having seen Once Upon a Time in Mexico), I switched gears to the freneticism of Wright with nary a backward glance (except for, of course, Planet Terror).
And, at the same time, thanks to the recommendations of Barbelith - which I still kind of miss, by the way - I'd read the source material, lovingly described by almost nobody as Amerimanga, and while there were perhaps a few narrative missteps there - some chapters could have been shortened, and maybe the ending was a little pat - it was still worth following in all kinds of ways.
The film, though, is something I love for the visual effects. Now, if you've read the previous post, firstly well done!, secondly who are you? and thirdly you'll know that I'm a big one for visual effects, although I only know how to do the most basic of basic personally. (I could probably animate a moving box for you, or some swirly text, or fun stuff like that, which if I were a wizard would be the equivalent of the light spell; useful in certain situations, useless in most others.)
But Edgar Wright uses a cutting style that I'm in love with; it's frenetic, it's often used for silly jokes, but it never breaks the flow of the film. In point of fact, it tends to enhance it - because the cutting means that often two minutes of visuals can be locked down into thirty seconds or a single minute without too much in the way of loss.
I wish I had more cogent arguments to make and more in-depth analysis to give you, but, frankly, I just love the film (not to perfection, but pretty close) for what it is and, maybe, what it represents, because even though it wasn't a particularly huge sucess at the box office, it was - as has been mentioned before - another taste of validation that the weird stuff I liked to read was worth making into a film.
Come gather round people wherever you roam and admit that the waters around you have grown
Each Day, A Film
January 22nd 2012 (Retrospective)
If I have to be honest, I don't actually go to watch that many films in the cinema. This is less to do with the whole DVD / streaming / torrenting argument and more to do with the fact that, nine times out of ten, it's a pain in the arse.
If you go at any other time than the matinee, you're running the very basic risk of being in a room with a lot of people you don't know - and every extra person is the extra gamble of a talker, or that their mobile phone will go off at an inopportune time, or that any one of hundreds of annoying personal habits will grate, grate, grate on you for the two hours you're trapped in a communal experience.
And yes, I probably sound like a misanthrope at the moment.
But I do occasionally like to go to see films on The Big Screen, and there've only been comparatively few times I've been disappointed, and this wasn't one of them, because we're here to talk about Watchmen.
Now, I have to be honest, I was a little shocked when the cinema was near-full for this one, because if you wanted a popular topic for a film, a seminal comic-book of the 1980s deconstructing tropes of superheroes and vigilantes wouldn't be my first choice.
Then the beautiful, serene title sequence starts up, and after that, I was pretty much sold. A little shallow, I know, but I'm a sucker for a well-made title sequence. If you've seen the film, admit it, it's beautiful.
The second thing to bear in mind is that this is one of the longest superhero films out there. Normally, there's a kind of progression; discover power, use power, meet villain, fight villain, angst, cake. Watchmen ignores such petty concerns to tell what's basically a detective story in the present rooted so far in the past that time gets all... I had the urge to write that "the timeline is a-changing", but there you go. Flashback, flashforward, try to ignore the dangling blue penises, focus on the drama; it's that kind of film.
Now, being a comic book reader - don't worry, it's not contagious - I had, after a decade or so of Marvel and DC, started to explore the 'seminal' texts, which boiled down to Watchmen and V for Vendetta, among a few others. Because of this, I'm fairly partisan when it comes to criticism; I don't hate the movie because it makes some small changes and one major squid omission, because it's a movie.
There's not much more to write, but I'd like to add one thing; Watchmen was clearly a gutsy proposition, coming before the final hurrahs of the massively over-budgeted films of the 2002 - 2009 period. Imagine pitching it to the executives;
"You know comic book movies are popular at the moment, right? Well, how about we make a nearly three-hour-long film about a Blue Nudist God and the bunch of nearly-psychotic vigilantes who supposedly "fight crime" until the government tell them not to, except one of them's planning to unite the planet via the gift of genocide - except that his plan causes the vigilantes to try to find out what's happening by breaking people's limbs in a variety of massively bloody ways, and there's a metaphor for orgasm using a flamethrower. Sound good?
Guys?
Guys?"
January 22nd 2012 (Retrospective)
If I have to be honest, I don't actually go to watch that many films in the cinema. This is less to do with the whole DVD / streaming / torrenting argument and more to do with the fact that, nine times out of ten, it's a pain in the arse.
If you go at any other time than the matinee, you're running the very basic risk of being in a room with a lot of people you don't know - and every extra person is the extra gamble of a talker, or that their mobile phone will go off at an inopportune time, or that any one of hundreds of annoying personal habits will grate, grate, grate on you for the two hours you're trapped in a communal experience.
And yes, I probably sound like a misanthrope at the moment.
But I do occasionally like to go to see films on The Big Screen, and there've only been comparatively few times I've been disappointed, and this wasn't one of them, because we're here to talk about Watchmen.
Now, I have to be honest, I was a little shocked when the cinema was near-full for this one, because if you wanted a popular topic for a film, a seminal comic-book of the 1980s deconstructing tropes of superheroes and vigilantes wouldn't be my first choice.
Then the beautiful, serene title sequence starts up, and after that, I was pretty much sold. A little shallow, I know, but I'm a sucker for a well-made title sequence. If you've seen the film, admit it, it's beautiful.
The second thing to bear in mind is that this is one of the longest superhero films out there. Normally, there's a kind of progression; discover power, use power, meet villain, fight villain, angst, cake. Watchmen ignores such petty concerns to tell what's basically a detective story in the present rooted so far in the past that time gets all... I had the urge to write that "the timeline is a-changing", but there you go. Flashback, flashforward, try to ignore the dangling blue penises, focus on the drama; it's that kind of film.
Now, being a comic book reader - don't worry, it's not contagious - I had, after a decade or so of Marvel and DC, started to explore the 'seminal' texts, which boiled down to Watchmen and V for Vendetta, among a few others. Because of this, I'm fairly partisan when it comes to criticism; I don't hate the movie because it makes some small changes and one major squid omission, because it's a movie.
There's not much more to write, but I'd like to add one thing; Watchmen was clearly a gutsy proposition, coming before the final hurrahs of the massively over-budgeted films of the 2002 - 2009 period. Imagine pitching it to the executives;
"You know comic book movies are popular at the moment, right? Well, how about we make a nearly three-hour-long film about a Blue Nudist God and the bunch of nearly-psychotic vigilantes who supposedly "fight crime" until the government tell them not to, except one of them's planning to unite the planet via the gift of genocide - except that his plan causes the vigilantes to try to find out what's happening by breaking people's limbs in a variety of massively bloody ways, and there's a metaphor for orgasm using a flamethrower. Sound good?
Guys?
Guys?"
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