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.
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