Cloud Atlas

First of all, I haven’t read the book.

Secondly, I missed this when it was released earlier this year. Combination of a busy schedule, but also the fact that it had quite a limited release, and seemed to mostly be on at 3pm in the afternoon.

Other than the fascinatingly long previews that were released for this, my only other knowledge of Cloud Atlas was directly from a First Tuesday Book Club review where it was panned by everybody except Jennifer Byrne. I was similarly warned off reading it by several friends. Yet I did know that it was a long novel that structured its narrative as a kind of matryoshka doll, starting at a point in the past and working it’s way through characters to some point in the distant future, and then seemingly back again. Additionally I knew that it attempted to show some form of continuity of thought or expression through history and projections of the future.

Maybe I was wrong about what I knew.

As a film I just don’t think it works. Visually it is amazing, but you got that with the price of admission when the directors were the Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer. The performances are credible throughout, and though he lists between mugging buffoonery and gentle belligerence, Tom Hanks manages to do well despite the fact that he increasingly resembles a cartoon character.

The problem is the approach. The scattergun method of delivering six interwoven yet distinct narratives just doesn’t wash. Occasionally there’s a magnificent melding of multiple narrative strands into a moment of gravity and power – Autua’s acceptance into the crew in the 1849 sequence, for instance – but these are too far and few between, and are quickly forgotten. The mosaic of the narratives might have succeeded had they been refined down, or the film shortened, but too often it feels as if the viewer is constantly interrupted just when something was starting to resonate. At times the intercutting of the narratives appears almost arbitrarily random or tokenistic, as if the directors felt if they didn’t intercut the audience might forget that was the point after all.

Yes it does build to a satisfying resolution, but so do all half-decent films. And for all the nigh-on three hours of attention-deficit storytelling that’s gone on before the final moments, it’s not worth it. The ideas of the novel are glorious, they’re magnificent and worthy of cinematic depiction. But this just doesn’t do them justice. It possesses all the grace and subtlety of a bull in a china shop, which is even more galling when that china shop is meant to convey some element of profound significance on the majesty of human existence.

In the end, too much needed to go. Cut most of Broadbent’s faffing about in a retirement home, cut the extraneous detail of Halle Berry’s strand (intrigue! conspiracy!), and deliver some kind of focus to all the meanderings (why did Ben Wishaw commit suicide? where was the motivation to do so?).

It could have worked and worked well, I feel, if they had told the story much as it appears in the novel. One strand at a time, building to some form of majestic revelation in the keystone narrative. As it is, it feels too much like an exercise in seeing how long the audience can put up with incessant cross-cutting. A shame.

They’re making it up as they go

This is not at all a review.

Disclaimer out the way, all I know about this post is my starting idea. I have a feeling of where I’d like to end up, what point I would like to finish on, what feeling I would like to create with my words, but I’m not sure yet how to get there. We’ll see.

Yes, you can see a point emerging on the horizon. I wish to write about the oft-made complaint, usually directed at once-popular and thriving, once-sources of of inspiration and new ideas in storytelling, that they’re making it up as they go along. They being the creators. Writers, directors, producers, whoever. They who deliver the story to us, as we sit there forever yelling out from our couches for Berk to feed us.

So why the complaint? Probably because the show (this is by and large a post about TV shows, though it sometimes does creep into discussion about films) has started to push a few too many elements of the story a wee bit too far with their patient faithful. The audience becomes conscious. ‘We can see what you’re doing!’ they cry. They can see the inevitable ending aversion, utilised by so many storytellers who just love to tell their story. Don’t get to the ending too soon, keep delaying this and give everyone the satisfaction of living in the world of the story just that little bit longer. Bad stories do this badly. Good stories – and now I’m going to mention Lost – do this well. Keep spinning the plates, but introduce more and so we don’t notice as the first plates start to fall. But the more plates, the bigger the crash at the end. And this happened with Lost. Outrage, fury, everyone claiming that they knew it all along, they knew it in their hearts, that the Lost creators were just making it all up as they went along.

Which is horseshit.

We’ll stick with Lost for several reasons. One is because it did storytelling well. Another is that it faced probably the biggest backlash of the type mentioned above. A final reason is because I still think it was a fantastic show that ended the way it always wanted to and ended perfectly and my life is wonderful thank you.

Lost did set up far too many mysteries. It thrived on it. And it did become far too enamoured in its ability to spin more and more mystery and confusion into the mythology in a way that seemed perfectly in keeping with the type of show it was. And the audience loved it. But at some point (Season Three) the nagging doubt crept into the audience’s hivemind that perhaps this was spinning out of control (again with the plates), and everyone wondered where it was all going.

And this continued, even through the exceptionally strong fourth, fifth and final seasons. And despite the finale – the staggering, brilliantly ineffable finale – the lasting memory for a majority of the audience is that they just bumbled their way through making things up, and hashed some claptrap together in a weepy ‘Look over there!’ series ending.

But is this such a bad thing?

Is it bad, to make things up as you go?

Why do we not like it?

I think it comes down to a sort of uncanny storyteller valley. The audience want to be spirited away to the imagination of the creator. And that imagination must be fully formed. It must be complete. It must convince. I mustn’t at any point seem like a lie (which it is). We enter into stories, books, films aware that we are participating in a bargain with the creator. Here’s our money now make us forget we gave it to you. We have an unconscious act of forgetting the conscious. ‘Tell us a story but don’t tell us that you’re telling us a story!’ If we get too close to the telling, to close that we can see the grotesque cracks in the corners, the wires holding Superman up, the zipper on the monster suit, we cry foul and go look for something that does it better.

Stories, like Lost, that appear to show a preparedness to organically evolve (like life!) run risk of drawing attention too much to their process of telling a story. Heaven forbid a story that is thought of, written, rewritten, rehearsed, performed, edited, broadcast over a seven year period should dare to evolve as it goes.

Yes shows like Lost have inconsistencies. And yes it flagged midway due to a myriad of reasons (sloppy writing, lack of direction from the show runners and so on). And yes, it didn’t answer everything it set itself up to. Mysteries went unexplained. But come on. In rewatching the opening season, the episodes that resonated so much, the moments that displayed strength and clarity of storytelling unlike many TV shows, all seemed a little simplistic. A little obvious. Cartoonish, almost. Even the moments from the first like the Locke-wheelchair revelation and the light in the hatch are basic in the deftness of their storytelling when held up against the Penny-Desmond moments through seasons 4 to 6, and Alpert’s backstory in the final few episodes. The show evolved, the characters with it, but so did the audience. Stories have to get better, have to become more complex and sophisticated, if they are to go on for a long time, because we do as we listen to them. The audience expects more. Demands it.

It would be prudent, then, to evolve as a storyteller in kind. There will be false steps, there will be inconsistencies, but all these stories are asking is that we forgive the odd zipper and smoke and mirrors, and just go with it. It’s what we’re there for in the first place.

Stories are made in the telling of them.

Zero Dark Thirty

Here is the world as it ends: alone, stunned, and with the never-ceasing echoes of alarms. Not with a bang, but many.

Zero Dark Thirty is incredible for what it tries to achieve. Alongside The Social Network, it is one of few attempts in recent film to chronicle the state of the world as we have it now, in front of us.

As a procedural, it works well. The film covers many years and breaks them into loosely shaped episodes, feeling more like a filmed non-fiction piece than a piece of cinema. Certain moments do lend towards the cinematic and the big-noting of character moments – particularly a central episode, ‘The Meeting’ – but these occasional leanings towards tradition and type in film are grounded within the horrific terrain of the subject material.

This is a film that begins with terror and, on the outside at least, tries to document a search for peace after one act of terror.

The opening sequence, though much talked about for its depictions of torture, is actually the easiest to manage, and it’s hard to see how some critics can maintain this shows a sanctioning of torture as a valid method of interrogation. To do so would reduce the film to simple cause-and-effect, whereby it begins with torture used to discover the links to Bin Laden’s whereabouts, and by the film’s ending he has been found and killed. The film, and life, is not that simple.

From the torture scenes onwards, the film documents a descent into hell, not a rising out of it. The truth, and certainty in it, becomes harder and harder to identify and process, and the audience is forced to question the cost of everything. The cost of lives, of humanity, to spend a decade in search of one man and make him to atone for his crimes. It begs us to question whether this is the legacy that we want to leave history to document.

As such, Zero Dark Thirty is unusual in its structure and approach to a difficult subject. Unusually, it comes to resemble The Silence of the Lambs, with its female detective navigating her way through a seemingly impenetrable chaos of leads and dead-ends. Terror and horror in both films are the same: unique, graphic and unintelligible. The compound in Abbottabad that secured Bin Laden is akin to Buffalo Bill’s basement of horrors – right down to the extensive night-vision and claustrophobia – as our protagonists descend further and further into hell to root out evil once and for all. Tellingly, the difference between the two films is that one can only feel as if the protagonists in Zero Dark Thirty brought hell with them when they landed in that compound, and have subsequently made the world that way. There is no salvation, no atonement for sins, just the fear, the paranoia of more terror on the horizon.

This film is the constant wailing of alarms in the distance that we have to live with, whether they’re real or just rattling around as echoes in our heads.

in defence of Superman Returns

Okay, so you’ve worked out what this is about. To date, I count myself as the only person I know who really liked this film.

And it’s strange, because it was well received at the time, made lots of money, and certainly continued the trend of displaying Bryan Singer as a director who could treat comic book characters with respect and seriousness, whilst maintaining a lightness of touch and affection for the source material. And this was well before every comic book film decided they were going to do the whole Nolan thing, as if that’s the only measure of how to do this stuff for a contemporary audience.

But, back to the film. I was new to Superman, not a huge fan of the originals. I found the character somewhat bland, a bit pointless – what can you do with someone all powerful anyway? It’s just not dynamic for a narrative.

And yet I found myself captivated by this. Singer had managed to not only reboot (can we find a new word for reboot, please?) the character for the fans, but make the story and the mythology relevant for a modern audience and – more importantly – a modern audience post September 11.

This is key to me. Singer goes to pains to show how the character fits into the modern world. The mention of kids with phones getting better pictures than the media is only part of this. Superman himself references how America had become so sure of itself, so wrapped up in its specialness, that it didn’t need him anymore. And away he went. Tragedy strikes, and now all call for a saviour. All call for a quick fix to cure the world of all its ills. Singer echoes a Christian mythology here – the capture and brutalising of Superman by Luthor’s henchmen is eerily similar to a scouring and crucifixion. Here is America destroying its emblem, terrorising it even, and ultimately the only way back for the good guys in Singer’s film is by their own efforts and ingenuity, not the reliance on a superhero.

This type of story worked, and resonated for the audiences, yet strangely nobody was granted the right to a sequel. It wasn’t action-packed enough, apparently, not dark enough for the Batman Begins crowd, not silly enough for the Spiderman brigade, and certainly not near the violence of a 300 or Sin City-type audience. But it was the perfect film for this character, the perfect way to treat it. The score is wonderful, especially in big moments like the plane crash, and the visual style is just wonderful. It feels exactly as it should, visually, a golden age now gone bad, and the characters are framed large in a way that highlights them as archetypes for our own ideologies. The sequences of Superman’s childhood – where he discovers and explores his powers – are a joy, and handled all with pure cinematic style; dialogue-free and full of implication.

Lastly, it gives a reason for Superman as a character. A relevance. This isn’t a story about him teaching us how to look after ourselves – though that does happen – it gives him a reason to be here in the first place. And that isn’t mythological, or superheroic, or powerful. It’s to discover his humanity as a father.

And Brando’s voiceover kills me.

Django Unchained

First up, I’m not a huge fan of Quentin Tarantino’s films.

In the past I have preferred his films when he’s exercised more restraint – Reservoir Dogs and Jackie Brown – and whilst I appreciated certain technical and structural aspects in Pulp Fiction and the Kill Bills, the films didn’t engage me in any way the registered real emotion or investment on my part as a viewer. And I think that’s the point with Tarantino’s films.

They’re fun, and enjoyable, in their stylised show-offiness and irreverence with the form, but ultimately it’s like going to the show grounds as a kid and going on all the rides. They’ll entertain you, for a brief period that you’re on them, but in the end they never go for as a long as you’d like, and they always cost more than you expect, and at all times there’s never any feeling that they’re giving you an experience that will affect your life.

I did enjoy Inglourious Basterds but as I’ve come to reflect on it, I enjoyed the opening sequence with Landa and the dairy farmer immensely, and then every sequence from that onwards less and less. It was fun, and silly, but ultimately didn’t actually offer up anything that made watching the film worthwhile.

So, finally to Django Unchained. In short, I had great fun watching this. So much more than I had expected to. Quickly, for me, 2013 is shaping up as the Year of Unexpected Joy in cinema. (As opposed to 2012, the Year of Ungodly Disappointment.) Two moments especially stood out. The first was the first bounty mission where Jamie Foxx’s Django accompanies Christoph Waltz’s King Schulz, which builds and builds into a mini-climax of pure cinema. It was everything you want in film: at turns dramatic and lofty, at others bloody and excessive, and for Tarantino it was unexpectedly poignant, emotional and restrained. And fun. Serious fun.

The only part of the film that eclipsed this sequence happens almost two-thirds of the way through. A dinner sequence between Django, Shulz, and Leonardo Di Caprio’s Calvin Candie (and his retinue) is astonishing. Long, twisting, ever-playful, this could easily serve as the major third-act climax of any film in its heightened drama. That it doesn’t, shows Tarantino’s refusal to offer up a simple film. What this sequence does best though is show-off his mastery of writing brilliant dialogue.

Much has been said of the violence in his films, and in this one in particular, but it’s a fruitless path to go down. There is very little violence in the key moments, like this sequence, and the action – so to speak – is with the words. Particularly in who controls the words. For most of the film, the controlling character is Schulz, who always appears to know more than everybody else and uses his words to achieve his own results. What makes this sequence so incredible, is the shifting control of the dialogue from Schulz, to Candie, and then to anybody who’ll claim it. It plays with the audience perfectly, and is almost a shame when it’s over.

The ending is almost perfunctory after this, but it’s handled with so much fun it’s hard to disappoint. The violence, as mentioned, is irrelevant. Tarantino shows in this particular film that he knows what he’s doing. The violence of revenge and retribution (usually towards those involved in the slave-trade) is over the top and comical. It is cinematic blood-letting, much the same as killing Nazis in Inglourious Basterds was. But the other violence, the real, factual violence of slavery in antebellum America is astonishingly restrained and withheld. Much is implied in cuts and sound, and most is kept offscreen. As a result, it is far more horrific for utilising our imagination rather than our blood-lust. A grown-up Tarantino indeed.

And so this is why I liked Django Unchained much more than many of his films. It did all that we come to expect from a Tarantino film, but it did more. It actually offered up some relevance and dialogue with a contemporary world. It’s hard to judge being out of the context of US society, but the acknowledgement and brutalising of white slave traders in this film is a necessary acknowledgement from white cinema. That Tarantino effectively kills off himself in this film – and his casual and flippant treatment of African American society in previous films – is something that I think he needed to do.

That Australia is included in this killing off – through the cameo of John Jarratt – is hopefully not missed by people, as it was hard to do so by me given that I saw this on Australia Day, in hardly a celebratory mood.

Final note: Samuel L. Jackson can act. Never seen this before.

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

Unexpectedly, and undocumented by many of the major coverage and reviews, Peter Jackson has delivered an extremely successful and entertaining adaptation of The Hobbit.

More on the reception later, because it’s worth dwelling first on the achievements of the film.

It seamlessly picks up the style, imagery and tone of the previous Lord of the Rings films in such a way that it is hard to feel over a decade has passed since The Fellowship of the Ring was first released. Aside from a curiously lumbering prologue that brings us back to Ian Holm’s Bilbo and Elijah Wood’s Frodo, the film picks up once we’re positioned in the time proper of the story. Admittedly, the introduction of the dwarves and their quest – to retake the homeland under the Lonely Mountain – is detailed and thorough, and some may feel too long for what is an adaptation of a short book. But ultimately it’s all necessary, as Jackson knows the relevance and resonance of these early scenes with Bilbo and the dwarves carries and underpins much of the crucial action throughout this film, and will have to do likewise for the coming two films.

This is not a retroactively constructed trilogy, formed out of three spontaneous stand-alone stories. These are thoughtful and considered plot points, made in full awareness of how long the journey will be, and how tedious it can become if it’s all spectacle without character-driven emotion and desire underneath. Much is the same in the original Lord of the Rings films.

The journey itself moves swiftly along, and continues the up-and-down episodic nature of the original novel, but introduces stronger thematic through-lines and overarching conflicts that stitch the episodes together into a continuous dramatic narrative. To be honest, this was something always missing from The Hobbit as a novel. It is a story written for children, in the manner of bed-time tales, which need to be short and almost televisual in the way they deliver a series of ongoing tribulations. Compared to The Lord of the Rings novels, this is a weakness of The Hobbit, and Jackson has improved the source novel immensely with this film.

The special effects will win the Oscar. That’s pretty much a given. Phenomenal.

Andrew Lesnie’s cinematography has never been better. What was so satisfying with this film was that Jackson and Lesnie’s camera allowed the audience time to actually sit in the environments, witness details and characters in wandering close-ups, something that wasn’t there in the original three films. Those had very much the staple of wide shots for new locations, close ups for dramatic moments, and everything else carried in standard mid to full shots. Here the camera is far more inventive and fluid, and it leaves impressions on the viewer more than the earlier films. The best example of this by far is the crucial Riddles in the Dark sequence where Bilbo encounters Gollum. Other moments, such as the flashback to the Battle of Azanulzibar (yeah I looked that up) and the climactic scene where the company fights off Azog and his wargs, are so captivating in the way the camera documents the scenes, that I could rewatch them over and over for all the tiny details included.

So I loved this film. More than I expected to. I expected to enjoy it, and more than some reviews had made out, but also because I didn’t like the book nearly as much as the longer, darker, more structurally sound trilogy. And yet I’d hazard an early stab at saying that I think this film is – as a film – more successful than any of the earlier three. It is, as a fantasy genre film, high above than almost anything else made before, something a lot of reviews are studiously ignoring. It is a testament to Jackson’s ability that these high-fantasy genre films are dissected on a level rarely afforded of the genre.

So why has there been negative coverage of the film’s release? Not to put too much stock in this, but Rotten Tomatoes has the film at 65%, whereas IMDB rates it an 8.3. It has grossed nearly $900 million to date. And it’s only been out a few weeks. Apparently there’s a divide between what critics are saying, and what people actually think.

Many people have lamented the fact that Jackson’s taken one short book and is turning it into a trilogy of films potentially as long as The Lord of the Rings, which was adapted from three very long books.

This is incredibly short-sighted and narrow-minded. Harsh, but necessary.

Some maths:

The Hobbit – 310 pages.

The Lord of the Rings – 1570 pages.

Brokeback Mountain – 65 pages.

—

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey – 169 minutes (so far, we don’t know the running time of the next two films, and they could well be shorter).

The Lord of the Rings – 558 minutes.

Brokeback Mountain – 134 minutes.

It is often said short stories adapt best into films. Hitchcock did this often. It is too hard to fit all the detail from a novel into a film. A 310 page novel will always lose detail. Jackson actually had to lose material – and a lot of it – from the original trilogy in order to adapt it into three very long films. What that shows is a mark of his adaptations that the three films are coherent, let alone entertaining. To reduce that volume of pages and detail into just over 9 hours of film is incredible.

We can only speculate how long the total running time of The Hobbit trilogy will be, but what’s become apparent from this first film is that he’s not wanting to leave parts out, and is including parts from other areas of Tolkien’s oeuvre to improve the drama, tone and consistency of the original novel. To make a child’s story into a film faithfully, after adapting the rather adult The Lord of the Rings, would be ridiculous.

Finally, my favourite thing about viewing this film. It seemed clear whilst watching this that Jackson was very careful not to repeat the mistakes of prequels-past, and nullify what was so good about the original films. Additionally, the lengthy preproduction time on this film has served it well in that the story is much more considered than the first three, which had the feel of trying to control a runaway train. Every scene in this film is entertaining in its own right, but also is going to enrich and expand and damn well improve future viewings of The Lord of the Rings. Characters and events get hasty treatment there, and this film has managed to change that and hopefully – when all three are released – allow an extremely pleased viewer the chance to watch six films in chronological sequence and have an experience never put to film before.

Zodiac

This is David Fincher’s best film.

Funny thing is, if you adjust for inflation, this was his least-grossing film. Less than Fight Club, which had age-restriction limitations and gained more of a life in the then-new DVD market. Less than The Game, made before Fincher was a name to hang a film on. Less even than Alien 3, which after the rush of opening weekends surely must have died by word-of-mouth.

So why his best? Even his greatest?

First point: if we discount Alien 3 (he did disown it, after all), Zodiac is effectively the mid-point of Fincher’s films to date. After Seven, The Game, Fight Club and Panic Room, and before The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Social Network and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. More on this point later.

Second point: it’s important to consider what this film isn’t, rather than what it is.

It isn’t  a serial killer movie. Nor is it a murder-mystery. Nor is it a police procedural. Nor is it All The President’s Men, despite Fincher citing it as the key influence on the script and tone of the film, as it fails to be a film about a meaningful search for a higher truth and the betterment of society.

The fact that it isn’t a serial killer movie obviously had a major impact on how people received the film upon its release. It was billed as a serial killer story. Most of the publicity in magazines and in the trailers was all about how Fincher – the man who made Seven – was turning his gaze to a real-life, unsolved serial killer story. Even the real life Robert Graysmith – played by Jake Gyllenhall in the movie – spoke of how Fincher had become almost obsessive in his research of the case, to the point where he might even offer a solution in his film.

As a film based on real events, Zodiac is extraordinarily faithful to the truth. Where possible, the filmmakers spoke to eye-witnesses and cross-checked all available perspectives on events. The first documented victims of the Zodiac killer aren’t even shown in the film, because as there were no survivors, there was therefore no way of actually recreating the moment. All speculation was left out.

What you then have is a film that fails to satisfy the viewers who had gained so much appreciation from watching Seven. Despite its bleakness, the narrative of Seven is so artfully conclusive and resolved that an audience leaves the film knowing exactly where they stood in relation to what happened. Kevin Spacey was bad. Morgan Freeman was good. Brad Pitt was compromised, but we feel sorry for him. Bad things happened, but it’s over, and we’re glad it didn’t happen to us. Effectively, a roller coaster, taking you (and your stomach) places you’d rather not go, places you might not expect, but you can get off at the end and stand back and look at it. See how it works and appreciate the craft.

For the first 45 minutes of Zodiac there is the hint that it might go the same way. But it’s not long before the film deviates. Suddenly, crimes the audience witness are not actually those of the serial killer. No facts, no fingerprints, no handwriting (so much handwriting!) leads us to him. The Zodiac is forever at arm’s length, always out of the corner of our eye, and never where we want him to be.

(Interestingly, Fincher cast different actors for every appearance of the Zodiac, as per the descriptions of the eye-witnesses, none of which agree.)

What the audience does get in this film is the failure of police and of the media to understand, explain and identify this killer. Nothing adds up. Graysmith disappears down a rabbit-hole of facts and half-facts and guesses and theories in search of his moment of clarity.

Graysmith: I need to know who he is. I need to stand there, I need to look him in the eye and I need to know that it’s him.

None of this is important for the audience though, in the sense that, Fincher doesn’t want us to solve the case with Graysmith. He doesn’t deliberate over the clues because that’s not the focus. The focus is the search, the yearning for meaning. For one single thing to hang on to in a world that is increasingly disappearing into meaninglessness.

Zodiac charts the passage of time. Numerous montages display this. The characters grow old, move on, forget and let go. Technology is rendered obsolete, cases are left behind, the heroes of today are cartoon characters tomorrow. At one moment, Graysmith witnesses the broad strokes of the Zodiac case recreated in the actual Dirty Harry film. Cheap, brutal, but with closure. And meaningless.

But as Graysmith gets closer and closer to one possible moment, where he can look someone in the eye and just know this one single truth, he becomes Dirty Harry.

Graysmith: Just because you can’t prove it, doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

Toschi: Easy, Dirty Harry.

This is Fincher’s statement on today. Film and society. He can’t make another Seven. It’s not real. It’s a thrill, a cheap trick, a spectacle that doesn’t actually change anything. The closest thing he’s made to Seven since was Panic Room, which was ultimately an exercise in style ahead of worthiness. According to Fincher’s Zodiac, life is becoming increasingly difficult to navigate, if one wants moral satisfaction. To succeed is to give up everything else, as in the case of Graysmith.

To return to my first point, this film is the halfway mark for Fincher. Everything since has been much more problematic than his earlier films, despite the reputation that Fight Club and Seven maintain. Benjamin Button is essentially a hymn to the inevitability of death. The Social Network is as daring and crucial to the documentation of contemporary media as Citizen Kane was in its day. And The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo actually managed to do what Panic Room didn’t – take a pulpy, hollow story and make it more than the sum of its parts.

Hopefully, when all’s said and done on Fincher’s career at some distant point in the future, Zodiac will garner much better appreciation than it did upon release. It’s definitely a film worth going back to, but with different expectations.

 

The Cabin in the Woods & Funny Games

No subtitle here because I really don’t want this to turn into a wanky cinema studies essay.

Basically, I saw The Cabin in the Woods the other night. I really liked it. It was fun. And I noticed something a few other people have noticed – that the opening scene and title card is a direct homage/reference/copy of Funny Games, the 1997 film by Michael Haneke. Which immediately for me set up what The Cabin in the Woods was on about. There was no way this was going to be a straight horror film.

So as I watched the story unfold I was comparing it with my experience of watching Funny Games. And both basically do the same thing, say the same thing, they’re just coming from completely different directions. I don’t think I’m breaking new ground in saying that they’re both chewing freely on the saturation and exploitation of violence in film and media.

At this point, it’s interesting to note that in the 15 years between the releases of the two films, the same points about violence in cinema are still valid.

– Why are you doing this to us? – Why not?

The opening scenes of both films are rather banal. Banal in that they’re documenting everyday actions. Everyday exchanges. Coworkers in The Cabin in the Woods, and a family in Funny Games. Both everyday banal situations are then assaulted by blood red title cards.

This is key. For both Haneke and Goddard & Whedon, violence and extreme violence has become part of the everyday. And it’s sickening. The protagonists of each film are shit out of luck, doomed to die, doomed to suffer in front of us.

Funny Games mocks this doom to the audience. It sets up usual scenarios, ones we are familiar with (opportunities for victims to get the upper hand/escape/save each other) and discards them. There is no normality here. There is no escape. They invited horrific violence into their home, and it’s there to stay. The antagonists cheat to make sure there is no happy ending. They literally alter the story in front of the audience.

Similarly, The Cabin in the Woods messes with the usual expected tropes. The antagonists here are just everyday joes though, doing a job to satiate the needs of Cinema Horror, where victims must die in set ways and set orders. They also cheat, to gain their own results.

If there’s a fundamental difference between the two, it’s that Funny Games lays the blame of its horror at the feet of the audience. The Cabin in the Woods however, blames directors. Particularly those – though this is not overt – that aren’t so concerned with horror, they’re more interested in disgusting their audience. Gorno films.

Where Funny Games is an appeal for us to stop, to see violence for what it is, The Cabin in the Woods is more of a request to return to the good old days. Where terror reigned, not gore. The anticipation was the horror, the imagination that anything, something, might happen. Instead we’re so used to everything happening these days we don’t anticipate it. It’s there. Everywhere.

Remember when you could just throw a girl in a volcano?

So, what’s the point in discussing these things?

I guess it’s that I love the horror genre, but neither Funny Games nor The Cabin in the Woods are actually horror films. They’re about the genre, rather than in it. And neither are particularly terrifying. But both have valid points about the genre. But now that they’ve said their things, what are we going to do? Can we get back to pure horror, as The Cabin in the Woods asks of us? Or have we gone too far, ruined our souls, that we are beyond redemption when it comes to responsible use of violence in film?

I just wish we could take these two films, marry them, and give them to Polanski or Friedkin. Ones who actually know how to terrify you. Haneke is too concerned with making films for film students, and Whedon is always in favour of cheap laughs than worthwhile statements. So both these films are infinitely valuable for cinema, but ultimately worthless if you’re after horror.

Is horror gone from cinema?

– Macguffin

The Avengers

Okay so it was not my intention to start with a rereview. But here we are, so let’s just move on.

What happened was I sat (lay) down (all over) on the couch on Christmas night and figured I needed something to help my mind escape the rest of my body that was focused on digesting. The Avengers was available to download, and why not. I had enjoyed it to a degree when I saw it earlier in the year, and there was no fear of anything untoward stifling the creative process that my stomach was busy with.

When I had originally watched the film, it was after all the cockahooping that had gone on when the film was first released. I avoid these things. I hate being caught up in bandwagon events with films. Unless I’m the one doing the cockahooping. We had decided to go and see it at The Astor – a grand old Art Deco cinema that was hosting a fundraising day to save it from redevelopment and redeployment. The night of the screening was immediately after the fundraising (prizes! Labyrinth! jaffa rolling!) and the mood was rife with enjoyment. A packed house. Vintage previews of Predator and Die Hard preceded the screening, and set everything perfectly up for one damn fine enjoyable evening. The crowd laughed, the crowd cheered, the crowd sat captivated through all 140 minutes of Joss Whedon’s huge film.

And it is was huge. Everything was huge. It was huge stacked on huge. Which works great on The Astor’s enormous screen.

So back to Christmas night and rewatching The Avengers.

It was everything I wanted from my viewing experience. But that was about it for me. As a disclaimer, I’m not a Joss Whedon fan. I (similarly) avoided Buffy, was not interested in seeing Firefly or Serenity, and the only one of his that I’m rather keen on is The Cabin in the Woods, so hopefully we can get to that at a later date. But I did want to enjoy The Avengers continually, not just once. My problem is that it’s just pandering, and this became patently obvious on watching it at home on a much smaller screen without a couple of hundred people around me. Isolated, and fending for itself, the film is just stale and hollow.

Yes, I know it’s a comic book thingy and Marvel and so on. Hollow is okay, so long as it’s fun. And it is fun. Sort of. It’s fun if you want to laugh along at all the glib jokes, especially from Robert Downey Jr. But shorn of that virtue, it’s just glib without the fun. The villain is also played for fun, and done well as such, but as so many of the heroes question during the film, what is his motivation? What is his endgame, when all’s said and done? We’re never really given an answer, and it becomes booming crashing spectacle for the sake of conflict.

The story, really, is mediocre. It’s done, seen-before, and uninspired. What is inspired is all the manoeuvring that Marvel and Disney must’ve done behind the film to get all these actors and all their prequel-y films lined up for this one film to land. That is impressive. And it’s handled with flair and panache and glib one-liners. But if we take away all our ooh-ing and ahh-ing at seeing them all on screen together there’s not much left. So what is the point? It’s film as show-and-tell. Look at what I can do! Here’s me bringing all these stars on to the screen! In the same film! Playing characters that know each other! Even if one’s from Norse mythology! Yes it’s silly and doesn’t try to hide that, which is fine if it wasn’t for the rampant pandering show-offiness that dominates everything else ahead of a compelling story.

Huge space alien monster thing definitely not flying.

Case in point is in the climactic battle scene with RDJ’s “I’m bring the party to you” line. Glib, check. Huge space alien monster thingy from somewhere arrives. Huge, check. Explosions. Reference to Jonah and the whale. Boom. And all the while I couldn’t help but wonder why this thing was flying through the sky. How. I mean, it’s a bloody huge space alien monster thingy. It has no wings. It’s defying all logic. And, before you start, I know. But still. There has to be some logic at play. What is it’s biology? What does it suspend itself in the air on? All the other aliens have little space rocket-y things, so that’s fine. Even whilst they’re blowing up all of Manhattan for some reason other than it looks cool. Or maybe that’s just it. Blow things up! Look cool whilst doing it!

Phew.

What I did take away, more than the first time I saw The Avengers, was the quality of Chris Evans as an actor and in playing his role. He is the straight man, but similarly he’s the only one not winking at the camera throughout, and it gives integrity to his performance. This, on top of a similarly underplayed number two role in Danny Boyle’s Sunshine, shows how good he is.

In the end, I don’t want my rereviews to become revisionist in appraisal, but in all our looking over the year that was this did provide an interesting coda for what has been an odd year in obscenely budgeted, highly hyped, anti-climactic blockbuster genre films.

(That, and I’m trying not to choke on the $1.5 billion in revenue this film has made.)

Merry Christmas.

– Macguffin