We Need to Talk About Kevin – Lynn Ramsey – DVD (7/4/12) As predictably harrowing as the novel’s
premise, Lynn Ramsey does fitting and powerful justice to a very troubling
story. The eerie soundtrack (that premeditates the tapping water of garden
sprinklers- a key and unsettling element of the film’s disturbing scene of
final violence) is innovatively arranged and written by Jonny Greenwood (having
already explored inventive film music in There
Will be Blood and Norwegian Wood).
Tilda Staunton gives a very strong and arresting performance as the tortured
mother, while Ezra Miller excels as the adolescent Kevin (he perfects a twisted
smile of malevolence). Not only mastering a non linear fragmentation in the
film’s first half (effectively building the portrait of a woman haunted by the
past, lost in the present and bleakly coming to terms with what might
constitute the future) but also creating some very memorable shots, brilliantly
utilizing light and striking compositions (For instance: Tilda Staunton’s gaunt
face framed by an expanse of Warhol-esque cans of soup, or later, sitting in
the ghostly emptiness of a hospital corridor, holding a garishly discordant
multitude of children’s balloons – both serving as dramatic examples of
masterful control and calculated visual flare. Having had everything she loves destroyed by
what she created; the mother is left with lonely and unnerving challenge of
understanding the destroyer. Before the film’s emotive and chilling influence
had truly settled (i.e. very early on), it occurred to me that We Need to Talk About Kevin could be
perhaps be the most hard hitting and torturously labored advert for durex ever
conceived: ‘If they had stayed safe…We
Would Never Have Had to Talk About Kevin’. However, such whimsical digressive
thoughts were soon dispelled by the compulsive and immersive nature of the
film. 8.5/10
Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo – Jessica Oreck – DVD (22/4/12) A documentary tracing the unique
fascination, in Japenese culture and history, with insects. From the chirruping
Crickets that are valued for their varying ambient ‘songs’ (produced through a
process called ‘stridulation’ whereby one serrated wing is rubbed against the
respective teeth of its other wing- the notion that the noise is created by
rubbing their legs together is a myth…or so the entomological fountain of
knowledge: Wikipedia, informs me!). Anyways, the documentary fuses poetry,
philosophy, anthropology, bizarre and brilliant visuals and a memorable
soundtrack to create a thoroughly immersive, entertaining and moving cinematic
experience. Becoming much more than a factual account, Oreck’s film tactfully
blends between poetic shots, redolent of essay film experimentation, eccentric
voice over information (ranging from the social observations of contemporary
Japan, folklore, science, poetry and philosophy), candid interviews – all
alongside the raw, unadulterated footage of a day to day involvement with this
under exposed and eccentric topic. Giant Luna Moths, pinned butterflies,
fighting beetles, emperors and gadflies, warriors and dragonflies and the boxed
song of crickets. It is an original, fascinating and, at times beautifully
hypnotic, documentary that manages to convey spiritual depth without
affectation or cringe-worthy navel gazing. A film that reaffirms what Western
materialism, amongst other unfortunate pastimes, has engulfed, ignored and
eclipsed: a simple enchantment with the natural world.
An innate appreciation opposed to the
neurotic hunger to change, improve or defend against nature, or more commonly
to repress any trace or interaction with nature. When cockroaches and maggots
are wheeled out in bucket loads for cheap entertainment in the car crash
charades of I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out of
Here! The shock game show sensationalism that snooty conservatives of
British Television would traditionally relate to ‘Trashy Japanese Gameshows’ of
yesteryear, it seems we (in all our Western gameshow glory) are now inhabiting
the stereotype that was reserved for a misjudged colonial ‘them’. I am not
saying that Japan is not without its extravagantly bizarre gameshows, far from
it: women tying raw meat to their heads, and then placing said vulnerable
craniums (loaded with blood red meaty
temptation) into the tank of a Komodo Dragon…it’s out there. A simple Google
search of ‘Japanese Gameshows’ will confirm this. But what I am, tangentially,
suggesting is that this film communicates a value we undoubtedly are in danger
of overlooking. It is the simplicity, tangible wonder and crawling, flying joy
of insects. Viva la woodlouse! Hail mighty housefly! Praise the carapace,
consecrate the six limbs, crown the antennae, worship the moth and…well, watch
the film. 8/10
Volver – Pedro
Almodovar – DVD (27/4/12) A tale of family, love, death, ghosts and
deception, all told with a gently dark sense of humour. Alberto Iglesias’ score
over the final credits is brilliant- but not as intense or memorable as the
soundtrack to the, ultimately more tense, The
Skin I live In. A terrific partnership between Director and composer…calls
to mind other great patnerships, or a contemplation of the chemistry between
film and music-which directors use which composers and why, how those
relationships are fostered, change and mature. Thinking of Alfred Hitchcock and
Bernerd Herrman, Daren Aranofsky and Clint Mansell, David Lynch and Angelo
Badalamenti, and recently the interesting relationship between David Fincher’s The Social Network and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and
Trent Reznor’s electronic accompaniment. Returning to the film, it feautures a
brilliant performance by Penelope Cruz (playing the short tempered and
emotional lead with effortless charisma and seductive scene stealing beauty),
meanwhile Blanco Portillo provides a gripping and nuanced performance of the
quietly strong Augustina, desperate to discover the truth about her mother
before her inevitable death. 7.5/10
The Headless Woman – Lucrecia
Martel – DVD (28/4/12) The film manages to take a potentially simple
occurrence and swamp its subsequent aftermath and telling with a complex,
unsettling, compelling and disorientating atmosphere. The film follows the life
of Verónica, an upper class Spanish woman who, at the very start of the film
has a car accident. We see her look in the wing mirror at what appears to be
the slumped body of a (now dead) dog, presumably the cause of the car’s abrupt
halt and a resulting ominous thud. From this moment on, her character becomes
ambiguously detached from her day-to-day existence, seeming remote, anxious and
melancholy. Our viewing experience matches Verónica’s altered mentality after
the accident: it becomes a film in which certainty is replaced by a haunted
suspicion and we are left wondering what
exactly did happen? Did she hit a dog – or, when she confesses to having
killed someone do we believe her? Is she loosing a grip on reality, or is her
reality unhinged by a trauma now repressed? We begin to inhabit the same space
of paranoia and isolation, never quite at ease with exactly why, or even who. The film manages to remain compulsive without ever delivering
the action, explanation or resolution that a conclusive clarity or
understanding aches for. Much of the film’s power radiates from María Onetto’s
central performance as Verónica. She conveys the distress of her emotional
instability with a helpless poignancy, carrying the suffering of an event which
remains unknowable while enacting, with naturalistic and understated
expression, the quiet desperation of a damaged mind struggling against a trauma
which evades understanding or satisfying reconstruction. The film consequently
becomes indirectly suggestive of both Lynch’s Mullholland Drive and Bergman’s Persona,
however without the undercurrent of surrealism, in its depiction of a woman’s
descent into psychological disarray. It lingers long after watching and, for
all its lack of action and cinematic adrenaline, builds an impressively
original and disturbing atmosphere. 9/10
That Obscure Object of Desire – Luis Bunuel – DVD (28/4/12) The film
begins with a man climbing aboard a train, he sees a young woman running
alongside the train and somehow manages to acquire a bucket of water: he throws
the water at her-competently drenching the poor wench. Once in his train cabin,
the other passengers nearby (a woman and her child, an old man he happens to
know from court and a dwarf who studies Psychology) are intrigued to know the
story behind this bucket- based station altercation: and so begins the
narrative of That Obscure Object of
Desire.
Needlesly Cynical and Comprehensive Plot Synopsis: (many, many SPOILERS
alert)
A bearded man (Fernando Rey),
resembling an aristocratic Alan Sugar or a slightly slimmed and elongated Tom
Jones meets a woman he falls hopelessly in love with. He appears to be around
the sixty mark, she meanwhile is a casual eighteen years old. He seems to woo
her with a combination of money, sharp dressed swagger and persistence. This
woman bizarrely changes, without anyone mentioning or acknowledging the change,
from one beautiful dark haired actress to inexplicably be replaced by another
insanely beautiful (but entirely different) dark haired actress- both playing
the same character. Their ill fated affair ends in his realization that,
unsurprisingly she was never really into him and was in fact stringing him along
to the point at which he bought her a house and entrusted her with a key. Once
given the key, she closes an iron gate whereupon he is locked out and subjected
to her triumphant laughter. She wins: the wealthy older man seduced and
deceived by the cunning young temptress. She reveals she was in fact sleeping
with a much younger and handsome fella, who is allowed to wander from the
shadows once the gate is shut. She then proceeds to strip off and taunt the
poor elderly gentleman with the spectacle of her having sex with her real
lover. Several unexplained changes betwixt each actress later she attempts to
demonstrate that the man was actually a homosexual, the whole thing being a
charade, and yes she does still in fact love him. The older man (our crisp suit
sporting protagonist) slaps her around a little bit (in a time when such fits
of physical outrage were only proper for a man in his position), livid that she
has returned after humiliating him so severely. This leads us chronologically
to him alighting the train, soaking her on the station and entrusting the
motley crew of passengers with his farcical tale. Meanwhile, what he doesn’t
know is that Concitta (his mercurial lover) has boarded the train too. She has
found a reciprocal bucket of water and, after our man has finished his
raconteur act, she appears at the cabin doorway and drenches him. Yadda yadda
yadda…they somehow patch things up and start a life again together. The whole
film takes place against a backdrop of street terrorism, car bombs and gang
attacks etc. At the very end of the film our lovers are walking hand in hand in
a shopping arcade (after staring at a seamstress in a shop-window weaving
patterns on a blood stained fabric) when an explosion engulfs the frame of
vision. The final shot is of the flames, billowing explosion and smoke-
characters lost from sight and potentially, and very much fatally, dead. Freeze
frame…Roll dem credits!
Moving on…
The intriguing casting of two
actresses (Carole Bouquet and Ángela Molina) to play one role was suggested by
Bunuel following a decisive argument he had with Maria Schneider, the actress
originally intended for the role. The use of the two actresses works in a
fascinating manner, reflecting changes of temperament and aesthetically adding
an unexpected dimension to the film. Despite my cynical round up of the
narrative it was an enjoyable and definitely interesting film (undeserving of
random derision!). Thematically the film taps into notions of sexual
gratification and its role within love, the tension between male and female
desires, desire as a mysterious and misleading force and of course, Bunuel’s
latent distaste for bourgeois affectations. Desire as an absence and the
distinctly surrealist fixation with the female form- as the ‘obscure object of
desire’, all provide the film with plenty of insightful moments for anyone
intrigued by Bunuel’s particular surrealist sensibility. It was Bunuel’s last
ever film. 7/10
War Horse – Steven
Spielberg - DVD – A film of classic family Spielberg sentimentalism that,
for the most part, fulfills its blockbuster objectives and entertains with
emotive competence. While I don’t feel the need to attack it with the venomous
critique that Peter Bradshaw so mercilessly deployed: ‘Suffused in a buttery-digital glow, as if shot on special film made of
liquid fudge, Steven Spielberg's
disappointing, coercively sentimental version of War Horse
has a baffling, soulless, artificial look’ – I am still pretty reserved with
praise. The combination of John Williams’ score, with its insistent
heavy-handed emotional signposting, and Spielberg’s lighting, that all too
lovingly evokes a cinema of saccharine pastoral landscapes, earnest twinkling
eyes and a consecration of the family unit to the point of moralistic syrup…can
all become pretty trying. I think also, at some point on the Kermode and Simon
Mayo podcast the comment: ‘War Horse: Why the long film?’ surfaced…and yep, it
could do with being a bit less lengthy. However, as a family film fashioned
with care, convincingly acted and replete with spectacle it delivers. 6/10
Blue Valentine – Derek Cianfrance – DVD –A
film that explores the untidy death of a relationship; a realistic, moving and
unflinching portrayal of how love and life exhaust each other. Both Ryan
Gosling and Michelle Williams give terrific performances, making for a
genuinely compelling, flawed and believable couple. The dialogue is interesting
and well written, with the film’s aesthetic palette reflecting its honest tone
with colours, scenes and settings devoid of glamour and shot with a subdued
sense of (that overused cliché) ‘grit’. 8/10
Troll Hunter - Andre Ovredal (missing appropriate Nordic
accents…as I cant find them currently) – DVD – A ‘found footage’ documentary
that follows a small group of students who stumble upon the fact that Trolls
live! A fantastic, fun, at times hilarious…all together impressively enjoyable!
It is truly refreshing (especially in the saturated sub genre of ‘found
footage’) to see such a fantastical, fairytale creature visually realized with
such serious detail and flair. It is the serious, straight faced nature of the
film that lends it its humour, excitement and charming emotion. A lot could be
said about this film, but far more enticing and immediate is the need to
express just how fun it is. Not a long film and not a film that explicitly tries
for comedy or the acceptance of horror fans in buckets of blood it is instead a
humble beast…a ruddy lovable troll. 8/10
