Films I Have Watched Lately But Didn’t Have Time To Write a Full Review Of

SALT – I haven’t yet watched what people call his “underrated magnum opus” EQUILIBRIUM, but it really seems to me that Kurt Wimmer can’t write worth a fuck. I couldn’t make it to the end of SPHERE when I tried watching it years ago, STREET KINGS was somewhat passable, but LAW ABIDING CITIZEN was so retarded that the excess of stupid almost took physical shape and punched me in the face. SALT is a predictable, forgettable but kinda entertaining action flick. It’s worth watching for Angelina Jolie’s decision to finally do some acting instead of parading around the screen with a seductive look in the one-third of her face that’s not comprised of her lips. One scene in particular, when she watches a man slowly die, is the one truly memorable moment in SALT and a small part of her overall shallow career she can be genuinely proud of. Phylip Noyce (director of the very good THE QUIET AMERICAN) does a fairly competent but not very inspired job, and is constantly sabotaged by the stupidity of Kurt Wimmer’s script.

THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION – Seriously. I only watched that recently. There are a number of must-watch movies I have yet to get to, and now I can cross one off the list. Oh, and I loved it. Tightly-scripted, beautifully-directed and brilliantly-acted (someone please digitalize Morgan Freeman’s voice so he can keep narrating films forever). It’s packed full of memorable scenes, all very well-fitted into the overall story. The sequence that shows an elderly ex-con trying to re-adapt to a world that moved on without him is classic. Roger Deakins once again proves he’s one of the best directors of photography in Cinema: the aerial shot of Shawshank Prison to the sound of Thomas Newman’s haunting music is ominous and breathtaking. Speaking of Deakins…

NINETEEN EIGHTEEN FOUR – Holy shit. I had expected this to be a decent adaptation of George Orwell’s classic (which I adore), but to my surprise it’s actually a magnificent adaptation. Extremely loyal to the book but with a glow of its own, pretty much everything in it works. John Hurt is the perfect Winston Smith, not just because of his defeated and sad appearance (curiously, he’s exactly how I imagined Smith when I first read the book), but because Hurt’s performance, as usual, is absolutely superb. In the ending, he and Richard Burton (in his final role) engage in an acting duel that must be seen to be believed. Suzanna Hamilton also delivers an impressive performance, giving her character a constantly grim countenance as if, even in her happiest moments, she knows there is no hope of a happy ending. Director/screenwriter Michael Radford manages to make the film as heartbreaking and cruel as the book, and Roger Deakins exploits its visual potential to the fullest: NINETEEN EIGHTEEN FOUR has one of the best opening scenes I’ve ever seen, not just because of the visuals but also thanks to Dominic Muldolney’s glorious — and in the context of the film, ironic — hymn “Oceania, Tis For Thee”.

METAL GEAR SOLID PHILANTHROPY – A surprisingly competent and free-to-watch fan-made film. It captures the batshit-insane campiness of Hideo Kojima’s videogame series, with its wild and delightful flickery between goofy humor and melodrama. It’s also quite well-directed (the action scenes are more thrilling than those of several major Hollywood productions) and considering the budget was, according to the filmmakers, less than ten thousand euros, the production values are insane. I mean, there’s actually a scene in which Solid Snake rides the arm of a gigantic robot. Oh, and the post-credits montage is absolutely hilarious. Definitely worth a watch.

FROM HELL – I had actually watched this, but a long time ago. I didn’t think much of it then, but at that point I hadn’t read Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s magnificent graphic novel. Now that I have, I watched the film again out of morbid curiosity, and it becomes by comparison a hilarious catastrophe. The producers had at their disposal a story of immense scope and genius and they decided to make it about a good-looking inspector with an opium-addiction and fucking psychic powers, played by Johnny Depp for some reason I cannot fathom — I mean, he’s one of my favorite actors, but c’mon — as he tries to find out who is Jack The Ripper and guess what: the audience doesn’t know either. FROM HELL the comic revealed his identity at the very beginning in order to develop his character, but FROM HELL the movie is a whodunit, and a pathetic one at that. It’s hard to pinpoint what’s the funniest thing about the film. Heather Graham playing a victorian England prostitute with perfect teeth? Jack the Ripper’s eyeballs going completely black after his identity is “revealed” as if the fact he guts whores isn’t enough to indicate his evilness? Great quotes from the graphic novel being dropped carelessly into the film out of context? How it misses the point of Moore and Campbell’s masterpiece by a light-year?

KICKASS – It’s a really entertaining and fun film. BUT. Not as ballsy as Mark Millar and John Romita Jr.’s very good graphic novel. One of the reasons it was enjoyable superhero-in-real-world fiction was that it had a complete loser as its main character: skinny, pathetic Dave Lizewski. In the movie he’s played by Aaron Johnson, who — wait. You’re kidding, right? Prettyboy Aaron Johnson? “Invisible to girls”? He looks like a stereotypical nerd in the same way Woody Allen looks like a vigorous sex beast. At least the gay friend subplot is still in the film. However, while in the graphic novel that subplot was resolved brilliantly, in the film they take the light-hearted route. Still, KICKASS works on its own, with Matthew Vaughn’s energetic direction, a good sense of humor and Chloe fucking Moretz being absolutely amazing alongside the great Nicolas Cage in full batshit insane mode.

Movie Review – The Social Network

Since CINDERELLA MAN, I’ve had a distaste for films based on real life facts that tell the story they want to tell and take cover behind “dramatic license”. A distaste cemented by THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY, along with an endless list of other films. If the film works as fiction, that’s a merit and should be counted (such as in THE AVIATOR, a film that glorifies Howard Hughes way too much but has an absolutely hypnotic narrative), but if a movie uses real people and fictionalizes them so much they might as well have changed the names, that counts as a flaw.

One of the few exceptions is the magnificent AMADEUS. Because it wasn’t about Mozart and Salieri, but what about they represented. They were archetypes in a story with a universal theme: the chasm between talent and ambition. And the wonderful scene in which an ill Mozart dictates music to a confused Salieri eliminates any doubt I could have that the changes were worth it.

THE SOCIAL NETWORK tries to do something similar. It is, after all, called THE SOCIAL NETWORK rather than FACEBOOK. The story is framed within a court hearing where the participants constantly accuse each other of embellishing their depositions or outright lying — depositions we see brought to life onscreen by Aaron Sorkin’s sharp writing and David Fincher’s excellent direction. And in the film’s final scene, two characters wonder how much of the story they just discussed is true.

None of which really changes that THE SOCIAL NETWORK is, after all, mostly about FACEBOOK and its co-founder Mark Zuckerberg. The narrative structure is just a weak defense against the accusations of distortion and fabrication the filmmakers knew they’d deal with. But the film’s attempts to portray Facebook as one part of a bigger picture are overshadowed by the focus on Zuckerberg and his company. There’s a noticeable gap between the moments in which the film tries to be a reflection about the times we’re living, and when it portrays the interactions between the characters and fabricates most of them. And the film’s attention is almost always on the latter.

Take, for example, the scene in which partygoers are about to snort cocaine off a girl’s belly, during which Sean Parker monologues about a new idea he’s had for a site and about digitalization in general. “We lived in farms, then we lived in cities, and now we’re gonna live on the internet!” he says excitedly. The cocaine has the full attention of everyone in the room, though, so he’s being ignored, which kind of makes it all stand out as the film philosophising about the web and just short of breaking the fourth wall without an actual narrative excuse to do so. It all feels like an out of place afterthought.

And then take the very first scene, in which Mark Zuckerberg is dumped by his girlfriend and then gives the first step toward Facebook: Facemash, which gets him noticed by the Winklevoss twins and Divya Narendra and ultimately leads to Facebook. Sorkin portrays Zuckerberg as awkwardly candid, obsessed with exclusive Harvard clubs, resentful towards people who row crew because he “can’t do that”, and clingy towards girlfriend-who-dumped-him Erica Albright. Throughout the film he fucks over Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss –the best rowers in Harvard –, resents his best friend for getting into an exclusive Harvard club, barely notices the people around him unless they’re useful to him and never manages to get Erica Albright out of his head.

I did several searches on this (five interesting links I found are here, here, here, here and here), and apparently, in real life, Zuckerberg rowed crew, couldn’t care less about exclusive clubs, is described as a fairly social person and had a girlfriend for a long time, during a significant portion of the period the film covers. Oh, and Facemash compared pictures of women and men.

Huh.

I get it. Sorkin couldn’t resist the idea of the founder of the world’s most popular social network being a social failure and also a mysoginist because why not. Fuck truth, it’s so delightfully ironic, right? No, actually, it’s kind of an obvious irony. The kind of irony a writer should resist when considering the project he’ll be applying it to. This is pretty much a film about the digitalization of social life, and they trace it all back to an anti-social guy with girlfriend issues and a fetish for exclusivity. The real Mark Zuckerberg might be a prick for all I know, but there are many kinds of pricks. From all the accounts I’ve read, the one in this film doesn’t match the actual Zuckerberg’s prick style.

So what is the point of THE SOCIAL NETWORK, then? Sure, it’s a very well-written film. Sorkin’s dialogue, as usual, is comprised of a verbal gem every thirty seconds (or thirty seconds comprised of several consecutive verbal gems, in some scenes), although in his attempts to be dramatic, he’s sometimes heavy-handed. There’s a scene in which Eduardo Saverin reveals to what amount his shares were reduced to, and before he says it there’s a ridiculously artificial build-up meant to make the contrast even more jarring but as a result makes it melodramatic (and untrue, Saverin’s shares were never reduced to .03% as the movie shows, but to the significantly higher amount of, roughly, 10%). Sorkin is equally exaggerated in his attempts to portray Zuckerberg as a genius, including a pathetic and unnecessary scene when he leaves a class while displicently answering the teacher’s question correctly.

Eduardo Saverin is a perfect example of the film’s greatest problem: the characters are reduced to simplistic roles, although the roles are portrayed competently by Sorkin. Saverin, in particular, is ever the well-intentioned victim. Then there’s Sean Parker, the cool silver-tongued manipulator. Mark Zuckerberg is always the candid obsessed nerd. Only the Winklevosses have any true depth, becoming the film’s most interesting characters as a result. Earlier I used AMADEUS as an example, and now I use it again: notice how complex are the personalities of Salieri and Mozart in that film, and how complex their relationship is as a result. As a film about relationships and social status, THE SOCIAL NETWORK never gets close to such complexity, and it was that complexity that resulted in AMADEUS being such a memorable classic.

David Fincher and director of photography Jeff Cronenweth compose beautiful-looking frames and have some inspired moments (such as the rowboat scene with tilt-shift photography), and editors Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall are fantastic at sustaining the film’s pace, to the sound of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s hypnotic soundtrack. Overall, it’s a film with defined character arcs, a competent balance between the rational and the emotional, fantastic acting from a homogeneously brilliant cast and some exceptional scenes, such as the Winklevosses’ argument with the president of Harvard, which is a non-stop trade of verbal barbs.

But it is not the story of Facebook. It’s mostly embellished and in significant part a fabrication, and it’s the very center of the film. Sorkin seems to believe a good story and an accurate story are mutually exclusive, yet he borrows from real life when it suits him. The rest he simply makes up. Zuckerberg’s Livejournal post, heard in a voiceover while he writes it, is a horribly butchered version of the real one, which Sorkin transcribes verbatim when it works for him but fills it with a cruelty that it didn’t originally have. And this doesn’t work for me. Because in the end, if the filmmakers’ true interest was making a film about social networking, they could have created their own fictional network, amalgamating elements from real life ones and coming up with fictional characters based on real life people, but unique in their own way. They could have used fiction to portray our current reality, to make an insightful commentary on the digitalization of our very social life.

But that wouldn’t gather as much publicity as a film about Facebook portraying Mark Zuckerberg as a prick, now, would it? So they use our current reality to portray fiction. Much more profitable. But a film that acts like a relevant, insightful film about social networking should be more responsible towards the origins of it, especially when they focus so hard on a real-life social network and the real people behind it. If I must question the veracity of every single scene in a film that is based on real life, it becomes little more than escapist entertainment. Very good escapist entertainment, but the film originally aimed much higher than that.

When I bring up the matter of veracity in films, I usually hear the argument “What does it matter?”, which is no argument at all. It’s a statement of defeat. Cinema is a medium with a huge toolbox, and veracity shouldn’t be restricted to documentaries. In the hands of a good creative team, any story can be interesting while staying true to fact. I wouldn’t dream of demanding the absolute truth from every film. But when a story based on real facts and using the name of real people might as well be fiction, I consider it a flaw.

It is, however, one flaw. THE SOCIAL NETWORK is still a good movie and excellent entertainment. But it’s a myth, much more likely to exist due to financial rather than artistic reasons, and far from being as insightful and relevant as it intends, or more accurately pretends, to be.

Movie Review – Predators

(warning: you might consider some parts of this review to contain mild spoilers, if you’re utterly obsessive about this kind of thing and/or couldn’t figure out what was going to happen next in TITANIC. You’ve been warned.)

Okay, one thing before we start: the music that plays in the ending credits of PREDATORS is Little Richard’s LONG TALL SALLY. Again: the music that plays at the end of a science fiction film about a special forces team being hunted by alien killing machines is Little Richard’s LONG TALL FUCKING SALLY. This kind of thing is becoming common. Is it a Hollywood tradition for people to take twenty shots of tequila before they work on the ending credits of a film? Is this what led to WATCHMEN ending with a My Chemical Romance song? Let me explain what’s wrong with this: you know when you finish a nice drink and then savor the pleasant aftertaste? Right. Now imagine if, the second you swallow the very last drop, someone immediately buries your face in a pile of cowshit. This is what you’re doing to the audience, filmmakers. I can’t believe you are failing to realize this yourselves, but you don’t break the atmosphere of your own fucking film like that. Imagine if at the end of THE GODFATHER they told Nino Rota to go eat a dick and played Tarantella Napoletana instead. Yeah. So stop.

This film starts with the protagonist in free-fall and frantically trying to open his parachute, and ends with LONG TALL SALLY for some reason known only to the retarded voices in director Nimród Antal’s head. So the film already starts with an action scene and doesn’t see the point in ending it. Stereotypes are quickly established: the cynical American mercenary, the Mexican cartel-enforcer (played, of course, by Danny Trejo), the strong Russian, the asshole convict, and so on and so forth. Also an attractive woman who is the American romantic interest because movie executives believe love can bloom in any situation whatsoever (i.e. they think you are a dipshit who won’t see this movie unless there’s an attractive woman in it, as if one goes to watch a film called PREDATORS for the women). The character development goes as far as the Russian showing people pictures of his children, which in a movie of this kind is the same as him writing “I am going to die” on his forehead. There’s one or two moments between the American and the Woman that are almost compelling, but not quite.

You could argue that the movie doesn’t need that, which instantly establishes you as a person willing to see the same fucking film over and over again as long as they change the cast and the title. PREDATORS takes no risks. It worships the formula and is, as a result, predictable. But within the formula it does have its moments. The character who shows up halfway through the film (played brilliantly by an actor whose name is best not disclosed) is hilarious but dangerous at the same time, although the script never does find an use for him other than what the plot immediately needs to move forward.

With half of the dialogue being barely decent and the other half being variations of “What the hell is that?”, PREDATORS is a film far more concerned with the action than anything else. So it’s a disappointment that, in that respect, it’s so unimaginative. Director Nimród Antal — possibly struggling to shoo the retarded voices that kept whispering “long tall sally, long tall sally” to him throughout production — only manages to create one truly excellent shot in the entire film: the travelling shot that goes from the characters desperately swimming in a lake to the predators hunting them. Aside from that, the action is clear enough, but run-of-the-mill in its execution. There’s way too many superfluous and/or badly-composed frames littering the scenes.

And then there’s the references. Oh the fucking references. As if we’re going to forget what franchise the movie belongs to unless they reference some of the scenes from the first film (such as a character taking off his shirt and wielding a blade, getting ready to fight a predator, which in this film results in a hilariously out-of-place action scene). But the movie goes even farther: the actor-whose-name-I-prefer-not-to-disclose even hums the music from one of the movies he was in, with very little excuse to do so. Does this sound clever to you? To me, it just sounds like a shot in the foot: deliberately breaking the audience’s immersion for no good reason.

The cast is equally run-of-the-mill, barely being convincing in their respective stereotypes. Adrien Brody adopts a gravelly voice like he just had throat surgery, but it works well enough. As for… mm. Actually, everyone acts with the exact same level of skill — not much, mind you — except for Alice Braga, who turns out to be the least dull stereotype. She’s almost a character. Braga seems to have taken this project a little more seriously than her colleagues, but there’s only so much she can do with the script they’ve got.

It’s an entertaining film, but so utterly forgettable. It doesn’t come even close to living up to its premise. Come on: a multi-ethnic special forces team against a gang of predators? This warranted a breathtaking action film. But then again, so did putting Sylvester Stallone, Jet Li, Jason Statham and Mickey Rourke in the same movie, and look how that turned out.

Movie Review – The Runaways

It doesn’t stray from the band movie formula: they meet each other, make music, start low, find moderate success, start touring, start vacuum-cleaning cocaine with their nostrils, start having ego-driven fights, etc. But THE RUNAWAYS makes good use of the formula, turning out to be an electric, wild ride of a film that still manages to maintain a surprising degree of factual accuracy, a concern that seems increasingly absent in biopics, thanks to “dramatic license” (an excuse that usually means “I’m not talented enough to make what actually happened work onscreen so let’s just make something up that I can write” or “the audience can’t take reality, so let’s water it down” or both).

The film starts in 1975, establishing the personalities of Joan Jett (Kristen Stewart) and Cherrie Currie (Dakota Fanning); born to rock, Jett’s goal is to find someone who’ll give a chance to an all-girl rockband (a laughable concept, at the time). She finds insane record producer Kim Fowley (Michael Shannon), who likes the idea. Cherie Currie is a David Bowie fan and seems to have an interest in singing, but her dysfunctional family and problematic life sidetrack her until Jett and Fowley find Currie and pick her as the lead singer of all-girl rockband The Runaways.

From then on it’s the aforementioned formula, but writer/director Floria Sigismondi surprised me with her confident grip on the story. With a particular talent for dialogue (every word out of Kim Fowley’s mouth is genius), Sigismondi and director of photography Benoît Debie adopt a vivid palette that screams Seventies, and editor Richard Chew knows when to cut intensely and when to let a composition linger onscreen for a while. Sigismondi also comes up with a clever visual rhyme — the first scene in the film starts with a close-up shot of a blood drop splashing on the ground (from Currie’s first period). Later there’s another close-up shot of a lock of Currie’s hair falling on a photo of David Bowie as she cuts her hair to look more like him. And later, completing Currie’s self-destructive arc, there’s a close-up shot of her photo as someone recklessly drops cigarette ashes on it.

After all, this movie is mainly about Cherie Currie. Joan Jett was in her element — she looked for Rock and found it, but Rock looked for Cherie Currie and found her. This important difference is stressed by Sigismondi repeatedly, and reinforced by the excellent performances of Kristen Stewart and Dakota Fanning, particularly the latter, who had the toughest job. Stewart is surprisingly convincing as the badass Jett, but Jett was a driven rocker, so her character doesn’t go through any major changes — Stewart only has to maintain her characterization consistent, and she does. Currie, on the other hand, wasn’t as sure of what she wanted to do with her life and the world of Rock and Success change her. Fanning portrays this brilliantly, as evidenced by the scene where she drunkenly staggers around a supermarket, unrecognizable from the first time we saw her. But it’s Michael Shannon who steals every scene he’s in, depicting Kim Fowley as a hyperkinetically hilarious madman (“Jail-fuckin’-bait! Jack-fuckin’-pot!”), but at the same time giving him an edge of cruelty and manipulation that ultimately hurts his relationship with The Runaways.

Fowley isn’t, however, the only source of humor in the film. There’s a particularly great scene in which Jett gives Currie a lesson while the latter is in the shower, and afterwards there’s an even better moment when Jett decides to take revenge on a male band that previously harassed her. THE RUNAWAYS switches tone efficiently, amping up the electricity to contagious levels during the concerts and calming down again to a crawling lethargy, as if it’s on drugs along with its stars — a merit of editor Richard Chew, whose fast-cutting during the concerts doesn’t render them confusing, but even more exciting. He, Sigismondi and Benoît Debie don’t hold back in portraying the radically different moods: there’s a ferocious red-filtered scene where Jett and Currie share smoke from a cigarette, later contrasted by a quiet, eerie shot of Jett floating on water, trying to inspire herself.

THE RUNAWAYS doesn’t hit all the marks. There’s the cliche montage that portrays the band’s growing success; the story largely ignores the other members of The Runaways (which makes it feel like Jett and Currie do the same); and the film makes it look like Jett came up with “I Love Rock ‘n Roll” when it’s actually a cover (the song is by The Arrows). The build-up to the ending is rushed, too, but the ending itself is one of the best scenes in the film, with a beautifully meaningful moment of silence between two characters.

Most of all, it’s a hugely enjoyable, well-acted, electric beast of a film that stays true to the essence of the band it’s depicting. It rocks.

Movie Review – The Expendables

Wherein a cast of mega action stars get together to aid the continuing destruction of their own genre.

Over the last two decades, a new status quo has established itself regarding action scenes: the more incoherent and confusing, the better. Nevermind the mise en scène, nevermind the carefully timed blood squibs, nevermind the steadicam — just tell the cameramen to film two actors flopping about with as much zoom as possible, then hand the footage to the editors, who will proceed to slice it like a cucumber and put the pieces in a blender. This style of filming is nowadays often applied to entire films (such as THE KINGDOM), for the sake of some illusion of realism or intensity that could be obtained by less superficial, more story-driven means. Experienced directors such as Ridley Scott — once a visionary — help perpetuate this stupidity, while less experienced directors such as Marc Forster, when in doubt, go for it as well (such as in QUANTUM OF SOLACE).

Sylvester Stallone not only adopts this style — he makes it worse thanks to his incompetence and lack of ambition. THE EXPENDABLES is supposed to be a homage to 80s action films, yet it looks very much like an aughties one: a visual mess incapable of causing even a hint of excitement, no matter how desperately composer Brian Tyler tries to convince us otherwise with his insistent pulse-pounding action score.

The problems start with the script, since screenwriters Stallone and Dave Callaham don’t even try to craft any interesting set-pieces. Probably assuming nostalgia would be enough, Stallone and Callaham sketch a simplistic plot about a Latin-American dictator manipulated by a CIA bastard and ruining a small Latin-American country of blah blah blah oh look a squirrel. Stallone has a team, comprised of Jet Li, Jason Statham, Terry Crews, Randy Couture and Dolph Lundgren, because if you want to ensure your action film will rock, you call Dolph Lundgren. It worked for THE PUNISHER, didn’t it? Oh, wait.

There’s other action stars scattered around the film as well, including quick participations from Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger — and I must say, their scene with Stallone is the one scene in the film that truly works (especially what Stallone says as Schwarzenegger is leaving). It’s good to see The Governator back onscreen. Say what you want about his acting, the man has charisma. And he was in a film that kicks this one’s ass: it was called TRUE LIES, it was directed by James Cameron and it was insanely clever in its stupidity. Now that’s a brilliantly-scripted and ingeniously-directed stupid action film, and Stallone, with the cast he was working with, should have set his standards as high. Instead, they don’t even reach direct-to-rental ambitions.

Take, for example, the scene where Stallone and Statham (you don’t seriously expect me to call them by their character names, right?), piloting a plane, fly over a dock and blow it to pieces along with the soldiers and vehicles on it. If Stallone had any creativity and ambition, he would have done a tracking shot that went from the beginning of the dock to the end of it, following the path of the bullets as they rip the soldiers and their vehicles apart in one single, glorious camera movement (think, for example, that brilliant scene in SHUTTER ISLAND where several men are executed in a flashback). Instead, Stallone and his coked-up editors cut the footage into so many shaky-camera pieces that it gets boring to watch. Let me repeat that, to further emphasize the disaster: Stallone actually manages to make a flyby with Jason Statham ripping a dock to shreds boring. Jason Statham, a rare breed of modern action star (i.e. a competent modern action star), an actor who is always interesting to watch, is rendered dull by Stallone’s complete lack of inspiration.

I should also emphasize that all the action scenes are like this, and they have horrible special effects. No, seriously. This part is so absurd I’m almost willing to believe they’re not and it’s me who’s going blind, but no, the special effects are horrendous. The one thing you can actually see in this film’s chaotic action scenes is how shitty the special effects are. There is a moment when a man is consumed by flames that are so obviously digital I cringed, not because I could see a man burning, but because I couldn’t actually see a man burning, just pretending to be burned. Not to mention Stallone’s dreadful use of CGI blood — yeah, you know what? I give up. I should have simply said that THE EXPENDABLES, a major motion picture in the same year IRON MAN 2 came out, manages to fuck up CGI blood and it would be enough said about the special effects department. It’s a red liquid, you clueless cunts. What’s so difficult to get right about that?

In fact, let me apply this kind of “it can’t get worse than this” logic to the entire film: THE EXPENDABLES has Mickey Rourke, and not even him can save this pathetic, bland and incompetent piece of shit. I’m tired of this new action movie status quo, and when even this film — which was supposed to be a homage to a time when keeping a camera still was okay — is consumed by it, I can’t be expected to have a tolerance level above zero.

There’s an action film playing in theathers right now that is much smarter, much more exciting and a much better use of your time than this one. It’s called INCEPTION, and the seventeen-second action scene with Joseph Gordon-Levitt in a hotel hallway is, alone, worth a hundred THE EXPENDABLES.

Movie Review – Inception

(spoiler-free, but discusses some of the film’s mechanics and structure in detail, so if you want to know very little about INCEPTION before you watch it, don’t read this review — and do watch it, it’s amazing)

It would be innacurate to say I had to watch INCEPTION three times in order to write about it as confidently as I wished to; I wanted to watch it again and again, and looked forward to doing it every time. After the first viewing, my mind was blown. I liked the film so much I was suspicious, and decided to watch it again to make sure the impression still stood. It didn’t — I spotted a few things that seemed like plotholes, and the dialogue was often very expositional. But cautiously, I still loved the film; I thought about the plotholes and they turned out not to be plotholes, just failures in my understanding of the film or things the plot didn’t explicitly explain. To make sure, I watched it a third time — and here are my final impressions.

INCEPTION is a movie entirely conceived with the purpose of getting editor Lee Smith to commit suicide. I assume that after THE DARK KNIGHT, Smith asked Nolan for a real challenge, and Nolan went, “Okay then, motherfucker — how about this script I’ve been working on for ten years, where action scenes happen in three different layers of dreams, and each layer happens at a slower time than the previous one, but simultaneously, and you’re not getting ten years to put that together? How’s that for a challenge, bitch?” Quite an ambitious and difficult one, which Nolan and Smith pull off.

Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is an extractor. He and his associates create dreamspaces, bring the unwitting subject into the dream, and the subject’s subconscious fills the dreamspace with their secrets — which Cobb is trained to find. However, it’s not as simple as that — every subject requires a certain approach, with Cobb and his team having to create a dream within another dream to fool them. After a failed attempt to extract a piece of information from a billionaire called Saito (Ken Watanabe), Cobb and his associate Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) are about to go on the run from the dangerous corporation that hired them, but Saito approaches them and offers a very difficult job: an inception, which consists of planting an idea in a subject’s mind while convincing him he had the idea himself — in other words, faking inspiration. Cobb is initially unwilling to help, but Saito promises him his heart’s desire: fixing Cobb’s charges and allowing him to return to the USA, where his children live. Relocating them to another country Cobb can visit isn’t good enough, as he would still be wanted as a criminal, putting his children in danger (this is my deduction, not something the film explains). So Cobb accepts Saito’s job, and begins to assemble a team.

INCEPTION operates on Action Movie Logic. This is something Nolan establishes from the very start and throughout the film, as he and Lee Smith invest on a very quick-paced (but competent and coherent) editing structure. The rules of dream-sharing are created so it is possible, but dangerous, for the main characters to complete their task. For example, one of the main problems of bringing someone into a dream is that the subject’s subconscious eventually realizes it’s being invaded, and the projections (people the subject imagines and populates the dreamspace with) start looking for the invaders and attack them. But, and this is where the Action Movie Logic kicks in, these projections can be confronted and killed. This and other rules would seem ridiculous in a less tightly-built film, but Nolan is clever enough to get us used to these strange concepts from the very start, and every plot development remains firmly realistic within the film’s context.

Additionally, Nolan foreshadows these developments, easing us in so they don’t take us completely by surprise, which could make said development seem implausible and shoehorned into the plot. But once we’re eased in, Nolan gradually raises the stakes and exploits the concepts to their maximum. For example, while you’re dreaming, what happens in reality can change the conditions of the dream, and what happens inside the dream can affect the conditions of another, deeper dream (and the deeper you go into dream layers, the slower time passes in upper layers due to how faster your brain is working). If you get wet, it might start raining in the dream. This particular rule leads to an absolutely superb fight scene with Arthur inside a hotel hallway (you’ll recognize it easily once you see it).

As you’ve probably noticed by now, INCEPTION is a movie full of ideas and concepts. They are explored with inventiveness and cleverness. But these many ideas have to be explained to the audience, which requires the dreaded exposition. Disguising exposition is difficult: you have to convince the audience the characters are explaining things to one another, not to you or at least as well as to you. Many mediocre writers fuck this up by having characters discuss a subject they already know everything about, making the exposition obvious — which often makes you feel like you’re being patronised by a filmmaker who doesn’t believe your intellect to be above that of a retarded goldfish. For this film, Nolan uses the “rookie character”, Ariadne (Ellen Page), to whom things are explained to; it’s a cliche, but a necessary one which Nolan uses wisely. Ariadne’s curious and confrontational nature, which he strongly establishes from the moment he introduces her, makes her go beyond being a simple “way in” for the audience, and into a sufficiently convincing character with a no-bullshit attitude that also works as a way to force Cobb to tell her (and us) his past, which in turn develops him as a character.

But not even Nolan can completely disguise the heavy and constant explaining, and there are moments when it does go overboard: the scene Cobb yells at Arthur is followed by so much exposition it becomes slightly convoluted (ironically, as the scene’s purpose is to clear things up). But mostly, Nolan succeeds, by having characters say the expositional dialogue while performing some kind of action to advance the plot, rarely giving us the impression the movie is stopping to let us catch up.

And surprisingly, there is time, amidst all this, for character development. Of course, Cobb, the protagonist, receives the most attention; his fascinating backstory takes the film’s concepts even deeper. But the supporting characters, such as Saito, Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy) and Cobb’s wife (Marion Cottilard), also receive dramatic arcs of their own (although to an understandably lesser degree) from Nolan’s brilliantly sculpted script. Some of the characters, such as Arthur and Eames (Tom Hardy), are unavoidably more unidimensional; you can only do so much in two and a half hours of film. But Nolan seems aware of this, which I guess is why he and casting director John Papsidera assembled such a talented cast: I’d dare say Tom Hardy is simply perfect as Eames, while Joseph Gordon-Levitt is quite convincing as the resourceful Arthur. The talented Ellen Page manages to turn a potentially annoying character into a likeable (or at least understandable) one, and the always reliable Ken Watanabe portrays Saito with fascinating ambiguity (at times a cold businessman, at others very human), although not as much ambiguity as Marion Cottilard, whose great performance in this film more than makes up for her weak portrayal of Billie Frechette in PUBLIC ENEMIES (where she was sabotaged by a mediocre script, to be fair). But it’s Cillian Murphy who surprised me — he’s a very talented actor, but I hardly expected him to be so remarkable as Fischer. He manages to actually make us care a little about his problems, since Murphy depicts the man’s emotional struggles so believably. And as icing on the cake, there’s Michael Caine and Tom Berenger.

Leonardo DiCaprio delivers the exceptional performance I’ve come to expect for him — but also in the character I’ve come to expect from him: the mentally-unstable, traumatised and hot-tempered protagonist Martin Scorsese had him play in three films (THE AVIATOR, THE DEPARTED, and SHUTTER ISLAND) — Howard Hughes, Billy Costigan and Teddy Daniels are not the same character, of course, but they share enough similarities to put DiCaprio’s versatility in doubt. And although he is a master of this kind of character — as he proved with his magnificent performance in SHUTTER ISLAND — INCEPTION should come as a sign to him that it’s time to shake things up a bit and invest in films that don’t require him to wear his now-iconic facial expression of emotional distress all the time — at this point, DiCaprio must have a vertical scar on his brow from the time it spends furrowed. However, as I said, this doesn’t make his work in INCEPTION any less competent, just familiar.

Always an excellent screenwriter (often co-writing with his talented brother Jonathan, but doing solo work in this film), Christopher Nolan is evolving noticeably as a director. While BATMAN BEGINS had absolutely incoherent action scenes edited incompetently by the very same Lee Smith, THE DARK KNIGHT showed an immense improvement both for the director and the editor, with many thrilling moments well-put together. INCEPTION represents another huge leap in Nolan’s improvement: the aforementioned superb scene in the hotel hallway is not simply one of the highlights of his career, but deserves to be considered one of the highlights of Cinema. Not just due to the magnificent special effects (although that particular scene has deceptively simple effects), but to the brilliant way it’s filmed (Wally Pfister’s cinematography is great as always) — a seventeen-second, well-coreographed shot with no cuts. But the scenes that don’t have many effects, such as the chase in Mombasa, are also thrilling thanks to Smith’s precise editing and the competent sound design — when a man cracks his head against a windshield, the sound effect is so sickeningly real and loud one can hardly help cringing. The score by the exceptional Hans Zimmer, which at times seems appropriately inspired by Trevor Jones’ score for DARK CITY, works wonderfully well and fits into the film’s internal logic with elegance: part of the main theme is a slowed down version of Edith Piaf’s “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien”, a song that is important to the plot of INCEPTION.

Investing on a fluid, quick narrative, Nolan gives the characters more personality through well-placed humor (“Yeah, but it was worth a shot.”), providing the audience with much needed exposition-free dialogue, or some times even disguising the exposition. By now I’m just plain sucking this film’s cock, I know, but I can’t help it: it’s exciting, in how many levels INCEPTION works, despite being so ambitious, so difficult to get right. I’ve spent a total of seven and a half hours with this film (not counting the time I took to think about it on the days following every session), and every minute was worth it. I don’t think I ever went to watch a film again in the movie theather three times within mere ten days. Nolan’s ideas and the way he explores them are just that fascinating. Sure, there are some flaws: the often expositional dialogue; Lee Smith’s occasional mistake (he seems carried away by the film’s quick pacing, and doesn’t realize he should let some shots linger for a while longer); some plot elements that aren’t introduced as elegantly as they should; Cobb saying his team has twenty minutes, and claiming that would give Arthur a couple, when by the film’s rules Arthur would in fact have one minute. This last one can be passed off as a mistake by Cobb, meaning they actually have more than twenty minutes and so Arthur has more time as well, although it must be said that on close scrutiny Arthur never seems to have enough time anyway*. But next to the things the film gets right, these mistakes are barely noticeable.

INCEPTION, along with Nolan’s body of work so far, are earning him comparisons with Kubrick. I don’t think this fits for two reasons. The first is that Kubrick was less skilled at conveying emotion into his narratives, which is not the same as being “sentimental” (something Kubrick’s disciple Steven Spielberg sometimes falls prey to, as one can verify by watching WAR OF THE WORLDS) — emotion is a key part of storytelling, and the stronger emotional attachment I’ve seen Kubrick reach was in FULL METAL JACKET. There was little reason to care about the characters in THE SHINING or 2001: A SPACE ODISSEY (which are, however, good films, especially the latter), A CLOCKWORK ORANGE was too much of a mess in too many aspects, and DR. STRANGELOVE is clever, funny and absolutely cold. Kubrick’s other films, I haven’t yet watched — except SPARTACUS, but I watched that one while having a strong fever, so I need to watch it again to provide a reliable opinion on it as I nodded off several times. Those are, however, enough to gather that emotion was far from being Kubrick’s strong suit. Nolan’s career, on the other hand, has many moments and plot elements that are memorable because of the emotional attachment we have to the characters: the flashback showing us the origin of Lenny’s condition in MEMENTO; the guilt felt by Will Dormer in INSOMNIA; Bruce Wayne overcoming his fear of bats in BATMAN BEGINS; the self-destructive rivalry between Angier and Borden in THE PRESTIGE; the Joker laughing maniacally after being punched by Batman inside the interrogation room in THE DARK KNIGHT; and the ending of INCEPTION.

Which leads me to the second reason: it’s useless to compare Christopher Nolan to Kubrick, or to anyone. His love for obsessed characters in complex plots is only part of a vision too unique to be compared to that of other filmmakers, regardless of whether they’re better or worse. Nolan is not the new anyone: he’s simply Christopher Nolan, and the way his career is going, it won’t be long until future rising filmmakers are compared to him.

* SPOILER WARNING, IF YOU DIDN’T WATCH INCEPTION, THE REVIEW ENDED ON THE PREVIOUS PARAGRAPH:

From the moment the van starts falling to the moment it hits the water, only a few seconds pass — which would translate to one minute, at most a minute and a half, in Arthur’s dream. There’s no way he could do all the things he does in a minute and a half. However, thanks to the complex world created by Nolan, one can find enough information to craft your own explanations. Of course, this is a slippery slope, as it requires the viewer to do the job of the writer, but not so much in this case.

According to the film’s rules, and in that particular scene, time is slowed down twenty times in relation to the previous dream, because in it the dreamer’s mind is working twenty times faster. But is this a constant? Does the dreamer always think this fast regardless of the situation? Arthur finds himself having to deviate from his plan and coming up with a new way to deliver the “kick”. I think it would be fair to assume his brain was in “oh, shit, oh, shit” mode and therefore working even faster than it would be if he was simply going along with the plan. So for him, time was going even slower, and he had enough to do everything he had to do.

This might sound far-fetched, but that I’m so willing to think this much about INCEPTION and explain the film’s apparent flaws is a very good sign of how much I loved it and how, in the end, it works brilliantly.

Movie Review – The Untouchables

Despite a mediocre career as of late, Brian DePalma is one of the most interesting and talented directors in the industry; a master at using inventive camera movements and complex mise-en-scène in the service of the narrative (instead of as a self-indulgent end in itself), he is also unflinching with violence or sex. In fact, it doesn’t surprise me that his last great work (that I’ve watched) was my all-time favorite film, CARLITO’S WAY — after all, what do you do after you’ve made something as magnificent as CARLITO’S WAY? Fucking MISSION TO MARS, apparently.

THE UNTOUCHABLES is from a rich time in DePalma’s filmography, soon after he had directed the fascinating BODY DOUBLE and the exceptional SCARFACE. And it’s an embarassing misstep and one of his most overrated films. David Mamet wrote it, and his approach was to turn Eliot Ness into an impulsive retard, to reduce his legendary group of Untouchables from eleven to three, to have Ness tutored by one of the group members for the entire film and to introduce one or two scenes with Al Capone acting like a dick so we’ll hate him more than we hate Ness for being an idiot.

I have a deeply-rooted annoyance with “dramatic license”, which I call “laziness license”, constantly exploited by writers who change history to suit their writing skills better instead of doing a proper adaptation job. Mamet uses the names of Eliot Ness and Al Capone to add weight and importance to the characters — but the price to pay for such a thing, staying true to the real people whose names you’re using, is completely ignored by the writer. Throughout the course of the film, Eliot Ness needs to be taught the job he was chosen to perform, endangers civilians, throws a man off a roof to his death (said man in real life killed himself years later) and goes to a train station where he knows something very dangerous is about to occur. And how many people does he take with him as backup? One.

Even if Kevin Costner acted well, it would be difficult to sympathize with the mentally-challenged Ness written by Mamet. However, Costner offers a lacklustre, inexpressive performance, downright mediocre whenever he has an emotional outburst. The then-inexperienced Andy Garcia displayed natural charisma, although he botches some of his lines (notice the uncomfortable pause when he says “that’s much better than you, you stinkin’ Irish… pig”). Charles Martin Smith does what he can with a hopelessly pathetic character (the moment he turns into Rambo and kills several people with a shotgun is absolutely ridiculous — his character is a fucking accountant). It’s Sean Connery and Robert DeNiro who stand out, the former as fictional beat cop Jim Malone, an Irishman who tutors Ness for the duration of the film. A fun and likeable character, very well-played by Connery, but brought down by his own implausibility — a beat cop who spends an entire film teaching a federal law-enforcement agent with a master’s degree in Criminology how to catch criminals. As for DeNiro, he’s excellent as usual, but his participation is more of an extended cameo than anything. The scenes he’s in serve little narrative purpose, or are just pathetic (such as the one where Eliot Ness, once again proving his astonishing stupidity, confronts him at a staircase).

DePalma put a lot of effort in directing this film — his camera movements and mise-en-scéne are as interesting as ever — but when it comes to subtlety this is DePalma at his worst. With an equally obnoxious Ennio Morricone (yes, even Ennio fucking Morricone fails on this film) composing an overdone, unsuited and melodramatic soundtrack, DePalma’s handling of emotional moments is ham-handed (with the exception of a murder inside an elevator, when DePalma emphasizes the character’s last breath with a sudden and brutal close-up) and the action scene happening at the bridge is carelessly shot and edited — it’s the one with the Rambo accountant, too. The train station sequence in slow-motion, although competent, is far from brilliant, with a few clumsy shots and the circumstances it happens in (Eliot Ness endangering civilians and with a single cop as backup) weaken it severely. Years later, DePalma would direct an infinitely superior sequence happening at a station in CARLITO’S WAY (the last half-hour of that film is absolutely flawless filmmaking). But DePalma’s worst moment in THE UNTOUCHABLES is easily the one where a guy is thrown off a roof, a moment so clumsily filmed it’s embarassing to watch.

To make things worse, the dialogue is mediocre. I’m not very familiar with Mamet’s body of work yet, but he has a good reputation in this field. Not that you’d know from this film. What Ness says to Capone in the ending is ridiculous, and the same can be said of Capone’s monologue before bashing a guy’s brains in. There’s one or two memorable lines, but mostly it’s shit like “He’s as dead as Julius Caesar” or “He’s in the car” (that last one depends on context, but it’s an out-of-place joke and horribly unsuited for the character who says it).

THE UNTOUCHABLES is not boring, but it’s a weak piece of storytelling that doesn’t deserve its title — it should go for a film with balls, willing to tell the real story or at least something closer to it.

Movie Review – IRON MAN 2

The first IRON MAN was a welcome surprise. I hardly expected it to be such the entertaining, funny and fairly smart action flick it was, and casting Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark turned out to be a good idea, since the billionaire scientist fit the actor’s style. Not that this is necessarily a good thing for Downey Jr., whose tendency to talk really fast and act as irreverently as possible is becoming more than a mere trademark, and an actor of his caliber shouldn’t be limited to a single type of character.

Regardless, his Tony Stark continues to be a pleasure to watch, even if screenwriter Justin Theroux decided to include a retarded subplot in which the man is being slowly poisoned by the palladium on his chest piece, something he seems to consider a low-priority nuisance, not as important as driving racing cars or aiming to fuck anything that moves. The overall story is that Stark is refusing to hand his Iron Man suit over to the American Government (which phrases their request as “to the American People”, of course). In the process of doing this, Stark further antagonizes his main rival, Justin Hammer (Sam Rockwell), another rich guy in the same business as him. To make things worse, there’s Ivan Vanko (Mickey Rourke), a Russian scientist who wants to bring down Stark for the sins of Howard Hug — Howard STARK, his father. In order to do this, Vanko builds his own high-tech suit, consisting of two electrical whips.

When focusing on Hammer and Vanko, Theroux’s script is competent. Hammer is at the same time a dangerous and sharp businessman and a hopeless imbecile, and Rockwell is clearly having loads of fun playing him, and does it well, because he’s Sam fucking Rockwell. He achieves the balance between convincing the audience Hammer is just stupid enough to act like he does, but smart enough to pose an actual threat. Mickey Rourke, meanwhile — do I even have to say it? It’s Mickey Rourke. I thought I was being redundant when I said Sam Rockwell does a great job in this movie, but Mickey Rourke as a Russian scientist who wields a pair of electrical whips? Take a fucking guess.

Theroux’s script is equally successful when it comes to comedy, which is not a surprise considering he was one of the screenwriters in TROPIC THUNDER. Most of the humorous moments in the film hit the mark (“Hammer tech?”), but Theroux does go overboard with the scene where a drunk Iron Man fights War Machine for the first time, which seems to be the only mildly relevant scene that directly derives from the “Stark is dying of blood poisoning” subplot — it’s the reason he’s drunk. But c’mon: couldn’t there be another reason he gets drunk? Such as, he’s Tony fucking Stark? A character famous for ingesting enough alcohol to knock out an Irishman? Fortunately, Jon Favreau directs the shit out of that scene, as he does the entire film, but more on that later.

The dying subplot is staggeringly stupid. I love how Stark constantly looks at a device that tells him the percentage of palladium in his blood — apparently he took the time to have the device built but didn’t follow up with trying to find a cure — and at a certain point the blood poisoning reaches about 70% and Stark can still somehow breathe, let alone put on a suit and kick some ass. (Plot spoilers — skip to next paragraph if that’s a problem) To make things worse, the subplot is solved with another even stupider subplot involving Stark’s dad, who apparently predicted his son would one day be suffering from palladium-poisoning and made sure to leave clues regarding a magical plot-solving chemical element. Which Stark logically synthesizes, by himself, in his office. I can accept this motherfucker building the first Iron Man suit out of junk to escape captivity, but c’mon.

However, Theroux deserves credit for setting up genuinely good setpieces in a way that doesn’t feel forced, and the climax of the movie truly feels like a climax, also thanks to Jon Favreau, a hugely talented director. With a good eye for composition and camera movements, he’s especially gifted at humor and especially especially at action scenes, always avoiding shaky cameras and going for clarity and coherency. He also knows how to make an audience collectively come from sheer awesomeness (or maybe that was just me), such as in the scene where Iron Man flies down from the clouds, amidst fireworks, to the sound of AC/DC’s “Shoot To Thrill”. But far from being a mindless action director, Favreau also manages to make some of the script’s stupider moments more believable, such as the aforementioned first fight between Iron Man and War Machine. Technically, the film is impeccable, you’ll be surprised to hear: great special effects, excellent sound effects and competent cinematography.

Favreau also brings together a good supporting cast. Scarlett Johansson turned out to be a good choice for Black Widow, at least until Black Widow is further developed in other Marvel movies, since she barely has any depth to her on this one. But for a first appearance, I’m perfectly fine with Johansson performing amazing coreographies while wearing a ridiculously tight leather suit. Favreau himself, as Tony’s right-hand man Happy, is funny and efficient, and Gwyneth Paltrow manages to play Pepper in a way that is endearing instead of annoying, even though she spends most of the film pissed off at Stark. Don Cheadle does a better job as James Rhodes than Terrence Howard did in the first film, and watching Sam L. Jackson playing Nick Fury is like watching a Bryan Hitch drawing come to life. It’s so good to see Jackson playing a real character instead of that pussy jedi in the STAR WARS prequels.

As an action film, it’s fun as hell, but it’s dumber than its predecessor. The first IRON MAN had a lighter tone, however its plot still had several (relevant) conflicts to remain interesting, while IRON MAN 2 retains the humor but goes for subplots that ultimately lead nowhere story-wise, serving only to increase the running time. The subplots that truly matter are the ones involving Justin Hammer and Ivan Vanko. Fuck Stark’s daddy crisis — the character doesn’t need to be yet another protagonist with parental issues. Stark is an alcoholic womanizer. You want a subplot, go with that. He doesn’t need to be dying to get drunk.

Movie Review – Dead Man

Human corruption is a theme that fascinates me, so it comes as little surprise that I liked DEAD MAN so much, despite its flaws. A poetically brutal western about a man gradually turned into a monster by the cruel society that he ends up in, this film written and directed by Jim Jarmusch succeeds in getting its point across without succumbing to pretentious writing. Archetypes and symbols are used by him with intelligence, and never become more important than the very interesting characters Jarmusch develops with an unexpected but efficient sense of humor.

William Blake (Johnny Depp) isn’t in this case the acclaimed poet, but an accountant on his way to the city of Machine, where he’s been promised a job. The film’s introduction consists of the train ride to Machine, with Blake growing more and more uncomfortable; as he gets closer to his destination, the scenery outside the window goes from friendly and beautiful to arid and lifeless, and the other passengers, from seemingly reasonable men in hats and suits to rugged, dirty men in pelts who give Blake hostile glares. Some might consider this sequence too long and repetitive, but I found it to be very effective in conveying just how out of place Blake is in that world; wearing a indescribably ridiculous suit, a dull hat and an introverted expression on his clean-shaven face, it quickly becomes clear that Machine is going to eat him alive.

Case in point, Machine turns out to be the end of the world, and on his way to what he hopes will be his workplace, Blake sees a number of unbelievable things and gets threatened with a gun within a minute of leaving the train (in another well-directed and well-paced sequence). Upon finally arriving, Blake is told the job’s taken, is threatened with a gun again and ultimately finds himself penniless and stranded in a place he doesn’t belong to and that doesn’t seem even mildly inclined to accept him.

After something good finally happens to him, Blake’s luck goes south again and he is seriously wounded by gunfire (in another exceptionally well-edited scene, it must be said). In possession of a revolver, he escapes and is saved by a half-breed Indian called Nobody (Gary Farmer), who has surprising knowledge of the white man’s culture and starts referring to Blake as the famous poet; upon learning Blake’s name, Nobody says, “Then you ARE a dead man!”. The Indian starts to guide him as though Blake is a lost spirit needing to find his way to the beyond. Blake the accountant, however, is required to do terrible things to survive in the harsh land that surrounds him, and starts to lose his humanity.

Despite the obvious archetype represented by the Indian (“Nobody”), Jarmusch develops him and other characters as unique human beings rather than portrayals of humanity as a whole (which seldom, if ever, works). The Indian has a backstory, and is a very entertaining character who, like Blake, is an outcast in his own way. The name he was given by his old tribe, “He Who Talks Loud, Saying Nothing”, is actually very appropriate, since what makes Nobody so interesting is that most of what he says is bullshit. At the same time, he is the only person who treats Blake well.

The supporting characters are equally interesting, with the highlight being the trio of killers hired to hunt down Blake. Their chemistry is impeccable; Cole Wilson (Lance Henriksen) is quiet and concentrated, Conway Twill (Michael Wincott) won’t stop fucking talking and Johnny “The Kid” Pickett (Eugene Byrd) is actually a kid who started bounty-hunting very precociously. The scene where Conway tells Cole’s backstory to Johnny is absolutely superb and one of the film’s funniest moments. One of the main flaws in DEAD MAN is that the character of Cole Wilson, brilliantly played by Henriksen, is badly-used by the script; Jarmusch didn’t seem to know how to fit the character in the ending, and does so in a way that mildly works, but not up to the careful build-up of Cole Wilson as a legendary gunslinger and psychotic fuckwit.

Sadly, other flaws plague this film; fortunately, none of them bad enough to overshadow the abundant good bits; sadly, they’re still there. The main theme composed by Neil Young is evocative and beautiful, but the rest of the soundtrack is a random plucking of guitar chords to punctuate certain events with as much subtlety as a hammer to the crotch; the middle of the film has a few script problems, namely two characters separating from one another only to be later reunited in a clumsy (but, okay, funny) way, as if the film needed some time to figure out where it wanted to go next; the editing is mostly exceptional, but Jay Rabinowitz does let some shots drag on for far too long, and he overuses fade ins and fade outs, giving the film an episodic structure. However, the latter is forgivable because there is a poetic rhyme to it; every time Blake sleeps or passes out, which is often, you can almost see the relief in his face as he leaves this cruel world for at least a few hours. Not to mention that the fade out that ends the film, thanks also to Jarmusch and his director of photography Robby Müller, is beautiful, ending the film on a perfect note.

Müller, by the way, does a fantastic job with the black and white cinematography. The composition of the shots and the subtlety of the camera movements result in a film that’s great to look at, and he and Jarmusch create moments of beautiful symbolism, such as the scene where Blake finds a dead baby deer, and sees himself in it, or, more precisely, the man he used to be.

Johnny Depp is a very versatile actor, but he always did have a preference for strange characters who don’t fit well among other people. Excellent as always, he portrays Blake’s change of personality with sensitivity and intelligence. Even in the latter half of the film, we can still see glimpses of the old Blake, as he stares innocently at the wilderness. Meanwhile, his increasingly indifferent reaction to gunning down people is an impressive and sad contrast. Depp, however, never allows his character to turn into a version of Clint Eastwood. William Blake’s change can be clearly seen in all its brutality, but is never overdone. Gary Farmer stays true to his character’s other name, always talking loud, but never overdoing it either. He’s very funny and very likeable. The cast is one of this film’s main strengths, with people such as John Hurt and Gabriel Byrne performing great cameos.

Another of the film’s strengths is the unexpected sense of humor displayed by Jarmusch; the film has several funny moments which never break the overall bleak tone of the narrative, which is a sign of good writing. Black comedy is especially present, and the dialogue is sharp, especially the lines said by Conway Twill. The fucker might talk a lot, but that turns out to be a good thing (for the viewer, since the characters travelling with Twill aren’t blessed with cinematic cuts).

DEAD MAN is the kind of film that, even if I didn’t like, I’d at least respect. The director is trying to tell a story in the way he thinks is best, a story that interests him. I’ll take that over any tested-for-certain-audiences Hollywood shit any day. But fortunately, DEAD MAN is also a memorable film. It has some flaws, but even they give the film a certain charm. It’s a film with something to say about humanity, but that doesn’t rely on that alone to be good and therefore avoids being just pretentious. It’s about its characters just as much as it’s about its message. Beautifully bleak, darkly funny and subtly moving, with the rare kind of ending that made me feel, at the same time, sad and relieved for its damned protagonist.

Movie Review – Paranormal Activity

I do have a soft spot for movies where there’s only one cameraman who is also a character (a diegetic camera), even though it requires some suspension of disbelief to work in a movie. After all, if you were trying to make a realistic film of, say, a huge monster terrorizing New York as filmed by an amateur cameraman, you’d be lucky to get a coherent image every twenty seconds and even luckier not to be vomiting on the first ten. But hey, it’s a movie about a monster stomping New York — fuck realism.

PARANORMAL ACTIVITY is another movie with a diegetic camera where the camera receives more attention than the premise — which is basically a haunted house. Well, okay, so it’s the girl who’s haunted, but she never leaves the house and the demon seems to get a kick out of making noises around the place, so it’s a goddamn haunted house. This particular unlucky girl is called Katie, and she seems to be a more interesting version of Christine from DRAG ME TO HELL, or maybe it’s just the movie that’s much better than that one hour and thirty-nine minutes of Sam Raimi masturbating. Katie has a boyfriend called Micah, who lives with her. Katie has been haunted by a demon since she was a child, and recently things have been getting worse. Wanting to help his girlfriend and to get some impressive footage, Micah buys a camera in order to film them both sleeping, and any apparitions from the bothersome hellspawn.

Which boils down to haunted house. In fact, this is one of PARANORMAL ACTIVITY’s greatest flaws — even in the face of overwhelming evidence that there is indeed a demon in the house, and that this demon indeed doesn’t like them very much, and that it’s indeed a fucking demon and not Casper The Friendly Ghost, the two protagonists always sleep in the house they’re being haunted in. They call a specialist (or Mr. Exposition, as I like to call this character that EVERY horror movie requires at some point), who explains that leaving the house will do them no good, since it’s Katie being haunted, not the house.

Yes, surely going to a hotel, or sleeping on friends’ houses, or on a park bench, or in the middle of a party aren’t better alternatives than sleeping in the one place you’re bound to be haunted in. You could argue that they couldn’t do it forever, but for most of the movie the characters are waiting for a demonologist — apparently the only demonologist in the planet — to become available and help them; surely they could have bought some time until then, instead of staying in the damn house suffering from increasingly dangerous apparitions. “Oh, they didn’t want to put their friends in jeopardy as well!” Yes, this kind of selfless behaviour is exactly what to expect from pants-shittingly terrified human beings.

However, Katie and Micah turn out to be likeable protagonists, and their failure to react to the situation in a more self-preservational manner can actually be forgiven considering their personalities and circunstances. Micah walks the thin line between absolute asshole and lovable manchild with impressive balance, and while I wanted to punch him at times, his sense of humor always got the best of me (which is exactly the effect he has on his girlfriend, so she’s immediately relatable, also I feel a little gay now). Always looking forward to the next apparition so he can capture supernatural footage, Micah seems to be unimpressed by the demon’s technique, while Katie, who has been putting up with this for far longer, doesn’t want to tease the creature into raising its cruelty standards.

Working with guidelines instead of scripts on how to behave and what to discuss for every scene — and therefore ad-libbing the dialogue, all this according to IMDB — actors Micah Sloat and Katie Featherston act naturally and convincingly, making it clear how much their characters care about one another while having their own interests at heart: Katie wants the demon to go away, Micah wants it to do something amazing (but preferably harmless) for his camera. The actors’ impressive characterization is the main reason their slow and some times plain dumb reactions to the demon can be forgiven.

PARANORMAL ACTIVITY also pulls off a diegetic camera that doesn’t require you to change your perception of reality to accept it; throughout the film, the camera is placed carelessly on tables, forgotten while something happens in another room, poorly-angled, but never to a point where it actually bothers the viewer. Director Oren Peli cleverly came up with situations where the camera being forgotten or badly-aimed actually enhances the effect he’s going for, since this is a film that relies on your imagination to be scary. And the clumsy camerawork is deceptively clumsy, just enough to give us the impression it’s an amateur filming it, while still allowing us to see what’s going on when that’s the director’s intention — an example of good diegetic camerawork.

And is it scary? Fuck yes. And this coming from a guy who can sleep watching THE EXORCIST (but who still can’t fucking play SILENT HILL II without shaking, I admit). The director escalates the tension very well by having the demon become increasingly angry and dangerous, and by leaving the protagonists’ totally helpless; especially, of course, when they’re asleep. The sleep sequences, in fact, are the film’s obvious highlight and live up to the hype, being absurdly tense without resorting to typical horror film techniques or flashy special effects (except in one sequence, when it’s called for). Commendably, Oren Peli avoids repetition despite the rigidly repetitive structure, coming up with new situations and scarier sequences that go above and beyond the couple’s bedroom.

The film’s ending, however, comes unexpectedly and can be kind of disappointing for that reason. But even so, despite some script flaws, PARANORMAL ACTIVITY is a well-acted and well-directed horror film that more than lives up to its ambition: to scare. It lets your imagination to do most of the work, and imagination has always been a fantastic horror technique.