"Making something disappear isn't enough. You have to bring it back."

It's that man again!

Once upon a time, a few months ago, a notion struck me that I could write a successful, film-related blog - successful in that it kept going out of pure spite, and film-related in that it wasn't about the latest trends in nail varnish. But then I discovered something terrible... I'm a lazy bugger.

Should anybody accidentally read this blog, keep the cork in the champers a while longer, I'm not dead yet. Should anybody accidentally read this blog AND enjoy it, then why not give me a nudge. There's nothing quite like an ego boost to encourage productivity.

I'm indulging in a 2011-type mopping-up film binge (yes, binge) over the next couple of weeks, so you lucky blighters might be treated to a brand new rant or six.

...of course, it would probably help if I told anyone this place existed.

Kill List (2011)

In an uncharacteristic turn of good fortune, I became the owner of a pair of tickets to see this British horror/thriller-type film make its UK debut at the Film4 FrightFest. It was considered to be one of the high points of the festival, being awarded a full five stars by sponsors Total Film (the magazine responsible for furnishing me with the tickets). So off to London I went, meeting my esteemed sibling at Leicester Square, and proceeding straight to the cinema, with just a brief “Ooh, is that Neil Marshall?” along the way. A couple of hours later we made our exit, smiley face belying the inner “what the hell was that all about?” which took a few more hours to ferment and bubble to the surface during the car journey home… so what the hell was that all about?

            To give much away about Kill List would be to do both it and you, dear reader, a great disservice, because this is a fairly unconventional film that relies heavily on the audience’s nervous uncertainty over what is yet to come. So, whilst I will endeavour to give away as little as possible here, if you wish your experience to be truly unsullied by prior knowledge of it, then look away now (as the actress said to the bishop).

            Kill List follows Jay, an assassin and former army sniper, out of work for 8 months and pressured back into the game by the expenses of family life, as he and his partner take on a job to dispatch three people, with no idea of why they must die. They duly follow orders and professionally set about bringing death to their targets… but then things start to become a little strange. Is Jay going a little mad, is someone out to get him, or is something else entirely going on?

            The tense atmosphere of foreboding is created with hardly any telegraphing of the developments to come, and I was on the edge of my seat for much of the screening… the downside of this being that the mood is perhaps too dark even for this kind of tale, as even the lighter, humorous moments are coated in the shadow of what is to come and what has gone before. That is a small price to pay however. The big problem comes at the climax (of which I shall tell you absolutely nothing!!!), when you are kicked squarely in the gut by the happenings on screen, stop to take a breath, then think to yourself “I have absolutely no idea what was going on in that film”.

            Now, to be fair to writer/director Ben Wheatley, there was just about enough on screen for the more observant of the audience to be able to work out the nuances of the story, as my brother and I did on our journey home. Sadly, not all the threads tie together, and there are a handful of sizable contradictions. The number one rule of trying to be clever when making a film is “be tidy”; if your plot is intricate or obscured, make sure that it still makes sense. Kill List doesn’t. It comes close, but in the end not close enough.

            That said, I think Kill List might be something of a must-experience film for anyone with a liking for horror films, or the grittier side of the British industry. The performers are all on the top of their game, the director crafts a genuinely involving aura throughout, and it was immense fun trying to fit all the bits together afterwards, even if they didn’t quite all go. Additionally, if you like that sort of thing, the most repellent of the violent scenes all got applause and even cheers from the FrightFest crowd, those most discerning of violence fans.

            It is always nice to see something quite different from the norm, and I shall be keeping an eye open for Mr. Wheatley next offering, as well as anything featuring the wonderful Michael Smiley, here playing the second hitman, Gal.

***/*****

Final Destination 5 (2011)

            If I have learnt only one thing from watching Final Destination 5 (and, so far, it has taught me little else) it is that subtitles and “3D” are a bad combination, particularly if said subtitles are in Lithuanian. However, assuming you aren’t going to watch this in a cinema in Vilnius, this is something the rest of you may have to take on trust for the time being.

            Final Destination was a work of some small amount of genius; a horror concept that had not been explored ad nauseum, allowing you to kill your entire cast of characters, then bring them back to life and kill them all over again. This is the kind of thing Hollywood producers dream about coming up with. Sadly, the series has taken a decidedly conventional downwards career progression, pausing for a brief upturn at the Mary Elizabeth Winstead-starring FD3 (I’m sure there were other people in it too, but they’re not important). Entry number five, whilst still being a watchable pile of gore, does nothing to arrest that downward trend, and I fear we cannot be far away from the Final Destination equivalent of Jason Goes to Hell.

           For a film that could have done so many interesting things with its concept, I find that I don’t need to tell you the story because it is exactly the same as the other four (and if you haven’t seen them then why the hell would you start at the fifth one? Common sense, please). Someone has a premonition of a big accident with much unlikely and graphic death, and with this foreknowledge manages to save a handful of the victims, who are them systematically (and with theatrical complexity) picked off by Death himself.

            The deaths are too silly and the 3D is distracting, but the fatal flaw with FD5 is that the depth of the characters is practically non-existent, meaning you simply don’t care too much about whether their innards stay inwards or not, and that has a serious effect on how much tension you feel as they inch ever closer to their elaborate doom. It’s paper thin stuff, just an excuse to be violent, but did we really expect anything else?

            I enjoyed Final Destination 5, in the same way that I enjoyed Halloween 5 and Saw 5, and I would even say that FD5 is better than those other two 5s… but it is what it is, and what it is is a throwaway piece of opiate for the base pleasure receptors. Fun but unfulfilling, and a bit of a waste when you consider what they could be doing with this series.

**/*****

Auschwitz (2011)

I sympathise with Uwe Boll, I really do. He is clearly a filmmaker with passion, and his reputation as “The Worst Filmmaker in the World^TM” is not entirely deserved; coming off the back of making a comical hash of some reasonably high-profile video game adaptations that had made him more than a little hated by self-righteous nerds everywhere, he was getting better. Tunnel Rats had been merely mediocre (which, given the competition, made it one of the best Vietnam war films ever made), revolting over-the-top comedy Postal had offered some genuine laughs between the grotesquery, and the likes of Far Cry and In the Name of the King had been no worse than your average Hollywood tripe. However…

Auschwitz opens with the director addressing the audience, first in German then English, explaining in fairly ineloquent terms why he had made this film – to educate the world. It is then followed by some obviously moronic teenagers failing to answer basic, asinine, leading and poorly-phrased (not to mention badly subtitled) questions about the holocaust. It is only after nearly 10 minutes that the “drama” begins, which is half-an-hour or so of mechanical “this is what happened at Auschwitz” footage. This is then followed by some more questions, this time answered by some slightly less brain-dead kids, and concluded by more Boll talking to the camera.

Ignoring the “documentary” parts (which is actually the majority of the film), the dramatised part is reasonably well shot and acted, but with dreadful editing which sadly makes the admirably restrained  performances of the gas chamber victims seems a little laughable. Unlike so much that Boll has done before, this is not gratuitous, quite the opposite in fact. As the director himself says at the beginning of the film, he is trying to show the reality, rather than tell stories of heroes as has been done in Schindler’s List and its kin. A noble intention, as the Spielberg’s film hardly did justice to the true nature of the holocaust, but in attempting to just flatly show the casual, business-like mass murder Boll fails to realise that just showing pictures of something does not convey the whole truth; the who truth can only be really appreciated by living those pictures, and that is why the more Hollywood-friendly holocaust films have focussed on just a few characters, drawing the audience into the world as much as possible.

Auschwitz is a quickie, shot with minimal budget and time, and bulked out by filler. Any good that could have been gained from just showing this film as a 30-minute short, or indeed by fleshing it out into a proper feature film, is entirely destroyed by the dull and patronising Q&A with the teenagers, which is only interesting for the somewhat darkly-comic irony that it demonstrates very clearly that the dim-witted kids and the clever kids can very easily be told apart based on appearance alone.

Uwe is right, the holocaust deserves better than the sentimental Hollywood treatment it’s been given thus far… but it sure as hell didn’t deserve this.

*/*****

Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011)

            If any film this year has been difficult to anticipate, this is it. Is it a prequel to the 1968 classic? Is it a semi-remake of the 4^th film in the cycle, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes? Will the special effects, slightly uneasy in the trailer, be convincing enough? Wasn’t Rise of the Apes a better title, if we’re honest? Are you going to force me to watch the excremental Tim Burton Apes film again?!

But enough rhetoric! It turns out that, despite some clear nods to the original film, this is its own beast and you need have no knowledge of Ape-lore to enjoy it. The special effects are almost exceptional, with the genuinely impressive facial expressions and body language being marred only by the standard CGI complaint that the effects geezers still can’t quite create effects, holistically, to fool the human eye when it comes to creating living creatures. That’s small grapes though, the Ape effects are easily sophisticated enough to tell the story, and the story and script are well worth the telling.

Fresh from his debut with independent British prison film The Escapist, director Rupert Wyatt has gone straight into the big budget blockbusters, and he seems undaunted. Despite bringing all the standard excitement required of a summer “tentpole”, Rise has a smart and well crafted story, one that rings true despite its fantastical premise, and one that is not even slightly preachy (a rarity from any film that comes close to involving the environment these days). James Franco is solid as co-lead, but the real star is Andy Serkis’ motion-captured Caesar. It’s is hard to tell how much of the performance is down to the actor, but whoever gets the credit, the lead monkey (sorry, ape) give a subtle and compelling performance, conveying so much with just physical expression. The supporting cast is also well selected, with Harry Potter alumnus Tom Felton turning in a suitably evil performance. I would say I hope he avoids typecasting, but he’s just so good at playing the malicious weasel types that I wouldn’t mind seeing him do that for a little while longer.

This is very much the sort of blockbuster I like to see, a well written story with interesting characters that only incidentally uses lots of special effects to tell said story. Film of the summer? Yes. Film of the year? Well… I wouldn’t be too unhappy if it was.

****/*****

Abraham Lincoln (1930)

D. W. Griffith’s biography of Abraham Lincoln was his first foray into the world of the talkies, and bugger me, is it a talkie! But yet, at the same time, not talkie enough. It lurches wildly back and forth from traditional silent film fare to awkward scenes of dialogue typical of very early sound films, with a stationary camera fixed on two people trying desperately not to move lest it be picked up on the primitive microphones.

Limited by new technology, yet driven by the commercial hysteria behind the fad of sound, one can hardly blame the director for such problems, but we don’t have to look far to find a big pile of other things we can blame him for. Despite being something of a pioneer of the silent era, with his controversial but popular epics The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance being particularly revered, Griffith seems to have hardly developed in the 15 years since and it isn’t hard to imagine this film seeming old fashioned even by the standards of 1930. Silent film, by the end of its reign, had developed into quite a sophisticated art form, and none of that sophistication is seen here even in the scenes where the restrictions of on-set sound are forgone.

Doing exactly what it says on the tin, Abraham Lincoln tells the story of the famed beardy bloke, from his youth to his time as US President, which saw him leading the Northern states in a civil war, freeing some slaves, then getting shot by an angry theatre patron. The content is all there, perhaps too much of it, presumably word-for-word from American school textbooks of the age.

This is a film without coherence, a director without a vision, who seems to be feeling his way through like a blind man at an orgy (yes, I’ve watched Naked Gun 33 1/3 recently… but I digress). The script is stage play dialogue attached to an epic film story (a combination that never works) and the patchwork style make this very difficult to watch. It isn’t all bad news though; Walter Huston, although often let down by the fumbling technical work, gives a creditable performance as Abe, and a brief scene of a dance near the middle of the film shows some technical merit… but that’s about it.

Don’t let the restrictions of the time excuse this film; all-time masterpieces of cinema were made several years before this, and others had gotten to grips with sound much better even before Griffith had started on Abraham Lincoln. No, this was a director who had stayed still while the craft he had helped to define had passed him by. He would only make one more feature after this, and that might have been one too many.

*/*****

Captain America: The First Avenger (2011)

Dah, da-da-dah, da-da-dah, da-dAmerica! Yes, that’s right folks, I said… AMERICA!

Captain America is a bad idea. That’s to say that Captain America is a bad idea to anyone who isn’t American. Or rather, Captain America is a bad idea to anyone who isn’t the sort of American who has five national flags hanging from their house and recites the pledge of allegiance every day over breakfast.

To those of us who don’t fit into that category, the idea of an America-themed superhero, who shows the world that America is best by saving them from the evil Nazi supermen splinter-group Hydra, and who is dedicated to fighting for truth, justice and the American way (no, wait, that was the other chap… Super-something…?) is a little bit nauseating. But fear not, dear friends, because the stomach-turning American patriotism that was originally so key to this character is hardly visible here, indeed being slightly lampooned by the use of the Cap as a bond-selling propaganda tool.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that you already know what’s going to happen in this film. Whether it’s because you’ve read the comics, or seen the all-too-revealing trailer, or you know about next year’s multi-superhero orgy flick The Avengers… or whether it’s because the first scene telegraphs the ending almost completely… you know how it’s going to go. But even without all that, you would probably still be able to have a pretty decent stab at predicting the story, because it is as clichéd as they come; anybody who has seen an underdog-becomes-super comic book movie will feel like they’ve seen this before, and sadly all of the many good things about The First Avenger aren’t quite enough to overcome that.

The cast is good, with Chris Evans a particularly wise choice for the scrawny Steve Rogers – the special effects used to make the very non-scrawny Chris Evans so puny are subtle and brilliant – who is transformed into the first of a new breed of super soldier, Captain America. Hayley Atwell is suitably loin-stirring as the love interest, and Hugo Weaving is always a good choice for a scenery-chewing baddie.

The action is entertaining enough, although the focus on the supernatural elements rather than the war itself (the one part of the story that makes this unique) was disappointing, particularly as it feels like this was mainly done to accommodate The Avengers.

Overall, an entertaining film that I shall no doubt re-watch and enjoy again, partly because it is rather forgettable. But the most important part, and the part that will never be forgotten, is the propaganda song “Star-Spangled Man”, which you will most certainly be humming for weeks afterwards. Dah, da-da-dah, da-da-da… well, you get the drift.

  

***/*****

"Drama is life with the dull bits cut out."

Blogging? That was quite popular a decade or so ago, wasn't it? Amongst geeky types, I mean. Oh, you're starting a blog? Well... good for you. What's it about? Films, you say? I bet there aren't many blogs about that...

Oh, hello there. Yes, folks, I've started a blog; a big hole in the aether where I can store my brain vibes on the subject of films, movies and talking pictures. That's it really. You don't have to read it, but I'd be happy to think that you have, and let's face it, you're a sad and lonely individual with nothing better to do... no, wait, that's me. Ok, you get back to your a-list parties and first class cricket matches, I'll write some stuff about films, and you can check in later after your lap-dance. Groovy.