Need For Speed

Need For Speed is the simple story of a small town American mechanic who causes the injuries and occasional death of countless civilians, cops and fellow racers because he gotta go fast. Or his friend died or something, who fucking cares? If you want to sit in pain for two hours, save your money and headbutt a brick.

12 Years a Slave

In one of my previous reviews, I briefly discussed my belief that a film's worth is not measured in its ability to be enjoyed, but in its ability to make you feel something. While they do have their limited worth as minor tales of escapism, in my opinion there's nothing more disheartening than casual indifference. I'd happily take a film that disgusted me to my core than one the best I can say immediately after is that it was kind of alright, and the best I can say after a month is confusion as to what movie is being discussed. A film that makes you feel something intensely, good or bad, is a film worth discussing. There's a scene in Django Unchained that is burned into my memory. Dr. King Schultz is standing in the library of plantation owner Calvin Candie, having just bought the life of slave girl Broomhilda von Shaft. He's reminiscing on the horrors of his journey, as are we, when his mind wanders to earlier in the day and the film quickly and graphically cuts to a man, sold as a slave into a fighting ring and unable to mentally or physically bear the burden of killing to survive for entertainment any longer, eaten alive by dogs as punishment. I remember it so vividly because it made me heave. Django Unchained managed to shine a small light on the pitch black of American slavery by turning it into a fantasy-driven spaghetti western revenge flick, but even it couldn't turn away completely from the deplorable acts that period of history wrought. 12 Years a Slave is not Django Unchained. There's no enjoyment to be had in this film, and it doesn't attempt to illuminate a single shred of the darkness. Django Unchained is a fairy tale that bends historical fact to offer a sense of hope and empowerment. 12 Years a Slave is simply a story about slavery, and how insane, inane and just plain fucking evil that word is.

12 Years a Slave moves at a cold, clinical, matter of fact pace to better serve how unfathomable Solomon Northup's (Chiwetel Ejiofor) true story is. The film begins with him as a free man, living with his wife and children in New York and working for money as a carpenter and fiddle player. He's offered a well-paying job by two travelling entertainers and during their night of celebratory drinks, he blacks out. He wakes up shackled in a dungeon, has his name changed to Platt, is given a background story of being a runaway slave from Georgia, is shipped to New Orleans and is placed back on the market. He trades hands with multiple plantation owners of varying degrees of cruelty while making progressively more desperate and futile attempts to reclaim his freedom. Surrounded by a people too beaten down and exhausted to even remember that there was ever a time they weren't under some form of oppression, Solomon desperately tries to hold onto the memory of his former life and the idea that as a black man, nay, as a human being, he deserves to be free. "I don't want to survive," he says to a man who would rather keep his head down to avoid death, "I want to live."

"Imagine it was you." Those were the words I found myself thinking over and over as I watched 12 Years a Slave. The film is expertly crafted to transcend ideas of race and whether you see any theoretical or metaphysical difference between two people of differing pigmentation. Because just imagine, as a human, that tomorrow it was announced you were no longer human. The laws were changing and it was decided that, based on the colour of your skin, you were legally recognised as inferior and therefore in servitude to another colour. Imagine, as a human, that you were a free man amongst slaves because you had a piece of paper they didn't. And then imagine that you're drugged and wake up in clothes that aren't yours with your piece of paper nowhere to be found and a man in your face legally recognised as your superior telling you your name is not what you say it is. Imagine he beats you with a spiked rod until it splinters over your bleeding back and, as he's preparing the whip, he asks again what your name is. Imagine that a skill you used to be paid respectably to do in acceptable working conditions is now your means to remain useful and therefore alive, and imagine that your new foreman is less educated than you and sees your intellectual superiority as a threat, because the law says he's the alpha. Imagine every day he comes by your work station and kicks everything and you down, and tells you to start over because it's not good enough. Because it will never be. Imagine that you bear it until you're at your wits end and show a brief glimpse of humanity: questioning, just for a second, that his judgement is not where it ought to be. Imagine he comes at you with a whip, and you can't stand to be whipped for not being another's definition of human any longer and you use your superior physical strength to wrestle the weapon from him and beat him for every time he touched you, until he's crying and bleeding and begging for forgiveness. Imagine awaiting the judgement for your actions from the man who owns you, sitting under a hot sun with the thought that you may soon be killed for defending yourself, until you're jumped by the man you attacked and are hanged from a tree. Imagine that you're rescued at the very last minute but are left to hang tiptoeing around in the mud for hours under a hot sun for all of your fellow slaves to see and learn from and never even think of trying themselves. Because even if you were right, you're still a nigger.

This thought is explored deeper and more eloquently by Bass (Brad Pitt), a paid worker assisting on Edwin Epps's (Michael Fassbender) plantation. Epps offers him a break from his duties with a drink, and Bass politely declines if he's not to offer the same courtesy to his other workers, which leads to an argument about the philosophy of slavery. "Is everything right because the law allows it?" Bass asks. "Suppose they'd pass a law taking away your liberty and making you a slave?" "That ain't a supposable case," Epps proudly replies. "Because the law states that your liberties are undeniable? Because society deems it so? Laws change. Social systems crumble. Universal truths are constant. It is a fact, it is a plain fact that what is true and right is true and right for all. White and black alike." It's a profound sentiment made all the more baffling by its undeniable grounding within common sense. Slavery doesn't make sense. It doesn't make sense now and it didn't make sense then. You can argue the legitimacy of something until you've convinced yourself and many others that it rings true, but if, at its core, you are wrong, one moment of undeniable truth can expose you forevermore. Take, for instance, a scene from Solomon's days of freedom. He's at a convenience store having a friendly conversation with the cashier. Another black man enters the shop and the cashier welcomes him graciously as Solomon quips that he should beware the prices of the store's goods. Seconds later, the black man's owner enters, firmly grips his slave's arm, apologises for the offence and storms him out of the store. The cashier is intensely embarrassed. But why? Because before he was presented with the legally-appointed knowledge that this man wasn't human, he was operating on the universal truth that he was. Later in the film, Epps is livid because he thinks his favourite slave girl, Patsey (Lupita Nyong'o), has run away. Turns out she'd just taken a trip to another plantation for a bar of soap. To clean herself with. It's a thought so unfathomable to Epps that it causes him to believe even more firmly that she was attempting escape. "Mistress Epps won't even grant me no soap to clean with. Stink so much I make myself gag. Five hundred pounds of cotton day in, day out. More than any man here. And for that I will be clean. That's all I ask." Epps orders Solomon to whip her before he takes over, lashing her again and again until her back is nothing but exposed flesh. Because she had the gall to request cleanliness as a reward for working well. There's an earlier scene on another plantation where a group of Native Americans come across Solomon and his fellow workers toiling in the forest. The two groups, no strangers to the cruelty of American oppression, sit with each other and dance. No words are exchanged. There are none.

I attempted to discuss 12 Years a Slave with a couple of people after walking out of the theater, but I couldn't get more than a few words out about it before I started crying again. I had to leave, I went home, I cried some more and I couldn't sleep. At just over two hours, it's one of the few times that the phrase "emotionally draining" isn't just a couple of buzz words. There were more than a few times in the film I found myself thinking, "Hit the space bar and take five", because what I was watching was so fucking harrowing that I was fidgeting, unable to get comfortable and desperate for a brief moment of reprieve. And then I realised that was the point. It's hard to watch because it should be. This is a film built to transcend race, religion or politics and just put you in the shoes of a human being legally recognised as a slave. Solomon Northup received no moment of reprieve, so why should you? It's all there in the title, though. Eventually, Solomon's years of slavery come to an end. He recognises compassion within, and presents his plight, to the aforementioned Bass, who risks persecution and perhaps death himself to bring word of Solomon's location to his home. There's a moment in the days following, in which the sun is setting and Solomon's toil is done until the morning. There's a gorgeous single take in which he looks into the sky, at the trees surrounding him and eventually directly into the camera, at me and at you. His eyes speak volumes, of the thought that over a decade of false imprisonment might finally be coming to an end, of the possibility that it isn't and that this may be the last straw, the last bastion of hope he has, the last shred of strength and resolve he can function on before giving in to what could easily be seen as inevitable despair, of the thought that not a single human being on this planet deserves this. And then, masterfully, as I'm holding my breath and crying in absolute awe of the courage and determination this man kept clutched tight to his chest, the shot continues and he looks away, back to the trees, to the poorly built shacks the slaves live in and the humongous, lavish mansion the Epps family resides in, and he looks down. Because even if he receives his freedom once more, which he does, slavery doesn't go away. He's but one man who managed to carve out a sliver of sense in a world that has none. A world that took his sliver of sense from him and beat him until he almost forgot he even had it. That's where 12 Years a Slave's brilliance lies. Its message isn't limited by history. The universal truth is constant: slavery is wrong. And yet it still exists. That does not make sense.

Wolf Creek 2

I can still remember watching Wolf Creek. I was about 15, it was late at night and the house was empty. A 90 minute film took me about two and a half hours to watch because I kept having to pause it and take breaks. I remember being so powerfully affected by it that I couldn't sleep after, not out of fear, but disgust. The idea that Australia's casual xenophobia could potentially manifest itself into such an evil identity as Mick Taylor who is, excluding the serial killer caveat, not really saying anything you don't hear on a train or at a pub, was unbelievably confronting. And then to take it so far as to suggest that he may be more than human, that he may be an intrinsic part of the landscape he inhabits, it left me feeling sick and fearful of the country I call home. But more than anything, it left me dumbstruck that Australian cinema was capable of such a gut-wrenching, effective horror experience. Imagine my surprise when a couple of years later, I sat down to the excellent documentary Not Quite Hollywood and discovered that through the 70s and 80s, Australia was making a lot of them. And they fucking rocked. When the trailer for Wolf Creek 2 was released, I was so excited. It seemed director Greg McLean was going even further down the exploitative route, removing much of the tense, brutal claustrophobia of the first film and replacing it with more of a wide-open, highway thriller vibe. I sat down to it with the hope that, in view of this lighter approach, it wouldn't completely abandon the themes of the first film, and...fuck. Be careful what you wish for.

Wolf Creek 2 is unashamedly a textbook horror sequel. The boogeyman takes front and center stage, the deaths are bigger, bloodier and in much higher frequency and, as is often the result, the story disappears. This movie is the equivalent of a greatest hits album: it's a disparate collection of ideas for murder propped up by various paper-thin cardboard cutouts referred to by the movie business as "characters". Wolf Creek spent almost an hour developing its characters so that the creeping realisation that there's no way they could ever survive this ordeal hurt even more. Wolf Creek 2 spends about seven minutes. Throughout the film, you're introduced to the German couple who are sympathetic because they draw love hearts in the dirt, the British surfer who's sympathetic because there's no reception for him to call his girlfriend and the old couple who are sympathetic because they're old. At some point, they all fall upon Mick Taylor's path and he may or may not present himself as a nice bloke before chasing them down and putting a knife in their spine and a bullet in their head. Rape, torture, or a speech about foreigners being vermin are optional. Rinse, repeat and escalate until 90 minutes then fuck off.

Those of you with keener sensibilities may be able to tell I'm not the biggest fan of Wolf Creek 2. But it wasn't all reprehensible dog shit, so let's get the good out of the way quickly. First, as much as I'm about to condemn his character, you cannot for a second fault John Jarratt's performance as Mick Taylor. No matter what the scene calls for, he jumps into it with complete conviction. As juvenile and vile as his character becomes, it's acted perfectly. Next, the film has an excellent opening that toys with an interesting idea. Mick Taylor is a product of a country rife with racism. He sees the foreigners he kills as no different to the pigs he makes a living on. But that level of territorial prejudice can exist internally as well. The film opens with two cops on highway patrol. Mick drives past and they make note of his southern license plate. Though he's driving under the speed limit, they pull him over anyway to give him a hard time for having the gall to head outside of his boundaries, as if they ever existed. Of course, Mick slaughters them, but it's an interesting concept that would have benefited from further exploration. Praise continues with the gorgeous cinematography that simultaneously captures the beauty and danger of Australia's landscape. It continues to run with the idea presented by films such as Picnic at Hanging Rock, Long Weekend and Wake In Fright that out here there's a different set of rules, and the odds will never be stacked in your favour. And finally, the car chase alluded to in the trailer is a gloriously tense tribute to Mad Max and Road Games with amazing and, more importantly, real stunts. It also features a moment that I'm ashamed to admit I found more than a little funny, featuring some startled kangaroos, a truck and a radio playing 'The Lion Sleeps Tonight'.  

In terms of the bad, I'm tempted to say, "Everything else" and be done with it, but for argument's sake, let's continue. On paper, Wolf Creek 2 isn't doing anything that the first film didn't. Where it falls apart is the attitude with which it presents itself, and with what it expects you to take away from it. This film is, I imagine, a similar result to what would happen if the idea of Wolf Creek was pitched to a sixteen year old who thinks Doodleburger's Alf Stewart videos are the best thing ever. Now don't get me wrong, I find them funny, but there's this little thing called context. The effectiveness of Doodleburger's videos comes from disgusting and profane language being lip-synced perfectly to a beloved character of a good and wholesome television show. Wolf Creek 2 attempts to achieve the same level of humour while also giving you the same film as its predecessor. But we're not in on the joke. It thinks it can make Mick Taylor funnier and edgier by having him say "cunt" fifteen times. When he attempts to rape his victim in the first film, it's appalling but it's within context. When he pulls down the German backpacker's pants and shouts, "Cookies!" in this installment, it's just appalling. When he's shot the old lady in the back for no reason other than housing his victim and demanding that he leave their property to the tune of 'The Blue Danube Waltz', and he's standing over her body alluding to raping her if she hadn't fucked things up before shooting her in the head and doing a rifle twirl, I wanted to walk out. A friend of mine did. Later in the film, Mick has the British surfer tied up in a chair. He's delivering disgustingly xenophobic diatribes about how in danger his country is of foreign vermin in between grinding the Englishman's fingers off every time he gets a piece of Australian trivia wrong, filling up his drink, and singing 'Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport'. Following that scene, he holds up a dress and says that the "Pommy bastard" will have to do now that his lady friend is dead. "I won't be your fucking faggot," he spits through blood and Homophobic Mick chokes him out at the very thought of it being gay. It'd be edgy if it wasn't so fucking stupid. I'm a firm believer that there is nothing, including all of the horrible acts and beliefs I've talked about in this review, that doesn't have the capacity to be funny. But it has to actually be funny.

There's a few moments in Wolf Creek 2 where one of its multiple foreign protagonists is trying to hitch a ride. Be they backpacking or bloodied up, nobody stops, prompting them to wonder what's wrong with this country. It could be this particular area is knowledgeable and fearful of their pig-shooting boogeyman, or it could be that Greg McLean is trying to have a bit of a chat about Australia's current immigration policies. But in the end, Wolf Creek 2 is just too dopey: it wants to deliver a film that salutes the first film and treads new ground, but its method to achieve that is to remove maturity and push everything into excess, and the result is a morally empty maggot of a film that says nothing. It's a film that's clearly satirising the sort of attitude that runs rampant through Australia, but it's so fucking moronic in its delivery that it winds up kind of championing it. I left Wolf Creek fearful of my backyard; of the almost supernatural powers it seems to wield and of the dangers inherent to my country's attitude towards outsiders. I left Wolf Creek 2 fearful of how many racist memes and "Holy fuk Mick Taylor 4 PM cunt!" Facebook statuses I was going to see posted by the "Fuck Off, We're Full" generation. I think there's a definite silver lining here though. First off, this movie's going to make a lot of money. Everybody saw Wolf Creek once it came out on home release and everybody loved it and hated it in equal measure, so it's within reason that everybody's going to see Wolf Creek 2, be it out of fandom or morbid curiosity. And even if it's a bad one, it's still an Ozploitation flick. It's definite success will pave the way for more and more Australian filmmakers to tap back into our forgotten past and introduce audiences to the batshit crazy and awesome good times we used to be capable of. Even from Greg McLean, who followed up Wolf Creek with the equally excellent big croc flick, Rogue, and whose third installment of this series I would still happily catch should he decide to give it a crack. And second, I really think Wolf Creek 2 should be the centerpiece of Australia's next tourism campaign. So strong am I in my belief that I went to the trouble to do up a concept.