Sunday, 20 December 2015
The Night Before
In spite of being orchestrated by his collaborative buddies more than himself, The Night Before continues Seth Rogen's goal to demystify and promote drug positivity, get well-respected dramatic actors to hop out of their comfort zones and give being funny a crack, and explore the more vulnerable and sentimental side of male friendship. If you can forgive the egregious product placement, The Night Before is a cute, charming, classic, Christmas comedy that should be integrated into the Holiday rotation of Lethal Weapon, Die Hard, Gremlins, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Love Actually, Iron Man 3, and Christmas Vacation. See it with friends. Thank you for a great year. Merry Christmas. <3
Tuesday, 15 December 2015
Crimson Peak
Crimson Peak's unmarketability is ultimately its greatest strength and weakness. On the one hand, a relatively high profile film that's hard to categorise incentivises more filmmakers to attempt challenging the status quo that regular genre conventions so often limit our palette with. On the other hand, people don't like shit that's challenging. That's the whole reason marketable genres exist in the first place. And make no mistake: Crimson Peak is a film that you can't categorise. It's even explained in the film: Edith Cushing (Mia Wasikowska) submits the new work on her novel only to be treated with skepticism when the publisher believes it to be a ghost story. "It's not a ghost story," Edith replies. "It's a story with ghosts in it." If we observe this thematically, the same results are present. Crimson Peak opens with the line, "Ghosts are real" and a wonderfully Guillermo del Toro-esque horror scene, before diving into a traditional 17th century romance. It's a film that wants it both ways, and once again, on one hand, I celebrate that. I can't recall the last time I saw a film like it, and on that alone, it's a success. But, on the other hand, how the fuck are you supposed to sell this film? It's too romantic to be categorised as a horror movie, but it's far too scary and violent to be categorised as a romance movie. In a perfect world, this wouldn't matter. Art would be freely available to make, and we could allow ourselves experiences with no preparation or prior perceptions. But we live in a world where art is a business, and as such, we're not going to see another Crimson Peak on this budgetary scale for a long time. We have to live with what we've got. Good thing Crimson Peak is a fucking winner, then.
I've said before that the best horror is that which reflects upon us what it means to be human. Crimson Peak technically isn't a horror movie, but it understands this principle more than most. The writing is on the wall as the film progresses. Guillermo del Toro isn't often lauded for his storytelling ability, which makes his leaning into gothic romance tropes all the more effective. We know as soon as the Sharpe siblings, Thomas (Tom Hiddleston) and Lucille (Jessica Chastain), are introduced that they're not the most straight and narrow folk. And as Edith continues to fall harder and harder for Thomas, and he for her, we know where this is going. But that's okay, because where Guillermo del Toro's strength does not lie in surprising story beats, it does lie in surprising moments of character. He deliberately subverts the damsel in distress trope by introducing and developing the traditional handsome hero, here in the form of Dr. Alan McMichael (Charlie Hunnam), who rushes to Edith's rescue at the first sniff of danger, only to have the stupid dork be stabbed in the stomach as soon as he walks through the door, leaving it up to Edith to save him. What makes the moment all the more surprising, however, is what comes before it. We get sniffs and hints that Thomas and Lucille's continuous plot to seduce young heirs into marriage before murdering them beneath the cloak of darkness and running away with the money is more Lucille's game than Thomas's, and over the course of time there are more than enough signposts to indicate he's actually fallen in love with Edith, but it comes through at its strongest when Thomas is the one to stab Alan. Whispering low enough so only the two of them can hear, he says, "You're a doctor. Tell me where." Alan delicately grabs Thomas's hand and shifts the blade to a non-lethal area, and with extreme pity in his eyes, Thomas drives the blade in. You could call him a monster, but it's a little more complicated than that. There are shades to him, you know, just like human beings. Even his sister, inarguably the more moustache-twirly of the two, muddies the waters of easy categorisation. Jessica Chastain knocks it so far out of the fucking park with this role, crafting a villain that is at once tragic and hilariously over the top. At times, this happens simultaneously; a perfect example being when she's feeding bed-ridden Edith porridge. As she details the awful, repugnant acts of her parents during their upbringing, she draws the spoon across the bowl at an agonisingly slow pace, creating a cacophonus crescendo of screeches, her steely eyes full of hatred never leaving Edith's. It's a beautifully absurd moment that also gives insight into the extreme pain of these characters, and makes it that little bit harder to not empathise with the siblings' plot to kill rich girls and keep fucking each other. When the world fucked them over this hard, why should they see any benefit in being a part of it? Thomas can't follow Lucille to the end this time, though. He pleads with her to let Edith live, and for the three of them to exist in harmony together, and Lucille responds by flying into a hurt rage, and stabbing Thomas in the face. As he dies, and two tears fall from his eyes, one clear and the other tinted red, your heart breaks - not just for the fucking mindblowingly cool imagery, and not just for what this means for Edith and Thomas, but for what this means for Thomas and Lucille. Once again, you could call Lucille a monster, but it's a little more complicated than that. She is human, after all.
I've said before that the best horror is that which reflects upon us what it means to be human. Crimson Peak technically isn't a horror movie, but it understands this principle more than most. The writing is on the wall as the film progresses. Guillermo del Toro isn't often lauded for his storytelling ability, which makes his leaning into gothic romance tropes all the more effective. We know as soon as the Sharpe siblings, Thomas (Tom Hiddleston) and Lucille (Jessica Chastain), are introduced that they're not the most straight and narrow folk. And as Edith continues to fall harder and harder for Thomas, and he for her, we know where this is going. But that's okay, because where Guillermo del Toro's strength does not lie in surprising story beats, it does lie in surprising moments of character. He deliberately subverts the damsel in distress trope by introducing and developing the traditional handsome hero, here in the form of Dr. Alan McMichael (Charlie Hunnam), who rushes to Edith's rescue at the first sniff of danger, only to have the stupid dork be stabbed in the stomach as soon as he walks through the door, leaving it up to Edith to save him. What makes the moment all the more surprising, however, is what comes before it. We get sniffs and hints that Thomas and Lucille's continuous plot to seduce young heirs into marriage before murdering them beneath the cloak of darkness and running away with the money is more Lucille's game than Thomas's, and over the course of time there are more than enough signposts to indicate he's actually fallen in love with Edith, but it comes through at its strongest when Thomas is the one to stab Alan. Whispering low enough so only the two of them can hear, he says, "You're a doctor. Tell me where." Alan delicately grabs Thomas's hand and shifts the blade to a non-lethal area, and with extreme pity in his eyes, Thomas drives the blade in. You could call him a monster, but it's a little more complicated than that. There are shades to him, you know, just like human beings. Even his sister, inarguably the more moustache-twirly of the two, muddies the waters of easy categorisation. Jessica Chastain knocks it so far out of the fucking park with this role, crafting a villain that is at once tragic and hilariously over the top. At times, this happens simultaneously; a perfect example being when she's feeding bed-ridden Edith porridge. As she details the awful, repugnant acts of her parents during their upbringing, she draws the spoon across the bowl at an agonisingly slow pace, creating a cacophonus crescendo of screeches, her steely eyes full of hatred never leaving Edith's. It's a beautifully absurd moment that also gives insight into the extreme pain of these characters, and makes it that little bit harder to not empathise with the siblings' plot to kill rich girls and keep fucking each other. When the world fucked them over this hard, why should they see any benefit in being a part of it? Thomas can't follow Lucille to the end this time, though. He pleads with her to let Edith live, and for the three of them to exist in harmony together, and Lucille responds by flying into a hurt rage, and stabbing Thomas in the face. As he dies, and two tears fall from his eyes, one clear and the other tinted red, your heart breaks - not just for the fucking mindblowingly cool imagery, and not just for what this means for Edith and Thomas, but for what this means for Thomas and Lucille. Once again, you could call Lucille a monster, but it's a little more complicated than that. She is human, after all.
And now that the stupid emotional shit is out of the way, let's talk about the other thing that Guillermo del Toro does better than anyone else: set design. Holy shit. This is a film soaked in blood as far as narratives go, but Guillermo takes it one step further by putting the Sharpe estate on overflowing red clay mines. When Thomas introduces Edith to her new home, he warns of the clay and demonstrates by stepping on a loose floorboard. The thick, red goop oozes and spreads around them. The house literally fucking bleeds. And as the film progresses, and shit gets wackier, nobody seems to notice that the red clay is coming out of every fucking hole it can. The bright red material twisting and snaking around the detailed tapestry of the Victorian mansion is a testament to the strength of practical set building. There's an unrelenting sense of a primal savagery lurking just below the surface, that intensifies and becomes more literal as the characters succumb to their baser instincts. The animalistic connotations that come with the colour red sink into the ghosts themselves, too. In this universe, spirits come to be through emotional resonance left behind in death. And considering in this universe it's unusual to not have at least one family member who was murdered through unclear, yet clearly passionate, motivations, it makes sense that each ghost's remaining emotional resonance is that of a blind rage. They don't speak English, opting instead to communicate through a series of clicks, howls and growls, and navigate their environments with a twitchy, violent anger. Those that aren't left behind with the grumps are no more subtle, either, a perfect example being the spirit of Thomas that appears in the film's climax; sporting a look of pure sorrow as each tear lifts off his face and floats upwards into nothingness. But, as I've said so much now, how are you supposed to sell this film? It's proof that genre hopping is perfectly acceptable so long as your aesthetic is clearly defined and adhered to, but what general audience-goer, who only has time and money for one film a month, is going to pony up for a film that can't even tell them what it is? Crimson Peak is exactly what I look for in cinema, and I'm glad that it exists. But I won't be surprised when I never see something like it again.
Sunday, 6 December 2015
The Martian
What a film. What a fucking film. When you encounter someone who laments for the state of cinema today, and pines for the golden-age (whenever the fuck that was), instead of explaining to them the clever ways a lot of mainstream cinema is advancing or challenging its place in the cultural pantheon, or bringing up the leaps and bounds independent cinema is making now that it's even more cheap to produce something, direct them towards The Martian. This is classic-to-the-core storytelling, that not only proves that the only thing stopping Ridley Scott from making a good movie is a screenwriter, but proves something much, much more important: every single one of our problems can be solved. Devin Faraci's beaten me to it, but I stand by his statement: this movie can save the world. In a period of history in which humanity seems to be up against insurmountable odds attempting to solve unsolvable problems, there's an overwhelmingly beauty to this film's simplistic approach to its central conflict: an unsolvable problem is naught but a small series of solvable problems. Come up with a solution to enough and before you know it, the unsolvable has been solved. This is math and science working at its most exhilarating and uplifting.
The Martian's Mark Watney (Matt Damon) is in a bind. I'm going to go out on a limb and say it's a bind most of us aren't going to encounter in our lifetime: he's stranded on Mars with a hunk of metal hanging out of his abdomen and his crew mates have fucked off home. This is in the first five minutes. It's a grueling succession of events, in which Watney wordlessly stumbles back to the base of operations on the planet and gets to work performing surgery on himself to get the debris out. Few shoot body horror like Ridley Scott, and it's on full display here. Covered in sweat, body heaving, open wound on his belly, Mark Watney utters his first line since waking up a dead man: "Fuck." From here, it's wordless scenes of a tragedy, as he potters around the living quarters, silently collecting his colleague's personal belongings and storing them away in boxes. This is someone who knows that hope left the planet not long after it fucked him over. That is, until he decides to see if there's any merit to not being consumed with self-pity and conduct a full analysis of the situation at hand. "I'm not going to die here," he proclaims, literally to a camera but metaphorically to himself, and begins to work out what he can do right now. Well, there's another group due to arrive on Mars in four years. Mark doesn't have food to last him that long, but he can utilise his career as a botanist to makeshift a farm using potatoes, converted hydrogen from rocket fuel and the elephantine amount of shit Mark and his crew produced during their time here. Not having to spend time thinking about food affords Mark the chance to spend time thinking about how he's going to get his rover designed for short-term travel a quarter of the way across the planet. All of a sudden this insurmountable task is a couple of small steps closer to being fixed.
What makes this all the more digestible, and fist-in-the-fucking-air inspiring, is down to two things:
1. Everyone in this film is good at their job.
2. Everyone in this film is a real human being.
They seem like trivial criteria, but I swear to you that's not the case at all. Let's start with the first. Mark Watney is no fool. Accompanying most actions he takes in this film are video testimonials breaking it down, as much for himself as for you, the audience. Eventually, as his actions begin to become a little larger than a one-person job, he has to work out a way to communicate with the NASA folk back home, and once they're on board, they have to be as switched on as he is. In many other films, the needed tension and conflict would arise from these people making a mistake that no-one saw coming, or acting rash, or in the moment, and having to scramble towards victory from an improvised angle. In The Martian, it's neither. In The Martian, tension and conflict comes simply from the weight of time. It turns out it takes a bit to get from Earth to Mars, and this time influences every decision made by Mark and the rest of the team, from something as relatively simple as deducing that Mark will have to starve for a collection of days whilst more food is being delivered to the planet, to something as tense as a beyond-complicated maneuver that will connect a gutted pod that is rocketing into the sky whilst holding Mark with his rescue ship. Time exacerbates this further by Mark being relatively helpless during this moment; sitting in his pod with no windows, just waiting for the time to come where he's no longer at the mercy of his mathematical projections. And it's here that we can segue quite organically into the second reason I stipulated above. When the math reveals itself to be slightly off, down to either miscalculation or chaos, and the pod is not going to connect with the rescue ship, someone has to do something, and Mark gets the idea to cut a hole in his suit and let jet propulsion allow him to "fly around like Iron Man". It's a dorky comment from a total dork. But it's the fact that Mark is such a dork that allows us to feel so fucking strongly for him. He swears. He dances like an idiot. He thinks posing like Arthur Fonzarelli for a NASA photo is a good idea. He likes super hero movies. He hates disco. He's us. And we want to think that in a similar situation, we'd be able to think of the perfect pop culture reference to distract us from the overwhelmingly dire odds we were up against. If we were to build on that, the ease with which we identify with Mark allows us to see his problem as something that can be overcome, and when everyone back home is a real person, too, who run the gamut of emotions during the film's run time, we come to understand that problems concerning the world concern each and every one of us, too. Many times has a technological development been influenced by an artist with a vision, and The Martian knows it has the potential to be looked back on as a turning point for scientific progress, and our perception of it. This is film-making at its most accomplished; it's exciting, it's engaging, it's funny, it's emotional, it's honest, it's scary, and it's hopeful, but it's not in excess of any of these things. It's the necessary amount of each to communicate its message and save us all. Praise be to rational problem solving.
The Martian's Mark Watney (Matt Damon) is in a bind. I'm going to go out on a limb and say it's a bind most of us aren't going to encounter in our lifetime: he's stranded on Mars with a hunk of metal hanging out of his abdomen and his crew mates have fucked off home. This is in the first five minutes. It's a grueling succession of events, in which Watney wordlessly stumbles back to the base of operations on the planet and gets to work performing surgery on himself to get the debris out. Few shoot body horror like Ridley Scott, and it's on full display here. Covered in sweat, body heaving, open wound on his belly, Mark Watney utters his first line since waking up a dead man: "Fuck." From here, it's wordless scenes of a tragedy, as he potters around the living quarters, silently collecting his colleague's personal belongings and storing them away in boxes. This is someone who knows that hope left the planet not long after it fucked him over. That is, until he decides to see if there's any merit to not being consumed with self-pity and conduct a full analysis of the situation at hand. "I'm not going to die here," he proclaims, literally to a camera but metaphorically to himself, and begins to work out what he can do right now. Well, there's another group due to arrive on Mars in four years. Mark doesn't have food to last him that long, but he can utilise his career as a botanist to makeshift a farm using potatoes, converted hydrogen from rocket fuel and the elephantine amount of shit Mark and his crew produced during their time here. Not having to spend time thinking about food affords Mark the chance to spend time thinking about how he's going to get his rover designed for short-term travel a quarter of the way across the planet. All of a sudden this insurmountable task is a couple of small steps closer to being fixed.
What makes this all the more digestible, and fist-in-the-fucking-air inspiring, is down to two things:
1. Everyone in this film is good at their job.
2. Everyone in this film is a real human being.
They seem like trivial criteria, but I swear to you that's not the case at all. Let's start with the first. Mark Watney is no fool. Accompanying most actions he takes in this film are video testimonials breaking it down, as much for himself as for you, the audience. Eventually, as his actions begin to become a little larger than a one-person job, he has to work out a way to communicate with the NASA folk back home, and once they're on board, they have to be as switched on as he is. In many other films, the needed tension and conflict would arise from these people making a mistake that no-one saw coming, or acting rash, or in the moment, and having to scramble towards victory from an improvised angle. In The Martian, it's neither. In The Martian, tension and conflict comes simply from the weight of time. It turns out it takes a bit to get from Earth to Mars, and this time influences every decision made by Mark and the rest of the team, from something as relatively simple as deducing that Mark will have to starve for a collection of days whilst more food is being delivered to the planet, to something as tense as a beyond-complicated maneuver that will connect a gutted pod that is rocketing into the sky whilst holding Mark with his rescue ship. Time exacerbates this further by Mark being relatively helpless during this moment; sitting in his pod with no windows, just waiting for the time to come where he's no longer at the mercy of his mathematical projections. And it's here that we can segue quite organically into the second reason I stipulated above. When the math reveals itself to be slightly off, down to either miscalculation or chaos, and the pod is not going to connect with the rescue ship, someone has to do something, and Mark gets the idea to cut a hole in his suit and let jet propulsion allow him to "fly around like Iron Man". It's a dorky comment from a total dork. But it's the fact that Mark is such a dork that allows us to feel so fucking strongly for him. He swears. He dances like an idiot. He thinks posing like Arthur Fonzarelli for a NASA photo is a good idea. He likes super hero movies. He hates disco. He's us. And we want to think that in a similar situation, we'd be able to think of the perfect pop culture reference to distract us from the overwhelmingly dire odds we were up against. If we were to build on that, the ease with which we identify with Mark allows us to see his problem as something that can be overcome, and when everyone back home is a real person, too, who run the gamut of emotions during the film's run time, we come to understand that problems concerning the world concern each and every one of us, too. Many times has a technological development been influenced by an artist with a vision, and The Martian knows it has the potential to be looked back on as a turning point for scientific progress, and our perception of it. This is film-making at its most accomplished; it's exciting, it's engaging, it's funny, it's emotional, it's honest, it's scary, and it's hopeful, but it's not in excess of any of these things. It's the necessary amount of each to communicate its message and save us all. Praise be to rational problem solving.
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