Gravity

The consensus amongst our little group was, I think, that while Gravity was worth a watch, it had been overhyped and was both sillier and more predictable than it was made out to be.

The story is pretty obvious from the trailer – when a space shuttle is hit by high-speed shrapnel (the Russians’ fault, of course), a scientific operation goes disastrously wrong and two astronauts are left out in the void of space with only one thruster pack between them, trying desperately to get to the ISS. 

It may have the novelty of a realistic treatment of space, but it’s the same basic scenario as any escape-from-a-hostile-environment film, be it a crew trapped in a submarine or a sci-fi flick about space shields slowly fading. It is also fanciful, relying on incredibly coincidental timing to put its characters in danger at just the right moments, one rather ham-fisted hallucination scene, a rather handy landing point just off a shore rather than in the middle of a vast ocean, and a fire-extinguisher-as-thruster scene that while reasonable overall, was done rather too soon after Wall-E.

The performances are strong, to be sure, and apart from some well-controlled hair the effects very convincing – done largely with CG and some huge rigs, apparently – but the effect is of course very familiar these days and only when you look into the lengths filmmakers go to get weightless shots (the most impressive being the ordeal for Apollo 13) do you realise how far it can be necessary to go for that effect. But the whole point of this film is to portray the environment realistically, with the dangers that can hit when technology fails, and thus the technical marvel only gets in the way.

In the end, beyond its first ten minutes, I don’t think Gravity manages to deliver on its promises. It’s a film that is ultimately not very thrilling, tense or believable, leaving only something that is quite formulaic and cliché. If the beauty of the view of Earth from orbit is enough of a draw, perhaps none of the other shortcomings matter. It’s not a film I would care to see again, though. 

Thor: The Dark World

It remains a bit of a golden era for comic book films - they keep on putting them out, with a whole lot of money behind them, and if your first try didn't quite fire on all cylinders, you get another chance, especially if you're an Avenger and your bad guy is a runaway favourite with audiences.

And so comes Thor 2, no longer needing to get bogged down with exposition or encouraging its audience to like its rather thin characters. And as such it was a silly but rather enjoyable film.

After quite a bizarre moment when after the trailers our 'Sky Superscreen' was taken over by Talking Tom from the Android app for somebody to propose to their future wife in the cinema (cute, but would you really choose Thor 2?), we donned our 3D glasses for the newest box office draw. With the various realms of Norse myth now largely peaceful and Loki locked up in prison, things seem good for Thor. But Dark Elves from before the time of Midgard - led by Christopher Ecclestone in heavy prosthetics - are seeking the aether, which will allow them to return the universe to darkness. As the realms align, little portals open, and since her job is to investigate such things, Natalie Portman's character steps through and happens to find the aether.

This is a story that relies on coincidence. It's Thor's girlfriend who finds the McGuffin, their allies have random bits of technology that just happen to be able to affect the portals between worlds in just the right way, and the ones falling in and out of these random wormholes are almost entirely our central gang, rather than innocent people ending up falling to their deaths and suchlike.

The film doesn't stand up to scrutiny and is deeply unsophisticated, but that's sort of the point. It's fun. The characters are broad but believable and Tom Hiddleston's Loki is one of the most compelling villains of any film franchise of the past few decades. Thor himself is flawed enough to be likeable and his Warriors Three excellent examples of economically-sketched characters. The big destructive setpieces are also highly enjoyable - with an extra thrill of pleasure for us watching the film in Greenwich, which is where the climactic action takes place. And yes, yes that woman on the Tube gave Thor bad directions.  I'm sure she was just flustered.

The traditional teaser in the first of two extra scenes during the credits revealed more hints about the Infinity Stones being central to the next Avengers film. Quite keen for that - though I hope things get incorporated a little better next time, for while the unexpected cameo here was fun, Thor's excuses for not going to visit the love of his life during or after The Avengers were basically awkward hand-waving. Iron Man 3 did it at least somewhat better with the heavy toll the finale took on Stark.

I'm very happy to continue to watch these silly comic films, I must say. Next time, bring on Beta Ray Bill!

Insidious: Chapter 2

Insidious, which I wrote a brief note about after seeing it saying that it started well but made the mistake of showing its ghosts and demons too often and too clearly and thus lost all of its tension, was a decent but ultimately disappointing film. However, it did well enough to spawn that staple of relatively low-budget horror: a sequel. And I must say, while similarly flawed, Insidious 2 was probably more consistently enjoyable and had some excellent moments, including a Back-to-the-Future-Part-II sequence tying into the first film that genuinely put a smile on my face, wrapped up by a similar treatment for this film’s prologue. Add in that pretty awesome old lady from the first film – sadly used for some dodgy Sixth Sense scene as a cliffhanger for a third ‘chapter’ already in the works – and you have something quite satisfying.

Which isn’t to say it’s good. The jumps are still very artificial, the ghosts’ powers vague and the lack of adequate lighting anywhere is somewhat tedious. It’s certainly nothing new, and most of the evil ghosts we’ve seen in horror since the 80s have had a tragic backstory about an abusive parent forcing a child into murder or some such – here with added ‘trap’…though this isn’t anime, of course. As horror sequels go, though, this is certainly one of the better ones, and I’d rather rewatch this than the original. 

(Another theatre review because of my lack of a theatre blog...)

Yesterday’s theatre trip to see Siro-A (ie, stylised, 白- A, or ‘White A’) was well worth the trip. The troupe of Japanese performers – five dancers, an electro DJ and a visual programmer – work their short but intensive set around a projector, and take the concept of interacting with light to great heights of precision-planning and cleverness. There were hints of tiredness about the show, with a rather less-than-full audience after an extended run in the Leicester Square Theatre and slight hints from the performers that they had been doing this same routine for a good few years – though the long beaky masks in most of their videos from Japan seem to have vanished. Part of what made everything work, though, was how extremely well-practiced it was, so seeing it after long months of repetition was no bad thing. The show kicked off with a fine example of cleverness, with the dancers holding up small boards to ‘catch’ areas of the stage-wide projection, then being able to interact with them, moving as they moved, combining them, pretending to knock them into each other, etc. Comedy was obviously going to be a big part of the act, with a typically ad-absurdium introduction for group leader Toshinori Abe that went beyond any typical resume to include his house on Google Maps, his entire family and even ex-girlfriends. Other ideas for the projection included shadow interaction with balls (the Japanese love shadow manipulation theatre – one game show we watched over there was ‘look at the performers and guess what their shadows will look like on a screen’), playing about with a hole that had some pretty brilliant surprise use of props, projecting onto a T-Shirt (and then having the performers mimic famous brands), imitating computer games, and a rather beautiful dance with ‘peacock’ psychedelic trails emanating from a pre-recorded version of the dance that ran near-perfectly behind the performer.

While the projections were ever centre-stage, it wasn’t just pre-made sequences performed in conjunction with a pre-made projector. Other sections included using real-time linked video and projection, including the first part where they turned the camera onto the audience and stuck their faces into various silly pictures. Of course, I was the first to be picked on, but was pretty amused when they made me into Superman. Another great use of the technology was to put two separate performances together in split-screen. The divided dance didn’t work brilliantly, but using the top half of one guy and the pictures the other brought out ended up hilarious, with centaurs and mermaids being topped off by the guy with the pictures using his hands for little ballerina legs. So funny. In other parts, they used audience interaction to create a very silly version of ‘We Will Rock You’ and pictures taken as the audience came in to have them almost ‘dancing’. It was at times close to the somewhat awkward English comedy club style of audience interaction, but somehow the theatricality of these stylised performers made them too otherworldly to find irritating – the same effect as with the Blue Man Group.

Funny, charming and clever, it was definitely money well spent. 

Other films watched on my flight today: Girl with the Dragon Tattoo – an overlong and ponderous film I’d been meaning to watch for ages but put off for ages. I was not at all keen. Far overlong and far too assured of its cleverness when really it told one cheese murder mystery story that devolves into hunting a lame serial killer, and one horribly shallow and sensationalist attempt at a gritty story about a disadvantaged girl being horribly abused then getting revenge. Both are lame ducks that think far too highly of themselves, and the result is far too overlong and ponderous. A disappointment.

On the long-haul flight, I started with Stoker, purely because the posters had interested me. Again, it thought itself rather cleverer than it was just for writing about murderers. Because heightened senses were a theme, ostentatious cinematography was stressed, which was mostly annoying, It’s part Psycho and part Nabokov, but without any innovation and too many easy ways out of interesting problems. I’m amazed the content editors allowed the shower masturbation scene to make it.

Something light next, so after Epic I watched The Terminal, which we had been speaking about before boarding the flight but I’d never seen. Cute and funny, it got away with how far-fetched things got with its story – based, of course, on real life – and with its product placement because it was such light, frivolous, Pninian fun.

I didn’t feel up to The Great Gatsby, so then watched some fun documentaries about the available historical evidence for the existences of King Arthur, Marco Polo and Robin Hood, made a start on The Anchorman but didn’t find it my sort of thing, so went to sleep and then watched another documentary about finding shipwrecks until the plane landed. 

Pacific Rim

Pacific Rim wears its heart on its sleeve, and is emphatic about being exactly what it is. Watching the trailer, we laughed at how it was clearly a Gundam film, but watching it, it soon becomes clear that it’s not pretending to be anything but a straight rip-off of Japanese monster films and mecha anime. The Godzilla-like creatures are even called Kaiju.

On the other hand, it is also still rooted very obviously in the Hollywood story. And the mecha subgenre in anime has grown to be very much centred on coming of age. From Gundam to Evangelion, Fafner to Gurren Lagann, the main characters are adolescents, sometimes with a time-skip to those adolescents being young adults. Piloting giant robots becomes a kind of metaphor for paternalistic control and early sexual tension abounds – as well as the sexualisation of the pilots themselves. Whereas in Hollywood, you get the action man who despite a trauma that makes him turn his back on his talents returns to kick butt and look macho. And while the latter is perhaps safer, it’s a whole lot less compelling and identifiable, and makes this for me very much a secondary experience to watching a mecha anime.

But that is not to say it is not at the same time a whole lot of fun and spectacular in a way that only a big-budget Hollywood film can be just now. The robots and monsters here are big and the CG is very impressive. There’s a great adrenaline rush from seeing a robot using a great long boat as a baseball bat, and even if the guy from Queer as Folk as a tough-guy American hero left a big hollow space at the heart of the film, especially alongside a very ordinary Japanese girl with a sad past that had to be fleshed out through flashbacks in a zero-chemistry romance, the minor players were fantastic. The two silly academics who had a peripheral but increasingly influential role on the story – essentially two up-and-coming actors channelling Rick Moranis and Lee Evans – were entertaining and crucially likeable, Del Toro of course gets his friend Ron Perlman in for an amusing cameo and best of all, Idris Elba from down the road in Canning Town is further cementing himself as a powerful Hollywood presence, perhaps doomed to always play powerful soldier types in genre films, but stealing the show every time and bringing with him a genuine gravitas that makes me want to see him play Othello.

Ah, I see he is to play Nelson Mandela soon. That ought to be something heavyweight to take him to the major leagues.

So while this didn’t feel like breaking new ground in terms of story or even Hollywood writing, it was immensely fun, a novelty to see in such a high-budget and realistic style and of course fills the quota on stuff being blown up and huge explosions. I liked how understated the Alice in Wonderland references were, too.

Some questions remain, of course, if we allow spoilers at the end here: were the sacrifices made by the Russians and Chinese really so irrelevant that nobody even acknowledges their deaths? Could Pentecost really not have packed the Aussie into an escape pod and set off his explosion himself? And making the newer robots entirely digital and able to be shut down by electromagnetic pulses – really? 

The Wolverine

They just missed the timing to have a film based on Wolvie’s time in Japan and see it do well. It is after all a little above being criticised as bandwagon-jumping, the idea that his past was at least in some significant part spent in Japan dating back to 1982 and a miniseries for which the young Frank Miller seems to consistently be given a bit too much credit. Miller was clearly a big fan of Japan and of manga – straight after that he went on to write and draw Ronin for DC – but that wasn’t the cliché it has come to be seen as today. The Silver Samurai elements of the story are even earlier – going back to the 70s. That said, the saturation of Japanese media is the reason this film comes just a little late – there’s already enough of a backlash against all things Japanese that I’m sure more than one potential viewer will dismiss this as ‘weeb stuff’.

And though it has problems, the Japanese element is not one of them. Treated rather as a more neon-lit potboiler New York, it’s very much exotic Japan packaged and presented to foreigners with certain expectations of a foreign culture. Thus, Wolvie is taken to Japan to meet a very old friend, gets mixed up in various intrigues, and ends up having to fight to save the day with his omega-level healing factor disabled – and we know how temporarily disabling omega-level mutants’ powers usually goes, right Mr. M? The Japan he enters is one of ninja, samurai and yakuza. It is one of glitzy high-rise apartments where politicians hire tall white whores – also popular in the hilariously busy and obvious red-light districts – where the super-rich live in extremely traditional old houses with sliding doors everywhere, and where people train kendo complete with absurd flips. It’s all very much how you’d expect a Hollywood superhero film to present Japan, and that’s okay by me.

The fact that Superman very obviously took its queues from how previous films have presented Logan was almost hilariously mirrored by this film, released almost simultaneously, has an almost identical set-up. Logan, wanting to get away from the life his powers give him, has become a drifter, going about small-town America with a busy beard and trucker’s clothes, trying to stay out of trouble but unable to resist meting out justice on the dumb rednecks where it is necessary, until an attractive young girl stalking him (Yukio from the miniseries with touches of Layla Miller) plucks him out of that world and into a new one of showing off superpowers in big dramatic battle scenes.

Things are a little different for Logan from before, though. Despite Scott getting not one single mention in the entire script, after the Phoenix saga Logan is haunted by guilt for killing Jean and preventing the Phoenix destroying the world. The whole premise revolves around the fact that Logan feels an immortal life is an empty one, and might welcome growing old and dying like everyone else – which remains probable even at the end, just not if it stops him making a bad situation better. Speaking of Superman, it was interesting how his getting his powers disabled reminded me that if not done carefully, a Wolverine story can be every much a Godzilla-vs-Bambi as anything from the Caped Crusader – for what tension is there when you know your hero can survive being reduced to a single atom or having his entire skeleton torn out?

Conceptually, then, the film was rich and well-judged. Unfortunately it stumbled on the basic building-blocks of a good story. I could live with the corny romance, even if it was creepy in exactly the same way Twilight is creepy (‘Hey, you were good friends with my granddad in the 40s? Well come hither baby!), but the plot was just too clunky. Captain America villain Viper is at once central to everything and peripheral, alternately seeming like mastermind and pawn, and her final motives – as well as the reason she’s kept around – all come over as muddy, which in turn make the archer character with the Silver Samurai’s original name have a bizarre story full of U-turns. If the ninja clan had expected Wolverine’s powers to be switched off, did they really think they could get him alive to the Silver Samurai? That, after all, was the plan, but de-powering him only seemed to make this harder to achieve, not easier. After all, he was very nearly dead in the Love Hotel (yes, they go to a Love Hotel, and it’s brilliant).

It’s for this reason I couldn’t wholeheartedly enjoy The Wolverine, even though Hugh Jackman is as always perfect in the role and the shinkansen scene is fantastic. It was also nice being able to understand the Japanese without subtitles 95% of the time – though I was conscious that Okamoto Tao has a bit of an odd accent in Japanese.

Then there was the scene in the credits, which was easily the highlight. How it reconciles with previous films I don’t know, but it was pure pleasure just to see those actors again, and though it was refreshing to have a film where really, the action was more James Bond than The Avengers in scale, I do want to see more of the X-Men again in Days of Future Past.