Cabin in the Woods

I didn’t know anything about this film before I went to see it, apart from that it was horror. My companion told me as we went in that it was also meant to be funny, which I thought to be no bad thing. If I’d known beforehand, though, that it a new work from Joss Whedon and one of his Buffy writing partners, I would have hesitated. That said, Drew Goddard’s writing on Cloverfield hadn’t overly annoyed me, and there were episodes of Firefly that…I didn’t mind.

And this film had all the fingerprints of Buffy on it. That same smugness, the attitude of ‘look, here’s a lame cliché, ugh, we’re so above it – we’re postmodern now, and we show you the conventions of this genre in an ironic way, you know… though ultimately we just end up totally relying on them anyway’. I really can’t stand it – it made me dislike Buffy, dislike Angel, dislike Runaways and worry about The Avengers. And it made me dislike the bulk of this film – until the last 20 minutes, where all hell breaks loose and the rest is gratuitous silliness and fun with lots of references to other horror films – my favourite being Hellraiser.

The rest of the film, though, was very reminiscent of Buffy, only with more ‘ironic’ blood and boobs and tired stoner jokes. Watch for the last twenty minutes of fun, by all means, but if you have the same attitude to Whedon and co as I do, steer clear. 

The Hunger Games

When I saw Battle Royale some ten years ago, I remember thinking it was a bit brainless and unoriginal, but still compelling. Perhaps a part of it was seeing The Running Man when I was still small enough to have a babysitter – I remember that because he was the one who brought the tape, with Fatal Attraction right after it, and for whatever reason the cartoony ultraviolence of The Running Man was deemed appropriate to show six-year-old me, while bunnies getting boiled was not. And then The Hunger Games came out, and one of the most common comments soon became that it was a rip-off of one or the other of these properties. A popular image going around the net right now is a riff on a line from Pulp Fiction: ‘What do they call The Hunger Games in Europe?’ ‘Battle Royale with Cheese’.

And the premise is the same: a bunch of kids are against their will sent to a wilderness, given weapons and told they must all kill one another until only one person remains. The backstory is different: in The Hunger Games it’s post-apocalyptic sci-fi, in which an oppressive state demands the fighting happens so that smaller societies who once rose in rebellion remember their place, while Battle Royale has a more satirical note, being based on the question of how to discipline children who are losing their respect for authority. This is the slight difference in the dynamic – the kids of The Hunger Games are blameless and innocent, but perhaps less identifiable as they’re from an imagined society. Those of Battle Royale are supposed to be responsible for their own fates because of delinquent behaviour – although of course innocents are involved there as well, so much of the same impact through indignation can be found.

That the story has been told before is not a big issue for me, though. I don’t mind seeing the same story in a different way. A lot of the media I consume is very derivative, and that’s fine – more important are characters, settings, relationships and the philosophical questions raised. And the fact is that the reason I disliked The Hunger Games boiled down to these.

Firstly, the film was very protracted and dull. The games themselves don’t start until what must have been well over an hour into the film. Up until that point, there’s a little tension as participants are chosen, as they get to make their first impressions and as they check out the opposition, but all of it could have been just as effective at half the length. Then the games start and while there’s quite a bit of action, what follows is disappointment after disappointment. Every single time, without fail, that there is a chance for an interesting scenario, the writing takes the easy way out. Catniss is developing maternal feelings for a young girl who saved her life? Great – what will happen when they’re the last ones left? Nope, no dilemma needs to happen because some random kills the girl. How will she survive now that she’s badly wounded? Oh, here comes a magic potion that heals her – something pretty much none of the other characters are seen getting. She’s been saved by one guy – what will happen when she meets him again? Oh, he’s been savaged by CG beasts. The rules have changed so that two winners can be declared? Oh, they’re bound to rescind that – oh, but now they have, there’s an absurd way to force an ending. At no point does it feel like characters are genuinely in fear for their lives and there’s always a cartoon solution to Catniss’ problems, and the way she pretty much never kills anyone but they manage to get killed by something peripheral so that her hands are kept clean gets really, really far-fetched.

The details are clumsy, too. There’s a tense moment where she thinks her partner has been killed, but it’s someone else, so why hasn’t her face appeared up in the sky like everyone else’s did when they died? If the trained killer boy has the element of surprise, why on earth doesn’t he carefully kill his rivals at the end? Oh, because he’s gone a bit nutty, of course. It all feels lazy and I didn’t care about a single one of the characters, except for basic ‘awww’ protective urges about the small kid for the few minutes she was onscreen. In general, Battle Royale presents far more interesting psychological dilemmas and gives a more believable version of what would happen when young people think it’s kill or be killed.

And the filmmaking was horrible, too. The one chapter of the book I read (and I no longer feel any need to read any more) had the prose style annoy me – it seemed to be drawing attention to itself by trying to be clever and elegant but failing, by trying to make its character perceptive and formidable but only making her seem arrogant and detached. While I didn’t dislike the Catniss of the film nearly so much as the book’s narrator, it seemed to me the horribly annoying filmmaking techniques were a brilliant way of mirroring the bad writing: every time there was action, the camera shook in the most absurd way, and even worse, anything vaguely creepy, unsettling or requiring a bit of anxiety had to be reflected by extreme close-ups, very tight framing and fast cuts. It all had a very Brechtian distancing effect, making it impossible to forget this was just a film and generally making the whole thing seem even more shallow than it was.

It seems a successful franchise and I don’t doubt there will be more. It makes me very, very sad that this film will likely be a successful series where His Dark Materials floundered and failed after its first film, though…

The Iron Lady

The consensus, from the reviews I’ve read, seems to be that The Iron Lady is a mediocre film with a stunning performance at its centre from Meryl Streep. I’d say that was fair – though to be honest, I don’t think the plot could ever please everyone. If it condemned Thatcher, it would be called a leftist fantasy and a distortion. If it painted her as saintly, it would get torn apart by all those who recall just how divisive Thatcher was. And sitting in the middle as it does, focusing on her Alzheimer’s and trying to project a balanced view, it gets decried for fence-sitting and having nothing to say.

I’m just about old enough to remember Thatcherite Britain, though more of my childhood memories come from the period when John Major was in power. My parents were comfortably middle-class and reaped some of the benefits of Thatcherism, so my early childhood was comfortable, brightly-coloured and joyful, one I will consider a kind of ideal just before the age of the Internet forever changed what it was like to be a kid, and which I hope I’ll live long enough to see painted as a kind of Utopia in films. But while we were comfortable in the 80s boom, my Dad was always left-leaning, had purposely chosen to work in an area with little wealth so that he was in low-income houses every day and was originally from a working-class background. While we had a strict – and pretty early – bedtime, one thing we were allowed to watch as a family despite all the vulgarity and swearing was Spitting Image, the satirical puppet show. So I grew up knowing at least through the lens of satire who the people in this film were – Thatcher herself, and Hurd and Heseltine and Howe. Thatcher was to me what she was on Spitting Image – a schoolmarm tightly controlling a cabinet of unintelligent man-children, who relieved herself in a urinal, heard the advice of Hitler in hiding and thought his ideas quite brilliant and of course, in that famous sketch that according to Ian Hislop now gets repeated by ex-cabinet members as though it really happened, answered the waiter’s ‘What about the vegetables?’ with ‘Oh, they’ll have the same as me.’

Here, though, is something of a humanised Thatcher. The most interesting part, sadly all but skipped through, is how she went from being laughed at as a woman in a man’s world with no hope of election to being elected as an MP, rising up to become education secretary and finally Prime Minister. This is a fascinating success story that sadly, while represented, is a disjointed series of flashbacks, which seems to me a wasted opportunity. Four major elements of Thatcher’s tenure follow: the contrast between increased wealth for the UK while unemployment also skyrocketed; the breaking of the unions; the conflict in the Falklands with Thatcher’s excellent counter to why we should go to war over land most in the country don’t even care about and which is thousands of miles away – that on those grounds it is just like Hawaii for the US; and the poll tax, perhaps Thatcher’s biggest mistake and here shows as almost a direct cause for her party turning against her.

The very idea of a film about Thatcher struck me as absurd, but the more I thought about it, the more curious I became, and when Streep won the Golden Globe and is now hotly tipped for an Oscar, I knew that it would be a film worth seeing. Personally, I neither loathe Thatcher nor worship her. She was a strong leader at a time the country needed one. The Unions may not have needed breaking, but big changes had to happen and it’s uncertain whether or not they could be implemented any other way. The Falklands were justifiable but certainly more could have been done diplomatically – though it’s very likely without military response Argentina would not have budged. And the poll tax was always utterly absurd.

But Thatcherism is where Britain totally changed, including in the backlash against Britain. As the first scene with Thatcher buying some milk covertly makes plain, Britain today is almost nothing like the Britain Thatcher grew up in, and it’s only the coming decades that can show us whether or not that is for good or ill. Had Thatcher been in power longer, would we have almost no industry today outside pharmaceuticals? Without her, would we have far better exports today and not rely so much on banking? Would immigration and the EU be different? We don’t ask these questions of John Major.

Because I wanted neither an evisceration nor a deification, I don’t mind the presentation of Thatcher’s life. But what I did not like was the bulk of the film being given over to Alzheimer’s – the part that will likely win Streep the Oscar. It’s pure pandering to the Academy and the shadow of Iris is everywhere – after all, Dench really ought to have won the Oscar Halle Berry got in what I still feel was uncomfortably tokenism, and Jim Broadbent, playing a similar role to the one he plays here, won Best Supporting Actor for it. It seems cruel to portray a woman still alive as hallucinating her dead husband all the time, and seemed to me a very simple-minded portrayal of Alzheimer’s. It allowed for strong performances, yes, but for me the balance was all off and I couldn’t help thinking of all those satirical ‘how to win the Oscar’ comics and cartoons.

So yes, I agree with the verdict that this is a mediocre film centred on a strong performance – but perhaps my reasons for finding it mediocre are different from others’. Oh, and I don’t know why Anthony Head seemed to be impersonating not Geoffrey Howe but my Uncle Ray, but it really tickled me.

Chronicle

On the one hand, Chronicle made me roll my eyes at the painfully strained need for an illusion that it was being filmed diegetically – ‘The camera needs to stay on for our investigation’, says one police officer, horribly obviously – and at the tired old story I’ve seen a hundred times before. On the other, it was fun, never dull and had some very funny moments.

Chronicle is basically your typical superhero origin story. Three very different friends find a mysterious glowing thing and it gives them super-powers. As their powers grow, so do tensions, until it all comes to a head. It reminded me of X-Men with a touch of Akira. Aimee, hilariously, spent the whole thing thinking of telekinetic hedgehog Silver from the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise. But superhero films don’t have to be fresh and original to be entertaining – indeed, they rarely are.

Two things are distinct about Chronicle. Firstly, the use of cameras within the world of the story, which of course began with Blair Witch Project, reached its apogee with Cloverfield and is now outstaying its welcome. There was really no need for it here, except maybe to cut down the budget, and it would be better without it. The second is the teenaged angst driving the whole thing. Main character Andrew has the kind of high school existence that through its media representation makes me thank my lucky stars every day that I didn’t grow up in the States, and makes the concept of God Bless America somehow gratifying and attractive. He is slight and awkward, which means he is mercilessly bullied – he is physically assaulted, mentally abused and his property is stolen and damaged. At a rave, he, his cousin (who tries to distance himself from the popularity game but comes over as arrogant as a result) and the popular high school quarterback investigate a cave, and soon after gain the ability to levitate small objects. This grows into being able to lift larger and larger things and even to fly. The different boys have different gifts – at first it seems like the quarterback will have the brute strength, the cousin will be able to defend himself strongly and Andrew will be have the most versatile power, but that never gets developed.

Sadly, the boys all think too small. They don’t fly far away to begin an amazing new life, returning to benefit those close to them. They don’t seek to improve the world, or fight crime like characters from Kick-Ass or Watchmen. They remain secretive, other than putting on a magic show, and then Andrew’s unstable mental state and difficult home life leads to him deciding to get some money. Does he go to fight drug lords in Cuba? Does he bust down into diamond mines? Does he go and steal the bonuses of corporate CEOs? No. He beats up some local drunks who recognise him for their cash, then robs a gas station (not even flying to one miles away), makes a mess of it and ends up in hospital. Soon after, he and his cousin are yelling ‘TETSUO!’ and ‘KANEDA!’ at one another (or pretty close) and Andrew totally loses control and needs to be stopped. How the film ultimately ended felt to me like what ought to have been its middle point.

The film could have been so much more, of course it could. But it works on its small-scale level, too. The film ends with most questions – including where the powers came from and how the world reacts in the wake of superhumans becoming definite, undisputable fact – unanswered, but it doesn’t really need more than that: it’s primarily about two cousins and how you shouldn’t abuse weedy kids because they might suddenly get very strong and very angry.

Sometimes the best superhero films keep the scale small. That said, this one was very much so-so – worth seeing but not rewatching. Hancock is a much better small-scale riff on the superhero, and Unbreakable does the serious parts better.

Coriolanus

The overwhelming sense from this film is of good timing: it’s been a little while since the last fashionable Shakespeare adaptation, Ralph Fiennes is a bigger star than ever thanks to his visibility in the Potter franchise, and with the last year’s news dominated by riots and uprisings against dictators, the decision to modernise the story must have seemed incredibly fortunate and certainly comes over as remarkably relevant.

On the other hand, it ends up being the very modernisation that holds back this film from being a truly outstanding adaptation and renders it rather dull and, in all honesty, student-y.

Coriolanus is not one of Shakespeare’s very best, despite some excellent moments. The original legend of a good soldier who is a poor politician ending up first exiled for his belief that eagles should certainly be beyond the reach of crows, only to return as a threat and then to end up in the worst position of all because he didn’t have the courage of his conviction and relented only really has an hour or so’s good story, with the rest fleshed out (expertly) by the relationship between Coriolanus as his closest friends, his family and his rival Aufidius.

Fittingly for a Shakespeare adaptation, the setting seems to sit somewhere between contemporary Britain and Rome, with filming in Belgrade giving the scenes of bitter war a grim authenticity. The best and most memorable scenes of the film are confrontations between armies turned into cells of soldiers infiltrating enemy territory and having grim, brutal clashes.

The true strength of this version is its powerful performances, though. Fiennes starts a little falteringly, but is excellent at showing a powerful man becoming vulnerable. I’m not sure I can imagine a better Volumnia than Vanessa Redgrave, who superbly balances ruthlessness, softness and slightly alarming madness. Gerard Butler’s Aufidius deals very well with a difficult part (both a great authority and a bit of a weird fanboy when Coriolanus shows up), and for all its silliness 300 has given him an onscreen gravitas that will benefit him for the rest of his career. James Nesbitt’s politician is perfectly pitched between likeable and loathsome, too, and Brian Cox is deeply reliable in a mature, understated Shakespearean performance.

But as I said, it’s the modernisation that makes the production really falter. On one side, the scenes with Coriolanus coming into contact with the common people fall horribly flat, and the scene with him getting opinions from the marketplace only for them to be quickly turned jumps about loosely and doesn’t work. It was a mistake getting real-life newsreader Jon Snow, for it will badly date the piece and to be honest makes it look like a BBC drama, as he seems to pop up all the time in the likes of Doctor Who. Tamora and Cassius are oddly-cast, and I was never sure whether they were supposed to represent the common people, rabble-rousing outsiders or vaguely meant to make it seem like the setting was actually Rome despite not having Italian accents. Either way, both were too exaggerated for the parts.

But more than that, the problem was that modernisation saps the scale. It’s alright for Luhrman’s Romeo + Juliet, where there are extravagant parties and huge churches, but here all the pomp of the Roman senate becomes men in suits in a conference hall, armies clashing become five guys in a tank on a desolate road and historic confrontations become TV talk show appearances. I’d much rather see a lavish, high-budget version with legions and togas and gold everywhere, and the change is really one thought of by hundreds of Fringe students before now. Some less grainy cameras for the external shots would have been nice, too, for a 2011 film with big-name stars.

On a side note, this is the last time I will be going to a cinema to see something arty. Popcorn has simply ruined the experience for me. Some morons a row in front of us had big bags of popcorn and couldn’t eat with their mouths closed. In a largely quiet, intense film like this it was absolute torture and I wished I could be at home watching on my projector. Selfish, idiotic people. I don’t understand the association of popcorn with the cinema, I really don’t. I’d like to say it didn’t affect my impressions of the film, but it certainly ruined the experience. I’m paying for a monthly subscription to the cinema anyway, so it’s not like they get less money if I pirate (though one ‘ticket sale’ less will be recorded), and I just hate popcorn that much. From now on, only loud films with things blowing up or people screaming all the time for me. I never again want to be stuck for two hours with selfish idiots going CRUNCH CHOMP GLMMPH CLUMP GULP in a darkened room.

War Horse

It’s a perfect marriage, really – Spielberg, perfectly poised for a comeback on the back of a film from JJ Abrams that was basically a tribute to him, adapts book and West End play War Horse for the screen, minus big puppets but plus real horses and gorgeous scenery. The subject matter of warfare recalls his superb Schindler’s List and memorable Saving Private Ryan, while the unabashedly sentimental story of a horse surviving against all odds nods back to his work for children.

I found this an enjoyable film, and with some real beauty, but not one I’d watch again any time soon, and one that could have been rather more affecting without some of its sillier moments. The plot is that a drunken old farmer risks everything buying a beautiful thoroughbred horse, mostly as a snub to his landlord. His son, who had seen the horse before and become rather taken with it, takes responsibility for training it up and it surprises everyone by adapting to being used as a workhorse. The farmer’s luck remains dismal, though, and a storm ruins the crops, so much to the son’s distress, the father sells the horse – WWI is breaking out and the cavalry need horses. So Joey the Horse goes off to war. On horseback, his new rider faces death and has a very fanciful vision of the horse living through the rest of the war and changing hands several times before finding a happy ending. Well, that’s not actually what happens, but it seems to me the most rational explanation for what actually unfolds: Joey is taken by the Germans, but lost again when two deserters are shot, then spends a while in a fairytale jam-making mill with a sassy little French girl. He is taken again by the Germans, though, and made to pull heavy artillery, which will kill even workhorses in a matter of weeks. However, he survives like this well over three years, at which point he gets free of the Germans as they retreat – presumably to the Hindenburg Line – faces down a tank that for whatever reason is driven by men who think chasing horses is a good plan, runs across No-Man’s land in a tangle of barbed wire, and lays there until he can be rescued, touchingly by soldiers from each side working together. And then the real unlikely coincidences begin.

It’s very mawkish and unlikely, but frankly, if you come to the film expecting anything different, I’d consider you a little uninformed. It’s after all about a horse surviving not just a few battles in the Great War, but its entirety, on both sides. If you simply accept that it’s a sweet fairy story set in the most dismal of worlds, you can enjoy this story, even if like me it’s your area of particular interest and study. And the fanciful character of the filmmaking only enhances it. No, a village in Devon shouldn’t be so often beautiful rolling hills and glorious skies and streets that are very obviously actually in the Cotswolds, but that’s all part of a romantic image of Britain at the time that is rather nice – and makes me feel lucky that my early childhood was in a picturesque part of the countryside. No, it doesn’t make a terrible amount of sense that three years’ crippling labour are glossed over, but it allows for the big resolution of the Armistice and what comes after. It doesn’t matter that the operations on the Somme in 1918 (which lest we forget was the battleground after years of hard struggle – the iconic Battle of the Somme was in 1916, the Germans then fell back to the Hindenburg Line, pushed the Allies back again and then finally retreated again and were overrun in 1918 with the Hundred Days Offensive) largely seem to involve running across a small bit of No-Man’s land and occupying empty but booby-trapped trenches. This isn’t a film to go to for great believability or accuracy – it’s simply a nice story about a horse in a sad time in human history.

For that reason, I consider it a decent film, but not one that I felt was a great weepy or worth multiple viewings. Nor do I feel any great need to see the play, which I always felt I should have gone to before now. Better stories have been told about WWI, most of them true. On the other hand, while it’s WWII films Spielberg is known for, especially ones that reflect upon The Holocaust, it is WWI that moves me the most, and this story is a fascinating addition to its mythos.

The Artist

I wasn’t entirely sure about The Artist based on the trailer, though a small part of that was not liking the way they had chopped up ‘Sing, Sing, Sing’, by far my favourite bit of big band swing (which in the film itself was replaced by a very similar original track we can charitably call an homage). It seemed like it would be a tribute to 1920s silent movies, I thought it looked entertaining but perhaps overly simplistic and not as clever as it thought it was.

to 1920s silent movies, I thought it looked entertaining but perhaps overly simplistic and not as clever as it thought it was.

Well, it indeed wasn’t quite as smart or innovative as it wanted to be, and suffered from a severe lack of subtlety in places, but it was nonetheless a very enjoyable watch and a loving tribute to a bygone era.

George Valentin is one of the great stars of the silent era. One day, a pretty young fan called Peppy Miller is pictured kissing him on the cheek, which propels her to fame in her own right. However, the silent era is ending and the talkies are taking over. While Valentin and Peppy begin a mostly chaste liaison that others – including Valentin’s estranged wife – may misinterpret, Valentin resists the transition into pictures with sound and gets left behind. The girl who rose up from nowhere to become Hollywood Royalty, though, was perfectly positioned for it, and becomes its new icon. In the end, it is Valentin who has nothing, but just maybe Peppy’s old loyalties will be able to save him.

The obvious comparison is to Rudolph Valentino, but the character is more an amalgam of John Gilbert, who butted heads with his studio head, whose career flopped when talkies arrived, who turned to booze and who an old-flame-turned-big-star attempted to rescue – and Douglas Fairbanks, who played the sort of characters Valentin plays here, and who lavished much of his personal wealth on a last silent film even when talkies had already taken over. There are elements of Mary Pickford as well as Garbo in Peppy, too, and the prominent influence on the film’s overall style is arguably their United Artists co-founder DW Griffiths (with Niblo and Sennett around the edges, of course). The end comes with a fanciful nod to Fred and Ginger.

It’s not really an original or imaginative plot, one that would no doubt occur to most with any interest in silent film, or possibly anyone who has ever seen the beginning of Mack & Mabel. Indeed, I much preferred the way Hugo treated the films of the decade before these, and much was too heavy-handed: a dreadful dream sequence reflecting Valentin’s anxiety about talkies, for example, or the scene where his estranged wife exclaims in titles ‘We need to talk! Why won’t you talk?’ just when his stubbornness about not transitioning to the talkies is dragging down his career. On the other hand, the devotion to a full film in black and white and glorious 4:3 with – barring the very end – only music and a single song is not only fun to watch and a fond homage, but really makes the film memorable in concept. The casting was also great, with one or two familiar, distinctive faces (John Goodman and James Cromwell) complimenting the two main actors’ perfect looks, the leading lady only vaguely familiar from A Knight’s Tale and the director’s previous works with them unfamiliar to me.

Possibly a film those who have seen very little silent cinema will love more than those more familiar with the era, as they will find it more novel and more original in story times, it is nonetheless a very enjoyable, straightforward love story with a satisfying ending, engaging characters and a superb conceptual hook. Oh, and I also enjoyed the fact that its quiet soundtrack prevented the usual loud munching of popcorn – it would have been too distractingly loud, so people refrained.