Evil Dead (2013)

1981 isn’t that long ago, but The Evil Dead is certainly dated. The remake may feel a little redundant, but it’s going to bring horror fans in and put bums on seats, that’s for sure. A bit of a cult classic, the original is perhaps better-remembered than it deserves, but I understood the motivation and the financing behind the reboot.

Unfortunately, with the quirky humour replaced by a po-faced refusal to acknowledge how the plot (ancient evil unleashed by affable young people in a secluded cabin thanks to vague evil magic in artefacts) has become cliché enough that it underpinned Cabin in the Woods, and the attempts to scare replaced by post-saw attempts to make you cringe with the visceral depictions of extremely painful acts, it mostly just felt dull. I’ve always found torture porn on the lame side, and if there’s no underlying psychological element, which here was at a bare minimum, it’s just not very interesting.

And the character types were not very likeable. I’m not going to like a drug addict, a jock, a geeky stoner guy, a firm female doctor-type and a token girlfriend unless they’re more than those archetypes, and none of them are. There was more of interest in the 2-minute prologue than in the entire remainder of the film, and the fact that when ancient evil is truly unleashed it gets only to the car park is truly anticlimactic. The only smile that the film raised was also the grim shaking-my-head sardonic one that came from realising deaths were coming in the least politically correct order possible.

Really, I couldn’t have expected much more than this. They couldn’t exactly throw out the entire plot. But I certainly expected to be much more entertained than I was. 

The Book of Mormon

(Not a film, but eh, I don't have a theatre blog)

Much of the buzz about The Book of Mormon is that it’s got a lot of buzz. You won’t get tickets without booking six months in advance. That’s part of the whole mythos it’s created. Well, I got lucky – a Facebook message from a schoolfriend saying a ticket was spare if anyone wanted it, so I waited all of two hours to get the hottest ticket in town.

And it was well worth the price of admission, and the genuine waiting time too – from beginning to end, it was incredibly enjoyable, and funny enough that I don’t want to do a plot summary in case any little detail of the brilliantly funny story is spoiled. Suffice to say it’s very much in the South Park vein, a few degrees away from the extreme crudeness and out-and-out surrealism of similarly-themed episodes, but also has its own strong identity and voice.

Throughout, much like Parker and Stone’s other musical ventures, there are gentle parodies of other musicals and musical styles. The hand of Avenue Q guy Martin Lopez is apparent too, and I felt like the momentary appearance of a big monster head was a nod backwards. Nothing is quite as good as the Les Miserables parody in Bigger, Longer and Uncut, and the general pastiches of rock musicals, showtunes et all work better than the direct derivatives of The Lion King and Annie, but the fact is that the writers are absolutely brilliant at making their songs funny – not counting sad refrains, every single musical number had at least one huge laugh, several of them being the very first line.

I paused to wonder in the interval why it is that I love the parody and pastiche here, but hate what Joss Whedon does and found it didn’t work in Eric Idle’s stage production Spamalot. After all, Parker and Stone are poking fun at musicals, and have a certain way of being able to stand above criticism by saying ‘Oh, it’s parody’. They can go over the top, have their actors overact and their songs lack taste because it’s comic exaggeration based on expectations, which rather makes hard criticism seem to miss the point. But the difference is, I think, affection. These imitations don’t sneer at what they poke fun at, they make an earnest and convincing attempt to recapture the same thing and do it right. They don’t sarcastically push camp and silly tropes away, but make use of them in a loving, amused way. That seems to be the distinction.

What The Book of Mormon emerges as is a warm tribute to a rather silly American institution, with odd-couple humour and Parker and Stone’s appealing skewering of naivety in the face of a world with problems that happy-clappy proselytisers seem to have no conception of – but they are strong with characters, too, and both the leading characters, while they go off on their own individual paths, end up likeable and deeply flawed. The Ugandans are not a politically correct representation of a people – of course not! – more a collection of others who have an innate noble-savage superiority to the clueless white kids who want to teach them about God, but they also get most of the best moments, especially a King & I-like moment towards the end, and I suspect ‘Hasadiga Eeboway’ will enter pop culture in some way or another. None of the characters are exactly detailed, realistic character studies – nor meant to be – and it works perfectly that way.

Analyse it however you like – the bottom line is that this is brilliantly funny stuff, and masterfully executed. Add in an ensemble that put anyone who’s ever been on X-Factor to shame, inventive costumes and sets and a very accomplished orchestra and you have…well, a show that deserves all the awards and attention it’s getting! 

Oz, the Great and Powerful

Whether Disney’s last foray into the world of Oz was a success or not is a bit of a tricky subject. Return to Oz was a bit of a flop, but has been rehabilitated by history somewhat, and now has a cult following for its creepiness and 80s aesthetic.

I doubt that Oz the Great and Powerful will get the same treatment, for while its reviews, too, are mixed, and while I enjoyed it, it was very simple and straightforward, and lacks the quirkiness of a cult classic.

But I would still call it a good, enjoyable film that does what it’s meant to do. In similar territory to Wicked, but much more canonical and much less subversive (ignoring the musical adaptation I haven’t seen), it serves as a prequel to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (and The Wizard of Oz). The wizard comes to Oz as an ordinary illusionist (and womaniser), is taken as a leader, at first is impotent and unable to stand up to the witches who largely rule Oz as he finds it – and who he stirs to transition from string-pullers in a largely benevolent realm to vicious tyrants – but with help from his close friends comes up with a plan to use spectacle and illusion to become the Wizard. Which is exactly what I hoped for an exactly what I got.

That said, I was a little worried for the first half. OZPINHEAD himself is hard to like, a scoundrel and a shameless breaker of hearts, and the way the plot is established is extremely lazy – it’s a prophecy that takes Oz from any random person to potential Wizard, and the one who sees him arrive just happens to be one of the most important people in the country, apparently out for a stroll alone in some random deserted area.

It really changes when Oz meets the little China Girl, a tiny girl made of porcelain who is a neat mixture of classic refinement and modern affection for forceful girls – and let us not forget this is a film no feminist test is going to find wanting, even if it’s the male who is at the centre, saving the day. Finding the little broken girl is a turning point for the character – he has to become responsible, and he has someone who believes in him. He has been sent on a frankly daft mission by the Wicked Witch of the East (in disguise, of course), who uses the opportunity to make a Wicked Witch of her sister – and if the transition from black and white standard-definition to widescreen (techni)colour wasn’t enough of a nod to the first film, the green skin, broom and sibling relationship here (none of which was in Baum) make it clear this is intended more as prequel to the famous film than the famous book.

Oz’s companions may be no Scarecrow, Tin Man and Lion (all of whom are obliquely referred to in some way), but the China Girl, cowardly monkey and, indeed, Glinda all serve a purpose and offer comic relief. Everything is a little slow until the very end, but the payoff is most certainly worth it.

There’s perhaps not quite enough heart here, and it’s all a bit clinical and by-the-numbers. True quirkiness seldom makes it through Hollywood rewrites these days, so don’t expect it. But accepting it as a product of its time and enjoying it as something simple and accessible, it is certainly to be enjoyed.  

Cloud Atlas

Like so many films these days, released in the UK months and months after the US, it may be easy for an audience in this country to forget that Cloud Atlas was eligible for Oscars - and completely ignored by the Academy. That, along with extremely polarized reviews, will no doubt lead to this film being considered an ambitious but ultimately failed project, despite easily making back its mammoth budget and having some very prominent critics raving about it.

It most definitely split audiences, in a way that the book didn't split its readers, and while the cause of this is primarily structural and derived from expectations about how the cinema will tell stories, ultimately it boiled down to the problem that I found with Cloud Atlas and also Mitchell's Ghostwritten, but wasn't present in Number9Dream - the fact that there really isn't a nice substantial connection between these different stories, only echoes, and that isn't quite enough to satisfy. That said, the screen adaptation quite wisely steered clear of the book's tendency to play with reality by making you think that the characters in previous stories are fictional - here, at least, they are all real even if they later inspired a fictional biopic.

It's unsurprising, but the film ditches the symmetrical structure of the film to cut between the six stories repeatedly, losing linearity in favour of an overall progression, faster pace (in a very long film) and quicker start - it's not easy for readers to be confronted with several chapters of Melville pastiche, but book readers are likely to be more patient than cinemagoers. It's also quite the feast for the eyes when six different films in different styles are intercut, often very beautifully juxtaposed. Of course a lot more is lost in concession to a cinema audience - the nuances of language, references to Nietzsche and Nabokov, the shock of child rape, side-references to Mitchell's earlier books - but there is plenty gained too, from visual spectacle to a more visceral depiction of just how unpleasant Sonmi's story is.
And the main problem here is that the film is confusing, especially for non-book readers. Blockbusters are not meant to be confusing, and 'is there actually any real connection between these stories beyond birthmarks and cursory mentions of previous stories?' looms a bit too large for this to have been a success.

But as one who knew that would be the case, I enjoyed it immensely. Having the actors recur not only means they all get a stab at playing extremely against-type (Tom Hanks as thuggish Irish writer? Hugh Grant as brutal savage murderer in warpaint? Hugo Weaving not only as a mocking phantasm of the mind, an Agent Smith-type assassin and a callous slave-trader, but best of all as a very, very scary woman? Sign me up) but each of them also gets to balance their hammy minor roles with a more moving and heartfelt main part. This is a film any actor must have loved to be in, and even if some of the attempts to make someone of one race look like someone of another are a bit disastrous, the style shifts are endless fun and this can truly be said to have it all - period drama, sci-fi chase scenes with lots of explosions, savage tribes in the jungle, gentle comedy, tender love, high art, political commentary...the only slight miss-hit was not having the 70s section a bit more like the trashy pulp story it was supposed to be. The fact that the San Francisco scenes were shot in Scotland is a bit of a revelation!

I will concede that this isn't for everyone. If you worry you don't understand some greater unifying theme rather than just going 'Clearly there's no great intention to make bolder connections', you will probably get annoyed searching for it. But if you can love a film for its self-conscious artifice, you are to my mind getting this one right.

Django Unchained

Tarantino’s latest offering is, like Kill Bill, a pastiche, albeit a little less direct. This time, the melting pot contains three things: spaghetti Westerns, blaxploitation and Deep South plantation drama – which after all isn’t the Wild West. It is very much a wish fulfilment fantasy, drawing many comparisons with Inglorious Basterds for being a bit of bloody catharsis for the great ills of the history of White civilisation, championing one of America’s underdogs. It’s a long way from the cleverly disjointed, extremely character-focused, nuanced and snappy early Tarantino works that are what made him great, but those aren’t the sorts of films Tarantino makes any more. He makes sweeping epics with lots of self-conscious nods to filmmaking and bold stylistic statements that have fallen out of mainstream direction, and has a whole lot of fun with them. The result tends to be something that consciously can’t be called great, but is extremely entertaining to watch and contains unforgettable ideas, superb characters and performances and flashes of absolute brilliance.

Django is a slave given the opportunity to escape his cruel fate by the grace of a white man. Well, that’s how some critics are spinning things, but let’s be fair – this isn’t a story that could be told about the era without that level of facilitation. This white man is another outsider – a German immigrant, very possibly but by no means certainly a German Jew (who can after all be nationalistic and like the same things as Wagner did), who masquerades as a dentist but in actuality makes his living as a bounty hunter. He needs Django because Django can identify some marks for him. So good at it does Django prove himself that they partner up for a longer term, and the charismatic German is sufficiently moved by Django’s search for his wife (named after Brunnhilde) to offer to help him. Unfortunately, she is now the property of one of the most merciless slave-owners in the South.

Much of this works brilliantly. The dehumanized black man gets to rise up to kill the abusive slavers if they have a price on their heads – though one harrowing scene at a farm gives shades of moral grey. The good doctor’s way of doing things is very flamboyant, letting people think he is simply a deranged murderer before he reveals the truth. There’s also a brilliant comedic scene where a proto-Klan argue about the difficulty of seeing out of their white hoods. It’s all very comic book, even slapdash. There’s almost a wilful lack of attention to details and continuity – witness the amount of beer going up and down in the glasses, or bullets making a clinking sound as they land in snow. That doesn’t even seem to be the right year for the Civil War. But this is self-conscious filmmaking, constantly drawing attention to itself. Look at these faded stars, given the Tarantino treatment. Listen to this original Morricone composition, with all that spaghetti Western heritage. Yes, if I want to, I will just slap words on the screen for exposition, and have a 70s-style theme song.

It’s not a well-plotted piece, it makes a point of its unoriginality, and really it should have ended at its false end. If the intended message was that you can save a whole lot of bloodshed and misery if you swallow your pride and admit you’ve lost when you’ve lost, as the good doctor could not, that got a bit lost. As soon as Django killed the Australians who could have helped him (including a pot-bellied Tarantino doing a rather odd accent and drawing attention to himself, without a director to tell him to do it better), it became clear that this wasn’t about a good moral message and Django was no good guy: to get his way, he would slaughter everyone, including one defenceless woman who had done nothing but been born to the same mother as the bad guy and, I suppose, failed to totally overhaul the entire social order of her day, who he could easily have let go. The puddle of blood grows huge as Django’s revenge is completed, and while Tarantino is of course known for his violence, I missed the meaningful blood and suffering of Reservoir Dogs.

But for all it was imperfect, it was of course fun, as mediocre comic books are fun, and there were undeniably fantastic performances. Django himself will win no Oscars, but Christoph Waltz’s Doctor Schultz is in with a shot, and Samuel L. Jackson as an Uncle Ruckus type with a real sharp edge behind the scenes was fantastically-played. Much to praise, then, but not a whole lot to keep praising after the layers have been peeled back, very possibly in some horrific torture scene.

A question that persists: if the workers know it’s an act, and the massa knows it’s an act, who does Samuel L. Jackson’s character do the Uncle Tom performance for? Only guests? Isn’t that…really annoying and silly for those in the know?

Lincoln

Stephen Spielberg’s bounce back from the now more-or-less universally decried Indiana Jones revival, helped along by JJ Abrams’ tribute to his style in Super 8, needed a heavy-hitter in the vein of his Schindler’s List or Amistad to really herald his return to full force. And with Lincoln, he has it – a mature, unpatronising, almost cheese-free historical biopic with some incredible performances that are sure to win a variety of awards and doesn’t have the somewhat hollow sentimentality of War Horse. Here, the mawkish scenes are kept more or less entirely to the bookends of the film – a rather silly opening scene in which Lincoln sits in a chair like his famous memorial and has two black soldiers and two white soldiers come and offer different points of view to him, as well as reciting his speeches back at him, and an ending that while not nearly so hard to believe has a rather awful crossfade from a flame in a lamp to an historic speech.

But the two and a half hours between those points are quite special. Slow at times, heavy undoubtedly – but still engaging, consummately-performed and easily able to keep the viewer immersed in a time of great suffering but great retrospective glamour. The sets are perfect, the casting superb, the wigs and makeup so well-done you notice them only when you are supposed to and the dialogue just the right mixture of formality and believable irreverence.

Central to it all, of course, is Daniel Day-Lewis, who is everything a top Hollywood actor ought to be – acting only in a select few films, avoiding celebrity gutter press and each and every time he appears in front of a camera stunning his audience with a superlative dedication to his craft and outstanding natural abilities. Deservedly, he may well become the first person ever to win the Best Leading Actor Oscar three times in a matter of weeks. That he is the son of one of the people I am writing about in my thesis always gives me a small surreal thrill, but in all honesty that is forgotten within moments of seeing him appear, because he so completely disappears into his character. He may seem an unlikely choice for Lincoln, not even American, but the facial resemblance is certainly there, and it’s quite brilliant how he pitches the performance so that it’s not too dissimilar from that iconic deep, commanding drawl from a thousand documentaries, cartoons and halls of presidents, but softened, taken up an octave or two, and given several notches of kindly old man.

The rest of the cast are also incredible. From characters who have nothing to say but ‘Aye’ or ‘Nay’ but put in a lifetime’s convictions into the word to Lincoln’s misunderstood and long-suffering wife, and especially Tommy Lee Jones as the best kind of loveable curmudgeon with such acerbic vitriol in his speeches that he can make an admission that he is going back on a lifetime’s convictions before his parliament sound like a victory just by turning it into an insult, he is a firey and irascible foil to Lincoln’s fatherly calm.

Not everyone will have a great love for this film. Those with extreme political opinions will find much to fault – on one side, there will no doubt be cries that the film does nothing to represent the South’s point of view and paints them as cardboard villains, and makes Lincoln out as too much of a saint, all the while massaging white liberal guilt. On the opposite side, no doubt there will be cries that this is nowhere near enough, that making a film patting whites on the back for having finally made progress and stopped enslaving other races is just patronising, especially making money from it, and that if the message were sincere, filmmakers and audiences alike would be doing more in the name of restitution. But both are based on political agendas, and it’s better to enjoy this as a slice of a time and a political manoeuvre than anything else. 

Crusade in Jeans

This moderately costly and well-produced 2006 film is an obscurity. It’s vaguely possible that people in Holland know of it, but in the majority of the world it went completely unnoticed and doesn’t have a single critic’s review on Rotten Tomatoes, meaning that presumably it didn’t get any press screenings, or most likely any screenings outside Holland at all, despite being entirely in English and the only celebrity on the cast – Emily Watson – being British.

So why did I watch it, and with quite a deep sense of emotion? Why has it been sat on my hard drive for – quite literally – years with me always a little scared of it? Well, that’s because I have quite the personal connection with it. Indeed, I feel like it was a crossroads in my life, and that is why I’m writing this. Not really for any critical purpose. Not because it had any impact at all on the world of cinema, or will ever get the sequel its cliffhanger promises and for which the remaining half the novel could supply a screenplay. But because I thought I was going to be in it, and when that never happened, I rather gave up on the acting career path altogether – to the extent I almost never talk about it. Had I got the part, my life would have been very different and I probably would have spent the rest of my life pursuing acting as a career, with the very strong element of a feature film role beefing up my CV. And while none of the young actors who had major parts have gone on to have stellar careers, both the actors who got the parts I was considered for have appeared in other films, and the boy who got the main part also has a career in music, essentially living a life I would like. This is about personal catharsis.

If I recall correctly, it was in early 2004 that I had the auditions for the film. I remember because at the audition I chatted with Harry Eden, who was a lost boy in the then-current Peter Pan had also starred in the difficult Real Men. Whether he was offered a part in this film I will never know, but I suspect it would have clashed with Polanski’s Oliver Twist, in which he played the Artful Dodger.

My agent at the time was very enthusiastic about my chances for this role. She knew me as literary, and the only one on her books likely to have heard of the Dutch children’s book Kruistocht in spijkerbroek, or Crusade in Jeans. I hadn’t, but I was easily capable of reading it in a few days and doing a good impression of someone who had. It was a pretty poor book, really, about a teenager who uses his mother’s experimental time machine for his own trivial ends, mixes up days and years and ends up part of the semi-historical Children’s Crusade in 1212, with all anti-Islamic rhetoric carefully sidestepped. The young hero, whose name surprisingly remained Dolf for the film (it’s short for ‘Rudolph’ rather than ‘Adolf’), ends up passing as a noble, mystifying others with his odd clothes and futuristic artefacts and soon becomes a hero to the good kids and a threat to the nefarious manipulators intending to sell the children into slavery.

The early scripts were pretty awful – I think still have some of the early drafts, involving horribly awkward dialogue where Dolf played music on his iPod and convinced followers that Marylin Manson was the voice of the devil, thankfully changed by the filmed version to a more palatable ‘troubadour in a box’ bargaining tool – and the final draft has awkward mistakes, like Carolus apparently coming back to life with nobody commenting. Interesting characters are melded into a dull love interest. But I got very invested, practised like hell and memorized audition dialogue. I passed an audition, but meeting the casting agent, was quite saddened to hear he didn’t see me as Dolf – he thought me too old, something in my eyes betraying a bit too much knowledge to be the likeable boy hero. That’s fair enough, really – I was never the blonde hero type, a quality the lucky guy who was cast exuded, and in all fairness I think he looked better with his shirt off than I would have. Instead, I was considered for Vick, the thuggish bodyguard, who is a secondary character but given an inflated role in the film (not even killed off), and I came around to this quickly, with much to relish in the role, which I thought I could make cold and slightly sinister. There was another audition stage, a group session where we took part in various exercises, and I’m confident I distinguished myself. At the end of it, I happened to look at the casting assistant, and she gave me a huge grin and a big thumbs-up. I left thinking I would at last get to be in a film, and just needed to wait for the call.

Well, the call never came. I never heard from them again – as is usual for that world. The chance came and went, and in the end I wasn’t cast – instead, some rather forgettable fellow played the role in a very straightforward schoolyard bully way, which may well have been the perfect way to do it, and I suspect did well because he looked like a rather less handsome version of the hero – which I don’t say in any attempt to be rude, as it’s an interesting casting decision. For my part, well, I wouldn’t as I suspected have looked too old, not at all (most of the cast are a bit old for their book counterparts), but if anything I would have looked too similar to the horribly miscast Nicholas, the spacey boy prophet.

I had watched bits and pieces before, to see what the guy who got the role I had wanted looked like and how he played it, but I couldn’t bring myself to finish until finally I decided I wanted to watch something live-action and had nothing else. A vindictive part of me smirked at how clearly the film was going to fail, how poorly it was done, but oh, I would have been proud to have been a part of it, and I would have loved to have played any of those parts and had the life that could have gone with it. Instead, after this never came to pass, I drifted through a few more stage roles in Cambridge, put my heart and soul into Alan Strang, realized that I was at the age where I’d be expected to do romantic roles and that I utterly loathed the part of acting that demands you perform physical acts of love with someone you do not love, and drifted away from it and into music. I didn’t pay for a new set of pictures for Spotlight, and that was the end of my having an agent. I was approaching the end of university and I imagined that within a year I’d have a career playing the drums, and a book published. Well, these things have failed to come to pass after all, at least so far, and I’ve largely drifted. It traces back to this, at least in my head. It was my last chance to be an adolescent actor of note, and it passed me by.

I don’t expect this to be read by anybody. But it’s something I’ve wanted to write out for a long time. I won’t let on that it’s personal, and just link it as usual from my Facebook. If anyone stumbles upon it, well, perhaps it will be of interest. But I doubt they will. I don’t promote my film blog so the only people who read it are friends – who don’t care for obscurities.