28 Years Later (Danny Boyle, 2025)

Dead on arrival

Charles Dickens got it right.

Some hundred and eighty years ago, he wrote a passage in Oliver Twist describing a haunting: 

He could trace its shadow in the gloom, supply the smallest item of the outline, and note how stiff and solemn it seemed to stalk along. He could hear its garments rustling in the leaves, and every breath of wind came laden with that last low cry. If he stopped it did the same. If he ran, it followed--not running too: that would have been a relief: but like a corpse endowed with the mere machinery of life, and borne on one slow melancholy wind that never rose or fell.

That sentence-- not running too: that would have been a relief-- is key. The undead are not in a hurry, they are never in a hurry; if they ever for once hurried that would break the tension. 

Rebecca (Ben Wheatley, 2020)

Rebounded

(WARNING: Plot of Daphne Du Maurier's / Alfred Hitchcock's / Ben Wheatley's Rebecca discussed in explicit detail!)

"How dare he?" I hear the folks hissing: "an Alfred Hitchcock classic, and an Oscar Best Picture winner!" Critics haven't been kind to Ben Wheatley's 2020 adaptation of the Daphne Du Maurier novel, and who can blame them? It's as if he'd taken a spraycan to La Giaconda and smeared her smile lime green.

Emma. (Autumn de Wilde)

Matchmaker, matchmaker

Emma. being the latest in a series of adaptations of Jane Austen and the latest adaptation of this particular novel, you want to ask: why? What does director Autumn de Wilde, screenwriter Eleanor Catton, and actress Anya Taylor-Joy bring to an already crowded table?

The Favourite (Yorgos Lanthimos)

The apple of her eye

Yorgos Lanthimos' latest film The Favourite may be his oddest yet if you stop and consider his work so far, from breakthrough feature Dogtooth (about a family teaching a  skewed view of the world to its walled-in children) to the recent The Killing of a Sacred Deer (about a curse hovering over a physician's family) where metaphorical fantasy and (better yet) the machinations of human nature give his films a memorably loopy spin.

The Lost City of Z (James Gray, 2016)

Lost and found

You wonder looking at James Gray's New York-based dramas where the producers got the idea he was the perfect director to adapt David Grann's nonfiction The Lost City of Z--about Percy Fawcett's quest for a long-lost South American city--into a feature film. You wonder furthermore where Gray got the balls to think he could blithely sail into the same territory staked out by Francis Ford Coppola in Apocalypse Now, or better yet Werner Herzog in Aguirre the Wrath of God.

T2 Trainspotting (Danny Boyle)

Choose again
  
I remember the experience of seeing Trainspotting for the first time --the drugs; the impenetrable accent; the band of bent-over addicts posed against the highlands as if they were the world's coolest band; The Worst Toilet in Scotland; the baby crawling on the ceiling. It was a high high, never mind the grim message that heroin addiction is a fast lane to nowhere (or as Mark (Ewan McGregor) might put it "fest loanin tae nowhaur"), Danny Boyle's movie was as startling as they came, one of the most vivid entertainments of the '90s. 

Boy we were stupid then weren't we? 

Far From the Madding Crowd (Thomas Vinterberg)

Far 'nuff

Thomas Vinterberg's adaptation of Thomas Hardy's first real success is, well, middling fair. The producers must have thought: "If we're doing a smart stylish update of a staid overfamiliar English novel we need a Dogme 95 filmmaker to shake things up literally (Vinterberg is fond of the handheld shot) and figuratively (Vinterberg's The Celebration involved incest while The Hunt told the story of a man accused of child abuse)." Vinterberg's not a bad choice--he has the grave, gravid approach to storytelling that Hardy seems to demand, with the kind of unflinching eye willing to capture the novel's more disturbing nuances.

Mr. Turner (Mike Leigh, 2014)

Man is an island

Mike Leigh's latest (his latest set in an earlier period, costumes and locations and all) Mr. Turner seems to take its cue from its eponymous character, an unfriendly, uncompromising, uncommunicative creature, except on specific occasions (usually his social equals; in one special case a woman--and even then he wouldn't say who he really was). He crosses entire countrysides in his unhurried gait, seemingly unaware of the gorgeous nature surrounding him--the rolling hills and suntinted seas and massive pillars of cumulonimbus--until he gets home and smears paint on the canvas, and you gradually irrevocably realize, to your not inconsiderable surprise, that this curt compact densely constructed little gnome of a man is actually a master of light and color.
 

Chimes at Midnight (Campanadas a medianoche, Orson Welles, 1965)

Now in Criterion Blu-ray 

Part of the Shakespeare blogathon

(Note: plot discussed in close detail--but at 450 years old and counting, is anyone still unfamiliar with the story?)

Bigger than life

What to say about this film? I first saw it on a pirated VHS tape I'd rented in New York back in 1991 (the tape startled me; I had no idea pirated tapes still existed in the USA), and despite the video snow, unstable vertical, wretched sound (not that the actual soundtrack was a model of clarity), thought it the most amazing thing I'd ever seen. Haunted Theater 80 at St. Marks for the longest time, because I'd been told they screened it before and might again, but it never showed up. Finally had a chance in Detroit of all places, an arthouse theater which served coffee and sandwiches while you watched. There were two screenings, and I went to both; had no reason to change my opinion.

Godzilla (Gareth Edwards, 2014); Locke (Steven Knight, 2013); Bendor (Vendor, Ralston Jover, 2013)

(Warning: stories and plot twists discussed in close detail)

Striptease

Liked Gareth Edwards' Godzilla (2014), not the least because the creature looks like Godzilla, not some generically ugly mutant iguana in search of a hiding hole (looking at you, Devlin and Emmerich). Liked the intro, which plunks Bryan Cranston and Juliette Binoche in the same car toether (by way of birthday greeting she showers her husband with kisses--you the man, Mr. White!). Fact is, Cranston's storyline provides much of the pathos and emotion in the film--gives us an unsettling measure of the cost of death and loss, a lesson that puts into perspective all the death and loss that follows. When Cranston's character departs (much too early), so does all that dramatic gravitas, with his son (the blandly handsome Aaron Taylor-Johnson) serving as an uncharismatic substitute (they would have done better to use Walt Jr.).

Which matters surprisingly less than you'd think. Edwards clearly loves his kaiju the way Guillermo del Toro loved his; he swathes them in mist and shadow, hiding them like so many treasured toys clutched close to his chest, allowing only the most miserly of glimpses--a claw here, a leg there--until the precisely timed moment when they are revealed in all their old-fashioned glory (no shakycam, ADHD-style editing nonsense here).

Edwards actually proves to be a remarkably supple filmmaker--he adopts the same strategy used in Jaws, when Spielberg realized that the mechanical shark wasn't working and had to indicate the creature's presence through indirect means (a stratagem used as early as Jack Arnold's The Creature From the Black Lagoon back in the '50s). 

The tactic serves another purpose. Never personally been sold on the solidity, much less realism, of digital constructs; no matter how careful the rendering or how much money they throw at all the workstations, the end result always seemed insubstantial, lightweight. This filmmaker seems to have gone a way towards solving that problem--as with Spielberg's flimsy mechanical shark, as with Arnold's clumsy scuba-diving fish suit, Edwards sells the effect by obscuring it with thick fog and even thicker dark, enveloping you with a shiver-inducing wall of sound (the nightmarish chittering of MUTOs (Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organisms), for one--like cockroaches the size of city blocks, moving just a few feet beneath you). 

Instead of smash-and-grab scare tactics, the slow burn; instead of monsters that dart forward like real-life predators, a stately (though not necessarily slow) and stylized glide across the nighttime landscape, maybe a fateful pause with clawed arm lifted high above the cable-supported motorway.*

* Sadly, Edwards doesn't seem to have any more idea than Christopher Nolan does on how suspension bridges really work; the cables snap and a large portion of the bridge remains up--by sheer force of script, for all I know.

David Edelstein in his review rakes the movie over coals for changing the original message (we are poisoning ourselves) to something more optimistic; I came out with a different takeaway--that Man is so feeble and unnecessary he's not even needed to deal with these kaiju (Godzilla will take care of it) and anyway he'd only screw it up (exhibit a: the aforementioned Taylor-Johnson); that if anything the Japanese and not the can-do, never-say-die Americans are more likely to understand the mysterious ways of nature. Wouldn't be surprised if American audiences stayed away in droves, or that local critics hated this (didn't happen). 

As for me--always liked a striptease, even from a nine hundred foot radioactive lizard, so long as the payoff at the end delivers. This in my opine delivered, filmmakingwise.

Close combat

Steven Knight's Locke (2013) is a nice little chamber piece with at most three elements--man, car, cellphone--that's it. Two kinds of suspense ensue: whether or not the man loses control of his car or his temper; whether or not the director (the more difficult challenge) manages to hold your attention for the full ninety minutes.

Knight does quite well, employing side windows and windshield like video screens where he can throw images, backgrounds, suggested interior states; sometimes he shoots the reflections directly, adding a third layer as we see the landscape beyond the glass, the driver, the background behind the driver. 

The sound design's nicely done too--mostly a claustrophobic cushioned silence, punctuated by road sounds and the eponymous' Locke's voice (Tom Hardy, soft-spoken and seductive with his rich Scottish brogue). Not a lot of music--but then the man is understandably in no mood for music: he's just left one of the most important engagements in his career and his wife to be at the side of a woman giving birth to his child, and he's desperately placing calls right and left, trying to keep his chaotic life together. 

When it comes to the challenge of shooting in enclosed spaces one thinks of Hitchcock's Lifeboat, Rope, and above all Rear Window, and one smiles; in addition to telling a compelling story in a confined space Hitchcock (at least with Rear Window) also manages to raise important points about privacy, and our voracious need to live life through others. Knight does well here, but he's not quite up to the level of the master, yet. 

She works hard for the money

I'd noted before that Ralston Jover's Bakal Boys gave us some of the most harrowing working conditions a Filipino youth--or any youth, for that matter--has ever experienced; with Bendor (Vendor, 2013) Jover pulls back to give us this character study of a woman who works hard selling dry merchandise by a street corner, though her real breadwinning activity is to act as front and liaison for abortions (an illegal procedure in predominantly Roman Catholic Philippines). 

Jover again uses his cinema verite style to immerse us in the retail industry that is the Quiapo Church plaza, where everything and anything is for sale, from plastic shopping bags to prayer candles to grilled skewered chicken feet (they're called adidas) to rosaries to aborfacients of dubious effectiveness (you think of Christ and the money changers at the temple, your hand just possibly itching for a leather whip). As the eponymous entrepreneur Blondie, Vivian Velez masks her legendary sensuality (not completely, hard as she may try--she's still a strikingly handsome woman) to focus with laser intensity on the bottom line--and the thin blue line; when the abortionist she works for runs afoul of the police, Blondie has to run literally for her life, everything else fallen by the wayside. 

Everything else seems to have fallen by the wayside for Jover too; his focus on his protagonist is every bit as intense as hers is for the profit margin, and you wonder ultimately what point he's trying to make--most intriguingly, what point he's trying to make with the doppelganger figure Blondie glimpses once in a while from the corner of her eye and follows, sometimes to good fortune, sometimes not (you think of the similar figure in Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now and wonder, darkly). 

As with a laser, by film's end (it runs for a brief seventy-five minutes) Jover's storytelling comes to a sharp and startling point, not through anything that happens but rather through something that fails to happen; not through any action but rather through unexpected and eloquent inaction. Suddenly the film snaps into focus, and you see the clever, clever design in all its entirety--the whole eloquently and wordlessly expressed in Blondie's careworn face. 

The Selfish Giant (Clio Barnard, 2013)

Little big man

You might say Clio Barnard's The Selfish Giant is one-third Of Mice and Men (two friends, one of them not ostensibly smart), one-third Oliver Twist (boys seduced into stealing for a modern-day Fagin) and maybe less than a third Oscar Wilde's fairy tale. Fact is, the eponymous giant's status in this picture is rather ambiguous: the title might refer to unscrupulous junkyard dealer Kitten (Sean Gilder--terrific actor, if not exactly of impressive stature); to the tall steel-and-concrete structures looming in the film's background; to any adult seeing these kids and failing to act decisively (pretty much all of them, when you think about it).

Barnard borrows from the films of Ken Loach and Mike Leigh (Loach's Kes being an especially vivid precursor), borrows from the kind of kitchen-sink realism Great Britain specialized in back to the '60s; one also suspects the presence of the Dardenne brothers in the gene pool--the focus on the poor and marginalized, the mostly handheld camera, the total lack of music (other than what you hear from a passing radio, or what onscreen characters sing or whistle aloud), the naturalistic acting, the often bleak urban landscape, the even bleaker weather. Barnard does make the style her own, however: once in a while she inserts what Ozu might call "pillow shots," images that bridge the transition from scene to scene--long shots of transmission pylons, transformer stations, nuclear reactor cooling towers, all often shrouded in haze like immense figures striding straight out of myth and legend. In Barnard's case her repeated use of these larger-than-life constructs (the majority of which for some reason--they're the biggest and easiest to find?--involve the power-generating industry) suggests that the story takes place in some fabled fallen kingdom, the ruins a reminder of the glory that was postwar industrial England.

Enter Arbor (Connor Chapman) and his best friend Swifty (Shaun Thomas); the two had just been kicked out of school for fighting. Good for them; they'd much rather work for Kitten, salvaging junk metal and cable copper from wherever and whenever. Barnard again makes a point, following these children as they drive a horsecart through the streets of Bradford, West Yorkshire: in this depressed economy the enterprise of choice isn't innovation or manufacture, but salvage--clambering in and out of junk piles, ripping motors out of fridges and washing machines for the coils of precious copper, on occasion stealing the wire out from under an unwary neighbor's nose. A police officer spells it out for Arbor's mother: stealing cable (and not in the digital download sense) is a criminal offense that could land them in jail. But Arbor doesn't care; school's a waste of time, bills need to be paid, and he has nothing better to do with his life.

What follows has the quiet desperation of ants crawling over a dead horse's near-clean carcass, of little creatures competing fiercely over increasingly slim pickings. The boys have to contend with police, with social workers, with their own occasionally worried parents, with property owners who care about their pilfered property, with other adults on a similar mission who wouldn't mind shoving aside a smaller competitor if it meant snatching a hunk of metal worth ten quid at Kitten's. Kitten is equally unscrupulous; when Arbor had been paid a particularly generous bounty, Kitten pulls out a few bills from Arbor's hand and calls it "tax, collected direct." Arbor still doesn't care; he has a little pocket money now, and Swifty can help pay for his family's overdue electric bill. Along the way Arbor talks yearningly of boosting power cables from the transmission pylons standing like sentinels over the Yorkshire countryside; like Wilde's titan they also hold up treasure of a value beyond dreaming, plainly visible but just that far out of the boys' reach.  

That said, the town of Bradford is not exactly Hell on earth. Barnard's film isn't as harrowing as Luis Bunuel's Los Olvidados, where the Mexican slums teem with murderous adults, uncaring-to-the-point-of-perverse parents, and out-and-out child sociopaths; nor are the working conditions as bad as in Ralston Jover's Bakal Boys where kids use cheap plastic snorkels to dive for scrap metal in the sea, of all places (Jover notes that a child goes missing every other week, thanks to underwater currents, or sharks, or who knows what else). 

Interestingly, Bunuel and Jover opt for a chillier, more distant emotional tone, knowing that with material as harrowing as what they have you don't need to pump up the drama for a strong film, that in fact you need to tone it down considerably or else it all becomes too much--the audience is in more danger of breaking out in laughter than breaking down in tears. 

Barnard gives us a bleak but relatively benign milieu where the children are taken care of (albeit indifferently) and the adults do stop short of seeing their offspring as literal prey. In this not-quite-best-of-worlds, a purgatory if you like caught between extremes (with perhaps a bias towards the lower), she's free to do the vulgar thing, reach out for the melodramatic, explicitly touch our hearts.

First published on Businessworld, 5.28.14