Splice

Splice – 2009, Vincenzo Natali

Genetic engineering goes horribly wrong in tense sci-fi horror. Sounds unoriginal and uninteresting, so it’s no surprise that even with a promising international trailer (‘Embed disabled by request’. Lame) Splice went by quite unnoticed.

The premise of Splice isn’t anything new; ambitious scientist take an experiment in ‘gene splicing’ too far and it’s all aboard to The Island of Dr Moreau, but this time it’s well written enough to rise above the usual B-Movie status.

The protagonists are scientists and lovers Adrian ‘Oscar Curse’ Brody and Sarah ‘been in loads of films but you still won’t recognise her’ Polley. At first they come across as un-likable, annoyingly cool, hip young scientist prodigy ‘nerds’. They live in a cool apartment surrounded by cool Japanese art and stuff and even in the lab they wear expensive and stylish clobber. As with all modern day would-be Frankensteins, their geeky ambition in the face of corporate pressure leads then to stay up late and, via Science Montage, isolate that elusive genome or whatever. And so what if we use human DNA, we’ll just destroy the embryo after a few cell divisions right?

Wrong. A monster is created. It starts out as the freaky rabbit thing from the clip and quickly grows into a super fast, super strong, almost human being. Things progress slightly predictably, but the lead characters are given enough subtly revealed background history to flesh them out and make their rash behaviour believable. Adrian and Sarah aren’t just crazy scientists, they progress from enthusiastic creators to unwilling custodians to loving parents to jealous lovers, all within a well paced 100 minutes.

The creature effects are well designed and executed and the director achieves just the right mix of suspense, gore, shocks and sexual tension that are vital to any horror (although it’s not a Horror horror if you know what I mean). About half way through the action relocates from the laboratory setting to the familiar creepy barn near the creepy woods, which seems a little lazy and clichéd but it makes sense to the plot and probably helped keep the budget modest. It’s cheaper to film things happening in the dark after all.

Good stuff all round, as good as my other favourite under the radar sci-fi film from 2009, Surrogates.

I was pleased to hear that Mr Natali is going to take the reigns of the long awaited Neuromancer adaptation.

European Crime Drama

Baise-Moi - 2000, Virginie Despartes & Coralie Trinh Thi

More should be done to warn the public about overrated films in order to save them the time and embarrassment of watching them. If I’d known before hand that ‘Baise-Moi’ is French for ‘Fuck Me’ I’d have known to avoid it. Baise-Moi became famous, or ‘notorious’, when the French censors tried to ban it and prevent its release unless heavily edited. This caused a certain amount of uproar amongst a few Frenchies who must have been fans of the book that the film was based on. ‘How can it be that in modern France, a film is banned just because it shows graphic sex and violence?’ was the argument the protestors put forward, disgusted at the idea of ‘the establishment’ censoring a film that didn’t feature anything that hadn’t been done before. An independent film representing the cutting edge of French cinema, self consciously continuing the spirit of Reservoir Dogs (according to what the author/director said in the special feature I watched on the DVD), and fighting against the American Hollywood Bullshit.

Of course the reason the French censors wanted to ban Baise-Moi is because , as Eric Daniel Pierre Cantona might put it, c’est un sac de merde. I doubt a French cinema censor is going to be bothered about watching hardcore porn in a film, or badly executed bloody violence (due to bad direction rather than the low budget). But if a film consists primarily of sex, violence and sexual violence, and there is no artistic merit to any of it, a censor might understandably feel that it is in no-ones interest to watch it.

It seems to me that everyone involved in the banning of Baise-Moi got it wrong. In trying to best fulfil their role of serving the public interest, the censors brought fame and notoriety to a film that no one should watch (as always happens when a film is banned. When will those censors learn?). Those who spoke out in favour of the film misinterpreted the reason for Baise-Moi’s initial censorship. It wasn’t prudish Puritanism that caused the French film authorities to ban Baise-Moi, it was defence of French cinema as a whole. There are a thousand incredible French films out there which are increasingly finding the international audience they deserve, and Baise-Moi lets the side down. By banning it the censors were doing the world a favour.

Inevitably the censors backed down, and even more inevitably the uncut DVD release appeared with enough quotes on the back from journalists who should know better to dupe the public into making Baise-Moi a home video hit.

The first twenty minutes or so aren’t actually that bad. The film has clearly been made on a shoe string with one camera and some amateur actors (and an amateur director?), but there is a grittiness to the opening scenes that is very promising. The two protagonists are introduced as women permanently down on their luck, victims of the small world they live in. Crime, drugs, rape and prostitution are part of their lives and for a long time they’ve accepted it. But things come to a head for the women individually, and when by chance they meet, it’s time for the main body of the story to begin, dragging the film down with it.

The two initially sympathetic French sluts embark on a road trip that becomes an orgy of sex and violence, more boring the more it tries to shock us. The rest of the film involves the women encountering a series of one dimensional male characters who will either get their cock out or suffer a gory death. That’s no exaggeration; almost every man in the film is either fucked or murdered. Maybe I missed some subtle commentary in this reversal of typical genre roles in such films, but I was too bored to pay close enough attention.

One of the things that I found so off-putting about Baise-Moi was the hardcore porn scenes. Of course I’ve seen loads of porn, but at the risk of revealing too much about myself, I find porn very boring when I’m not watching it ‘in anger’. The first close-up shot of a blow job occurring is a bit unexpected, but from then on it just gets tedious. The difference between sex and porn is that sex is between Person A and Person B, porn takes place between Person A, Person B and Camera Operator C. It’s carried out as a performance, not an act of pleasure. Un-simulated sex is always more shocking (and arousing perhaps) in mainstream cinema than ‘look what we’re doing’ porn. The directors and cast of Baise-Moi were too either too dumb or too keen to shock to notice this. Being unsophisticated is not a cinematic crime, and it can even be an asset to a film, but Baise-Moi takes itself far too seriously to get away with such poor film making decisions. Basically, it’s a bag of shit.




Pusher – 1996, Nicholas Winding Refn

The poster (or at least the UK DVD cover) of Danish crime thriller Pusher is very misleading. At no point does the main character Frank played by Kim Bodnia ‘dual-wield’. In fact there are very few shots fired in the film which is still refreshing a whole fifteen years later. At the time Pusher must have been a revelation; America had Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, the UK had Lock Stock and France had La Haine, then up pops Pusher, grittier and more realistic than them all. One hand held camera used throughout, filmed on location in Copenhagen, no sets from what I could tell, and with an excellent cast throughout, not a single dud between them. It also stars the sexiest Dane going, Mads Mikkleson.





There’s nothing cool about the main guy in Pusher. He’s a slightly inept drug dealer and he’s in a lot of trouble. From the picture on the DVD case and the description on the back; ‘Frank has two days to get loads of money before gangsters come to get him etc’ I was expecting to get something more like a violent version of Run Lola Run. Like Run Lola Run, the events in Pusher are propelled by the activities of an inept drug dealer in debt to some bad men. Unlike Run Lola Run, out main character is still a sympathetic guy despite his obvious failings and all the silly mistakes he makes.

Though the direction and the lead performance Pusher achieves a very believable characterisation; we can believe that this guy would fuck up the way he does. This is a very important part of what makes a film ‘very good’ and it’s often overlooked. Consider John Travolta’s character from Pulp Fiction, Vincent Vega. Half way through the film (I think, it's been a while since I watched it, too long in fact) he goes to take a dump while waiting for Bruce Willis to get home, and leaves his Uzi on the kitchen counter. Bruce comes home while Vic is in the can, picks up the piece and kills the hit man with his own gun when he opens the bathroom door. Ridiculous as the whole situation is, Travolta’s character is well enough defined by this point in the film for this scenario to be acceptable. We can believe that Vic would screw up like this so we’re not annoyed by his death, in fact it seems fitting.

Pusher is the same in this respect, and this is why Pusher is not a bag of shit.

Sucker Punch

MINOR SPOILER ALERT – I’m not going to ruin it for you, but if you really don’t want to know what happens to the doe-eyed sex dolls of Sucker Punch, watch it before you read.

Sucker Punch – 2011, Zack Snyder

So what’s the deal with Sucker Punch? The title and the premise and the trailers don’t really explain much, which is no bad thing, it’s nice to go into a film without knowing what to expect (beyond hot babes shooting big guns).

The deal is thus -
Snyder and his old lady have though up a collection of ambitious action set-pieces based upon pop culture violence. The list reads like a clichéd internet comic:

1. Giant Samurai Monsters With Miniguns
2. Nazi Robot Zombies
3. World War Two meets Lord Of The Rings with Dragons
4. erm...not sure what to do now...Pirate Monkey Ninjas would be silly...lets just do a disappointing rehash of the climax of Batman Begins (you know, with the train) and mix in a little I, Robot action.

The premise which serves to set up all the mayhem is explained in what is basically a series of music videos. The opening sequence is actually very good. Without any dialogue it is established that the main character’s mother has died, leaving her and her little sister all the money. (Step?) Daddy isn’t happy, so he kills the younger girl and frames the older blonder girl for the murder. Poor little blond girl is then sent off to a creepy asylum for insane (insanely sexy?) young ladies. Evil Daddy makes a deal with Evil Chief Orderly to have the girl lobotomised in order to prevent her ever talking about what really happened to her sister. They have this conversation within earshot of the blonde girl, setting up her descent into fantasy and her attempt to escape.

Then there’s another music video sequence (Bjork this time) as we take a tour of the asylum and meet the staff who will later be recast as the bad guys in the upcoming fantasy. In her mind the pretty blond girl replaces the harrowing asylum with an illusion; her own little world where she can carry out her escape. Naturally, she replaces the asylum with a burlesque house. She and the other girls are no longer inmates but captive exotic dancers, with an ever present air of forced prostitution loitering off screen. The pretty blond is henceforth known as Babydoll, forever scantily clad and lusty eyed, fighting for freedom with her fit mates: Sweet Pea, Rocket, Blondie and Amber.




Blondie, Amber, Babydoll, Sweet Pea then Rocket...I think.
Hmm... the one on the right in the picture below is not one of the characters in the picture above(?). But you get the idea.



To escape they need to nick a load of symbolic items, and the only way they can do that is if Babydoll creates a distraction by doing a sexy dance. The sexy dances are represented by crazy, violent action fantasies. Got that? OK.

Never have huge, carefully constructed action sequences been so boring. There are a couple of reasons why Sucker Punch fails to deliver the promised knockout blow. Firstly, all peril is removed from the action sequences for the sake of a cheap gag; during the stand off between the tiny blond Babydoll and the first Giant Samurai the tension is broken when the Samurai kicks her square in the face and sends her flying through the air and through a wall (ha, didn’t see that coming). But then the delicate little thing stands up without a scratch on her! So it is established that in these fantasy fight scenes, the main characters are invulnerable, and any peril goes out the window before the action really starts.

Secondly, Sucker Punch draws us down into two layers of fantasy, neither of which clearly relate to what is happening in the real world. We jump into the burlesque house dream world from which we drop down into the action sequence fantasy layer (difficult not to make it sound like Inception but it isn’t) and don’t refer back to reality again until the very end, so most of film is spent in a kind of peril-less limbo where the audience is left wondering if it’s all just a dream. Are the girls ever in any danger at all? Nothing compromises emotional involvement better that confusion.

Sucker Punch aught to be mindless fun, and on the surface it is, but somewhat annoyingly it’s clear that Snyder is trying to do something clever. The best thing to do is take Sucker Punch at face value.

Who’s the real sucker? I am, for paying £12.40 to watch it in the IMAX. But I was drunk.

Stay Hungry

Stay Hungry – 1976, Bob Rafelson

Did you know Schwarzenegger won a Golden Globe?
Hard to believe, but having seen his uniquely humble performance in Stay Hungry, I can dig it. By this point in his career Arnold had been in a couple of films where he either said nothing or was entirely dubbed, but in this forgotten gem he holds his own along side a young Jeff Bridges.

I stuck this on my LoveFilm list for the sake of Schwarzenegger completionism but I was pleasantly surprised. Jeff plays a young blue blooded Alabamian who’s got time and money to spare, Arnold plays...a bodybuilder. Not exactly a stretch, but watching him in this film it’s amazing to see him play an intelligent and sensitive young hulk, revelling in the hospitality of the Deep South, opposite Bridges’ equally young yet jaded local.

Jeff and Arnold were only born a couple of years apart and from this scene it’s like they could have been brothers (if one of the brothers had become Mr Universe).



‘You can’t grow without burning’. Truer words never spoken. Sally Field is also in this as the love interest that the two studs are kind of fighting over.

The guys who make Family Guy clearly don’t think much of her, but she never looked better than here. Little know actor R G Armstrong gives an excellent performance as the strange gym owner ‘Thor’. You’ll recognise Armstrong as General Phillips from Predator:



The film ends in drama and farce as Thor’s self destructive tendencies come to a head amid a comedy shambles typical of films of this period. This is a serious film, but it has the same joyful vibe as films like Smokey and The Bandit and Every Which Way But Loose, the poster for which I feature purely for it’s awesomeness:

Ten Short Film Reviews Ten

Dogville – 2003, Lars von Trier
It’s not perfect but it’s very good. I would even go so far as to say it’s ‘important’. I’ve not seen any of Lars’ other work but his challenging, unconventional films (often made in trilogies) put him in the same bracket as Andrei Tarkovsky, Wong Kar-Wai, Ingmar Bergman and any other ‘Greats’ you care to mention.
Dogville is famously filmed on a bare stage with the walls of the houses marked out on the floor. Nicole Kidman turns up one day, on the run from the mob, cautiously accepting the shelter the townsfolk cautiously offer. The morality tale that plays out is one of the most compelling stories I’ve seen in a long time. It’s a radical idea and it works very well, so well that the minor flaws are emphasised: the cast is full of exceptional talent but they all underplay their characters too much, the digital effects are simple but still obtrusive, it’s too long, and I don’t like the narration. The end credits are inspired.

Legion – 2010, Scott Stewart
I’m a bit fan of all the ‘War between Heaven and Hell’ stuff, in particular the Prophecy films and the comic Preacher. Legion is a nice edition to the genre which plays out the Final Battle on a very small scale, but it’s entertaining enough with some nice creature effects. Not quite as good as Constantine, which is a film with few fans, but I like it.

Spawn – 1997, Mark A. Z. Dippe
Who? Spawn? Oh yeah, the comic. Todd McFarlane’s forgotten work. I’ve not read the comic (who has?) but the story of the Spawn franchise is quite interesting. McFarlane was (and maybe still is) a very talented and driven writer and artist who wanted to create an iconic superhero to rival Batman and Superman. The result was Spawn, which can perhaps be interpreted as a pop culture metaphor for the 90’s, but I’ll leave that to someone else.
The film adaptation of Spawn was incredibly ambitious. Made a couple of years before The Matrix/Spiderman/The Fellowship of The Ring, it is probably quite an important film in the evolution of digital effects. The GCI in Spawn is very uneven, a result of two different companies creating different sequences. Some bits are very disappointing even for 1997, while others CGI shots still look passable today. The make up is very good too, John Leguizamo is unrecognisable and brilliant as the fat clown and without him Spawn wouldn’t be worth watching. Michael Jai White plays Spawn and does as good a job as necessary from behind his make up. Martin Sheen makes a fool of himself as the villain in what I can only assume to be a deliberate attempt to make the rest of the cast look good.

Battlefield Earth – 2000, Roger Christian
Oh my! It really is the worst film ever made. The third line of Battlefield Earth is ‘Nooooooooo!’ and it’s down hill from there. The direction and editing is very heavy handed, the director worked on the Star Wars films, and he’s clearly trying to do his own version (some of the music sounds like it may actually be from Star Wars). The alien bad guys are like a hybrid of Klingons and Ferengi in platform boots, and Travolta’s performance as the big bad guy is bizarre in its awfulness, although he was clearly having a lot of fun doing it. I suppose that it is quite fun to watch though, as every two minutes there’s another ‘What were they thinking?’ moment.

Soylent Green – 1973, Richard Fleischer
One of those films that’s quite famous, but nobody knows why, everyone’s heard the phrase ‘Soylent Green is people!’. It was made five years after the original Planet of The Apes and a couple of years after The Omega Man (based on I Am Legend), so Heston was getting a bit typecast in Sci Fi films. But it’s to his credit that he took these roles so seriously. Soylent Green isn’t particularly amazing but it was a mainstream 70s Hollywood film that had a definite social message about the disparity and injustices between the very rich and the very poor. In the 80’s Heston went on to become a bit of a paranoid nut-job and figure head for bigotry, but in the 60’s he campaigned for civil rights. It’s seems strange that he became so caught up in all the ‘white majority oppression’ bullshit, but for a time at least his heart was in the right place, and his decision to make Soylent Green is evidence.

Starman – 1984, John Carpenter
One of John Carpenters lesser known films, it’s a very pleasant tale about an alien being who comes to earth from the stars to learn about the human race, specifically 80’s sweetheart Karen Allen. Geoff Bridges performance as the child like alien gets a bit annoying sometimes but it’s not a bad film.

Dreamscape – 1984, Joseph Ruben
Somewhere between The Dead Zone and In The Mouth of Madness, and nothing like Indiana Jones despite what the poster suggests.



Poor mans Harrison Ford, Dennis Quiad plays a young man who squanders his physic talents down at the racetrack and in the singles bars until Mac von Sydow recruits his and teaches him to invade people s dreams. Some nice stop motion in the dream sequences and a suitably creepy turn by the always reliable David Patrick Kelly, and even Norm from Cheers pops up.

Croupier – 1997, Mike Hodges
Clive Owen is absolutely without charisma. Croupier has some value as historical documentation of life in England in the 90’s. It looks shitter than I remember.

Renaissance – 2006, Christian Volckman
French animated sci-fi noir.



Nice that they tried something so original, but it doesn’t quite work. Clearly made with a limited budget; it looks like they used off-the-shelf character software rather than creating there own, which is a good way to save money, but it takes away any emotional weight from the characters if they all look like mannequins.

Unknown – 2011, Jaume Collet-Serra
SPOILER ALERT (but you weren’t going to watch it anyway were you?)
I feel a little bit guilty about having watched this at the cinema recently. There are lots of films out there worth watching right now but I ended up going to watch this with some of the guys from work. I should put my foot down. Anyway...
Unknown is a bit boring, It follows in the footsteps of many other ‘European Action Thrillers’ from the last ten years: Set in a famous European city, lots of local colour and culture to try and make the film rise above the mediocrity of the plot, exciting but incredibly long car chase etc.
This one’s set in Berlin and covers the familiar ground of ‘Secret Agent loses his memory and mistakes his cover story for his real life’ a la Total Recall. The plot is stretched out over 90 minutes, then the big mystery is revealed, but there are still 20 minutes left at this point, so we descend into one of the most compulsorily climaxes to a film I’ve seen in a long time. “What’s that? You want a big action sequence at the end? Oh, all right then” Cue exploding hotel. Unbelievably and annoyingly Liam Neeson’s character loses his memory after banging his head, them at the end he gets another bump on the noggin, and all his secret-agent-close-quarters-combat-training suddenly comes back to him. Surly no one would consider employing the ‘two bump amnesia rule’ in this day and age?
This film is basically a result of the success of Taken, but it was the simplicity of Taken that made it work so well. Unknown trys too hard to be clever, and ends up compromising its own integrity.

The Social Network

The Social Network - 2010, David Fincher

Sky Atlantic

I’ve not been watching many movies recently because I’ve been Sky+ing so much on Sky Atlantic, here’s what I’ve been watching.

Broadwalk Empire
I feel as though I have reached a kind of TV series watching state of nirvana. After having seen all of The Sopranos and The Wire and The Shield, I know how to watch a series from the beginning; how to be patient, how to recognise when I should remember something. I think the writers may have had the previous viewing experiences of the audience in mind as some characters are killed of far more abruptly that I expected, so it’s not as though we can predict everything.

Five episodes in, Broadwalk Empire is picking up the pace. I actually think that the pilot directed by Martin Scorsese isn’t as good as the rest of the series so far. I’ve watched episode 1 twice now and it seems a bit too whimsical. It features a very Scorsese-esque ‘murder and body discovery montage to period music’ which I think was unnecessary.

Excellent as the series is, I think it’s slightly uneven. All the external shots on the titular boardwalk are created with CGI to recreate 1920s Atlantic City, these sequences all have a kind of dream like quality which doesn’t sit well with the internal shots which are filmed in incredibly detailed studios. I’m often reminded of the dream sequences from the Sopranos, like the one where Tony is talking to the fish which has Pussy’s voice.

I’m nitpicking though, coz it’s ace.

Treme
From the braniacs behind The Wire, and how. Only two episodes in it’s still not clear where this is going, but as a Wire vet I know that when all the story lines come together it’s going to be awesome.

I’m glad I went to the effort of watching Spike Lee’s When The Levees Broke: A Requiem In Four Acts (two would have done) also on Sky Atlantic which documents Hurricane Katrina and the resulting floods. Now that I’m an expert on Katrina and New Orleans, I smugly know the background of the characters and their circumstances better than the average Treme viewer (and isn’t that the point of HBO drama; to feel clever for watching it?)

There is one very annoying character – the DJ guy who keeps fucking up- but otherwise they’re all good, and many are based on real people. One of the characters is played by a Katrina Survivor who appears in When The Levees Broke, as does Wendell Pierce, who’s family lived in New Orleans. Walter is in it too.

Blue Bloods
Hmm...difficult to recommend this one. Blue Bloods sits somewhere between The Shield and all that CSI style bullshit. The episodes are very formulaic: Nasty crime (but not too nasty) takes place, Donnie Wahlberg’s detective character is assigned to investigate, he calls on the help of his district attorney sister and Police Commissioner father to help, in a moment of desperation he gets all Vick Mackey on some guy who he knows did it, but can’t prove it. Then at the end of the episode the whole family of cops gets together over Sunday dinner and debates the morality and legality of how they solved this week’s case. Somewhere in there is an ongoing plot about police corruption. Tom Selleck looks like a walking advertisement for Just for Men.

The Sopranos
It gets better every time.

Battle Star Galactica
I quite like it. I never watched any episodes when it was new but I can understand the appeal. Family friendly Sci Fi drama, some poorly conceived characters but the way the Cylons have been re-imagined is good, and every other episode has a good plot. Future Star Trek series (please) would learn a lot from this. Sky Atlantic is also showing Voyager from the start. I remember liking it first time round but I’ve caught a couple of the early ones and it’s not as good as I remember.

Six Feet Under
I watched the first three series or so when they were on Channel 4 ten years ago(!), much better than I remember. I remember being quite disturbed by the idea of Charlotte Light and Dark back when I was 18.

So,

After years of snobbishly claiming to not really watch TV, I have found myself watching at least 6 programs religiously. But it’s OK, because there are loads of other TV-addicts who consider themselves quasi-intellectuals watching exactly the same stuff. But for how long? It’s only free for six months y’all.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/tvandradioblog/2011/jan/05/sky-atlantic-mad-men-treme

By the way, is anyone watching Outcasts? It seems like something I might dig, but it’s on the BBC, so I dismiss it as being a nice idea but poorly made, mainly due to a lack of script editing by completely un-savvy producers, who stay in their jobs because they’re mates with the right people, and having only produced state funded television for their whole careers are incapable of creating a contemporary drama that is anywhere near as good as foreign commercial offerings.
Rant Rant Rant, But seriously, even when the great Charlie Brooker was given free reign to write a zombie series for Channel 4/E4 it still went a bit wrong. Why can’t we get it right over here? Maybe because UK TV producers/directors/writes don’t work well with each other?

Dead Set had one writer and one director for all five episodes. Over at HBO teams of many writers and directors and script editors and producers ensure that the best ideas/characters/plotlines are kept and the rest voted out.

There’s nothing new about this. Everyone cottoned on years ago when Friends was the most popular show on telly and no one in the UK could write a sitcom anywhere near as popular or consistent.

Shieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeet!