Checking On My Sausages

The New Cinema of Shattered Minds

2012-05-14T10:53:00.002+01:00

Delusions, split realities, multiple personalities; the erection and dismantling of psychosis, or something like it, is the most notable preoccupation in modern cinema.

Trapped in a room, stuck in a cave, tortured by visions, something's amiss, all is askew, zombies, monsters, killers, they're after you. Our heroes and heroines are men and women in trouble. Or everything's OK...until the wallpaper begins to peel.

The major questions in these films are 'what is happening?', 'what is real?' and even 'who am I?'. What is dream and what is reality in Inception? What is imagined in The Ward, Bug or Take Shelter? What is damaged? You, the world, or both?

The intensification of disorientation and misinterpretation of experience reach awakening and we see, finally, how much was delusion. We understand that an illusion had been constructed, Switchblade Romance, The Uninvited, that falls when the fake expands to bursting or fades to natural end. We see the lies beneath the crises, twisted adventures. We see how visions of happiness were always only that - visions.

The world was never out there but in here, in the mind. But what triggered delusion? The heart of all of these films, 1408, Triangle, is trauma. Trauma that forces a break from reality. In mental collapse pain is moved to another level and manifest in horrific metaphor. Elsewhere involuntary 'coping mechanisms' kick in where a happier narrative, Mulholland Drive, Dream House, masks and abstracts suffering, a Bougereau painted on top of a Bacon.

A dead daughter, a dead husband, a dead wife, guilt over murder, Shutter Island, Mulholland Drive, obsessive jealousy, loss and fear of loss, this trauma is a boomerang. These stories emanate from it (many of these films have a pre-delusion section in which we are obliquely 'told' what provokes it) and return to it. The tendency of the puzzle-story is that the completed jigsaw should reveal something terrible, even worse than what may have been suffered in the unreality. Yet that terrible, by its very human nature, in conjunction with the clarity of revelation, has an uplifting dolorous call - grief is love in death's grip.

Trauma has its foot in the door preventing The End's storybook closure. Because these loves live forever so must trauma. Trauma distorts reality. The truth is impossible to accept. You become new people playing different or multiple roles (where they are effectively opposing themselves) in dumbly detached and remotely twinned realities.

Stories are not going to save you (apart from in Sucker Punch, where stories are under partial conscious control) but they do, incidentally, help. Truth and understanding wait where they have led you, where they have finally failed.

Three trends of 21st Century cinema that come together in the new cinema of the broken are the puzzle narrative, the twist and unresolved ambiguity.

The puzzle narrative gained strength at the end of the last century with the success of Memento and The Usual Suspects. The revelatory twist that overturns what we have been led to believe achieved especial popularity, likewise at the end of the 1990s, on the back of The Sixth Sense and Fight Club. Ambiguity, Martha Marcy May Marlene, Lost in Translation, letting the audience write the last page, is a directorial tic still emerging.

What brought these trends together, apart from the popularity of each? I don't know. Perhaps the traumatic events in the United States of America in 2001 have obliquely and subconsciously been depicted with the freshly forceful modes of storytelling to which they are peculiarly suited. Puzzles, twists and ambiguity lend themselves to confusion, paranoia, cruelty, sadness and cold brutish reality.

There's no way out. It doesn't seem real. It's just like a film. Like a dream.

The Shining : Analysing an Image # 2

2012-05-05T12:07:00.003+01:00

Here Jack is smashing his way into the bathroom where Wendy cowers in fear

The wood-chopping man, the centuries-old strong and comforting figure of a husband and father is here turned against the family.

The wife and mother screams. As she brings her hand up to her face her wedding ring is visible.

From this acute angle across the door the axe seems so much bigger and the butcher (kitchen - female) knife Wendy holds so much smaller and inadequate seeming. This is a battle she appears incapable of winning.

The colours are cold, stark and anaemic. They are dirty and off-white. The tiles tell us that this is a room where things are meant to be clean and made clean. Instead there are stains: literal, be it on the walls themselves, or figurative, on the sanctity of home and the sacrament of marriage.

One briefly thinks of a more specific violation, rape, as the large axehead thrusts against and through the wood and, from this angle, 'into' her.

Her face shows abject terror. She looks as if she is weeping, overwhelmed with sadness that it has come to this.

With the axe in between us and her, she is made more helpless, separated from us. We are not able to intervene and are placed as if another victim hiding on the other side of the door.

However, the camera's focus (and ours) remains more on her than on the horrific axe, whose intrusion is more other-worldly, more difficult to comprehend by being indistinct and blurred.

Movie Morality Debate Topics

2012-03-14T16:57:00.002Z

Here I bring the week of pieces on the morals of film to an end with a few thoughts for debate.

Playing Tricks

What are the issues surrounding a film which pretends to be fiction and isn't or pretends to be real and is fictional or fake. Think of the ambiguous natures of Abbas Kiarostami's Shirin, of Catfish or Exit through the Gift Shop. Do we need to know whether a work of art is 'real' or 'unreal'? Is it our right? Are we being betrayed?

Do we need to be more aware of how documentary film-making skews reality in conscious and unconscious ways?

Special Editions, 3D, Directors Cuts....

The rapid advancement of technology has facilitated the creation of many variations of the same work. Does greed play a part? Is our sense that only watching all the versions would represent a proper knowledge of the work being exploited?

Altering Films

To what extent do we own or have a stake in films that we have seen? Think of E.T. and of Star Wars.

Back from the Dead

What are the moral implications of revivifying the image of dead actors and actresses?

Censorship

What should be censored? Should we allow the worst things imaginable be screened, as long as what is filmed remains fictional/simulated? When, if ever, can the unchecked exercise of freedom be damaging?

Piracy

Are the lines blurred, in a world of easier and easier access to media, between right and wrong? Do rights holders exert too much control?

Inspiration vs Theft

Where does homage become plagiarism?

Moral Messages for Children

Are films in general perpetuating the tyranny of groups and cliques? How are friendships, parental relationships, love stories and sexual relationships presented, coded and resolved? Are they imprinting the right things in children's minds? Are children's films coarser than they were? Do we need to be more careful in children's films where the audience may be more impressionable and the conscious filtering of fictional from real less sophisticated?

How do we navigate the need of art to reflect the real and explore the unreal, to remember the world as we forget it? Should artists be encouraged to offer enlightenment?

Most importantly, how much of an impact do films really make on us? How much (if we take modern film as one entity) of us as we are is on the screen? How much of us as we will be?

I may pick up on a couple of these questions in the future.

Dear Zachary [Morality Blogathon]

2012-03-09T18:20:00.002Z

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As part of the Movie Morality Blogathon Jeff Pike over at the blog PKCan'tExplain has posted a review of Dear Zachary, a film he says "roots itself with ease and confidence inside the true-crime subgenre of documentary filmmaking, where all talk sooner or later focuses inevitably, and naturally enough, on 'evil' and 'justice'.":

Dear Zachary at Can't Explain

"Because there's no justice here. Morality gets no purchase, and is revealed for what it is: merely good ideas, not mandatory. One person managed to successfully trample the system at large for a few years—separate criminal justice systems in Canada and Pennsylvania—for no more reason than that she wanted to, and along the way she irrevocably destroyed multiple lives and sent many dozen more sprawling in one way or another."

Jeff's Martial Arts Centre is always open for writing and discussion on film and music.

On Torture Porn [Morality Blogathon]

2012-03-06T19:30:00.001Z

A story is a story is a story.

Fiction doesn't have to shed light on anything real or espouse any message yet we can fall into the trap of thinking that it is. We think that what a film shows it condones because the director has the power of Gods to intervene and make right. We think of a film as presenting an enclosed view of a subject, a last word that relies on no context.

The majority of films are first and foremost stories, visions of things that just...happen and then... disappear. They are fantasies, inspired by but parallel to our world.

How can we hold a fiction, and one example of fiction at that, responsible for something that it was never intended to address and how can we blame it for what we, in society as a whole, think and do?

There are always trends in art, be they stylistic or thematic. There have always been films featuring physical and psychological torture (Wes Craven's 1972 The Last House On The Left is one ) but over the last few years the numbers have swelled into a loose movement/ sub-genre. They are more common, more insistent, more explicit. In Saw, Hostel, Martyrs, Cube, The Human Centipede, A Serbian Film the human body and mind is subjected to prolonged pain and degradation.

The umbrella term “Torture Porn”, meant generally as a pejorative, was coined a few years ago. The “porn” of “torture porn” does not necessarily have anything to do with sex or sexuality but rather the explicitness of the material, referring to titillation and quick arousal of one kind of another – here, through violence.

A Serbian Film

A section of these films do, however (by the very nature of their rawness and their will to strip back niceties), have a sexual connotation, be it direct, through nudity, the choice of nubile young women and handsome studs for the main roles, or a pervasively teasing tone.

A film doesn't have to have sex in it for it to touch upon sex. A scantily clad woman. Sweat. Beauty lusted after, made dirty, ugly and destroyed. The name “Torture Porn” puts violence and sex side by side and in these films, violence and sex do go hand in hand; violently sexual, sexually violent. They are presented as natural bedfellows.

* * *

Where did this new wave come from? As with all art it came directly from the success of the first films of this kind to touch shore. Artists and their patrons have to follow the money.

Why is there money in it? Why do people enjoy these films?

We are offered the opportunity to visit hell and to come back into the light alive, to be chopped up into little pieces and surface intact. They are an adrenalising endurance test that pushes you to a psychological and physical limit. They have a shuddering and breathtaking intensity, a morbid sense of exaltation. We are reminded of our carnal selves, infinitely vulnerable to infinite kinds of wound.

There is a shivering buzz in seeing a film with the balls to show outrageous things. 'Woah! Did they really do that?'

We like to be shocked.

Shock can be good. If it is uncomfortable and gruesome it does not mean that it is morally 'wrong'. There can be an imperative to shock. Shocking practices are best shown straight i.e. shockingly. Extremes can bring hidden truths home by making them big and visible. Where are we headed? What, in these awful, horrifying, situations do we already recognise as dormant or active within us?

Perhaps Torture Porn reflects something in us, and in the young people at whom these films are primarily aimed. Do we see people as less than we did? Why are we less disgusted than we were? Do young men and women exploit and use each other more and more? Are we objects to be captured? Are we not companions to be cherished? This poster for Captivity was quickly taken down after complaints:

Why was it ever put up? It's odd and worrying. Is the mirror of film showing us what we look like? Whether it's only fiction, a throwaway slice of entertainment, or not is irrelevant; the point is that we would not have been entertained by these films in such numbers let alone welcome them into the mainstream with open arms.

* * *

As I have said, one film may do little or nothing but put together, as a group of films, they resonate louder.

What effect does Torture Porn have? Effect trumps whatever the intention of the film-maker - whatever satirical bent, whatever redemptive escape or emotional switcheroo. We can always say “it's just a story”, and it is, but stories can still change us. Illusions with good intentions can be problematic and damaging in the real world. We can always say “they are adults” (and yes, the other part of the audience may already think in demeaning ways) but a steady stream of fiction presented in a 'realistic' fashion reinforces and normalises attitudes and behaviours. That goes for anything, not just horror like this.

The most extreme behaviours won't be normalised but their repetition in films meant to represent a good night out could help to shift one's moral fulcrum. They could aggravate a disregard or buttress it with a sort of validation. Film has the cachet of a cool art form. The worst, over-the-top actions we see in “torture porn” have at their root basic thoughts and feelings that emerge more commonly.

Do we practise on our dolls?

What is worse is that torture in a few of these films is treated like a game. The torturer is the self-appointed master and rule-maker. Games of death. He does it with relish. In Final Destination fate runs the game and delivers inventive death to squirming laughter. It's just play-acting but these atrocities are framed in the same way we frame our visits to the cinema and the same way we interact with film. It's just a game, it's only play, it's a moral pass.

Final Destination and the puzzle-like torture chamber of Cube

The victims are cut off, tied up, isolated in stone rooms, abandoned barns or dark motels. They are alienated from everything they know and given what amounts to a taste of reality. Their complacencies and their habits are played with and rudely disabused. They are made to feel more human. They are alive with raw nerves. Intriguingly, there is oftentimes a complex, sneaky morality at work in the minds of the torturers (or at least one used as an excuse for barbarity) – you need to be woken up. You deserve it. You need it. We the audience only fantasise about giving someone we don't like, someone whose personality we can't stand, a slap. And here we have it and guilt-free. What do we do with it now?

We place a lot of stock on the idea of which characters we identify with, or are meant to identify with. Are we encouraged to identify with a torturer or the victim? Do we like the charismatic killer who dances as he slays? Do we care if a self-centred upstart teenage twit is taught a lesson? The fact is we identify with everybody. People are empathetic and therefore will always place themselves in the shoes of others no matter how little sympathy they have for them and no matter how the story is skewed in favour of one character.

Whatever we see can enter into us and alter how we relate to the real world. It can pass beyond the nightmares of typical horror (checking under the bed for maniac clowns after watching Poltergeist) and take on a real form “out there”. Even those who abhor films like these, who would love to see them censored, can be affected for the worse which is precisely why they fight so strongly against it. Powerful images stay. They are hard to shake.

I exaggerate, perhaps. I scaremonger, but it would surprise me if this constant mortification of flesh and Monsters Inc.-esque scream-catching did not deaden us a bit.

A film cannot make us suspend our humanity. It can't make you enjoy violence or be 'complicit' in it. But it can guide our humanity or shut parts of it off for a couple of hours. As soon as we enter a screening we are using different rules of engagement. Different moral standards apply. We're perfectly behind a smart assassin like 'The Bride' in Kill Bill in a way we wouldn't dream of being in real life. She'd be a mass murderer. The issue is when that special receptiveness unconsciously absorbs radical things which are then, washed in that fictional varnish that hides immorality, taken out and released in the real world.

The intensity of the suffering on show in Torture Porn is being gradually dialled up as we become harder to shock. Shock turns into desensitisation. Desensitisation, in films like these, would mean boredom. Bored, we are unmoved by the agony. Furthermore, with our reactions changing, Torture Porn, or elements of it, will find their way into “children's” films i.e. certificate 15 and under. They have already.

Hostel II : Images of War and Torture

On the other hand, for those not desensitised, the torture and indignity that they witness will become so unbearable that they will have to switch off entirely, no longer able to place themselves in the victim's shoes. Paradoxically, this means that the character is objectified and any positive message about the evil we do, or any political allegory, will be neutered. It's a Catch 22. The dilemma is about what you show and how much of it you show.

These films can have a serious point, but any point in this genre could cut both ways.

These films are point blank morally wrong but I do wonder why they are made. Why do they think people want to watch? Why, if it is a woman “tortured” is she always young and always pretty? Why is it so relentless?

So, what does this all say about where we are now? Where will we take this art? Where will this art take us? Maybe none of it really matters and maybe stories are all they'll ever be.

The Shining : Looking At One Image

2012-02-24T13:29:00.000Z

This is one of the last shots of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. This is the (driven) mad father whose attempt to kill his family has been thwarted.

The devil's hell has frozen over.

He is frozen in an expression of inhuman rage. A pure emotion, a state.

It is an uncanny and horrifying end to those uncanny and horrifying last days. It is pathetic and blood-curdling. Even though he is gone and seemingly no longer a threat, it is uncomfortable to look at him. He is a beast.

It is humorous too. This is a cartoon villain like the ones with whom he is associated, and who he associates himself with, in the film - Wile E Coyote* or the Big Bad Wolf** - who are never able to catch their prey or satisfy their hungers.

This is an extreme image of the frustrations of an artist paralysed by writer's block.

His eyes are rolled up in death but also as if the awful flame of his ardours have been doused with refreshing cool - he almost looks ecstatic, his mouth slightly open (aaah!)

He is stuck in the ground like a tombstone to himself, an epitaph of insanity written on his face. There is no need for anything beyond "here lies".

Time is frozen. He is the so-called "caretaker" who has somehow been here before. He is being preserved. He is a tombstone to a type of man, perhaps.

There is something monumental here, something larger than life.

Will he come again; will he thaw? The danger is still alive. What is frozen implies life and movement before. Will he, it, move again when spring comes? The ground is angling downwards but it hasn't taken him all the way down into hell/the earth.

* Earlier we saw Danny watching a Road Runner cartoon and we can hear the lyrics "the coyote's after you... when he catches you, you're through."

** When he is standing outside the bathroom with an axe he takes on the role of the wolf "little pigs little pigs let me come in...then I'll huff and I'll puff".

Wile E. Coyote cemented solid in Going Going Gosh!,
a victim once again of his own trap

Movie Morality Blogathon : 6 - 14 March

2012-02-06T14:54:00.001Z

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Because I think it would be fun, I propose a stock-take of everything that has to do with ethics and morality in modern film.

As long as it has a moral dimension you can write about whatever concerns you, interests you, gives you hope, no matter how big the pressing issue or how small the pet peeve. Hopefully this can get people thinking and create various debates.

Once you have a piece ready you can leave a link to it in the comments section at the bottom of this post or send me the link by email at srgfilmstuff@hotmail.co.uk. Alternatively (if you don't have a blog, for example) you can send me the full piece and I can post it on the site in its entirety.

Here are just a few of the subjects you could tackle:

The responsibility of film-makers towards us; our responsibility towards a film as viewers; relationships (sexual and otherwise); censorship; the ratings systems; normalising and glamourising; shock value; torture porn; where a film might be immoral or moral; the rating system; what is being shown to children; profanity; dealing with real historical events and people; piracy; what we do with old films and how the moral rules of engagement have changed over the decades...

The blogathon will run from the 6th to the 14th of March.

Thank you.

Helicopters

2012-01-25T09:22:00.000Z

Annoying little insect* hovering haughtily above. Spying on us, sniping at us.

Light it up like a firework and bring it down to earth.

What knavery is this to deny us explosion by cutting away before the deed is done (I Am Legend) or worse leave a crumpled heap of metal, dry and unexploded?

If you want a picture of the future of cinema, imagine a helicopter exploding - forever.

Its eye is shining...

...is it here for good or ill. Is it here to take us away from this hell...?

...and we ascend vulnerable, hanging as if by a string.

A helicopter can be devil, a swarm of death from above, or, in the same guise, angel - mercy and salvation on its whirring wings.

Maybe it is just a mystery...

*A helicopter being looked upon like an insect is an image brilliantly used in the first (later pulled) trailer for Spider-man, when it is caught like a fly in a web that spans the gap between the twin towers of the World Trade Center :

Remakes : Why not?

2012-01-09T12:35:00.002Z

Nothing seems to raise the hackles like the news that a film is being remade, with the idea more likely to be scorned if it is a remake of an old American classic or a rushed reboot of a modern gem of foreign cinema.

The Thing, the second remake, after John Carpenter's The Thing, of The Thing From Another World from 1951, has just been released and David Fincher's remake/adaptation of the Swedish film/book The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo followed a few weeks ago. There are plenty more in the pipeline too, such as South Korean Park Chan Wook's Oldboy in the hands of Spike Lee and Japanese manga/anime staple Akira given over to Jaume Collet-Serra. Soon we will discover who will walk in the footsteps of Paul Muni and Al Pacino to play Scarface.

Why not just watch or promote the original? Whither originality? Is it knocked down in the pursuit of a fast buck?

Why might films be remade?

Perhaps the original has a formula proven to be successful. A good idea is a good idea. Take something strong and economically viable and repeat. Take something cult and roll it out. A name, a brand could represent the closest to a sure thing.

Films might be remade for love of the original - to be part, in retrospect, of the process of the object of one's affection, to be responsible for the extension and curation of its life. On the other hand it could be dissatisfaction with the original that drives the project - the ideas were sound but the execution could be improved upon.

Although we tend to poo-poo the idea, different countries do have different sensibilities. Remaking a film in your own language whilst paying attention to cultural nuances will engage more people. Either way, with a new director, actors, director of photography, landscape, language etc nothing could possibly remain the same.

Likewise, we adapt ourselves as receivers of signals depending on who we know is sending it. Would Exorcist II, feverish and outlandish as it is, be beloved if it were an Italian horror film? Would its oddness, borderline amateurishness, be more easily enjoyed and admired? I hazard to guess 'yes'.

Subtitles, which distract attention from the image and which turn the aural into visual, change the nature of the film more than we might acknowledge. What is written, even with an aural and acted accompaniment, is experienced quite apart to the same thing heard, responding uniquely to their unique forms and the conventional ways of interacting that appear to govern them.

Was Wong Kar Wai's first English language film, My Blueberry Nights, his least successful critically because his poeticism doesn't work in quite the same way coming out of people's mouths (frankly artificial) as opposed to written and underscoring the action with gobbets of charming romanticism? Does the brilliance in his chinese-language films become soppy and inauthentic in the simple step from those white letters (accompanied by a musical, purely emotion-infused vocal murmuring) to the aural plane? What is said tends to have more responsibility to realism and functionality.

Furthermore, and paying no heed to the snobs, there are those who find it hard to watch subtitled films and it is obvious why.

Remakes (or adaptations from one media to another for that matter) offer fascinating insights into story making and story telling. They make you think about how something is put together, about structure, about characterisation, about technique, cause and effect. These are vital educational tools for the young and old - how has Martin Scorsese transposed
The Invention of Hugo Cabret to the screen in Hugo? How has Middle Earth changed through Peter Jackson's lens? What is happening to the frameworks of Rio Bravo as it transmogrifies through Assault on Precinct 13 and the French film Nid de Guepes? How has Therese Raquin, in tone and pungent odour, been transformed into 21st Century South Korean vampire story Thirst?

Remakes, comparisons, allow us to think about the soul of the thing. To think about the craft of art. Riffs and versions on the same idea - Infernal Affairs and The Departed. [Rec] and Quarantine. Not dispiriting. An exciting opportunity.

[Rec] and Quarantine

Once a film has been remade and we have two passes over basically the same material, a HYPOTHETICAL ORIGINAL is born - a ghost but with a form. The hypothetical original exists in our mind even without a remake but a remake brings it into focus. What it is is not so much what the versions share but what they appear to be responding and commenting on. The two films are in fact both versions of this hypothetical original.

The original isn't the be all and end all, its own mausoleum. It is living. Why do Directors remake their own films? Hideo Nakata remade The Ring in America. Likewise Takashi Shimizu and The Grudge. Yasujiro Ozu remade the black and white A Story of Floating Weeds as the technicolour Floating Weeds, Michael Haneke, Funny Games. Leo McCarey's Love Affair was indeed An Affair to Remember. Alfred Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much knew it twice, and Cecil B DeMille adapted the play The Squaw Man on three occasions, in 1914, 1918 and 1931.

They want to get closer to the perfection in their heads. They want to take advantage of new technologies. The original is not the original. It is in the mind and out there like a mist. They want another opportunity to revisit the same people and places and make right. Art lets you come back and remould, albeit with new clay.

Even though Alfred Hitchcock himself remade his own films and adapted a vast amount of short stories and novels, Gus Van Sant's remake of Hitchcock's Psycho was greeted by outrage. Is Van Sant's film redundant because it is almost a carbon copy? Far from it. It is redundant because it is not a carbon copy (in terms of shots). If it were it would be a once-in-a-lifetime experiment in which variables could be studied and where the magic of film would be shown to reside between the shots and without their confines.

What is a sequel if not a species of remake?

Do remakes hold back American cinema? Are they made to bury the originality of non-hollywood cinema? Are they supermarkets stocking products you can purchase in delicatessens and selling them cheaper?

The Thing (2011)

Is it vandalism?

Does it do the original works a disservice? Does it alter the brand even if the original remains untouched? Does it replace the original in the public's mind and if so, would people only be aware of the original because of the remake?

Why are commerce and money dirty words? Art has always revolved, and needed to revolve, around money as a facilitator and a spur. All artists should be penniless, destitute martyrs (warming their hands over their authentic inner voice) in their lifetimes and enjoy fame and fortune from the grave.

When we think 'remake' do we actually think that the films are re-made as if something that was sacred is now sinned against and reanimated as a zombie, abhorrent to behold? No two films could ever be the same. Swapping Peter Lorre for James Stewart, or Tony Leung for Leonardo Di Caprio, brings an entirely different colour to a character. A remake will always be worthwhile. The present doesn't change the past. A remake does no trampling and means no disrespect.

We accept countless incarnations of plays because there is no original performance, and endless repetitions of classical music written before the era of recorded sound.

Film is obviously a special case, but perhaps we could try to forget what remakes might mean and enjoy them for what they are - to use something of the approach we take when it comes to the fertile cross-germination of high art when we think of film, an art that, although it may give us pleasure, we are awfully quick to bring low.

Sucker Punch - Film of the Year 2011

2011-12-09T08:20:00.023Z

Sucker Punch is the story of the abuse of women, domestic and institutional historical and modern. It is the story of five girls/young women, and one in particular - Baby Doll, an orphan.

She has been placed in a mental hospital (framed by her step-father for the death of her sister) in which she is destined to receive a lobotomy. As she is about to be operated on, she finds it within herself to move to a new reality - a brothel. Here she is being prepared to have sexual intercourse with a man called the High Roller. In preparation for this meeting, Baby Doll is told that she must learn to dance.

Her dancing transfixes the men in her presence, which hypnotism her new-found friends (also present in the brothel reality) take advantage of to acquire five items that she believes will help them escape. Just as the men are distracted, so are we, for we do not see her dance but are instead led into a splendidly exciting third reality - where the girls fight battles with samurai monsters, zombie nazis and fire-breathing dragons (traditionally male arenas) - through which we see those quests played out.

Here the girls adapt the costumes of exploitation, cutting their outfits into attractive uniforms for battle against it, draining them of associations of filth and breathing soul into body, turning revulsion into revelry and an adventure of freedom. Within seconds I did not see exposed flesh and live toys to be fondled - I only saw them. We revel in them and with them (and of course there is nothing wrong with finding women attractive or with lust).

What is ugly is made beautiful, just as the tomb of a moth secretly becomes the womb of a butterfly. What may tempt some is acknowledged, laid in front of us and then remodelled.

What is more, there is no hatred, no vindictiveness, no revenge. Baby Doll's abusive step-father quickly disappears from the stage. No-one is hounded, humiliated or 'made to pay'. The girls show mercy throughout. Only inner strength and self-respect count. This is not about women versus men but right versus wrong and humanity versus inhumanity. Calling for a reductive label to be put on a film (feminist, chauvinist, degrading or empowering?) pretzel-twists all nuance, delicacy, and personal responsibility and morality out of the equation.

All that matters is that we care. And I did.

Sucker Punch speaks the right language. It places us both in the girls' shoes, pained, uplifted and inspired, and in those of their oppressors. Sucker Punch lives in the midst of what it criticises (the type of person, the type of film).

Are we to be distracted from what is really happening in the brothel, what is really happening in the hospital? Will we allow, like those men in the dark, our soul to be stolen from under our nose, bewitched by these loud noises, these propulsive songs and intense gyrations? These abstractions are used to divert us, to make the story palatable, to turn barren, po-faced lecture (many films about abuse tastefully leave our possible complicity and the gradations of exploitation to one side) into apt demonstration and to mirror the closed doors and drawn curtains behind which awful acts are perpetrated.

There are risks to giving medicine with sugar (to having one's cake and eating it) as some will taste only the sickly sweet and relish the boobs (albeit there are no lascivious or gratuitous shots whatsoever), the lipstick smears and the ejaculatory gunfire. For them the film may be encouragement for 'objectification' or 'mindlessness'. Many critics and viewers have indeed seen the film itself, rather than its situation, as degrading and misogynistic.

What do you see?

Each action is code for another on a different layer, each object has a counterpart elsewhere on a second and third map. Sucker Punch is strong and dark with metaphor, its structure brilliantly interwoven with its message. These are not the tangential puzzles found in Mulholland Drive or Inception. Rather they drive to the very heart of the narrative. There is no obfuscation.

We are exhilarated and moved by camaraderie and solidarity and sacrifice. We are saddened and perturbed as the meaning of what we see is exposed by its echoes. Sucker Punch is massively enjoyable and increasingly hard to watch for what's at stake.

When do these stories begin to break through the screen?

What do the dances in the brothel mean in the hospital - do they stand for therapy or for rape? Does sex with the high roller in the brothel mean a lobotomy in the hospital? There is no easy way out. The realities are not dreams or escapes, but vivid and tangible expressions, paths to clawing back a little independence, dignity and happiness. This is non-escapist entertainment that, cleverly and (I believe) necessarily, looks and sounds like escapist entertainment.

Sucker Punch promotes the significance and power of love, of the mind, of stories, of film, of allegory, and of physical intimacy.

Are we perverts for pulling these curtains back? Or are we exposing something true and rotten?

Fun, intelligent and emotionally powerful. The finest film of the year.

Film and Musicality : The Importance of Tempo, Rhythm, Length and Timing

2011-11-19T15:39:00.006Z

Why we like or dislike a film may rarely be in step with our conscious rationale of why.

Art is an odd spell and few of us know which of its words make us fall into a slumber and which snap us back to reality. The tiniest things can make all the difference - even a pink sweater instead of red...

We talk about liking the plot, the ideas, the look, the atmosphere, the music, the characters, the acting and all the combinations of the above. It is easier to quantify, understand and communicate these bigger and more obvious components of a film, and much harder to pin down the smaller parts that give each film its unique fingerprint.

We must struggle, too, with the idea that films may be made out of different components but that they categorically do not work on us in that way. These components cannot be fully separated once they have been put together.

One of the elements least (consciously) acknowledged when we look over our experience of a film is what we could call the work's 'musicality'. Yes, we may talk about a film being too long or too short, or about it moving too slowly or too quickly, but little else besides.

So what are we discussing when it comes to tempo, rhythm, length and timing?

Shot length / Placement of Cut

Is the shot too short or too long? In a film that sets its heartbeat at 40 a shot that lasts for a few minutes may be perfect. One such is a mesmerising journey on a train at the beginning of Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks.

One shouldn't underestimate the difference that a fraction of a second can make. Intrigue can flip to boredom at a moment's notice.

Is the movement of the camera or movement within the frame demanding a cut? Is the action inappropriately truncated? Has an emotional arc, or a developing ambience been betrayed?

Scene length

Is the scene too short or too long? There will come a point where a scene will outstay its welcome or, on the other hand, stop when we wish it hadn't. This may only be felt as a barely perceptible twinge.

The pace/build of action and plot progression

Is the story being served properly? Is it being allowed to breathe the right air? Is it ahead of itself or behind? Is too much said too early or too late? Is there enough in the film to sustain the time given to it?

What is the mix of quickness and slowness? Is it too programmatic, episodic or set to one particular rhythm?

Time spent on each part of the story or each geographical location

Is too much emphasis placed on certain plot strands?

Let the Right One In, having established the core of the story as the relationship between the two youngsters and courted our interest with its flourishing, wastes a surfeit of time on Eli's quest for blood.

Timing of reactions to actions / Timing of Edits

We must bear in mind that actors aren't actually 'reacting' to what is news to the characters.

Let us take Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull as an example. On multiple occasions people act and react a split second too early or too late, whether through the fault of the acting or of the editing. We are instinctively alarmed by the unnatural.

These are only brief thoughts, a polite pointing in the direction of something camouflaged. The right thing at the right time can produce magic; the right thing at the wrong time, discordance; wrong thing at the wrong time, ruin.

All of these elements form part of an overarching mother rhythm and length. Have we spent enough time extracting the juice of the story - exploring implications, feeling emotions, sensing surroundings...?

It is a mistake to think of a film as having one body with one unchanging rhythm. It changes itself and it changes as we change in response. It is constantly adapting itself to serve the story. You cannot think of a film as being in four-four time or six-eight.

This is not pro the metrics of cinema, which are intriguing as tools to map cinema's mechanical evolution, but of limited use in explaining our idiosyncratic thoughts or sensations. Such-and-such a technique can never guarantee such-and-such an effect. We can say that something made us feel in a certain way but there are no universal conclusions to be drawn.

It is for each of us to feel and, in any way we can, explain our individual responses.

It is useful, nevertheless, to be aware of what may have an influence on the viewer. We should try and engage with the musical in film, that which flits between the scientific, the personal and the philosophical

This musical nature will make or break a film in spite, often, of everything else within it.

Forest of the Hanged (Pӑdurea Spânzuraţilor)

2011-11-09T16:58:00.003Z

Forest of the Hanged opens on a dusty road. Hundreds of soldiers are marching. Suddenly one of them turns around and looks at us. Conscience, a challenge. He has turned against the tide and looked us in the eye, humanising in an instant the whole machine of war.

This 1964 Romanian film is an adaptation of a novel written in 1922 by Liviu Rebreanu. The novel was inspired by the fate of the writer's brother Emil, a soldier who was executed during the First World War for attempted desertion from the Austro-Hungarian army

In the story Emil is Apostol Bologa, a sub-lieutenant. We first meet him as he attends the hanging of a deserter; the look in the dying man's eyes as he swings from the noose will come to haunt Apostol, a man who prides himself on his acute sense of duty.

The Austro-Hungarian Army comprises many different nationalities. This means that, across Europe, from Italy to Russia to Romania, men are being asked to fight against their own people. The General is aware of these temptations and complications. Loyalties are tested : friends asked to condemn friends, countrymen to kill countrymen. The man we saw hanged, Svoboda, was a Czech trying to cross to the Czech side. Now Apostol, a Romanian, has been transferred to the Romanian front.

What will Apostol choose, death for betrayal on one hand or moral death on the other?

Eventually, disgusted by the senseless carnage of war and by his part in the fate of his own kind, Apostol takes a stand and refuses to take part in the show trial of twelve Romanian farmers.

In the midst of his turmoil he had found love with a Romanian girl Ilona, the only purity still sparkling in the quagmire. Nonetheless, unable to live with himself, he chooses to die with his soul untouched : he is caught crossing to the Romanian side, an act for which he will pay with his life.

Apostol is taken off in a cart to be hanged. He is taken away smiling. They ride under the trees, from whose leafless branches hang dozens of men like strange fruit. Here is the forest of the hanged:

* * *

Forest of the Hanged, directed by Liviu Ciulei, is an especially evocative film. The characters not only debate their philosophical dilemmas but live them with every fibre of their beings. The world they inhabit is a dirty one in all senses of the word. It is hard to get out of the mud and find your way from darkness to light.

The black and white photography is wonderful and runs deep with rich shades. Two examples : the carriage surrounded by a wall of old shoes in which Apostol's friend Muller has made a home is a fantastical creation. Even in a black and white film it looks golden; the beautiful embraces that Apostol and Ilona share are bathed in a stunningly clear, virginal, light. Images such as these recall those of Andrei Tarkovsky's Ivan's Childhood. Both films place particular emphasis on quality and tone of light.

In the opening scenes of the film the camera seems too near to, or too far from, the action as if trying to get its bearings. Throughout the film it glides (for example into and out of mirrors - symbolic of reflection and introspection) but also turns violently or even swoons...sometimes the director will leave a part of the image deliberately out of focus. What, I think, helps make Forest of the Hanged so involving is that the film has both rawness and elegance to it; visualising our worse and better natures.

We also come to find subtle religious allusions. The film makes an apostle of Emil by calling him Apostol. Furthermore, why, we may ask ourselves, are there twelve Romanian insubordinates?

Apostol, though, is no saint. He values some lives (Romanian), above others. Muller, on the other hand, finds all killing wrong and teases Apostol, who wants to be transferred away from his quandary to Italy, with biting sarcasm : “On the Italian front there are no brothers....only here there are brothers”.

With so much degradation and death around them, and when suffering reduces us to our basic, naked, human characteristics (those we all share), such discrimination on the basis of nationality suddenly seems ludicrous.

The film puts this across in quite brilliant fashion. At one point Apostol is asked to act as interpreter for three Romanian prisoners. All the characters in the film speak in Romanian. However, none of them, apart from Apostol (a Romanian), can understand the Romanian characters. In this way the director underlines the idea that the differences between sides and the reasons for lack of understanding (or indeed for war itself) might as well be imaginary (or at least are intentionally exaggerated). The distinctions between nations are confused and blurred again: Muller is heard musing to himself “Mozart...a great composer”, to which his companion responds: “Ah, one of your Germans”.

With Apostol's fate secured, Ilona comes to bring him his last meal. All dressed in black, she prepares the little table as if it were an altar or a grave. She is honouring and mourning him. They look at each other without saying a word and eat. What caring and dignity...

A soldier stands watch over them. He says that she begged him to let her see Apostol. He gave in. “We are people, aren't we?”, he explains. What beauty...

It is easy to see why Forest of the Hanged is considered one of Romanian Cinema's greatest achievements gained international renown in 1965 when Liviu Ciulei won the best director prize at Cannes.

Words as Visual Storytellers

2011-10-21T13:57:00.005+01:00

One rarely come across discussions of the visual manipulation of words and letters in film. I am not referring here to the symbolism of naming characters or places (to denote personality, role, destiny and so forth) or of the sometimes unorthodox presentation of subtitles and unvoiced emotions (e.g. Night Watch or Crank 2 : High Voltage, Scott Pilgrim)

I am talking about putting words (and their constituent letters) on screen and altering them or presenting them in such a way as to add to, or comment on, the story. There is something in the world inhabited by the character, a world whose fabric, imbued with a new and nascent reality (effected by the character) communicates directly with us. An aside, if you will.

As a start, here are three examples I have mentioned in passing before. The first comes from Superman Returns. Superman is taken to hospital through the transparent doors of an operating theatre called "Trauma 1".

We see the name only from the other side, from which it reads "I AMUART". The film is about how the "father becomes the son" and "the son becomes the father". It is also about the ties of life between God and man and how we are made in his image. All that he is we can be. I AM U ART. I am, you are:

Click to enlarge

In a flash that may pass us by, much is encapsulated (like the inscription over church doors) with inconspicuous ease.

Olivier Assayas, in his film Demonlover, uses the same subtle technique, that of simply flipping a word back to front. The purpose this time is to reveal, to those sharp enough to notice, a hidden truth and an imminent danger. Diane is a conniving woman in a conniving business that thrives on back-stabbing. Repairing to an aeroplane restroom, she prepares to drug a colleague's (a superior) tub of water. She thinks, and we think, that she has the upper hand but as she plunges the syringe into it we see that she is:

Evidently Evian spelt backwards is naive, but flipped over visually the clue isn't at all obvious. A little work is needed to decipher this piece of dramatic irony.

A third example, found in a chase scene in G.I. Joe The Rise of Cobra (full analysis of the scene here), does not alter the word seen on screen but springs it into the frame at the perfect moment.

The scene involves Duke (part of a team of good guys) chasing Ana (and her team of bad guys) as she and her partners in crime attempt to blow up the Eiffel Tower. Duke and Ana used to be together and used to love each other, though we are led to believe that those feelings still linger beneath a new animosity. The chase through the streets of Paris (the city of love) can be seen as a variation on a romantic chase.

Duke gets to Ana just too late, as she already launched a missile at the tower. The missile's load, crucially, works over time, eating away at the metal. It can be stopped by a remote control that Ana wears around her waist.

Ana, fleeing from Duke, boards a craft. Duke leaps onto it and quickly reaches out to press the button strapped to her waist. The physical contact is brusque and Ana's gasp can be read as both one of frustration and gratification.

He reaches to push the button...

Ana gasps.

The word that tells us everything both in terms of the bomb and Duke and Ana's future is on the screen of the remote control in bright red letters. The bomb and she have been :

The same double entendre, I suggest, could not have been done verbally.

The reconciliation is not complete, though, as the Eiffel Tower is already falling and beyond help.

* * *

Now for the transformation of Selina Kyle into Catwoman in Batman Returns. As she undergoes this change she does many outrageous things : gulps down cartons of milk, stabs her soft toys and sets fire to her doll's house.

She does one thing, though, that is a throwaway gesture. On one of her walls she has the words "Hello There" written in neon lights. Sashaying through her apartment she nonchalantly flicks at these letters, smashing two of the bulbs. She doesn't seem aware of what she is doing. We though are shown a long shot from outside the window of a new message she has spelt out that sums up the fieriness of her metamorphosis : "Hell Here".

The next example comes from an episode of the television series Moonlighting called "The Dream Sequence Always Rings Twice". One of the main characters, David, is a self-satisfied sort. In the dream of the title he is a horn player. We see him sitting on a window sill..."I always play my horn with my shirt off, late at night, by an open window next to a flashing neon light, I know I look good that way".

Across from the window is a neon "HOTEL" sign. The camera slowly moves back and then stops. Now, next to this apparent paragon of manliness, with a couple of letters now obscured, is the flashing word : HOT.

One final example, not so much of manipulation but of subtle and amusing visual commentary, comes from Jean-Luc Godard's Une Femme est Une Femme. A young woman, Angela (played by Anna Karina), is waiting on the street at night. Before we see her, we are shown a large neon sign affixed to a building which we presume houses a beauty shop. The sign is in the shape of an arrow pointing down. On it is the word "Beaute".

We pan down the arrow...

...which points almost straight down at Angela:

Melancholia - Lars Von Trier

2011-10-10T17:53:00.003+01:00

Contains spoilers

Justine suffers from depression. She is detached. She is sad. She is mournful. She feels things both deeper and not at all. She is a foreign body weighed down by the world. Her emptiness has such mass, this black bile.

At first things simply happen to her: a wedding she cannot delight in, a job that follows her all the way to the reception. As the night draws in she withdraws from the festivities and, through apathetic bitterness, takes control. Her active disinterest makes her husband see that their marriage is already null ("What did you expect?"). She erupts in a vicious parting shot at her selfish boss. She doesn't want the rituals, the constraints of position. She doesn't want the company. These are the death throes of social niceties. This is the casting off of artifice.

The next day, with the reception over, she falls deeper into depression, unable to eat or wash or even get out of bed. She seems defeated.

As night turns to day and as our focus moves from the disastrous wedding to the threat of looming planetary catastrophe, Justine moves (slowly, as if across the night sky) from mourning...to acceptance...to complicity.

Somehow knowing her fate, she succumbs to it. Nay, welcomes it. Her and it are magnetised and in unison. Melancholia has destroyed her life and now it will end it. She, suffering for too long, believes that the world is "evil" and that "no-one will miss it". Before Justine's depression appeared like mourning. Now she stands in a sublime and calm detachment. There is nothing to lose.

Her sister Claire, meanwhile, seeing the end coming, trembles from her very soul. The film's power comes from these two opposing forces - halting panic and the dark eye of peacefulness.

* * *

It is wrenching to see Justine suffer. It is painful to see her tangled in the grey roots of melancholy and to see Claire's passionate love for her sister disguised in passionate loathing : "sometimes I hate you so much". Cynicism and nothingness show the opposite. It is amusing and triumphant to hear her scorn her sister's tasteful plans to celebrate annihilation with a glass of wine on the patio ("I think it's a piece of shit").

And it is overwhelming, all of it. Moving, battering and crushing. Wagner's Tristan and Isolde prelude (the only non-diegetic music in the film) swells aloofly, comforting, teasing, epic, romantic and tender. It is played in its entirety to begin the film and from then on dipped into; parts are introduced, played and replayed, the canvas repainted with an echo of those first images.

The key to a brilliant film can often be the spectacle of something strange, new and extraordinary witnessed by characters whose every movement, decision, and every uttered syllable makes perfect sense. Even though no reason is given for Justine's state of mind, we understand. It all becomes terribly clear.

Top: Melancholia, Albrecht Durer

Above : Melancholy, Paul Gauguin

Toy Story 3

2011-09-22T11:37:00.004+01:00

Saying how you think a film could be improved isn't arrogant or disrespectful. People are more comfortable with 'it's too sentimental' or 'it's too long' than 'it should be less sentimental' and 'I would make it shorter'. If you have judgement then you should be constructive and offer an alternative vision.

The basic story of Toy Story 3 - a child grows up and goes to university; what will happen to his toys? - is a good one. There are a number of things you can do with this premise.

Toy Story 3 takes the first step towards something interesting and enriching just as the first step of Up, the home lifted from the ground by a cloud of balloons, offered so much promise. Would we see challenging things for children, new things, truly breathless things? No. We see not much more than shortcuts to the surface of emotion, to a sadness and a reflection that dries out as quickly as the tears.

Firstly, I think that it's a shame that neither Andy nor Bonnie, to whom he gives his toys at the end, ever discover that the toys are alive. How would they treat them? How would the toys act? Given that the toys are meant to be representations of people or at least types of people, then the revelation that they are alive would open up a raft of possibilities. Could they ever be disposed of or left lying around? What of their individualism, seeing as there are, for example, "100 million just like" Barbie? If Andy knew about the toys the story would become one about the responsibilities that come with being an adult. It wouldn't be just about moving on or leaving childish things behind. The themes we are given are rigged. We know he won't take his toys to university.

A third film should give creators some leeway to try new variations once the basis of the story has been established - to improvise on the foundational chords of the first two. Trilogies tend to either return to a starting point, with new light shed upon an old order, or opened to a new future and a new order.

Each Toy Story film is essentially the same as the last – the toys are separated from Andy. Toy Story 3 ends differently but with the beginning of the same story : Andy is reincarnated as Bonnie. “To infinity and beyond”, toys never die. Will these miniature Peter Pans really go through these upheavals of death and renewal for eternity? They never really grow up.

Interesting avenues again briefly appear...

Dragged towards a hellish furnace on a pile of trash, the toys look to their erstwhile enemy Lotso to help them. He climbs to the button, saying he wants to stop the machinery, and then runs away leaving them to their fate with the words : "Where's your kid now, Sheriff?"

It sounds like 'Where's your God now?'

Earlier Lotso, "the evil bear who smells of strawberries", shouted : "Think you're special? You're a piece of plastic, you were made to be thrown away".

What if he had said 'You're flesh and blood, you were made to die'?

These troubling ideas (too troubling for children if laid out in the open quite so clearly) and incidents end up going nowhere as the film returns to the antiseptic world (no insects, or dust) of being played with. Their minds are not opened by danger, by exposure to new ways of living, or by the bonds they make with each other. All the toys want is to be part of someone else's story, such as the opening chase over a crumbling railway bridge. They are happiest when floppy and submissive. Mrs Potato Head “deserve[s] respect”, she says, because she has “over 30 accessories” and not because she is a living thing independent of her owner. The toys do not mature. They don't even look scratched or beaten up with age (which would help put across how time makes them obsolete). I suppose, as a throwaway joke, it is funny to hear a toy say that it improvises its role, but it is also sad. They wear the same expression as they are flung about, made and forced to smile. And they like it.

Toy Story 3's 'darkness' (Lotso's prison camps, destruction by fire) is nihilistic. Critics have said it is an allegory for Communism or Socialism or even the Holocaust. Does it make the film more worthwhile if you can constipate out a link between its simple story of bullying, control and violence to something else more 'adult' or 'intellectual' or politically significant? There are no specifics in the film that justify these parallels, let alone illuminate the story through them.

Nothing comes of the darkness. It is only there to scare and terrify kids. It is a black hole. It isn't mitigated by imagination or transfigured by the good of the characters or of the world.*

* * *

What would have been interesting in a story about people growing up is if, just as Andy realises that he can live without his mother, the toys realise that they can live without Andy (or any humans at all for that matter). What if he had gone to his box of toys at the end and they weren't there? What if they had taken the same step into adulthood?

I understand that they are toys with a toy outlook (and it is admirable that they are a little more than stand-ins for people) but, when so human in other respects (and we are invited to empathise with them), their actions seem eternally childlike, their existence depressing and their minds stuck on original factory setting. If they are to stay on this smiley treadmill, the film would need to be changed quite significantly to properly grasp at all this would or could entail.

It is charming that Chuckles the toy clown has a tag from her owner that reads “My heart belongs to Daisy” but it appears that it actually does. The toys cannot just be. They are unable to form a proper family together, one that gives them meaning and security, not without the benevolent Parent / Guardian / Owner / Friend / Companion / God above. All this is a little abstract for young children. There is nothing that they can relate to, from the toys point of view, as they grow up.

This would work better if the toys were more literally 'given life' by their owners. It would work better if a good owner had good toys and a bad one bad toys (touching on nature / nurture) but bully Sid in Toy Story's nightmarish toys turn out to be perfectly friendly. The fact that the toys are more than what they were made to be makes it even more disappointing that the protagonist toys are not allowed to make a break of their own into the adult world.

Although the toys are saddened that Andy may not want them any more, they are never angry at him. Their loyalty is almost perfect. They wish for the joy, enlightenment and fulfilment that comes from being played with. They never truly turn against him.

It reminds me of Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ. Jesus has profound doubts about whether he is the son of God and about what God may want from him. He rails at God but never, not once, doubts that he exists. It is those hard yards, much like the ones avoided in Toy Story 3 (turning against Andy or Andy realising that they are alive), that would have made the narrative stronger and deeper. Where is that lack of faith and certainty that one would expect? Will they reject their Gods for a life of self-made fresh-grown morality? The little green aliens end up controlling the claw that they worship but can't make anything of this discovery of the mechanics of the world.

* * *

In Up the antagonist Muntz fell to his death from a Zeppelin. In Wall E human beings were polluting, obese babies. In Cars the fundamentals of the human character were depicted in the automobiles – farting. Toy Story 3 continues the trend of mean-spiritedness. For a second or two it looked as if Lotso was going to help the toys and turn over a new leaf. Instead, despite being told that his former owner replaced him (the start of his bitterness) precisely because she loved him and missed him, and despite being saved by Woody from the trash compactor the film would not let him be good. Evil cannot be transformed. In fact irredeemable Evil exists, children, and deserves to be tied to the front of a truck for flies to splatter into him for the rest of his life (which is neverending, don't forget). Stuff the stuffed bully.

Why? What if Andy had taken Lotso to College? It's a thought.

What I did enjoy, in Toy Story 3, how children like Bonnie are seen as givers of meaning, as nurturing, as magical (the way she strokes Jessie's cheek when she receives her). It is a shame that that goodliness was not extended to everyone or everything. A film doesn't need a message or a moral (and, yes, destruction can be fun) but does it need a negative one? Defeating evil is one thing, but revelling in your victory with schadenfreude is quite another. Who knows what the film-makers meant but this element of the story leaves a sour taste.

I enjoyed how Mrs Potato Head could leave her eye somewhere else and still see through it remotely. I enjoyed how Mr Potato Head could stay alive, his mind and soul somehow intact, with his eyes ears and mouth embedded in a tortilla. The latter is perhaps the only flash of imagination, of something that makes you giggle or sends shivers down the spine.

I have always thought that Pixar's films, and many of the new breed of animated films, are schizophrenic. Half the film is aimed over children's heads at the adults who they know are accompanying them. The other half is the simplest and most banal 'kids' stuff' whose progression can be guessed after five minutes. At times, parents and their children are watching two separate films. What is wrong with a children's film for children? Why do we need any innuendo, or meaningless pop cultural shout-outs, or tedious and strange riffs on Ken's 'girliness'? Something can be wholesome without being safe.

A good story for children is a good story for anyone : Aesop, Roald Dahl, Kipling, C.S.Lewis...I think of animated films like the Danish animation Valhalla or America's own Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs or anything from Studio Ghibli. They are fun and clever, excting and enthralling for children and adults on the same level.

Toy Story 3 isn't fun or funny. I think that the gags are too obvious. What is most disappointing is how predictable it is. Once a ball is set rolling down a hill, you can never predict exactly where it will go. But Pixar can. Once the story starts it is only ever going in one direction...

*In a way the hands of the film-makers' are tied, as they cannot fully follow through on all the implications of life and death that occur to us because we are in a children's film. We are just left with unnecessary dread.

A Fearful America : Heroes and The Village

2011-09-03T19:12:00.003+01:00

After years of doubt and struggle Claire Bennett, with television cameras following her into the night sky, climbs to the top of a Ferris wheel. At this moment our eyes, the eyes of the world, are fixed on one young woman. She isn't hiding herself away any longer, nor any part of what makes her her and what makes her different. Is it desperation or is it hope? What does she mean by "people never change"? Does she think that she (and other 'specials' like her) can live in the open as part of a harmonious society?

Standing on top of the wheel as if on top of the world, she spreads out her arms and jumps. She hasn't given up on us. She has taken a giant leap for mankind.

Will they, will we, welcome her? And so Heroes ends on a note of ferocious optimism.

M Night Shyamalan's The Village tells of a place isolated from the world, set back from modern civilisation. Its elders were caused great pain and grief by society. Their hearts were blackened by the "towns". Out of fear they built the village to "protect innocence" and to shield the young from suffering. In an effort to keep them safe, they tell their children stories of creatures, monsters lurking in the woods that separate their homes from the towns.

One day one of the younger villagers, Lucius, falls ill and Ivy, who is to be his wife, fearlessly travels through the woods to the towns to get medicine. She is blind. Beyond the boundary of the village and beyond the woods, she meets a man from the towns. She is shocked to find "kindness" in his voice. "I did not expect that," she says.

She arrives at Lucius' bedside with the medicine. Has she brought hope back with her from this encounter? Can she conquer the fear of those who have only pessimism and mourning to comfort them? Will she lead them out to a communion with the world?

In both stories an older generation has control over how a younger generation experiences the world. They keep them from dangers real and perceived and jealously guard the secrets that maintain illusions. These tales concern responsibility and power - the power of special abilities, the power of being a parent and the responsibilities inherent. The Village and Heroes show how genuine concern allied to power and opportunity can lead to a possessiveness as damaging (in Heroes children were even experimented on, given injections of a formula meant to give powers - for example Company co-founder Angela Petrelli to her son Nathan) as that which they seek to protect their charges from.

They keep them fragile, using fear, perpetuating fear.

Earth-mover Samuel, the embittered visionary of Heroes' Season 4, gathers 'specials' in a travelling circus where they can hide in plain sight. He talks of founding a "homeland". He has created an America within America, one like the one it is, or was, meant to be. Tent-poles and archways are decorated with American flags. His brood of misfits, of foreigners, of aliens recalls the nations who first came to form the America we know now.

Edward Walker, founder and chief elder of The Village's community, has also forged an America within America and set it in the late 19th Century (1897 is written on the headstone of a newly buried villager) whose values and behaviours, we infer, he believes offers a healthier template for living.

They have both retreated in and from fear and harsh reality to comfort and to a narrative - of gifted circus performers and of villagers in a benign and gay 19th Century that may never have existed.

However, whereas Edward and the men and women who have collaborated in his project want to completely remove themselves, Samuel plans to eventually burst out of the womb and to confront, defeat and ultimately use fear against the world entire rather than benumb his little nation with illusory comfort. He wants to show the world his powers and, by revealing what he and they can do, force acceptance, and the opportunity for life, liberty and the fruits of labour, through fear.

Two Ways of Facing Fear - Edward Walker and Samuel

Claire is different. She exposes herself and her kind, in those last moments of the series, not through a threat but a prostration (landing face first). Her stare into the camera, and into the homes of potentially millions of Americans, is part challenge, yes, but part hesitant reaching out.

How real is the danger that causes these characters to fear and to act in these ways? If fear can ever be fully rationalised, what are at its beginnings?

The elders of The Village reacted to real acts of violence, mostly murder, that affected their families. A TV screen appears near the end of the film that tells of a girl's body being found and soldiers lost in Afghanistan. This is not a representation of the world, from the Director's or our point of view, that is skewed to the negative. This is what the world is like. What is key is that the villagers are the usually unseen victims of the stories we watch. They try to withdraw to the fiction with which all we see of distant and unknown people is glazed.

The fear they teach to the younger members of their community is all-encompassing (creatures, people) and no less real to them for being half-based in fiction. Perhaps it is apt that where make-believe stands in for fact (or grows from it - the elders talk of rumours of creatures that were the basis for the full-grown horrors they visit on the young), Lucius will conclude a plea to go into the woods with "The End". This could be their route to salvation, too, as the mind of a young person is moulds and is receptive to the magical and transformative nature of fantasy.

The people of Heroes face the threat of murderous collector of abilities Sylar. In Season 3 the threat is wider, as they are hunted and rounded up (tied up, orange jumpsuits, no charge, flown abroad - all echoes of Guantanamo Bay) by the Government. Noah, Claire's father, knows about the cruel and brutal experimentation undertaken on Elle (who can create electricity) by her own father. The 'specials' and their families know too of potential or embryonic futures witnessed and reported by time travellers Peter and Hiro. These futures involve being driven underground (by what levels of society we are not sure), war and quasi-apocalyptic destruction. However, how a normal person in a position to shun or embrace, would react to a 'special' in their midst is largely unknown. The heroes will occasionally show an individual what they can do, when it is absolutely necessary, and the thrill of showing off and of danger that they seem to take from it can be extrapolated to the ecstasy and dread exposure they may feel if their secrets were blown onto the wind once and for all.

The authorities in Heroes are fearful too. Wary of those who are different, especially given Sylar's initial killing spree, they seek to hide them away in prisons or, in a possible future, cure them with injections. These authorities are led (The Company, Pinehearst), or encouraged into action (the Government in Season 3), by 'specials' themselves out of fear of harming or being harmed. Power and, one could say, a healthy dose of self-loathing (more on this anon) would lead these institutions to become more and more destructive.

Those working for the Government, made aware of 'dangerous' specials by another of their 'kind', Nathan Petrelli, manipulate them as patsies, as false-flags to rally support for more stringent actions against what they would begin to paint to their superiors as a group of terrorists. Matt Parkman (who can read minds) is drugged and sent out into Washington with a bomb strapped to him. The chains of imprisoned Tracy Strauss, who is able to freeze objects, are loosened so that she will escape and cause untold (and convenient) damage before being apprehended again.

In The Village Ivy, as she is about to journey to the towns, is made aware that the creatures are only men in costume. When she is subsequently stalked by Noah (a simpleton apparently driven to insanity by his knowledge of the "farce") now dressed as the monster, her testimony give the elders a chance to perpetuate the myth and to bolster the boundaries of the village.

These are the tactics that some in America and beyond have suspected their governments guilty of - exaggeration, opportunism and borderline falsity - using consciously or unconsciously to gain backing against terror through terror. That of course is the whole set-up of the village - a fake ring of danger used against a larger danger beyond. Again, fiction built on fact and used to embellish and strengthen it.

Excuses and Fear used against Fear:

Matt Parkman primed to explode (above)

and

Noah dressed as a Creature

Sometimes those in power are the terrorists themselves. Linderman in Heroes advocates the use of a nuclear explosion in New York City to bring people together (and to achieve other desired results) : "a united sense of hope couched in a united sense of fear".

Fear coming from actual experience can grow larger upon closer scrutiny (dwelling in grief and hate) like the shadow of a menacing shape lit closer and closer. It is fuelled by ignorance, by a lack of confidence and by pessimism.

Perhaps one can reduce it all to age or to the battle between optimism and pessimism. The older generation of Heroes and The Village have, respectively, gone off the straight path and given up on it. They are set in their ways. They are afraid to live. They cannot imagine a life different to their own. Their fear is ossified. The elders tell the children to eradicate the colour red from the village as it attracts the creatures ("those we don't speak of" - a classic occupatio technique). Red is blood. Pain attracts more pain and fear multiplies exponentially.

It is no surprise that those who are immortal or capable of healing in Heroes, such as Adam Monroe, who has seen so much suffering, so many lives come and go. the same chronic illness afflicting mankind, that their pessimism transmogrifies into desperation and misanthropy on a terrifying scale. Adam wants to wipe out humanity with a virus and Linderman, as has been discussed, wants to wipe the slate for a new world order. Only a cataclysm will do. Claire too, herself (according to Sylar) undying, flirts with militancy and rage in her darkest hours (at one point she stands in front of an oncoming express train having pondered whether she is "even human").

And hope? Can they truly achieve freedom and tolerance?

The natural curiosity and will to be independent of youth are bedfellows of hope. They want to dig up secrets and to test limits and it is this lust for discovery and truth, for finding out who they are, that is the motor for both narratives. It will look to shatter the skeleton of fear once and for all.

As has been discussed, fear offers children a thrill. The boys in The Village stand with their backs to the dark woods and see how long they can go before becoming too scared. The young here can achieve baby-step victories over fear, dipping their toes in the water. Only Ivy and Claire will eventually dive in, no longer fearful of drowning.

The younger they are the more optimistic they seem. Candace, in Heroes, is a woman who can make you see what she wants you to. We are led to believe that she is a fat woman who was most probably bullied and abused. She appears to us and the other characters as thin and pretty. Candace talks to Micah, a young boy, about the planned nuclear explosion will "heal the world". Micah replies defiantly: "I didn't know it was sick". In The Village Ivy, blind, says "I see the world, just not as you do".

If you are at peace with yourself, your circumstances and your abilities then you view the world bathed in a forgiving light. This is because the world isn't Us vs Them or the U(nited) S(tates) vs Them, whether them is other races or nations or beliefs or physical attributes. Us is them. Heroes is firmly rooted in this idea. Those who are normally 'them', the odd, the 'specials', are our protagonists, our eyes and ears. They are our heroes.

So, for these people hidden away physically or hidden away within themselves, is the world good or is it bad? That is the pivot upon which their actions swing. Can fear be conquered?

In other words, is it a world worth taking a chance on?

If I, Claire, am good and hopeful then the world can be too. If I, Ivy, have trust and love, then the world will move for that love. There are many obstacles for those haunted by loss and those onto whom grudges and insecurities are passed. But life cannot be retreated from. That society you run from will grow around you from under your feet. Out of fear came hope. In The Village a bloodied knife in Lucius' chest forced courage to the fore. In Heroes when her mother burnt the house down Claire needed to be able to heal, she did. When Becky, hunted by The Company, hid under the bed and didn't want to be found, she turned invisible. When Daphne was struck down by cerebral palsy she was given the gift to run. And faster than the wind.

Shameful Criticism

2011-08-26T16:18:00.008+01:00

There is a mean streak in film criticism or, more specifically, film reviews. It isn't enough for some people to say that a film is bad or unsuccessful. Some reviewers are negative with a force that seems personal. They hurl insults that are over the top and insinuations that are baseless.

Reading certain reviews it would be hard to believe that a bad film is not an attack on someone's God-given right to honest-to-goodness entertainment. They are paid to watch films and, when presented with a poor film, act like a spoilt child whose lollipop turned out to be bitter, not sweet.

Every release provides an opportunity for these critics to bend their basest instincts into vitriol. At the merest encouragement a review of a film can turn into a writer's showcase, the more creative and insulting the description of the failure, the more heroic the reviewer. It's a see-saw : the film goes down, the critic goes up. A few may even feel rigged, exaggerated, in bad faith.

There's nothing wrong with saying a film is bad. You cannot prove somebody wrong in their opinion. What we want is sober, erudite and constructive appreciation. So much of what we have (in the mainstream, linked to on sites like rottentomatoes) even sometimes from the more lauded, is an eloquently embroidered "it sucks!". Even the best, most level-headed, critics can indulge in snarky puns on the film's title. The problem is in approach and attitude.

And it is spreading...

"Marshall deserves credit for putting the "show" back into the Pirates business. But, let's face it, he's polishing a giant turd"

"[Sucker Punch] proves that while masturbating over your cast may not make you blind, it can impair directorial vision."

"...a film that unspools as a limp, cynical attempt to replicate the nuance-rich tapestry of her 2003 gem Lost in Translation..."

"Yes, Sofia has unfairly had to live with the embarrassment of being blamed for the failure of The Godfather Part 3, but it wasn’t just her fault. The entire movie and casting were terrible. As payback for that crippling humiliation, Francis Coppola has given his daughter a career as a writer-director."

"I simply hated The Last Airbender and I know I'm not alone in this. This is one of those times where hate may not be a sharp enough word for such wasted potential. In the right hands, this could have been something special. Instead, it was in Shyamalan's hands, and if this film is any indication, he didn't wash them after using the restroom."

Jean-Luc Godard - Women in Close Up 1959-2010

2011-08-15T14:10:00.000+01:00

If a film-maker has a singular voice, each frame will be as good as a signature and each image like a self-portrait.

Some believe that the Leonardo Da Vinci's Mona Lisa is a self-portrait. In that spirit here is a portrait of Jean-Luc Godard (and his films) via the faces of his actresses - from Charlotte et Veronique in 1959 to Film Socialisme in 2010.

Music: Rachmaninov prelude op.23 no.5, played by Sergei Prokofiev

WWE: World Wrestling Entertainment

2011-07-15T14:17:00.073+01:00

There has perhaps been no more consistently inventive or enjoyable television in the past 15 years than World Wrestling Entertainment’s flagship shows Raw and Smackdown.

In what other programme would an Olympic gold medallist spray milk at his opponents out of a fire hose and another week perform a 'moonsault' from 15 feet off the ground? In what other show would the millionaire owner and his family participate as fearless fighters and offer themselves up as the chief villains of the piece? In what other show would you find the most childish of behaviour and the most brutal of beatdowns?

It is funny, clever and exciting. Most importantly it is ridiculous.

Professional wrestling is one hell of an odd bird. If a limousine is dropped from a crane, we could call it Action. If two enemies mock each other, Comedy. If a daughter slaps a mother, we call it Soap Opera. It is more often than not lazy and imprecise to diagnose genres, especially if the art in question isn't trying to follow or break conventions. The WWE isn’t a mishmash of types. It reminds you of other and varied things (Saturday Night Live, Dallas, anything and everything) but it is its own thing. There really is nothing like it.

North American professional wrestling (as opposed to Japanese professional wrestling, which goes without storyline set-ups, albeit retaining character styles and types) is fundamentally about so-called feuds, compelling confrontations over honour or ego or title belts. These rivalries are the bread-and-butter of the WWE (the finest of all wrestling organisations) and even extend to the snide banter between commentators who will sometimes side with particular competitors. For feuds, the build-up is as important as the fight that takes place in the ring. These are the speeches (promos), the challenges, the interviews, the backstage sketches that create personality and motivation. Resentment, rage, disdain, negative chemistry. Hype.

The WWE avails itself of many different tones and colours; types of humour, of character, of plot or of match.

There are hard-hitting brawls with very little complication or variation of 'moves'. Then there are intricate tussles that involve speed, holds, a repertoire of moves and counter-moves that are amateur wrestling (in which a few wrestlers have a grounding) sprinkled with gold-dust.

The first kind are more 'fights', so to speak, and can degenerate into ultra-violent encounters (often sanctioned as 'no disqualification' matches) involving sledgehammers and steel chairs, ludicrous considering this is meant to be a real organisation with real rules. In these matches intelligence is used to be sly or underhand or vicious. The second kind is often known as 'technical' and intelligence here is knowing how to get the upper hand with a flick of a wrist, the flip of a body or a perfectly applied submission hold. These are more 'believable' as true battles for supremacy.

There are spectacular moments in the ring too - leaps off the top rope, a ladder, or onto the perennially cursed, and crushed, Spanish Announce Table. A good mixture of these in-ring ingredients, as with those outside, makes for a satisfying two-hour programme.

The WWE doesn't want for creativity or fantasy. The Undertaker has made a habit of 'dying' and then rising again and Mick Foley played three characters (Mankind, Cactus Jack and Dude Love). Once two of them discussed whether the third, Cactus, should emerge from the shared psyche. In the past couple of years the dashing and narcissistic Cody Rhodes has suffered a broken nose and, believing himself hideous, shuns the camera's gaze. Elsewhere CM Punk has led a Straight-Edge Society to save people from the dangers of drink and drugs. The entire roster has recently been menaced too by the Nexus, a group of rookie wrestlers who announced their wish to rule the WWE by dismantling the ring and anyone who would stand against them ("You're either Nexus or against us").

A few years ago the WWE began to take the edge of its violence (no blood), profanity and provocation. Thankfully the dirty side (going as far as necrophilia and hanging in their two darkest hours) has been washed away with a new commitment to a PG certificate. Intensity of combat and pushing the envelope artistically need not entail cussing, sex and gore. Going specifically after a younger fanbase should eventually help creatively as well as financially; restrictions are the mother of invention.

There are many elements that need to convince and work in harmony to put across such wild concepts as WWE offers. The person striking or speaking needs his opponent to 'sell' surprise or anger towards words or appropriate physical discomfort towards blows, just like in any drama or fiction on television. You won't look good unless the person you are fighting wants you to. The commentary team must do justice to the larger-than-life goings on, to imprint them in our minds as incredible ("Oh my GAWD!") and credible ('he's focusing on the injured right knee'). The live crowd, in fact, plays the biggest part of all with cheers, boos, signs, shock and the accumulated energy they bring to the arena. If we see people excited then we will be too.

The crowd is both audience and performer (unscripted, even if they know their role) for the second audience sitting at home.

The men and women who perform in the WWE are athletes, actors, choreographers and creators of personas with distinct backgrounds, ideologies, catchphrases and gimmicks. Professional wrestling in its mainstream American guise is the craft of an all-round entertainer. It is the craft of an athlete training and preparing not for competition with others but, with the same dedication, preparing to meet the demands of themselves, their audience and their art.

No matter how much you work to minimise injury, the almost daily trans-American schedule is punishing on the body and the mind. This toll has been blamed in some parts for a couple of high profile tragedies that have befallen wrestlers in the past decade. It takes courage. Things can go wrong. Fake or not, the human body remains flesh and bone.

Some of the performers are best in the ring. Some are better at talking. Some are better at telling a story non-verbally, of nuancing a physical and emotional dynamic in the ring. Some shine at being mean, some at being heroic. The trait that most characters share is arrogance. They think they deserve a shot at success, they think they're the smartest, the coolest. the most righteous.

A number of these personas cleave closely to the person at their heart. Several of the storylines of corporate machinations or of love or of poisonous grudges originate in the real. The actual purchase of WCW by WWE owner Vince McMahon was dramatised and spun, with his son Shane buying it from under him out of spite. Conversely, stories can bleed off-screen and outside the fictional sphere. Triple H and Stephanie McMahon were married in the show and then subsequently fell in love and wed in real life (they are still married in the show too). In the past few months CM Punk, rumoured to be annoyed at how he was being treated by management and dissatisfied with the direction the company was taking, was allowed the freedom to give an in-story speech bemoaning the self-same things.

When you buy a Rey Mysterio or Stone Cold Steve Austin toy, you are buying a character and a real person all at once. When you buy a toy Thor, you aren't in the same way purchasing Chris Hemsworth along with a Norse God.

Indeed, performers have been known to get caught up in their personas to the extent that they are reluctant to, or downright refuse to, relinquish a title (let's not forget that success in the story is success and money for the 'actor'). How far an artistic persona represents the artist him or herself is a debate that causes much consternation and confusion. The line that separates the two is one that we sense and understand instinctively, taking into account the conventions of each genre.

There is a sliding scale. In some arts the two overlap more than others , at least according to unwritten rules. An actor is not attacked for his character's deeds. The ideas and viewpoints represented in a book may or may not be espoused by the writer unmediated. In music we feel that the persona is more transparent. Do rappers speak as themselves or are their lyrics filtered through a character? In the last case a defence of violent proclamations seems, rightly or wrongly, harder to make.

Professional wrestling plays with the balance and understanding of real/fiction and the WWE does this more brilliantly than any other television. As a matter of fact it exposes the extent to which real and fiction in these arenas and elsewhere are in opposition at all. If there is an accidental or a fleetingly purposeful revelation of that which cannot be fully understood or explained within the story-frame (known as Kayfabe) an audience educated in switching between viewership registers will easily put it to one side. Those who are curious about the world is put together or negotiated would consider behind-the-scenes and on-stage as forging a newer, stronger and more vital 'reality'.

This isn't like Moonlighting or The Simpsons (or Shakespeare's soliloquys, or the Marx Brothers) where characters break the fourth wall. The WWE is constantly giving and taking from the audience , seeing what absurdity it can get away with, adjusting plots as they are unfolding, skirting the myriad lines between too much and not enough.

The WWE shows how quickly we can put ourselves in a different place mentally - how very little square footage is needed to suspend disbelief. We can get involved with something that has only the surface of truth. That is all we need : a mask of pain, an expression of delight, the thud of the canvas. If it looks right, who can say it isn't?

Having said all that, constantly making oneself aware of the irreality of the contests does not make for greater enjoyment of the contests and tales at the core. It isn't clever to know that something fictional is fictional. Though it is interesting to dissect its creation (for essays such as this, for example) I doubt it does anybody any favours to constantly alienate oneself from the story in this way. You have to, or at least I have to, get 'into it'.

* * *

In some circles Professional wrestling has been given 'legitimacy'. Roland Barthes and others compare it to ancient Greek theatre. Others say it is like a live-action cartoon. These essays can sometimes smack of cowardice. The writers clearly enjoy wrestling but can only laud it indirectly through more established and respected forms. Wrestling should not seek such dubious cachet.

Wrestling is still being attacked. They say "it's not real" or "it's a farce". The fact these criticisms exist shows that the world created by the WWE is more realistic and its artifice therefore more disquieting than other programmes or plays. Regardless, that no-one is actually trying to cause brain damage is a strange criticism.

Even in a fresher and younger incarnation the WWE has a grungy energy to it. It is slick, yes, but not antiseptic or anodyne. Other wrestling promotions are comparatively amateurish in terms of acting or camerawork even if they may occasionally surpass the WWE in wrestling quality (the lowlier organisations are called 'Indies', a bit like independent studios against WWE's Hollywood machine). The sets are impressive. Wrestlers enter to fireworks, a wall of big screens flashing out their entrance videos, speakers roaring with their theme tunes. John Morrison (the goofy and gymnastic 'rock star') comes out in slow motion while Mexican jumping bean (the Mexican 'luchador' style of wrestling is high-flying and acrobatic) Sin Cara fights in a dimmed mysterious blue light.

The WWE leads the field with their video packages. Montages are used to summarise a feud or a story and whet the appetite for the coming final showdowns on Pay-Per-View. These two/three minute trailers are superbly edited and rarely fail to make the so-so epic. With the quality of film trailers in decline the employees of the WWE are simply the best in the business:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ceWfiotkGc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sod3MoDj_Zs

The company structures its product along the lines of genuine sports. It has a hierarchy of belts and titles. There are marquee events like the majors of golf or tennis Grand Slams (such as Wrestlemania, Summerslam, Survivor Series). The way the calendar is arranged to peak at PPVs gives a satisfying rhythm of ups and downs.

For all its spangly ostentation and insolence, Professional Wrestling can actually make boxing (from which it takes a few of its modes of confrontation) or mixed martial arts look silly. Why? Because something that is surreal or unreal can digest a lot of hype. Hype in real fights, with people going out to hurt each other, is laughable and disturbing. They try to make the real into a film. Are all boxers deluded egomaniacs? They don't really want to decapitate others or eat their children. Yet they still act up to an image. Or just act up.

Because outcomes are pre-determined the WWE is not sport. It is true sport in another sense - play and trickery. They make harmless fun out of the spectacle of harm. The WWE is great entertainment : rib-tickling and rib-cracking. It is fantastic fun.

Letting Objects Tell the Story : Robert Bresson

2011-07-04T15:54:00.007+01:00

Instead of showing what has happened to the person we can be told the same through the objects that they are, or were, in contact with.

I am not referring here to the metaphorical or symbolic aspects of these moments but the simple 'What has happened?' and 'What is happening?' that they answer.

Robert Bresson may be the finest at communicating in this way. He accentuates, paradoxically, the physical presence and the soul by not showing it - and he does so with brevity and with power. Here are two examples taken from L'Argent and Une Femme Douce (first thirty seconds of the clip) :

They are different. The first is a product of what we already can hear and expect. A hand is raised but we do not see it strike. Instead the cup shows the force. The woman then carries her pain (the cup and coffee are now a representation of and vessel for it) away with her. The second is the purest of this technique; it uses objects to reveal or take us down a path towards understanding.

Another well known example, of the first kind, is in Fritz Lang's M. Elsie's treasured ball is seen rolling alone on a patch of grass. This is the most elegant of a representation of loss that has become hackneyed - balloons floating free, a slipper left on the road...

Humanity Through Excess

2011-06-10T10:47:00.002+01:00

Elizabeth Berkley in Showgirls

A group of films in the last couple of decades have highlighted the perturbing underbelly of entertainment businesses through super-saturating and adrenalising their most loved qualities.

They offer a more concentrated version of our dreams, fantasies and desires. They place them under a microscope and, by doing so, push them gently to absurdity. They show us potential presents and plausible futures where what is now deemed excess will be the accepted norm.

Showgirls (Paul Verhoeven 1995), Demonlover (Olivier Assayas 2002) and Gamer (Mark Neveldine, Brian Taylor 2009) take what we want from unrestrained entertainment (power, unlimited possibility, freedom for expression and exploration) shake it up and hand it back to us fizzing.

It is critical that what we are shown remains recognisable and believable for the exaggeration to work. If they do, they can sicken us as they thrill us. It is a fine line to tread, here finely trodden. We could compare them to the similarly brash They Live (John Carpenter), whose vision of a world under complete government control is too far removed and too jokey (purposely I’m sure) to make us stop and think.

The three films in question are, in different ways, about the commodification of people. They are about the image becoming untethered from its origin – the real. They are about a chosen profession (striptease vaudeville), a particular field (animated pornography) and a certain trend (video games becoming more ‘realistic’ and immersive) in which people give themselves to, or are lost within, an amoral web. We find that people are no less disposable or controllable than icons and avatars; exploiting, being exploited and allowing oneself to be exploited.

There is a sliding scale of agency for the human protagonists that moves from control to complicity, acquiescence and, finally, enslavement. Backstage politics and back-stabbing in Showgirls; power over pornography rights and over others in Demonlover; a struggle to keep one’s body and soul from the puppet hands of a grand game player/designer in Gamer. These are the battles that allow a climb or a fall.

These films say that the virtual or the escapist can change our attitude to the real. Everything is a representation of something else; an echo on a new plane. The image can replace the real. The problem with increased game realism is not that it will appear like real life but that real life will seem just like the game. These films play on the two meanings of the word “object” – something that is acted upon (1) can become a mere thing (2).

Only in Gamer does the main character gain leverage and is able and willing to extricate themselves from the milieu. Tillman is able to turn off the network that allows his brain to be at someone else’s fingerprints (for the purposes of a deadly video game with real live people controlled) and free the world.

In Showgirls Nomi witnesses bitchiness, selfishness, inhumanity and rape on the Las Vegas strip (expose yourself to get a place on the strip) yet, despite seeking revenge for the last, stays in the feverishly glamorous and seedy world. For her the exterior image is what matters : on the billboards, pumped pink and shiny through neon tube veins. Once she has conquered Vegas as the star of the show "Goddess", she emerges from her chrysalis to take the road to even greater stardom. The final image of a road sign directing her to Hollywood is an awfully dispiriting one, a kick in the guts to "A Star is Born" cliches.

In Demonlover Diane, no longer an executive playing with chips, becomes the slave to a teenage gamer, the victim of the next level of play: interactive sexualised torture. Skin pores, the pupils of eyes are reduced to pixels. It’s different when you are porn’s pawn and not its pimp.

These films imply that it is hard to get out of the system when hidden compulsions can dictate one’s ‘decisions’. Circumstances can make decisions compulsions. Tillman’s wife in Gamer has allowed herself to be controlled in a live game called “Society” to gain money. There, in society, she is more often than not subjected to violent sex. What more should we expect : she is an attractive woman at a man's mercy. Nomi, the face of Showgirls, is practically “forced” to step on others and turn a blind eye to degrading practice in order to reach her perfectly reasonable aspirations. Money, desperation and low self-esteem lead these people to market places where hierarchies, and we, as the drivers of the market, hold them and weigh down on them.

Gamer - A teenage boy controls a real man with real bullets

These films use fun, or the style of high-end low "trash" to percolate our defences. They exaggerate and extrapolate. Ultimately shown 21st Century’s possible destinations, the journey that had seemed so pleasurable sours and hollows, collapsing in on itself.

By the end we wonder what violent games, and our control over things that look like us, may do to us. We wonder how human images, that can be twisted and deleted, may alter us irrevocably. We wonder why people ‘willingly’ offer themselves up to exploitation and what it may mean to sit by spurring the flesh fair on. We think how the quest for fame at all costs may be anything but a sign of aspiration or a beacon of inspiration.

The direction in which our moral compass is set, or the extent to which we separate what is within the cinema from what is without, will determine the nature of the films. I believe that they rely on us to follow the path from excitement and titillation to disgust and disquiet. They can be seen purely, and perfectly legitimately, as an indulgent taste of the forbidden but they work best as efforts to bring together image and reality, fiction and reality, to show us what we may not want to see. They bring the distant viewer and player face to face with the consequences of his actions. Is this what you want? Then have it.

Lest we be reminded : the experiences and memories that we bring into the theatre mean nothing can ever truly be ‘just a film’.

Some critics may call those films that show people degraded “degrading” as if depiction can only condone. They may also call them “sick” for even touching upon such potentially sickening subjects. They call them “sexy” just because there is sex or nudity, without looking at how or why. They call them “guilty pleasures” but they do not appreciate or specify that the guilt is not at the quality of the production (they are superbly put together) but at the increasingly self-conscious pleasure we may derive from the troublesome things that occur on-screen. The films' high-mindedness is (necessarily) camouflaged.

Showgirls, Demonlover and Gamer manage to both celebrate themselves and question themselves.

They use the staples of lavish and lurid storytelling (what could be referred to as ‘Exploitation cinema’) to both royally entertain and subtly satisfy a vital aspect of much Exploitation Cinema : a mirror and commentary on emerging social trends (cf. George A Romero's zombie films). They are almost completely guileless, a lesson without a professor, satire (of megalomaniacs, C-list wannabes and Hollywood rags to riches conventions?) with barely a wink. In other words, straightforward not snarky, and never condescending.

Yes, these are films that really are studies of exploitation. Maximalist, outrageous, in-your-face, balls-to-the-wall films with a profoundly human(ist) bent.

Demonlover - Waiting to be abused by an unseen player

Veiled Faces - Attraction and Love

2011-06-07T17:41:00.001+01:00

Day of Wrath (Carl Theodor Dreyer)

A veil to conceal and to beautify, a frame to display, a face just beyond touch, a flirtation, a seduction, a vision and ineffable emotion through a glass darkly, a mystery with a hint of danger...

Apocalypse Now Redux

Medea (Lars Von Trier) - New Wife

Let the Right One In - Something strange and fascinating

Romeo + Juliet - Through an aquarium

Superman Returns - X Ray view : Lois in the lift

Tree of Life

What stands between two people can be symbolic, too, of a witch's web of seduction (Day of Wrath), of the natural and pure (Romeo + Juliet). These flimsy walls may be used to represent an infinitesimal but often uncrossable distance to the magical other. Can we ever fully understand someone else?

Action Scenes : Levels of Complication

2011-05-26T16:02:00.001+01:00

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This article is an attempt to show the degrees of complication in action scenes, the simple elements that are used to build excitement. Separating and classifying the blocks that build action scenes is by no means an exact science and there are, undoubtedly, messy dribblings wherever cuts are made.

One Level

This is the bare bones Fight or Chase.

Thor : Fistfight vs Security Guard. A simple tussle.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon : Flight into the forest. Jen flees pursued by Li Mu Bai

Two Levels

An extra element of danger or uncertainty is called into play. This could be the geography of the place or nature of the arena in which a chase or a fight takes place - height, fire, or unpredictable foreign elements such as traffic. The reason for the fight can also be the second layer, for example a bomb primed to explode. In other words: time. The two levels could equally be the combination of a fight and a chase (i.e. firing at each other while running/driving).

Quantum of Solace : Suspended and swung over the ground on ropes, Bond and Mitchell attempt to kill one another. This evolves from a chase (three levels - involving gun fire and rooftops).

Batman Begins : Monorail fight - the track is destroyed and time waits to trigger a fall

Attack of the Clones : Arena Battle. Obi-Wan, Anakin and Padme fight off the Geonosians as well as the monstrous creatures that have been set upon them. Two adversaries are present with separate and differing motives to be vanquished.

Three Levels

Yet another danger. Another action or consequence to be taken into account. Maybe another person is put into the equation.

Spider-Man 2 : Fight on the side of a building. The fight itself, the height of the building on whose wall it takes place and the precarious position of Doctor Octopus' hostage, Aunt May, used as a pawn to weaken Spider-Man's position.

Fast Five : Two cars chased through traffic (two levels) pulling a bank safe that destroys cars in their wake. A chase with weapons and serious obstacles.

Four Levels

Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull : Jungle Chase. A chase through the jungle by car (one), weapons such as swords and rocket launchers (two), height in the precipitous cliff that suddenly appears to one side of the chase or the possible fall awaiting the swinging Mutt (three), and the perils and pitfalls of deadly ants (four).

Yes, these don't all take effect simultaneously but I think it qualifies nonetheless.

Five Levels

Mission Impossible III : Wind Farm

One: Having rescued one of their agents the team board a helicopter and fly off. They are then pursued by another helicopter. Thus an action scene is born.

Two: The team's helicopter heads into a wind farm, introducing a level of danger and uncertainty requiring skill and nerve to overcome them.

Three: The enemy chopper enters the wind farm. By shooting a heat-seeking missile (which the team will head off by swerving and shooting flares) they have launched the scene onto a third level.

Four : One of the team (Lindsey) is lying on the floor of the helicopter in great pain. It is discovered that she has an explosive device in her head. A defibrillator is readied that will deliver a charge that may disable the explosive. Two countdowns converge: the machine's countdown to readiness and the invisible one behind her eyes.

This is not strictly a direct part of the action but it does divert the energies of those involved. It is, regardless, part of the scene.

Five : Height. Zhen slips out of the door of the helicopter because of the pilot's tight manoeuvres. She hangs on for dear life.

Eventually the enemy helicopter is chopped up by a blade. Lindsey, however, dies seconds before the defibrillator is ready to save her.

* * *

Of course none of the above takes into consideration Emotional Complications. Take G.I. Joe Rise of Cobra or Mr and Mrs Smith, where men and women must fight people they once, and perhaps still, love. What about when the eponymous hero of Spider-Man is faced with the balanced fates of a tram-load of passengers and the woman he loves, Mary Jane.

There are many ingredients at the disposal of artists. By using or eschewing them they excite, tease and torture.

100 Posts! Full Archive

2011-05-17T16:20:00.000+01:00

Checking On My Sausages has reached 100 posts. Here they are, give or take a few that were updated by later posts or have been removed.

Essays / Thoughts

A Wounded America : Bad Lieutenant and Southland Tales
A Cinema is A Cave
Acting in True Grit
The Action/Sports Film (particularly Unstoppable and the Bourne films)
A.I. Artificial Intelligence : Love, Self-love and Self-hate
The Animated World and Books

Avatar and Language
Avatar and the Fusion of Male and Female
Avatar : The American Flag

Chungking Express : Identities and Labels
Close Ups

Dekalog : Chance and Control
Dekalog III : A Dialogue through Light
Dekalog : God in Man
Dekalog IX and X : Greed, Mistrust and Acceptance

Do Films Need Music?
Drag Me to Hell : Three Thoughts
Film Criticism and the Action Film
Film-makers' Intentions
G.I. Joe The Rise of Cobra : Paris Chase Scene
Golden Age Gals or Why the Stars shone brighter in the Forties
Hulk : What Has Been Passed On ? (Physical and Emotional inheritance)
Inglourious Basterds : Observations
Is Every Film a Documentary?
The Last Airbender : Circles, Globes and Peace
"Me Too" Cinema
Pixar : Just a Toy
Reacting to Characters' Reactions
Viewer Authorship

Reviews

Alice (Jan Svankmajer)
Antichrist
Auschwitz, by Uwe Boll
Avatar
Black Swan
The Bourne Ultimatum
The Box
Bridge to Terabithia
Cinderella / Battle of Kerzhenets - Cutout Classics
Citizen Kane
Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs
Damnation (Bela Tarr)
Dekalog
Demonlover (Olivier Assayas)
Destino (Salvador Dali / Walt Disney) and Computer Animation
The Exorcist and Horror before The Horror
Film Socialisme (Jean-Luc Godard)
Flight of the Red Balloon (Hou Hsiao Hsien)
Jeanne La Pucelle (Jacques Rivette)
La Joie de Vivre (Animated Film)
Lady in the Water (M Night Shyamalan)
The New World
Police, Adjective
Psycho II
Public Enemies (Michael Mann)
Revolver (Jonas Odell)
Scenes of the Decade
Scream 4
Star Wars Episode I : The Phantom Menace
Stone Wedding (Nunta de Piatră)
Story of a Street Corner (Animated Film)
Terminator Salvation
The Top 50 Greatest Films
The Trial of Joan of Arc (Robert Bresson)
Twin Peaks : Fire Walk With Me
Whisper of the Heart (Yoshifumi Kondo)
Your Animated Film Reviews

Image Galleries / Essays

Deer in Film
Gallery of the Cinematic Image
Images Recalling the Passion and Resurrection
John Carpenter - Under Siege
The Matrix Revolutions : Symmetry
Memorable Kisses
Muses (Actress/Director Partnerships)
Performance of the Decade
Romance Language
Swings
Travelling through film by Train

Miscellaneous

Directors' Art Outside of Film
Disturbing Moments in Film
Revenge of the Sith Companion : Why is Star Wars so loved?
Taxi Driver - Writing while Watching

Videos

(Videos by Me)

Love
In Praise of Godard

(Other Videos)

Lotte Reiniger's Animation The Star of Bethlehem

Scream 4

2011-05-14T12:44:00.000+01:00

(Contains Spoilers)

The new heroes and heroines of Scream 4 are savvy technologically, connected by mobiles, Facebook and live web streaming. They are thoroughly clued in. too, on the conventions and convolutions of the fiction they find themselves in.

The older characters, including the original three (Dewey, Gale and Sidney) find it hard to keep up with modern ways. Sheriff Dewey doesn't realise how quickly rumours of the new murder case have spread on the internet and Gale's attempts to film the Stabathon with hidden cameras end in failure.

We see the generation gap in the way the killer deals with them. The girls are teased and manoeuvred into position via the social media sites they frequent and their mobile phones. For Jill's mother, on the other hand death is delivered the old-fashioned way : by post. She's knifed through the letterbox.

However, the new generations know-how proves of little practical use. They are the ones who die. Furthermore, on two occasions, gadgets enable victims or potential victims merely to see the killer on their screen before they see them with their own eyes (screens and interfaces are as another pair of eyes, often detaching them from immediate sensations i.e. intimacy).

* * *

Among these students are those who have not (especially the persons behind the Ghostface mask) been able to make the leap into maturity without disaffection, bitterness or confusion. While there are distant echoes of high-school massacres, what are most frank and explicit are frustrations that come from being invisible to others (in affection, attention and the anonymous mime of fragmented 21st Century communication), not knowing how or where to get respect ("I don't need friends, I need fans") or being uneducated in, or unaccustomed to, coping with rejection.

Their parents are almost completely absent, even at night; these young people uncomfortably straddle the threshold between childhood and adulthood. Some get by, some struggle, all suffer.

The bonny, middle class, hyper-domestic living rooms and bedrooms (virginal in a manner of speaking) lack any of the messiness associated with teenagers and the sight of them disordered, smashed and covered in gore is harrowing. Surfaces, neat and beautiful; depths, foul and befouled.

When Jill beats herself up to look like a victim ("everyone loves a victim") it really is painful. With every blow the internal wounds become written on their face. It isn't the jumps or the shocks or the stabbings that hit home but that pain. When Kirby is stabbed by Charlie he is almost weeping when he spits that she hadn't noticed him in four years. He walks away hunched over and decidedly non-triumphant. Later, it is apparent that Charlie is seeking Jill's approval, in vain, as Clyde to her Bonnie. The mask is the face of a ghost - the person who puts it on is already, to all intents and purposes, dead.

Under the Bed : Jill in the position of victim and stalker. Hiding and lurking.

The killers are highly self-conscious and reach out for self-esteem. Not only for them is technology providing an impotent remote closeness.

Sidney, whose changing face is the very portrait of Scream, is haunted and hollowed upon seeing her nightmare returning to life, is another damaged (yet in some ways hardened and more determined) soul.

Jill's monologue, once she has revealed herself as one of the killers, seems both an unconvincing (as if fed into her earpiece by Director Wes Craven and writer Kevin Williamson) appraisal of a modern world gone wrong and an arresting and ascerbic diatribe/confession.

* * *

Ghostface is just a mask : the mask of the angry, the jealous, the lost. It is an adopted identity. Any one of us could put it on. One of the traits that distinguishes the Scream films from the pack is that we already know the killer. We don't know who exactly but we have already met them. It can be anyone - not a person of supernatural strength or gothic fairytale degeneracy.

Masks - Enough for Everyone

Perhaps this is why the killer is filmed differently from other slasher film perpetrators. In the first scene proper of Scream 4 Jenny runs up the stairs towards the camera pursued by Ghostface. As she goes past the camera we turn to follow her. Then exactly the same happens with Ghostface.

Generally speaking, when gazing at a killer, the camera would be static. The killer may come past the camera, or through it or across it but the camera won't adjust to follow his movements. It doesn't happen in Halloween or Black Christmas or countless other Slasher films that the Scream series takes its inspiration from. It may pan, but it won't twirl or spin. It is about the otherness of the character, its relentlessness.

Scream is different. "There's something really scary about a guy with a knife who just...snaps"

* * *

The original cast all survive the killers' attempts to remake the incidents depicted in the original in-film film Stab (based on what we see in Scream). They reclaim the series from its imitators and from itself : "Don't f**k with the original!" (even the Stab films have become clever sillies - Stab 7 doesn't even bother to mask the killer* and Stab 5, we are told, involves time travel).

The final word uttered by Sidney, in killing Jill, is "Clear". Defibrillator paddles are normally used to restart a failing organ and to revive the patient. This is what she does to the franchise, returning us to the beginning (or to zero) with a jolt that, ironically, kills the enemy.

* * *

Scream 4 is a film wrapped up in itself. The characters talk about horror films all the time. Bit by bit, aware that the killers are adapting real-life events and tipping their hats to cinema's heritage, they start to feel like they are now part of a movie. They watch their tongues ("I'll be right back" says a police officer, and quickly regrets it) and they wonder if the murderers are playing by the book or breaking the rules (surprises are cliched, as someone says).

Because the Ghostfaces could be adhering to convention or departing from it there is no way of knowing how to be safe. There is no rhyme or reason, no discrimination made between who will die and who will not. There are more deaths in this film than in the other three Screams and they are matter-of-fact. They can come at any time. It is so easy to take a life with a simple movement of the arm.

The previous Screams were exasperating because the angle of a horror film about horror films and people who like horror films seemed tacked on and not deep in the sinew of the narrative. Here it is the film. Layers upon layers, not decoration. There is something charming about a work that feels like an essay on and love letter to horror films.* It is lovingly and precisely engineered. It's a film that was clearly worked on with much care.

* * *

Scream 4 not only plays with itself, its past and its inspirations but connects with the real world...

Jill is fed up with playing second fiddle to her cousin Sidney, disenchanted with her life in the shadows. She is played by Emma Roberts, the niece to a (currently) more well-known actress: Julia Roberts. The film doesn't hide the parallel. Jill's surname is also Roberts. A frisson, a trembling, an added kick.

Dewey and Gale are now married in Scream 4, though they are going through a rocky patch. Scream was the film that brought together the now married actor and actress who play them: David Arquette and Courtney Cox. The film plays with the tension between them as characters and the tension between the film and real life. It has been suggested that Scream 4 has brought them closer after a period of separation (sounds lovely).

Then there is horror buff Kirby. She is played by Hayden Panettiere, best remembered as Claire Bennet in the TV series Heroes. Claire had a special healing power that meant she could survive being shot, run over or... stabbed. When she is suddenly punctured by the knife and told that it takes longer to die than in the movies, because of the images we associate with her, it pierces us still deeper.

So Scream 4 is wrapped up in itself, in the world of film and how the world interacts with fiction. It is, too, furnished and coloured by the backgrounds of its players.

* * *

Scream 4 doesn't terrify you in the moment but afterwards, in the dark streets where your fate may be waiting for you camouflaged in black.

Scream 4 is not very scary, nor very funny. It can be frightening (Kirby desperately reeling off sequels in an attempt to appease Ghostface) and it can be amusing. If one were to watch and judge on strict genre lines (having said that, which one film would be the template, because all are different?), it could be deemed a failure. "It's not a comedy, it's a horror film!" says Ghostface but it needn't be experienced as answerable to either. Seeing films as fitting genres is like seeing the world only out of train windows. There is so much land between the tracks.

It is what it is : engrossing and likeable.

The characters are believable and interesting (Kirby, Trudie and Sidney especially). Sub-plots, gradually and delicately advanced, are made vital.

The inhabitants of Woodsboro are the kind of people you can care about for as long as the film lasts, and longer.